Copyright © 2020 by Ben Bova
E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover by Kathryn Galloway English
Book design by Amy Craig
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-09-400094-7
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-09-400093-0
Fiction / Science Fiction / General
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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To Rashida, the light of my life
And for the little, little span
The dead are borne in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Foreword
A dullard once asked Dizzy Gillespie his opinion of Charlie Parker. With admirable economy, Diz said, “No him: no me.” Full disclosure: that describes my professional relationship to Ben Bova. As editor of Analog, in 1972 he bought my very first submission to any market—a miracle!—but far more important, he rejected the next thirteen stories I sent him, every time with a standard form rejection to which he’d added a single brief sentence by hand. Those thirteen sentences formed a complete course in how to write commercial fiction, and have made it possible for me to earn a living scribbling for nearly half a century.
But that doesn’t explain why I’m here recommending this book. It’s because my gratitude made me take a very close look at Ben’s own fiction—with the result that to this day, he is one of my favorite living writers in our genre. Every Ben Bova story I’ve ever read has been a trifecta: it taught me something interesting about science, and something important about us, the people science happens to, and also, something illuminating about the nature and practice of heroism. And made it look easy.
This book is a perfect example: a majority of these stories are old favorites of mine too, yarns that penetrated the fog of my own thoughts deeply enough, decades ago, that today I recognized them within a few paragraphs, and reread them with great pleasure. In another forty-odd years, I’m confident you will too.
—Spider Robinson
INTRODUCTION
I can hear you muttering, “Another anthology? Why?”
After all, I’ve written more than a hundred works of short fiction, and nearly 150 novels, anthologies, and books of nonfiction. Why another anthology?
Because the stories I write are like my children. I want them to see the light of day, to sparkle in the sunshine, to please the men and women who read them.
Is that too much to ask? I hope not.
So here are fourteen stories. From among all the short fiction I’ve written, these are my favorites.
I wish that they please you.
Ben Bova
Naples, Florida
2019
Introduction to
“Monster Slayer”
They say that there are only three (or maybe seven) basic themes to all fiction. Take your pick.
Which one is the theme of “Monster Slayer”? Darned if I know. Harry Twelvetoes’s story didn’t come to me in a flash, complete, all neatly categorized and set to be put into words. Most of the creative process for his story was buried deep in my subconscious and only came to the surface as I worked on the tale, day by day, scene by scene, sentence by sentence.
I don’t think this story can be neatly fitted into one of those academicians’s categories. I think of it as Harry’s story, uniquely the tale of an individual man trying to find his place in the world.
And succeeding—although he never realizes he has.
MONSTER SLAYER
This is the way the legend began.
He was called Harry Twelvetoes because, like all the men in his family, he was born with six toes on each foot. The white doctor who worked at the clinic on the reservation said the extra toes should be removed right away, so his parents allowed the whites to cut the toes off, even though his great-uncle Cloud Eagle pointed out that Harry’s father, and his father’s fathers as far back as anyone could remember, had gone through life perfectly well with twelve toes on their feet.
His secret tribal name, of course, was something that no white was ever told. Even in his wildest drunken sprees Harry never spoke it. The truth is, he was embarrassed by it. For the family had named him Monster Slayer, a heavy burden to lay across the shoulders of a little boy, or even the strong young man he grew up to be.
On the day that the white laws said he was old enough to take a job, his great-uncle Cloud Eagle told him to leave the reservation and seek his path in the world beyond.
“Why should I leave?” Harry asked his great-uncle.
Cloud Eagle closed his sad eyes for a moment, then said to Harry, “Look around you, nephew.”
Harry looked and saw the tribal lands as he had always seen them, brown desert dotted with mesquite and cactus, steep bluffs worn and furrowed as great-uncle’s face, turquoise-blue sky and blazing Father Sun baking the land. Yet there was no denying that the land was changing. Off in the distance stood the green fields of the new farms and the tiny dark shapes of the square houses the whites were building. And there were gray rain clouds rising over the mountains.
Refugees were pouring into the high desert. The greenhouse warming that gutted the farms of the whites with drought also brought rains that were filling the dry arroyos of the tribal lands
