And you, Mama, forgive me… I always talked back to you, telling you that your sharp tongue and bad temper would get you sent off to Body Spares. But I hated being right.
Body Spares. Spare me.
At press conferences there’s always some reporter, dumb as a rock, or maybe just misinformed, who asks the classic question. As if it were the most baffling riddle in the world: why don’t we just use the bodies of “horses” specially designed for Voxl, instead of putting our own bodies at risk?
At first I’d go off into long explanations. Now I just look at them and smile. Idiots.
The punishing training sessions and the huge doses of synthetic hormones and drugs we subject ourselves to, at the risk of destroying our metabolisms forever, are no fun, true enough. But there’s no other way.
Completely suited up, with the suit turned on but my helmet not yet connected, I stand up and take a long look at myself in the mirror. Six foot three, 230 pounds of pure muscle. Not uniformly distributed, the way it would be on any average bodybuilder, but beautifully concentrated, almost sixty percent in the legs. Each of my thighs is thicker than my waist. My calf muscles are as big around as my head. In normal gravity I can jump five feet eleven inches straight up without even flexing my legs. I have quicker reflexes than a hysterical wildcat. I can drop a coin, roll to the floor, and catch it in my mouth before it hits. A Voxl player’s body is the most precious equipment he possesses—and the hardest to acquire.
An anatomy like this has to be carefully cultivated, sometimes for years. Years of training each reflex, each muscle, to reach perfection. I wouldn’t trade even the strongest body straight from a Body Spares booth for my own. Not even the body of a twelve-foot Colossaur. I wouldn’t know how to handle it like I do this one. It wouldn’t respond to me in the same way.
Only one in ten thousand humans has in his genes the potential to become a Voxl star. Only one in five million has what it takes to become, someday, a member of Team Earth. The champions.
Having this muscle power so concentrated in your legs can be a bit much, even a pain, in everyday life, it’s true. But we’re Voxl players because—among other things—we aren’t multimillionaires. If we could use one body to train and play in and another the rest of the time, we’d simply have no need to play. And we wouldn’t. Except Yukio, maybe.
But for now, even he doesn’t have enough money to afford the luxury of using a body that isn’t his own.
It’s true, since there’s two sides to every coin, that some unlucky players rent out their bodies to Body Spares for pretty good money. Their main clients are xenoid ex-players curious to see what the body of another species feels like. For them, it comes out pretty cheap.
But even those bodies, compared to ours, are like twentieth-century helicopters next to a late-model aerobus…
While I’m thinking all this and looking at myself in the mirror with satisfaction, Gopal places the captain’s vocoder between my teeth. Like my teammates’, mine is a combination of dental guard and laryngophone. It allows me to communicate with the rest of the team and to activate or deactivate the field shield by flicking a special switch with my tongue.
My vocoder also has two other tongue controls: one to talk with Gopal without the rest of the team overhearing us; the other, more important one lets me stop the game clock whenever one of my players gets hurt or if we want to go into a strategy huddle.
Just as I’m finished getting dressed, the warning bell rings: time to head for the court. Off the court, with my suit turned off, each step I take is as ponderous as a graceful tyrannosaur’s. I climb onto the antigrav field, which now whisks me straight to the place where we’ll meet our challenge.
We still don’t know whom we’ll be facing.
In the World Championship and in League play, you always know your opponents beforehand: their favorite formations, even the clinical histories and psychological profiles of each player. And based on all this information you draw up a strategy.
But not in this match.
The League team that will be playing us won’t find out far in advance, either. Maybe it’s only now, as their ship is already entering the suborbital trajectory for Earth’s troposphere, that their coach will be informing them of the League’s irrevocable choice: they are the ones who will be testing their strength this year against Team Earth…
We walk out onto the court.
Or, better said, we enter into it. Voxl is played inside an enclosed rectangular hall, measuring about twenty-five feet high by fifty wide by one hundred long. That is, one by two by four arns by the standard Centaurian measure.
The walls of the playing court are still transparent in both directions, so we can see the crowd going wild outside. Lots of them with their faces painted half pink, half blue, waving huge flags with Earth silhouetted against a backdrop of stars. We can make out the convulsive movements of their mouths and their necks strained from yelling. But we can’t hear them. It’s completely soundproof inside here. And when the game begins, the polarized walls will turn opaque for looking out. Nothing must distract the players of the galactic sport.
“They’re saying, ‘Go Earth, pink and blue, we’re gonna stomp all over you!’ and ‘Earth, Earth, Earth is hot, the xenoids, they ain’t diddly squat!’ ” Jonathan’s voice comes over our headphones, letting us know what’s up. He can lip read. He taught deaf kids for three years after they kicked him out of the League. A crappy job, but it beats starving to death or sinking into male social work, super-dangerous and illegal.
He chatters incessantly. Seems nervous. He’s normally quiet as the grave before a match. I’ll keep an eye on him. I don’t want him to fall to pieces right now…
Suddenly Jonathan points up, and Mvamba does the same. No need for them to say anything. It’s almost telepathic, the way we can tell the entire stadium has fallen silent.
The League players have arrived.
The ship is black. Blacker than black. So dark it gleams in the setting sun like an immense and ominous beetle. It docks at the empty tower, the visiting team’s, and the dome of the court immediately hides it from us.
Even so, we’ve had time to notice that the ship is at least ten times the size of our aerobus. They must have onboard changing rooms. As usual, the League team will come down ready to play.
I look at my men for the last time before the decisive moment. Mvamba. Arno. Yukio. Jonathan. The Slovskys. And me. Humans all. To the xenoids, we’re trash. Members of the most backward, despised, subjugated, and humiliated race in the galaxy. Relentlessly crushed in our crude primitivity by technologies so advanced they seem like magic to us. By economic powers so massive they could pay their weight in gold for every Earthling and even for the whole planet itself without much effort. By destructive forces so extreme they could wipe the entire solar system from the galaxy.
Humans, like ninety-nine percent of the audience.
For them and for us, this is our only chance for revenge. The only occasion when, once a year, we can face off with them, the proud, domineering xenoids, on nearly equal terms.
It doesn’t matter that no human team has ever managed to beat a League team in Voxl.
We are their hope, their demand for justice, their favorite sons, their thirst for revenge. We have to win.
We’re going to win. Because we are the champions.
Because we have all the anger, if not all the strength.
So, if any justice exists in the universe, victory will be ours.
We all feel the same way. Even though no words are spoken…
We see the mouths in the crowd distended in a silent scream of infinite hatred. And before turning around, we already know that behind our backs the League team is walking onto the court. We wheel about in unison to face them. To see them, to gauge them, to meet them.