Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  The ship’s computer asserted: “Sports-eyes is serious. No interview, no sponsorship.”

  “Very well. Let there be an end to it.”

  “Nonsense. You cannot live without Contest. Mina’s death proved that. You are a hookup addict,” Great Senses said, its fifty-by-fifty-meter panel of honeycomb-crystal glowing red for regret amid the blue of assertion.

  You are an addict. A simple statement of fact. It hurt, because it meant that Will was tied to Sports-eyes. But he couldn’t deny it.

  “You cannot live without Contest and you cannot Contest without a contestship. And this starship is owned by Sports-eyes. And there is the immense cost of the planet-push-coils to consider. . .

  “I’ll find a way to sponsor it myself.” But even as he said it, Tondius Will knew it was impossible.

  “Sports-eyes has legal access to this ship. If you refuse to speak with the reporter, you’ll have to talk to the show’s director. And he’ll come here personally. And you know how they like to touch you in greeting—on the lips. Latest homeworld fad.”

  Will the Chill spat in disgust. The self-cleaning walls of the ship absorbed the spittle.

  “All right,” said Will. “I’ll speak to the reporter. But only on the screen. Should I dress? What is the present custom?”

  “No need. Nudity is sanctioned.”

  Will turned and strode to the lift, rode the compression tube to tertiary level, communications. He glimpsed his reflection in the glass of the communication room’s inactive screen. He was golden-skinned, compact but muscular, utterly hairless, his bald scalp gleaming with metal hookup panels—for his physical guidance-rapport with Great Senses and the contestship—set flush with his cranium. His dark-eyed, pensive features, already cold, intensified as he approached the screen. His full lips hardened to thin lines; his hairless brows creased.

  A nulgrav cushion darted from a wall niche to uphold him as he sat. The screen flickered alive. The Sports-eyes communications ensign, a spaceship shaped like an eye, flashed onto the screen. The sign faded, and Will faced a spindly, nude, gray-haired man with tiny, restive blue eyes and lips that seemed permanently puckered.

  The stranger ceremoniously blew Will a kiss. Will merely nodded. The man moved uneasily in his seat; his shoulders bobbed, his thin cheeks ticked, his prominent Adam’s apple bounced. “Eric Blue here.” He spoke rapidly. “They call me Blue the Glue. This is a guh-reat honor for me, Tondius Will. A very great honor.”

  Will shrugged.

  Blue the Glue pounced on Will the Chill. “Will, it’s my understanding that you didn’t want to give this interview. Correct?” Will nodded slightly.

  “Well, uh, Will—heh—why is that? Can you be frank? I mean, you’re Titleholder for four Contests, you’ve been a planet-hurlin’ waverider for many longuns now. Twice my lifetime. You’ve earned two replenishings, so you’ll live another century at least. Is this the last interview for another century? As far as I know only one other SprtZ NewZ holorag has spoken to you in your entire—”

  “What is the pertinence of this?” Will asked sharply. Blue’s voice was abundant with hidden meanings. His face was not his face. Will wished he were back on Five, listening to those who spoke with no faces at all.

  “It’s relevant to your image. And your image is important to your audience-draw. And your audience-draw is dropping off, Will. Though some say you’re the best damn planet-hurler since Elessar in 2270. Still, you don’t—”

  “I don’t caper and jape for the cameras like Svodba? I don’t brag endlessly on my prowess and gossip about lovers like Browning? I don’t soak up publicity like Munger? Is that your complaint?”

  “Look, Will, there’s a difference between, uh, maintaining dignity—and being cold. And you’re cold, man. They’s why they call you Will the—”

  “There’s a different between being emotive and artistic, Blue.”

  “Look here, let me put it to you in the plainest terms. I’m a Sportsize reporter, my job is public relations— you’ve failed to give me anything to relate to that public, Will. Sportsize stars need audience appeal. They have to be likable characters. They have to be likable—ah— folks. They have to be fellows people can identify with. Not cold and distant automatons—”

  “All waveriders are cold and distant, as you put it, Blue,” said Will, coldly and distantly. “But most of them pretend they’re not, in order to maintain themselves in the public eye. But it is not coldness, not really. Not inside. It is the aura of unflinching and unremitting dedication.”

  Blue the Glue looked startled. “Well. Now we’re making progress. The Philosophical Waverider? Image BoyZ might be able to do something with that.”

  Will snorted.

  “Will, I wonder if you’ll be kind enough to examine a holotape I have with me and give me your analysis of it. I’ll feed it into your screen, with your permission.” Without waiting for permission, Blue punched a button and the screen was filled with a simplified holoimage of the final weeks (time-lapsed, sped-up to twenty minutes condensed action) of Will’s Contest with Opponent Brigg in system GV-5498. Two planets approached one another, one brown-black, crescent-edged with silver, its atmosphere swirling turmoil; the other, Will’s masspiece, shining chrome-blue like the shield of Theseus. Both were approximately Earth-sized and devoid of life, as was customary. Relative to the viewer’s plane of perspective, the planets closed obliquely, Brigg’s from the lower left-hand corner and Will’s from the upper right-hand corner of the rectangular screen.

  How diluted the public impression of Contest! Will thought.

  The right-hand planet, GV5498 Number Four, showed white pushcoil flares at its equator and Southern Pole. Atmospheric disturbances and volcanic explosions roiled the contiguous faces of the planets as gravitational fields meshed and struggled.

  Involuntarily, Will twitched and flexed his arms as if he were in hookup again, adjusting pushcoils, controlling the tilt, impetus, spin, momentum, and mass resistance of his masspiece.

  Seconds before impact, as dead seas boiled and ice caps fractured, as continents buckled like children flinching back before a blow, the pushcoil on the South Polar face toward Will’s Opponent flared and forced the pole to swing back, tilting the axis, lobbing the North Polar bulge forward, precipitating collision before Opponent expected it.

  Opponent’s planet took the worst of the collision forces. And after the impact, orgasmic rending of two worlds: more of Will’s masspiece remained intact than remained on Opponent’s. So Tondius Will won the Contest. And took Title from Brigg.

  The two Sports-eyes contestships, Will’s and Brigg’s, we glimpsed speeding to safety from the still-exploding bodies—

  The image vanished, the face of Blue the Glue returned. “Now,” said Blue, “why did you fire that pushcoil on your South Pole, the face toward Opponent, during the last stage’s final—”

  “It should be obvious,” Will interrupted wearily. “The ploy’s success supplies its logic. You must have noticed that my mass-piece had a more irregular spherism than Brigg’s. There was more mass in the North Polar hemispheres. It was like an inverted pear, relative to the viewer’s perspective of impact zone. I applied torque in order to use the club-end of the planet with the greatest force of momentum—this can be useful only in rare instances, and Brigg probably hadn’t seen it before. Most impacts are initiated along the equatorial swell.”

  “I see. Beautiful. Uh, such niceties are too often lost on the Sports-eyes viewer who sees—”

  “Niceties! It was the most obvious ploy of the game. Brigg perceived it instantly but too late; he couldn’t compensate in time. Niceties! The most important plays of the game are the early stages when masspieces are moved into place for the final approach to designated impact zone. If one misapprehends the earliest adjustments of trajectory of Opponent’s masspiece—or mistakes its accruence level of mass energy and the modifying attributes of the surrounding fields—well, one has lost the game long before entering impact
zone. What do you know of subtlety beyond your techniques for interrogation? What is this whole affair to you, Blue? What can you know of the exquisite visions of hookup? You see only very limited aspects of Contest. You observe, and not scrupulously, the composite images drawn from a thousand Sports cameras and you see them in timelapse and you see only brief flashes of the months of preparation. There is no comprehension of the internal artistry requisite—we spend weeks at a time in hookup, assessing and tasting and physically experiencing every known factor in hundreds of millions of cubic kilometers of space!” Will was not aware that he was shouting. “What is it to you? A contest between two waveriders hovering off dead planets which they seem to—to shove about by remote control, kicking —kicking!—the planets out of orbit and tossing them at one another—and the piece surviving impact with the greatest mass determines winner. That’s all it is, to you. And in the timelapse you thrill to a few adjustments out of the hundreds of thousands we make, the few that are visible to you. You huzzah at the fight’ of planets, their gargantuan turnings; they seem like colossal bowling balls in the hands of mites riding tiny specks and you swill your drink and clap your hands with juvenescent glee when you see the wracking and cracking of impact. You enjoy the sight of planets cracked like eggshells! Idiots! What do you know of the possession of men by worlds? Can you even for an instant imagine—”

  Will stopped. He swallowed, sat back, untensing. Specks of black swarmed his vision.

  Blue was grinning.

  “I suppose,” said Tondius Will ruefully, “that you’re proud of yourself now, eh, Blue? You recorded my little tirade, no doubt. You’ll crow about it at the SprtZwrtrZ Club. How you got a rise out of Will the Chill.” Will’s tone was bitter ice.

  “It’s good to see passion in you, Will! Though I have to admit I don’t entirely get your meaning. But why are you so tight with your enthusiasm, Will? We can build your ratings if you’ll give me more of that. And, really, can’t you leak us just a little of your love life?”

  “I have no lover: male, female, or bimale. None.”

  “No? None? Except your masspieces and playing fields, perhaps. . . . But you had a lover once, didn’t you, Tondius?”

  Will felt his face growing hard and dark with anger.

  Blue spoke rapidly. “Just for the sake of accurate historical perspective, listen, please, and answer my question—a yes or no will do. I have a document here I’d like to read to you. I want to know if what it states is true or false. Is this true? ‘In a.d. 2649 Tondius Will’s fourth confrontation with Enphon brought him at last into public eyes and put him in the running for Title. It was said he had prepared for this Contest for eight years; Enphon’s reputation doubtless warranted this, but eight years is unprecedented even for a waverider.

  “‘It is known that at this time Will’s lover, Mina Threeface, was not permitted to visit the waverider—he avoided all distractions. For eight years he refused to screen to her for more than a period of ten minutes once a month. The lover of a waverider is best advised to understand his need for utter concentration. Apparently, Mina did not understand. She hovered just out of scanrange in her father’s yacht and, minutes before impact, she dove on a sure course for the impact zone between masspieces, dispatching an emergency transmission to Tondius Will: I’ve gone to Impact Zone. Avert your masspiece, lose Contest because you love me. Or I die. His Great Senses dutifully relayed this message to Will. Tondius Will’s thoughts can only be conjectured. He had to measure the scope of two loves. He found he could not permit himself to surrender or even stalemate Contest simply to save Mina. She was trapped between impacting planets, she died there and, though Will won Contest, it was this victory that also won him the cognomen Will the Chill—”‘

  “Yes,” Will said softly, though inwardly he shook with the effort at self-control. “It’s all true. It’s true.” And he added: “Your heart, Blue—your heart is far more chill than mine will ever be.”

  Will broke contact and strode to the hookup chambers.

  * * * *

  Hookup flushed Will’s circulation, winnowing fatigue poisons from his blood, unclouding his brain. Refreshed, he adjusted hookup from yoga to extern. The cushions at his back, the cups gripping his shaven pate, the crowded instrument panel—all seemed to vanish. He closed his eyes and saw the universe.

  The senses (but not the mind) of Great Senses were his, now. He scanned first through visible light. He had been orbiting Roche Five for two months; the alien constellations overwheeling the Roche system seemed almost natively familiar. He observed nine of the ten-planet system, each in its respective orbit, hookup magnifying automatically; Roche’s Star occluded Number Two. Dominating the right-hand scope of his vision: Five, fifth planet from Roche’s Star, bullring half in golden-red light, half in shadow. Five was Will’s Contest masspiece. And patching into a drifting Sportseyes camera satellite’s signal, he could see himself: his contestship soaring above the twilight border, north-south over the face of the Earth-sized planet. The contestship, with its outspread solar panels and the beaked globe at its forward end, resembled a metallic vulture scanning the barren planet face beneath.

  Not quite barren, thought Will the Chill. The survey crew was wrong—there’s more than desert and ruins down there.

  He looked up from Five, and sought for Opponent. Focusing away from visible light, he worked his way down (“down”) through infrared’s multifarious blaze, down through the longer wave lengths, seeking a certain radio transmission. He sorted through the transmissions of the star itself, discarded background sources, letting frequencies riffle by like an endless deck of cards, each card with its wave-length-identifying signet He was looking for a Queen of Diamonds. She wasn’t transmitting. He worked his way up (“up”), toward shorter wave lengths, and ten thousand hairs split themselves ten thousand times apiece. He skimmed X-rays, and, through hookup’s multifaceted neutrino-focused eyes, spotted her, traced her spoor of nuclear radiation—she was using a hydrogen-scoop, fusing, traveling overspace, so Will’s Great Senses (constantly monitoring gravwave ripplings) wouldn’t notice her change of position. She was far from Three, her own masspiece.

  What was she doing? Then—Will shuddered. A strong probe signal had bounced from his contestship. He felt it again, and again. He waited. It came no more. He traced the signals to their sources—and found that the source was Opponent’s contestship, fusing to travel unnoticed in ordinary space. Will tied in with Great Senses. “Did you feel that?”

  “Someone tasted our defense screens with a probe signal,” Great Senses replied, voice particularly mechanical coming through hookup channels. “Who was it?”

  “It was Opponent! She’s traveling through upper space so we wouldn’t be likely to think the probe came from her ... no reason for her to assess us from that direction, surreptitiously. She knew in this stage we’d expect to find her wave-riding. What do you think? Is she testing our reflexes or trying to kill us?”

  “Three sleeps gone there was a disguised Opponent drone—I recognized it for what it was, though it was designed to appear as a Sports-eyes camera, because it was maneuvering in a pattern for which a Sports-eyes vehicle would have no use. It was probing our defense systems.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I was waiting for confirmation of my suspicions. We have it now.”

  “She plans to kill me.”

  “That’s within the scope of Contest rules. She has the right to kill you. Under certain conditions.”

  “It’s accepted technically but it’s not considered sporting. No one’s killed an Opponent for half a thousand Contests.”

  “Shall we kill her first?”

  “No. I shall Contest, and I’ll defend myself. She’s inexperienced. Luck brought her this far. She’s too impulsive to take the Title.”

  “But she has innersight. Admittedly she’s unjudicious, little precision as yet. Her Opponent second to last died in deep space. .. . She admitted nothing. They said it
was a leak.”

  “I didn’t know.” Will snorted. “So, she’s a killer. Let her kill if she can. That’s all—I’m going back to scanning—”

  “One moment. Do you want me to maintain ship’s gravity?”

  “Yes. I’ll be going planetside. After hookup. I’ve got to go down to—ah—” He hesitated. Why lie to Great Senses? But he couldn’t bring himself to voice the truth. So he said: “I’m going down to inspect the fusion scoops. All that dust—there may be corrosion on the pushcoils. And we’ll keep the planet in this orbit for another sleep. Until then, maintain gravity. I want to be gravadjusted—I might be going planetside fairly often.”

  He broke contact with Great Senses.

  But in the programming room the lights of Great Senses went from questioning-green to doubting-orange.

  * * * *

  The atmosphere of Five was breathable, but too rarefied to nourish him long. So he wore a respirator. Also, a thermalsuit against the bitter cold, die cutting winds. That was all. Unweaponed (against the advice of Great Senses: Opponent skulked nearer), he leaped from the airlock of the lander. He stretched, getting the wieldiness of planetside back into his limbs. He walked a few meters to a large boulder, clambered atop it, and looked about him.