Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Team C found Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Campinas, Ouriphos—the actual Ouriphos, or what had been left of it after the earthquake—Bujumbura, Kigali, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, Leningrad, Tallinn, and Helsinki. An impressive score—and for nine of the cities they had been playing in the dark. The floating cameras zoomed in for close-ups of their smiles.

  Team D found Tokyo, Jakarta, Bandung, Herat, Ferah, and (at the last minute, thanks to Nikos), Wichita. But we were saved from last place by Team E, who had found only two cities, Saskatoon and Kifta, and had misidentified Kifta. They couldn’t hide their embarrassment, not even the Team Leader, not even when the cameras targeted him. The glances that went around the dome were almost compensation for our losing the quarter. Team Leader E stared straight ahead, mottled color rising on the back of his neck; unless he made a fast recovery in the next quarter, he’d be fucking his hand for months. And the fan reaction and betting back home on his orbital didn’t even bear thinking about—let alone the sponsor’s reaction. The team ended with only twenty-eight points adjusted.

  Team C won the quarter, of course, 480 adjusted. Team Leader instructed me through my ’plant to try to find out their I.D. tactics in the coffee hour.

  Larissa always does that to me. As if I were some kind of tactical genius, just because once I’d been quarterback for the team that racked up the record, 996 points in a single quarter. We’d found Pax. But you can’t find Pax every quarter—after all this time, the accursed place is still floating around the Pacific—and underneath I’m always afraid some flyer-mate will psych out how bad I really am at team tactical programs.

  What had Maria seen on my face?

  I didn’t find out. I didn’t find out Team C’s I.D. tactics either, because the coffee hour is only fifty-six minutes by strict rule before the blackout period, and Team B Leader had taken the risk of doping all of his people on Impenetrables set to kick in right after the ref announcements. God, he was self-confident. I looked at him sideways, when I was sure Maria or the cameras weren’t watching. He hadn’t changed much in the two years since our divorce. Short, muscled, smiling. Ari.

  Then the coffee hour was over and the Leaders took the dome field down and Maria and I went back to the flyer and shot each other with the time-release knock-out drugs. The camera hovered close as we laid the strips on each other’s necks, and stayed close afterward. There’s a hazy period while the stuff takes effect. Players are vulnerable: it’s a warm sweet letting go, sometimes of words as well as consciousness. But I was pretty sure I didn’t give anything away. Maria finally stopped talking to me and rolled over in her bunk, and I smiled to myself in the darkness.

  Preparation for second quarter.

  When I woke, Maria was blinking sleepily. The camera was already on. I felt rested, but of course that was no clue to how much time had elapsed—the drug made me feel rested. Had we been out two hours or twenty? However long it had been, the computer had moved all the flyers for the second round. I knew the latitude and longitude of where we had been, but now we could be literally anywhere in the world. Again.

  Adrenaline surged, and my stomach tightened with pleasure.

  We strapped ourselves into the kick-off chairs. The portholes were shallow opaque caves. “Tallyho,” Maria said. I ignored her. The computer kept us waiting for ten minutes. When the seat straps finally unlocked, Maria tried a direct run for her console (she’s strong), but I was ready for her and made a flying tackle. She went down. I scrambled over her, reached my console, and activated it. The first half-hour control of the flyer was mine.

  Maria got up slowly. She wasn’t hurt, of course, but she made a show of rubbing her shoulder for the camera. She’s a high-ranked player on a number of orbitals. Very dramatic.

  The portholes de-opaqued. Daylight. More barren plain, more dust blown by unbreathable air, some scraggly plant stuff in dull olive. Not much rock. No coast. No snow or frost, but of course with the greenhouse effect worsening every year that ruled out less than fifteen degrees of latitude. We could still be anywhere. You always hope the random patterns generated by the computer will set you down right at the edge of a qualifiable city, but that has only happened to me once. And it was Moscow, only ninety points unreffed.

  I lifted the flyer for an aerial view, taking it up as high as the rules allowed. Maria and I both peered through every single porthole. Nothing but plain. Then I saw it, a quick flash of silver on the right horizon. Water. I headed right.

  “Water over there!” I said excitedly, jazzing it up for the camera. It was watching Maria for the reaction shot, of course, but she just looked thoughtful: the serious young player concentrating for the fans back home.

  A small river meandered across the dust. Along its banks, plants were a little greener, a little fuller. They disgusted me; pitiful things, trying to actually grow in this place. God knew what chemicals were in the river.

  I followed it at top speed, needing to reach a city before my half-hour was up. With speed limited during play to sixty-five miles per hour, every minute counted. I didn’t want to arrive at a city just as Maria’s console cut in and mine shut down.

  We flew for twenty minutes. Ruins appeared below us, some broken concrete and the mound pattern that means structures under the dust. But visual was enough to tell me that the place was too small to qualify as a city. Some stupid little town, not even enough left of it to get a fix on the architecture and make a guess what continent we were on.

  Then the alarm bells went off.

  “Lift! For God’s sake lift the fucking flyer!” Maria screamed. I thought she was over-reacting for the camera until I saw her face. She was terrified.

  Maria was—or rather, somewhere along the line had become—toxiphobic.

  The computer had removed the aerial ceiling the second the radiation detectors had registered the toxic dump. I took the flyer up to forty thousand feet. It was the one time the rules allowed a major overview during a quarter, but Maria didn’t even glance at a porthole. She stood breathing hard, eyes on the deck, pale as dust. By the time she had control of herself again, we had shot forward and I was dropping back to legal height.

  Maria was toxiphobic.

  And she hadn’t even seen the ruins over the horizon at 342 degrees.

  I used the five minutes I had left to take us as far in the other direction as I could. Five minutes would never be enough time to fly there and do an I.D. My best bet was to hope she didn’t fly that way during her half-hour.

  She didn’t. She veered off at twenty-eight degrees, and I kept careful track on my compass of everything she did after that. We came across three more polluter towns, but nothing big enough to qualify for points. When my console came back on, I headed straight back to my ruins, flying with that cocky grin that alerts fans that something is going to happen. Maria watched me sourly, at least when the camera was off her. “Know where we’re going, do we?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

  The city ruins were extensive, with roads leading in from all directions and a downtown section of fallen concrete and steel poking above the blowing dust. There were no clues, however, in the architecture, or at least none that I could identify. Ari had been the architectural whiz.

  I started the chatter on the ’plant. “Cazie on. I’ve found one. Daylight, doesn’t seem to be waxing or waning. No architectural clues to describe. Central downtown core, roads leading in from all directions, collapsed overpasses, plain with a 1.62 degree incline, small river flowing outside the city but not through it, no other still-existing visible waterways.”

  “Team Leader on. What’s the diameter?”

  “Crossing it now . . . I estimate three miles metropolitan . . . hard to be sure.”

  “Regular perimeter?”

  “Circling now . . .” The detector shrilled.

  I started to take the flyer up and to the right, but after a minute the alarm shut down.

  “Cazie on. There’s a toxic dump, but it’s small—a few seconds mov
ed me out of range.”

  “Did you see anything significant while you were lifting?”

  “No. I’ll circle in the other direction, try to get a shape for the perimeter.”

  By now the fans would be glued to their sets. They, of course, already knew what city we had. The name would be shimmering across their screens. The question now was, how would we players identify it? And who would get the points? I had 14.3 minutes left. Maria stood at her console, jaw clenched so tight her lips flared out slightly, like a flower.

  “Cazie on. The shape is pretty regular. No, wait, it flattens out into a sort of corridor of ruins extending out at 260 degrees. There’s a river here. Another one. A big one, but really muddy, clogged, and sluggish. . . .” Not for the first time, I wished that soil analysis from inside the flyer was legal. Although then where would the challenge be?

  “Jack on,” he said through the ’plant. “Do the city ruins go right to the edge of the river or was there a park?”

  “Cazie on. Seems to be extensive flat area between even the smallest ruins and the river.”

  “Team leader on. Vestigial vegetation?”

  “None. The . . .” The alarm shrilled again.

  This time the computer let me take the flyer all the way up. Maria started to tremble, clutching the edge of her console with both hands. Even over the alarms I could hear her: “Near cities. In their water, by their parks, goddamn fucking polluters, toxic dumps all over the place they deserved to all die . . .” But I didn’t have time to gloat over her loss of control. Over twenty thousand feet the high-altitude equipment kicked in, all per game rules, and I got it all: aerial photos before we broke the cloud cover, sonar dimensions, sun position above the clouds, steel density patterns. Of course we couldn’t access the computer banks, but we didn’t have to. We had Jack, who had been a first-draft pick for his phenomenal memory. I passed him the figures right off the console, such a sweet clean information pass it almost brought tears to my eyes, and in less than a minute Jack said, “Syracuse, United States, North America!” Team Leader filed it, the computer confirmed, and the news went out over ’plants and cameras. The first score of the quarter. 185 points, plus points for initial continent identification, and no fouls for holding too long in toxic range. Mine.

  I took the flyer down and grinned at Maria.

  Once we knew where we were, the plays became a cinch. Chatter flew heavy over team channels: if you’re in waning light and Cazie is in full light at 76 20’ W 43 07’ N, where might I be in what seems to be dawn? I pictured fans flipping channels, listening, arguing, the serious betters plotting flyer trails on map screens.

  Maria found Rochester, United States. Her time ran out and I got Buffalo, United States and Niagara Falls, Canada, which barely qualified for size and wasn’t very many points, given that the falls are still there, torrents of water over eroded rock. Ari once told me that those falls are one of the few places on earth with relatively clean water because water going that fast through rapids cleanses itself every hundred yards. He was probably teasing.

  Time was called a few hours after we reached dusk. Maria looked tired and angry, the anger probably because she’d given away so much. She was behind in points, behind in psych-out, undoubtedly down in the betting back home. .

  I whistled some Mozart.

  Maria stared at me coldly. “Did you know they buried him in an open grave for outcasts? With lime over him so the body wouldn’t smell? Just threw him in like garbage?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t see that it mattered. His music is glorious, but he was probably just as morally guilty as all the rest of them. Polluters do not deserve to live. That’s the first thing children are taught: Do not foul the life systems. I had a sudden flash of memory: Myself at four or five, marching around kindergarten, singing the orbital anthem and fingering the red stitching on my uniform: MY BODY, MY ORBITAL.

  I said maliciously, “At least limestone isn’t toxic.” But she didn’t even react. She really was depressed.

  The screen in the corner suddenly flashed to life: Team Leader A. It startled both of us so much we turned in unison, like mechanical dolls. Only Team Leader A can use the screen to contact everyone during a game, and then only for game called, for an emergency, or for important news from home. He’s the only one allowed direct orbital contact. My stomach tightened.

  “Team Leader A. News flash. Don’t panic, anyone, it’s not an orbital. Repeat, no orbital is in danger. But something has happened: They’ve opened warfare on the moon.”

  Maria and I looked at each other. She was breathing hard. Not that she knew anybody on the moon, of course; it’s been two generations since anybody but diplomats have made contact with those maniacs. Generations before that their ancestors chose their way off planet, ours chose ours. To qualify for an orbital, you had to be a certain kind of person: non-violent, non-polluting, no criminal record of any kind, clearly selfsupporting (you had to have money, of course, but money alone wouldn’t do it), intelligent, and fair. You had to be able to respect rules.

  Nobody else got in, not even relatives of qualifiers. Our founders knew they were choosing the future of the human race.

  Everybody else with enough money but not enough decency tried to get to a moon colony.

  “As far as orbital diplomats can tell, the war started when one underground moon colony mined another and detonated by remote. We don’t yet know how many colonies are involved. But the orbitals agree that there is no danger to us. This war, if it is a war, is confined to themselves.”

  Team Leader A looked at us a minute longer. I couldn’t read his expression. Then the screen went blank.

  “Oh, God,” Maria said. “All those people.”

  I looked at her curiously. “What do you care? There’s no threat to any orbital.”

  “I know that. But even so, Cazie . . . that’s not a game. It’s real. Dying trapped underground while everything explodes around you . . .”

  I got out the third set of black-out strips. To tell you the absolute truth, I find attitudes like Maria’s tiresome. She can’t really care about moonies; how could she? They’re no different from the maniacs who ruined Earth in the first place. She was just pretending because it made her look sensitive, cosmopolitan . . . to me it looked flabby. Moonies weren’t like us. They didn’t understand moral obligations. They didn’t follow the rules. If they all blew each other up, it would just make space that much safer for the orbitals.

  And her depression was ruining my triumph in the game.

  That was when I realized that she must be doing it deliberately. And pretty neat it was. I had almost lost my edge for the game, thinking about moonies trapped underground . . . there’s nothing so terrible about being underground anyway. It probably wasn’t that much different from the coziness of an orbital. It was wide, open, unprotected spaces that were scary.

  Unless you were scoping them from thirty thousand feet, making a high, clean information pass, the first one of the quarter and a total of two hundred points . . .

  I opened her black-out drug, grinning.

  In the third quarter the computer set us down in darkness, on sand. Blowing sand as far as the high beams could see at maximum altitude. Miles and miles of blowing sand. Over my ’plant Nikos, our broad-base geography offense, ran me through the most likely deserts. Maria used a sweet triple-feint to get to her console first, and she called the first play.

  We didn’t find anything for hours. Team C reported Glasgow just as our sky began to pale in the east, and that gave us an approximate longitude. Jack found Colombo. Team A reported Managua and Baghdad. Then, slowly, mountains began to rise on our horizon. I calculated how far away they must be; they were huge.

  “Nikos on,” he said. “All right, I have to make this quick, Cazie, my play starts in forty-five seconds and we’re coming into something. The mountains are part of the Rockies, and you’re between them and the Mississippi River in the Great Central Desert of North America. Fly close e
nough to describe specific mountain profiles with degree separations to Jack and he’ll take it from there. Jack, can you take it now?”

  “Jack on. Got it. Cazie, go.”

  I described for three minutes and he suggested where I should look. I did, but not quick enough. Maria got La Junta, United States, North America. I got Pueblo, just barely. Then we hit a toxic dump and an announcement from Team Leader A simultaneously.

  “Team Leader A. News flash. Orbital diplomats in three moon colonies have ceased communicating: Faldean, Troika, and Alpha. The assumption is that all three colonies are destroyed and our . . . our diplomats are dead.”

  His image stared straight ahead. After a minute he added, “I’ll let you all know if they call the game.”

  Call the game.

  “They won’t do that, will they, do you think?” I said to Maria.

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  I found Colorado Springs.

  But how many fans were even watching?

  They didn’t call the game. We finished the day almost dead even. Right after we took the black-out drug, Maria crawled into my bunk. I was surprised—flabbergasted. But it turned out she didn’t even want to fuck, just to be held. I held her, wondering what the hell was going on, if she thought I’d fall for some kind of sexual psych-out. The idea was almost insulting; I’d been a pro for nearly eight years. But she just lay there quietly, not talking, and when black-out was over she again seemed focused and tough, ready for the last quarter.

  “Tallyho.”

  I never did learn what that meant. But I wasn’t about to ask. I knew Maria had finished most of the two-year Yale software, and I’ve never even accessed a college program.

  We de-opaqued in rocky hills, in daylight. Twenty minutes later we found a saltwater coast. After that it was almost too easy: Algiers. Bejaia. Skikda. Bizerte. Tunis. Not even any toxic dumps to speak of.

  Too easy. And Maria and I were almost even in pre-reffed points.

  “My play!”

  “Take it, asshole. You won’t reach Kalrouan or Monastir by the time the quarter ends.”