The food was tasteless and grainy. The eggs weren't eggs. The coffee tasted real, but was thick enough to fork into his mouth.
There was an empty seat in front of him, and an albino sat down. Except for his deathly pale skin and the sunglasses that shaded his eyes, the man seemed very healthy, muscles straining under his tight workshirt. He smiled without warmth. In addition to the glop on his tray, there was a small orange. The albino placed it carefully on Aubry's side of the table. "From a friend," he said quietly.
Aubry pushed the orange back across the table with his fingertips. "I don't have any friends in here."
"Oh, but you're wrong. Denim wants to be your friend."
"Why?"
"He can use you. He likes what he sees." The man put a mouthful of food away and watched Aubry.
"What sees? I never met the man."
"He knows all about you. He wants a talk."
"He knows where to find me."
"No. You come to him."
One dark eyebrow rose and something like a smile twisted Aubry's face. "Now that's not very friendly."
The albino drank a swig of the "coffee." Aubry watched his reaction carefully, then followed suit.
"Listen, Knight. Denim is going to talk to you. You just hope he talks nice." Their eyes locked. The rhythm of Aubry's chewing remained monotonously steady. The albino dropped his eyes to his plate. He lifted another forkful and pretended to have broken contact voluntarily.
The rest of the meal was eaten in silence. The messenger hurried through his food. Finally he stood, gathered up his tray, and smiled. "Just remember, Knight, you can be spare parts." And he left.
Spare parts. Aubry watched the man go. Aside from the pale skin, there seemed to be nothing else unusual about him.
Aubry glanced at the man immediately to his right. He was wiry, with fixed, logy eyes and two day's growth of beard blueing a pale chin. His sleeve was rolled up to the biceps. His left forearm seemed thinner than his right. There was a long rectangle of scar tissue beneath a shriveled tattoo. Two tables away sat an inmate in a wheelchair.
Aubry grunted and finished his meal.
Denim found him during the recreation period. The rec yard was two levels under the surface, a room almost seventy meters square, with a five-meter ceiling. The upper third of the rec room was covered in ceramic.
There were two racks of weights, two ping-pong tables, and mats for calisthenics. Card tables and racks of magazines dominated the remainder. In one corner of the room was a set of uneven parallel bars, and on them a man with painfully thin legs was working vigorously.
Around the outer edge of the room there was a running track. Aubry grinned.
He stripped down and spread out his legs, feeling the bunching quadriceps atop his thighs quiet as he relaxed into the stretch. He did a half dozen more, and when his skin was covered with a light sheen of perspiration, he walked to a water fountain and filled his mouth, holding it as he moved onto the track.
He started running around the edge of the wall, pulling air down to the bottom of his lungs, matching his strides to his breathing cycle. For the first time in months he felt the kinks work out of his muscles. The weight of the water in his mouth caused slight pressure on his jaw, and he tightened down.
There were a few others jogging or running along the .2-kilometer track, so he took little notice when a small, slender oriental man moved up and ran alongside him. The man spoke in a low voice. "Denim wants to talk to you."
Aubry looked down directly at the man's bald spot, grunted incuriously, and picked up his stride. The little man matched him, pumping his short, skinny legs faster. This time when he spoke it was between gasps. "He's over there." He jerked a thumb toward the weight racks. "Come on. Don't hurt to be polite."
From where they were, Aubry could see that two men were at the racks. One was Jo Jo, the other the large albino from breakfast. Both of them had stripped to the waist and both were monstrously muscular. He said nothing and increased his speed.
The small man gasped alongside. "Wait!" Red-faced and gushing out his words from a slack mouth, he kept up.
Clearly, the idiot was going to keep running until he keeled over. Curiosity caught at last, Aubry trotted to a halt. The little man stumbled up to him, sucking air like a drowning swimmer. Finally he motioned Aubry along, and the two of them walked between rows of tables and chairs, the short man leading the way.
The two muscle boys stopped pumping iron, standing as he approached. A third man sat leaning against one of the racks. He was Caucasian, tall, and slender as a coathanger. Aubry typed him as a former pimp, and smiled at the image of the two muscle boys as Denim's "women."
Denim wore his fatigues with lazy elegance, as if they had been tailored for him. His hair was longer than regulation, and he wore it tied in a knot, ponytailing down the back of his head. His mouth was an ugly slash.
"You're Knight?" Aubry nodded silently. "Good. I've heard a lot about you. You did good work, before you got stupid." He watched Aubry's eyes, looking for emotion that wasn't there. "You know," he continued, "there are some people who are very angry with you, and you're lucky ...I'm supposed to give you a chance to make it up." He moved a step closer. "The Ortegas can forgive, if you play your hand right."
Aubry raised an eyebrow.
"Muscle. You're supposed to be the best—" The albino tensed. Denim laid a restraining hand on the pasty shoulder. "Cool off, Sugar." He turned back to Aubry. "All the tough boys have their places here, and they're very jealous of their ranking. Now, you can go through the mill, maybe get knifed in the shower, or you can throw in with us and start at the top." He spread his arms. "I expect you know about Federal Statute 874 -BB. No? It allows federal prisoners to donate limbs and organs to the Federal Transplant Bureau. In exchange, a prisoner can earn money or a reduction in his sentence.
"Sometimes an order comes down the pike for a kidney, or an eardrum, or an eye... and someone has to find an obliging con who wants more than anything else in the world to be a Good Samaritan and help a stranger in need." He smiled wolfishly. "Needless to say, there are kickbacks... I'm sorry, honoraria, for any assistance we can offer. I have an excellent arrangement with the assistant warden."
Aubry said nothing, his gaze floating from one bodyguard to the other. They had edged marginally closer.
Denim seemed annoyed that no answer had been made. "What's wrong? Doesn't suit your skills? All right, how's this. Sometimes one of our brothers has an accident—falls down a flight of stairs or slips in the shower. Afterwards we discover that he had signed a Total Donate Card and that he can be— ah, disassembled, and used as might best benefit medical science." His eyes sparkled as Aubry's lips curled into a smile, then grew tight as the big man started to turn away.
Sugar's hand shot out and grasped Aubry's shoulder. Aubry turned with the pull and looked him in the eye, then pursed his lips. He lowered his head and spat out the mouthful of water—a well-aimed stream that splashed into a grilled drain at the albino's feet.
Sugar bared his teeth. Denim shook his head urgently.
Aubry spoke very softly, very distinctly. "Stay away from me, and I'll stay away from you. Good luck with your 'business.'" And he walked away.
Denim watched him thoughtfully. "Let him go. He won't be trouble." He laughed as if at a secret joke. "He thinks we're finished with him. When he learns different, he'll come around." He jerked his head back toward the weights, and the two bodyguards took their places again. Denim watched with a practiced eye as they performed their daily exercise.
The weeks melted together, an endless muddied stream of inconsequential events. Aubry was assigned to the digging crew, clearing away the debris left by blast and jackhammer in the lower level. He was given no heavy tools that might have served as weapons. Thick gloves protected his hands, while his back and arm muscles levered the rocks into the trolleys. The air was close, the lighting bad, and the ceiling insufficiently shored; but he grew used to it, came
to look forward to the ache it gave his body.
He ate ravenously and slept deeply, dreaming of tombstones.
He said little to anyone, and after the first few months people stopped trying to converse with him.
There was one exception, the slender blond who pushed the library cart past the cells after dinner. Every day he tried to rouse Aubry from his cocoon, but failed. Until the day that Aubry was jerked out of his reverie by a magazine slapping down on his belly. He grabbed it and automatically rolled it into a club, ready to swat the gently bemused figure in the doorway. Something in the young man's face made him pause, and he unrolled the magazine and looked at the cover.
On it, amidst a blaze of stars and a crescent moon, in a golden bubble of light, were the words: Sphere, the Magazine of Null Boxing.
Aubry looked up, but the librarian was already gone. He opened the Sphere and browsed. He ignored the unfathomable columns of print, his eyes fixed on the photos, the illustrations of weightless wrestling and kickboxing technique, the color studies of orbital mayhem.
Aubry wiped moist palms on his trousers and devoured the magazine hungrily.
The next day when the blond passed, Aubry said, "Hey—"
With a grin, the man brought the cart back, and Aubry saw that he was barely out of his teens and wore thick glasses under a square-cut thatch of pale hair. His chest poked bonily through his T-shirt. "Yeah?"
"Got any more Sphere?"
"Nope, but I will in a week. I knew you'd like that."
Aubry rubbed a thick knuckle under his nose. "Yeah, well, I did. Thanks."
"No sweat. It's my job, you know. Everybody's gotta have something to do, you know?"
"I know. What're you called?"
The young man grinned again. "The legal's Billy Mack, but you can call me Mother."
Aubry laughed, and it felt good. "All right, Mother. You keep me posted about those magazines, you hear?"
Mother nodded, backing toward the door. He paused there, suddenly seeming even younger. "Uh—is it true what they say about nullboxers? I mean, about your reflexes?"
"Depends on what you've heard."
The young man swallowed hard. "What I heard was something about having to be faster than any normal human being. Something about being fast enough to accelerate your opponent's chin or ribs to the breaking point before the rest of the body can overcome its inertia and bounce away."
Aubry laughed. "I don't know what the hell inertia is, but..." He flipped the copy of Sphere to a page of advertisements, checked the other side, then ripped it free. "Watch." He tossed it up in the air, his eyes never leaving Mother's face. As the paper fluttered down, Aubry's hand flickered out, and there was a sharp popping sound. Apparently undisturbed, the paper continued its path to the floor. Aubry picked it up and held it out.
It was pierced by three neatly punched fingerholes.
Mother's eyes widened. "Can I... can I have that, Aubry? Can I call you Aubry?"
"Go to town."
He took the paper, gazing at the holes in wonderment. Again he flashed that broad, honest grin, then left.
Aubry shook his head as he leafed through his magazine for the twentieth time, lingering over the color plates of stars and the long, gradual curve of Earth. In the midst of the gentle blues and tans, the speckled white of clouds, two powerful men were locked in desperate struggle.
That night he dreamed of clouds and weightlessness, and awoke refreshed.
At lunch the next day, Mother brought his tray over to Aubry's table and sat across from him. With him was another man, older, heavier, with a suspicious look in his eyes.
"Aubry," Mother said lightly, "this is my—friend, Carl." Aubry nodded without speaking. He felt Carl's nervousness but couldn't quite place it. "I've been telling him about you."
"Don't listen to too much of that," Aubry growled. "I never got a real match. Just some basic training in a Shuttle tank."
"Doesn't matter," Mother said hastily. "He's a big nullboxing fan. Aren't you, Carl?"
Carl's dark face creased, bringing a thin white knife scar to light. It ran in a diagonal from left eye to right corner of the mouth, with a healthy nick taken out of the right nostril. "Yeah, that's right." His eyes flickered from Aubry to Mother, and suddenly Aubry had the missing information.
"How long have you two been together?"
Mother answered shyly, "Four years?"
"Four years? How old are you, Mother?"
"Twenty-three."
"What'd they pinch you for? Smuggling cigarettes in your diapers?"
Mother laughed. "Close. Selling grubs. Damn. I had a grub farm in my apartment, and my landlady phoned me in. Ten years. I hope she gets a spider."
"And four years with Carl. Congratulations."
Mother excused himself to get more water and Aubry felt the tension expanding in the air again. He lowered his voice and said, "Don't even think about it, Carl. I'm not in the market, and I'm not interested in your boy, all right?"
Carl traced the scar on his face with a forefinger. "I got this fighting for him. I'd do it again."
"True love," Aubry said without mockery. "What do you do here?"
"Film room. Took me a long time to get that gig, too."
"Flatfilm?"
"You don't think Death would be set up for holo, do you?" Mother returned to the table and discreetly touched the back of Carl's hand.
"Go ahead. Tell him about the movie."
Carl shrugged and blinked.
"Next Thursday is movie day for your level."
"What's the flick?"
"Got a detective movie and a sports reel."
Mother's grin tipped Aubry off. "What sport?" He tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.
"Well, it seems we have coverage of the Welles-Mustapha title match."
"Welles?" Aubry's fingers were gripping the table savagely; his heart trip-hammered. "I was supposed to fight Welles. Holy—and now he's fighting for the title?"
"Everybody says he's too old to do it " Aubry glared at Carl. "Anyway, Mother is crazy about it, and begged me to get it in. It took some time, but..."
Welles-Mustapha. A classic match-up for sure. The thought of seeing it lit Aubry's face. He stood up from the table. "Thank you." He tried to smile, and found that it was difficult to keep it shallow—that for the first time in months he was feeling expectant, eager. Emotions he had sworn to stay away from. He had to leave the table. "Thank you both."
He got up, tray in hand, trying to deny the excitement that coursed through him, but failing. He dumped the garbage from his tray and sat at the edge of the room, waiting for the signal to leave.
His hands were shaking.
When the prison auditorium filled with eager viewers, and the lights went down, Aubry could feel his heart thundering in his chest. His body canted forward on his seat, the saliva furballing in his mouth.
The newsreel music played. Hissing and catcalls filled the room until Carl turned the sound down. Then there was anticipatory applause and a few whistles.
The legend Welles-Mustapha blazed across the screen, and a rough chorus of approval sounded in the room. An announcer's voice called the fight card, and from a clear black screen the flatfilm dissolved to an image of pinpoint stars and a long blue curve of Earth, atmospheric haze obscuring the shape of the continent below.
"Station Four," the voice said, "two thousand miles above the surface of the Earth." Station Four was a cluster of huge gray cylinders anchored at a central globe.
"Here, in a regulation ten-meter plastic bubble, two giants of the sphere will meet in combat " The camera moved up on one of the oblong shapes and seemed to dissolve through its surface to the interior, where the bubble was blown and anchored, cameras ready to catch the action and a few hundred seats set up for the fortunate few who could afford to fly up to witness the ultimate in contact sports.
An over-brassed arrangement of Also Sprach Zarathustra rang over the speakers as two shuttles approache
d the "stadium," each carrying one of the gladiators. They docked at opposite ends, and the camera went back inside for the disembarking.
The two men, John Welles and Mustapha, entered the cylinder to the cheers of their partisans. Aubry watched with unblinking eyes as the referee briefed them on the rules: "Let's have a clean match. No blows to groin, eyes, or joints. Chokes can be held until your man is unconscious. If you get him in a hold or lock, you've gotta give him a chance to surrender. If he doesn't tap out, you may continue until the joint is broken, unless it would result in a fatality. Protect yourselves at all times. Touch gloves and come out fighting."
The men shook hands and doffed their robes, revealing oiled and chiseled torsos. They swam along the safety lines and entered at opposite ends of the bubble. The referee was a small chunky man who bounced from one side of the bubble to the other, testing its resiliency, then braced himself out of the way as the two men floated cautiously toward each other.
Welles flipped in midair and kicked out, pushing off from Mustapha. The two flew in opposite directions, and Welles rebounded off the clear plastic wall, tucked into a ball, and shot back toward his opponent. The referee scrambled hurriedly out of the way as the challenger, Mustapha, caromed around the sphere doing flip-flops: hands, feet, hands...
They clashed, and suddenly there was a knot of straining bodies. A sudden movement, and they flew apart, rebounding together again, each seeking the advantage.
Punch and kick blended into lock, suddenly broken and converted to counterkick at such a speed that no one in the auditorium but Aubry saw exactly how it was done. There was the incredible midsection strength that could torque the body without the assistance of gravity. There was the coordination that combined gymnastics, wrestling, and kickboxing into a totality that was much more than the sum of its parts.
The audience screamed with every blow, cheered and clapped until the room rocked with the thunder of their approval. Aubry felt his teeth sink cruelly into his lower lip. As the two nullboxers performed their weightless arabesques, broke apart and reformed into straining knots of tortured sinew, as their grunts echoed on the soundtrack and their sweat droplets drifted in the air within the bubble, he fought a losing battle with his control.
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