Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  At last I realized the horror of the Devil's NDA. For the rest of my life, I would be trapped by my knowledge of the Secret, stuck in contractual amber as I watched friends and lovers walk blithely toward an eternity of pain, unable to stop them. Unable even to hint at the grim future I foresaw. Decade after decade of powerlessness. How many souls would I damn through my inaction?

  The devil had snared me, not in his domain, but in my own private little hell of non-disclosure.

  "Wait," I said.

  Harriet stood there, her eyes burning.

  I almost said it, almost told her. I almost went to hell.

  "Nothing."

  She turned and fled.

  · · · · ·

  It is, of course, only a matter of time.

  No one can bear the weight of this knowledge forever. At some point, I'll slip, and reveal the Secret to save someone. After all, the damned are all around me. My friends, co-workers, and lovers are all stained with the soot of the burning. I still read the NDA every day, more carefully than when I foolishly signed it. It's a very well written contract. An expression or a gesture leading to the truth could damn me. Any hint at all.

  Sooner or later, I will fuck up.

  I've thought of suicide, the quick and dirty way to lock in my special knowledge, my insider's price, but I'm too much of a wimp to pull the trigger.

  At this writing, I live in Africa. Less than one percent of the population of this city speak English, an added layer of protection. But my old software buddies still visit, and I'm too lonely to turn them away, though I can see how damned they are. A few of them seem to know that I have a secret. They question and prod me about my new life, about why I left their world. Perhaps the Devil appears to them as he did to Harriet, just to tempt me with their salvation.

  He wants my soul badly.

  But I haven't completely despaired. Old Scratch showed his weakness to me, back when I was dead. He doesn't have good software help. He doesn't understand the new paradigms of information distribution.

  So I've finally implemented that dead-man switch, the threat that I once held over my partners' heads.

  Every month, I send a message, the correct codeword from a non-patterned series of my own devising. The FallingMan.com server waits for this missive impatiently. Should I die (to be trundled safely up to heaven), or finally screw up and spill the beans to someone (to be carted off screaming to hell), my monthly codeword will be missed, and the server will leap into action.

  Indeed, if you are reading this, that is exactly what has happened.

  So please forgive the breadth and intensity of this spam. I'm sure someone's had to delete this story from about ten thousand mailing lists, and my recording of it should occupy about half the Napster and Gnutella indexes, listed as everything from the Beatles to Britney Spears. Part of my job at Falling Man was viral marketing. The whole world is reading with you.

  So this, my friend, is no secret:

  Forget the backups. Screw the pixels. Lose the smartcards. Avoid the minibars. Overthrow the rule-governed systems. Break the commandments. Exceed the algorithms. Ignore the special effects. Don't undo.

  Disclose everything. Paint the landscape.

  Go analog.

  Save your soul.

  Unsportsmanlike Conduct, by Scott Westerfeld

  There's a lot you can fit into a 851-gram teleport.

  Lean beef is about two-thirds water, so more than two-and-a-half kilos of ground chuck can be reconstituted from a transport that size. Enough for twenty-nine decent hamburgers, one for every human being on the planet. For fixings we had lettuce and plenty of soybread, and our tomatoes were bigger than golf balls that second year on Tau.

  Alternatively, each member of the colony could have received a seven-page letter. Not text or camfeeds, but actual pieces of paper touched by our loved ones, marked with tactile incisions of the pen. (And try spraying perfume on a textfile.)

  With 851 grams of hops pellets, we could have produced about 2,000 liters of homebrew. We had our own sugar and malt, but they'd never given us seed crop for hops, to make sure we couldn't drink more beer than Houston decreed.

  Or, for a truly exotic experience, three medium-sized oranges would have massed about the same. Not dehydrated, pre-juiced, or even peeled. Just the real things smelling of an earthly summer's hard sunlight. We had a tiny anti-scurvy orchard, of course. But our starship had brought only fast-growing limes, our oldest trees four feet tall and delivering a small, bitter fruit.

  None of these items were in the transport, however. We had voted. With one annoyed abstention, the choice had been made.

  The tube glowed, scattering its weird light through the shed. The familiar room turned eerie around us, bent like the colors of an Oklahoma landscape just before a tornado folds into shape overhead. Seven light-years away in the packed suburbs of Houston, lights dimmed and air-conditioning faltered as a grid serving fourteen million was poached. This torrent of power crowded its way into some unthinkably long and narrow channel of the quantum that led to us, 851 grams of matter riding the wave.

  When the tube light faded, we all stood blinking.

  I popped the clean-seal, which hissed at me as vacuum equalized, but waited a moment before opening it. My instincts insisted that the transport would still be hot to the touch inside, however ridiculous that notion was. And worse, if the squirt had blown, we'd all wasted weeks of mass allowance on a pile of splinters.

  But the transport had come in clean. I lifted it up for Alex and Yoshi to admire.

  "Beautiful," Yoshi said.

  "Much better than my old one." Alex was right. The thirty-ounce Louisville Slugger felt much sweeter than our broken bat. The long, wide grain of the wood showed the considerable age of the ash tree from which it had been hewn. The finish lent it an emerald gleam in the antiseptic lights of the clean shed, and it hefted like a feather in my hand.

  Of course, our pals back on Earth wouldn't have sent us anything but the best. The price of a solid-gold bat wouldn't approach the energy costs of a 851-gram transport.

  Still, this Slugger was a beauty.

  Yoshi took it gingerly from my hands, a look of relief on his face. It had been his wild swing that had cracked the first one two weeks before, reducing it to the two most expensive pieces of firewood in human history, leaving us without the game.

  Alex patted him on the shoulder, all forgiven now. The old bat, nine gloves, and six baseballs had comprised her entire personal mass allowance on the starship out, and had proven the most popular contribution to the public good. (With the possible exception of Iain Claymore's micro-still.)

  Alex took the bat from Yoshi, stepped back, and took a practice swing. She grinned like a kid on her birthday.

  "Let's play some ball."

  · · · · ·

  Half an hour later, we had two teams out on the field.

  Our baseball field was a medium-age impact crater full of sheetgrass, basically flat if you ignored the low, concentric ripples emanating from the natural pitcher's mound in its exact center. The home-run "fence" was a ring of chalky two-meter cliffs at the crater's edge, reachable even by amateurs like us thanks to Tau's nine-five gravity. The sheetgrass surface was impeccable, tractable, soft in a fall, quick-drying after the heavy Coriolis rains which swept across us every afternoon: the best of astroturf and earthly grass combined.

  Of course, sheetgrass wasn't grass in any botanical sense, but a genetically identical colony of cilia that acted as water filtration system for the composite organism that filled the crater. In a way, we owed our presence here on Tau to the rain-catch organisms. They accounted for most of the biomass of the planet, and thus most of the rich oil field below our feet had once been sheetgrass or some ancient relative.

  It had been two weeks (six Tau-day microlunar months, actually, a bit over a hundred hours each) since Yoshi's swing had snapped our old bat and brought baseball on the planet to a halt. It hadn't taken much arm-twisting to get
two enthusiastic teams of nine onto the field. We even had a few human spectators in addition to the usual audience of Taus.

  "Looks like pretty good attendance today, Doctor."

  "I count sixty-seven." Dr. Helene Chirac lifted her tablet and peered at the screen. "That beats the previous record by five."

  "Think they missed it, Doc?"

  "It seems likely they noticed our absence on the field."

  As always, Dr. Chirac was our umpire. (With seventeen PhDs and three MDs between us, that title was usually ignored, but something about the gray-haired, imperiously formal Dr. Chirac made it unavoidable.) As head of the xeno team, she had attended every game since the Taus had started watching, hoping that her elusive linguistic breakthrough might be found here on the field.

  Other than becoming baseball fans, the Taus didn't have much to do with us. No Tau had ever set foot on the land we'd developed, steering well clear of the camp, solar array, drill site, and farmland. Whether it was out of respect for our claims or fear of contagion, we didn't know. Like good spectators, they stayed at the edge of the baseball field. And when the odd home run came their way, they always scattered to let one of us retrieve the ball.

  The rest of the xeno team were biologists and could work with other life-forms or long-distance observations. But Dr. Chirac, a linguist, needed face-to-face contact with the dominant species. Umping baseball was as close as she got.

  Our Tau fans were definitely learning the game. They knew when to cheer now. They showed no favoritism, making their characteristic stuck-pig squeals on tough catches as well as long drives, and a few were clapping as my team took the field for the top of the first inning. They were finally starting to get some sound out of those big, soft hands. I waved to them as I took the mound.

  My opposing captain was at the plate. Two full ranks my junior, Alex really was a captain, as well as our pilot for the landing two years before, company meteorologist, and a damn fine cajun cook.

  "Seven innings?" she shouted, swinging the bat with pleasure. She didn't usually lead off the order, but rank hath its privileges.

  I looked at the angle of the reddish sun. Plenty of afternoon left. We were taking off an extra half-day in honor of our new bat, and to celebrate our latest pipeline milestone, which we'd reached ahead of schedule. Probably a longer game would tire everyone out for a good night's sleep. Morale needed a boost, I figured.

  "Let's go for nine," I called.

  Alex gave me a questioning look.

  I nodded. "That's right. Cancel the late shift. It's a beer night."

  "You got it, Colonel." She stepped into the batter's box. "Doctor?"

  Dr. Chirac completed a sweep with her tablet, with which she'd been snapping pictures of our alien audience, and nodded curtly. "Play ball."

  I took a deep breath, slapping our best baseball into the worn pocket of my glove. The ritual begun, I cracked my neck on both sides with a dip of each shoulder, squinted at Yoshi on first and McGill at third, tugged aside my filter mask and spat, then licked my lips once from right to left.

  Wound up.

  And threw. A bit low and to the left.

  "Ball one!" Dr. Chirac shouted in her familiar way, loud enough to carry to the alien observers. The xenos weren't quite sure of the Taus' hearing range yet, but Chirac called the game at high volume, introducing minimal variation in baseball's signs and signifiers. The more consistent she was, the easier it would be for the Tau to learn the patterns of the game. She stepped back, folding her arms to gaze at the audience as she did between each pitch.

  Hunter returned the ball to me. I cracked my neck again, checked the bases, and licked my lips. He gave me two fingers down, to which I nodded. Alex couldn't stand up to my fastball.

  I wound up, pitched it in hard. Swing and a crack, straight up or just about. I ran a few steps forward, but Hunter sprang up and waved me off, taking the catch.

  The humans in the field raised a ragged cheer, echoed by the high-pitched hooting of the Taus.

  "How'd she feel?" I yelled to Alex as she trudged back from halfway to first base.

  She laughed. "What, are baseball bats feminine now?"

  "That one is."

  Alex picked it up from where it had flown from her grasp and ran her fingers down its length. "Maybe you're right. She's pretty sweet."

  "Don't ask, don't tell, Captain." I smiled, mentally moving myself to the top of my team's order, and returned to the mound.

  · · · · ·

  The game went long, and our shadows lengthened, then doubled as Antipodes rose, full as it was every weekend. Like most small-town baseball games, ours was a dramatic affair, the score padded by overthrows, dropped catches, and stolen bases. By the bottom of the ninth, the teams were tied at twelve runs apiece.

  "Come on guys, extra innings," Alex shouted as her team took the field.

  "No way. Let's wrap this up," I exhorted my own troops.

  The Taus seemed to have caught the growing tension. They'd been agitated since the end of the seventh. I wondered if they'd noticed we were playing a couple of more innings than usual.

  No one knew how smart the Taus were. They were definitely tool-users well into the agricultural revolution, planting their ferny staple plants with stick hoes and fending off large predators collectively, using spears and slings and a lot of hooting. According to some of our Earthbound theorists, their social rituals were about as advanced as humans at the beginning of language development, although Dr. Chirac always warned me about making comparisons. Their repertoire of vocal noises sounded awfully sophisticated to me, and fully half of it was too high for human hearing.

  My job had little to do with contact, of course. Our mission priority was getting the pipeline up, never mind the local environment and culture, intelligent or not. With a global population of about a hundred thousand Taus, we weren't exactly crowding them. And they had no use for the oil we were stealing, anyway. Maybe twenty thousand years from now they'd miss it. But I figured we were doing them a favor. We'd leave them enough accessible oil for a short run at internal combustion, but not enough to fuck their planet as thoroughly as we had ours.

  In the meantime, Earth's billions needed oil for plastics, our ancestors having apparently forgotten that petroleum is useful for things other than burning. And of course the U.S. needed another few decades of cheap gas and big cars to complete our conversion.

  Hunter went in and hit a single, and got a big cheer from the Taus. I wondered for a moment if our alien audience knew the score was tied.

  "The natives are restless," a voice behind me observed.

  "I didn't know you were watching, Ashley. Thought you didn't approve."

  Ashley Newkirk shrugged. "A base imitation of the mother game, without subtlety or grace."

  "Aye, but at least it doesnae take five days." Iain Claymore was another abstainer from baseball, and physical activity in general, but was happy to take any side against Ashley. The two Brits were on the xeno team, like all of the non-Americans in the colony, but were strictly horticulturists. They had little to do with the dominant species, too busy observing how our invader species were affecting the local flora.

  "One day you must tell me the rules again," I said, praying he would ignore the offer. Ashley had once tried to reveal the mysteries of cricket to me, but his explanation turned to apoplexy every time I made an analogy to baseball. In his mind, any query that compared the two was like asking of Rembrandt's painting: "Interior or exterior?"

  Jenny Flagg was up next. She had once been a reliable single, specializing in Texas-leaguers that landed just behind the shortstop. The problem was, after two years everybody knew her one trick. The outfield moved in.

  The first pitch flew past her wild swing. She was looking to hit it hard, trying to force the fielders deep. They didn't buy it.

  "Strike one!" Dr. Chirac declaimed. If nothing else, the Taus would probably learn to count to three.

  "Jenny!" I made a calming gesture with
my hands. With the score tied, all we needed was her usual single.

  She nodded, took a less aggressive stance.

  But she slashed again at the next pitch, a drive that flew high over second base, clearing the center fielder's outstretched glove by centimeters. Jenny ran a leisurely double while Hunter pounded home.

  "That's the ball game!" Dr. Chirac shouted. The Taus cheered.

  The field jogged desultorily in. Our team gathered around Hunter and Jenny, providing the Taus a textbook example of a human victory celebration.

  "The beer's on me," I announced, then turned to Jenny. "But I should have you up on insubordination charges, Sergeant Flagg."

  She shrugged as we headed back toward camp. "I thought you and I were engaged in a subtle deception, Colonel."

  I laughed. "At least now you'll get a little respect for your long ball—"

  "Colonel!"

  I turned at the shout. Dr. Chirac still stood at home plate, transfixed and staring into the outfield.

  A small party of Taus was approaching.

  I signalled for everyone to stop where they were and walked with quick, even steps to Chirac's side.

  "Sweet Jesus," I said. They were armed, as always, slings at the ready around their necks. Over the last two years, we'd cleared the field of rocks pretty thoroughly, but the Tau could be deadly with improvised projectiles. I was more awed than worried, though. This was the first time they'd entered the human colony.

  "They look friendly, I guess."

  "Don't you see it?" Chirac was breathing hard, her tablet making the small reminder beep that indicated high-memory motion capture.

  "See what?"

  "There are nine of them."

  · · · · ·

  They didn't want gloves.

  That made sense, at least. Their big hands were already baseball glove-sized. It had crossed my mind to wonder once or twice if that's why they watched the game. We must have looked a bit more Tau-like with brown leather webbing our fingers.