Analog SFF, January-February 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The twenty-year-old me, the one who'd never changed, was ecstatic. The forty-three-year-old me, the one in my bones, and brains, tried (at least briefly) to feel sorry for the guy who'd had to drop out. But the ageless competitor in my guts didn't care. I had reached the spot where, if nature had been fair, I'd have been a generation ago. I could handle that. As I said, this isn't a tale of cheating caught and bad behavior redeemed.

  * * * *

  The 10,000-meters is run in a single heat. There were twenty-seven of us, and I was so nervous two days beforehand that I couldn't sleep. It wasn't just that my entire future depended on this; if the rat tests were right, I had no future. This was everything: truly the be-all and end-all of my life.

  That's when my coach blindsided me.

  That's not what coaches are supposed to do. They're supposed to build you up, calm you down, focus you, and point you in the direction of victory. And that's what he thought he was doing.

  He did it by telling me a story.

  "When I was young,” he said, “I was all piss and vinegar, like you.” (I've never met a coach who didn't talk in clichés. Maybe everything's been said so many times the nonclichés were used up, long ago.) “Then, my wife developed multiple sclerosis.” His voice cracked, then steadied. “Usually, they give you at least a dozen good years. She only got five. But until the very end, she insisted that I run, and came to all of my meets, even when it had to be in a wheelchair, strapped in to keep her from falling out."

  He paused, while I wondered what this could possibly have to do with me.

  "This,” he said, gesturing to the track, “isn't life. A wise man and great athlete once said that. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and I love every minute of it, but in the big scheme of things"—he pursed his lips and blew out a sound, like pffft—"it's nothing."

  He turned from the track to me. “Trust your training. Nobody out there is better prepared. If the gods smile, you'll run well. If they don't—well, it's just a race.” He patted me on the back. He wasn't really all that much older than me, but he didn't know it, so I couldn't tell him how odd that felt. Or what I thought of this entire speech. “So, relax. Have fun. And realize that if you don't feel you have to win, you'll run better. And if by some chance you have a bad day ... well, you've got a whole life yet ahead of you. This is only a small piece of it."

  * * * *

  As a guy who'd barely made it into the race, I wasn't expected to be a contender. That made it easy to maintain my thirty-year-old identity because nobody did any of those little spotlight profiles on me that the TV folks love to plug into their coverage to mask the fact that whatever they may or may not think of their audience's intelligence, they themselves don't have the attention span to cover a long race from start to finish.

  Only Kringle, my coach, and I knew how much I'd improved since the trials. I wondered if Kringle had timed it that way deliberately—though having me come up as an alternate, rather than number three on the team, was cutting it a bit fine. If I won, I'd be the unknown who burst onto the scene: far better than the favorite who lives up to his promise. He'd never be able to go public with that—but in selling his wares to the next generation of do-anything hopefuls? He'd make sure they knew.

  The race came late in the day, a concession to August heat, but not the best thing on the nerves. One place where my fake identity and real life overlapped was that both of us had been mainly doing road races for the past several years. The real me because, at my one-time age, there just isn't much in the way of track racing out there. The new me because it was a lot easier that way to create a guise that avoided unwanted questions. If I won, it would be critical that nobody puncture my new identity. Not that anyone would be actively trying to do so, but it would be embarrassing if someone did it by accident.

  Road races tend to be run in the morning. Here, I had all day to fret. And to try to keep away from my coach before he gave me some bromide worse than, “You have all of your life ahead of you.” Yeah, right. At least now, I knew for sure he wasn't a Kringle insider.

  But all endless waits eventually end, and at last we were called to the start.

  I'd like to tell you it was an exciting race, the most dramatic 10,000 in Olympic history. But it was probably pretty ordinary. Thirty-year-old me had the ability to run with the best of them. And while the inner voice in my head might still be the college freshman who'd not yet realized he didn't have world-class speed, forty-three-year-old me had run a lot more races than anyone else on the track. I figured the experience would hold me in good stead now that I finally had the body my unaging inner voice always wanted.

  It started as one of those tactical duals that make the television crews happy they've got lots of those spotlight profiles in the can. Twenty of us ran in a big pack, where not stepping on someone and not getting stepped on are your biggest worries. Nobody wanted the lead, least of all me.

  Unfortunately, forty-three-year-old me didn't know what to do in that situation. I'd never been fast enough to be caught up in such a thing. In big, important races, there'd always been someone streaking away uncatchably in front. Sometimes lots of someones.

  Now, I had the body to streak away—at least for a while, but I didn't know when or whether to try it. So much for all that experience. It had been with a different body.

  The laps rolled by and nothing much happened except that a few people started dropping out of the lead pack. Still, at the halfway mark, there were more than a dozen of us. My coach was screaming at me with each lap, but he wasn't allowed on the field, and from the front row of the stands, I couldn't tell if he was saying “good job” or “get going.” Something that started with a “G,” I think. For all I could tell, he might as well have been giving the weather report.

  Still, I had to do something.

  Before all of the injections, one thing I could do was kick. Sit back and pounce—that would have been my style. But now that most of my fast-twitch had been converted to slow-twitch, I suspected that if there were still a dozen folks around at the start of the last lap, I had a better chance of coming in twelfth than first.

  If you're in danger of being out-kicked, the way to win is to run the kick out of your opponents before they get a chance to use it. Or just run away from everyone, which is pretty much the same thing.

  I knew the theory just fine. What I didn't know were the details. I waited another mile, then moved to the lead and sped up. Before the race, my coach and I had set a target pace, but the pack had been way slower than expected, so I knew I had to be faster now. The question was how much.

  Within a couple laps, I'd dumped half of the pack, but there were still five left. On the backstretch, I looked up at the big television screen at one end of the stadium and saw myself, closely shadowed by a Kenyan who'd won last year's world championship and two other guys who'd been here before.

  I picked it up again with six laps to go, then again with four, and except for the world champion, the others started to drop off.

  Then, with two laps to go, the Kenyan started to push back.

  This was an old game, and I'd always been good at it. Not fast, but wily. Once I passed someone, they stayed passed. But now it didn't work. The Kenyan pushed harder and when I tried to return the favor, nothing much happened. I still managed to stave him off until the last lap, but then he went around me like I was standing still, followed shortly after by the other two. If anything, I was slowing down, frantically looking at the jumbo screen to see who next was coming up behind me.

  I finished totally spent ... and fifth. Even at that, I'd barely held off number six. I was the top American, but that wasn't what I'd wanted.

  My coach was livid. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he asked. “First you let yourself get sucked into a slow, tactical duel that you can't win, then you take off like a scared rabbit.” He drew a big, theatrical sigh, probably trying to remember his own advice about it just being a race. “Okay,” he said. “Live and learn. But
you ran that thing like a damn teenager."

  Knox appeared a moment later, and for once he wasn't beaming. "That," he said, “wasn't my fault.” Then he turned on his good leg and clomped off.

  My coach stared at him, then at me. Belatedly, I wondered why Knox walked with a cane, and what, if anything my coach knew of it. Was Kringle making his own vicarious effort to redress nature's inequities? Even the devil, I guess, has his reasons.

  A week later, my coach resigned. Kringle found me a new one, and the next year I took bronze at the Worlds, beating the Kenyan who'd bested me at the Olympics. But the Worlds just don't have the same cachet, and while my nominal age of thirty-two wasn't necessarily too old for a bid at the next Olympiad, I was already fading. Humans, rats—apparently we react similarly to Kringle's ministrations.

  The trail to Angel's Rest isn't long, but someone had stretched it while I'd been away, and I nearly put it off too long. At my prime, I could have popped up there in thirty minutes, barely breaking a sweat. This time it took two hours, and I'd never have made it without a walking stick. But the summit was everything I remembered: a big flat slab of rock, capped in head-high brush and scraggly firs, looking straight down on the mile-wide river. Below, a freeway hugged the headland, the monotonous drone of trucks audible even from here. A train rumbled a deeper bass, while downstream, a barge plowed a V-wake through sun-glinted water. Everywhere, it seemed, people were on the move, but my own moving days were over.

  Unlike the old days, when this was my private retreat, my brother had come up here with me, in case I needed assistance or (the unspoken fear) rescue.

  The only surviving member of my immediate family (we Morgans aren't a long-lived tribe), he'd been the one part of my old life I'd insisted on retaining. But at Kringle's insistence, I'd never let him far into my new life. Mostly, it was easy. He wasn't much of a sports fan, and while I couldn't hide my new appearance, I'd told him that it and my new name were because I'd tried to take up acting, only to be halted by a rare muscle disease. Not that it mattered: my brother is very much of the don't-ask, don't-tell persuasion.

  In my rock-star-dreaming days, he'd wanted to play bass to my lead. Two years older but twenty years more passive, he'd never claimed to resent our never-was stardom. Still, he'd remained in music, and was now a junior high school band teacher.

  I looked down on the cars, moving antlike: linear drones, everyone going where someone else had been. Follow the leader, from cradle to grave.

  I myself had stepped out of line. Yes, it had taken a chemical boost, but even without a gold or silver medal, I had excelled. Maybe it was just as good I'd not gotten one. The only way I'd been able to get as far out of line as I'd done had been by cheating, and this way, there was no chance I'd ever be caught. I was a fluke: an asterisk in the history books.

  My brother was sitting on my favorite life-pondering rock, staring into sunlight the color of the medal I'd given so much not to attain.

  "Are you happy?” I asked.

  He shot me a glance, then looked back to the late-afternoon distance. “Sure."

  "No. I mean really, truly happy. Remember when we wanted to be rock stars?"

  This time he grinned. “Oh, yeah. After that, I wanted to be an astronaut.” His gaze was still on the river. “I grew up. On a ten-point scale, I'm an eight. I'll take it. But you ... you did live it there for a while, didn't you? Were you happy?"

  It was my turn to stare into the eye-numbing goldness. I wondered how much he knew, how much he might have figured out. I wondered if it mattered.

  "Good thing it happened before you got sick,” he said a few minutes later.

  The sun was getting low, and walking down a steep trail isn't as easy as people think. Luckily, we'd brought flashlights. Declining my brother's offer of assistance, I heaved myself to my feet. Then, leaning heavily on my stick, I began the descent into twilight.

  Copyright ©2008 Richard A. Lovett

  * * * *

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  Novelette: SMALL BUSINESS by Edward M. Lerner

  New forms of industry will engender new forms of competition—though not entirely new....

  The blue shirt moved out of the holo at a glacial pace, as though sliding to the left down a very sticky inclined plane—not that, in microgee, any plane inclined more than any another. Just as a hint of the objective finally appeared, the bored technician, to the soft zzzp noise of Velcro parting, sidled in front of the camera. Sweat-stained denim once again filled the scene.

  There went an hour's slow progress.

  "Damn,” Jason Grimaldi muttered. He batted aside a floating clipboard. His companions shushed him, although the only sound accompanying the video at that moment was the whirrr of a ventilation fan. Jason studied the wrinkled garment for clues to the nearest side of the obstruction.

  "Should we wait? He might step back.” The comment was a vintage Bill-ism. Jason did not get how someone who always hoped for the best became a revolutionary.

  Jason nudged a joystick. “Too risky, with the batteries so low. I won't make a bet on how he'll next move, either. I'm going for altitude.” Most rooms in the space station had an orientation, even when nothing but convention distinguished floor from walls from ceiling.

  The view in the holo display crept upward. A frayed collar came into view, then a neck. The nightshift stuckee needed a new uniform and a haircut. Channeling Bill, Jason hoped the sloppiness denoted lax discipline. They needed all the help they could get.

  Moving to either side of the neck would bring their objective into view the fastest—unless the tech moved again. Checking the power readout, Jason rejected the gamble. The gauge was approaching redline; they might not recover from another setback. So: onward and upward.

  It would be minutes until they could see over the man's head. Jason stretched tense muscles as best he could. At two meters and almost a hundred kilos, he overflowed the standard-sized command seat. The bridge, alas, offered no room for pacing.

  In the holo, salt-and-pepper hair gave way to shiny scalp. The target peeked at them through sparse wisps.

  The batteries were down to two percent.

  "Increase the focal length,” Sherry suggested.

  The hair in the foreground softened to a blur; details of equipment across the room became maddeningly almost discernible. Jason panned. The image vibrated as though, as though ... As though what? The camera platform's steady pace was not the problem—computers compensated for that. Jason gnawed on a pencil stub, staring at the fuzzy picture. Vibration? Why would there be...?

  Uh-oh. He cranked up the volume of the audio pickup. What was that tone beneath the ubiquitous fan noise? The microphone must be very near an unsuspected air vent to capture the bass rumbling of a duct. Too near.

  Target and technician alike spun from sight as Jason lunged for the joystick. For a time, the image tumbled too quickly for digital correction. The scene finally resolved into an ant's-eye view of the console shelf onto which air currents had delivered the ‘bot. The speaker emitted zzzps Jason had no problem identifying: approaching footsteps. Over the tearing sounds came a disgusted voice: “I hate bugs."

  They glumly watched the descent of a bent-double sheaf of printout.

  * * * *

  Six months earlier, Jason would never have expected to end up a revolutionary either. Comfortably settled at K-State, he pursued his studies with monomania
and a few close friends. When the mood was right, he and his university buddies might rail against the injustices of life. Why not? Griping was free, and a way to let off steam.

  Still, Jason listened more than he griped. His parents drove FedEx trucks. No matter what those boxes contained, delivery could only happen locally. He gave little thought to where the goods in those boxes were made. Preoccupied with his dissertation research, his material needs were few. His stipend as a graduate assistant paid the rent, and he tutored for mad money.

  That complacency vanished the day Sherry Nilsson appeared in the Student Union. Every move she made declared her a spacer. Somehow she made the unaccustomed struggle against gravity graceful and exotic. He admired her from afar, giving no thought to the improbability of a spacer picking Manhattan, Kansas as a destination. Looking back, he didn't think much in those days—or the thinking he did wasn't done with his head.

  Opposites truly did attract. Sherry was as willowy as Jason was burly, as blond and Nordic as he was dark and Mediterranean, and—the biggest contrast of all—an econ postdoc. Had he found buttons cute, doubtless he would have added cute-as-one to Sherry's list of virtues. She drew Jason like a moth to a flame, and he could only hope that his fate would be less clichéd and fatal.

  It would be weeks before he wondered whether Sherry was here precisely because she was his “type.” Or that his technical skills and working-class roots, not his diamond-in-the-rough charms, had attracted anyone's interest.

  Jason tried to insinuate himself into her circle. Sherry and her friends seemed always to be debating politics or economics. He often couldn't tell which. He decided that the boundary wasn't necessarily clear cut.

  With uncharacteristic patience he dallied at the outer fringes of her clique. Then one day the main topic was government regulation of innovation. He swallowed hard. The verbal jousting had at last touched on a subject in which Jason could claim expertise. It had something to do with technology, anyway.