The Games (27 page)

The crowd in the stands cheered as the commentator’s voice modulated upward. Baskov didn’t bother to understand the words being spoken; their meaning was clear. Two flags rose on opposite sides of the oval.

The matchup was decided by a complex system of ranking and lottery. The winner of the first round would advance into the second, and so on, and so on. A classic pyramidal elimination. He looked at the flags and saw Argentina and France would be first.

Icers stood at intervals around the periphery of the oval. Near the commentator booth, he saw the armed guard, light glinting off his chrome helmet. Baskov touched the dial of the two-way clipped inside his breast pocket. “Can you hear me?” he said softly.

The guard shifted, and his arm came up, touching the side of his helmet. “I can hear you,” said a voice from Baskov’s pocket. Too loud.

Baskov turned the knob. “Just stand there and look pretty. Don’t do anything unless I explicitly tell you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the voice came again, softer now.

“Do nothing.”

“Yes, I hear you.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Yes, I hear you.”

The flags were at the top of their poles, and the crowd was on their feet. Inside the skybox, people shifted toward the windows, jockeying for visibility. The glass was soon blotted with gawkers, except for a two-foot gap on either side of Baskov, where no one dared encroach.

Voices in the skybox grew louder, faces pressed to glass, staring down.

Baskov had been here, at this moment, many times. He watched the faces. There was a unique thrill that pervaded these nights—even Baskov felt it—that stretched back through time to something older, more basic. The Romans had only discovered, not invented, it. When all the artifice fell away, what remained was this: two living creatures trying to kill each other. It was nothing less than the original sport.

A few weeks from now, the other Olympics would begin. Men jogging in tracksuits. But
this
now—

—this was the real shit.

The noise of the crowd spiked. They knew it, too.

Baskov smiled.

Distant movement, and down in the pit, a door began to open.

S
ILAS SAT
on the bed next to Vidonia, their eyes locked on the TV. A graphic of the French flag flapped in the lower-right corner of the screen.

The spectacle of it washed over them. The beautiful fucking spectacle, tens of thousands of people on their feet.

It was a science competition, Silas reminded himself. Not some competitive athletic event. It was surreal—a science competition that hundreds of millions of people would watch. There was only a single rule: no human DNA. All else was wide open. The most profound endeavors have the fewest rules: love, war.

The event was many things. Some good, some barbaric. But among them, this: it was the greatest show on the planet.

Silas reached for her hand.

B
ASKOV TOUCHED
the window again, and the spot in front of him zoomed even larger until the floor of the pit spread across his entire field of view.

The door with the French flag slid up into the wall. At first there was only darkness there, a shadowed rectangular hole eight feet wide by ten feet tall.

Slowly, a shape moved color into the shadow.

Something green and scaly and covered in sporadic tufts of hair.

It was low to the ground and moved like the crack of a whip, a thing part alligator, part wolf, with eyes that didn’t point in the same direction.

Leave it to the French
.

To Baskov, it seemed that countries sometimes put out gladiators simply to show they could, without any particular competitive consideration. In reality, the French gladiator was probably less dangerous than the constituent species from which it was assembled. If the French had lacked the demonstrated ability to successfully cross phyla (a tricky thing, even if you knew what you were doing), then they certainly shouldn’t have made their attempt on the world stage. There are
basic and fundamental differences between the physiologies of reptiles and mammals, which resisted crossing. As Baskov watched the creature move into the light, he wondered how many distorted siblings it had left behind. How many tries had they made to produce this one fighter?

The tragic creature moved farther into the arena, dragging a long wire-haired tail behind it through the sawdust.

The spectators cheered. In Baskov’s experience, they always cheered, no matter the competitor.

Years ago, before the gladiator competition, there’d been problems with gene doping and genetic tweaks. Web-footed swimmers. Myostatin freaks. Then testing caught up, and the Games enforced the ban.

But the crowds had still wanted the freak show.

They’d wanted
this
.

Science had wanted it, too—an arena to showcase its newest art form.

So the freak watchers were given the gladiator competition. The single event where genetic engineering was allowed. It became the most popular event in the Games.

And the most vilified.

A second door began its slow ascent. The strange French weregator didn’t even notice.

Behind the Argentina door was something that lacked the French contestant’s seeming docility. Big furry forelimbs dug at the sawdust while the door rose. A head pushed under, then shoulders, a long torso. The creature was out in a flash of brown; and in another instant, it froze, locking eyes on the combatant across the arena.

Baskov was impressed, he had to admit. He hadn’t expected anything like this from Argentina. The gorilla hybrid had claws at the ends of long, muscular arms. Its mouth was a gaping maw of teeth, borrowed from somewhere in order Carnivora.

It surged across the sawdust, kicking up plumes of wood chips in its four-legged charge. The weregator finally noticed and turned, baring its teeth.

The two collided in an explosion of flesh and bone.

Even Baskov was taken aback by the scope of the violence. Their modes of attack were primitive but effective. They latched their jaws onto each other and shook. The weregator had Isaac Newton on its side, but mass only counts for so much. In the end, it was those claws that decided it.

The gorilla thing sank its teeth deeper into a shoulder, tightening its hold. Then it simply began digging into the side of the scaly creature in the same way a dog might dig a hole in the ground. There was blood, then the sound of cracking ribs. The weregator loosened its hold and tried to get away, but it was no use. The gorilla thing held fast and continued digging. The French contestant screamed when its abdominal wall was breached, and then organs spilled out in bright loops, piling between the gorilla thing’s back legs exactly like the dirt behind a digging canine. It was fantastic.

The fight lasted six minutes. The victor was left to feed for another three. The French flag came down, leaving the flag of Argentina flapping alone.

The crowd roared.

When the door slid open again, the icers distended from the walls, blowing freezing clouds of CO
₂
; the survivor was maneuvered back into its pen.

The men and women in the skybox drifted from the windows, smiles on their satisfied faces. “Damned good match” seemed to be the consensus.

The crowd thrummed outside. What would their reaction be to the strange U.S. gladiator? Baskov wondered. Would they roar? Would they scream?

The cleanup crew busied themselves in the arena. They chained the carcass of the weregator to the back of a small tractor and hauled it away, methodically raking the path smooth behind it. Several others stayed behind to bag up the largest stray clumps of tissue.

Little time was wasted between matches. When the arena was clean,
the announcer’s voice came again. It would be Saudi Arabia vs. Australia. This match would be even better, Baskov thought.

Two new flags went up the poles. The skybox crowd—most with freshened drinks in their hands—shifted back against the glass.

The door with the Aussie flag opened first, and Baskov knew immediately why the Australians had been so secretive about their creation. There was certainly no rule, implied or otherwise, that required a gladiator be constituted from species native to the particular country it represented. Such a rule would have put Africa at a prohibitive advantage. But for Australia, it seemed to be a matter of national pride. Their contestant didn’t just step into the arena, it hopped.

The crowd roared, the people in the skybox smiled, and Baskov had to admit it was kind of cute, in a predatory, rip-your-head-off sort of way.

While not so difficult as mammal-reptile crosses, marsupial-placental hybrids were usually just as painful to look at. Like the Argentinean contestant, the Aussie gladiator was surprisingly sophisticated. It was built like a giant kangaroo but armed with bulk and teeth as no kangaroo he’d ever seen. The arms were long and powerfully thick, terminating in vicious hooked talons.

It was too good, almost. Baskov remembered reading once about a species of carnivorous kangaroo that became extinct tens of thousands of years ago, leaving only its bones lying buried in the sun-scorched earth. Perhaps the Australians had made a breakthrough in DNA extraction technology. Perhaps their gladiator hadn’t been so difficult to come by, after all. Baskov made a mental note to file a petition of display against the Australians after the Games were over. If they
had
come up with some new tricks for extracting the code of extinct species from fossil bones, then it was only fair that everybody know them.

The other door began to open, and the ’roo jumped away from the sudden movement. It turned and lowered its head to stare under the rising iron, digging its long front limbs into the sawdust.

From beneath the Saudi door slid a long, low bear of a thing.

The crowd roared.

It was built like a wolverine but larger, with a flatter head. There was no flashiness about the beast, nothing that jarred or caught the eye. To those unfamiliar with nature’s handiwork, this could be mistaken for one of her own. It was like something you’d expect to see on a nature vid shot in some exotic out-of-the-way place. It wasn’t a creature you could put a name to, but it
looked
like it should exist. Baskov knew the ones that looked normal were usually the most dangerous.

The creature locked its eyes on the ’roo, then squealed, a porcine scream of alarm. The two beasts froze for a moment. Then they charged.

The crowd roared again—a noise like a runaway freight train rising up through Baskov’s feet and legs, shaking the glass in the skybox.

The ’roo jumped high and spun away from the snapping jaws. The jaws followed. The ’roo jumped again, then came in for a quick attack—a mash of fur and skin, the snap of jaws, and the ’roo stayed just out of reach.

For a moment, Baskov was afraid things were going to be one-sided; those kinds of matches were never fun to watch. You couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for a creature running for its life. But the ’roo turned and stood its ground, attempting to connect with a series of jabs as the Saudi gladiator came at it.

The wolverine thing was too fast and took advantage of its lowered angle of attack. The ’roo had to bend down to punch, and the wolverine thing went for the descending throat. Twice it almost got it. Twice the ’roo flinched back at the last second. When the wolverine thing came in for the third time, the ’roo countered with a kick from a
hind
limb, sending it sprawling through the sawdust.

The crowd screamed. Around him, in the skybox, voices shouted, faces pressed to the glass.

The kangaroo thing was smart to change strategies, but Baskov knew it would not be enough. Even before blood had been drawn, he could tell the ’roo was doomed. Against a taller enemy, one it could strike at from an upright position, the ’roo might have had a chance.
But against something long and low to the ground, it couldn’t use the cutlery at the end of its arms without bringing its throat within striking distance.

The wolverine thing charged again, snapping at air.

The ’roo countered with a glancing kick to the broad skull. The wolverine thing screamed again, baring a wide row of jagged teeth. The two circled each other.

As Baskov thought it might, the fight ended at the very first show of red.

The wolverine thing came in again and drove the Aussie combatant off balance. When the ’roo tried to fend off the Saudi gladiator with a jab, the wolverine caught it by the throat, pulled it to the ground, and ripped out its windpipe.

Tissue flung away in a spray of gore as the wolverine thing pulled free a chunk of living meat and shook it violently in its teeth.

It took one second.

The crowd roared again while blood spurted the sawdust red. The ’roo thrashed in death. It was over.

The vibration rose up through Baskov’s feet again as the crowd roared, shaking the stadium.

Again, the victor was allowed to feed for a short while. Again, the icers moved in and brushed the survivor back into its holding pen. Again, the loser’s flag was lowered. And again, the people in the skybox moved back away from the window to freshen their drinks and grab a bite from the complimentary buffet.