Iterations and other stories (collection)

And there was more—wonderfully more. Matt’s brother Alf had broken his leg once, falling off a ladder; Matt knew what was going to happen. He’d have to wear a cast for weeks, or even months. Yes, that would be uncomfortable; yes, it would be awkward. But he welcomed it, because it meant that, at least for a while, he would be excused from the horrors of phys. ed.

That reprieve would be great—but things would be fine after the cast was removed, too. For when he eventually came back to gym class, Matthew Sinclair, football hero, knew he would never be picked last again.

If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage

Author’s Introduction

In late 1980 and early 1981, The Village Voice: The Weekly Newspaper of New York sponsored a contest called “Sci-Fi Scenes.” The rules were simple: write an SF story precisely 250 words in length—no more, no less (tide words didn’t count, a fact I took full advantage of). Ten weekly winners would be chosen by a trio of judges (Shawna McCarthy of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; Robert Sheckley, the fiction editor of Omni; and Victoria Schochet, the editor-in-chief of SF at Berkley Publishing). Each winner received a hardcover copy of the first edition of Peter Nicholls’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia; my story won in the contest’s fourth week.

For several years, I had this entire story—in tiny type— printed on the back of my business card, and in 1987 a Washington, D.C., outfit called Story Cards printed it as the text inside a bon voyage card.

* * *

One look at the eyes of that allosaur had been enough: fiery red with anger, darting with hunger, and a deeper glow of… cunning. Those sickle claws may be great for shredding prey, but he can’t run worth a damn on mud.

Come on, Allo-baby, you may have the armament, but I took Paleo 250 with Professor Blackhart!

Damn the professor, anyway. If it weren’t for his class, I’d be on Altair III now, not running for my life across a prehistoric mud flat.

Those idiots at Starport Toronto said teleportation was a safe way to travel. “Just concentrate on your destination and the JumpLink belt will do the rest.”

Hah! I was concentrating, but when I saw that fat broad, I couldn’t help thinking of a brontosaur. So I let my mind wander for half a second: the JumpLink belt still shouldn’t have dumped me here with the dinosaurs. There should be enough juice left for one more Jump, if I can get it to work.

Damn, it’s hard fiddling with your belt buckle while doing a three-minute kilometer. Let’s see: if I re-route those fiber optics through that picoprocessor…

The thwock-thwock of clawed feet sucking out of mud is getting closer. Got to hurry. Thwock-thwock!

There! The timer’s voice counts down: “Four.”

Concentrate on Starport Toronto. Concentrate. Thwock-thwock!

“Three.”

Toronto. The Starport. Concentrate. Thwock-thwock!

“Two.”

Concentrate hard. Starport Toronto. No stray thoughts. Thwock- thwock!

“One.”

Boy, am I going to give them Hell—

Where the Heart Is

Author’s Introduction

In the summer of 1982,1 worked at Bakka, Toronto’s venerable science-fiction specialty store. One Saturday in July, a man claiming to be a film producer came in looking for an SF story that he might adapt into a short film. I suggested I could write an original script instead (having just received a degree in Radio and Television Arts, breaking into scriptwriting was much on my mind). He agreed, I did so—and, as a new writer, I learned an important lesson: nothing ever comes of encounters like that one.

Years later, I converted the script into a short story. In 1991, Nova Scotia publisher Lesley Choyce bought it for Ark of Ice, an anthology of Canadian SF he was putting together. That began my relationship with Lesley’s Pottersfield Press, which later issued two anthologies I co-edited (Crossing the Line: Canadian Mysteries with a Fantastic Twist with David Skene-Melvin in 1998, and Over the Edge: The Crime Writers of Canada Anthology with Peter Sellers in 2000).

What pleases me most about this piece is that even in the script version from 1982, I predicted a global network of computers, which I called “the TerraComp Web.” That makes me one of the very few SF writers to foresee the World Wide Web (heck, I even came close to getting the name right…).

* * *

It was not the sort of welcome I had expected. True, I’d been gone a long time—so long, in fact, that no one I knew personally could possibly still be alive to greet me. Not Mom or Dad, not my sisters… not Wendy. That was the damnable thing about relativity: it tended to separate you from your relatives.