Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (16 page)

A tear slid down her face. “At what price to me?”

“Ai, Janelle.” He put his arms around her shoulders and drew her to him. “I don’t know how to take you home. But if you let me, I will give you a home here worth having.”

She laid her head against him and fought back her tears.

 

Dominick’s suite was far different than the chamber where Janelle had spent her first night in the palace. It was five times the size. Low black-lacquered tables stood around the room, surrounded by big cushions instead of chairs. Rich tapestries in gold, red, and green hung on the walls. The rugs he used for a bed filled one corner, tumbled with velvet pillows. Braziers burned in other corners, and oil lamps flickered in wall sconces, shedding a dim golden light. It all had a barbaric elegance.

Janelle sat with Dominick on his bed, leaning against the wall. They had come here from the library, and now he held her. She fitted to his side, unable to talk, her thoughts edged with pain.

After a while, she said, “It is hard to believe you are brothers.”

He answered in a low voice. “Do not see me with blinders. What Max does and believes—it is in me also. I had a different life, and it taught me other ways. Had brutality molded me instead, I would be just like him.”

“Will you go to war?”

“He is my brother, despite everything.” He sounded tired. “But I will not desert my home and people to go ‘across the sea,’ as he says I must. If that means we must fight, so be it.”

She understood. Six of his officers had died in the raid on the palace. He could rebuild the hall, but nothing would bring back those men. At least Kadar, the guard who had helped her in the tunnels, had survived. He had been injured, but he was recovering.

“Gregor told me about your family,” Dominick said. “I’m sorry.”

She couldn’t talk about it. So she said only, “My father was an ambassador. Do you have them here?”

“Yes. It is a position of honor, usually held by a nobleman.” He rubbed his hand along her upper arm. “The people of Othman have a history of strife with the Andalusian Empire. We descend from their colonies, but we gained our independence centuries ago.”

Andalusia. Southern Spain. “The empire doesn’t exist in my universe. But Spain is a nation. I lived there for years.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “It is no wonder the prophecy predicted you would affect our balance of power. Your background suits you well to the throne.”

Dryly she said, “I don’t think your brother was interested in my background.”

The corded muscles in his arm tensed. “Max will never be satisfied until he takes you from me or kills us both.” Grimly he added, “He will succeed with neither.”

“He says he and I are married.”

Ire sparked in his voice. “He cannot marry my wife.”

“His spy told him you and I never wed.”

“I gave you the jewels. And we consummated the marriage. So we are wed.”

“Uh, Dominick.” She lifted her head. “We didn’t consummate it.”

“I stayed the night. As far as anyone knows, we did.” He cleared his throat. “Unless you plan to say otherwise.”

She smiled. “I won’t.”

He looked relieved. “Good.”

“I met your daughter. She’s charming.”

His tone gentled. “Yes. All my children are.”

“I’m sorry . . . about their mother.”

“Ah, well.” He sounded muted. “It has been years.”

He fell silent after that, and she regretted bringing up the memories. After a while, she said, “What happened to your people five hundred years ago? Was there a war? A catastrophe?”

“I don’t think so.” For one of the few times since she had met him, he sounded uncertain. “Some of the people just left.”

“To where?”

Dominick pointed upward. “There. Somewhere.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “I have more education than most because my mother insisted Max and I study history, language, astronomy, and mathematics when we were boys, as much as anyone could teach us. But it barely touches what is in my library. Why did our ancestors desert this world and never come back?” He shook his head. “We have lost that knowledge. They took so much with them. Legend says they left us behind deliberately. Some claim a political rift existed between those who went and those who stayed. Others say we remained of our own free will, as guardians of Earth, and that those who left cannot return because they became lost between worlds, even universes.” Softly he said, “Perhaps it is both. But it’s been half a millennium. Our memories are faded.”

It was heartbreaking to think of the human race fractured that way. “Maybe they’ll return someday.”

“You will search for answers?”

She nodded, gratified he didn’t object. “Gladly.”

“You say I have some small talent for scholarly pursuits.” He sounded bemused.

“More than small, I think.”

“I haven’t the interest, though.” His smile flashed. “But ah, Janelle, our children will be brilliant.”

It hurt to realize her children would never know her world. Yet it was true; if they inherited their parents’ ability for abstract thought, and learned to use it, they might truly reach for the stars. She would teach them what she knew. But most of all, she would love them, as her parents had loved her.

He was watching her face. “Together, you and I can achieve much.”

“I hope so.” Her voice caught. “We will make a good place.” Somehow.

“Aye,” Dominick murmured. “We will.”

Janelle didn’t know if she would ever understand this complicated man, but she wanted to try. She knew life here wouldn’t be easy. It was a violent world, harsh and unyielding, and Maximillian would always be there. Yet it also had an incredible beauty. If she could never go home, she could at least have her work in the library, a family to love, and dreams of the day when humanity might soar beyond the bounds of Earth.

A bittersweet peace settled over her. This wasn’t a life she would have chosen. But it might hold joy, even astonishing events, and for that, she could look forward to the future.

I
’m defining the Golden Age of SF as July 1939 through 1945. At the time there were few SF hardcovers and no paperbacks; the field was almost entirely a matter of stories in pulp magazines.

You can argue about the ending date, but the beginning is easy: A. E. van Vogt’s first story, “Black Destroyer,” appeared in the July 1939 issue of
Astounding
; Robert Heinlein’s first story, “Lifeline,” would appear in the next issue; and
Astounding
was fully under the direction of John W. Campbell (earlier issues used a good deal of material purchased by his predecessor).

In my view, Golden Age SF is the SF bought by Campbell for
Astounding
(and its fantasy companion,
Unknown/Unknown Worlds
) during his great initial period as editor.

Modern SF was largely defined by the stories written for
Astounding
during this period by Heinlein (above all), van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, the team of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and Isaac Asimov (who also had an early story in the July 1939
Astounding
).

Two other major writers worked in this period: Murray Leinster, who had started writing important SF in 1919, and Ray Bradbury, whose best contemporary work appeared in
Weird Tales
. Neither man can be described as “a Campbell writer,” though Leinster did major work for
Astounding
.

There’s a tendency to believe nowadays that stories which appeared in other magazines during the Golden Age had been rejected by Campbell. There certainly were magazines assembled from rejects, paying salvage rates for their material, but that doesn’t mean they were unsuccessful or ignored at the time. In 1940, issues of Fred Pohl’s
Astonishing
outsold Campbell’s
Astounding
by seventy thousand copies to fifty thousand, though Pohl paid roughly half Campbell’s word rates.

But many of the SF magazines of the time were simply different from
Astounding
, not necessarily better or worse. Ray Palmer’s Ziff-Davis publications
Amazing
and
Fantastic Adventures
were the bestselling SF magazines of all time, selling 180,000 copies per issue. Their market appears to have been unsophisticated but not juvenile: sex and violence were strong, consistent themes. Though their stories had a great deal of action, they were often as plotless as literary fiction.

Standard’s
Thrilling Wonder Stories
and
Startling Stories
(and, for that matter,
Captain Future
) did tend to be juvenile. Not stupid, not badly written, but likely to appeal to an audience younger than that of
Astounding
. Kuttner and Moore did about as much good work for
Standard
as they did for
Astounding,
and when Bradbury came into his own (after my period), the
Standard
magazines were his natural habitat.

Finally,
Planet Stories
was a frankly adventure market. Unlike the Ziff-Davis magazines, stories in
Planet
did have plots. They were likely to involve lost Martian cities and exotic princesses, but they had beginnings, middles, and ends.

SF cover art in the Golden Age is very well known—but here it’s the magazines other than
Astounding
that are either famous or notorious, depending on your point of view. This is the period of bug-eyed monsters and girls wearing brass bras or transparent spacesuits over swimsuits. These garish cover paintings were intended to be noticed on newsstands.

There are modern collectors who appreciate these covers as art, but there are many others who consider them sexist, juvenile embarrassments. Exactly the same attitudes appear in the letter columns of the magazines themselves, argued with passion on both sides.

The contents of the magazines, however (with the limited exceptions of the Ziff-Davis magazines), don’t reflect the implications of the covers. Some pulps were explicitly sadistic and violent, but not the Golden Age SF mags. The readers knew that, but a layman scanning a newsstand might honestly have lumped
Thrilling Wonder Stories
in with
Terror Tales
.

Astounding
was the one magazine in the field in which the arguments for decorous, respectable covers won over exploitation and sales.
Astounding
’s covers were often extremely accomplished art, but they were determinedly sedate even when the story being illustrated would honestly lend itself to a more active development. For example, the March 1943 cover shows people rising through water in a transparent elevator shaft. This is indeed an illustration of Kuttner and Moore’s
Clash by Night
, but that novelette also includes battles between giant warships on the storm-tossed, monster-ridden seas of Venus.

Campbell, who from the moment he took over the magazine tried to get rid of the name
Astounding
(he finally succeeded in 1960), was also trying to keep his covers respectable. Battles and monsters weren’t respectable, even if they appeared in the stories themselves. (
Unknown Worlds
had even gone to basically typographic covers before paper shortages killed the magazine.)

There’s a final factor about the Golden Age that is often overlooked: it almost precisely overlaps World War II. Not only did this affect the contents of stories (there are more Nazi spies and heroic allied castaways than you might expect), it affected the writers. By 1944, Heinlein, de Camp, Hubbard, and Asimov were either in or employed by the Navy, and artists were doing war work also.

Stories were written not by who was best but by who was left. That doesn’t mean there was no good work—Leinster’s
First Contact
comes from 1945, and Kuttner and Moore were at their very peak—but some commentators have made a case for ending the Golden Age in November 1943, when
Astounding
shrank to digest size.

Our present-day vision of the Golden Age of SF is in many ways a creation of post-war editors who mined the period for fat hardcover anthologies. Those editors focused on
Astounding
, and rightly so. But the magazines of the day were remarkably diverse—and remarkably interesting, in their widely different ways. It was a time when there was SF for everybody, not just a narrow group . . . and personally, I wish that situation held true today.