by Nancy Kress
Sor said, “Is a ball required?”
“Yes. Right here.”
Jason had made the ball, Sharon saw. It consisted of a wad of leaves wrapped around and around with cords of Jofrid’s tough rope.
“Jason,” she said, “is that ball going to stay stuck together if anybody kicks it?”
“Sure it is,” Jason said. “Now, here’s the deal. This is the fifty-yard line. The end zone on one side is between those two bushes over there...”
It took a long time, but eventually, everybody understood the rules. At least, Sharon thought they did. It was hard to tell until they actually played. Sharon didn’t really want to, but she didn’t want to be a wet blanket, either. And maybe the game would convince the kids inside the Discovery that the Yanks were harmless. Who knew?
“Okay,” Jason said. “Da Vinci, you stand here on the fifty-yard line and start telling our story. Sor, your team has the ball. Your goalposts are that way, remember. GO!”
Everything happened at once.
Sor bent over the ball and threw it back to Jofrid, who caught it. She started to run forward. Instantly Robbie darted forward, grabbed the ball from her―how fast he was!―and started to run with it in the opposite direction. Sor jumped toward him, but Jason blocked his way. That left Sharon, who ran toward Robbie― wasn’t that what she was supposed to do? But by the time she intercepted him, his hands were empty.
She hadn’t seen Robbie throw the ball! Where was it? Wildly Sharon looked around, still running, and crashed into da Vinci, who was chanting, “...communication cube vital to Earth. If the Panurish get it―” The robot fell over, still chanting. Jason was screaming “Foul! Foul!” and Jofrid seemed to be tangled up on the ground in her long green dress.
Tara, watching from the sidelines, clapped her little hands and laughed.
“Where’s the ball?” Jason cried. “Who’s got the ball?”
Nobody had the ball.
Jason stood in the “football field,” scratching his head and looking bewildered. Jofrid untangled her skirts and staggered upright. Sor searched for the ball, but couldn’t find it. Neither could Sharon. But she suddenly had an idea.
“Robbie, did you steal the ball and hide it?”
Robbie looked innocent.
“You did, didn’t you?” Sharon said. “You flattened the ball and hid it somewhere under the vine groundcover!”
Robbie grinned. “The idea be that the other coves ain’t to have that ball, right enough, miss? Well, they ain’t having it!”
“No, no!” Jason cried. “That’s against the rules, Robbie! You can’t remove the ball from play without penalty!”
“Nobody makes Robbie pay nothing, guv’nor,” Robbie said. “I’ll take anybody apart who tries, I will.”
Suddenly Sharon got the giggles. The short nineteenth-century thief stood smiling at Jason, refusing to give back the “football” made of leaves and vines. And Jason looked as serious as if this were a game between two high schools that had been sports rivals for a million years. It was just too silly. But she tried to hide her laughter because it seemed so important to Jason.
“Robbie,” she said, “give Jason the ball.”
“Never will, miss.”
Jason cried, “But I’m on your team! We’re on the same side!”
“Oh. Well, then,” Robbie said. Reluctantly he walked to a place in the dense groundcover that looked to Sharon like every other patch of groundcover and pulled out the football, slightly flattened. “Here it be.”
“Fine,” Jason said. “Ten-yard penalty to our side. Okay, second play. Jofrid, you stand here. Sor, Sharon―”
“―before the Panurish find the cube,” da Vinci said earnestly to the closed starship. He too had pulled himself upright again. “So we came from Earth through the sally port―”
“Zero-zero, first down,” Jason called slightly desperately. “Play!”
On the second play, Sor captured the ball and started running. Sharon watched him admiringly. He ran so straight and strong and swift...until he suddenly pitched forward and fell onto his face in a patch of purple-leafed vines.
“Sor!” she called, running toward him. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, the leaves are soft,” Sor said. “But something tripped me...a rope!”
“I made the snare and set it,” Jofrid cried. She danced over the field in glee. “And it worked, it worked! It brought you down much better than Jason’s ‘blocking!’”
“Jofrid!” Jason roared, “Sor is on your team! You don’t want to bring him down! He’s on your team! And snares are illegal in football!”
“Oh,” Jofrid said in a small voice. She stopped dancing around.
“―and so the Panurish have come to get the cube,” da Vinci said, “and we―”
“Where in blue blazes,” Jason roared, “is the ball?”
Robbie grinned. He’d done it again, Sharon thought. He’d used his amazing powers of thievery to steal the ball right out from under their noses. This time Sharon couldn’t hold in her giggles. She collapsed on the grass, laughing and whooping, while Jason tried to explain all over again that the game had rules, rules, and Jofrid tried to persuade Robbie to give up the ball, and da Vinci chanted on about communication cubes and the Panurish.
But the Discovery didn’t open up. The football game might be the funniest thing Sharon had ever seen, but apparently, the kids inside the starship didn’t think so. Or maybe they didn’t have a sense of humor. Or maybe they had all died years ago, and Jason's teams were playing for an audience of skeletons. Or maybe the survivors had marched toward some Shangri La beyond the horizon, some paradise on Planet Jump, abandoning the ship that reminded them of all they had lost.
Whatever the reason, the starship stayed locked up tight, and the Yanks stayed on the outside.
By late afternoon, everyone was starving.
“Okay, team, we head back to the t-port now,” Jason said. “Got to be sure to get there by dark.”
Sharon found she was glad to go. Tara had taken a long nap but woken up cranky. The baby was hungry. Sharon was, too. It seemed a long time since they’d finished off the tubes of nutrients for breakfast. Her stomach growled as she trudged along with the others toward the t-port a half-mile away.
“Everybody clear on the plan?” Jason said. “Sor, you and Robbie t-port back to Earth, grab as much food as you can carry, and find out what ideas Dr. Cee has for getting us inside the Discovery. Jofrid, you make us another fire. And Sharon, you take Tara back for good, right? You see now that this is no place for a baby?”
“Yes,” Sharon said.
“You mean it, now? No last-minute switches like last time?”
“No,” Sharon said. “I mean it.”
And she did mean it. It had been a mistake to bring Tara to Jump. Sharon saw that now. She’d done it in a blind panic, concerned about the baby. The truth was, da Vinci could take care of Tara with a lot less strain than Sharon could. He’d done it all afternoon. And if da Vinci could care for Tara, then so could another nanny robot in 2336. Sharon loved Tara, but toting her around, changing her, and amusing her twenty-four hours a day was harder than she had expected. Babies were a lot of work. How come Mrs. Northrup liked taking care of five or six of them in daycare? Well, Mrs. Northrup was an adult. Maybe when Sharon was, too, she’d be happy to run a day-care center. But for now, she’d be glad to just go back through the t-port and turn the baby over to Dr. Cee.
Jason smiled at her. “Good.”
They walked over the last low hill while the sun was still well above the horizon. The t-port place was marked by a bare patch in the groundcover. The Yanks sat down around it, silent, and waited for the shimmer that meant a ten-minute door was open across billions of miles of empty space. A shimmery door to Earth.
"Sor,” Jason said, "why don't we pass the time with you telling us some things, like how that electro-staff works, and what other options we might find in your tool kit. I want to know what oth
er tools and weapons we can ask for when you jump back to Edge Station!"
Slowly the sun sank. Three of Jump’s moons appeared in the sky, two in the east and one on the western horizon. One by one, the alien stars came out, silver and cold.
Twilight came and went. It turned full dark. And the door, which was supposed to be automatic, never shimmered and opened.
The t-port wasn’t there anymore.
Chapter Nine
“Okay,” Jason said. “Nobody panic!”
Actually, nobody looked panicked, but Jason felt that way. The other Yanks just stared, stunned, at the place the t-port should be.
“Da Vinci, you got any idea why the t-port isn’t here?” Jason said.
“No,” the robot answered. “It should appear on time.”
“Well, so should subways, and they’re sometimes late,” Jason said. He hoped he sounded reasonable. “We’ll just wait a while. Meantime, Jofrid, you work on that fire, okay? Sor, you and Robbie look around a bit on the other sides of those hills. Maybe the t-port just missed the spot a little.”
“No,” da Vinci said again. “Micropositioning is very accurate.”
“Well, we can look, can’t we?” Jason said irritably. “Better than doing nothing.”
He walked around the t-port site, squinting at it, hoping it would suddenly appear. Sor and Robbie disappeared over low ridges. Sharon bent over Jofrid’s fire, feeding it bits of leaves. Tara started fussing again. Why couldn’t babies have an “off” switch, like computers? Tara would be better running as a background program.
Jason poked at the place the t-port should be. Nothing. All he felt was night air, getting colder. Unlike last night, the sky was cloudy, the stars and moons mostly buried under a hazy mist. Jason’s s-suit switched itself on.
An hour later, the t-port still hadn’t appeared.
Sor and Robbie came back with armloads of the purple fruit the tester machine had said was all right to eat. It tasted good, but the stuff wasn’t very filling. The Yanks sat around the fire, feeling hungry. No one said much. Too depressed, Jason thought. And it was his job to solve this mess. How was he going to get the Yanks something to eat? How were they going to get back to Earth? What if the Discovery kids weren’t opening up the ship because they were all dead inside?
“Da Vinci,” Jason finally said, “tell me everything you know about t-ports. Maybe there’s something we missed, something we can check out here. Tell me everything.”
Da Vinci said, “Everything? That would take seventeen point six three hours and―”
He was cut off by sudden terrible shrieking like demons out of the night. “EEEEIIIIIIIIIIII EEEIIII! EEOOOO-OOO-OOOO!”
Tara screamed. Everyone jumped up, looking around in terror. Jofrid smiled. “I caught one!”
One what? Whatever it was, Jason wasn’t sure he wanted it caught anywhere near him. The shrieking went on and on. Sor turned on the laser light in his tool pouch, and it cast a powerful wide beam into the darkness. Jofrid and Robbie ran along the path of light, and after a minute, the others followed.
Over the next hill, its foot caught in a snare, was a pigbird. A second pigbird attacked it. The two darted at each other, shrieking and biting, flapping their wings. The noise was unbelievable, and so was the violence with which the two animals fought.
Robbie’s eyes gleamed. “It’s a cockfight!”
“A what?” Jason demanded.
“A cockfight, guv’nor. Ain’t you never seen one? The sporting coves arranges them. To bet on. I’ll give you a quid against quid-and-a-half on the one in the net. To the death.”
Sor said, “You...you are…” He turned away and threw up in the bushes.
Jason felt a little sick himself. Nothing he couldn’t handle. Boy, Sor was a wimp. He was gonna feel really ashamed when he stopped puking. Jofrid, Jason noticed, didn’t seem upset at all. There was probably lots of animal killing in Iceland in 987. Sharon had gone back to the fire, taking the screaming baby, which was good.
It was over in two more minutes. Robbie had been right; the pigbird trapped in Jofrid’s snare had won, despite the vine wrapped around one of its feet. It looked wounded, flapping its wings feebly on the ground, but the other pigbird was dead.
As Jason watched in astonishment, Robbie stepped forward, grasped the snared bird around its neck, and killed it with his knife. And then Jofrid calmly stepped forward, picked up the other dead pigbird, and started pulling off its feathers.
“More meat on here than I thought,” she said. “It will roast well.”
Jason decided that he, too, should go back to the fire.
Sor was already there. To his surprise, Sor didn’t seem at all ashamed of puking. “That Robbie is a barbarian even for his own time,” he said. “He does not know how to behave in any circumstance.”
“What do you mean?” Jason said.
“To bet on death, or on any kind of violence―it’s weak and stupid.”
“Weak? And it’s not weak to, like, toss your cookies looking at a dogfight?”
“They’re not dogs.”
“Whatever,” Jason said.
“No, of course it’s not weak to have a civilized reaction to uncivilized behavior,” Sor said, and now it was Sor who sounded astonished. “Do you mean you approve of Robbie’s obvious relish for violence?”
Did he? Jason wasn’t sure. He tried to sort it out. “Well, I didn’t find it exciting like he did, no. And I wouldn’t go betting on any fight to the death between any animals. My parents helped to get a dogfighting ring shut down when I was little, and it made the neighborhood better.”
"But violence isn’t always bad, Sor. Sometimes you got to defend yourself. And about killing animals―well, people got to eat.”
“Violence is not justified except in extreme cases of self-defense, and then only with sorrow for the life you take,” Sor said. “And eating meat is barbaric. At least meat that came from an animal's death, and not a tissue culture tank.”
Jason didn’t answer. No point in another argument. But Sor’s distaste for violence made something suddenly clear to him. He said, “So that’s why your Dr. Cee had to yank us from the past. I didn’t really get it before. You guys in 2336 are too squeamish to do what has to be done.”
“That’s not true,” Sor said angrily. “But yes, we have found the presence of youths from the past to be...useful in dealing with aliens who haven't the same standards of behavior we have achieved. Still, betting on poor animals fighting to the death? That isn’t necessary, no matter how you parse it.”
Jason couldn’t argue with that. But he realized he had some doubts about Sor now. He was smart and cooperative, but was he too wimpy to be of use if the mission on Jump got rough?
There was no way to know. But at least Jason had learned one thing: He had two team members who were anything but wimpy. Robbie and Jofrid took killing as just part of the day’s work.
Maybe that wasn’t so good either.
Confused, Jason decided not to think about it. Instead, he prowled around the camp, looking for the t-port. He didn’t find it.
Jofrid and Robbie came back with the pigbirds, which had been de-feathered and gutted and were now headless. Reluctantly, Sor tested the meat in his safety device and pronounced it safe to eat. Jofrid rigged up a sort of grill out of green twigs over the fire and roasted the pigbirds, turning them often. In a short while, they smelled delicious.
“When can we eat, Jofrid?” Jason asked. His stomach was growling hard.
“Soon,” Jofrid said. She and Sor were roasting something else over the fire, bumpy vegetable-looking things.
“We’re calling these ‘potatoes,’” Sor said. “I tested them for edibility, and they’re safe for us to eat.”
Jason was struck by a question. “Hey, how come so much of this stuff is safe for us to eat, huh? I mean, humans don’t come from Jump, right? We evolved on Earth. How come we can eat Jump food? Da Vinci?”
Sharon said, “Da Vinci went
into contemplation again when he saw the pigbird fight.”
“Again? Well, Sor, start him up,” Jason said. Sor did, and Jason repeated his question.
“Answer unknown,” da Vinci said. He was rocking Tara on his mechanical shoulder. “But the best probability is that there are only so many ways life can evolve. On basically Earth-type worlds, life evolves with basically Earth-type chemistry since the same twenty amino acids happen to be the most stable ones, and these combine to make the most practical proteins. Although that is only the start, and there is likely much vegetation on Jump that would be poisonous to humans. As there is on Earth.”
“Great,” Jason said, looking at the roasting vegetables. “You tested these, right?”
“Of course,” Sor said.
When Jason tasted the “potatoes,” they were good. So was the roasted pigbird, for which Jofrid had made a sort of sauce from the purple fruit.
“Man, we’re all sure glad you’re along, Jofrid,” Jason said when he finished eating. “You can do ‘bout everything, girl!”
Jofrid flushed with pleasure. Sharon looked proud of her friend. Even Sor, who’d eaten no meat but had filled up on potatoes and fruit, had stopped glaring at Robbie. Robbie sat close to da Vinci, almost leaning against the robot. Everybody looked full and warm and sleepy.
Weird, Jason thought. Here they were maybe marooned on Jump, with nothing going right, and people looked pleased. It wouldn’t last, of course; everybody knew that, too. They were all in deep doo-doo, and this well-fed moment was just that: a moment. Tomorrow, Panic City.
But they might as well enjoy the moment while it lasted.
It lasted four more hours.
Sharon poked Jason awake. He’d been dreaming about the perfect basketball shot, a dunk so high and handsome that Kareem or Larry could have made it, only he, Jason, was the one who did. Then he felt Sharon’s fist in his ribs, and he jolted awake.