Chapter Forty-Three

Coach Wills took a moment to approach and return my datapad to me, his hand came out, he held the device between two pudgy fingers that must have once been monstrously strong, now waxing and waning between whether they would thin to bone or go to fat as time took its toll in his slowly declining years. He spat into the grass when he held it out to me, I extended my hand to accept it, but he didn’t let go.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do, I looked down at the device he wouldn’t let go of and then up at him, “Don’t matter where you from, alien. Don’t care what nobody said. Don’t care what nobody believes. You helped out where you were needed. Far as I’m concerned, you got a place on my planet. Do what you gotta do, an see if you can convince the rest of em. Good luck.” He grunted and released his hold on the device then walked away from me without another word. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to his daughter on the sidelines, but it didn’t matter.

He had a point. “I’ve got work to do.” I told myself and began identifying everybody I could. The football players I did by number, but that was when I noticed something. Everybody wasn’t on the field… various pairs of dlamisan fortune seekers and security officers were paired off with different groups of humans, the same was true of human security forces and football players, each one interspersed into opposite numbers so that they alternated from one to the next. ‘This is different…’

The whistle blew, and the humans selected different types of throwables. The football players chose footballs, but the security forces seemed to choose a greater variety of objects…

The whistle blew again, and the dlamisans took a sprinting position down on all fours, tails stiff, bodies low to the ground.

Then the whistle blew again, and I darted my eyes to where Captain Bonny was. She was a waif of a thing next to the others, a little tall for a female of my species… but slender compared to the hulking brutes. ‘How can she think she has a chance…’

The various balls flung from human hands, the football players in long, steady arcs over distance while the security team members had a far wider array of results.

My people are fast, fast and strong, and I admit I was proud, watching them race over the ground with speed few humans could even hope to match on their best days. Charging forward, eyes low, predatory instincts high, it took everything inside me not to run with them, I could see now why there were others on the side. Human hands held the shoulders of the dlamisans waiting for their turn. I ignored the cameras and watched the way the humans positioned themselves, waiting for the return.

At once it was obvious that the coach had modified my rules a little, offering a few yards distance for interception rather than right at the line. The first dlamisan soldier caught his football… in his mouth, unsurprisingly, chomping down hard, he immediately began his return.

His muscles were rippling beneath ink dark fur and he ate up ground like floodwaters overran the land…

Until the impact. Two opposing humans charged forward, their hulking frames smashing into his, arms grappling, they picked him up and charged him back several paces before slamming him to the ground, one stealing his ball away before the other could take it, and flinging it into his own point basket.

I looked toward Mavis, she had on a pair of augmented reality glasses and it didn’t take a genius to see how she was keeping scores even beyond what her eye could track.

But none of that shocked me like the noise.

Cheering and ‘ooohs’ I yanked my head left and right and saw that seats were starting to fill with visitors.

My spine tingled as I began frantically dashing down notes and sought out the wily Captain. She had her ball before I knew she had it, but carried it in her hand. She had abandoned the faster gait of being on all fours and ran like a human sprinter even though it slowed her down. “Rooooooooo!” She howled out and drew eyeballs toward her, a dlamisan security officer banked toward her attempting to knock her off her feet the way I’d been bowled over in the past.

If she could smile like a human, she would have. She jumped, landed on his back, and hopped off. “Roooooo!” her wild howl carried through the air as she hopped on the backs of runners as she sprinted toward her goal, the human thrower she worked with clearly had more of an eye for teamwork than the last one, as he stuck out his foot and tripped the human on the left, then ran across the front of the hopping mad ship captain and slammed bodily into both an oncoming dlamisan crew member and a human attempting to interfere in Bonny’s return.

“Roooo!” She held up her hands in triumph as she scored the first point and took position again.

Out on the field it became a melee of strength against strength, speed against speed as my people vied to get closer to the goal and into the reach of their respective human throwers.

The crowd was larger, and in a moment of inspiration I flicked on my datapad and scrolled to the nearest local media outlet.

“In an impromptu exhibition we’re told was jointly planned by the alien exchange students and the University of Louisville’s football team… along with a handful of other advisors from local security teams for our joint embassies, a new sport is being introduced on Earth. On site with us we have someone closer to the inventor of this new sport who is able to tell us a little bit about it.”

The camera panned over and I saw, of all people, Fauve. “Miss Walker, what’s this sport called?”

“Ballyball. It was invented by Bailey, the student staying with us.” She said and waved at the camera. “Hi, Bailey, sorry I couldn’t be there to watch!” She gave a big toothy grin and the young reporter quickly moved on to the next question.

“And why was it invented?” The reporter asked, while behind them we could see the screening of the live play taking place as Byron sacked a dlamisan security officer and knocked the ball free.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“So we’d have something to play together. See you can only play a proper game of Ballyball with aliens and humans playing to our strengths, they’re faster, we’re more flexible, and we’re both,” she made to flex a bicep, “really strong. So he wanted a game we could all play together, because people who play games together can't bring themselves to hurt each other afterward. Even if those games get a little rough, that’s just part of the fun.” Fauve said as if she were quoting me.

My jaw dropped, and I turned half my ears to listening to that, moving the video aside on the screen to go back to taking notes as I watched strategies begin to evolve among teammates and rivals.

The pirates weren’t as big as the security officers, but they were hardy folk and they evolved impromptu short term alliances, tossing balls back and forth to one another to avoid giving up a point, I looked down at the video monitor, Bonny Red was getting a lot of screen time with her shocking degree of acrobatics, often jumping off of her counterparts to return the ball back to its destination and score another point.

Again and again, throwers positioned themselves and runners took position, breathing hard, it was the purest form of athleticism I’d ever seen, muscles rising and falling, my airsacs seized up just watching the sport evolve.

Eight times the Captain of the Red Spark scored without being touched, until an adroit human jumped up himself, wrapped his arms around her waist, and brought her crashing to the ground.

The crowd gasped, I flipped to the video feed while darting my eyes up, the stadium had more and more people streaming in and filling seats. It wasn’t hard to figure out from there.

‘Teresa is behind this.’ I knew it, it was a most undlamisan like leap of intuition, the logic obvious only in hindsight, off to my right the cheerleaders were doing their all to get the crowd into the game, their own acrobatics sometimes mimicking Bonny Red. For a moment though, when she went down, hard, from eight feet in the air, the whole game ground to a halt.

The one to tackle her got up, and for impossibly long seconds, the giant monitor flicked on to life. I don’t know which camera caught it, but I could hear the murmuring of the crowd as their sudden favorite lay wounded in the grass.

Then, on the monitor, the zoom in caught the one to take her down, leaning over her, she was breathing hard, her limbs spasmed for a moment… and in a single instant of utter selfishness I could never forgive myself for, I admit… I was afraid for my chances at success.

But leaning over her, the human to bring her down extended a hand, and she cocked her head, flopping her ears out, and took his hand in hers to let him help her back up to her feet.

“Ye knocked me wind out o’me mainsails there, neighbor. Good hit!” She nodded enthusiastically, and another nearby human picked up the ball she’d lost in the strike… and tossed it back to her.

She reflexively caught it in her mouth… and then the game was on in a flurry of motion as if it had never paused for a moment.

I noted the names and faces as best I could, reminding myself to get number and named shirts for everyone to play in like the football team, and resumed taking notes.

As the game went on and players began to swap out, one set of teams began to be supplanted with another, and the crowds continued to roll in. I’m sure that popular human historical fictions that humans love to make, the ones that never let the facts get in the way of the truth, will show that the entire stadium was filled to the brim over hours.

But that wasn’t the case. I doubt I could have handled it if it had been. There were a few thousand there, but I noticed that the camera that interviewed Fauve showed the crowd up close, thus giving the illusion of being vast, and centered on particular players, thus creating crowd favorites with particularly good performances.

Players that cycled out came in and drank their fill, and I did my best to keep the water flowing while noting the little contributions between teammates and rivals.

Whoever worked the camera for the big screen made sure to catch particularly favorable acts of sportsmanship. Watching the acts of competitive retrieval continue to evolve new strategies and ever shifting alliances formed by glances in a single instant only to be abandoned and reforged from one throw to the next in both retrieval and interception, the scores began to tighten up.

And when the student news arrived to start interviewing players, their cameras out and microphones extended the same way toward merchant sailor or dlamisan security officer or football player or human security officer… ‘backstories’ began to emerge.

I suppose it was inevitable though. Bonny Red, as humans say, ‘stole the show’. She struck a pose with a simple water cup and told wild stories, her head tilted up with pride, her chest thrust out as if she were a proud human, the ‘pirate bodice’ and other dress gave her a dashing, romantic air that was both familiar and alien to human and dlamisan alike.

Her silken voice was sweet and smooth like honey and she played it up for all it was worth. “Aye a’course I wanted to find a safe port of call, but ye can’t hope to get nothin without risk. Not many neighbors out there,” she pointed up toward the endless blue sky, “understand that like me. Thas why I like humans. Yer a right brave folk, strappin explosives to yer behinds to send you rocket’n up toward space. Lot a folk out there think yer nuts. But I likes it I do. If’n ye gotta sail the void, ye need good mates and good ships and good ports, an I figure humans got all three.”

I had to wonder if she wasn’t laying it on a little thick, but it felt real to me, the way she praised them it was like she’d finally found people who might understand her. So even if it was a little thick, I think it was sincere.

The crowd continued to thicken until the players began to tire, dlamisans began to weaken, human tackles and throws lost something of their edge…

And the whistle of Coach Wills finally blew.

“Time for the final scores!” All the frisbees and balls had been used up and stored, and thanks to the augmented reality glasses and a little communication with whoever managed to get the scoreboard going, the tallies began to come out. Another thing I neglected… largely because I never imagined it would actually be this complicated, I could only conclude that Mavis got involved in identifying fixed teams, and kept my mistake from ruining the outcome, if not the true purpose of the observational study.

In my first edition of this work, I spoke of the winning team, but with the long reflection of years, I came to realize… it didn’t matter. The truth is, as recording devices showed dlamisan and human players socializing together and speaking openly with one another as if they’d been friends for a lifetime, a far more important victory had been struck.

A victory not won by individuals, or even paired off teams, or even me alone.

It was us.

All of us.

Human of Earth and Dlamisan of Dlamias… we both won that day, our whole worlds…

In yet another undlamisan-like moment of intuition, I felt the winds of inevitable change sweep over my body and give me chills as if my fur were gone and I was as naked as a human.

Nothing would ever be the same.

Not for any of us.

Not after that.

And I was right.