Wolf and Raven

by Michael A. Stackpole

  As we entered the locker room we saw a single bank of twenty-four lockers facing us. Two of the lockers in the upper row, in slots four and seven, withdrew back into the wall. It left the row looking like some gillette’s broken grin for a moment or two, then new lockers slid into place. We both exchanged glances, then shrugged and located our appropriate lockers by the little laminated name plates slotted into them.

  I opened mine, then sat down hard on the bench. “Oh, Val, what have you done?”

  “Do we have to wear this stuff?”

  “Dress code.” I groaned aloud. “Your clothes will fit perfectly. Valerie is pretty sharp, but her taste runs a bit odd.”

  The ParVenue, being the latest word in virtual country clubs, demanded that its patrons attire themselves appropriately when on the premises. This meant I exchanged my polo shirt for a navy one of a lighter weight and pricier designer label. Over it went a yellow cardigan sweater of a hue I’ve only seen in snow. The knickers that replaced my pants matched the sweater in color and fastened tight right below my knees. My blue and yellow plaid socks got tucked beneath the knickers, and my pseudo-golf shoes were a merciful black without any spikes.

  “I’m not wearing my cap,” Jimmy growled.

  Oh yeah, my cap was a tam that matched the socks. In silent agreement with him I sent it flying like a frisbee into a wastebasket. “Comes a point when a man just has to put his foot down.”

  I swung my locker door closed, giving Jimmy his first full look at me. “Wolf, my mother used to dress her poodle in that type of outfit.”

  I growled at him. “Hold your arms out at your sides and in those red togs you’ll look like the poodle’s favorite fire hydrant.”

  “Point taken. Hope these women are worth it.”

  I caught a glimpse of myself in a wall-mounted mirror. “I’m beginning to doubt it, but let’s not keep them waiting, just in case.”

  * * *

  As strange as it may seem, Jimmy and I were not the oddest-looking individuals at the club. The corridor leading from the locker room to the bar and restaurant had a glass-walled section that let us look into the huge warehouselike structure onto which the front façade had been grafted.

  Jimmy paused and stared out at the people gathered there. “Just think, if they were bees, how much honey they’d be making.”

  I nodded at his apt analogy. Honeycombed stacks of small golfing stalls rose from ground to ceiling. On the bottom two levels the stark white rooms had golfers fitted with simsense helmets. Little mechanical ball-setters placed golf balls on tees or appropriately angled sections of astroturf. As the players swung through the balls, they blasted them into nets at the other end of their golfcave. One guy, at the far end of the row, endured a driving shower and buffeting winds produced by the chamber as he sought the absolute most in sim-golf experiences.

  Just above them golfers also wore simsense helmets, but hit no balls. They still swung their clubs with wild abandon, and one man snapped a putter in half and tossed it down into the net protecting the floors below. Other golfers went through the motions of delicately chipping a shot onto a green, and one man stood with driver in hand, desperately waving at an imaginary ball to get over the imaginary trees and onto the imaginary green.

  The top level had smoked-gray caps on the hexagonal rooms. Up there golfers were pulling down simsense data directly from the ParVenue’s golf course database. These did not need the challenge of weather and balls and perfect posture or square groove clubs. They played solely in their minds. For them the challenge was besting golf courses in places dreamed up by madmen and physicists and modeled on the fastest decks available. They might play two holes on the front nine from the Sea of Tranquility, then shift to a course imagined for the blazing surface of Venus. Changes of gravity and density of atmosphere were their enemies.

  I saw one golfer on the lower level miss his shot and twist around before falling to his knees. “Do they have spitballs in golf?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe that was a water hazard.”

  I smiled and led the way to the bar. We passed two soaking wet guys who were swapping stories about playing the club’s simulation of the Burning Tree course during Hurricane Felicia and I spotted our dates immediately. Of course I didn’t know any of the half-dozen men watching them from the bar and surrounding tables, but I gathered neither did the women, and they liked that situation just fine.

  I smiled at Lynn Ingold and gave her a hug and a kiss as I reached the table. She’d braided her copper hair, and the braid dangled down the front of her white blouse to the tip of her left breast. Her pert nose and quick smile combined with bright green eyes and a scattering a freckles to make her seem full of elven mischief from back in the days when that didn’t mean gunfire and magic. The top of her head came up to my nose, and my arm fit around her shoulders as if we’d been designed as a set.

  “Jimmy Mackelroy, this is Lynn Ingold and that is probably your greatest fan in all of Seattle. Valerie Valkyrie, meet Jimmy Mackelroy.”

  Val is normally quick-witted and I expected a verbal jab for my introduction of her, but she was awestruck enough to just ignore me. Like Jimmy, she was of African-American descent, but her blue eyes and café-au-lait complexion suggested a liberal dose of other things in her bloodline as well. She wore her brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Taller than Lynn, but with the same slender, long-legged figure, she was sufficiently gorgeous to make the Pope reconsider his vow of celibacy.

  In fact, if not for the barely noticeable jack behind her left ear, she’d have been the picture of the sort of fashion model Jimmy dated, according to the tabloid trid.

  Jimmy took her right hand in his. “I am very pleased to meet you, finally.”

  That shook Val out of her trance. “Finally?”

  Jimmy smiled. “Section seven, row five, seat twelve. You’ve got the whole box, paid for and all. Everyone on the team has been curious, but the team’s deckers can’t find out who you are.”

  Val blushed and sat down. “Oh, that, well. . .”

  “Jimmy,” I said, nodding toward Valerie. “She’s the reason we’re members here. Could your father’s deckers do that?”

  “No, I don’t think they could.” His smile broadened as he glanced from Val to me. “I guess now I’m going to owe you a favor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Jimmy smiled sheepishly. “Remember when we met you said you’d owe me a favor? Well, introducing me to Ms. Valkyrie here fulfills that and then some. Oh, and dinner and drinks are on me—the team had a pool collected for the first man to learn her name.”

  All of us laughed, easing a bit of the nervousness Valerie clearly felt. It struck me as funny because I knew she was bold enough to deck her way into even the most secure of corporate databases without even a hint of anxiety. With other deckers, the problem would have been just trying to interface with something that wasn’t silicon-based, but Val’s never been a social disaster. She was really taken with Jimmy and almost paralyzed because of it.

  Lynn clearly sensed the same thing in Valerie and took the conversation initiative before any silence could become awkward. “Jimmy, I’ve never been able to get Wolf to tell me how you actually met. I know he’s helping you now, but I gathered you’ve known each other since before that.”

  Jimmy nodded easily and leaned forward onto the table. “You remember the night when the gangs all went nuts and blew up that apartment complex?”

  Lynn nodded. She knew of it in the same way that almost everyone else in Seattle did—by what she heard on the trid and read in the newsfax. This meant she had no idea about my involvement in the events of that evening. As she’s a pacifist who never seemed too interested in trying to find out exactly what I do in working with Doctor Raven, I never felt inclined to give her a blow-by-blow description of what had happened that night. Not that I repeated stories of that night all that often—describing almost dying leaves something to be desired.

  “About a week
later, at the Dome, I saw this guy leaning against my car. I wasn’t getting a clean read off him, but he didn’t seem overtly dangerous. He introduced himself as Wolf and asked if I’d be willing to make a personal appearance at a pizza place downtown.” Jimmy shrugged. “I almost referred him to my agent to blow him off, which is what I normally do.” Before Jimmy could continue his story, a man who had managed to create a fashion atrocity within the strictures of the club’s dress code sauntered over to our table and lightly slapped Jimmy on shoulder. “Jimmy Mackelroy, isn’t it?”

  Jimmy nodded and shook the man’s proffered hand. “And you are?”

  “Phil Knobson. I own the Mitsu dealership over in Bellvue. Ace Mitsubishi. Heard of it?”

  Jimmy thought for a second, then shook his head. “Sorry, but I put most things out of my mind during the season, you know?”

  “Yeah,” the man replied automatically as he waved a woman over. Her outfit matched Phil’s and I started looking for a phone to call the haute couture police. “This is my wife, Maggie. Maggie, this is Jimmy Mackelroy. I’ve told you about him, right?”

  Maggie nodded, her blond perm as stiff as an acrylic spider web. “Phil, he never misses your games.”

  “So, look, Jimmy, I’m thinking we can do some business. You come down to the shop, we cut an ad or two, and I make you a sweet deal on a new car, you know?” Jimmy stood slowly, continuing to smile as he towered over the salesman. “I think that’s worth talking about, Phil, but right now I’m here with my friends, you know.”

  “Sure, sure, I gotcha. Look, why don’t we all go to dinner? My treat.” Phil glanced at the rest of us, then looked back up at Jimmy.

  I let the Old One’s dislike of Phil and his plastic wife bleed into my voice. “Actually, we were going to be dining outside the club, Phil. A private party.”

  Phil didn’t get my message, but his wife did and gently tugged on her husband’s shirt. “Honey, let’s let these nice folks get back to their party, okay?”

  Phil looked at Maggie as if her suggestion was a wild pitch, but when he glanced at Jimmy he saw that Jimmy had blasted it out of the park. “Yeah, okay, well, look, can I call you?”

  “Just call the team office and they’ll direct you to my agent. She arranges all those things.” Jimmy shook Phil’s hand again. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  “Right. Have a good night, folks.”

  As they departed, Valerie shivered. “When I get home, his credit rating will die.”

  Jimmy smiled. “If you can do that, I can guarantee you a lot of business from the other players on the team.”

  Lynn raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t happen very often, does it?”

  “More often than I’d like to admit, I’m afraid.” Jimmy shrugged and jerked his head in my direction. “When anyone approaches me I have to be thinking ‘What does he want me to buy? What’s in it for him?’ That’s really tough, especially when it’s a kid wanting an autograph, because dealers are known to use kids to get players to sign holopics they later sell for big nuyen. Most of the time folks are just nervous and genuine, but there are clunkers in the bunch.”

  Lynn covered my left hand with her right and gave it a squeeze. “So what did you think Wolf wanted when you first met him?”

  “He was different. None of this fake camaraderie or an apologetic ‘You don’t know me, but. . . .’ He just introduced himself and asked, explaining he’d already told someone else I’d do the signing. Most folks would have then tried to play on my sympathies, begging me to get them off the hook. Wolf just said, ‘If you’re willing, great, if not I’ll have to think of something else.’ ”

  I grinned sheepishly. “You remember it better than I do, I think. I seem to recall some stammering on my part.”

  “No, man, you were cool.” Jimmy chuckled lightly. “Instead of wanting something from me, Wolf was giving me a chance to do something nice for someone. I asked him what was in it for me, and he just smiled like he is now. He said he didn’t have much, but he’d owe me. I got the feeling that being in his debt wasn’t a bad thing at all.”

  Lynn gave me a peck on the cheek. “It’s not been for me.”

  Jimmy smiled, then nodded to me. “At least he treated me like a human being. Too many players get tightly identified with the players whose StatSoft they use. I guess it’s like trid actors being identified by their roles instead of their true names. For the guys who like that, it’s great—Babe being a fine example of that. For the rest of us, it’s a pain.”

  Lynn frowned. “I guess I don’t understand why you have to use statsofts when you play.”

  Valerie’s eyes brightened. “It’s really not that hard to follow, Lynn. Back toward the end of the twentieth century baseball started slipping in popularity. A devastating players’ strike and a number of betting scandals rocked the game. Because players and managers were betting on games and seen as grossly overpaid, fans started deserting. Baseball officials reacted, taking serious steps. For example, one of the greats, Pete Rose, was banned from the game and initially barred from election to the Hall of Fame because of gambling. Baseball also tried expansion, interleague play, and radical realignment to bring the fans back, but it only slowed the slide. They needed something to reverse it and that need, coupled with two other things, set up the current system.”

  Her earlier nervousness banished as we got into a discussion of baseball, she laid out the thinking behind the current system like a professor lecturing from her dissertation. “When the world changed and magic came back, and with the rise of bioware and cyberware, the potential for rigging games really spiked. Something had to be done to combat that eventuality. At the same time sabermetricians had managed to reduce the game to a stack of stats, and with the proper program you could produce a box score that would be very close to what the true outcome of the game would be.”

  Val held her left hand open, palm up, then made the same gesture with her right hand. “At roughly the same time a great nostalgia for baseball hit. Old-timers’ games and replays of old championship series became very popular. The film Field of Dreams and its holovid sequels made lots of money. Suddenly the corps that owned baseball got a great idea.”

  She brought her hands together, her fingers interlaced. “The Hall of Fame produces statsofts for all the players who ever played the game. Teams bid for the services of players in certain years of their careers—guaranteeing a statistical level of performance—and the teams play. It’s possible to have Babe Ruth from 1916 pitching to himself from 1927, for example, and that makes for a very exciting game.”

  Lynn shrugged. “But that could be done with a computer simulation. Why do they need players?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Good question. They use us mules because we can get broken, which introduces an element into the game that a computer simulation can’t really cover.”

  “Even so, aren’t the outcomes preordained—statistically speaking?” gave Lynn’s hand a squeeze. “They would be except for players like Jimmy here. He’s a Legacy player.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jimmy hesitated and Val answered for him. “There are some players in the annals of major league baseball who never had the chance to play enough games to provide a solid statistical base to make them a good player. The teams bid a lot of money for the headline players, like Babe Ruth and Tom Seaver, then fill out their roster with lesser known players. Legacy players come after that, and their identities are kept secret. That injects more chance into the game and allows folks to guess at who their favorite players are.”

  She reached over and gently slapped the back of Jimmy’s hand. “Last year I thought you were playing Luscious Luke Easter from 1953, but this year, I don’t know. This season you could be Red Lutz in 1922 or Bobby Lowe from 1894.”

  “Good guesses all.” Jimmy smiled at her and I saw Val blush. “Luke Easter was a great player. I’d like to think, if I were playing him, I could do him justice.”

  So would managemen
t, and that was the basic problem I’d been asked to help solve. The team wasn’t playing up to their averages. Everyone was off their statistical average and even though a few players, like Jimmy, were doing better than they should have, the overall effect was to take the edge off Seattle and that spelled disaster in the upcoming pennant battle with the San Diego Jaguars.

  Jimmy leaned forward and brought his voice down into a conspiratorial whisper. “Look, this place is making my skin crawl. Shall we get out of here?”

  “Sure. We can catch something to eat down the street.”

  Jimmy’s face brightened. “You know, I’d just as soon head over to that pizza joint on Westlake you talked me into visiting.”

  Val looked slightly stricken. “The Dominion place across from the Jackal’s Lantern?”

  I waved her concern off. “Don’t worry, Val. The prevailing breeze blows from Dominion toward the Lantern and not vice versa.” I stood and pulled Lynn’s chair out for her. “How did you get down here?”

  “Val gave me a ride.”

  Valerie smiled as Jimmy held her chair for her.

  “Lynn, why don’t you go with Wolf. I’ll drive Jimmy, if that’s okay with you?”

  “I’d be delighted,” he replied to her and I had no doubts he would indeed.

  II

  I arrived at the Dome late in the afternoon the next day because of the night game. I found Jimmy already there and dropped to the bench in front of the locker I’d been assigned. “Jimmy, thanks for going out last night. Valerie is on cloud nine, or so I was told when Lynn called me after talking to Val.”

  “Good. She was a lot of fun.” He smiled pleasantly. “She drove me back to my place and we talked for a long time. She knows baseball and a lot more, too.”

  I pulled my street shoes off and set them beside the spikes in the bottom of the locker. “I was directed to communicate to you, through means subtle but effective, that Val would be willing to go out with you again.”