Steel Beach

by John Varley

  In the days of the Romans, athletes fought each other with swords and other deadly weapons-not always voluntarily. Crippling injury or death was certain, in every match.

  Even in later, more "enlightened" days, many sports were little more than organized mayhem. Teams of athletes crashed into each other with amazing disregard for the imperfect skills of contemporary healers. People strapped themselves into ground vehicles or flying machines and raced at speeds that would turn them into jelly in the event of a sudden stop. Crash helmets, fist pads, shoulder, groin, knee, rib, and nose protectors tried to temper the carnage but by their mere presence were testimony to the violent potential in all these games.

  Did I hear someone protesting out there? Did someone say our modern sports are much more violent than those of the past?

  What a ridiculous idea.

  Modern athletes typically compete in the nude. No protection is needed or wanted. In most sports, bodily damage is expected, sometimes even desired, as in slash boxing. A modern athlete just after a competition would surely be a shocking sight to a citizen of any Earth society. But modern sports produce no cripples.

  It would be nice to think this universal non-violence was the result of some great moral revolution. It just ain't so. It is a purely technological revolution. There is no injury today that can't be fixed.

  The fact is, "violence" is a word that no longer means what it used to. Which is the more violent: a limb being torn off and quickly re-attached with no ill effects, or a crushed spinal disc that causes its owner pain every second of his life and cannot be repaired?

  I know which injury I'd prefer.

  That kind of violence is no longer something to fear, because

  (discuss Olympic games, influence of local gravity in venues)

  (mention Deathmatches)

  (Tie to old medicine article?)(ask Brenda)

  ***

  I hastily scribbled the last few lines, because I saw Brenda returning with the popcorn.

  "What're you doing?" she asked, resuming her seat. I handed her the page. She scanned it quickly.

  "Seems a little dry," was her only comment.

  "You'll hype it up some," I told her. "This is your field." I reached over and took a kernel of popcorn from her, then took a big bite out of it. She had bought the large bag: a dozen fist-sized puffs, white and crunchy, dripping with butter. It tasted great, washed down with the big bottle of beer she handed me.

  While I was writing there had been an exhibition from some children's slash-boxing school. The children were filing out now, most of them cross-hatched with slashes of red ink from the training knives they used. Medical costs for children were high enough without letting them practice with real knives.

  The ringmaster appeared and began hyping the main event of the evening, a Deathmatch between the champion Manhattan Mugger and a challenger known as One Mean Bitch.

  Brenda leaned toward me and spoke out of the side of her mouth.

  "Put your money on the Bitch," she said.

  "If she's gonna win, what the hell are we doing here?"

  "Ask Walter. This was his idea."

  The purpose of our visit to the fights was to interview the Manhattan Mugger-also known as Andrew MacDonald-with an eye toward hiring him as our Earth-born consultant on the bicentennial series. MacDonald was well over two hundred years old. The trouble was, he had elected to fight to the death. If he lost, his next interview would be with St. Peter. But Walter had assured us there was no way his man was going to lose.

  "I was talking to a friend out at the concessions," Brenda went on. "There's no question the Mugger is the better fighter. This is his tenth Deathmatch in the last two years. What this guy was saying is, ten is too much for anybody. He said the Mugger was dogging it in the last match. He won't get away with that against the Bitch. He says the Mugger doesn't want to win anymore. He just wants to die."

  The contestants had entered the ring, were strutting around, showing off, as holo pictures of their past bouts appeared high in the air and the announcer continued to make it sound as if this would be the fight of the century.

  "Did you bet on her?"

  "I put down fifty, for a kill in the second."

  I thought that over, then beckoned to a tout. He handed me a card, which I marked and thumbed. He stuck the card in the totaliser on his belt, then handed me the marker. I pocketed it.

  "How much did you invest?"

  "Ten. To win." I didn't tell her it was on the Mugger.

  The contestants were in their "corners," being oiled down, as the announcer continued his spiel. They were magnificent specimens, competing in the highest body-mass class, matched to within a kilogram. The lights flashed on their glistening browned skins as they shadow-boxed and danced, skittish as race horses, bursting with energy.

  "This bout is being conducted under the sporting by-laws of King City," the announcer said, "which provide for voluntary Deathmatches for one or both parties. The Manhattan Mugger has elected to risk death tonight. He has been advised and counseled, as required by law, and should he die tonight, it will be deemed a suicide. The Bitch has agreed to deliver the coup de grace, should she find herself in a position to do so, and understands she will not be held responsible in any way."

  "Don't worry about it!" the Mugger shouted, glaring at his opponent. It got a laugh, and the announcer looked grateful for the interruption in the boring paragraphs the law required him to read.

  He brought them out to the middle of the ring and read them the rule-which was simply to stop fighting when they heard the bell. Other than that, there were no rules. He had them shake hands, and told them to come out fighting.

  ***

  "The first stinking round. I can't believe it."

  Brenda was still complaining, half an hour after the finish of the match. It had not been a contest that would go down in history.

  We were waiting in the reception area outside the entrance to the locker rooms. MacDonald's manager had told us we could go in to see him as soon as the pit crew had him patched up. Considering the small amount of damage he had suffered, I didn't expect that to be too much longer.

  I heard a commotion and turned to see the Cyclone emerging into a small group of dedicated fans, mostly children. He got out a pen and began signing autographs. He was dressed in black shirt and pants, and had a bulky brace around his neck, which seemed a small enough inconvenience for a man whose head had been rolling around the ring an hour earlier. He'd wear it until the new muscles had been conditioned enough to support his head. I figured that wouldn't be long; the brain of a man in his profession couldn't weigh all that much.

  The door opened again and MacDonald's manager beckoned to us.

  We followed him down a dim corridor lined with numbered doors. One of them was open and I could hear moaning coming from it. I glanced in as we passed. There was a bloody mess on a high table, with half a dozen pit crew clustered around.

  "You don't mean to tell me… "

  "What?" Brenda said, and glanced into the room. "Oh. Yeah, she fights without nerve deadening."

  "I thought-"

  "Most fighters turn their pain center way down, just enough so they know when they've been hit. But a few feel that trying to avoid real pain makes them quicker on their feet."

  "It sure would make me quicker."

  "Yeah, well, obviously it wasn't enough tonight."

  I was glad I'd had only the one piece of popcorn.

  The Manhattan Mugger was sitting in a diagnostic chair, wearing a robe and smoking a cheroot. His left leg was propped up and being worked on by one of his trainers. He smiled when he saw us, and held out his hand.

  "Andy MacDonald," he said. "Pardon me for not getting up."

  We both shook his hand, and he waved us into seats. He offered us drinks, which a member of his entourage brought us.

  Then Brenda launched into a breathless recap of the match, full of glowing praise for his martial skills. You'd never have kno
wn she just lost fifty on him. I sat back and waited, fully expecting we'd spend the next hour talking about the finer points of slash boxing. He was smiling faintly as Brenda went on and on, and I figured I had to say something, if only to be polite.

  "I'm not a sports fan," I said, not wishing to be too polite, "but it seemed to me your technique was different from the others I saw tonight."

  He took a long drag on his cheroot, then examined the glowing tip as he slowly exhaled purple smoke. He transferred his gaze to me, and some of the heat seemed to go with it. There was a deepness to his eyes I hadn't noticed at first. You see that sometimes, in the very old. These days, of course, it is usually the only way you can tell someone is old. MacDonald certainly had no other signs of age. His body looked to be in its mid-twenties, but he'd had little choice in its features, given his profession. Slash boxers inhabit fairly standardized bodies, in nine different formulas or weight classes, as a way of minimizing any advantage gained by sheer body mass. His face seemed a bit older, but that could have been just the eyes. It wasn't old enough for age to have impressed a great deal of character on it. Neither was it one of those generic "attractive" faces about half the population seem to prefer. I got the feeling this was pretty much the way he might have looked in his youth, which-I remembered, with a little shock-had been spent on Earth.

  The Earth-born are not precisely rare. The CC told me there were around ten thousand of them still alive. But they look like anyone else, usually, and tend not to announce themselves. There were some who made a big thing about their age-the perennial talk-show guests, story-tellers, professional nostalgics-but by and large the Earth-born were a closeted minority. I had never wondered why before.

  "Walter said you'd talk me into joining this project of his," MacDonald said, finally, ignoring my own comment. "I told him he was wrong. Not that I intend to be stubborn about it; if you can give me a good reason why I should spend a year with you two, I'd like to hear it."

  "If you know Walter," I countered, "you'll know he's possibly the least perceptive man in Luna, where other people are concerned. He thinks I'm enthusiastic about this project. He's wrong. As far as I know, Walter is the only one interested in this project. It's just a job to me."

  "I'm interested," Brenda piped up. MacDonald shifted his gaze to her, but didn't feel the need to leave it there long. I had the feeling he had learned all he needed to know about her in that brief look.

  "My style," he said, "is a combination of ancient fighting techniques that never got transplanted to Luna. Some well-meaning but foolish people passed a law a long time ago banning the teaching of these oriental disciplines. That was back when the conventional wisdom was we ought to live together in peace, not ever fight each other again, certainly not ever kill each other. Which is a nice idea, I guess.

  "It even worked, partially. The murder rate is way, way down from what it was in any human society on Earth."

  He took another long drag on his smoke. His attendants finished their work on his leg, packed up, and left us alone. I began to wonder if that was all he had to say, when he finally spoke again.

  "Opinions shift. You live as long as I have, you'll see that over and over."

  "I'm not as old as you, but I've seen it."

  "How old are you?" he asked.

  "One hundred. Three days ago." I saw Brenda look at me, open her mouth to say something, then close it again. Probably I'd get chewed out for not telling her so she could throw a centennial birthday party for me.

  MacDonald looked at me with even more interest than before, narrowing those disturbing eyes.

  "Feel any different?"

  "You mean because I'm a hundred years old? Why should I?"

  "Why, indeed. It's a milestone, certainly, but it doesn't really mean anything. Right?"

  "Right."

  "Anyway, to get back to the question… there were always those who felt that, with natural evolutionary processes no longer working, we should make some attempt to foster a certain amount of aggressiveness. Without sanctioning real killing, we could at least learn how to fight. So boxing was re-introduced, and that eventually led to the blood sports you see today."

  "This is just the sort of perspective Walter wants," I pointed out.

  "Yes. I didn't say I didn't have the perspective you need. I'm just curious as to why I should use it for you."

  "I've been thinking that one over, too," I said. "Just as an exercise, you understand. And you know, I can't think of anything that's likely to convince a man in the middle of a protracted suicide to put it off for a year and join us in writing a series of useless stories."

  "I used to be a reporter, you know."

  "No, I didn't."

  "Is that what you think I'm doing? Committing suicide?"

  Brenda looked at him earnestly. I could almost feel her concern.

  "If you get killed in the ring, that's what they'll call it," she said.

  He got up and went to a small bar at the side of the room. Without asking what we wanted, he poured three glasses of a pale green liqueur and brought them back to us. Brenda sniffed it, tasted, then took a longer drink.

  "You can't imagine the sense of defeatism after the Invasion," he said. It was apparently impossible to keep him on any subject, so I relaxed to the inevitable. As a reporter you learn to let the subject talk.

  "To call it a war is a perversion of the word. We fought, I suppose, in the sense that ants fight when the hill is kicked over. I suppose ants can fight valiantly in such a situation, but it hardly matters to the man who kicked the hill. He barely notices what he has done. He may not even have had any actual malice toward ants; it might have been an accident, or a side-effect of another project, like plowing a field. We were plowed under in a single day.

  "Those of us here in Luna were in a state of shock. In a way, that state of shock lasted many decades. In a way… it's still with us today."

  He took another drag on his cheroot.

  "I'm one of those who was alarmed at the non-violence movement. It's great, as an ideal, but I feel it leaves us in a dead end, and vulnerable."

  "You mean evolution?" Brenda asked.

  "Yes. We shape ourselves genetically now, but are we really wise enough to know what to select for? For a billion years the selection was done naturally. I wonder if it's wise to junk a system that worked for so long."

  "Depends on what you mean by 'worked,'" I said.

  "Are you a nihilist?"

  I shrugged.

  "All right. Worked, in the sense that life forms got more complex. Biology seemed to be working toward something. We know it wasn't us-the Invaders proved there are things out there a lot smarter than we are. But the Invaders were gas giant beings, they must have evolved on a planet like Jupiter. We're hardly even related. It's commonly accepted that the Invaders came to Earth to save the dolphins and whales from our pollution. I don't know of any proof of that, but what the hell. Suppose it's true. That means the aquatic mammals have brains organized more like the Invaders than like us. The Invaders don't see us as truly intelligent, any more than other engineering species, like bees, or corals, or birds. True or not, the Invaders don't really have to concern us anymore. Our paths don't cross; we have no interests in common. We're free to pursue our own destiny… but if we don't evolve, we don't have a destiny."

  He looked from one of us to the other and back again. This seemed pretty important to him. Personally, I'd never given much thought to the matter.

  "There's something else," he went on. "We know there are aliens out there. We know space travel is possible. The next time we meet aliens they could be even worse than the Invaders. They might want to exterminate us, rather than just evict us. I think we ought to keep some fighting skills alive in case we meet some disagreeable critters we can fight."

  Brenda sat up, wide-eyed.

  "You're a Heinleiner," she said.

  It was MacDonald's turn to shrug.

  "I don't attend services, but I agree
with a lot of what they say. But we were talking about martial arts."

  Is that what we were talking about? I'd lost track.

  "Those arts were lost for almost a century. I spent ten years studying thousands of films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and I pieced them back together. I spent another twenty years teaching myself until I felt I was adept. Then I became a slash boxer. So far, I'm undefeated. I expect to remain that way until someone else duplicates my techniques."

  "That would be a good subject for an article," Brenda suggested. "Fighting, then and now. People used to have all kinds of weapons, right? Projectile weapons, I mean. Ordinary citizens could own them."

  "There was one country in the twentieth century that made their possession almost mandatory. It was a civil right, the right to own firearms. One of the weirder civil rights in human history, I always thought. But I'd have owned one, if I'd lived there. In an armed society, the unarmed man must be a pretty nervous fellow."

  "It's not that I don't find all this perfectly fascinating," I said, standing and stretching my arms and legs to get the circulation going again. "I don't, but that's beside the point. We've been here about half an hour, and already Brenda has suggested plenty of topics you could be helpful with. Hell, you could write them yourself, if you remember how. So how about it? Are you interested, or should we start looking for someone else?"

  He leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at me.

  Before long I began to wonder when the theremin music would begin. A look like that belonged in a horror holo. Eyes like that should be set in a face that begins to sprout hair and fangs, or twist like putty into some Nameless Evil Thing. I mentioned before how deep his eyes seemed. They had been reflecting pools compared to this.