Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex (1996), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, and Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Universe of Things (2011).

Ostracized as the only unchanging, "normal" person in Dreamland, a place where people go when they sleep and constantly change into other things, Roan must prevent an evil force from destroying the Seven Sleepers.

A novel of dreams and images, reality and illusion. Juele is the youngest and most promising new student at the legendary School of Light, where she will learn how to master illusion. She has a crucial role in her mentor's project to surround the Castle of Dreams with an image of perfection.

Troubled by unhappiness, Chuck Meadows mounts a dangerous journey into his own unconscious to discover the deepest secrets of his soul.

A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.

In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible -- the Children of the Next Level -- and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.

A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from 'other' sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA's interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.

And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.