Future Games: Anthology Part 13

If you've ever been a fan of Cleveland teams-the Indians, the Browns, the Cavs-this story is a great comfort as it explains so many things. It also may account for otherwise normal people owning seventy-three-inch flat-screen TVs and the invention of smartphones. One cannot help but feel, however, that the arcane initiation rite referred to herein has expanded to include at least some women and now exempts some men . . .

The Fate of Nations.

James Morrow.

Pus.h.i.+ng aside the knotted pairs of running socks, I lift the journal from my dresser drawer. I unfasten the delicate lock, turn to a fresh page, and ready my ballpoint pen. Click.

Dear Diary, let me say at the outset that I once counted myself among the luckiest of women. Dennis had a lucrative job as a software engineer at Micromega. Our daughter, Angela, loved school and always brought home top grades. Thanks to the salt.w.a.ter fish fad, my little pet shop-Carlotta's Critturs in Copley Square-was turning a tidy profit.

The first signs of trouble were subtle. I'm thinking especially of Dennis's decision to become a Boston Bruins fan and a Philadelphia Flyers fan simultaneously, an allegiance that served no evident purpose beyond allowing him to watch twice as much hockey as before. I also recall his insistence on replacing our coffee cups and drink tumblers with ceramic mugs bearing the New England Patriots logo. Then there was Dennis's baseball-card collection, featuring the 1986 Red Sox starting lineup. Wasn't that a hobby more suited to a ten-year-old?

It soon became clear that Dennis was battling a full-blown addiction. The instant he got home from work, he plunked himself in front of the tube and started watching ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPN3. Dozens of teams enlisted his loyalty, not merely the Boston franchises. He followed the NFL, the NHL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball. Our erotic encounters were short and perfunctory, bounded by the seventh inning stretch. Whenever we went on vacation, Dennis brought his portable Sony along. Our trips to Martha's Vineyard were keyed to the All-Star Game. Our winter sojourns in Florida centered around the Stanley Cup.

"What do you get out of it?" I asked. The edge in my voice could nick a hockey puck.

"A great deal," he replied.

"What does it matter?" I wailed.

"I can't explain."

After much pleading, hectoring, and finagling, I convinced Dennis that we needed a marriage counselor. He insisted that we employ Dr. Robert Lezzer in Framingham. I acquiesced. A male therapist was better than none.

The instant I entered Dr. Lezzer's presence, I began feeling better. He was a small, perky, beaming gnome in a white cotton s.h.i.+rt and a red bow-tie. He said to call him Bob.

It took me half an hour to make my case. The lonely dinners. The one-way conversations. The chronic vacancy in our bed. As far as I was concerned, ESPN stood for Expect s.e.x Practically Never.

No sooner had I offered my story than Dennis and Bob traded significant glances, exchanged semantically freighted winks, and favored each other with identical nods.

"Should I tell her?" asked Dennis.

"Depends on whether you trust her," Bob replied.

"I do."

"Then let her in. It's the only way to save your marriage."

Dennis bent back his left ear to reveal a miniscule radio receiver, no bigger than a pinhead, embedded in the fleshy lobe. The implantation had occurred on his eighteenth birthday, he explained, as part of an arcane initiation rite. Every adult male in North America had one.

"Throughout the long history of Western civilization," said Dennis, "no secret has been better kept."

"But what is it for?" I asked.

"If he gave you the short answer, you wouldn't believe him," said Bob, bending close so I could see his transceiver.

"Luckily, we're only four hours from New York City," said Dennis, stroking me affectionately on the knee.

Bob recommended that we leave as soon as possible. We arranged for Angela to spend the night at a friend's house, then took off at two o'clock. By dinnertime we were zooming south down the West Side Highway, heading toward the heart of Manhattan.

We left our Volvo in the Park & Lock on 42nd Street near Tenth Avenue, hiked four blocks east, and entered the subway system. Although I'd often walked through the Times Square station during my undergraduate days at NYU, this was the first time I'd noticed a narrow steel door beside the stairwell leading to the N and R trains. Dennis retrieved his wallet, pulled out a black plastic card, and swiped it though a nearby magnetic reader, thereby causing the portal to open. An elevator car awaited us. We entered. The car descended for a full five minutes, carrying us a thousand feet into the bedrock.

Disembarking, we entered a small foyer decorated with two dozen full-figure portraits of men dressed in baseball uniforms. I recognized Ty Cobb and Pete Rose. Dennis guided me into an immense steel cavern dominated by a sparkling three-dimensional map that, according to the caption, depicted our spiral arm of the Milky Way. Five thousand tiny red lights pulsed amid the flas.h.i.+ng white stars. Five thousand planets boasting intelligent life, Dennis explained. Five thousand advanced civilizations.

So: we were not alone in the galaxy-nor were we alone in the cavern. A dozen men wearing lime-green jumpsuits and walkie-talkie headsets paced in nervous circles before the great map, evidently receiving information from distant locales and relaying it to a hidden but eager audience.

I must admit, dear Diary, I'd never been more confused in my life.

Four other couples occupied the cavern. Each wife wore an expression identical to my own: exasperation leavened by perplexity. The husbands' faces all betrayed a peculiar mixture of fearfulness and relief.

"The Milky Way is a strange place," said Dennis. "Stranger than any of us can imagine. Some of its underlying laws may remain forevermore obscure."

"It's chilly down here," I said, rubbing each shoulder with the opposite hand.

"For reasons that scientists are just beginning to fathom," Dennis continued, "political events on these five thousand worlds are intimately connected to particular athletic contests on Earth. Before each such game, these dispatchers in the jumpsuits switch on their mikes and inform us exactly what's at stake."

"I don't understand."

"Women have difficulty with this. Bear with me. Here's how the universe works. Because the Dallas Cowboys won Super Bowl XII, the slave trade on 16 Cygni Beta ended after ten centuries of misery and oppression. By contrast, it's unfortunate that the Saint Louis Cardinals took home the National League Pennant in 1987, for this sparked the revocation of the h.o.m.os.e.xual Toleration Act on 70 Virginis Kappa. Physicists call it PROSPOCAP-the Professional Sports Causality Principle. With me, darling?"

"I guess." I was so flabbergasted that my breath came only with great effort, although the cavern's poor ventilation was also to blame.

"Thanks to PROSPOCAP, we know that the advent of women's suffrage on 14 Herculis Gamma traced directly to the Oakland Raiders' emergence as the AFC Wild Card Team in 1980. We also realize that the end of theocratic dictators.h.i.+p throughout 79 Ceti Delta followed directly upon the New York Yankees' trouncing of the Atlanta Braves in the 1999 World Series. On a darker note, the most devastating nuclear war ever to occur on Gliese 86 Omicron had its roots in the Boston Celtics' domination of the 1963 NBA Playoffs, Eastern Conference."

I decided to ask the obvious question. "How could a sports fan possibly cheer for his home team knowing that victory means nuclear war on another planet?"

"A fan learns the implication of any given win or loss only ex post facto. Until the moment of revelation, it makes sense to a.s.sume that your team is on the side of the angels. After all, even the most morally reprehensible outcome is preferable to oblivion."

"Oblivion?"

"The instant any team's supporters stop caring sufficiently, all the creatures on the affected planet become comatose."

I looked into Dennis's eyes. For the first time in our marriage, I understood my husband. "You care, don't you, darling? You really care."

"I really care."

"If only I'd known-I never would've hara.s.sed you for watching the Pro Bowl on my birthday. Do you forgive me?"

"Yes, Carlotta, I forgive you."

"Comatose? All of them?"

"Comatose. All of them. Death by dehydration follows in a matter of days."

Dennis went on to disclose an equally well-established fact. When it came to awareness of PROSPOCAP, a radical numerical disparity between males and females was an ontological necessity. Should the ratio ever exceed one knowledgeable woman for every two hundred knowledgeable men, the entire galaxy would implode, sucking all sentient lifeforms into the resultant maelstrom.

So you see why I picked up my pen today, dear Diary. I simply had to tell someone about this vast, astonis.h.i.+ng, and apparently benign conspiracy.

Earlier tonight Dennis and I watched the Denver Broncos face the San Diego Chargers on Monday Night Football. The Broncos won, 21 to 14. As a result, an airplane manufacturer on Epsilon Eridani Prime managed to recall four hundred defective jetliners before any fatal crashes occurred.

"I'm curious about something," I told Dennis as we trod the stairs to our bedroom. "Do they have athletic events on other planets?"

"Ball sports are a constant throughout the galaxy."

"And do these sports also have . . . consequences?"

"In Terran Year 1863 CE, the Pegasi Secundus Juggernauts beat the Tau Bootes Berserkers in the Pangalactic Plasmac.o.c.k Playoffs. A few hours later, three generals named Heth, Pender, and Pickett led the disastrous Confederate charge at Gettysburg."

"I see."

"In the subsequent century, the Iota Horologii Leviathans scored an upset over the Rho Cancri Demons in the Third Annual Ursa Majoris Lava Hockey Tournament, whereupon Communism began its rapid collapse in Eastern Europe. Need I go on?"

"No, my sweet. You needn't."

As Dennis said when he first showed me the great map beneath Manhattan, the Milky Way is a strange place-stranger than any of us can imagine. But I am obligated to keep my awareness of PROSPOCAP a secret, lest the galaxy evaporate.

Next Monday evening the Patriots will play the Pittsburgh Steelers. I'll be there, oh yes, cheering my team on. You see, dear Diary, I've finally learned to care.

According to Robert W. Henderson, the origins of ball games date back to religious rites in ancient Egypt, where the ball represented a fertility symbol and opposing teams' mock combat symbolized the fight between good and evil. As a character in "Unsportsmanlike Conduct" puts it, only one animal-the human-organizes play-fighting into complex contests of skill. The conflict in sport, the victory and vanquishment, is carefully hidden under dozens of rules and accommodations. But when humans on an alien planet discover the indigenous beings want to play "their" sport, an extremely interesting series of events follow.

Unsportsmanlike Conduct.

Scott Westerfeld.

Part One.

There's a lot you can fit into a 851-gram teleport.

Lean beef is about two-thirds water, so more than two-and-a-half kilos of ground chuck can be reconst.i.tuted from a transport that size. Enough for twenty-nine decent hamburgers, one for every human being on the planet. For fixings we had lettuce and plenty of soybread, and our tomatoes were bigger than golf b.a.l.l.s that second year on Tau.

Alternatively, each member of the colony could have received a seven-page letter. Not text or camfeeds, but actual pieces of paper touched by our loved ones, marked with tactile incisions of the pen. (And try spraying perfume on a textfile.) With 851 grams of hops pellets, we could have produced about 2,000 liters of homebrew. We had our own sugar and malt, but they'd never given us seed crop for hops, to make sure we couldn't drink more beer than Houston decreed.

Or, for a truly exotic experience, three medium-sized oranges would have ma.s.sed about the same. Not dehydrated, pre-juiced, or even peeled. Just the real things smelling of an earthly summer's hard sunlight. We had a tiny anti-scurvy orchard, of course. But our stars.h.i.+p had brought only fast-growing limes, our oldest trees four feet tall and delivering a small, bitter fruit.

None of these items were in the transport, however. We had voted. With one annoyed abstention, the choice had been made.

The tube glowed, scattering its weird light through the shed. The familiar room turned eerie around us, bent like the colors of an Oklahoma landscape just before a tornado folds into shape overhead. Seven light-years away in the packed suburbs of Houston, lights dimmed and air-conditioning faltered as a grid serving fourteen million was poached. This torrent of power crowded its way into some unthinkably long and narrow channel of the quantum that led to us, 851 grams of matter riding the wave.

When the tube light faded, we all stood blinking.

I popped the clean-seal, which hissed at me as vacuum equalized, but waited a moment before opening it. My instincts insisted that the transport would still be hot to the touch inside, however ridiculous that notion was. And worse, if the squirt had blown, we'd all wasted weeks of ma.s.s allowance on a pile of splinters.

But the transport had come in clean. I lifted it up for Alex and Yos.h.i.+ to admire.

"Beautiful," Yos.h.i.+ said.

"Much better than my old one." Alex was right. The thirty-ounce Louisville Slugger felt much sweeter than our broken bat. The long, wide grain of the wood showed the considerable age of the ash tree from which it had been hewn. The finish lent it an emerald gleam in the antiseptic lights of the clean shed, and it hefted like a feather in my hand.

Of course, our pals back on Earth wouldn't have sent us anything but the best. The price of a solid-gold bat wouldn't approach the energy costs of a 851-gram transport.

Still, this Slugger was a beauty.

Yos.h.i.+ took it gingerly from my hands, a look of relief on his face. It had been his wild swing that had cracked the first one two weeks before, reducing it to the two most expensive pieces of firewood in human history, leaving us without the game.

Alex patted him on the shoulder, all forgiven now. The old bat, nine gloves, and six baseb.a.l.l.s had comprised her entire personal ma.s.s allowance on the stars.h.i.+p out, and had proven the most popular contribution to the public good. (With the possible exception of Iain Claymore's micro-still.) Alex took the bat from Yos.h.i.+, stepped back, and took a practice swing. She grinned like a kid on her birthday.

"Let's play some ball."

Half an hour later, we had two teams out on the field.

Our baseball field was a medium-age impact crater full of sheetgra.s.s, basically flat if you ignored the low, concentric ripples emanating from the natural pitcher's mound in its exact center. The home-run "fence" was a ring of chalky two-meter cliffs at the crater's edge, reachable even by amateurs like us thanks to Tau's nine-five gravity. The sheetgra.s.s surface was impeccable, tractable, soft in a fall, quick-drying after the heavy Coriolis rains which swept across us every afternoon; the best of astroturf and earthly gra.s.s combined.

Of course, sheetgra.s.s wasn't gra.s.s in any botanical sense, but a genetically identical colony of cilia that acted as water filtration system for the composite organism that filled the crater. In a way, we owed our presence here on Tau to the rain-catch organisms. They accounted for most of the bioma.s.s of the planet, and thus most of the rich oil field below our feet had once been sheetgra.s.s or some ancient relative.

It had been two weeks (six Tau-day microlunar months, actually, a bit over a hundred hours each) since Yos.h.i.+'s swing had snapped our old bat and brought baseball on the planet to a halt. It hadn't taken much arm-twisting to get two enthusiastic teams of nine onto the field. We even had a few human spectators in addition to the usual audience of Taus.

"Looks like pretty good attendance today, Doctor."

"I count sixty-seven." Dr. Helene Chirac lifted her tablet and peered at the screen. "That beats the previous record by five."

"Think they missed it, Doc?"

"It seems likely they noticed our absence on the field."

As always, Dr. Chirac was our umpire. (With seventeen PhDs and three MDs between us, that t.i.tle was usually ignored, but something about the gray-haired, imperiously formal Dr. Chirac made it unavoidable.) As head of the xeno team, she had attended every game since the Taus had started watching, hoping that her elusive linguistic breakthrough might be found here on the field.

Other than becoming baseball fans, the Taus didn't have much to do with us. No Tau had ever set foot on the land we'd developed, steering well clear of the camp, solar array, drill site, and farmland. Whether it was out of respect for our claims or fear of contagion, we didn't know. Like good spectators, they stayed at the edge of the baseball field. And when the odd home run came their way, they always scattered to let one of us retrieve the ball.

The rest of the xeno team were biologists and could work with other life-forms or long-distance observations. But Dr. Chirac, a linguist, needed face-to-face contact with the dominant species. Umping baseball was as close as she got.

Our Tau fans were definitely learning the game. They knew when to cheer now. They showed no favoritism, making their characteristic stuck-pig squeals on tough catches as well as long drives, and a few were clapping as my team took the field for the top of the first inning. They were finally starting to get some sound out of those big, soft hands. I waved to them as I took the mound.