A Planet for Rent (9 page)

We are the champions.

The best on Earth.

The defenders of human pride in the sporting arena.

The public knows it. They have confidence in us.

We know it because their raucous cheers rock the fuselage of our aerobus like thunderbolts when they detect us in the sky. Our vehicle, painted in the colors of Earth, descends from the high-velocity lane and heads along the wide avenue toward the stadium, gliding a few scant yards above the heads of the fervent crowd.

They worship us. We’re their idols. If we win today, we’ll be even more than that. Practically their gods.

“What a sea of people. The pilot’s going to get us killed,” grumbles Gopal, our coach, looking down through a hatch. He can’t help it. These ceremonial pre-game entrances always make him jittery. But the rest of the team, including me, really enjoy it. It’s a beautiful tradition, and what would Earth be if we gave up our traditions, too?

Our pilot is used to crowds, and he confidently drives the aerobus above the ocean of humanity. Doesn’t even glance down.

I do. The sight of thousands of faces wild with hope, thousands of hands shooting me the V for Victory, gives me strength before each game.

Today I’ll need it more than ever. This is going to be the toughest Voxl game of my life. My gateway to fame if I do well. My path to becoming a has-been, a nothing, if I fail.

I’m going to go out there and give it my all.

Everybody else on the team knows how important today is, too. Each in his own way is focused on a single idea: winning. Nobody wants to think about a loss...

Losing would mean eternal shame. Maybe the end of our careers, maybe no Voxl team would ever want to give us another contract...

Just thinking about it brings bad luck.

But no. Victory is ours. It has to be. Today, we’re not just the best Voxl players on Earth right now; we’re the best in years. We are the champions, and this might be the year.

Never before have six humans this good at Voxl played together on the same team.

Mvamba, tall and skinny as a basketball player, is kneeling in front of a miniature folding altar. Praying in his deep Bantu dialect to a tribal fetish, carved from a piece of wood as dark as his skin.

Sometimes it really does seem to help if you believe in a personal, intimate little god who watches over you, pray to a protective spirit or a guardian angel. Not even two years ago Mvamba was a regular guy driving broken-down old aerobuses around Sydney. Just one more African immigrant, left stateless after the xenos sank their whole continent in Contact times. A scout from the local team, the Black Hands, saw him throw a rock at a mugger and decided to give the kid a tryout. His career rocketed straight to the top: center forward for the Black Hands, offensive back for the Melbourne Skulls... and now, his big shot. A chance only one player in ten thousand will get: defending the colors of the whole Earth. A rookie couldn’t ask for more. Most likely, he’s giving thanks to his fetish for his good luck.

Here, watching Mvanda’s prayer with a smirk, is Arno Korvalden, the Danish defensive back. The Blond Hulk. A committed atheist and the burliest guy on the team at 412 pounds and six feet nine inches. Also the oldest hand. He was playing with the Copenhagen Berserkers back when I was still swiping credit cards in the outer ring of the Havana astroport. Sportswriters have been speculating about his retirement for some time. But the Great Dane keeps on playing, and right now he’s the best defender on the planet. Not that he cares much how Earth does; Arno is a pragmatic guy, a mercenary who only responds to the scent of money. Gopal only got him to play with us by promising him a huge bonus, which he’ll make win or lose. Anybody else and there’d be doubts about how well he’d play, but the Blond Hulk is a man of his word. And, simply put, he only knows how to give one hundred percent. Obviously he’ll do his very best.

Yukio Kawabata is here and not here. Though his body is present, the Zen Buddhist trance he’s been in for nearly an hour has probably sent his spirit back to the imperial Edo of his samurai ancestors. From the way he plays it, Voxl is obviously just a modern equivalent of Bushido for him. Yukio is an idealist through and through. He can afford that luxury; he’s rich enough already. His family owns a nice block of shares in the Planetary Tourism Agency. That’s why he doesn’t care how much he makes or whether he wins or loses. He plays well, better than anyone else; that’s his obsession. And he’s a terrific right center, with reflexes and fast legs that are the envy of lots of professionals in the League.

The League...

The League is like Mecca and Valhalla put together for any Voxl player. The League is where teams of every race meet and compete. The armored, incredibly agile insectoid grodos versus the polyps of Aldebaran, slow to move on their wide, muscular single feet, but with hundreds of whip-fast tentacles to make up for their speed. The hulking, red-carapaced Colossaurs versus the rapid, svelte Cetians.

The League means astronomical salaries, unimaginable bonuses, the ability to travel anywhere in the galaxy. And an entourage of publicists trying to get you to use their expensive, sophisticated gear. Being a player in the League is almost better than being a god.

The League is the dream of every human player. It’s only there that Colossaur, human, and polyp can play on the same side, no difference, no racism. At least in theory.

Jonathan, our veteran player, has told us the story a thousand times. He was there, at the top. But then he fell. He’s never told us how or why, and we’ve never asked him. The first rule of group life: respect everybody else’s secrets if you want to have a private life of your own. That’s the only way the team can eat, travel, sleep, and play, always together, without killing each other. Follow that rule, and you avoid the unnecessary expense of psychologists and counselors. Ignore it—and they’ll still be a useless expense, because they won’t prevent or even delay the inevitable explosion of violence.

Jonathan must be busy with his medical monitor, as he is before every game. He keeps obsessive track of his blood pressure, pulse, erythrogram, temperature, and the hormone levels in his blood. I get the impression he’s taking it too far. His expulsion from the League must have broken something inside the complex machinery of his mind. But who cares, so long as he plays as well as he does. And his fixation on keeping in top physical condition has brought about the miracle that maybe even he no longer believed possible: At the age of forty-two, he’s been given a second chance. After eight years, three of them without setting foot on a Voxl court, he’s made it. He’s the only human who’ll have played for Team Earth twice. If he doesn’t make it now, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. And I don’t want to be around when it does.

The situation of the Slovsky twins is totally different. They’re only eighteen, and they’ve been playing practically since before they learned to walk. The sons of Konrad Slovsky, the famous coach, Jan and Lev were already famous when they were kids, before I ever touched a voxl. This is their first year as pros, and they don’t look nervous. They are two bundles of muscles and sinew trained to perfection. And as if that weren’t enough, the two of them play together with the sort of perfect coordination I’ve only seen in holovideos of Cetian clone teams.

They’re all engrossed in their holographic simulator. Sometimes I feel sorry for them. They never talk about women or holofilms or even drugs. Maybe it was their father’s fault: he’s nearly turned them into robots, superspecialized Voxl-playing machines. If something or someone stopped them from playing, it would be like keeping them from breathing. Their life is about getting better and better at it. For them, no training is ever hard enough. If Gopal ever wakes up with the unlikely idea of going a little bit easier on the team, Jan and Lev will probably protest and accuse him of treason against Earth or something like that.

Monomania seems to be an essential condition for becoming a good Voxl player. At least if you’re human.

Sometimes I wonder whether I’m still me. Whether I haven’t gone crazy, sacrificing my whole life to this game...

Sometimes I also wonder what I’m doing here.

But much more often I’m amazed at myself. At how far I’ve come, starting from as far down as I did. In five years, from petty street pickpocket to high-performance athlete. From failure to triumph. From anonymity to fame.

If my mother could see me now. Her always telling me I was a bum, a lowlife criminal, no good for anything but Body Spares. And my father. I hardly remember him; lost in space with his homemade starship, trying to make an unlawful escape. Running away from poverty when I was just two...

Or María Elena, the first girl I made love with. At sixteen I was more scared than she was, and she was eleven. She was running away from boarding school to be with me. Where could she be now? Probably drowning in the swamp of social work. An orphan girl doesn’t have too many options. At least her physique should help her: she was always pretty, and you could tell she was going to have a great body. She was already practically a little woman at eleven: tall, slim, coalblack hair, cinnamon skin, jet-black eyes.

My mother, who kept telling me about my future in Body Spares, was the one who ended up there because of a fight with her neighbors. She always had a bad temper, and in the end the cheap rum had made it worse. By month two she was dead; an Auyar picked her to be his “horse.” But thanks to the measly enough death benefit I got from the Planetary Tourism Agency, I was able to buy my first set of Voxl gear, second-hand but functional. And I started playing.

It was an all or nothing bet. Like my whole life has been. An orphan boy doesn’t have too many options...

Yes, I’ve been lucky. But I need to keep on being lucky.

I kiss my cross with the image of the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre, blessed by Cardinal Manuel Castro himself. When he gave it to me a week ago, he said I was the pride of his diocese and my people’s hope.

Protect me, dear Virgin. Keep my rebounds on target and my throws perfect. Free me from all wounds and give victory to your most faithful son: me, Daniel Menéndez. You, who can do everything...

The pilot drives the aerobus languidly. We pass between two walls of floating hologram ads, grazing them. We could have flown straight through them without trouble, but that would have meant dealing with a hailstorm of complaints from the advertising companies. Not even Earth’s heroes are above commercial laws.

Past the titanic holoposters, there it is. All ours.

There’s supposedly room for three quarters of a million people in the Metacolosseum of New Rome. Six levels. Sixty gigantic holoscreens. Enough airconditioning for a mid-sized orbital city. Entrances large enough to let in small asteroids.

Today it’s full to bursting. The tickets for this game are always sold out nearly a year in advance.

We float through the main entrance, above the sea of people, dotted here and there with silvery bubbles. The force fields of the prime box seating of the richest and most paranoid xenoids. Other extraterrestrials, more confident about their tourist immunity, prefer to risk getting their data cards lifted in order to enjoy the jubilant atmosphere of the human throng. The authentic local color. The incomparable emotion of being one more person in the audience at the Voxl game of the year—Voxl, the galactic sport, as the reporters and advertisers like to say.

We set down on one of the two empty towers that lead straight to the playing court. We all look at the other tower and think the same thought: who will our opponents be this time?

We’ve faced players from every race in the simulations. We know the strong points and weaknesses of every species, their tricks, their skills... but not even the best holograph can be more than a pale reflection of reality.

As soon as the landing gear of the aerobus touches down, the hemisphere of the force field closes above us, hiding us from the public and the public from us. Gopal is the first to leap down, and half a minute later I’ve got the whole team lined up in front of him.

Our old coach stalks back and forth in front of us, his hands behind his back and a scowl on his face. He looks more like an old general than ever. Finally he stops and sighs. Here comes the speech. I think, with a cynical sense of relief, that it’ll be his last.

“Players!” he booms, and now he’s more like a drill sergeant, because no general would howl like that. His voice sounds too loud for his long, gaunt body.

“I’m not going to tell you all what you already know. I’m not going to remind you how much is riding on your victory, today, right here. I just want you to think about one thing: that we’re humans. The sons of Earth...”

“
And proud of it
!” we scream, as he has taught us.

“Good.” His smile fills our hearts with something ineffable. “Do you all know what it means to be the pride of Earth? It means that, just this once, it doesn’t matter if you were playing on opposite teams in the World Championship six months ago. Or if the countries where you were born have hated each other to death since before Contact. Now we’re all one thing: humans. And they’re all xenoids. The enemy. It’s us against them. It them or us. And nothing else matters.”

He let out a deep sigh. “As for the rest, I hope you already know it after six grueling months of training. And if you haven’t learned it, may Allah help us.” We all smiled at the joke, added to break the tension.

Jonathan glances at me and winks. Meaning, “The old man says the same thing every year.” Probably true, but I can’t laugh. As team captain, it’s up to me to set an example.

“Forget defense. We’re playing to win. As the game develops I’ll be giving you instructions,” Gopal adds, and his olive Hindustani skin looks pale with exhaustion. “But don’t forget that you’ll have the last word, because...”

“
We are the champions
!” The battle cry fills our hearts with faith, and Gopal grins like an old gargoyle.

“Yeah... What I was about to say, though, was that you’re the sorriest troop of monkeys I’ve ever seen set foot on a Voxl court. But, sure,” he winks at us, and for a fraction of a second he’s nearly Mohamed Gopal, the Delhi Wonder, once more, the first human to play in the League, “now you’ll get your chance to prove me wrong.”