Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories Page 17

  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 t
imes 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.

  ***

  Stalking the Unicorn with Gun and Camera

  Author’s Note: Sport Hunting

  I wrote this after I saw one too many soft-eyed unicorns in convention art shows and read one too many memoirs by old-time African hunters on how they stalked their prey. At the time I had no idea that I’d borrow the title for the first of the John Justin Mallory novels.

  When she got to within 200 yards of the herd of Southern Savannah unicorns she had been tracking for four days, Rheela of the Seven Stars made her obeisance to Quatr Mane, God of the Hunt, then donned the Amulet of Kobassen, tested the breeze to make sure that she was still downwind of the herd, and began approaching them, camera in hand.

  But Rheela of the Seven Stars had made one mistake—a mistake of carelessness—and thirty seconds later she was dead, brutally impaled upon the horn of a bull unicorn.

  • • •

  Hotack the Beastslayer cautiously made his way up the lower slopes of the Mountain of the Nameless One. He was a skilled tracker, a fearless hunter, and a crack shot. He picked out the trophy he wanted, got the beast within his sights, and hurled his killing club. It flew straight and true to its mark.

  And yet, less than a minute later, Hotack, his left leg badly gored, was barely able to pull himself to safety in the branches of a nearby Rainbow Tree. He, too, had made a mistake—a mistake of ignorance.

  • • •

  Bort the Pure had had a successful safari. He had taken three chimeras, a gorgon, and a beautifully-matched pair of griffons. While his trolls were skinning the gorgon he spotted a unicorn sporting a near-record horn, and, weapon in hand, he began pursuing it. The terrain gradually changed, and suddenly Bort found himself in shoulder-high kraken grass. Undaunted, he followed the trail into the dense vegetation.

&n
bsp; But Bort the Pure, too, had made a mistake—a mistake of foolishness. His trolls found what very little remained of him some six hours later.

  • • •

  Carelessness, ignorance, foolishness—together they account for more deaths among unicorn hunters than all other factors combined.

  Take our examples, for instance. All three hunters—Rheela, Hotack, and Bort—were experienced safari hands. They were used to extremes of temperature and terrain, they didn’t object to finding insects in their ale or banshees in their tents, they knew they were going after deadly game and took all reasonable precautions before setting out.

  And yet two of them died, and the third was badly maimed.

  Let’s examine their mistakes, and see what we can learn from them:

  Rheela of the Seven Stars assimilated everything her personal wizard could tell her about unicorns, purchased the very finest photographic equipment, hired a native guide who had been on many unicorn hunts, and had a local witch doctor bless her Amulet of Kobassen. And yet, when the charge came, the amulet was of no use to her, for she had failed to properly identify the particular sub-species of unicorn before her—and as I am continually pointing out during my lecture tours, the Amulet of Kobassen is potent only against the rare and almost-extinct Forest unicorn. Against the Southern Savannah unicorn, the only effective charm is the Talisman of Triconis. Carelessness.

  Hotack the Beastslayer, on the other hand, disdained all forms of supernatural protection. To him, the essence of the hunt was to pit himself in physical combat against his chosen prey. His killing club, a beautifully-wrought and finely-balanced instrument of destruction, had brought down simurghs, humbabas, and even a dreaded wooly hydra. He elected to go for a head shot, and the club flew to within a millimeter of where he had aimed it. But he hadn’t counted on the unicorn’s phenomenal sense of smell, nor the speed with which these surly brutes can move. Alerted to Hotack’s presence, the unicorn turned its head to seek out its predator—and the killing club bounced harmlessly off its horn. Had Hotack spoken to almost any old-time unicorn hunter, he would have realized that head shots are almost impossible, and would have gone for a crippling knee shot. Ignorance.