Steel Beach (7 page)

Not long after she left I went to the doc and had my own hand healed. Then I ran a big tubful of water and eased myself into it. The water was so hot it turned my skin pink. That’s the way I like it.

After a while I got out, rummaged in a cabinet, and found an old home surgery kit. There was a sharp scalpel in it.

I ran some more hot water, got in again, lay back and relaxed completely. When I was totally at peace with myself, I slashed both my wrists right down to the bone.

Dirty Dan the Dervish went into his trademark spin late in the third round. By that time he had the Cytherian Cyclone staggering.

I’m not a slash-boxing fan, but the spin was something to see. The Dervish pumped himself up and down like a top, balancing on the toes of his left foot. He’d draw his right leg in to spin faster, until he was almost a blur, then, without warning, the right foot would flash out, sometimes high, sometimes low, sometimes connecting. Either way, he’d instantly be pumping up and down with the left leg, spinning as if he were on ice.

“Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!” the fans were chanting. Brenda was shouting as loud as anyone. She was beside me, at ringside. Most of the time she was on her feet. As for me, they issued clear plastic sheets to everyone in the first five rows, and I spent most of my time holding mine between me and the ring. The Dervish had a deep gash on his right calf, and the slashing spin could hurl blood droplets an amazing distance.

The Cyclone kept retreating, unable to come up with any defense. He tried ducking under and attacking with the knife in his right hand, and received another wound for his trouble. He leaped into the air, but the Dervish was instantly with him, slashing up from below, and as soon as their feet hit the mat again he went into his whirl. Things were looking desperate for the Cyclone, when he was suddenly saved by the bell.

Brenda sat down, breathing hard. I supposed that, without sex, one needed something for release of tensions. Slash-boxing seemed perfectly designed for that.

She wiped some of the blood from her face with a cloth, and turned to look at me for the first time since the round began. She seemed disappointed that I wasn’t getting into the festivities.

“How does he manage that spin?” I asked her.

“It’s the mat,” she said, falling instantly into the role of expert—which must have been quite a relief for her. “Something to do with the molecular alignment of the fibers. If you lean on it in a certain way, you get traction, but a circular motion reduces the friction till it’s almost like ice skating.”

“Do I still have time to get a bet down?”

“No point in it,” she said. “The odds will be lousy. You should have bet when I told you, before the match started. The Cyclone is a dead man.”

He certainly looked it. Sitting on his stool, surrounded by his pit crew, it seemed impossible he would answer the bell for the next round. His legs were a mass of cuts, some covered with bloody bandages. His left arm dangled by a strip of flesh; the pit boss was considering removing it entirely. There was a temporary shunt on his left jugular artery. It looked horribly vulnerable, easy to hit. He had sustained that injury at the end of the second round, which had enabled his crew to patch it at the cost of several liters of blood. But his worst wound had also come in the second round. It was a gash, half a meter long, from his left hip to his right nipple. Ribs were visible at the top, while the middle was held together with half a dozen hasty stitches of a rawhide-like material. He had sustained it while scoring his only effective attack on the Dervish, bringing his knife in toward the neck, achieving instead a ghastly but minimally disabling wound to the Dervish’s face—only to find the Dervish’s knife thrust deep into his gut. The upward jerk of that knife had spilled viscera all over the ring and produced the first yellow flag of the match, howls of victory from Dirty Dan’s pit, and chants of “Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!” from the crowd.

The Cyclone’s handlers had hacked away the torn tangle of organs under the caution flag, repaired the neck artery during the second pit stop and retired glumly to their corner to watch their man walk into the meat grinder again.

The Dervish was sitting erect while his crew did more work to the facial wound. One eyeball was split open and useless. Blood had temporarily blinded him during the second round, rendering him unable to fully exploit the terrible wound he’d inflicted on his opponent. Brenda had expressed concern during the lull that the Dervish might not employ his famous spin now that his depth perception had been destroyed. But the Dervish was not about to disappoint his fans, one eye or not.

A red light went on over the Cyclone’s corner. It made the crowd murmur excitedly.

“Why do they call it a corner?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“It’s a round ring. It doesn’t have any corners.”

She shrugged. “It’s traditional, I guess.” Then she smiled maliciously. “You can research it before you write this up for Walter.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Why the hell not? ‘Sports, Then and Now.’ It’s a natural.”

She was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any harder to swallow. I wasn’t particularly enjoying this role reversal.
She
was supposed to be the ignorant one.

“What about that red light? What’s it mean?”

“Each of the fighters gets ten liters of blood for transfusions. See that gauge on the scoreboard? The Cyclone just used his last liter. Dervish has seven liters left.”

“So it’s just about over.”

“He’ll never last another round.”

And he didn’t.

The last round was an artless affair. No more fancy spins, no flying leaps. The crowd shouted a little at first, then settled down to watch the kill. People began drifting out of the arena to get refreshments before the main bout of the evening. The Dervish moved constantly away as the dazed Cyclone lumbered after him, striking out from time to time, opening more wounds. Bleeding his opponent to death. Soon the Cyclone could only stand there, dumb and inert with loss of blood. A few people in the crowd were booing. The Dervish slashed the Cyclone’s throat. Arterial blood spurted into the air, and the Cyclone crashed to the mat. The Dervish bent over his fallen foe, worked briefly, and then held the head high. There was sporadic applause and the handlers moved in, hustling the Dervish down to the locker rooms and hauling away both pieces of the Cyclone. The zamboni appeared and began mopping up the blood.

“You want some popcorn?” Brenda asked me.

“Just something to drink,” I told her. She joined the throngs moving toward the refreshment center.

I turned back toward the ring, savoring a feeling that had been all too rare of late: the urge to write. I raised my left hand and snapped my fingers. I snapped them again before I remembered the damn handwriter was not working. It hadn’t been working for five days, since Brenda’s visit to Texas. The problem seemed to be in the readout skin. I could type on the keyboard on the heel of my hand, but nothing appeared on the readout. The data was going into the memory and could later be downloaded, but I can’t work that way. I have to see the words as they’re being formed.

Necessity is the mother of invention. I slipped through the program book Brenda had left on her chair, found a blank page. Then I rummaged through my purse and found a blue pen I kept for hand corrections to hard copy.

(File Hildy*next avail.*)(code Bloodsport)
(headline to come)

There may be no evidence of it, but you can bet cave men had sporting events. We still have them today, and if we ever reach the stars, we’ll have sports out there, too.

Sports are rooted in violence. They usually contain the threat of injury. Or at least they did until about a hundred and fifty years ago.

Sports today, of course, are totally nonviolent.

The modern sports fan would be shocked at the violence of sports as it existed on Earth. Take for example one of the least violent sports, one we still practice today, the simple foot race. Runners rarely completed a career without numerous injuries to knees, ankles, muscles, or spine. Sometimes these injuries could be repaired, and sometimes they couldn’t. Every time a runner competed, he faced the possibility of injury that would plague him
for the rest of his life
.

In the days of the Romans, athletes fought each other with swords and other deadly weapons—not always voluntarily. Crippling injury or death was certain, in every match.

Even in later, more “enlightened” days, many sports were little more than organized mayhem. Teams of athletes crashed into each other with amazing disregard for the imperfect skills of contemporary healers. People strapped themselves into ground vehicles or flying machines and raced at speeds that would turn them into jelly in the event of a sudden stop. Crash helmets, fist pads, shoulder, groin, knee, rib, and nose protectors tried to temper the carnage but by their mere presence were testimony to the violent potential in all these games.

Did I hear someone protesting out there? Did someone say our modern sports are much
more
violent than those of the past?

What a ridiculous idea.

Modern athletes typically compete in the nude. No protection is needed or wanted. In most sports, bodily damage is expected, sometimes even desired, as in slash boxing. A modern athlete just after a competition would surely be a shocking sight to a citizen of any Earth society. But modern sports produce no cripples.

It would be nice to think this universal non-violence was the result of some great moral revolution. It just ain’t so. It is a purely technological revolution. There is no injury today that can’t be fixed.

The fact is, “violence” is a word that no longer means what it used to. Which is the more violent: a limb being torn off and quickly re-attached with no ill effects, or a crushed spinal disc that causes its owner pain every second of his life and
cannot be repaired
?

I know which injury I’d prefer.

That kind of violence is no longer something to fear, because

(discuss Olympic games, influence of local gravity in venues)
(mention Deathmatches)
(Tie to old medicine article?)(ask Brenda)

I hastily scribbled the last few lines, because I saw Brenda returning with the popcorn.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, resuming her seat. I handed her the page. She scanned it quickly.

“Seems a little dry,” was her only comment.

“You’ll hype it up some,” I told her. “This is your field.” I reached over and took a kernel of popcorn from her, then took a big bite out of it. She had bought the large bag: a dozen fist-sized puffs, white and crunchy, dripping with butter. It tasted great, washed down with the big bottle of beer she handed me.

While I was writing there had been an exhibition from some children’s slash-boxing school. The children were filing out now, most of them cross-hatched with slashes of red ink from the training knives they used. Medical costs for children were high enough without letting them practice with real knives.

The ringmaster appeared and began hyping the main event of the evening, a Deathmatch between the champion Manhattan Mugger and a challenger known as One Mean Bitch.

Brenda leaned toward me and spoke out of the side of her mouth.

“Put your money on the Bitch,” she said.

“If she’s gonna win, what the hell are we doing here?”

“Ask Walter. This was his idea.”

The purpose of our visit to the fights was to interview the Manhattan Mugger—also known as Andrew MacDonald—with an eye toward hiring him as our Earth-born consultant on the Bicentennial series. MacDonald was well over two hundred years old. The trouble was, he had elected to fight to the death. If he lost, his next interview would be with St. Peter. But Walter had assured us there was no way his man was going to lose.

“I was talking to a friend out at the concessions,” Brenda went on. “There’s no question the Mugger is the better fighter. This is his tenth Deathmatch in the last two years. What this guy was saying is, ten is too much for anybody. He said the Mugger was dogging it in the last match. He won’t get away with that against the Bitch. He says the Mugger doesn’t want to win anymore. He just wants to die.”

The contestants had entered the ring, were strutting around, showing off, as holo pictures of their past bouts appeared high in the air and the announcer continued to make it sound as if this would be the fight of the century.

“Did you bet on her?”

“I put down fifty, for a kill in the second.”

I thought that over, then beckoned to a tout. He handed me a card, which I marked and thumbed. He stuck the card in the totaliser on his belt, then handed me the marker. I pocketed it.

“How much did you invest?”

“Ten. To win.” I didn’t tell her it was on the Mugger.

The contestants were in their “corners,” being oiled down, as the announcer continued his spiel. They were magnificent specimens, competing in the highest body-mass class, matched to within a kilogram. The lights flashed on their glistening browned skins as they shadow-boxed and danced, skittish as race horses, bursting with energy.

“This bout is being conducted under the sporting by-laws of King City,” the announcer said, “which provide for voluntary Deathmatches for one or both parties. The Manhattan Mugger has elected to risk death tonight. He has been advised and counseled, as required by law, and should he die tonight, it will be deemed a suicide. The Bitch has agreed to deliver the
coup de grace
, should she find herself in a position to do so, and understands she will not be held responsible in any way.”

“Don’t worry about it!” the Mugger shouted, glaring at his opponent. It got a laugh, and the announcer looked grateful for the interruption in the boring paragraphs the law required him to read.

He brought them out to the middle of the ring and read them the rule—which was simply to stop fighting when they heard the bell. Other than that, there were no rules. He had them shake hands, and told them to come out fighting.