“The Good Kill” by Barry B. Longyear
“Prevenge” by Mike Resnick and Kevin J. Anderson
“Prevenge” by Mike Resnick and Kevin J. Anderson
“Man, Descendant” by Carl Frederick
“Where Lies the Final Harbor?” by Shane Tourtellotte
Barry B. Longyear opens this issue of Analog with “The Good Kill,” a murder mystery of fox hunts and the English countryside. However, Longyear gives the setting his own twist. Many of the characters are amdroids, human engrams which have been implanted in animals or mechanical constructs. When hunt master Miles Bowman is killed during a fox hunt in which the fox is his partner and one-time human, Archie Quartermain, suspicion immediately falls on Bowman’s wife, Iva. Longyear’s setup means that anyone, one of the hunting party, Iva, the fox, or even Bowman’s horse, could be the guilty party. Longyear focuses his attention on Jaggers and Shad; the former is a human who has had problems in the past with his amdroid partner, while Shad is a one-time human who is now a duck. Not quite a police procedural, Longyear’s story takes all the twists and turns one would expect from a mystery, along with plenty of references to classic mystery films, from The Maltese Falcon to the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series. At the same time, Longyear introduces several sociological and emotional issues concerning the downloading of intelligences, although all too often he dismisses these concerns quickly in order to focus in more depth on the plot of the murder mystery. While this helps move the mystery along as Jaggers and Shad consider and dismiss various suspects, it doesn’t provide a very fulfilling look at the world Longyear has created, although with any luck, he’ll examine the more sociological issues in future stories set in this milieu.
When reading “Prevenge” by Mike Resnick and Kevin J. Anderson, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report.” However, while both stories deal with stopping crimes before they are committed, their methodology is completely different. In “Prevenge,” Kyle Bain is a member of the Knights Temporal, an organization created by Harvey Bloom to send people back in time to prevent murders. When Bain is sent back to prevent the murder of Vincent Draconis, Bain has absolutely no sympathy for Draconis, who made his fortune by stepping on anyone who got in his way. While Bain may not have wanted to help save Draconis, he has a job to do and sets out to do it. When the stream of time appears to work against Bain’s goals, he takes drastic steps to save Draconis’s life, resulting in an almost paradoxical, but satisfying, ending. Resnick and Anderson do allow themselves plenty of room for a potential direct sequel to “Prevenge” which would further examine the morality of Bloom’s project, as well as the possibility of other stories about the Knights Temporal.
“Man, Descendant” allows Carl Frederick to tell the story of Conrad, an identical twin who agrees to take part in an experiment in the time dilation effects of a black hole. Conrad is launched close to a black hole in the ship Time Capsule, while his brother, Mark, remains on the mother ship, the Gravity Explorer. The story is told as a series of entries in Conrad’s log, alternating with the comments made by an alien race. While there is apparently little connection made between Conrad and the aliens, as the story continues, a link becomes clear.
Using twins in science fiction to test time dilation goes back at least as far as Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars. In Frederick’s story, Conrad and Mark are adults, and, in fact, Conrad has a wife and daughter for whom he is keeping his private journal. His journal remains calm, even as events get out of hand. Juxtaposed against Conrad’s memoirs is the curiosity of the aliens who apparently have access to his journals. Frederick hints about their culture, which could have provided an interesting commentary on its own, but his interest is more in the manner in which they extract information from Conrad’s journals. Frederick doesn’t fully explain the tie between the two cultures and races until the very end of the story.
Shane Tourtellotte sends investigative reporter Chloe Roberts into space as she tries to solve the mystery of the disappearance of navigators in “Where Lies the Final Harbor?”. Roberts ruffles feathers when she asks about the disappearances while on Shastri Orbital Station. When the navigators all shut her out, she finds one, Pascal Mesereau, who is willing to take her out on a voyage, which she claims is unrelated to her investigation of the missing navigators. Even as Chloe does not press Pascal on the subject of the navigators, she manages to pique his interest in the mystery, for he is as in the dark about it as she is. Naturally, their trip comes across a mystery that is related to the missing navigators. The story is well written, showing the importance of navigators in Tourtellotte’s future history. In some ways, the position of navigators in “Where Lies the Final Harbor?” is reminiscent of their role in Frank Herbert’s Dune, although Tourtellotte’s navigators retain their humanity even if they are somewhat reclusive when it comes to the rest of humanity. In the end, once Chloe and Pascal discover the cause of the navigators’ disappearances, both react in very different, yet utterly believable, ways, although there is still something that rings false about Chloe’s treatment. Furthermore, given the importance of navigators to the society, it is a little strange that no official organization has attempted to solve the problem of the mysteries and that Chloe and Pascal find out what is happening as easily as they do.