Futures Near and Far (9 page)

Joe is off sitting by himself. He has, I note, lost the
first round of the consolation series, and is now out of the tournament
altogether.

I pass part of the time practicing small, null gravity
maneuvers in the bleachers. I hook a finger around the grip at the top of a
seat, letting my body float. I spin counterclockwise, then clockwise, flip
forward, then backward. I fix my eyes on my fingers as they twist and grip at
the plastic. That’s the secret of keeping one’s orientation, not to mention
keeping one’s dinner down: find a stable point and focus on it.

Later, I bounce from seat to seat, pushing off with feet,
toes, elbows, knees, fingers, hands. Never has Newton’s Third Law seemed more
real. Even breathing, I remind myself for the thousandth time, can be a source
of propulsion.

Just remember the rules, I say silently. The karate
technique will take care of itself.

It seems like only a few moments later that I am hearing my
students offer words of encouragement. My name has been called. I push off for
the sphere. Eunice Hershey is arriving from another direction. Once more, the
referee ties the red ribbon to my belt. We are inside the sphere, waiting for
the command.

I glance into her eyes. She is intimidated. I haven’t failed
to make the quarter finals in ten years, back on Earth. Somewhere in the
distance the referee shouts.

She takes the offensive. I stay at my side of the sphere.
She is leaving me an opening to the ribs just beneath her elbow. My foot takes
advantage of it.

Time is moving very strangely. It seems like an hour before
the whistles blow, the flags wave, the referee calls the score.

“
Yoko geri, chu dan
.
One half-point, red.”

More intimidation. I begin to smile. The old feeling is
back. I have the mind set that has carried me through so many matches. Eunice
sees it.

She tries a less direct approach this time. Off to my left,
then across in front of me. Her foot licks out as she passes. Not close enough
for a point; I don’t block. She continues past. I launch off. We cross twice at
the center of the sphere, engaging tentatively. I land again, this time on the
velcro. I stop, and turn. I know she will be off to my right.

She is not.

I feel a wind brush my temple. My block is almost in time.

The whistles blow.

I tread the velcro back to my starting position, listening
to it go scritch, scritch, scritch, feeling it tug at my feet.

“Ura uchi, jo dan,”
the referee announces. “One half-point, white. One half-point, red. Continue.”

Eunice seems surprised, as if uncertain she had really made
the score. She shouldn’t be; it was a clean technique.

She takes to the air again. I decide to move the slow way,
walking the velcro. I must wait for the right opening, the one sure to be worth
the point. There are no second chances at this stage. There. She is open to her
face. I strike.

And miss. Not by much, but wide enough not to tempt the
judges. I continue to the other side of the sphere. She is charging me again. I
block her with my left leg, shoving her back across the sphere. When she
returns, I am ready.

No. Her knee is in the way. I halt my technique.

I misjudge how limber she is. Her leg twists impossibly far,
bringing her body with it. She makes contact with my side.

The maneuver has left a broad opening, which I take, but the
whistles are already echoing.

The referee must be announcing the score, but I don’t hear
it. I offer Eunice my congratulations, and precede her out of the sphere. The
red ribbon is removed, and I am soon in the midst of my strangely quiet group
of students.

“Your strike was
much
better than her kick,” Sally blurts.

“But it was
after
her kick,” I reply calmly.

They offer more condolences, which I barely hear, and some
part of me shuttles words back in their direction. Presently Sally is due to
perform another kata, and I insist that they go on without me.

What the hell. I have enough trophies already. I spot Joe,
still in his perch, and float over his way.

“Close match,” he says. I decide he means mine, not the one
going on in the sphere right now. We watch that one, and the next, which
features a woman player. She loses.

“What do you say we get a beer?” I ask. The only alcohol
available is outside the stadium, in the space station proper, where there’s
gravity, and an old man can tell up from down.

“Sounds good to me.”

We unstrap and head for the exits, gliding like a pair of
pterodactyls.

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I think of this as the third of my “nanotech” stories
because I wrote it after “Suicidal Tendencies” and “Reef Apes,” but you could
say it’s the first, because it takes place before the end of the 21st Century,
at a point where it has only recently become possible to use nanotechnology to
roll back the clock and make the old young again. The other two stories are set
further down the line.

What this story brings to my mind is what Theodore
Sturgeon once called the space between the lines. That is, whenever I look back
on it, what I remember first and foremost is not the particulars of the story,
but where I was, what I was doing, and who I was with during its creation. Most
of all, I think of a beloved workshop.

From late 1988 until the summer of 1993, I belonged to a
monthly writers’ group known as the Melville Nine. The number was an inside joke;
there never were nine of us. We aimed for ten and went as high as fourteen.
“Melville” was chosen both for its literary connotations and from where we
gathered, on Melville Circle in Richmond, CA, at the late Janet Berliner’s
elegant fourth-floor condo on the shore of San Francisco Bay. Its members,
mostly professional writers, at various times included Joel Richards, James P.
Killus, Risa Aratyr, Ron Montana, Lisa Mason, Martha Soukup, Grania Davis, Lisa
Swallow, Marina Fitch, P.D. Cacek, and Lori Ann White.

I never missed a meeting. Workshopping is my bread and
butter. I’ve been part of some that did me no good, and my non-sf college
fiction-writing classes may even have set me back, but by and large, I can
think of no better way to improve one’s craft than to present one’s work to a
cadre of trusted colleagues and listen with an open mind to their critiques.
From those colleagues, I get brainstorming, refinements, confirmation,
inspiration. Sometimes a draft would change radically as a result of this feedback.
Other times the influence was modest but still valuable — “Marathon Runner” is
in that camp. I still recall the smile from Janis Lonnquist, one of our amateur
members who has since sold many teleplays, that told me my character had the
appeal I intended. I vividly recall brand-new member Risa Aratyr — also an
amateur then but who had already completed her novel
Hunter of the Light
(HarperPrism, 1995) — wanting me to do more
with the nanotech possibilities. Being new to the group, she was unaware I had
already done most of what she suggested in “Suicidal Tendencies” and “Reef
Apes.”

After May, 1993, Janet left the Bay Area. A fragment of the
group went on without her, calling ourselves the Will Write For Food workshop,
but the tide had turned. We never settled on a permanent venue. A variety of
circumstances quickly reduced our roster. Ultimately the monthly meetings
became six times or four or even once per year until they petered out
altogether in 2005. I still participate in workshops here and there when I can,
but it’s not the same. When I was in the midst of a Melville Nine meeting, I was
a man at home.

Autumn leaves floated
onto the patio. Neil Corbin counted them: Three from the maple, six from
the ornamental plum. Another shifting of the seasons — what did he care?

He keened his ears for the familiar chorus of shuffling
shoes or the clicking of Joe and Al’s daily game of dominoes. But not a person
stirred, and none were visible save crazy Anne over in the shade of the
umbrella table. Were it not for the birdsong in the trees, Neil would have
sworn his deafness had never been cured.

A car turned into the driveway — another source of silence
but for the low moan of tires on concrete. The vehicle stopped mere yards from
Neil’s chair. A muscular, casually dressed young man emerged.

“Sorry I’m late, Gramps. Are you ready?”

Neil accepted his grandson’s help in rising. “You’re looking
good,” the old man said.

“You will, too, Gramps. Come on. The clinic’s expecting
you.”

Neil removed his elbow from the young man’s grip. “I only move at one speed, Matthew. You know that.”
He padded toward the car, wobbling but making steady progress.

Matthew rolled his eyes, piled the luggage in the trunk, and
went to the driver’s side.

“You forgot the trophy,” Neil said.

The item lay beside the chair where Neil had been sitting.
Grumbling, Matthew retrieved it, placing it in his grandfather’s lap rather
than waste time reopening the trunk.

Neil’s hands closed over the statuette above the bronze
plate that bore his name. His hands automatically stroked the contours of the
running figure, but his attention wandered elsewhere, soaking in one last view
of the place that had been his home for so long. His glance tracked to the
empty, dusty windows of the far wing. His room had been the third from the end,
just over the sign reading “
Shadyhome
Retirement Community.
”

The once-immaculate grounds bore the first small signs of
neglect. The grape vine he had planted when he came to live there hung lush
with fruit in the arbor by the fish pond, its trunk almost as fat as a tree.
He’d never seen so many grapes on it, ripe and ready. His fellow residents
always ate them too quickly.

“You must be almost the last guy to move out,” Matthew
commented. “I think you’d have stayed there if the place weren’t shutting
down.”

“Could be,” Neil said. He sighed. “Let’s go.”

Traffic seemed to part magically in front of them, quiet
except for the wind of passage and an occasional cranked up music system.
Matthew, as if sensing Neil’s lack of interest in conversation, kept himself
busy manually guiding the car, though the navigation menu prompted him as to
what speed to travel, and when to change lanes, in order to maintain the
symphony of cross-town transit.

Matthew really
was
looking good. He held the steering wheel with a teenage grace and ease. Neil
lifted his own palm, stared at the creases, and after a slight pause, pulled
down the visor to look in its tiny mirror.

Moles and liver spots disfigured his bald head. The
translucent pallor of his complexion was relieved only by the rosette stain of
burst capillaries. Wrinkles — no, crevasses — lined a face rendered gnomelike
by passing decades.

He lifted up the visor, and turned back to the scenery. He blinked in surprise. They were arriving at
their destination. Miles had vanished, lost to the mirror.

“Dr. Rosen said to have him paged from the lobby,” Matthew
reminded him — Neil hated it when young folks imagined he had no memory
capacity. “Do you want me to go in with you?”

“No. I can manage on my own.”

Matthew chuckled. “I’ll pick you up here tomorrow at 10:00
sharp.”

“You’ll be late,” Neil said. He hobbled into the clinic as
resolutely as his one-hundred-twenty-year-old legs could carry him.

o0o

In the morning Matthew was on time, of course, tardiness
cured by the deliberate skepticism. The young man was leaning against the car
as Neil stepped out the door ahead of Dr. Rosen and strode briskly down the
walkway.

Matthew’s eyes telescoped outward like a cartoon character.
“Gramps?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Neil answered, voice firm and deep. “You
tell me.”

Matthew grinned and opened the car door. “Looks like they
got every molecule in the right place.” He slapped his grandfather on the back,
a firm tap that, only a day earlier, would have caused a stagger. “Come on.
You’ll want to get home and see your new room.”

“I can’t wait,” Neil said, deadpan.

Neil slid gracefully into his seat, and had his door closed
before Matthew could assist. Through the open window poured the aromas of heavy
dew and mulch from the flower beds along the walkway. He sucked in a deep
breath. When had his nose ever been able to detect scents so well?

Matthew stepped away to speak to Dr. Rosen. They kept their
voices so low that Neil knew they were talking about him. Irritated, Neil deliberately
turned away.

A woman was sitting on a bench about twenty yards in front
of the car. The morning sun haloed her reddish curls, giving her oval, smooth
features an angelic peace, like a Renaissance madonna, but with northern
European coloring.

Neil made eye contact. She blushed, and turned her gaze to
the avenue, as if expecting someone.

Slowly, belatedly, Neil thought to smile, but it was too
late. Matthew climbed in and the vehicle pulled away.

“You really
were
a
runner,” Matthew said, gesturing at Neil’s body. His jovial tone seemed forced.
No doubt his mind was still on whatever Dr. Rosen had told him.

The sawdust scent of the track welled up in Neil’s mind.
Hurdles skimmed his calves. Competitors hovered in the corner of his eyes, not
quite keeping pace with his long, sure leaps and strides. The ribbon parted as
his chest struck it.

“I broke a track and field record or two.” Neil waved his
hand dismissively. “Just school records, you know. I had one good season in
sprints and hurdles.”

“I thought your event was the marathon.”

“That came later.”

Neil was jiggling his right leg, and tightening his fists
just to gauge their strength. Matthew kept looking at him with a
cat-with-a-canary grin.