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Registers and INT 10 calls for Paradise/WD video b
FREE BOOKS!
Once in a while a first novel comes along that impresses us
so much we want to rush out and rent a billboard on Times Square.
But even though Dave Wolverton took grand prize in the 1986
Writers of the Future Contest and has won other awards for his
short fiction, he's by no means a household name. That's why
we're offering a free copy of his brilliant first novel, On My
Way to Paradise, to the first 13 readers of this excerpt to
respond leave with E-mail BANTAM.BOOKS. (We would like your
comments in any event.)
On my way to Paradise is a gripping merger of cyberpunk,
military SF, and Latin American magic realism. Readers of
William Gibson and Lucius Shepard will definitely enjoy Dave
Wolverton. If you like him too, we'd love to know about it--and
please tell your friends!
One early reader of On My Way to Paradise was multiple
award-winner Orson Scott Card. He calls Wolverton's book "One of
the deepest and most powerful science fiction novels ever
written," and urges, "Pester your bookstore to order it. Read it
at once. I believe that this novel lwill be remembered as the
first book by the finest science fiction writer of the 1990s."
Here's an excerpt from On My Way to Paradise to show you
what kind of reading experience it offers. On My Way to Paradise
goes on sale in mid-November (512 pp., $4.95) wherever Bantam
Spectra Books are sold. This excerpt Copyright 1989 by Dave
Wolverton.
* * * *
A dusty gray hovercraft floated to a stop in front of my
booth in the feria. As its door flipped open an emaciated woman
struggled up from the shadows within and into the stabbing
daylight. A strange feeling swept over me, the physical shock
one feels upon recognizing an old friend whose face has been
marred by tragedies. I searched my memory for an elusive name.
Her head slumped and rolled from side to side as she moved.
Sweat stained the armpits of her black skinsuit, and blood
dripped from the bandaged stump at the end of her right arm. An
old mestizo woman lurched away from the craft, made the sign of
the cross, and muttered "Que horror!" A small boy gaped at the
thin woman and moaned "Una bruja!" and the crowd murmured in
agreement that this walking skeleton must be a witch.
She staggered to my booth, shouldering past curious
peasants, and thrust her bloody stump over the counter. I opened
my mouth, hoping my tongue would find the name my mind couldn't
supply, as she demanded in English, "Are you Senor Angelo Osic?"
I nodded, relieved that she didn't know me, secure in the
knowledge that her husky voice was unfamiliar.
She braced herself on the counter, trembling. "Can you
fix this . . . this body?"
"Si--yes," I said, gently prodding the stump at the end
of her arm. "Do you have your hand? Perhaps we could reconnect
it."
"No."
Her wound was fresh, but would soon be infected. "A
new hand will take months to grow--months more to be usable.
Might I suggest that a prosthesis would be fast--"
"Do a hand. Now! And bones too. I need bones." She
talked with the quick, commanding voice of the rich refugiados
from the Estados Unidos Socialistas del Sur. I thought she must
be a criminal from Guyana or the American colonies in Brasilia
Independiente. I studied her closely: The slope of her
shoulders and her narrow cheeks indicated that she'd been born
with a small frame, but even if she had bone disease too, the two
factors couldn't account for the small diameter of her joints.
"How long were you in low G?" I asked.
"Never been in low G," she lied.
"You should be in the hospital," I told her, afraid to
deal with a criminal. "I am only a poor pharmacologist. And my
drugs are not as miraculous as people sometimes claim."
"Fix me!" she said. "No hospitals. No questions." She
pulled out a computer crystal as long as her hand and slipped it
into my palm. Its smooth, nonglare surface was virtually
invisible, except for the packet of liquid RAM at one end. It
was fine crystal, Fugitsu quality, worth a small fortune, perhaps
even enough to buy a rejuvenation treatment. I had never been
able to afford a rejuvenation, and needed one badly.
"You need a place to rest--a hospital bed," I said.
She leaned forward, and I saw she was young, much younger
than I had first imagined; her black hair fell in front of her
deep-set, black eyes and her sweaty face paled with genuine
terror. "If you ball me over, I die," she said.
In that moment when she showed her terror, I thought she
was beautiful. I felt a strong urge to help her, to comfort her.
Telling myself she might not be a criminal, I got out of my booth
and locked its rusted aluminum door, then escorted her back to
the hovercraft. I gave the driver my address in Gatun and told
him to go by way of Avenida Balboa. He drove slowly through the
crowded feria, and soon the thin woman closed her eyes and curled
into a ball and breathed in the wheezing manner of those deeply
asleep. We floated past crowds of mestizos selling bright
dresses and macaws, fresh fruit, cheap Thai microchips tumbling
from earthenware pots. Everywhere their hungry eyes and gestures
beckoned the merchant sailors from Europe, Africa, and Asia who
searched the backwaters of Panama for high-tech and contraband
items. The local peasants became angry with my chauffeur for
driving in a pedestrian zone and refused to move, so he flushed
the hovercraft's thrusters, blowing hot air and dust into the
crowds, burning the naked legs of the children. Their curses and
cries of pain came to me distantly through the thick glass of the
windows. I felt dirty and sinful to be in that craft, and wished
I hadn't agreed to take care of the thin woman. I jacked in a
call to Uppanishadi-Smith Corp. and ordered a limb-regeneration
kit, an osteoporosis rehab packet, and a self-regulating canister
of fluothane. I wetted my lips with my tongue and searched the
faces in the crowd for a friend.
On the border of the free zone, the crowds thinned and I
found Flaco, a good friend who did not mind dealing with
criminals as much as I did, and had the driver stop the limo.
Flaco stood with some arms dealers who haggled with four
guerrillas over the price of used body armor. One of the
guerrillas pulled off a helmet, and I saw by his oversize,
misshapen ears that he was a chimera--one of the genetically
upgraded supermen General Torres had created in Chile before the
socialists overthrew his regime. I watched the chimera search
through the armor for a better helmet; even from where I sat, I
could see that he was bypassing the best helmet in the lot, and I
resisted the urge to go point it out to him. But I just watched,
wondering if he'd see it, noting the wideness of his torso, the
girth of his limbs. Although he was short in stature, his frame
was huge. In Haiti men had engineered ten-kilo fighting cocks
with spurs long enough to disembowel a coyote, and no one had
raised an eyebrow. But when Torres announced that he was
engineering chimeras so they could live on other planets, the
news caused fierce riots in Concepcion, revolt in Temuco. I
remembered a picture shown to me by a peasant from Talcahuano: he
smiled as he and a fellow rioter each held the wingtip of a large
brown creature, half bat, half man. He told me he'd clubbed it
inside one of the engineering compounds. The Alliance of Nations
had lodged formal protests of the work done in Chile.
The chimera finally noticed the good helmet in the lot
and picked it up. He had a broad, pleasant smile, and I was
happy he had come to fight the Colombians.
I waved to Flaco. He came to the hovercraft, stuck his
narrow face through the window and raised an eyebrow as he saw
the thin woman.
"Hola, Angelo. So, you have taken to dating dead women?"
he said, laughing. "Good idea. Very classy! Very sensible!"
I got out of the hovercraft, embraced Flaco, and walked
out of the thin woman's listening range. "Yes," I said. "She's
quite a catch for an old man. Not only is she beautiful, but
when I'm done with her, she'll make fine fertilizer for the
lawn." Flaco laughed. I handed him the crystal. "What is the
value of this?" I asked.
Flaco rolled it over in his hand. "Any software on it?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe four hundred, five hundred thousand," he said.
"Will you check its registration code? I think it's
stolen. Also," I whispered, "I must know who this woman is. Can
you get a retina scanner and bring it to my home tonight?"
"Yes, my friend," Flaco whispered. He glanced at the
woman in the floater. "Once, I saw a spider with legs that thin-
-"
he said, "I stepped on it." He patted my shoulder, then laughed.
I got in the hovercaft and left the free zone. And as we
floated down the highway on the outskirts of Colon, we rolled
past the evenly spaced rows of banana plants. Because I'd never
floated down that road in a fast car before, I noticed for the
first time how perfectly ordered the plantations were, with each
plant three meters from its neighbor. I lost my eyes while
serving in the army in Guatemala as a young man, and had them
replaced with prosthetics. They register colors in the infrared
spectrum as shimmers of light, something like the sheen one sees
glimmering off platinum in the sunlight. And on this day the
dark green canopy of the banana plants shimmered with infrared
light. Under the canopy of leaves were jumbles of hammocks,
burlap lean-to's, tents, cardboard boxes and old cars--squalid,
temporary shelters for the refugiados who were fleeing the
socialist states in South America. The refugiados were afraid to
brave their way through Costa Rica to the north, so they huddled
together, waiting for ship passage to Trinidad or Madagascar or
some other imaginary capitalist paradise.
I looked at the homes among the plantations and thought
it strange to see such disorder among order. It reminded me of
an incident from my childhood: a family of murderers called the
Battistas Sangrientos had been caught selling body organs outside
our village. When the police caught them, they took the family
to the beach to execute them in front of the whole town so people
would know what a despicable crime had been committed. Three
boys in this family were only children, perhaps ten to twelve
years old, and it was rumored that when gutting victims these
boys often raced each other to salvage the most precious organs.
But all the Battistas swore the boys were innocent. And when the
police got ready to shoot the family, the Captain told them to
form a line, but the young boys clung to their murderous father
and refused to leave. The policemen clubbed the boys, and it
took a long time for the police to get the family to stand in
line. And once the family was standing in a line, it took a long
time for the Captain to give the order for the firing squad to
shoot. I have always believed that the Captain waited just so he
could enjoy that moment of watching them stand in line. And as
the bullets tore through the children I wondered, Why could the
Captain not shoot them while in a huddle, clutching their father?
What difference did it make?
* * *
Author Dave Wolverton recalls that he began writing On My
Way to Paradise in response to a dream. "I dreamed I was on a
dusty market street and the sun was glaring; peasants in white
were milling about, and a horribly emaciated woman was walking
toward me, holding a bloody stump at the end of her right arm. I
wanted desparately to help her, to give her something. When I
awoke the dream haunted me, and I decided to write a story in
which I'd give her a new hand."
The resulting story--which won a $4,000 prize in the Writers
of the Future contest--eventually grew to novel length. For
there was much more to the tale of Angelo Osic and the woman he
aids, Wolverton said.
"I began having dreams about Angelo. Mercenaries in battle
armor huddled beneath an alien skull, telling jokes about their
rivals. Giant dark crabs in a mist-shrouded forest, whispering
with soft feminine voices. A Desert Lord, like a giant mantis,
bursting from a hidden lair in the sand to throw its stones."
We hope Dave Wolverton finishes his second novel soon. In
the meantime, enjoy On My Way to Paradise.
--Team Spectra
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