by Larry Niven
Okay, Mr. X hadn't screwed her yet. Maybe she was getting ready for him.
But the bed pad was wrinkled. Had it been used?
He studied the report. Traces of her perfume and body oils, a few cells, a strand of hair…
But no one else's. Nothing at all that didn't match her. Not male, or female, and as for the llama and the spayed gerbil… nothing.
Did she check in to masturbate, or what?
What were you doing there, Sharon? What was in the wall?
All right. Let's think this through. You had an assignation with a married man. You were in love…
Alex's ego wouldn't allow him to think that. There had been no one in her heart. There had been room for him. He knew it. He'd felt it. It had to be true.
Then Sharon: You wanted to call the affair off. You agreed to meet him one last time. You The hole in the wall was right for a wide-angle scan. Sharon could have gotten her hands on a pinhead camera.
All right. You wanted… he wanted? Sharon checked into the motel. She would have had time to mount the camera. He wouldn't.
She wanted evidence. Information…
And that other, nasty thought coiled and hissed in his hindbrain. She got under your skin mighty fast, didn't she, Griff?
You let her into the security lines, past your defences faster than you had to, because she was going to be taking over in two weeks. So she had access.
To what?
May I? she had asked.
"Playback," he said. "Last access Sharon Crayne date July nineteenth security files."
There was a momentary pause-more, he suspected, for the psychological benefit of the user than from any need of the system. Then the screen flashed NO ACCESS CODE THAT DATE SHARON CRAYNE.
He thought of Sharon poring over the files. A smile struggled to surface, succeeded but lost its warmth along the way. It hung there on his mouth, cold and lifeless.
How long have you been dead now, Sharon? Thirteen, fourteen hours? And a file that doesn't exist is the last thing that you looked at.
The smile was deathlocked onto his face. He felt ghastly.
Somebody walked by his workstation and dropped a plastic data sheet off next to him. With an unoccupied splinter of attention he heard a rustle. saw a shadowy figure, heard somebody talking behind him.
He refused to come up from his search, even when he felt the hand on his shoulder.
"Griff!" Tony said louder this time.
Alex jerked and stared up at the sympathetic face above him. For the first time, it was Griffin who looked away, who couldn't meet and hold his gaze.
"You want to know what Sharon was looking at last?"
"Just… want to look at it."
"I can do better than that. I have a complete playback loop. Every word, every command. Sometimes you get a weird effect in programming and can't figure out how you did it, so you'd like to go back and-" Tony sat next to Alex, and his fingers became a blur. "-watch over your own shoulder…"
Alex, still numbed, watched without enthusiasm. He wanted to tell Tony to go away.
"Funny," Tony said. "I can't pull up her visual…"
"Why would that be?"
"She may have put a block on it? Let's see the keystrokes." Tony continued to work while Alex watched. "I've still got some tricks."
"Breaking and entering type tricks?"
"I'm shocked, shocked that you would-" The structures of MIMIC began to appear. The view rotated, then zoomed in. "-accuse me of such a… preposterous… There."
Suddenly Alex was watching Sharon again, and his heart broke.
She was totally absorbed in her work, busy, typing and writing occasionally, triggering some of the inputs with eye and head movements alone. She was alive, and he knew that he loved her. The urge to reach out and touch her, to speak the words he had never spoken, lashed him like a bitter wind.
"Griff, it looks like she called up the ScanNet system for the entire Gaming area."
Tony pulled back to a broader image of MIMIC, encompassing all nineteen floors. Some of the corridors flashed red: Sharon had been into them.
"Here, here, and here," Alex said, "we have the radiation signs."
"Why would she want those locations?"
"Don't those signs seal out Gamers?"
"They do. Strongest mantrap in IFGS: cost of opening that door by any means, one absolute death. No saving throws, no defence."
"Cute notion," Alex said. "Yours?"
"Doris and El." Tony sat back, and watched the play. "You know, Alex…"
"What?"
"We don't have a playback from the correct angle, but the way she's doing this reminds me of something."
"What?"
"Well, it's the way she's acting. The pattern. Trying to block the record, that too. She's recording ScanNet sensor locations."
"Maybe she wanted to look at the whole thing later, at her leisure. "
Tony chose his next words carefully. "Maybe, but why not just have it pumped into her room?"
Alex sat stonily.
"Sorry, Griff. I didn't mean to imply anything…"
The air around Alex seemed to crackle. "Go ahead. What were you about to say?"
"We'll… say I saw this. Say I didn't know Sharon, which I don't. Say I didn't know she was your friend."
"Will you cut the bullshit?"
Suddenly, unmistakably, the potential for physical violence normally submerged deep within Alex Griffin was quite close to the surface. Tony considered backing off. Instead he said, "I'd say she was recording this to give to someone else."
And there was a bugging device in the wall at the motel.
"We don't have any sound," Alex said, controlled again. "It looked to me as if she was saying something. Can you get that for me again?"
Tony tapped out commands. They were looking at Sharon's mouth. Griffin moved his lips along with her. "I'm coming, sweetheart. Mommy's doing everything she can."
Tony McWhirter froze. "What the hell?"
Alex stood. "Thank you, Tony."
"Sure," Tony said, still confused. "Any time."
Alex left the room.
Tony McWhirter let six seconds pass before he exhaled again. His armpits felt damp and clammy.
In Chino there were men who spent their whole lives at the edge of violence. Tony had never seen Alex Griffin like that. It disoriented him to learn that the man was human after all.
And, drown it, if he was thinking what Tony had already thought, it was no wonder.
8
Earlybirds of Prey
"Loremasters have five major weaknesses: If they are reckless, destroy them. If too cautious, capture them. If prone to anger, ridicule them. If proud, humiliate them. If they are, or have been, sexually or emotionally involved with their teammates, harass them. "
"Study your opponent's weaknesses, and never miss an opportunity to exploit them."
— Nigel Bishop, The Art of Gaming, 2052
Thursday, July 21, 2059 — 4:25 A.M.
Gaming Central was alive on level three now. In two hours everything would begin.
Richard Lopez entered the domed room to a standing ovation from the technicians and took his place to Tony McWhirter's left, at a console opposite Mitsuko. She had arrived an hour early to run her checklist.
With every touch, every movement of foot or hand, every whisper of voice, shapes and sounds came alive in MIMIC.
The circular room was separated roughly into thirds, with Tony McWhirter's control console in the center. Backup technicians and assistants were behind him at consoles and holo stages. To his right, on the far side of a glass wall, was a multivision stage. Upon it, a troupe of mimes twisted and turned through their movements, practicing. El directed, and Doris led by example.
She was superb. Every movement, every torsion of the head and arch of her spine, transformed her into a different animal, a different entity. She ranged from subhuman to human to transhuman with the flicker of an eyelash. Her troupe was
no less adroit. Skills thousands of years old matched perfectly with twenty-first-century Virtual imaging techniques.
The Virtual images in Tony's field of vision flickered from shape to shape, trying this and that. The hologram projections, computer-based Virtual illusions' makeup, and backdrops, combined to create the effect they called
DreamTime.
Tony felt like a voyeur, a mere observer in the process, but there wasn't much he could do. For now, his task was that of an overseer.
"Richard?" he said.
The little man turned to look at him. "Yes?"
"Have you run your testing sequences?"
"Working on that now, Tony."
Richard Lopez moved like a man prematurely aged. A touch of arthritis, perhaps? But when he sat down at the board and began to bend the machine to his will, when he fell into the thought and movement patterns he understood and loved so well, it was as if Richard Lopez swelled in size, becoming another person entirely. Then he was like a concert pianist in his prime.
Images flowed through the computer, Virtual images perfectly matched with the holograms and the backgrounds.
It was realer than real. Tony watched the DreamTime unreality that flowed and shifted, then looked back at the room around him. It made him dizzy. In comparison, reality seemed rigid and colorless.
Acacia had almost finished packing.
All equipment was designed to nest precisely together, fitting into her backpack or belt pod with a maximum of balance and a minimum of strain. She inspected every inch of her costume, then peeled the seam open with her thumb and slipped into it. She pirouetted in front of her mirror. Perfect. She lunged and recovered, shadow-fencing.
She felt the two pounds she had gained in last week's nervous eating. But thirty-two ounces be damned: balance felt good, costume looked good, and she was electricity in tights.
Except…
Nigel.
He was still asleep on the bed that they shared. He lay on his back, respiration down to three breaths a minute, arms out to his sides in savasana, the corpse pose that led him directly from meditation into sleep.
His control was something close to total.
Even or especially when they made love. Every trick she knew, everything she tried, every sensual exertion that broke the control of ordinary men, brought them gasping to the brink of climax and beyond, merely amused him. Occasionally, a light dew of perspiration glistened on his forehead.
For Nigel Bishop, control was like a religion.
Especially last night. She felt like a woman of glass. He had peered into her, seen all her secrets, and perceived the unspoken.
She had turned and writhed, atop him yet completely under his control, his fingers light upon her wrists… light, unless she tried to twist away. If she attempted escape, they became like manacles.
"Acacia. Pet," he breathed into her mouth. "You're nervous."
"Shouldn't I be? My God, Nigel, what we're doing…"
He smiled, his teeth very white and clean in the darkness. "Why yes, yes, you should be." He paused. "Is there… anything else?"
He arched his head up and caressed the side of her neck, nibbling. His teeth touched the pulse point on her throat, closed about it subtly. Acacia wanted to scream, but didn't. But didn't speak her mind, either. And somewhere deep inside her, where all of his gentle, brutal assurances could never reach, she was afraid.
One final time, Acacia evaluated herself in the mirror. Backpack. Sword. Panthesilea, hello again.
Time to meet her team.
Five seconds after she left the room, Nigel Bishop's breathing began to speed. He opened his eyes.
Yes, he thought. She knows something is wrong. She isn't sure what. She will justify and rationalise, because she thinks she is in love, and that should carry her well into the Game. And then?
Nigel smiled. He didn't have the faintest idea.
Alphonse "The Barbarian" Nakagawa, Loremaster for the Texas Instruments-Mitsubishi team, was a tall, thin half-Japanese from Austin with a golden halo of Jesus hair and the thin, angular body of a stork. His grandfather had been a shrimp fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico, his father an oil rigger. For him, the California Voodoo Game began with his wife's image on a hotel phone screen, too early in the morning.
"Saray? Heck fire, woman what time is it?"
Was she glaring? "It's six forty-five here. The Game starts in two and a half hours."
"Christ. I feel like I was ate by a coyote and shit off a cliff. "
"I see you're working your shitkicker routine overtime. Sorry, but we've got to talk."
"Ah… right. Okay, I'm sitting up."
"Al, someone really wants your balls."
"I'm a Loremaster. Goes with the territory."
"Phone call, black screen, anonymous, twenty minutes ago. I took that long to think it through before I called you. I couldn't really tell the gender, even. Male, I think. 'Guess who's sleeping in your husband's bed?' "
"Damn! Let me in on the secret, would you?"
"Crystal Cofax, I assume, I should hope! I hung on long enough that he could have said. I don't think he knew. So I got tearful and hysterical and called you a bug-fucking pederast TexNip prick and swore I'd call you that instant and demand explanations."
"Just right. But… um."
"It is Crystal, isn't it?"
"Sure. Yes, dear, honestly. She's back in her room, but you could call her."
"Okay. What means um?"
"Well, could be Bishop. Rumor has it, he's crooked as a bucket of snakes. Either he's bluffing, or he knows I've got a little friend up here. Thinks I'm cheating."
"Why didn't he give me a name?"
"Maybe he's playing another game. He's sharp as a rat turd, but maybe he doesn't know…" Alphonse felt his thought processes coming unstuck. "Doesn't know. Just peeked at an unmade bed. But that'd mean he was here in my room."
The last came out as an indignant squeak.
Saray laughed. "You're in the security wing of the Arabian Nights, dear. Aren't you letting your imagination run away with you?"
But Alphonse wasn't watching her anymore. He was studying the door, imagining Bishop overriding the lock, or bribing a maid, or stealing a key from the front desk, or emergency-coding the central processor, or…
"Al?
"Huh? Oh… I was just wondering how he did it."
"You can't be serious."
"Serious as cancer," Alphonse said thickly. "This is war."
He had to check his valise. Was it gone? Did Bishop have all of his data cards?
"Alphonse? Alphonse? There you go again. Listen, call me back when you have a flash of sanity, however brief."
"I'm gonna hurt that boy."
She grimaced and was gone.
He checked the closet and found all of his gear. Bishop for sure. If something had been misplaced, it would mean he faced a lesser adversary. But if Nigel Bishop had targeted him… researched him… and why not? Alphonse Nakagawa was the only real threat to the Bishop.
So Bishop knew Saray was pregnant, but he must think their marriage was lockstepped. That was reasonable. There were only two couples in the world-and once there had been three-that Saray and Al would swap with. During a Game he kept, as the expression went, his pecker in his pocket. He believed it improved his performance.
Thought you could bitch me up? Well, Bishop, when l'm finished with you, there won't be anything left but fur and claws.
But I'll keep my smile tight for a while. I'll let you think it worked. The only question is were you in my room?
Alphonse stalked the room, peering under the bed, searching behind the cabinets for bugs, checking and rechecking the locks on his valise a dozen times before finally, reluctantly, concluding that he was probably overreacting.
But if Bishop's stolen my strategy notes, I'm fucked, and laughed at.
It's too late to change everything now. What to do? One chance: if Bishop doesn 't know I know…
The knock
on the door jolted him. It was room service, with breakfast. Al the Barbarian ate as he dressed. He tried to convince himself there was no real problem, that it was all, as Saray suggested, a paranoid fantasy.
Ha. As Grandpappy Nakagawa used to say, that dog wouldn't hunt.
The room was small and stark and reminded Panthesilea more of a locker room than anything else.
Captain Cipher was the first to notice her in the doorway. He peered up at her through his oversized helmet with its blue visual shield. "Milady," he said. There was no whining in his voice now, no uncertainty There was a different quality to him. He even smelled clean.
Acacia looked at the rest of her team.
Steffie "Aces" Wilde, Engineer/Scout. Mati "Top Nun" Cohen, Cleric. Terrance "Prez" Coolidge, Warrior. Corrinda Harding, Thief.
Each nodded, a silent salute as she came into their ken. They were appropriately busy stretching or checking their equipment.
Acacia checked her watch. "05:15 hours. Crack of dawn. Game starts in two hours. Any last-minutes to discuss?"
Corrinda pumped a pneumatic cuff around her bad knee, checked the pressure, eased off a little, flexed it… and tried to hide her grimace. "It's fine," she said. "Just a little stiff."
"We'll keep the jogging to a minimum.''
Top Nun adjusted her hood. "How are we going to protect Cipher, and to what degree will we be expected to?"
A reasonable question. The rest of the team were all athletes. They pumped air, did grueling hours of yoga and martial arts, ran, swam, worked the rings. Cipher was a couch potato right to the eyes.
"Crystal Maze was a special situation," Acacia said. "I knew we'd need him more than we needed the other categories. Here, we know from the preliminary notes-" She lifted a thin sheaf of notes entitled "California Voodoo," then dropped it again. "-that no Gaming category is dominant."
She checked through her own equipment as she considered. "Prez? Work with me for a minute."
"Prez" Coolidge, the tall, stocky African-American, slid an assegai out of his back sheath. The spear balanced like a willow wand in his gigantic hand. He flicked on the monitor, and a holographic blade projected over the slender sensor. Gyro switched on. Acacia dropped the Virtual shield in front of her face, and the spear became even sharper and more fearsome.