Read Online Steel Beach by John Varley - Free Book Online Page A

as they’re being formed.
    Necessity is the mother of invention. I slipped through the program book Brenda had left on her chair, found a blank page. Then I rummaged through my purse and found a blue pen I kept for hand corrections to hard copy.
     
    (File Hildy*next avail.*)(code Bloodsport)
(headline to come)
     
    There may be no evidence of it, but you can bet cave men had sporting events. We still have them today, and if we ever reach the stars, we’ll have sports out there, too.
    Sports are rooted in violence. They usually contain the threat of injury. Or at least they did until about a hundred and fifty years ago.
    Sports today, of course, are totally nonviolent.
    The modern sports fan would be shocked at the violence of sports as it existed on Earth. Take for example one of the least violent sports, one we still practice today, the simple foot race. Runners rarely completed a career without numerous injuries to knees, ankles, muscles, or spine. Sometimes these injuries could be repaired, and sometimes they couldn’t. Every time a runner competed, he faced the possibility of injury that would plague him for the rest of his life .
    In the days of the Romans, athletes fought each other with swords and other deadly weapons—not always voluntarily. Crippling injury or death was certain, in every match.
    Even in later, more “enlightened” days, many sports were little more than organized mayhem. Teams of athletes crashed into each other with amazing disregard for the imperfect skills of contemporary healers. People strapped themselves into ground vehicles or flying machines and raced at speeds that would turn them into jelly in the event of a sudden stop. Crash helmets, fist pads, shoulder, groin, knee, rib, and nose protectors tried to temper the carnage but by their mere presence were testimony to the violent potential in all these games.
    Did I hear someone protesting out there? Did someone say our modern sports are much more violent than those of the past?
    What a ridiculous idea.
    Modern athletes typically compete in the nude. No protection is needed or wanted. In most sports, bodily damage is expected, sometimes even desired, as in slash boxing. A modern athlete just after a competition would surely be a shocking sight to a citizen of any Earth society. But modern sports produce no cripples.
    It would be nice to think this universal non-violence was the result of some great moral revolution. It just ain’t so. It is a purely technological revolution. There is no injury today that can’t be fixed.
    The fact is, “violence” is a word that no longer means what it used to. Which is the more violent: a limb being torn off and quickly re-attached with no ill effects, or a crushed spinal disc that causes its owner pain every second of his life and cannot be repaired ?
    I know which injury I’d prefer.
    That kind of violence is no longer something to fear, because
    (discuss Olympic games, influence of local gravity in venues)
(mention Deathmatches)
(Tie to old medicine article?)(ask Brenda)
     
    I hastily scribbled the last few lines, because I saw Brenda returning with the popcorn.
    “What’re you doing?” she asked, resuming her seat. I handed her the page. She scanned it quickly.
    “Seems a little dry,” was her only comment.
    “You’ll hype it up some,” I told her. “This is your field.” I reached over and took a kernel of popcorn from her, then took a big bite out of it. She had bought the large bag: a dozen fist-sized puffs, white and crunchy, dripping with butter. It tasted great, washed down with the big bottle of beer she handed me.
    While I was writing there had been an exhibition from some children’s slash-boxing school. The children were filing out now, most of them cross-hatched with slashes of red ink from the training knives they used. Medical costs for children were high enough without letting them practice with real knives.
    The ringmaster appeared and began hyping the main event of