• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2388 0

by the beginning of another race. The races were fast, but not anywhere near two and a half times as fast as Terra’s, despite the gravity difference. It was the same problem as the high jumpers’ plants, but continuous through the race: the runners took off with such acceleration that they had to stay very low to keep from bounding too high away from the track. In the sprints they stayed canted forward throughout, as if desperately trying to avoid falling on their faces, their legs pumping furiously. In the longer dashes they finally straightened up near the end, and began to scull at the air as if swimming forward from an upright position, their strides longer and longer until they seemed to be leaping foward like one-leg-at-a-time kangaroos. The sight reminded Maya of Peter and Jackie, the two speedsters of Zygote, running the beach under the polar dome; on their own they had developed a similar style.

Using these techniques, the winner of the fifty-meter dash ran the race in 4.4 seconds; the winner of the hundred in 8.3; the two hundred in 17.1; and the four hundred in 37.9; but in each case the balance problems engendered by their speeds seemed to keep them from a full sprint the way Maya remembered seeing it in her youth.

In the longer races, the running style was a graceful bounding pace, similar to what they had called the Martian lope back at Underhill, where they had tried it without much success in their tight walkers. Now it was like flight. A young woman led most of the ten-thousand-meter race, and she had enough in reserve to kick hard at the end, accelerating throughout the entire last lap, faster and faster until she gazelled around the track only touching down every few meters, lapping some of the other racers who seemed to toil as she flew past; it was lovely; Maya shouted herself hoarse. She held to Michel’s arm, she felt dizzy, tears sprang to her eyes even as she laughed; it was so strange and so marvelous to see these new creatures, and yet none of them knew, none of them!

She liked to see women beating men, though they themselves did not seem to remark it. Women won slightly more often in long distances and hurdles, men in the sprints. Sax said that testosterone helped with strength but caused cramping eventually, hampering long-distance efforts. Clearly most of the events were a matter of technique in any case. And so one saw what one wanted, she thought. Back on Earth— but these people would have laughed if she had started a sentence with that phrase. Back on Earth, so what? There had been all sorts of bizarre and ugly behavior back in the nest world, but why worry about that when a hurdle was approaching and another runner advancing in your peripheral vision? Fly, fly! She shouted herself hoarse.

At the end of the day the field athletes, finished with their events, cleared a passageway into the stadium and around the track; and a single runner jogged in, to sustained applause and wild cheers. And it was Nirgal! Starting hoarse already, Maya’s shouting was ragged, almost painful.

The cross-country racers had started at the southern end of Minus One that morning, barefoot and naked. They had run over a hundred kilometers, over the heavy corrugations of Minus One’s central moors, a devilish network of ravines, grabens, pingo holes, alases, escarpments and rockfalls— nothing too deep, apparently, so that many different routes were possible, making it as much an orienteering event as a run; but difficult all the way; and to come jogging in at four P.M. was apparently a phenomenal accomplishment. The next racer wouldn’t be coming in until after sunset, people said. So Nirgal took a victory lap, looking dusty and exhausted, like a refugee from a disaster; then he put on pants, and ducked his head for his laurel wreath, and accepted a hundred hugs.

Maya was the last of these, and Nirgal laughed happily to see her. His skin was white with dried sweat, his lips caked and cracking, hair dust-colored, eyes bloodshot. Ribby and wiry, almost emaciated. He gulped water from a bottle, drained it, refused another.