"Not even that girl down at Llano's?"
"Maria? She's all right. But she's not …" Ramon made a gesture that encompassed sky and land and ocean. She is not the world.
"All right. Here's the keys. You can have the red van over there. There's already gear loaded. But you get it back in two weeks. And this time, you better have some clothes on."
"Yeah. Don't worry. This is going to be the big one."
It was a warm day in the second month of June, and the van hummed beneath him as the miles flowed away below him. Greenglass country glittering, the flocks of wool-elk and bigheads scattering as he passed overhead. The Océano Tétrico. The handful of weathered wooden ships that were the fishing fleet of Fiddler's Jump, and then north, along the thin silver-white band that was the Rio Embudo, where he had almost died twice. Somewhere in that flow—eaten by fish, his bones washed out to sea—the other Ramon had by now become part of the world in a way that could never be undone. Ramon touched his brow in a sign of respect for the dead.
"Better thee than me, cabron," he said.
The clearing was easy to find. The months of deep winter or else the aliens had scoured away all trace of his first landing there. He eased the van down, shut off the lift tubes and lit a cigaret. The scheme was simple. He'd left notes about what had happened—Maneck, the other Ramon dead somewhere in the river, and, most importantly, the exact location of the refuge—hidden in his things. The aliens might not understand the idea of insurance, but he was willing to teach them. And then he could make his deal.
The aliens would tell him where they didn't want humanity exploring, any other refuges that might exist, and he would file claims in Diegotown that made the sites look worthless and dead. In return, they would tell him where two or three really good sites were—places where mines could be built with every nugget of ore leaving a few coins in Ramon's pocket. And then let the monsters do what they wanted to do. It didn't matter to him. Let them hide inside their hill until the end of time, if that's what they wanted. Or perhaps eventually, in time, he could talk them into coming out, eh? Convince them, from his unique perspective that straddled both worlds, that being discovered didn't mean that they would all have to die. Wouldn't that be something? If he could do that, he wouldn't even need the pinchemines to be famous and rich. And it would be a good thing for the aliens too, for whom he'd gradually come to feel a strange kind of sympathy; no one, not even alien monsters, should have to hide inside in the dark all the time when there was a world like this one to be out and around in.
He took in a deep lungful of smoke, remembering Maneck's fear of cancer preventing them from fulfilling their tatecredue. It was a risk, of course. Maybe a big one. There was no knowing what these bastards would think or do. Stranger than anorteamericano, or even the Japanese. Maybe they'd just kill him, not caring or not understanding about the insurance. Who could know? But life was a risk. That was how you knew you were living.
The cliff face was back exactly as it had been. He couldn't be certain, but he thought that even the individual stones had been set back in place. Here was the boulder he'd hidden behind. And there, in the place that made the most sense, was the site he'd placed the coring blast.
"Hai!" he shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. "Monsters! Hai! Come out! Another monster wants to talk with you! Or do I need to blow this wall down again?"
Ramon stepped back. High above and to the south, two flapjacks rippled in the high atmosphere, circling each other. The sun overhead was warm as blankets. For a long moment, Ramon felt something like dread in his belly. What if they'd decided that his escape had constituted gaesu after all? What if inside the mountain there was nothing but the dead?
And then, far above, the mountainside irised open, and a thing flew out, straddling a device that was for all the world like a flying cycle. The pain in his belly eased. Ramon raised his hands and waved them over his head, drawing the monster's attention, calling it down. It circled once, as if uncertain.
Ramon took another drag of his cigaret, oddly reassured by the alien's hesitance, and waited for it to descend.
NANCY KRESS
Nancy Kress (born January 20, 1948) is an American science fiction writer. She is the author of eighteen books: three fantasy novels, seven SF novels, two thrillers, three collections of short stories, one YA novel, and two books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the "Sleepless" trilogy, which began with Beggars in Spain. The novel was based on a Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name; the series then continued with Beggars and Choosers and Beggars Ride. The trilogy explores questions of genetic engineering, social structure, and what society's "haves" owe its "have-nots." In 1996 Kress temporarily switched genres to write Oaths and Miracles, a thriller about Mafia penetration of the biotech industry. This was followed in 1998 by Stinger, about the introduction of a genetically-engineered and very nasty form of malaria into Maryland. Her most recent books are Yanked!, a YA time-travel novel, and Beaker's Dozen, a well-received collection of short stories. Just out is a new novel, Probability Moon. Like much of Kress's fiction, this novel is concerned with the genetic foundations of human behavior. Unlike recent work, however, Probability Moon takes place off-world, and includes such grand old SF tropes as aliens and a space war.
Kress's short fiction has appeared in all the usual places. She has won three Nebulas: in 1985 for "Out of All Them Bright Stars," in 1991 for the novella version of "Beggars in Spain" (which also won a Hugo), and in 1998 for "The Flowers of Aulit Prison." She has also lost over a dozen of these awards. Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, and Russian.
In addition to writing fiction, Kress regularly teaches at various places, including Clarions East (University of Michigan) and West (Seattle). She has also taught summer writing conferences in Cleveland, Ohio; Rochester, New York; and Juneau, Alaska. She is the monthly "Fiction" columnist for Writer's Digest magazine, which she regards as a sort of extension of teaching. In a former life she was a copywriter for Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, and various other corporations. She now lives in Maryland with her husband, Charles Sheffield, who also writes science fiction.
End Game, by Nancy Kress
Featured in Hartwell & Cramers's "Year's Best SF 13".
Allen Dodson was sitting in seventh-grade math class, staring at the back of Peggy Corcoran’s head, when he had the insight that changed the world. First his own world and then, eventually, like dominos toppling in predestined rhythm, everybody else’s, until nothing could ever be the same again. Although we didn’t, of course, know that back then.
The source of the insight was Peggy Corcoran. Allen had sat behind her since third grade (Anderson, Blake, Corcoran, Dodson, DuQuesne . . .) and never thought her remarkable. Nor was she. It was 1982 and Peggy wore a David Bowie t-shirt and straggly brown braids. But now, staring at the back of her mousy hair, Allen suddenly realized that Peggy’s head must be a sloppy mess of skittering thoughts and contradictory feelings and half-buried longings—just as his was. Nobody was what they seemed to be!
The realization actually made his stomach roil. In books and movies, characters had one thought at a time: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
“An offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“Beam me up, Scotty!” But Allen’s own mind, when he tried to watch it, was different.Ten more minutes of class I’m hungry gotta pee the answer is x+6 you moron what would it be like to kiss Linda Wilson M*A*S*H on tonight really gotta pee locker stuck today Linda eight more minutes do the first sixteen problems baseball after school—
No. Not even close. He would have to include his mind watching those thoughts and then his thoughts about the watching thoughts and then—
And Peggy Corcoran was doing all that, too.
And Linda Wilson.
And Jeff Gallagher.
And Mr. Henderson, standing at the front of math class.
A
nd everyone in the world, all with thoughts zooming through their heads fast as electricity, thoughts bumping into each other and fighting each other and blotting each other out, a mess inside every mind on the whole Earth, nothing sensible or orderly or predictable . . . Why, right this minute Mr. Henderson could be thinking terrible things even as he assigned the first sixteen problems on page 145, terrible things about Allen even, or Mr. Henderson could be thinking about his lunch or hating teaching or planning a murder . . . You could never know. No one was settled or simple, nothing could becounted on . . .
Allen had to be carried, screaming, from math class.
***
I didn’t learn any of this until decades later, of course. Allen and I weren’t friends, even though we sat across the aisle from each other (Edwards, Farr, Fitzgerald, Gallagher . . .). And after the screaming fit, I thought he was just as weird as everyone else thought. I never taunted Allen like some of the boys, or laughed at him like the girls, and a part of me was actually interested in the strange things he sometimes said in class, always looking as if he had no idea how peculiar he sounded. But I wasn’t strong enough to go against the herd and make friends with such a loser.
The summer before Allen went off to Harvard, we did become—if not friends—then chess companions. “You play rotten, Jeff,” Allen said to me with his characteristic, oblivious candor, “but nobody else plays at all.” So two or three times a week we sat on his parents’ screened porch and battled it out on the chessboard. I never won. Time after time I slammed out of the house in frustration and shame, vowing not to return. After all, unlike wimpy Allen, I had better things to do with my time: girls, cars, James Bond movies. But I always went back.
Allen’s parents were, I thought even back then, a little frightened by their son’s intensity. Mild, hard-working people fond of golf, they pretty much left Allen alone from his fifteenth birthday on. As we moved rooks and knights around the chessboard in the gathering darkness of the porch, Allen’s mother would timidly offer a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. She treated both of us with an uneasy respect that, in turn, made me uneasy. That wasn’t how parents were supposed to behave.
Harvard was a close thing for Allen, despite his astronomical SATs. His grades were spotty because he only did the work in courses he was interested in, and his medical history was even spottier: bouts of depression when he didn’t attend school, two brief hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward. Allen would get absorbed by something—chess, quantum physics, Buddhism—to the point where he couldn’t stop, until all at once his interest vanished as if it had never existed. Harvard had, I thought in my eighteen-year-old wisdom, every reason to be wary. But Allen was a National Merit Scholar, and when he won the Westinghouse science competition for his work on cranial structures in voles, Harvard took him.
The night before he left, we had our last chess match. Allen opened with the conservative Italian game, which told me he was slightly distracted. Twelve moves in, he suddenly said, “Jeff, what if you could tidy up your thoughts, the way you tidy up your room every night?”
“Do what?” My mother “tidied up” my room, and what kind of weirdo used words like that, anyway?
He ignored me. “It’s sort of like static, isn’t it? All those stray thoughts in a mind, interfering with a clear broadcast. Yeah, that’s the right analogy. Without the static, we could all think clearer. Cleaner. We could see farther before the signal gets lost in uncontrolled noise.”
In the gloom of the porch, I could barely see his pale, broad-cheeked face. But I had a sudden insight, rare for me that summer. “Allen—is that what happened to you that time in seventh grade? Too much . . . static?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t seem embarrassed, unlike anybody normal. It was as if embarrassment was too insignificant for this subject. “That was the first time I saw it. For a long time I thought if I could learn to meditate—you know, like Buddhist monks—I could get rid of the static. But meditation doesn’t go far enough. The static is still there, you’re just not paying attention to it anymore. But it’s still there.” He moved his bishop.
“What exactly happened in the seventh grade?” I found myself intensely curious, which I covered by staring at the board and making a move.
He told me, still unembarrassed, in exhaustive detail. Then he added, “It should be possible to adjust brain chemicals to eliminate the static. To unclutter the mind. It should!”
“Well,” I said, dropping from insight to my more usual sarcasm, “maybe you’ll do it at Harvard, if you don’t get sidetracked by some weird shit like ballet or model railroads.”
“Checkmate,” Allen said.
***
I lost track of him after that summer, except for the lengthy Bakersville High School Alumni Notes faithfully mailed out every single year by Linda Wilson, who must have had some obsessive/compulsiveness of her own. Allen went on to Harvard Medical School. After graduation he was hired by a prestigious pharmaceutical company and published a lot of scientific articles about topics I couldn’t pronounce. He married, divorced, married again, divorced again. Peggy Corcoran, who married my cousin Joe and who knew Allen’s second wife, told me at my father’s funeral that both ex-wives said the same thing about Allen: He was never emotionally present.
I saw him for myself at our twentieth-fifth reunion. He looked surprisingly the same: thin, broad-faced, pale. He stood alone in a corner, looking so pathetic that I dragged Karen over to him. “Hey, Allen. Jeff Gallagher.”
“I know.”
“This is my wife, Karen.”
He smiled at her but said nothing. Karen, both outgoing and compassionate, started a flow of small talk, but Allen shut her off in mid-sentence. “Jeff, you still play chess?”
“Neither Karen nor I play now,” I said pointedly.
“Oh. There’s someone I want you to see, Jeff. Can you come to the lab tomorrow?”
The “lab” was sixty miles away, in the city, and I had to work the next day. But something about the situation had captured my wife’s eclectic and sharply intelligent interest. She said, “What is it, Allen, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I don’t mind. It’s a chess player. I think she might change the world.”
“You mean the big important chess world?” I said. Near Allen, all my teenage sarcasm had returned.
“No. The whole world. Please come, Jeff.”
“What time?” Karen said.
“Karen—I have a job.”
“Your hours are flexible,” she said, which was true. I was a real estate agent, working from home. She smiled at me with all her wicked sparkle. “I’m sure it will be fascinating.”
***
Lucy Hartwick, twenty-five years old, was tall, slender, and very pretty. I saw Karen, who was unfortunately inclined to jealousy, glance at me. But I wasn’t attracted to Lucy. There was something cold about her beauty. She barely glanced up at us from a computer in Allen’s lab, and her gaze was indifferent. The screen displayed a chess game.
“Lucy’s rating, as measured by computer games anyway, is 2670,” Allen said.
“So?” 2670 was extremely high; only twenty or so players in the world held ratings above 2700. But I was still in sarcastic mode, even as I castigated myself for childishness.
Allen said, “Six months ago her rating was 1400.”
“So six months ago she first learned to play, right?” We were talking about Lucy, bent motionless above the chessboard, as if she weren’t even present.
“No, she had played twice a week for five years.”
That kind of ratings jump for someone with mediocre talent who hadn’t studied chess several hours a day for years—it just didn’t happen. Karen said, “Good for you, Lucy!” Lucy glanced up blankly, then returned to her board.
I said, “And so just how is this supposed to change the world?”
“Come look at this,” Allen said. Without looking back, he strode toward the door.
I was getting tir
ed of his games, but Karen followed him, so I followed her. Eccentricity has always intrigued Karen, perhaps because she’s so balanced, so sane, herself. It was one reason I fell in love with her.
Allen held out a mass of graphs, charts, and medical scans as if he expected me to read them. “See, Jeff, these are all Lucy, taken when she’s playing chess. The caudate nucleus, which aids the mind in switching gears from one thought to another, shows low activity. So does the thalamus, which processes sensory input. And here, in the—”
“I’m a realtor, Allen,” I said, more harshly than I intended. “What does all this garbagemean?”
Allen looked at me and said simply, “She’s done it. Lucy has. She’s learned to eliminate the static.”
“What static?” I said, even though I remembered perfectly our conversation of twenty-five years ago.
“You mean,” said Karen, always a quick study, “that Lucy can concentrate on one thing at a time without getting distracted?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?” Allen said. “Lucy Hartwick has control of her own mind. When she plays chess, that’s all she’s doing. As a result, she’s now equal to the top echelons of the chess world.”
“But she hasn’t actually played any of those top players, has she?” I argued. “This is just your estimate based on her play against some computer.”
“Same thing,” Allen said.
“It is not!”
Karen peered in surprise at my outrage. “Jeff—”
Allen said, “Yes, Jeff, listen to Carol. Don’t—”
“‘Karen’!”
“—you understand? Lucy’s somehow achieved total concentration. That lets her just . . . just soar ahead in understanding of the thing she chooses to focus on. Don’t you understand what this could mean for medical research? For . . . for any field at all? We could solve global warming and cancer and toxic waste and . . . and everything!”
As far as I knew, Allen had never been interested in global warming, and a sarcastic reply rose to my lips. But either Allen’s face or Karen’s hand on my arm stopped me. She said gently, “That could be wonderful, Allen.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 132