THE ALL-PRO (Galactic Football League)

by Scott Sigler

  The two men sat at a table, silently staring at each other in a way that wasn’t awkward, a beer bottle in front of each of them.

  Cillian was a big man. Not Quentin’s size, but still about 6-foot-6, maybe 280 pounds. Light scars, some old, some new, dotted his knuckles and criss-crossed the backs of his hands. The marks of the working class. His weathered face showed deep lines, lines that seemed too deep for his age. Maybe fifty? Lines from laughter, from worry, from work, from a life clearly far from the privileges of football stadiums and interstellar yachts.

  “So,” Quentin said. “How old are you?”

  “Forty-six,” Cillian said, then took a sip.

  “Huh,” Quentin said. “So you had me when you were ... twenty-six?”

  The older man nodded. “Yes. We had your sister when I was sixteen.”

  Quentin nodded. That wasn’t unusual on Micovi. “How old was Mom?”

  “Fourteen when she had your sister, eighteen when she had your first brother, who died in child birth, twenty-one when she had your brother Quincy, twenty-four when she had you.”

  “I had another brother?”

  Cillian looked off to a corner of the bar. “Yes. His name was Quaid. Would have been, I mean. Or was. Yeah, was.”

  Quentin let out a long breath. From zero family to all of this information, so fast, it was overwhelming. “You ... you know about Kin-Kin?”

  “Who?”

  “I mean Quincy,” Quentin said. “You know that he ... that he’s dead?”

  Cillian blinked rapidly. He was trying not to cry. “Yes. Gredok told me. Forgive me, Quentin, it’s ... well, I know I haven’t seen any of you in a long time, but it’s not easy to hear one of your children has passed on.”

  Quentin drank. The news of his mother had been hard, even though he had almost no memory of her. What must it feel like to learn your own child, someone you’d held in your arms, had been dead for fifteen years?

  Cillian cleared his throat, nodded once as if to say done with that, then the smile returned.

  “I can’t even describe what this is like, son. Oh ... I ...”

  “Go ahead.”

  “As far as I know, you hate me. Is it okay if I call you son?”

  Quentin laughed. “Sure. I mean, it’s fact, right?”

  “It is.”

  “Then go ahead, because I’m going to call you Dad until you’re so sick of it you want to punch me in the face.”

  Cillian raised his beer bottle, extended the neck. Quentin did the same. They clinked bottles, took a sip and that was that.

  So many questions. One far more important than all the rest, but there were enough other things to learn that the big one could wait. “Do you know if my sister is alive?”

  “I don’t,” Cillian said. “Gredok said he’s looking, but I’ve never heard from her. I take it you haven’t either?”

  “I didn’t even know I had a sister until two months ago. I hope we find her.”

  They both fell silent, enjoying the moment together. Quentin realized he’d said we to describe himself and Gredok. That was trippy — thinking of Gredok as actually being his ally, not a dangerous obstacle.

  “Dad, what was Mom like?”

  He smiled, looked away. “She was an amazing woman. Very devout. At least when I knew her. She was so beautiful. I loved her from the moment I saw her. I wish we could have waited to have kids, but ... well, you know what the Church is like.”

  Quentin did know. Girls were expected to be married by thirteen and have their first pregnancy that same year. Sixteen and unmarried? No kids? You could bet that the Elders would arrange a marriage for you, probably to a man who already had a wife or three. Breed fast, breed often was the slang term used when no Elders were around. His mother and father had fallen prey to the same pressure that faced all young teens on Micovi. All across the Nation, for that matter.

  “She was kind,” Cillian said. “She could cook like you wouldn’t believe. We never had much to eat, but she could make anything taste good. You should have seen what she could do with a roundbug casserole.”

  “Roundbug casserole? But they’re poisonous!”

  “Not the way she prepared them,” Cillian said. “You have to know what you’re doing, but yeah, they’re edible. Took her a full week to prep one. When we had three kids, there wasn’t much choice. If my friends saw one in the mines, I’d volunteer to kill it. I’d take it home. Your mom would prep it. She’d eat a plate first, just to make sure she’d done it right, then you kids would gobble it right up. It was meat — don’t know if you remember how hard that was to come by or not.”

  Quentin tried to imagine what that must have been like for a young couple. His father, risking his life to kill a deadly roundbug. His mother, preparing it, then eating it — to see if she would get sick, possibly even die — before serving it to her children. All of this because people often starved on Micovi. For the unconfirmed, there was never enough money, never enough food.

  This man said he had risked his life for his children. If he had loved them so once, why had that stopped? Why had he vanished? Why had Quentin spent almost his entire life alone? It couldn’t be avoided anymore. The question had to be asked.

  “Dad, why did you leave us?”

  Cillian slowly turned his beer bottle, rotating it, the bottom edge lightly scraping against the tabletop. “Quentin, are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “I’ve been alone since I was five.” The words came out harsher than Quentin had expected. “Every day was a fight to stay alive until I started playing football, so, yeah — I want to know why.”

  Cillian looked up from his beer bottle, looked into Quentin’s eyes, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess that’s fair. Before I tell you, I want you to know that whatever differences your mother and I had, she loved you and your brothers and sister very much. She would have done anything for you. She did do anything for you.”

  Cillian fell silent. He went back to turning his bottle. Quentin waited. He would get his answers. He would get them now.

  “Micovi was a bad place,” Cillian said finally.

  “Still is.”

  Cillian shook his head, looked up. “Now it’s a paradise by comparison. When you were just a little thing, it was ... people died all the time. A lot of people. Pogroms, purges ... felt like they happened every other month. Anyone could denounce you for heresy. No evidence was needed. Once you were denounced, the purity investigators would start investigating. The thing was, back then, the Church held more tightly to its belief that High One was always right. If the Elders started investigating you, for any reason, it was because it was the High One’s will. The very fact that they started investigating you meant that you had to be found guilty of some kind of heresy.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Quentin said. “I mean, if you didn’t commit heresy, how could you be found guilty?”

  “Because if they investigated you and you weren’t guilty, that meant that High One was wrong. High One can never be wrong, Quentin. That was the Church and the government at the time.”

  “So how does that apply to you and Mom?”

  Cillian went back to spinning his bottle but kept talking. “Anyone could denounce you. But at the same time, you could denounce anyone. No one was safe, but if you were connected to the Church it was a bigger risk to denounce you. You have to understand, Quentin, people would denounce anyone — men, women, children ... even babies.”

  Babies? Now Cillian was just padding things, to make himself feel better about abandoning his children. “Give me a break. How could babies commit heresy?”

  “Because they were possessed, of course,” Cillian said with quiet disgust. “You wouldn’t want to let a possessed baby grow up to be a possessed child, now would you? I saw ... tragic things. Horrible things. Our culture was feeding on itself, eating up everyone and everything. Your mother, she saw other children being taken away, saw their families screaming, saw anyone who fought back taken away
as well. So to protect the three of you, she ... she made it so that to denounce her was dangerous, a big risk.”

  “How?”

  Cillian ground his teeth. His eyes narrowed. He looked sadder than ever. This part of the story, clearly, was more difficult to reveal.

  “She took up with a Bishop,” he said.

  It took Quentin a moment to process the words. He’d never even considered that his mother could be anything besides caring, perfect, angelic. “You mean she cheated on you?”

  Cillian shook his head. “No, son, it wasn’t like that. We ... we agreed on it. For the three of you. The Bishop had made advances at her for years. She ignored them, but when things got bad and we needed a way to protect you ...”

  His voice trailed off. He finished with a shrug. Quentin wondered what it had been like — both for what his mother had to do to protect her children and for what her husband had to bear for the same reason.

  “That doesn’t explain why you left.”

  Cillian finished his beer, as if he needed it for courage. He waved for another round. They both kept quiet until two more bottles arrived.

  Quentin waited.

  Cillian drained half the bottle before he continued. “The Bishop decided he wanted to marry your mother. We agreed to divorce.”

  “Divorce is illegal.”

  His father nodded. “Those are just rules, Quentin. Rules rarely apply to the people who make them. The Bishop had our marriage annulled.”

  He made it sound so easy to do something that could be a capital offense. “Annulled? Just like that?”

  Cillian shrugged again. “He was rich and powerful. We were poor. We let it happen because it would protect you. A couple of days later, I noticed that I was being followed. Followed by purity investigators.”

  To be married with three children in such a violent, unpredictable place, a place without rights. Then the marriage is gone and the people who make people vanish start following you. His father was right — in comparison, now Micovi was a paradise.

  “The Bishop knew your mother still loved me so he wanted me gone,” Cillian said. “Your mother saved my life. She got the Bishop to give me a sentence of banishment instead of execution, but on one condition. I was never allowed to contact her. Or you, or your brother, or your sister. I had to walk away from my family ... forever. I’d seen what the Bishop could do, Quentin. He did not make idle threats.”

  “So you just left.” Quentin tried to say it with venom, with fifteen years of pent-up hatred, but the words just came out normal. What else could his father have done? In that situation, what else could any father who loved his children have done?

  Cillian leaned forward, stared into Quentin’s eyes. “Yes, Son, I just left. My choices were leave or be burned at the stake. I wanted to stay and fight. You have no idea how badly I wanted to stay with all of you, but your mother provided the only safety we could find in a crazy time. So, to keep all four of you safe, I left. I started a new life.”

  “But ... but why did it take you so long to find me? I worked so hard to make my name known, my face known ... and you didn’t show.”

  Cillian smiled, sat back, shook his head. “Don’t think that hasn’t weighed heavily on me, son. Just imagine the irony — a son who is one of the most well-known athletes in the galaxy and a father that doesn’t follow sports.”

  Quentin stared back. He wanted to throw the table aside and strangle his father, wanted to smash the beer bottle into his mouth and twist it, give him a broken-glass smile. The rage of lost years billowed up, mushroomed, detonated — and then it was gone.

  How ridiculous. A single, dark laugh coughed out of Quentin’s throat. He couldn’t help it. “My dad isn’t a football fan?”

  His father laughed, shrugged again. “I never played any sports when I was a kid. I was more into the movies. Don’t get me wrong, Quentin, I’m not blind — I appreciate what you can do, the life you’ve made for yourself. High One has blessed you with amazing talents. But when you’ve seen as many people die for nothing as I have, well, sports just seems kind of ...”

  “Silly?”

  Cillian nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry, son. That’s the way I always felt.”

  “Felt? Past tense?”

  “Yes, past tense. I find myself suddenly mesmerized by this football team from Ionath. I want to watch every play, see every snap.”

  Quentin drew in a long, ragged breath. It was a lot to handle. So many emotions. Too many to process. Could this really be happening? His father? And what about his mother’s ordeal? All to keep the kids safe. And even with those sacrifices, his mother had still died. His brothers had died. His sister might very well be dead, there was no way of knowing.

  “I can’t make up for lost time, son. The past is the past. All I can do is try to be there for you now, watch you blossom in this fantastic city where everyone loves you. If you’ll let me, I’ll live here in Ionath and spend every minute with you that I can.”

  Quentin ground his teeth. He would not cry in front of this man that he did not know.

  Cillian’s face looked as emotionless as one of Gredok’s stone statues, but tears trickled down both cheeks.

  “But you have to do one thing for me, Son,” he said. “There’s one thing I really want.”

  Quentin nodded before he spoke. “Yes, Dad, anything. What is it?”

  “Gredok gave me sideline passes for the game on Sunday. I want to see you kick the living hell out of the Lu Juggernauts.”

  Quentin threw his head back and laughed, so loud it drew looks from the other patrons. He couldn’t stop smiling. He lifted his beer bottle in salute. His father did the same.

  “Dad, it’s funny that’s the one thing you want, because that’s definitely the one thing I can give.”

  Both men drank to that. Quentin ordered a third round. They spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find out as much as they could about each other.

  • • •

  QUENTIN RAN LEFT toward the sidelines, looking downfield, searching for targets. Halawa in the end zone, 17 yards away but double-covered. Way back in the right corner of the end zone he saw Milford, but that far across field would mean a pass of some 60 yards — the ball would be in the air far too long. He looked for Becca, but she had maintained the block that sprung Quentin free from a blitzing linebacker.

  Rick Warburg — not wide open, but moving toward the left sideline, a white-jerseyed, yellow-helmeted linebacker trailing him by a half-step. Quentin could have made that pass in his sleep, throwing low so that only Warburg could catch it.

  But Quentin didn’t throw.

  Instead, he tucked the ball and turned upfield.

  The linebacker covering Warburg waited until Quentin crossed the line of scrimmage, then came in fast. Quentin didn’t have any room to run. He’d have to go out of bounds after a 5-yard gain ... except, he saw Rick Warburg coming, right behind the linebacker.

  Rick Warburg, whom Quentin simply refused to throw to, was trying to make a block.

  Quentin cut to his right, away from the sideline, forcing the linebacker to match the cut. Quentin then cut left, back toward the sideline, making the linebacker turn his shoulders in that direction. That let Warburg get his helmet in front of the linebacker — a blind-side block that sent the Quyth Warrior flying, made the home crowd ohhhh! with glee. The block also left Quentin untouched, sprinting up the left sidelines, heading for the end zone.

  Halawa’s defender rushed out of the end zone, the speedy Sklorno desperate to stop Quentin’s run. Halawa managed a push — not much of a block, really, just enough to knock the defender off-balance a little. And that was all Quentin needed. He lowered his head and drove his helmet right into the cornerback’s blue and gold number 24, knocking her on her back.

  Quentin stumbled, fell, but crossed the goal line before he hit the ground.

  Touchdown Ionath.

  Krakens 22, Juggernauts 20.

  The crowd went wild, cheering a score th
at put their team ahead with just 17 seconds left in the game, a touchdown that all but guaranteed victory. Quentin stood, tossed the ball to a flying zebe, then raised his arms high. Quentin scanned the back of the end zone, somehow knowing that Cillian would have positioned himself there to see his son score.

  Past the goal post, standing against the wall. Standing and clapping like a madman.

  Cillian.

  His father, who had just watched his son run in the game-winning touchdown. A lifetime of loneliness evaporated. Six seasons of giving his soul to the game, leaving his flesh and blood on field, across the galaxy, six seasons of looking to the stands in hopes of seeing family and Quentin Barnes finally had his wish.

  The vision of his father vanished as Halawa jumped on Quentin’s head, driving him to the ground. Laughing and trying to protect himself as best he could, Quentin disappeared beneath the orange and black pileup of his own exuberant teammates.

  GFL WEEK SEVEN ROUNDUP

  Courtesy of Galaxy Sports Network

  BYE WEEKS: Orbiting Death, To Pirates, Yall Criminals, D’Kow War Dogs, Neptune Scarlet Fliers, Texas Earthlings

  THE WABASH WOLFPACK (6-0) remains the league’s only undefeated team, thanks to a 31-17 pounding of the Themala Dreadnaughts (4-2). Halfway through the season, Wabash seems unstoppable with the league’s number-one rushing offense, third-ranked passing offense and number-one passing defense. Against the Dreadnaughts, running back John Ellsworth ran for 105 yards and a touchdown, while fullback Ralph Schmeer rushed for 102 yards and two scores. That is the first time this season that two running backs from the same team each rushed for over 100 yards in the same game.

  The Wolfpack holds first place in the Planet Division, a halfgame ahead of the To Pirates (5-1) and a game-and-a-half ahead of third-place Ionath (5-2).

  The Pirates had a bye week, while the Krakens climbed back into title contention with a 23-20 win over the Lu Juggernauts (0-7). Playing without starting tailback Ju Tweedy, who was out with a one-game suspension, the Krakens needed a come-from-behind, last-minute drive to seal the win, pulling ahead on quarterback Quentin Barnes’ 15-yard touchdown run with 17 seconds left in the game.