Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories (15 page)

“11.237 tons,” Bellwether corrected her.

“Well, it’s just not fair!” said another girl.

“Yeah,” said a third. “How do we compete against
that
?”

“Right,” said Eric Flint, who had wandered into the room. “We naked girls have to unionize.”

Bellwether looked around the room for the other dragons, but couldn’t find any. It disliked the thought of inter-species competition; after all, it was still five feet and six tons short of its full adult size, and that could be a real handicap up against a purebred Gorgon, especially the short-coated Southern variety. And judges tended to favor lamias, partly because they were so rare, and partly because they had the breasts of a human female and most of the judges were males. (It didn’t matter that they weren’t human males; a fondness for ladies’ breasts is a universal constant. If you think not, just pick up a copy of Mike Resnick’s
The Outpost
.)

“Get ready,” said a fan, whose badge boasted eight ribbons of varying colors, which seemed to give him some authority as well as a self-righteous swagger. “You’re next.”

“But where are the other dragons?” asked Bellwether.

“If you didn’t bring ’em along, tough,” said the fan. “You’re on, with or without your group. You got a name for what you’re wearing?”

“Skin?” asked Bellwether, feeling very disoriented.

“Whatever,” said the fan with a shrug. He scribbled something down and handed it to David Drake, who was standing behind a microphone, one of the few places he was safe from impassioned groupies.

“Costume number 73,” announced David, “is” —he stared at the card, frowning— “Skin.”

“Get out there!” said the officious fan, giving Bellwether a shove.

The previous costume, a tall pudgy man dressed as Iron Man, hadn’t quite left the stage yet. As he passed the row of judges, he paused to threaten Anne McCaffrey with exaggerated gestures. Bellwether, certain that Anne was under attack, rushed to her rescue. He bounded—well, thudded—across the stage, and with the swipe of a mighty forepaw (or perhaps it was a mighty twelvepaw; who knows?) he promptly separated Iron Man’s head from his body.

“That’s terrible!” cried Anne.

“It’s not
that
terrible,” said a few fans seated behind her. “After all, he was an editor.”

“I hope the dragon’s not going to eat him right in front of us,” said another judge.

“He’s not going to eat him at all,” said David Drake with absolute certainty.

“Why not?” asked another fan.

“He was an editor,” explained David. “Did you ever try to clean one of those things?”

The entire audience agreed that this was a telling point, and relaxed.

Bellwether struck a show pose, everyone thought it was bowing, and it was given a standing ovation. As it was leaving the stage, the Conan everyone had been discussing came on, brandishing his fearsome longsword. He swung it a little too close to Anne, and Bellwether simply exhaled a sheet of flame and melted it.

“Damn!” said Conan. “Do you know what that cost me in the dealers room?”

“You shouldn’t threaten the judges with it,” said Bellwether.

“I was only
pretending
to threaten them.”

“I was only pretending to correct you,” said Bellwether with a shrug that knocked four stage assistants into the sixth row of the audience.

Conan turned toward the judges. “Can I get a ruling on what just happened, please? I would like for Skin to be disqualified.”

“For what?” asked Anne.

“For melting my sword and ruining my presentation.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said Anne. “You’re standing there in nothing but a loincloth and a melted sword, and you want us to disqualify a ten-ton fire-breathing dragon that’s standing forty feet away. Is that correct?”

“11.237 tons,” interjected Bellwether gently.

“Well, it made a lot of sense before you summarized it,” said Conan petulantly. He turned to Bellwether. “And that’s a dumb costume, and an ever dumber name!”

Another flame shot out of the dragon’s mouth, incinerating Conan’s loincloth and exposing his … ah … shortcomings for the entire audience to see. He ran off, stage left, down the stairs, and totally out of this story, though I’m told he’s due to make a comeback in Eric Flint’s
Foundation and Stays
, yet another saga in the Foundation series.

The competition got back on track, with three Tarzans (100, 350, and 400 pounds), two Red Sonjas (83 and 382 pounds), the Hulk (4 feet 11 inches) and other equally captivating costumes. Finally it was over, and the judges withdrew to deliberate.

It didn’t take long. In less than five minutes they had returned, and handed their decision to David Drake, who read it, looked at them like they had finally lost their wits, shrugged, and announced that the prizes for Most Authentic, Most Legs, Most Green, Most Combustable, and Best in Show were all awarded to Bellwether.

“The prizes include free passage to next year’s DragonCon,” David announced, “as well as a complimentary suite with asbestos wallpaper. Have you anything to say, Skin?”

Bellwether got out the words “I would like to thank my —” when an orchestra started playing and they cut to commercial. (It was a demonstration about why crosses had no power against vampires in Jewish neighborhoods, and was sponsored by a manufacturer of Stars of David.)

Finally the masquerade was over, and Bellwether hung around backstage, graciously accepting a victory kiss from Anne.

David Weber came up to congratulate the dragon. “By the way, have you decided what sex to be yet?”

“No, I’m still basking in the glow of winning, even if it’s not the Pan-Galactic Dragon Show,” said Bellwether. “But I’m sure I’ll decide before I come back next year. After all, there are only seven sexes to choose from.”

“Seven?” said David, his eyes widening with interest. “Where
is
this planet of yours?”

“Don’t tell him,” cautioned Eric Flint. “We seven-sexed dragons have to organize first.”

***

Costigan’s Wager

Author’s Note: Chess

This may be the most unusual story I ever wrote. Back in 1989, Orlando was bidding to host the 1992 Worldcon, and one of their attention-getting gimmicks was to hand out bookmarks, with an ad for the convention on one side and an original short story—250 words tops—on the other. I decided not to do a Feghoot-type pun … and let me tell you, not much is harder than creating a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in under 250 words.

“Your move,” said Satan.

“Don’t rush me,” muttered Costigan irritably as he surveyed the board.

“It’s not as if we’re playing for something important, like political power,” said Satan. “The stakes are really quite trivial.”

“There’s nothing trivial about my soul.”

“Have you ever seen it?” scoffed Satan. “Do you ever use it? Of course not. If I win, you’ll never miss it.”

“And if
I
win, I’ll be up to my neck in money and beautiful women,” replied Costigan. “So shut up and let me concentrate.”

Satan fell silent, and after another moment of thoughtful consideration, Costigan moved his unprotected queen to King’s Bishop Five. Satan pounced on the sacrifice, never noticed the two rooks lurking in the background, found himself immediately on the defensive, and resigned after the 29th move of the game.

• • •

“What’s going on?” demanded Costigan as he surveyed his infernal surroundings.

“Welcome to hell, Mr. Costigan,” said Satan with a truly Satanic grin.

“We had a bet! I won!”

“So you did, Mr. Costigan, so you did.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you,” said Satan, just before he threw his latest victim into the fiery pits, “that gambling is a sin? And we all know what happens to sinners, don’t we?”

His amused laughter filled what was left of Costigan’s universe.

***

The 73-Hour Rasslin’ Match

Author’s Note: Wrestling

This is another story excerpted from
The Outpost
. I must confess that I find pro wrestling unwatchable, and have for the past half-century or so, but when I was a kid I loved it, phony histrionics and all, so I thought I’d give it one last tip of the hat.

I’d been drinking, and I vaguely remember committing some minor trivial misdemeanor, something like armed robbery, and I seem to remember some weird-looking gendarmes, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in a damp underground cell, and one of my arms was chained to a wall. Facing me across the cell was another human, chained to his wall.

“How are you feeling?” he asked me.

“I’ve been better,” I admitted. “Where are we?”

“Under the arena.”

“They’ve got an arena?” I asked. “They didn’t strike me as all that sporting.”

“It was built by a long-dead race,” said my companion. “But our captors have put it to good use.”

He looked familiar, and I kept staring at him, and finally I knew where I’d seen him before. “Hey, aren’t you Backbreaker Barnes?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“I’ve seen you fight a couple of times,” I said. “I still remember the night you wiped up the floor with Meyer the Maimer.”

“One of my better bouts,” he agreed.

“It was pretty even for a few minutes,” I said. “Then you seemed to go berserk.”

“The sonuvabitch made a comment about my mother, and I just plumb lost my temper.”

“Insulted her, huh?” I said.

“No,” answered Barnes. “He said she was a bright, good-looking woman and a fine cook.” He paused and grimaced. “I
hated
my mother.”

“Well, I knew he said
something
.”

He stared at me. “I think I recognize you too,” he said at last. “Didn’t I see you knock one out of the park against Iron-Arm McPherson?”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“I remember it like it was just yesterday,” said Barnes. “You’re … damn, I can’t remember your name.”

“Rasputin Raskolnikov Secretariat Lenin Man o’War Trotsky at your service,” I said. “You can call me Big Red.”

“Big Red!” he repeated. “That was it. I don’t know how you remember your official handle.”

“It took me a few years to learn it, I can tell you that,” I said.

“Well, Big Red,” he said, “I wish I could say I was glad to see you, but the truth of the matter is that I wish they hadn’t captured you.”

“Thanks for the kind thought,” I said. “But at least we’ve got each other to talk to.”

“Not for long, alas,” said Barnes.

“Oh?”

He nodded his head sadly. “Yeah, I’m afraid one of us is gonna have to kill the other.”

“Why? I’m not mad at you, and you don’t seem exceptionally annoyed with me.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” he said. “The aliens get their amusement by taking us to the arena and having us fight against each other.”

“What if we refuse?”

“Then they’ll kill us both.”

“Has this been going on long?” I asked.

“About two weeks,” said Barnes. “Well, sixteen days to be exact.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because they took seventeen of us prisoner.”

“You’ve been killing a comrade a day?” I asked.

“Don’t look so disapproving,” he said. “If I don’t kill them, the aliens will. At least this way I’m still alive, and there’s a chance, however small, that one day I’ll be able to claim my just and terrible vengeance.”

“What if a participant fakes being dead?” I asked.

“They toss the body into the river that runs through the city,” he said. “It’s filled with carnivorous fish can take all the flesh off your bones. If you’re not dead when they throw you in, you will be about ten seconds later.”

“I see.”

“I’ll make it as quick and painless as I can,” he promised me.

“I appreciate the thought,” I said. “But I was kind of planning on making it quick and painless for you.”

“For me?” he said with a laugh. “I’m Backbreaker Barnes!”

“And I’m Big Red,” I said. I was going to throw back my head and laugh like Barnes did, but I had this feeling that nothing would come out, so I just stared at him.

“Look,” he said. “If you put up a fight, I’m going to have to soften you up for the kill. I’ll probably have to break a couple of arms and legs, and maybe bust your ribcage with a bear hug. It’d go a lot easier with you if you’d just let me give your head a sharp twist and be done with it.” He paused. “I swear I’ll always honor your memory.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to oblige you, Backbreaker,” I said. “It’s just that as an athlete, I was taught to always give my best. The paying customers deserve it.”

“We don’t have any paying customers,” he pointed out. “Just godless aliens.”

“Just the same, I’m going to have to give it my best shot.”

“It’s your decision.”

“And if you feel yourself weakening,” I continued, “let me know and I’ll end it just as painlessly as I can.”

“What do you know about killing blows?” he said contemptuously.

“I’m a quick study,” I said. “Especially when my life is on the line.”

“You ever do any freehand fighting, professionally or in college?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “I wrestled for a couple of semesters to keep in shape between track and baseball seasons.”

“Yeah?” he said. Suddenly he smiled. “You know, maybe we could put on a real show for these bastards.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“If we take turns throwing each other around the ring, and try some real crowd-pleasing holds, maybe they’ll like it so much that they’ll want an encore and they can’t have an encore if one of us is dead.”

“What the hell,” I said. “It’s worth a try. And it beats trying to kill each other.”

“I wish we weren’t chained to the walls, so we could practice a bit,” said Barnes.

“Well, maybe we can just discuss it,” I said. “You know, kind of create a scenario, so we know who throws who when.”

“Why not?” he said enthusiastically.

So we fell to it, choreographing every move, every throw, every hold. We didn’t want to hurt each other, so we devised ways to make the aliens think we were gouging out each other’s eyes and banging each other’s heads against the ring support posts when we were just pretending to do so.

We figured we could keep it up for maybe an hour or two, at which time we were dead sure that the aliens would be having such a good time that they’d insist on a rematch, which meant the two combatants would have to be kept alive for another day.

Well, they gave us some slop to eat for dinner—as food it wasn’t much, but as gruel goes it was probably better than most—and we fell asleep shortly afterward. Then it was morning, and they unhooked us from the walls and dragged us up a long ramp, and pretty soon we found ourselves in the center of a huge arena, with maybe a thousand aliens in attendance.

One alien walked into the middle of the ring with us (I call it a ring, but it was on ground level and didn’t have any ropes), and signaled the crowd to be quiet. Then he turned to us.

“You have no weapons, and there are no rules. The survivor gets taken back to his cell.” He backed away from us. “Let the battle commence!”

I charged Barnes, and let him throw me with a flying mare. The aliens had never seen anything like that, and they screamed their approval.

I got to my feet, closed with him, and gave him a hip toss. He flew across the ring, and the crowd went wild.

Well, we spent about an hour taking turns throwing each other all the hell over the ring. Whenever we’d get tired, one of us would put a headlock or a body scissors on the other. We’d scream like we were in terrible pain, but actually it didn’t hurt at all, and it gave us a chance to rest.

“How long do you figure we’re got to keep this up?” I asked during one of the times he was giving me a fake bear hug.

“Beats me,” he said. “I was hoping they’d have broken it up already.”

They didn’t show any sign of breaking us up, so we kept at it. By the fourth hour we’d run through all our choreography and started making things up as they occurred to us. I gave him a body slam, and he writhed in agony, so I knelt down to see if I’d actually broken anything.

“I’m fine,” he whispered. “But I learned that if you land with your arms and legs splayed, it makes a hell of a noise and makes the crowd think you’re all busted up.”

“Let me try,” I whispered, so he climbed painfully to his feet and slammed me, and it turned out he was dead right, and we spent the next half hour body-slamming each other.

The crowd started getting bored, so I invented the piledriver, and he invented the figure-four grapevine, and I invented the stepover toehold, and he invented the claw, and I invented the forearm smash to the jaw, and he invented the rabbit punch, and the next time we looked up it was morning again and we’d been at it for a full day and night.

“How are you holding up?” he asked as he applied a half-Nelson to me.

“I’m getting a little hungry,” I said.

“Well,” said Barnes, “if you’re hungry, and I’m hungry, then
they
must be getting hungry. All we have to do is outlast ’em.”

We kept at it another day and night, and by now the audience was getting kind of restless, either from pangs of hunger or unanswered calls of nature. But they had also become incredibly partisan, so much so that when Barnes threw me into the second row some of the aliens began pummeling me and sticking me with sharp objects until I could get back into the ring.

“They hate me!” I whispered as I invented the hammerlock and put it on him.

“Half of them were booing me when I tossed you out there,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Let me throw you into them and let’s see what happens.”

So I did, and what happened is that the half of the crowd that hadn’t bothered me began hitting and kicking Barnes.

“You know,” I said when he’d crawled back into the ring and we were taking turns pretending to stomp on each other’s fingers, “there’s a hell of a profit in this sport we’re inventing. I think these aliens would rather watch us than fight the war.”

“You’ve got a point,” he said, grabbing my foot and twisting it. As I fell to the floor he said, “I figure we’ve been going at it for almost two and a half days. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need to visit a bathroom pretty soon now.”

“I don’t think they’ll let us leave,” I said, pretending to stick a thumb in his eye.

“We’ll never know if we don’t ask,” he said, staggering over to the announcer. He jabbered at the alien, who seemed to consider what he said, then entered the ring.

“The combatants will take a ten-minute nourishment break,” he said.

We were led off to the dungeon from which we had come.

“I don’t want a
nourishment
break!” complained Barnes.

“I know,” I said, “but it probably sounds better than saying he was stopping the fight so you could take a shit.”

We were back ten minutes later, and we went at it tooth and nail, but truth to tell we were running out of inventions, and I knew we couldn’t keep it up much longer, especially since we hadn’t had any sleep.

When we’d been at it for just under 73 hours, I collapsed as Barnes swung at my head and missed by a good two inches. He knelt down next to me and pretended to pummel me.

“You got to make it look better,” he said. “Everyone in the first two rows has got to know I missed you.”

“Hell, the force of the wind from a missed blow could knock me down right about now,” I answered. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep fighting, Backbreaker. Maybe you’d better snap my neck right now.”

“We started together, and we’re going to finish together,” he said. He sneaked a look around while gnawing on my ear. “I got it,” he said.

“What?”

“See that big box along the back wall?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“I think that controls all the lights in here,” he said. “What if I was to throw you into the crowd, and while you were climbing onto your feet you swiped a burner or a blaster and blew the box away? We might escape in the confusion.”

“How far do you think we could get, two unarmed men on an alien world?” I asked, bringing my knee up into his stomach.

“There’s a bunch of corridors below the arena, on the dungeon level,” he said as he doubled over. “One of them leads outside the walls of the city, pretty near where you left your ship.”

“It just might work,” I agreed.

So, with that, he got up, grabbed me by the hair, lifted me high over his head, and threw me into the crowd. I landed three rows deep, and managed to get my hands on a burner as I was disentangling myself.

I fired it at the box, and the arena was plunged into total darkness. Suddenly I felt Barnes’ hand on my arm, tugging me to my left.

“This way!” he whispered.

I followed him, and a minute later we were racing down the underground corridor. Some of the aliens tried to chase us, but even after 73 hours in the ring we were too fast for them.

We made it to my ship, and here I am.

As for the Backbreaker, he said he felt too much like an actor and not enough like an athlete, so we parted ways. But I still think there’s money to be made staging rasslin’ matches (which I prefer to think of as insincere rather than phony), and I aim to get rich proving it as soon as I find the right partner.

Now, I know that sooner or later the crowds will figure out that it’s all an act—but hell, people pay to go to the theater, don’t they? You go to a play two nights in a row, you know exactly how the second performance is going to go. But come to my new profession two nights in a row and you’ve got no idea what you might see the second night.

If the fans get as passionate as I think, we may have to protect the rasslers by having them fight inside a steel cage … but who knows? There may even be more profit potential in that.

***