Futures Near and Far (23 page)

Claude grunted. “That your problem? That why you’re here?
You get caught with your hand in the cookie jar?”

“None of your business.”

“Hey . . .” Claude held up open hands,
gesturing peace with mittens that needed darning.

“I don’t see you asking them why they’re here,” Bill said.

Claude scanned the dull eyes and stubbled chins of the men
loitering twenty paces away. “I know why they’re here. Them and me, we’re at
the end of our roads. Got nowhere else to go.”

“And I do?”

“I think so. I can see it in your eyes. You could go back to
the world, if you wanted to pay the price.”

Bill pressed his lips closed. He had blown it, talking about
the boy in the laundromat. He’d forgotten to be the mime, stay behind the mask,
silent.

Claude stopped staring. He rose, rubbing mittens together.
“Care for a walk?”

“Might as well,” Bill said, relieved to be granted a change
of subject.

o0o

They set out for downtown. The clouds closed off any
glimpse of the stars, their dark umbrella heralding another dose of Seattle’s
itinerant drizzle. The cold wormed into Bill’s collar, into the cracks in his
shoes, into his ears. But where clothes pressed, the warmth of the exercise
suffused faster than it could be removed by the brisk air.

As the two men entered the maze of skyscrapers, the shadows
drew back, banished by neon and fluorescence. The lights played softly up the
chrome, glass, and concrete, accentuating the buildings’ vertical angles until
they seemed to climb toward infinity. Bill loved the architecture of Seattle.
Perhaps that was the reason he had chosen the place to flee to.

His joints ached, protesting the increasing humidity,
reminding him of his forty years of age and his weeks of questionable
sustenance. He watched with envy as men and women strode into the Hyatt Regency
lobby and continued into the rest of the hotel. The doors parted magically for
them, acknowledging the proximity of their localizers, recognizing them as
registered guests. No need for keys. Whatever areas they belonged in, be it
their own sleeping rooms or the spa, restaurants, gift shop, or concierge
suite, the doors would know and grant them entry.

Those same doors would remain closed for Bill. If he managed
to piggyback his way through them when they opened for someone else, a little
light would blink in the security office and tall men in suits would appear to
escort him to the exit — discreetly, of course.

The world was so convenient, for those that managed never to
scratch their mother’s pianos, be tracked down in mid-tryst by jealous wives,
go to the wrong places with company cars. Or . . .

“Ah, soft beds,” Claude murmured, startling Bill out of his
soliloquy. “Room service. Maids.”

Bill laughed hollowly. It would have been enough just to
amble along the mezzanine level, past the conference rooms and banquet hall, in
temperature-controlled air.

“I stayed here once,” Bill said, gesturing up at the guest
floors.

“Back before you decided to become a professional mime?”

Claude wasn’t going to stop probing. “I didn’t do anything
businessmen haven’t been doing for seven thousand years,” Bill said testily.
Immediately he regretted his tone. These days Claude was the nearest thing he
had to a friend.

The brief time spent stationary had cost them their envelope
of warmth. “Come on,” Bill said. “Let’s go back. There’s something I’d like to
do.”

o0o

Roars of laughter bounced off the brick and stucco of the
alley walls. Jimmy slapped his prosthetic foot in applause.

Bill was performing “The Beast with Two Backs,” a mime
routine he never showed his normal clientele. It touched a real need in the
hearts of men who had probably been deprived of sex longer than they had lacked
homes. Bill’s hips pumped the air with abandon. His mouth dropped open and his
eyes closed, feigning bliss. Any woman witnessing the antics would have been
mortified, but there were no women here. There were only men ready and willing
to appreciate a little entertainment, a little distraction from the bleakness
of their existence, and they paid in a pure sort of gold: camaraderie.

Though it was past midnight, all eight men present were
still awake. Bill knew the names of only half of them, but tonight they were
part of his community. It was a union founded on links no thicker than spider
web. A thing as mundane as climate could sever the strands.

Had severed it. This was Bill’s farewell performance. He’d
decided that much. The thermometers of the city delivered an uncompromising
message. Soon even in the daylight hours, the alley would be inhospitable. The
rains would fall harder than tarps and blankets could fend off, the wetness
containing the seeds of influenza or pneumonia. Within another few weeks, even
Jimmy would seek a less exposed, less independent venue to haunt — a mission, a
Vet hospital. That or the police would finally sweep him out.

Bill reached the final mock spasm and, breaking into voice
to mark the end of the routine, emitted a long, deep sigh. Jimmy kept the mood
going by bringing out his harmonica. He glanced at Bill, asking silently if he
wanted to accompany him, but Bill shook his head and settled down on an upended
box near Claude.

They listened together awhile. Halfway through the third
song, Claude turned and said privately, “Do you know a woman who wants a guy
with brain damage?”

Bill paused. “No.”

“Neither do I,” Claude said. “So here I am.”

Bill pulled off the Chaplin mustache and shoved it in his kit,
sighing. The alley became a cul-de-sac, with Bill at the dead end. Claude had
revealed himself. Bill could do no less.

o0o

“It’s not the end of the world,” his lawyer said. “You
made some mistakes, that’s all.”

The man was younger than Bill. Sleek. Well-dressed. He
gestured toward his computer screen. Bill watched the numbers, charts, and text
scroll across it: credit reports, income statements, loans, bank account
activity, employment record — all the documentation that described who he was,
there with a few taps of a keyboard. Only a tiny fraction of it was data Bill
had supplied. The rest was simply . . . available.

“The second-offense bit will be a challenge, but there are
plenty of means for damage control,” the man added.

On the wall behind the attorney hung a morph calendar. Bill
had one in his own office that showed a different landscape each day, complete
with branches that swayed in the wind, clouds that moved across the sky, shifts
of lighting to indicate the hour. This calendar displayed a still-life painting
by a latter-day Norman Rockwell.

The painting showed a well-kept dachshund standing at a
living room window, gazing out at its front yard at dusk, where a scraggly
terrier, obviously a stray, danced with a tennis ball. As Bill watched, the view
dissolved — the morph calendar seemed to be set to a one-minute cycle — and in
its place appeared the same scene, painted by the same artist, as seen from the
yard. The terrier, breath steaming in the frosty air, was rendered in mid-leap
in the foreground, while the dachshund, its eyes round, tongue lolling, peered
forlornly through the broad window pane.

The terrier seemed so happy. The dachshund, so envious.

“Excuse me,” the lawyer said. “Did you say something?”

“Couldn’t I just . . . run away?”

The man chuckled. “Wouldn’t we all like to do that.” Shaking
his head, he went on describing how best to proceed, unaware that Bill had
stopped listening.

o0o

Claude pursed his lips as Bill finished the story. “So now
you’re living a dog’s life.”

Bill raised an eyebrow. “I guess you could say that.”

“The question now,” Claude murmured, “is which dog do you
want to be?”

Claude did not wait for an answer. He turned his attention
toward Jimmy and his harmonica.

Someone dumped crumpled newspaper in a metal drum and threw
in a match. In the brief glow of the flames, Bill saw feet tapping and knees
jiggling to the music. Blood still flowed in his companions’ limbs, but it did
so too sluggishly to lift them to their feet to actually dance.

They were free, but like Bill, chains remained around their
ankles.

Bill tried to hum, tried to sway in time to the beat. The
terrier was out in the cold, trying desperately to pretend nothing was better
than chasing that ratty tennis ball across that lawn.

Return to Table of Contents

By the time I broke
into professional fiction writing in early 1979, I was already a black belt in goju-ryu
karate-do. Yet in all the years between then and the creation of this story in
1993 for Roger Zelazny’s
Warriors of Blood and Dream
anthology of martial arts science fiction and fantasy, the only karate
story I’d produced was “New Breed.” People
who knew of my martial arts credentials would ask why I hadn’t done
more.

It’s simple. I create works of imaginary pasts and
futures. Things beyond my experience. Often, in fact, beyond the very
possibility of my experience. Money and readership aside, the act of creating a
piece of fiction is the way it expands my universe just a little more, makes me
more complete. Novels and stories bring to me aspects of existence that I would
never otherwise sample.

Karate, however, is with me three or more times a week,
fifty-two weeks a year. My parents have long since thrown out the television set on which I used to watch David
Carradine walk through walls on “Kung Fu” and Bruce Lee shape himself
into a legend on “Green Hornet” and “Longstreet” (the movies came later). Back
then I could believe the myth that ninety-pound weaklings could master enough
secret arts in a few weeks to wipe the floor with
the hirsute, muscular bullies who had been persecuting them. Though I
wasn’t exactly a weakling (I was, in fact, on the way to becoming not only
hirsute and muscular, but a good deal more than ninety pounds), I had been a
victim of bullying. In my imagination, I was the protagonist of no small number
of martial-arts power fantasies.

But by the time I was writing professionally, karate was
part of my real world. I had come to know the potential of a punch. I had sweated through bouts with opponents who
were bigger, stronger, faster, more confident. I had passed the point
where I could “make stuff up.” I had to be true to what I knew. My expertise
paradoxically had made it harder for me to write a karate story.

So it was with some trepidation that I set about
composing the piece for Zelazny (who, alas, died the very month the book came
out). But in the end, the process was sweet. As I sifted through the maze of
accumulated experience, out came the ambience of the dojo, the richness of the
lessons I’d received from my instructors, Don Buck and Gosei Yamaguchi of
Goju-Kai Karate-Do U.S.A. A lot of me went into this one — perhaps more than I
was comfortable with at first, but looking back now, “Fearless” has become one
of my favorites of all my stories.

I knew the Peruvian would be trouble from the moment he
appeared on the tournament floor. He seemed to hover an inch above the polished
hardwood, coiled and ready to spring. He was heavily muscled, dark, hairy — the
quintessential kick-ass karate player.

Armando Ruiz. Mongo, his
enemies called him, though never to his face.

I wasn’t likely to spar him until at least the quarter-finals.
A lot could happen between now and then, but the way things looked, Mongo was
the competitor most likely to steal my shot at the trophy.

I’d already defeated my first opponent; my second match was
half an hour away. I had an opportunity to devote full attention to Ruiz as he
stepped into the ring and exchanged bows
with a sturdy, Nordic Shito-ryu player.

He scored a kill in eight seconds.

The match consumed so little time I had to replay it in my
head to fully grasp it. Mongo had charged forward, punches flying one after the
other, erasing the Viking’s powerful defense as if it had been made of smoke.
Three, four, five potent impacts to the face and the Viking logged off, leaving
empty floor behind.

The referee raised Ruiz’s arm and declared him the winner.
The audience roared. The Peruvian waved at the bleachers, seemingly intoxicated by the noise. The stadium bulged
to overflowing, attesting to the increasing popularity of
vr
combat arts. And why not? Not since
the days of gladiators had sport combat been
to the “death,” and there was no such thing as a poor seat. Though the figures I saw seemed to extend up to the rafters,
every spectator experienced the tournament as if from front row center.

Mongo strutted out of the ring, joining the contingent from South America. After the mandatory
sixty-second delay, the loser logged back on in a fresh surrogate. The
Viking, though now whole and uninjured, shook his head as if dazed and wandered
off to the end of the tournament hall, where the consolation rounds would
begin. The crowd mocked him.

Beside me, Mr. Callahan ran his fingers through his mop of
intensely black hair. “First boxer I’ve seen at a
wuko
event this season,” he commented dryly.

At tournaments sanctioned by the newly reestablished World
Union of Karate Organizations, contestants were supposed to be
karateka
, testing their skill against
others of their kind. Ensuring that had been a problem long before the advent
of full-scale virtual reality conferencing. Now it was worse. All sorts of
opportunists were flocking to bask in the glory and prize money, including
those who had scarcely seen the inside of a
dojo
.

I’d studied Ruiz’s record after the contestant list had been
issued — just as he no doubt had checked mine. The Peruvian did have a black
belt, but it was a hastily awarded
sho
dan
from some backwater South American kenpo school known for its loose
standards. Winner of dozens of boxing matches, the man had ridden the karate
tournament circuit less than two months, just long enough to qualify for single
A class. Now he’d come up to northern California thinking to walk over the
players accessing the prestigious San Francisco
vr
node.