Future Games

by John Shirley

  “And I came to waveriding . . . ”

  When your mother killed herself en route to Earth from your father’s doom on Reginald IV, and the captain of the transport adopted you; he was himself a retired waverider.

  “And I know your history, and how you came to die, one hundred thousand at a single stroke, trapped by imperfect unity . . . ”

  We are as one hundred thousand waves . . .

  “On a single sea.”

  The understanding forged anew, the voices hushed. The air about him began to course and whirl, a dust-devil rose up and the spirit host—seen in the dark of his closed eyes as endless banners of unfurling white—enclosed Tondius Will. He wept in unbridled joy and relief as they entered him, and swept him up . . . He could not abide the touch of flesh on flesh, not since he had crushed Mina between two worlds. They took him with them, for a while, and let him incorporeally ride, like a surfer on a sea constituted of the ectoplasm of one hundred thousand souls. For this time of merging, loneliness was beyond conception. For this time of—

  But it ended.

  Returned to his body, he felt like an infant coughed from the womb into a snowdrift.

  He screamed. He begged. “Please!”

  No longer (the voices said), for now. If we kept you from your body any longer, you’d wither and pass on to us. It would be too soon. You’re not quite ready to lead us yet, though you have the innersight of energies, particles, and planes. You are a born sailor of upper spheres. But not quite yet. Next time. Soon.

  “Wait! One thing! You said you would search for her. Have you found her? Was she too far away?”

  Linear distances don’t impede our call. We have found her. She was very much alone. She is coming. Next time. Soon. (The voices faded.)

  They were gone. Will was alone in the dark.

  The sunharp moaned faintly. Distant whispers; starlight rumors stirred its webwork.

  He shivered in sudden awareness of the night’s cold. Stretching, he fought numbness from his limbs. He turned up the heat in his thermalsuit, checked his air tanks’ reading. Best get back to the landing pod, and soon.

  He turned and began to descend the hillside. At the outermost finger of the ragged walls, he stopped and listened. He nodded to himself.

  He took a light from his belt, flicked it alive, and set the small beacon on a ledge of the crumbling wall. “Come out and face me as you shoot me!” he called.

  Silence, except for the echo of his shout.

  Then, a squeak of boot steps on gravel. A broad, dark figure in a gray thermalsuit stepped warily from a murky doorway. He was two meters from Will. Most of the assassin’s face was concealed by goggles and respirator mask. “You are one of the guild,” Tondius Will observed. The assassin nodded. He held a small silver tube lightly in his right hand. The tube’s muzzle was directed at Will’s chest. Will said, “It is a tenet of your guild that if your quarry discovers you and challenges you then you are compelled to face him. Yes?”

  The assassin nodded.

  “Well then, come into the light of my lamp. I want to see some of your face as you kill me. You can’t begrudge me that, surely.”

  The assassin took two strides forward, stepping into the ring of light. His lips were compressed, his eyes were gray as the ice a thousand meters beneath the ice cap. His thick legs were well apart and braced.

  Will the Chill fastened his eyes on those of the assassin. The stranger frowned.

  Tondius Will spoke in a voice compelling; it was compelling because his voice was the raiment of his will power, and his will was backed by the unspeakable mass of all the planets he had hurled. He said: “I am going to move my arm quickly in order to show you something. Do not fire the weapon, I am not going to reach for you. I’m going to reach into this wall . . . The guild of assassins esteems its members greatly skilled in martial arts . . . ”

  To his left was a high wall of transparent bricks backed by old metal. Ancient but solid. Will had explored these ruins thoroughly. He knew there was a metal urn on the other side of the wall, lying on a shelf; he knew just where it was. He moved, visualizing his left hand passing through the obstruction as if through a cloud, fingers closing about the small urn; he pitted perfect form against the mass resistance of the wall.

  There was a crack! and a small explosion in the wall side; dust billowed, chips of glass rained. The assassin twitched but did not fire. Will withdrew his arm from the hole he’d made. He held something in his bare hand. A stoppered urn of age-dulled gold. “Waveriders learn that masses are merely electron-bounded fields of space-influence,” he remarked casually, examining the urn in the dim light, “and all fields have a weak point, where that which seems impenetrable may be penetrated.” He paused, glanced up, murmuring, “That’s the principle behind the traversing of space between stars: knowledge of secret passages through the fabric of spacestuff. And it’s the principle behind what you’ve just seen, assassin.” Will reached out with his right hand, poised it over the urn, and, with a motion outspeeding the eye, he stabbed a rigid thumb at the metal casing held in his other hand. The urn split neatly in two; half of it dropped to the ground. The assassin took a step backward; his eyes dancing with wonder, he held his fire.

  Tondius Will reached into the half of the urn in his left hand and extracted something that had lain there for ten thousand millennia. A tiny skeleton to which a thin shroud of skin clung; a miniature mummy. “It’s an infant who died at birth,” Will muttered. “The urn was his sarcophagus. A shame to disturb it. So . . . ” He bent, retrieved the fallen half, replaced it over the mummy. Clamping the two halves snug with his left hand, with the thumb of his right he pressed the seams of the urn, all the way around, fusing it shut. Moving slowly and easily, he replaced the urn in the hole he had made in the wall. Then he returned his gaze to the eyes of the assassin. “Now: can you match what I have just done?”

  The assassin slowly shook his head.

  “Then, you know that I could kill you,” said Will lightly, taking a cautious step forward so that he was within striking distance. “I could kill you even before you pressed the fire stud of your charge gun.” Will smiled. “Yes?”

  Looking stooped and weary, the assassin nodded.

  “Therefore, your mission is useless. Depart now, in peace.”

  The assassin shook his head . . . The tenets of the assassin’s guild.

  Will saw the man’s eyes narrow. Will knew, a split-second realization, that the assassin was depressing the stud of his charge gun.

  Will struck, doubly. One hand struck aside the charge gun, the other dipped into the assassin’s chest. Just as that hand had penetrated the wall.

  Will took something from the man’s chest and held it up for him to see.

  Spurting blood from the gaping crater in his chest, the assassin took two seconds to collapse, two more to die.

  In 1976 CE the physicist-philosopher Denis Postle said: “Mass-energy tells space-time how to curve and curved space-time tells mass-energy how to move.”

  Imagine you are involved in a competition which requires that, with your right hand, you throw a discus with Olympic skill, while your legs are performing an elaborate ballet movement and with your left hand you are playing the world tennis champion (and winning), and in between racquet strokes you must move a piece to attack a champion chessmaster effectively on a three-dimensional chessboard. If you can imagine doing all that in near simultaneity, then you know something of what it is to be a waverider.

  Externally. In hookup, Will’s eyes were closed, his hands were clamped rigidly on armrests, his legs flexed and poised; except for his heaving chest, he seemed inert—about to fly to activity like a drawn bowstring.

  Internally. He saw himself, in his mind’s eye, floating naked in space; outside him were luminous matrices, the energy fields, flickering in and out of ken as he looked up and down the spectrum. He approached a pulsing sphere—to innersight, the sphere seemed only ten meters across. It traveled in preordaine
d paths through the matrix. Paths he had ordained. He had set this globe on the road it was taking by manipulating pushcoils situated about the vast surface of its genuine counterpart, Roche Five.

  He felt the presence of Opponent, though he could not yet see her.

  He sensed her position as a man with closed eyes knows the whereabouts of the sun by the feel of its glare on his eyelids. She had not yet moved Roche Three from tertiary-stage orbit. But she was there, satelliting Three elliptically, just within pushcoil-control range. She was waiting for Will to serve.

  Will served. He reached out, mentally, for the imaged sphere. He placed his hand near the eastcenter south polar pushcoil, poised over the pushcoil column in a hand posture that told Great Senses exactly how much push should be exerted by the coil, and for how long, and at what intervals. Through hookup, Great Senses drank Will’s muscular expressions, translated them into mathematical formulas. Great Senses knew Will’s flesh, though Will denied that flesh to humanity.

  Except for autonomic functions, breathing and blood moving, Will’s every movement (as visualized on the noumenon plane, hookup) represented, to Great Senses, a signal to be transmitted to the pushcoil control units on Five.

  Externally. He was rippling like an eel, rippling purposefully, sending three dozen signals in one dozen seconds. Sometimes several pushcoils were activated simultaneously, sometimes one at a time; on each occasion the activation signal carried a precisely quantified regulation of the thrust applied.

  Roche Five moved out of orbit.

  A man about 1.8 meters high and weighing 170 pounds moved a mass of about six billion trillion tons, some 11,000 kilometers in diameter. And he did this (apparently) by rotating his hips and flexing shoulder muscles.

  Internally. Swimming through space after the sphere, waving his hands about it in intricate patterns like a wizard invoking visions from a crystal ball, he swept it easily (but not effortlessly) in a wide arc, ninety degrees from the solar system’s orbital plane, right angles from its former path.

  This was stage three-fifty in Contest. Six months since stage one.

  The greater the scope entailed in implementing an activity, the greater the need for strict attention to small details.

  Each split-second decision taking into account all that Will read of gravitational fields, electromagnetic and heat-energy factors, gravdrag on nearby asteroids, influence of solar wind—the consequences of interaction with these factors.

  Will struggled with ecstasy. Each aspect of the celestial field had its own music, in Will’s mind, and its own fireworks, exquisite and hypnotic: a threat of distraction.

  Opponent drew Roche Three in ever-widening spirals, never quite breaking free of the gravitational field of the sun. She used the pull of the sun, increasing her speed as she neared it. She expended weeks in each strategic repositioning, always moving with strict reference to the ploys of Will the Chill . . .

  Concentration opaqued time; Will’s fixation on Contest never faltered. The weeks collapsed upon themselves; Three and Five spun nearer, and nearer.

  Hookup fed and cleansed him. In place of sleep it washed his unconscious and hung it to dry in the winds of dreaming. Weeks melted into minutes. Sports-eyes recorded all. Sports-eyes staring from a thousand angles, a thousand droneships with camera snouts preparing the composite timelapse vid reducing Contest to the relative simplicity of a bullfight.

  They entered the specified ninety thousand cubic kilometers of space agreed upon as Impact Zone.

  Like macrocosmic sumo wrestlers, the planets closed, bulk upon bulk.

  The masspieces were ten thousand kilometers apart.

  She was closing fast, impulsively, driving straight as a billiard ball, utilizing the equatorial bulge as impending impact point. She was overconfident, perhaps, because Will had not been performing as well as in the past; his mind was troubled, divided. He had to struggle to keep from thinking of the ruins, the sunharp, the voices, and Mina.

  This was his final Contest, and his heart pleaded with him to play it to denouement.

  But as the two planets engaged for impact—each making minute split-second adjustments in trajectory, rate of spin, and lean of axis—Will rose up from hookup, thinking: Sports-eyes, this time you’re cheated. Crack your own eggshells.

  Great Senses was not capable of surprise. But it was capable of alarm.

  Alarmed by Will’s withdrawal from hookup, the computer spoke to him through ship’s intercom. “What’s wrong? Impact is in—”

  “I know. Less than two hours. So it is scheduled, and so Opponent expects. But there will be no impact. We are stalemating; no one wins. I’ll back out of the approach pattern as if I’m preparing another. But Five will never collide with Three.”

  “Because of the voices in the ruins?”

  Will was capable of surprise. “You aren’t supposed to read my mind.”

  “I read only what hookup leaks to me. I know you want to preserve the planet for the voices. The dead one hundred thousand. Why? They’re already dead. Do you want to preserve Five intact as a monument to them?”

  “In a way, it will be a monument. But—do you know what they require of me?”

  “They want you to guide them upspectrum. Beyond the shortest known wavelengths, the highest frequencies. Into the fuller spheres.”

  “I want to go. I want to see upspectrum. And I want Mina . . . We have to depart from an intact planet; it’s like a door into the Farther Place. If the game were consummated, most of Five would be destroyed . . . The only reason—beyond my love of Contest—that I’ve played this far was to be near Five. I had to Contest to stay near, since this is sponsor’s Ship.”

  “Within an hour the quakes on Five will begin. If you want to preserve the ruins—”

  “I’ve programmed the backup navigator. You won’t have to do a thing. In forty-five minutes the pushcoil will veer Five. Opponent’s momentum will prevent her from coming about to strike. As soon as we’re out of impact zone, on that instant, transmit a message to her, tell her, as is my right at this point, I declare stalemate, by right of points accrued. That will infuriate her.”

  “And you’ll go to the surface of Five.”

  “Yes . . . and you’ll go to serve another waverider.”

  “And on Five you’ll die and go with the unseen multitude.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Will you crash the lander?”

  “No. I’ve got to be in sunharp rapport with them when I die.”

  “Then—you’ll remove your respirator? An ugly death.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary. She’s proved herself to be vindictive. When she discovers the stalemate she’ll come after me. She’ll find me in rapport.”

  That was where she found him.

  The sudden change in orbital trajectory had riven the surface of Five. The sky was mordant with volcanic smog. Some of the ruins crumbled. The sunharp survived.

  Roche Five was moving into a wide, cold, permanent orbit. The pushcoil column, in the waning light like a colossal mailed fist and forearm, flared for the last time.

  He stood before the sunharp, tranced by its distant hum. The voices whispered, sang louder, a cry touched by exultation.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Again you have not come alone (said the voices). A she comes in a small, armed ship. Just out of sight, in the clouds. She approaches.

  “I know. She will be the instrument of our union.”

  Tondius . . .

  “Mina!” shouted Will the Chill warmly.

  I’m here.

  The planet was rotating into darkness. Light diminished, night engulfed Five. But Tondius Will had no lack of light: “Mina!” he breathed.

  She touched him before the others, a chill breath, a kiss of ether. Then the others came and he was borne up, the surfer deliquesced; a sea of one hundred thousand and two waves. His body, still standing, remained alive and for a few moments it tethered him to that plane.

  S
omething metallic broke from the clouds. A chip of light glittered low in the black sky, growing. It was a contestship, diving like a vulture. It spat a beam of harsh red light; the laser passed through Will’s chest and through his heart—but before his body crumpled his ears resounded with a joyous cry, the song of the sunharp: struck by the laser passed through his flesh.

  One wavelength, infinitely divisible.

  Freed of his body Will had no need of hookup. He showed them the way. In a moment, the one hundred thousand and two had gone.

  Far over the surface of Five, Great Senses surveyed the planet. Its face of honeycombed crystal was a mixture of three colors: red for regret, blue for considering, green for triumph.

  Great Senses veered from Five and departed the system.

  Opponent’s ship departed as well.

  Now, Roche Five, icing over, a frigid forever monument to a transcended race, was utterly empty. Except for the lonely ghost of a forgotten assassin.

  Football players keep getting bigger and stronger. In 2011, of the 1,948 active NFL players, the average weight was 247 pounds; 426 players weighed over three hundred pounds, five players tipped the scales at over 350. The introduction of Nautilus machines in the mid-1970s allowed wider use of slow-resistance weights; development of the science of timing weightlifting routines made the machines even more effective. The result was stronger athletes. Future football players will probably be even bigger and stronger . . . but not stronger than beings from a heavy-gravity planet. Although not swift, a team of such aliens would still easily dominate a human team. Or would they?

  Run to Starlight

  George R. R. Martin

  Hill stared dourly at the latest free-fall football results from the Belt as they danced across the face of his desk console, but his mind was elsewhere. For the seventeenth time that week, he was silently cursing the stupidity and shortsightedness of the members of the Starport City Council.

  The damn councilmen persisted in cutting the allocation for an artificial gravity grid out of the departmental budget every time Hill put it in. They had the nerve to tell him to stick to “traditional” sports in planning his recreational program for the year.