Balance Point (16 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

Funhouse’s suns had sunk into twilight when Juju’s limo bore Ya Ya and me onto the grounds of the Funhouse Sporting Club. FSC’s high-rise hotel, spa, villas and casino consistently earned five stars, but the complex’s signature attraction, indeed, all of Funhouse’s signature attraction, was the Coliseum at the complex’s center.

FSC Coliseum’s light banks glowed against the darkening sky, already shining down from the Coliseum’s roof to light its interior, as we pulled in. Juju dodged traffic and dropped us just feet in front of the light-studded, transparent express elevator that carried high rollers like Ya Ya up the Coliseum’s outer wall to the sports book and lounge that necklaced the Coliseum’s top level.

When Ya Ya stepped out of the limo, nap or not, he looked the worse for wear. Juju, standing smiling and perky alongside the limo’s rear door, held out to us a little silver tray, waist-high on her, at eye level for Ya Ya. It was the kind of tray limo drivers often extend both to offer good-bye breath mints and to supply a landing pad for tips.

Juju’s tray, however, was sprinkled not with breath mints, but with red rockets that probably had a street value equal to the last expense reimbursement report Howard had signed for me. Industrial-strength uppers seemed like overkill on a world where people got stoked just by breathing.

I had no intention of ingesting anything from a tray held by Juju, in case her hidden talents extended beyond hit chauffeurette to poisoner with a great ass.

Ya Ya, however, raked off half of her rockets, gulped them, then left Juju a tip that moved her to bend forward and kiss the top of his scruffy head.

Three minutes later, when we stepped off the glass elevator into the sports book, Ya Ya’s red rockets had kicked in, and he was bouncing off the walls again. The book was a smoky, chandeliered, two-story crescent, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked down into the Coliseum on one side while the opposite curve was a wall of massive, blue-glowing flat screens.

With the evening’s undercard barely started, the book was already awash in high rollers, walk-into-a-pole-gorgeous escorts, and cocktail waiters and waitresses wearing neat black vests.

The book was also thick with Funhouse Gaming Authority regents wearing gray suits and frowns. People who played Funhouse’s games understood that the house always won. But Funhouse’s government cracked heads to insure that the house didn’t win too big, and neither did any individual cheater. Not because fair gaming was the right thing to do, but because if gamblers thought Funhouse was rigged, the whole place could shrivel back into just another backwater planet with pretty flowers.

Ya Ya squinted his eye at the great blue screens, where the pari-mutuel totalisator numbers fluttered and winked as bettors within the Coliseum and at locations all across Funhouse placed bets and thereby shifted the odds. “Big night. Very big.”

I’m neither a gambler nor a xenoeconomist, but if I was reading the numbers right, the planetary handle, the total value wagered across Funhouse, on tonight’s main event already exceeded the Gross Planetary Product of some of the less populous outworlds. And the night was young.

“Mr. Cohon!” A guy in a chestnut-brown tux and string tie, a silver cup on a chain dangling from his neck, waggled up to Ya Ya, cradling a flat leather book in the crook of his arm. He waved his free arm at a seating area of five stepped tiers of tables that faced the windows, indicating the third tier down from the top. “Usual table?”

Ya Ya shook his head, pointed to the top tier, which was set with only a single table in front of a gilded burgundy velvet banquette. “That one, tonight, Harry.”

Harry’s mouth fell into a small “O,” the size and shape of a persimmon. Then he grinned down at Ya Ya. “So
you’re
the one!” Harry rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “An honor for
moi
to serve you.”

Ya Ya looked down at the floor, smiling like the gnome who swallowed the canary, and nodded.

Once Harry seated us at the pinnacle table, Ya Ya looked over Harry’s leather book, pointed at a line on a page, and Harry bustled away. I glanced around the room from our perch and was surprised to see how many people, who looked like they were rarely impressed by anyone not them, gawked at us. I said to Ya Ya, “Wow!”

“Big wow.”

Knowing I would be laying over on Funhouse, I had read up on high-end gaming during
Iwo Jima
’s line-of-sight run up to her first jump, while I was down in steerage nursing my dignity after being body-cavity searched.

Most high-roller gamblers prefer to win and lose in anonymity. But some (to choose a purely hypothetical example, gangster trolls with serious adequacy issues) glory in the limelight. The exhibitionist high rollers show up at casinos and sports books to visibly gamble big money on the turn of a card or a hoof. They love to display daring and nerves of steel that make strong men gasp and weak women swoon.

The most envied, highest-rolling sports book in the known universe was this one atop Funhouse Sporting Club Coliseum. And within this book the highest of the rollers did their showing off pursuant to highly structured etiquette.

If your idea of a big night at the tables or the races was to risk a few thousand, you’d get better gawk mileage from the crowd in some pissant casino. But a bettor who had wagered, either on premises or in advance online, a five-figure total could claim a table to see the evening’s contests here at FSC’s book on tier one. Six figures, tier two, and so on.

They say a hundred million’s not the pile it used to be, but if you wagered one hundred million or more on a single night’s events, you could plant your butt publicly in the seat at the pinnacle, if you chose. Of course, that exposed you to losing your butt publicly, too.

I stared at Ya Ya, my mouth open. “You spread a hundred million around on a single night’s events?”

“No.”

“Then why are we—?”

“Whole bazoomba on main event.”

Before I could close my mouth, Harry the sommelier returned with a bottle, displayed it to Ya Ya, uncorked, tasted with his little silver cup, and decanted the wine without drifting a grain of sediment up the neck. Say what you will, Harry knew how to handle wine. Take it from
moi
.

At that moment a party of four got seated two tiers down, in the six-figure cheap seats. They initiated a worshipful discussion with Ya Ya, tonight’s king of high rolling. The attention swelled him up like a balloon that needed a shave. But the level of detail concerning the merits of the upcoming bout and the odds soon underwhelmed me.

I slipped away cradling a glass of Harry’s finest, which proved in fact to be a Trueborn first-growth Bordeaux, with a texture and nose that knocked my saloon-keeper socks off. They say a wine’s first duty is to be red, and its second is to be a Bordeaux, and over the years and the planets, I’d come to agree.

I doubted that I could ever be comfortable with high rolling, but I wished that Kit could have been here with me to share this moment of gawking at how the other half lived. Until I realized that she
was
the other half. She had probably spent spring breaks in places like this on Edwin’s coin, with her poison-ivy-league friends, who, if they were here now, would be sniggering at the uncultured rube what brung her. Regardless of how much he had taught himself about Bordeaux and about life.

I stepped out past the glass windows into the open, now dark, night air, and looked down into the Coliseum.

Funhouse Sporting Club Coliseum seated fifty thousand spectators in a single-purpose, circular amphitheater with steep sides that gave it the proportions of a bucket, rather than a bowl like a Trueborn football stadium. The seats that tiled the bucket’s sides were upholstered in arterial blood red. The bucket’s bottom was not solid, but the one-hundred-yard-diameter circular surface of a tank of gin-clear salt water that continued down to a depth of four hundred feet, and glistened beneath the Coliseum lights in a turquoise shade like a Trueborn’s backyard pool.

Already, only a spatter of red marked empty seats, and crowd buzz echoed up off the still and empty water.

Although the water was still and empty, the crowd was hardly unentertained.

In the open air above the tank the biggest and brightest jumbholo in the Human Union projected other contests live from venues across Funhouse.

The current feed was full-contact titanopod racing from an affiliated track I had glimpsed from the limo, thirty miles from this Coliseum. The image and sound were first-class. It was as though the race was really going on below me.

Full-C T’pods don’t resemble the docile grazers I had glimpsed from the limo earlier. As I watched, two titan stallions, one black with crimson armor, one palomino with blue, broke ahead of a pack of six and thundered down the home stretch. Two jockeys rocked side by side atop the rolling shoulders of each titan, clutching its reins. All four of the forward jocks fought to keep their respective mounts focused on the finish line as the neck-and-neck beasts crashed shoulders, staggered apart then crashed again. Each titan dipped his great head as he galloped, fighting to gore the other with the spikes studding his headpiece and shoulder plates. Each animal already bled down its flanks and legs, and blood spray spattered all the jocks in crimson, from boots to helmets. White saliva foamed from each titan’s bridled muzzle.

Crowd roar welled up loud now, and thousands of spectators in the Coliseum stood and shrieked. They were the ones who had suddenly realized that a mount on which they held a ticket was coming home to win, or at the very least to place.

The third jock on each titan was called the croup, because he or she rode atop the titan’s upper butt, which on Earth horses was called the croup. For most of the race the croup’s job was to apply the whip as necessary to motivate his titan.

At the moment, however, each titan’s croup was applying the whip with homicidal vigor not to his mount, but to his opposite number.

Violence was part of the sport, and acrobatic croups good with whip and spiked boots were crowd favorites. The added animal-on-animal and jock-on-jock contact dimensions made conventional horse racing seem flat, according to the Funhouse Gaming Authority.

As I watched, the palomino’s croup snatched the tip of his opponent’s whip in both hands, and heaved backward like he was in a tug of war.

The black’s croup was jerked from his saddle, tumbled twenty-six feet to the track, and, just as he got to his knees, was pummeled into bloody paste as the closely following pack thundered over him.

The crowd fell silent. Well, half of it did. Not because they had witnessed a fellow human’s quick and violent death. Mayhem was part of the draw here. But because a titan that came home with fewer than three jocks up was disqualified. The silent fans’ sure win or place tickets had become worthless.

The palomino crossed the line, his jocks pumping their fists in triumph, and thousands cheered. The black limped home, bleeding barrels from a shoulder gore. He would be put down. It was, apparently, very exciting. It was also insane.

Thum-thum-thum
.

The titanopod race image winked off.

The crowd buzz rose in pitch and volume at the sound of sky crane impellers approaching in the distance. The Coliseum’s now-open retractable roof existed not so much to let nice weather enter but to let competitors enter with aerial flair.

The two sky cranes, one carrying the main event’s champion and the other the challenger, drew close, then began orbiting the Coliseum just beyond the glow of the lights.

Each contestant dangled beneath one of the sky cranes in a sling, wrapped in a protective hydration jacket studded with flashing colored lights. Gold for the champion, crimson for the challenger. Simultaneously, the crowd clapped and stomped to ancient Trueborn tribal chants about who would rock whom, so loudly that the Coliseum shook.

The look was like what fans saw when advertising aerostats orbited Trueborn football stadiums during games. The objective here, however, was not to peddle beer, but to whip up the crowd and increase the handle, and it was working so well that I was getting a headache.

I went back inside and sat beside Ya Ya.

“Which one did you bet the farm on, Ya Ya?”

“Underdog.”

I turned and eyed the tote board. At the moment, the challenger’s odds were one hundred twelve to one against. “Yikes! Is it smart to bet the ’dog?”

Ya Ya shrugged. “No money made playing favorites. I was you, I bet everything you got in world on the ’dog.”

I shook my head. The only things I had left in the world were my hope of seeing Orion again and my hope of patching it up with Kit, and the odds of either were too slim to buy me a ticket. Besides, I had already tried betting everything on the ‘dog on Funhouse once.

During my previous, long-ago layover on Funhouse, four of us skinheads went to The Bugs, because they were Funhouse’s cheapest pari-mutuel alternative. We bet everything we had on the underdog, because we were advised that there was no money to be made playing favorites. We adopted this strategy because we needed to win big, so we could afford to get properly laid. A handjob didn’t last long.

Fun facts from the stand-up card for beginners that was on our table that day: Bugs breathe through openings like portholes down the sides of their exoskeletons, which is inefficient, so air with a higher oxygen content benefits bugs even more than it benefits higher animals. Earth’s fossil dragonflies breathed air with nearly double the oxygen concentration of today’s Earth air, and grew bigger than carrier pigeons. What does that have to do with going to The Bugs?

Funhouse’s scorpions and spiders didn’t just grow bigger than Earth scorpions and spiders, they grew as big as Earth crocodiles and grizzly bears. The Bugs were also lightning fast, and tactically more sophisticated than one expected when they faced off against one another in a cage and fought to the death.

Here’s a tip, though: It says on the how-to-bet-for-beginners card that tiger-stripe scorpions
can
go to their left. But if you bet on that you will never get laid.