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David Afsharirad is a writer and Associate Editor at Baen Books. He lives in Austin, TX.

SEE THE FAIRVILLE ODDITY!

For the last fifty miles, Aaron had seen this message proclaimed from various sun-bleached billboards as he travelled along Highway 285. These weren't the big steel contraptions that lined the interstate, but old wooden structures, made of painted plywood, most falling down and nearly illegible. He wondered how old they were. Fairville, his phone's GPS informed him, wasn't on the map anymore, just another ghost town in the vast empty of West Texas.

It had been a mistake to take the back roads, he thought now. He'd reasoned it would be a good way to see some of the country as he travelled from Austin to Los Angeles, where Megan awaited, but though the views had been intermittently lovely, overall the trip made him lonely. Rural Texas had been emptying out for decades, everyone moving to one of the major cities along the I-35 corridor. Driving these lonesome roads, it would sometimes be hours before he saw another vehicle, and the small towns he stopped in had the hallowed out look of someone waiting to die.

And it was taking forever. He thought of an old saying he'd heard from his grandmother. The sun has rose and the sun has set and we ain't out of Texas yet.

SEE THE FAIRVILLE ODDITY!

Like the others, this sign featured a giant yellow question mark and a listing for how many miles still separated the weary traveler and the aforementioned oddity. Twenty-five, in Aaron's case.

This particular billboard looked to be in slightly better repair. And the one at the ten-mile mark looked like it might even have been touched up in the last decade. Was it possible, Aaron wondered, that though Fairville itself had gone the way of the dodo, the Oddity remained?

He hoped so. In addition to the Oddity, the billboard promised FOOD and GAS, and he could stand both. He remembered his mom always packed a cooler full of food when the family went on long road trips back when he was a kid, but this habit hadn't been passed down to the younger generation. Whenever Aaron took to the road, the fuel he ran on was McDonald's cheeseburgers and Taco Bell burritos, with the occasional gas station hot dog thrown in for good measure. What he hadn't counted on was that most of this back-country route did not fall in the shadow of the Golden Arches. Yesterday, he'd stocked up on beef jerky and Hostess cupcakes (not nearly as good as he remembered), but his supply was dwindling. Some real food would be nice. And he could top off the tank. At a little less than half-full, he wasn't in dire need of gas, but like fast food establishments, gas stations were in short supply along this forgotten stretch of road, and he did not want to have to get out and push.

So yes, he's stop and grab a bite and fill the tank—and see the Fairville Oddity, while he was at it. If, he reminded himself, there was still food and gas to be had and an Oddity to be seen.

SEE THE FAIRVILLE ODDITY!

D.J. (“Dave”) Butler grew up in swamps, deserts, and mountains. After messing around for years with the practice of law, he finally got serious and turned to his lifelong passion of storytelling. He now writes adventure stories for readers of all ages, plays guitar, and spends as much time as he can with his family. He is the author of numerous novels including the Witchy War series, the Cunning Man series (with Aaron Michael Ritchey), In the Palace of Shadow and Joy, and more. “A Window on Sarovar” is set in the world of his upcoming novel Abbott in Darkness.

“I miss windows,” Ellie said.

John tried not to listen to her. He mumbled, mouthing the strange words that ran as a vocabulary list across the screen of his multitool. Eetroo, he read. River. Sarovar Alpha had many rivers. It was a watery planet with two principal continents. Eez, tomb, gravesite. When was he going to have to talk about tombs in his new job as a Company accountant? He shook his head and scanned down, looking for more practical vocabulary. Et, food, that should be a useful word. But what did it mean that em plus a verb constituted a present progressive?

“John,” Ruth said. “You’re folding your hands.”

“You’re just jealous that I’m so flexible.” He grinned at his wife. “Not everyone can touch the back of their wrists with their own fingernails.”

“I’m worried your weak connective tissue will snap and you’ll pull your hands off,” she said.

“That can’t happen,” he said.

“Are you sure? That’s exactly what can happen to your heart.”

John grinned again and said nothing, to avoid the conflict.

Ruth shook her head and looked at the girls. They lay flopped on cushions on the floor of the family’s cabin of the Sarovar Company starship Oberon. The cushions were a pile of all of the cushions from the cabin’s sofa, the pillows from each of the cabin’s four beds, the dog’s sleeping cushion, and two more inflatable foam pillows spat out by the printing unit in the corner. Ruth sat on the sofa, also made of inflatable foam, and without cushions.

“Are you actually looking at pictures of windows on your multi?” she asked Ellie.

Five-year-old Ellie harrumphed.

“You can’t have windows on a starship,” Sunitha told her younger sister.

“You can,” Ellie said. “The ship that took us out to Jupiter had windows.”

“That wasn’t a starship,” Sunitha said. “It was just a shuttle.”

“It still goes in space,” Ellie said.

“But not between stars.” Sunitha dropped into her faux upper-crust British accent. “Sarovar System is forty light-years from Earth. We couldn’t just fly there directly through normal space.”

“Mom,” Ellie said, “Sunitha is now going to try to tell me about wormwood because she thinks I don’t know anything about it or about how we got to Sarovar and she knows everything.”

The lights in the cabin shifted to amber, which was a prelude to a broadcast announcement.

“I do not know everything,” Sunitha said.

Ellie folded her arms across her chest. “That’s right.”

“But I know more than you.”

“Mom!”

Elaine Midcoh of Pembroke Pines, Florida, has won the grand prize in the 2022 Jim Baen Memorial Award competition for her short story, “Man on the Moon.”

Michael Z. Williamson is retired military, having served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. He has consulted on military matters, weapons and disaster preparedness for Discovery Channel and Outdoor Channel productions and is Editor-at-Large for Survivalblog, with 300K weekly readers. His novels A Long Time Until Now and That Was Now, This is Then make use of his extensive research into the Paleolithic era.

I’ve done a lot of research on the Upper Paleolithic recently, for my novels A Long Time Until Now, That Was Now, This is Then, and for an upcoming third.

I have several friends enamored of this hypothesis, and I’m not sure why. Pretty much no credible researchers like it, and I find it utterly uncompelling on every level. I looked at it again after a recent debate. I like it less every time I look at it.

It summarizes like this: The Solutrean Culture of the area that is now France and Spain, (22,000-17,000 BP) used overshot flaking to shape their flint tools, and as of the proposal date, were the first culture to do so. Clovis points (13,200 BP) of the Americas also used overshot flaking. Lots of Clovis points are found in the Eastern U.S., therefore, the Solutreans must have travelled across the Atlantic, and settled there 3800 years later with the same technology. In support, it is argued that the oldest settlement sites in the Americas are in the Eastern U.S.

That's it.