Everybody Pays (10 page)

I know where it is now. I’m going there.

There’s other Dancing Girls here. You’re not allowed to even talk to another crew member while you’re on the HydroFarm. Everything is on video. In the dark, they have infra and thermal—they can see your coding day or night. So there’s no way to hook up.

But this . . . I can’t believe it could be so easy. I mean, how could I even
know
how hard it was supposed to be unless somebody told me? A guard told me. They always want the same thing. The Rulers know the Guards are going to want sex. So they do things to them to make them not want it. But those things don’t work. They don’t erase things, they just bury them. You have to know how to dig down deep. The nuim helps. I do it anytime I want. The most important thing is never to let them know. I only have three cycles left now.

Charm is in my head. She will come with me. Sometimes I get a voice that says she won’t. That it won’t be Charm anymore. I remember once, when I was a Game Boy, she said she wasn’t my girlfriend. She said it in front of some of the others too. I didn’t mind, because I know Charm and me is supposed to be a secret. And that was Charm, so it didn’t scare me. What scares me is the voice that says she won’t be Charm anymore. The HydroFarm changes people, the voices say. I have never been there, so I don’t know. But the voices know.

There’s no perimeter here. You could just walk off. Back into one of the deep tunnels. I heard they don’t even chase you. But you can’t live out here. So I guess some people just die. If you make it back to the hub, they will video you sooner or later. That’s how you get brought back.

I see Charm. I don’t know if she sees me. I have to wait until she does before I take her away. I have to be quick and quiet.

Radioman has been here for three turns now. I see him, standing just outside the perimeter. He wants me to go with him. I have what he needs. He has what I need, too. On my next turn, I’m going to go across. I can’t wait anymore.

Here she comes. To be with me.

He even brought my razor.

I’m myself now.

Radioman was good.

for Anastasia Volkonsky

GAMBLERS

T
he whisper-stream says they used to have fights—sporting contests, I mean—like this all the time. A long time ago. Outside, before the Terror brought everyone down here. Way before I was born.

You can check out stuff like that—I mean, stuff that happened Before—if you really want to, but that costs credits. A lot of credits. And even then, you don’t know if it’s really true. The only truth in Underground is free—when the Book Boys write on the walls. Everyone knows that. If it’s written in blue, it must be true. And only the Book Boys can write in that special blue everyone recognizes.

I don’t care about any of that anyway. I don’t need ancient Info, I need credits. Without credits—heavy credits—I can’t play. And if I can’t play, I can’t get anything I want. That’s my job, to play.

Most of the players aren’t like me. They’re not professionals. They don’t think about the odds, they don’t do the research—they just go with their blood, with their feelings. That’s my edge.

You can’t fix these fights. There’s always rumors—about drugs and stuff—but it would be real hard to drug a Traxyl. You couldn’t get a needle into them, and they only eat Zone Rats, those huge things that mostly stay out in the Uncharted Zone. I guess you could maybe drug one of the rats; then, when the Traxyl ate it . . . But I don’t think it would work. It wouldn’t be slick enough—everyone could tell.

That would be very bad. There’s a rule against gambling on the Traxyl fights, but it’s not a Major Rule, and the only thing they do is fine you when they catch you. That’s part of the cost of doing business—it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, one thing I learned for myself: everyone gambles, one way or the other.

And there’s other rules too. Not the ones the Rulers make, but everybody knows and obeys them anyway. And if one of the Traxyl handlers tried to fix a fight, that would be the end. I saw it happen once. A handler cut his Traxyl’s eye with a razor ring just before he sent him out. Traxyls can’t smell or anything. And I don’t know if they can hear too good either. But they need their eyes—big, huge eyes, so they can see in the dark when they go after the Zone Rats. The other Traxyl locked on to the one with the cut eye and it was over quick.

Traxyls don’t eat each other. They kill for territory. Hunting space. If one comes into another’s space, they fight. Everybody knows that’s how they work. That’s how the pit fights started, I guess. I wasn’t the only one who saw what the handler had done. They just threw him into the pit and he was gone real quick.

No human would have a chance against a Traxyl. They’re not that big—even the biggest ones are only about thirty kilos—but they’re all armor-plated, and once they lock their jaws, there’s no way to open them. Every once in a while, one gets loose, and the Police have to kill it. Shooting doesn’t usually stop them. You’d have to hit them right in the eye to do that. And even then, it has to be one of the Superslugs—regular bullets won’t make it all the way into their brains. So the Police have to blow them up. Anyone around gets killed when they do that. It’s a Rule that no Traxyls can run loose. If people get killed to stop one, that would be sanctioned—not breaking a Rule. Besides, anything the Police do is not against the Rules.

The Rulers don’t like it when a Traxyl gets loose, so the places where they hold the fights keep getting moved. Farther and farther away from the Central Tunnels. Some are so far away that you need to hire one of the Guides to take you there and bring you back. It’s a funny thing about the Guides—they’re all skin/shade 20+, almost a reddish color—and that doesn’t make sense. I mean, if they know the Deep Tunnels—the ones far away from Central—so well, you’d think they’d be real pale from spending so much time there. But they’re not.

Now almost all the fights happen near the Border, just this side of the Uncharted Zone.

Traxyls live in the Uncharted Zone. Trappers go in there to bring them back. A good fighting Traxyl is worth enough credits to live for a few years. Live
nice,
I mean, not just get by. Most of the Trappers don’t succeed, which is why Traxyls are so rare. We know the Trappers don’t succeed when they don’t come back. So, in a way, they’re just like me. I mean, people
call
them “gamblers” for going in there, but it’s only the true professionals who go out and come back—the ones who make a living at it.

There’s always rumors—that’s what the whisper-stream is for, to carry them along—about people living in the Uncharted Zone.
Living
there, not just going in and coming out. I don’t know if the rumors are true. And if they are, what would those people do about the Traxyls? I even heard the Traxyls guard the people from the rats, but that sounds so crazy—I mean, what’s the odds on
that
? I check the walls every day, the same way everyone does. And, one time, the Book Boys wrote it in blue:

One of the girls in the Sex Tunnels told me that meant the people who live in the Uncharted Zone bred the Traxyls to protect them from the rats. But girls in the Sex Tunnels say anything. This one said she was going to go out to the Uncharted Zone herself one day. To “join them.” When I asked her what she meant, she just went back to work on me. Xyla was her name—that was about all I remembered.

But I did remember I liked her. So, next time I was in the Sex Tunnels, I asked for her. They told me she was gone. That happens all the time—I didn’t pay much attention.

The only thing I really pay attention to is the Traxyl sheet. It costs fifty credits, and it comes out about a week before the fight card. It doesn’t give you a won-lost record—that would be pretty stupid for Traxyls—the loser always dies, that’s how they tell when it’s over. The sheet tells you how many fights each one had before, weight and height, any crippling injuries—they fight Traxyls even if they’re crippled, and some of them win that way for a while too—the name of the handler, stuff like that. The sheet never tells you where the fights are going to be. You have to buy that info too, but it’s always hand-to-hand, and you can only get it at the last minute. The sheet gives you their records. The Traxyls, I mean. Every one has an alphanumeric burned into its side. This doesn’t hurt them, just makes a mark on their armor. The hardest thing to guess is when a new one’s going to be good. They don’t train Traxyls or anything. Soon as they bring one back from the tunnels, they put it into the pit to fight.

You can’t tell anything about how good they’re going to fight by looking at them. I had to learn that for myself. At first, I would bet on the biggest one, but that wasn’t . . . consistent. It wasn’t a good system. In fact,
nothing
was good until I realized what the trick was: You can’t tell
anything
about a Traxyl. There was one—M29X4—that won eleven in a row. That was a record. No Traxyl had ever done that. When I came to the fights that night, I saw he was matched against a Traxyl that had only fought once before. So the odds on the one-win Traxyl were about 50 to 1. And I found a Taker who was offering 75 to 1 just before the fight started, and I put up a thousand credits. And my Traxyl won. I bet I was about the only one who
did
win that night.

So that’s my system. Once I realized that any Traxyl can kill another anytime, I just go with the ones at the longest odds. Now, if the odds are close, then I think about it a lot. I have to bet on every single match, otherwise the Takers would catch on to my system and I couldn’t get any of them to do business with me. One of the hardest things about being a professional is to look like an amateur.

I’m not the only one with a system. When M29X4 got killed, a lot of people figured eleven wins was the maximum. So, the more a Traxyl won, the more people would bet on it—until it got close to eleven, and then they would back off. But when J44B8 won thirteen before it was killed, that theory got killed too.

I always wondered about the handlers too. It seems as if some of them even liked their Traxyls. I could never be sure, because you can’t
touch
one or anything, but it looked that way. I saw one handler crying when his Traxyl died. But I figured he was probably upset because he lost so much money.

It doesn’t matter now, anyway. First it was on the InfoBoard. A message from the Rulers that Traxyl-fighting had been upgraded to a Major Rule infraction. That meant a year on the HydroFarm if you were caught. But it wasn’t clear about gamblers. I mean, fighting Traxyls was against a Major Rule, but was
betting
on the fights? So, in a way, I guess everyone who did it was gambling twice. You’d think that would scare people away, but it didn’t.

Then the whisper-stream started flowing. It said the people in the Uncharted Zone were going to stop the Traxyl-fighting by themselves. That was crazy. I mean, it was a rumor inside of a rumor. Nobody even knows if there
were
people in the Uncharted Zone.

But no Trappers came back for eighteen cycles. And no more would go in, even when the price for a Traxyl went up to a hundred thousand credits. It wasn’t a gamble anymore; it was a sure thing—if you were a Trapper, you were going to get trapped.

There were still lots of Traxyls, though. Only one died in each fight, and there were plenty left. They just kept matching the winner from one fight against another, the way they always did.

They couldn’t get more the way you’d think either. Traxyls don’t mate when they’re captured. I don’t even know how they tell males from females, but they never have babies. Or eggs. Or whatever. I mean, you can’t put two of them together to see if they would . . . have sex. Because they’d kill each other, and you wouldn’t make a single credit off
that.

I have been doing this for eighty-seven cycles. A long time. But I knew it was all going to end when the word got passed: all the Traxyls left were going in one last fight. It was going to run for as long as it took—maybe a quarter-cycle straight. Until there was only one Traxyl left.

That’s what the Book Boys wrote on the walls. I figured it was proof that the last fight was coming, all right. So, when I got the last sheet, I also got the last word.

They had to hold the fight way out in the tunnels. So near the Uncharted Zone that the Police were really close. Another gamble. But that was the only way to hold a fight that size. There were over three hundred Traxyls left, and there had to be room for people to sleep, and make food, and everything—a quarter-cycle is a long time. It’s hard to keep something that size quiet, and that made me nervous. But it was my last chance. I had three hundred thousand credits, and I planned to walk away with at least a couple of million. So I’d never have to gamble again.

They keep the Traxyls in little clear Jexan cages before the fights. So the gamblers can look them over if they want to. Some people think they can tell things like that. The cages have slots in the front, so all the handlers have to do is reach in and push them out into the pit once they throw the switch.

It was just before the first fight when I heard the noise. A high, humming noise I’d never heard before. Then they came in. Children. They don’t let children come to these fights, but these were
all
children. Maybe a hundred or more. Holding hands, making this high noise. Everybody just . . . stared at them.

Then one of the Traxyls broke out of its cage. It went right for the first people it saw. You could hear that high noise the children made even over the screams.

More Traxyls broke out. People ran. But the children kept walking closer. Then some of them started to open the cages themselves. It was all blood and flesh and bone by then. Everyplace. If the Police heard, they never came.

The last thing I saw when I looked back was the Traxyls. They were following the children back into the tunnels. Moving toward the Uncharted Zone. But they weren’t chasing the children. They were just trotting along next to them.

for Alice Darrow