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feet while you are awaiting your opponent’s shot, allowing your weight to be centered and enabling you to run for a ball in any direction.
    And Ugo employs this modified technique to blunt Corbière’s tactic of disguise with his improved anticipation and his more effective punishing groundies deep in the court that move the Breton back and forth on the court like a crazed and purposeless robot, or more precisely like one of those plastic grizzly bears at the amusement park shooting-gallery game with the glass porthole in his side that, when you shoot it in the porthole, howls and reverses direction abruptly and toddles off to the left instead of to the right until you hit him in the porthole again, in which case he howls and turns around abruptly and toddles off to the right again.
    And Ugo does not relent his furious attack and his artful panoply of shots until the final point is over, yet another miraculous drop shot that leaves Tristan Corbière glued to the baseline and gasping for air and the crowd erupting in wild applause and deafening cheers.
    The final score in favor of the Florentine maestro: 0-6, 1-6, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0.
    The two combatants meet and shake hands at the net and Giglio is thinking what an amazing comeback and could there possibly be a better way to prepare, physically and mentally, for the Juniors Grand Slam coming up in Paris and that first, ballyhooed meeting with American Jack Spade?
    After the awards ceremony, Giglio gets a call on his iMiniTelevideoPhone. It is from Gioconda, whose beaming face, smiling out from the apparatus, he has missed and whose sultry voice he is happy to be hearing again following a two-week absence.
    “Ciao, carissima! Dove sei?” Giglio asks.
    “Well, I’m right here up in the hills, in our favorite spot, you know? And I watched the entire match, every single, glorious point, right here on my TelevideoPhone. I could hardly wait to call you. Giglio, sono così orgogliosa, I am so proud of you, and of Ugo!”
    “ Grazie, cara. I’m so proud of him, too. Oh, Gioconda?”
    “Sì?”
    “Could you pick up some apples and pears for us?” Giglio says, holding aloft the glittering silver winner’s bowl.
    Gioconda smiles into the phone that Mona Lisa smile. “Ti amo,” she says, but in a different way than ever before, Giglio is thinking, and with a slightly different look in her eyes, a look that says, he is imagining, Mi manchi tanto, I miss you so.
    As Giglio walks back proudly to his beloved beat-up jalopy, Viola, he looks over at his Ugo. This lad who has, at this important Juniors tournament, accomplished a remarkable achievement: He has proven to the world, but more important to himself, that he is developing what might turn out to be the most beautiful game of tennis ever known to the human species and that he can, even this early on and under the direst of situations, play with extreme grace under extreme pressure and so, now, in the year of our Lord two thousand and forty-five, of all the players on the planet who are eighteen years old or less, he, Ugo Bellezza, a mere fifteen-year-old, is the best.
    The best, that is, with the possible exception of Jack Spade.

6
    Sinister
    HAD CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS GROWN UP in south Florida instead of in Genoa, Italy, he might not have been so eager to conclude that the world is round.
    The area in and around Palm Beach Gardens is flat. Mind-numbingly flat. So flat in fact that if you stand in the middle of PGA Blvd. on a moderately clear day and look east toward the horizon and really, really strain your eyes, you can see, way there in the distance, Genoa.
    It is April 2045, and Jack Spade is fifteen, and Florida is being its usual muggy and buggy self. The Sunshine State is bulging with people, 59 million of them, metastasizing primarily from descending northern cells, mostly elderly ones, at an alarming rate of nearly two million a year. The average age in the state is now eighty-eight, paralleling the ever-growing