QSFer David Gerrold has a new queer sci-fi book out (bi, poly): The Girl Who Was Silver.
Mandarin is torn between worlds, his love for an immortal Silver barely dampened by booze and loathing. The Change is to blame. When a youthful redhead turns up brutally slaughtered in Mandarin’s bathtub, he is yanked headfirst into the churning underbelly of a warring city and its factionalized inhabitants.
Someone is playing a murderous game of chess—but to what end? Working for a shadowy enforcement agency in the hunt for answers is only part of the equation for Mandarin—the rest is clear-eyed vengeance. High-tech weaponry may let the light in, but no answers are to be found in the murky realms of trolls, halflings and furies.
In the calm after the chaos, Mandarin will find the answers, but at a great and unexpected cost.
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Excerpt
Silverlight hair. Porcelain skin.
Eyes the color of the evening sky, a gaze as pale as ancient ice.
An immortal.
She made no effort to hide her disease, slipping through the crowd as silent as smoke. She’d look the same a thousand years after the rest of us were dust. If she chose.
She must have been searching for something, or someone. She wouldn’t have come down without a reason. Here in the dirt we lesser beings liked to pretend we understood the immortals, liked to pretend we knew their pain, could see past their dispassionate stare. Some of us even thought we could speak to them as equals. I suppose that amused them, watching children dance and prance and occasionally beg for elevation. A fool’s game. I turned away, put my back to her, returned to my drink and thoughts of darkness.
It didn’t work. She found me anyway. She slid into the place opposite me. She smelled of something I couldn’t identify, sweet but musty. Time and darkness and something else. Her gaze was inescapable and uncomfortable. I glanced away. The rest of the patrons of the club pretended not to notice us. I looked back to her.
“Mandarin,” she said.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Yes.” She reached across and touched my hand. “You are.”
I pulled my hand away. “What do you want?”
“You were offered a gift. You turned it down.”
“If you say so.”
“I was there.”
“So why are you here now? I know the rules. ‘Once refused the gift can never be offered again.’”
“I’m not here to offer anything. But I’m still curious why you said no.”
I avoided her gaze. “Long story.”
“I have time.”
“I don’t.”
She nodded. “Your choice.” She considered her nails, a deliberate gesture. Immortals never do anything by accident. Something in the change makes them think differently. Short-timers are impulsive and emotional. Those on the long ride think slower, more methodically. That’s as near as I’ve ever been able to explain it.
She studied me thoughtfully. “Do you have anything better to do?”
“I’m waiting for rigor mortis to set in,” I said.
“We all are,” she replied. “Some of us wait longer than others. What do you intend to do while you’re waiting?”
I lifted my drink in mock salute to her. “This.”
“Would you like a job?”
“Not particularly.”
“Yes, I know. You don’t need the money. Do you want the challenge?”
I shrugged. “I stopped looking for challenges a long time ago.”
“No, it wasn’t a long time,” she said. “Maybe to you. Not to us.”
“Still not interested.”
“All right,” she said. She gathered herself as if to leave.
“What kind of a job?”
She stopped herself so gracefully, her entire shift in posture had to have been planned. She knew even before she moved that I would have to ask and she would have to stop and turn back to me.
“Will you come with me?”
“Tell me here.”
“I was sent to find you, not tell you.”
“So you don’t know?”
She didn’t answer that. “Are you coming or not?”
What the hell. I followed her out, knowing that behind my back every pair of eyes in the club were tracking our path. And the moment after we slipped out the door, the level of conversation would escalate from whispered to frenzied, from hungry curiosity to desperate speculation. It was the pattern. So what.
A dark limo waited at the curb. The doors slid open as we approached. She took the rear-facing seat, she pointed me to the seat opposite. I settled in without comment. There was a time I would have thought her beautiful, now I saw her beauty as unnatural and unnerving. It is possible to be too perfect.
The car slid through the night, a black shark cutting through a sea of darkness. She studied the view outside her window, the silent lights of the huddling city. Perhaps she cared, probably not. Finally she noticed me again.
“We’re going up the hill,” she said. “Not all the way up, but far enough. Farther than you’ve ever been. You are going to meet a man. You have never met him before, but he knows who you are and he is expecting you. You will have a conversation. At the end of that conversation, you will come back down the hill. There is nothing for you to say or do or decide. All you have to do is listen. Is that clear?”
Nodded. “Esta claro.”
“Bien.”
The car growled into the canyon and began winding its way up toward the summit. We passed through several visible checkpoints without being stopped and probably just as many invisible ones. We passed ranks of ostentatious villas, places where elite short-timers might mingle with immortals, but those quickly gave way to unremarkable gardens and parks, buffer zones. The road narrowed and darkened beneath a canopy of leaves. The headlights of the limo illuminated the sheltered groves. A few more curves and we turned into a slim drive that led up and around and finally onto a broad hilltop that overlooked the entire city, a matrix of light spread from here to the horizon. The city glittered, but its inhabitants were invisible. It could have been deserted, abandoned with the lights left burning.
We arrived at a curving path, wide, paved in stones that glowed a pale blue. The path led up a gentle slope toward a gazebo, maybe a temple, a delicate confection. A roof that floated above high slender pillars. Long white drapes drifting like smoke. An open fire-pit in the center. Graceful couches scattered around. The place was meant to impress with its casual elegance. Others would have been impressed, but that’s because others still believed.
The door slid open and I climbed out of the car. She didn’t follow. I looked back to her. She shook her head. “This is as far as I go.”
Author Bio
David Gerrold’s work is known around the world. His novels and stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His TV scripts are estimated to have been seen by more than a billion viewers.
Gerrold’s prolific output includes stage shows, teleplays, film scripts, educational films, computer software, comic books, more than 50 novels and anthologies, and hundreds of articles, columns, and short stories.
He has worked on a dozen different TV series, including Star Trek, Land of the Lost, Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, and Sliders. He is the author of Star Trek’s most popular episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
Many of his novels are classics of the science fiction genre, including The Man Who Folded Himself, the ultimate time travel story, and When HARLIE Was One, considered one of the most thoughtful tales of artificial intelligence ever written. His stunning novels on ecological invasion, A Matter For Men, A Day For Damnation, A Rage For Revenge, and A Season For Slaughter, have all been best sellers with a devoted fan following. His young adult series, The Dingilliad, traces the healing journey of a troubled family from Earth to a far-flung colony on another world. His Star Wolf series of novels about the psychological nature of interstellar war are in development as a television series.
A ten-time Hugo and Nebula award nominee, David Gerrold is also a recipient of the Skylark Award for Excellence in Imaginative Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Horror, and the Forrest J. Ackerman lifetime achievement award.
In 1995, Gerrold shared the adventure of how he adopted his son in The Martian Child, a semi-autobiographical tale of a science fiction writer who adopts a little boy, only to discover he might be a Martian. The Martian Child won the science fiction triple crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus. It was the basis for the 2007 film Martian Child starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet.
Gerrold’s greatest writing strengths are generally acknowledged to be his readable prose, his easy wit, his facility with action, the accuracy of his science, and the passions of his characters. An accomplished lecturer and world traveler, he has made appearances all over the United States, England, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. His easy-going manner and disarming humor have made him a perennial favorite with audiences.
David Gerrold is the 2022 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.