As for buddy Jason, the cynical slacker now sported a sick new Bump-brand deck, a closet full of Neff T-shirts and hats, and six new pairs of Vans kicks, all obtained at no cost to him, thanks to his unwarranted but uncontested inclusion on a list of professional skateboarders.
After tapping so many sweet spots, Arp had begun to understand them better and better on some deep, non-verbal level. He began to intuit where they could be found and what kind led where. He just hoped that his extra-normal senses were not developing along the lines experienced by the hyperacute hero of The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, a movie which had scared the pants off him a few years ago, when he had streamed it off his Mom’s Netflix. But so far as he could tell, his sanity remained solid.
One thing Arp had learned: not every goal was obtainable in every location. In computer networking terms, Arp realized, sweet spots featured only a ‘partially connected mesh topology.’ Some sweet spots persisted, while others were highly evanescent. And some required more physical input on his part than others. For instance, to obtain the thousand-dollar gift card, he had been forced to wade out into the yucky River Rouge, with Jason acting as spotter and lookout, dive to the bottom, and push a shopping cart exactly one foot deeper into the muck. Not exactly easy.
But taken all in all, the employment of sweet spots for personal gain offered immense payoffs for very little input.
Having gained confidence in his new talents, Arp decided he could proceed with his ultimate goal: to get Veronica Kingslake to fall in love with him. After that, what more could he possibly ask for?
Arp would have preferred to poke one of the multiple relevant sweet spots when he was alone with Ronnie. But since that never happened, he had to do it at school.
Under the lackadaisical and inattentive guidance of Mr. Mollusk, who as a former youthful track star had no real interest in any sporting activity other than sprints, mixed phys-ed classes generally devolved into groups of girls standing around gossiping and bunches of guys horsing around the equipment. Today was no different.
Arp was chilling with Jason and a few other dudes, while they shot baskets in a half-assed fashion. He participated with one eye on Ronnie where she stood across the gym with her friends, near an exterior wall. He hardly heard the banter of his pals until something Armando Zavala said made him take notice.
“Hey, who’s ready to die?”
Arp got nervous. His formless intuition regarding the effects of the sweet spot he was about to employ revealed potential for some collateral danger. But he felt he had to risk it.
“Whatta ya mean?” Arp asked.
“Aren’t you following news about that Percy asteroid? Seems like it might’ve hit something out in space and gotten aimed our way. The scientists aren’t so sure it’s gonna miss us anymore.”
Jason commented dryly, “The margin for error in their predictions is plus or minus fifteen per cent. Not exactly betting odds.”
Arp was going to reply, but then the basketball was passed to him, and his moment to poke the sweet spot had arrived.
Arp heaved the ball high and wide of the basket. It soared through the air and struck a small frosted window fifteen feet up the wall near where Veronica stood.
Held in place only loosely by an invisibly deteriorated seal, the glass popped outward. The rest of the okiegoes cascade was not immediately visible, but Arp heard the unmistakeable indignant yawp of a disturbed crow, the frantic cursing of what was presumably a passing pedestrian, and the screech of car tires. Even while everyone was laughing at him for his failed throw, he was running toward Veronica and the other girls.
With a tremendous crash, accompanied by female screams and shrieks, the forequarters of a huge SUV thrust through the wall, blasting bricks everywhere even as it lost momentum amidst the wreckage. Several girls, including Ronnie, had fallen to the floor, but no one seemed really hurt. Arp spared a microsecond to give thanks, but kept racing forward.
Once securely attached to the destroyed wall, an accordion-style folding room divider tall as the gym began to peel off and fall directly toward Ronnie. Wailing, she made a scrabbling attempt to rise, but seemed to have forgotten how to work her limbs.
Almost without seeing it, Arp encountered the pommel horse he had been aiming for, braced his hands against the device, and began to push. Only some hundred and twenty pounds, the device slid easily, especially under Arp’s adrenalin-powered urgency.
The pommel horse stopped precisely alongside Ronnie, and Arp dropped down to further shield her fetally recumbent form just as the detached assemblage of aluminum and vinyl crashed down onto the sturdy support – and no further.
An eerie silence reigned for a moment, before shouts erupted. But Arp hardly heard anything.
Ronnie’s beautiful tear-streaked face loomed inches from his, her lips parted invitingly, albeit unromantically slicked with snot, and a look of absolute adoration bloomed across her features, betokening her heart as forever his.
At his moment of triumph, doubt suddenly besieged Arp.
He sure hoped Veronica was worth it.
“Aw, c’mon, Arp, just one little rube, please! Winter’ll be here soon, and I really need that new snowboard and a plane ticket to Aspen.”
“No! I told you, no more sweet spots!”
This Saturday morning the two friends were hanging out on the old Thornhill Place Bridge, where Jason had been practicing his moves on the crumbling bridge railing, despite risking a fifteen-foot drop to the greenway below. Some three weeks had passed since Arp’s staged heroics in the gym, and this was the first time he and Jason had been able to chill together.
Veronica had fallen for her factitious savior more deeply than Arp could have predicted. She was inseparable from him, and much of their time together was spent in lusty clinches that stopped just short of sex. (Ambitious Mom and Pop Kingslake had plans for Veronica that did not include any chances at teenage pregnancy, and she had internalized their goals completely.) Arp found himself chafing under his new role and responsibilities. He felt like a total fake. He had gotten precisely what he wanted, but it was proving less – or rather, more – than he had envisioned. In short, Ronnie was cramping his style and freedom, and making him feel continuously guilty of fraud.
And besides, the disturbing fallout from that last sweet spot still bothered him. People had gotten hurt! Several of the other girls had suffered contusions and even a fracture or three. All as the result of Arp’s selfish actions. The thought of unintended consequences accompanying future use of sweet spots plagued him. Sure, he got what he wanted every time, but at what ancillary cost, seen or unseen?
And now douchebag Jason was bugging him for a frigging snowboard and plane ticket, of all things!
Arp got ready to tell his friend off, but Jason spoke first.
“Aw, fuck it! What’s the point of pretending we’ll ever even see another winter anyhow? This planet is totally doomed.”
The two teens automatically cast their eyes heavenward, though of course no sign of the killer asteroid, dubbed Perses, showed in the bright daytime sky.
“You really figure it’s gonna hit us, Jay?”
“I don’t think anybody figures otherwise anymore. Even Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly caved in. But everybody’s just too stunned to argue or give a fuck anymore.”
Arp recognized this much to be true. Under the imminent threat of inescapable planetary catastrophe, the global population was proving remarkably calm. Maybe because no one could really envision the catastrophe. Oh, sure, there had been isolated riots and protests. The loss of the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the Vatican, and Lubbock, Texas, still stung. But on the whole, there had been no scenes of contagious mass hysteria. Something about the certitude of the non-human-engineered destruction and its mutual nature, as well as a tiny smidgen of hope, had forestalled utter panic. There was no place to run or hide, no one exempt or special. Everyone was in it together, and so a sense of ostrich-head-in-the-sand resignation and willful cognitive d
issonance prevailed.
Arp had reacted much the same as everyone else. With one small difference.
He had a nagging, half-unadmitted intuition that he could save the world.
Being alone now with Jason for the first time in weeks, he finally felt compelled to spill his guts.
“Jay, what would you say if I told you I saw a sweet spot that could stop the asteroid?”
Jason grabbed Arp by both shoulders, his face beaming, and shook his friend. “I knew it! I knew it! I told Blueberry you could do it!”
Arp jerked away. “What! You told Blueberry! How does she even know anything about sweet spots?”
Jason had the grace to look sheepish for once. “Aw, Arp, you didn’t have to see her and listen to her these past few weeks. You know I like to hang with Blue, but she was getting to be a royal pain. She was so bummed about you and Ronnie hooking up. But at the same time she was all like, ‘Oh, what a hero he is! How could I have ever doubted him? He’s so good and noble. Yada yada yada!’ I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I had to set her straight.”
Arp pondered this development. “So now what does she think of me?”
“She thinks you’re a total jerkwad, and she loves you more than ever.” Jason snorted. “Girls!”
A strange, hot sensation suffused Arp. He knew that if Ronnie ever found out the truth about him, she would turn on him in an instant and despise him forever. As she probably well should. Yet Blueberry Chefafa knew the whole story, and still loved him.
Suddenly the world seemed to invert like an old sock, and Arp saw everything differently.
“Let’s go find Blue and talk all this over with her.”
“Righteous!”
The boys found Blueberry home alone, so they could discuss everything without pretense or secrecy.
“So it’s like that,” concluded Arp. “The sweet spot’s somewhere in Chicago, but I can’t pin it down at this distance. It seems to shift back and forth across a small area. Plus, it looks like it will involve some major input to trigger the rube. And it’s the, um, densest one I’ve ever seen. Totally gnarly with connectivity. I don’t really understand the complexity of it. Some of the links seem to go down to the subatomic level. All those factors are why I just didn’t rush in and trigger it. Of course I want to save the planet. But who knows if I wouldn’t be causing something even worse?”
Her gaze earnest and wise, Blue cut to the heart of the matter. “Exactly what could be worse, Arp? You plunge the planet into the sun? Not likely, I say. No, you’ve got to take the chance.”
Arp felt truly heroic at last. “All right, I will!” He instantly deflated. “But how can we get to Chicago?”
“Just look around,” Jay said. “There’s got to be a useful sweet spot right under your nose.”
With Jason driving, it still took Arp two whole hours into the five-hour trip to Chicago to master all the dashboard controls of the stolen Lexus LX570, Blue offering helpful advice from the back seat. They didn’t feel rushed or nervous – at least in terms of the police; the threat of Armageddon was another matter entirely – since the decisive suicide note found along with the car keys on the seat of the unlocked vehicle indicated that the owner would not be reporting the theft anytime soon.
Around hour four, as they got into the city proper, everyone quieted down to let Arp focus his powers. Eyes closed, he began to issue directions based on his sweet spot GPS, until finally he called, “Stop!”
Opening his eyes, Arp found himself at an iconic spot.
The street at the base of the Sears Tower, once the world’s tallest building, and, coincident with its loss of that stature, redubbed the Willis Tower.
“Where now?” asked Jason.
“Up.”
The car-owner’s wallet afforded them the fifty dollars needed for three Skydeck passes. They rode to the 103rd floor in silence.
At the point of exiting the elevator, Blueberry suddenly balked, letting the other visitors stream past. Jason held the door open.
“No, Arpad, I don’t feel good about this. Something tells me there’s danger ahead. Let’s turn back. It’s ridiculous to think you can do anything here to change the fate of a whole planet.”
Arp felt himself in the grip of dreamlike forces larger than himself. Vistas of luminous cosmic webs full of shining nodes of action swam before his eyes. “No, we’ve come this far. I have to try, now.”
Arp exited the elevator, followed by Jason and Blue, and headed straight for one wall.
Attached to the wall at intervals, glass boxes projected outward a few feet, so that visitors could step inside and have the illusion of standing unsupported in midair. As a family of tourists emptied out of one, Arp and his friends crowded in. The whole panorama stretched away below them like a Lego cityscape.
“It’s right out there,” said Arp. “The sweet spot to deflect the asteroid and save the planet.”
Jason squinted. “Where?”
“About five feet ahead at the level of my chest.”
“How can you possibly use it, Arp?” Blue asked plaintively.
Arp pressed his face to the glass separating him from saving the planet. “I know I can trigger it if I can reach it. But reaching it –”
Arp suddenly paused. “Of course! I just need to use this rube right here. A sweet spot whose function is to give me access to the other sweet spot!”
At once Arp knew why Blue had to be present. “Give me your bag!”
Blue’s bag in hand, he rummaged inside and found what he was looking for: Blue’s geeky science-girl laser pointer.
He turned back to the window and shone the little intense laser out and up at a precisely intuited angle.
Seconds later, a small plummeting object appeared in the sky.
Information flooded Arp’s brain, as if the sweet spot were talking to him.
The object consisted of a chunk of blue airplane toilet ice, discharged from a United Express flight. But more importantly, frozen in the middle of the chunk was a worker’s forgotten steel alloy wrench.
Arp yelled, “Get back!” He shoved Jason and Blue away from the observation box.
The glass shattered into a million fragments and rained downward to the street and inside the Skydeck. Freed from its icy casing upon impact, the wrench bounced along the floor until it hit the elevator door, wedging itself between the panels so that the elevator could not be easily opened to permit the arrival of any interfering authorities.
Arp stepped forward to where cold clean air gusted in. He could sense the floating sweet spot even more vividly now, since access had become unimpeded. It called to him. He couldn’t fathom the entire long and braided cascade of events connected with it, but he knew with a certainty that triggering the okiego would save the planet.
“What now?” said Blueberry.
“I jump!”
Jason was shedding atypical tears. “Do it, dude, do it! We believe!”
“Kiss me, Arp!”
Arp hesitated. His timing had to be perfect. Was a kiss allowed?
Intuition told him to go for it.
He hugged Blueberry and kissed her for what seemed forever. And at the same time, further illumination flooded his mind.
A few stories above the Skydeck, having duplicated the 1999 feat of daredevil Alain Robert, who had ascended the Sears Tower’s exterior human-fly-style by hand and foot alone, an illegal BASE jumper named Burnett Kershaw, resting on a ledge, was preparing to leap off, ripcord of his chute firmly in hand.
The very last part of the first stage of the rube fell into place as a TV station’s helicopter arrived.
Arp broke off his kiss, smiled, ran toward the empty window, and hurled himself into space, eyes tightly shut, praying wordlessly.
Something told him to tuck and roll.
He felt himself passing perfectly through the sweet spot, activating the rube.
He untucked at just at the right moment to intersect an extremely startled Burnett Kershaw in hi
s descent. Arp clamped his arms around the guy’s torso, then burst out laughing.
And a quarter of a million miles distant in space, an asteroid named Perses began to shiver.
THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR THREE
KEN MACLEOD
Ken MacLeod is the author of twelve novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to The Restoration Game (2010). In 2009 he was a Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. His forthcoming novel Intrusion (2012) is ‘a democratic dystopia.’ He has wanted to write a short story called ‘The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three’ ever since he saw an anthology of that title a scary number of years ago. Ken’s blog is: The Early Days of a Better Nation at kenmacleod.blogspot.com.
In the Year Three, l’année trois as it’s called here, there are three kinds of Americans living in Paris: the old expats, the new émigrés, and the spooks. And then there are the tourists, who’ve travelled via Dublin, their passports unstamped at Shannon. You can find them all at Shakespeare and Co.; or they can find you.
I was browsing the bargain boxes for SF paperbacks when I noticed that the guy at my elbow wasn’t going away. At a sideways glance I identified him as a tourist – something in the skin texture, the clothes, the expression. He looked back at me, and we both did a double take.
“Bob!” I said, sticking out my hand. “Haven’t seen you since – when?”
“The London Worldcon,” said Bob, shaking my hand. “God, that’s... a long time.”
“How are you doing?”
“Fine, fine. You know how it is.”
I nodded. Yes, I knew how it was.
“What brings you here?” I asked.
“Business,” said Bob. He smiled wryly. “Yet another SF anthology. The angle this time is that it features stories from American writers in exile. So I’m systematically approaching the ones I know, trying to track down those I don’t have a contact for, and commissioning. The deal’s already set up with Editions Jules Verne – the anthology will be published here, in English. In the US it’ll be available on Amazon. That way, I can get around all the censorship problems. It’s not so bad you can’t read what you like, but publishing what you like is more of a problem.”
Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction Page 7