Futureland. Part 4

"What about the last fight you had, with Bobo Black?"

"I told you. I was off. I had trouble getting it to him."

"You had trouble because you couldn't get to him, and you couldn't get to him because he was outthinking you in there. If he hadn't'a got tired you would have had your first UBA loss."

They were in Fera's permanent suite on the three hundredth floor of the Fifth Business, the Broadway hotel. Fera had had eight UBA fights by then. All with men. All ending by KO.

"Zeletski can box better than Black, and he doesn't get tired. He hits hard enough to put you down. We need a little more time. You need a better cla.s.s of fight. Like this Black. You have to go through a couple of wars. And there's something else."

"What, Daddy?"

"Money, baby. Lotsa money. It's been chump change up till now. We got this suite, but that's just 'cause this hotel wants to brag on you. You lose one fight and we're outta here."

"We've been broke before."

"Yeah, but," he hesitated. "You know with the Pulse I can't take chances. Ever since Congress legalized Pulse you got to have money. You got to have money or you're dead."

The Pulse was a drug dealer's dream. Cooked up at CalTech in the late hours when the professors were in bed. The gene drug altered the structure of the pleasure centers of the brain, temporarily allowing consciousness some measure of control over dreams. With just the right amount, a pulsar, as the users called themselves, could create a complex fantasy, build a whole world and live in it for what seemed like days, weeks. The original intention of the students was to create a time warp in the brain where they could do months of complex research in an evening.

"But the drug gave entre to the id," Dr. Samboka of NYU explained in the EastCoast DataTimes after it was far too late. "And the id has a powerful inclination for sensuality and instinct."

Pulsars' minds drifted into pa.s.sionate love affairs and musical performances that lasted for days. Many lost interest in the world around them, making better worlds in their unconscious minds. And to make matters worse, or better from a profit point of view, it turned out that after four or five uses, the brain collapsed in on itself without regular ingestion of the drug. It was an addiction from which death was the only withdrawal.

The Pulse, named after the heartbeat many addicts reported hearing before slipping into fantasy, was legalized in 2031. Pulse party parlors appeared everywhere. The cost was fixed by the government, but there was no coverage on state medical insurance and no emergency fund for the poor pulsar who went broke. And because the user had to have the drug every three days, there were few job cycles that a pulsar could hold.

Pulsedeath was an everyday event. Almost every user died horribly from a collapsed brain. Only the rich could be sure of long-term supply. And even they died ultimately, their brains like overstretched rubber bands snapping finally from overwork.

"I know it's going to kill me," Rickert Londonne, Pulse proponent and user, proclaimed on prime vid. "But last night I was the emperor Hadrian. I controlled the Roman empire. I strode the city streets and lived among the people, common and extraordinary. I battled the Vandals, the Goths, and the Persians. I built a world. What did you do last night?"

Pulse had another unexpected impact on the economy. In the days between use, Pulsars read many books of fiction and history to seed their minds with the possibility of dreams. Electronic publis.h.i.+ng industry stocks soared.

"We could make a billion-dollar fight if you get the women of the world on your side, Fifi. Get that and I can live a few more years."

"I will, Daddy. And I'll pay to have the MacroCode Gen-Team find you a cure."

"I know you will, baby. I know you will."

3.

The night before the Mathias Konkon fight, Pell Lightner came up to the three hundredth floor of the Fifth Business. He whispered his name into the key-mike and the door slid open. He hesitated a moment before entering, took a deep breath, and then walked in confidently, standing to his full five foot nine and a half inches.

"Fifi?"

There was no answer. He went through the entrance area into the living room.

The sight of Leon Jones sitting on the long, overstuffed sofa gave Pell a scare, but then he realized that his girlfriend's father was far beyond worrying about him. The elder Jones's eyes were open, and he seemed to be looking right at Pell, but really he was gazing far away into faded Pulsedreams. After years of use the dreams had dwindled into a kind of bleached-out euphoria. The loss of specific dream content was the first sign that a user's brain was near final collapse.

"Hey, baby." Fera was standing at the door to her bedroom, naked.

Pell liked it that the musculature of Fera's chest hadn't erased her womanly figure. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were real b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and except for that one evening on the Sammy Rosen show, Pell was the only man to see under her dress nowadays.

All of his young life, Pell had lived in Common Ground, the place for all unemployed citizens. He had learned to appreciate a good thing. He was only nineteen, permanently unemployed and without benefits except for an octangular sleep tube underground and regular rations of rice and beans.

"Take down your pants," Fera said.

Automatically Pell took a step forward. At the same time he pulled down his pants. He leapt toward her and she held him up in her arms. Fera grinned broadly when Pell grabbed her hair to keep his balance.

She carried him from the room while her father mused.

Fera had met Pell at a Soul Shack on Middle Broadway. He was strutting around among the Backgrounder girls, acting like the c.o.c.k of the walkway. She got a hot ribs and yam dinner in a plasbox and then walked up to the group of young Backgrounders. Pell was arrogant and snide, but when she asked him if he wanted to go with her he was in the car as quickly as he could move.

"You remember when we first met?" Fera asked her lover. She was on top of him, grinding her hips.

"Yeah," he coughed.

"Did you love me for my body or my money?" Her coa.r.s.e blond hair raked his eyes.

A look of confusion came over his face. For a moment it seemed as if he had found an answer, but instead he had a powerful o.r.g.a.s.m.

"I can't, I can't," he cried meaninglessly.

"Baby, do you love me?" Fera asked Pell in her dark bedroom. Through the open window the spires of upper Manhattan stretched toward the sky.

"We don't use that word underground."

"What do you say, then?"

"I look for you, I see you, I won't turn away."

"That's a lotta words just to say the same thing."

"It's not the same thing. Not at all. 'I love you,' means, 'I need you.' The way I say it means that you can count on me. The way I say it is strong."

"You turned away from your friends to come with me."

"I never told 'em I wouldn't."

Fera laid her big palm on his chest.

"I wish I was like you, Pipi," she said.

"What you mean? Here you up above, b.u.t.ter and cream--and I'm down below, bread and water."

"But you know what you think."

"Huh?"

"If I say something or ask something, you have an answer. Even if you just don't know you sound so sure. All I know is that I love my daddy. That and boxing is all I have. Everything else is a mess. That's why I like fighting, because I get so mad not bein' sure, and hittin' somebody makes me feel better. Even gettin' hit feels good."

"Then that's good enough. It keeps you upover."

"But I want more."

"What?"

"Like you. To look and not turn away."

4.

The Konkon fight was the turning point in Fera Jones's career. The night before was the first time Leon experienced a Pulse Reflux episode. It left him bedridden and unable to be in his daughter's corner. She asked Pell to stand in for her father, and the diminutive Backgrounder agreed. He had been sitting ringside for over six months and had some notion of what was expected of a corner man. The only thing he didn't know how to do was stop the bleeding in case of a cut, but Leon had been smart enough to bring in Doc Blevins, the premier cut man of boxing, as a permanent member of Ferocious Fera Jones's corner.

Mathias Konkon was a wily boxer. He avoided the brunt of Fera's initial onslaught. He rolled with some blows and picked others off with deflecting gloves. He had a solid chin, too, and so whenever Fera was accurate enough to land a hard punch, she was surprised with a series of left hooks and right uppercuts in answer.

Over six rounds she had lost all but one.

In between rounds Pell begged his boxer to box.

"Stick and run, Fifi," he pleaded. "Let him come after you. Let him come after."

"I can get him," Fera declared. "All I need is one shot and he'll cave in."

Each round she went out streaming sweat and oozing confidence, but at the bell she came back another point down on the scorecards.

In the seventh Konkon let loose. It was toward the end of the round and Fera was breathing hard. She'd thrown her full artillery at the slippery Fijian. If she had connected with anything, the announcers were certain that Mathias would have wound up in the hospital. But the shorter boxer had figured out just the right crouch to avoid a haymaker. When he saw that his opponent was temporarily winded, he threw a full-fledged attack at her head.

"Jones is in trouble!" Atkinson exclaimed at ringside.

"He'd do better to attack the body," Bonner added conservatively. "Kill the body and the head will fall."

At that moment, Mathias connected to Fera's jaw with a jolting right cross. Fera Jones sprawled out on her back, unconscious from every indication. But while the referee was waving the exultant Konkon back to his corner, Fera Jones opened her eyes and willed herself to her feet.

"She's cut!" Bonner yelled. "She's cut over her right eye!"

The blood was cascading down the right side of her face. But Fera Jones didn't even dab at it with her glove.

The referee asked her did she want to go on.

She nodded.

He asked her another question.

She answered to his satisfaction.

He waved for the fight to continue, but the bell rang before another blow could be thrown. Doc Blevins was in the corner with his steel compressor and cotton sticks, ready for his charge. His bald head was painted black and red for the colors of Jones's trunks. There was a bright green stripe painted across his forehead for his Irish mother.

The ring doctor stood at the side, watching the procedure closely. Pell stood over his fighter, his fists clenched as if he wanted to hit her himself.

Instead he pinched the flesh at the tip of her chin, hard. Her eyes, vacant until then, cleared.

"He's gonna beat you, you stupid cow. He's gonna beat you 'cause you out there fightin' like a girl. Like a f.u.c.kin' girl." Every word was broadcast around the globe on VIN, Video International Network. "You're the best fighter that ever lived and you're throwin' it away 'cause you don't want to do what you're supposed to do."

"I can get him," she said.

"Not if you don't jab. He's got you so girly out there that you forgot how to box. He's made a fool outta you, and look at you. All blooded up and ugly. It's over. I'm throwin' in the towel."

Pell reached for the towel. He picked it up.

"No, don't," Fera said, more like a child than a machine of destruction. "I can do it. I can do it."

Pell paused, towel in midair there between him and his fighter. Over a hundred million people around the globe watched.

"One round, Fera. One round to prove that you can do what's necessary."

The bleeding had been stemmed. Certainty returned to Fera's eyes. She nodded and fifty million women around the world felt their hearts thrum and galvanize. Groucho T, the Internet philosopher, later said, "The whole world changed between the seventh and eighth rounds."

Konkon never had a chance after the seventh. In rounds eight and nine Fera's left jab turned his face into hamburger. In round ten she knocked him to the canvas six times before the referee gave her the win.

"I want to thank Diana for my victory," Fera said to the Eclipse, "with a nod to Legba for sending me his trickster friend, Pell Lightner."

The Radical Feminist Separatist Party of Ma.s.sachusetts declared that the next day would be a floating holiday, called Fierce Woman Day, and closed down the state. Women around the world bought T-s.h.i.+rts with the images of Fera and Pell on them. The president came to visit Fera in her suite at the Fifth Business, and Time magazine named her Woman of the Century.

Leon Jones had been hospitalized, and was undergoing deep neuronal therapy for severe reaction to Pulse. But he left his bed to come to the victory party thrown in Madison Stadium in honor of the tremendous victory over Konkon.

"I always knew you had it, baby," he told his daughter.

"It was Pell, Daddy. He brings out something in me, something more than boxing."

"What do you mean, Fifi?"

"I don't know, Daddy. I don't even know that it's something I can know."