Morning Child and Other Stories by Gardner Dozois Page B

a bullet in his chest. His head was tilted up toward the scuttling gray clouds. His eyes mirrored the rain.
    That’s what happened to my leg. So much nerve tissue destroyed that they couldn’t grow me a new one, and I had to put up with this stiff prosthetic. But I got used to it. I considered it my tuition fee.
    I’d learned two things: that everybody is human, and that the universe doesn’t care one way or the other; only people do. The universe just doesn’t give a damn. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that a relief? It isn’t out to get you, and it isn’t going to help you either. You’re on your own. We all are, and we all have to answer to ourselves. We make our own heavens and hells; we can’t pass the buck any further. How much easier when we could blame our guilt or goodness on God.
    Oh, I could read supernatural significance into it all—that I was spared because I’d spared the null, that some benevolent force was rewarding me—but what about Goth? Killed, and if he hadn’t balked in the first place, the null wouldn’t have stayed alive long enough for me to be entangled. What about the other team members, all dead—wasn’t there a man among them as good as me and as much worth saving? No, there’s a more direct reason why I survived. Prompted by the knowledge of his humanity, I had shielded him from the explosion. Three other men survived that explosion, but they died from exposure in the hours before the med team got there, baked to death by the sun. I didn’t die because the null stood over me during the hours when the sun was rising and frying the rocks, and his shadow shielded me from the sun. I’m not saying that he consciously figured that out, deliberately shielded me (though who knows), but I had given him the only warmth he’d known in a long nightmare of pain, and so he remained by me when there was nothing stopping him from running away—and it came to the same result. You don’t need intelligence or words to respond to empathy, it can be communicated through the touch of fingers—you know that if you’ve ever had a pet, ever been in love. So that’s why I was spared, warmth for warmth, the same reason anything good ever happens in this life. When the med team arrived, they shot the null down because they thought it was trying to harm me. So much for supernatural rewards for the Just.
    So, empathy’s the thing that binds life together, it’s the flame we share against fear. Warmth’s the only answer to the old cold questions.
    So I went through life, boy; made mistakes, did a lot of things, got kicked around a lot more, loved a little, and ended up on Kos, waiting for evening.
    But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
    It’s a fine, beautiful morning.
    It’s always a beautiful morning somewhere, even on the day you die.
    You’re young—that doesn’t comfort you yet.
    But you’ll learn.

THE HANGING CURVE
    I T WAS A COOL OCTOBER night in Philadelphia, with a wet wind coming off the river that occasionally shifted to bring in the yeasty spoiled-beer smell of the nearby refineries. Independence Stadium, the relatively new South Philly stadium that had been built to replace the old Veteran’s Stadium, which still stood deserted a block or so away, was filled to capacity, and then some, with people standing in the aisles. It was the last game of a hard-fought and bitterly contested World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, 3-2 in favor of the Phillies, the Yankees at bat with two out in the top of the ninth inning, and a man on third base. Eduardo Rivera was at bat for the Yankees against pitcher Karl Holzman, the Yankees’ best slugger against the Phillies’ best stopper, and Holzman had run a full count on Rivera, 3-2. Everything depended on the next pitch.
    Holzman went into his slow, deliberate windup. Everybody in