The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Erno began to puzzle out some of the Stories for Men. One was about a “prize fighter”-a man who fought another man with his fists for money. This aging fighter agrees with a promoter to fight a younger, stronger man for “twenty-five bucks,” which from context Erno gathered was a small sum of money. The boxer spends his time in the ring avoiding getting beaten up. During a pause between the “rounds” of the fight, the promoter comes to him and complains that he is not fighting hard enough, and swears he will not pay the boxer if he “takes a dive.” So in the next round the boxer truly engages in the brutal battle, and within a minute gets beaten unconscious.

But because this happens immediately after the promoter spoke to him, in the sight of the audience, the audience assumes the boxer was told by the promoter to take a dive. They protest. Rather than defend the boxer, the promoter denies him the twenty-five bucks anyway.

The boxer, unconscious while the promoter and audience argue, dies of a brain hemorrhage.

The story infuriated Erno. It felt so wrong. Why did the boxer take on the fight? Why did he allow himself to be beaten so badly? Why did the promoter betray the boxer? What was the point of the boxer’s dying in the end? Why did the writer-someone named James T. Farrell-invent this grim tale?

FOUR

A week after the meeting, when Erno logged onto school, he found a message for him from “Ethan Edwards.” It read:

I saw you with that girl. Cute. But no sex, Erno. I’m counting on men like you.

Erno sent a reply: “You promised me another adventure. When?”

Then he did biochemistry (“Delineate the steps in the synthesis of human growth hormone”) and read Gender amp; Art for three hours until he had to get to his practicum at biotech.

In order to reduce the risk of stray bugs getting loose in the colony, the biotech factories were located in a bunker separate from the main crater. Workers had to don pressure suits and ride a bus for a couple of kilometers across the lunar surface. A crowd of other biotech workers already filled the locker room at the north airlock when Erno arrived.

“Tyrus told me you’re fucking Alicia Keikosdaughter, Erno,” said Paul Gwynethsson, whose locker was next to Erno’s. “He was out flying. He saw you in the park.”

“So? Who are you fucking?” Erno asked. He pulled on his skintight. The fabric, webbed with thermoregulators, sealed itself, the suit’s environment system powered up, and Erno locked down his helmet. The helmet’s head’s-up display was green. He and Paul went to the airlock, passed their ID’s through the reader and entered with the others. The exit sign posted the solar storm warning. Paul teased Erno about Alicia as the air was cycled through the lock and they walked out through the radiation maze to the surface.

They got on the bus that dropped off the previous biotech shift. The bus bumped away in slow motion down the graded road. It was late in the lunar afternoon, probably only a day or so of light before the two-week night. If a storm should be detected and the alert sounded, they would have maybe twenty minutes to find shelter before the radiation flux hit the exposed surface. But the ride to the lab went uneventfully.

A man right off the cable train from Tsander was doing a practicum in the lab. His name was Cluny. Like so many Earthmen, he was short and impressively muscled, and spoke slowly, with an odd accent. Cluny was not yet a citizen and had not taken a cousin’s name. He was still going through training before qualifying to apply for exemption from the mita.

Erno interrupted Cluny as he carried several racks of micro-environment bulbs to the sterilizer. He asked Cluny what he thought of Tyler Durden.

Cluny was closemouthed; perhaps he thought Erno was testing him: “I think if he doesn’t like it up here, I can show him lots of places on Earth happy to take him.”

Erno let him get on with his work. Cluny was going to have a hard time over the next six months. The culture shock would be nothing next to the genetic manipulation he would have to undergo to adjust him for low-G. The life expectancy of an unmodified human on the moon was forty-eight. No exercise regimen or drugs could prevent the cardiovascular atrophy and loss of bone mass that humans evolved for Earth would suffer.

But the retroviruses could alter the human genome to produce solid fibrolaminar bones in 1/6 G, prevent plaque buildup in arteries, insure pulmonary health, and prevent a dozen other fatal low-G syndromes.