The Future Is Ours

by Hoch Edward D.

  ABOUT “THE BOY WHO BROUGHT LOVE”

  As the title suggests, this is the story of a child who defeated a tyrannical king with love. At once a messianic allegory and an interplanetary folktale, this is the closest Hoch came to an overtly religious story.

  First Publication—Crisis, ed. Roger Elwood; Thomas Nelson, 1974.Reprinted in Weird Worlds #2, 1979, and in Magical Wishes, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh; Signet, 1986.

  THE BOY WHO BROUGHT LOVE

  On Crucis Two, the second planet of the sun Alpha Crucis, men still talk of the boy Serov. Some say he possessed magic powers while others claim his only power was the ability to speak to the people and to lead them. Whatever the truth, it was Serov who caused the downfall of the evil King Hapan. And he did it with a gift of love.

  * * * *

  It had been a century of troubles for the people of Crucis Two, when solar storms buffeted the planet and space pirates from other worlds landed by night to kill and burn. Such conditions had caused the rise of the great King Hapan, and the fact that he was an evil man was overlooked in the struggle for survival. Hapan ruled with an iron fist, crushing the space pirates and even calming the solar storms with the aid of great reflecting mirrors. But in the process he doomed many of his own people, many of the loyal citizens of Crucis Two.

  It was in such a time that the boy Serov was first seen wandering with the other orphans among the endless desert camps where those without families lingered and often died. He was no more than ten or eleven years old, and the clothes hung loosely from his frail body. But when he spoke, the older men and women listened.

  “Some say he is a wizard,” his advisers told Hapan. “He talks in words too wise for one so young.”

  Hapan, whose title was Ruler of the Suns, glowered at those around him. “You tell me that I can defeat the space pirates and tame the sun itself and yet a ten-year-old boy can upset my people with his talk? What does he tell them?”

  “He speaks of freedom and beauty,” they said.

  Hapan was an old man at that time, tired and unwell. But he still ruled his people with unyielding force, and he was not ready to see his power diminished by the words of a mere boy. “Arrest him,” he ordered. “Bring him to me!”

  The boy Serov was seized in the marketplace as he spoke to the people, and brought before the ruler in chains. “Well,” King Hapan said, staring down at the boy before him. “You have given me a great deal of trouble in recent days.”

  The boy lifted his chained hands. “I come in peace. I am no wizard. I only speak to the people of love and beauty!”

  “You spread uncertainty and distrust. You spread the germs of rebellion where before there dwelt only the healthy seeds of loyalty. I have ruled here many years on Crucis Two and you do not win my kingdom so easily.”

  “I bring only love,” the boy insisted. “Do you fear that?”

  Hapan did not fear love, and yet as he stared down at the face of the chained boy, he knew there was a danger here. This was not an ordinary boy to be won over with trips to the space zoo or the hologram theater. The face of Serov held kindness and love, but it held something else too. Perhaps it held a vision of all the forces King Hapan had repressed during the years of his rule.

  “If I had you tortured or killed, would you respond with love?” he asked.

  “Yes.” The boy smiled. “Sometimes love can be a powerful weapon. Sometimes love can even destroy.”

  The king only laughed. “You can destroy me with love?”

  “Yes.” The boy spread out his chained hands. “I could send you a gift of love that would kill as surely as a laser beam, and yet I think you would die happy.”

  King Hapan at last grew fearful of this talk and he ordered the guards to abandon Serov in the wilderness, where the boy might wander and finally perish from lack of food.

  That was the last anyone saw of the boy for many months, and Hapan assumed that he had indeed perished. In time the memory of him passed, and the king began to make preparations for the annual Festival of Welcome.

  For as long as anyone on Crucis Two could remember, the coming of spring had been the occasion for great rejoicing. The celebration centered about the Festival of Welcome, at which all the people of the area were invited to pay their respects to the king. Hapan would stand at the gate of his great chrome palace, touching hands with all who came, and sometimes the line would stretch for miles. It was the custom that he remained at the gate until all had been greeted, and in earlier, happier days the ruler often stood there through half the night—until the very last of his subjects had departed for home. Now he was lucky if a few hundred came to touch his hand.

  So the day of the Festival dawned, sunny and warm, as were all spring days on the planet. He walked to the palace gate and was pleased to see that the line had already formed to greet him. It seemed longer than last year’s line had been, and his heart was gladdened. Perhaps it was a sign that the people were accepting the necessary harshness of his rule at last. He touched the first man’s hands and murmured the traditional words of greeting.

  By the time the fifth hour had passed, he knew there would be more to greet him than in previous years. Some were the familiar faces of his palace staff, but there were many strangers, too. By their dusty garments he could see they had traveled far to see him this day, and he gave them an extra word of greeting and a squeeze of the hand.

  By evening the line ahead seemed no shorter, and only the pleasure of it all kept him from tiring. Word of the event had spread throughout the kingdom, and an amazing thing was beginning to happen. Men and women who had never in their lives come to the Festival of Welcome began now to appear in the line. Some he even recognized as former enemies and he wondered what had brought them to pay tribute to him.

  When dawn came, the line at the palace gate was still nearly a mile long, and through his bleary old eyes Hapan began to suspect that some of the strangers were coming through twice. He considered calling a halt to the Festival of Welcome, but to do such a thing would only be a sign of weakness and age. He would last for a few more hours, till noon at least, and certainly by then all would have passed by him.

  But once again, as the line dwindled to only a dozen or so men, and King Hapan began to dream of sleep, others came from the countryside. Men and women working on the big synthetic farms put down their tools to join the line. Noon passed, and the heat of the day was upon his head.

  Hapan licked his parched lips and sent for wine. It refreshed him, and soon he returned to the touching of hands.

  * * * *

  On the morning of the third day he was barely able to stand, and still they came. He recognized more of his old enemies, and wondered why they had joined the line. He saw children from the space schools, and marveled at what brought them here. Toward nightfall he had a chair brought to the palace gate because he could no longer stand.

  Yet still they came.

  He was weaker on the fourth day, and now he knew with a certainty that he must call an end to this madness. Yet they came on, and he touched them all. Now even his own palace guards and household joined in the procession, lengthening it once again.

  On the fifth day, toward noon, he could no longer hold up his head. He slumped in the chair and would have slept, except for the persistence of those who touched his hand.

  Toward evening on the fifth day he opened his old eyes for the last time, and he saw before him the familiar face of the boy Serov, standing now at the head of the line.

  “When?” Hapan managed to ask. “When will this all end?”

  And the boy answered, “Never, my king. This line goes on forever, because it is made up not of your friends but of your enemies. This is the gift of love I promised you. Love from your enemies. A love to destroy you.”

  And the old king closed his eyes
forever, slumping lower in his chair, and the people praised the boy who had freed them.

  ABOUT “CENTAUR FIELDER FOR THE YANKEES”

  This final story in our section of STRANGE FUTURES is not so much science fiction as it is light fantasy, in which a creature from Greek mythology changes the face of Major League Baseball.

  First Publication—Mythical Beasties, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh; Signet, 1986.

  CENTAUR FIELDER FOR THE YANKEES

  Let me tell you, there was a time not so long ago when a centaur would have been kept in a zoo or a circus. He certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to play major league baseball. But times have changed, and we’re more tolerant of people who are different. I suppose that’s why Mark Eques ended up playing baseball for the New York Yankees.

  But I’d better tell it from the beginning.

  * * * *

  The idea of centaurs—creatures having the head, trunk, and arms of a man and the body and legs of a horse—had been around since Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Iliad. It was Lucretius who declared that the creature must be mythical because horses reach maturity before humans, and are full-grown at three years of age. The horse would die fifty years before the man. All this is true enough, but when Professor Hagger of Columbia University returned from the Greek Island of Antikythira with a young living centaur early in the 22nd century, a great many preconceptions changed.

  Like most everyone else in America, I’d equated centaurs with unicorns and other mythical beasts. Seeing one live on the evening news took some getting used to. Hagger christened the young creature Mark Eques, and set about educating him. It was quite a story for a month or two, during the slow news days of summer, but by fall Professor Hagger and his discovery had faded from view. Mark Eques was living on a farm in upstate New York, staying pretty much out of the public eye.

  A few years passed before we heard about him again, and this time it was an announcement by Professor Hagger that Mark was about to enter Columbia University, having passed the traditional college entrance examinations. He was even entitled to special consideration by the university, since the government had ruled that Mark was a handicapped human being and not any sort of monster.

  Mark found college to be difficult, and by the end of his first year it appeared he was ready to drop out. That was when Roscoe Greene, a scout for the New York Yankees baseball team, contacted Mark, and when I had my first meeting with the boy centaur.

  I was a sportswriter on a Boston paper at the time, and I became interested in Mark when he attempted to run in the Boston marathon. They couldn’t officially bar him from it, but they did the next best thing. They set up a special category for centaurs. Since he was the only known centaur on earth, he had no one to compete against but himself. There was no point in running at all, and on Patriots’ Day he didn’t even bother to appear.

  But baseball was a different story.

  Mark Eques had been ruled a handicapped person, and under federal regulations in those early years of the 22nd century, handicapped persons were allowed to play professional sports, so long as their handicap did not prevent them from performing their duties. I had to hand it to Roscoe Greene for coming up with that one.

  An old girlfriend in the Yankee front office tipped me off to what was happening, and I drove all night to reach the Dutchess County farm where Mark was living with Professor Hagger after he completed his first year at Columbia. It was horse country, with the roads bordered on either side by neat white fences that extended back over the rolling hills as far as the eye could see.

  As I pulled into the Hagger farm shortly after nine in the morning I saw that Roscoe Greene had arrived first. He stood at the fence speaking with Mark Eques. When he saw me he cursed, not too softly. “What in hell are you doing here, Danny? Go back to Boston where you belong!”

  “Hello, Roscoe. Glad to see you, too. Is it true the Yankees are about to sign Mark here to a position in center field?”

  Mark Eques, his hairy chest bare to the morning sun, grinned boyishly and pawed the grass with his front hoof. “I’m gonna play in the big leagues,” he announced proudly.

  “What does Hagger say about all this?” I wanted to know.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Greene answered smugly.

  Professor Hagger must have observed my arrival, because he came out of the farmhouse to join us. When Greene introduced me, he said, “So the press is onto this already! You don’t waste any time.”

  “Danny’s a go-getter,” Greene confirmed “One of these days he’ll cover a story before it happens.”

  “Has he ever played ball?” I asked the professor. “Is he any good at it?”

  “His family apparently played a version of baseball,” Hagger responded. “He remembers it as a child.”

  “I’m good,” Mark Eques answered for himself. “They wouldn’t let me run in the marathon, but they can’t stop me now.”

  “He has tremendous speed in the outfield,” Professor Hagger confirmed. “Virtually nothing gets by him. His base-running is superb, too. We’re still working on his hitting.”

  “What do you think, Roscoe?” I asked Greene.

  “I think he has unlimited potential. Young, clean-cut—people will flock to the games just to see him play.”

  “The other managers will never allow it,” I predicted.

  “We’ve already got the courts behind us. Let the other clubs go out and hire their own centaur.”

  * * * *

  Mine was the first exclusive interview with Mark Eques on his signing with the Yankees, and for a week or two it was quite a story. The other major league clubs grumbled, of course, until New York agreed to share with them the additional revenues Mark’s appearance was expected to generate. So, after a month of hoopla and further training, the centaur took the field for a July 4th doubleheader against the Boston Red Sox. I was there, of course, covering Boston on the road as I usually did, but so was just about every sportswriter in the country, along with all the TV and satellite people. It’s a wonder there was any space left in the Yankees’ new domed stadium for just plain fans.

  Mark Eques galloped onto the field wearing his Yankee shirt and the crowd went wild. He removed his hat while the National Anthem was played, and then continued on into center field. The first inning was a disappointment for the fans and television cameras, with not a single ball making it out of the infield. But in the top of the second Mark showed his stuff, charging across center field to nab a well-hit grounder and peg it to first base for the out. The crowd went wild for the second time.

  He could hit, too. He ended the day’s doubleheader with two doubles and a single, which wasn’t bad. The Yankees won the first game 5-3, and only dropped the nightcap 2-1 as a result of a ninth-inning Boston homer. Even a centaur in the outfield couldn’t protect against home runs.

  The following week’s games showed that his biggest strengths were in fielding and baserunning. Once he got the hang of it, Mark proved a whiz at stolen bases. The sight of him galloping into second at a full charge was enough to intimidate most any second baseman in the league. By the end of July, the Yankees had climbed into a tie with Boston for first place in the American League East.

  That was when I was approached by Lippy Lewis.

  Lippy was a gambler who specialized in sports betting of any kind. He’d bet big money on Boston as an early-season favorite to take both the pennant and the World Series, and he wasn’t about to lose it. “Tell me something, Danny,” he said one afternoon in August after the Yankees had extended a midseason winning streak to seven games. “Do you think that Eques guy could be bought off?”

  “Lippy, you always did have a big mouth,” I told him. “I guess that’s how you got your name. Do you want me to run what you just said in tomorrow’s edition? I could probably even g
et your picture in. What were you thinking of offering him—oats?”

  Lippy shrugged. “Money. Women. He must have some weakness.”

  “Stay away from him, Lippy, or I will print that.”

  “Hell, you’re a Boston guy! The Sox are your meal ticket, too.”

  “Mark Eques is my meal ticket this year. He’s the greatest thing that’s happened to baseball in two decades. Stay away from him, Lippy, or you’ll be in big trouble.”

  But I knew Lippy Lewis would do as he pleased, and I wasn’t surprised the following week to see him chatting with Mark after a game, standing by the horse trailer that Professor Hagger used to make the run to and from his farm. The trailer was even used for games on the road, though it had to be transported by air between distant cities. I stood off to one side, waiting until Lippy departed, and then strolled up to Mark.

  “Lippy’s got a bad reputation,” I said casually. “You shouldn’t be seen talking to him too much.”

  “That guy? He doesn’t bother me. He offered me money and girls to miss a few fly balls.” Mark seemed to find the idea amusing.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I had enough money. As for girls, it’s wrong to mate outside your species. Professor Hagger taught me that.”

  “But there are no female centaurs, are there?”

  “Oh sure,” he replied offhandedly. “They’re just shy, that’s all. They live in the caves and the mazes and no one ever sees them.”

  “I thought mazes were for Minotaurs.”

  Mark looked disgusted. “No one believes in them anymore.”

  * * * *

  Professor Hagger always attended the games, of course, transporting Mark back and forth in the trailer. I caught up with him at the next home appearance, with the Yankees now firmly in first place. “Has there been any more trouble with Lippy Lewis?” I asked.