sheffield

Jupiter
Higher Education w/Jerry Pournell

When a misfired practical joke gets him kicked out of school, Rick Luban thinks he has nowhere to go but down. Instead, he gets a second chance--and a whole new life--when he signs up for a career in asteroid mining.
But life in space proves more challenging than Rick expected. Competition is intense and the harsh realties of space allow no room for error. On his way to a brighter future, Rick faces ever more demanding tests, as well as the very real dangers of sabotage and murder.

The Billion Dollar Boy

Shelby Cheever V is a spoiled brat. He is also the richest kid in the country. Actually, make that the universe. Bored with his all-the-amusements-money-can-buy life, he decides on a bit of interstellar action, Shelby-style. But it turns out life on a starship is not all fun and games. As part of a crew, Shelby has a few things to learn. Like, how to follow orders instead of simply giving orders. Can Shelby learn how to cooperate with his crewmates?
He may not have a choice. When Shelby becomes the target of a hostage-for-ransom scheme, he'll need all the help he can get.

Putting Up Roots

When Josh and his autistic cousin Dawn are sent to the planet Solferino, they join a group of kids already working for an interplanetary conglomerate stationed there. Assured by the bosses that no intelligent life exists on Solferino, Josh and Dawn come to suspect otherwise. Especially when Dawn makes contact with one of the creatures, a creature with whom she shares a mysterious ability to communicate.
With the corporation pressuring them, Josh and Dawn are drawn into a battle to save the creatures. And, it turns out, to save themselves.

The Cybourg From Earth

Jeff Kopal is heir to a powerful military family. He's got everything going for him. Except one thing: Jeff is a total screw-ups. His family has had it. So when Jeff blows off his naval entrance exams he figures his future is basically kaput. Instead, he is being sent by the navy into deep space to deal with rebellious cyborgs. How did that happen?
Jeff will have to find out before it's too late. Otherwise, He may become the pawn in someone else's dangerous-and very deadly-game.

Heritage Universe

Summertide
Barclay Shaw

Divergence
Barclay Shaw

Convergence
Gary L Freeman

Transvergence
Dru Blair

Resurgence
Bob Eggleton

Heritage Universe

Summertide

It was just before Summertide, the time when the twin planets, Opal and Quake, would orbit closest to their sun, subjecting both - Quake in particular - to vast tidal forces. It was to be the most violent Summertide ever, creating something that only happened every 350,000 years.
Access to the unstable Quake was supposed to be prohibited, but some very insistent travelers were determined to make the trip. Professor Darya Lang, who studied artifacts left by the long-vanished aliens called the Builders, had a hunch that she might find the Builders themselves. Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H'sial had their own interests in Quake, and would do anything to get there. And Councilor Julius Graves was hunting murderers - if they were hiding on Quake, he would find them.
Planetary Administrators Hans Rebka and Max Perry had no choice but to go to Quake - risking their lives to protect the others - and to learn, just maybe, the secret of Summertide and the Builders.

Divergence

For millennia, humankind and the other intelligent races have studied the bizarre and unfathomable constructs of the legendary beings known as the Builders. But for all that study, they are still no closer to figuring out who - or what - the Builders have been, or where they have gone. Then, on the world called Quake, in the midst of the violent planetary upheaval that is Summertide, a small group of humans and aliens witness the culmination of all those years of watching and waiting: the planet Quake opens up, and something comes out - and it looks as if, at long last, the discovery of the Builders themselves is at hand.
All her life, Darya Lang has dreamed of finding the Builders, whose artifacts she has single-handedly cataloged for the rest of the universe. Troubleshooter and adventurer Hans Rebka has his own dreams of unraveling the mystery of those artifacts. To Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H'sial, the Builder artifacts represent a once-in-a-lifetime shot at untold wealth. And close behind them come the others: Councilor Julius Graves, who does not trust anyone else to make first contact unassisted; the slaves J'merlia and Kallik, who crave only a reunion with their masters; and the embodied computer E.C. Tally, charged with finding out just what the rest are up to.
The trail that begins at Quake leads to unexpected Builder artifacts full of traps for the unwary and answers for those who know how to ask the questions. But the biggest question of all will remain an enigma, while their search unleashes the greatest threat to civilization ever imagined...

Convergence

Convergence Humans first reached out to the stars traveling at a painfully slow sublight crawl - then they found the Bose network, which allowed ships to jump instantaneously from one node in the galactic arm to another. Once in the network they found the Artifacts: enigmatic structures, millions of years old, left by a vanished race. Incomprehensible to both human and non-human minds, the Artifacts seemingly defy natural law.Now, after millions of years, a new Artifact has appeared - and previously discovered Artifacts are showing strange changes in their inexplicable activities. When a motley crew of human and alien scientists and adventurers set out to examine still more Artifacts, they should have considered the fact that some changes are more dangerous than others...

Transvergence (Transcendence & Convergence)
Resurgence

THE GALAXY'S
IN DANGER—SEND FOR
HANS REBKA
Hans Rebka, interstellar troubleshooter, thought he had done it all by now—not only solving the mystery of the gigantic Artifacts which a vanished race called the Builders had left behind millions of years ago, but also preventing the warlike and tyrannical Zardalu from regaining their onetime dominance of the galaxy. He figured he was entitled to work on smaller problems that only involved one planet at a time. Unfortunately, he is about to find that his earlier exploits were only a warm-up for the main event.
In the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy, something is destroying whole stellar systems. Only the Builders could have the power to snuff out whole stars and planets, but if the mysterious super-race has returned, why should they bring a wave of cosmic destruction with them? Has a new, malevolent super-race arisen?
Rebka reassembles his old motley crew of humans and aliens to investigate. But when they arrive in the beleagured spiral arm, they become trapped on a planet directly in the path of destruction. And they must escape, for they have learned the secret of the destroyed star systems: a battle is beginning that will determine the ultimate fate of the galaxy itself.

Cold as Ice (1992)

Twenty-five years after the great interplanetary war in which nine billion people were killed, Cyrus Mobarak is determined to bring human settlement to the protected seas of Europa.

The Ganymede Club (1995)

A tale of the years immediately following the Great War, a horrifying spasm that was over in weeks, but killed half the human race.
Lola Belman was a refugee. She and her younger brother were on one of the last ships to leave Earth as the bombs began to fall; by the time they left lunar orbit, they were orphans. Lola is now praticing as a therapist on Ganymede, and she has a new patient whose past is a mystery.
During those years of chaos, many records were lost and histories forgotten, and it was an ideal time for anyone who wanted to conceal his or her identity. Now there is a small, dangerous group who will stop at nothing to keep Lola from exploring the past and discover their existence.

Dark as Day (2002)

Alex Ligon, heir to a multiplanetary fortune, develops a population-expansion model that suggests the human race is doomed. Milly Wu, newly arrived at the SETI project base, believes she has detected the signals of intelligent aliens. And eccentric and reclusive mathematician Rustum Battachariya, who collects Great War hardware the way some people nowadays collect World War II relics, stumbles on something rather more dangerous: a weapon that can destroy the sun.

The Godspeed Drive. It is the faster than-than-light spaceship drive that made human colonization of the galaxy possible. But it was not invented by humans - it was found in the wreck of an alien ship that drifted into the solar system. No understood everything about how it worked, but it linked a hundred star systems together, and made even marginal planets like Erin in the Maveen system habitable.
But one day the Godspeed ships stopped coming. Erin and the Forty Worlds around Maveen were cut off from Interstellar commerce, confined to the slow insystem shuttles that were the only spaceships that were left at Muldoon Port.
Jay Hara grew up on isolated Erin, longing for the legendary days when Godspeed ships spanned the galaxy, and a young man's dreams could take him to the stars. So when an old, sick spacer named Paddy Enderton showed Jay some very strange devices and told him that he had found a Godspeed base out in the asteroid belt, Jay was eager to believe, despite the doubts of his uncle Duncan and his friend, Dr. Eileen Xavier. But when Jay's farm was raided, his animals killed and his mother beaten, by men searching for Enderton, he became convinced that there was some truth in Enderton's ravings.
They won financing from the university, and have chartered a ship to take them out to the asteroid belt, in search of a small moving rock marked as Paddys Fortune in Enderton's navigation device. But the ship is not what they think it is. And the crew and captain have a very different, and deadly, agenda once they find the Godspeed base.

The problem was partly one of expectations. Mile-long spaceships, vast flotillas, girdling Earth in their thousands and bristling with weapons; subtle etheral messages, drifting in as radio signals from the stars and requiring painstaking decoding after their detection.

Sorry; none of the above. No one, in all the millions of words written about first contact, had told us to be ready for a single, stubby vessel. No one had told us to look for four fronded purple plants sitting in garbage cans of dark soil.

Even after the first shock, we didn't do well. How was our delegation to know that the plants were no more than a habitation, and the Riddlers themselves comprised a commensal intelligent muti-cell mold that lived among the roots?

Luckily, they took it very well. Maybe I should say, we thought they took it well; with the Riddlers, you could never be sure of their thinking. I can be sure, though, that their interpretive equipment produced a most realistic chuckle of amusement when I explained our misunderstanding.

"Not a problem," it said. "It takes all sorts to make a Galaxy. This won't count against you when it comes to acceptance within the Federation. Why, we doubt if we'll even bother to report it."

Words intended to reassure (I think) but also enough to alarm me and the other five delegation members who had flown with me up to the Riddler ship.

"Very few things. Of course, it would be a mistake to fire any more of those silly nuclear rockets at us. A number of Federation members strongly believe that new applicants ought to be potty-trained before they are considered eligible for admission. But we happen to believe other criteria are more important. Go back home and wait. We will beam down to you three questions, in increasing order of difficulty. Your answers, provided to us in each case within twenty-four hours of asking, will be used to decide your eligibility."

Note that they did not say "riddles." The name that the media of earth gave them, the Riddlers, came about only because of their first questions. They termed it the establishing question.

"What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?"

An odd beginning, for beings with no legs at all. Or was that itself a hint, offered to us at the very start? I've often wondered about what, a hundred times. Suppose the tubs of soil and the fronded plants housed nothing but tranmission and receiving equipment, and the Riddlers themselves remained far away? Suppose they did not want us to know their true shapes, for good and sufficient reason?

Those suspicions only came to me later. At the time the question seemed so simple and familiar that we were at first reluctant to give the answer. However, we couldn't think of any sensible alternative, so twelve hours after we received their tansmission I sent out the answer to what has been known to humans for four thousand years as the Riddle of the Sphinx: "The creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening is a human being."

"Thank you." Their reply came at once, "Sounds fine to us, but if you will please wait . . . "

What alternative did we have? Their ship zipped away from Earth orbit, with an acceleration that made it clear they had the inertialess drive we have wanted for so long. One day later the Riddlers were back.

"The second question we'll term the question of judgment," they said. "Who is the greatest human who has ever lived? It is desirable that humans agree on the answer that you provide to us."

If the first problem had been trivially easy, this one was impossibly hard. The greatest human? What did the adjective mean? Was it a trick question? Did all humans have to agree on the answer? How significant was the fact that the Riddlers had giggled in the middle of the transmission?

We had twenty-four hours. We would have spent twenty-four years without reaching a consensus. We didn't know how the Riddlers judged greatness, and requests for clarification produced no answer from them. Greatness might be scientific, artistic or religious. It could mean the tallest or fatest human. It might be in terms of all-around accomplishments, rather than achievement in only one field. It could even mean -- though no one but Admiral Rawson supported the idea -- the most successful military conqueror.

The arguments back on Earth were horrendous. Twenty-two hours of heated discussion produced bunches of candidate names. Christ, Shakspeare, Napoleon, Mozart, Newton, Confucius, Bach, Moses, Da Vinci, Mohammed, Aristotle, Julius Ceaser, Einstein, Buddha, Socrates, Imhotep . . .

Twenty-two hours also proved that humans would never agree. Moslems vetoed Christ and Buddha. Artists vetoed scientists, scientists pooh-poohed the list of artists. Minority groups complained of Western Judeo-Christian bias. Feminists objected to every name, and proposed an all-female slate of candidates.

Consensus? Forget it. But no answer was the worst answer of all. As the head of the delegation, I was forced to make a decision. I sent our reply: "The greatest human who ever lived was the one who discovered the use of fire."

It was a cop-out, of course, since we could not offer a name. All I can say is that we avoided all problems of race, color, creed, religion, gender, and sexual preferences, and someone had to decide.

"Very good," the Riddlers said. "A most interesting answer. If you will please wait . . ."

Their ship vanished, as rapidly as before. This time we waited for over three weeks, biting our racial metaphorical fingernails. Finally the Riddlers returned.

"The last question we will term the question of ethics," their transmission said. "It is more complex than the first two, so please listen carefully. Are you ready?"

"We are ready." But I wasn't sure what the Riddlers meant by "ready," and I crossed my fingers when I said it.

"Let us suppose that you are accepted into the Universal Federation of species. As you expand through the Galaxy, you encounter numerous other star-faring civilizations. Suppose that you meet an unscrupulous race, which, following an Earth tradition, we will call the Bad Guys. The Bad Guys seek to gain an advantage over humans, but they do not know you well. To learn as much as possible about you, they undertake a diabolical experiment. On a remote Earth-like planet, far off the usual space-lanes and with no intelligent life, they introduce a tribe of animals genetically close to humans: chimpanzees, brought there from Earth. However, by means of an externally imposed radiation field, the Bad Guys raise the intelligence of the chimps to match the intelligence of humans. The Bad Guys can then observe the development of a native civilization on the planet, without ever allowing their own presence to become known, and they will learn more about humans. Do you understand?"

"We have not yet asked one. To proceed: humans, traveling those far-off regions of the Galaxy distant from the usual spaceways, discover the planet on which the Bad Guys are conducting their experiment. The Bad Guys flee, leaving intact the engine that generates the intelligence-enhancing field. It is discoverd by the human explorers.

"The humans now face a dilemma. Suppose that they go away and allow the augmenting field to remain in operaiton. Then, when the elevated chimps achieve spaceflight and move beyond their home planet, the brave explorers will decline to animal intelligence and be unable to operate their ships. They will inevitably die. The way to the stars will be closed. The alternative is to turn off the field, allow the chimps to lapse back to primitivism, and hope that time and evolution will permit the development of a naturally intelligent species on the planet. Do you understand all this?"

This time, oddly enough, there was almost no disagreement among the thousands of human groups who had fought so bitterly about the answer to the second question. We could have sent our answer within a few hours. I waited, but only because it seemed impolite to offer a quick answer to what the Riddlers had said would be the hardest question.

Finally I beamed our consensus: "To an intelligent creature, the loss of intelligence is as bad as or worse than death. If the radiation field were to be turned off, an intelligent species would be destroyed. That is unconscionable. The field must be left on, and the humans must go away."

"Very interesting," said the Riddlers. "Thank you. That is an illuminating answer. If you will please wait . . ."

We are still waiting. It has been almost a year and a half since they left, but there is no sign of the Riddlers.

I do not think that they will be coming back. We failed the test. It is as simple as that.

Charles Sheffield

Waiting for the Riddlers