There Is No Darkness

  Everybody was mad; at me, at Pancho, at Mr. Wolfe, at the lawyer. Everybody seemed mad at everybody else. I felt right at home.

  “About time you joined the party,” said B’oosa, noticing that my eyes were open. My eyes might have been open, but my brain wasn’t working too well.

  “You found me,” I said.

  “A giant like you leaves large footprints; everyone remembers you. It was easy to trace you here. But we couldn’t find out where you were staying last night. People in this city seem remarkably closed-mouth.” He glared at Mr. Wolfe, who was standing behind his lawyer and several bodyguards. “And these goons,” he indicated several policemen standing around, “detained us so that we were unable to stop that ridiculous fight.”

  One of the policemen stepped forward. “Goons?” he said. “I resent that. We’re respectable —“

  “Shut up!” said B’oosa with considerable irritation in his voice. No one challenged him. They’d have been fools to try.

  I tried to sit up, managed it this time. “All this doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s over and done. Let me get my money and leave.”

  “There are complications, Carl,” said B’oosa. “There evidently will be no money.”

  “No money?”

  “There is a clause in your contract,” said the lawyer, “that holds you responsible for any damage you might cause during the match. It is a normal precaution we take. You signed the contract; it’s valid and will hold up in any court. You’re liable for damages.”

  “What damages?” The only damage I could see was done to me.

  “The holo camera you mistreated suffered considerable stress.”

  “They’re practically indestructible,” I shouted. That’s why I’d picked it up.

  “Nevertheless, we have determined that it incurred damages to the sum of, shall we say, P15,000.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Plastiflesh or not, I was going to tear him apart.

  Pancho and B’oosa held me back. Even as mad as I was, it didn’t take very much effort on their part. I’d had it. In more ways than one.

  Dr. M’bisa, The Dean, came over to me. He was really upset. “Forget it, Carl,” he said. It was the last decent thing he said to me for two days.

  XI

  I really caught it. I suppose I’d brought it on myself, but it seemed like everyone was over-reacting. I had several long talks with the Dean. At one point he handed me a petition from the students saying they didn’t hold me responsible for the tax. I noticed Pancho hadn’t signed it. At least he was on my side. Seemed like he was the only one, though, and he caught a lot of trouble for going along with me.

  There wasn’t anything official they could do to us, though. I caught some extra schoolwork and stuff like that, but I hadn’t really broken any rules, just stretched them a lot. Bad judgment was the term the Dean used, along with childish pride and stubbornness. He used these terms a lot in our little discussions. I didn’t mind the schoolwork; I was mending in bed, anyway. The rest of the group was in and out: the official part of the tour on Earth was finished and there were ten days of free time before we left.

  That gave me ten days and I was sill P14,662.50 behind.

  B’oosa chided me a lot in that detached way he has. I think he was amused at the lengths I had gone to try and pay back the money. He also told me the Dean was probably worried about the bad publicity and loss of potential students if one of us happened to get himself killed on an unsupervised adventure.

  I was lying in the hotel bed, surrounded by books, when B’oosa walked in with Pancho. The books were for effect; actually I was digging though my mail. There was a lot of it.

  “Back from the great cultural centers of the universe?” I asked.

  “You really ought to try it sometime, Carl,” said B’oosa. “It’s possible some knowledge might work its way through that thick skull of yours.”

  “Love to,” I said. “But as you can easily see, I’m a poor invalid, confined to bed. I may never heal.”

  Pancho tossed a book at me. I caught it easily. With my “bad” hand.

  “You don’t fool me,” he said. “I saw you doing deep knee bends last night after you thought we were asleep. You’re just lucky the Dean hasn’t sent down word to keep you tied up for the next week or so.” He flopped in a chair and B’oosa walked to the bed, picked up one of the letters.

  “More bears?” he asked.

  “No,” I shuddered. “But just about everything else. What’s a lion?”

  B’oosa set the letter he was holding back down on the bed. “Are you sure that you don’t have any Maasai’pyan blood in you?” he asked.

  “No, I …” Then I realized he was joking. “Why?”

  “You remind me a little of my brother. Of course he was not quite so tall as you, and somewhat darker. But you had some things in common, when he was your age.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stubbornness. A certain tendency toward self-destruction. Do you know the word ‘eunoto’?”

  “No.”

  “In English you might say ‘rite of passage,’ but the translation would not be accurate.

  “Our planet was colonized by people from the Maasai tribe, from Earth. They were a very … conservative people, on Earth, almost anti-technological, preserving traditions whose origins are lost in pre-history. The ones on Earth still do.”

  “Your people rebelled?”

  He nodded slowly. “That’s right; that’s why we call our planet New Maasai, Maasai'pya. In breaking off from the old ways, my ancestors cold-bloodedly evaluated the body of Maasai tradition and updated it point by point, changing the culture to one compatible with the new interstellar community.”

  “One tradition we maintained — though in a radically altered form — was eunoto. On Earth, this was four days of tightly controlled ritual, marking the passage of a young man from the warrior class to the elder class. These ‘elders’ were only seventeen or eighteen years old, which reflected the reality that the warrior class was a hopeless anachronism. It had been centuries since they had anyone to fight.

  “Yet the notion of a ritual period marking the passage from irresponsible youth to responsible adult — kivulana to mwenyeji — was worth preserving. The details are unimportant, but the essence of it is that for one year a young person is neither child nor citizen. He decides for himself when his eunoto year will be, sometime between the onset of puberty and the age of twenty. There is a separate body of law for eunoto, which encourages physical testing, even recklessness. Murder is not allowed, but assault is, under conditions of dueling.

  “My brother and I did not learn to use the quarterstaff in a gymnasium. We learned in the jungle and in the street; we had to fight anyone who desired combat, and under certain conditions we did have to issue challenges.”

  “And if you didn’t fight or challenge?”

  “You went back to kivulana. Not only was that a disgrace, but it meant you had to begin eunoto over again. Some people never do finish eunoto; they are objects of pity and scorn.”

  I could tell there was a big moral coming. “So what did your brother do?”

  He laughed ruefully. “It was rather bizarre. On the last day of his eunoto, another boy delivered to him a truly blood-curdling insult. It was a set-up. When the insult was delivered, by a third party, the boy was on the other side of the world, and wouldn’t be back for several days.”

  “A rational person would have shrugged it off. What my brother did was set himself up for a duel and then refuse to fight. So he got his revenge, but at too great a price.”

  “Another year of vacation?”

  “Oh, it is that. A boy’s dream, in fact, or a girl’s: the government subsidizes your travel to anywhere in the world.” He got a faraway look. “Climb mountains, swim rivers, swagger your way through waterfronts and bazaars — do as you wish for a year. Test yourself, find the boundaries of your ability. You learn much about life, but after a year you should have lear
ned enough: humility, restraint, a sense of purpose. A person who deliberately sends himself back is marked for the rest of his life. He has declared himself unable or unwilling to grow.”

  “And he gets another year of helling around at the taxpayer’s expense,” I said.

  “That is part of it,” B’oosa admitted. “But do you see that this is what you are doing? You made the gesture, and that was not a bad thing. But persisting beyond reason is bad. Is childish. What will your parents, your planet think if you get yourself killed here? What will they think of Starschool?”

  “My parents,” I said slowly, “my planet … would expect me to pay my own debts.”

  “As I would!” he said with surprising force. “Debts that you yourself incurred. But this is not something for which anyone holds you responsible. Everyone aboard Starschool sees this cynical tax for what it is — everybody but you.”

  Pancho had been silent through this whole discussion, leafing through the mail. B’oosa looked to him for confirmation. He shrugged. “Un hombre hace lo necesario.”

  “Every planet must have that proverb,” B’oosa said. “ ‘A man has to do what a man has to do.’ Real life admits options. A year of eunoto would teach you that. You both should dye your skin black and go to Maasai’pya.”

  “Perhaps eunoto is where one finds it,” Pancho said.

  B’oosa rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Boys!”

  “It’s something I have to get through.”

  He started pacing. “If you keep fighting monsters for free, and dealing with people like that Wolfe, all you’ll get is dead. I would miss having you around to entertain me.”

  “How can I tell the good offers from the bad? I get so many. Look.” I held up a handful of envelopes.

  “Most of these have clauses you wouldn’t like. They are all trying to take advantage of your temporary novelty value. And your lack of legal training, I might add. If I had seen your contract with Mr. Wolfe before you had signed it, you never would have gotten into that mess.”

  “Does that mean you’ll help me?”

  “You are like my brother. He took advantage of me too, when I would let him. I’d hate to see you die and not get paid for it. I’ll look over the contracts for you, that much I’ll do. Just don’t tell the Dean I had anything to do with this. I’m supposed to be a steadying influence on you two rascals.”

  That got me out of bed. I spread the offers out on the table and the three of us started looking them over.

  “No lions or tigers,” said B’oosa.

  “Or bears,” said Pancho.

  “Sharks and bulls are out, too,” I added. “After all, it’s my body.”

  “Here’s one,” said Pancho. “Wrestling alligators in a place called The Glades. Alligators are just big lizards with teeth.”

  “Let me look at that,” said B’oosa. He studied it for a minute. “No good,” he said. “The money looks fine on the surface, but it’s all tied up with how much holo time they can sell. If they don’t sell much time, you don’t get much money. Better to look for one big show than to try and pick up a lot of little ones.”

  We eliminated most of the offers.

  “This one looks interesting,” B’oosa said. “ No animals. It’s a formal challenge from a gladiatorial team in Lusaka. If you come up with a team with a total weight of 400 kilograms, they’ll take you on with a team of equal weight for a prize of P60,000. The prize is bonded, and independent of the sponsoring corporation’s profit or loss. Sounds fair, but you’d need a team.”

  I looked at Pancho. “You interested?”

  “Not me, man. 400 kilograms of Earthies is a real mob. They’d crawl all over us, likely bite us to death.”

  “Nonsense,” said B’oosa. “Two good men back-to-back with quarterstaffs can hold off any mob indefinitely, as long as their opponents don’t use long-range weapons. Gladiators are only allowed to use clubs, vibroclubs, quarterstaffs, and bolos. Only the bolo can be thrown effectively, and it’s easy to counter with a quarterstaff. Just get them to set a time limit and you shouldn’t have any trouble. It’s certainly easier than sharks or bears. More dignified, too, I might add.”

  I had my doubts, remembering the time B’oosa flattened me with a quarterstaff. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not nearly good enough with the quarterstaff.”

  “You’re not that bad, Carl. All you need is practice and some instruction. From what I’ve seen of the Earthies, they’re not too good with the quarterstaff, even the best of them”

  “But I only have a few days, and … hey! Would you teach me?”

  “Me? Why should I have anything to do with this? I don’t usually spend my time teaching hard-headed kids how to go out and get themselves hurt. Besides, there are some museums I haven’t seen yet.”

  “But you’re good,” I said. “The best in the University. Better than anyone on this planet, I bet. You could teach me a lot.”

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose even someone like you could learn the rudiments if he tried hard enough. It would be a challenge of sorts. If I could teach you, I could teach anybody. Of course it would take years before you could become even halfway decent by Maasai’pyan standards, but it shouldn’t take too much for you to hold your own against the Earthies.”

  “It might work,” said Pancho. “I could handle the bolo.”

  “You?” I asked.

  “Sure. On Selva we are practically born with bolos in our hands. I’m good with one. Before I joined Starschool I was village champion.”

  Champion? It began to look possible. Only … “We’d need to find another quarterstaffer.” I looked at Pancho and grinned. He caught it right away.

  “He’d have to be good,” said Pancho. We both looked at B’oosa.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I’m not interested. I’m too old and too smart for that foolishness.”

  “Wouldn’t work, anyway,” said Pancho. “Mr. B’oosa isn’t tall enough. It would take a lot of man to protect you. We’d better find someone larger.”

  “Nonsense,” said B’oosa. “Size means nothing with the quarterstaff. I’ve already shown you that.”

  “Besides,” said Pancho, grinning. “He would have to be someone strong and fast. Someone with courage.”

  “Are you saying that I —“

  “That’s right,” I interrupted, looking at Pancho and ignoring B’oosa. “He should have brains as well. Someone you could trust in a fight.”

  “Look —“

  “Someone who could fight as well as other people talk,” said Pancho. “Where could we find someone like that?”

  “I could place a wannad,” I said. “ ‘Wanted: One strong courageous gladiator to help a couple of foolish schoolboys pay off a debt. Experience with quarterstaff a necessity. Maasai’pyans need not apply.’ Someone would answer it. A bun, probably, a derelict who didn’t know one end of a vibroclub from the other. We’d most likely both get killed trying to protect him.”

  “Enough,” said B’oosa. “Enough.”

  “You’ll do it?” I asked him.

  “It seems I have no choice,” he said good-naturedly. “If I don’t, you boys are bound to get into trouble. Besides, winning this one should put an end, once and for all, to all this undignified sporting with animals.”

  Together, the three of us weighed in at 320 kilograms, B’oosa also being a giant by Earth standards, even though he weighed a paltry 95 kilos. That left us 80 kilos to round off the team. I had an idea where I could find 80 kilos of mean gladiator.

  * * *

  I found him in the Plaza de Gladiatores, but he looked like he’d been the one who fought the bear, not me.

  “Shize, Springer,” said the Heller. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Markos,” I said. “And thanks for the warning about the bear.”

  He rubbed the side of his face. It was swollen and patched roughly with plas
tiflesh. “There were other people who didn’t care for that little conversation we had.”

  “They almost killed him,” said Angelo, who didn’t look too good himself. “It was very close.”

  “They ain’t gonna kill me till they can’t get one more dightin’ pesa out of me. Gonna dightin’ bleed me dry if they can,” said the Heller. “But they’re gonna have one hell’va fight on their hands. Old Markos don’t give up easy.” He took a long pull on the beer I’d bought him.

  “I’m sorry I brought you trouble,” I said.

  “Shize, man,” said Markos. “I bring my own trouble. Bad news is my middle name. But they had no call messin’ up on my little friend here. It was none of his affair. How’s he gonna find one of them señoritas if he keeps gettin’ bashed up like that? He’ll end up as ugly as me. Broke as me, too.”

  “I made it my business, amigo,” said Angelo. “Your trouble is mine.”

  Markos shook his head, looked up at me. “But what brings you here? Can’t be you’re looking for another bear.”

  “No, I’m looking for a gladiator.”

  “This is the right place. Whole dightin’ town’s full of ‘em. What you got in mind?”

  “I need a fourth for a team we’re fielding against a bunch of Earthies from Lusaka. He has to be good with a vibroclub and weigh eighty kilos or less. Purse is P60,000. It’s bonded. If we win, it’s P15,000 all the way around.”

  “I’m seventy-eight kilos and can do things with a vibe that you ain’t thought of. That kinda money I could get off planet and away from Wolfe. Start over. I’m your man.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  XII

  By the time Markos and I got back, B’oosa had all the details ironed out. We were going to be facing a team of nine Earthies; four with quarterstaffs, two each with clubs and bolos, and one vibroclub. Each team was allowed only one vibroclub, it was some sort of rule.