Search Worlds Without End

The women served, bred, and obeyed-never questioning the dark Divine Will that yearly claimed the lives of their sons. The men ruled, meditated, and sired-if they survived. That was the way it had always been on Marah, where a deadly virus attacked young males and left ony a few to reach maturity... the way it had always been until a beautiful and forceful Terran female landed and began asking questions-and a devoted true-believing Shepherd named Jared began having doubts!

The stories in Aventine tell the strange adventures that happen to the rich guests at a secluded outer space luxury resort.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay
• The Siren Garden - (1974) - shortstory
• Tropic of Eden - (1977) - shortstory
• A House Divided - (1978) - shortstory
• Broken Stairways, Walls of Time - (1979) - shortstory
• Shadow Dance - novelette
• Ménage Outré - (1981) - shortstory
• Bête et Noir - (1980) - novelette

Who was the cop killer? A Silent? Their anger launched the crime wave that brought the Terrans to Egar. Could one of them be ruthless enough to want the police out of the way - permanently? A Normal? The telepathic aliens seemed friendly enough - but psychotics could fake innocence. And if their culture permitted a murderous conspiracy - how were the humans to know? A Terran? Faced with culture shock on a strange world - their innermost thoughts open to the mind-readers - fears and pressures mounted. Had one of their own gone mad? As the cops tried to solve the mystery, somewhere the assassin waited.

Inspector Cole Dunavan is a cop without a body. A ghost who can't remember anything except his own murder. No one sees or hears him. He cannot move objects and initially cannot move through closed doors. When he learns that his body has not been found and the circumstances of his disappearance make it appear he betrayed his marriage and was killed by his mistress... who has also disappeared, he vows to put things right. A murdered cop, a ghost and an avenger working to communicate with his former partner, get straight with his wife, and catch his own killer.

The planet seemed like salvation for the dying colony ship Invictus, except... within a day of landing, the colonists found the world to be inhabited and themselves caught between two opposing cannibalistic armies.

For Liberty Ibarra, who learned languages fast, the situation called for courage, tact, and a blind faith in the aliens' envoy, the brother of the enigmatic emperor... until she learned that her "friend" was also a political schemer with a talent for assassination. Then it began to look as though the humans had dived over the edge of the pan straight into the fire.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1984. The story can also be found in the anthology New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (1994) edited by Forrest J. Ackerman, Jean Marie Stine and Janrae Frank.

In an ancient Africa of verdant Sahara plains, warrior woman Jeneba Karamoke has grown up scorned by her people because her father was a leopard man. When she rescues a party of fellow warriors from cannibalistic monster half-men, she hopes it will finally win acceptance for her. But no... in order to prove she isn't lying about the vanished hero Tomo Silla's part in their capture by the half men she must make Tomo face the tribe. Can she find him, and then survive more monsters, foreign tribes, and a curse laid on a fabled city to bring him back alive?

The team from the Department of Surveys and Charters wasn't anticipating anything special on Nira. DSC policy called for periodic studies of developing races on proscripted worlds, and it was merely time for another look at the winged, stone-age Shree. The team scientists were curious about how far the Shree might have come in their slow climb toward intelligence: Monitor Chemel Krar was mainly concerned with enforcing the absolute rule against any contact or interference with Nira's natives. The hardest part of the job would be sticking out the full five years of the study. As it turned out, the study lasted five days. At the end of that time, one team member had died violently, and the rest were scattered over the face of Nira. Suddenly it was the Shree who were doing the studying.

Homicide detective Allison Goodnight has a big problem. One look at the mutilated victim in her latest case tells her he has been killed by a rogue werewolf. She ought to know; she's a werewolf, too. Her whole family is - members of an ancient species separate from humans but passing as human. It is urgent that she close this case, without revealing the killer's nature, before more people die and humans' racial memory of her kind reawakens. But the killer is a stranger unknown to any of the local clan... and her new partner is watching her with unnerving intensity. If he sees too much, she may have to turn killer herself to protect her people.

Zane Kerr has a problem. He was excited to be working with the detective having the highest clearance rate in the department, but Allison's secretive conduct of this case disturbs him. And when the description of a mysterious blonde woman seen with the victim matches a number of Allison's relatives, and even Allison herself, he has to wonder if she is trying to protect, not catch, the killer. One way or another he is determined to find out.

When San Francisco Homicide Inspector Garreth Mikaelian begins hunting a mysterious red-haired woman who appears involved in the murders of two out-of-town businessmen, he faces a killer unlike any he has investigated before. For unknown to him, Lane Barber is a vampire.

When Garreth comes too close, she attacks him and turns him into a vampire, too. Now, even as he struggles to cope with this devastating change in his life without betraying to others what he has become, he is back on Lane's trail... this time with a vengeance. But can he find her, and find a way to bring her to justice, before she decides to attack again, and this time finish him off?

Two years ago Garreth Mikaelian was turned into a vampire by the seductive Lane Barber. He tracked her to a small Kansas town and when she tried to kill him, killed her. He thought. But a call comes from his old partner in San Francisco that seems to indicate Lane is still alive. Garreth goes to San Francisco to find out. He determines that she *is* dead. But now someone is killing vampires and friends of vampires and trying to frame Garreth for it. Is it the vampire who created Lane? Or maybe his partner's new partner who seems to know Garreth is a vampire and hates him for it? And as Garreth searches for the true killer, is a suspense novelist researching a new book an ally or foe?

Garreth Mikaelian thought he destroyed Lane Barber, the woman who made him a vampire. But did he? When he returns to San Francisco to see, he is relieved to find she is dead. But someone is killing vampires and friends of vampires... and trying to frame Garreth for it. Is it another vampire who wants vengeance for Lane's death? Or a detective who appears to hate vampires and knows Garreth is one? He needs to find the killer before the frame traps him... or he becomes the killer's next victim.

In Lee Killough's Blood Games Vampire Garreth Mikaelian thought he had his existence all arranged. He is comfortably settled in a town where, his nature unknown to those around him, he works the night shift as a police officer. His blood comes in bottles. He has a routine and friends. But that peace is shattered when his fellow officer and sometime lover Maggie Lebekov is killed by a lethal trio playing ever escalating blood games.

Garreth finds himself racing to locate the suspects before other law enforcement officers do, to be sure they are captured alive. Because if they are not yet vampires, and the leader may already be a very old and powerful vampire, they have drunk vampire blood and if killed will rise again even more deadly.

It looks like straightforward suicide to Detective Janna Brill. Starship outfitter Andy Kellener locked himself in his office after hours and took a fatal drug dose. But Brill's exasperating new partner Mama Maxwell thinks it's murder, and his chief suspect is Kellener's partner Jorge Hazlett. The trouble is, Hazlett has an airtight alibi. In 2091's cashless society, every purchase is made with a data chip implanted in the individual's wrist... and Hazlett's bank records put him in a shopping mall clear across town at the time of his partner's death.

To get their man, Brill and Maxwell have to prove Hazlett faked his shopping spree... and possibly destroy law enforcement's best tool since DNA for tracking suspects!

The Spider... it's a new marvel of technology. And another word for death for detective Janna Brill and her partner Mama Maxwell.

Future police Janna Brill and Mama Maxwell must catch a band of killers who don't seem to exist...