A Planet for Rent by Yoss Page A

something or someone stopped them from playing, it would be like keeping them from breathing. Their life is about getting better and better at it. For them, no training is ever hard enough. If Gopal ever wakes up with the unlikely idea of going a little bit easier on the team, Jan and Lev will probably protest and accuse him of treason against Earth or something like that.
    Monomania seems to be an essential condition for becoming a good Voxl player. At least if you’re human.
    Sometimes I wonder whether I’m still me. Whether I haven’t gone crazy, sacrificing my whole life to this game...
    Sometimes I also wonder what I’m doing here.
    But much more often I’m amazed at myself. At how far I’ve come, starting from as far down as I did. In five years, from petty street pickpocket to high-performance athlete. From failure to triumph. From anonymity to fame.
    If my mother could see me now. Her always telling me I was a bum, a lowlife criminal, no good for anything but Body Spares. And my father. I hardly remember him; lost in space with his homemade starship, trying to make an unlawful escape. Running away from poverty when I was just two...
    Or María Elena, the first girl I made love with. At sixteen I was more scared than she was, and she was eleven. She was running away from boarding school to be with me. Where could she be now? Probably drowning in the swamp of social work. An orphan girl doesn’t have too many options. At least her physique should help her: she was always pretty, and you could tell she was going to have a great body. She was already practically a little woman at eleven: tall, slim, coalblack hair, cinnamon skin, jet-black eyes.
    My mother, who kept telling me about my future in Body Spares, was the one who ended up there because of a fight with her neighbors. She always had a bad temper, and in the end the cheap rum had made it worse. By month two she was dead; an Auyar picked her to be his “horse.” But thanks to the measly enough death benefit I got from the Planetary Tourism Agency, I was able to buy my first set of Voxl gear, second-hand but functional. And I started playing.
    It was an all or nothing bet. Like my whole life has been. An orphan boy doesn’t have too many options...
    Yes, I’ve been lucky. But I need to keep on being lucky.
    I kiss my cross with the image of the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre, blessed by Cardinal Manuel Castro himself. When he gave it to me a week ago, he said I was the pride of his diocese and my people’s hope.
    Protect me, dear Virgin. Keep my rebounds on target and my throws perfect. Free me from all wounds and give victory to your most faithful son: me, Daniel Menéndez. You, who can do everything...
    The pilot drives the aerobus languidly. We pass between two walls of floating hologram ads, grazing them. We could have flown straight through them without trouble, but that would have meant dealing with a hailstorm of complaints from the advertising companies. Not even Earth’s heroes are above commercial laws.
    Past the titanic holoposters, there it is. All ours.
    There’s supposedly room for three quarters of a million people in the Metacolosseum of New Rome. Six levels. Sixty gigantic holoscreens. Enough airconditioning for a mid-sized orbital city. Entrances large enough to let in small asteroids.
    Today it’s full to bursting. The tickets for this game are always sold out nearly a year in advance.
    We float through the main entrance, above the sea of people, dotted here and there with silvery bubbles. The force fields of the prime box seating of the richest and most paranoid xenoids. Other extraterrestrials, more confident about their tourist immunity, prefer to risk getting their data cards lifted in order to enjoy the jubilant atmosphere of the human throng. The authentic local color. The incomparable emotion of being one more person in the audience at the Voxl game of the year—Voxl, the galactic sport, as the reporters and advertisers like to