New Frontiers

by Ben Bova

  Hari-ibn-Hari asked cynically, “Would they refuse before or after our tongues have been taken out?”

  “Before, of course.”

  The Daemon of the Night stared at his fellow storyteller. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

  “I am.”

  Hari-ibn-Hari gaped at the two of them. “No, it would never work. It’s impossible!”

  “Is it?” asked Fareed-al-Shaffa. “Perhaps not.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING the three bleary-eyed storytellers were brought before the grand vizier. Once again Scheherazade watched and listened from her veiled gallery. She herself was bleary-eyed as well, having spent all night telling the sultan the tale of Ala-al-Din and his magic lamp. As usual, she had left the tale unfinished as the dawn brightened the sky.

  This night she must finish the tale and begin another. But she had no other to tell! Her father had to get the storytellers to bring her fresh material. If not, she would lose her head with tomorrow’s dawn.

  “Well?” demanded the grand vizier as the three storytellers knelt trembling before him. “What is your decision?”

  The three of them had chosen the Daemon of the Night to be their spokesperson. But as he gazed up at the fierce countenance of the grand vizier, his voice choked in his throat.

  Fareed-al-Shaffa nudged him, gently at first, then more firmly.

  At last the Daemon said, “Oh, magnificent one, we cannot continue to supply your stories for a miserable one copper per tale.”

  “Then you will lose your tongues!”

  “And your daughter will lose her head, most considerate of fathers.”

  “Bah! There are plenty of other storytellers in Baghdad. I’ll have a new story for my daughter before the sun goes down.”

  Before the Daemon of the Night could reply, Fareed-al-Shaffa spoke thusly, “Not so, sir. No storyteller will work for you for a single copper per tale.”

  “Nonsense!” snapped the grand vizier.

  “It is true,” said the Daemon of the Night. “All the storytellers have agreed. We have sworn a mighty oath. None of us will give you a story unless you raise your rates.”

  “Extortion!” cried the grand vizier.

  Hari-ibn-Hari found his voice. “If you take our tongues, oh most merciful of men, none of the other storytellers will deal with you at all.”

  Before the astounded grand vizier could reply to that, Fareed-al-Shaffa explained, “We have formed a guild, your magnificence, a storytellers’ guild. What you do to one of us you do to us all.”

  “You can’t do that!” the grand vizier sputtered.

  “It is done,” said the Daemon of the Night. He said it softly, almost in a whisper, but with great finality.

  The grand vizier sat on his chair of authority getting redder and redder in the face, his chest heaving, his fists clenching. He looked like a volcano about to erupt.

  When, from the veiled gallery above them, Scheherazade cried out, “I think it’s wonderful! A storytellers’ guild. And you created it just for me!”

  The three storytellers raised their widening eyes to the balcony of the gallery, where they could make out the slim and graceful form of a young woman, suitably gowned and veiled, who stepped forth for them all to see. The grand vizier twisted around in his chair and nearly choked with fury.

  “Father,” Scheherazade called sweetly, “is it not wonderful that the storytellers have banded together so that they can provide stories for me to tell the sultan night after night?”

  The grand vizier started to reply once, twice, three times. Each time no words escaped his lips. The three storytellers knelt before him, staring up at the gallery where Scheherazade stood openly before them—suitably gowned and veiled.

  Before the grand vizier could find his voice, Scheherazade said, “I welcome you, storytellers, and your guild. The grand vizier, the most munificent of fathers, will gladly pay you ten coppers for each story you relate to me. May you bring me a thousand of them!”

  Before the grand vizier could figure how much a thousand stories would cost, at ten coppers per story, Fareed-al-Shaffa smiled up at Scheherazade and murmured, “A thousand and one, oh gracious one.”

  * * *

  THE GRAND VIZIER was unhappy with the new arrangement, although he had to admit that the storytellers’ newly founded guild provided stories that kept the sultan amused and his daughter alive.

  The storytellers were pleased, of course. Not only did they keep their tongues in their heads and earn a decent income from their stories, but they shared the subsidiary rights to the stories with the grand vizier once Scheherazade had told them to the sultan and they could then be related to the general public.

  Ten coppers per story was extortionate, in the grand vizier’s opinion, but the storytellers’ guild agreed to share the income from the stories once they were told in the bazaar. There was even talk of an invention from far-off Cathay, where stories could be printed on vellum and sold throughout the kingdom. The grand vizier consoled himself with the thought that if sales were good enough, the income could pay for regilding his ceiling.

  The sultan eventually learned of the arrangement, of course. Being no fool, he demanded a cut of the profits. Reluctantly, the grand vizier complied.

  Scheherazade was the happiest of all. She kept telling stories to the sultan until he relented of his murderous ways, much to the joy of all Baghdad.

  She thought of the storytellers’ guild as her own personal creation and called it Scheherazade’s Fables and Wonders Association.

  That slightly ponderous name was soon abbreviated to SFWA.

  AFTERWORD TO

  “SCHEHERAZADE AND THE STORYTELLERS”

  The story was written as my contribution to Gateways, a story collection honoring Frederik Pohl on his ninetieth birthday, edited by his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull.

  The storytellers are all based on fellow writers of science fiction, their names thinly disguised by pseudo-Arabic monikers.

  In addition to being a masterful storyteller himself, and a good and dear friend, Fred Pohl was a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America—a slightly ponderous name that is usually abbreviated as SFWA.

  INTRODUCTION TO

  “DUEL IN THE SOMME”

  The frontier in this story is a frontier of technology. Virtual reality is the name commonly given to an electronic method of presenting sensory inputs to a person. A VR user sees, hears, even feels a simulation of the real world. VR allows you to experience a scene, instead of merely reading or watching or listening to it, a scene that actually exists only in the circuitry of the virtual reality system.

  Although VR technology hasn’t gone as far as it is presented in “Duel in the Somme,” the day is coming when virtual reality systems will offer a complete digital hallucination; the user will not be able to tell the difference between the VR simulation he (or she) is experiencing and the real world.

  Which opens some intriguing possibilities …

  DUEL IN THE SOMME

  THE CRISIS CAME when Kelso got on my butt in that damned Red Baron triplane of his and started shooting the crap out of my Spad. I mean, I knew this was just a simulation, it wasn’t really real, but I could see the fabric on my wings shredding, and the plane started shaking so hard my teeth began to rattle.

  I kicked left rudder and pushed on the stick as hard as I could. Wrong move. The little Spad flipped on its back and went into a spin, diving toward the ground.

  It’s only a simulation! I kept telling myself. It’s not real! But the wind was shrieking and the ground spinning around and around and coming up fast and I couldn’t get out of the spin and simulation or not I puked up my guts.

  I knew I was going to die. Worse, Kelso would get to take Lorraine to the ski weekend and tell her all about what a wuss I am. While they were in bed together, most likely. Rats!

  How did I get myself into this duel? All because of Lorraine, that’s how.
Well, that’s not really true. I can’t blame her. I went into it with my eyes wide open. I even thought this would be my best chance to beat Kelso.

  Yeah. Fat chance.

  I mean, it was all weird from the beginning.

  There I was, taking the biggest risk I’d ever taken, sitting at my workstation and using my BlackBerry to text message sweet Lorraine: GOT RSRVS FR ASPEN COMING WKND. JOIN ME? EL ZORRO.

  I mean, everybody in the company was after Lorraine. She was beautiful, smart, elegant, kind, beautiful, sweet, independent, and beautiful.

  Me, I was just one of the nerds in the advanced projects department, a geekboy stuck in one of those cubicles like Dilbert. Not that I was repulsive or tongue-tied. I mean, I wasn’t as slick and handsome as Kelso, but I didn’t crack mirrors or frighten babies with my looks. Lorraine always smiled at me whenever we passed each other in the corridor. I sat with her in the cafeteria a few times and we had very pleasant conversations.

  She even called me Tom. Not Thomas. Tom. I mean, even in school everybody called me by my last name, Zepopolis. The few friends I had called me Zep. When I first started working at the company guys like Kelso called me Zeppelin, but one glance from Lorraine and I started dieting. She even complimented me on how I was slimming down. Talk about incentive!

  But I didn’t have the nerve to sign my real name to the invitation I sent her. I thought it might add an air of mystery to the invite, maybe get her thinking romantic thoughts and wondering who her secret admirer might be. Zorro, the masked swordsman. The dashing hero. Yeah, right.

  Kelso saw right through me in a microsecond.

  “Zepopolis,” he snapped, leaning over the top of my cubicle wall. He was tall enough to stand head and shoulders above the cubicle’s flimsy partition.

  I jumped like I’d been shot. Dropped my no-fat doughnut on the floor, nearly sloshed the coffee out of my Star Wars insulated mug.

  “Yes, sir!” I blurted, leaping to my feet as I swiveled my chair around to face him. Kelso was the department head, a position he’d obtained by hard work, intelligence, and a powerful personality. Plus the fact that his father was founder, CEO, and board chairman of Kelso Electronics, Inc.

  See, Kelso was after Lorraine, major league. Flowers, gifts, taking her out dancing, to the theater—he even sat through an entire opera with her, according to the office rumor mill. So far, she had been pleasant to him, polite and friendly, but that’s as far as it went. Again, according the office vibes.

  I figured she might welcome a little competition, a little mystery and romance. I figured I might even have a chance with her. Kelso figured otherwise.

  He looked me over with a jaundiced eye. “You the hump who sent that weird invitation to Lorraine?” he demanded.

  I could have denied it and that would be the end of it. I could have admitted it and apologized and that would be the end of it.

  Instead I drew myself up to my full five-nine and said, “That’s right. I’m waiting for her answer.”

  “Her answer is no,” Kelso said, with some heat.

  I heard myself say, “I’ll have to hear that from her.” I mean, I talked back to him!

  Kelso just stared at me for about half a minute (seemed like half a year), his fingers gripping the partition so hard they left permanent dents. Kelso was big enough to snap me in half; he played handball every lunch hour (for him, lunch was two hours, of course). He took boxing lessons at a downtown gym. He even played polo, for crying out loud.

  His voice went murderously low, “I’m telling you, Greek geek, Lorraine isn’t going on any ski weekend with you or Zorro or anybody else except me.”

  “Don’t I have something to say about that?”

  We both turned at the sound of her voice, and there was Lorraine, like a vision of an angel dressed in hip-hugging jeans and a blouse that clung to her like Saran Wrap. She was standing in the entrance of my cubicle, her beautiful face set in a very soulful expression.

  I sputtered at the sight of her. “Lorraine, I—”

  “Are you El Zorro?” she asked, a slight smile breaking out.

  “He’s El Deado if he’s not careful,” Kelso growled.

  Lorraine arched her brows and asked, “Are you two fighting over me?”

  “It wouldn’t be much of a fight,” Kelso sneered. “Two blows struck: I hit Zorro and he hits the floor.”

  “Neanderthal,” I heard myself say. That’s stupid! I told myself. Don’t get him sore enough to start punching!

  “Geek,” he replied.

  Lorraine said, “I won’t have you fighting. I’m not a prize to be awarded to the winner. Besides, it’s no way to settle this.”

  That’s when the Great Idea hit me.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What if we fight a duel? An actual duel, like they did in the old days?”

  “A duel?” she asked.

  Kelso grouched, “Dueling’s been outlawed for two hundred years. More.”

  I pulled out my trump card. “But what if we fight a duel in a virtual reality simulation?”

  “Virtual reality?” Lorraine echoed.

  “Simulation?” Kelso’s heavy brows knit together. “Like we use to train pilots?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got VR systems that give the user a complete three-dimensional simulation: you see, touch, hear a world that exists only in the computer’s chips.”

  “And it’s interactive, isn’t it? You can manipulate that world while you’re in it,” Lorraine chimed in. I told you she was smart as well as gorgeous.

  “That’s right,” I said enthusiastically. “You can move in the simulated environment and make changes in it.”

  Kelso was frowning puzzledly. “You mean we could fight a duel in a virtual reality setting…?”

  “Right,” I said. “Share a VR world, whack the hell out of each other, and nobody gets really hurt.”

  A slow smile crept across his devilishly handsome face. “Whack the hell out of each other. Yeah.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Winner takes all?” Kelso asked.

  I nodded.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Lorraine snapped. “I’m not some prize you win in a video game. I don’t want anything to do with this macho bullflop!”

  And she flounced off without a backward look at us, her long dark hair bouncing off her shoulders. We both stared at her as she just about stomped down the corridor.

  Rats, I thought. Here I wanted her to fall for the romance of it all, and all she did was get sore. Double rats.

  I shrugged. “Well, it was an idea, anyway.”

  “A good idea,” said Kelso.

  “Whattaya mean?”

  He gave me a narrow-eyed look. “This is between you and me, Zepopolis.”

  “But Lorraine—”

  “You and me,” Kelso repeated. “We fight our duel and the loser swears he won’t go after Lorraine ever again.”

  “But she—”

  “Lorraine won’t know anything about it. And even if she does, what can she do? I’ll whip you in the duel and you stop bothering her. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I muttered. But I thought that maybe—just maybe—I’d beat Kelso’s smug backside and he’d be the one to stop sniffing after Lorraine.

  So that night, after even the most gung-ho of the techies had finally gone home, Kelso and I went down to the VR lab and started programming the system there for our duel. I knew the lab pretty well; I used it all the time to check out the cockpit simulations we created for the Air Force and Navy. It wouldn’t take much to modify one of the sims for our duel, I thought.

  The lab was kind of eerie that late at night: only a couple of desk lights on, pools of shadows everywhere else. The big simulations chamber was like an empty metal cave, except for the wired-up six-degree chairs in its middle.

  Kelso and I talked over half a dozen ideas for scenarios—a medieval joust with lances and broadswords, an old-fashioned pistol duel aboard a Mississippi steamboat, jungle warf
are with assault rifles and hand grenades, even a gladiatorial fight in ancient Rome.

  I slyly suggested an aerial dogfight, World War I style. I didn’t tell Kelso that I’d spent hours and hours playing WWI air battle computer games.

  “You mean, like the Red Baron and Snoopy?” he asked, breaking into a wolfish grin.

  “Right.”

  “Okay. I’ll be the Red Baron.”

  I tried to hide my enthusiasm. “That makes me Snoopy, I guess.”

  “Flying a doghouse!” Kelso laughed.

  “No,” I replied as innocently as I could muster. “I’ll fly a Spad XIII.”

  “Okay with me.” Kelso agreed too easily, but I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time.

  “We’ll start with an actual scenario out of history,” I suggested, “a battle between the Red Baron’s squadron and a British squadron, over the Somme sector in—”

  “A duel in the Somme!” Kelso punned. “Get it? Like that old movie, Duel in the Sun.” He laughed heartily at his own witticism.

  Me, I smiled weakly, disguising my elation. I had him where I wanted him. I had a chance to beat him, a damned good chance. So I thought.

  It wasn’t cosmically difficult to plug the WWI scenario I had used so often into the VR circuitry. I got the specs on the Spad XIII and the Fokker Dr. 1 triplane easily enough through the Web. The tough part was to get the VR system to accept two inputs from two users at the same time without shorting itself into a catatonic crash. I spent all night working on it. Kelso quit around midnight.

  “I’ve got to get my sleep and be rested for the weekend’s exertions,” he said as he left. “With Lorraine.”

  He went home. I continued programming, but my mind filled with a beautiful fantasy of Lorraine and me together in the ski lodge, snuggling under a colorful warm quilt.

  That was before I found out that Kelso flew real airplanes and was a member of a local stunt flying organization. Good thing I didn’t know it then; I’d have slit my throat and gotten it over with.

  So the next night, after a quick takeout salad (with low-cal dressing), I headed down to the VR lab. I bumped into Kelso, also heading for the sim chamber. With Lorraine! They had eaten dinner together, he informed me with a vicious smile. And there were almost a dozen techies trailing along behind them.