It rarely rains on Mars. Most of the domes are equipped with the requisite machinery, most of the caverns too, but only Estrid makes use of it on a regular basis, the populace voting every now and again to determine the coming rainfall, averaging a light shower every two to three weeks, a few hours of storm per year or so. It’s not Estrid, but it’s raining anyway when she arrives, the city cold and slick in the unhurried night. The ship is old and illegal when it crests into the larger of the two spaceports of Cartagh, its clearances as fictive as her identity. The ship is ferrying salvage, salvage vastly more illicit than a few fraudulent certificates, salvage worth millions of solars to the right buyer. Salvage of the sort that has paid for the body she has carried with her for nearly a decade now and will pay for the body waiting for her in the clinic nestled somewhere deep in the folds of this rain-wet city. But the trip was a condition of her last victory; fairly bartered, fairly won, it is hers by right and pain.
• • •
The Moon is grey; Mars, red. Let these name the colours of her life, her thirty-two years lived over three worlds. The Moon is where she sheds the prologue of a meaningless childhood, where she watches the devastation pour down on Earth for months and months, waiting, until the overtaxed volunteers ladling out her meals finally tell her that she has no family, not anymore. The ships are coming up all the time, lives filling out the refuges, the sanctuaries, the crumbling nations of Earth sending up what remains of their battered beleaguered populations as the blue world and cradle of all life devours itself in its last insensate spasms. The Moon is where she learns to steal, to snatch, to lift, to work with quick fingers and quicker wrist in the space between two breaths. The Moon is where she learns to fight, to use tooth and fist and nail to safeguard her petty treasures. And when all her ferocity proves no security against the snitch and she is caught once too often, the Moon is what takes her in, gives her another, cleaner bed, warmer food. The Moon is what gives her patron and protector, pride and purpose and power. The Moon is what gives her the name that she will carry like a secret through all her years, when she overhears the grownups talking about her. “Hands,” one says, “like rabbits. The fastest fucking pair of them you’d be lucky to see.” Rabbit-hands, her child-self thinks, and is pleased, and she can still remember what it was like to be pleased with that accidentally caught scrap of praise when they put her in another body and move her from the picking of pockets to the incipient and lucrative world of the fighting pits.
• • •
The emergence of the famous fatal/lethal distinction has recognisably served as something of an informal metric for the diffusion and assimilation of somatology into common (Anglophone) culture (see Hong 2108 for a fuller, although somewhat dated account). Where fatal prior to the twenty-second century generally denoted circumstances and conditions leading to death (a fatal mistake) and lethal instead the possibility or capability of causing death (a lethal dose), the introduction of total somatic reintegration as an emergency measure for otherwise unsurvivable traumata is understood to have provoked their respective instances of semantic drift, as it became necessary to demarcate massive, albeit no longer necessarily life-threatening damage to the body, and irreparable damage to the brain. Thus, a lethal blow, weapon, or incident became one that destroyed the body and rendered the somatic vessel incapable of future occupation, whereas its fatal counterpart would be one resulting in brain death, irrespective of somatic damage. Phrases such as fatal weapon—an awkward construction prior to the distinction as fatal was not usually employed as a predicate of agency—thus entered the English lexicon as a comfortable means of discussing, inter alia, certain armaments of often biotechnological origin designed to target the invaluable brain, with little or no regard for the body it inhabited. The word mortal, originally subtly distinct from both, remains so, although recent work by sociolinguists (Behera 2119, Hansen 2124) seems to suggest yet another case of the inbelt/outbelt divide.
—Marianne K. Loughlin, Descartes’ Revenge: One Hundred Years of Somatology, 2026–2126
• • •
Her third time in the circle, and her steel is still old steel from an old Earth, bartered from the markets, fixed up by an artisan, the hilt worn and firm in her grip, a good long fighting knife. Serviceable, not special. His is some brutally sharp variant of glass, thought up by a genius in the Belt, manufactured on Mars, shipped out to the Moon. Something like obsidian, except not black but the deepest blue, something with the cutting edge of glass subtracted of brittleness. She could try to break it, wear it down on the defensive, parrying again and again—but no. There is—there was—a scar she is never not surprised to realise is gone, a scar on her lost native skin, two inches once slanted over her left collarbone that reminds—reminded her of what glass knives are like now. She is content with her steel.
She steps inside first, a shirt, leggings, boots, training gear. His own is not much different, slightly looser pants and a faded shirt, but a belt too, which she recognises, elegant leather and a beautifully wrought buckle. The buckle bears the insignia of a different, not irrelevant organisation, and were it anywhere but this circle, were she to draw her steel on him anywhere but this inviolate circle it would serve as a herald of the wergild she would owe, a body paid for with her own slow suffering. But here, it is stripped of that significance, it is merely decoration, ornament. Here in this circumscribed arena nothing of consequence is allowed but yourself and your knife.
It starts easy enough. A jerk feinted here, a jolt there—minor gambits for which neither falls, and then he snaps forward, slices and misses as she weaves away, not even bothering with a counter. He snaps back, circling, always, always circling.
• • •
Every child in the system can tell you the name of the man who conquered death, the latter-day Prometheus, second Obatala, the Enki-come-again who took apart the human body and put it together with steel, not clay. He gave it the gift of not divine breath but captured lightning. Very few of those children can give you names of the women and men and alters who worked with him, alongside him—his colleagues and assistants and teachers. Fewer still could tell you the names of all those who took Argovich’s legacy and restored that softness of wet muscle, wrapped around the hard honeycomb of bone, all swathed in the seven layers of skin.
Hence the neologisms: cythetic, for Argovich’s original rebuilt carapace, and orthetic, for regrown meat and skeleton. It is orthetic bodies they throw into that charnel pit, it is flesh that bleeds under the dance of those knives, veins that split, blood that spills. Originally it was cyths, Homo mechanicus, pitted against itself, standard soldiers’ somatics contending ruthless for that cold acclaim, and it was once shattered circuitry leaking that ichor and electric life, but metal does not reward its inhabitants in the way tissue can, does not remould itself as protein will over day after day of relentless self-struggle. It does not spiral from strength to strength as sinew does, tearing and splitting and reknitting and reforming and reinforcing.
• • •
Still wary, he moves again, serpentine, a fast arm, faster than she would have thought, but her arm comes forward this time not to block but to slash into his exposed wrist. He catches himself, whips the arm back, waits a blink to see if she commits to the strike, and she does not. Back to circling.
She begins to understand, to see: he’s fast; she’s maybe a shade faster, but he has the reach with a half-head of height, more brute strength to command as well. If she has anything, it’s footwork, movement, something not exactly agility, not dexterity, but control, a discipline of her body, of and not just over the body, an instinctive knowledge of how to work the body and its knife with not just speed and power but precision.
He slices, a simple motion, lazy almost, and she dodges with equal ease. He slices again, wanting not the sweet shudder of impact but first blood at least, the first touch of red, the first tang of iron in the air. She denies him, her body flickering with his darting, thwarted blade, and then he presses forward, commits with enough of a lunge that she must either step away or commit herself; she steps away.
• • •
The knife held in an armoured and motorised limb is capable of as much as that limb can do, and that limb can do as much as it was designed and manufactured and assembled to do, but the knife held in the clasped fingers and creased palm of a poised arm is dependent on the strength with which it has been trained, and if that strength has limits they are asymptotes, because there can always be someone who has trained longer, trained harder; there can always be someone stronger, faster, someone better.
The steel body is not an athlete: it is an exhibition. This body of warm flesh and bright blood moves and breathes and breaks and remakes itself for those brief few moments in the pit, in the circle that sees knife against knife, the sum of all those solitary hours with nothing but self against self, the limit of this primate form met, met and mastered, again and again, until that someone stronger, that someone faster, that someone better is nobody but your vicious and victorious self.
• • •
If he is frustrated he does not show it. A twitched bluff she does not respond to. A quick cut of her own he easily avoids; just testing, playing with each other, hand and step and arm in perfect unity. He slashes at her, she ducks forward and tries for a low stab of her own. She is committed, and so when he evades her dive, he slices at where her face will be, and there is what they call the bell, the touched tone of knife against knife, blade meeting blade, steel kissing glass in that air and the small short tremor of impact along each hand and arm. Both pull back for thrust and counterthrust, slash and pivot, return and misstep—her one mistake, because she has not stepped back far enough, and now his knife changes direction faster than she would have believed; now, there is no way for her to avoid his darting length of darkened blue, no time to step back twice, and she can parry again but he will still be too close, will easily swerve and cut her arm open and she will lose her weapon. His knife cannot be denied blood so she offers it, gives it away in the one instinctual epiphany she does not question. She offers her free hand to take and absorb the knife, to swallow his honed glass. It cuts into her, punches past the soft flesh of her palm, through the spaces of the skeleton of her fingers, and in that bright shock of pain, she sees it, perfect as a wrapped gift. He’s too close now, and his knife is stabbed through her hand, lodged there, her hand already formed into a fist, too tight for him to retract his weapon. He’s too close, too eager: vulnerable. Her knife arcs forward, glacial with the knowledge, the certainty of her victory. The entry is like every other: a moment of resistance, then a warm wetness, deep as it goes till the hilt comes to its rest. He makes a sound, empty and familiar, some cousin of surprise. A moment, slow, silent, just the two of them with their minuet complete. He tries to make the sound again, cannot, collapses, lost.
• • •
There is no such thing as submission in a knife fight. There is such a thing as knockout, which is rare enough but not unknown in the circle, and its laws ascribe it the same significance as any other loss. You do not die in a knife fight, but if you could, if your body was forlorn and helpless and your irreplaceable brain housed in that reskull left ripe and ready for the killing harvest, then it is understood that you have lost, that you are lost. You are beyond helping and, effectively, dead. And then in that greyscale world where the blood sport thrives, where money circles and re-circles more than all the asteroidal orbits of the Belt taken together, they add one to the column you do not want them to touch, and you go home humiliated. Perhaps you don’t come again, perhaps you go back to whatever line of work in which you found yourself before, and you follow the scene with the smallest touch of wry regret. Or perhaps, you do return, hungrier, keener, with another body, another knife, another chance. She would not know, because she does not lose.
Before she leaves the Moon, she has a dozen fights and a dozen victories, twelve–zero. Twelve–oh, she repeats to herself at times, and it is what drives her, pushes her on when she is sick and dizzy and has already pushed her bruised borrowed body far beyond what she would have reckoned it could bear. It amazes her now, that third fight, all of them, really—her initial forays into the pit. The knife fight is a game of inches—which isn’t?—and whenever she recalls those early chapters of her career, those first few hard-fought hard-won bouts, she is astonished at the clumsiness, the rough naiveté of those contests. Trapping the knife is common now, or rather, the attempt is common. To forfeit blood for calculated gain, to use the body like a net in an echo of the Roman retiarii: every open avenue is exploited, every possible advantage in the circle is claimed. Her competitors are not just more dangerous physically, they are cleverer too, and the knife has evolved as well, has grown lighter, slightly broader. It has become less about stabbing and more about slashing, although nobody forgets what one good thrust can do. She knows, she listens, and she watches. She absorbs the tricks and the tactics, and she is still twelve–nothing, a dozen fights and a dozen victories.
And yet. She eats well, sleeps well, and lives well under the protection of her patrons, one of only two undefeated duellists on the Moon to boast double-digits. And yet. Nobody would say it to her, nobody would say it near her, but she knows. Twelve–oh, they all know, but those twelve are a dozen on the Moon, that zero, a Lunar immortality. On Mars, slow and stately Mars, they say, the best fighters fight with the best knives for the best crowds. On Mars, that red brilliance of the inner system. On Mars, it began: as soon as they inoculated the life of the brain from the death of its body, they grasped the possibility of the blood sport. On Mars they established the first rules, the first precepts and principles for the body and its knife, and it was on Mars that they first wagered their money and roared their approval when all their long waiting and patient watching culminated in that sudden spray of crimson glory.
The Moon is fine, they say, for talented amateurs who want to see where they might stand, for affluent dilettanti wanting to show off their custom orthetics. The Moon is fine for a few scrapes, fine if you want to rack up a few scars, fine if you don’t care about what it means, fundamentally, to stand there in that hallowed circle with nothing but a honed length of blade against the killing edge of another held in a hand that will do everything it can to cut you apart.
• • •
The feeling appears to be mutual. In Ellis Kinley’s well-known documentary, every attempted mention of the sport is met with disdain and contempt: “Nah, we don’t touch that shit, we don’t go near that shit,” says a trainer at one of Mars’s largest gyms. Yet when playing (illicitly circulating but not difficult to obtain) footage of the fights to practitioners of the closest relevant martial arts, Kinley was able to elicit something like collegial critique: “The fuck’s that stance?” Certainly some eskrimadors recognized elements of their own discipline in some of what they witnessed (“What an agaw [disarm]!”), even as they asserted their own superior distance from the blood sport: “It’s like kids, you know, just pretending, play-acting.” It is inconceivable the knife fighters train in total isolation from any established close-combat styles and traditions, especially those that already integrate the presence of bladed weaponry. But because the scene is so insular and its competitors emerge, without any apparent exception, from the soldiers and enforcers of the existing criminal syndicates, the prospect of any experienced eskrimador or pesilat entering its circles from the “legitimate” side seems unlikely, and so any serious assessment of this alleged superiority must be considered infeasible, at least for the time being. Whether or not the knife fights, then, are truly crucibles of humanity at its harshest and rawest, as its enthusiasts and even some popular discourses would seem to claim, or simply spectacles of thrillingly proscribed violence, yet remains to be seen.
—Yang Luo, Farsides of the Moon: Notes Toward an Anthropology of the Lunar Greyscale Economy
• • •
Mars is heavier than the Moon. This matters and does not matter. Gravity is an indifferent, implacable legislator, but all laws have their loopholes. There is a cocktail, or cocktails, rather, tailored for each environment. Originally developed for spaceflight, for all the maladies that come packaged under the wrapped gift bow of weightlessness, then since reformulated for all the homes and habitats outside the forsaken Earth. The treatments keep most of (organic) humanity within a relative set of anthropometric standards, mélanges of biomedical marvels that just about simulate a terrestrial environment for the growth and upkeep of extraterrestrial lives, such that the average Lune and the average Martian are both more or less identical with the now-lost figure of the average Terran. So nurture here will be equable, but nature will not: Mars is heavier than the Moon. The body can be made to grow identically, but it will never move identically. Anything which was thirty grams on the Moon is seventy on Mars. Everything weighs over twice as much here, everything including and especially herself, the new orthetic they put her in to begin all over again. She needs to unlearn everything about the Moon, everything about Lunar fighting, Lunar motion, unlearn everything about Lunar existence, and the new over one-third g is punishing. It is like a fist, a perpetual fist closed around herself, constricting, forestalling everything she wants to do. Where she could leap, she now must skip; where she could lunge, she now must step. She watches the fights, and not just the knife fighters, but the boxers and the fencers and the gymnasts. Everyone is slower here, she concludes. Everything happens with a gradualness she cannot believe until she finds her own body repeating it, repeating the languid viscidity that is the ineluctable condition of life in the world which will be her third and final home.
• • •
She makes progress on Mars, on her new body. Her patrons have a small presence in the cities she passes through, the spheres she moves between. Mostly she trains, increasingly if not entirely adapting to Mars. She does not regain the speed and agility of her second somatic, but grows satisfied with what she can accomplish with her third. Two standard years, she promised herself, at least two standard years before she would resume. Two standard years pass, and still she trains. Two standard years and eight standard months, and her first on Mars is a bold and assured young man whose arm she rends open a minute in, whose knife drops to the floor before she finishes him with two stabs to the chest. The second is a nimble woman who falls for a feint and bleeds out with a huge slash in her side. She has tried glass, titanium, all kinds of alloys, has even fought once with ceramic back on the Moon, but it is steel she returns to, and it is steel with which she begins to recreate her reputation, dispatching would-be corpse after would-be corpse in the circle, slicing and cutting and thrusting, easy wins on the red planet of Mars, the underworlds of its six capitals. They begin to talk about her, to study her. She carries the Moon with her, they say, the Moon on which she was twelve–zero. She fights in the style of the Moon, and more than fights—she wins in the style of the Moon. She is quick and deft and powerful. She is patient, trying nothing for an hour, until she finds a weakness, until she finds an opening. She does not commit until she can be sure. She will endure the wounds, trickling blood, ignoring light cuts and shallow gashes, learning and learning what she can before she moves, her arm snapping sudden and alive, surging forward like a snake, like a raptor, like one bright burst of brute lightning, and more often than not that one honest movement is all there is. They begin to talk about her, some begin to fear her, and some even begin to bet on her. She was undefeated on the Moon and went undefeated on Mars. She is faultless and unrelenting and invincible in the circle. Her patrons meet with their own peers for quiet talks, polite negotiations, agreeable terms and amenable conditions.
• • •
She comes nineteen–nothing to her greatest crowd on Mars. Fights happen in uncooperative spaces, empty warehouses in cheap light, flimsy chairs arrayed around a loop of metal thorns, caltrop wire specially sharpened. All those chairs are filled that night and a dozen unobtrusive optics are feeding live capture across encrypted networks to spectators scattered all over the planet and more than a few off it, none of which matters. The man across from her is twenty-three–zero with his own steel, which does not matter either, except as twenty-three points of data which might be formed into a pattern yielding a weakness. Her people have scraped together a million potential configurations of that data, scried through a thousand possible patterns and secured no such weakness. She, having watched all his available victories with a kind of restrained admiration, has come to more or less the same verdict. No doubt the reverse is true, that they have looked through her own fights, as much of them as they could have got, almost certainly even gone offworld to pluck what might be plucked from her Lunar history. She does not know if their reconnaissance has revealed a vulnerability. She will know when they begin, when it begins, her eighth fight on the red world, when she is once again Lady Luna, Face of the Moon, Selene and Máni and Chang’e, incarnate and incarnadine avatar of all those deities and divinities dreamt up of that pale disc circling a lost planet. When either his blade or her knife spills lethal blood, when there is a victory or a death, a victory and a death, witnessed and agreed.
• • •
It rarely rains on Mars; it’s raining when she dies. In the slender hours of a drizzled twilight, under the first signs of an ascendant sun in the climart of the great domed city of Sarraf, she steps out from her apartment, twenty-seven–zero, the finest knife fighter on two worlds. She is preparing for a run through the city, her regular morning circuit, when the door above her opens. The woman who has rented that room will never be traced nor found, and when she fires the silenced pistol three times—first at the back of the leg and then twice through the downed head—it will become a fifth small tattoo on her cythetic thigh. The woman is mildly sorry; she maintained a minor interest in the scene, enjoyed what she saw.
It will take some months before the body is released to another fabricated identity. A few weeks more until a bribe dislodges a trivial piece of evidence in an unresolved case out from the archives in which it would have otherwise been left to linger. They bury her with her knife on the Moon, a meaningless tombstone and a deserted service. Nobody visits her grave and gradually, she is forgotten. The fights go on.
• • •