A Planet for Rent (11 page)

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 give 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.

As if all this didn’t make Voxl difficult enough, our suits also pick up velocity when they bounce against floors, walls, and ceilings, though not as terribly quickly as the ungraspable voxl. Largely because at the outset of the game, the gravity in the court is turned down to 0.67 g, the normal value for Centaurians, and that slows the action down a bit.

You can see why one journalist said that a Voxl match, especially a match played by novices, looks a lot like a madman’s notion of how planets move through the solar system.

The scoring system isn’t very rational, either, at first glance. The match ends when one team accumulates eighteen points. But the points don’t accumulate one at a time. No, that would have been way too easy and too boring for the sadistic Centaurians.

The first goal, by either team, is worth six points. The second and third are five each. Fourth, fifth, and sixth, four points. The seventh and eighth goals are worth three. After that, if neither team has won yet, the remaining goals are worth one point each, with a win requiring a two-point margin.

Games rarely go into single point
s. The system is conceived so that the stronger team, the one that can prove its superiority and dominate the first four goals, will leave the other team on the field in the shortest time possible. Or, as they used to say where I come from, “
Adiós, Lolita de mi vida!
”

Nor is it very easy to score a goal. The Mayas may have thought that it was nearly impossible to propel the rubber ball on their
tlachtli
, using only their knees, hips, and elbows, through the high stone hoop barely wider than the ball itself, but if they’d seen Voxl they would have thought their game was child’s play.

There are only a handful of rules. You can touch the voxl with any part of your body, but there is no hoop or goal posts or anything of the sort. You make a goal by sending the voxl on a triple rebound between two opposite walls (including floor and ceiling) without any interference from the opposing side after the last touch from the player who sets it in motion.

And doing that, again, is anything but easy.

When you also take into account the fact that the concept of fouling or rough play doesn’t exist in Voxl, you’ll have a better understanding of the true purpose of the forcefield armor suits. First and foremost, they keep the players’ backbones from being shattered into a thousand pieces half a minute into the match. The suits have the curious and highly useful property of possessing a large moment of inertia. In addition to their tendency to act like a compact mass whenever hit by an external impact. That is, when a 650-pound Colossaur falls on top of you going a hundred miles an hour, you won’t be inexorably pulverized; instead, you will “merely” be sent flying slowly in the opposite direction...

Even so, injuries happen all the time. And that’s where the sub comes in, to take the place of the wounded guy while the medical monitor fixes his sprain, dislocation, or broken bone with its orthopedic machinery, making him good as new with a nice dose of custom drugs and regenerative synthetic hormones.

The bell rings again. It’s coming. Any moment now...

There it is!

The size of a human head and tinted a vivid green, the voxl materializes against the immaculate white of the court. The League team uniforms are magenta blurs, racing to capture it. We’re bolts of pink-and-blue lightning, out to stop them. Bursts of color, putting the spectators’ visual agility to the test as they try to decipher the tangled web of our nearly supersonic movements.

Mvamba picks up speed by bouncing off the Great Dane’s stomach. Kowalsky and the two Cetians use the Colossaur’s huge shoulders to do the same. The Slovsky twins flank the walls. Yukio bounces off of me, and I set off spinning across the floor almost frictionlessly, aiming to sweep opponents aside and intercept the voxl.

The Colossaur smashes into Mvamba, rolls over him, and keeps going. Mvamba is swept aside like a feather, spinning erratically. Arno tries to cut off the ogre from Colossa, but is unable to contain him. Bad. Oh, better: the Slovsky twins run into the Cetian clones and dominate them. Yukio gains control, and the first bounce is ours...

But Kowalsky jumps and avoids my sweep. He goes after Yukio, runs into him, uses the momentum to get off the ground. Very bad. He reaches the voxl after its second bounce and sends it sideways. One bounce, two... One of the Slovskys (I can never tell them apart) intercepts and dominates it. Our bounces. One, two,... The Colossaur steps in. Arno tries to stop him, but a half turn and a twist neutralize him, and the third bounce is ruined. He’s strong, this Colossa kid.

Now he’s dominating. One, two... I’ll stop this...

But here comes Tamon Kowalsky, slipping between Yukio and me and separating us. Very talented... Three.

First goal goes to the League: Six to zero!

They’re good, they’re the best damned players I’ve ever met. I call time and coach my players.

“Now it’s their serve. Dangerous,” I warn them over the audio system. “Arno, you underestimated the Colossaur. You’re no match for his strength, one on one. Yukio and Mvamba, take care of that ogre. Play him for speed. And you, Great Dane, neutralize that renegade. As if your life depended on it, Korvaldsen. Twins, good play, guys—keep doing that, but don’t get cocky. Those clones are real treacherous.”

Voxl on the visitors’ side. It touches the floor, shoots off. One of the Cetians controls it, a Slovsky intercepts. But doesn’t dominate, lets it get away. The Colossaur, confused by Yukio and Mvamba. Arno corrals Kowalsky against the ceiling. Here’s my chance.

I jump in and capture it. Dominate it, and here goes the bounce: one, two... My guards forgot about the Colossaur’s tail. It flicks me aside with a skillful backslap and I mess up my own goal.

Now it’s a Cetian with the voxl. Kowalsky blocks me, but the Slovskys jump in. One bounce.... The twins are fast, they snatch it before the second rebound.

They block the Colossaur’s back and pass it to Yukio, who makes a breakaway. He’s our lightest player, our swiftest. One, two, thr... Kowalsky blocks it at the last second, goes into a secret pass, and now the Colossaur has it. He’s too slow, he’ll have to pass it to one of the others. Arno?

The Blond Hulk gets there on time, sets his weight and inertia against the giant xenoid’s, and spoils his pass. Voxl out of control. Jan Slovsky traps it at low velocity, bounces against the ceiling. He’s magnificent. How did he capture it?

I stop one of the Cetians. This is going well. The Slovskys: one, two, thr... Kowalsky, again! The worst thing is, the twins are following the same playbook their father created for that renegade when he was captain of the Hussars. That won’t work.

Now he rebounds, evading Mvamba. This Tamon is a thorn in my side. Lev Slovsky joins in, his brother supporting him from behind: the renegade can’t escape the pair of them. They’re like one mind in two bodies... Shit, he tricked them! He wasn’t trying for a goal. He passes to a Cetian who’s not guarded. I try to get there, but... Floor, ceiling... Yeah, I have time...

Ohhh... The Colossaur hurls Mvamba, blocking my way. Floor again: that’s three. Hell and damnation.

Second goal to the League: Eleven to zero!

I call time again.

“Captain, I suggest you switch tactics.” Gopal’s voice is cold. He only calls me “captain” when he thinks I’m not doing it right. But what more does he want? “Be creative: they’re expecting twins against clones and for you to go for the goal. Kowalsky is the real danger; have the Slovskys stop him, and leave the clones to the African and the samurai. Your skill against the Colossaur’s brute strength, and that leaves Arno free to go for the triple rebound. He can do it.”

“We’ll see,” I reply, a little skeptical. It’s a risky formation, but it might work. I’m not sure I can handle the Colossaur. Nearly three times my weight, and besides, that tail... But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. End of time out.

There’s the voxl, on their side. They head out, intending to hold to the strategy that’s already given them an eleven-point lead. They hesitate for an instant when they notice our changed lineup. What were you expecting, weirdos? Humans must be the only animals who will trip over the same rock twice—but never three times.

The twins completely cancel out Kowalsky on the second rebound. Good for their morale: seeing that they can take on their idol. Mvamba and Yukio are keeping pace with the clones, the voxl is left unguarded, and the Colossaur can’t decide between the Dane and me... Perfect, he’s going for the one with more body weight.