I knew the Peruvian would be trouble from the moment he appeared on the tournament floor. He seemed to hover an inch above the polished hardwood, coiled and ready to spring. He was heavily muscled, dark, hairy — the quintessential kick-ass karate player.
Armando Ruiz. Mongo, his enemies called him, though never to his face.
I wasn’t likely to spar him until at least the quarter-finals. A lot could happen between now and then, but the way things looked, Mongo was the competitor most likely to steal my shot at the trophy.
I’d already defeated my first opponent; my second match was half an hour away. I had an opportunity to devote full attention to Ruiz as he stepped into the ring and exchanged bows with a sturdy, Nordic Shito-ryu player.
He scored a kill in eight seconds.
The match consumed so little time I had to replay it in my head to fully grasp it. Mongo had charged forward, punches flying one after the other, erasing the Viking’s powerful defense as if it had been made of smoke. Three, four, five potent impacts to the face and the Viking logged off, leaving empty floor behind.
The referee raised Ruiz’s arm and declared him the winner. The audience roared. The Peruvian waved at the bleachers, seemingly intoxicated by the noise. The stadium bulged to overflowing, attesting to the increasing popularity of vr combat arts. And why not? Not since the days of gladiators had sport combat been to the “death,” and there was no such thing as a poor seat. Though the figures I saw seemed to extend up to the rafters, every spectator experienced the tournament as if from front row center.
Mongo strutted out of the ring, joining the contingent from South America. After the mandatory sixty-second delay, the loser logged back on in a fresh surrogate. The Viking, though now whole and uninjured, shook his head as if dazed and wandered off to the end of the tournament hall, where the consolation rounds would begin. The crowd mocked him.
Beside me, Mr. Callahan ran his fingers through his mop of intensely black hair. “First boxer I’ve seen at a wuko event this season,” he commented dryly.
At tournaments sanctioned by the newly reestablished World Union of Karate Organizations, contestants were supposed to be karateka, testing their skill against others of their kind. Ensuring that had been a problem long before the advent of full-scale virtual reality conferencing. Now it was worse. All sorts of opportunists were flocking to bask in the glory and prize money, including those who had scarcely seen the inside of a dojo.
I’d studied Ruiz’s record after the contestant list had been issued — just as he no doubt had checked mine. The Peruvian did have a black belt, but it was a hastily awarded sho dan from some backwater South American kenpo school known for its loose standards. Winner of dozens of boxing matches, the man had ridden the karate tournament circuit less than two months, just long enough to qualify for single A class. Now he’d come up to northern California thinking to walk over the players accessing the prestigious San Francisco vr node.
Mongo was a fake. A cheat. He diminished us all.
“Think you can beat him?” Callahan asked.
The grandmaster could answer that better than I. I figured it had to be a trick question, a teacher-to-student moment.
“I don’t know.”
Callahan smiled. Apparently that was the correct reply. He leaned close and said conspiratorially, “Think of it . . . as a challenge.”
o0o
I won the remaining elimination rounds. I’d figured I would. The players who faced me were good, but their moves were transparent. The important thing was not to think about Mongo while I was in the ring with others, and I succeeded. I’d always been able to focus during a match.
Ruiz won as well. He backed one opponent up against the perimeter of the ring. The invisible wall, uncrossable to contestants during a match, served as his ally. Despite all the running away the other guy did, Mongo took a mere twenty-seven seconds for the kill. The next competitor’s fighting technique bought him two solid kicks, but in the end he lasted no longer.
Three opponents out in less than thirty seconds each. I’d never done that well. Ruiz was radiating self-confidence. But I didn’t tremble as I entered the ring.
“Go get ’im, Fearless,” called my dojo-mate, Keith Nakayama.
“Fearless! Fearless! Fearless!” shouted the crowd. I appreciated the support, but I made myself ignore them all. It was time to concentrate. Mongo swaggered into position. We bowed.
“Hajime!” the referee shouted, back-pedalling out of the way.
Ruiz charged forward, cocking his fist at his right side, left hand extending to brush away any block I might raise in his way. It was the same attack that had overwhelmed his previous opponents.
Side-stepping, I planted a roundhouse kick to his solar plexus. He grunted, momentarily dropping his guard. I took the opening to his face. Blood exploded from his nose as my fist landed, staining both our gis as well as the referee’s shirt.
He staggered back. I chased him. Wrong move. He surprised me with a right hook.
Stars flickered across my field of vision. My ears rang. Suddenly I knew what I was up against. Nobody should have been that fast or hard with their fists. I resisted the urge to close in — my normal inclination. I circled, keeping him at kicking distance.
He wanted none of it. Blood pouring from his nose, he sucked air through his mouth and moved in, trying to put a stop to me before I got lucky. His knuckles battered against the bones of my arms.
Escaping to the left, I slammed a side kick into his lower thigh. He cried out and pitched to the ground. Good enough. I’d missed the knee I’d been aiming for, but the muscles of Ruiz’s leg were spasming so much from the impact, he couldn’t stand.
I swept forward, raising my foot to crush his throat.
Too slow.
His good leg lashed out. Instantly I felt as if I’d landed on a spear. My groin and then my entire abdomen clenched. I folded up and tried to roll away — anything to dismiss the pain.
Ruiz tripped me. I fell to my hands and knees, and somehow a moment later he was crouching over me. He landed a hammer strike on my left kidney.
My diaphragm muscles locked up, taking my wind. The Peruvian slammed his fist down again. The pain sharpened to an unbelievable level—
And suddenly I was no longer in the arena.
The pain vanished. Time held motionless. Around me loomed the familiar walls of my room at home. A view of the tournament filled the videoscreen on my desk. I saw my surrogate on hands and knees, Ruiz raising his fist for a third blow. The referee leaned over us, his expression a study in concentration.
The neural jack at the back of my neck itched. A warning light on my virtual reality deck was flashing: I had one point three seconds to reengage the link to my surrogate or it would dissolve.
I gripped the arms of my wheelchair and thumbed the switch—
Back in my vr body, a malicious agony greeted me, but I couldn’t give in to it. If I permitted Ruiz to land the third hammer-strike, the pain would once again surpass the safety threshold and drive me out. I rolled—
His fist glanced off my side. I kept twisting my body, wrapping my legs around Mongo’s hips: Scissor throw. We ended up tangled together. I grabbed his arms and the match degenerated into a wrestling contest. That gave me some of the recovery time I needed.
“Yame!” shouted the referee. “Start over.”
Mongo seemed reluctant to disengage, but he wiped the torrent of blood from his upper lip and stalked back to his starting place.
I got up slowly, partly to earn even more of a respite, and partly because I was incapable of rising quickly. My breath came in rapid snatches — that was all the fierce tightness in my midsection allowed. Judging from the burn in my groin, at least one of my testicles was herniated.
I dared not delay too much. The referee would disqualify me. I straightened as much as possible, facing Ruiz at regulation distance.
The timeclock loomed huge in the background. Eighty-seven seconds left in the match. Ruiz glared, daring me to fight hard. If neither of us killed or drove the other from his surrogate in the remaining time, we’d both be declared losers and be ineligible to continue to the next round. I guess he figured that in my condition I might play defensively, ruining his chances out of spite. The Peruvian wanted his victory.
“Rei!” the referee cried. We bowed to each other once again.
“Hajime!”
Ruiz hurtled forward, eager to seal his triumph. I maintained a squinting, defeated expression until he was committed to his attack.
I kicked. This time I didn’t miss his knee. Bone gave way beneath my foot. The jagged end of Ruiz’s femur, broken just above the joint, jutted through skin and pant leg.
As Ruiz collapsed, I staggered back. Loose, rocky objects rolled in my mouth and it dawned on me that while I’d kicked him, he’d punched me. I spat the teeth out and moved in. Mongo was vulnerable now, occupied with the pain of his destroyed limb, perhaps even driven out of his vr body altogether. I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip away.
I shaped my thumb and forefinger into a pincer shape — koko, or tiger-mouth — and struck, capturing the Peruvian’s larynx and ripping it from his throat.
He gurgled. His body spasmed. Blood gushed from the hole between his jaw and clavicle. Then he vanished as the software logged him off.
Alone in the ring with the referee, I straightened up. All I had to do to cement my victory was stride to my starting place and allow my arm to be raised. But the room was spinning. My head felt swollen to five times normal size. Mongo’s earlier blow had done more than liberate teeth. It was threatening to become a knockout punch after the fact. The anguish from my groin and kidney area also demanded that I give up.
Hell with that. I staggered across the distance. My arm went up. The applause from the gallery began. “Log off and reboot,” I sighed gratefully.
My vr deck accepted the cue. My battered surrogate dissolved. For an instant I was back in my wheelchair at home, then I rematerialized at the tournament. Gone was the pain, the blood, the exhaustion.
The cheering reached a crescendo. I must admit it felt good. But I waved to the spectators strictly for the sake of form. Tonight there was only one person whose approval mattered.
I headed for the group from my dojo, who stood dressed in gis at the periphery of the floor.
“Congratulations, Fearless,” they called.
“On to the semi-finals!” added Keith.
I nodded, smiling, and turned apprehensively to Mr. Callahan, who waited slightly apart from the others, hands folded across his chest.
“Block your face, block your face, block your face,” the grandmaster stated as if reciting a mantra. He was interrupted by a torrent of boos from the crowd. We turned to see Mongo, logged into a fresh surrogate, standing on the ring. He was staring at me as if I were some kind of Inca king somehow resurrected from the dead. Whirling, he stalked off toward the South American contingent.
“Still can’t believe he lost,” Keith chirped.
I laughed. Soon I forgot the incident entirely as sensei began advising me regarding my next match. A warm, satisfied glow suffused like liquor through my body. Though Callahan’s comments might sound like criticism, I knew better. I hoped I wasn’t grinning like a fool.
Hours later I won my category, clearing the way for advancement to double A level. I was walking on air by that time. I lingered as long as possible, enjoying the congratulations, and left with the stragglers.
It was always difficult to abandon the vr environment. Had the deck not been hardwired to prevent constant use, and were the access fees not quite so high, I might have spent ninety percent of my waking hours ambling around in my surrogate. You would, too, if your real body were like mine.
A miasma of aromas cascaded into my nostrils as my sense of smell, held in abeyance while in the virtuality, regained its natural place in my perceptions. The faded traces of fried onions drifted from the kitchen, the redolence of unflushed toilet from down the hall, and closer to home my terrycloth sweatsuit reminded me that I needed to throw it in the laundry basket soon. I stretched muscles grown stiff from my long sit in the wheelchair, released the restraining straps and neural jack, and wheeled into the bathroom for an overdue draining of my bladder. I didn’t waste time with the reflection in the bathroom mirror.
I rolled down the long hallway toward the kitchen and living room. “Dad?” I called.
Silence. I searched for a note on the fridge. Nothing.
“I won, Dad,” I said to the air.
Oh, well. All in all, I didn’t have it so bad. Dad might not have approved of my interest in combat arts — “blood sports,” he called them — but at least he let me pursue them, and had even before I’d turned eighteen.
He’d never been that indulgent with my older brother Bennett, but Bennett wasn’t a double amputee. Especially not a double amputee as a result of Dad’s drunk driving.
After a snack, I returned to my room and ordered my vr deck to replay my last match. On the videoscreen a lean, mean, fighting-machine version of myself took on Ruiz. My moves looked worse in playback than they’d seemed to me at the time. Mongo’s looked better, especially the punch that had scattered my teeth.
Ruiz had done it so effortlessly. He hadn’t even thrown a full karate-style strike, but simply extended his hand forward ten or twelve inches at hyperspeed.
It fascinated me. I should have been a good boy and exercised my real body on my physical therapy equipment, but I kept studying the video, trying to devise strategies that would help me out next time I faced a skilled boxer. I couldn’t afford weaknesses. I was on my way. Thomas Callahan himself was watching me. Thomas Callahan, reigning champion of the Tokyo International Tournament of Karate Masters in the unrestricted category. The big cheese of the big event. He wasn’t just tolerating my presence in his classes, he wasn’t just humoring me. He was paying attention. Two of his senior students had even told me that he was grooming me as a successor. It wouldn’t be too many more years before he’d have to retire. No one, naturally, would ever beat him in the ring, but after all, he was eighty-two years of age. What better way to go out than have one of your own students assume your place?
I wasn’t there yet, but I would be. Double A play next season, then triple A, then the master’s circuit. A lot of players stood in my way, but I knew I could beat them eventually.
The front door opened. “I’m in here, Dad,” I called. Engrossed in my big plans with my eyes pegged on a slow motion version of the match, I barely paid attention to the footsteps coming down the hallway.
And then my head was spinning, my cheek swelling, and blood was trickling down to my chin. My wheelchair spun around.
Mongo loomed over me, teeth bared, his real body as intimidating as his surrogate. “No cripple makes a fool out of me,” he said in Spanish, and struck.
My head slammed into the chair’s headrest. Teeth — real teeth — bounced off my tongue and palate.
My reflexes, conditioned by my vr fights, kicked in. I threw up a block as Ruiz’s second punch came in. My technique and timing were perfect, and my real-life arm was nearly as strong as that of my surrogate, but it didn’t mean much. Without legs, I couldn’t back off, couldn’t veer enough. I blocked two punches, missed, blocked the fourth, and then my focus was gone.
Boom — there went my nose. The spray blinded me. A groan spilled out of my mouth; I couldn’t help it.
I kept expecting the safety feature to log me off. All I could feel was pain, pain, pain. Overriding it came the stench and taste of blood, reminding me that this was no virtuality. There was no escape.
“How does it feel, cripple?” Ruiz hissed. “Think you can win this one?”
Still he battered me. My hands fell limp — I’d lost the power to keep them raised. There was a spiked ball-bearing slamming back and forth on the inside of my skull.
He wasn’t going to stop, I realized. Mongo had left the rational world behind. He meant to kill me. He was holding back his strength, prolonging my suffering, but he was going to keep punching until I died.
I don’t know how many times his fists crashed into me after I came to understand just what kind of danger I was in. Adrenaline alone was maintaining what little shred of consciousness I had left. I felt myself sinking down a funnel. Following me was the echo of my own sobbing and a distinct blast very much like a gunshot.
o0o
I woke up slowly, through a haze of pain. The odor of antiseptic and bleached bed linens wormed through the gauze and bandages covering my nose. My bloated tongue pressed uncomfortably against the stumps of my teeth. I recognized the pinch of an IV tube feeding into my left arm. Wires held my lower jaw together.
I opened my eyes. Dad rose from a chair beside the hospital bed and leaned over me. In the far corner sat a pasty-skinned, gray-haired man I didn’t recognize.
“Kaiser Hospital,” my father explained. “You’ve been unconscious about eighteen hours.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. The woozy feeling had to be from the painkillers, I decided. Whatever they had me on, it wasn’t enough.
“Mongo?” I mumbled. Between the wired jaw, the swollen lips, and mashed tongue, I sounded like Jabba the Hutt without subtitles. The old man was first to understand.
“Your father was napping in his bedroom. The noise woke him,” the stranger said. His voice tickled my memory. Maybe one of the hoarse old senior citizens from the physical therapy clinic?
“I shot him in the ass,” Dad said.
I blinked, wondering if this was the same man who had raised me. “You had a gun?”
“I’ve had one since Desert Storm. I never said violence didn’t have a purpose.”
Live and learn. “He’s . . . alive?” I mumbled. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“Of course,” Dad replied. “In jail, booked for assault, battery, and attempted murder. You won’t have to worry about him. He’ll serve time, then he’ll be deported back to Peru. He’ll never be local enough to do this again.”
“And wuko has already banned him from tournament play forever, upon my prompting,” said the old man.
Now I knew where I’d heard the man’s voice before. “Sensei?”
“Yes.” Mr. Callahan climbed laboriously out of his chair, straightening up with arthritic awkwardness.
It was really him. He’d come all the way from San Francisco to my Sacramento home. I didn’t know which to feel: I was startled to see just how old and bent his real body was, even though I’d heard about it from veteran students. And I was damn proud that I mattered enough to deserve a bedside visit.
“Looks like I still have to work on that upper block,” I tried to joke.
The grandmaster smiled, reached out a gnarled hand, and squeezed my elbow. “Just get back into the tournament circuit as soon as you can. Think of this incident . . . as a challenge.”
His usual advice. I tried to grin. “Hai . . . sensei . . .” I murmured, and sank back into a morphine haze.
o0o
Mr. Callahan had left by the time I next awoke. I didn’t hear from him during the weeks that followed. By the end of my convalescence, the memory of the visit had paled, vividness drained behind the ordeal of pain and drugs. It resembled more a dream than something that had actually happened.
When my surrogate finally materialized at his headquarters dojo, the grandmaster just pointed to my regular place in the line, as if I were just another student who had been attending all along. During warm-ups, basic exercises, and partner drills, he focussed on other pupils. There were, after all, plenty of them to focus on. As usual, the night’s class filled the room; in fact the walls had been expanded to accommodate a heavy attendance. Richard Callahan’s reputation drew hundreds, perhaps thousands of potential students. Not only was vr karate a big prize money affair these days, but vr dojos eliminated the constrictions of classroom size and the hassles of commuting. A student still needed to live within the radius of the local node to participate in partner exercises such as sparring, because bouncing data off satellites introduced too much delay into reaction times, but others who were content to restrict themselves to observation and individual exercise could attend from anywhere in the hemisphere. Callahan kept the group at a manageable size only by restricting attendance to the cream of the crop recommended by lesser instructors. That’s how I’d gotten in, back when I was fifteen.
I had never felt so invisible. Sure, there were a lot of people, but this night of all others, I had expected a word or two, a nod, a “Welcome back.” The other students expected it as well. They cast sideways glances from me to sensei and back, anticipating interaction. None came. Finally the class completed a long session of kata and sat down to rest.
Callahan was pretending to be an inscrutable Oriental. It was a role he played regularly. His surrogate body was as freckled and red-headed as his Irish surname would indicate, but like many of the original generation of great American players from the 1960’s, he wore the legacy of his direct study under traditional Japanese and Okinawan experts. Those old farts never gave anyone a break. They marched like God in front of their students, all aloofness, hardness, and discipline, even if they liked you. Maybe especially if they liked you. Right then, I didn’t know what was lurking inside the grandmaster’s head.
“Jiyu kumite,” Callahan announced, signalling the beginning of the sparring section of class. Tonight’s session would be freestyle combat. Unlike shiai — competitive sparring — there would be no declared winners or losers, no points taken. The object was to show off a diversity of karate technique. The best performance was that which demonstrated artistry and a balanced repertoire.
Yet because the venue was an integrated virtuality, contact would still be hard. Killing and maiming might occur. This possibility kept us on our toes. It gave us the attitude Callahan wanted us to have — gave us a opportunity to practice bushido, the way of the warrior.
I submerged into that alertness. I kept my breathing steady, synchronized with my heartbeat. Warmth radiated from my skin, stoked by the fires in the muscles beneath. Rivulets of sweat travelled down my torso. Except for the lack of odor, my surrogate felt more like me than my real body. At times, while at rest, I could feel featheriness in my legs as if my real body somatic sensations were written atop the simulation as on a palimpsest. But not tonight. Tonight I was there.
Mr. Callahan looked down the long line of practitioners local enough to spar. Often during freestyle, he would simply divide these students in two equal groups and everyone would fight simultaneously. Tonight he selected his favorite alternative: He picked just one pair at a time, leaving the rest of us to serve as an audience.
I licked my lips as two of my dojo-mates faced each other. I wanted to be out there.
The pair danced around for most of their session, coming away intact save for bruised forearms. The second match followed just the opposite pattern — one partner got the drop on the other immediately, and proceeded to batter him severely, though Callahan had them pause twice and restart. The third pair charged at each other so enthusiastically they both were logged off by the pain threshold override.
Abruptly the crowd vanished from my view. The moment I’d been waiting for had arrived. The only figures I could see on the floor were Mr. Callahan and, facing me, an opponent. I couldn’t identify the latter — his appearance was a composite of average Caucasian features, which was probably how I looked to him.
The headquarters dojo master program had temporarily disguised us. Callahan believed that students would have difficulty attacking friends and classmates with proper vigor unless identities were secret. Only the grandmaster and the audience saw who was who, and the latter, invisible and inaudible, could only reveal what they knew after the kumite session had ended. I didn’t yet know whether I was facing, for example, my pal Keith Nakayama or that asshole ni dan from Oakland.
The grandmaster gave the commands. At last.
As always, I seized the initiative. My opponent faded back, avoiding a front kick, so I drew back my hand to strike—
The other guy started to cock his own fist. Without intending to, I hurried my punch. It glanced off the player’s chin, rendered meaningless by my overreaction. Simultaneously, his counterstrike hit me hard in the ribs.
I backed away. My opponent pressed, narrowly missing with a roundhouse kick, partially connecting with a face punch, and landing a stout kick to my midsection that I handled only because I tensed my abdomen correctly at the last moment.
My momentum was gone. I fought hard and made my partner earn every gain, but the match felt wrong. I should’ve been dominant. I should’ve been shaping the give-and-take. I always did that. All too soon Callahan yelled, “Yame!”
I limped to my starting place, nursing a swollen cheek, sore ribs, and a lacerated shin. My opponent was bleeding a little from one nostril, but seemed otherwise untouched.
The grandmaster excused us. The dojo master program cycled us off. Reappearing two seconds later in a refreshed surrogate along the sidelines, I saw from the reaction of my dojo-mates that my opponent had been Mark Evanoff, a player I barely knew. The man was an undistinguished student who competed at C level in tournaments — a good karateka, but not the sort I had ever had problems with before.
I hadn’t “lost.” That term didn’t apply to freestyle. Nor did I regret that Evanoff had done so well; he’d earned it. Yet I had never come away from a match so devastated.
I turned to Callahan. The grandmaster met my glance with a neutral expression that could have meant anything, then called up the next pair of partners. Back to the routine of the class.
I put on a mask of indifference, acting by rote until the last sparring session was done and everyone lined up to bow to the Shomen, to the grandmaster, and to each other. As was his habit, Callahan logged off as soon as the closing ceremony was over. As soon as was practical, I followed suit.
The yellow and green status lights of my vr deck and the stale odor of the cologne I’d put on that morning greeted me as I became aware of my all-too-real bedroom. I remained in my chair, straps snug, neural jack connected, staring out my tiny window that almost allowed me to see the state capitol.
Almost was the key word. I could almost walk normally. I could almost get by without people directing their stares at my empty pant legs.
And now, in the one place where I had still been as complete and perfect as anyone else, I no longer measured up.
o0o
“I can’t help you,” said Dr. Lavin. “The condition has nothing to do with the surrogate or the interface. The reflex is buried in your brain and in your spinal trunk nerves.”
I’d expected as much, but I’d wanted to hear it from a vr specialist. By this point, no straw was too thin to grasp. Nothing had improved since that first workout. Whenever I sparred, I flinched.
I wasn’t afraid to step out on the floor. I still had all the courage I’d ever had. The problem was below the level of conscious manipulation. As Dr. Lavin had so depressingly confirmed, my neurons remembered the beating Mongo had given me. I couldn’t just shake off that psychic legacy the way I could repair a wiped-out surrogate.
“We’re able to erase fatigue or pain or tissue damage in a surrogate because those experiences are entirely part of the simulation. The programming automatically negates those parts of the construct each time you log off.” Behind his bottle-bottom glasses Lavin’s eyes blinked exuberantly. The man was one of those intense, wiry engineering types who once given a start on his favorite subject could hold forth for hours. “Of course, the surrogate does learn. Your deck performs an on-going analysis of data in order to preserve gains. That’s how you develop stamina and coordination and strength. If this reflex of yours was a flaw recorded somewhere in the heuristic net, I could probably find and purge it. At the very least, we could reconfigure the surrogate as it was the day before the attack. You’d lose some of its accumulated customization, but you’d still have everything up to that point.”
He sighed. “I work in an industry that seems to make anything possible. That’s a chimera, my boy. We can send all sorts of input along an existing nervous system, we can trick the brain into establishing a whole second set of somatic feedback loops in order to operate a surrogate — as long as the simulated body is a close analog of the real one — but we can’t recreate the nervous system itself. If we could do that, you wouldn’t be tied to that wheelchair and vr deck. We’d be able to fashion you into a cyborg with legs as good as any you were ever born with.”
The technical details obviously fascinated Lavin. Lost in his expounding, he didn’t understand what all this meant in human terms, what it meant to me. This slight effect, this involuntary tic, changed everything.
Fearless, they had nicknamed me. And it had been true. I’d always attacked full-out. It was reckless, maybe, but it allowed me to dominate players of better technical skill. My boneheaded confidence was my secret weapon. So what if a surrogate was obliterated? I could be back a minute later, ready to go again. My subconscious had accepted that.
Now when a partner made a move against me, flashbacks of Mongo’s fists would pop up — not so much the actual image as my reaction, my recollection of cringing. With that sort of handicap, I could never win tournaments. At my level of expertise, there was no room for distraction. My competitive career had just been aborted.
“You’re awfully quiet. Have you been following all this okay?”
“Fine,” I said, staring at his Far Side desk calendar. “Just wondering what I’m going to do now.”
“It’s manageable, I would think,” persisted the specialist. “Over time the symptom may extinguish itself. Meanwhile, there are plenty of vr sports that where a slight hesitation won’t matter. Tennis, perhaps. Certainly bowling. Have you tried golf?”
o0o
“Log on,” I ordered my vr deck, and listed the code for Mr. Callahan’s headquarters dojo.
“Password?” asked the deck in its pleasant, motherly voice.
I was surprised when it accepted the one I gave. I hadn’t tried it in eight months. I’d expected Callahan to have dropped me from the roster of those who had clearance into his vr conference address.
The headquarters dojo foyer materialized around me. Out on the floor several players were loosening up. Mr. Callahan was not there; he would make his appearance precisely at the hour, if he followed his habit. Six minutes to go.
I felt like a damn fool. I avoided the glances of dojo-mates who recognized me. I didn’t need their pity. I’d been a player who counted. A player who was going places. Now I wasn’t. Everyone knew that. That knowledge had kept me away the better part of a year.
Yet retirement hadn’t worked. Karate-do had written too many chapters in my book. Call it an addiction, maybe. In any event, I’d decided I’d rather be able to add a page or two to the narrative once in a while than let the work lie totally fallow.
For six minutes I paced the foyer. Right on time, Mr. Callahan winked in on his dais of honor. He raised an eyebrow at me and gestured at the workout floor where everyone was lining up for the opening ceremony. I took my place with the others of my rank. Callahan continued in silence to the front of the room.
I blew out a pent-up breath. First hurdle crossed. I was allowed to resume training.
The class knelt and bowed. Warm-ups began. I fell into the familiar routine. With each callisthenic, and later with each move of kihon — basics — I relaxed more and more. This was what I needed. I belonged here.
Finally we wrapped up a choreographed attack drill and lined up for sparring. Callahan had not taken much note of me — just a slight posture adjustment during kata practice — but I didn’t let what he did or did not do affect me. I was here simply to run the paces. I’d worked out as hard as possible. Harder, even, in that I’d set my surrogate’s default so that “I” was just a bit out of shape. Normally, like most vr players, I maintained my body’s programming at the prime level of strength, agility, youth, and flexibility possible for my morph. Some players complained that they wanted to be able to switch back and forth to an array of differently configured surrogates — larger and more powerful I would assume. But I was happy with what vr hardware and brain physiology allowed. It gave me my body as it would have existed had my legs never been pulverized and were it possible to remain age twenty, perfectly toned, and completely fresh. The challenge was not to forget to work on the stuff technology couldn’t cover. Tonight the extra strain kept me focussed. I needed that if I were to face an opponent.
Mr. Callahan called up a dozen members of the class and matched them up with partners. He skipped me. I sat twitching as my colleagues were set free to test their skills, as I wanted to do.
Or rather as I had to do, even if I came away as unhappy and defeated as before.
The first group sat down. Mr. Callahan looked straight at me. My heart rate sped up. To my frustration he selected a combination of sparring partners that left me out.
And so it went. He called up a total of seven rounds of players. Some of my buddies got to spar three or four times. Aside from me, the only students he left out were the ones he always left out, chiefly those players who were by nature or philosophy opposed to the active combat portion of the discipline. The rabbits, the jerk from Oakland called them.
“Time to close class,” the grandmaster said. It was over. He hadn’t given me an opportunity to prove myself. I’d been relegated to the list of those who required special handling. He might as well have hung up one of those blue and white placards you see all the time on the best parking places.
I logged off the instant we finished the closing ceremony.
“How was class?” Dad asked as I rumbled across the hallway to the bathroom.
“Chickenshit,” I said.
o0o
Though attending the next workout gave me as much pleasure as eating sawdust, I came. Again, Callahan didn’t allow me to spar. Nor did he the next few times.
I could’ve gone elsewhere to train. The Sacramento-based martial arts virtuality where I’d started out years before would have been delighted to take me back. But I’d practiced with the best. Accepting anything else would have been another kind of surrender.
I also could’ve asked sensei why he was treating me as he was. I didn’t. Traditional dojo etiquette precluded a student from questioning his master’s style of instruction. Call it a silly custom, but to me ritual is the essence of karate. Callahan would accept me by the book, or not at all. I could be just as Japanese as he.
After six weeks, I did speak with Keith Nakayama. We were lingering after a class, refining a kata after the other students had winked out. “Is he ever going to let me spar again?”
“Does it matter?” Keith asked.
I cocked my head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Sparring is a late addition to karate-do,” Keith reminded me. “Gogen Yamaguchi introduced it in 1935. You don’t have to spar to be a legitimate karateka. Mr. Callahan himself stopped sparring forty years ago, and didn’t begin again until the vr renaissance. All through his middle years he practiced only kata and drills, until the arthritis made him give up that, too. Nobody ever stopped calling him a master. He went from seventh to tenth dan in that time.”
“Not the same,” I said. “That was his choice.”
“Oh?”
Keith sounded like a learned grandpa. And come to think of it, that was exactly right. Nakayama was one of Callahan’s sempai — his senior students. No matter how young he might look standing there in front of me, he had to be at least seventy years old. To him, I was an infant.
What was he saying? Clearly, he was serious that giving up sparring altogether seemed to him an honorable option, one that he felt completely comfortable with and had at one point chosen for himself. Even now, in vr mode, he rarely entered tournaments, though he participated regularly in freestyle within the context of the class. He was a damn good fighter, but I strongly suspected that when middle age had hit him and he’d cut back on kumite, he hadn’t felt it to be a great loss.
But Callahan? He’d taken his first major title at age eighteen. Men like him didn’t just gracefully accept being put out to pasture. That’s why he was world champion in his weight class now.
“If . . .” I stammered, “if sensei understands what it’s like for me right now, why is he doing this to me? Shouldn’t he be pushing me to spar, instead of cutting me off?”
Keith waved his hands vaguely. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but I trust him. Why not give it some time, and see what happens?”
“How much time?” I asked. Too much had already passed.
Keith smiled strangely, and shrugged.
o0o
I wasn’t sure I had as much faith in Mr. Callahan as Keith did. On the other hand, I didn’t have any solutions of my own. I kept working out. Callahan maintained the moratorium on my sparring. Three months passed before I began to notice a change.
My partner that night was a very quick player named Tim Bromage. We were engaged in yakusoku kumite — prearranged sparring drills. This was not a circumstance I enjoyed. Tim wasn’t a problem for me during unrestricted freestyle. Quick as he was, I knew ways to ruin his balance and break his concentration. But in yakusoku kumite, it was a different story. Every move was pre-determined. One side was the attacker, one the defender, and neither partner could throw in unrehearsed techniques. Much of the practice was by Mr. Callahan’s count. This left me no opportunity to use intimidation, fakes, alternate angles of attack, or superior pacing. Form was everything. With my repertoire stifled, Tim had a way of getting his front kick in on me before I could step back and block. He was simply too fast for me. It was frustrating as hell.
But not tonight. Every time Tim kicked, I caught him. Every damn time.
“Good,” said Mr. Callahan as he passed by. It was the first comment he’d directed at me, other than routine instructions, since the day at the hospital.
A few workouts later, the class was again immersed in a session of yakusoku kumite. This time my partner was a wide, very powerful san dan. His punches were slow. In freestyle, I could find a million openings on him thanks to his ponderosity, but if he ever landed one, it was bad news. That night, of course, the nature of the practice didn’t allow me to get out of the way, and though he was supposed to pull his punches, I expected to be bruised.
Instead, I blocked him. Powerful as he was I succeeded, thirty times out of thirty, in performing the defensive technique so precisely, so well-timed, that his fists never once struck their target.
“Good,” Mr. Callahan said again.
I got the idea. Sensei had been emphasizing defense more than usual. Not in an obvious way, but with such regularity that I couldn’t help but improve that part of my repertoire. I’d never cared much whether I perfected my blocks — “a good offense is the best defense” was my motto. He was steering me toward a new personal style.
All right, you fucker, I thought. I don’t know why you don’t just say it aloud, but if those are the dues you’re asking me to pay, I’ll become the best damn blocker in the universe.
For nine more months, I honed countermoves to every type of offensive technique — even those that attackers never used. By the end of that time there were still players better at blocks than I, but I was closing the gap.
One night Mr. Callahan announced at the beginning of the freestyle section of class, “We’re going to do an exercise I haven’t brought out for the past few years. Mr. Nakayama and Mr. Titelman will demonstrate.”
The two men, the highest-ranked players there that night other than Callahan himself, rose and faced each other. “Mr. Titelman may use only offensive techniques. Mr. Nakayama may only defend.”
The grandmaster gave the command to engage. The two hachi dans merged in a flurry of technique. Accustomed as I was to high-level play, my mouth still dropped open. They were awesome. Titelman’s combinations blended one into the next, minus the hesitation that came from worrying about counterattacks. Deft, compact, and quick, he radiated such a command of his movements he seemed unstoppable.
Yet Keith thwarted him. With inhuman precision my pal deflected, avoided, and battered his opponent’s fists and feet out of the way. He didn’t look at all like a defender. As Titelman kicked, Keith caught him by the ankle and swept him off his feet. As Titelman swung a furi uchi — a whiplike strike — to Keith’s temple, the latter ducked under it and shoved his attacker far back out of range. Titelman spent more time on the floor than the guy who should, by rights, have been a complete victim. It took him half the match to land a single blow.
They bowed to each other and sat down. Callahan pointed to me, “You will be the defender. Mr. Stevens will attack.”
At last. Though not true sparring, the exercise was the removal of a tether. I hopped up quickly.
As we faced one another, the dojo reprogrammed our appearances. Stevens’s rugged features dissolved into those of a generic opponent. Yet for once I did know who I was up against. Stevens was an ex-Marine, a dedicated ni dan with a fighting style as aggressive as mine had been.
“Hajime!” cried the grandmaster.
I hesitated, wanting to leap forward as Keith had done, but Stevens raced in and my cringing reflex kicked in strong as ever. But I had time to fade back. My hips twisted, removing my groin — his target — from the line of fire. I snagged his foot with my palm and guided it away. It was a classic move known as sukui uke — scooping block. I’d practiced it a million times that year.
He punched. I danced aside and leaped forward, turning him so that I ended up behind him, my body tight against his. He tried to whirl, lashing out with his elbows and heels, but I had a good grip on his gi, and for five glorious seconds, he couldn’t touch me. A snarl of frustration leaked from his throat, and my mood climbed to a height it hadn’t seen in nearly two years.
Good things don’t last. Stevens broke free of my grip. His elbow connected with my ear. I staggered back, leaving way too much of an opening. Blocking furiously, I managed to hold on for about thirty seconds before he knocked me down and killed me with a kick to the back of my neck.
Yet as I logged back on in an uninjured surrogate, I didn’t feel defeated. Keith, seeing my glow, winked at me as I returned to my place in the line. He and I both knew that if I’d had to spar a player like Stevens a year earlier, without being able to punch or kick, I would have been wiped out in half the time. A warm river of satisfaction percolated through my system.
One thing would have made it better. I had still quailed at the moment of attack. But for the first time, I looked forward to what Mr. Callahan might have up those white cotton sleeves. He had already turned to the next set of freestyle partners, seemingly absorbed in them, but I knew he had a plan just for me.
o0o
For the next six months, the grandmaster let me spar nearly every class in the modified way he’d introduced. I was always the defender. A sense of anticipation mounted among the dojo regulars. They knew, as I did, that sooner or later I’d be set free.
That moment came in a way I never expected. It was an ordinary workout in every other respect, until Mr. Callahan called me to the center of the room . . .
And stood across from me.
“Tonight, you will spar normally. Jiyu kumite.”
All the moisture vanished from my mouth. The grandmaster. The ju dan. The hanshi. He had not sparred one of his own students in years. He saved his sorcery for tournament opponents. Outsiders. Enemies.
I stared him straight in the eyes and tried not to soil my gi pants.
Keith handled the commands. As he shouted, I sprang into the most defensive position I knew.
I didn’t even see most of the techniques Callahan threw at me. Fists, feet, elbows flew all around me. Abruptly I was in my wheelchair at home. My vr deck cheerfully informed me that the match had lasted fifteen seconds. It had seemed like one.
I rematerialized at the dojo. Callahan nodded and said, “Again.”
Shaking, I took my place. We engaged. And this time, something awakened in me, something that had been developing for a long time. Call it the state of mind a doe calls up to defend her fawn against a mountain lion. My rising block redirected the fist racing toward my face. My body twisted away from the kick arcing toward my belly. I lifted my leg out of the way of sensei’s stomp at my kneejoint.
He took me out with a roundhouse kick to my head. I hadn’t lasted any longer than before. But everything had been clearer. I’d seen what most of the techniques coming at me were.
I rematerialized. “Again,” said Mr. Callahan.
Oh, God, I thought. He charged. I retreated as fast as I could, frantically defending myself.
And this time, in the midst of all the yielding, pumped up with fright, I saw a brief opening.
I struck. My fist tapped sensei’s chin. Not as strongly as I might have liked, but enough to make him blink, enough that jawbone kissed my knuckles.
A few moments later he killed me again. I’d lasted twenty-three seconds.
But I’d gotten a punch in on him. A punch on him. When I logged back on, I found him smiling at me. A drop of blood hung from his split lip.
“Perhaps we’ll have the chance to spar again one day,” he said, and gestured for me to return to my place.
o0o
The next three months — during which I sparred every class — confirmed what had ignited that night. I had a new ability. Though I still couldn’t leap in undaunted as I had before Mongo, I now knew how to wait, letting my opponent commit to his movement, and on a good night, when I was sharp, I could turn the tables on any number of players. It was not as easy as bowling them over with an unbridled attack, but it gave me a goal to reach for, virgin territory to explore. As Fearless, I’d never have been able to score a hit on the grandmaster. Only someone capable of being truly intimidated could ever be a master of defense.
I’d just finished an invigorating workout and was staying late, polishing a little kata to wind down, when a voice from the foyer startled me.
“Did you enjoy yourself tonight?”
I jumped and turned around. Mr. Callahan strode onto the floor.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to seem as casual as he. “Yes, I enjoyed myself a great deal.”
His lips curved into a Mona Lisa pose. “I’ve heard you’ve signed up for the Riverside Invitationals.”
“Just C level,” I replied. “To test my wings. It’s a start.”
“Yes. It is. How do you feel about it?”
“I . . .” I coughed. “It’s never going to go away, is it? I’m going to flinch for the rest of my martial arts career.”
“Possibly.” He scratched his chin. “Does it matter?”
Not the way it had. The bitterness was leaching out, the sense of being a victim was fading. But . . .
“I still want to win,” I said. “When I was Fearless, I knew I’d make it to the top. I don’t know if the new me ever will.”
He smiled fully. Turning to the mirror, he pointed at the reflection of my lean, perpetually healthy surrogate. “You’ve got fifty, sixty, maybe seventy years left. Who can say what you’ll be able to do in all that time?”
His arm dropped to his side. Though the move was graceful, it seemed to carry the weight of eight decades. How many obstacles, how many disappointments, I wondered, had this man weathered on the way to becoming a karate megastar? I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be in his league. At the moment, though, that wasn’t as important as this: Thomas Callahan was envious of me. The obstacles I faced might be too much for me, but then again, they might not. I had hope. He, no matter how well his brain and spinal cord had been preserved to this point, was up against a handicap that no amount of resistance could conquer.
“Guess I’ll just have to try,” I said. I understood now that my attempt mattered as much to him as it did to me.
He nodded. “Think of it,” he said softly, “as a challenge.”