Future Games

by John Shirley

  The humans in the field raised a ragged cheer, echoed by the high-pitched hooting of the Taus.

  “How’d she feel?” I yelled to Alex as she trudged back from halfway to first base.

  She laughed. “What, are baseball bats feminine now?”

  “That one is.”

  Alex picked it up from where it had flown from her grasp and ran her fingers down its length. “Maybe you’re right. She’s pretty sweet.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell, Captain.” I smiled, mentally moving myself to the top of my team’s order, and returned to the mound.

  The game went long, and our shadows lengthened, then doubled as Antipodes rose, full as it was every weekend. Like most small-town baseball games, ours was a dramatic affair, the score padded by overthrows, dropped catches, and stolen bases. By the bottom of the ninth, the teams were tied at twelve runs apiece.

  “Come on guys, extra innings,” Alex shouted as her team took the field.

  “No way. Let’s wrap this up,” I exhorted my own troops.

  The Taus seemed to have caught the growing tension. They’d been agitated since the end of the seventh. I wondered if they’d noticed we were playing a couple of more innings than usual.

  No one knew how smart the Taus were. They were definitely tool-users well into the agricultural revolution, planting their ferny staple plants with stick hoes and fending off large predators collectively, using spears and slings and a lot of hooting. According to some of our Earthbound theorists, their social rituals were about as advanced as humans at the beginning of language development, although Dr. Chirac always warned me about making comparisons. Their repertoire of vocal noises sounded awfully sophisticated to me, and fully half of it was too high for human hearing.

  My job had little to do with contact, of course. Our mission priority was getting the pipeline up, never mind the local environment and culture, intelligent or not. With a global population of about a hundred thousand Taus, we weren’t exactly crowding them. And they had no use for the oil we were stealing, anyway. Maybe twenty thousand years from now they’d miss it. But I figured we were doing them a favor. We’d leave them enough accessible oil for a short run at internal combustion, but not enough to fuck their planet as thoroughly as we had ours.

  In the meantime, Earth’s billions needed oil for plastics, our ancestors having apparently forgotten that petroleum is useful for things other than burning. And of course the U.S. needed another few decades of cheap gas and big cars to complete our conversion.

  Hunter went in and hit a single, and got a big cheer from the Taus. I wondered for a moment if our alien audience knew the score was tied.

  “The natives are restless,” a voice behind me observed.

  “I didn’t know you were watching, Ashley. Thought you didn’t approve.”

  Ashley Newkirk shrugged. “A base imitation of the mother game, without subtlety or grace.”

  “Aye, but at least it doesnae take five days.” Iain Claymore was another abstainer from baseball, and physical activity in general, but was happy to take any side against Ashley. The two Brits were on the xeno team, like all of the non-Americans in the colony, but were strictly horticulturists. They had little to do with the dominant species, too busy observing how our invader species were affecting the local flora.

  “One day you must tell me the rules again,” I said, praying he would ignore the offer. Ashley had once tried to reveal the mysteries of cricket to me, but his explanation turned to apoplexy every time I made an analogy to baseball. In his mind, any query that compared the two was like asking of Rembrandt’s painting: “Interior or exterior?”

  Jenny Flagg was up next. She had once been a reliable single, specializing in Texas-leaguers that landed just behind the shortstop. The problem was, after two years everybody knew her one trick. The outfield moved in.

  The first pitch flew past her wild swing. She was looking to hit it hard, trying to force the fielders deep. They didn’t buy it.

  “Strike one!” Dr. Chirac declaimed. If nothing else, the Taus would probably learn to count to three.

  “Jenny!” I made a calming gesture with my hands. With the score tied, all we needed was her usual single.

  She nodded, took a less aggressive stance.

  But she slashed again at the next pitch, a drive that flew high over second base, clearing the center fielder’s outstretched glove by centimeters. Jenny ran a leisurely double while Hunter pounded home.

  “That’s the ball game!” Dr. Chirac shouted. The Taus cheered.

  The field jogged desultorily in. Our team gathered around Hunter and Jenny, providing the Taus a textbook example of a human victory celebration.

  “The beer’s on me,” I announced, then turned to Jenny. “But I should have you up on insubordination charges, Sergeant Flagg.”

  She shrugged as we headed back toward camp. “I thought you and I were engaged in a subtle deception, Colonel.”

  I laughed. “At least now you’ll get a little respect for your long ball—”

  “Colonel!”

  I turned at the shout. Dr. Chirac still stood at home plate, transfixed and staring into the outfield.

  A small party of Taus was approaching.

  I signaled for everyone to stop where they were and walked with quick, even steps to Chirac’s side.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said. They were armed, as always, slings at the ready around their necks. Over the last two years, we’d cleared the field of rocks pretty thoroughly, but the Tau could be deadly with improvised projectiles. I was more awed than worried, though. This was the first time they’d entered the human colony.

  “They look friendly, I guess.”

  “Don’t you see it?” Chirac was breathing hard, her tablet making the small reminder beep that indicated high-memory motion capture.

  “See what?”

  “There are nine of them.”

  They didn’t want gloves.

  That made sense, at least. Their big hands were already baseball glove-sized. It had crossed my mind to wonder once or twice if that’s why they watched the game. We must have looked a bit more Tau-like with brown leather webbing our fingers.

  As Dr. Chirac quickly briefed me, I realized that she was in command for the next couple of hours. At long last, we were in a contact situation.

  “Keep the winning team playing, in the same positions for consistency. Play nine innings, no matter how dark it gets. Go along with any call I make, however strange.”

  “Thinking of cheating, Doc?”

  “Absolutely not, but I may have to adapt the rules a bit. With their body structure, it’s going to be a small strike zone. Go easy on them, but play to win. And for god’s sake don’t hurt one. Any questions?”

  “Just one.”

  “What?”

  “Are we the visitors or the home team?”

  She nodded. “Interesting. It’s our field, but their planet. Still, they won’t be aware of the distinction, given that we haven’t had any visiting teams lately. Let them bat first.”

  I was glad Dr. Chirac had chosen who would play. Everyone wanted to be in the first interspecies baseball game.

  Contact had been one of our mission parameters from the beginning, but after the excitement of finding Tau inhabited, two years of being snubbed by the natives had left those of us in the military and construction side feeling left out of the explorers’ club. But the old excitement came back quickly. The news spread through handcom calls, and before the game had started the entire human population of Tau was in attendance. Yoshi and the rest of the xeno team frantically mounted fixed cameras to record the game.

  “Play ball!” Dr. Chirac shouted as I took the mound.

  I faced the Tau at bat, preparing myself to throw the first interspecies pitch in baseball history.

  She (a ninety-percent chance with Taus) was gripping the Slugger with her two sling hands, shifting her weight on the other four like a restive batter. The two mid-hands popped up occasio
nally to scratch her thorax and stroke the bat.

  They had been watching us closely. One of the Tau’s sling hands let go of the bat for a moment to touch its brow, as if adjusting an invisible cap.

  I dipped my shoulders one by one, getting a pair of good cracks from my neck, hoping my arm would stay in the game for nine more innings. Checked first and third, spat, and licked my lips.

  The creature in front of me didn’t look ready for a fastball. For a first-time batter, she didn’t seem utterly clueless, but she held the bat a bit too far back, as if stuck in the wind-up of a swing.

  I threw at a nice, easy speed.

  Like many first balls of new seasons, it was not a great pitch, dipping low enough that Hunter had to scoop it up from the dirt. But the Tau gamely swung, missing by a country mile. (Or, as Chirac’s tablet recorded, a good forty centimeters.)

  I saw Dr. Chirac hesitate before she called, “Strike one!” Her eyes narrowed a bit above her filter mask, as if thinking I’d thrown an unhittable ball on purpose.

  I shrugged as it flew back to me.

  My second pitch tightened up and went in right at thorax level, where the Tau’s first swing had passed over the plate. She swung and missed again, low this time, but closer.

  “Strike two!”

  The ball came back from Hunter, who yelled his usual, “You got her now, Colonel!”

  I smiled at Hunter’s attitude. It wasn’t like the Tau were going to walk in here and win a game off us. We had to assume this was as much about contact for them as it was for us. They might as well get a real baseball experience.

  Hunter flashed me two fingers down, and I nodded.

  After nine innings, my fastball isn’t exactly scorching, but it ain’t bad for an old man’s. I laid the ball straight into Hunter’s glove, and the Tau batter swung late by a solid second.

  “Strike three!” Chirac called, and cocked her thumb for the Tau to go.

  There was dead silence for a moment. Did she know she was out? Had my fastball constituted humanity’s first interstellar diplomatic blunder?

  The batter hung its head, rested the Slugger on its abdomen, and trudged back toward the other Taus clustered to the right of home plate.

  Hunter started the cheer. “Way to go, Colonel!” He clapped and whistled. The remaining humans and the Taus around the field joined in. When the batter got back to her teammates, they put up their sling hands to pat her head softly, almost like a team high-fiving each other.

  I looked at Dr. Chirac, who was recording the display. They apparently knew the rules, at least the basics. Over a year or so of watching the game, the Tau had learned some baseball.

  It occurred to me that of everything we had accomplished here—prospecting for oil, building a solar array to power the tube, planting the farm, drinking and fighting with (and screwing) each other—this game was our only real collective ritual.

  Our colony had no common religion. The small group that had once held Mass had dwindled due to a schism: Some wanted to observe every seven Tau days, some every lunar week, others to match Earth Sundays. As a result, any prayers nowadays were pretty much done in private. After a few weeks on-planet, I’d let the military protocol loosen. There were only seven of us who were U.S. Army, so I saw little point in raising the flag every morning. Even our work schedules were erratic. Everyone adapted differently to the eighteen-hour day, and McGill and I let our people change their shifts when Tau-lag left them sleepless in the planet’s long twilit night.

  To the Tau, we must have seemed an unruly lot, chaotic and unpredictable. But in baseball we had found ritual and ceremony, a focus that brought us—the twenty Americans, four Japanese, two Cubans, and our French umpire, at least—together.

  So perhaps it didn’t matter if the Tau never got a hit.

  It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

  Three up, three down.

  The top of the Tau order only got the bat on the ball once, producing a foul tip that went over Hunter’s head. For a moment, I wondered if the batter would mistakenly run, but she knew it had gone foul and just eased onto her back four, waiting as Hunter chased it down. Then she struck out swinging on the next pitch.

  We were up.

  “Jenny,” I called as we came off the field. “You go in first.”

  “And do what, Colonel?”

  I shrugged. “Chirac says play to win. But no dangerous line drives. And don’t argue with the doctor’s calls.”

  “Can they even pitch?”

  “I guess we’ll find out. They’re pretty good with those slings, though.”

  I could see Jenny’s lips purse even through her filter mask. “Deadly, actually.” We’d seen them take down the local predators at a hundred meters with a fusillade of rocks the size of human fists.

  “Relax, Jenny. So far they seem to know the rules. I don’t think they’re suddenly going to throw beanballs at us.”

  “Wish I had a batter’s helmet, just in case the pitcher pulls out her sling.”

  I looked back at the Taus. They were throwing the ball to each other, warming up like humans taking the field. They had adapted their sling technique to a throw, like an underarm pitch tilted forty-five degrees.

  “You’ll be okay.” I patted Jenny’s shoulder and jogged over to join Yoshi by one of the cameras.

  “They’re throwing pretty good.”

  He nodded, following the ball with the camera headsup, a zoomed-in view on a translucent layer over his face.

  “I’ve seen the kids toss rocks like this,” he said. “My guess is that it’s the original behavior that the sling was adapted to augment.”

  “They used to hunt barehanded?”

  “They’re built for it.” Yoshi sent me a headsup. He had some software running that interpolated Tau skeletal structure. (Conveniently, the Tau practiced ritual exposure after death. Given that carrion-eaters usually dragged away the corpse, we figured an autopsy or two wouldn’t stretch the bounds of cultural sensitivity.) As the Tau with the ball wound up, I watched the compound socket that allowed her arm smooth 360-degree rotation. She was far more fluid than a human throwing underarm. Faster, too.

  I wondered if Jenny was really safe. These guys were built to throw.

  The Tau team had managed a pretty fair imitation of our field placings, and when the alien on the mound raised a hand, another slung the ball to her.

  Jenny hefted the bat and walked up to the plate, and my jaw dropped.

  “Did you see that, Yoshi?”

  “Well, I guess they can tell us apart,” he said quietly.

  The outfielders had moved in, covering the ground where Jenny’s Texas-leaguers tended to land.

  “The question is,” Yoshi said, “do they really understand Jenny’s hitting style, or are they just imitating our strategy?”

  “Good point. Remember, she got a hit by going deep last game.”

  “Barely,” Yoshi muttered. Then I remembered that he’d been the one in center field for Jenny’s last at-bat.

  She knocked the dust from her shoes and stood at the ready, glancing at the Tau playing catcher. It was the closest any of us had actually gotten to the dominant life form before today. Just behind the catcher, Dr. Chirac looked ecstatic.

  “Play ball!” she shouted.

  The Tau started to jitter on the mound, some sort of pre-pitch dance. She finished with jerk of the head accompanied by a little coughing noise. I heard a giggle from my team, which spread throughout the humans.

  “Well, Colonel,” said Yoshi, “she’s got you cold.”

  I blinked, then saw it: the little dance had been an imitation of my wind-up ritual. She’d bobbed her shoulders one by one, checked the bases, then spat on the ground. No doubt she would have licked her lips if she’d had a tongue.

  Of course, as far as the Tau knew, it was in the rules that you had to spit before you pitched. All four humans who regularly spent time on the mound had a tendency to do so. As observers,
the Tau had the classic problem of a small sample size: They couldn’t distinguish between the explicit laws of the game, its long-held traditions, and the personal habits of the few players they’d seen.

  Jenny readied herself, and the first pitch came at her. It was low and outside, but she stepped back nervously. The pitch had looked tentative to me, slower than they’d been throwing in the outfield. Hopefully, that meant the Tau were trying not to hurt us.

  The catcher scooped it in effortlessly and tossed it back with a high, arcing throw, an imitation of Hunter’s returns.

  “Ball one!” Chirac called, focused on her tablet as the pitcher warmed up again. The humans around me tittered again as the alien performed its little pantomime of me.

  “Can’t wait to get a sample of that fresh saliva,” Yoshi said.

  “Well, at least I’ve made one contribution to science,” I said.

  The second pitch got a little closer to the plate; I reckoned it was between knees and chest, but still outside. Chirac called another ball.

  Jenny looked more confident now. The outside pitches seemed cautious to a fault, and when the third came almost within reach, she leaned forward across home plate and took a swing at it.

  The ball smacked off down the first-base line. Jenny started to run, but checked herself as it drifted foul. The Tau playing first base managed to get in front of the ball, but didn’t get her hands low enough. It bounced off the hard abdominal carapace and rolled toward Yoshi and me.

  I scooped it up.

  “Is she okay?” I said softly.

  “Sure,” Yoshi said. “They’re tough. As long as we don’t hit one in the head.”

  I tossed the ball softly to the first baseman, then looked down at my hand. I’d touched a ball that had been touched by an alien. Not since my boots had first planted themselves on Tau soil had I felt such an otherworldly thrill.

  “Strike one!” called Chirac, nodding approvingly.

  From then on, Jenny gamely tried to get a hit, managing to strike out chasing the errant pitches. The Tau on the mound was getting better, but she still was about as accurate as a drunk little-leaguer. At least she was throwing faster, apparently confident that she wouldn’t kill anyone.