Search Worlds Without End

A powerful new laser being built on the far side of the moon is intended for scientific use only, but it soon becomes the focus of a diplomatic storm that threatens the solar system.

This short story originally appeared in Amazing Stories, April 1993. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The Macurdies had been farmers for generations, and Curtis Macurdy would have been content to spend his life with his exotically beautiful wife Varia, earning a living by tilling his plot of land in the American Midwest. Varia was from Yuulith, a magical world separated from Earth by only a dimensional barrier that could sometimes be broached.

Curtis Macurdy leads two lives. On earth, he is a farmer; but on the other side of the secret cross-dimensional gate, in the world of Yuulith, he is the invincible mystic warrior, the Lion of Farside. With the war over, Macurdy hopes to return to his life as a farmer. But trouble is growing in Europe as Adolph Hitler rises to power and the Nazis threaten more than the fate of Earth...

Curtis Macurdy passes through a cross-dimensional gate into a land where his peculiarities are honored, not cursed. There he finds old enemies and another war, and discovers that peace carries a steep price. Meanwhile, his old adversary prepares a doomsday weapon.

Remember: Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill you, but family is what you know. Family is what works.

Cariad Corcoran has a new sister who is everything she is not: tall, beautiful, confident. They're unlikely allies and even unlikelier sisters, but they're determined to find the moon's first footprint, even if the lunar frontier is doing its best to kill them before they get there.

A missing spacecraft -

A cryptic message -

And a fearsome secret hiding in plain sight.

Five years after he was marooned in Earth orbit, Ryan Hunter must go even farther to find the man who saved his life. With former astronaut Penny Stratton, he leads an unconventional rescue team into a threat beyond anything he could have imagined. What they can't know is that the fate of millions rests on their shoulders.

Because something big is coming...

Farside, the side of the Moon that never faces Earth, is the ideal location for an astronomical observatory. It is also the setting for a tangled web of politics, personal ambition, love, jealousy, and murder.

Telescopes on Earth have detected an Earth-sized planet circling a star some thirty light-years away. Now the race is on to get pictures of that distant world, photographs and spectra that will show whether or not the planet is truly like Earth, and if it bears life.

Farside will include the largest optical telescope in the solar system as well as a vast array of radio antennas, the most sensitive radio telescope possible, insulated from the interference of Earth's radio chatter by a thousand kilometers of the Moon's solid body.

Building the Farside observatory is a complex, often dangerous task. On the airless surface of the Moon, under constant bombardment of hard radiation and infalling micrometeoroids, builders must work in cumbersome spacesuits and use robotic machines as much as possible. Breakdowns - mechanical and emotional - are commonplace. Accidents happen, some of them fatal.

What they find stuns everyone, and the human race will never be the same.