The Secretary of State has died and Tom Shandor discovers that the Secretary requested that he put together his official biography for national consumption. Shandor has no idea why he's been chosen for the project, nor what shocking secrets he'll find once he starts the project. There's more riding on the choices he will make than he could possibly have imagined.
Sometimes she had walked for days at a time in that dream; she would wake to find food that she could not remember gathering. Somehow, pervasive, the dream voices had taken over; the whispering winds had been full of voices and even hands. She had fallen ill and lain for days sick and delirious, and had heard a voice which hardly seemed to be her own, saying that if she died the wind voices would care for Robin.
This is a story that they tell on the solitary farms on the borders of the Catskill mountains, where I grew up. It is a mistake to think that country is settled and modern, just because the big highways stretch from city to city, and the factories hold out clean jobs that pay better than the scratch-the-soil farming on shale rock. For between every farm is a stretch of woodland, and every farm has its own woods, and by night there are deer and rabbits and even wolves and the big lynxes that prowl south of Canada in a hungry season. And every now and again, to some lonely farm-girl who roams the edges and center of the deep woods by night, a child will be born like Helma Lassiter . . .
He came to her handsome and youthful in appearance. He had been alive far longer than she could have imagine. In that time he had faced many dangers, but was she the danger that would undo him and send him to eternal damnation?
In 'The Planet Savers' Marion Zimmer Bradley introduced the world to her amazing Darkover series. A disease threatens all of Darkover and the only man that can save Darkover has a multiple personality disorder. He is two distinct men, but two men who hate one another and vie for possession of their one body. But to save Darkover they must work together.
They asked me about it, of course, before I boarded the starship. All through the Western sector of the Galaxy, few rules are stricter than the one dividing human from nonhuman, and the little Captain of the Vesta-he was Terran, too, and proud in the black leather of the Empire's merchant-man forces-hemmed and hawed about it, as much as was consistent with a spaceman's dignity. «You see, Miss Vargas,» he explained, not once but as often as I would listen to him, «this is not, strictly speaking, a passenger ship at all. Our charter is only to carry cargo. But, under the terms of our franchise, we are required to transport an occasional passenger, from the more isolated planets where there is no regular passenger service. Our rules simply don't permit us to discriminate, and the Theradin reserved a place on this ship for our last voyage.» He paused, and re-emphasized, «We have only the one passenger cabin, you see. We're a cargo ship and we are not allowed to make any discrimination between our passengers.» He looked angry about it. Unfortunately, I'd run up against that attitude before. Some Terrans won't travel on the same ship with nonhumans even when they're isolated in separate ends of the ship. I understood his predicament, better than he thought. The Theradin seldom travel in space. No one could have foreseen that Haalvordhen, the Theradin from Samarra, who had lived on the forsaken planet of Deneb for eighteen of its cycles, would have chosen this particular flight to go back to its own world.
Xanadu. Not the Xanadu of Coleridge's poem, but-to the half-forgotten space drifter who discovered the place thirty years ago-a reasonable facsimile. It was a cloistered nun of a city, hidden behind a wide skirt of the most impassable mountains on Mars. And the city was more impassable than the mountains. No human being had ever entered it-yet. They'd tried. Two expeditions, twelve years apart, had vanished without trace, without explanation other than the dusty notebook Andrew had unearthed, today, from the rotted shreds of a skeleton's clothing.
After space, there was always one more river to cross . . . the far side of hatred and murder!
Steena of the spaceways—that sounds just like a corny title for one of the Stellar-Vedo spreads. I ought to know, I’ve tried my hand at writing enough of them. Only this Steena was no glamour babe. She was as colorless as a Lunar plant—even the hair netted down to her skull had a sort of grayish cast and I never saw her but once draped in anything but a shapeless and baggy gray space-all.