Analog SFF, January-February 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "You can't use countermeasures against it,” the visitor agreed.

  "Nope. You can't jam a rock."

  * * * *

  From low Earth orbit, many landmarks on the surface could easily be seen even though cloud cover screened some areas. The officer gazed through the targeting sight, increasing the magnification to pick out individual buildings and vehicles. “This is amazing. They're loading the rounds?"

  His commanding officer nodded, then pulled something out of a storage compartment. In zero gravity the object had no weight, but the officer could tell from the way the other man handled it that its mass was substantial. “Here's one of the small ones.” He left it hanging in the air between them.

  The officer examined it, seeing a streamlined shape like a toy rocket or a trophy. “Solid metal?"

  "That's right. Fin-stabilized. The targeting systems up here drop them on the right trajectories. As it falls through the atmosphere it gains energy, so it hits with a lot of force, so no warhead is needed. The launchers are spring loaded, but you could hang outside the ship and drop them by hand if you felt like throwing them at the enemy."

  "A piece of metal.” The officer wrapped his hand around the projectile, getting a feel for its mass. “Yet it's the latest weapon. Between ones like this and the big kinetic projectiles, we'll be able to do a lot of damage on the surface. Who needs nukes?"

  "A big enough kinetic projectile can do as much damage as a nuke."

  The officer frowned. “I wonder how many of these we and our opponents are going to place in orbit, and how big they'll be."

  "If I were you, I'd worry more about whether we'll all end up using them."

  The first officer's frown deepened. “How long until the test shot fires?"

  "Five minutes. Approximately. The automated targeting system will time the drop to maximize chances for a hit. We'll be able to watch it all the way down on infrared as the outer surface heats from friction and creates a glowing trail."

  The officer took another look at the projectile in his hand. “The culmination of millennia of human weapons development, and yet it doesn't have any homing device or warhead or propulsion, and we can simply throw it at the enemy."

  "That's right,” his commander agreed. “It's just a rock."

  Copyright © 2008 John G. Hemry

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  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  David Bartell leads off our March issue with “Cavernauts,” a tense tale of a rescue mission against long odds in a locale much farther out than the ones Bartell has frequented so far. Actually it's a deft interweaving of outer and inner space, in more than one sense: the twisted caves of Callisto, and a much-evolved descendant of the internet that has changed people's attitudes toward themselves and the universe in unexpected ways. But two things that have stayed the same are that outcomes can't be foreseen, and reasons and motives are not always the same thing....

  Henry Honken's fact article, “From Token to Script: The Origin of Cuneiform,” might be considered “linguistic paleontology": a recent attempt to piece together from early artifacts the actual process by which one of our species’ first writing systems came into being. We'll also have stories by Richard Foss, Carl Frederick, and Jerry Craven; an unusual father-son collaboration by H. G. Stratmann and Henry Stratmann III; and the expansive conclusion of Robert J. Sawyer's novel Wake.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: EXCELLENCE by Richard A. Lovett

  As we learn to change who we are, we may have to reconsider what our competitions mean....

  If there's a rule about deals with the devil, it's that you don't realize you're making one at the time. Especially when the devil in question walks with a cane and looks more like Kris Kringle than Beelzebub.

  He said his name was August Knox and that he was a researcher working to beat muscular dystrophy, Lou Gehrig's disease, and all the other muscle-wasting disorders the world has ever known. Maybe he was. Or maybe he was just out to make a buck. He was peddling a dream, and you don't look a gift horse too strongly in the mouth.

  You remember BALCO, right? The ones who, back at the turn of the century, supplied drugs to a whole generation of track stars? Perfect, undetectable drugs—at least until someone blew it and alerted the authorities.

  Well, suppose BALCO visited you at age forty-two and asked if you wanted to be a guinea pig for a new product. Kringle/Knox wasn't with BALCO, obviously—they'd been out of business for years—but that's what he was pedaling. Test samples of a new product, guaranteed undetectable by conventional blood or urine tests, that would tune up your muscle efficiency not just by enough to roll your performance back to age thirty, but to match you with the best of them.

  Could you win an Olympic medal? No guarantee there, but you'd be in the hunt. There's only one catch: there wasn't any guarantee the process was safe, either. If humans were like rats, you'd peak in a year and stay there for eighteen months. Two years, if you were lucky. After that? Well, once the rats had started to decline they'd done so rather precipitously.

  I'd seen an old movie about that when I was a kid, though I think it was a mouse. I don't think it had a happy ending, but going from forty-two to forty-three to forty-four stuck in a more slowly declining body wasn't exactly a happy ending, either.

  "Would I still be able to run?"

  "Probably not."

  "Hike?"

  "Define hike."

  I told him about my favorite place in the world, a viewpoint called Angel's Rest, 1,500 feet above the river. I go there at least once a month to stare into the afternoon sun and think about life. There are never any answers, but the sun and the staring are what really matter.

  "Is it wheelchair accessible?"

  So, what would you do? Go for glory at the expense of a fast burnout? Or be decliningly ordinary for however many years remain?

  Me, I chose the flame and die. My name's Jefferson Morgan, and ordinary has never been my goal. When I was twelve, I wanted to be a rock star: not just any rock star, but the next John Lennon—the one against whom all others would be measured. Then my voice changed and I realized not everyone got to sing lead.

  A few other things changed too. At twelve, I was a skinny Goth—at a time when Goths were becoming Tweakers, but before Tweakers became Quillheads. By the time I was ready to enter college, I was still nerdy and skinny, but I'd grown a new skill: I could run. A lot faster than average, it turned out.

  It paid for college.

  I was good, but not spectacular—just like my grades. And then, I was out, with no real idea what to do next.

  And that had pretty much been the story. I kicked around for two decades: tending bar, parking cars, even mopping a few floors. I hooked up with a shoe-store-sponsored running team where, again, I was good, but not spectacular. Plenty of free shoes, but no free rent. Then age started to eat at my speed, until Beelzebub/Kringle hobbled up to me at track practice one day with his cane and beaming, beady eyes.

  * * * *

  Of course, I had to reinvent myself and lie about my age. Nobody's going to believe a middle-aged guy who suddenly runs like a kid. Luckily, I've always looked young (maybe that's part of why Kringle picked me), and a bit of hair dye and Botox made me younger yet. Not all that young, but lots of runners are prematurely aged by the sun. The college kids fall into two camps: those who worry about skin cancer, and those who are too macho to let on, even if they do. I'd been in the first camp. Now I looked like I was in the second.

  Kringle/Knox had a pocketful of fake IDs, so I picked one from Vegas—a great choice for someone who wants to be anonymous. I even went there a time or two and practiced squinting into the sun. And of course, any runner worth anything who's from such a climate leaves it the first time he gets a chance, so there wasn't anything odd about the fact that nobody would remember me. That and the Botox were the perfect cover.

  Kringle helped too, by planting a few old race results and helping me
create a bio. No college, no high-school track. If asked, I was a late bloomer who for years had been more interested in training than racing. Every track's got a couple of those guys, and nobody remembers their names. But if I did hit it big, dozens of folks would be sure they remembered me. “Oh, yeah,” they'd say. “He was the quiet guy who kept to himself. Fast, though. I should have known he'd make it someday.” The rumor mill would flesh out my new history better than I ever could. Same with “my” old jobs. Who remembers bellhops, anyway?

  It was only after I'd started the treatment that it crossed my mind that with all those fake identities, Knox/Beelzebub probably didn't intend me to be his only product tester. I just hoped I was the only 10,000-meter runner. He'd insisted I pick one event and stick to it, so he probably had other guys doing other distances, and maybe entirely different sports, as well.

  Eventually, I decided there couldn't be more than a few of us in each event. He could probably get away with having his folks go gold-silver-bronze—if I got a medal, I wasn't going to complain a lot about its color—but if there were a whole phalanx of us chasing the same three spots, you could bet your sweaty jockstrap that half of us would be screaming to the press, willing to wreck what little was left of our lives for a shot at bringing down the guy who promised us all the same thing.

  Or maybe the treatment wasn't as good as advertised, and there wasn't that much chance of a Kringle-fest finish. When you get down to it, even deals with the devil are founded on trust.

  * * * *

  The treatment took the form of shots. Lots of shots. It was based on gene therapy designed for muscular dystrophy patients, Knox told me as he stabbed enough needles into my quads to make me feel like an inside-out cactus. If he had colleagues, I never met them. For that matter, if he had a lab, I never saw it. He just came to my apartment once a week, with vials of amber fluid and a pocketful of syringes.

  For the first few weeks, all the shots did was make me weak.

  "It's the virus,” he said, having moved from my quads to my hamstrings and then my calves. “It inserts the genes into your muscle cells, and your body sees it as a mild infection. Don't worry, it'll pass."

  That's part of what makes it undetectable, he added. The virus was based on a common one, like flu or West Nile or some such thing, so while I'd show antibodies for it on a blood test, that didn't mean anything unless the authorities were prepared to reject anyone who'd ever been sneezed on or bitten by a mosquito. But the gene changes could only occur within a few centimeters of the injection sites, which was why he was turning me into a pincushion. “There won't be anything in your blood to show you've been altered,” he explained between jabs, “and nobody's going to start requiring muscle biopsies in the near future. That's just way too invasive."

  He paused. “Though if someone does ask for one, it might be good to refuse. I don't think the genes we're working on would show up unless they knew what to look for, but there's no reason to chance it."

  * * * *

  Meanwhile, I started to train. Part of being great is having a good coach, and while Knox hadn't been able to retain the services of the best in the business, the one he found was no slouch. He was just what a talented dark horse like me was supposed to be able to find: good, hungry for victory, but not too good.

  I wasn't sure what, if anything, he knew, but Knox made it clear I wasn't supposed to talk to him about the treatments, so I doubted it was much.

  Knox was a bit chary on specifics, but no athlete allows that many injections without asking questions. Basically, I was being subjected to two types of gene changes. One altered my ratio of muscle fibers. There are two types. Sprinters tend to be born with a lot of “fast-twitch” fibers—the human equivalent of the white meat in turkeys. These are good for short bursts, such as (for turkeys) getting airborne, back before we bred them to be incapable of escape. Distance runners are heavier in “slow-twitch” fibers, the equivalent of poultry's red meat, which can go forever (or close to it) at a slower speed. The only difference from turkeys, other than who eats whom at Thanksgiving, is that in humans the red and white are all mixed up, higgledy-piggledy.

  Before starting treatment, Knox had biopsied me (it really does hurt) and told me I was 77 percent slow twitch.

  "There's probably a distance for which that's perfect,” he said. “But it's not in the Olympics. I'd rather see you somewhere between eighty-five and ninety."

  Three weeks of injections later, and a month of low-grade flulike symptoms, a repeat biopsy showed my legs to be 87 percent slow-twitch.

  Knox beamed his most Kringlesque smile. “Magnificent. Time for phase two."

  That turned out to have something to do with satellite cells, which are kind of like stem cells in your muscles. Under the right conditions, they fuse with muscle cells to make them bigger and stronger. They also help you recover from races and hard workouts. The problem is that they can only do this so many times. After that? Well, that's part of the reason Kringle's treatment isn't permanent. Most likely, I'd bounce from being a “good” forty-two-year-old to a great pseudo-thirty-year-old, then back to forty-two and on to fifty-two, sixty-two, or worse.

  And that, I suppose, is half of why I knew I'd made a deal with the devil.

  * * * *

  The other half was that during the treatment stage, it was hard to pretend I wasn't cheating. Not just to the world at large, which was easy because I didn't want to get caught, but to myself.

  Most dopers simply tell themselves everyone else does it. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter, because that makes it the other guy's fault. But as far as I knew, nobody had ever before done what I was doing. Within a few weeks, though, I'd made my peace with it. The first time I was young—back when it was purely natural—the only thing that had kept me from being among the best was the (poor) luck of the genetic draw. I'd always had the discipline, the toughness, the competitive drive. Knox/Kringle had merely redressed nature's imbalance—equalized the playing field, and all that. Back in my rock-star days, if someone had offered to improve my vocal cords, would I have turned ‘em down?

  Then I quit worrying at all, because once the injections ceased, I started to improve. I ran a road race and hit a time I'd have loved to see when I really had been thirty. Then my new coach went to work on me. Twelve weeks later, I ran the best 10K of my life, by a full fifteen seconds per mile. In case running isn't your sport, let me assure you: that's a lot.

  Knox, I decided, was a genius. My coach wasn't much worse. And, whatever else you might think, I'd never worked harder in my life. Kringle had merely redressed nature's imbalance. What I did with that was up to me.

  * * * *

  What I did next was to stress-fracture my tibia.

  My coach was stunned. “Why didn't you tell me you were prone to these?” he demanded. “We weren't even working you all that hard yet."

  But the fact was that I wasn't injury-prone. I'd never before lost more than a few days to injuries, and never to anything as major as a cracked bone.

  "We've seen this in a couple of others,” Kringle said the next time I saw him, confirming my suspicion I wasn't his only Olympic hopeful. “The drugs make your muscles stronger, but not your tendons, ligaments, and bones. They're still your original age and need time to adapt."

  I had to think about that for a while. Not the muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments bit. That made sense. It was the parts of me not all being the same age that was disconcerting.

  It was the first time I'd ever truly felt my years. I don't know about you, but I'd always felt pretty much the same person at forty-two (soon to be forty-three) that I'd been at thirty. Or twenty. I have friends who say they feel like radically different people than even a few years ago. I've never understood that. Whoever I was at twenty: that's me now. Pre-Kringle, post-Kringle—makes no difference. Oh, I've learned things, done things, wished I hadn't done things ... but I've always been the same me.

  Now, my muscles were thirty, my bones f
orty-two, and the essential me still felt like that long-gone twenty-year-old.

  There's a famous statue by Rodin, which shows the soul of a young woman striving to break free of the flesh of an old crone. Kringle had simply made it possible—not just with a rejuvenated body, but with the one I'd always wanted (other than the bones). I just couldn't figure out if I was the young person, or the older one, or both at once.

  * * * *

  Luckily, physical therapy was the perfect antidote to doubts. That's because it kept me too busy to think.

  My coach proved well connected and got a sports medicine lab to let me use an odd device that suspends you above a treadmill while you walk, then run, with only a fraction of your weight hitting the ground. The result was that eight weeks later, when the docs pronounced the fracture healed, I was in nearly as good shape as I'd been in before it happened, and I still had more than six months before the Olympic trials—plus ten more weeks until the games themselves.

  * * * *

  You're probably expecting a tale of cheating caught and bad behavior redeemed.

  It didn't quite work that way. Once we'd gotten over the old-bones surprise, Kringle obviously knew what he was doing. So did my coach. And, as luck would have it, we caught the treatment's lead time nearly perfectly. It would have sucked to peak for the trials, only to be in decline for the big event. Instead, the trials found me still on the upswing. Maybe a bit too early, actually. I was fourth, which isn't quite good enough to make the team but does make you an alternate who can go live in Olympic Village. Once, I'd have sold my soul simply for that. Now, it felt like a defeat.

  What it really meant, though, was that my body was still reacting to the treatments. And, there's a reason there are Olympic alternates. The third-place finisher developed a gimpy Achilles tendon—I don't think Kringle/Beelzebub had anything to do with it—and suddenly, I was in.