by John Shirley
As the bubble slides past the maglev rail, Kip clambers up the outside, slipping a little on the bubble’s wet surface. Now people notice. Their exclamations sound like kittens in a bag. Kip ignores them; attempting to catch a maglev in motion is an excellent way to get killed, and her timing must be perfect. She takes a breath and thinks of Lily’s deep red hair.
The instant she spots approaching lights, she launches herself from the top of the bubble. It’s like jumping off a pillow. The train’s still approaching as she drops; when she lands, it’s on the second to last car.
She’s back in motion. The maglev is an express going south, not north, at 125 miles per hour; but even an express stops on occasion. At the next station, she can switch directions.
Kip jumped her first race when she was twelve. She couldn’t get enough of it. She buzzed her hair, to her mother’s distress, and assembled fitted clothes of slick material that wouldn’t snag. Prices jumped as people who didn’t even know what trainjumping was caught onto the clothing trend. She got the Sticky Fingers mod that gave her hands and feet a grip like a gecko’s. She assembled a cocktail of masks that blocked positive ID from the surveillance net, and painted her face and arms with black and dark-blue stripes before each race. She had design and motion patterns all picked out for when she got to the top of the waiting list at Firebird Design, the best tattoo house in the city. She was short, something genetic modification still couldn’t do a thing about, but she was long-muscled and lean, and being small was sometimes an advantage.
She got so she could pick out other runners on her networks and in the gymnasium; they had no net of their own, initially for pragmatic reasons—freerunning and trainjumping were illegal—and later for idealistic ones. But once you did it for awhile you could spot your own kind. They moved through the world as though it existed for their purpose; every building was a jungle gym, every obstacle a toy.
Kip would stand on the roof of Tytos Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Seattle, home to two dozen high-powered law firms, and think to herself that runners were the secret masters of the city. They knew things about it that it didn’t know about itself.
Her performance in the races improved. She began to win.
The problem is, the maglev doesn’t stop at any of the stations. Her only mistake so far might mean she won’t finish the race at all: this train has finished its service run and is heading for home. It whips south, descending from Capitol Hill and skating the edge of Old Downtown before heading south down the Duwamish Valley: penthouses above, ancient industrial wasteland of empty warehouses and illegal nightclubs and theaters below. Then it whisks underground and stops at the Terminus with a whine just on the edge of hearing.
The Terminus is in what used to be called Tukwila. It’s close to twenty miles from Northgate, and it might as well be on the moon: jumpers call it the Terminus because there are no connections here. End of the line.
“Shit,” Kip says, again, and hops off.
The first time she raced against Narciso, they’d followed the same route from start to finish. She’d chased him through a network of concrete walkways that opened onto a treed plaza, a city park and incidentally also the race’s finish point. Johnny had laid out a red target circle that lit up when the winner landed on it.
She’d been running, eyes on Narciso’s black tank top and his brown arms and his dark, dark hair, when he leaped into the air with a flash of white slippers and landed in an athletic crouch. The red circle lit up around him.
Narciso always beat her after that. And once the race was over, he’d come up to her at the afterparty, his arm slung loosely over Lily’s neck, and grin. “Tough luck, kid. Next time, eh?” And Lily would smile at her in a way that made Kip think of pity, and she’d hate them both.
But later, lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come, she’d forget the look on Lily’s face and think of her hair, the paleness of her skin, the sharp line of her jaw. How all that would feel, under her fingers.
If she could beat Narciso. If only.
But right now, stuck in the deserted Terminus, Kip can only imagine how he’ll grin and do a backflip or some other such stupid, flashy shit into the finish point. She wants to beat him so badly that the desire tastes like blood in her mouth.
No train will come to the Terminus for another ten minutes. Kip runs along the service platform. She could go out to the Street and hail a taxicab, the luxury conveyance of the uptowner who wants to explore the theaters, bars, fleshpots, and strange temples of the Street, but not too closely. But the cabs’ impressive on-board security systems, which include a surface wired to deliver a ten thousand-volt charge and automatic evasive maneuvers to foreign contact, prevent her from hopping onto their roofs as she would onto a train, and actually getting into and paying for a cab is specifically and explicitly against the rules of the race.
Kip knows how she’ll feel if she wins the race on those terms.
Something tickles at the back of her head. She turns her attention to it, and it blooms into a full-scale announcement:
“There is a power outage in the Seattle Center area. Affected transit routes have been re-routed, re-scheduled, or cancelled. Please plan accordingly.”
It must be one hell of an outage if they’re bothering to announce it on the citywide net instead of just quietly re-routing people. Which means an effect big enough that people would actually notice. Which means a lot of dead trains.
Which means she’s back in the game.
The service door will bloom alarms if she opens it, but the ceiling and the wall of the Terminus don’t quite meet: ventilation. It’s small, but so is she. She scales the wall, squeezes through the gap, and rolls and splashes into a gutter on the Street.
She pops to her feet and starts running. This is a quiet, deserted area: a part of the Street called the Underground, even though it isn’t. Fast movement attracts attention. Her instincts, trained for the freerunning environment, are wrong here. A skinny man lurches out of a doorway like a zombie. She dodges him and runs up the middle of the street, in the dim light that filters down from the understory, then up the first staircase she sees.
There are people here, enough to remind her that it’s Friday night in the world that still waits for the weekend to have a good time. The rain has stopped. And there, just to the north, is Skyway Station. Routes and timetables slam together behind Kip’s eyes. She fades into the shadow of a building, scales a wall to a narrow ledge overlooking the station, waits perhaps twenty seconds, and drops onto the Street-level light rail, pressing her body against the roof to avoid notice.
It’s not nearly as fast as the maglev, but ten minutes later she’s back in the city core and riding a bubble up a building to the maglev, which will take her directly past Lake Union. The bubble is slow, so she has time to consider that right now, as she positions herself to jump off at the platform, a train is leaving the Terminus; right now, as the bubble rises blindly past and she leaps out to the shelter roof, it’s accelerating out of the tunnel; right now, as she hops aboard a maglev northbound from Sixth and Pine Tower, that other train is rising toward the understory. She’s beaten it by five minutes.
It might be enough.
And as she crouches there, the wind tearing at her scalp, fingers and toes gripping against the force of the train’s acceleration, she spots another lithe, dark shape crouched against the top of the car ahead. Lights flash above them in rapid succession and she sharpens her gaze. She just knows that it’s Narciso.
She crawls forward, fighting the wind of the train’s speed that peels her fingers from the cold metal, seeing Lily’s face and how different it will be if she reaches the finish point before Narciso.
The train slows around a curve, slinging her weight to one side as it swings east of Lake Union and then hits the northbound straightaway. Two stops until Northgate, which will be closest to the finish point. Four minutes.
The maglev decelerates with a falling hum. Some instinct makes Narciso
turn. He sees her. He grins that grin, the one that’s so charming, and shouts something. All she catches of it is “caught up.”
She wants to throw him off the damn train. Onto the platform. He wouldn’t be hurt. He’d catch the next one. And then he’d lose.
Narciso sees what she’s thinking, maybe catches a bit of it in the aether of the net. The grin fades. And then, when the train’s braking shoves her forward like a giant hand, sliding sideways off the car, her fingers and toes peeling from the surface like old tape, he reaches out and she thinks it’s to shove her away or throw her off, but she ducks and her balance goes and she rolls sideways, off the maglev for the second time that night and into the endless glass and metal canyon of Lake City Way.
She spreads her wings, and looks down.
You never do this when jumping. Look at the ground and you’ll hit it, that’s the way the word goes. A red line across the city map in her mind: Roosevelt slidewalk, below and to the right. Crowded, but a damn sight nearer than the Street.
Her feet hit the slidewalk’s moving rail. People stare as she runs, jumping over their hands to avoid mashing fingers, hopping over their heads from one side to the other. The maglev passes overhead with a magnetic whine and shoots away to the north. She ignores it and keeps running.
The slidewalk empties out. She jumps onto its moving surface and runs, runs, runs. She runs all the way to the damn Research Center. It glitters in the lights of the moon and the city, walled on all sides by nightclubs, galleries, restaurants, and luxury homes except where the maglev line cuts through.
She passes the maglev station. The train has been and gone. But when she glances up again, to the lip of the canyon that is the roof of the towers of the Northgate complex, there is a slim shape running. Ahead of her, where the slidewalk ends, stands a building artfully draped in vines growing from somewhere above and falling across the sheer, glossy wall like hair across a girl’s bare back.
Kip catches the vines and climbs. The buildings are shorter here, slanting toward the water, a sprawled last-century office park with a disused helipad on one of the roofs. Kip reaches the top, runs across a flat roof, leaps a gap, runs through an asphalt field planted in parallel white lines, leaps another gap. To her left, along another row of buildings, Narciso is doing the same thing. Further away to the west comes the rest of the pack, delayed at Seattle Center by the power outage.
Kip grins. Now it’s a race.
There’s a crowd gathered on the helipad. The red finishing dot lies right in the middle of the old landing target. Kip’s gaze locks onto it. Narciso has fallen back from her peripheral vision. She leaps another gap. Across one more roof and there’s the final leap, biggest she’s ever jumped, by the time it occurs to her that she might not make it she’s already hurtling through the air, a war-whoop tearing from her lungs, she hits the other side rolling, she’s up again and she pelts to the finish point and leaps onto the dot. It lights up. Only then does the silence recede into cheering.
They’d cheer anyone, they would. But she grins all the same, and looks for Lily’s face in the crowd. See? she wants to say. See? See?
The crowd rushes. Things grow confused. The other racers arrive. Narciso grins at her and hugs her. Around them melt a hundred hearts, but Kip doesn’t care. Johnny’s saying something about posting their reels and the small mob begins to ooze toward an open-air Street-level place on the lakeshore for the afterparty, but Kip trails behind. She’s just behind Lily, who’s following the crowd with her head down.
Kip’s heart stops. She trots a few steps and touches Lily’s arm. Lily turns and smiles, and Kip tries to smile back, but she can’t, because she’s seen that smile on Lily before, and it’s the way she smiles at everyone who isn’t Narciso.
“Good job,” Lily says, in a friendly way. Her heels click on the concrete.
Narciso comes up next to her. “Hey,” he says softly. And Lily takes his hand, and they wander away from the crowd, to some other corner of the helipad, where the breeze off the lake will ruffle Lily’s hair.
Kip stands very still. So still that no one notices. Oh, she could scream, cry, fling up her hands. But it’s occurred to her that she has built this entire fantasy, as complex and far-reaching as the cracks in the ancient road, and neither Lily nor Narciso know a thing about it.
She feels like she’s standing on the roof of a tall tower, looking down at an entire city that doesn’t know she’s there, imagining herself its secret master.
Then she goes home.
■ Knuckleballer Eri Yoshida was the first female drafted by a Japanese professional baseball team, the Kobe 9 Cruise. In 2009, she played in eleven games. In 2010, she joined the Chico (California) Outlaws in the independent Golden League. She met with little success: 0-4 with a 12.28 ERA. In 2012, she played for Na Koa Ikaika Maui of the North American Baseball League. Her W/L for 2012 was 4-6 with a 5.56 ERA.
■ On 2 February 2011, Justine Siegal, age 36, became the first woman to throw in batting practice for a Major League ballclub, the Cleveland Indians. She went onto pitch BP to the Athletics, Rays, Cardinals, Astros, and Mets.
■ “In 2005, Ronald Evans, a hormone expert working at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies . . . showed how genetic modification can increase the athletic power of mice. . . . Evans’s mice could run for an hour longer than normal mice, were resistant to weight gain no matter what they were fed on, and remained at peak fitness even when they took no exercise.”—UK Daily Mail Online, 31 July 2012
Diamond Girls
Louise Marley
Ricky sat alone in her private locker room, turning a baseball in her elongated fingers. The pregame had begun, and the speakers in the main locker room rattled with music and announcements and advertisements. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and cradled the baseball in her palm. Just another game, she told herself. It’s a long season.
But it wasn’t true. Long season, sure.
Someone hammered on the door and shouted, “Arendsen! Skip says to join the guys now.”
“Coming,” she called back. She stood and stretched her arms over her head, her fingers ritually brushing the ceiling. She put the ball, her first major-league game ball, back into its protective cube. Lew had saved it for her, gotten it signed.
She missed Lew. No one called a better game than he did, but he had retired at the end of last year, her rookie season, his bat worn out, his knees gone. It had been tough this season without him, a different catcher every rotation, a different attitude every game. She’d lost her last three starts. The sports columns had her on her way back to the minors after two of them, and they weren’t far from the truth.
Her agent tried to shield her from the worst of management’s comments, but she knew her career was on the line. Three losses were a bad way for anyone to start a season. It was worse for Ricky Arendsen.
And now this. Skip had tried to warn her, in his bluff, half-articulate way. “Management took a risk on you,” he had said this morning, shuffling through the scouting reports on Everett. “Not worth the grief if you aren’t the best.” She only nodded. She knew that already.
Now she closed her locker and tucked her mitt under her arm. She left the cramped space that was hers and walked around the corner to the other door. The official statement to the press said that Ricky Arendsen had a separate locker room for her own privacy, but Ricky—and everyone else—understood it was more complicated than just that. Maybe the guys didn’t want a woman in their locker room. More likely, they didn’t want her in their locker room.
It had been the same in high school, in college, in the minors. It didn’t matter that she possessed a killer curve, a hundred-plus fastball, a splitter that made grown-up men wave their bats like beginning T-ballers. What mattered, not to everyone, but to enough of them, was what she was and how she got that way.
Ricky adjusted her cap and pulled open the door with its vivid team logo.
The Skipper looked up when she came in, point
ed to the bench in front of him. Raimundo grinned at her and moved over to make room. He was catching her today, which was good. She felt a bit better when he was behind the plate. She didn’t have to shake him off as often as she did Baker.
“Hey, Rick,” he said as she eased herself onto the bench. He moved another couple of inches over to give her space. She nodded down at him. Raimundo was a good six inches shorter than she was, just clearing six feet four.
“Hey, Ray,” she said. She quirked her lips and lifted her eyebrows, pretending a calm she didn’t feel. “Place is crawling with reporters.”
“Whatcha get, Newsmaker.” He said it with sympathy, his forehead crinkling.
“Yeah. I know.”
Newsmaker was the least offensive of the many appellations attached to Ricky Arendsen when she came up to the show. The worst had been coined by a conservative preacher in a weekly newspaper column. The fans picked it up, shouting it whenever she took the mound. Lab Rat, Lab Rat, a one-two rhythm, a bit of doggerel that irritated her dreams.
She fiddled with the laces on her mitt, hooking them tight with the extra-long first joint of her finger, flexing the designer muscles of her wrists. She was a hell of a specimen, just as they said. Her thighs were smoothly muscled, perfectly jointed at the hip. Her calves were long and strong, her ankles like steel. Her eyesight was off the charts.
She wondered what Grace Everett’s eyesight was like.
They were calling Everett The Natural. No engineered virus, no stem-cell modifications, no Lab Rat. Just a wiry, quick second baseman, a freckled girl with a stringy red ponytail and a wicked bat. In the minors they called her Gracie, or Little Red. Now, coming up against Ricky Arendsen, Grace Everett had become The Natural.