“And if—when—I win?”
“You’ll be reunited with Risa, I promise. Free to go. All the rest. You can even sell your story, if you can find anyone who’ll believe you.”
“Know a good ghostwriter?”
He’d winked at me then. “Enjoy the game, Nozomi. I know I will.”
Now I stood on my designated spot and waited.
The lights went out.
I had a sense of rapid subliminal motion all around me. The drones were whisking out and positioning the inert Strobelife creatures in their initial formations. The process lasted a few seconds, performed in total silence. I could move, but only within the confines of the suit, which had now become rigid apart from my fingers.
Unguessable minutes passed.
Then the first stammering pulse came, bright as a nuclear explosion, even with the visor’s shielding. My suit lost its rigidity, but for a moment I didn’t dare move. On the faceplate’s head-up display I could see that I was surrounded by Strobelife creatures, rendered according to their electrical field properties. There were grazers and predators and all the intermediates, and they all seemed to be moving in my direction.
And something was dreadfully wrong. They were too big.
I’d never asked myself whether the creature we’d examined on the yacht was an adult. Now I knew it wasn’t.
The after-flash of the flash died from my vision, and as the seconds crawled by, the creatures’ movements became steadily more sluggish, until only the smallest of them were moving at all.
Then they, too, locked into immobility.
As did my suit, its own motors deactivating until triggered by the next flash.
I tried to hold the scene in my memory, recalling the large predator whose foreclaw might scythe within range of my suit, if he was able to lurch three or four steps closer to me during the next pulse. I’d have to move fast, when it came—and on the pulse after that, I’d have another two to contend with, nearing me on my left flank.
The flash came—intense and eye-hurting.
No shadows; almost everything washed out in the brilliance. Maybe that was why Strobelife had never evolved the eye: it was too bright for contrast, offering no advantage over electrical field sensitivity.
The big predator—a cross among a tank, armadillo, and lobster—came three steps closer and slammed his foreclaw into a wide arc that grazed my chest. The impact hit me like a bullet.
I fell backward, into the dirt, knowing that I’d broken a rib or two.
The electrical field overlay dwindled to darkness. My suit seized into rigidity.
Think, Noz. Think.
My hand grasped something. I could still move my fingers, if nothing else. The gloves were the only articulated parts of the suit that weren’t slaved to the pulse cycle.
I was holding something hard, rocklike. But it wasn’t a rock. My fingers traced the line of a carapace; the pielike fluting around the legs. It was a small grazer.
An idea formed in my mind. I thought of what Icehammer had said about the Strobeworld system; how there was nothing apart from the planet, the pulsar, and a few comets.
Sooner or later, one of those comets would crash into the star. It might not happen very often, maybe only once every few years, but when it did it would be very bad indeed: a massive flare of X-rays as the comet was shredded by the gravitational field of the pulsar. It would be a pulse of energy far more intense than the normal flash of light; too energetic for the creatures to absorb.
Strobelife must have evolved a protection mechanism.
The onset of a major flare would be signaled by visible light, as the comet began to break up. A tiny glint at first, but harbinger of far worse to come. The creatures would be sensitized to burrow into the topdirt at the first sign of light, which did not come at the expected time . . .
I’d already seen the reaction in action. It was what had driven the thrashing behavior of our specimen before it dropped to its death on the cabin floor. It had been trying to burrow; to bury itself in topdirt before the storm came.
The Arena wasn’t Strobeworld, just a clever facsimile of it—and there was no longer any threat from an X-ray burst. But the evolved reflex would remain, hardwired into every animal in the ecology.
All I had to do was trigger it.
The next flash came, like the brightest, quickest dawn imaginable. Ignoring the pain in my chest, I stood up—still holding the little grazer in my gloved hand.
But how could I trigger it? I’d need a source of light, albeit small, but I’d need to have it go off when I was completely immobile.
There was a way.
The predator lashed at me again, gouging into my leg. I began to topple, but forced myself to stay upright, if nothing else. Another gouge, painful this time, as if the leg armor was almost lost.
The electrical overlay faded again, and my suit froze into immobility. I began to count aloud in my head.
I’d remembered something. It had seemed completely insignificant at the time; a detail so trivial that I was barely conscious of committing it to memory. When the specimen had shattered, it had done so in complete darkness. And yet I’d seen it happen. I’d seen glints of light as it smashed into a million fragments.
And now I understood. The creature’s quartz deposits were highly crystalline. And sometimes—when crystals are stressed—they release light; something called piezoluminescene. Not much; only the amount corresponding to the energy levels of electrons trapped deep within lattices—but I didn’t need much, either. Not if I waited until the proper time, when the animals would be hypersensitized to that warning glint. I counted to 35, what I judged to be halfway between the flash intervals. And then let my fingers relax.
The grazer dropped in silence toward the floor.
I didn’t hear it shatter, not in vacuum. But in the total darkness in which I was immersed, I couldn’t miss the sparkle of light.
I felt the ground rumble all around me. Half a minute later, when the next flash came from the ceiling, I looked around.
I was alone.
No creatures remained, apart from the corpses of those that had already died. Instead, there were a lot of rocky mounds, where even the largest of them had buried themselves under topdirt. Nothing moved, except for a few pathetic avalanches of disturbed dirt. And there they’d wait, I knew—for however long it was evolution had programmed them to sit out the X-ray flare.
Thanks to the specimens on the yacht, I happened to know exactly how long that time was. Slightly more than four and a half hours.
Grinning to myself, knowing that Nozomi had done it again—cheated and made it look like winner’s luck—I began to stroll to safety, and to Risa.
VANILLA DUNK
Jonathan Lethem
One of the most acclaimed of all the talented new writers who emerged in the 1990s, Jonathan Lethem has worked at an antiquarian bookstore, written slogans for buttons and lyrics for several rock bands (including Two Fettered Apes, EDO, Jolley Ramey, and Feet Wet), and is also the creator of the “Dr. Sphincter” character on MTV. In addition to all these Certifiably Cool credentials, Lethem also has made short fiction sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, New Pathways, Pulphouse, Universe, Journal Wired, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Aboriginal SF, Crank!, Full Spectrum, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, won the Locus Award for the Best First Novel as well as the Crawford Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His other books include the novels Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl in Landscape, and a collection of his short fiction, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. His most recent novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000.
In the compelling story that follows, he shows us that even in a future where skills can be bought and sold, what matters most is what’s in the heart . . .
* * *
; Elwood Fossett and I were in a hotel room in Portland, after dropping a meaningless game to the Sony Trail Blazers—we’d already made the playoffs—when the lottery came on the television, the one where they gave away the Michael Jordan subroutines.
The lottery, ironically, was happening back in our home arena, the Garden, while we were on the road. It was an absurd spectacle, the place full of partisan fans rooting for their team’s rookie to draw the Jordan skills, the rookies all sitting sheepishly with their families and agents, waiting. The press scurried around like wingless mosquitoes.
“Yo, Lassner, check it out,” said Elwood, tapping the screen with his long black club of a finger. “We gonna get you and McFront some company.”
He meant the white kid in the Gulf + Western Knicks jersey, stranded with his parents in that sea of black faces. Michael Front—“McFront” to the black players—and I were the two white players on the Knicks.
“Not too likely,” I said. “He won’t make the team unless he draws the Jordan.”
Elwood sat back down on the end of the bed. “Nobody else we’d take?”
“Nope.” There were, of course, six other sets of skills available that night—Tim Hardaway, if I remember correctly, and Karl Malone—but none with the potential impact of Jordans. In a league where everyone played with the skills of one star or another, it took a Jordan to get people’s attention. As for the little white rookie, he could have been anyone. It didn’t matter who you drafted anymore. What mattered was what skills they picked up in the lottery. Which star’s moves would be lifted out of the archives and plugged into the rookie’s exosuit. More specifically, what mattered tonight was that the Michael Jordan skills were up for grabs. It was fifteen years since Jordan’s retirement, so the required waiting period was over.
The Jordan skills were just about the last, too. The supply of old NBA stars was pretty much depleted. It was only a couple of years after Jordan retired that the exosuits took over, and basketball stopped growing, started feeding on itself instead, becoming a kind of live 3-D highlights film, a chance to see all the dream teams and matchups that had never actually happened: Bird feeding passes to Earl the Pearl, Wilt Chamberlin going one on one with Ewing, Bill Walton and Marques Johnson playing out their careers instead of being felled by injuries, Earl Maginault and Connie Hawkins bringing their legendary schoolyard games to the pros, seeing if they could make it against the best.
Only a few of the genuine stars had retired later than Jordan; after that they’d have to think up something new. Start playing real basketball again, maybe. Or just go back to the beginning of the list of stars and start over.
“Nobody for real this year?” asked Elwood. He counted on me to read the sports papers.
“I don’t think so. I heard the kid for the Sixers can play, actually. But not good enough to go without skills.” Mixed in among us sampled stars were a handful of players making it on their own, without exosuits: Willard Daynight, Barry Porush, Tony Smerks, Marvin Franklin. These were the guys who would have been the Magic Johnsons, Walt Fraziers, and Charles Barkleys of our era, and in a way they were the guys I felt sorriest for. Instead of playing in a league full of average guys and being big stars, the way they would have in the past, they were forced to go up against the sampled skills of the Basketball Hall of Fame every night. Younger fans probably got mixed up and credited their great plays to some sampled program, instead of realizing they were seeing the real thing.
The lottery started with the tall black kid with the Pan Am Nuggets drawing the David Robinson skills package. It was a formality, a foregone conclusion, since he was the only rookie tall enough to make use of a center’s skills. The kid stepped up to the mike and thanked his management and his representation and, almost as an afterthought, his mom and dad, and everyone smiled and flashed bulbs for a minute or two. You could see that the Nuggets’ general manager had his mind on other things. The Pan Am team was one of the worst in the league at that point, and as a result they had another lottery spot out of the seven, a lean, well-muscled kid who could play with the Jordan skills if he drew them. If they came up with Robinson and Jordan the Nuggets could be a force in the league overnight.
Personally, I always winced when a talented seven-footer like Robinson was reincarnated into the league. Center was my position, and I already spent most games riding the bench. Sal Pharoah, the Knicks’ regular center, played with the skills of Moses Malone, one of the best ever, and a workhorse who didn’t like to sit.
Elwood read me like a book. “You’re sweatin’, Lassner. You afraid the Nuggets gonna trade their center now they got Robinson?”
“Fuck you, Elwood.” The Nuggets’ old center played with the skills of a guy named Wes Unseld. Not a superstar, not in this league, but better than me.
I played with Ralph Sampson’s skills—sort of. Sampson was briefly a star in his time, mostly because of his height, and as centers go he was pretty passive, not all that dominant in the paint. He was too gentle, and up against the sampled skills of Abdul-Jabbar, Ewing, Walton, Olajuwon, Chamberlain, and all the other great centers we faced every night, he and I were pretty damned ineffective.
The reason I say I only sort of played with the Sampson skills is that, lacking the ability to dominate inside, when I actually got on the floor—usually in the junk minutes toward the end of a game—I leaned pretty heavily on an outside jump shot. It’s a ridiculous shot for a center, but hey, it was what I had to offer. And my dirty little secret was that Bo Lassner’s own jump shot was just a little better than Ralph Sampson’s. So when I took it I switched my exosuit off. The sportswriters didn’t know, and neither did Coach Van.
“Relax, fool,” said Elwood. “You ain’t never gonna get traded. You got skin insurance.” He reached over and pinched my thigh.
“Ouch!”
They gave away the Hardaway subroutines to a skinny little guy with the Coors Suns. His smile showed his disappointment. It was down to four rookies now, and the Jordan skills were still unclaimed. Our kid—they flashed his name, Alan Gornan, under the picture—was still in the running.
“Shit,” said Elwood. “Jordan’s moves are too funky for a white cat, man. They program his suit it’s gonna break his hips.”
“You were pretty into Michael Jordan growing up, weren’t you?” I asked. Elwood grew up in a Chicago slum.
“You got that,” he said. His eyes were fixed on the screen.
“He won’t get it,” I said. “There’s three other teams.” What I meant, though I didn’t say it, was that there were three other black guys still in the draw. I had a funny feeling Elwood didn’t want our rookie to pick up the Jordan moves. I could think of a couple of different reasons for that.
The Karl Malone skills went to the kid from the I.G. Farben 76ers. Down to three. Then they took a break for commercials. Elwood was suddenly pacing the room. I called the desk and had them bring us up a couple of beers, out of mercy.
The Nuggets’ second man picked up Adrian Dantley, leaving it down to two rookies, for two teams: us and the Beatrice Jazz. I was suddenly caught up in the excitement, my contempt for the media circus put aside for the moment.
We watched the commissioner punch up the number on his terminal, look up, and sigh. His mouth hung open and the crowd fell silent, so that for a second I thought the sound on the hotel television had died.
“Jazz, second pick.”
That was it. Alan Gornan, and the Knicks, had the rights to the Jordan skills. The poor kid from the Jazz, who looked like a panther, had just landed the skills of Chris Mullin, undeniably a great shooter, a top-rank star, but just as undeniably slow, flat-footed, and white. It was a silly twist, but hey—it’s a silly game.
The media swarmed around Gornan and his parents. Martin Fishall, the Knicks GM, thrust himself between the rookie and the newsmen and began answering questions, a huge grin on his face. I thought to look over at Elwood. He hated Fishall. He had his head tossed back, and he was chugging his beer.
The camera closed in on a head shot of Alan Gornan. He looked pretty self-possessed. He wore a little diamond earring and his eyes already knew how to find the camera and play to it.
They shoved a microphone in his face. “Got anything you want to say, kid?”
“Yeah.” He grinned, and brushed the hair out of his eyes. Charisma.
“Go ahead. You’re live.”
“Look out, New York,” said Alan Gornan. “Clear the runway. Vanilla Dunk is due for takeoff.” The line started out a little underplayed, almost shy, but by the time he had the whole thing out he had a sneer on his face that reminded me of nothing, I swear, so much as pictures I’ve seen of the young Elvis Presley.
“Vanilla Dunk?” I said aloud, involuntarily.
“Turn that shit off,” said Elwood, and I did.
* * *
That was the last of Alan Gornan for the moment. The new players weren’t eligible until next season. All bravado aside, it would take Gornan a few months of working with the Knicks’ programming experts to get control of the Jordan skills. In the meantime, we were knocked out of the playoffs in the semifinal round by the Hyundai Celtics. It should have been a great series—and we should have won it, I think—but Otis Pettingale, our star guard, who carried Nate Archibald’s skills, twisted his ankle in the first game and had to sit, and the series was just a bummer.
I spent that off-season mostly brooding, as I remember. Ringing my ex-wife’s answering machine, watching TV, fun stuff like that, mostly. Plus practicing my jump shot. Silly me. If I’d only been six inches shorter I could have been a big star . . . that’s a joke, son.
Training camp was a media zoo. Was Otis Pettingale too old to carry the load for another season? What about the Sal Pharoah trade rumors? And how were they going to fit Alan Gornan in, anyway? Who would sit to make room for the kid with the Jordan skills—Michael Front, who played with Kevin McHale’s skills, or Elwood Fossett, who played with Maurice Lucas’s? The reporters circled the camp like hungry wolves, putting everyone in a bad mood. They kept trying to bait us into second-guessing Coach Van on the makeup of the starting five, kept wanting to know what we thought of Gornan, who we’d barely even met.
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