The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  It happened so fast.

  Silas watched in silence as the creature fed. Minutes later, he was the first to speak. “Well, that was—”

  The gladiator’s growl stopped him in mid-sentence. Its head snapped up as if offended by the interruption. An instant later, the uneaten portion of the goat slammed against the bars, splattering blood and bowels over him and those with the misfortune of standing too close to him.

  Vidonia turned without a word and walked out. As Silas looked down at his fouled lab coat, the creature reared its head back and howled. To Silas, the howl sounded very much like laughter.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Her voice carried accusation in it, and something else. He tried to gauge her. They sat at the picnic tables just outside the lab, pushing food around on their plates.

  He’d known there was something brewing beneath the surface for several weeks now. It was in the tone of her voice when she spoke of the project. It was in her careful choice of wording. Most of all, it was in the things she didn’t say. Is she finally going to let it show? Is she finally going to say it?

  They’d been talking for ten minutes now, circling the real point with their conversation. The wind had turned cold, and Silas raised his collar against the chill on his neck. Perhaps a lunch outside on the picnic tables hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

  “What are you getting at?” he asked. He was tired of avoidance.

  “I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to end up as so much pulpy sawdust at the bottom of the arena,” Vidonia said.

  Silas studied her face.

  “I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to die,” she said.

  “It’s why it’s here in the first place.”

  “I know. That doesn’t make it less of a stupid waste.”

  “You have a problem with the gladiator competition?”

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation.

  Silas looked at her.

  “This is your project,” she said. “I understand that. But I don’t understand the kind of man that destroys his creations.”

  “I don’t destroy them.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “The competition does that.”

  “And your project is part of that competition.”

  “Without the competition, those creations you speak so highly of wouldn’t exist at all.”

  “That creature you’ve made is like nothing else that has come before. It’s unique and should be studied, not thrown away in blood sport.”

  “You are studying it.”

  “For what? Even the winners usually die of their injuries. And the ones that don’t die are just put down later. There are no old gladiators.” She looked away into the wind, a soft expression on a sharp profile. She took a slow sip of her Coke. “All this talent, all this scientific knowledge, and all we can think to do with it is to build a better killer.”

  Several wasps hovered in slow circles over the picnic table, attracted by the food and moving sluggishly in the cold air. He swatted at one that came too close and missed, sending it spinning in a wash of air. “Have you ever heard of the pit bull terrier?” he asked finally.

  “What?”

  “The pit bull terrier?”

  “Some kind of dog?” she said. She seemed irritated by the off-subject question.

  “I didn’t think you would have. It was finally outlawed about ten years ago, after decades of bans and regulation. Even back when they’d still been legal to own, insurance liability made it impractical to do so. Fanciers strove for years to rehabilitate the breed’s image, but too late, and with too little consistency, and the breed died of its own bad reputation.”

  “So they’re extinct?”

  “The breed is extinct. The genes no doubt still live on in mixed-breeds and family pets all over the place—it’s hard to regulate that stuff, after all—but there’s no AKC recognition, and the moment you call a dog a pit bull, it’s illegal. So maybe you call it something else, give it a new name. Or maybe you don’t call it anything. But still, the breed—that old name—is dead.”

  “What does that have to do with the gladiator competition?”

  “More than you might think. Pit bulls came from London originally—the inadvertent hybrids of bull-baiting dogs and early proto-terriers. The combination was deadly. The original baiters were used to fatigue cattle into submission for slaughter. These dogs had big, musclebound heads, and their instinct was to attack livestock—clamp their jaws onto a bull’s face and then not let go, no matter what.”

  “Charming practice,” Vidonia said.

  “And a dangerous occupation, it turns out. If the dog’s hold slipped, it faced the bull’s hooves, so the dogs with the strongest bites tended to survive the longest, leave the most offspring, you get the picture.”

  Vidonia nodded.

  “Multiply that by a few hundred years, and you get some pretty tough dogs. They’d hang on until the bull was a bloody mess.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “Maybe, but a lot of practices were disgusting before modern refrigeration. At one time, it was the preferred method of slaughter.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “The adrenaline altered the meat. Some thought a baited bull tasted better, and they believed the meat lasted longer before spoilage set in.”

  “Did it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you have a point?”

  “Bull-baiters were aggressive but only toward livestock. They couldn’t care less about people or other dogs. This wasn’t true of the earliest terriers. These dogs were territorial and protective. They were basically mean-bastard little dogs, but they were too small to do much damage.”

  “Okay.”

  “The accidental crosses between these two breeds proved as worthless to butchers as they were unstoppable in the fighting pits. These so-called pit bulls had the vise grip jaws of their baiting ancestors, but the new hybrids ignored cattle in favor of other dogs. Like the bull-baiters, if they got their teeth in, you couldn’t shake them loose. The early pit bulls actually brought about the extinction of several other ancient strains of fighting dog in Western Europe. Classic Darwinism; no other dog could compete.”

  “I’m supposed to be impressed by this?”

  “In the archives here at the compound, there is an old recording of an illegal pit fight. The handlers in this fight had trouble keeping the dogs apart long enough to start the contest. The dogs craved it. They lived for it. It was barbaric. It was grisly. But no more so than what happens between the lion and the gazelle. Or between the wolf and the deer. Nature, red of tooth and claw. Animals have always had to fight for survival.”

  “But not for sport.”

  “Sport was their survival. Without that sport, eventually, there were no pit bulls. Sport was their ecological niche.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  He continued, “Without the gladiator competition, this specimen you seem so impressed by would not exist, because the funding behind it would not exist. I was in college when the gladiator competition first became a regular part of the Olympics, so I’m old enough to remember what the field of genetics used to be like. This competition is the best thing that could have happened. When you combine scientists with capitalists, great leaps forward are made, always. Throw in a healthy dose of national pride, and anything can happen.”

  Just then, a wasp fell out of the air and landed in her hair. She hardly reacted, turning her head slowly from side to side to try and free it from the dark windblown tangle. It crawled down a wayward curl onto her cheek, and he expected her to yelp and flinch away. But instead she gently swept the wasp to the table with the side of her hand. It sat, throwing its legs up for a moment, before righting itself and buzzing back into the air above them.

  “You say you’ve seen video footage of these dogfights?” she said. “Well, I’ve seen the blood with my own eyes. I may not know what a pit bull is, but I’ve see
n the boys and their fighting dogs in the back alleys where I grew up. And more significantly, I’ve seen these dogs a few days later with their faces so swollen with infection that their eyes look like little peas stuffed in puffy dough. What you do is still just back-alley dogfighting to me.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Tell me good comes out of it somehow. Fine. Tell me it’s a necessary evil. So be it. But don’t you dare tell me how much the animals enjoy it.”

  She looked up into the sky above them, watching the wasps. “I don’t see how the gladiator contest is even legal, given all the laws against animal cruelty.”

  “Back-alley dogfights don’t funnel money into research for genetic diseases. The United States has many self-serving laws. Why not question why cigarettes are banned while alcohol remains legal?”

  “So what do you get out of this, then? Is it the money? The fame?” Her eyes flashed with anger.

  His own temper was rising now. He fought against it and decided to take the conversation in another direction. “You’ve seen Michelangelo’s statue of David, right?”

  “Pictures.”

  “I saw it twenty years ago when I was in Florence. I’m not going to tell you it changed my life, but it did change my perspective. I’d seen pictures, too, but when I saw it with my own eyes … words can’t even describe. I’ve never considered myself to be artistically inclined, but looking at that statue, I knew I was witnessing creative perfection. Michelangelo took a lump of stone and found the human form inside. When he was finished, it looked soft; it looked warm.”

  “It’s a statue.”

  “If you ever get a chance to see David in person, you’ll understand. No one could ever hope to surpass it. At least not in that medium. Michelangelo found the truth in stone, and that truth is the commonality between art and science.”

  “Truth?”

  “Each of us looks for it in the ways that are available to us.”

  “So that’s what you are looking for, the truth in your medium?”

  “It is what we are all looking for.”

  “And you think Michelangelo would have approved?”

  “If he were alive today, Michelangelo wouldn’t bother with stone. He would be a geneticist.”

  “You’re serious.”

  Silas nodded. “I wouldn’t want to face Italy’s gladiator in the arena.”

  SILAS WAS tired. Bone tired. He lay on the long couch in his office, legs propped up and over the armrest, hands thrown back behind his head. He had grown accustomed to the long hours at the lab, but the initial cycle of pre-competition press conferences had begun today, and his energy reserves were depleted. There was nothing left, and the bad part was that he knew it would get worse before it got better. How do you explain to a room full of reporters that you can’t answer their questions? No pictures of the gladiator available. No information available. Why are you all here, then, you ask? Because the Olympic Commission wants you running those special-interest stories that turn the public’s eye toward the coming games. That’s why. No, I can’t tell you a damned thing to make your job easier. No, I can’t tell you what the gladiator looks like, or how it was designed, or anything at all, really, but hey, the United States won’t disappoint. I’m supposed to tell you that. Quote me on that.

  He was a better scientist than he was a PR man, or at least he hoped to God he was, or he wasn’t much of a scientist at all. His eyes closed, and he willed his mind blank. For a moment, sleep seemed possible.

  The knock on his door was not welcome. He waited.

  The knock came again.

  “Damn.” Silas climbed to his feet.

  Tay Sawyer’s grinning face met him through the cracked door. Internally, Silas cringed, but he swung the door wide and let the trainer in anyway. He liked the man but wasn’t in the mood to deal with his restless energy this particular afternoon.

  Tay Sawyer was one of those men whose activity level seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere in preadolescence. He was a force never at rest, but his hyperkinetic agitations didn’t distract from the fact that he was the best trainer in the business. He was a short, thick man, baby-faced, slightly bowlegged, and prematurely balding. The top of his head was shiny and tanned.

  “What’s going on, Tay?”

  “Great progress. I had to see you. This gladiator, Silas, I have to hand it to you, you’ve done something special this time.”

  Silas collapsed back onto the couch.

  Tay continued, “You’ve got to come down and see what it can do.”

  “Now?”

  “Not now. How about Friday?”

  The man’s excitement was endearing but not in the least bit contagious. Exhaustion had inoculated Silas against it. Tay still didn’t sit; he paced. The way his compact form hustled across the carpet made each step seem a muscular endeavor. The muscles in his thick legs showed in grooves through his dress slacks.

  “Bring Ben, too,” Tay said. “He’ll probably want to see it.”

  “What exactly is going on Friday?”

  “The new robotics will be up.” Tay rubbed his hands together in mock mad-scientist glee. “Then I can start the real training.”

  “What time do you want us there?”

  “I know you’re busy, so how about lunchtime. It won’t take long.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “Great,” Tay said, and the grin brushed his earlobes.

  He even smiles enthusiastically.

  “We’re going to make history with this one, Silas. I’ve never seen reflexes like this before. You’re a goddamned genius.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I did the first tests for reaction time today. Zero-point-zero-two seconds. Can you believe that?”

  Silas wasn’t sure what that meant, but he nodded.

  “I checked it four times,” Tay continued. “Then I checked the equipment. But it’s for real. This thing makes lightning look slow.”

  “Great. I’ll see you Friday, then, okay?” Sleep was calling him now.

  “Yeah, boss. See you Friday.” Tay turned to go.

  “Hit the lights on your way out.”

  SILAS CLOSED his eyes for an eight count. When he opened them, the pain was still there. He pinched the bridge of his nose. The nap he’d taken earlier in the day had helped clear his head, but it had done little to protect against eyestrain. By the feel of it, he’d been staring at the computer screen for about an hour too long. He glanced at the clock on the wall, and it told him his late night had turned into an early morning. Again.

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. Both knees popped. He touched the save icon with his finger, flipped the computer off, and folded it back into his desktop. That was enough for one night. He wasn’t going to work himself into a migraine twice in one week.

  He locked his office door behind him and headed for the stairs. On the main level he saw light spilling down the hall from the west wing. He paused, searching his pocket for his car keys. He pulled them out, looked at them, then put them back in his pocket and turned toward the light.

  Vidonia was bent over a series of plasticine prints. The underlighting recast her face in a net of unfamiliar angles. She held a magnifying glass in her hands and occasionally looked through it for a closer inspection of her work. The prints completely absorbed her. He watched her for a full minute before speaking.

  “It’s not so strange,” he said.

  “What’s that?” she answered quickly, without looking up. Silas realized she’d known he was standing there for some time.

  “What we’ve been doing here at Helix for the past twelve years.”

  “I guess that would depend on your perspective.”

  Silas stepped into the room. “It’s what man has been doing for tens of thousands of years.”

  “Genetic engineering? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “No, it’s true. They just didn’t call it that.”

  �
�What did they call it?”

  Silas looked down at the sheets. They were incomprehensible to him. “Oh, many different things. They called it the fattest cow. They called it a best laying chicken. The fluffiest sheep.”

  “DNA splicing is a far cry from animal husbandry.”

  “Not really. Not if you think about it. You try and accumulate the genes you want into a given set of animals. You can do it the slow and inefficient way, by breeding. Or you can do it the fast way, in a petri dish. But it’s all the same thing, the gathering together of desired genes. The elimination of the undesired. Only the technology is different.”

  “I don’t think you’d ever get this,” she said, gesturing toward the shadowy plastic sheets, “through selective breeding.”

  “No, you never would. I said what we’ve done at Helix for the last twelve years isn’t so strange. What Evan Chandler has done is an altogether different story. This wasn’t the gathering of genes. This was the invention of new ones. The difference is highly significant.”

  She finally looked up from the table, and he saw the strain on her face. He recognized the frustration. She was an intelligent woman, and intelligent people were used to being able to understand what they were studying. “Your inventor was either a genius or a madman,” she said. “And I can’t tell which.”

  “Well, I think you know which gets my vote.”

  She smiled. He knew better than to tell her to get some sleep. He knew how he reacted when people suggested that to him.

  “Well, I’m heading home,” he said instead. “Tomorrow, Tay is having a training exercise. You’re welcome to come by if you’d like.”

  “Are you going to get another innards bath?”

  “Not this time. He said robotics will be involved.”