To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga) (23 page)

He jerked his arm out from under him, but a mace blow drove the sword from his hand. A foot struck at his shield, forcing it back to the sand. Blake reached for the foot with his sword hand, grabbing the ankle and twisting, but it was too late. He saw the blow coming, a savage stabbing down at his unprotected stomach.

Blake felt a sudden, fantastic puncturing of pain in his buckling body. Then the agony lessened. He felt the mace strike, then the rip upward through his flesh, but it was far away.

He now looked down and saw the mace buried in him, just below the breastplate. He felt it twist against the armor as he squirmed. He heaved at the leg on his shield arm and the other warrior was thrown back, stumbling to gain his balance, ripping the mace from Blake's intestines.

Blake lurched to a sitting position, reaching for his lost sword. It was at a hand's width from the tips of his fingers but he could not grasp it. A great numbing was spreading throughout his body. He looked again and saw a handful of gray-blue intestines coiling out from his belt line, smeared with blood and pulsating oddly.

He stared at the inside of his body sliding out and into the sand in this slow, sinuous movement. He stared a long time; then he fell back, his helmeted head thudding into the sand, followed by another flood of distant pain. He lay in the sand, looking up into the blue sky. Tiny black dots swam across his vision, dots with trailing lines and wiggly black lines that floated. He blinked, and the dots and lines changed direction.

I'm dying...

The other gladiator came up into view. He looked down, seemingly impassive behind his helmet. Then slowly the man removed the helmet and Blake saw that he was crying.

The sky grew dark and Blake felt his throat trying to form words, but only a croak emerged. Everything seemed to slide away, melt away ... Pain, feeling, vision, all melted and ran. The sky grew blacker, closing in at the edges, and he felt as if he were sinking into a deep hole in the sand, sinking backward into darkness.

There was now only a thread of pain. Then there was nothing. Nothing at all .

The room began to reappear. The nothingness had seemed to last for a very long time. Gratefully, Blake felt the restraining straps and the cushioning seat. He saw the room, the white walls, and the gray seats. A little bit distant was a scrap of paper on the floor. Blake stared at this one disrupting element in the whole room, and it seemed oddly significant, as if
he
were that scrap – a discard among piles of garbage, but incredibly glad to be alive.

In a few moments Sergeant White reappeared. He did not speak, but unfastened the straps. Blake found that his body was sweating, a cold, frightened sweat, and he felt too weak to stand. The sergeant leaned against the back of a nearby seat and looked at him a moment.

"You were Jim De Santiago, one of the best fighters this Arena has seen. The other man was Lloyd Berman, Interparish Children of God champion from Los Angeles. That tape is fifteen months old. Berman went down two months ago, in Denver, to Philippe Huppe of the Lord of Light of the Fantastic Truth, out of their Paris mission."

"I hope I never meet any of them."

"They are all professionals. They fight for money and glory, and they rarely meet a condemned criminal in combat. Most of them think it is beneath their professional ethics to execute for the State."

"Then why did you have me go through that?"

"To see how the best work. Very few of the condemned get as good as the pros. Some do, and those are the ones the pros will fight. But it takes a certain aptitude, a certain killer instinct, and a lot of dedication. Few of the prisoners get to spend that much time at practice."

"Then why are you doing this to all of us?" Blake asked angrily.

"All of us,
sir!"

"All of us, sir."

"Because you must not just be led in for a slaughter. You'd grate on the sensitive feelings of the crowd if they thought you were just throwing your life away, a suicide like one of those protestors. You must put on a show, a life-and-death circus, something real, something that at least looks equal, even if it isn't fair. Something so that the bishops and the parishioners don't feel guilty about sending you in to die."

Sergeant White rubbed his face, then looked at Blake through narrowed eyes. "And you
will
learn one end of a sword from the other. Also the net, the flame spear, the robot tank, and anything else I show you. If you go out there and just get slaughtered, they come down on me. There is no way I am going out there myself. I will do anything I have to in order to prevent that. Even if every man, woman, and child they send me gets killed. You understand that, Mason?"

Blake sighed. "Yes, Sergeant, I understand it."
Self-preservation dies hard in all of us.

"All right. Now get into the locker room and draw some equipment. Get Gimp to show you what you need. Then go right on out to the exercise room. Snap it!"

Blake threw up his shield to ward off the blow of Kapuki's sword and thrust his own plastic weapon at her blindly. He felt a sharp pain in his side and jerked down the shield to catch another stinging blow on the side of his neck.

"Stop!" Sergeant White's voice was angry. "Blessed be the saints in Heaven, Mason, but don't you
ever
recognize a feint?"

Blake looked wearily at the slim Kapuki, who now was resting, leaning on the blunt tip of her practice sword, grinning at him. "All right, Sergeant, I'll try, just for you."

Blake put up his shield again and stood in the stance he had been practicing. There was a sudden movement behind him and a blinding blow to his head, and he pitched forward to crumple in the sand of the practice arena. He twisted around, spitting sand, blinded by the ceiling lights and his own blurred vision. Sergeant White stood over him.

"Don't get loose-mouthed with me, Mason. I don't care how much of a novelty you are!" He kicked Blake painfully in the thigh. "Get up! Take your position! Kapuki, you slam the sass out of this dumb toad!" When Blake did not get up fast enough, White added, "Starting right now!"

Kapuki's sword kicked up sand as she brought it up in a swift movement, grabbing it with two hands and bringing it down with all the force she had on Blake's unprotected back. He yelled in pain and struck back at her with a wild blow.

Kapuki easily evaded it and jumped in to stab at him again, giving him a bruise on the already painful side. Blake angrily came up on one knee and knocked her sword aside with his shield, stabbing back at her with his own blunted weapon.

"That's it!" Sergeant White said happily. "That's it!"

Blake made several rather wild strikes at the slender oriental girl as he rose. She parried one and he missed getting a blow across the face only by a millimeter or two.

On his feet now, Blake pressed the attack, using shield, sword, and fast footwork to drive Kapuki back several steps. She got in one more blow to his hip, a glancing hit that opened her up for a brutal thrust to her midsection. She gasped, gagged, and fell back, sucking noisily for air, and Blake moved in fast. He hit her shield so hard she lost it, and he battered her with his until she fell, still gasping. He raised his sword for the kill, then suddenly stopped.

He looked around. Several of the others had stopped their practice to watch. Sergeant White was smiling, leaning with folded arms against a much-patched robot practice gladiator.

Blake glared at the instructor. "You made me do this." Blake flung the sword away, followed by the shield in the other direction. "I won't kill her, not even in practice." Blake felt himself trembling with anger and almost in tears from his frustration.

Sergeant White kept on smiling. "But for a second there..." he said softly. He shoved himself away from the robot and sauntered toward Blake, nodding his head and looking from side to side with a smile. "You'll go out there, all right," he said casually. "You'll kill or you will be killed. But you won't go out there and throw your life away. I won't kill you, but you might wish I had."

He stopped, facing Blake, who was still quivering with anger. Without warning, the sergeant's hard fist came out and hit Blake on the side of the head, sending him once again into the sand. The arena lurched, and the sounds of the others still practicing at the far end were sharp and clear, but somehow slow. He looked up at White and saw him looming in a distorted way. The gladiator trainer snorted in disgust and walked away.

Narmada and Bennett helped Blake to his feet and over to a bench. Blake sat there a moment with his head in his hands, then raised it. He looked for and found Kapuki nearby, rubbing at a large bruise. "Kapuki, I'm sorry, I didn't mean–"

"You
better
mean!" she said. "The only way you are going to survive out there is if you are good. If you and I meet, with real weapons, I'll kill you – but not because of
this.
Just because I want to live!"

Startled by her angry words, Blake stared at her. The slim young oriental girl looked at him with hard eyes. "Soft, stupid fool! If they were all like you back then, no wonder we are in such a mess!" She turned and walked away toward the medical robot.

Blake looked at Bennett, then Narmada. "I just wanted to apologize for hitting her like that."

Narmada looked disgusted. "Apologize? Are you going to forgive her or do you want her to forgive you? She's right. No wonder we're in such a goddamn mess now!"

Neva moved closer and peered at Blake through the slits in her padded practice helmet. "You all right?"

Blake nodded and watched the others move away and resume practice.

Neva watched them go and then said softly, "They're right. Going out there and fighting is playing their game, I'll admit. But going out and just giving up, letting yourself be slaughtered, is playing their game, too, on a different level. If you give up, especially
you,
then it proves men are sheep, it proves that those in power do know what is right for us."

Blake didn't speak for a long time. His side hurt and he knew there would be a terrible bruise. Then he said, "Why especially me?"

"Because you're a symbol. I know you don't think of yourself that way, but you are. All of you are. All of you who came here the way you did – anachronisms in the flesh. You
are
that romantic past, that time of freedom and love!"

"What have you been reading about my time? Freedom, yes. But it was hardly a utopia. We, too, had overpopulation, food problems, sociological turmoil–"

"But it was different. Then there was religious freedom, not religious chaos. There was sexual freedom and–" She stopped talking, as if she had gone too far. "You're a symbol of that, Blake Mason, whether you want to be or not." Neva looked around, then stood up. "Go fix your cuts. We'll ... we'll talk of this later."

Blake watched her go back to pick up her sword and shield. She seemed lost in the heavy padded breastplate and helmet, a child playing at some deadly game. Blake shivered in a sudden uncontrollable spasm.

Why did I come to the future? One foolish moment and I threw my life away. Rio is lost to me, perhaps forever, perhaps even dead.
The two or three or even four hundred years of life he supposedly had coming to him now were fool's gold, meaningless – even dangerous.

The world was full of beautiful women,
he thought.
Why did I have to pick Rio?
Her picture came into his mind, surprisingly not the beautifully gowned Rio he had seen at Voss's dining table, but Rio as he had first seen her at the top of the stairs at Casa Emperador more than a century before. He recalled clearly that shock of recognition that had gripped him then.
She's the one,
he had told himself then.
She's the one,
he told himself now.

I have to save Rio,
he thought.

He looked at his sword, partially covered by the sand where he had thrown it.
Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
He got up and walked over to it. His side was stiffening up, and he grunted when he bent down to pick it up.
But maybe they can live by the sword for a while.

He looked at the others, hacking and thrusting, and heard the clang and thud of their blows. He limped over, picked up his shield and fitted it to his left arm, feeling the solid grip in his hand. He hefted the sword and started toward Kars, who everyone said was the best of the class.

Kars was fighting with Rob, and Rob was losing. "May I cut in?" Blake said.

Rob looked at him in amazement, then stepped back. Kars looked from Rob to Blake, then shrugged and began the attack.

*               *           *

Blake lay on his bunk. His bruises had faded and he had not gotten any new ones in over a week. Kars was nursing the first bruise he had received from anyone but Sergeant White, and that made Blake smile.

Tomorrow they were getting real swords.

Blake closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
Where are you, Rio?
He shifted on the bunk, feeling the newfound muscles flex. He ached a little all the time, but Neva said that was standard.

Tomorrow they were getting real weapons.