outlaw from that day on.
And now, I’m Captain of a pirate crew.
Alliea
Rob was an unlicensed boxer, I was his manager, as well as his lover, as well as his wife.
They were scary days. Boxing was a capital crime, thanks to the Cheo’s latest edict. I guess he was afraid that the enslaved masses of the Universe would be driven into revolution and dissent at the sight of two men dancing around a ring hitting clumps out of each other.
We travelled from planet to planet, and Rob would fight all challengers. He would fight two men in a single ring. He would fight women, he would even box with cyborgs, and beat them. He had an astonishing capacity to take physical punishment coupled with natural speed and grace and a remarkably fluid upper body. He was, some argue, one of the greatest boxers there has ever been.
His greatest fight was against Eduardo Munoz. Rob was already an acknowledged champion at the cruiserweight level, but Munoz was a superheavyweight, a bruiser, a sheer block of human rock with the power of pistons in his arms. In training sessions, Munoz would pound the heavy bag so hard that the dents could not be removed. He would practise punching on concrete walls. He routinely killed sparring partners, and only regular bribes prevented him from being charged with murder.
But Rob stepped up a weight division, bulked up, and fought like an angel. He slipped in and slipped out, ducked under Munoz’s sledgehammer blows, and threw so many powerful punches that the computer checker eventually lost count. Munoz had the heart and the wind cut out of him by Rob’s forensic dissection. By the end of fifteen rounds, Munoz could not raise his arms. So Rob pelted him with a thousand relentless punches before the final bell rang.
The fight went to Munoz. The fix was in. The crowd was in uproar. But Rob calmly challenged Munoz to an instant rematch. The battered champion had enough pride to accept the challenge. The two men stood in the ring. Rob lowered his guard. He beckoned Munoz on, inviting him to give his best shot. So Munoz threw his best punch. Rob took it head-on, without any attempt to duck. He absorbed the blow, letting the kinetic energy flow through his head and torso and legs into the canvas. And he rocked, and he swayed, but he did not fall.
Then Rob unleashed his counterpunch. He hit Munoz on the jaw, and the champion literally flew through the air, over the ropes, and landed on the three corrupt fight scorers. Two of them died, one of them was knocked unconscious. The referee – the only conscious member of the adjudication team – declared the fight in favour of Rob. We got a purse of $11 million. But we had to flee that night, pursued by angry gangsters.
Ah, what glorious days… Ironically, I had never liked boxing before meeting Rob. But I came to love the sport for its speed and beauty and camaraderie, and for the fact it breached the ultimate taboo. Brain damage. Any other extreme sport – sky diving, sabre fighting, alligator wrestling – offered dangers and injuries that could easily be remedied by a trip to the organ bank. But a single powerful punch could cause irreversible brain damage that couldn’t be patched up without altering the psyche, or losing whole batches of memories.
That was the buzz. Risk everything. Live for the moment.
At least, that was the appeal for me. For Rob, it was more basic; he simply loved the sport. He was a natural athlete, he trained remorselessly. He trained with hunting dogs, running with them over rugged terrain. He raced horses. He pulled tractors with ropes to improve his upper-body strength; he once swam an entire ocean to improve his stamina. And his reflexes were superior to those of the average spacejet pilot.
And boy, we made poetry in bed. Rob was the master of tantric, soul-shaking, buttock-trembling fucks. I was young, passionate, blonde then, and I had orgasms like supernovae. I will miss that. I know I’ll never feel such physical joy again.
We toured the outer galaxies with our boxing show. Rob would challenge space miners and martial artists, and they would fight five or six hours at a time, without gloves or padding, until they were covered in blood and blisters. Rob never lost.
He was my hero.
We made a lot of money, and we had a huge amount of fun.
Then I was raped by a space trooper, and Rob tracked him down and killed him. I was crazed, out of control, I wanted to kill the trooper’s squadmates, on the grounds that they must have known what their friend was going to do, and should have stopped him. But Rob said no, I was out of line, making accusations without evidence. He always had a strong sense of fair play. So I calmed down, and agreed to let it be.
Then the troopers sought us out, looking for revenge, talking big to anyone who would listen about how they were all going to rape me this time. So we let ’em come, then killed the whole fucking lot of them. And we went on the run. That’s how we hooked up with Flanagan and his crew.
It’s been a good life, until now.
Now Rob is dead. And I’m alone.
Let’s raise our glasses. To Rob.
Lena
I won’t sleep. That would be like death. So I endure my torment, at the hands of these wretched pirate scum.
I stand at one end of the room. I shuffle. One, step, at, a, time.
Five hours have passed. I am dehydrating. They’ve given me a tube, I suck greedily at it.
I can hear sounds outside my room. Singing. Celebrating. A wake, for their lost colleague.
I wish we’d killed them all. That thought is immoral. You shouldn’t…
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
Shuffle. One. Step. At.
Flanagan
“I hate the idea of doing this. I guess I must.”
Rob stands before us, sheepishly, his three-dimensional hologram image blinking at the camera.
“Alliea, you’re the best. I love you. The rest of you… Ah you’re a bunch of useless fucking losers. May you die shamed. May you choke on your beer. You’re alive and I’m dead, fuck the lot of you!”
We give a solid cheer to that.
“Sing with me, comrades.”
“There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun.
It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy.
And me, O God, for one.”
We join in the singing, raucous and loud. Alliea’s contralto soars high above us. She does a jazz riff with the blues melody.
Rob segues into a tech-hop number by Singularity, to a rhythm guitar backing laid down by me. He sings:
“Soul sister, lover, brother, mother, feel my
Feel my!
Feel it, hear it, blur it, murmur it, disinter it, whirr it, yeah that’s my spirit,
Heart and soul, got no control, takes its toll, got no goal, ain’t a whole,
Hate this world, spirit’s whirled, this dimension is unfurled,
