Future Games

by John Shirley

  Will stopped. He swallowed, sat back, untensing. Specks of black swarmed his vision.

  Blue was grinning.

  “I suppose,” said Tondius Will ruefully, “that you’re proud of yourself now, eh, Blue? You recorded my little tirade, no doubt. You’ll crow about it at the SprtZwrtrZ Club. How you got a rise out of Will the Chill.” Will’s tone was bitter ice.

  “It’s good to see passion in you, Will! Though I have to admit I don’t entirely get your meaning. But why are you so tight with your enthusiasm, Will? We can build your ratings if you’ll give me more of that. And, really, can’t you leak us just a little of your love life?”

  “I have no lover: male, female, or bimale. None.”

  “No? None? Except your masspieces and playing fields, perhaps. But you had a lover once, didn’t you, Tondius?”

  Will felt his face growing hard and dark with anger.

  Blue spoke rapidly. “Just for the sake of accurate historical perspective, listen, please, and answer my question—a yes or no will do. I have a document here I’d like to read to you. I want to know if what it states is true or false. Is this true? ‘In 2649 CE Tondius Will’s fourth confrontation with Enphon brought him at last into the public eye and put him in the running for Title. It was said he had prepared for this Contest for eight years; Enphon’s reputation doubtless warranted this, but eight years is unprecedented even for a waverider.

  “It is known that at this time Will’s lover, Mina Threeface, was not permitted to visit the waverider—he avoided all distractions. For eight years he refused to screen to her for more than a period of ten minutes once a month. The lover of a waverider is best advised to understand his need for utter concentration. Apparently, Mina did not understand. She hovered just out of scanrange in her father’s yacht and, minutes before impact, she dove on a sure course for the impact zone between masspieces, dispatching an emergency transmission to Tondius Will: I’ve gone to Impact Zone. Avert your masspiece, lose Contest because you love me. Or I die. His Great Senses dutifully relayed this message to Will. Tondius Will’s thoughts can only be conjectured. He had to measure the scope of two loves. He found he could not permit himself to surrender or even stalemate Contest simply to save Mina. She was trapped between impacting planets, she died there and, though Will won Contest, it was this victory that also won him the cognomen Will the Chill—”

  “Yes,” Will said softly, though inwardly he shook with the effort at self- control. “It’s all true. It’s true.” And he added: “Your heart, Blue—your heart is far more chill than mine will ever be.”

  Will broke contact and strode to the hookup chambers.

  Hookup flushed Will’s circulation, winnowing fatigue poisons from his blood, unclouding his brain. Refreshed, he adjusted hookup from yoga to extern. The cushions at his back, the cups gripping his shaven pate, the crowded instrument panel—all seemed to vanish. He closed his eyes and saw the universe.

  The senses (but not the mind) of Great Senses were his, now. He scanned first through visible light. He had been orbiting Roche Five for two months; the alien constellations overwheeling the Roche system seemed almost natively familiar. Dominating the right-hand scope of his vision: Five, fifth planet from Roche’s Star, bulking half in golden-red light, half in shadow. Five was Will’s Contest masspiece. And patching into a drifting Sports-eyes camera satellite’s signal, he could see himself: his contestship soaring above the twilight border, north-south over the face of the Earth-sized planet. The contestship, with its outspread solar panels and the beaked globe at its forward end, resembled a metallic vulture scanning the barren planet face beneath.

  Not quite barren, thought Will the Chill. The survey crew was wrong—there’s more than desert and ruins down there.

  He looked up from Five, and sought for Opponent. Focusing away from visible light, he worked his way down (“down”) through infrared’s multifarious blaze, down through the longer wavelengths. He sorted through the transmissions of the star itself, discarded background sources, letting frequencies riffle by like an endless deck of cards, each card with its wave-length-identifying signet. He was looking for a Queen of Diamonds. She wasn’t transmitting. He worked his way up (“up”), toward shorter wavelengths, and ten thousand hairs split themselves ten thousand times apiece. He skimmed X-rays, and, through hookup’s multifaceted neutrino-focused eyes, spotted her, traced her spoor of nuclear radiation—she was using a hydrogen-scoop, fusing, traveling overspace, so Will’s Great Senses (constantly monitoring gravwave ripplings) wouldn’t notice her change of position. She was far from Three, her own masspiece.

  What was she doing? Then—Will shuddered. A strong probe signal had bounced from his contestship. He felt it again, and again. He waited. It came no more. He traced the signals and found that the source was Opponent’s contestship, fusing to travel unnoticed in ordinary space. Will tied in with Great Senses. “Did you feel that?”

  “Someone tasted our defense screens with a probe signal,” Great Senses replied, voice particularly mechanical coming through hookup channels. “Who was it?”

  “It was Opponent! She’s traveling through upper space so we wouldn’t be likely to think the probe came from her . . . no reason for her to assess us from that direction, surreptitiously. She knew in this stage we’d expect to find her waveriding. What do you think? Is she testing our reflexes or trying to kill us?”

  “Three sleeps gone there was a disguised Opponent drone—I recognized it for what it was because it was maneuvering in a pattern for which a Sports-eyes vehicle would have no use. It was probing our defense systems.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I was waiting for confirmation of my suspicions. We have it now.”

  “She plans to kill me.”

  “That’s within the scope of Contest rules. She has the right to kill you. Under certain conditions.”

  “It’s accepted technically, but it’s not considered sporting. No one’s killed an Opponent for half a thousand Contests.”

  “Shall we kill her first?”

  “No. I shall Contest, and I’ll defend myself. She’s inexperienced. Luck brought her this far. She’s too impulsive to take the Title.”

  “But she has innersight. Admittedly she’s injudicious, little precision as yet. Her Opponent second to last died in deep space . . . She admitted nothing. They said it was a leak.”

  “I didn’t know.” Will snorted. “So, she’s a killer. Let her kill if she can. That’s all—I’m going back to scanning—”

  “One moment. Do you want me to maintain ship’s gravity?”

  “Yes. I’ll be going planetside. After hookup. I’ve got to go down to—ah—” He hesitated. Why lie to Great Senses? But he couldn’t bring himself to voice the truth. So he said: “I’m going down to inspect the fusion scoops. All that dust—there may be corrosion on the pushcoils. And we’ll keep the planet in this orbit for another sleep. Until then, maintain gravity. I want to be gray-adjusted—I might be going planetside fairly often.” He broke contact with Great Senses.

  But in the programming room the lights of Great Senses went from questioning-green to doubting-orange.

  The atmosphere of Five was breathable, but too rarefied to nourish him long. So he wore a respirator. Also, a thermalsuit against the bitter cold, cutting winds. That was all. Unweaponed (against the advice of Great Senses: Opponent skulked nearer), he leaped from the airlock of the lander. He stretched, getting the wieldiness of planetside back into his limbs. He walked a few meters to a large boulder, clambered atop it, and looked about him.

  Just below, the double-domed lander squatted on spidery limbs. Beyond the lander, many kilometers across the battered yellow plain, rose the shining column of the nearest pushcoil, the planetmover.

  Anemic sunlight glanced from its argent hide, light streaks chasing the shadows of striated dust clouds skating low in the bluegray sky. It was afternoon, but overhead a few stars guttered, visible in thin atmosphere.

&n
bsp; The pushcoil column towered, broad and austere, into the clouds and beyond. Its lower end widened into a compression skirt that uniformly clamped the ground; steam and fumes trailed from vents in the conical skirt: the column was converting minerals into energy, building power for conversion into magnetic push. There were ten such columns placed at regular intervals about the planet. Put there by the Sports-eyes Corporation for Will the Chill’s exclusive use.

  Made from metals extracted from Five’s core, the columns were powered geothermally. Sports-eyes had built hundreds on hundreds of worlds. Worlds now asteroid belts and clouds of dust; crushed and dispersed for the amusement of jaded millions on the homeworld.

  The Sports-eyes crew had departed months before; Will was glad that they were gone. He hadn’t spoken to another human being, except on screen, since Mina’s death, years before.

  Will turned and gazed west. Roche’s Star was low, opposite the column. Long shadows reached from the endless scatter of boulders and crater rims. The meteorite-scored hills to the north stretched to him like the pitted, skeletal fingers of a dead giant.

  Will strode into the grasp of those peninsular fingers.

  In those hills were the ruins, and the sunharp, and the voices. Will began to climb, anticipation growing.

  In the ship. In the hookup chamber. In the hookup seat. In hookup.

  Time to re-examine the playing field. He tested the solar wind, noted its slant and strength.

  Then he immersed himself in somatic-eidetic impressions of gravitational energy. An exquisitely fine and resiliently powerful fabric flexed between star systems. On this skein a star and ten planets moved like monstrous spiders, electromagnetic grips adhering them to the field, bending the webwork. The gravitational field was the playing field, and Will examined each component’s interaction with the whole.

  Will needed no numerical calculation. No holotrigonometry. He had never got beyond the multiplication tables. All he needed was hookup and Great Senses and the skill, the innersight. Great Senses was navigator, astrogator, life-systems watch. Hookup was Will’s cerebral connection with the ship’s electronic nerves, a binding of synthetic and biological neural systems. Will’s was the instinct, the athleticism, the determination. Determiner of destinations.

  He knew the ship physically.

  The ship’s cognizance of (and interaction with) visible light, cosmic rays, gamma rays, nuclear forces—these he felt in his loins. Physically.

  De hipbone is connected to de backbone; the electro is connected to the magnetic. The seat of his magnetic sensorium was his spine. This chakra he experienced in the region of his heart. Electricity in the heart. Physically.

  He comprehended the gravitational field through shoulders, legs, arms. Very physically.

  In loins, light-packets. In heart, electromagnetism. In limbs, gravity.

  In hookup they integrated as variations on the wave-particle theme: in his brain. Sometimes, Tondius Will remembered a poem, one of many the ship’s library had recited to him. It was Blake.

  Energy is the only life and is from the body:

  and Reason is the bound or outward

  circumference of Energy.

  Energy is Eternal Delight.

  Innersight hookup. On one level he knew the vast gravitational field in term of mass and weight, gross proportions.

  Take it down, another and broader condition of unity.

  He penetrated the vacillation of gravitrons, the endless alternation between wave and particle forms, slipped the knife edge of his innersight into the transitory sequence between wave into particle and particle into wave; waves, here, revealed as particles and particles ex- posed: packets of waves.

  His brain took a Picture, recorded and filed it. He had memorized the playing field.

  And that was enough for now. He willed internalization. Hookup shut down his connection with Great Senses. He sat up and yawned. But his eyes glittered.

  He was hungry, and there was no hookup here to feed and refresh him. He was weary, but the hills drew him on. There was only the sighing wind, hiss of breath in respirator, clink of small air tanks on his belt, crunch of his boot steps in sand. And the wide-open, the empty. He trudged the rim of a crater, admiring the crystalline glitter streaking its slopes, the red nipple of iron oxides in the impact basin. On the far side of this crater were the ruins, upthrusting along the broken ridges like exposed spinal segments. Light splashed off the sunharp, still half a kilometer away.

  The sun was westering behind the mesas, the jet sky overhead spread shadow wings to enfold the bluer horizons.

  Will slid down the embankment, enjoying the earthy heft of hillside resisting his boots. He reached the floor of the gully and picked his way over rough shin-high boulders to the base of the hill whose crown exposed the first stretch of ragged ruins, uneven walls like battlements above.

  The hills were not simple hills—they were barrows, grave mounds cloaking the remains of a once-city. Here, an earthslide triggered by a meteorite strike had exposed a portion of the city’s skeleton. The walls of rusted metal and cracked glass and tired plastics, throwing jagged shadows in the fading daylight, were notched and scored with age, erosion.

  But there were no signs of war on the ruins. These were not broken battlements . . . Genetic Manipulation experiments had released an unstoppable plague, robbing the world of most of its life and all its fertility. No offspring were born to lower life forms, or to the world’s people. People they were, of a sort, with tendrils instead of boned fingers and large golden whiteless eyes like polished stones. The plants withered, the air thinned, the land died. Those who survived, one hundred thousand living on chemically synthesized food, were so long-lived they were nearly immortal. Childless, living without societal evolution in an endlessly bleak landscape, they surrendered to a growing collective sense of futility. A new religion arose, preaching fulfillment beyond the veil of death, advocating mass suicide. A vote was taken, its tally unanimous. The remaining one hundred thousand decided to die. To die by poison, together, and all at once . . .

  For so Will had been told. The voices in the sunharp told him this.

  He passed through the maze of roofless ruins, coming to the broad square at their radial center. He beheld the sunharp. Everything here had decayed but the sunharp. It had been built at the end, as a monument. Built to endure a nova.

  The diamond-shaped sunharp’s frame was constructed of light silvery tubing. A coppery netting was woven densely between the frames, for sifting and carrying light impulses.

  The final rays of sunset, veering lances of red, broke the thin dust cloud and struck the coppery sunharp wires. Till now it had been singing in the subsonic. Struck full by crepuscular rays, its netting vibrated visibly, resonated internally, interpreted the sun shiver. Translated into sound waves, photons sang out. Choirs of alien races, chorus of human voices, subhuman voices, wolves baying and birds singing: all in concert. The wind sounds of thousands of landscapes (each landscape altering the wind song as Bach’s inventions vary the hymnal theme) combining into a single voice. The nature of rippling endlessly defined in song.

  Will listened, and more than listening: he heeded. And if Blue the Glue had seen Will’s face just then, he might not have recognized him; he did not associate joy with Will the Chill.

  Royal purple gathered in the ground hollows, dusty darkness collected in the dead windows of the ruins, the stars shone more fiercely, the mesas at the horizon swallowed the sun. The sunharp’s call dwindled to lower frequencies, softly moaning to starlight and occasionally pinging to cosmic rays. Other sighs came to replace the sunharp’s voice. Will shuddered and, for an instant, dread enfolded his heart. But the fear left him abruptly, as it always did before they spoke to him. He smiled. “Hello,” he said aloud.

  There came a reply, one hundred thousand voices speaking the same word at once, a mighty susurration in an alien tongue. A greeting.

  Then they spoke subvocally, in his own tongue, echoes within t
he skull.

  For the fifth time you have returned to us (said the voices). But the first time and the three thereafter you came alone. Why have you now brought a companion?

  “I have no companions,” said Tondius Will.

  We see now that you do not know about the one who follows you. It is a lurking he who does the bidding of a distant she. The he comes to destroy you.

  “Then he is an assassin,” said Will sadly, “sent by my Opponent. She becomes reckless. She has breached the rules of Contest. Death-dealing must be done by Opponent or by her machines only. Still, I will not protest. Let him come.”

  The time is not yet, Tondius Will.

  “Will the time be soon?”

  You doubt us. You wonder if you are the One prophesied by the Gatekeeper. You are he. Ten thousand times in ten thousand millennia we have attempted transit to the fuller spheres. Ten thousand times we have been denied. One hundred thousand cannot enter as one, said the Gatekeeper, unless they become onemind, or unless they are guided by a sailor of inner seeing. We were bound together by a united death. Simultaneity. We plunged together into that tenuous Place, this between. We need a guide to lead us out. Do not doubt us. You are He. The Gatekeeper whose seven stony visages exhale blacklight said to us: One who wields spheres below can guide you through spheres above . . . You are He. We know your history, Tondius Will.

  “My father . . . ”

  Was an orbitglider, a great athlete of space race.

  “My mother . . . ”

  Was a freefall ballerina for a space-station ballet company.

  “My paternal grandfather . . . ”

  Was an Earthborn snow skier of Earth who journeyed to the ultimate ski course on mountainous Reginald IV, and died on Thornslope.

  “His father, my great-grandfather . . . ”

  Was a Terran trapeze artist.

  “One of my great-grandmothers . . . ”

  Was a surfer on the vast seas of terraformed Venus, and once rode a wave for seven days.