The California Voodoo Game dp-3

by Larry Niven

  "They grew strong in secrecy. One day, when they felt that they had grown strong enough, they attacked us. It was slaughter. There was no force in New Africa strong enough to stop them, for they gained new, terrible power from the atomic machine in New Africa's basement. Only the Nommo could even slow their advance. They made a barrier between the Mayombreros and us. That line is all that has preserved us until now.

  "But the Mayombreros grow stronger daily. We cannot hold out forever. When they find a way to destroy the Nommo, we will all perish."

  Twan leaned forward. "Is there anything we can do?"

  "Yes. In this building are objects of power. Find them, and you will be able to call powerful allies. Gods. Use these gods, or allow them to use you. Your magic, already formidable, will become fearsome. You will be able to confront even the Mayombreros."

  Trevor Stone said, "And then what?"

  Nigel Bishop spoke as if his subordinate hadn't. "This power source-if it were shut down, it would destroy the Mayombreros?"

  "No, but it would weaken them."

  "How dependent on that power are you?"

  "We have our own sources but thousands in New Africa might die without it."

  Acacia leaned over to hirn. "That means an Engineer or maybe a Magic User could shut down the reactor."

  "Why can't we just wreck it?" Corrinda Harding asked.

  Bishop looked at her with disgust. "Don't you remember the briefing on the train? We'll need to turn it back on."

  Alphonse thought for a moment, then said, "This building is too huge. We need help. Guides?"

  "Those with mirrors will not need guides-the mirrors will talk in your dreams. But I will send Bobo, and Coral."

  The blond bodybuilder was jolted. "Mamissa Kokoe! Is this only to be rid of me?"

  She shrugged, and quakes ran across her body. "You may return a hero, or die a hero. I've never doubted your courage or your sincerity, Bobo. But what can a man like you do here? Wait for the Mayombreros to come to us?"

  Alphonse pondered. Crystal had gotten a mirror, and Acacia, and Tammi. That meant that Clavell and Bishop would decide between Coral and Bobo. Pair enough. Which would be worth more, a native of the attic or of the basement? Or trade a guide for a mirror? Such talismans were links to the gods, often enough, and sometimes had information human guides lacked…

  There was a moment in which everyone was weighing the odds and considering their options. Then they began to stand. First one, and then another and another, until all twenty-two Adventurers were on their feet.

  Al the Barbarian was first to speak. "We hear you, Mamissa. You say it's gotta be done, that's good enough for me and the girls I go with. We'll shut down that reactor and recover those talismans or like to die trying. Who's with me?"

  The rooftop rocked with cheers, and as someone else had said under somewhat different circumstances, the Game was afoot.

  "They're leaving the roof. They never even noticed the fish," Tony said.

  Doris Whitman looked up. "They'll be back. There are talismans in the pool."

  "Mmm."

  "Goddamn touchy artist. I noticed the fish, okay? The fish is wonderful."

  Tony smiled. Nothing worse than a novice Game Master, he thought, and said, "That'll have to do."

  16

  Long Odds

  Tony McWhirter was becoming very twitchy.

  With five top Game Masters to run it, Tony hadn't expected California Voodoo to give him this much trouble! But with five teams to keep track of, and glitches in the machinery, and prima donnas screwing up the story lines, Tony wasn't getting time to take a full breath.

  The enclaves were clumping up a little. UC and Apple were descending via stairs, sending scouts for a quick look at each floor. Texas Instruments-Mitsubishi and Army, with more than their share of mountain climbers, were exploring the modular wall. General Dynamics was descending much faster, which meant they might miss something, unless Bishop had special knowledge as was his wont.

  Army and Tex-Mits had done badly in the trading on the roof. They had two mirrors and no guide. Gen-Dyn had Coral. She looked fetching in short shorts, a neon-blue daypack, and a raggedly chopped off T-shirt reading "Shop Till You Drop." Bobo, assigned to UC and Apple, did without the shirt. The guides shared a brainless look that fitted their roles nicely. Their information had great gaps in it and was not trustworthy.

  Tony hadn't planned those alliances and hadn't welcomed them, but they'd make the Gamers easier to keep track of. He needed that, with all the distractions, failing equipment, missing NPCs… and a distracted, manic Alex Griffin.

  Tony hadn't felt pressure like this since the South Seas Treasure Game eight years earlier, when he had been trying to slay monsters and steal corporate secrets at the same time. They just weren't giving him room to maneuver!

  Through computer cutouts Tony had carefully invested five thousand dollars with another ten sequestered in various main and side bets, spreading the bets out around the country so that no one would ever be able to trace them back to him. Nobody who wasn't better at this than Tony, anyway. On one of four screens he watched numbers flow.

  His nerves were screaming at him. It had been a crazy, self-destructive impulse, carefully worked out in anal-retentive detail over the last few weeks. He was betting his job, his reputation, his friendships, against a trivial profit. He'd lose it all if he was caught. He could even lose the bets. He had special knowledge, sure, but the odds… well, they weren't fitting the expected patterns.

  Hey, now… was that what had been pecking at his composure? The numbers?

  Most of the bets went down as he would have expected. Halfsmart Vegas money, people betting as if this were just another sport. Idiots who assumed that if the sponsoring companies were high on the stock exchange, their teams were shoo-ins. People betting on past performance of a corporate banner before knowing the composition of the team. People betting for favorite Loremasters… and that was smarter money.

  But… oh, take the odds against Army. They'd peaked at 7:45 A.M. Thursday the twenty-first, just about the time that everyone discovered that the game wasn't to be played within the Park.

  Now, one could figure Army's chances in several ways.

  They'd started in third place because they knew Gaming Dome A better than anyone. That advantage had evaporated… but the Army ran wargames, too, in deserts and mountains, through ghost towns ruined by the old Quake.

  But a gambler might also know he could ask any soldier that war games involve tens of thousands of warriors and a bare few wizards and Loremasters (called "strategists" and "generals"). Real Games are personal.

  Then again, the oldest players, like Trevor Stone of Gen-Dyn, now became really valuable. They'd done this, too: they'd Gamed in desert terrain, and up mountains and down river rapids, before Dream Park's domes had gone up in spring of 2040. Army didn't have anyone like him.

  So figuring the odds was like herding rattlesnakes, and the pattern that emerged was bound to be chaotic. The odds against Army dropped, then bottomed out as more players took a better bet, then wobbled… but look at that bottom curve. It was as flat as west Kansas. When the odds hit that point, somebody had been waiting.

  Something, some lost datum, had been gnawing at him, and this was it: roughly six hundred thousand carefully coordinated dollars skewing his numbers.

  Timing. It was the timing that was unbelievable. So smooth had it been that the odds, which had dropped to 22-3, rose to only 14-3 before the last of the big money was recorded. If Army won, somebody was going to make a killing.

  Now who could have done such a thing?

  Nigel Bishop's unforgettable grandstand play. He had simultaneously saved and humiliated Army's Loremaster. Tony had been sure Bishop had done it for the cameras, a stunt for the fans and a record for the history books, but hey…

  Money made a more satisfying motive. You could count it. You'd know when you won. Six hundred thousand dollars at, say, 2–3 odds…

&
nbsp; Even if Bishop was fronting for someone, his cut could hardly be less than a million dollars. If Army won. But could he do it? Throw the Game to Army? Even if one of the other players Say Acacia Garcia Was aiding him?

  Tony took the numbers off his number-four screen, to be replaced by a less damning view of the basement power plant. Nothing was happening there. No team would get that far for at least twenty-four hours.

  El and Doris were working miracles, stage left. The Lopezes seemed to be loafing, talking to each other with one eye for the screens. Like Tony. But Tony's mind was seething.

  If Bishop hoped to pull something like this off, wouldn't he need somebody on the inside?

  Tony leaned forward in his chair and conjured up a file on Bishop.

  The Art of Gaming, of course. Bishop's magnum opus, the piece of strategic writing that had secured his place in Gaming history. Tony hadn't read it in years, but a quotation flickered vaguely to mind. He summoned up the book and did a global search for the word spy.

  Here: When gathering intelligence, know that reliable intelligence is the single most important factor in your success. Therefore, do not forget that there are factors which go beyond the stated rules of the game. You are engaged in a war, and those of you who remember this most clearly, without sentiment or fear, are the ones who will succeed.

  There are disaffected members in any Gaming organisation. Get to know them, and their vulnerability. You can appeal to vanity, or greed, or a sense of adventure. And you can get them to give information that you would otherwise have had to sell lives to obtain.

  Treat them well, and never forget them, these spies…

  Bishop's highest priority in Gaming was gathering intelligence. And because Bishop had been in retirement when he had written The Art of Gaming, he had been extraordinarily candid.

  A spy.

  Goldfish nibbled at Tony's adrenal glands. Minutes ago he'd been worried about a few thousand dollars' worth of bets. Now… Had Bishop corrupted Acacia? Screwing her was one thing. Tony would merely have flayed him alive for that. But forcing her to throw a Game was unspeakable.

  For that matter, weren't they looking for a motive for Sharon Crayne's death?

  Sharon had been scanning and possibly recording some of the building specs. That would certainly be a lovely piece of intelligence data for a Loremaster. And if she had sold it to Bishop, and the sale had gone wrong somehow…

  Naaah. Why would a relatively innocent misadventure blossom into murder? On the other hand, with between one and four million dollars at stake… People had died for a whole lot less.

  Tony gritted his teeth. He'd have to see if he could track that money.

  It was, all in all, the thinnest string of supposition he had ever considered seriously. It would never hang together. And a poor, distracted Game Master just didn't have time to deal with it! Gamers were moving into MIMIC's bowels in little paranoid clumps. They'd want his attention… heh… they'd be trying desperately to evade his attention starting real soon now.

  Then again… a mystery, a veritable mystery, and a shot at Sharon Crayne's killer? That could jog Alex Griffin out of his black mood. Griffin fancied himself a man of thought but Tony knew him to be happiest in action. Get him to believe he was doing something.

  After all, it had been a long time since the Griffin had stalked a Game.

  17

  Burning Love

  "Change is the god of fire, thunder and lightning. He… is used in Santeria to overcome enemies, as well as for works of passion and desire."

  — Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, Santeria, 1987

  Thursday, July 21, 2059 — 2:50 P.M.

  Al the Barbarian never got dizzy. It said so right in his character notes. This was of little comfort to Al Nakagawa's stomach, which wanted nothing more than to squeeze itself dry and empty, curl up quietly, and die.

  He and S. J. Waters lay at the outer lip of a modular apartment on the seventeenth floor. It was an abandoned shambles, its dock open to the elements; and its intended mate, a portable office quarters, was a cracked half-eggshell dangling far down the side of New Africa. At a whisper of "Reveal treasure," the eggshell glowed green. There was something in there worth having.

  Al slid away from the edge and rolled onto his back. "First talisman," he said drearily. "She's there, all right."

  The wind whistled in from the California-Nevada border, hot and dry and hollow. The steel and concrete box creaked slowly back and forth. Two hundred feet below was the desert floor.

  "Phew." The cables ran up to the modular wall track. It looked like some force had ripped the box free of the apartment and sent it tumbling down. Or a cargo copter had attempted to link it up, decades before, and the job had never been completed.

  Modular apartments were the twenty-first century's answer to an increasingly mobile society. The living and office quarters of a house or apartment could be detached and shipped to the other side of the country within forty-eight hours, allowing employees to bounce from one job assignment to the next without leaving home.

  But he'd never seen a modular wall as high as this one. It seemed to him now that the whole concept was idiotic.

  Crystal's mane of unkempt red hair flagged around her shoulders as she coaxed secrets from the circuit box. It was plain metal and glass, disguised as a lamp by the edge of the open wall. The rolling sheet of weatherproofing protecting the apartment had long since worn away, and the box was uncomfortably close to the edge.

  Crystal traced a line with her finger: Al wished that he could see what she saw, but that was one of her abilities. All Gaming categories overlapped, a little. Crystal's Engineering abilities gave her a little facility with mechanical things-less than a Thief, usually, but SJ had taken his crack and failed.

  Major Clavell hovered over her, worried. "What have you got?"

  "Problems," she said. "This diagram is complex. I'm not entirely sure…"

  Al watched the major. He had suggested a truce, adding his Warriors to Al's team. Jockeying and trading had erupted the minute their conference with Mamissa Kokoe ended.

  A truce between Clavell and Alphonse was a natural: Clavell needed Al's women. At the current attrition rate, Al would need the extra sword arms, but he didn't look forward to a power struggle.

  Al the Barbarian touched Crystal's shoulder, and suddenly he could see the diagram. His heart fell: the glittering maze of circuitry was interrupted in a dozen places. A real Engineer would have seen a perfect model.

  While the major conferred with Poule, Al bent to whisper in Crystal's ear.

  "I notice the major is hovering. Problems?"

  Crystal shook her head. "No! Man's made some useful suggestions. He's no dummy.''

  "Nervous?"

  "Me or him?"

  "Either."

  "Both."

  Al was nervous, too nervous to have Army at his back but Army teams tended to play straight, and he knew of no instance in which they had broken truce or sabotaged allies. That they left for Congress, maybe. With Bishop and Acacia and, for God's sake, the Troglodykes out there, the Army was a welcome ally.

  New Africa was vast, and he was glad to have three Scouts. The Tex-Mits/Army grouping had crept down the halls, following arcane clues visible only to the Scouts' eyes, or Crystal's mirror.

  At the end of a dark corridor on the twelfth level, SJ found a locked door that glowed orange to his Reveal location spell.

  He picked the lock under Clavell's approving eye. Al let Clavell enter the apartment first, hoping that the major would get first crack at a Beastie, and maybe a chance to reclaim a little lost honor. The scuffle with Bishop had been enough to bruise anyone's ego.

  But there was nothing alive in the apartment. Crystal's spell of Revelation gave them the control panel, and when they looked out over the open lip…

  Crystal passed her hand over the mirror, and the image of Coral's brother Tod appeared. "Hey," he said. "It's dull being dead. Thanks for calling."

  Cry
stal held the mirror out over the edge. "What can you tell us about this?"

  "Oh," the mirror said, "Like I heard that we used to live in these dangling little boxes, but that was like back in the ice age or something. Then during some little cat fight between my people and the roof yokels, some of the boxes got ripped away. Long way to fall-like people pizza time."

  "Is there anything valuable in it?"

  "Not that I know. But who tells me anything? I'm just a mirror."

  SJ inserted a probe into the panel, and it sparked gently.

  "All right, let's give it a try." Crystal punched a button, and the ancient machinery began to creak. Cable rolled smoking through the winch, and the dangling box was reeled back up toward its berth.

  Mary-em slapped Crystal's broad back in congratulation, and General Poule puffed up to make a short speech Twenty feet below them, the room stopped. A little glowing rectangle on the control panel blinked: NEED ACCESS CODE.

  "Oh, crap," Clavell said disgustedly. "We need an Engineer to break the code."

  "Only Peggy the Hook had enough experience," Al grunted. "Last time I saw Peggy, her face was being chewed off."

  "Just great. Can you do it, SJ? You're a Thief-"

  "Half-Thief. If a half-Engineer can't do it, neither can half a Thief. This happened because of a magical war. If anything's lurking about, trying to break that code without a scan would be suicide."

  Al sighed. "I've got a notion. We can signal one of the other teams, and borrow an Engineer."

  For a moment Clavell was preoccupied, then he shook himself out of it. "Hell with that."

  He shucked off his pack, spun and unzipped it, and dug inside. "SJ," he snapped. "Let Al have your Spider."

  Alphonse winced. "You're kidding, of course."

  "Ah." The major stopped digging. He brought out a hand grip device that looked very like a dead spider: six stubby curved arms connected to a flat handle. On the underside of the handle was a Teflon gear device. It was a standard rappelling implement, adjustable to cables from 1/2 inch to 3 inches, standard equipment for a Hazardous Environment Game.