by Fonda Lee
“Any of your family coming to see you fight?” Carr asked him. They were working the rubber bands, DK leaping off a trampoline launching pad and hitting targets that Carr threw into the air. Elastic cords clipped to his waist tethered him to the ground, giving him extra resistance. A launch strong enough to propel him a short distance in artificial gravity would explode him across the Cube in a fight.
“One of my brothers, and a cousin,” DK said. He grinned his small, pearly toothed grin. “If I got every Kabitain to come to Valtego at once, there wouldn’t be enough strippers to entertain them all. They would have to fly in emergency reinforcements.”
DK was among the minority of zeroboxers with a family that seemed halfway functional, not to mention one that was so large: two parents, five older siblings (DK claimed to have been driven to fight as a result of being the smallest and ugliest of the lot), and assorted uncles, aunts, and cousins scattered across Earth, Luna, and half a dozen settlements. All Terran, though; DK insisted that none of his blood had turned domie. His grandparents were Catholic, he said, and had been from the region everyone referred to as Asialantis. They had been fortunate enough to have the money and means to leave the submerging islands of Indonesia and use the relocation stipend to buy their way into seasonal work in suborbital transport.
There were other people in the gym, and every few minutes, someone passing by would say to Carr “Nice fight” or “Hey, congrats.” Adri “Assassin” Sansky stopped by to give him a hug and say, “Hey, hot stuff, I hear the Martian jumped higher than a jackrabbit on Luna to sign you again.” Carr liked how her words weren’t tainted by rivalry. Female zeroboxers held their own grudges, Carr knew; maybe worse ones, since there were fewer of them and they ended up fighting each other repeatedly. Adri, though, despite her ripped physique, still seemed to him like a friendly, plain-pretty girl-next-door. “Better watch this kid, DK,” she said, half teasing.
DK punched the final target out of the air and landed, bending his knees to stop his momentum. Carr glanced at him. Though he’d never felt compelled to downplay himself in the Cube before, he said, “It was close. I got lucky.”
“Lucky?” DK unhooked himself from the waist harness and hopped off the trampoline, shaking his head. “Lucky is what happens to those who pay their dues. You could have flamed out after that one bad fight, but you didn’t. You came back and trained hard, and you delivered.” He dropped a hand on Carr’s shoulder. “Enjoy the attention. You deserve it.”
“Thanks,” Carr said, but he didn’t feel at ease with DK’s praise. He imagined he heard an edge to it, which was probably unfair, a figment of his own mild discomfort. DK was twenty-two years old, had been on Valtego since he was nineteen, and had a strong, though not spectacular, 9-3 record. He’d taken Carr under his wing early on, given him advice, helped him land gym time and a decent apartment, cornered three of his matches, and been, as DK generally was, an all-around helpful guy. Now, Carr was certain, his new contract placed the two of them on par.
Adri was looking past them toward the front entrance. Her eyes narrowed. “Now what’s this?”
A woman had walked in. She was dressed like someone from the ZGFA corporate offices upstairs, but she stood at the front of the training floor and turned her head, eyes roaming around the room as if she was looking for someone. Carr hadn’t seen her before. He would have remembered her if he had. She was young, head-turningly attractive, and Martian.
Adri’s lips straightened into a line as she crossed her arms. “Domies,” she grumbled. “You see more of them around here every day.”
Carr hadn’t really noticed this to be true, but Adri’s view of all things Martian had turned bitter ever since her brother had taken the immigration incentives and a quadrupled salary and moved his family to the Red Planet. Now Adri subscribed to Earth First, that blatantly pro-Terran protectionism news-feed.
The stranger’s searching gaze passed over Carr, then slid back and stopped on him. She strode toward him purposefully. “Carr Luka?” she asked when she reached him.
“Yes,” he said.
She extended her right hand, Terran-style. “I’m Risha Ponn. Your new brandhelm.”
It took Carr a few beats to recover from his surprise and shake her hand. He’d practically forgotten Gant’s mention of a brandhelm; the financial terms of the contract had been far more important at the time.
DK and Adri exchanged a glance of barely concealed astonishment. Carr opened his mouth, fumbling for an explanation about how this wasn’t his idea, but DK said, “Looks like you’ve got business, Carr.”
“Yeah,” said Adri. “We’ll leave you to it then.”
“The rest of practice … ” Carr protested, but DK raised a hand in a dismissive, backward wave as he and Adri drew away.
Carr sucked the inside of his cheek. Great. The word around here would be (a) he was conceited, and loaded enough to hire a brandhelm mere days after his contract renewal, or (b) Gant was giving him some unprecedented special treatment. He wasn’t sure which was worse. He turned back, unsmiling, to the woman in front of him.
She was a little taller and older than Carr, dark and thin the way Martian women were, with high cheekbones and shapely eyes that suggested she was descended from the Asian colonists who’d founded the domed cities all along the Valles Marineris. He realized he was staring with his mouth slightly agape when she said, a little shortly, “Could we sit down and talk?”
He felt a flash of embarrassed irritation. She’d walked into his gym, disrupted his practice, turned him into a subject of gossip, made him blush, and now presumed that he’d drop everything to meet with her. He held up his arm and pointed to his cuff. “Did you think to call?”
“I wanted to see where you spend your time. I’ll need to learn everything about you, so I may as well start right away.” There was an offhanded shrug in her voice, the self-assurance bordering on arrogance that he was familiar with from zeroboxers sizing up each other, not from women when they talked to him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this idea of her learning everything about him.
“There’s a noodle place across the street,” he said. “I’ve got an hour. A Terran hour, not a Martian one.”
“Fine with me.” She walked with him out of the ZGFA building, ignoring the curious looks that followed them. The noodle shop had a dozen tables right beside the street, so diners could gaze up through the sky windows at the stars and the ships in port or get their fill of people-watching, whichever they preferred. Risha wasn’t inclined to either, it seemed. She scrolled through the menu for all of five seconds and ordered udon with shrimp. Carr ordered curry udon with a side of edamame, then sat back. He crossed his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits, and looked at her.
“You eat shrimp,” he said. Martians, as far as he knew, were all vegetarian. Raising animals for food would be a staggering waste of precious, mined water and terraformed land; he’d heard somewhere that colonists considered the practice immoral.
Risha said, “I’m half-Martian, if you must know.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“The geneticist made sure I had all the standard Martian traits. My parents didn’t want me to be disadvantaged in any way.” Risha snorted as she picked up her chopsticks. “Good thinking at the time. Turns out that when I was twelve, they decided not to renew their marriage contract and I moved with my father to Earth.”
“That must have been tough,” Carr said. There had been Martian ex-pats in Toronto, but, growing up, he didn’t see them on the streets often. They tended to stay in their domed, climate-controlled neighborhoods, uncomfortable with Terran crowds, heat, and open sky.
“The first year was awful. I shrank four inches. Gravity adjustment therapy and bone density treatment made me feel too heavy to get out of bed, and that wasn’t even the worst of it. On the bright side, I do eat shrimp.” She paused and leveled an impatient look at C
arr. “We’re supposed to be talking about you, not me.”
“I get to learn about you too. Decide if I want you as my brandhelm.”
She put down her chopsticks, as if that idea hadn’t occurred to her. “I don’t think there are other candidates,” she said. “Unless you have the money to hire your own?”
Of course he did not. “Maybe I don’t need one.”
“Everyone needs one. Everyone who wants to be someone. That includes you, I’m sure.”
Carr found himself staring again, his initial annoyance blotted out by fascination. Risha had a calm and quick intensity. Everything about her—her steady gaze, the way she leaned slightly forward with her mouth gently pursed, her slender fingers rolling the chopsticks—seemed subtly challenging. Most of the girls Carr met were on vacation, pretty and giggly, ready to have a good time. Risha was different. She made him want to sit up straight and pay attention. He wasn’t used to feeling this way around a woman.
A service droid slid up with their food. As she ate, Risha unfolded a thinscreen and said, while scrolling through her notes without looking at him, “You’re trending up strongly. Your subscriber base grew by thirty-nine percent in the forty-eight hours after your match against Jay Ferrano, and your first four fights are the most downloaded of all Terran zeroboxing matches this week. That makes you the fourth most-watched zeroboxer and the fifty-ninth most-watched Terran athlete right now.” She nodded to herself at this bit of excellent news. “What’s more, your genetic profile should appeal to a very large pool of consumers and sponsors.”
Carr was about to ask who the first, second, and third most-watched zeroboxers were, but the question flew from his head. “You looked up my genetic profile?”
She raised her head at his indignant surprise. “Only what’s publicly available through an employment check. The point is, you don’t have any physical or mental risk factors, off-spec traits, or anything that might be a red flag for sponsors. You’re also young, attractive, and advantageously aracial.”
Carr had no reply. He was used to being judged on physical characteristics—body mass, reach, speed, strength—but not in the way Risha was laying it out. He’d never considered how being an ethnic mash-up—dark hair, gray eyes, light olive skin—might be useful to him in any way, or imagined sponsors evaluating him on criteria unrelated to his ability to win in the Cube. He supposed he did need a brandhelm after all. He hid this sour thought behind a long drag of salty udon soup.
“It’s preliminary,” she continued, “but I’ve written up the outline of a ZGFA brand campaign promoting the rise of the next generation of Terran zeroboxing stars, elevating you as the leading asset.”
Carr supposed he ought to feel flattered. Instead, he scratched the back of his neck, confused. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?”
“How so?”
“I hate to dash your optimism, but I’m still a new guy here. I’ve got six pro fights under me. You want to look just at the younger fighters? Heck, DK’s had nearly a dozen matches. Blake’s right up there too.”
“Danilo Kabitain?” Risha nodded absently, plucking the tail off a shrimp. “Not as marketable. He’s obviously from Asialantis—a weak market, no one with money lives there anymore—plus he was born on a settlement and has never lived on Earth, so he’s not even technically Terran. Murphy is polarizing among fans and has a moderate-high risk of asocial behavior that won’t sit well with sponsors.”
“They’re good zeroboxers,” Carr said, defensive.
“Broad appeal is what we need, to grow awareness and popularity of the sport.” She slid the thinscreen toward him. “We need to start increasing your touchpoints if we’re going to retain your new subscribers. You haven’t been sending out anything from your optic cameras or broadcasting any exclusive post-fight commentary.”
Carr’s eyes swam at the blocks of graphs and numbers she’d shoved in front of him. He pushed the thinscreen back across the table. “The only ‘touchpoints’ on my mind are the ones scored in the Cube. Those are the only important ones.”
She tilted her chin down and studied him, mouth pursed. The light had started to soften into simulated evening. The halogen street lanterns came on, and the boulevard began to fill with people hunting for dinner spots, arriving or leaving the gravity zone terminal, wandering past the bright holovid banners that encouraged them to visit Second Womb: A Weightless Spa Experience. Risha folded her thinscreen. She said, a little slower and more quietly, “We’re on the same team, Carr Luka.”
A thought occurred to him as he nudged his empty bowl aside. “How many clients have you had, Risha Ponn?” He articulated her full name, as she had done with his.
She hesitated a moment, her confident mask slipping a little.
“I’m the first one, right?”
“Yes.” She held his gaze. “I asked for this job. I’ve always wanted to work off-planet.”
Great stars. An overzealous, way-too-easy-on-the-eyes, half-Martian rookie brandhelm. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. In a brief spasm of paranoia, Carr wondered if Gant had dumped her on him just to keep her busy with one of his less valuable fighters.
Then he squinted with satisfaction. He knew who Risha was after all. She was that fighter entering the Cube on Valtego for the first time, aloof and anxious, desperately hungry to prove himself. Carr had met that guy plenty of times; he’d been him, too.
“All right,” he said, leaning back and stretching, feeling more relaxed. “We might have started off a bit prickly with each other. Seems like we can agree that I know next to nothing about this marketing stuff, and you’re no zeroboxer. I guess I’ll have to trust you, and if we’re going to be on the same team, like you say, then you’ve got to do the same with me.”
Risha was silent for a moment. Then she crossed her long, glistening legs, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear in a small movement that made her seem younger and just a touch vulnerable. “You know,” she said, “you’re quite consistent with what I expected from studying your fights and interviews. Athletically gifted, ambitious, and arrogant, but more intelligent and emotionally stable than is typical for a man who makes a living with his fists.” She smiled then, a small but lovely smile. “I like you, Carr. I think we’ll work well together after all.” She extended her hand to him across the table.
Carr laughed. At least Risha fit one Martian stereotype, speaking her mind as bluntly as a scientist pronouncing results. Her hand, when he took it, was firm and hot, like a smooth, sun-warmed stone. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go, then.”
FIVE
The tour group, sixteen people in all, floated out to the deck tentatively, tethered to the guide-rails and firmly grasping the hallway rungs. Without the clamor of the crowd and the sharpness of adrenaline, the Cube and its stadium seemed altogether different. Tame, empty, just a large transparent room hanging in space. That didn’t stop the tourists from gazing in wonder at the structure and the vacant tiers of seating, oohing and ahhing and madly tapping cuff-links to send their optic feeds to friends.
Idly, Carr wondered who they were: high rollers on a complimentary special excursion, corporate executives on a team-building trip, travel journalists, or just people with the right connections to Valtego brass. These behind-the-scenes tours interrupted training, especially when zeroboxers were asked to come out and act as guides, but it would be stupid to say no to something that helped pay the bills around the gym and kept the ZGFA in the Valtego city council’s good graces. Today, everyone else was busy, and since Carr was two weeks post-fight with no word yet about his next match, he’d naturally been tapped to entertain the planet rats.
“How many of you have watched zeroboxing?” he asked, raising his voice over the sound of the janitor droid’s vacuum hose as it swept the stands. A sizable show of hands. “Does anyone know how it originated?”
“On mining ships,” shouted an overweight man floating in the back.
Carr nodded. “The old ion propulsion ships used to take months to make each leg of the trip from Mars to the Main Belt, over to Earth with their cargo, and back to Mars. The crews would be signed up for voyages that lasted for years. Well, you can imagine these miners were pretty rough guys, on ships with not a lot of room. Re-mineralization therapy wasn’t that great back then, so they also needed to keep exercising and blow off steam. They started using the recycling holds for sport fights, which is why amateur matches are still called ‘recyclers.’”
A hand shot up in the back. “Did you plan that move against Ferrano, or did it just happen?”
“Err … sometimes you start with a plan, but then throw it out and make a new plan about two seconds before you do it.”
A woman in the front asked, “Do you know who you’re going to fight next?”
Carr spread his hands, “Hey, hold on. If you want to ask me questions, let’s save them for the end so you don’t miss the good part of this tour, okay?” Employing the mid-fight strategy adjustment he’d just described, he decided to skip the rest of his educational spiel. “Who’s been on a spacewalk?” Most of them. “Who’s been in a Cube?” Only one. “Well this is your chance. Two at a time in there, and if you feel nauseous at any point, just tug the tether and we’ll pull you out.”
There was a murmur of excitement, and people lined up at the entry hatches. Carr let the first two in, a young woman and a slightly older man, both of whom looked like office workers in their gym clothes. He watched them drift toward the center, the man cycling his arms and legs superfluously, the woman squealing as she started to turn upside down. Instinctively she tried to turn back “right side up” instead of simply stretching her feet out for the wall with her cheap rental grippers. Carr hoped she wouldn’t be sick. It happened once in a while, and no one wanted to be responsible for clean-up.
