Free FSF, January-February 2010 by Spilogale Authors Page A

out, returned with a small naked baby tree gnome. Before he knew what had happened, it was in his mouth, and oh, it tasted delicious!
    Sure , thought his new other half. We can find what we need. We can find what we want, but you have to let us get it . An image of Spike, looking plump and tender and helpless, flashed through his mind. What happened to my niceness spell? Navin wondered.
    Without that curst spell you hobbled us with, we could have had the fingers off that tricksy sister before she woke, and the toes off her boyfriend, too. That spell worries us.
    His hand snatched two more baby tree gnomes from the nearby nest. So small and rounded, soft-skinned and squirmy. They smelled like ambrosia.
    Babies, he thought. Babies had never hurt him.
    They squalled until he bit their heads off.
    * * * *

    "I don't understand it, sir, the computers have only been down for an hour."
    * * * *
    [Back to Table of Contents]

Novelet: WRITERS OF THE FUTURE by Charles Oberndorf
Charles Oberndorf is the author of three novels: Sheltered Lives, Testing, and Foragers, and he is working on two more. He teaches at the University School in Cleveland, where he has taught seventh graders for more than twenty-five years. His new story, like his last ("Another Life” in our Oct./Nov. 2009 issue), is set in the far future, but unlike the last one, this tale would get a PG-13 rating if it were a movie.
    * * * *
    Once there had been a thousand worlds. Ten million remaining flesh and blood souls: all this humanity divided amongst spheres, wheels, and cylinders, all these worlds orbiting the path Mars once followed.
    And there were the Minds, that silver-yellow halo circling the sun where Earth once flew its steady course. The Minds had converted the rest of the solar system to their own purposes, and nothing else remained but possibility. One day we might overwhelm the Minds and limit their omnipresence. One day we might build starships and seek other worlds where humanity might start over.
    Now a hundred worlds orbit the path Mars once followed, at most one million remaining flesh and blood souls. We live the Old Age of mankind. Today's entropic sadness is to be newborn, or ten, or twenty, to be full of youth and to not feel old at all.
    —Magnus Esner
    * * * *
    I. A Writer's Beginning
    When I was an adolescent, Magnus Esner was my favorite writer. You had to wait a year, a whole 687 days, for a new novel to come out, and you had to join a queue to read it. In those days, a book by Esner could only handle a hundred readers at a time. I still remember when it came my turn to read Suicide Missions , the anticipation I felt while putting the gear on. I was in my reading chair, head back, hands draped on armrests, legs outstretched, and I was no longer living in my world, but instead I was living in another world, in Haynlayn. I was in my tiny bachelor's quarters with a bed that folded into one wall and clothing hampers that pulled out from the other. I was Rahul Valentine in my tiny room, watching my hands pick up items for cleaning teeth, washing skin, placing them in my kit while Esner's voice, the perfect storytelling voice that probably wasn't his voice at all, said, “He was getting ready to depart in his one-man fighter. He would fly sixty-five million kilometers until he reached the Minds. He knew he wasn't coming back. He knew he would never see Nina again, never again feel her warm kisses. He would never push off in the free-fall gym, never play wallball again, never again rage against his father's expectations or his mother's absence from his life."
    Here I was, eight years old, a mere adolescent, a reader, and I was Rahul Valentine, who would have been alive hundreds of years ago, if he'd really existed, and I was preparing to die for the future of mankind. This was back when there were more than a thousand worlds, when Haynlayn waged its singular war against the Minds. The reader me, the real person in the reading chair, would be so