Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

pick-up league, and I’ll fly halfway across the galaxy to see if it’s him, but invariably it’s some guy who’s seven feet tall and starting to go a little bald.
    Anyway, that’s why you never saw him or heard of him. But trust me—no one who ever had the privilege of watching Magic Abdul-Jordan in action will ever forget him. He’s probably out there somewhere, towering above his world like an attenuated mountain, still working on his moves, hoping and praying that they’ll ask him to come back for one last game so he can give a new generation of fans one final thrill.
    But of course they never will.
    ***

Monuments of Flesh and Stone
    Author’s Note:
    This was written around a painting by Hugo winner Frank Wu. Everyone else saw two humanoid aliens reaching their arms up for a low-hanging world. Me, I saw two guys going for a basketball. There was a tiny man lying on a blanket in the background, and a humanoid female pushing a grocery cart (even Frank couldn’t tell me why)—and I incorporated them into the story as well. And, oddly enough, I took it all seriously.

    Plutarch sure as hell wasn’t much of a planet. It resembled a war zone, except that nobody had fought a war, not in its entire history.
    In fact, nobody had done much of anything. I know; I had to bone up on the place before I arrived there.
    In the whole history of planet, not a single resident had ever sold a book. Or a story. Or a poem. Not one had ever become a professional actor, either on stage or in holos. None of them had ever composed a piece of music. If any of them had ever made a scientific or medical breakthrough, no one had recorded it. Of course they had their share of local politicians, but not one of them had ever gone on to higher office off the planet. It was just a peaceful, forgotten little world, out on the edge of the Democracy, five-sixths of the way to the sparsely-populated Outer Frontier.
    There wasn’t a single thing to distinguish it—except for the statue.
    It had been created by the Denebian sculptor Mixswan, who had stuff on display on half a hundred worlds. I don’t know how they afforded him (or was he an it?); the whole population must have chipped in.
    Mixswan didn’t exactly do non-representational art, but the figures didn’t look like the Men or Canphorites they were supposed to be. They appeared gold and spiky, all angles rather than muscles. One of them—it looked like it might have been the biggest—had broken and eroded over the centuries, and the bottom half was totally gone, while another was missing its head. Still, the statue instantly caught the eye —and I’ll never know how Mixswan managed to keep that ball in the air.
    It was the most impressive sight on Plutarch. Hell, it was the only impressive sight. I’d heard about it—after all, it was the only thing on Plutarch anyone ever talked about—and since I was here on business, I figured I’d better let the locals see me admiring it.
    So I looked at it, and looked at it, and wondered what the hell kind of world would commission a statue to commemorate a defeat. I mean, if I ever celebrated a loss, I’d be looking for a new job the next day and no doubt about it. And yet Plutarch had created no statues, no edifices of any type to mark a triumph in this, a victory in that, a breakthrough in something else. Just the one statue that must have put them in debt for years, maybe decades given Mixswan’s reputation. It didn’t make any sense.
    A woman with a pushcart walked over to me. I’d seen hundreds of different shopping carts in my life—anti-grav, self-propelled, able to select items off a shelf and grab them with artificial hands, even some that could morph into a flyer or a boat to take the owner home when he or she was done shopping—but this was the first I’d ever seen where the owner actually had to use his own strength to push the damned thing.
    “I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before,” she said. “Welcome to