Future Games: Anthology Part 22

"Right, I hear you, coach," said Zajac. He saw on his faceplate the rapid movement of the Stinger wings heading out from their starting position. They were going to flank the Condors' front line, gambling, banking that their center would come up with the puck and then they'd be past the Condors' first line of defense without a struggle. Of course, if Gill reached the puck first the Stingers would be in bad shape. "Pete," called Zajac to his other wing, "what do you want to do?"

"What's it look like, Maxie?" asked Soniat.

"Too soon," said Gill, huffing a little as he sprinted toward the center line.

"Maxie has it," said the coach calmly. "The projection is that he'll reach the puck forty-four seconds before their boy."

"We'll be through them," said Soniat.

"Sixteen strong side," said the coach, calling the play.

"Okay," said Soniat.

"Right," said Gill.

"Did you hear that?" asked Zajac. The two defens.e.m.e.n behind him answered that they did.

"That's a.s.suming Maxie doesn't fall on his face getting there," said Moro from his lonely goalie post.

"Uh," snorted Gill.

The two wingers, Zajac and Soniat, were converging on center ice. When the three Condor players got sufficiently close together, they would appear as one large blue blur on the faceplates of the Stingers. The puck would be a muted glow submerged beneath them. One of the Condors would carry the puck toward the Stinger goal and the others would swing away, but it would be a moment before the dots on the faceplate maps would separate enough for the Stingers' defens.e.m.e.n to know who had the puck and in what direction he was going. Those seconds would mean a considerable head start. Under normal circ.u.mstances it would be almost impossible for the Stingers to chase down the puck carrier. Only superb play and a good deal of luck would save them. The Condors would converge again in the area of the goal, so the Stinger goalie would not have advance warning of where the puck was coming from. He would see three streaking Condor skaters, and have no notion which man would be the attacker. They would come at him from straight on and from oblique angles to the right and left, and he would be helpless until the final instant of the approach. Then everyone watching the game would learn what the poor man's reactions were like.

Soniat would take the puck off to the left, crossing the routes of Gill and Zajac. The three would weave their way down the ice, skating apart as far as an eighth of a mile and then returning, pa.s.sing the puck to each other whenever one of the Stinger defens.e.m.e.n seemed to a.n.a.lyze the pattern too well.

The play was a good one. The trouble was that it just never got off the ground.

"d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l," muttered Gill in Zajac's ear.

"What's wrong?" asked the coach.

"The d.a.m.n puck isn't here."

"Oh boy," murmured Seidl, "he missed it."

"I was off by less than a hundred yards," said Gill. "Get moving, Maxie!"

"Too late, he's got it," said Gill. "Look out, here he comes."

"We see him," said Zajac. Because he and Soniat had been closing in, they weren't far from the Stinger center's path. Gill hooked around in vain pursuit, but Zajac closed in on an angle that would intercept the puck carrier before either of the Rome IV wingers could arrive to help out.

"Take it away, take it away," called Moro. Calling out encouragement was about all he had to do at this stage of the game.

"I'll get the son of a buck," said Gill. He was still trailing Zajac, who was shortening the distance between himself and the puck carrier. After a minute he announced that he had visual contact with the Stinger center.

"Crease the b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" cried the coach. The game transformed him from a pleasant, amiable technician into a half-crazy commander who l.u.s.ted to get out on the ice himself.

"Exactly what I'm going to do," said Zajac. Some players would have skated alongside the opposing player, trying to fish the puck away with swipes of the stick. Zajac's technique was a little more direct, and accounted for his intimidating reputation. The two men skated directly at each other; for a while it seemed that the Stinger center didn't know Zajac was coming. Then he must have been warned, because he looked up and jerked as if startled. He began skating away from Zajac, but Zajac was faster. He closed the gap between them, coming in from the Stinger's side. He let himself glide past the man a few feet, planted one skate, and swung around. Zajac took off after the puck carrier and caught up to him in five or six powerful strides. They skated silently together, matched stroke for stroke. The Stinger protected the puck by changing his stick to his other hand, keeping the puck out of range of a slas.h.i.+ng reach by Zajac, but that wasn't Zajac's plan. He, too, transferred his stick to his outside hand. He raised his left arm to shoulder height, then brought it down and back, catching the Stinger skater in the chest with his elbow. The man leaned backward, arms flailing, off balance. Zajac gave him a slight push, and the nameless man toppled over on the ice. Zajac slapped the puck away a few feet, skated after it, then changed direction and began cutting smoothly back toward Maxie Gill, the center line, and-one-and-a-half miles beyond-the Stinger goal.

"You got it?" asked the coach.

"Sure," said Zajac, not even breathing hard, "no problem."

"No problem," said Gill.

"Way to go, Jackie," said Brickman.

"Sixteen strong side?" asked Soniat.

"As before," said the coach. "Nice playing, Jackie." Zajac aimed for his rendezvous with Gill and Soniat.

The play developed exactly as it had so many times on the coach's animated board. Zajac brought the puck up, fed it to Gill. Zajac crossed over to the left wing, Gill continued up the middle, then pa.s.sed the puck to Soniat. Soniat drove toward the goal, and Gill slipped into the right wing. Soniat crossed left, abandoned the puck to Zajac, and Zajac skated toward Gill. The puck leapt from blade to blade, and the puck carrier swooped and changed. The three men wove a braided pattern in the ancient chill of Niflhel. Soon the Stingers were faced with a problem. Only two defens.e.m.e.n, and then the goalie, stood between the three Condors and the first score of the game. The Stingers would have to make a choice, and a speculative one at that. It would be a poor decision for both defens.e.m.e.n to gang up on a single charging Condor lineman, so each picked one of the three and intercepted. One of the Rome IV skaters went after Gill, and the other decided upon Soniat. At that precise moment, however, Zajac had the puck on the right wing, and undeterred he sped through the last of the Condor defense, unhindered now toward the goal.

"Nothing to it now, Jackie," said Gill, a little short of breath.

"Breakaway, breakaway!" chanted the coach. He had offered a minimum of thoughtful guidance, but so far this game hadn't needed any.

"No one to stop you now, Jackie," said Soniat. "We checked these fools hard. You're in the clear."

Alone. All alone on the pale green ice, beneath the unwavering stars of a stranger world, Zajac skated, exhilarated, cheered and warmed by his own skill and luck and daring. A little over a mile to the goal, according to the rough estimate he could make from his faceplate map. Then would come the final dramatic thrill of deking the Stinger goalie out of position, the silent man-on-man confrontation and the slamming home of the puck, the flash of the neoprene stick and the clean flight of the puck into the corner of the net. He pictured the goalie lying sprawled vainly across the ice, and Zajac celebrating all alone, all alone until Gill and Soniat joined him for the cross-country journey back into position for the next face-off. . . .

All alone. It was the time of the game that Vaclav Zajac loved the best. He luxuriated in the feeling of solitude, of purposeful activity, of being the focus of energy in the dynamic effort. He leaned forward and skated with long, powerful strides. He looked around him to the close horizon: there was nothing to see, no other people, no physical features of dramatic interest. The photo amps in his helmet showed him just smooth gla.s.s underfoot and velvet sky above, the gliding orange puck and the diamond chip stars. This was exaltation. Perhaps this had always been the utter joy of the sport, since the days when Indians skated on frozen lakes with the ribs of elks bound to their feet. When Zajac had been a small boy he had played s.h.i.+nny, battling a small rubber ball across the frozen river of his native Moravia. He had learned the game, learned the techniques, subjected himself to the necessary conditioning, accepted the demands and rewards, at an early age. Now, separated from those games by many years and uncountable miles, he was still getting the same intoxicating sensation as he ripped the puck away from the other team and set out alone toward the goal. He was inexorable. He was overpowering. He was alone.

He skated with his head up, his knees slightly bent. He kept the puck ahead of him, moving it forward with little taps, first to the left, then to the right. The feeling of pure speed was like a pa.s.sionate embrace. He wanted it to go on and on, never to end, and it wouldn't end, not until he climaxed the overwhelming surge down the ice with the conquering drive into the goal. Even then the excitement would linger, fading a little of course, but the giddy arousal would remain, spoiled only by the arrival of his teammates and their chattering congratulations. That always ruined it a little for Zajac, but it never destroyed the experience completely. The race was always his, and he lived for it alone. Now, on the home ice of Niflhel, he exulted.

"Let's go!" said Brickman, who was miles behind, completely out of the action, who had nothing to do but skate about somewhat bored and watch Zajac's green dot streak toward the goal on his faceplate.

"Okay, Jackie, okay!" said the coach.

Zajac grimaced and changed the channel. He listened to the soft, lilting, excruciating music for a while.

He was thinking about the move he was going to use on the Stinger goalie. His mind wasn't on his skating, on the immediate condition of the playing field. He didn't see the frozen ripple, the small raised scar on the glacial floor. He didn't know it was there until his skate hit it with a numbing shock. There was a raw grinding feeling, and then Zajac was flying flat in s.p.a.ce, falling. He landed heavily on his left side, his left arm pinned under him. There was a noiseless push of liberated gases; it was as jarring as a blow to the jaw in a beer-soaked brawl. Then everything was still. Everything was very quiet. Everything waited. Zajac was stunned and probably dying, but he didn't know it yet. He was caught in a billion-year-old trap, and he hadn't even heard it spring shut. He would have to learn the rules one by one, the hard way, and if he was going to survive he had no time to lose.

"Oh, h.e.l.l," he said. He took a deep breath.

No one answered. No one wondered what had happened.

"I guess I'm all right," he said.

No one asked him what he meant.

"Coach?" he said.

The black coldness waited.

"I fell pretty hard out here but I'm okay. I can feel the puck. I'm lying right on top of it. Give me a minute to catch my breath." He felt warm. Actually, as he calmed down a little, he felt hot. His suit wasn't cooling him off enough. He wondered what was wrong. He tried to sit up, to take a quick inventory of his monitoring systems. He learned with an ice-cold s.h.i.+ver of fear that his helmet was frozen fast to the rock-solid ice. He nearly dislocated a shoulder trying to raise his head.

Zajac was afraid. He had never before felt this particular kind of fear, this awareness of the nearness of death. It was so close, the end of his life, that he could not see how he could avert it. He knew he couldn't deke death with a good feint in one direction, then go skating off free and clear in another. It would take more than that. He didn't know what it would take, and that thought terrified him. He needed help, and that thought mortified him. But his terror was greater.

"Coach?" he called. He waited in vain for a reply. He switched channels. "Maxie? Pete?" There wasn't even the sound of static. He went back and forth through the five channels: there were four channels of utter, terminal silence, but channel three was coming through clearly. The d.a.m.ned music, sweet strings and a binging triangle playing a sprightly march. It was a paralyzing insult added to his calamity.

"Hey, coach!" Zajac screamed. His voice sounded raw and harsh to himself, and the effect was ominous. He was in trouble, that was definite, but he was ashamed that he was losing control so quickly. He forced himself to calm down, to think. He carefully appraised his situation.

Evidently he wasn't receiving his teammates' communications. That didn't mean, though, that they weren't receiving his. "Coach, Maxie, Pete, if anybody can hear me, I had a tumble and I'm frozen onto the ground. My helmet and my shoulder. I landed on a couple of the trade-off b.u.t.tons and they melted the ice, and then I got caught in it. I can't hear a thing. I can't hear you, and I can't see where you are. My faceplate map isn't functioning. I don't know what to do. You're going to have to come get me, because I can't move. I only have one arm free, and the trade-off b.u.t.tons are going to be overworked, trying to compensate for the coldness of the ground. So hurry." He stopped talking. He felt a little foolish, not knowing if anyone could hear him.

What next? He didn't know. The climate control would be raising the temperature of his suit as the internal heat bled away. Eventually the heating unit would fail, and then it wouldn't be long before Zajac, suit and all, would be lifeless solid human ice. He didn't know how much longer the suit's unit could function.

As he waited, an unpleasant thought returned again and again: his only hope was that he'd be found and rescued in time. The prime concern, therefore, was that if the others weren't receiving his calls, and if neither his suit nor the puck were sending out signals, they would never stumble across him in time. And stumble across him is what they'd do-eventually. If they ever found him at all, they'd trip across his marble-stiff corpse in the dark.

There was no way of judging how quickly the time pa.s.sed. The sun-the dim, distant star that barely held Niflhel in its weak grasp-cast no shadows on the enemy ice. Zajac couldn't see that sun from his sprawled position, so he wouldn't be able to observe it as it cut its way through the strange constellations. He doubted if he'd be alive long enough to notice much stellar movement in any case. There was nothing else within sight that could help him in any way. There was nothing else at all but ice, endless ice, murderous ice.

Zajac waited and studied himself closely for any sign of panic. The notion that at the end, as he began to feel the sting of death creeping along his rigid limbs, he might lose control of his mind was more repellent to him than the threat of death. He feared madness more. Though his suffering would be limited by the mercilessness of the environment, he swore that he would choose an immediate end by his own hand rather than descend muttering and weeping into insanity. It occurred to him that his promise was one he might not want to keep at that final instant, or even be able to remember.

There were many things to regret while he waited between life and death. He thought about his joyless childhood, about the unkindness he had often shown others, about the broken vows and broken dreams, about all the things of a lifetime that are without meaning and are given importance only by an ultimate realization that they can now never be corrected. Zajac felt contempt for his own remorse, because he knew how shallow he was. Even as the tears slipped from his eyes, he laughed skeptically. "You don't mean a word of it, Jackie," he whispered. "Try to die like a man." Whatever that meant. . . .

This gelid vista would be the last thing he would see: a jagged horizon, low ridges of pallid green s.h.i.+ning in his suit's lamplight, ice of a color he had seen sometimes in a young woman's eyes, a sky as black and empty and devoid of hope as h.e.l.l-and wasn't h.e.l.l described just like this? A lake of ice, rather than pits of flame? And Lucifer frozen in the middle of it, immobile and bitter? The comparison made Zajac laugh aloud, and it was not a healthy laughter, with just the faintest tinge of hysteria. It brought his wandering thought to a sudden focus. His experiment with fancy ended abruptly.

Was there anything that he could do to release the helmet from the tenacious ice? His hockey stick lay on the rough surface not far from his outstretched right hand, within reach. Zajac didn't believe he could use it to chip the helmet free; the neoprene was tough, but not as hard as the ice. Still, he reached out and grasped the end of the blade, then drew the stick near. He would never be able to use it to pry the helmet loose, either. The stick would snap like a dry bone.

If he were to live, to free himself from the frozen tomb, he needed an audacious idea. In order to find the key, he needed all the coolness of thought on which he prided himself. And, he admitted, he might need all the crazy reasoning of desperation, as well. In the same way that he might have proceeded to fix a leaking faucet at home, he took it by the numbers.

How could he get free? By removing himself from the ice, of course. How could that be done? By getting rid of the ice, by breaking it or melting it. Could he break it? He had already decided the answer to that was no.

That left melting.

What could melt the ice? Under these circ.u.mstances, only the heat inside his suit. The warmth from the trade-off b.u.t.tons was melting the ice in that immediate area, leaving a bowl-like depression under his left side, but his helmet was too far away and there was no way of delivering the heat from between his shoulders to the necessary point.

Was there another way of transferring heat from inside his suit to the place where the helmet was welded to the ground?

Zajac didn't have an immediate answer. More accurately, at first he didn't want to examine the only solution that did present itself.

"Well," he murmured after a moment, "there is a way." He had a flickering, half-formed notion.

It was unpleasant. It was very unpleasant.

The idea grew, and Zajac realized that there was every reason to believe it would work. But the more clearly he understood what had to be done, the more grotesque and awful it seemed. Yet it was a choice between sacrifice and certain death. Rational thought demanded- Zajac pressed the b.u.t.ton in the handle of his hockey stick. The dileucithane tape that wound around the blade immediately lost its adhesiveness. With his free hand he removed the relaxed tape from the stick. Now it was ready to be used again, and he was careful not to foul it in tangles because he would never be able to untwist it, and that would be the end of him. He transferred an end of the tape to his left hand and clumsily wrapped the length of it around and around his right arm, just above the tape that sealed his right gauntlet to his sleeve. He pulled the tape as tight as he could, so tight that he knew he was shutting off the circulation in his arm.

It occurred to Zajac that if he managed to save himself and then stay alive until he could be rescued, he might look back on this nightmare and realize that there had always been a simple and easy way to solve the crisis. If there were he couldn't see it now, and as he became more frantic he cared less about what he would think in the future. The terrible present overshadowed all that. Maybe he would curse himself for a fool. Maybe his teammates would be shocked by the means he had selected to save himself, when there was some other obvious method he had overlooked. Zajac's mouth was very dry, and there was a loud buzzing in his head that distracted his attention. He was near emotional collapse, and he put the thought of hypothetical painless answers in the back of his mind. He had not been able to find one, and so he was compelled to follow the path he had chosen.

His right hand tingled with a myriad sharp pinp.r.i.c.ks. He closed his eyes tight and tried to calm his agonized thoughts. The pain in his hand became a throbbing that he couldn't ignore. Needles of pain stabbed up his arm from his fingertips to his shoulder. It was time to act, but the process of summoning courage and strength was more difficult than he had imagined. "Come on, Jackie," he whispered, "just do it. Do it or you'll die right here."

His left thumb found the b.u.t.ton on his right gauntlet. He pressed it, giving as he did an odd, high-pitched cry. The tape on the gauntlet went dead. He unwrapped it quickly and flung it away. He ripped the gauntlet off with his left hand and shrieked as the unbearable cold attacked his exposed hand. He grabbed at the back of his helmet, twisting as much as he could so that he could reach the frozen bond. The remaining warmth in his freezing hand turned the ice to thin and poison gas. He rolled over, and his helmet was free. He sobbed loudly and rose to his knees. His right hand remained on the ice where he had rested.

Zajac got to his feet, staggered, stumbled, fell again to his knees. He felt dreamlike, a little dazed. He felt no pain; that meant that he was in shock. He was alive, but he didn't know for how long. The ragged end of his forearm was exposed beyond the tourniquet of tape, and the killing cold would soon crawl through his veins like serpent's venom. He was very cold. He looked back to where he had lain prisoner. His right hand, his strong hand, was blanched white as new snow in the glare of his lamp. The thumb had snapped off. The light flashed from a gold ring on the fourth finger. Zajac's eyes opened wide and he stared, sickened. He clutched his ruined arm to his chest. Suddenly, like a vast and overpowering expulsion of evil, he vomited inside his helmet.

With an effort he got to his feet again, a bit unsteady on his skates. Freeing the helmet had been only part of the problem, although he hadn't wanted to think about the rest until now. He was faced with the difficulty of staying alive until he could find the other players. Evidently they couldn't find him, or they would already have come to his aid. His uniform suit wasn't transmitting its signal. The puck, though, ought not to have been affected. He remembered, however, that he had been on top of it the entire time. It was likely that its position had just reappeared on the faceplate maps of both the Condors and the Stingers. If Zajac were lucky, they'd all be sprinting toward him that very instant, and they'd be there to call for help in a few minutes.

If he weren't lucky, of course, the puck was as lost as he, and therefore he'd have to find his own salvation. He grimaced. That was the way it had always been, the way he had always preferred. He was too lightheaded from shock and loss of blood to recall how only a short time before he had rejected that delusion.

In the single-mindedness of his condition, Zajac decided to head for the Stinger goal, the nearest place where he could be certain of finding another person. He tried to find traces of his pa.s.sage across the ice before his accident, to get an idea of the direction of the goal. The ice was so hard that his tracks were almost invisible, but he caught them in the oblique beam of his lamp. He saw the small wrinkle of ice that had caused his fall, and he mouthed a vicious Slovak curse. He picked a place on the horizon, a tiny landmark of three sharp spires of ice, and skated weakly toward it. He estimated that the goal should be only a bit more than a half mile beyond it.

His right arm, from the shoulder to the torn end, felt paradoxically warm. The rest of the body was colder than before, and he shook with chills. He tried not to think about the loss of his hand, but the image of it lying abandoned on the ice kept occurring to him, and he had to fight down new sickness again and again.

After fifty yards he realized that he was carrying his hockey stick. "Stupid," he said to himself. He dropped it to the ground, and then came to a halt. "What I ought to have is the d.a.m.n puck." The puck may or may not have been transmitting. If it were, it would give the others his position. It was worth taking along. He bent down and picked up his stick, then turned and went back for the puck. It took him several minutes to find it; he spent the whole time muttering angrily. When he located the puck he started off again toward the Stinger goal, holding his stick left-handed, stick-handling the puck across the ice. He was too confused to realize that he could simply have carried the puck in his left hand, that he didn't need to obey the rules of hockey: for Vaclav Zajac, that game ought to have been over. But his thoughts were sluggish and wrapped in a kind of m.u.f.fling peace. At intervals a great, sharp, piercing pain broke through the fog, the first tentative bits of the ma.s.sive anguish to come. Clumsily, holding the hockey stick in the crook of his right elbow and guiding it with his left hand, Zajac maneuvered the puck toward the indifferent horizon.

Zajac wandered in the dream delirium that accompanies serious bodily trauma. He patted the puck along, directing all of his attention to that small ch.o.r.e, forgetting for the moment what had happened to him and where he was going. The only thing that seemed to matter was nudging that neoprene puck forward in a straight line. At one point he a.s.sembled his senses enough to ask himself why this task was so vital. He had no ready response. It had something to do with the game. He recalled the game well enough, and the team and the station. He tried to imagine what everyone was doing back aboard the station. He wondered if they were following his progress, if they were excited or concerned or completely bored. The game must mean very little to the others aboard the station, he realized. To them it was only a pattern of glowing points of color on a two-dimensional map. How involved could they be with that? The action was rapid, as the orange dot sped toward one end of the rectangle or the other. But there was no indication that these points of light even presented living players. As far as the people on the station knew, the hockey team may never actually have been delivered to the surface of Niflhel. The games might really be played at a keyboard console in another room.

If that were true, though, Zajac mused, why did he hurt so terribly? And what the h.e.l.l was he doing?

The numbing clouds in his mind dispersed to several bright, clean bra.s.s notes. It was the music again on channel three. This time, however, Zajac welcomed it; it was rea.s.surance that he wasn't alone in the world. He had begun to feel like the last survivor of his race, or like a solitary spirit of the cosmos awaiting physical reality. He listened to an appalling trumpet improvisation based on the Horn Call from Siegfried. In addition to the trumpet there was a piano, a snare drum, a string ba.s.s, a vibraharp played with a heavy hand, and a guitar. The music pulled Zajac along, and he was grateful for it. Utter silence would have killed him, would have persuaded him that he was tired, that he shouldn't bother to go on, that an attempt to prolong his life was an affront to the entire entropic basis of the universe. But human beings had shouldered aside that silence and filled the s.p.a.ce with sappy music, and that accomplishment heartened Zajac. He would not surrender until he, too, had made a mark equal to that trumpet solo.

Less than a quarter mile from his goal the agony dispelled all the soft sleepy thoughts. He saw and felt with a clarity that unnerved him. He was isolated as few people ever had been. He had been singled out, he was marked, and he had been made ready for death. His futile struggles were worse than useless-they were humiliating. How could Vaclav Zajac believe that he had the resources to repel all that a hostile world chose to throw at him? It was arrogance of the sort that hastened death.

Movement caught his eye. He looked up from the ice and saw a man in the green and white uniform suit of the Rome IV Stingers about a hundred yards away. It was their goalie. The man waved at him. Whether the goalie was signaling concern or boastful challenge Zajac couldn't tell. Even if the receiver in his helmet were functioning, the two men wouldn't have been able to communicate. Zajac took a better grip on his hockey stick and skated for the net. He was so dazed that his highest priority was scoring the goal. He forgot his own terrible condition. He slanted over on a path that would take him past the goal net at about a forty-five degree angle. He didn't worry about rocketing the puck past the goalie on the first pa.s.s; he wanted to get a look at the man's moves, his defensive tendencies.

Zajac's eyes tried to peer through a red haze that exploded into golden points of light. He heard his own heartbeat and the roaring of his blood, and the noise bore the hollow echoes heard usually only in dreams and drunkenness. The world seemed to pulse around him, to grow larger and then shrink so there was barely room for Zajac to breathe. In all the universe there was only Zajac's troubled brain, his bewildered senses, and the unwanted freight of ghastly pain. His terror had dissipated, replaced first by fatigue, then by mindlessness, finally by a growing resentment. His anger was directed entirely toward the Stinger goalie, whose duty it was to thwart him. Zajac desperately needed to slam the puck home, but now he doubted if he was strong enough to accomplish it.

Two familiar skaters in Condor uniforms approached him from the left wing. "Maxie, Pete," he said, sighing. He left the puck on the ice: he didn't need it any longer. They had found him.

Zajac skated in a wide loop toward the goal, then toppled forward. He sank to his knees, blinded by the throbbing pain. It was now a rhythmic beating that filled his entire consciousness. He stood again, unaware that he did, and he moved blindly over the ice. He cried softly to himself, and in a short while the pain subsided. It didn't vanish completely, but the hammering was pushed down to a manageable level, and allowed Zajac to clear his head.

He looked around and saw the goalie, who seemed unusually intent on Zajac. It had been compa.s.sion, then, that the man had been expressing. That made Zajac feel good. He expected to see the Stinger player crouched, wound tight, motionless as a stalking cat waiting for the first glimpse of the puck. Instead he was moving slowly over the ice, toward Zajac. Zajac waved his left arm wildly, ignoring the increase in pain, trying to tell the foolish goalie that everything was all right, that the worst had happened and Zajac was no longer worried, that the goalie had better tend to his own troubles because Gill and Soniat were speeding toward the open net, pa.s.sing the puck between them. Zajac, not thinking clearly, tried to shout, "Get back to the net, you d.a.m.n fool!" The effort cost him, and he was struck down by an angry slash of pain. He lay still for a moment, an indefinite length of time. When his awareness returned, the goalie was only fifteen feet from him. Soniat had one arm in the air, Gill had the puck on his stick, in front of the goal. He did not take the shot. He swooped by and swung around, toward Zajac.

Zajac smiled placidly to himself. He rose to his knees, and he knew then that he was exhausted, used up. He might never skate away from that spot. He leaned on his stick and watched. He tried to see the face of the Stinger goalie through the man's faceplate, but it was obscured. Zajac listened to the music; it was partially drowned out by the drumming in his head. Gill skated close by, and Zajac wanted to wave but he couldn't. Gill dropped the puck by Zajac's side. It skidded a few inches and came to a stop against his knee. The goalie was bending forward, reaching out a hand, helpless, perhaps frightened. Gill was gesturing to Soniat, evidently suddenly aware of Zajac's desperate state. Soniat skated toward them. Gill pointed first to Zajac, then into the black sky. Zajac nodded; yes, yes, he understood, they were coming for him.

Zajac was fading. He wondered idly, as if he had no personal stake in the answer, if the shuttle would arrive in time. He looked up at the stars, then at Gill, then at the puck beside him. He pushed the puck with his stick, more than slapped it, awkwardly, from his kneeling position. An angry noise began to burr in his head. Gill was waving an arm wildly but Zajac never took his gaze from the puck. It slid straight and true for the far side of the empty cage, and it seemed to take forever to cross the distance. It skimmed over the victorious ice, and as Zajac struggled to clear his vision, the puck came to rest at last, home in the corner of the goal.

Freerunning and trainjumping-high-risk urban games of a future in which Seattle has highly efficient ma.s.s transit-become popular, if illegal, sports for teens in the world of "Kip, Running." But some things never change. Whether it is street-racing hot rodders in an era when hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles are common, slam dunking in the neighborhood gym, making the game-winning goal, hitting a home run, or das.h.i.+ng through danger like these kids-sometimes you want more than an adrenaline high or even the thrill of winning, you want the attention and admiration of a certain special someone.

Kip, Running.

Genevieve Williams..

The runners are lithe and young. None are older than sixteen. Nothing about their hair or clothing dangles in excess, though they ornament themselves in other ways: hair cut in patterns like ornamental lawns, tint cascading through the patterns like advertising. Tattoos adorn them like jewelry or ripple across their bodies like silk scarves, wet and s.h.i.+ning in the omnipresent April rain.

Kip, small and subtle, gathers with the rest of them on top of the platform shelter at Pike Station, 120 feet above the Street. There are fourteen runners besides herself, eying her and each other as though plotting how best to throw their compet.i.tion off a building. Like her, they're masked and mirrored: a combination of camouflaged clothing, surveillance-reflective skins, and sensor-scrambling biosign suppressors will make watchful eyes slide right off them. Trainjumping is illegal, as are most of the other things runners do to win a race. Freerunning, bubble-riding, running along slidewalk rails-all of it.

Johnny has the starting gun. His silver, bullet-shaped dirigible-one of very few allowed in Seattle airs.p.a.ce, Johnny is a rich kid-is moored nearby, ready to carry him and a.s.sorted hangers-on, hollabacks, and boytoys to the finish point atop Northgate Research Center, some eight miles away. Lily is among the girlfriends, bottle-redhead, dressed in green. She's there for Narciso, but Kip pretends Lily's there for her.