The picador urged his horse closer, but the huge bull kept backing out of range. Looking wily rather than frightened, he backed halfway across the arena. Another picador circled around and stabbed him from behind.
Muerte V. roared and spun around, catching the horse’s armored belly with his horns. He tossed his head and lifted horse and rider nearly a meter off the ground. They seemed to hang motionless for a brief moment — and then fell to earth with a clatter of plastic armor. The picador flew over the horse’s head and lowed into the sand.
The man was trying to stand up when Muerte V. slammed into him from behind. A toss and the man was flying again, spinning end over end like a thrown rag doll.
The horse got up and limped away on three legs. Muerte V. didn’t even look at him, but charged under the man and caught the picador on his horns before he could reach the ground. He tossed the man again, but by then the other picadores had the bull surrounded, so he couldn’t chase after him.
They pic’ed him unmercifully while the dismounted man crawled to safety. Even with all his armor, it looked as if he’d had more then just the wind knocked out of him. Still, I’d have been glad to trade places with him.
They must have pic’ed the bull at least thirty times before they formed in a line and paraded off the ring. The board fence creaked under my weight and almost buckled as I vaulted over. I was so scared that my knees were trembling, and they almost gave out when I hit the ground. By the time I got my balance, the bull had covered half the distance between us. I could feel the beat of his hooves through the ground.
I took Octavio’s advice and stood as still as I could until Muerte V. was only a couple of meters away, then I leaped to my left and landed running. I felt the wind of the bull going by and then heard a loud splintering crash.
Looking over my shoulder, I could see that the bull had collided with the fence and his horns were stuck in the wood. He freed himself with a toss of his head that sent boards flying. I ran on a few steps and stopped, turned to face him. He’d already begun his charge. I got set to jump again. Once more he tilted his head and tried to hook me with his left and I jumped out of his way as he stampeded by.
I sprinted about a hundred meters — no trick at all in Earth gravity — and turned, but he wasn’t coming after me. He just stood there, watching. After I stopped, he walked toward me very slowly. He came to a halt maybe ten meters away.
His breath was a sandpapery rasp and his mouth was flecked with white foam. Streaks of blood, dull brown with caked dust, ran from the pic wounds. A milky film covered his bad eye, and the lid was half-shut. One horn had broken off a few centimeters from the tip, and ended in jagged splinters rather than a point. A hoof pawed the sand and his right ear twitched constantly. Even from this distance he stank, a mixture of wet fur and bad meat.
He charged. I tensed and jumped, but this time he wasn’t fooled a bit — sharp pain in my leg and I spun awkwardly around, landed on my shoulder and face. Wiped sand out of my eyes and staggered to my feet. Bright red pulsing out of my calf.
The referee had his rifle up but didn’t shoot. Too late, I realized I should have stayed down. That might have ended the match. Muerte V. stumbled in a turn — he was tiring — and charged back.
Couldn’t jump, so I waited and when he got close enough I sidestepped, grabbed a horn and twisted myself up onto his back, just like you would do to tackle a razorlizard. I clamped my long legs around his chest and rode.
I hung onto his neck while he bucked and tossed, trying to get me with those horns. He was going for the wall and I knew I’d be crushed if I didn’t do something. I let go of his neck and, next time he tossed, grabbed a horn in each hand and leaned all my weight to one side. His head twisted and the horn bit into the ground, sent up a spray of sand for meters and then crack!
I floated through the air for what seemed like a long time, then my chest scraped along the sand for a while and I stopped, tried to scramble up, fell, got up again and looked back.
Muerte V. was lying on his side, shuddering. He gave a kick with his back legs and lay still. The crowd was whistling and stomping — I didn’t know whether that was good or bad — and I limped over to the bull’s body and saw what had killed him. His horn dragging through the sand had hooked a pipe buried under the surface, part of the plumbing used to water down the sand between fights. The shock of hitting it at full speed must have broken his neck.
Two medics and a man in formal clothes came into the ring. The man handed me a check — 750 pesas — and said something in rapid-fire Spanish that I couldn’t follow. The medics guided me off the sand, to the infirmary. The crowd was still making a lot of noise and I was just trying to stay upright.
They put me on a table — the beds were too small — and started treating my leg. Octavio was stretched out on one of the beds, still unconscious. A door opened and Francisco came in.
“Carl! Are you all right?”
“Dandy. Bleeding is my hobby.”
“Don’t worry, señor,” one of the medics said. “You’ll be out of here in a half-hour. We’ve fixed a million of these little cornadas.”
“Did it go well, Francisco? How did I look?”
“Call me Pancho, man. Didn’t you hear the loudspeaker?”
“No.”
“They called it one of the greatest … killings they’d seen in Guadalajara. They want you back.”
“Thanks, anyhow. I think I’ve had my share of bulls.”
“I should think so.”
We both watched them work on my leg. Having sprayed it with something that felt cold and stopped the pain, they put on plastic clamps that held the edges of the wound together. Then one of them mixed up a dish of plastiflesh and painted it over the wound.
“We can take the clamps off as soon as the plastiflesh dries, señor. It will hurt for a day or two, but by the time the plastiflesh peels off, you’ll be as good as new. Here.” He handed me a little vial of pills. “Don’t take more than four a day.”
“Shouldn’t I see a doctor?”
He laughed. “For a little scratch like that? No, señor, just eat a couple of good rare steaks to put back the blood you lost. Why pay a doctor to tell you that you’ll be all right in a week?”
“He’s right, Carl,” Pancho said. “Earth may not have much to be conceited about, but it’s a great place to get sick. Even Heaven sends people here to learn medicine.”
After about fifteen minutes they took off the clamps and tried to find me a cane. They had quite a collection, but none of them was long enough to do me any good. I just swallowed a pill and limped away.
By the time we got on the underground, the pain was almost gone. Almost.
“Well, Carl, I guess that bull finally punched some sense into you. It was a nice gesture, but …”
“Gesture nothing. I’m still going to pay back the fund. Every pesa.”
“But you said —“
“I said I’m not going to fight any more bulls, and I’m not. Those animals have been bred for fighting for two thousand years, man, and they have gotten pretty tough. Just a plain animal, a wild animal, I can take. You know if they have any reptiles, like lizards? Lizards I can handle.”
“That, I don’t know. This planet’s so crowded, I doubt they have many animals around that aren’t used just for food.”
“Well, Octavio — he’s the little fellow that fought before I did — said they use these bulls for food after they’re killed in the ring. Maybe there’s all kinds of animals they do the same thing with.”
“Could be. We could ask around.”
“Yeah — I know just the place to go.”
Pancho grinned, rubbed his hands together. “Well, don’t leave me out. As I say, somebody has to go along to pick up the pieces.”
VI
The Plaza de Gladiatores was much different at night. No more people than there were during the day, I guess, but they all seemed to be outdoors. Hot as it was, I couldn’t blame them. All the m
usicians were outside too; it was loud and festive and not too well lit. There were only a couple of light-panels; most of the illumination came from long torches burning. There was a delicious smell of meat roasting. I realized I was hungry, really starved. In front of one of the taverns they were cooking a huge slab of meat over an open pit of glowing coals. Waiters scurried in and out of the taverns, balancing large trays piled high with food. The trays were almost as big as the waiters themselves, and the food looked delicious.
“So this is where you spent the day,” Pancho said. “Now I wish I had missed the museum, too.”
We sat down at a small plastic table under a huge old tree and a waiter came over. We ordered drinks and meat — strong drinks and rare meat.
“Now what?” Pancho asked. “We just sit here until some —“ He was interrupted by a heavy thud, followed by a low twang. A dagger had appeared in the tree between us. It looked vaguely familiar.
“Shee-ize, Springer! You still here?” The Heller from this afternoon came swaggering up, pulled his knife out of the tree and sat down. “Just can’t soak up enough of this local color, can ya?”
I explained in a few words about the bullfight. He had heard of Muerte Vieja, but had never seen him in action.
He inspected the fresh scar on my leg. “Gonna give up the bulls for a little scratch like that? Shize, I seen guys took a horn in the gut and were back —“
“Hell no!” Pancho said, with more violence than I would have used against this customer. “Carl just wants to try some other kind of animal. The bulls —“
“Aw yeah,” the Heller said with a chuckle. “I shoulda known, a big mother like you, them bulls wouldn’t be no big shize. Where you goin’ — Houston?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I came back here for, to find out what else there was to fight.”
“You don’t know about Houston, the Houston Sea?” We both shook our heads. “Tiburónes — great fun! You never seen a tiburón fight?”
“What is that in English? What kind of an animal?” Pancho asked. Guess they don’t have them on Selva, either.
“Sharks, man, tiburónes. Great big fish, sharks; rows of teeth, big teeth. Great fun!”
“How much do you get for killing one?”
He laughed. “You can’t kill ‘em, man. They’d probably toss you in the slammer if you killed one of them. All you gotta do is stay alive. Think it’s P300 a minute.”
“Man … eaters?” Pancho asked.
“R-i-g-h-t, man, dightin’ right.” He was getting excited at the idea. “They eat men. They eat fish. They eat each other. They eat anything. I’ve heard they’ll even eat a plastic two-by-four if they’re hungry enough. And they’re always hungry.”
“How big are they?” I asked.
“Come in all sizes — little ones the size of your arm up to biggies twice your size. And man, they hungry all the time.”
“Weapons?”
“Nothing but a dightin’ vibroclub.”
Didn’t sound too good. On Springworld we hunt fish, swimming underwater for them — but they don’t hunt us back! Nothing carnivorous in our oceans and lakes is as big as a man. Besides, I wasn’t sure how well I could fight underwater.
“Hmm … I don’t know,” I said. “Know of anyplace they fight lizards?”
He roared with laughter. “Lizards? Them little green dighters? How many you want to take on at once? A thousand? A million?”
“Guess you don’t.”
“No man.” He sobered up a little. “What, you got lizards on Springworld big enough to fight?”
“Bigger than your tiburónes. Lots of teeth, long claws.”
He raised both eyebrows. “Then you got nothin’ to worry about. These sharks — they really do look mean and all, but all you gotta do is touch ‘em on the nose with a vibroclub and they swim away. Almost nobody ever gets bit. Almost.”
I looked at Pancho. “Think I’ll try it.”
He shook his head. “I think you’d try it even if you didn’t know how to swim. God!”
The Houston Sea was about two thousand kilometers from Guadalajara, five thousand from Chimbarazo. To save money (my money, anyhow), we took the shuttle to Guadalajara and, from there, an airbus to Houston. Didn’t save too much money, though; travel’s pretty cheap on Earth. Most of the public transportation is taken care of by the taxes everybody seems to pay.
It was a “tourist special” and we had plenty of time in the air to read the brochures. The Houston Sea is kind of a natural memorial to a big turning point in human history, when the old Atomic Age nations went out with a bang and the Alianza moved in to fill the power vacuum. The Houston Sea used to be a land mass called Texas. The big port they call Houston used to be an inland town called Oklahoma City.
I liked Houston better than any of the other Earthie cities we’d seen. For one thing, everybody spoke English. It wasn’t crowded or dirty and you could smell the salt air from anywhere in the city.
The “shark shows” were handled by an organization called Underseas Entertainment, Inc. They were located in a skyscraper just offshore, an old-fashioned building half underwater. We saw our first shark while we were gliding over the water on the covered sidewalk that connected the skyscraper to land.
“There’s one,” said Pancho, pointing off to our left.
It was swimming along just under the surface, one fin sticking out of the water. It was grey and leathery-looking and just a little smaller than I am. Pretty big, for a fish.
“Make a good-sized dinner,” I said with a nervous chuckle.
“You or it?” asked Pancho. We both stared at the fin neatly slicing the water. I didn’t answer him.
Since I had phoned ahead and made an appointment, they were expecting us. A young man at the reception desk told us to go down the lift to the “minus-two” floor, two stories underwater.
Stepping out of the lift, we found ourselves facing a transparent wall. It brought us up short; we both stopped dead and stared. I didn’t even try to count the number of sharks on the other side of the plastic. Most of them were about a meter long, some a little less. But there were five or six the size of the one we’d seen topside, and they all looked hungry.
The strange things about these sharks was that they were constantly moving; they never stopped, they never rested. It made them seem less like a fish, more like some streamlined eating machine. On Springworld, I’d spent hours watching fish, but all the fish I’d ever seen spent a good part of their time just floating in one place with their gills waving around, like they were resting or thinking. These creatures flicked and wiggled in and out of sight continuously, as if they were constantly looking for something. Probably lunch. They had a terrible kind of beauty, a mixture of grace and meanness — the wide, unblinking eyes, the huge crescent mouth. One swam by with his mouth partly open; it was full of wicked-looking, triangular teeth.
“Quite a sight — eh, boys?” I turned, startled. It was the man I’d talked to on the ‘phone; I recognized his garish blood-red tunic. Mr. DeLavore.
“You must be Mr. Bok.” He grabbed my hand with his tiny one and pumped it up and down. He turned to Pancho. “And … ah …”
“Señor Bolivar,” Pancho said.
“Good, good.” DeLavore gave Pancho’s hand the same treatment, introducing himself. “You must be Mr. Bok’s partner. Won’t you both please follow me.”
We followed him through a door, down a corridor to another door, this one with his name on it. We passed through an empty anteroom into a plush office.
“Sit down, please, sit down.” He stood behind his desk while Pancho sank into a deep easy chair. I eased myself onto the arm of one and it didn’t break.
He settled behind his desk and made a steeple with his fingers, studied it for a long second. An unexpected furrow appeared in his smooth forehead and he cleared his throat.
“I’m not in the business of talking people out of joining our Shark Show team. But I have to make sure before a
nyone signs anything, that … that they know exactly what they’re getting into.”
“I know that it’s dangerous,” I said. Trying to be helpful.
“But you’re from offworld. Both of you’re from offworld. Have you ever seen Shark Show?” We hadn’t, of course.
“I shouldn’t think so. Our offworld franchise only extends to one planet outside of Earth-system. And neither of you is a Heller, obviously.”
“Fighting sharks, well … here.” He took two objects out of a drawer and laid them on his desk. Weapons. “You’ve seen vibroclubs before.” I hadn’t. It was a metallic stick about a third of a meter long with a wooden handle and a wrist strap.
“Don’t use it. You have a choice, of course, but don’t use it, take my advice. The worst thing you can do to a shark is to hurt him. That makes him angry, and if you get a shark angry you don’t have a chance.” He set the vibroclub down.
“That’s for grandstanders and … suicides. You get paid twice as much, but you probably won’t get to enjoy spending it. This is what you want to use.” He picked up the other instrument. “This is a billy, a shark billy.”
The shark billy was a plastic stick about a meter long, with a flat plate on one end that had lots of little nails sticking out of it.
“You use this to push the shark away,” he said, demonstrating. “The small nails don’t hurt him; they’re just to make the billy cling to his hide.”
“I have some tapes here that show you how to use it.” He pulled the drapes behind his desk, exposing a large holovision cube. We saw several tapes of people using the billy. It didn’t look too difficult — when a shark swims toward you, you just thrust this thing at his nose and push him away.
None of the tapes showed a person fighting alone, though; all of them were two people, back to back.
“Do you use the billy any different when you don’t have a partner?” I asked.
“Oh, if your partner’s hurt, we try to pull you out immediately. There’s no —“