Shockball (33 page)

As the game went on, the level of excitement in the arena peaked. Grown men and women began leaping up and down in front of their seats, screaming at the players on the field. The viewer panel never stopped vibrating, and I couldn’t imagine how noisy it was, outside our insulated box.

There were amusing moments. One young woman rushed onto the field and had to be hauled off by official drones. Despite her expensive business suit and carefully groomed hair, she acted like some kind of crazed psychiatric patient, screaming obscenities at the visiting team as she frantically waved a small flag bearing the home team’s emblems.

To watch apparently intelligent beings embarrass themselves with such juvenile enthusiasm for what had to be the
stupidest
game in existence made me wish I’d been born on a Hsktskt planet. At least with the lizards, violence had some meaning.

Another player, this one on the StarDrivers team, was shocked. The decibel level reached a new crescendo.

“Why do they scream when someone gets penalized?”

“They cheer because they like seeing the players get hurt.”

“That’s disgusting.”

He shrugged. “That’s shockball.”

Milass came to sit on the other side of me and leaned over to address the chief. “Should I begin?”

“Yes.”

Rico’s
secondario
brought over another tray of food and sat beside me. He held it out.

“No, thank you,” I said politely, thinking he was offering it to me.

“Hold this for the chief.” Milass scooped up a couple of dessert tarts and started munching on them. “How many times did the Shaman take you to sporting events?”

I took the tray. “Once.”

“How old were you?”

More questions about my childhood. I ignored him. “If you want to know something, Rico, why don’t you ask me yourself?”

“I must attend to the game. Answer Milass.”

It was hard to concentrate; I couldn’t take my eyes off Reever. Plus the questions Milass asked were extremely annoying.

“How many hours of leisure were you permitted each day?”

“Were you permitted to go on holiday, and if so, where?”

“How many times a day were you permitted to eat?”

Reever took a bad hit and went down under a pile of three opponents, and I jumped to my feet. “No!” The tray went flying. The drone waiter hurried over and began cleaning up the mess.

Milass yanked me back down. “Answer me.”

“I could have as much leisure time as I wanted, I went on holiday with my paid companion twice a year, and I ate three times a day. Satisfied?”

Rico said nothing, but made a languid gesture.

The questions went on. Really idiotic questions this time, about how much credit I was given and what toys were provided for me and things like that. The more I told them, the more I sensed Rico withdrawing. It was as if my answers disgusted him.

Maybe they did. I hadn’t ever given much thought about how privileged my childhood had been—who did? Although Joseph had never been an affectionate parent, he had literally showered me with material things. The real motives behind his generosity still made me sick.

To Rico and Milass, however, the facts probably made me sound like a thoroughly spoiled brat. I was relieved when the halftime warning went off, and Milass got up and went to the lift.

“Come. You will see to the players below.”

I saw to the players. There were dozens of minor electrical burns from the many penalties incurred by the team in the first half. Reever included.

I got to him as quickly as I could and wiped the sweat from his face as I ran my scanner over him. “Are you okay?”

He nodded and leaned back against the storage unit behind him.

“Rico had me up in his private box. I’ve been watching the game. Guess what? The Night Horse tribe owns the Gliders.” I injected him with a mild analgesic and treated fresh burns on both of his palms. “Do you have to keep playing?”

He took his clear plas mouth protector out before he answered. There were teeth marks in it. “As long as I stand upright, yes.”

“Can you run these plays without getting the penalties?”

“I’m trying.” He regarded the protector without expression. “The plays are deliberately flawed so we can gain maximum advantage on the field.”

“Who’s calling the plays?”

“Rico schedules them before the game.”

I straightened and glanced at the next player waiting for treatment. “I’ll try to talk to him about it.”

Reever closed his eyes. “Be careful.”

The twenty-minute interval went by too fast, and the players were signaled to return to the field. I went back up to the private box with Milass. This time I didn’t try to bait him while we were in the lift. I was too busy formulating an argument to use with the chief.

Rico was busy, too. I walked in to find him with Ilona on his lap. He was lazily fondling her body while she purred and rubbed her cheek against his. Her eyes widened when she saw me step off the lift.

“What is she doing here again?”

“She is my personal patcher.” Rico pushed her off and slapped her backside. “Go back to our hogan, sweet one. I will return after the game.”

Ilona made sure to bump shoulders with me on her way to the lift. Oddly, Milass went with her, leaving me alone with Rico.

“Your girlfriend doesn’t like me,” I said as I sat down.

“She is young,” he said, as if that explained it all. “What do you think of our game?”

“It’s revolting. Brutal, criminal, and meaningless. I think whoever invented it should be shot. They should give each of those spectators a couple of electrical burns, make the players get some psych therapy, and throw the team owners into prison.”

“You do not like it.”

“It disgusts me.”

He stretched and smiled at the viewer. “It is not a woman’s game, I think. Though there are several female players on other teams.”

The chauvinist didn’t sound too pleased about that. “But not on your team.”

“Not mine.” He waved to the drone, who brought over a plate with fruit-flavored sherbets. “Women have a simpler purpose in the great scheme of things.”

“Like sitting on your lap and letting you paw them?”

“Why do you ask?” He licked some ice from the silver spoon in his hand. “Are you intrigued by my attentions to Ilona?”

“Sure. I always wonder why other women have such bad taste in men.”

He threw the drone’s plate at the viewer panel, splattering it with a rainbow assortment of sherbet, which immediately began to melt and drip down all over the immaculate red-and-black floor covering.

He stood up, towering over me. “You have been overindulged since you took your first breath.”

“You should have been around the last three years.” I went to help the drone clean up the new mess, but the dark man seized me by the wrists and pushed me down on my knees. “You’re ruining my trousers.”

“You serve me,” Rico said, tightening his grip. “Say it.”

He wasn’t just angry. He looked ready to kill me. We were alone; there was no one to stop him.

I remembered my four broken ribs, which made it easy to say the words. “I serve you.”

For a long moment we stayed in that position, me on my knees, him ready to strike. My heart pounded in my ears, driven by the waves of fury rolling from him. Slowly his fingers uncurled, until he released me.

“Watch the remainder of the game.”

Then he simply walked to the lift and left me there.

I waited a few minutes, then tried to get out myself. The lift didn’t respond to my summons—he’d apparently locked me in.

I took the opportunity to search for weapons or anything that I could use to defend myself. There was nothing—even the utensils on the banquet table were made of thin plas and therefore totally useless.

At last I dropped in a seat and watched the violent escalation of the game on the field below. Reever was still playing centerfield, still getting the sphere on every other play. The tally board showed the gap between the teams’ scores—the Night Horse were winning.

But not without paying a heavy price. Four of Rico’s players were penalized so frequently they dropped out of the game with injuries by the final quarter. The replacement players evidently weren’t as skilled and for nearly the entire final twenty minutes of the game, Reever ran the sphere.

I watched, mesmerized by Reever’s speed and the thundering approval of the screaming fans as he moved toward the touchzone. I didn’t cheer when he scored points. All I could do was let out whatever breath I was holding.

The game ended at last. The arena vids lit up with the final score: Gliders—35, StarDrivers—7.

“Way to go, Duncan,” I said to the image of my husband as he was carried off the field on the shoulders of his teammates. “At this rate, your kidney may last a whole month.”

Milass emerged from the lift.

“You will attend to the players now.”

Back down to the locker room, where I did another full round of treating injuries. This time the burns were much more severe and there were several cases of thrombosis and minor stress fractures to be dealt with. Reever hadn’t been hurt as badly this time, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

“Did you watch the entire game?” he asked as I scanned him.

“Yeah. Real riveting, seeing you get pounded like a filet of veal. I especially liked it when the other guys spit on you. Sports traditions are so heart-warming, aren’t they?”

“There is a reason for what I’m doing, Cherijo.”

“You’ll have to explain it to me some time.” I finished my scans and dressed the new burns on his palms. “Gee, look. The insides of your hands are starting to match the outsides.”

He studied the new injuries, and flipped his hands to display the old scars. “I will heal.”

“But not before next week.” I checked his pupils, and then his ears. “I assume you’re playing again.”

“I have to.”

“Never say I stood in the way of you enjoying yourself, Reever.” I clicked off my optic magnifier and thrust it back in my case. “Excuse me, I have other dolts to fix.”

My first shockball game was not to be my last. Rico insisted I be brought to every subsequent game leading up to the final playoffs for the World Game. In between treating players, I sat in his private box and submitted to more interrogations by Milass.

Reever kept playing, and wild applause broke out whenever he took the field. Women began rushing at him after the games from the sidelines. He ignored them, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Bad enough when it was just Ilona being his groupie. Now he had thousands of women wearing number-fourteen jerseys to every game.

After one match that sent the Night Horse into overtime play, Rico summoned the entire team up to his private box to celebrate their victory. That was when Reever overheard Milass questioning me, and pulled me aside later to ask me about it.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Rico seems to get some kind of charge out of hearing about my childhood.” I looked over at the chief, who was drinking with the players. He was telling a story everyone thought was funny, judging by the amount of laughter.

“You don’t see how he looks at you when you speak with Milass,” he said, looking worried—for Reever, anyway. “He’s angry about something. I can almost sense it.”

“You feel it, too?” I asked, then I bit my lip. “Damn.”

“What are you talking about?”

I hadn’t meant to let him know about the weird connection I shared with Rico, but he was already steering me into a private corner.

Tell me.

He linked to me so fast that I barely registered the mental connection now.
It’s nothing, really. Just, I can tell what he’s feeling sometimes. Whenever he gets close to me
. I looked at my footgear, which I was shuffling nervously.
Look, I don’t have any feelings for him. I mean, other than disgust and revulsion and what I’d normally feel toward a murderer. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t turn this thing off
.

We have never tested your telepathic abilities.

We both looked at Rico, both of us thinking the same thing:
What if he can pick up our thoughts
?

I decided to use my voice. It seemed safer. “If I was a telepath, wouldn’t I be able to read anyone in the room? The only people I can do it with is you and… him.”

Reever’s hand went under my chin, and he made me look up at him. “I am not jealous of Rico.”

“You don’t have any reason to be.”

“I know that.” But his eyes were so cold. “You’ve been keeping this from me as well, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” I was tired of the anger and the lies. “There’s something else we need to talk about.”

“Not here.” He leaned forward, and murmured the rest against my ear. “I’m going to try to link with him. We have to know if he’s a telepath, or just a transmitter. We also need to find out all of his plans for us. See if you can separate him from the group, just for a moment. I don’t want anyone else to see what I do.”

“Okay. Wait here.” I took two glasses of wine from the passing drone waiter. “Be prepared to ad-lib your way through this.”

I wandered through the crowd over to Rico and the players, and squeezed in beside the chief. To get his attention, I handed him one of the drinks. “Do you have a minute, Chief?” when he frowned, I added, “Reever and I want to have a private toast.” I held out my hand and turned up my smile, like we were all good pals.

He folded his hand over mine. “Of course.”

I led him over to the corner where Reever was waiting. “Look who I ran into, honey. Chief, my husband wants to make a toast.” I lifted my glass, and gave Reever a glare.

Reever lifted the drink he’d snatched from a nearby table. “To the glory of the Gliders, and the coming World Game. May we make you the owner with the most wins in the junta.”

We all clinked our glasses together, and drank. Somehow, I had ended up with another merlot. I nearly choked on it.

“Why do you toast to our success, patcher?” Rico asked after a healthy swallow. “You despise this game.”

I gave him a goofy smile, as if I was a little drunk. “I guess it sort of grows on you after a while.”