by Yoss
I start gearing up. The ceremony is as ancient as Voxl itself. Some two thousand years old, from the time the Centaurians started playing it on their frigid world, long before they came into contact with other intelligent races.
Gopal helps me on with each piece of the uniform, just as personal servomechs are doing in each of the other teammembers’ changing rooms. Helping the captain dress is an ancient privilege for the coach... and our last chance to exchange views.
“Careful with Mvamba’s leg, it’s still weak from his latest defracturing treatment,” he whispers while helping me pull the medical monitoring and feedback lining over my bare skin. It’s a complex device that will oversee my physical status, second by second. My metabolic stress levels and any fractures, sprains, or dislocations will be logged by the system. It will also make sure my heart doesn’t explode while the device administers the hormone and stimulant dosages I’ll need to bear up under all the stresses and strains of the game.
“You think the twins will make it through to the end of the match?” I ask, bringing up an old point of contention: for me, despite their undeniable physical conditioning, they could still use a little battle hardening.
Gopal nods confidently. But he whistles a catchy tune from Delhi that I’ve heard him hum other times when he’s nervous and doesn’t want anyone to know.
He’s not positive they’ll hold up either. I’ll keep that in mind.
Over the inner lining he places the shock-absorbing coverall that will protect me from the effects of the force field suit, the outermost layer of my armor.
“Keep an eye on Arno,” Gopal is still counseling when he begins placing the field generators on me. “Sometimes he forgets he’s on defense and he tries to win the game all by himself.”
I nod. I’ll keep an eye on Arno.
When I turn the suit on, an impenetrable force field surrounds me. A calculated diffraction effect makes it glow in the glorious pink and blue of Team Earth. And the number 1 that identifies me as captain, under the triangle logo of Planetary Transports Inc., our official sponsor. May the Virgin protect them a thousand times.
Competitive gear for a first-class Voxl player is incredibly expensive. Factor in the strict technoscientific quarantine to which Earth is subject, which means that practically every piece of gear has to be purchased from the Centaurian corporation that hold nearly exclusive manufacturing rights throughout the galaxy, plus the fact that the training equipment, special diets, and all the rest practically double those costs, and you start to realize that the guys at Planetary Transports are true patriots. That they’re highly committed. And that they’re likely to boil us alive if we don’t validate their investment by giving a good performance they can use as advertising.
For a quarter of what they’ve invested in feeding me, monitoring my medical condition, training me, and suiting me up, my father could have bought himself a first-class ticket and gotten off this planet safe and sound.
I’m going to dedicate this match to you, Papa... wherever you are. If you weren’t pulverized by an asteroid or recycled by the gypsy junk-hunters, maybe you’re still tumbling along out there, frozen for all eternity. All I know for sure is that you didn’t make it. Sorry, old man. A few more years and I would’ve taken you on a trip. Of course, you had no way of knowing that, or patience enough to wait for the miracle...
And you, Mama, forgive me... I always talked back to you, telling you that your sharp tongue and bad temper would get you sent off to Body Spares. But I hated being right.
Body Spares. Spare me.
At press conferences there’s always some reporter, dumb as a rock, or maybe just misinformed, who asks the classic question. As if it were the most baffling riddle in the world: why don’t we just use the bodies of “horses” specially designed for Voxl, instead of putting our own bodies at risk?
At first I’d go off into long explanations. Now I just look at them and smile. Idiots.
The punishing training sessions and the huge doses of synthetic hormones and drugs we subject ourselves to, at the risk of destroying our metabolisms forever, are no fun, true enough. But there’s no other way.
Completely suited up, with the suit turned on but my helmet not yet connected, I stand up and take a long look at myself in the mirror. Six foot three, 230 pounds of pure muscle. Not uniformly distributed, the way it would be on any average bodybuilder, but beautifully concentrated, almost sixty percent in the legs. Each of my thighs is thicker than my waist. My calf muscles are as big around as my head. In normal gravity I can jump five feet eleven inches straight up without even flexing my legs. I have quicker reflexes than a hysterical wildcat. I can drop a coin, roll to the floor, and catch it in my mouth before it hits. A Voxl player’s body is the most precious equipment he possesses—and the hardest to acquire.
An anatomy like this has to be carefully cultivated, sometimes for years. Years of training each reflex, each muscle, to reach perfection. I wouldn’t trade even the strongest body straight from a Body Spares booth for my own. Not even the body of a twelve-foot Colossaur. I wouldn’t know how to handle it like I do this one. It wouldn’t respond to me in the same way.
Only one in ten thousand humans has in his genes the potential to become a Voxl star. Only one in five million has what it takes to become, someday, a member of Team Earth. The champions.
Having this muscle power so concentrated in your legs can be a bit much, even a pain, in everyday life, it’s true. But we’re Voxl players because—among other things—we aren’t multimillionaires. If we could use one body to train and play in and another the rest of the time, we’d simply have no need to play. And we wouldn’t. Except Yukio, maybe.
But for now, even he doesn’t have enough money to afford the luxury of using a body that isn’t his own.
It’s true, since there’s two sides to every coin, that some unlucky players rent out their bodies to Body Spares for pretty good money. Their main clients are xenoid ex-players curious to see what the body of another species feels like. For them, it comes out pretty cheap.
But even those bodies, compared to ours, are like twentieth-century helicopters next to a late-model aerobus...
While I’m thinking all this and looking at myself in the mirror with satisfaction, Gopal places the captain’s vocoder between my teeth. Like my teammates’, mine is a combination of dental guard and laryngophone. It allows me to communicate with the rest of the team and to activate or deactivate the field shield by flicking a special switch with my tongue.
My vocoder also has two other tongue controls: one to talk with Gopal without the rest of the team overhearing us; the other, more important one lets me stop the game clock whenever one of my players gets hurt or if we want to go into a strategy huddle.
Just as I’m finished getting dressed, the warning bell rings: time to head for the court. Off the court, with my suit turned off, each step I take is as ponderous as a graceful tyrannosaur’s. I climb onto the antigrav field, which now whisks me straight to the place where we’ll meet our challenge.
We still don’t know whom we’ll be facing.
In the World Championship and in League play, you always know your opponents beforehand: their favorite formations, even the clinical histories and psychological profiles of each player. And based on all this information you draw up a strategy.
But not in this match.
The League team that will be playing us won’t find out far in advance, either. Maybe it’s only now, as their ship is already entering the suborbital trajectory for Earth’s troposphere, that their coach will be informing them of the League’s irrevocable choice: they are the ones who will be testing their strength this year against Team Earth...
We walk out onto the court.
Or, better said, we enter into it. Voxl is played inside an enclosed rectangular hall, measuring about twenty-five feet high by fifty wide by one hund
red long. That is, one by two by four arns by the standard Centaurian measure.
The walls of the playing court are still transparent in both directions, so we can see the crowd going wild outside. Lots of them with their faces painted half pink, half blue, waving huge flags with Earth silhouetted against a backdrop of stars. We can make out the convulsive movements of their mouths and their necks strained from yelling. But we can’t hear them. It’s completely soundproof inside here. And when the game begins, the polarized walls will turn opaque for looking out. Nothing must distract the players of the galactic sport.
“They’re saying, ‘Go Earth, pink and blue, we’re gonna stomp all over you!’ and ‘Earth, Earth, Earth is hot, the xenoids, they ain’t diddly squat!’ ” Jonathan’s voice comes over our headphones, letting us know what’s up. He can lip read. He taught deaf kids for three years after they kicked him out of the League. A crappy job, but it beats starving to death or sinking into male social work, super-dangerous and illegal.
He chatters incessantly. Seems nervous. He’s normally quiet as the grave before a match. I’ll keep an eye on him. I don’t want him to fall to pieces right now...
Suddenly Jonathan points up, and Mvamba does the same. No need for them to say anything. It’s almost telepathic, the way we can tell the entire stadium has fallen silent.
The League players have arrived.
The ship is black. Blacker than black. So dark it gleams in the setting sun like an immense and ominous beetle. It docks at the empty tower, the visiting team’s, and the dome of the court immediately hides it from us.
Even so, we’ve had time to notice that the ship is at least ten times the size of our aerobus. They must have onboard changing rooms. As usual, the League team will come down ready to play.
I look at my men for the last time before the decisive moment. Mvamba. Arno. Yukio. Jonathan. The Slovskys. And me. Humans all. To the xenoids, we’re trash. Members of the most backward, despised, subjugated, and humiliated race in the galaxy. Relentlessly crushed in our crude primitivity by technologies so advanced they seem like magic to us. By economic powers so massive they could pay their weight in gold for every Earthling and even for the whole planet itself without much effort. By destructive forces so extreme they could wipe the entire solar system from the galaxy.
Humans, like ninety-nine percent of the audience.
For them and for us, this is our only chance for revenge. The only occasion when, once a year, we can face off with them, the proud, domineering xenoids, on nearly equal terms.
It doesn’t matter that no human team has ever managed to beat a League team in Voxl.
We are their hope, their demand for justice, their favorite sons, their thirst for revenge. We have to win.
We’re going to win. Because we are the champions.
Because we have all the anger, if not all the strength.
So, if any justice exists in the universe, victory will be ours.
We all feel the same way. Even though no words are spoken...
We see the mouths in the crowd distended in a silent scream of infinite hatred. And before turning around, we already know that behind our backs the League team is walking onto the court. We wheel about in unison to face them. To see them, to gauge them, to meet them.
My eyes and all my teammates’ eyes scrutinize them avidly. Gathering data, imagining likely strategies, weighing possible strengths and theoretical weaknesses. They must be doing the same with us.
Voxl teams are limited by weight, not by the number of players. No more than 1,263 pounds, exactly six Centaurian paks.
Our team weighs that much on the nose. Jonathan, our sub, matches the 201 suited-up pounds of Yukio, our lightest player. There’ll be six of us on the field, and we haven’t left a single gram of advantage to our opponents.
There are just four of them; they’re betting on strength.
Their defensive back is a Colossaur who’s been surgically stripped of the bony plates of his natural armor. Under his still-unplugged, transparent suit, his skin is a strange pale pink instead of reddish-brown. A real giant of his race; must weigh about 650 pounds. Clever trick, that amputation: on the field, where we all wear the same armor, the thick natural carapace of a native of Colossa would merely be dead weight. So he gains mobility and keeps 650 pounds of muscle, plus the added advantage of a very strong tail.
I seem to see the Colossaur’s tiny sunken eyes smiling as he scans our lineup. Not even the Blond Hulk, with his 412 pounds, could meet him in a direct hit, and the dirty scum feels safe. He knows we’ll have to spend most of our time trying to avoid him.
Before dismay can chill my team’s spirits, I tell them over the vocoder, “Forget about running away from the ogre. We’re going to control him. In pairs—I don’t want any heroes. You listening, Copenhagen? Anyway, he’s not much for legwork... We’ll beat him on the rebounds. Mvamba, you’ll help the Hulk check that shelled mollusk. And if he looks too big, look at him with one eye closed and he’ll seem smaller.”
Their laughter tells me everything’s going well. It’s very important, if you want to be a good captain, to toss in a joke at the right time. It raises morale.
Apart from the Colossaur, there are the Cetians. Two handsome specimens. Identical as raindrops. Like they’re clones. Worthy opponents for the Warsaw twins. If Jan and Lev manage to check them, they’ll have graduated to manhood.
The Slovskys are heftier than the slim pair of xenoids, who must not even reach two hundred pounds each. Probably their equals in coordination. But speed is another kettle of fish. The natives of Tau Ceti aren’t just as beautiful as angels, they’re also as nimble and slippery as eels, more than any other humanoid. They’re almost a match for the insectoid grodos, the fastest beings in the galaxy in spite of their armored chitin exoskeletons.
Well, at least they didn’t bring any grodos. There’s no way to remove the weight of their shells without killing them...
But what really has me worried is their fourth player. There’s a look of disgust on Gopal’s face. The twins’ jaws have dropped. With a peremptory gesture I order them to keep quiet. None of the other players seem to have recognized him.
It’s Tamon Kowalsky, the former captain of the Warsaw Hussars who led them to championships three years in a row. And the captain of Team Earth five years ago. Jan and Lev grew up in the shadow of his legend. Their father was his coach...
Now he’s a traitor. A sepoy. A turncoat mercenary who sold out to the League and is playing against his own race, against his own planet. He has a credit tattoo over his right eyebrow, which speaks for itself about the privileged economic status he’s achieved. But it’s a sure bet he’s a social pariah, a lonely outcast.
He probably has enough in his account to buy the whole Metacolosseum and maybe half of New Rome, but it doesn’t look like the money has made him happy. Behind his wild mustache, his face has the same sour look as ever—or worse.
He’s superfit. About 240 pounds, a little more than my current weight. Can I take him on? I’ve seen him play with the Hussars. He was already fast then, and nobody was better than him at picking up rebounds. Since he joined the League he must have gotten tons better. I’m going to need Yukio with me just to neutralize him.
My guys are looking curiously at Kowalsky. Dangerous.
I’d better tell them who it is.
“That’s Tamon Kowalsky, from the Hussars. Samurai, you and I will take that renegade. Banzai?” I ask. The Japanese looks at me, and his eyes blaze. Bushido does not forgive betrayal.
“Banzai. Domo arigato, Daniel-san,” he replies, half-joking. We studied Japanese together, but of course he speaks it much better. Genetic predisposition, maybe. Ever since they instituted Planetary as the common language for all Earth, historical languages are just a hobby for a few nostalgics.
The bell rings and we approach our opponents to gi
ve the traditional Centaurian greeting: the slightest of contacts between the tips of our fingers, our arms held out straight. A paranoid race, those Centaurians, I always think at these moments.
Returning, we energize our suits while the polarized transparent walls go opaque to hide us from the audience. Gopal returns to his room, and we remain there, waiting. Watching, all our muscles taut, for the voxl to materialize.
These seconds drag by like centuries.
The voxl is not a ball but a spherical concentration of force fields. It has mass, though not much, and it bounces off the walls... But that’s where any comparison with a basketball ends.
There are two very curious characteristics of the way it interacts with the force fields of the six court surfaces. The first is that it gains speed instead of losing momentum every time it bounces. As if the walls had an elasticity coefficient greater than one. It takes just five or six rebounds for the voxl to move at such a high velocity that not even our hypertrained reflexes can really follow it.
The second peculiarity is that, like all force fields, it is extremely slippery. Which means that the angle of its bounce will be almost entirely unpredictable. Even when it strikes perpendicular to the wall, ceiling, or floor, you can bet the voxl will almost always shoot off at an angle of at least five or ten degrees of deviation—and at a higher speed.
The only things that slow the voxl down (and not by much) are the force fields of our suits, which have the opposite polarity. But it is so slick that it doesn’t make much sense to try to catch it directly. It’s impossible to hold; all that will happen is that it will fly off slowly in the direction you least want it to go.
Batting it produces similar effects. You might as well wrap it up with a bow and hand it to the opposing team: it will tumble off in any direction at all, the more slowly the harder you hit it.
The surest way to control this willful object is to use soft, almost tender strokes to change its direction and velocity. With lots of practice and at least as much good luck, you can almost get it to go where you want.
