Futureland. Part 3

6.

No one believed the lie about a fall at work that left Chill Bent paralyzed, blind, and rich from the insurance he got. They all knew that poor men and women often sold pieces of themselves to the rich in order to give their children a chance. Hazel Bernard tried to get the marriage between Chill and Kai annulled but failed. At the age of nine, in 2030, Ptolemy Bent joined the Jesse Jackson Gymnasium for Advanced Learners so he would have a social life among other children. But his education came from tutors and texts provided by the Prime Com Link. He worked hard on his radio receiver, which he never discussed outside of home, and one day he convinced Kai to buy him a $300,000 transmitter, the state of the art in amateur radio communications.

"Chilly, you awake?"

"Is that you, Popo?" The ex-convict put out a hand to gently caress his nephew's face.

"Uh-huh."

"You got peach fuzz on your chin."

"You always say that. When you gonna call it a beard?"

"Peach fuzz," Chill said behind a chuckle.

"I made contact, Chilly."

"You did?"

"Uh-huh. An' I told 'im 'bout you."

"You think the big man'd have somethin' better t' do than worry 'bout a blind an' crippled thief."

"You the best man in the world, Uncle Chilly. He said he wanna meet you, you'n Gramma Misty."

"Really? He said that? d.a.m.n. Well I guess it won't be too much longer anyways. Kai said that the doctor said that my kidneys wouldn't get a nickel down in Panama."

"You don't have to die, Chilly," Ptolemy said, his voice wavering between high and low adolescent tones. "I'm'a just put some wires on your head. You and Grandma."

"You there, Mama?" Chill called out.

"Yeth, baby. Popo gonna make uth out a ethperiment. He thure look fine." Misty's ancient voice was weaker. Chill knew that time was short for both of them.

"I bet he do, Mama."

After what seemed like hours of preparation, Ptolemy said, "Ready?" Then came a white-hot flash at Chill's temples and then the feeling of electric fingers going up under his skull and into the brain.

Suddenly he could see again. Ptolemy was sitting there looking at another Chill lying on the bed. The boy, almost a man, wearing a lavender andro-suit with no s.h.i.+rt, had hair that made him look like the king of lions. He was still skinny, and darker than he had been. From brown to black, Chill thought, and then he was gone forever from the Earth. First his thoughts were elsewhere, and then slowly, electron by electron, the matter of his soul was transported. Somewhere there were bursts of stars and lines of reality that connected uncounted voices.

G.o.d, Chill thought. But there was no answer to his a.s.sertion. A halo of winking lights radiated next to him, mingled with him, and he knew in some new language that this was his mother. The word freedom occurred to Chill, but the meaning faded with the clarity of his light. So much he knew that he was unaware of. So much beyond him even then.

It's like I'm a breath, he wanted to say.

Yes, Misty's new form replied.

Ptolemy Bent was arrested and tried for the euthanasia killing of his uncle and grandmother. He was sentenced to twelve years to life in a private prison run by the Randac Corporation of Madagascar.

At the trial G.o.d was ruled an improbability.

"He is aware that he disintegrated their brain tissues," claimed Morton Tremble, the prosecution's expert psychiatrist, "by using feedback from a powerful radio transmitter. Maybe he thought, consciously, that he was sending their souls to G.o.d or whatever. But in truth he only did this because both were so close to death already, as he himself has testified. He admitted that he knew their bodies, including their nervous systems, would die. This is a cla.s.sic case of mercy killing. And Ptolemy Bent was completely aware that euthanasia is against the law."

Kai Lin, who was by Ptolemy's side every day of the trial, stored his radio equipment in her bas.e.m.e.nt. She never visited her husband's grave.

The Greatest.

1.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" veteran ring announcer L.Z. Scappelli proclaimed. "Now you're in for a treat. For the first time anywhere the Universal Boxing Authority has sanctioned a pro heavyweight bout between the s.e.xes."

A whole tier of seats taken up by women rose in loud acclaim in the vast underground complex of Manhattan's Madison Stadium. So boisterous was their cheering that the boos and hisses from elsewhere around the arena were drowned out. Women hooted and screamed; they rose to their feet and pounded the plastic backs of their chairs.

"It's quite a scene tonight, isn't it, Billy?" said audiovid announcer Chet Atkinson. The fight was blacked out in the Twelve Fiefs of New York City because the main event--Brigham versus Zeletski--hadn't sold out the 120,000-stadium seats by fight time.

"You better believe it," Billy "the Eclipse" Bonner, onetime UBA lightweight champion, replied. Each word seemed to roll around on a bed of marbles before leaving his mouth. "The ladies want to see blood."

"What do you think about Fera Jones stepping into the ring against a man, Champ?"

"Well, Chet, I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned. I don't like to see ladies with the gloves on. I mean, even the WUBA is too much for me to watch sometimes. But there's no denying that women have been becoming more compet.i.tive. They hit harder and move faster every year."

"So do you think she has a chance tonight?"

"I don't think she'll get hurt too bad," Bonner replied. "Jellyroll is more of an act than he is a fighter. They set him up with opponents that have no chance against him. I mean, the crowd loves it, I do too, but Jellyroll tipped the scale at almost three-eighty at weigh-in, and he doesn't have a knockout punch."

"Three-eighty," Chet agreed. "And six seven. But Fera Jones weighs an impressive two-sixty and stands six foot nine. She has the reach, age, and height advantage over Jellyroll. And she looks like she was molded from iron. I mean, just look at the muscle definition on those legs."

"Nice legs, I'll agree with that, Chet. But this is a brutal sport. Man is the warrior. I don't care how much the Radical Feminist Separatist movement wants to play with genetics, a man will always come out on top in one of these wars."

It was never proven that Fera Jones was the product of SepFem-G, an outlawed genetics program that came out of the feminist studies department at Smith College. Actually, there was evidence to the contrary. Fera lived with, and was managed and trained by, her father, Leon Jones, a onetime history professor at U. Ma.s.s. Not that there weren't lots of questions about them.

Leon was Negro, medium brown with thick, kinky hair, generous lips, and a broad nose. Fera was a natural, if dirty, blond, with skin too dark to be Caucasian but not exactly the right coloring for Negro, either. Her mother was unknown to the public. Fera claimed that she didn't know anything about her mother.

"Your father must have known who she was," a woman's magazine journalist once suggested in an interview.

"If I bring it up I can see the hurt in him," Fera replied. It was the most she ever said about her mother publicly.

There were plenty of questions about Fera Jones. She was tall enough to play men's basketball and strong enough to compete in a strongman contest. She'd run through the Women's Universal Boxing a.s.sociation's list of contenders in one year--all wins by knockout. In twenty-four fights she'd gone to the second round only once. That was against Slippery WandaJoe Williams. WandaJoe managed to avoid Fera's haymakers for the first three minutes, but ninety-one seconds into round two she caught a fist that was what Fera called her tooth decay preventative.

"If the tooth is out it can't get decay," she joked with Billy Bonner after the bout.

Fera was so proficient that many said she was actually a man trying to make it by pretending to be a woman. The WUBA had performed DNA tests proving Fera's gender (also disproving the theory that she was the product of a separatist test tube). But the public was not convinced by computer graphs and petri dishes. So Fera went on the X-rated people's access vid show Behind Sammy Rosen's Blue Door.

Sammy's usual guests were p.o.r.n performers who had special talents and fan clubs, marital aids to hawk, or a performance schedule that needed advertising. Fera had only one thing to prove on Sammy's show. When he tried to kiss her she pushed him to the floor and held him down with her bare foot. Then she pulled off her dress and told the vidder to get close-ups of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and genitals.

"You wish I was a man," she said into the camera. " 'Cause if I was, somebody might have a chance to beat me."

That one live airing moved Sammy's show to new heights, but he never forgave Fera for his humiliation. From then on, each of his shows began with a replay of him smas.h.i.+ng her gla.s.s image with a hammer. Of course, this only served to make her more popular.

The referee was going over the rules in the middle of the ring when a fight broke out between a man and woman on the floor of the stadium. Women poured down from their exclusive tier and security guards closed in to stop the melee.

When the ref said, "Go to your corners and come out fighting," there were already blows being thrown and blood being spilled.

"This is exciting isn't it, Champ?"

"I don't know, Chet. All I can say is that I'm glad the viewers here in New York can't see this. Even though Jellyroll is shorter, he looks much bigger than Fera."

"I agree, Champ. She looks frightened, fragile compared to him. And you know Jellyroll says that he's not going to go easy on her."

The next voice heard was not one of the announcers but the gravelly deep voice of the exhibition fighter Jellyroll Gregory. "I'm gonna beat her to the floor just like she did to my friend Sammy Rosen. I'm gonna beat her down in the first round. I like to get these fights over quick, 'cause they don't let me eat till after it's over."

The bell rang.

"Looks like the security forces have stopped the brawl just in time for the real fight to begin," Chet Atkinson reported. "Fera Jones comes to the middle of the ring. Jellyroll seems cautious . . . No! He's leaping right at her, both fists flailing. Fera barely avoids getting hit. She falls back. He's jumping again! He's run right into her. Almost four hundred pounds of man and muscle. She's going down!"

"They're both going down, Chet," Bonner corrected. "The referee, Xian Luke, is calling it a fall. He's rubbing both boxers' gloves off on his s.h.i.+rt."

"We should say that Luke is one of the best refs in the game today," Chet said. "He asked for this job tonight because he said that he didn't want to see anyone get hurt."

"I don't think he was worried about Jellyroll, Chet."

"Me nei--Oh no! Jellyroll throws a roundhouse right that connects with Fera's jaw. She's falling back. She's on the ropes. I think she might have gone all the way down if the ropes hadn't been there to stop her. Jellyroll is on her again. He's throwing everything he's got. Jones is covering up."

"Jellyroll wants to get her out of here quick. He doesn't want to be out there carrying around three hundred and eighty pounds in the later rounds."

"Another fight has broken out in the seats!"

"Forget that, Chet! Fera's coming back! She's jabbing in the center of the ring. Look at the speed of that jab! One, two, . . . six jabs before Jellyroll could get his defense up. His eye, yes, there's a cut open over his left eye! Jellyroll is bleeding. Jellyroll is bleeding!"

Chet Atkinson jumped in to say, "It's like old times. Like back when they fought bare-knuckled. They're swinging in and out of the ring. Fera Jones is going for Jellyroll's spare tire. We can hear the blows here at ringside. He's trying to mount a counterattack. Fera better watch it. She's leaving herself open swinging away like that. Oh! Jellyroll connected to her jaw again."

"That was right on the money," Billy Bonner cried. "Jones is backing up, but she's not going down. Oh! He connected again. What's holding this woman up?"

"I don't know, Champ. But she's not falling back on the ropes this time. Fera Jones is going to the body. These blows are vicious. It doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman when you get hit like that. Oh s.h.i.+t!" Chet Atkinson never complained about the $10,000 he was fined for cursing on a show with only a V rating. "She connected with an uppercut! Jellyroll is lifted from the canvas! He's down! He's down! Jellyroll Gregory is down!"

"And I don't believe that he's getting up," Billy added. "No. Luke is waving Fera away. He's calling the fight over. The parmeds are jumping into the ring. Six of them."

"They'll need that many if they have to carry him out of here."

"Look, Chet. The women are tearing up the stands! They're throwing the chairs into a group of taunting men. Fights are breaking out everywhere."

"You better get in there and talk to the winner, Champ. Before they tear the house down."

"So, M Jones," the Eclipse asked amid the hubbub of the crowded ring, "how did it feel in there against a man?"

"I've had harder fights, Billy," Fera said. "But first I want to give thanks to the G.o.ddess Diana, and I want to thank my daddy for making me the greatest fighter in the world."

"He hit you pretty hard a couple of times. We thought you were going down once."

"He never hurt me. The first time he hit me I moved back in case he was throwing a combination, but I stumbled and fell into the ropes. He never hurt me."

"Well, you sure hurt him."

"Bring on Zeletski," Fera said. "Bring on your champion."

"What do you think, Professor Jones?" Bonner asked Fera's father/trainer/manager. "Do you want to see her jump up in compet.i.tion to Zeletski's level this quickly?"

"Fera could beat Zeletski any day. She has the power and she knows how to get it to him. You saw how Jellyroll hit her. I tell you Fera would make Sonny Liston quiver in his boots."

"Thank you, Professor, Fera . . ." An uproar rose. "Someone has just thrown a chair into the ring. There are fights breaking out everywhere. The police are trying to restore order, but I don't even know if the main event will go on. Back to you, Chet."

"There you have it. Fera Jones has an impressive win tonight and her trainer says that she's ready for a champions.h.i.+p shot. There would be a lot of money in that fight. But not if a brawl breaks out like this one. I'm being told that we will go off the air while the police regain some semblance of order. This is Chet Atkinson, with the Champ, Billy 'the Eclipse' Bonner, saying--"

2.

"But, Daddy, I am ready. I can take him. I can. You said so yourself after the fight with Jelly Belly."

"You got the power, Fifi. You got the heart. But you need more experience."

"n.o.body's ever beat me, Daddy."