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The Weekly Magazine of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery

ISSN: 1206-8691

Stories Published In 2000


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 These are the stories SpaceWays Weekly published in 2000.

January February March April May June July August September October November December
  • "Unplugged"
  • Michael John Jasper
  • Issue #123 January 07 2000
  • What happens to ex-cyber jocks when they want to get their plugs removed to live in the real world? They go to a special facility which helps them to do just that. Mickey is one of the cyber jocks who wants to unplug, before he loses the woman he loves. He returns to Ruben's, for the second time, to see if he can break his dependence on "jacking in".
  • "Silence Of Hearts"
  • Karen L. Kobylarz
  • Issue #124 January 14 2000
  • Kaileya is a young woman who has inherited the gift of magic from her mother. She is tricked into using it to kill a dragon, an act that she quickly regrets. To atone for her mistake, she goes to join the Hunters. Can she face the gods and be found acceptable for the Hunters?
  • "The Gift"
  • Michael T. Marsh
  • Issue #125 January 21 2000
  • In the future, a young boy is growing up in an anti-technology community created by his father. On one of their rare visits to the city, he learns of a different world, a world of nanotech and cyberspace. He eventually leaves home, and becomes enhanced with nanites so that he can live in the cyberworld. Returning home for his mother's funeral, he confronts his father, who has hated him for giving into the evils of high-tech. After a fruitless night together, the young man prepares to head back to the city. But he leaves his father a gift: a vial of nanites containing a virtual copy of his mother.
  • "Screen 7B"
  • Barry Hollander
  • Issue #126 January 28 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • A long range ship is deep in space and Jen is out of cold sleep and on duty. She discovers that Rodgers had left a practical joke for her; a virtual pet which was now sitting on one of the bridge screens demanding to be fed. The program irritates her and she decides to ignore, waiting for it to "die", as virtual pets were supposed to. In retaliation, it takes a bite out of the info on the screen, immediately triggering an alarm. This goes on for several hours, with each pet induced malfunction worse than the last. She finally finds a redundant engineering monitor, Screen 7B, and baits it with a rich flow of data. When the pet shows up to eat it, she cuts the wire linking the monitor to the ship's network, trapping the little beast.

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  • "Man's First Enemy"
  • Bruce Corbett
  • Issue #127 February 4 2000
  • An interesting story about a party of time travellers going back in time to hunt dinosaurs. This story is told from the viewpoint of a female predator, leading her small family pack on hunts. They see the humans, wondering at their strange behaviour. Eventually, she decides that they are so stupid, that they would be easy prey. So her pack hunts the humans. Several of the dinsoaurs are killed, but they prevail. The losses are acceptable, such is life.
  • "Thinning The Herd"
  • Jim Owens
  • Issue #128 February 11 2000
  • A bizarre tale about two people sent out to a public field to get rid of an infestation of pests. The pests are rogue lap tops, personal computers and the big server which threatens to destroy everyone in the field after the agents have shot several pieces of hardware. A weird little parallel universe and a delightful tale.
  • "The Chanter"
  • A. C. Ellis
  • Issue #129 February 18 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • An tale with an incredible depth for a short story. The Silver Queen is the total ruler of her world, but she is bored. She demands that one of her aides create a new diversion for her. Enter a mythical person who intrigues even the Queen. But her meeting with him proves to be her downfall when he causes her to die. The people are generally confused but, as time passes and the Queen's machines begin to fall apart and noone harrasses them any longer, they begin to realize that they are finally free of her oppression.
  • "The Pool"
  • Chris Lindsay
  • Issue #130 February 25 2000
  • A powerfully emotional tale about a warrior who gave everything he could give, except his life, to save his people from a terribly evil creature. Now, an empty shell of who he used to be, he sits beside a pool near his home, trying to recapture who he once was. The pool is magic, giving him reflections of memories he no longer feels or experiences.

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  • "His Feathered Hands"
  • C. A. Mehrlein
  • Issue #131 March 3 2000
  • A story about the creation of the universe. Worlds are created by great, bird-like beings for the Tree of Life. By adding good planets to the Tree, they strengthen it and help to drive back the darkness. When a young student attempts to create a world with intelligent life, he is killed to prevent him from destroying the balance. But in the process, his creation is accidentally knocked into the void of the Tree, where it does eventually spawn intelligent life; humans.
  • "Journey to Niskor"
  • Barbara Davies
  • Issue #132 March 10 2000
  • A young man has just finished his training at the Healing College. The distant village of Niskor is in urgent need of a Healer and he is sent. He stops at a nearby village to get someone with a sled and team of dogs to get him to Niskor. He is young, arrogant and disdainful of the poor villagers. He treats them with disdain and scorn. On the trip to Niskor, they nearly die in a violent storm and he learns something important, that people cannot be judged their appearances and he is the least of people to make such judgements.
  • "Coin"
  • Terry Hickman
  • Issue #133 March 17 2000
  • The story of a harried and self-involved business man who gets stuck on a space station between flights. After giving his ticket to a musician, who then dies when the shuttle blows up, the man finds himself in the company of a homeless beggar. He had been angry at the beggar the day before, for asking for money. The experience leaves him open to re-learning how to be human once again.
  • "One Such Shore"
  • Frank Tuttle
  • Issue #134 March 24 2000
  • A young woman is on a sailing ship, bound to a distant land to teach the children of the land's governor. She is unhappy with her position, although is a position that any teacher yearned for. On the voyage, she gets to learn something about the people who own the ship. She gradually finds herself drawn to them and decides that she will not reach her posting after all, for she had found a more desireable life.
  • "Another Tiger Woman"
  • Kirsten Lincoln
  • Issue #135 March 31 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • In ancient China, shame came from being a woman born in the year of the Tiger. One such woman has the added shame of being large and strong. It is a shame she bears quietly, trying not to bring disgrace upon her father more than necessary. Then she encounters one of the young princes beset by enemies and manages to hide him. While tending his wounds, she learns the prince's secret, that he is really a woman. Thus starts a new friendship between royal and peasant, who have secrets to share and enemies to defeat.

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  • "Locoweed"
  • Bill Vernon
  • Issue #136 April 7 2000
  • Not truly a science fiction story, but a delightful characterization of a cowboy with a sense of the supernatural.
  • "Burning From The Inside"
  • Thomas Claburn
  • Issue #137 April 14 2000
  • Another story about Sarah (#87 "Splendour in the Desert", #108 "Watchman of the Sands"). This time she encounters a strange walled city where everyone goes about robed and masked. She convinces them to let her do some guard duty in exchange for some food and shelter. As things progress, she uncovers the secret of the city, that the accuse their own of being evil, beat them to death and cremate them. Sarah herself almost becomes a victim before escaping.
  • "Forever"
  • Beth Bernobich
  • Issue #138 April 21 2000
  • A love story about two people who are immortal in a way. Their lives together keep looping around in time, to be repeated over and over again, forever.
  • "The Dragon At The Top Of The World"
  • Katriena Knights
  • Issue #139 April 28 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • A wizard goes on a quest to find the Dragon at the Top of the World. When someone becomes a wizard, he or she gives up their soul in exchange for magic. The young mage named Fox decided that he did not want to die without his soul. He had read that the Dragon had the answer to his problem. When he finds the Dragon, it tells him that it has what he wants, in this chest right here. The Dragon opens it and shows him what is inside; the souls of all of the mages. Fox is told that he can take his, but he will lose his power. Deciding that his soul is more important, Fox takes it back, and is reborn as a dragon.

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  • "What Price A Friendly Freep"
  • Joy V. Smith
  • Issue #140 May 5 2000
  • A ship exploring around in space finds an odd little life form, kind of like a puff ball on legs. The crew takes them in and they quickly become favoured pets. The freeps become even more favoured when the little ship is boarded by pirates and the crew is on the verge of being spaced. One of the pirates off-handedly kills one of the freeps. The rest of the freeps gather together and counter-attack, killing the pirates.
  • "Intruder"
  • Michael R. Warren
  • Issue #141 May 12 2000
  • Cats have busy and interesting lives. The one in this story is no different. Even when the UFO shows up and starts killing cattle, this cat takes it all in stride. He wanders aboard the ship and does all of the things a cat could be expected to do and inadvertently saves the Earth.
  • "The Storyteller"
  • Pearl Stark
  • Issue #142 May 19 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • A wonderful tale about a world in which storytellers are important people in their villages. They don't tell people stories of the past, however. When you come of age, they tell you the story of your future, so you know your purpose in life. This is the story of a young girl who's storyteller tells her that she must immediately go on a journey to a distant mountain. There she will find a dragon and she must kill it. It takes her more than a year to journey to the mountain and when she finds the dragon, she discovers the truth of why she was sent there; it was her journey to become a storyteller.
  • "Down Time"
  • William L. Churchman
  • Issue #143 May 26 2000
  • This story starts out telling us about an eager teenage boy racing around in the locker room at school, rushing out to a greatly anticipated date. Then it gets interrupted and we discover that it is an alien starship captain enjoying some down time with a virtual reality simulation. After dealing with an attempted hijacking of his cargo, he returns to his down time, to experience being a nervous boy on his first date.

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  • "Richard 42128"
  • D. K. Latta
  • Issue #144 June 2 2000
  • Winchell Balkan, is a field agent for the Council of Research and Exploration and he is the guy who gets sent in when there has been a problem. A research facility, under military protection, seems to be having problems on their isolated island and Winchell gets sent in. The problem, it turns out, is Richard 42128, a deep sea exploration robot the facility had engineered. While Winchell is trying to sort things out, Richard shows up, ripping through a section of the base. Winchell notices that while the military blazes away at it, Richard is careful not to hurt anyone. Winchell eventually uncovers a murder, perpetrated by the military commander and witnesses a robot carefully excavating its dead creator from the ground.
  • "The Last Spelling Bee"
  • Stephen D. Rogers
  • Issue #145 June 9 2000
  • An elementary school is having its annual spelling bee, a contest in which students are given a word from a dictionary and they must create a magic spell for that word. The winner gets some very nice prizes. Things are going well until young Daniel gets the word armageddon.
  • "Chunk Of Change"
  • Jeff Verona
  • Issue #146 June 16 2000
  • An exgaging story about the life of a scavenger who learned that partners are bad for business. Then he finds an alien ship drifting in a junk field and realizes that he finally hit the find that will make him rich. Except that the alien ship has disabled his own and now he needs help from one of the more successful and universally despised scavengers; for a share of the take. In the middle of a crises, he learns that there are more important things than money and one of them is to have someone around to help you when you're in trouble.
  • "The Traveller"
  • Carolyn Scott
  • Issue #147 June 23 2000
  • A traveller turns up at a room and board house being run by a widow with two children. He is a mysterious man, about whom she can get no concrete details. But he seems nice enough and fixes things around the house. Even the children take a liking to him. Just as she starts thinking that she may be willing to have a relationship again, the traveller departs as mysteriously as he came. The traveller then returns to his own time period, in the future, to his dying father. The woman was his father's mother. His grandfather had died, leaving her a widow. The traveller tells his father that his grandfather had been a good man before he died, even though that was not necessarily the truth.
  • "Chime"
  • Frederick D. Brown
  • Issue #148 June 30 2000
  • A modern fantasy tale in which two young girls are drawn from the family cottage by the sounds of chimes and become trapped within the trees. Years later, tired of living, their mother returns to the trees to join her daughters.

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  • "Misplaced Reality"
  • Karl El-Koura
  • Issue #149 July 7 2000
  • In the future, the planet is crowded and resources are being stretched to the limit. So the United States comes up with a solution for their country. They create institutes where you can voluntarily check in and become part of a virtual reality. You are then only occupying the space of one bed and using minimal resources to sustain your body while your mind lives out whatever life you care to have. But one man keeps committing suicide within his simulations because he is always vaguely aware that they are not real. During his awake times, he asks to be returned to the real world. But he cannot, there is no room. A solution is found; he can have a small dome to himself on the moon and perhaps the moon colony can spare him some supplies. He agrees and he lives out his meagre life, alone on the moon, unaware that it is just another simulation.
  • "Pariah"
  • Robert Beer
  • Issue #150 July 14 2000
  • Fitzhenry was a genetic engineer who developed a technique for altering humans. He was condemned and sentenced to death, except that he managed to escape into space on a ship. The ship returns many three hundred years later, with Fitzhenry still alive. He has come back to hand himself over to serve his sentence. It becomes the job of a security officer to decide how to handle the case. He needs to balance the requirements of justice with the history of the fact that Fitzhenry became viewed as the saviour of the human race. He also needs to convince Fitzhenry that he has a reason to live.
  • "The Last Penny"
  • Karen Travis
  • Issue #151 July 21 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • An old woman is struggling with the end of currency. In a short time, all paper currency and coin are to be handed in and everything will be done with a bar code imbedded in your hand. But she has spent her life saving change in jars and banks and feels that she will miss it. She decides to take her remaining coin collection and spend it friviously in the few remaining days that it is valid currency. That's when she befriends a young man who lives outside of society. He does not have a bar code and cannot access anything. Together, they learn that change has to be dealt with, not avoided.
  • "Tommy And The Mushroom King"
  • Howard Andrew Jones
  • Issue #152 July 28 2000
  • A wonderful tale told in the style and flavour of the old pulp fiction magazines. Tommy has a vivid imagination in which he is a member of the Dimension Patrol. Together, he and Captain Kyle battle the evil Mushroom King who is threatening to take over the world.

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  • "Cycles"
  • Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen
  • Issue #153 August 4 2000
  • The life of an insect, told from the perspective of the insect, who's people once had a great civilization but had slipped back into barbarism. While learning that she cannot buck the life cycle, she also strives to push her people back onto the path of greatness.
  • "A Place For Two"
  • S. Douglas Larsen
  • Issue #154 August 11 2000
  • When the first colony ships are being readied to go, a young couple who are assigned to go frantically try to pull strings to insure that they end up on the same ship. Things eventually work themselves out, although not in quite the way they anticipated.
  • "Gather Rainbows"
  • Atk. Butterfly
  • Issue #155 August 18 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • A young man is engaged in his rites of passage, in which he must walk through a field of flowers which transform into little dragons. They are enslaved to him and only he can set them free, and he must do so quickly. They tell him that to set them free, he must gather rainbows. As he pursues this quest, he learns some important lessons along the way. Each time he learns one of the lessons, some of the dragons are set free.
  • "Whale Song"
  • Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen
  • Issue #156 August 25 2000
  • A scientist finally decodes the whale song. But she's reluctant to publish her findings, for it turns out that the whales are not the intelligent species they have been portrayed as. Instead, their songs are more akin to the wordless hummings of three year olds. They are intelligent, but incredibly stupid.

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  • "What's In A Word?"
  • Magee Gilks
  • Issue #157 September 1 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • Two young girls meet; one, Tam, is growing up in the Down Under, the infrastructure of the world spanning city. The other, Persephone, lives up above in the city. When Persephone ventures into the underworld and meets Tam, they scare each other witless. They slowly figure out that all of the things their parents had said about the other half of society may not be true. One thing Tam learns is that the Topsiders are not forcing the Trogs to remain below; it is the Trogs themselves who keep themselves down below. So Tam dares to embark on a daring journey, a journey to the Topside, to see how she might like life up there.
  • "Age Of Dependency"
  • Robert Hogan
  • Issue #158 September 8 2000
  • Old Charlie is a grocery bagger at a grocery store. It's the only thing they will let him do because he does not understand the new technology which runs the store. Charlie doesn't care. He knows that the people who rely on the technology are idiots. The cashiers can't even do simple arithmetic. When the power gets knocked out by an oncoming storm, Charlie becomes the hero when he shows that he can add up the customers' purchases without the high-tech cash register.
  • "Archibald"
  • Bart Carroll
  • Issue #159 September 15 2000
  • The touching story of a young woman who is scratching out an existence after the human race has been knocked down by an alien invasion. One of the amenities she has managed to get for herself is Archibald, the torso of one of the alien war machines. She has discovered that there is a compartment in its chest which seems to be heated from inside, which makes it a convenient oven. She uses it for baking food and pottery both. To make the war machine a little more appealing, she has painted it with bright colours and given it name. When a leftover of the war comes visiting, Archibald manages to save her.
  • "Why Endings Matter"
  • Paula Fleming
  • Issue #160 September 22 2000
  • A human woman and an elf woman are on a search for historical information concerning the coming of the elves to this land. They are searching through some caves when the tunnel collapses behind them. As they lay in the cave, waiting to die, they discuss the differences in human and elf beliefs regarding the end of life.
  • "Cut And Paste"
  • Kristin Vann and Sean Sands
  • Issue #161 September 29 2000
  • In the future, a man is dying and doesn't want to. So he agrees to participate in a new genetic experiment. A hospital builds a genetic copy of him as a younger man and copies his memories into it. In this way, he achieves a sort of immortality. But when he is asked to question the clone, to determine how well it was duplicated, he begins to realise that he will not live on in the clone any more than any parent lives on in their child.

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  • "Astronaut Man"
  • Jeff Verona
  • Issue #162 October 6 2000
  • A man is at the space launch centre to take a flight into space, for the burial in orbit of his wife's ashes. He had promised her that some day they would be in space together and this is how he plans to keep that promise. But his son is riding him for being selfish and blowing his life savings on such a foolish thing.
  • "Nothing Left To Lose"
  • Rie Sheridan
  • Issue #163 October 13 2000
  • A young girl and her mother are caught by slavers and are being held in a pen. The little girl struggles to keep her sick mother alive. When a healthier, better dressed man gets dumped into the pen, her hopes rise. She begs him to check on her mother, only to discover that she has already died. The man then tells the girl that he is leaving and plans to take her with him, to show her a different life. He starts by teaching her how to pick the lock on the slave pen.
  • "To The Power Of Nine"
  • Justin Stanchfield
  • Issue #164 October 20 2000
  • A rescue time arrives at a research post too late to save the research team. There are suggestions that the system's sun is unstable and threatening the colony, but the evacuation order cannot be given without proof. The outpost was studying the problem when the team was struck down by a burst of radiation. The rescue team begins a desperate search for the professor's notes, but the computer system has been badly damaged. Oddly enough, the nine cats in the outpost are still alive. When they notice that the behaviour of the cats is very uncat-like, and someone remembers that the professor was a believer in brain taping, the process of recording your memories to be restored into a clone after death, they realize that the professor taped his memories into the cats. The only problem now is, how to get them out.
  • "The Ringed Round"
  • Frank Tuttle
  • Issue #165 October 27 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • We join Mallara and Burn once again (#93 "The Asking and the Vow", #121 "The Helpers"). This time, they are investigating a ring of stones near a village which is reputedly inhabited by the Winter King, an ancient spirit. It is also Ollow's Eve, a time of celebration late in the fall before the onset of winter. During the night, Mallara encounters what definitely appears to be the Winter King, except she realizes that it is actually an elemental, trapped here by the evil power of the stones and by the beliefs of the villagers. She manages to free the spirit, who remains in the form of the Winter King. Mallara doesn't know if there was a Winter King before, but suspects that there is now.

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  • "The Least She Could Do"
  • Mark Rudolph
  • Issue #166 November 3 2000
  • In the future, when people begin to suffer from a disease which deprives them of their memories, they are herded up and trained to do menial tasks. This happens to Opal's friend Nina. When Opal visit's a restaurant, she sees one of these retrained people cavorting in front of the restaurant dressed in a clown suit. The poor woman was oblivious to the down pour of rain. As Opal is driving away, she realizes that it is her friend Nina. Not knowing how to handle the situation, Opal drives into what is left of her friend, killing her and sparing her from further indignities.
  • "What Mary Saw"
  • Kenneth Burke
  • Issue #167 November 10 2000
  • An agent is sent into a small town to investigate the disappearance of two other agents. He meets a nice young woman named Mary who has one of those truly scary, jealous, dead-beat, red-neck type boyfriends. It turns out that when the boyfriend notice the two agents nosing around Mary's place, while questioning her about her story about seeing a UFO, he assumes that they are secret lovers and kills both of them. When the agent confronts the boyfriend and gets a confession, he kills him. He quietly cleans up the mess and leaves town, knowing that noone will miss the boyfriend. He simply regrets that he won't be able to help that nice Mary once his people begin their invasion.
  • "Flutterwhorls"
  • Matt Talluto
  • Issue #168 November 17 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • A deeply engrossing story of a woman who wakes up on a beach with no memory of who she is. She keeps encountering a boy, first as a baby, then as three or four years old, then six. Each time she sees this boy in the course of the morning, he is a little older. He then vanishes when she looks away a moment. He then starts asking her to help him find the flutterwhorls. She does and by mid-afternoon, she and the boy find them and set them free. Then she does not see him again for the rest of the day. Just before sunset she discovers an old man lying on the beach and realizes that he is the boy, grown old and dying. She also knows that it is her son, the one she died giving birth to and that she has been meeting him in some sort of afterlife.
  • "Masking"
  • Paula L. Fleming
  • Issue #169 November 24 2000
  • A beautifully mysterious fantasy tale about a society where magically powerful people live behind masks. The maskers are the elite of society and rule over it. When an outcast masker meets an aristocratic daughter, he begins to wonder if he can make his way back into that society.

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  • "Hero"
  • E. K. Rivera
  • Issue #170 December 1 2000
  • The story of a young man with super-powers who moves to New York to become the Hero who saves the day. But things don't work out that way. He struggles with his feelings concerning his life and what his super-powers have done, or not done, for him.
  • "H2O"
  • Lori Ann White
  • Issue #171 December 8 2000
  • Water has become a precious commodity in the future, as pollution and greenhouse effect have reduced the usuable supply. It is an offence, punishable by death, to waste water. One man, working in a computer animation company for the government, is hoping to be able to get promoted upward into a level where he and his wife can have all of the water they want.
  • "A Conversation With The Author Of The Iron Pig (And Other Notable Events)"
  • C. A. Mehrlein
  • Issue #172 December 15 2000
  • A weird and wonderful tale about a man who finds a web page about a long dead author and his works. As he begins to research the story behind this author, whom history seems to have contrived to erase from memory, he discovers that the website was put up by the ghost of the man. He meets with the ghost and discusses what happened to him, and how the ghost hopes to have his work brought back into the awareness of the reading public.
  • "Retirement"
  • Jeff Rybak
  • Issue #173 December 22 2000
  • An old warrior decides to retire so he buys himself an inn. Then, once he is prepared to be settled, he tries to give his sword to his son, as his father gave to him, as he got it from his father before that. Except the sword, which is magical, speaks up and says that it too would like to retire.
  • "The Third Maiden"
  • Paula L. Fleming
  • Issue #174 December 29 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • A dragon tries to capture three virgin maidens but is instead enchanted by them. Each wants something from the dragon. He is able to comply with the wishes of the first two, but not the third. The third maiden flings him into the future and binds him to the earth in the form of a roller coaster. When the other finally free the dragon, they are confronted by the third maiden who agains demands her wish of the dragon. This time, the dragon has learned to give her what she wants and the four are joined together for eternity.

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