Kudzu’s eyes widened, then narrowed.
“No comment,” he said.
* * *
That night, to celebrate, Man-Mountain Gentian took Melissa to the Beef Bowl.
He had seventeen orders and helped Melissa finish her second one.
They went back home, climbed onto their futons, and turned on the TV.
Gilligan was on his island. All was right with the world.
WINNING
Ian McDonald
British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six, and Hearts, Hands, and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, and the acclaimed Evolution’s Shore, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking In Tongues. His most recent book is a new novel, Kirinya, and a chap-book novella, Tendeleo’s Story, both sequels to Evolution’s Shore. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a website at http://www.lysator.liu.se/^unicorn/mcdonald/.
In the vivid and inventive story that follows, he demonstrates that even in a high-tech future where a competitive edge is measured out in microseconds, there’ll be many different kinds of winners and losers, all depending on your point of view . . .
* * *
The beach is a white crescent of sand under the white crescent moon. Caught in the arms of the moon is a single bright star; a low-orbit manufactory. Below, the tourist hotels and beachfront restaurants show a scatter of lights. Tourists from Dahomey and Luzon and Costa Rica drink and dance and snort designer synTHC and stalk in sexual ambush among the pin lasers and multi-layer video shriek. It is many hours since they abandoned the casual nudity of the beach to the moon and the stars and Hammadi.
He slips under the loose wire by the irrigation channel outfall. The air is clean and cool, it has the crispness of autumn and the end of the season: after these tourists have checked out of their rooms and flown back to Dahomey and Luzon and Costa Rica, there will be no more. In the moonlight Hammadi limbers up using the isotonic flex routine the Company taught him. In twenty seconds he is ready. He slips out of the fleecy track suit. The repro shops of Penang and Darwin produce good copies of professional bodysuits; skin smooth, patterned with patches of bright primaries, sponsorship logos in all the right places. They look good, but Hammadi has worn both and knows the difference. A copy docs not caress you, does not become one with you through eight thousand biomonitors and sensory systems and interfacers. It does not feel like a living skin. It feels like what it is: smooth stretch fabric made up in the immigrant sweatshops of Vancouver and Tananarive.
The wind is blowing off the mountains where snow has lain for weeks: Hammadi shivers, breathes it in, lets it blow through the hollow places of his body and soul. Tank-taught disciplines take over, tyrosine and norepinephrine levels in his bloodstream soar, pushing him into a state of amplified awareness. His senses are so finely honed he can count every grain of windblown sand against his cheek, hear the roll and surge of the blood around his bones, see the photons boiling from the lights of the tourist hotels and beach clubs. He gathers the energy surging within him into a tight cord, releases it. And he is running, past the hotels and beachside clubs and closed-down restaurants, down the long crescent of white sand. He is the Lion of God, the swift arrow of desire, he is the man Allah made fast so that he might delight to see him run.
* * *
It had always been his blessing and his curse, to have been specially gifted by God, for his father had used it as an excuse to exalt him above his brothers. At the dinner table, the only place where the lives of all the al-Bourhan family intersected, al-Bourhan Senior would bang the table and point at the inhumanly tall inhumanly beautiful bodies of the professional athletes that moved with liquid grace and power on the wall-mounted Sony flatscreen. Mouth full of couscous, he would berate his four other sons for their uselessness. “You think I don’t hear, you think I am deaf, stupid, you think I am old and senile; that I don’t hear you muttering how I am unfair, unjust, a bad father because I love Hammadi better than the rest of you? Well, I do not deny it. I love Hammadi the best, and you know why?” Crumbs of food would fly from his lips, he would stab his fingers at the figures drifting languidly around the track. “That is why. Because God has given him the chance of bettering himself, because he can hope for a life that is more than just getting a job and marrying a good woman and raising a family, a life that is more than serving drinks on a silver tray in a hotel or selling brass teapots to tourists until you die. That is why.” When al-Bourhan spoke like this, Hammadi would leave the room. He could not look at his father or his brothers. He had not asked to be gifted by Allah. The inhumanly tall, inhumanly beautiful figures of the athletes on the wallscreen kept drifting around the oval track beneath the tiered seats in the great stadium.
Jamila al-Bourhan was a woman who served God by serving men. She knew that men were stupid and vain creatures, capable of almost limitless stupidity in the name of their vanity, yet she married them, bore them, served them, even loved them, because she loved God more. Her work was her prayer, her kitchen her mosque. The law no longer required that women wear the veil, but some women can wear invisible veils all their lives. She watched al-Bourhan, the man God had made her to serve, wake Hammadi at five in the morning to train. She watched him take the boy out after his day at the garage to practice on the gritty, sweating streets. At night, when the cafés and bars were putting up the shutters, she watched him, on Haran’s moped, pacing her son through the pools of hot green neon Arabic. She watched her family with the dispassionate detachment of Allah All Merciful, All Wise.
She was watching from the kitchen the day al-Bourhan presented the package at the dinner table. Everyone knew what it was, of course, but Hammadi pretended he did not as he opened the plastic wrap and held the brightly colored bodysuit up against himself.
“It’s only a copy,” al-Bourhan apologized, but she saw the look on his face that was at once shy and proud. She saw Hammadi bow his head to hide his embarrassment, she saw how her four sons bowed their heads to hide their disappointment and anger. That night Hammadi went running, brilliant as a bird beneath the glaring fluorescents, just like the professionals on the sports channels. His brothers sat around the table drinking mint lea and watching a Russian metal band on a music channel beamed by satellite from Singapore.
That night Jamila al-Bourhan spoke with the husband God had given her. “You will drive your sons away from you; they see how you look at Hammadi and how you look at them and they feel unworthy, they feel they are not sons to you.”
“Wife,” said the husband Allah had willed to her, “so many times I am explaining this and still you will not understand. Hammadi has been touched by the hand of God, and God’s gifts are not to be wasted. It would be as wrong for him not to run as it would be for me to kill a man. If I push him to train, if I push him to his limits, and beyond, if I make him hate me a little, I do it so that someday he will be the one standing there on that track with the world watching him. I do it only so that he may fulfill the will of God for him.”
“The will of Khedaffey al-Bourhan, you mean,” said the woman who loved Allah more than she loved men. “It is an easy, and terrible mistake to make, to think your will is God’s will.”
But al-Bourhan was already shouting at his useless sons to switch off that decadent rubbish and tune the set back to IntRelay SattelSport. Hammadi’s mother picked the discarded bodysuit off her son’s bedroom floor. It felt like something a sna
ke had left behind.
That Sunday night al-Bourhan took Hammadi by black-and-white moped cab to a street corner where the palm-lined Boulevard of Heavenly Peace ran into the shanties where the refugees from the war in the south had been hidden by the government. There were a number of other boys already there, some in bodysuits like himself, some just in shorts and vests. There was a large crowd of spectators, people not just from Squattertown, but from all parts of the city. Electric-thin men kept this side of starvation by government food handouts stood only a bodyguard away from designer-muscled men and girls in paisley body paint. Al-Bourhan paid the entrance fee to a man sitting on an upturned tangerine crate. Hammadi went to warm up with the other runners. Excitement was a warm snake coiling in the pit of his belly. All the hours driving himself along those roads and pavements in those twilight hours, that chilly predawn glow, in the weariness after hours of wrestling with the innards of buses and trucks, had been for this electric thrill of competition. He saw his father haggling with a small man in a crocheted hat who seemed to have a lot of money in his hand.
The starter called them to order. There were no blocks, no lanes, no electronic timing, no hovering cameras, but crouching under the yellow floodlights the government had put up to reveal the lives of Squattertown, Hammadi felt he was in that great silver dome with the eyes of the world watching. “Fast as a cheetah,” he whispered. “God’s cheetah.” Then the gun went off, and the spectators, rich and poor, rose as one with a roar, and Hammadi was burning along the boulevard under the tattered palm trees, blood bursting in his veins, to feel the tape brush across his chest. He returned to his father, who was receiving a large amount of cash from the man in the crocheted hat, high on victory.
“Nine-point-nine-seven,” said al-Bourhan. “You can do better than that.”
Every weekend there was a street race somewhere in the city, or in one of the neighboring cities. Al-Bourhan’s winnings from the man in the crocheted hat, who went to all the races, grew smaller and smaller as the odds against his son grew shorter and shorter. He still made quite a lot of money out of Hammadi, but it was not riches he wanted, it was success.
The season traditionally concluded with the big meeting in the capital where the nation’s youth met together in the Great Fellowship of Sport to have their endeavor rewarded with medals from the hand of the President. Medals from the hand of the President and the Great Fellowship of Sport were the farthest things from the minds of the athletes who traveled up to the capital: the talent scouts from the big corporations would be there with contracts in their thumb-lock impact-plastic cases.
The capital was an eight-hour bus journey distant. So that Hammadi might be fit and fresh, al-Bourhan booked them into a hotel close by the stadium. It was not a very expensive hotel, just grand enough to have prostitutes in the lobby bar. As Hammadi came down in the elevator for his evening run, they unfolded pneumatic thighs, smiled diamante smiles, and surrounded him in a nimbus of synthetic allure from their wrist-mounted pheromone enhancers. They ran cooing, purring fingers over the firm contours of his bodysuit. Hammadi was half-hysterical with sexual confusion by the time his father shooed them away from his champion back to their stools by the bar. On his return they clicked their tongues and pursed their lips and hitched their rubber microskirts to flash dark vees of pubic hair at him. Hammadi’s sleep that night was prowled by soft, writhing, fleshtone dreams.
Entering the stadium from the competitors’ tunnel, Hammadi was overcome by a sudden disorientation. He was a street racer, a runner of the boulevards and the palm-lined avenues; surrounded by a curving wall of faces, tier upon tier upon tier of mothers fathers brothers sisters wives husbands lovers, he was reduced to a small and brilliantly colored insect creeping upon the smooth red running track. He searched the banked seats for his father. Impossible to find the one face in the ten thousand that meant anything to him. He was anonymous. He was nothing. The other runners came out onto the track and he saw their spirits shrivel as his had done, and they were all the same, equally handicapped, all street racers, night runners, poor boys on the round red track. Above the stadium, blimp-borne laser projectors painted advertisements for the sponsoring companies across artificially generated clouds.
The starter called them to order. Hammadi prayed the prayer he always prayed before he ran, that God would make him fast today. All along the line the other runners completed their preparations physical and spiritual. The starter raised his gun. The flat crack filled the stadium one split second before the crowd rose in a wall of sound and Hammadi plunged from his blocks down the red tracks and across the line in one continuous thought.
He collected his medal from the President, who did not shake hands due to yet another public-health scare, and took it to show his father.
“You show me that? A bit of metal on a string and you think you have achieved something? Hammadi, meet Mr. Larsby. He is from Toussaint Mantene.” A small white man in an expensive Penang suit took Hammadi’s hand for a full minute and said a lot of things, none of which Hammadi could later remember. He was high on winning. On the way back to the hotel in the taxi Hammadi’s father kept hugging him and saying how this was the proudest day in his life. The small white man in the Penang suit was waiting for them in their room. With him was a taller, thinner man in a Nehru suit. He was scanning the walls with a small hand-held unit.
“Purely routine,” he said. “You never know, they get everywhere.” He had the kind of voice Hammadi had only ever heard on the satellite channels. The small man opened his thumb-lock impact-plastic case and took out two thick sheaves of paper.
“Right here and here,” he said. The small man placed his signature under Hammadi’s graceful Arabic, and al-Bourhan and the man in the Nehru suit witnessed.
“Congratulations,” said the small man, Larsby. “Welcome to Toussaint Mantene.” Al-Bourhan was sitting on the bed in tears. The realization was only slowly penetrating Hammadi’s victory high that he was not an amateur, a street racer, a boulevard runner anymore. He was on the other side of the television now. He was one of the inhumanly tall, inhumanly beautiful figures that drifted around the silver dome. He was a professional.
His father was ecstatic. His brothers unsuccessfully tried to hide their jealousy. His mother concealed her pride behind fear for his spiritual well-being. But they all came with him to the big airport in the capital where Larsby and the man in the Nehru suit would take him onward on a suborbital Sänger. The brothers watched the incredible shapes of the aerospacers moving in the heathaze. Al-Bourhan shouted at them for not being appreciative of their brother’s blessing. To Hammadi it was enough that they had come. His mother nervously watched the streamlined aircraft with the crescent moon and star of Islam on its tail approach the airdock. She took her son’s face in her hands, and the intimacy of the gesture abolished every other person in the departure lounge.
“God has given you a gift,” she said rapidly, for Larsby and the man in the Nehru suit were approaching through the aisles of seating. “Never forget that it is not yours, it is only lent to you. Be true to the one who gave it to you. Honor Allah and He will honor you.”
Then Larsby and the man in the Nehru suit came and took him through emigration control into another country.
* * *
He has settled into his stride now. All the motor and sensory faculties of his body are operating at optimum. He is aware of the exact state and function of every muscle. He can hear, like gunfire in the hills, the crack and fire of his synapses, the seethe and surge of chemotransmitters along the neural pathways. He feels he can run at this pace forever. He knows this is just a phase, in time he will pass from it into the next when his body will begin to cry out in protest at what his brain is forcing it to do. The muscles will begin to burn, the lungs to strain for oxygen, the red dots will explode softly, noiselessly in his vision. He will want to give up; stop, give in to the pleading of the body. But he will keep on, along that beach, and he will find that suddenly t
he pain and the urge to give up will no longer matter, his spirit will have risen above them, above all things physical and psychological. He will perceive himself running on the crescent of white sand beneath the lights of the orbital factories with the eye of God. He calls this the “Sufi State,” after those men who whirled themselves out of the flesh into the spirit. Running is not merely a conquering of space and time by the body, but also by the soul.
He has left the lights of the beachfront cafés and tourist hotels behind, his run now takes him past the condominiums of the rich: the government officials, the police chiefs, the drug squirarchs. Their low white houses huddle behind triple-strand electrified wire and thermal-imaging myotoxin dart throwers. A few lights burn on patios and by pool sides. He can hear the cries of the women as they are tumbled naked into the swimming pools and the bull laughter of the men who are tumbling them. The cool wind carries the smell of barbecuing meat and the sweet, glossy scent of synTHC. Close by the wire, dog eyes shine reflected long-red. The manufacturers of custom dogs supply implanted electronic surveillance systems as standard. Standard also the chips in their cerebral cortexes connected to a portable Behavior Control Unit. Implanted compressed gas lances that can blow an intruder’s intestines out through his mouth and anus are extra. They watch the running figure in their artificial enhanced vision. They do not bark, they never bark, their vocal chords have been removed. Behind the biobeat and the drastique the cries of the women have taken on a new, insistent rhythm.
Hammadi runs on. His footprints in the damp sand by the sea edge slowly fill with black water.
* * *
They laughed when he asked where the windows were.
“It costs a billion apiece to build these things, you can’t expect decoration,” said Larsby. Hammadi was disappointed. If he was going to the edge of space, at least he wanted to see what it was like. Like a good Muslim he refused the hostess’s offer of tranquilizers and was sick for the entire forty-minute suborbital flight.
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