Iterations

by Robert J. Sawyer

  It was a day of multiple miracles. Not only had Matt been chosen to be captain, but he even caught the ball about a minute into the game. He realized in a panic that he had no idea which set of goal posts belonged to his team—the closer one, over by the road, or the farther one, by the fence that separated the schoolyard from the adjacent houses.

  He had to pick one—had to make one more choice—and he needed to do it in a fraction of a second.

  Matt chose the farther one. It would be a longer run, but there were fewer boys from either team deployed in that direction. He worked his legs as hard as he could, pumping them up and down like pistons. What a glorious victory it would be if the weaker team actually won the game! And if he—Matthew Sinclair!—got a…a touchdown, it was called—well, then, that would put an end to him being chosen last!

  He ran and ran and ran, as fast as he could. His feet pounded into the sod, still damp from the morning dew. He thought, or imagined at least, that clods of dirt were flying up from his foot-falls as he ate up meter after meter—no, no, no: yard after yard—coming closer and closer to the goal line. His lungs were aching from gulping in so much cold air, and his heart felt as though it would burst within his chest. But if he could only—

  Ooof!

  A hand had slammed into his back—he’d been touched!

  No! It was unfair! He deserved this chance, this opportunity, but—

  But the rules were clear: this was touch football, and Matt had to stop running now.

  But he couldn’t—for it had been more than a touch; it had been a good, firm shove, a push impelling him on.

  He found himself pitching forward, the moist grass providing little traction. And the boy who had pushed him from behind was now slamming into him, as if he, too, were sliding on the slick turf. But Matt knew in an instant that that wasn’t it; oh, it was supposed to look like an accident, but he was really being tackled.

  Matt slammed into the ground, so hard that he thought the football, crushed beneath his chest, would actually pop open. The other boy—Spalding it was; he could see that now—slammed down on top of him. Almost at once, a third boy—Captain Takahashi himself—piled on top.

  The sound of Mr. Donner’s whistle split the air, but belatedly, as if he’d been reluctant to interrupt good theater, to bring an end to just punishment. But the whistle was ignored; Matt’s crime of creating mismatched teams was too great. Somebody shouted out, “Pile on!” Another body slammed on top of them, and one more after that, and then—

  Crrrackkk!

  It was an incredible, heart-stopping sound, like a gunshot. If Matt hadn’t been buried under so many bodies, he expected he would have heard it echo off the school’s brick walls.

  There was a moment of nothingness, of no sensation, while the other boys reacted to the sound.

  And then—

  And then pain, incredible pain, indescribable pain.

  The agony coursed through Matt’s body, starting in his leg, shooting up his spine, assaulting his brain.

  The other boys, sensing something was deeply wrong, began to climb off. As their weight shifted on top of Matt, fresh, fiery pain sliced through him.

  At last, Spalding got up. Matt looked up and saw an expression on the bully’s face he’d never seen before: a look of fear, of horror. Spalding was staring at Matt’s right leg.

  Matt swung his head down to have a look himself, and—

  For a moment, he thought he was going to vomit. The sight was horrifying, unnatural.

  Matt’s right thigh was bent in the middle, twisted in a hideous way. He reached down and hiked up his gym shorts as far as they would go, so he could see—

  God, no.

  His thighbone—his femur, as he’d gladly have told Mr. Pope—was clearly broken. The bone was pushed up toward the surface, pressing against the skin, as if any second now it would burst out, a skeletal eruption.

  Matt stared at it a few seconds more, then looked up. Mr. Donner had arrived by now, panting slightly, and Matt saw him looming above. “Don’t move, Matt,” he said. “Don’t move.”

  Matt enjoyed the look on the teacher’s face—one of incredible unease; there would be an inquiry, of course. Donner would be in the hot seat. And the faces of the other boys were equally satisfying: eyes wide in fear or revulsion, mouths hanging loosely open.

  Matt opened his own mouth.

  And a sound emerged—but not the sound the other boys might have expected. Not a scream, not a wail of pain, not the sound of crying.

  No. As Matt looked down at his twisted leg again, he began to laugh, a throaty sound, starting as a bizarre chuckle and then growing louder and more raucous.

  He looked back up at the other boys—his teammates, his tormentors—and he continued to laugh.

  Some of the boys were backing slowly away now, their faces showing their confusion, their wariness. The damaged leg was bad enough, but this inappropriate laughter was just too darned creepy. They’d always known Sinclair was a little weird, but they’d never have said he was crazy…

  They don’t get it, thought Matt. They don’t get it at all. He’d snapped his leg playing football! How cool was that! It was a badge of honor. People would talk about it for years: Matt Sinclair, the guy whose leg got broken on the—yes, he knew the word; it came to him—on the gridiron.

  And there was more—wonderfully more. Matt’s brother Alf had broken his leg once, falling off a ladder; Matt knew what was going to happen. He’d have to wear a cast for weeks, or even months. Yes, that would be uncomfortable; yes, it would be awkward. But he welcomed it, because it meant that, at least for a while, he would be excused from the horrors of phys. ed.

  That reprieve would be great—but things would be fine after the cast was removed, too. For when he eventually came back to gym class, Matthew Sinclair, football hero, knew he would never be picked last again.

  If I’m Here, Imagine

  Where They Sent My Luggage

  Author’s Introduction

  In late 1980 and early 1981, The Village Voice: The Weekly Newspaper of New York sponsored a contest called “Sci-Fi Scenes.” The rules were simple: write an SF story precisely 250 words in length—no more, no less (title words didn’t count, a fact I took full advantage of). Ten weekly winners would be chosen by a trio of judges (Shawna McCarthy of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; Robert Sheckley, the fiction editor of Omni; and Victoria Schochet, the editor-in-chief of SF at Berkley Publishing). Each winner received a hardcover copy of the first edition of Peter Nicholls’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia; my story won in the contest’s fourth week.

  For several years, I had this entire story—in tiny type—printed on the back of my business card, and in 1987 a Washington, D.C., outfit called Story Cards printed it as the text inside a bon voyage card.

  If I’m Here, Imagine

  Where They Sent My Luggage

  One look at the eyes of that allosaur had been enough: fiery red with anger, darting with hunger, and a deeper glow of…cunning. Those sickle claws may be great for shredding prey, but he can’t run worth a damn on mud.

  Come on, Allo-baby, you may have the armament, but I took Paleo 250 with Professor Blackhart!

  Damn the professor, anyway. If it weren’t for his class, I’d be on Altair III now, not running for my life across a prehistoric mud flat.

  Those idiots at Starport Toronto said teleportation was a safe way to travel. “Just concentrate on your destination and the JumpLink belt will do the rest.”

  Hah! I was concentrating, but when I saw that fat broad, I couldn’t help thinking of a brontosaur. So I let my mind wander for half a second: the JumpLink belt still shouldn’t have dumped me here with the dinosaurs. There should be enough juice left for one more Jump, if I can get it to work.

  Damn, it’s hard fiddling with your belt buckle while doing a three-minute kilometer. Let’s see: if I re-route those fiber optics through that picoprocessor…

  The thwock-thwock of clawed feet
sucking out of mud is getting closer. Got to hurry. Thwock-thwock!

  There! The timer’s voice counts down: “Four.”

  Concentrate on Starport Toronto. Concentrate. Thwock-thwock!

  “Three.”

  Toronto. The Starport. Concentrate. Thwock-thwock!

  “Two.”

  Concentrate hard. Starport Toronto. No stray thoughts. Thwock-thwock!

  “One.”

  Boy, am I going to give them Hell—

  Where the Heart Is

  Author’s Introduction

  In the summer of 1982, I worked at Bakka, Toronto’s venerable science-fiction specialty store. One Saturday in July, a man claiming to be a film producer came in looking for an SF story that he might adapt into a short film. I suggested I could write an original script instead (having just received a degree in Radio and Television Arts, breaking into scriptwriting was much on my mind). He agreed, I did so—and, as a new writer, I learned an important lesson: nothing ever comes of encounters like that one.

  Years later, I converted the script into a short story. In 1991, Nova Scotia publisher Lesley Choyce bought it for Ark of Ice, an anthology of Canadian SF he was putting together. That began my relationship with Lesley’s Pottersfield Press, which later issued two anthologies I co-edited (Crossing the Line: Canadian Mysteries with a Fantastic Twist with David Skene-Melvin in 1998, and Over the Edge: The Crime Writers of Canada Anthology with Peter Sellers in 2000).

  What pleases me most about this piece is that even in the script version from 1982, I predicted a global network of computers, which I called “the TerraComp Web.” That makes me one of the very few SF writers to foresee the World Wide Web (heck, I even came close to getting the name right…).

  Where the Heart Is

  It was not the sort of welcome I had expected. True, I’d been gone a long time—so long, in fact, that no one I knew personally could possibly still be alive to greet me. Not Mom or Dad, not my sisters…not Wendy. That was the damnable thing about relativity: it tended to separate you from your relatives.

  But, dammit, I’m a hero. A starprober. I’d piloted the Terry Fox all the way to Zubenelgenubi. I’d—communed—with alien minds. And now I was home. To be greeted by the Prime Minister would have been nice. Or the mayor of Toronto. They could even have wheeled in a geriatric grand-nephew or grand-niece. But this, this would never do.

  I cupped my hands against naked cheeks—I’d shaved for this!—and called down the flexible tunnel that had sucked onto the Foxtrot’s airlock. “Hello!” A dozen lonely echoes wafted back to me. “Yoohoo! I’m home!” I knew it was false bravado. And I hated it.

  I ran down the corridor. It opened onto an expanse of stippled tile. A red sign along the far wall proclaimed Welcome to Starport Toronto. Some welcome. I placed hands on hips and took stock of the tableau before me. The journalists’ lounge was much as I remembered it. I’d never seen it empty before, though. Nor so neat. No plastic Coca-Cola cups half-full of flat pop, no discarded hardcopy news sheets: nothing marred the gleaming curves of modular furniture. I began a slow circumnavigation of the room. The place had apparently been deserted for some time. But that didn’t seem right, for there was no dust. No spider-webs, either, come to think of it. Someone must be maintaining things. I sighed. Maybe the janitor would show up to pin a medal on my chest.

  I walked into an alcove containing a bay window and pressed my hands against the curving pane. Sunlight stung my eyes. The starport was built high on Oak Ridges moraine, north of Toronto. Highway 11, overgrown with brush, was deserted. The fake mountain over at Canada’s Wonderland had caved in and the roller coasters had collapsed into heaps of intestines. The checkerboard-pattern of farmland that I remembered had disappeared under a blanket of uniform green. The view towards Lake Ontario was blocked by stands of young maples. The CN Tower, tallest free-standing structure in the world (when I left, anyway), still thrust high above everything else. But the Skypod with its revolving restaurant and night club had slipped far down the tapered spindle and was canted at an angle. “You go away for 140 years and they change everything,” I muttered.

  From behind me: “Most people prefer to live away from big cities these days.” I wheeled. It was a strange, multitudinous voice, like a hundred people talking in unison. A machine rolled into the alcove. It was a cube, perhaps a meter on a side, translucent, like an aquarium filled with milk. The number 104 glowed on two opposing faces. Mounted on the upper surface was an assembly of lenses, which swung up to look at me.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  The same voice as before answered: a choir talking instead of singing. “An information robot. I was designed to display data, including launch schedules, bills of lading, and fluoroscopes of packages, as required.”

  I looked back out at where my city had been. “There were almost three million people in Toronto when I left,” I said.

  “You are Carl Hunt.”

  I paused. “I’m glad someone remembers.”

  “Of course.” The tank cleared and amber letters glowed within: my name, date and place of birth, education and employment records—a complete dossier.

  “That’s me, all right: the 167-year-old man.” I looked down at the strange contraption. “Where is everybody?”

  The robot started moving away from me, out of the alcove, back into the journalists’ lounge. “Much has happened since you left, Mr. Hunt.”

  I quickly caught up with the little machine. “You can call me Carl. And—damn; when I left there were no talking robots. What do I call you?”

  We reached the mouth of a door-lined corridor. The machine was leading. I took a two-meter stride to pull out in front. “I have no individuality,” it said. “Call me what you will.”

  I scratched my chin. “Raymo. I’ll call you Raymo.”

  “Raymo was the name of your family’s pet Labrador Retriever.”

  My eyes widened in surprise then narrowed in suspicion. “How did you know that?”

  Raymo’s many voices replied quickly. “I am a limb of the TerraComp Web—”

  “The what?”

  “The world computer network, if you prefer. I know all that is known.” We continued down the hallway, me willing to go in the general direction Raymo wanted, so long as I, not the machine, could lead. Presently the robot spoke again. “Tell me about your mission.”

  “I prefer to report to the Director of Spaceflight.”

  Raymo’s normally instantaneous reply was a long time in coming. “There is no person with that title anymore, Carl.”

  I turned around, blocking Raymo’s path, and seized the top edges of the robot’s crystalline body. “What?”

  The bundle of lenses pivoted up to take stock of me. “This starport has been maintained solely for your return. All the other missions came back decades ago.”

  I felt moisture on my forehead. “What happened to the people? Did—did one of the other starprobes bring back a plague?”

  “I will explain,” said Raymo. “First, though, you must tell us about your mission.”

  We exited into the lobby. “Why do you want to know?” I could hear an edge on my words.

  “You are something new under the sun.”

  Something new—? I shrugged. “Two years ship time to get to Zubenelgenubi, two years exploring the system. I found intelligent life—”

  “Yes!” An excited robot?

  “On a moon of the sixth planet were creatures of liquid light.” I paused, remembering: two suns dancing in the green sky, living streams of gold splashing on the rocks, cascading uphill, singing their lifesongs. There was so much to tell; where to start? I waved my arm vaguely. “The data is in the Terry Fox’s computer banks.”

  “You must help us to interface, then. Tell me—”

  Enough! “Look, Raymo, I’ve been gone for six years my time. Even a crusty misanthrope like me misses people eventually.”

  “Yet almost a century and a half have passed for Earth since you left�
�”

  Across the lobby, I spied a door labeled Station Master’s office. I bounded to it. Locked. I threw my shoulder against it. Nothing. Again. Still nothing. A third time. It popped back on its hinges. I stood on the threshold but did not enter. Inside were squat rows of gleaming computing equipment. My jaw dropped.

  Raymo the robot rolled up next to me. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

  I shuddered. “Is this what’s become of everybody? Replaced by computers?”

  “No, Carl. That system is simply one of many in the TerraComp Web.”

  “But what’s it for?”

  “It is used for a great many things.”

  “Used? Used by who?”

  “By whom.” A pause. “By all of us. It is the new order.”

  I pulled back. My adrenalin was flowing. To my left was the office. In front of me was Raymo, slipping slowly forward on casters. To my right, the lobby. Behind me…I shot a glance over my shoulder. Behind me was—what? Unknown territory. Maybe a way back to the Terry Fox.

  “Do not be afraid,” said Raymo.

  I began to back away. The robot kept pace with me. The milky tank that made up most of Raymo’s body grew clear again. A lattice of fluorescent lines formed within. Patterns of rainbow lightning flashed in time with my pounding heartbeat. Kaleidoscopic lights swirled, melded, merged. The lights seemed to go on forever and ever and ever, spiraling deeper and deeper and…

  “A lot can happen in fourteen decades, Carl.” The multitude that made up Raymo’s voice had taken on a sing-song up-and-down quality. “The world is a better place than it has ever been before.” A hundred mothers soothing a baby. “You can be a part of it.” I knew that my backing was slowing, that I really should be trying to get away, but…but…but…Those lights were so pretty, so relaxing, so…A strobe began to wink in the center of Raymo’s camera cluster. I usually find flashing lights irritating, but this one was so…interesting. I could stare at it forever…