Rayguns Over Texas, Page 2

  Around 1981, when it became apparent that Australia would win the 1985 WorldCon bid, Willie and Robert decided that the North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFIC) should be held in Austin. A NASFIC occurs whenever the World Science Fiction Convention is not held in the US. In order to host the convention, a bid committee is formed to try to entice other fans to support them. This involves going to conventions in other states and speaking of facilities, floor plans, hotels, and other fun subjects. Robert and Willie took it further, throwing parties and bringing chili and beer from Texas to the unknowing masses. The Texas SF Enquirer, a FACT newsletter/fanzine edited by Pat Mueller (Virzi), was used to promote the bid. When the NASFIC was voted on in 1983 at the Baltimore World Convention, it was an easy win. The Texas SF Enquirer would later win the Best Fanzine Hugo Award in 1988.

  FACT (the Fandom Association of Central Texas) was born about this time. My memory on some of these dates gets fuzzy, so if I am wrong, I am sorry. FACT was born to help organize Texas fans in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and other places. In the incorporation process, I was one of the three people to sign the articles of incorporation.

  There were fannish wars around this time, which I chose to ignore. Willie and Robert fought against what they perceived as outside forces led by the Huns. FACT survived and became stronger.

  I need to point out somewhere here that, in 1979, I found the woman of my dreams and we were married that same year. Sandi puts up with my SF-related obsessions and has attended several WorldCons with me, including the 1988 New Orleans WorldCon, where she was the designated acceptor for our friend, Brad Foster, who was nominated as the Best Fan Artist. We got to sit in a special area along with all the nominees. Foster won, and Sandi got to go on stage and accept the award. Her picture was prominently featured in color on the front of Locus a few months later (though she was credited as unknown acceptor for Brad Foster). I struggle for a mention in Locus (much less a black and white picture), and she goes on the cover. I finally got a recognizable picture there in 2011.

  Conventions began to appear around the state. In 1980, I had attended the final SolarCon in El Paso. Nothing more happened there until a WesterCon was held there in 1996. El Paso was on the edge of the potential WesterCon circuit. The convention moves from town to town yearly and must be held in the Mountain or Pacific Time Zone.

  Dallas/Ft.Worth had the Dallas Fantasy Fair for about 10 years, finally folding in 1996. In 2002, Dallas got a new science fiction convention with ConDFW. A couple of years later, FenCon began. Their audience is frequently the same, though the focus is different. ConDFW is a more literary convention, while FenCon has a strong filk (science fiction folk singing) and costuming program.

  ApolloCon in Houston has been running since 2004. ApolloCon has a working relationship with NASA and has had scientists and astronauts as guests and panelists.

  In 1996, FACT decided to form a group to handle the bidding and running of national level conventions. ALAMO (the Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization) was created at that time. ALAMO oversaw the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio (LoneStar Con2), two World Fantasy Conventions (Corpus Christi, TX in 2000 and Austin, TX in 2006), and one BoucherCon (the world mystery convention) in 2002.

  I attended all those conventions, as well as most of the ConDFW, FenCons, and ApolloCons, over the years. Throughout these conventions and the years, I have met and talked with a great number of writers.

  Finally, the popular Texas Literary Festival occurs each October in Austin. Science fiction and fantasy are generally among the draws. Recently, this included Sean Williams, Garth Nix, Jasper Fforde, Justin Cronin, Joe R. Lansdale, and more.

  Beside the already mentioned Texas SF Enquirer, there have been a number of fanzines produced from Texas over the years.

  Based out of Houston, the online fanzine, SF Signal, won the Hugo in 2012. Run by John DeNardo, J P Frantz, and Patrick Hester, with the help of a loose confederation of writers and fans known as The Functional Nerds, the site features reviews, interviews, and a regular podcast series.

  While not based in Texas, RevolutionSF, another online fanzine, prominently features Texas writers and reviewers. Editors Peggy Hailey, Mark Finn, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Matthew Bey, Steve Wilson, Rick Klaw, and Fred Stanton all call Texas home. Bey, Wilson, and David Chang publish Space Squid, a related fanzine.

  San Antonio’s John Picacio, Sanford Allen, and Paul Vaughan started the Missions Unknown blog in 2009 to feature science fiction, fantasy, and horror events in the south Texas area. I contributed to their entries and eventually became an Unknown Missionary in 2010.

  Long gone fanzines I have enjoyed over the years included Pirate Jenny (another Hugo nominee from Pat Mueller), The Nature to Wander from Dallas area fan Dale Denton, Lawrence Person’s literary criticism fanzine Nova Express (another Hugo nominee), and Texas Fandom, a one-shot from Becky Matthews, which listed all known Texas fans at the time of its publication. The Houston Science Fiction Society produced the club fanzines, Mathom and The Purple Obscenity.

  Is this all there is to Texas science fiction? Certainly not! Long before I got involved, there was science fiction activity. The earliest science fiction group in Texas was the Dallas Futurian Society, formed by Reamy and Orville Mosher in 1953, which included future writer, Greg Benford. They held the first SF convention in Texas in 1958. SouthwesterCon 6 (the previous five had been in other states) had well-known Texas fan and newly published writer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, as their guest. The final day of the convention included the dissolution of the Dallas Futurian Society.

  Another group of Dallas fans would eventually emerge, featuring Reamy and Larry Hearndon. They put together the Big D in 73 WorldCon bid. Dallas was thought of as a shoo-in to win the bid when everything collapsed. Details of the bid collapse were never publicly revealed and remain a mystery. The committee withdrew their bid, just before the 1971 NoreasCon in Boston, where the vote was taken. Reamy eventually re-emerged as the chairman of the 1976 MidAmeriCon in Kansas City.

  As a result of associating with writers in Austin and AggieCon, I began to seriously start writing in 1981. I wrote my first short story, “Night of the Blade,” then, but it did not sell until 1987, when it appeared in the mystery, semi-pro magazine, Hardboiled. Lansdale bought my first two professional sales for The New Frontier and Razored Saddles in 1989. Those two stories got me on the John W. Campbell ballot, where I finished fifth out of six places - not dead last, but also not ahead of “No Award,” which finished fourth.

  In 1994, following the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans, I found myself in partnership with Willie Siros, his sister, Nina Siros, and Lisa Greene with a bookstore in Austin, Adventures in Crime and Space. Over a seven-year period, we tried to supply the necessary fix of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy for the central Texas area. Eventually, the technology bubble burst and we lost more than 40% of our mailing list in one quarter, as people moved away. Eventually, our landlord, convinced that West 6th Street was golden, decided he could do better with the property than having a slow-paying book store there, and we were asked to vacate. It was somewhat gratifying to see that spot remain empty for nearly five years before he found an occupant.

  Babylon Moon

  Matthew Bey

  Banished to space following a singularity event,

  a team of Rastafarian scientists discover a malevolent force.

  Will the love of Jah enable them to survive the disastrous encounter?

  We hold a reasoning as we fall toward Babylon, the five of us in our bubble of aluminum and plastic. The entire vacuum shell is the size of a city bus, maybe a little larger, and the place where we draw breath and wait, that is cramped. We lie shoulder to shoulder, touching and smelling each other for days and days. So we speak the reasoning to settle our minds, voice our hopes, and proclaim our love of Jah.

  I cap of gre
en, gold, and red, freeing my dreads so that they float around my face.let my dreads free from my cap of green, gold, and red. They float around my face. Ever since I was a little girl, my hair has been red and straight. It does not twist easily into locks, and when it does, the color is too light. But to me they are beautiful, because they link me to the homeland of Africa-Zion and the bloodlines of Solomon and Sheba.

  Of my colleagues, only I-and-I overstand the astronomy. I monitor the video feed of our six-centimeter navigational telescope. Below us lies the blue globe of Earth and the hazy sliver of Africa-Zion, the home of my heart. I have never seen the glass spires of Nairobi, and perhaps I never will.

  North America and Oklahoma, my home of birth, is in night and cannot be seen. It makes no difference to me if I never see the Babylon-ravaged land of America again.

  As we float in the vacuum shell, skimming the envelope of air that cradles all Earthly life, we pass the chalice from hand to hand, breathing the herb to deepen the reasoning. It is the tradition of our dreadsman forebears to use a water pipe made from coconut, but that design is hard to implement in microgravity. We use a vaporizer instead. Our director, Bongo Pei-Xi, she has ground the collie weed into fine powder and put it in the vaporizer chamber which heats it to slightly greater than one-hundred Celsius. An electric pump sucks off the vapor and fills a mylar balloon which we each breathe from in turns. It does not please the heart like passing a kutchie with its wet tip of twisted paper, but it serves as chalice all the same.

  For the first time in weeks, I-and-I relax, trusting to Jah to light our path and guide our ballistic trajectory through heaven. Jah murmurs updates from time to time in dignified Amharic. He turns down the sound system before He talks, so He does not have to speak louder than the Prophet Marley. He is not my first Negus, but like them all, He knows I-and-I like a father knows a babe or an engineer knows a circuit.

  On the other side of the vacuum shell is our doctor Rosaria. Her black dreads are so long that the tips brush against my own, swirling in the microgravity like the tentacles of an anemone. She drums her fingers on her chest straps in the slow beat of the Prophet Marley’s rhythms.

  Bongo Pei-Xi begins the reasoning with a statement of pride. “We are all children of Africa.” Even when she speaks Amharic you can hear the Mandarin in her voice. “Even though Babylon take the stars from us, it be irie. We ride Babylon’s back.”

  The chalice balloon comes to me. I inhale the cool vapors and pass to my left, to Ngwali. He is the only man on our mission, and the only native African.

  Ngwali brushes his elbow across my breast as he breathes of the ganja. I know his touch is intentional, though he feigns carelessness. We play a secret game, he and I, secret from our colleagues and nearly hidden from us. Since our training on Barbados, I have dropped hints, coy looks, and subtle smirks. I build the groundwork with Ngwali for a brief and heated intimacy.

  Jah turns down the music to remind us that we are falling toward Babylon. We have four hours in the tiny can of air, and then it will get scary.

  The Babylon cloud grows within the ring of particles that used to be Earth’s moon. Through his metallic speakers, Haile Selassie I tells us how to burn our plasma engine to match speed, to intercept.

  When the Babylon cloud grows to full size, it will move to a transcription point, which we predict to be above the Babylon complex that used to be Beijing. There the Babylon cloud will wait, for seconds or minutes. And then, suddenly, it will be somewhere else. If we do our job right, and if the luck of Jah be with us, we will also be someplace else.

  I feed the video from the instruments to our Jah in a box. The wires always go in, they never go out. That is the first law of keeping Jah in the box.

  “Adjust latitude gyroscopes three degrees negative. Four seconds ignition.” Jah speaks to us in technical Amharic. Our Bongo Pei-Xi complies and the vacuum shell lurches. We are slowing, we are matching velocities, but we will hit the Babylon cloud at two hundred kilometers per hour.

  I observe the Babylon cloud through the telescope, my elbows bumping against Ngwali as I adjust the LCD image. On the visible bands the cloud is a milky, translucent color, fading to transparency at the edges. On the infrared it glows like a burning ember. The tonnes and tonnes of computronium, which make it so many times faster and smarter than I-and-I, must vent its waste heat to the vacuum of space, which is no mean feat, even for Babylon. The computronium must have the greatest surface area possible, or all those calories from all those thoughts will melt it to a plasma of carbon, silicon, hydrogen, and a pinch of trace elements. For this reason it looks like a cloud to the naked eye.

  But there is something different about this Babylon cloud from all the others I have studied in the archives. There are parts of it that are cool. Parts of it that are dumb.

  “Emperor Selassie?” I speak to Jah in his earthly honorific. “What do you make of this piece of Babylon? What are those shapes inside?”

  He pauses for a moment before answering, which scares me. They are cousins, Jah and Babylon. If anything can overstand the motives of Babylon it is He. “This cloud carries a payload, child,” He replies.

  “Of what?”

  Again He gives silence. He is unsure, and Jah is never unsure. “I do not know. Adjusting impact to avoid the anomalies. Three degrees longitude gyroscopes. Two seconds ignition. Now.”

  Our vacuum shell lurches as Bongo Pei-Xi follows Jah’s directions. Even without magnification, the hazy white cloud of computronium is all I can see before us.

  “Prepare for impact, children.” Jah is calm. But then Jah is immortal. There be thousands of Him, installed in every vacuum shell and in every university. Should this Jah in a box die the vacuum of space, another of Him shall still be directing the subways of Nairobi.

  Ngwali clutches his straps with one hand and my thigh with the other. “Are you ready, Susan?” He is smiling with teeth as white as starlight.

  The Babylon cloud swallows us like a river swallows a pebble.

  #

  We feel neither the impact with the Babylon cloud, nor the transcription across light years. In a fraction of a moment, the power of Babylon carries us into the vast darkness of heaven.

  The first job is to unpack. We exit the pod, wearing our vacuum suits, opening the hatches that store our survival equipment. Babylon surrounds us. We are in a pocket of vacuum with a ten meter radius, a sphere edged by a delicate tangle of computronium. I say delicate because the computronium branches like a briar patch. The fractalized webbing goes from thick as fingers to thin as molecules. Although it is delicate, it is not fragile. Babylon is hard like diamonds, soft like feathers, and flexible like wind. I have never heard of anyone injuring even the smallest part of Babylon. Even touching Babylon is rare. That is why Babylon tolerates us. Babylon does not care. Babylon has not cared since the eighth week of the singularity, when the surviving humans had nothing of interest and nothing remaining to exploit.

  On my first sortie, I-and-I rode Babylon to a proplyd cloud in the Orion Nebula. For three weeks I watched the slow swirling of dust around an infant sun. By astronomical scales the collapse into a planetary system is fast, like a magnet snapping against iron. By human scales it is frozen and timeless.

  On the second sortie, Babylon took us to a binary system where a white dwarf and a red giant spun around each other, an eclipsing variable star that had never been visible from Earth.

  For ten thousand years the white dwarf had sucked hydrogen and other matter from its companion star. For ten thousand years the gas had built up on the dense surface, a hundred thousand gravities crushing it to a thin shell. For ten thousand years it had been safe and dull, looking to the naked eye like a single sun, too bright to stare at directly. But Babylon arrived mere hours before the white dwarf’s surface flashed into spontaneous fusion.

  The Negus and I-and-I realized th
e danger almost immediately. He warned my colleagues to seek shelter on the far side of the Babylon cloud, but they did not move fast enough.

  The nova was small by galactic standards, but the wave of radiation passed through the Babylon cloud like a wind of death. There were enough wispy curtains of computronium between the nova and I that I survived, although the germ cells of my ovaries did not.

  Before the nova ejecta reached us, Babylon returned to Earth. I made my way through the cloud to find my colleagues charred to ash inside their vacuum suits. As soon as possible, my Negus and I left the murdering cloud for the safety of low-Earth orbit. Once again, Babylon had destroyed the people I loved with its careless omnipotence.

  While my colleagues drag out the inflatable habitats, I set up the telescopes. Like all the gear in our shell it is collapsible and dense. After all, we have only the space of a city bus to store everything we need to start a new world.

  The vacuum shell floats a hundred meters inside the computronium cloud. It takes minutes of air jets and drifting, my equipment dragging behind me, to reach the edge of Babylon. Each wisp of white-hot computronium scutters away as I approach, like a school of minnows fleeing a shadow. When I reach open sky, Babylon parts like a curtain of ghosts and, presenting the vast sphere of stars, my field of study, my passion, and my solace.

  I inflate the telescope and leave it to scan the heavens. The telescope is automatic, Jah does not control it. That is because the wires go in, but they do not come out. That is the first law of keeping Jah in the box.

  With my naked eyes I scan the heavens. It looks little like the sky I saw as a child in rural Oklahoma. The stars are cold and bright and many.