Search Worlds Without End

Hugo, Nebula, Ditmar and Locus Award nominated novella. It originally appeaerd in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1976. The story can also be found in the anthology A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (1981), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Terry Carr. It is included in the collection The Custodians and Other Stories (1978) and Richard Cowper SF Gateway Omnibus (2014). The novella is incorporated in the novel The Road to Corlay (1978).

This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

Collection containing:

• The Custodians (1975 novelette)
• Paradise Beach (1976 novelette)
• Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1976 novella)
• The Hertford Manuscript (1976 novelette)

Piper at the Gates of Dawn begins the White Bird of Kinship series. The other stories are unrelated.

The Hertford Manuscript is a sequel to The Time Machine by HG Wells.

The Custodians tells of a visitor to a French monastery, and of one specially built tiny room which is constructed precisely on the intersection of mysterious force fields, so that anyone who enters is able to foresee the future. Paradise Beach is the story of a wall-screen whose image of the sea attunes itself to the individual perceptions of the onlooker. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is set towards the end of the next millennium when the stories about the coming of the mysterious white bird of kinship become associated with the travels of an old story-teller and his young nephew, whose pipe seems to have a magical quality. Finally, The Hertford Manuscript tells of the remarkable discovery of a seventeenth-century book with some pages purporting to be the journals of a nineteenth-century time traveller.

On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptor of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment.

And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past.

The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes. When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain's seven island kingdoms.

Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy's own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.

A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.