Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1984. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Armageddons (1999), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the collection The Tithonian Factor and Other Stories (1984).

The ability to distinguish reality from fantasy is supposedly the root of sanity.

But if a man lives in two worlds, and both are real, what then? Is he mad, or sane? One person, or two? And if one of his worlds should begin to grow dim, a shadow world, could one say he was in danger of going sane?

Alvin is a clone. One of four, all raised separately, all with unnatural powers. Terrified by their potential, their creator attempts to wipe their recent memories, their knowledge of the talents. But the process goes wrong, and all four are left with no memory at all. They see the world with brand new eyes.

Sent to a remote research station, kept under the guidance of an intelligent ape, Alvin begins to recover his memories. Desperate to rediscover his brothers, he sets off to London in a desperate search for their creator. But when he is kidnapped by criminal apes, the trouble really begins.

From the moment when young Christopher Blackburn is prevailed upon to attend a seance at The Seekers' Temple a series of seemingly inexplicable and increasingly terrifying experiences gradually convinces him that he has been singled out by some unknown power which is bent on his destruction. But why? And what can he have which has attracted the attention of the sinister Guardians? In a desperate hunt for the answers to these questions Christoper learns for himself the old truth that no man is an island; the new one that it is possible to be in two times at the same place; and the sombre one that some of us are more responsible to posterity than we care to admit!

Earth, 2000 years after the holocaust which drove man deep underground; a ghostly, deserted planet peopled only by the diligent robots who, century after century, silently harvest grain which no man will eat. Up into this eerie world comes Mel, a questioning young Roamer who has disobeyed the Law which says he must never venture into or beyond the Lost Levels. Together with three companions, and a companion not of this earth, Mel takes on the awesome task of freeing human beings from the tyranny imposed upon them by their remote ancestors; of justifying the agonized cry of Barney as he died in a Forbidden Level; 'I am a man! Everything is for Man!'

Table of Contents:

• Out There Where the Big Ships Go - (1979) - novelette
• The Custodians - (1975) - novelette
• Paradise Beach - (1976) - short story
• The Hertford Manuscript - (1976) - novelette
• The Web of the Magi - (1980) - novella

In the 24th Century, mankind lives in Utopia. Everyone is happy, apart from one man. 'A misfit, a throwback, a genuine freak' is how eighteen year old Bard (with typical eighteen year old romanticism) describes himself.

'The Last Romantic' was full of bravado, for in the perfect society individualism was not encouraged, and the threat of 'rehabilitation' was ever present. But Bard had a plan - he would enter the Caves of Sleep until he was twenty-one, his own man without let or hindrance, and in control of a fairly large fortune. But even in Utopia, plans have a way of going awry.

Tom Jones is naïve, impressionable and very, very willing. His chief talent is conversing with dolphins in the Aquatic Mammals Division of HMS Profundis, a gargantuan submarine destined to roam the ocean depths for a century following the nuclear holocaust.

Years pass and mad captain succeeds mad captain. Eventually the ship falls under the command of one Admiral Prood, a kind, understanding man who finally comes to a startling conclusion. He is God the Father. The Almighty Himself. And all he needs now is a son to sit at his right hand.

Enter the innocent Tom Jones.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1975. The story can also be found in the anthologies The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, and Best SF: 75, The Ninth Annual (1976), edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss. It is included in the collections The Custodians and Other Stories (1976) and Out There Where the Big Ships Go (1980).

On the murky outskirts of our solar system, a lonely star has exploded, emitting monstrous doses of radiation...

The year is 1983. The exploding star Briareus Delta, 132 light years away, provokes only mild interest from planet Earth. Suddenly, appalling tornadoes and storms ravage the cities and countryside, leaving death and desolation in their wake. Then mankind realises another terrifying side-effect - every adult in the world has been rendered infertile.

Schoolteacher Calvin Johnson discovers he is one of the select few to have acquired strange psychic powers. Termed 'Zetas', these people experience mental flashes of the future - a future of freezing isolation, snow-swept landscapes and bleak, ice-bound cities.

A second ice-age is imminent as man faces the ultimate horror... extinction.

As a young boy, Laurie Linton encountered a strange apparition: a ghostly man who urgently mouthed a message:

KILL MAGOBION!

Years later, as a member of the UN Narcotics Security Agency, Linton and the beautiful Carol Kennedy were assigned a special duty: investigation of a mysterious drug which endowed its addicts with superhuman powers.
Now, that investigation leads Linton and Carol into a bewildering maze where past and future slide by each other at terrifying speed... where international peace teeters in the balance... and where all blues point to the top-secret Ministry of Internal Security and its prestigious, powerful leader - COLONEL PIERS MAGOBION.

George Cringe is a middle-aged school-teacher, married with several children. His marriage, while not a failure, is hardly a great success, and he is somewhat drawn towards a fellow teacher, Jennifer Lawton, who is much younger than he is. For relaxation, George has taken to creating an endless SF saga set on the planet Agenor, where his hero and heroine, Zil Bryn and Orgypp, face various problems, their current one involving an outbreak of psychedelic mushrooms.

Hugo, Nebula, Ditmar and Locus Award nominated novella. It originally appeaerd in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1976. The story can also be found in the anthology A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (1981), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Terry Carr. It is included in the collection The Custodians and Other Stories (1978) and Richard Cowper SF Gateway Omnibus (2014). The novella is incorporated in the novel The Road to Corlay (1978).

This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

Collection containing:

• The Custodians (1975 novelette)
• Paradise Beach (1976 novelette)
• Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1976 novella)
• The Hertford Manuscript (1976 novelette)

Piper at the Gates of Dawn begins the White Bird of Kinship series. The other stories are unrelated.

The Hertford Manuscript is a sequel to The Time Machine by HG Wells.

The Custodians tells of a visitor to a French monastery, and of one specially built tiny room which is constructed precisely on the intersection of mysterious force fields, so that anyone who enters is able to foresee the future. Paradise Beach is the story of a wall-screen whose image of the sea attunes itself to the individual perceptions of the onlooker. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is set towards the end of the next millennium when the stories about the coming of the mysterious white bird of kinship become associated with the travels of an old story-teller and his young nephew, whose pipe seems to have a magical quality. Finally, The Hertford Manuscript tells of the remarkable discovery of a seventeenth-century book with some pages purporting to be the journals of a nineteenth-century time traveller.

On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptor of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment.

And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past.

The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes. When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain's seven island kingdoms.

Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy's own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.

A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.