by John Shirley
“Sorry, Coach,” Jenny said, “but I didn’t want to get walked, you know?”
“That was fine, Sergeant. We’re all playing it by ear.”
The other human batters followed Jenny’s lead, swinging at whatever the Tau pitcher could get to them. But she was too fast and wild. For the next few innings, strike-out followed strike-out for both teams.
“I wonder if we’re teaching them bad baseball,” Yoshi said. “I mean, shouldn’t we take a walk at some point?”
I shrugged. “All in good time. Maybe she’ll throw some strikes one of these days.”
In the fourth inning, with two down, Hunter got a hit. He connected off a low, straight fastball that popped into short left field. A human probably would have caught it, but the Tau aren’t very fast on their feet. The alien fielder collected it on one bounce and slung it toward first base, where Hunter was already camped out.
After the frustrations of the early innings, we cheered him loudly, joined by the Taus in the audience, who apparently weren’t taking sides.
“Very cricket of them,” Ashley Newkirk said approvingly.
“We’ll have to teach them the Bronx cheer,” I said.
The pitcher had found her range, and the next two humans managed what looked like genuine little-league at-bats: not great pitching, and some over-enthusiastic swings to be sure, but both made it onto base. The Taus were not good fielders. Their six-legged body design didn’t allow for much backward or sideways motion. They had to turn their whole body around to chase balls that flew long.
Still, Yoshi was one happy xenozoologist. He’d captured more unique movements in four innings than in two years of field work.
With the bases loaded, I was up again.
As I approached the plate, I glanced at Dr. Chirac, remembering what she’d said. Play to win.
The first pitch came in high, and I pulled back.
“Ball one!”
The second looked good, and I took a shot at it. But I hadn’t expected a good pitch, and my swing was late.
“Strike one!”
The third pitch was low, and I let it go. The fourth was inside, and I left that, too. I snuck a look at Chirac, who nodded subtly.
The next pitch was way outside.
“Ball four—take your base.”
I jogged to first, and Hunter walked in to score. The Tau audience squealed with appreciation. A few of my teammates remembered to high-five Hunter, but they looked embarrassed. We’d scored on a walk, against a pitcher who’d never held a baseball before today.
The rest of the game went scoreless. Hunter got another hit, a couple of us managed tepid grounders and were thrown out at first. As my arm started to go, a couple of Taus got walked as well. But when nine innings were over, the first interplanetary baseball game had been won by humanity, one to zero.
The last Tau batter trotted over to his teammates, and they all touched his head softly with their big hands. A cheer rose up from them, echoing the squeals of the Taus out beyond the fence, and the visiting team made its way across the field and out of sight.
“Shouldn’t we have let them win?” McGill asked. McGill looked like what he was: an aging rig worker, his skin leathery from summers off the Louisiana and California coasts, black half-moons of crude apparently tattooed under his fingernails. He was also the Halihunt rep here on Tau and head of the construction team. Halihunt were our corporate sponsors, who had put up some of the funding and all of the political bribes necessary to make the mission happen, and would reap the lion’s share of benefits. His eyes had the bright sheen they’d shown a year before when we’d had our one fatality, Peter Hernandez lost to a drilling cave-in. Bad PR scared the hell out of McGill.
Dr. Chirac shrugged. “We don’t even know if they understand that they lost the game. They knew it was over, because we’d played nine innings and the score was uneven. But do they know actually what winning means?”
We all looked at each other, clueless.
While the rest of the colony celebrated a new bat, the end of a day off, and a new era in human interplanetary contact, the xeno staff and the military had taken our homebrews into the command tent. We had to get our story straight before our various reports went back to Earth via the tube.
“I just feel bad about the way we won,” Alex said.
I took a deep breath. “I know, Alex, taking that walk seemed like a lame way to score, but the game’s the game.”
Dr. Chirac jumped in. “I think the colonel is correct. We want to test their understanding in as many ways as possible. How much of what they are doing is sheer imitation? How much is pattern recognition? And how much is creative thinking—real strategy? Are they actually trying to win?”
“They’ve seen us react when we win and lose,” Jenny said. “They must know we like winning better.”
“They have no way of understanding human body language, sergeant,” Dr. Chirac said. “Our cheers may sound like moans of pain to them. And perhaps they have no concept of mock conquest, which is what winning a game is. The desirability of winning might be a difficult concept for them to come to.”
“I’m no linguist,” Ashley Newkirk said, puffing at his empty pipe. “But lots of animals play-fight and engage in submission rituals.”
Dr. Chirac nodded her head slowly. “But only one animal organizes play-fighting into complex contests of skill. The conflict in sport, the victory and vanquishment, is carefully hidden under dozens of rules and accommodations. We cannot assume the Tau understand that this is a fight. It doesn’t look like one on the surface. We must discover if they know what it is to win. How far they’ll go to avoid losing. If they’d ever cheat.”
“Cheating?” Ashley Newkirk protested. “I think we should assume they’re trying to play fair.”
“A noble assumption, and a proper one so far,” Dr. Chirac said. “I merely point out that we should let them push the parameters of the game as far as they can. We have been handed the tool we need to make real contact.”
Chirac’s words were measured and intense, the look in her eyes one of a lifelong dream coming true before her. When the xeno contact team had been equipped ten years ago, we’d had only the vaguest idea there was intelligent life on Tau. Evidence of cultivation had been glimpsed from space, but the locals had stayed clear of the ground probes. On landing, we had discovered the Tau’s reticence. To make things still harder, their speech and hearing stretched into much higher frequencies than human, higher even than we could analyze with the dolphin gear we’d brought in through the tube. Without specialized devices, of the sort that only a larger xeno team and bigger industrial base could supply, we didn’t have the technical capacity to learn their language. Except for a few spy cams, we could hardly even study their physical culture.
But now they were playing baseball with us.
Chirac continued. “This game is clearly our best hope for communication. In baseball, everything happens within a relatively simple framework, visible to the naked human eye. A framework which we understand, and hopefully they have come to learn. We shouldn’t be caught up with notions of chivalry, Mr. Newkirk. We should try to win these games—that’s the best way to test their understanding of rules and strategy.”
“Personally,” I said, “I doubt they can tell rules from habits. Like when they imitated my warm-up ritual. Do they think you have to spit before you pitch?”
“Ach, from watching you lot, I had assumed it was a rule myself,” Iain Claymore said.
“And sliding into home plate,” Alex said. “Do they know you do it to avoid being tagged, or do they think it’s just a decorative flourish?”
“That’s what we’ll be finding out over the next few weeks,” Dr. Chirac said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Jenny Flagg said. “Our big problem right now is their physical limitation. I mean, can the Taus slide? At the moment, they can’t even get a hit. Maybe they’ll never be able to. It’ll be hard to explore their strategic thinking if their s
kills aren’t up to it.”
We all looked at Yoshi. An evolutionary biologist who doubled as one of our MDs, he had the best understanding of Tau physical abilities.
“Look, they’ve got plenty of physical skills. They’re deadly with those slings. Literally. And they have a number of sling-related behaviors that look game-like. Adolescents throw rocks to each other; adults stage mock sling attacks. Some of those behaviors might, in fact, be rule-governed sports rather than unstructured play.”
“Wait a second,” I interrupted. “We’re the ones with the spy cams and the PhDs. How come they learned how to play baseball before we figured out how any of their games work?”
He shrugged. “Because there’s more of them than us. We’ve only got three people working full-time on dominant species behavior. Dozens of Taus have been watching baseball for over a year. But I’ll be prioritizing gameplay from now on, I assure you.”
“But can they hit a ball?” Jenny asked.
Yoshi nodded. “There’s no mechanical reason they can’t. They use spears to fend off projectiles in pre-hunt play. They have superhuman vision and great hand-to-eye. They may not run very fast, but neither did Babe Ruth.”
Ashley Newkirk looked quizzical at the name, but no one bothered to explain.
“I think their pitching will come along first. Like I said, it’s already in the culture. Probably the only reason they’ve thrown poorly so far is that we’ve been playing adults, who generally use slings. As far as fielding goes, they’re not used to the dynamics of a perfect sphere, but they should pick that up easy enough. Tau adolescent play includes catching rocks on the fly, but not on the bounce.”
“So they’ll have more trouble with grounders.”
“Probably. But once the ball’s in hand, the throw to first base should be fast and accurate. As for batting . . . ” He shrugged. “It’s anyone’s guess. But it’s a difficult skill even for humans to learn. They’re pretty good with spears. Let’s give them a chance to develop before we start intentionally walking them.”
“Intentional walking?” Ashley said. “What does that mean?”
“When you throw wide on purpose, letting someone get on base without a hit,” Alex explained. “For tactical reasons.”
Ashley raised his eyebrows and muttered, “Bloody odd game.”
I cleared my throat. “Okay, for the moment we play regular ball, the same as we would against a bunch of kids. Take it easy, but play real baseball. Show them the ropes. At least, that’s what we’ll suggest to NASA.”
“You think you’ll get permission?” Iain Claymore asked. “Playing games with wee beasties may take valuable time away from stealing their oil. We’ve got a whole planet to exploit here.”
McGill spoke up, ignoring the Scotsman’s tone. “Contact is our second mission priority. In my report, I’ll point out that we’re ahead of schedule on the pipeline. I’m sure Halihunt won’t have any objections to pursuing scientific aims here.”
I nodded. “And we won’t have any trouble finding volunteers to play, even if they have to use free time. But at some point we may not be so far ahead of schedule, and we’ll need support to keep playing. When xeno writes its report, you’ve got to sell this project. Make it big: baseball as Rosetta stone.”
Dr. Chirac offered us a rare chuckle. “I may steal that line.”
“Please do. Any questions?”
“Just one,” Ashley said, a smile visible behind his pipe. “What if today they decided they don’t like baseball and never show up again?”
Yoshi laughed aloud. “Don’t worry about that, Newkirk. Everyone likes baseball.”
NASA and Halihunt, of course, decided to play ball.
Our request couldn’t have come at a better time. The current powers in Washington were not those who had originally funded the mission, and the space agency, as always, was looking for ways to improve its image. Within the U.S., the idea of exporting the national pastime to Tau was a natural. The Halihunt public relations wing immediately annexed half our discretionary data bandwidth, demanding video of aliens at play. The mission had been a Halihunt loss leader for a decade now, tough to swallow for corporate execs used to thinking about the next quarter, not eight-year space journeys. But here was good PR with its own revenue stream. They wanted to license images and find sponsors for equipment teleports. There were even plans to send us uniforms through the tube. With snazzy corporate logos, of course.
On the international front, a breakthrough in the mission’s scientific side was a godsend. Outside the reach of the U.S. media, the Tau expedition was pretty much seen for what it was: an attempt to restore the U.S. to unquestioned superpower status. Seventy years of unilateralism on global warming, oil dependence, and off-and-on military occupation of the Middle East had pissed off pretty much the whole world. Despite the fact that every other economic bloc had converted to renewable, Earth’s fossil fuel supply was finally drying up. America’s decision to open up whole new worlds to drilling was going down like day-old fried eggs.
After two years of hard work, I’d started to get nervous, wondering if the economics of our primary mission would prove viable. Our oil wells were useless unless the hundred-square-kilometer solar array could keep transport cheap: The energy costs went down geometrically when power was available at both ends of the tube. And the longer you kept a single tube open, the cheaper and more stable it became. Thus, the London-New York-Bejing tube was very efficient, and long-haul aircraft a thing of the past, but you still had to drive to the local store. The math said that a perpetual tube carrying a thousand barrels a minute of crude from Tau to Earth was profitable in the extreme and would give the U.S. economy another hundred years to switch over. But the technology had never been tested in industrial quantities on an interplanetary scale.
If Tau’s frequent Coriolis rains interrupted input to the solar array, if the planet’s petroleum reserves varied unusably in composition, if the transport math didn’t hold up over interstellar distances . . . I had lived daily with the possibility that all our work here might be pointless.
Until now.
As of that first game, we had done something no other human beings had ever done. After two years of being snubbed by the locals, as if they knew what we were up to and didn’t approve, we had finally made contact with them. They had walked into our camp, held our tools in their big hands, tried to communicate on our terms.
They even wanted to play with us.
That night after the first game, having drunk six beers and sent off my report, I went to bed happy, feeling as if my little colony finally belonged here on Tau.
Part Two
Yoshi was right; they mastered the pitching first.
Their fast balls were wicked, slapping hard into the catcher’s soft, bare hands. They introduced their first game adaptation as a result, rotating catchers every inning, just behind the line-up, so that the next few batters up would have unbruised hands. And they developed a selection of deadly curve balls.
They seemed to understand the battle of the count very well. You never knew whether they were going to throw a hittable fast ball or a slicing curve. Of course, as Dr. Chirac pointed out, a random number generator could provide the same challenge. But when you swung through empty air, it sure felt like there was guile behind those mean, fast pitches.
Hunter and Alex loved batting against real pitching for a change, but for old guys like me, it became seriously difficult to get a hit. I took to bunting, putting the ball onto the ground to take advantage of their shaky fielding. This engendered their second big adaptation, moving the infield in whenever slow swingers were at the plate. For three straight games, I couldn’t buy a base.
Then one day, standing ready to get out again, I noticed something that I’d missed. Before the pitch, the catcher pointed two of his fat, short fingers at the ground. I reacted instinctively, swinging hard as the pitcher let go. One of our brand new Sluggers (Louisville Sportscraft was one of our official spon
sors now) connected with the ball, electrifying my hands with the bright shiver of the sweet spot. The ball soared over the insultingly contracted outfield, and I rounded second before the sheetgrass brought the ball to a stop, three Tau fielders in shambolic pursuit.
I pulled up at third, out of breath and not wanting to risk the awesome Tau throw-in. Alex came out to coach.
“Nice hit, Colonel. Looks like you’re out of your slump.”
“There’s been a new development.” She waited patiently as my breath came back. “I read their signs.”
“You what? They’re flashing signs?” She looked at the third baseman a few meters from us. Her slightly spicy scent drifted over to us in the light breeze.
I nodded. “Our signs, that Hunter and I always used.”
“You guys had signs?”
“Yeah. Hunter’s idea. No one ever figured it out. Except the Tau, apparently.”
“You think they saw you flash all the way from the fence?”
“Too far. They must have picked them up since they started playing us. Still learning.”
“And they’re consistent?”
“Let’s find out.”
Honorio, our Cuban military attaché, stepped up to the plate. I squinted at the catcher. As quick as Hunter’s agile fingers, she flashed three to the side.
“Change-up.”
The pitcher started her usual fastball wind up, but the ball came out of the whirlwind moving a hair slow. Honorio swung early, missing everything.
“Good eye,” Alex said quietly.
I called the next two pitches. Honorio did not, and found himself headed to the bench.
“Superb, Colonel,” Alex said. “They’ve adopted our symbolic behavior. Learned our language.”
“Chirac’s going to eat this up. But I wonder if the Tau know they’re supposed to be secret.”
“That’ll be easy enough to find out, Colonel. Just make it clear we recognize your old signs and we’re getting hits because of it. Maybe then they’ll make up their own.”