Future Sports Read online

  Table of Contents

  PREFACE

  THE WIND FROM THE SUN

  ARTHUR STERNBACH BRINGS THE CURVEBALL TO MARS

  MAN-MOUNTAIN GENTIAN

  WINNING

  THE DEAD

  GAME OF THE CENTURY

  STREAK

  THE HOLY STOMPER VS. THE ALIEN BARREL OF DEATH

  STROBOSCOPIC

  VANILLA DUNK

  FUTURE SPORTS

  Edited by

  Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-144-3

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: July 2002

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

  UNICORNS!

  MAGICATS!

  BESTIARY!

  MERMAIDS!

  SORCERERS!

  DEMONS!

  DOGTALES!

  SEASERPENTS!

  DINOSAURS!

  LITTLE PEOPLE!

  MAGICATS II

  UNICORNS II

  DRAGONS!

  INVADERS!

  HORSES!

  ANGELS!

  HACKERS

  TIMEGATES

  CLONES

  IMMORTALS

  NANOTECH

  FUTURE WAR

  SPACE SOLDIERS

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  “The Wind from the Sun,” by Arthur C. Clarke. Copyright © 1963 by Arthur C. Clarke. First appeared in Boys’ Life, March 1964, under the title “Sunjammer.” Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, the Scovil Chichak Galen Agency.

  “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Copyright © 1999 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Man-Mountain Gentian,” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 1983 by Omni Publications International Ltd. First published in Omni, September 1983. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Winning,” by Ian McDonald. Copyright © 1989 by Sphere Books Ltd. First published in Zenith 2 (Sphere). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Dead,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 2000 by Michael Swanwick. First published in Starlight (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Game of the Century,” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1999 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Streak,” by Andrew Weiner. Copyright© 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Holy Stomper vs. the Alien Barrel of Death,” by R. Neube. Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Stroboscopic,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 1998 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, August 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Vanilla Dunk,” by Jonathan Lethem. Copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  PREFACE

  Sports of one sort or another go back into distant prehistory, and have probably been around ever since something at least vaguely recognizable as a human being came down from the trees to walk on the open savanna (and perhaps before! Jump-tag from branch to branch was probably a favorite sport for our chittering insectivore ancestors). Certainly games resembling checkers or chess go back into ancient Egypt and Sumer, and there’s evidence for dice games stretching back into the Neolithic—and, although they leave fewer traces for archaeologists to dig up, I’m willing to bet that chase-and-fight games reminiscent of soccer or football have a heritage going back into the Ice Age as well, wherever there was an open field, good summer weather, and some restless hormone-drenched young hunters with time on their hands.

  And probably sports will remain an important part of human existence for hundreds or even thousands of years to come. As long as we remain recognizably human, as we understand the term (brains floating in vats or disembodied computer-simulations made of data and pixels are probably not going to want to go out in the backyard and kick a ball around), sports will be part of our lives—whether they’re high-tech variants of the familiar sports we see today on television, or yet-to-be-invented sports suited for life in space, or in zero-gee environments, or on other worlds.

  So open up the pages of this book and let some of science fiction’s most expert dreamers take you into the sporting worlds of the future, where you will find baseball being played on the low-gravity diamonds of Mars, football players genetically engineered for superhuman speed and strength, basketball players who download their playing skills from computer chips, Sumo wrestlers who clash minds instead of bodies, cyborg zombie boxers of immense stamina and strength, tests of strength and skill that pit humans against aliens, spaceship races across a course as big as the solar system, gameworlds created by science where the stake is life itself . . .

  No matter how much the details change, though, with sports, even future sports, one thing will always remain the same: There will be winners. And losers. And those who are willing to risk it all for a chance to be better than anyone else can be . . .

  Enjoy.

  THE WIND FROM THE SUN

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most famous modern science-fiction writer in the world, seriously rivaled for that title only by the late Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke is probably most widely known for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but is also renowned as a novelist, short-story writer, and as a writer of nonfiction, usually on technological subjects such as spaceflight. He has won three Nebula Awards, three Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Grandmaster Nebula for Life Achievement. His best-known books include the novels Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, Rendezvous with Rama, A Fall of Moondust, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, Songs of Distant Earth, and The Fountains of Paradise; and the collections The Nine Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, and The Sentinel. He has also written many nonfiction books on scientific topics, the best known of which are probably Profiles of the Future and The Wind from the Sun, and is generally considered to be the man who first came up with the idea of the communications satellite. His most recent books are the novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, the nonfiction collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds: Collected Works 1944-1998, the fiction collection Collected Short Stories, and a novel written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Light of Other Days. Most of Clarke’s best-known books will be coming back into print, appropriately enough, in 2001. Born in Somerset, England, Clarke now lives in Sri Lanka, and was recently knighted.

  Here, in one of the best known of all Future Sports stories, he gives the ancient sport of sailboat racing a whole new dimension . . .

  * * *

  The enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds. In three minutes the race would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at peace, than at any time for the past year. Whatever happened when th
e Commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. After a lifetime spent designing ships for others, now he would sail his own.

  “T minus two minutes,” said the cabin radio. “Please confirm your readiness.”

  One by one, the other skippers answered. Merton recognized all the voices—some tense, some calm—for they were the voices of his friends and rivals. On the four inhabited worlds, there were scarcely twenty men who could sail a sun yacht; and they were all there, on the starting line or aboard the escort vessels, orbiting twenty-two thousand miles above the equator.

  “Number One—Gossamer—ready to go.”

  “Number Two—Santa Maria—all O.K.”

  “Number Three—Sunbeam—O.K.”

  “Number Four—Woomera—all systems GO.”

  Merton smiled at that last echo from the early, primitive days of astronautics. But it had become part of the tradition of space; and there were times when a man needed to evoke the shades of those who had gone before him to the stars.

  “Number Five—Lebedev—we’re ready.”

  “Number Six—Arachne—O.K.”

  Now it was his turn, at the end of the line; strange to think that the words he was speaking in this tiny cabin were being heard by at least five billion people.

  “Number Seven—Diana—ready to start.”

  “One through Seven acknowledged,” answered that impersonal voice from the judge’s launch. “Now T minus one minute.”

  Merton scarcely heard it. For the last time, he was checking the tension in the rigging. The needles of all the dynamometers were steady; the immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the sun.

  To Merton, floating weightless at the periscope, it seemed to fill the sky. As well it might—for out there were fifty million square feet of sail, linked to his capsule by almost a hundred miles of rigging. All the canvas of all the tea clippers that had once raced like clouds across the China seas, sewn into one gigantic sheet, could not match the single sail that Diana had spread beneath the sun. Yet it was little more substantial than a soap bubble; that two square miles of aluminized plastic were only a few millionths of an inch thick.

  “T minus ten seconds. All recording cameras ON.”

  Something so huge, yet so frail, was hard for the mind to grasp. And it was harder still to realize that this fragile mirror could tow him free of Earth merely by the power of the sunlight it would trap.

  “. . . five, four, three, two, one, CUT!”

  Seven knife blades sliced through seven thin lines tethering the yachts to the mother ships that had assembled and serviced them. Until this moment, all had been circling Earth together in a rigidly held formation, but now the yachts would begin to disperse, like dandelion seeds drifting before the breeze. And the winner would be the one that first drifted past the Moon.

  Aboard Diana, nothing seemed to be happening. But Merton knew better. Though his body could feel no thrust, the instrument board told him that he was now accelerating at almost one thousandth of a gravity. For a rocket, that figure would have been ludicrous—but this was the first time any solar yacht had ever attained it. Diana’s design was sound; the vast sail was living up to his calculations. At this rate, two circuits of the Earth would build up his speed to escape velocity, and then he could head out for the Moon, with the full force of the Sun behind him.

  The full force of the Sun . . . He smiled wryly, remembering all his attempts to explain solar sailing to those lecture audiences back on Earth. That had been the only way he could raise money, in those early days. He might be Chief Designer of Cosmodyne Corporation, with a whole string of successful spaceships to his credit, but his firm had not been exactly enthusiastic about his hobby.

  “Hold your hands out to the Sun,” he’d said. “What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there’s pressure as well—though you’ve never noticed it, because it’s so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it comes to only about a millionth of an ounce.

  “But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important, for it’s acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it’s free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it. We can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the Sun.”

  At that point, he would pull out a few square yards of sail material and toss it toward the audience. The silvery film would coil and twist like smoke, then drift slowly to the ceiling in the hot-air currents.

  “You can see how light it is,” he’d continue. “A square mile weighs only a ton, and can collect five pounds of radiation pressure. So it will start moving—and we can let it tow us along, if we attach rigging to it.

  “Of course, its acceleration will be tiny—about a thousandth of a g. That doesn’t seem much, but let’s see what it means.

  “It means that in the first second, we’ll move about a fifth of an inch. I suppose a healthy snail could do better than that. But after a minute, we’ve covered sixty feet, and will be doing just over a mile an hour. That’s not bad, for something driven by pure sunlight! After an hour, we’re forty miles from our starting point, and will be moving at eighty miles an hour. Please remember that in space there’s no friction; so once you start anything moving, it will keep going forever. You’ll be surprised when I tell you what our thousandth-of-a-g sailboat will be doing at the end of a day’s run: almost two thousand miles an hour! If it starts from orbit—as it has to, of course—it can reach escape velocity in a couple of days. And all without burning a single drop of fuel!”

  Well, he’d convinced them, and in the end he’d even convinced Cosmodyne. Over the last twenty years, a new sport had come into being. It had been called the sport of billionaires, and that was true. But it was beginning to pay for itself in terms of publicity and TV coverage. The prestige of four continents and two worlds was riding on this race, and it had the biggest audience in history.

  Diana had made a good start; time to take a look at the opposition. Moving very gently—though there were shock absorbers between the control capsule and the delicate rigging, he was determined to run no risks—Merton stationed himself at the periscope.

  There they were, looking like strange silver flowers planted in the dark fields of space. The nearest, South America’s Santa Maria, was only fifty miles away; it bore a close resemblance to a boy’s kite, but a kite more than a mile on a side. Farther away, the University of Astrograd’s Lebedev looked like a Maltese cross; the sails that formed the four arms could apparently be tilted for steering purposes. In contrast, the Federation of Australasia’s Woomera was a simple parachute, four miles in circumference. General Spacecraft’s Arachne, as its name suggested, looked like a spiderweb, and had been built on the same principles, by robot shuttles spiraling out from a central point. Eurospace Corporation’s Gossamer was an identical design, on a slightly smaller scale. And the Republic of Mars’s Sunbeam was a flat ring, with a half-mile-wide hole in the center, spinning slowly, so that centrifugal force gave it stiffness. That was an old idea, but no one had ever made it work; and Merton was fairly sure that the colonials would be in trouble when they started to turn.

  That would not be for another six hours, when the yachts had moved along the first quarter of their slow and stately twenty-four-hour orbit. Here at the beginning of the race, they were all heading directly away from the Sun—running, as it were, before the solar wind. One had to make the most of this lap, before the boats swung around to the other side of Earth and then started to head back into the Sun.

  Time, Merton told himself, for the first check, while he had no navigational worries. With the periscope, he made a careful examination of the sail, concentrating on the points where the rigging was attached to it. The shroud lines—narrow bands of unsilvered plastic film—would have been completely invisible had they not been coated with fluorescent paint. Now they were taut lines of colored light, dwindling away for hundreds of yards toward that gigan
tic sail. Each had its own electric windlass, not much bigger than a game fisherman’s reel. The little windlasses were continually turning, playing lines in or out as the autopilot kept the sail trimmed at the correct angle to the Sun.

  The play of sunlight on the great flexible mirror was beautiful to watch. The sail was undulating in slow, stately oscillations, sending multiple images of the Sun marching across it, until they faded away at its edges. Such leisurely vibrations were to be expected in this vast and flimsy structure. They were usually quite harmless, but Merton watched them carefully. Sometimes they could build up to the catastrophic undulations known as the “wriggles,” which could tear a sail to pieces.

  When he was satisfied that everything was shipshape, he swept the periscope around the sky, rechecking the positions of his rivals. It was as he had hoped: the weeding-out process had begun as the less efficient boats fell astern. But the real test would come when they passed into the shadow of Earth. Then, maneuverability would count as much as speed.

  It seemed a strange thing to do, what with the race having just started, but he thought it might be a good idea to get some sleep. The two-man crews on the other boats could take it in turns, but Merton had no one to relieve him. He must rely on his own physical resources, like that other solitary seaman, Joshua Slocum, in his tiny Spray. The American skipper had sailed Spray single-handed around the world; he could never have dreamed that, two centuries later, a man would be sailing single-handed from Earth to Moon—inspired, at least partly, by his example.