Future Sports Page 9

  The anti-rejection drugs were abreacting with the free-g tranqs. He felt vast and vertiginous.

  India. The room was the same; the television he could not turn off was the same; the balconies with the nude sunbathing women were the same (except that here they were fat and brown rather than fat and pink); the palm-fringed ocean with its cargo of jet surfers and power skiers and body sailers was the same. But somewhere some geographical sense long abused by the mandatory uniformity of the world insisted this was India.

  And this was the Pan-Olympiad. The youth of all nations gathered together in the Great Fellowship of Sport under the Eternal Flame and the Six Rings (one for each continent and one extra for the new orbital settlements). With the inevitable exceptions; some of the companies locked in takeover and merger battles were not sending teams, and T.S.A. Lagrange were boycotting the games as protest against the Pan-Olympic Council ruling that their technique of temporarily suspending their athletes’ personalities through massive doses of PGCPE and ergominesterase and giving control of their bodies to the coaching computers was contrary to the Pan-Olympic tradition of sportsmanship.

  Hammadi could not pronounce her name in her native language, but she told him it meant Swallow. He translated that into his native language and she said she liked the sound of it very much. She had been assigned to him by the organizing committee as his liaison and guide through the planetary party that was the Pan-Olympiad. He was mistrustful at first that she was a spy for a rival corporation; performance data was a highly negotiable commodity. He had no illusions that his training schedule had not been prepared with the help of black data. Larsby assured him of his hostess’s impeccability.

  “It’s the Pan-Olympics, boy,” he said twelve times a day every day. “Only comes ’round every four years, enjoy it, make the most of it.” It was unnecessary for him to add that this might be Hammadi’s only chance to enjoy it; Hammadi understood how short an athlete’s professional life could be. In three years he expected to retire with at least one world record to a condominium on the coast and a life donating sperm to Toussaint Mantene’s genetic engineering program at a million a year. So when he came out from the closed training sessions, he was glad to let Swallow whirl him through the color and movement and gaudiness and loudness of the Pan-Olympic city. She was the perfect hostess; informative, spontaneous, with the intelligence to be a foil to Hammadi’s curiosity; witty, pretty (he could not deny that); fun to be with. She never made him feel like a street-racing boy from the global boondocks. The anticipation of her company after training put an extra sparkle in his performance; with his probability models improving every day, Larsby was happy to accede when Hammadi asked if Swallow might be permitted into the sessions. She sat with Larsby in his glass booth and watched Hammadi pit himself against holographic enemies.

  “You are so beautiful when you run,” she told him. “So alive, so you. You are like a big, graceful cat. Like a hunting cheetah.”

  Hammadi bowed his head and blushed as he had learned to do when he was a boy and his father praised him above his brothers. Within was a different heat altogether.

  She slipped her tongue into his mouth for the first time in Vidjaywada Shambalaya’s, immersed in ethnobeat and video shriek of interior bioscapes macroprojected from nanocameras circling the bloodstreams of the club resident drastique dancers. Further radical replacement surgery had left Hammadi fifty centimeters taller and forty wider than Swallow; pulling her to him to taste her again, he understood how easily he could have snapped her like the bird from which she had taken her name. The smell of her enveloped him, erased the din of the club.

  “You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?” she asked.

  He shook his head shyly.

  “This is your first time.”

  He nodded his head shyly.

  “Mine, too.”

  Larsby had a singular honor to bestow upon Hammadi. He was to carry the Company Banner in the Grand Parade of All Athletes. Swallow thought he looked most impressive in his specially designed team uniform in the Toussaint Mantene colors. Parading into the stadium at the head of Team Toussaint Mantene under the gaze of two hundred thousand spectators and fifty global sat-tel networks, he looked long at the place where she had told him she would be sitting.

  Later, she said she was so proud of him.

  He said it had been nothing. Duty to the Company.

  She said she thought he was beautiful.

  He said no, she was beautiful, beautiful Swallow.

  She said she had never felt about any other man the way she felt about him.

  He said he had never known a woman who could make him feel the way he did right now.

  She said did he want to make love to her?

  And his will said no, but his body said yes, yes.

  Of course, he came too early, before she even turned on. He was embarrassed, but she told him it was all right, everything was all right, it was just inexperience, this is new territory for them both, they would explore together, as a team. They made love again and this time it was a slow, attenuated coming together that had him roaring like a lion and whimpering like a dog and her growling guttural obscenities in the back of her throat. Afterward he told her he loved her, he loved her, he loved her, but she had fallen asleep like a small and graceful savannah cat. He woke her again with his penis to make love again. Outside in the submorning, blimps painted the clouds Day-Glo with holographic sponsorship messages and the never-ending world party coiled and uncoiled. The lights of the low orbitals, the new estate, rose to the ascendant and set.

  He was too excited to sleep afterward, though the two-hundred-meter heats were only two days away. He sat in a soliform chair and thought about Swallow and thought about God. Sexual impurity had been the most heinous of his mother’s library of sins. Yet what he had experienced had been so good and so holy that it could only have been a gift from God. Only when he had run himself into a state of sublime awareness had he ever experienced anything as divinely thrilling. He felt no guilt; two adult, responsible humans had been attracted to each other, as Allah had created them; had come together, as Allah had created them; had made love, as Allah had created them. He had enjoyed the creation of God. He had committed no sin. He had not dishonored God.

  He crossed to the bed to look at her in the nakedness of sleep. He stroked her back, her thighs, her breasts, ran his fingers through her hair. His fingers stopped on the ridge of bone just behind her left ear.

  Embossed in the flesh were three letters.

  T.M.®

  He knew those letters. He carried them himself, in the places where Toussaint Mantene had replaced his own bone and sinew with their diamond-fiber doped ceramoplastics.

  He booked a ticket on a Sänger on the apartment unit. Team Toussaint Mantene Security came bursting in through the door they had told Hammadi only he could open to see just what the hell their prospective Pan-Olympic star thought he was doing, but he had already slipped away from them through the corridors and arcades and never-ending planetary party. In the acceleration seat he thought about the prostitutes in the almost grand hotel. The smile subtler, the costume less provocative, the enhanced pheromones less insistent, the approach less blatant. That was all.

  He had told her that he loved her.

  Despite the g-shock tranqs, he still threw up. The hostess swiftly vacuumed up the floating globules of vomit before gravity returned.

  * * *

  He sat on the balcony and looked at the sea and waited for Larsby. He was not long coming. It gave Hammadi a dry satisfaction to see the bland carelessness discarded like the mask it was. He let the small man scream himself hoarse, then asked, “Who was she?”

  “Someone, anyone, no one, does it matter?”

  “It matters.”

  Larsby had been defeated the moment he had walked through the door.

  “Just a girl. From our Industrial Espionage Division. A Strength Through Joy girl. You would have recognized one of
our own, so we had to do a little camouflaging surgery to, ah, fit her to the role.”

  “Don’t blame her. It was you got careless.”

  Larsby grinned helplessly.

  “Tell me why,” Hammadi said.

  “Because you still didn’t believe in yourself. Because there was still an area in your life where you believed you were a failure.”

  “With women.”

  “It’s all there in your file. PsychCorps saw it the first day you walked in here. You have a massive self-confidence problem with women, you don’t believe you can be successful sexually. While that self-doubt remained, you could never have beaten Bradley Nullabiri. So we set you up with a woman who would be irresistibly attracted to you, go to bed with you, tell you she loved you so you would feel great enough about yourself—”

  “I know!” Hammadi shouted. Then, more gently, “I know . . .” He looked at Larsby. “Did she ever, do you know if, whether, she . . . felt anything?”

  “Would it make a difference?”

  “Not really.”

  “We needed you to beat Bradley Nullabiri.”

  “Winning is everything.”

  “Yes,” said Larsby.

  “You aren’t even sorry,” Hammadi said. “Well, it will just have to go down in history as one of the great unanswered questions in sport.” He handed Larsby an envelope.

  “You don’t want to do this, boy.”

  “Oh, yes I do.”

  On the television you couldn’t turn off, Bradley Nullabiri was running in the finals of the two hundred meters. He won. Hammadi did not feel a thing.

  With regret the Company accepted Hammadi’s resignation and took away his apartment with its view of the palms and the ocean and the naked sunbathing women. It suspended use of his plastique card and payment to his account and his parents’ trust fund. It stripped him of the pastel-and-black bodysuit in which he was to have beaten Bradley Nullabiri. It put him into surgery and took back the PCP pump in his brain stem. It removed the sensory amplifiers and implanted neurochips and the biotech interfacers. It took out the diffusers and the synaptic controllers and the bioassay monitors and the mastoid speaker and the subvocal mike and the parallel ports and the serial muscular triggers and the subdermal blood scrubbers and left him with himself. It took all this away because it was and always had been and always would be Company property, on loan to him under the terms of the sponsorship contract.

  That was what the man in the Nehru suit told him. The only thing the Company left him were the radical replacement ceramoplastic joints and shock absorbers. To have taken them away would have killed him. He stood two meters thirty in his skin, and the weight of his new mortality bore down in him. He felt like an angel cast out of heaven.

  The deductions the Company made from his account for the reclaimative surgery left him just enough for a Sänger flight home. The seatback flatscreen showed him the closing parade of All Athletes in the Great Fellowship of Sport in the silver stadium in Madras. Hammadi felt like he had died.

  His father would not speak to him. Disowned him, disinherited him, ignored him, treated him as worse than dead. His brothers wanted to sympathize but were kept from doing so by fear of their father’s wrath. His mother kept al-Bourhan from throwing Hammadi out of the house. She listened, long long hours in her mosque-kitchen as her son tried to explain why he had done what he had done. In the next room the television blared. His father’s silence blared louder.

  “I honored them, but they would not honor me,” he said. “They pretended they cared about me, that they respected me as a man, as a Muslim, but all they respected was winning, all they wanted was a piece of meat that could run around a track faster than the other pieces of meat. And to please them I compromised myself, little by little. I became what they wanted me to be, not what God wanted me to be.”

  “You did not compromise.” his mother said. “Not when it really mattered. In the end you honored God.”

  “And has God honored me?”

  Jobs were easy for anyone who had done time with the Companies, even a failed star. Hammadi settled quickly into his post at the tourist-bus company arranging transfers between airport and hotels for the people from Dahomey and Luzon and Costa Rica. His workmates soon learned not to question this overtall, gangling freak about his racing days.

  On his way home along the boulevards and palm-lined avenues he would be passed by street-racing boys, out practicing. He could not look at them. His eyes were like lead. When he came home in these moods, his mother would say, “God made you fast, God still makes you fast. He still delights to see you run. He is not interested in whether you win or not, just that you run for His pleasure.”

  It took many months for the truth of what she was saying to penetrate his sense of loss. But it was the truth, that in winning he lost, that in losing he won. God had made him not to win, or to lose, but to run. Now when he saw the street runners, he would watch them, carefully noting, analyzing, mentally commenting, correcting, coaching. One night he found his old, old bodysuit draped on the bed. Mother’s intuition. He stroked the silky stretch fabric, rubbed it against his cheek. He smiled at how ludicrously outmoded it was. In the privacy of his room he stripped, slipped it on.

  It was nothing like a real bodysuit, of course, and it clung oddly around his massively reengineered frame, but it felt right. That night he found his way through the wire mesh onto the private pail of the beach and began to run, slowly at first, but with gathering strength and speed, along the white crescent of sand, for the glory and delight of Allah.

  * * *

  It is nearly over now; the white crescent of sand is dwindling away between sea and stone to a horn, a sliver, to nothing. He has left the people far behind, their cities, their hotels and beach clubs and condominiums, their farms and Squattertowns and satellite dishes and sardine boats. He is among the eternal things; sea, sand, stone, sky, stars; unchanging things. God-like things. At the end where the beach peters out into jumbled rocks, he will stop, and then turn and jog slowly back beneath the moon and orbiting factories to the hole in the wire where he has left his track-suit. But only at the end. Not before. He will run the race, he will go the distance. He glances at the fluorescent timer patch on the sleeve of his bodysuit. Not bad. Not what he would have hoped for once. But not bad.

  He is close now. The sand is running out beneath his feet, into the sea. He is tired, but it is a good tiredness. He is panting, but he still smiles. He is here. The end. The race is over. He stops, rests his hands on thighs, bends over, breath steaming in the cool air. He looks around him at the white crescent of sand, at the white crescent moon, at the sea, at the lights of the tourist hotels and the condominiums, almost all gone out now, at the eternal glow of the city.

  And he leaps into the air. Arms spread, fists raised to heaven. A leap of triumph, a leap of joy. The leap of a man who knows that God has taken pleasure in seeing him run, for Him, just for Him, under the stars and the moon, along the deserted beach. The leap of a man who has won.

  THE DEAD

  Michael Swanwick

  Professional boxing has long been criticized for its corruption and soulless brutality, but as this mordant little look into the future of the sport demonstrates, hold on to your hats, because you ain’t seen nothing yet . . .

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the twenty-one years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide, won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” In the past two years he’s won back-to-back Hugo Awards—he won the Hugo in 1999 for his story “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” and follo
wed it up last year with another Hugo Award for his story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.” His other books include his first novel, In the Drift, which was published in 1985, a novella-length book, Griffin’s Egg; 1987’s popular novel Vacuum Flowers; and a critically acclaimed fantasy novel, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (a rare distinction!). His most recent novel was Jack Faust, a sly reworking of the Faust legend that explores the unexpected impact of technology on society. Coming up is a new novel featuring time travelers and hungry dinosaurs, Bones of the Earth. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, and in a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers, Slow Dancing through Time. He’s also published a collection of critical articles, The Postmodern Archipelago. His most recent books are three new collections, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, and Tales of Old Earth. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their son, Sean. He has a website at www.michaelswanwick.com/.

  * * *

  Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bussed our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless; their hands and faces so white as to be faintly luminous in the hushed light. I thought it in bad taste, but “This is Manhattan,” Courtney said. “A certain studied offensiveness is fashionable here.”

  The blond brought menus and waited for our order.

  We both ordered pheasant. “An excellent choice,” the boy said in a clear, emotionless voice. He went away and came back a minute later with the freshly strangled birds, holding them up for our approval. He couldn’t have been more than eleven when he died and his skin was of that sort connoisseurs call “milk-glass,” smooth, without blemish, and all but translucent. He must have cost a fortune.

  As the boy was turning away, I impulsively touched his shoulder. He turned back. “What’s your name, son?” I asked.