The saturn game the coll.., p.1
The Saturn Game: The Collected Short Stories Volume 3, page 1
The Saturn Game
Volume Three
The Collected Short Works of
Poul Anderson
Edited by Rick Katze
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
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Contents
TITLE PAGE
GATEWAY INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS
PUBLICATION HISTORY
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
THE ETERNAL CONVERSATION BY TOM EASTON
THE SATURN GAME
NO TRUCE WITH KINGS
LIMERICK
OPERATION SALAMANDER
LIMERICK
SAM HALL
ROBIN HOOD’S BARN
LIMERICK
THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN
UNTITLED SONG
SUPERNOVA
UNTITLED SONG
SUNJAMMER
ARSENAL PORT
LIMERICK
HIDING PLACE
A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS
WHAT’LL YOU GIVE?
LIMERICK
A SUN INVISIBLE
MUSN’T TOUCH
ELEMENTARY MISTAKE
PEEK, I SEE YOU
LIMERICK
EVE TIMES FOUR
HUNTER’S MOON
LIMERICK
WEBSITE
ALSO BY POUL ANDERSON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Publication History
Editor’s Introduction is original to this volume.
“The Eternal Conversation” by Tom Easton is original to this volume.
“The Saturn Game” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, February 1981.
“No Truce with Kings” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1963.
“Operation Salamander” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1957.
“Sam Hall” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1953.
“Robin Hood’s Barn” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1959.
“The Only Game in Town” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1960.
“Supernova” appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, January 1967.
“Sunjammer” writing as Winston P. Sanders first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, April 1964.
“Arsenal Port” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1965.
“Hiding Place” first appeared in Analog Science Fact–Fiction, March 1961.
“A Tragedy of Errors” first appeared in first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1968.
“What’ll You Give” by Winston P. Sanders first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, April 1963.
“A Sun Invisible” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, April 1966.
“Mustn’t Touch” appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, June 1964.
“Elementary Mistake” writing as Winston P. Sanders first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, February 1967.
“Peek, I See You” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, February 1968.
“Eve Times Four” first appeared in Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, April 1960.
“Hunter’s Moon” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, November 1978.
Untitled Limericks and Songs appeared in Hombrew, NESFA Press, February 1976.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
This is volume 3 in a series collecting Poul Anderson’s short fiction. When concluded, I expect that there will be between 6 and 8 volumes encompassing about 1.5 million to 2 million words of the approximate 4 million words of short fiction that he wrote during his career.
Some stories are a piece of a larger history. Some are stand-alone. Excepting the first volume which contained the three “Wing Alak” short stories, these volumes are not intended to include complete series. Nor are they published in any internal chronological order. For the most part, except for a few changes in the words used by Poul Anderson in later versions of the stories, I have selected the original magazine version.
The reader will notice that in “Operation Salamander”, “Chevvy” is used instead of the usual “Chevy.” I checked several sources to verify that this was not a proofreading error. This spelling is used in different editions and in different stories about these characters.
As such, you will find stories of time travel, fantasy, the near future, and the far future.
Manse Everard, David Falkayn, and Nicholas van Rijn are represented. I hope to have a Dominic Flandry story in a later volume.
Poul Anderson was a devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes. Previous volumes had included Sherlockian stories, such as “The Martian Crown Jewels” and “The Queen of Air and Darkness” which used a character with many of the traits of Sherlock Holmes. This volume also contains a Sherlockian story (No, I do not intend to name it) which is far less obvious until the finale.
Sit back, open the book, and read. And enjoy reading stories by a master craftsman who gave us so many good stories.
Rick Katze
Framingham, MA
May 2010
THE ETERNAL CONVERSATION
by Tom Easton
When I was invited to write the introduction to this volume of Poul Anderson’s collected short stories, my first thought was, “Why me?” My closest connection to the man was first as a reader and later as a reviewer. But perhaps that is enough, for I read Anderson’s stories over the course of many years. He was always one of my favorite writers, not least because I often felt that he was speaking to me almost as if we were facing each other across a table with drinks in our hands. His style, though it could wax poetic as in “The Saturn Game” (1981), was always easy, conversational, and accessible, and it dealt with topics dear to the heart of every science fiction fan. In fact, he introduced us to some of those topics.
Many of the ideas he introduced were later picked up by other writers, but that is no surprise. One of the remarkable things about science fiction is the way its writers are in continuous conversation with each other, their readers, and the general—but especially the science-technology-engineering—culture.
I was reminded of this recently when I saw Avatar (which some say closely resembles Poul Anderson’s 1957 story, “Call Me Joe”). There have been a great many SF stories in which the driving force behind the plot was the search for and rapacious efforts to obtain some difficult-to-find raw material. Engineers have used the term “unobtainium” (with “handwavium,” “buzzwordium,” “wishalloy,” and others as rough synonyms) to refer to such materials since at least the 1950s, and “unobtainium” has appeared in previous films (e.g., The Core, 2003). It has also appeared in a disparaging sense, as a way of saying “Oh, c’mon now! You’d have to make that out of unobtainium!” It has even been trademarked.
So it’s a good example of the conversation, where an idea bounces from one realm to another over the years. If we restrict our focus to science fiction alone, the field has long accepted that any writer who comes up with a nifty idea or gizmo will see others use it too. Blasters, anyone? Positronic brains? Warp drives? Hyperspace? Time travel?
The conversation also deals with more abstract topics, as when Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” (1954) used the conflict between the laws of physics and sentiment to say that of course the cute stowaway would have to be tossed out the airlock. The basic idea had been used before, but the story was still instantly controversial—we would, after all, prefer to have the universe bow to our wishes—and spawned a number of literary ripostes, including Poul Anderson’s “What’ll You Give” (1963), which says that sometimes we just have to follow the dictates of sentiment, and doing so may even pay o
Anderson’s “The Saturn Game” represents another kind of conversation, less between writers than between one writer and his surrounding culture. Precursors of today’s massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) existed at the time, but the general public was more familiar with the term “psychodrama.” As the story hints, the precursor games were largely text-based; if a player had an avatar, it was not an on-screen image; it existed in the player’s head. Like psychodrama, those games could serve to explore one’s own psyche, as well as the psyches of fellow players. Some people claimed that, again like psychodrama, they could be therapeutic. But those games, like today’s, could be totally absorbing to the point of distraction.
To Anderson, the game is an aspect of reality, a way of revealing his characters, a way of playing science fiction and fantasy against each other, and a way both of commenting on a fascinating world and—via distraction—of helping to build the crisis at the heart of the story. The conversation also deals with the way people crave to deny harsh realities (compare with “The Cold Equations” and “What’ll You Give”). It is thus a multi-leveled and even recursive conversation, and thus intriguingly complex. But Anderson, for all that he wrote “scifi,” a genre often vilified as simple-minded, was rarely a simple-minded writer. He could be direct and tightly focused on a single idea, but a great deal of his work rewards careful reading.
At times, sometimes after a couple of drinks, any conversation turns reflective. This happens with SF writers too. A number of renowned members of the clan have, in their later years, chosen to link all the tales they ever wrote, either by creating a connecting thread to tie everything into a single future history or by calling all the tales alternate visions or worlds and creating a bridge to let them mingle.
Poul Anderson takes a third approach to building a capstone for a career in The Boat of a Million Years (1990). Very briefly, it is as if he said to himself, “Let’s see…I’ve written about all these ages of the world, in all these styles, about all these types of characters. Men and women, whores and merchants, leaders and followers. Romans and robots. Oxcarts and spaceships. Fantasies and historicals and science fiction. I wonder…Can I find a way to use it all? Not repeating myself, no. A new story, something that needs all I have ever learned to do, something that unifies all the many things I have been concerned with over the years.”
The result is an astonishing display of virtuosity. Anderson posits that very, very occasionally an immortal is born. Meet Hanno the Phoenician, Rufus the Gaul, Deathless the Amerindian shaman, Aliyat of Syria, Svoboda of the steppes, others. Each draws attention by failing to age and must, to survive, cut and run, time and again, losing homes, loves, wealths. Endlessly, they must adapt and cope in whatever ways they can, though they may find professional niches—prostitute, bureaucrat—that permit both stability and relative invisibility. Yet they are lonely, and they yearn for others like themselves. Occasionally, they meet. Sometimes those meetings produce enduring partnerships, conversations as enduring as the one science fiction conducts with fantasy, history, science, and technology. The tale begins in Phoenician times and ends in the era of space travel and of listening posts that detect the conversations of distant sentients.
The conversation never ends!
Tom Easton
Dedham, MA
April 2010
THE SATURN GAME
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If we would understand what happened, which is vital if we would avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future, we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it crossed a threshold of human experience.
—Francis L. Minamoto,
Death Under Saturn: A Dissenting View
(Apollo University Communications, Leyburg, Luna, 2057)
“The City of Ice is now on my horizon,” Kendrick says. Its towers gleam blue. “My griffin spreads his wings to glide.” Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions. His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air strikes through his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. “I lean over and peer after you.” The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. Its head flickers palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith hammered into the steel.
“Yes, I see the griffin,” Ricia tells him, “high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my sleeve, but I tear the spider-silk apart and dash forth into the open.” The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, “Is it in truth you, my darling?”
“Hold, there!” warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana ten thousand leagues away. “I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back, Princess of Maranoa. Pretend you decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words.”
“I stay far aloft,” Kendrick says. “Save he use a scrying stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast has a rider. From here I’ll spy out city and castle.” And then—? He knows not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King’s embrace?
“I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus,” Mark Danzig interrupted.
His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Colin Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the universe.
To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows at instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase, dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, nightside wanly ashimmer with starlight and moonlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.
Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.
“I’m sorry,” Jean Broberg whispered. “It’s too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and…almost like the place where our game had brought us—Took us by surprise—”
“Huh!” Mark Danzig said. “You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don’t tell me any different. I’ve watched these acts for eight years.”
Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight. His movement sent him through the air, across the crowded cabin, until he checked himself by a handhold just short of the chemist. “Are you calling Jean a liar?” he growled.
Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness.
“Please!” Broberg exclaimed. “Not a quarrel, Colin.”
The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two, despite longevity treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were engraved around large gray eyes. “Mark is right,” she sighed. “We’re here to do science, not daydream.” She reached forth to touch Scobie’s arm, smiled shyly. “You’re still full of your Kendrick persona, aren’t you? Gallant, protective—” She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced a laugh. “But I’m just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy.”
