Futures Near and Far (27 page)

One thing would have made it better. I had still quailed at
the moment of attack. But for the first time, I looked forward to what Mr.
Callahan might have up those white cotton sleeves. He had already turned to the
next set of freestyle partners, seemingly absorbed in them, but I knew he had a
plan just for me.

o0o

For the next six months, the grandmaster let me spar
nearly every class in the modified way he’d introduced. I was always the
defender. A sense of anticipation mounted among the
dojo
regulars. They knew, as I did, that sooner or later I’d be set
free.

That moment came in a way I never expected. It was an
ordinary workout in every other respect, until Mr. Callahan called me to the
center of the room . . .

And stood across from me.

“Tonight, you will spar normally.
Jiyu kumite
.”

All the moisture vanished from my mouth. The grandmaster.
The
ju dan
. The
hanshi
. He had not sparred one of his own students in years. He
saved his sorcery for tournament opponents. Outsiders. Enemies.

I stared him straight in the eyes and tried not to soil my
gi
pants.

Keith handled the
commands. As he shouted, I sprang into the most defensive position I
knew.

I didn’t even see most of the techniques Callahan threw at me. Fists, feet, elbows flew all around
me. Abruptly I was in my wheelchair at home. My
vr
deck cheerfully informed me that the match had lasted
fifteen seconds. It had seemed like one.

I rematerialized at the
dojo
.
Callahan nodded and said, “Again.”

Shaking, I took my place.
We engaged. And this time, something awakened in me, something that had
been developing for a long time. Call it the state of mind a doe calls up to
defend her fawn against a mountain lion. My rising block redirected the fist
racing toward my face. My body twisted away from the kick arcing toward my
belly. I lifted my leg out of the way of
sensei
’s stomp at my kneejoint.

He took me out with a roundhouse kick to my head. I hadn’t
lasted any longer than before. But everything had been clearer. I’d seen what most
of the techniques coming at me were.

I rematerialized. “Again,” said Mr. Callahan.

Oh, God, I thought. He charged. I retreated as fast as I
could, frantically defending myself.

And this time, in the midst of all the yielding, pumped up
with fright, I saw a brief opening.

I struck. My fist tapped
sensei
’s
chin. Not as strongly as I might have liked, but enough to make him blink,
enough that jawbone kissed my knuckles.

A few moments later he killed me again. I’d lasted
twenty-three seconds.

But I’d gotten a punch in on him. A punch on
him
. When I logged back on, I found him
smiling at me. A drop of blood hung from his split lip.

“Perhaps we’ll have the chance to spar again one day,” he
said, and gestured for me to return to my place.

o0o

The next three months — during which I sparred every class
— confirmed what had ignited that night. I had a new ability. Though I still
couldn’t leap in undaunted as I had before Mongo, I now knew how to wait,
letting my opponent commit to his movement, and on a good night, when I was
sharp, I could turn the tables on any number of players. It was not as easy as
bowling them over with an unbridled attack, but it gave me a goal to reach for,
virgin territory to explore. As Fearless,
I’d never have been able to score a
hit on the grandmaster. Only someone capable of being truly intimidated
could ever be a master of defense.

I’d just finished an invigorating workout and was staying
late, polishing a little kata to wind
down, when a voice from the foyer startled me.

“Did you enjoy yourself tonight?”

I jumped and turned around. Mr. Callahan strode onto the
floor.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to seem as casual as he. “Yes, I
enjoyed myself a great deal.”

His lips curved into a Mona Lisa pose. “I’ve heard you’ve
signed up for the Riverside Invitationals.”

“Just C level,” I
replied. “To test my wings. It’s a start.”

“Yes. It is. How do you feel about it?”

“I . . .” I coughed. “It’s never going to go
away, is it? I’m going to flinch for the rest of my martial arts career.”

“Possibly.” He scratched his chin. “Does it matter?”

Not the way it had. The bitterness was leaching out, the
sense of being a victim was fading. But . . .

“I still want to win,” I said. “When I was Fearless, I knew
I’d make it to the top. I don’t know if the new me ever will.”

He smiled fully. Turning to the mirror, he pointed at the
reflection of my lean, perpetually healthy surrogate. “You’ve got fifty, sixty,
maybe seventy years left. Who can say what you’ll be able to do in all that
time?”

His arm dropped to his side. Though the move was graceful,
it seemed to carry the weight of eight decades. How many obstacles, how many
disappointments, I wondered, had this man weathered on the way to becoming a
karate megastar? I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be in his league. At the moment,
though, that wasn’t as important as this: Thomas
Callahan was envious of me. The obstacles I faced might be too much for
me, but then again, they might not. I had hope. He, no matter how well his
brain and spinal cord had been preserved to this point, was up against a
handicap that no amount of resistance could conquer.

“Guess I’ll just have to try,” I said. I understood now that
my attempt mattered as much to him as it did to me.

He nodded. “Think of it,”
he said softly, “as a challenge.”

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Two specific impulses
drew me to write this novelette. First, and more generally, I hungered to do a
far-future, outer space piece, the sort of thing I had once thrived upon as a
reader, as when in my younger days I devoured pulp-magazine classics like E.E.
“Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series and the exploits of Captain Future by Edmond
Hamilton, and when as an adult I took in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, David
Brin’s Uplift sequence, and individual books by the likes of Robert Silverberg,
Poul Anderson, and Samuel Delany. It felt like the time was ripe to make my own
attempt to plow that ground. In the Short Fiction Reviews topic on the lamented
GEnie electronic bulletin board, I had read messages by Gardner Dozois
bemoaning the over-emphasis in the
Asimov’s SF
submission pile of near-future
Earth settings, as if, to the current crop of writers, the era when humankind
can travel to distant parts of the galaxy is too remote to address. Vernor
Vinge and other exceptions abound, but in some ways I have to agree with
Gardner’s assessment. Modern sf writers have in great numbers conceded the outer void to the space opera crowd and
the media tie-in franchises, eschewing the milieu as a canvas for
non-formula work, especially at short lengths. Perhaps it has finally sunk in
just how vast the galaxy is, and how silly a fantasy hyperdrives and warp
engines and jumpgates are. It could be that when it comes to humans living on
worlds outside our solar system, we really can’t get there from here by any
means that our species would accept as a viable method. Though science fiction
is supposed to be about flights of imagination, it’s also supposed to be about
situations that might somehow come to pass, given what we think we know to be
true about the universe. It’s annoying not to be able to do what Asimov did in
a more naïve age and paint the galaxy as a latter-day Roman Empire, with the
distant provinces no more than a few months’ journey away. Easier to avoid the
frustration. I’m as guilty as other writers when I prefer to sidestep the
challenge and either write fantasy of one sort
or another, or science fiction set close to right here, right now. With
“A Raven on My Shoulder,” I wanted to make up for that laziness.

Once I set the task for myself, however, I did not wish
to depend upon the crutch of faster-than-light travel. I knew I wanted to be
more strict than that. Right away that determined what sort of story I would
concoct. If my characters were going to have to travel at speeds far slower
than c, I couldn’t have them whizzing about from place to place. Once they got
somewhere, they needed to stay put. So I knew from the git-go that that my tale
would concern a colony world, and that the planet and its location,
environment, and other characteristics would be an integral part of the tale.

The second guidepost I
can date with precision. I came to it at the 1994 Nebula Award banquet
in Eugene, Oregon. Keynote speaker Eric
Drexler, of nanotechnology fame, devoted much of his talk to wishing
aloud that science fiction writers could incorporate more of the real-science
visions that were tantalizing himself and his colleagues. (In many ways the
same sermon I heard routinely from Bob Fleming, the very person who had
introduced me to Drexler’s seminal work,
Engines
of Creation.
) Among his examples, Drexler pointed out that long before
we would have any real hope of physically journeying to the far parts of the
galaxy and meeting sentient, technology-wielding aliens, we would be able to
see them. Or at least, see evidence of their civilizations.

Drexler described a series of satellites strung in a
circle around Sol out, say, a bit beyond the orbit of Neptune. Meaning that the
diameter of that circle would be on the order of two billion miles. By
coordinating the signals received by those satellites, they could serve as a
huge interferometric lens, a telescope to outstrip all telescopes.

We don’t have to wonder if it would be possible to build
it. In the past twenty years since that 1994 awards banquet, interferometric
arrays have become something of a “thing” in deep-space astronomy. Even back
then, as Drexler pointed out, the sort of array he was describing required no
new major scientific discoveries. The project is more along the lines of an
“engineering challenge.” The great roadblock continues to be funding and the
will of society. When it becomes cheap enough to build that lens, and enough
people want it built, the concept will become a reality.

With such a lens, we could resolve planets on stars in
the Andromeda galaxy. We could see continents and other major features on
almost any planet within our spiral arm of the Milky Way, unless stars or dust
or other matter stood directly in the way. And we could make out buildings and
streets of cities on planets around stars many dozens of lightyears from us. We
wouldn’t actually be able to see living creatures, because the images would
have to be built up over multiple sessions — snapshots taken at the same time
of day (time of day on the alien planet, not ours) over and over until details
fully resolve — and anything moving around would not succeed in making an
impression.

Hearing Drexler describe this was fascinating. It was
also unnerving once I considered some of the possibilities. Right now, if there
is a civilization on a planet circling Gamma
Leporis A, the locale of “A Raven on My Shoulder,” if they have an
interferometric lens of that magnitude, they could be viewing a picture of my
home of twenty-seven years ago, a rental tract house on the other side of Santa
Rosa from the neighborhood in which I now dwell. Alien eyes could be gazing
right now upon the light reflected off the swing set my toddler daughter would
go out to on many an afternoon so that I could push her. They wouldn’t see me.
They wouldn’t see her. But they would see the swing set, the lawn, the apple
tree. I thought of that backyard as our private domain.

Glass houses, my ass. We’re living in a glass universe.

“We lasted three months until our first murder. That’s not
a bad record when you think about it.”

Neil Moran glanced at the speaker, Dimitri Vlahakos,
Inspector General for the Gamma Leporis A-III colony. Neil had been acquainted
with Dimitri for more than a century. The man’s intense, olive-skinned face
dwelled in more than one memory of university days, back when Athens seemed to
Neil incredibly far from home. The sangfroid rang false. Dimitri was a man of
exuberant Mediterranean gestures and passionate declarations. He was not the
sort to shrug and look for the silver lining.

Who was he trying to convince?

Sometimes Neil wanted to reach inside his own skull, peel
away brain tissue until he found the implants the Thwaa had left there, and
yank them out.

An impossible fantasy. The implants had no nexus. Traces of
them inhabited every dendrite and axon in his nervous system, as much a part of
his body as, say, potassium ions or oxygen or collagen. All he could do was
wish.

Neil gazed out the transport window at the planet. The Neil
Moran he had been on Earth was gone. He had no choice but to be the Neil Moran
of Gamma Leporis A-III — or Bjornssen, as he supposed he should begin referring
to it. If he tried to deny it, reactions like that of Dimitri would remind him
of all that had changed.

Observing that his Pollyannaish assessment had fizzled,
Dimitri swept his hand across the view of sere peaks, eroded gullies, and
slopes dotted with chaparral and scree. “Picturesque, don’t you agree? Like
your Southwest, where you were born, yes?”

Neil accepted the change of subject. “I don’t remember much
of that first-hand. The Plague hit when I was only eight. But you’re right;
it’s beautiful. Doesn’t quite fit the name. Bjornssen.” From twenty-seven
lightyears away, the Hershel Telescopic Array had shown a world marked by
wind-whipped peninsulas and glacier-flattened islands, much like the homeland
of the Danish astronomer who processed the initial interferometric scans. Here
in the middle latitudes of the main continent, that geography was not in
evidence. The vista offered a solidity and permanence that peat bogs could not
aspire to. Neil decided he really needed to get out and about more. He had
lingered too long aboard the ark.