by Timothy Zahn
It was a possibility that had never once occurred to him. He'd begun playing Deathworld six years ago, confident that he would always have the excitement of conquering new worlds, as well as the joy of creating them. With the ideas and resources of a million gamers to draw on, how could it be otherwise? But the rapid and widespread communication which the Net permitted had thrown him a curve. His own ideas had been picked up, bounced around by others, and then tossed back at him. There was no real way to stop it from happening—the more good ideas he came up with, the more he would find them staring back at him on someone else's world. Conceited though it sounded, he was apparently too good at this. Either he would have to quit building worlds or he would have to drop out of Deathworld completely. There was no joy in battling his own reflection.
Only... what would he do then?
He could take up a new game; start from scratch at Fantasy or Star Empire. But sooner or later he'd run into the same problem. So what was the use? There were other types of games, of course, but the solitaire video ones that his parents had grown up with would probably drive him stir-crazy, and the old spectator sports like football were definitely out. And that was pretty much it, unless he wanted something like chess or Monopoly.
The result was clear. His gaming days were over.
Congratulations were still appearing on the screen. With a sudden flash of anger Elliot cut them off, and for a minute he stared at and through the screen. He'd never realized before just how much the games meant to him, how much they made the rest of his life tolerable. It was as bad as losing a girlfriend. Maybe worse.
Slowly his fingers moved, typing for the list of public lectures/conversations currently on the Net. Perhaps talking with someone would help take his mind off his loss, he decided, scanning the list. One of the lectures caught his eye: Theory of Interstellar Travel: Lecture 1. Not what he'd had in mind, really, but... Shrugging, he punched in the proper code.
"The theory was established in the nineties," a voice boomed out at him. Grabbing for the volume control, Elliot hastily turned it down from its usual game position. As he did so, words began to appear on the screen: someone in the audience making a comment. "But it's never been completely verified," he wrote. "And it contradicts Einstein in several places."
"Granted," the speaker returned. "But it agrees on all the points that have been tested experimentally."
"Excuse me," Elliot typed in, "but I've just joined in. Could you tell me what theory you're referring to? Reply to CET-4335T."
Another question for the speaker flowed across the center of the screen; at the same time, words began to crawl along the bottom. Someone was responding privately to Elliot's question. "Hi," the message said. "We're discussing Bobdonovitch's theory about the possible extension of tunnel diode effects to interstellar travel. Have you heard of Bobdonovitch?"
"No, but I'm familiar with tunnel diodes."
"OK. Well, Dr. Stanley Raymond here thinks there are ways to confirm the theory on a microscopic, electronic level, where it diverges slightly from quantum mechanics and relativity."
"I see—I think," Elliot typed. "Thanks."
"Sure," the other replied and disconnected from Elliot's line.
Turning his attention back to the main discussion, Elliot listened to the last half of the speakers answer to someone's question on actual hyperspace travel. "...basic hardware is still at least a decade or two away. Probably more like a century, given the disinterest of the scientific community."
He paused, and a new voice spoke up. "That's as good a lead-in, I think, as any for our next speaker. Proving that Bobdonovitch was right is, of course, the key to getting other scientists interested in the whole idea of star travel. Dr. Hans Kruse, at Syracuse, will now discuss some possible ways to test the theory."
Elliot settled back comfortably in his chair as Dr. Kruse cleared his throat and began to speak.
—
"I see my fears were groundless. I have apparently wasted some time," said the Drymnu. "Not wasted," the Sirrachat disagreed. "All knowledge is valuable. And it was an easy mistake to make. Fragmented races look so powerful, sometimes."
"Yes," the Drymnu agreed ruefully. "A shame that they waste their energy on the idle pursuit of fun."
"Their loss. But, ultimately, our protection."
"True."
—
Elliot worked late into the night, an electronics textbook propped up on his keyboard, a notepad balanced on his knees, and Bobdonovitch's paper displayed on his TV screen. Many of the concepts were new to him, but that was all right—it simply added to the challenge. He had the time it would take to learn the basics; the time and, thanks to the Net, the information. In its own way, this was a more exciting puzzle than any he'd met in Deathworld—and the possible rewards were infinitely greater. Elliot Burke might someday be hailed as the man who took humanity to the stars. Glancing out the window at the starlike lights of the city, he smiled.
This was going to be fun.
Afterword
"The Challenge" was one of the first stories I wrote after going pro in 1980, and I'm reasonably sure it predates most of the crush of game-oriented stories that have appeared since then. If a leader is defined as one who sees which direction the crowd is going and gets in front of them, then I suppose I could claim to have started a trend. But I wouldn't claim it very loudly.
For any of you sharp-eyed, perfect-memoried people who may have recognized the Drymnu as also having made an appearance in the 1982 Analog story "Final Solution": yes, they (it?) are (is) the same. Like "The Shadows of Evening," "The Challenge" was originally to be the first of a series which somehow got sidetracked. I've really got to stop doing that.
The Cassandra
It had been raining all morning the day Alban Javier left Aurora: a dull, cold, persistent drizzle out of a uniformly gray sky. Looking up from under the wide brim of his hat, Javier wished that the rain could have been accompanied at least by roiling thunderheads and crashing lightning—something that would have lent dignity to the event taking place. But perhaps it was more fitting this way, he told himself blackly. It was, after all, with a whimper instead of a bang that mankind was abandoning this world.
He had been scheduled to leave on the nine A.M. flight, but it was now nearly two and his part of the long line had barely made it past the landing field's inner gate. Behind him, outside the fence, the waiting crowd had abandoned any semblance of order and was pressing close to the mesh, taking advantage of the minuscule shelter offered by the fence's two-meter overhang. Javier glanced back at them from time to time, but always turned away quickly. Too many of the rain hats and poncho hoods had bits of pure-white hair poking from beneath them, and with the nearer ones Javier could see the emerald green of their eyes as well. It was something like looking in a multiple-image mirror, and it made him feel all the more uncomfortable.
Ahead of him, the line shuffled forward a half meter. Picking up his single travelbag—all that the colonists were permitted to bring—Javier moved up and focused on the building into which the line ultimately disappeared. A good hundred meters away yet. Still, a considerable number of the city's residents had left in the past week. Perhaps the inevitable trance would hold off long enough for him to escape finally into space.
It didn't. He had, in fact, covered barely five more meters when the familiar tingle rippled through his body, and as his muscles locked in place the gray rain faded from before him....
A fireball becomes a river of flame racing through a dark, narrow corridor, erupting finally from a wood-shored entrance to blacken the grassy knoll above. The screams from within fill the air, but even as swearing rescuers plunge into the mine they are fading into the silence of death. Those still alive are brought out first, their agony muted by drugs. The rescuers who carry out the dead are no longer swearing. All are grim-faced; some are crying. The blackened bodies pass closely enough to touch....
And Javier was back on Aurora, standing in the ra
in with knotted muscles and a throat full of nausea. Behind him someone—a younger teen, probably—was sobbing with reaction. Ahead of him, the people had bunched together a bit more closely, leaving a small bubble of space around him, as if he were the carrier of some loathsome disease. He didn't bother to turn around; he knew that his own inner horror was mirrored in a hundred pairs of green eyes, and he had no desire to see it. Even misery could get tired of company.
With a shuddering sigh he slid a wet hand under his collar and massaged the taut neck muscles there. One final going-away present, he thought dully; with love, from Aurora.
—
The cubicle euphemistically referred to as the kitchen manager's office was about the size of a king-sized coffin, Javier decided as he stood silently in the half- meter of space between the front wall and the cluttered desk. Wedged into a chair across the mound of paper was a man so fat that it was hard to understand how he had ever gotten into such a limited area. Unbidden, an irreverent thought flickered through Javier's sense of futility: that Hugo Schultz had been placed behind the desk as a child and allowed to grow into his current position.
Schultz looked up from the application he'd been reading and fixed Javier with a pig-eyed stare. "You didn't put down what job you wanted," he said, his voice just loud enough to cut through the sounds of the hotel kitchen that the cubicles walls made only token effort to keep out.
"I'll take anything that's open," Javier said simply, matching the other's volume.
Schultz nodded. "Uh-huh. I see you've got Earth citizenship. You born here?"
A lie would be so easy—and so useless. Javier's entire public information file was available via a single phone call, should Schultz choose to check on it. Besides, to anyone who had followed the events at the frontier over the past few years, his hair and eyes were a dead giveaway. "No, I was born on Aurora."
"Thought so," Schultz grunted. "You're a Cassandra, then?"
Javier winced at the term, but its use was far too widespread these days to be avoided. "Yes."
Schultz grunted again and studied the application some more. "A master's degree, no less. You get that on Earth?"
"No, on Aurora."
"I thought all the schools went when the rest of the planet fell apart."
"They did. But I was one of the first of my generation—the first generation of Cassandras. The society didn't begin its collapse until we entered the labor force, and by then I had my degree." He shuddered slightly at the memories. "I stayed on Aurora to try and help. Six months later Earth ordered the planet evacuated."
"At Aurora's request." The words were heavy with accusation.
"Yes," Javier acknowledged, making no effort to defend Aurora's leaders or their decision. On some worlds of the Colonia, he'd discovered, the stigma of being from a failed colony was almost as bad as that associated with his Cassandra visions, and he had long since tired of both fights.
Schultz's expression didn't change, but his voice softened a shade. "Why? What were you running from?"
"Ourselves. Each other. The visions." Javier shook his head. "You can't understand what it's like, Mr. Schultz. Never anything but people dying—usually on a massive scale, and always so close you can practically smell them." "But they don't come true, do they? That's what I heard, anyway."
"Enough do," Javier said. "A few percent, I suppose. But that doesn't really help. All it does is add uncertainty to the whole thing, like watching a laser being aimed at someone and not knowing whether it's charged or not."
"Did leaving Aurora help?"
There it was at last: the question that, in one form or another, everyone eventually got around to. Have the trances stopped coming? Again, the temptation was to lie; again, he knew it would be useless. "Not really. Scattering us around the Colonia eliminated the group trances, but that's about all."
"Those are the ones where someone had a seizure and half the Cassandras in the city joined in?"
"Sort of," Javier said carefully. They were treading on dangerous ground here. He would have to watch what he said.
"The story goes that every time the dust cleared from one of those you had a bunch of dead people and a mess of wrecked equipment." Schultz's steady gaze had challenge in it.
Javier understood; it was a roundabout way of asking another familiar question. "The deaths came about mainly when people driving or working heavy machinery weren't able to stop before the trance began. But we always get a couple seconds' warning, so for most jobs there really isn't any danger, either to ourselves or anyone else."
"You were pretty stupid to let Cassandras do that sort of work."
Javier shrugged. "We didn't have much choice. The entire third generation had the curse, and the work force desperately needed us. Anyway, the deaths and damage weren't all that devastating in themselves. It was the panic and fear that went with all of it."
Schultz held his gaze for a moment and then dropped his eyes to the application again. Javier waited silently, listening to the muted clatter of dishes around him and trying to ignite at least a spark of hope. The effort was futile. Schultz was far too smart not to have realized that someone with Javier's education wouldn't be looking for work in a hotel kitchen unless he was desperate. Bracing himself, Javier waited for the inevitable turndown.
"All right," Schultz grunted abruptly. "You can start on dishwasher and cleanup duties. Our stuff's not very fancy—sonic washers and brooms—but it's not likely to get away from you, either. If you're carrying a stack of dishes or something and it happens, put them down, pronto. And don't tell any of the other kitchen staff where you're from. They're not too bright, most of them," he added, anticipating Javier's obvious question, "and probably won't connect the hair and eyes to Aurora."
"I... yes, sir. Thank you, sir," Javier said, thrown off balance by the unexpected response.
"Sure. One other thing." Again the pig-eyes bored into Javier's face. "How often do you get these trances of yours?"
"Two or three times a week, usually, in a big city; maybe once a month in a less populated area."
"What's your accuracy rate?"
"About five percent. All the ones that do come true seem to happen within twenty-four hours of the vision."
"One in twenty. Not too good, is it? So okay, here's the deal. You get a vision, you keep it to yourself. I don't want to hear about it, and I don't want the staff to hear about it. Life in New York is hectic enough without doomsayings that probably won't happen. Got that?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Abruptly, Schultz raised his voice in a shout that made Javier jump.
"Wonky!"
A moment later the door at Javier's right popped open and a thin, weasellike face peered in. "Yeah, boss?"
"This is Javier; he's on cleanup duty. Show him around and get him started."
"Sure." Wonky tossed a broken-toothed grin at Javier. "Let's go, kid."
"You like the boss, Javier? Huh?" Wonky asked as they left the cubicle.
"He seems very fair," Javier answered cautiously.
Wonky nodded vigorously. "Yeah, sure is. Friend of mine, good friend. Knew him in Jersey, couple years ago. He told me if I ever needed a job just come to him. So I did."
Javier nodded. Wonky was a thin youth with darting eyes and quick movements. He had probably grown up on the city's streets, his scars and missing teeth the dues of survival. Such people hadn't existed on Aurora, but Javier had met many in the old cities of Earth. None of the younger worlds of the Colonia, he had once heard, had been in existence long enough to develop the vast social and economic disparities of the mother world. Give them time, though, and the slums would come.
He shook off the mood. It was probably natural—maybe even inevitable—for a Cassandra to lean toward morbid thoughts. But such borderline self-pity should not be overdone, especially on a day like today. He had a job!
Now if only he could keep it.
—
The first few days went well. The work itself
was, of course, childishly simple, and Javier quickly learned all that Wonky could tell him about the kitchen and its operation. Of the hotel served by the dining facilities he learned nothing. Wonky's duties as busboy ended at the edge of the dining room; so, effectively, did his world.
Javier threw himself into his job with a will and efficiency that caused many puzzled looks and—inevitably—snide comments from his fellow workers. The strange coloring of his hair and eyes probably also slowed their acceptance of him, but if anyone actually identified the newcomer as a Cassandra he kept that knowledge to himself.
Strangely enough, Wonky seemed immune to the general aloofness and would often hang around Javier during slow times. His conversational range was limited, but Javier learned many helpful tips about living in the big city from him. He was grateful, too, for the company.
Luck was with him in another guise, as well: his first three visions occurred outside of working hours, away from the hotel. Two happened in the tiny rundown room he had rented a few blocks away, the other as he was walking home one afternoon. As always, they were images of disasters: an aircar crash, an earthquake, and a flash flood. And as usual, they did not come true, at least not as far as a check of the news media could establish. Years ago, Javier had believed he would get used to the visions, as one could get used to nightmares or scenes of violence on the evening news. Now, though, he knew differently. There was an overpowering immediacy to the disasters he was forced to witness, an accuracy of sensory detail that made them as real to him as anything else in the world. To deny the visions at any level would require similar denial of all reality, and Javier wasn't yet desperate enough to yield to insanity.
He'd been at work for almost a week when Wonky came in from the dining room with a load of dishes and the look of a kid with a secret. "Hey, Javier, guess what I just saw in the dining room."
"What?" Javier asked. His eyes and most of his attention were on the sonic washer, which had a tendency to drift off its proper frequency and rattle the dishes.
