Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 2002. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 8 (2003), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Nano Comes to Clifford Falls: And Other Stories (2008).

Listen to the full story for free at EscapePod.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush (2016), edited by John McFetridge and Kevin J. Anderson. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edtied by Charles Yu and John Joseph Adams.

Read or listen to the full story for free at Escape Pod.

In 1971 university students Walter Bishop and William Bell use an exotic chemical compound to link their subconscious minds. Unexpectedly, they open a rip in space through which comes a menace unlike any our world has ever seen - the Zodiac Killer. His singular goal is death, and it falls to Bishop, Bell, and Nina Sharp to stop him.

As a child, Olivia Dunham is "Subject 13," exposed to the experimental drug Cortexiphan. The effects it has upon her manifest when her stepfather assaults her mother--with dire consequences. All of her life, Olivia hides the strange things Cortexiphan has done to her. But when faced with a life-or-death situation, she can no longer deny her true nature. For if she does, someone close to her will die.

In 2008, Peter Bishop is estranged from his father and running shady operations in Southeast Asia. His latest scam lands him in a life-or-death situation involving weird events beyond the ken of modern science. On the run, he finds himself pursued by strange specters of his past... and his future.

Only a few nuclear weapons fell in America-the weapons that destroyed our nation were biological and, ultimately, cultural. But in the chaos, the famine, the plague, there exited a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Deseret, formed from the vestiges of Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The climate has changed. The Great Salt Lake has filled up to prehistoric levels. But there, on the fringes, brave, hardworking pioneers are making the desert bloom again.

A civilization cannot be reclaimed by powerful organizations, or even by great men alone. It must be renewed by individual men and women, one by one, working together to make a community, a nation, a new America.

Table of Contents:

• West - (1987) - novella
• Salvage - (1986) - novelette
• The Fringe - (1985) - novelette
• Pageant Wagon - (1989) - novella
• America - (1987) - novelette
• Author's Note: On Sycamore Hill - (1985) - essay
• Afterword - essay by Michael R. Collings

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1985 and was reprinted in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, #14, September 2009. The story can aslo be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986), edited by Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 21 (1986), edited by George Zebrowski and Future on Ice (1998), edited by Orson Scott Card. It is included in the collection The Folk of the Fringe (1989).