Venuses From Mars

I.

A rented Buick shot through the Jersey pines, rattling and battling against a scarred, pocked road toward a sharp bend around a hill that hid their destination like an asshole.

Walter Lattimore folded the road map into his lap and let Vernon do the swearing. Vernon Asch had been swearing since Toms River. He kept swearing and the other two were about to swear.

They were three: a Times man, a sociologist, and a writer of sweat-magazines, respectively gravity, framework, and prurience by way of the article that would or would not be filed by Tuesday. Walter pointed directions towards new roads that always felt like they’d become their last known destination.

Around that bend and past two more forks, there stood a city that resembled no other city in North America.

Nova Atomsk did not belong to the devil-haunted Pine Barrens, and in some equally tangible respect did not belong to the year. Indeed it did not belong to this world at all. It lay in a hollow of the wood in iron and granite, its outer wall raised on the kind of cyclopean blocks that no extant union would have agreed to lift and no available crane would have agreed to set, and the wall ran in a polygon around towers whose silhouettes were lit by something colder than electric light. Beyond the towers, half hidden in the mist that rose off the swamps to the south, stood a coliseum.

A coliseum. Not a stadium. The word the eye reached for first was “coliseum,” and the reach, on inspection, was earned.

Rudolph Liebling, in the back seat with his notebook, said, “You will at least admit the article is going to write itself.”

“I will admit,” Walter said, “nothing.”

They had been on the road since first light. The federal pass, signed by a man in Washington who did not want his name in print, sat in Walter’s coat pocket beside two pencils and a Lucky Strike pack he had not opened all day. Twenty-two years had passed since the Yabans and their handlers came down from the sky in their warps, twenty-two years since the State Department had quietly negotiated their tenancy in this corner of New Jersey with a blueberry-skinned garçon clad in glittery King Louis XVI fancydress, and they negotiated in awkward, beguiled tones on the grounds that the consequences of asking these space fellows to leave appeared, on early consideration, apocalyptic. 

Fifteen of those years had been spent making of the wood a city-state. The making had been done, on the testimony of every embassy that had bothered to look, by the women. Almost every one of those testimonies would describe them in whatever language did the most descriptive disservice. Kollidorian Amazons was the most preferred by the Classical-minded analysts, the French made their own word for the hell of it, and only then did the begrudging pigs of the lecture halls and desk-bound geeks admit that the actual word they’d given themselves was ‘bolloi.’

Bol-loi. Or was it Bo. Lloi? Was the flick of the tongue against the teeth a little feminine roll? Did they choose it to agitate every one of those self-important Greek-classical analysts into a hysterical  debate over whether there had been some error in speech or whether they did draw direct ancestry to great ancient Mediterranean warriors? What did it even mean— labor-person, well then there must be a mistake. No, no mistake. Who stacked the stones and stoned the veiled marms to death to pay off honor debts in Atomskian squares? Boll-oi. 

Vernon knew better men who wrote worse prose who exploited some academic hypothesis that said that the Yabans were the Spartans. With prehensile monkey-like tails. A theorist’s youngest child took most credit.

Soviet researchers declared under approval of Kruschchev, Brezhnev that they were actually the bol-shevik polloi, and represented a miraculous inter-proledimensional arrival of the New Soviet Man of Tomorrow jumping backwards to assist in the liberation of the working classes through genderless muscularity. Years earlier, less adventurous academics from more severe institutions had tried the opposite rescue: the “bol-oloi,” they insisted, were not female at all, but neo-Spartan males misread by distracted observers who mistook pectoral fat, high voices, gynoid shapes, and foreign manners for womanhood. Then a bolloi asked a researcher if they wanted to check.

No Yaban then knew what “Sparta” meant but they’d always say it sounded tasty. 

Rudolph cleared his throat at this point in the drive every time he made it, and Walter, who had now made it with him three times, knew what was coming.

“It is the most extraordinary refutation of this whole Women’s Lib nonsense I have ever encountered, and a refutation by absence at that. In fifteen years a troupe of muscular pseudo-lesbian alien dames put up a city-state that would flush Lycurgus’s face with envy. If the building of it had been left to us miserable Earth-men’s women, we would still be looking at wood listening to them complain about not ruining the daisies. You know, I came home from a previous symposium having said something less inflammatory than that, and Marjorie put a saucepan upside my head. I still told the bitch—”

Vernon, driving, said, “Will it survive the second saucepan?”

“I’ve taken worse from the wife. What, you think you fancy a smooch, sweetcheeks? Keep your eyes locked. I want to see the blasted place at sunset at least.” 

Vernon snorted and turned the wheel. He had been turning over a paragraph in his head since they left the Holland Tunnel. Stag had asked him for nine thousand words on the seedier turn the city had taken since King’s funeral, and Stag paid the way Stag paid, which was the only reason Vernon had agreed to write a piece pretending the seedier turn was bad news. The seedier turn was the best news Vernon had received in fifteen years of writing the boys their bedtime stories. He had spent the last eighteen months filing copy for For Men Only and Saga and three publications he was not contractually allowed to name, all of which paid him to invent jungle goddesses and Wehrmacht torturers and barbarian queens for nineteen-year-olds about to ship out of Long Binh. He had been running low on barbarian queens. 

He’d even grown out a mustache to sleaze up the author profile. 

The Buick had now climbed a rise in southern New Jersey, and beyond the rise was the answer.

“I have a question,” Vernon said.

“We agreed you would ask all your questions to me,” Walter said. Rudolph answered anyway, and Walter drowned him out with his pencil. He had written in his notes on the way before the bend: ‘Mr. Liebling is the sort of man who possessed the supernatural ability to demand answers he’ll refuse to listen to and will later assume he did and expertly refuted.’ Best to keep the bastard talking himself into loops.

He heard the clipped end of some response he guessed Rudolph was bullshitting, and Vernon did not answer, because the first gate had come up.

Two Yabans in dark armor that Vernon would later describe as Roman if Rome had gone to war with Mars looked into the car for ten seconds without speaking and waved them on. At the second, the same kind of inspection by the same kind of Yabans, except that one of these was a bolloi, and Vernon’s pen, which had been steady through all of New Jersey, lost a centimeter at the sight of her.

She was tall in the way that did not register as tall until she stood beside the car. Her hair was a black cliff that she had tied up and had not then bothered to tame. Her eyes were yellow. The armor she wore was the same as the male’s, cuirass and plates and high boots and nothing yielding to the suggestion of breast or hip, though the body inside it was not in any doubt about its kind. She read the pass, said, “Coliseum gallery,” in flat English, and stepped back.

Vernon drove on slowly. “Now.”

“Yes, Vernon.”

“Was that lady or gentleman?”

“That was, by their schema, a lady. The gentlemen have gentlemen’s features, you won’t mistake them. They’re actually bigger, if you can believe it. The third sort, of whom less is known, do not often appear in public, and when they do they are veiled.”

“Veiled.”

“Veiled. In black.”

“What does that veil cover, do we know?”

“The face,” Rudolph said, “and everything else, like those Moslem tribesmen keep their women.”

Walter watched the towers slide past on his right. “Alright, fellas, we’re here. Save your questions for later, you’ll need ‘em.”

The third gate brought them into a forecourt of gray flagstone where a white-haired Yaban boy in some kind of orange livery indicated, by gesture and by no English at all, that they were to follow him on foot. He walked them along an outer arcade where torches and electric sconces alternated in a pattern Walter thought intimidating in its shape— where did this lead? God, not to the pit of the arena, there weren’t enough following or ahead to feel good until he felt good by the thrum of a crowd— and then up a flight of stairs that opened into the gallery.

The gallery held forty seats arranged behind a stone parapet. Walter, Vernon, and Rudolph were the only humans in it. The other guests, who occupied the front row, were Yabans in civilian dress (‘cloaks, tunics, pelts, and shined armor, some without any reasonable legwear whatsoever, why are men wearing speedos with that weirdo knight armor? Then you got ‘em clad like Space Age legionaries, what sort of crazed civilian dress was this?’– Vernon) and the same cliffs of hair, and one figure wholly veiled in white whose presence was acknowledged by the boy with a deep bow and big smile before he showed the humans to their bench. Walter glanced at the veiled figure for slightly longer than was polite. The veil moved when the figure breathed, which was the only motion it made. Rudolph, beside him, noted the bow and underlined it. ‘Eastern style.’

Below them was the Blood Pit.

It is hard, even on rereading the legal pad on which Walter took his initial notes, to isolate what he saw first. At random, the size. The pit was the size of a small football field set into the earth, ringed by a wall of dark stone twenty feet high, raked smooth into a fine sand the color of dried blood, and torchlit at the rim by sconces that threw shadow up the walls and warmth onto the sand: warmth as in cinema, warmth as in the kind of light no real combat had ever deserved.

Then the audience. The audience filled the four tiers of stone benches that climbed the bowl, perhaps eight thousand seats, and not a seat was empty. Yabans of every description, from the lean adolescents of the upper tiers down to the heavily armored elders nearer the rim, leaning forward already though no fighter had yet entered. (“These are the I-talian sort, they’ve got the sweat and the women” – Vernon). 

Among them, distributed at the boxes and the dignitary seats at every tier, were creatures Walter was unprepared for. 

Small brown men in tunics with cup-shaped ears, and Walter said  twice these could not possibly be Yabans, but the boy made no response. 

A pair of tall robed figures whose hoods showed no faces inside. No, those aren’t Yabans either. 

Hunched dog-faced things with yellow eyes that talked among themselves in clicks. Yabans? No?

Above the pit, on the side opposite the gallery, was the Imperial Box. Yabans!

The flag that flew above the box was the device the briefing had told Walter to expect. It resembled, in its first glance, a stylized radish or a modernist heraldic axe, or some Futurist’s notion of a piston, and on second glance it resolved into the rune the briefing had called the “Saiyan war crest” that had been shared across the different species of Yaban, whatever that meant. The men in Washington had photographs of it and left it in a catalog scribble-noted ‘Anti-commintern (undecided?) 1922 again!’ Vernon had been shown one in passing and spoke something Walter remembered like, “That looks like something Marinetti would have drawn drunk,” which had appeared to Walter at the time as one more pulp-writer’s lazy comparison and which now, as the flag hung over an arena waiting for blood, did not feel lazy.

Inside the box sat the Action Gamemaster.

He was a nagoi (“what severely Jewish kablahblah shit is this?” – Vernon) of the heavier build, in his middle age by Yaban reckoning, hair sticking up in a wide black matted fan as if the fellow had been born with a Van Der Graaff sphere for a brain. He had a terrific red coat thrown over the same kind of armor the gate guards had worn, with a half-mask of bronze pushed up on his forehead. On the rail before him rested three bronze levers and a lacquered board of fighter names. Beside him, in attitudes of attention or of boredom and in every variety of half-veiled informality, sat half a dozen of what Walter at first took for women and then, on the boy’s quiet word, was told were nymphs. 

Nymphs as in the term used by every old empire of Earth for the same kind of being, here for them a fact, with pointed ears and the long bare arms and the long bare legs (“where’s the long bare breasts?” – you know who) and the kind of attentive eyes Walter considered would be familiar to ancient Delphic priests. They held burnished trays and Arabesque cruets glowing and sloshing the primary and secondary colors, silvery bandages, instruments of sorts that might have brought a GI back to an asylum. Fluttering plasmic light also circled their bodies and settled on and off their fingers reenacting a John William Waterhouse fantasy. They had big breasts.

The rapture that took Vernon (if any presentable man of civilization saw it, he would describe in less civilized terms) brought such a monkeyish hysterical mood to the writer that, if he were not pretending to be a decent man, it would have been enough to have him committed to a different ward in the same GI asylum.

Oh rapture, great rapture, this was the realized wet fantasy of thousands of lurid pulps, sweats, penny-dreadfully sick-with-youthful testosterone vile literature. One of those fantastic carmens swung and swayed her hips carrying along those pale devilish fingers victuals towards one of the dog-headed beasts and another male Yaban fellow, and leaned forward with a delicate pop of one slender foot, and the angle of curves and light gave Vernon the best sights his wife couldn’t offer.

“Different species entirely,” Rudolph said, anticipating Vernon. “They are not Yabans. They don’t have tails. They’re actually women, since God knew the nagois needed something normal.”

“Oh Hell! Then what’s that magnificent thing under the tarty little dress? Where do they come from then?”

“They came with the warps.”

“No, ignoramus, I meant where did they come from in relation to these fuckless folks?”

To this Walter pulled at his mouth and invented something he could assume would satisfy the man. It didn’t.

Vernon wrote: nymph nurses. Underlined it twice, then ‘nymph’ three times more. Then beneath: SEE ABOUT FREELANCING TO ARGOSY. MOTHE—ING MOTHERLODE.

Rudolph saw the underlining and said only, “Vernon.”

Vernon shrugged.

Walter set his pencil down and ran a hand through the bristle-hair.

---

II.

Down at the gate of the pit, the iron rose.

Yulaan stepped forward into the sand and the torchlight, and the cheers and the jeers fell on her in the first wave. She had been imagining this for a long time. She had imagined it back in the future while lying awake in the bivouac dust on the night marches and during the long quiet hours in the Death Chamber when the gravity engine ran low and there was nothing to do but watch the dummies reset and fight amongst themselves and when the Xaxalpas and Fujiwaras hogged their PlayStations and Super Famicoms respectively. 

She had imagined a roar, and got one. 

She had imagined steel, and got it. 

The thing she had not imagined was the smell. The sand had been raked since the last fight, but it had been raked over old sand, and the old sand carried the hot copper of every body that had been opened on it that month.

She breathed in.

Ah it was almost as delicious as sizzling food.

The Action Gamemaster stood up. He stood up slowly, watchingly, boringly slowly. His voice carried without amplification.

“This is your first time here in the new Atomsk, Sol Yulaan?”

She waved her tail and lifted her fist.

“Good! Then consider this your introductory training. A warrior’s life is cheap. There are millions of your lot. You’re not special. You’re goblin shit! Remember that. Now let your blood boil with the thrill of combat!”

Yulaan clenched her fist and said, “No vroda ever claimed otherwise,” and shouted for war.

In the gallery, Rudolph wrote in the margin of his notebook: Gladiator, Roman model, Latin sermon, Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant. The war-dame is embarrassing Friedan more than me. Save for the authentic article from the days of Christ and His disciples, human sight can’t handle such primeval bellicosity

Vernon wrote: He called the war-wench goblinshit. goblin—shit. Who calls a chick ‘goblinshit’ who even survives that?? goblinshit goblinshit.

Walter wrote:    

The boy, who had stayed at his post, said in patient English that all proceedings would be translated as required, that there was a Yaban dialect peculiar to the pit which was simpler than the household or battlefield form, and that the gallery’s understanding could be relied upon to within a margin of perhaps ten percent.

“What are we missing?”

“The cusses.”

The bars on the far side of the pit lifted. A rabid kegarin goblin rushed forth, ugly and spittle-dribbling, black-eyed and evil, the dog-faced thing charging at the bolloi with mad bloodlust.

Yulaan’s eyes thinned. She ducked. The clawed swipe missed. She drove her fist into the kegarin’s chest and followed up with several gory blows to its face that left it without a head and only a spine poking out of its raw neck.

Walter heard, in his own seat, the sound of Vernon swallowing.

The doors opened again and two more kegarins entered. Yulaan waited for them to approach, disarmed one carrying a spiked club, caught the club before it fell, and bashed its brains in. She followed with the other, mashing it to mulch.

She raised her fist.

The doors opened a third time. From the far end came something different. The thing that loped into the pit was a head shorter than the kegarins and twice as quick, its skin a sickly chartreuse, its eyes pink, its skull oversized in the smooth domed manner of a brain in a jar. It moved on splayed digitigrade legs. Its claws were white and long.

“Saibaiman,” the boy said. “These are older specimens I think. They come in fours.”

Three more did follow. They emerged at intervals of four seconds each, fanning across the sand with the disciplined swarm logic of insects, and Yulaan met them with a different fight altogether. Where she had been a butcher with the kegarins, she was a fencer with the Saibamen. She pivoted, slipped a leaping bite, caught a wrist on the descent, snapped it, and threw the spinning body into the path of the next jumper. A second Saibaiman opened its mouth and spat a wad of thick green acid. Yulaan dropped under the spit and the wad hissed against the wall behind her, etching a hand-sized white burn into the stone. She came up under the spitter and drove her elbow through its chin.

The fourth was on her back before the third hit the ground. It got its claws into the meat of her shoulder. She rolled, brought it under her, and brought her tail around to crush its neck against her own shoulderblade.

She stood. Four corpses, one of which had stopped twitching. The crowd had begun to clap in a strange syncopation that the boy explained, when Walter looked over, was the Yaban acknowledgement of “interesting work.”

Vernon wrote ‘Cybermen(??)’

Then the next wave came in pairs, and backed off to let defense catch their breath. Two bollois with scimitars dropped into the sand and ran at her from opposite ends. They were perhaps eighteen or twenty years old, perhaps younger, perhaps older, Walter couldn’t tell because these Yabans didn’t seem to age properly. They were entirely topless. Their breasts were, Walter didn’t even pay attention for long because it was the muscles that stole his time: the kind no beauty magazine had ever dared to sell. They moved with the body language of soldiers, and the only thing in the gallery’s sightline that registered femaleness was the fact of the breasts themselves, dropped, by the design of the situation, into a context that made them ordinary. Of course Walter had to write this, very carefully, because, next month, there was no other paragraph a million eyes would read ten million times more than this one. 

He wrote on his pad in scratchy lines, ‘The jungle-tailed Amazons have less shame than the great Miss America protestors in discarding their armor against indecency. Here in Nova Atomsk, they undress the top and hammer and smash and murder as any industrial cowboy pugilist finds suitable, and suitably no male-Yaban nor any other observer raises offense.  Rotten arteriosclerotic bastards in Manhattan killing themselves with Silva Thins will claim this is some tradition of an ancient liberatory Tea Party of the chest, since they can never let go of the ‘hoi-bolloi’ hypothesis, but there’s nothing of the sort at work. They are full and heavy, and I mean this literally— some bolloi body magicke keeps them from any frustrating mot—’

Yulaan caught one’s blade on her forearm, took the cut, and used the same forearm to break the bolloi’s nose. Walter dropped his pencil. The other got close enough to slash her tunic across the chest and open a long scarlet stripe across her ribs. Yulaan caught the second by the wrist, twisted, and drove the scimitar into the first one’s neck, leaving both of them in the sand. Then a nagoi with a qiang spear came at her from behind; she dropped, rolled, kicked up sending the boy flying back, and sprang herself with her tail, both fists out to smash into and through the next approaching kegarin.

She had two cuts now, the chest one and the shoulder one, and the blood was beginning to mat her hair to her cheek. 

A half-veiled nymph descended from the box and made the necessary inspection over the bolloi Yulaan had killed (a kneeling, a wrist-press, rising to feet, more Vernon-agitating hip swaying) before the body was pulled out by the heels through a side gate. The nymph returned to her seat. Wine was offered. She accepted.

Yulaan opted instead to grab a Saibaiman arm out of the blooms of gore and took a heroic bite, and tossed the rest aside when her back hit with a soft ‘splat’ against the ruddy stone wall. She rested.

Walter went on: ‘Muscular Amazon combat. Pulpy Vernon will either eroticize the sight, for which the blood pit is too horrible to pretend, or it would never allow any woman near the carnage.’

He then circled ‘I forgot the nymphs!’

He saw Vernon pick his pencil back up.

Rudolph wrote: No weeping. No removal of the children’s gaze. The box passed her over without remark. The Yaban gentlemen do not mourn their war-dames. My initial impression is that this is the question not arising.’

He underlined the question not arising and put the pencil down.

Then the bars on the gallery side of the pit lifted, and the cheering changed key.

---

III.

Two warriors stepped out together.

The first was a male Yaban Walter would, in his article, eventually describe as a barbarian out of any of the recreational fictions of the past half-century. He was tall, and his hair, swept back into a coal-black mane, fell to his shoulderblades. He wore the chest plate and the legwear of the formal Yaban militia, the chrome silver and black spandex combination Walter  learned early in his career was called vitakoze. He carried no weapon. His arms were folded. His tail flicked once.

The second, beside him, was a head taller and three times the weight, broad as a doorway, his shoulders piled into a slope that began somewhere above his collarbone. His skin was a shade darker than the first Yaban’s. His hair was short and brushed back into a single trailing  black tuft. He wore the same vitakoze, except that on him it strained in the manner of a coat worn one size too small.

The boy in the gallery said, by way of identification, “Daizuren of the Sol clan and Torgaljin of the Terkash.”

In the sand below, Yulaan looked at the first of them and her face did a thing that Walter could not at the distance of the gallery quite read. The bangs hid her eyes, but the mouth tightened and then very briefly opened, and then closed again, and then settled into the same hard line it had carried through the Saibamen. Her tail, which had been lashing, went still.

“Daizuren,” she said.

The Action Gamemaster, on his bench above, made a gesture of generosity. “Brother and sister! A reunion. The crowd is moved. Perhaps the warrior can stand a little longer with help.”

Daizuren walked to within four paces of his sister and stopped. He did not look at her. He looked at the gate Yulaan had come through, which was raising again. He said, in their language, something the boy in the gallery declined to translate.

Yulaan’s mouth twitched. “Watch my left.”

The bars rose.

What came out first was the size of a yearling bull and the color of an underripe lemon. It walked on its hind legs in a loose biomechanical lope. Its arms were too long. Its face was a smear of fused features with no nose to speak of and a mouth that ran nearly ear to ear. Behind it came another, this one a sour pink, and behind that one a third whose skin was the color of a swimming pool. They came out and stopped and looked at the three Yabans in the pit and made a sound that, in Walter’s later notes, he could only render as a phonetic approximation of a child screaming through wet cloth.

“Those are Mutoid Men,” the boy said. “They come from a planet in our world called Mezara.”

“Mezara?” went Rudolph. “They aren’t  yours?”

“No,” the boy said as he then turned to the trio with a smile too innocent for what he said. “In a way, they’re yours.”

The yellow Mutoid Man went for Yulaan. She drove her shoulder into its chest in a Tessan-kō and put it through ten feet of sand on its back. The pink one went for Daizuren and got the heel of his hand up under its jaw, then the ridge of his forearm across its throat, then a knee through its sternum in a fluid two-beat that put the creature down before its second leg had finished folding. The blue one went for Torgaljin, and the blue one made the mistake of going for Torgaljin.

Torgaljin caught the Mutoid Man’s swinging forearm in his palm, closed his hand, and stopped the swing in the air with no apparent effort. He looked at it for a moment. He squeezed. There was a small wet pop. He brought his other hand up and struck the Mutoid Man across the face with the open palm, and the slap sound carried to the gallery and made Walter’s molars ache.

Then the bars opened a fourth time, and what came out was bigger.

It stood seven feet at the shoulder. It was the color of overripe plum. Its arms hung past its knees. Where its eyes should have been there were three sockets of unequal size, each containing a small black bead that moved independently of the others. It walked on two legs and dragged a third half-vestigial limb behind it. It looked at the three Yabans and then at Torgaljin specifically, and Torgaljin laughed.

He reached up and tore the chestplate off his armor in one motion, then did the same to the strap-shirt beneath. His chest was a topographical exercise. He set his feet, drew a long breath, and held it. The skin across his shoulders and arms went taut and then visibly thicker, the muscle bunching under it like something rising from below, and a faint corona of bioelectricity began to crawl over his collarbone. The boy in the gallery murmured a Yaban word Walter did not catch.

The plum-colored Mutoid Man came at him in a charge that crossed twenty feet in one bound. It struck Torgaljin in the chest with both fists, full force, with the kind of impact that should have flattened a city block.

Torgaljin slid backward six inches in the sand.

He smiled.

He grabbed the Mutoid Man’s right arm at the wrist and at the shoulder, planted his foot against its sternum, and pulled. The arm came free at the joint with a long wet crack and a spray of mucous fluid. Torgaljin stepped back, hefted the arm in his hand, considered the weight, and then beat the Mutoid Man to death with it. He used the elbow joint as a club. The Mutoid Man went down in three swings. Torgaljin kept hitting it for two more swings after it stopped moving, then dropped the arm in the sand beside the body and shook out his shoulders.

In the gallery, Vernon said, very quietly, “I cannot use this. The censors will not let me use this. This is the best material I have ever seen and I cannot use any of it.”

“Put it in a novel,” Walter said.

“No publishing house is— you think I’m a quack?”

“Put it in a novel anyway. Mary will forgive you.”

Vernon snorted and went back to his pad.

---

IV.

Then the gates around the pit opened together, four at once, and what poured out was a mixed company. Mutoid Men of three sizes, kegarins in armor, a pair of hard-eyed nagois with axes and swords made of bone and steel. Twenty-some bodies converging on the three.

What followed is hard to describe in sequence because no one in the gallery had the eye for it. It happened in three radiations from a common center, the three Yabans facing outward and connecting only at the shoulderblade, the wave folding in on them and being broken in three different rhythms.

Torgaljin’s rhythm was a slow heavy beat, percussive and final. He killed without moving his feet much. Daizuren’s rhythm was the smooth two-and-three of someone trained at length in something that resembled karate done by people who considered karate excessively abbreviated. Yulaan’s was the short hard staccato of Hakkyokuken adapted to a body that weighed half again what it had weighed at the start of the evening.

Because Yulaan was changing.

She had ripped off her bolyaga top at some point during the fourth or fifth strike, and now she stood in only the black spandex bolyaga leggings and her boots. 

Vernon nearly wanted to wolf whistle at the sight. He couldn’t and he couldn’t even tell himself why. 

Walter looked back at the empty spot from earlier.

“     ”

All across her body, the bare skin, everywhere they’d seen and what she’d just shown, carried scars dug deep and shallow in chaotic patterns, Vernon rubbed out “trenches” for his grandfather’s sake, one of the words he promised to never use, and left it sketched like several tic-tac-toe crosses overlapped at odd angles.  

Then added, ‘Damn it! I wrote Thungor with too few scars’

Then he noticed Daizuren stood akimbo and the moment of calm felt comfortable enough to add ‘how does a woman gather so many scars? Presumably war-scar’rd, unless they’ve got the idea of she-discipline like our eastern-tyrannies. even if war-crazy. wouldn’t the body fall apart like oversliced pastrami?’

The sight inspired words for Walter, and the opening of the match dazed him enough that he’d forgotten them, but seeing the girl’s back— the back! Good Lord. He looked down and that was the word. “Lord”

Look at Miss Calvary-walk! So scourged! What nasty kinds of savagery did she suffer and what comfortable hands did she rest in that allowed for this?

“Just noticed, that girl right there,” said Rudolph, pointing his pen at Yulaan who swung her arms to stretch and prove the skin-thicket of scars ran just as thorough along the arms, “There’s an old professor from Leningrad I met once, and he worked out before lecturing, because he liked showing everyone his scars. I didn’t like him. I don’t like her either.”

The boy scowled at him and then cupped his hands by his mouth til he recoiled as if suddenly remembering the act illegal or dishonorable or, Walter didn’t know exactly, he’d never seen someone stop themselves from such an animated urge to cheer. 

Yulaan’s shoulders had braced, and her forearms had bulked out and her thighs were pressing the spandex tight. Her hair, which had been loose and damp with blood, lifted off her shoulders in a slow rise. The bangs that had hidden her eyes parted as the static began to ring around her body til it sparked and crackled in waves that propagated out and then popped back to her skin only to repeat the motion in jagged, rhythmless arcs.

“When the hell did she become Tesla Girl? What comic book shit is this?” went Vernon.

Walter dropped his pencil. 

And not out of shock.

Rather, it fell out of his hand, and it never hit the pad.

Several stones the size of a man’s fist began to vibrate in their settings on the wall. Two of them came loose and lifted clear of the stone and hung in the air at the level of Yulaan’s hip, drifting slowly in the field that had begun to crawl off her skin.

“What the hell is this?! Some gravity field?! What sorta power she summonin’, boy?”

And the boy folded his arms and let his tail rest along his crossed legs. He grinned after seeing Rudolph’s face. “That’s just a typical Power-Surge.”

Rudolph repeated, “Power-Surge?”

“Whenever you raise your chi super high, it’s like… It’s like… The elements get so overcharged with energy, they stop obeying gravity.”

“Huh… That right…” Vernon watched and observed but didn’t understand even with it happening before his very eyes. 

In the Imperial Box, the Action Gamemaster sat forward. The half-mask of bronze pushed down off his forehead and seated on his face. He smiled.

The boy said, “Do you see her hair? Is it cool?”

“Yeah, the broad looks like she stepped on an electrical socket,” said Vernon.

“We call that the High-voltage state,” the boy said, more to himself than to the humans. “She is heavier with it than I had guessed.”

Yulaan chose an approaching pygmy Mutoid Man as a demonstration. She coiled her body and raised two fingers.

The mutant freak lunged. She closed her hand and threw her palm forward at him.

A surge of empty charged air pulverized the thing’s body, reducing him to minced limbs and giblets blown a dozen yards back.

To this, Vernon and Rudolph tried to stammer a comment. Walter didn’t manage either but he did write, or he committed to writing and later found the page blank for ‘I’ve seen these creatures use this ‘chi kung’ method of combat on six separate occasions and each time my eyes want to convince me this is nothing more than a Crowleyan illusion by barbaric martial artists. I have never been less convinced of that conclusion. God only knows how desperate the American and Soviet militaries will get to teach special ops how to do that.’

The overcharge continued to arc off the bolloi, until it relaxed into a thousand smaller static discharges across her body that created a chirping electro-sizzle. 

She backed towards her brother and Torgaljin.

The trio stood for a moment with their backs together, the wave momentarily broken around them, Yulaan in the center with her arms crossed and the static crawling visibly across her bare shoulders, Daizuren on her left with his hands hanging at his sides and his breath hard, Torgaljin on her right with one arm bleeding and the other arm not. The picture they made was the picture Walter would, three weeks later, fail to find a satisfying English compound for.

He found his pencil by his feet. The article was already writing itself in his head, badly. Some alternate universe, one felt, in which Mussolini and Marinetti had succeeded. Succeeded in what? In their challenge to humanism, in their resurrection of the rugged martial values of Antiquity, in their revenge upon the Madonna by gift of sword and hammer. The muscles, the scars, the muscles, the blood, the electricity, the muscles, the muscles! 

Beside him Rudolph wrote, in a smaller and tidier hand:

Atomskian Titanism is the most brutal question to the Women’s Liberation movement currently being staged on the planet, and the brutality is not in any disdain for the movement. They have nothing here to liberate from. That bolloi who took the spear in the third wave received no special tenderness in the boxes, no weeping, no removal of the children’s gaze. The Yaban gentlemen passed over their dame without remark. I doubt they noticed her individually at all. The Liberationist visiting this gallery would, I suspect, leave more shaken than she came. Here, the women are free, and they are worthless goblinshit. 

He paused. He wrote, in a different hand again:

Marjorie will not believe me. Marjorie will not be made to believe me. If I bring this home, I bring it home as a Latin tag. I will say only: vide Atomscum.

He underlined vide Atomscum and almost smiled.

Then a smaller Mutoid Man, this one a sour green, broke from where it had been crawling among the bodies and came at Yulaan in a low loping rush. She was on it before the gallery registered that she had moved. Her elbow took the Mutoid Man across the face, hard enough to knock its head halfway around its neck, and she was already into a Meteor Combination by the time the head came back. Six kick-strikes in just over a second, struck through a body propelling itself with a spring-loaded snap. Daizuren stole her kill, taking his elbow through the man’s face and leaving him meat to be cut down. The Mutoid Man’s torso came apart on the fifth strike. The body hit the sand on the sixth.

Yulaan stood over it for a moment, hair raised and sizzling. She and her brother passed by and slapped palms and tails, and the impact popped off in white bouncing stars like a dual transformer blow-out.

Another three waves came. Carnage. What was the best way to describe this to middle America? Meat-butchers with a violence fetish caught in berserker murder frenzy. Walter thought his mother would be too offended by “fetish” and crossed it out. Mania, then.

Vernon said the only thing that could be on an American’s mind. He said it to himself, low: “You know the funny part?”

The other two looked at him for the answer, and he said, “If we could get regular Earth folk to be like this, we’d be richer than Rockefeller. Can you imagine the draw? Boxers and kung fu crooks, beating and blasting each other like this. Charge ‘em a buck a match, and you’re loaded by sundown.”

The boy listened and wondered. 

The strike that took Torgaljin came while he was laughing.

He had been turning to receive a charge from the last of the larger Mutoid Men, and the laugh was at something Yulaan had done, and the kegarin he had ignored on the principle that kegarins were beneath his attention had crawled out from under the body of one of its dead and gotten a spear up under his armpit on the unguarded side. The point did not penetrate the torso plate. It penetrated the soft seam below it and went four inches into him before the haft snapped against his ribs. Torgaljin stopped laughing. He turned and brought his palm down on the kegarin’s skull, which produced a sound like a wet ottoman being dropped from a window. Then the Mutoid Man arrived and hit him in the temple with both fists, and Torgaljin took two stumbling steps and folded, sitting heavily, and toppled onto his side.

A bell rang somewhere in the pit. Two of the half-veiled nymphs from the Imperial Box descended a stairway cut into the wall, knelt beside him with a quickness that did not belong to women in trailing silks, lifted him onto a stretcher of some lacquered material, and bore him out through a side gate. None of them looked at the rest of the fight. The fight had not paused for them.

Yulaan and Daizuren finished it. Yulaan did most. Daizuren took the last two, one with a leg sweep into a heel drop, the other with what Walter, in his notes, would identify as some kind of palm strike I have only ever read about in connection with Okinawa.

The pit went quiet.

The crowd began the slow handclap that the boy had identified earlier as the appreciation. It built. The torches guttered with the stamping. The Action Gamemaster rose.

---

V.

“Wondrous!” he called. “But I tell you, Warriors, you remain nothing! Any common jin can kill a Mutoid Man. If you think yourselves worthy of memory, then face one another!”

Yulaan turned her head. The bangs, lifted by static, half-covered her eyes. Walter, who had spent most of an hour trying to get a clean read of her face, finally got one. The expression that passed across it gave nothing simple away. Walter recognized in it the look of a woman recognizing she had walked, willingly, into a sentence she had been writing about herself for years.

She faced her brother.

Across the pit, Daizuren said something in their language. Yulaan answered, also in their language. The boy in the gallery did not translate. After a moment Walter said, “What did they say?”

The boy said, “He told her she has gotten heavier. She told him not to waste his strength on his hair.”

Vernon laughed, once.

“Never tell a lady her weight, eh? My wife Mary smacked me for less!”

The boy looked puzzled. “Her chi is heavy, yeah, but she’d love to hear that, right.”

She lunged forward and he caught her. The motion brought renewed pain to her sliced shoulder. With his baby sister in his grip, he lifted her over his head and brought her down chest-first onto his knee. She spat blood and rolled over onto her side. This was not a sparring match. She rolled again to avoid his fist breaking the ground, wrapped her fingers around a blood-sticky scimitar, and lifted the blade towards him. He dodged, wrapped his tail around her hand and the hilt to arrest her, and beat her face. She reached out to stop him, clutching his own face, and aimed her fingers towards his eyes in a desperate attempt to gouge one out and stop the beating. 

Seeing this, the boy stood up as his milky white tail thrashed.

Vernon said, “Looks like it’s game over for that girl right there. Damn! Guess she wasn’t gonna win this one from the start. That fellow is fierce!”

Walter went, “Well, what was her name? Ulaanbataar or something like that?”

The boy wrinkled his nose and said, “Yulaan.”  He quickly turned his head back to the arena and said something the men heard first tense and low, and then— and then a shout they understood real well: “Holy shit!”

The earth quaked, and debris and limbs lifted again off the soaked earth. Vernon and Walter clapped hands over their ears. Rudolph, who had been peering toward the far end of the coliseum, discovered his duck-and-cover instinct a half-second late and struck the rail hard enough to save himself from the aisle. When he looked down, there was a crater under the two warriors and white fire around Yulaan.

“What the hell was that?! I think she— she sprung up so fast, it looked fake!”

“Good god, look,” shouted Vernon as if he had seen the Lord in the ring. 

Yulaan was on her feet, locked against Daizuren. He drove back. They locked into a test of strength, hand clutching hand, muscles searing, wounds burning, sweat and blood dripping, bioelectricity crackling around their hands, soil and rocks breaking midair around them. Soon the air grew hazy and thick. Rings of lightning flashed and crackled around the two in uncountable seconds.

The crater broke deeper. The trio ducked again. 

While doing so, Walter laughed with a frazzled gasping noise and pointed at Vernon’s mustache— the thing was lifting over his nose. Rudolph thought his trilby was being snatched by some thief and beat wildly above his head, before he felt his sideburns tingle the same way he’d felt them when standing under a Tesla coil. 

“They’re too strong,” he repeated thrice, and yet in his ears it sounded damp and distant as if shouting over a cacophony. 

Yulaan broke first, ducking and uppercutting his chin, then arced her arm around his shoulders to crush him into the ground, the impact blowing out a deeper crater in the dust.

She finished with a heavy Pneumatic Strike against his chest. Before he could counter with a right-left hook combo, she threw herself back, and he jumped up. This brought him right into her trap, and she kicked his chin and sent him flying into the wall. His whole body broke through, and he lay motionless in the rubble.

They popped the bubble of heavy air. No more tension. Everyone clapped. 

Yulaan panted and grabbed her knees.

The Action Gamemaster stretched out his arms and called out, “My new champion! You have answered last year’s humiliation with this raging blast of power. Wonderful! Now—Getavara’s Laughter calls for your brother’s head. Raise it to the crowd and show your mettle!”

Vernon perked up. He had written a scene just like this before. How validating! The grand bastard was asking her to behead Daizuren.

The boy also sat up. “Oh.”

“That a problem?” he asked the young Yaban. 

“O-oh, um… I mean… If she really must, then that’s…”

Yulaan paused and pulled at her mouth, taking several beats to look at the dark smears on her palm. And then she limped in motions Walter didn’t trust. He’d seen the same motions in draft dodgers claiming bone-spurs and suddenly-reemerging childhood leg fractures. 

She stooped over a shamshir and let each finger wrap around the bone hilt, and then stumbled over to the wall. 

Only then had she looked over to Daizuren. 

Walter had spent over a decade covering Yabans and knew just enough about them to distrust his own conclusions. And so he wondered: had Earth made her so soft-bellied she couldn’t even cut off her brother’s head in public? 

“Oh, her brother’s getting back up,” said Rudolph.

“She fucked around too long.”

She jogged to Daizuren so calmly that the crowd made what Walter guessed were restless jeers.

Daizuren stood again. He smiled.

So did she.

He grabbed her with his tail and karate kicked her up the face, sending her flying back. His injuries were too great, and he fell to his knees and then to his face after, his strength completely spent. 

The scimitar clattered against the stone floor. Yulaan hit the ground back-first and lay there, passing out of consciousness.

Vernon checked the pulse of the crowd and deduced through the raised fists and hocks of meat that they were satisfied by the compromise. 

“A double knockout!” cried the Action Gamemaster. “It seems both brother and sister will live to fight again, and I earn myself two champions today.”

---

VI.

Below the gallery, four nymphs descended in pairs and gathered the unconscious siblings between them onto a single broad stretcher. Yulaan and Daizuren rode out shoulder to shoulder, blood-matted hair pooled together, the static still drifting off Yulaan’s skin in faint visible curls. Before they left the Blood Pit, both siblings woke. Walter could see their mouths moving but could not hear what passed between them.
The nymphs carried them with the upright dignity their kind seemed to inherit somewhere along the line, eyes fixed on the champions rather than the gallery. Vernon would have given half his fee to catch the words.

The crowd stamped on the benches. Stones came loose from the upper tier. The Action Gamemaster bowed. The Imperial Box began to clear.

In the gallery, the three reporters did not move for a while.

Vernon was the first to speak. “I cannot write any of this.”

“You have been saying that for ninety minutes,” Rudolph said.

“I mean I cannot write any of this. The Argosy crowd would not believe it. The Stag editor would think I had been on something. I have nowhere to put it.”

Walter was looking at the empty pit. “Then write the piece you came to write. The boys over in Long Binh don’t need this from you. They just need some sexy Amazonian barbarian battle queen to whack off while Vietcong shoot at ‘em. And you literally got some muscle babe flashing her tits at everyone and busting everyone’s heads. Bollois are a problem for prose. They aren’t the boys’ problem.”

Vernon nodded slowly. He wrote in the corner of his pad: the bolloi is a problem for prose. He did not underline it.

Rudolph closed his book. “No, no, the lesson is cleaner than that. The ladies at the symposium will say the bolloi prove their thesis. They will say, there, you see, woman unleashed, woman armed, woman freed of nursery and parlor and matrimonial shackle, and lo, she builds a city. Rubbish! The bolloi proves mine. If human women possessed the civic appetite they claim has been chained out of them, history would show one city of theirs. One. A port, a fort, a republic, a canal, a wall, a fleet. Anything. Anything! Instead these alien bitches arrive in our pine woods and in fifteen years they  raised a good and proper polis out of mud and mosquito water. The Romans would have looked at Atomsk and  declared ‘Whoever built this gets us.’ That does not make Marjorie an architect. It makes Marjorie’s excuses worse.”

Vernon looked over from his pad. “They’d say you’ve ignored property law, money, schools, fathers, husbands, churches, babies, fists, and the whole damned arrangement.”

“Yes, yes, the usual feminist rosary.”

“They’d also say you’re comparing housewives in Queens to armored space monkey Amazons with prehensile tails and bones like bridge cable and enough upper body strength to fold a steam train in half.”

“I am comparing claims to results.”

Vernon looked at him. “You already wrote that one in your head, didn’t you, ya egghead?”

“Several times. Figured I’d annoy you plenty.”

“You’re comparing a lady with a saucepan to a thing that can beat a goblin to death with another goblin.”

Rudolph smiled thinly. “Then let the lady put down the saucepan.”

“They don’t fuck!”

Rudolph shrugged. “Neither does my wife.”

“No, no, the difference is, the bollois ain’t pretending to be prudes, and Marjorie’s laughing at you.”

Walter spoke a pitch higher, “Did you notice the goblins fled when the Yulaan girl became the goddess of thunder for a moment? I have been trying to remember and I think they fled.”

“They did, yeah.”

“The Mutoid Men did not.”

“The Mutoid Men are probably us, so they probably didn’t want to look scared by a chick. That’s what that whelp boy said. They’re mutant homos.”

“That is the worst thing I have heard tonight. That is the single worst thing I have heard tonight.” They laughed.

Walter said, “Write it for yourself.”

The boy stepped forward and said in his careful English that the gallery would be cleared in five minutes, that the second event of the evening was a private match and not for publication, and that they were free to stay the night. They declined. 

The veiled figure in the front row had risen and was being escorted out by two attendants who did not approach within six feet of her. Rudolph watched her go. He did not write anything down.

Instead he said, “Over in Paris, because of course the French would care, they’re scrambling a bunch of presentations about the sexuality of les ménades de gorilles.. They already have a couple thousand RSVPs.”

“Ah!” shouted Vernon loud enough that someone else had to hear it. “They gotta discharge from all this somehow, right-right? What the hell is wrong with them? Half of em already walk around like Space Age go-go dancers, then they up and forget what sex is!”

They rose.

“Well, see, even Marjorie is always chattering about that one. My universe is trying to bribe to buy one of the cadavers to dissect—”

“Yeah? Dissect? That what they’re callin’ it now?”

Vernon spotted a white tail fluttering and saw the boy running toward Yulaan, who staggered along with Daizuren holding her up.

“Which one of us were you rooting for, Yuta?”

And Yuta said without hesitation, 

“Yulaan!”

Daizuren smacked him with a laugh. “Really? You’re going to do your big brother like that?” And the three lifted off the ground and flew to another spot out of sight. 

Vernon felt his face pull into one of those diagonal smirks and shook his head with a huff. 

A white-veiled nymph caught his eye, in her stride she swam and swirled across and away, and he looked  towards the trees for gusts, the  stone path for any leaf eddy, anything which could explain the motion. A good photograph in a better year would have led to a hundred loony-magazine articles on fairies in the Pines. He recognized her as one of the gallery nymphs. 

Then he said, “I didn’t see any black veils. Unless you did. You think you saw any of those, ah, third ones?”

Walter, on the way out, looked back up stairs and remembered the dark ruddy dust in the pit. “Yenois you mean? No.”

Rudolph asked a passing bolloi for a light and she lit his Cuban with a finger snap before disappearing into some shadows towards the Pine Barrens.

“I don’t even get why they need three. Fascinating biologically at least. I’ve read up on studying this pygmy tribe in the Pacific that also allegedly has three, in sociological terms. Nothing like this.”

“Yenois, they’re the real women, ain’t they?” 

Rudolph cupped his hand over the cigar burn until it glowed brighter. “I guess. Actually that makes three altogether on its own axis. Bollois, yenois, nymphs, I mean. For some reason God needed to invent their women thrice.”

“Maybe Getavara was havin’ a laugh, eh! Heh heh! They got them the Venuses from Mars, they got the nymphs, which I mean, wow! And then they hide their actual women like purdah Muslims.”

Walter was already walking back to the Buick and had a line in his head for the article, but that one, ‘Venuses from Mars,’ replaced it until he chose the tag as the article title, and returned to the first line. He turned it over once and rejected it. He turned it again and rejected it. The line wanted to be quotable, and the thing he had watched did not. He thought instead about the figure of the Action Gamemaster lowering his bronze mask onto his face, and the weight of the half-veiled nymph watching her countrywoman dragged out by the heels without a flinch, and the slow rise of Yulaan’s hair off her shoulders, and the flag with the alien rune that was, on third glance, a radish after all. 

He could pry open his college thesaurus and buy a thousand thirty-dollar words for a bolloi’s muscles. Vernon, you bastard. He scratched that out and sighed. Why overthink it at all? Pulp would pulp it. Sociology would misuse it. The Times would domesticate it. The State Department would classify it. The women’s-lib argument would get dragged into it. The male chauvinists would mock it and cheer it in the same breath. The Hong Kong film-makers would pray to it. The night was in his hands and needed to be on paper.