Search Worlds Without End

Sustained atmosphere, versatile forms and dramatic effects are the hallmarks of these stories of the macabre, supernatural and horror which rely on shock and breathless climaxes for their completion.

Table of Contents

• Absence of Mind - short story
• Amateur Gardening - short story
• Another Planet - short story
• Clair de Lune - novelette
• Couleur de Rose - short story
• Cyclamen Brown - short story
• Esmeralda - short story
• Hands - short story
• Liebestraum - short story
• Miss Thing and the Surrealist - short story
• Music When Soft Voices Die... - short story
• Petronella Pan - short story-
• The Glass Eye - short story
• The Last of the Romantics - short story
• The Little House - short story
• The Lovers - short story
• The Other Passenger - novelette
• Valdemosa - short story

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Treachery and Treason (2000), edited by Laura Anne Gilman and Jennifer Heddle, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2011. The story can also be found in the anthology Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Reporter Kate Kilroy accepts an assignment to travel on the Valkyrie, a German ship veiled in secrecy for decades after it was discovered adrift in 1939 with only one passenger aboard, a baby boy named Isaac Feldman.

Obsessed with understanding his origins, Feldman has spent a small fortune restoring the Valkyrie to try to solve the mystery. Assembling a team of experts and sparing no expense, he aims to precisely recreate the circumstances of the Valkyrie's doomed final voyage. Little does Feldman or his team know that the ship has an agenda of its own. As the Valkyrie begins to weave its deadly web, Kate realizes that she must not only save herself, but the world as she knows it.

Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 4 (1968), edited by Damon Knight. The story can also be found in the Nebula Award Stories Five (1970), edited by James Blish, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume III (1981), edited by Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor, The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (1981), edited by Barry N. Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini, The Best of the Nebulas (1989), edited by Ben Bova, and Foundations of Fear: An Exploration of Horror (1992), edited by David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collections The Cube Root of Uncertainty (1970), Moonferns and Starsongs (1971), The Best of Robert Silverberg (1976), Phases of the Moon (2004), and To the Dark Star: 1962-69: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Vol. 2 (2007).

A German submarine, U-330, patrols the stormy inhospitable waters of the North Atlantic. It is commanded by Siegfried Lorenz, a maverick SS officer who does not believe in the war he is bound by duty and honor to fight in.

U-330 receives a triple-encoded message with instructions to collect two prisoners from a vessel located off the Icelandic coast and transport them to the base at Brest -- and a British submarine commander, Sutherland, and a Norwegian academic, Professor Bjornar Grimstad, are taken on board. Contact between the prisoners and Lorenz has been forbidden, and it transpires that this special mission has been ordered by an unknown source, high up in the SS. It is rumored that Grimstad is working on a secret weapon that could change the course of the war...

Then, Sutherland goes rogue, and a series of shocking, brutal events occur. In the aftermath, disturbing things start happening on the boat. It seems that a lethal, supernatural force is stalking the crew, wrestling with Lorenz for control. A thousand feet under the dark, icy waves, it doesn't matter how loud you scream...

Violin prodigy Etta Spencer had big plans for her future, but a tragedy has put her once-bright career at risk. Closely tied to her musical skill, however, is a mysterious power she doesn't even know she has. When her two talents collide during a stressful performance, Etta is drawn back hundreds of years through time.

Etta wakes, confused and terrified, in 1776, in the midst a fierce sea battle. Nicholas Carter, the handsome young prize master of a privateering ship, has been hired to retrieve Etta and deliver her unharmed to the Ironwoods, a powerful family in the Colonies--the very same one that orchestrated her jump back, and one Nicholas himself has ties to. But discovering she can time travel is nothing compared to the shock of discovering the true reason the Ironwoods have ensnared her in their web.

Another traveler has stolen an object of untold value from them, and, if Etta can find it, they will return her to her own time. Out of options, Etta and Nicholas embark on a perilous journey across centuries and continents, piecing together clues left behind by the mysterious traveler. But as they draw closer to each other and the end of their search, the true nature of the object, and the dangerous game the Ironwoods are playing, comes to light--threatening to separate her not only from Nicholas, but her path home... forever.

I've been orphaned by my time.
The timeline has changed.
My future is gone.

Etta Spencer didn't know she was a traveler until the day she emerged both miles and years from her home. Now, robbed of the powerful object that was her only hope of saving her mother, Etta finds herself stranded once more, cut off from Nicholas?the eighteenth century privateer she loves?and her natural time.

When Etta inadvertently stumbles into the heart of the Thorns, the renegade travelers who stole the astrolabe from her, she vows to finish what she started and destroy the astrolabe once and for all. Instead, she's blindsided by a bombshell revelation from their leader, Henry Hemlock: he is her father. Suddenly questioning everything she's been fighting for, Etta must choose a path, one that could transform her future.

Still devastated by Etta's disappearance, Nicholas has enlisted the unlikely help of Sophia Ironwood and a cheeky mercenary-for-hire to track both her and the missing astrolabe down. But as the tremors of change to the timeline grow stronger and the stakes for recovering the astrolabe mount, they discover an ancient power far more frightening than the rival travelers currently locked in a battle for control...a power that threatens to eradicate the timeline altogether.

From colonial Nassau to New York City, San Francisco to Roman Carthage, imperial Russia to the Vatican catacombs, New York Times #1 best-selling author Alexandra Bracken charts a gorgeously detailed, thrilling course through time in this stunning conclusion to the Passenger series.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2002. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois.