My eyes and all my teammates’ eyes scrutinize them avidly. Gathering data, imagining likely strategies, weighing possible strengths and theoretical weaknesses. They must be doing the same with us.
Voxl teams are limited by weight, not by the number of players. No more than 1,263 pounds, exactly six Centaurian paks.
Our team weighs that much on the nose. Jonathan, our sub, matches the 201 suited-up pounds of Yukio, our lightest player. There’ll be six of us on the field, and we haven’t left a single gram of advantage to our opponents.
There are just four of them; they’re betting on strength.
Their defensive back is a Colossaur who’s been surgically stripped of the bony plates of his natural armor. Under his still-unplugged, transparent suit, his skin is a strange pale pink instead of reddish-brown. A real giant of his race; must weigh about 650 pounds. Clever trick, that amputation: on the field, where we all wear the same armor, the thick natural carapace of a native of Colossa would merely be dead weight. So he gains mobility and keeps 650 pounds of muscle, plus the added advantage of a very strong tail.
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.