A Cosmic Christmas 2 You Read online

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  DEDICATION

  THE SHAPE OF CHRISTMASES TO COME by Hank Davis

  ANGEL OF LIGHT by Joe Haldeman

  AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT by Tony Daniel

  CHRISTMAS CARD by Connie Willis

  AWAY IN A MANGER by Wen Spencer

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR JESUS by Frederik Pohl

  SHEPHERDS AND WOLVES by Sarah A. Hoyt

  IN THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS by Tee Morris

  WORMHOLE MAGIC by Marianne Plumridge

  A CHRISTMAS IN AMBER by Scott William Carter

  SPACE ALIENS SAVED MY MARRIAGE by S. N. Dyer

  ZWARTE PIET’S TALE by Allen Steele

  HOW THORVALD THE BLOODY-MINDED SAVED CHRISTMAS by Esther Friesner

  JULIAN: A CHRISTMAS STORY by Robert Charles Wilson

  Edited by

  HANK DAVIS

  A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

  Edited by Hank Davis

  Twelve new stories of Christmas in very unusual circumstances, ranging from vampires to robots, from the hills of Appalachia to a high orbit space station, all celebrating the holiday in their own, off-beat ways.

  Features tales by New York Times best seller Larry Correia, Darkship series creator Sarah A. Hoyt, Sapphire Award Winner for urban fantasy, Wen Spencer--and much, much more!

  BAEN BOOKS EDITED BY HANK DAVIS

  The Human Edge by Gordon R. Dickson

  We the Underpeople by Cordwainer Smith

  When the People Fell by Cordwainer Smith

  The Technic Civilization Saga

  The Van Rijn Method by Poul Anderson

  David Falkayn: Star Trader by Poul Anderson

  Rise of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson

  Young Flandry by Poul Anderson

  Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson

  Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra by Poul Anderson

  Flandry’s Legacy by Poul Anderson

  The Best of the Bolos: Their Finest Hour, created by Keith Laumer

  A Cosmic Christmas

  A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

  In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

  A COSMIC CHRISTMAS 2 YOU

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4516-3942-1

  Cover art by Sam Kennedy

  First Baen printing, November 2013

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A Cosmic Christmas 2 You / edited by Hank Davis.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3942-1 (pbk.)

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Christmas stories, American. I. Davis, Hank.

  PS648.S3C673 2013

  813'.0876208--dc23

  2013033170

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-204-4

  (copyrights of stories in A Cosmic Christmas 2 You)

  Introduction: “The Shape of Christmases to Come” © 2013 by Hank Davis

  “Angel of Light” by Joe Haldeman first appeared in Cosmos, December 2005. © 2005 by Joe Haldeman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “And to All a Good Night” by Tony Daniel appears here for the first time. © 2013 by Tony Daniel. Published by permission of the author.

  “Christmas Card” by Connie Willis. A somewhat different version may have appeared in Starwind magazine, date unknown. The revised version © 2013 Connie Willis. Published by permission of the author.

  “Away in a Manger” by Wen Spencer first published online by Baen.com, 2013. © 2013 by Wen Spencer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus” by Frederik Pohl first appeared in Alternating Currents, Ballantine Books, 1956. © 1956 by Frederik Pohl. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Shepherds and Wolves” by Sarah A. Hoyt appears here for the first time. © 2013 by Sarah A. Hoyt. Published by permission of the author.

  “In the Spirit of Christmas” by Tee Morris first appeared online by Imagine That! Studios, December 9, 2012. © 2012 by Tee Morris. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Wormhole Magic” by Marianne Plumridge. An earlier version of the story appeared online on the Infinity Plus website in 2004. © 2004 by Marianne Plumridge. The revised version is © 2013 by Marianne Plumridge. Published by permission of the author.

  “A Christmas in Amber” by Scott William Carter first appeared in Analog, December 2005. © 2005 Dell Magazines. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Space Aliens Saved My Marriage” by S. N. Dyer first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1990 © 1990 by Davis Publications. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Zwarte Piet’s Tale” by Allen Steele first appeared in Analog, December 1998 © 1998 by Dell Magazines. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “How Thorvald the Bloody-Minded Saved Christmas” by Esther Friesner first appeared in Fabulous Whitby, Fabulous Albion, 2008. © 2008 by Esther Friesner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Julian: A Christmas Story” by Robert Charles Wilson first appeared as a chapbook, PS Publishers, 2006. © 2006 by Robert Charles Wilson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to all the contributors,

  as well as those who helped with advice, permissions,

  email addresses, and other kindnesses,

  with extra thanks to Connie Willis,

  who revamped one of her early stories

  until she was no longer unhappy with it.

  And to Toni Weisskopf, whose idea

  the whole thing was, including the title.

  Teachers in Kentucky in the 1950s

  weren’t paid generous salaries, but come

  December 25, my mother and father managed

  to put a lot of cool stuff under the tree for their

  two rotten kids. This book is for you,

  mom and dad

  THE SHAPE OF CHRISTMASES TO COME

  by Hank Davis

  LAST YEAR, in the introduction to A Cosmic Christmas, I publicly mused that it was hard to find anything to say about Christmas that hasn’t already been said. Now I have to say something about Christmas that I haven’t already said.

  Well . . .

  How’s the weather out? Read any good books lately?

  Welllll . . .

  Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane (watch for the landmines).

  Last time I considered how science fictional some of the gifts under the present-day tree would have seemed just three or four decades ago, such as laptop computers, cell phones, GPS units, etc. That reminds me of the high-tech toys from the 1950s when I was a rotten kid. “High-tech” for the time, that is.

  One of them, from Christmas 1955 if memory serves, was a battery powered thing shaped like a futuristic bus. I don’t remember its name (and I’m too lazy to try to find it online), but it had a plastic radar-dish-like antenna on its top that was really only a directional guide. It came with a spherical whistle, a very low-pitched whistle. The bus moved slowly across the floor, but when the aforementioned rotten kid blew on the whistle, something inside would turn the front wheels. The “antenna” wo
uld also rotate, so that you could gauge which way the bus was about to turn, and stop blowing when the antenna was pointing in the direction you wanted it to go. The bus would also have unanticipated changes of course if the TV happened to be on and a voice or sound on TV happened to hit the right pitch, briefly redirecting the angle of the wheels.

  Now this seems very primitive now, what with cars, tanks, helicopters and robots which are electronically, rather than sonically, remote-controlled. But it was an unusual item then.

  Or there was the gadget (again, of unremembered name) which looked like a cartoonist’s idea of a radio station, complete with two plastic antenna on top which did absolutely nothing but look decorative. It came with two handheld communicators. When both of them were hooked up to the station by wires (yes, wires), the holder of one communicator could talk to the other and almost hear what the other was saying, as long as there was no loud ambient noise in the room . Of course, the wires that came with it weren’t very long, so you couldn’t talk much more than from one room to another. It was an advance on the old tin cans connected by string setup, but not much of an advance.

  Then there was the airplane flight simulator, though I don’t think it was called that. It was mostly mechanical. There was a small pilot’s wheel on the front, and a window with a little airplane silhouette on a wire that went across the window. The airplane cutout would move left or right as you turned the wheel, while a strip of paper inside the gadet rolled from the top of the window to the bottom, as if the plane were flying over terrain. On the strip was a red line that moved from side to side, and you moved the plane to stay on the red line as it wavered back and forth. If you got off the line, you supposedly were off the radio directional beam and there was a beep.

  I could go on—I haven’t yet mentioned Robert the Robot, with a tiny acoustic phonograph inside, so that he would talk when the crank on his back was rapidly turned—but I’ll stop there.

  It isn’t surprising that these toys seem downright neolithic now—there have been considerable advances in electronics in nearly six decades, after all—but consider the shape of toys to come, circa 2013. Barring atomic war, worldwide plague, an unexpected visit from an asteroid, or mass entinction due to watching reality shows, the toys of the present day will probably seem just as primitive by 2073. (Which, come to think of it, will be three years before the American Tricentennial. Lay in a supply of fireworks early, they may be completely outlawed by then.) What then will be a state-of-the-art high-tech toy?

  Science fiction has thoroughly covered the idea of robots made to look like children to be playmates for the old-fashioned human children, or maybe child substitutes for parents, but that might be a possibility. Or maybe a holographic image of a child would be even better. They’re intangible and can’t break. And they can’t break those fragile human kids if they go out of skew on treadle.

  One thing about the mid-1950s toys is that they could only do one or maybe two things, and that was it. Which led to them ending up in the attic or a closet once the thrill was gone. Unless imagination took over, and the airplane simulator became the control wheel of a spaceship, zoom! zoom! That’s still true of some modern toys, but not with electronic games. If you get tired of one game, you can plug in a different cartridge for another one. (Anybody remember board games?) Maybe toys can be made to be modifiable. Suppose you get tired of a toy, and can push a button to make it change shape to something else, like the soft weapon in the Larry Niven story.

  Or maybe the ultimate toy will be something like the “feelies” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Are there still English professors who insist that novel isn’t science fiction?) Put an electronic thingy on your head and suddenly you’re there, wherever there is. Back in time with—hmmm, probably not cowboys and Indians, unless the 21st century flushes the currently omnipresent Political Correctness crap—but maybe the age of chivalry with knights in armor (without the fleas and lice, of course), or the stone age (will Neanderthals have to be treated with Political Correctness?), or be the first on your block to be a T-Rex in the Cretaceous. Or go forward in time with starships of the future (will Star Trek still be popular?). Be John Carter of Mars. Be a Gray Lensman. Be Eric John Stark. Be Jirel of Joiry. Be Ferdinand Feghoot. (They’ll all be in public domain by then.) Of course, the grown-ups will have to make sure that the kids don’t get hold of the adult feelie recordings . . .

  Or maybe the kids will visit the more recent past, like the 20th century when the kids had toys that didn’t have electronics. Or even moving parts! (I direct your attention to Isaac Asimov’s story, “The Fun They Had.”)

  But there’s one toy that I don’t think they’ll have to play with via virtual reality. I’m sure that the Slinky will still be around . . .

  —Hank Davis

  INTRODUCTION

  ANGEL OF LIGHT

  HERE’S A TALE OF OLD-FASHIONED horse trading in a future that’s not unusual just because the aliens are here, and getting in on the horse trading. Omar Khayyam (as channeled by FitzGerald) wondered “what the vintners buy/One half so precious as the stuff they sell.” I don’t think either party in this yuletide transaction would have asked that question. Nor, I think, would they be likely to want the Moving Finger to do a rewrite of events as they came to pass.

  JOE HALDEMAN is a Vietnam veteran whose classic novels The Forever War and Forever Peace have the rare distinction of having won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel of the year. He has served twice as president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and is currently an adjunct professor teaching writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stephen King has said, “Haldeman writes with wit, grace and ease. If there was a Fort Knox for the science fiction writers who really matter, we’d have to lock Haldeman up there.” His most recent work is the trilogy comprising Marsbound, Starbound, and Earthbound.

  ANGEL OF LIGHT

  by Joe Haldeman

  IT BEGAN INNOCENTLY ENOUGH. Christmastime and no money. I went down into the cellar and searched deeply for something to give the children. Something they wouldn’t have already found during their hajjes down there.

  On a high shelf, behind bundles of sticks waiting for the cold, I could just see an old wooden chest, pushed far back into a corner. I dropped some of the bundles onto the floor and pushed the others out of the way, and with some difficulty slid the chest to the edge of the shelf. From the thick layer of dust on top, I assumed it was from my father’s time or before.

  I had a warning thought: Don’t open it. Call the authorities.

  But just above the lock was engraved the name, john billings washington. John Washington was my father’s slave name. I think the Billings middle name was his father’s. The box probably went back to the twentieth century.

  The lock was rusted tight, but the hasp was loose. I got down from the ladder and found a large screwdriver that I could use to pry it.

  I slid the chest out and balanced it on my shoulder, and carefully stepped down, the ladder creaking. I set it on the worktable and hung one lantern from the rafter over it, and set the other on a stack of scrap wood beside.

  The screaming that the screws made, coming out of the hardwood, was so loud that it was almost funny, considering that I supposedly was working in secret. But Miriam was pumping out chords on the organ, singing along with Fatimah, rehearsing for the Christmas service. I could have fired a pistol and no one would have heard it.

  The hasp swung free and the top lifted easily, with a sigh of brass. Musty smell and something else. Gun oil. A gray cloth bundle on top was heavy. Of course it held a gun.

  It’s not unusual to find guns left over from the old times; there were so many. Ammunition was rare, though. This one had two heavy magazines.

  I recognized it from news and history pictures, an Uzi, invented and used by the old infidel state Israel. I set it down and wiped my hands.

  It would not be a good Christmas present. Perhaps for ’Eid, for Ibriham,
when he is old enough to decide whether he is to be called. A Jewish weapon, he would laugh. I could ask the imam whether to cleanse it and how.

  There were three cardboard folders under the gun, once held together with rubber bands, which were just sticky lines now. They were full of useless documents about land and banking.

  Underneath them, I caught a glimpse of something that looked like pornography. I looked away immediately, closed my eyes, and asked Mohammed and Jesus for strength. Then I took it out and put it in the light.