Shockball (31 page)

That made him raise an eyebrow. “I think I can avoid incurring any penalties, Cherijo.”

I stopped pacing. “Don’t you start overproducing testosterone on me now, Reever. That kidney may be healed, but it’s still fragile. Those reformation cells are still taking hold.” I kicked a stone. “Why doesn’t he get one of his own people to replace Black Otter? Why does it have to be you?”

“Perhaps he’d rather sacrifice someone who doesn’t belong to the tribe.”

I’d had enough of what Rico wanted sacrificed. “We’ll just see about that.”

I tried to talk to the chief. I sent a dozen requests through my guards and Hawk to be granted an “audience.”

Rico ignored me.

When my efforts at being diplomatic failed, I tried the direct approach, and went to confront him. As soon as I got within ten feet of the chief’s hogan, my guards politely but firmly steered me away.

“You may not go there. The chief does not wish to speak with you.”

“Is that right? Well, the chief can go to hell!” I shouted at the hogan, hoping he’d hear me. All that got me was a fast march back to the medical alcove, and after that I wasn’t allowed even within yelling distance of Rico’s hogan.

In the meantime, Kegide arrived every morning to collect Reever, and led him off to the surface and the practice field outside the village, to train. According to what Reever told me, there were men in the village who were veterans of the game, and they scrimmaged against the Night Horse players during each practice session.

“Apparently the goal of the runback is to keep the sphere in motion while crossing the length of the playing field, until an attempt can be made to kick the sphere into the touchzone. Each successful touch-in awards the runback’s team four points.”

“How thrilling. Hold still.” I cleaned a laceration on his shoulder and dressed it. “If all you have to do is kick the damn thing, why are you getting so banged up every day?”

“Kegide plays the position of blockback. He attempts to prevent me from crossing the field, kicking the sphere into the touchzone, and also tries to take the sphere away from me.”

“This involves knocking you down, right?”

“Yes.”

“God.” I saw the slight curl on one side of his mouth. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“I have never participated in a cooperative athletic competition before.” He shrugged. “It is interesting.”

“Uh-huh.” I pulled his tunic back down and swatted him on the arm. “Stop being so interested. Your kidney is more important than your success at team sports.”

It was frustrating. Since I wasn’t allowed to attend the practice sessions, all I could do was scan him and treat whatever wounds he received when he returned from the surface. At first, Reever got battered pretty regularly. Gradually he began showing up with fewer injuries, and then hardly any at all. My insistence on scanning him was virtually unnecessary.

What really bothered me was when he started getting interested in the game.

“I was able to score three times today,” he said after a couple of weeks of this nonsense. “Defense prevented the village team from scoring any points at all.” He looked down at my scanner’s display. “I have found a very effective running pattern. No one was able to successfully tackle me.”

“You’re becoming such a jock.” And I hated it, but I didn’t say that. “Stay right where you are. I’m not done checking your spinal cord.”

“I am fine.” He pulled his tunic over his head. “I am looking forward to playing at the professional arena tomorrow.”

Men. Give them a chance to compete as athletes, and even the brightest of them turned into instant Neanderthals.

“Not without this.” I went to my worktable and brought back the special torso brace I’d made for him. It wasn’t much, but it would provide some protection for his abdomen. “Wear it under your uniform.”

He fingered the padded material, which I’d reinforced with sheets of flexible plas. “If the officials permit it.”

I could care less about the rules. “Don’t let them see it.”

He looked at me oddly for a momem. “Cherijo, if something happens to me, I want you to leave this place immediately.”

“Oh, sure, no problem, seeing as I can come and go as I please.”

“Find the outcasts. They will help you.”

“I have two mothers about to give birth, and a syphilis carrier to track down. Plus, the minute I appear on the surface, Joseph’s men will grab me,” I reminded him. “We’re stuck here for the moment. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you.”

I hoped.

Things happened to Reever after he started playing professional arena shockball. It wasn’t as easy as the scrimmages with the surface villagers, and he always came back from every game with muscle strains, tears, bruises, and cuts. I started laying out therapeutic packs as a matter of course.

In direct relation to his injuries, his enthusiasm for the sport seemed to grow. I found I had to constantly bite my tongue or I ended up showering him with acidic sarcasm about the supposed allure of professional competition.

In the meantime, I kept trying to get to Rico, but he refused to see me.

One day Reever came back with five other players needing treatment. They were all in bad shape. He walked in with three of them, carrying the other two. I performed a quick visual and had the two unconscious men put on berths first.

“Multiple fractures, deep tissue thermal injuries, blood clots all over the place.” I scanned the other player, then tossed down the instrument in disgust and started the infuser lines. “How many penalties did they take, Reever?”

“One had six. The other, seven. We’re all burned. Take a look at him first.” He pushed another player toward me. “He was penalized while at the bottom of a pileup. The sphere malfunctioned in his hands. It took several minutes to reset the computer.”

“God. Look at this mess.” I relived an old nightmare from my past as I carefully scanned the player’s broken, charred fingers. “Sit down over there before you pass out.” I turned and yelled at the guards. “Get Hawk in here, now. I need some help.”

Several hours later, I finished wrapping the burns on Reever’s hands and feet, and looked over the other players, now resting comfortably. “I’ve never seen injuries this bad before. What went wrong at the game?”

He pulled off his jersey, which had a huge number fourteen on each side, and the name
Nilchi’i’
emblazoned across the back of the shoulder yoke. “The Gliders are trying to progress to the semifinals for the playoffs, and the teams challenging them are much harder to beat. Rico does not want the team to lose. He ordered the plays to be run, knowing we would be penalized.”

“Why didn’t you just refuse to play?”

“I did at first.” Reever looked at his bandages. “Milass told me that if I did not run the plays, he would come back here and use his knife to blind you.”

I got indignant. “And you believed him?”

“I wasn’t going to take a chance.”

“That is good, whiteskin. Because I would have carved her eyes from her head.”

We both turned around to see Milass standing in the entrance.

“Come to see the damage you’ve done?” I asked, gesturing to the unconscious men. “They’re going to be out of action for a couple of weeks.”

“If they are truly men, they will survive.”

Suddenly, something clicked. “You were a player. That’s how you got those burn scars on your face.” Fury surged through me. “Is that why you’re forcing these men to nearly kill themselves every time they play this stupid game? So they can be as homely as you are?”

“They will bear their scars, as I do.”

I wanted to lunge at him, but Reever had a hold on my arm. “You’ll be bearing a few more by the time I get through with you, you little twerp.”

“Any time, patcher.” He plucked out a blade and waggled it at me, like a taunt. “Come to see me any time.”

I made Reever and the other patients comfortable, then pulled Hawk out into the tunnel.

“I’m not going to stand by and keep treating these players for self-inflicted wounds. You get me to Rico so I can tell him that personally.”

“No.”

I wanted to break some of my knuckles on the nearest stone wall. Instead, I took a couple of slow, deep breaths. Control. That was what I needed. Control and a couple of fully charged pulse rifles.

“Hawk. You’ve worked Medical long enough to know how serious this situation is. These men are risking their health, and possibly their lives, to win a game that is meaningless.”

“It means a great deal more than you understand.” Hawk looked at my expression and lifted one warped shoulder. “There is much more at stake in playing for the junta than mere victory. The Night Horse are the only Native Americans competing professionally. We represent a lost ideal, we fight for ethnic recognition.”

“So weave more rugs. Stage more ceremonials. Sing more chants. Whatever,” I said, throwing out my hands. “Anything would be better than forcing these men to court electrocution just for the sake of putting some numbers on a four-story vid screen.”

“They are not forced to play, patcher. They do it willingly, for our chief, for our people.”

“Your chief doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.”

“On the contrary.” Hawk looked up, and the inten-sity of his gaze made me take a step back. “Rico has prevented hundreds of our people from being deported. He created
Leyaneyaniteh
for their sake, not his own. He preserves a way of life that has been otherwise reduced to a few paragraphs in the databases of museums.”

“That doesn’t give him the right to ask these men to deliberately injure themselves in these games.”

A strange smile curved his scarred mouth. “They are happy to do it. Suffering for the good of the tribe is a noble thing. It is an expected thing.” He looked back into the alcove. “I will help you finish making the chart notations, but I will not speak any further on this.”

“Fine.”

We went back to the patients, and completed the tedious task of recording the individual case particulars on their charts. Hawk moved over to Reever, who was watching both of us.

“Your woman does not understand the ways of men,” Hawk said.

“You would be surprised what she knows,” Reever said, then he made a long, trilling sound.

“No whistling.” I turned around. “You’re going to… Hawk?”

Hawk was pressed back against a console, his face completely blanched. He stared at Reever with utter horror.

Reever sat up, and trilled something else. This time it was a bunch of different sounds, all mixed together.

The hunchback nearly fell flat on his face as he stumbled for the entrance.

I watched him go, then turned to my husband. “Now what’s this all about? What did you do, mess up one of his chants?”

Reever stared at the entrance with a thoughtful expression. “Something like that.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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Dolts to Fix

I
thought being shunned, kept prisoner, under guard, and having to treat my husband and the other shock-ball players for self-inflicted injuries was bad enough.

Silly me.

The next game was scheduled a week later, and no one was permitted to remain on the injured roster. I was told to put support casts on the players with bone fractures, and protective dressings on everyone’s burns. Except their hands—I found out junta rules prohibited players from insulating their hands with anything. The hard way, of course.

“Bandages won’t insulate them against the sphere,” I argued with Milass, when he came into Medical carrying the bundle of dressings he’d removed from the players. “Those burns are still healing.”

“They are Night Horse. They will play without them.” He dropped the ripped bandages at my feet. “They need none of your whiteskin coddling.”

“How about nerve damage? Do they need that?” I yelled after him as he stalked out.

I lectured Reever on being careful until he left the alcove to join the other players going to the arena.

Then I sat down to wait, until my guards came to get me. By the arms.

“You are to attend the games,” one of them said when I asked what the hell they thought they were doing.

I tried to twist free. “No thanks.”

“It is not a request, patcher.” One of them shoved a medical case into my hands, then pushed me ahead of them.

“Yeah. It never is.”

I hadn’t been out of the tunnel since escaping from Joseph, so emerging into the sunlight took a few minutes’ adjustment. We weren’t at the surface village— that route hadn’t been used since Joseph and the League had taken up permanent residency there—but in the middle of a park of some kind.

By the time I got my bearings, the Night Horse were hustling me across the manicured grounds toward a glidebus parked on an access road. On the side of the bus was a stylized mural of a shockball player with black-feathered wings sprouting out of the back of his jersey.

“Who’s that? Vulture Man?” I asked, pointing to the bus.

“He is the Glider.”

So that’s where the team got their name from. “What is he? Some kind of Indian hero?”

One of the guards chuckled. “No, patcher. The Glider is very real. He has been seen flying through the mountains for years. Many whiteskin have tried to capture him, but without success.”

“He must be an alien, avoiding deportation.”

“The Glider is a great figure of legend among the junta.”

“I still think he looks like a big vulture.”

They made me get on the bus and walk past seats filled with Night Horse players dressed in bulky protective gear.

I was shoved into the seat beside Reever. “What’s going on? Why do they want me at the game?”

He put a hand over mine.
I
don’t know. I heard Milass tell the men to go and get you. He was angry. If you see Rico, don’t antagonize him
.

That’s going to be hard.

The glidebus pulled out onto the empty road and started heading toward the dense cluster of ground and hover-buildings I recognized as downtown New Angeles.