Zeroboxer

by Fonda Lee

  Risha’s face went still. She listened in quiet, growing dismay as they gave her the details. Then, shaking her head, she spoke. “It’ll take time. At least a day for the Surya police to get in touch with the Terran embassy on Mars and to communicate with Genepol. Even more for the Martians and Terrans to sort out the full story between them. In the meantime, War of the Worlds has to go on.”

  Carr was nodding even before Risha finished; it had taken only a few minutes for her to strike the vein of truth, to steel his resolve. “I have to fight tomorrow. Doesn’t matter if I win or lose—I have to show up.”

  Uncle Polly said, stern and sad, “You’ll only make it worse for yourself.”

  Carr looked around the small room, at the people to whom he owed so much. “I need to go in there. I made a promise. I told a whole planet that I was fighting for them, representing them, that I would do everything I could to live up to that honor and responsibility.” He swallowed, feeling as stripped as a naked wire, his soul laid bare and vulnerable. “Even if I can’t ever do that … I can do this. I can give them what they want.”

  Gant’s incredulity was sharp. “You’ve been fighting illegally all this time, and now you’re asking me to let you do it again?”

  “Yeah. I guess I am.”

  “Bax,” Risha said, “we’re in Martian airspace.”

  Gant went silent. Grim calculation spun in his eyes. “Huh,” he said. “You’re right about that.”

  “Why does it matter?” Uncle Polly asked.

  “On Mars, there’s strict control and oversight of genetic design, to ensure consistent adaptive traits,” Risha explained. “Genetic enhancement is not explicitly banned under athletic rules because it’s a non-issue. On Surya, there are no laws keeping Carr out of the Cube tomorrow.”

  Carr could almost hear the gears in Gant’s head whirring. He looked at Carr the way he had once before, deciding whether to place a bet. This time: Fold or double down? Abandon course or stay at the helm?

  “Great stars,” the Martian finally murmured, half in disbelief, half in dark excitement. “We’re actually going to ride this ship into the sun together, aren’t we?”

  Stay, then. For now.

  Risha’s gaze reached for Carr like a physical touch across the space between them. With a wrenching pang, he forgave her everything, even without wondering if she could do the same for him. Her voice changed, dropped. “I saw the semifinal fight … and then the news-feeds, and the riots … you were right, this is bigger than us. We set out to strike a chord with people, and we did. Now we have to own what we made. We have to finish the story we promised to tell.”

  “And afterward?” Uncle Polly asked quietly.

  Inside of Carr, the sealed box had finally fallen open, spilling contents that were no longer sharp and poisonous, but dull and molten, mixing with the rest of him in a cloudy alloy. His smile was leaden. “One fight at a time, coach.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Risha commandeered the hotel conference room and set up an interplanetary link. By midday Surya time, Carr had released statements on his personal feed and the ZGFA official feed and done an exclusive interview with Enzo. Within minutes of being posted, the interview was picked up by Cube Talk With Brock, and from there it sped through the Systemnet like a nuclear reaction.

  They’d crafted the message carefully. Carr talked about the semifinal fight; he stood by his conviction that Macha had cheated in the third round, but stated that he placed no blame on the WCC, and while he was going to file a complaint against Macha, he wasn’t going to fight the judges’ ruling. He thanked his fans for their outpouring of support, but strongly denounced the violence that had occurred and urged it to stop. He promised to do his best in the finals, expressed his respect for Kye Soard, and told everyone that win or lose, this would be his last fight for the indefinite future.

  “Everything else can wait,” Risha said. They were alone, finally. Uncle Polly had gone to check on the progress of the tournament and bring them both something to eat. Carr looked down at the last message on his cuff, sent by Enzo a few minutes ago: Thanks for the interview. Good luck!! Your first and biggest fan, forever and no matter what.

  He dared to bring his hand up to Risha’s face, then around her neck. When she didn’t resist his touch, he pulled her to him, fiercely, and closed his mouth over hers with the desperate relief of a drowning man surfacing for air. She gave in, folding herself against him, and he closed his eyes, moving his hands through her hair and down her shoulder blades and waist, drawing comfort from her warm and familiar contours. He felt wetness on her cheeks and drew back, wiping away her tears with the pads of his thumbs.

  “I’m sorry. And I’ll understand if you don’t stay,” he said, though he wasn’t certain he could keep such a promise. “Once we go back to Valtego, you have your own decisions to make.”

  Her chin quivered. “I almost left Surya, you know. For Mars, or Phobos, or Ceres—it didn’t matter where. I thought I’d lost my career, the future I’d pictured with us together, everything. Then, even though I didn’t want to, I watched your fight with Macha … ” Anger lit her face as she touched the sealed gashes across his forehead with her fingertips. “And all I wanted was to be there. I should have been there.”

  “No,” he said, putting a hand over her mouth. “You had every right not to be.”

  She drew his fingers away from her lips. “I called you a lie.” Water gathered in the corners of her eyes. “You’ve been lied to. You lied in turn, to me and to others. But you’re not a lie. You’re the truest thing in my life. Even if I have to thank an unscrupulous splice dealer for what you are. You’re still all the things I believed in and asked other people to believe in.” She closed her eyes again for a moment, and when she opened them, they were steady. “I’m here because I love you, not because I forgive you. But I do—love you. Walking away … that would be the lie.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder. Carr’s throat was too clogged for him to reply, so he just held her, and kissed her on the eyes and lips and neck, and felt, for the first time, that maybe, just maybe, he could handle anything, even losing the tournament and being stripped of his titles and falling from the highest high to the lowest low, if Risha was there to hold him up.

  They stepped away from each other when they heard the door opening. Uncle Polly came in. He looked away from their flushed faces and busied himself setting down a foil-wrapped vegetarian burrito for Risha and a pre-fight snack for Carr: a small bowl of whole-wheat pasta, a cup of yogurt, an apple. “That’s all you’re getting,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”

  “How’s it going in the other divisions?”

  “Story of the day is Adri. She pulled off the upset of the tournament and won the women’s midmass.”

  “That’s fantastic,” said Carr, grinning widely for the first time in two days and being reminded of his facial bruises as he did so.

  “That’s the only bright spot, I’m afraid. Danyo put up a hell of a fight but ended up losing the final on points. Brut got knocked out in the semi, so it’s two highmass Martians heading into the Cube now.” He glanced at Carr and they shared the same thought. There wouldn’t be another Terran men’s champion to deflect any of the attention or pressure off Carr’s fight. “Once they’re done, there’ll be a break. And then you’re up.”

  Gant had worked some scheduling miracle to push the lowmass final to the end of the day, to give Carr and Risha enough time to do what they had to without sacrificing the few, badly needed hours of sleep Carr had snuck in earlier. Even so, Carr felt as though his body could use three weeks of rehab and daily nano injections. He’d always appreciated his ability to heal quickly, but one night was not enough, not even for him. Twisting his torso to the right brought on a painfully tight hitch in his left side. His face was still swollen, and he suspected a hard blow would open up his gashes again. When a WCC-appoint
ed doctor had come by a few hours earlier to check up on him, he’d smiled through the whole range of movements and the doctor’s prodding. “Feels fine,” he’d lied. Uncle Polly grimaced behind the doctor’s back but kept his mouth shut.

  They ate in silence. Carr’s jaw hurt; he chewed slowly. The belly of a Martian passenger ship was gliding across the ceiling window of the hotel’s conference room, cutting through their view of the Red Planet. He wondered if the cruiser carried new immigrants—Terrans who’d given up the natural bounty of Earth, who’d consented to permanently altering their genes and those of their descendants, all to start fresh on a frontier world. “We’re so close to Mars,” he mused. “Seems a shame I don’t get to see it.”

  Risha put a hand on his arm. “Maybe you will. I’ve already gotten half a dozen interview requests from Martian media.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  A private car arrived to take them to the stadium. Security droids marked their progress all the way along the route to the gravity zone terminal, and when they’d passed the last set of them and were shooting through the freeway tube, Carr looked out and saw the enormous holovid figure of Kye Soard posed along one whole side of the exterior stadium wall. His receiver picked up the audio tag and Soard’s cheerful, accented voice started up in his ear. “I’m Kye ‘the Samurai’ Soard, ready to defend Martian zeroboxing against all invaders!”

  Carr grimaced, stabbing his cuff to mute the ad. The familiar transition to zero gravity tugged on his insides in a way that had not bothered him since he was a boy flying up to Xtreme Xero for the first time, watching his home recede into miniature, feeling terrified and exhilarated to be leaving the security of solid ground for a future anchored to nothing. “Talk to me, coach,” he said.

  “You know it all, Carr. You don’t need me to yammer at you.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “All right,” said Uncle Polly. “How are you going to stop Soard from pulverizing your legs, like he did to DK?”

  “Keep moving, keep my legs under me, and crawl tight. Work my flying game and stay light on the walls.”

  “When you close, close fast and get deep into his range. How about his reversals?”

  “Push him out into the center as much as I can, where he’s slower. Cut the corners before he does.”

  Uncle Polly nodded. “You can run a corner as fast as he can. He’s not going to be expecting that. He’s going to be waiting for you to fade in the third round, and you’re not going to do that either.”

  That was optimistic, Carr decided, since he was going into the match wounded and tired in a way he’d never gone into any fight before. But he kept talking, and answering everything Uncle Polly asked him, and the familiar high-octane verbal back-and-forth of their pre-fight drive was like a tether that a space walker might hang on to, and Risha’s warm hand in his was his oxygen supply.

  There were half a dozen security guards holding back a crowd that had gathered at the athletes’ entrance for his arrival. As soon as he emerged, people started cheering and shouting questions all at once, and Carr found himself unable to even reach the guide-rails. In order to move himself forward he had to push off the crowd itself, as if it were a single amoeba-like organism covering the walls. When they got into the hallway, the guards blocked it off and he breathed easier as they made their way toward the locker room. Where the hall split, Risha leaned in to kiss him, briefly and softly, her hair drifting around both their faces like a breeze. “See you after,” she whispered.

  “See you after.”

  She drew away, the warmth of her fingers lingering on his jaw. He tried to memorize everything about her face, the sadness and the tenderness, her beauty and her strength. Then she turned toward the stadium, and he pulled himself through the entrance of the locker room.

  Scull was waiting for him, with all his gear. Next to him, toes jammed under the stabilizing bar, was DK. When he saw Carr, he pushed himself up and the two of them regarded each other in silence. DK looked nearly as bad as Carr did, his face bruised, moving gingerly after yesterday. “Big fight,” he said. “I wondered if you could use a second cornerman.”

  A thin smile crawled across Carr’s face. “Yeah, I sure could.”

  He changed into his shorts, leaving his thermal top on. He drank a little water and took a long piss, nerves acting up in a way he almost welcomed. Scull wrapped his hands; DK helped him into his gripper shoes and gloves. As he warmed up, people began to arrive, and soon the locker room was full of his fellow zeroboxers: from the ones who hadn’t made it through the first round of preliminaries to Adri, aglow with victory, and Danyo, his eyes dull from losing a hard-fought battle just a few hours ago. None of them said anything; they just gathered around as he got ready, heating the dry, motionless air of the locker room with his breaths. When the five-minute warning came down the hall, Carr pulled himself over to the bench and let his heart rate come down as Uncle Polly helped him out of his top and did a final check on his gloves and shoes.

  He’d never been in a locker room that was so quiet before a fight. He remembered, all of a sudden, his first fights on Valtego, being ushered out to the Cube with a lot of pep talk and backslapping: You’re so ready, kid and Go get ’em and Make him float. Rookie zeroboxers needed that kind of thing. That’s how you pumped a guy up, sent a youngster out to battle. Had it really only been a few years ago for him? It felt like a lifetime. Now, with the camaraderie of old soldiers, there was a solemn, expectant respect in the nods and the whispered “good lucks” that piled around him as he pulled himself out toward the bright lights of the stadium.

  He didn’t shoot through the air and somersault to the deck in a flashy entrance. When he heard his name announced, he drifted out and caught the deck lightly, like a bird alighting. The stands were dark and full, the lights white and harsh, the air thick with the smell of ozone, beer, and the sweat of many bodies. Carr straightened and walked steadily on his grippers, straight to the center of the deck, where he motioned for the surprised announcer to hand him the microphone. He held up a hand to the crowd.

  “I have something to say,” he said, then repeated himself, more loudly. The roiling cheers and boos fell silent. The shadowy crowd rippled forward expectantly. “I have something to say to everyone here, and to everyone else who’s watching, whether you’re on Earth or Mars, or a Moon settlement or a city-station.” He heard his voice magnified and echoing back to him disembodied, not sounding like his own at all. He turned in a slow circle, looking out across the tiers of seating, recognizing sections as unmistakably Terran by the huge waving placards of his own bloodied, resolute image. UNBROKEN. So many of them.

  “I’ve always said that I’m proud to be Terran. But yesterday, a lot of people were hurt and a lot of things were destroyed because people are looking for something in this tournament that has nothing to do with zeroboxing. I’m one man, here to compete against another … not because I think I’m better than him, but because we’re both trying to be the best we can be, and the other person can make us better. That’s how you find out if you have the guts to give everything, to respect the other guy and come back to fight another day.”

  They were listening; Carr could even hear the Cube fans whirring. “The real spirit of the Cube isn’t about winning against an opponent,” he continued, “but winning against yourself. Whether you’re Terran or Martian, cheering for me or for Kye, just please … remember that.”

  He handed the microphone back to the announcer. There was a lingering moment of collective silence, and then the noise started up: a wave of murmuring conversation, turning into applause, climbing into alternating, blending chants of “LU-KA! LU-KA!” and “SO-ARD! SO-ARD!” Across the deck, Kye Soard was regarding Carr with a baffled but grudgingly respectful expression. At the referee’s call, he came up and they stood before each other.

  “Yesterday,” Soard said, “what Macha did. It was a disgra
ce to Martian zeroboxers. I am sorry for it. I will beat you, how do you say on Earth? Fair and square.”

  Carr extended his glove and the Samurai touched it with his own. He sauntered away, lean and graceful as a panther. He looked healthy and rested and confident. He looked like a champion.

  Carr went back to his side. The technician checked his optics and receiver. Scull put in his mouth guard. DK spread gel on his face. Carr said, “Thanks,” and hoped they both understood he meant it to mean more.

  DK put his battered face up to Carr’s. “Just so you’re clear,” he said, “this doesn’t mean I like you. As much as I hate to admit it, behind the pretty face and the marketing machine, you really are the best of us. You’re the only one who can beat him.” A spark danced in his round brown eyes and his teeth flashed in a wide, cheerfully vengeful smile that made Carr think, the Captain is going to be just fine. DK clapped Carr on the back. “Now go to it.”

  The hatch flashed red and Carr dove through. The Cube swallowed him, abruptly cutting his perception of everything outside to a distant, blurry presence. He closed his eyes for a second and free-floated, knowing exactly where he was, bounded by the six clear sides that defined his world. Without conscious thought, he reached above his head and landed lightly on the nearest wall. His senses were sharp, his body coiled, but he felt as calm as a deep, still lake.

  He had only one thing left to prove. He might have been designed and conceived to serve another man’s ambition, raised and trained under a lie, marketed and attached to causes beyond reason, but here, in this prism, he was only himself. There was truth to him—for three rounds of six Martian minutes each, there was nothing else.