by Larry Niven
Alex Griffin: born September 17, 2021, to Elliot and Darsha Griffin. Which made him… forty-three years old. Alex! We're older than we look! Father dead. Mother's whereabouts… unknown. Nothing dramatic here, Alex, just a career woman with ever-decreasing time for a young and demanding malechild. A child shunted into boarding schools? One who distinguished himself in military service… goodness, look at these classified files. Vail wondered if Tony McWhirter could do something about those…
"Cat's in the cradle," Vail hummed. Mummy made half-hearted efforts to reconcile with grown-up Alex, who would have none of it. Gradually they lost touch.
Alex Griffin, a man who had talents beyond the typical cop mentality. Perhaps with the right nurturing… of course, was it nature or nurture? The eternal argument. Even studies of identical twins begged the question: prenatal nutritional environment was essential for proper brain development, and twins shared that down to the last amino acid. Light and sound that reached the womb affected the brain of an unborn child.
Vail had once proposed an experiment that would resolve the question once and for all. Stimulate five thousand fertilized ova to produce quadruplets. Double-blind implant the little angels in mothers chosen at random from the
Embryadopt lists all income levels, all education and intelligence levels, all races.
Wait twenty years…
Vail sighed. He supposed he could understand why his colleagues were appalled by the notion. Such squeamishness often obstructed progress.
At any rate, Alex Griffin was what he was, and wasn't terribly likely to change.
On to Sharon Crayne. Thirty-two. Unmarried. Master's degree in psychology, University of Washington. Two years with the Washington State Police, recruited to Cowles Industries after a stint at a private security agency. No record of any problems at all. Six years there.
Vail sighed and leaned back in his chair, watching the numbers and patterns flash past. What was he looking for? A motive to betray Dream Park and/or Cowles Industries?
In Vail's opinion, motives nearly always broke down into three basic categories: 1) Relief from something 2) Revenge for something 3) Desire for something
Vail only knew Sharon socially, as a face at Alex's shoulder. He knew that she had climbed the ranks in Cowles Industries rather swiftly. She would have little to resent in that matter. Revenge was not a plausible motive.
Relief, then. From blackmail? A threat? Certainly possible. He would have to cull the data for a sign, for evidence. For… anything.
Desire? Ever since college, Crayne had chosen challenge over pure money-making opportunity. Her new position with the Barsoom project would entail nearly a thirty percent wage increase, and she wasn't spending the money she made now. Not desire for money, then.
Vail found his resentment slipping away. Here was a puzzle, the unravelings of this dead woman's sorry life. And somewhere in the maze lay the answer.
On level seventeen, S. J. Waters brushed a thin hand across his dripping brow. It was hot here.
The iron box in front of him had twice resisted their efforts to open it. Magic had failed: bolts from Major Clavell's magic wand had glanced off its surface, sparking uselessly. Brute strength had failed: none of the Warriors had a power rating high enough to rip the top off. A direct assault with a crowbar hadn't even scratched it.
But there was something in the box, and they needed it. It was now up to their Thief to try to pick the lock.
SJ muttered a prayer to Baal, god of thieves, and his Virtual vision exploded. He could see into the lock, peer into its most intimate workings, but that wouldn't necessarily be enough. There was no way to avoid a little genuine dexterity on this one.
The interior of the lock looked like a box filled with little gears. He extruded his lockpick and inserted it.
"Ah people," he said after a moment. "This thing has a booby trap in it."
Lawrence Black Elk waved a handful of feathers over SJ. "We can heal you," he said positively. "Fear not, lithe one."
SJ glared at him. "Oh, thank you, great mage!" He didn't look at Mary-em, but he could feel her grinning.
He could see the probe as it snaked its way through the twists and turns. He paused. There was a throbbing red obstruction, and he snaked back a little. It was like picking a lock whose tumblers kept moving. In fact, it seemed as if the "tumblers" were actually searching for the probe He yelped as an electric shock jolted through his fingers.
A dark border outlined his hand. It was creeping up his wrist.
He continued to work the probe. Presently the box sprang open. SJ backed away from it. A black aura pulsated to a funereal rhythm around his arm and shoulder, spreading down his torso Black Elk screamed, "By the gods of sun and sky bring the death into me, that I might conquer it!"
The black border flowed like ectoplasmic tar, down SJ's arm and into Black Elk. Black Elk danced; he shimmied, he threw powders into the air and twirled beneath them; and the black border settled into his body even closer.
His life energy flowed out through his fingertips, through his eyes, through his mouth and nose.
Then the aurora was solid black. He crumpled to the ground, dead.
Clavell scanned him. There wasn't a spark of life left in him.
SJ was stunned. "What in the hell was that?"
Clavell had to force himself to speak. "We can't challenge the magic here-it's just too powerful." He knelt by Black Elk and brushed two fingertips over the staring eyes. "He was a good soldier."
Mary-em straightened up. "Shall I?"
"Please. Waters, what did we get?"
SJ poked around in the box with the tip of his knife. His peripheral vision caught the motion of Mary-em's mighty swing; he cringed despite himself, and turned as Black Elk's head bounced toward him.
"In the box, Waters."
"Looks to me like we've got a map," he said. He turned it this way and that. "It says something about the land of the Nommo."
The major took the map and overlaid it on the general map that Loremasters had been given by Mamissa.
"Look," he said. "It shows a path. Hidden door here… stairway
… what do you think?"
Crystal knelt and traced a finger along the twisting route. "I think that we have to go," she said.
"And there's another passage here," SJ said, his voice a reverent hush. "One which we can hardly afford to overlook."
The major examined the spot in question and agreed soberly. "Lead the way," he said.
The halls were deadly quiet here, long abandoned. Cobwebs spanned the walkways, and the shop windows were broken and dusty. But SJ followed the map, and followed the trail that blazed in the air in front of him, a trail that no other could see.
He held up his hand. "It's here," he said.
"Are you sure?" Mary-em tightened her grip on her weapon, real tension in her face for the first time that day. She felt the burn of a rarely encountered emotion digging at her, demanding.
SJ looked at the spot where the trail terminated. "I can't open this," he said. "It's going to need magic."
Major Clavell stretched out his arms and began to chant.
Almost too slowly, the hall began to rock. The winds increased in power, swirling about them like a miniature tornado. Lights danced from the ends of his fingers. Thunder crashed and shuddered, and the hall seemed to warp out of phase Then the wall peeled back, and there were two large metal boxes stacked one atop another there in the wall.
Al the Barbarian licked his lips. "Do you think…"
"If it isn't," Poule said, "we're in bad trouble."
SJ poked it open with the tip of his stick. They breathed a sigh of relief.
Nestled within a womb of foil were sandwiches, apples, and thermoses of coffee and soup. In the other container were pods of juice and soft drinks.
Dinner!
SJ and Mary-em sat together, tucked back in a corner of the hallway. General Poule took the forward watch to ensure their privacy.
"Been a long time," Waters said happily.
Down the hall there were rooms marked off-limits with hourglass radiation symbols a guarantee of lethal roentgens for the first person foolish enough to pass the portal. Other doors were a part of the game: they might hide booty or information. For now the most important were the doors with a half-moon stenciled upon them.
It felt strange to let the adrenaline burn out, wear down, and to evaluate the fatigue behind them. SJ felt that, but it was balanced with a spring-steel sensation as well: he had trained hard for this, and was looking forward to whatever the day might bring.
Mary-em said, "Scout/Thief?"
"Code-name Aquarius, but nobody ever uses it."
"Used to be Engineer."
The wrinkled little woman seemed even harder and more deeply creased than when he had last seen her what, five years before? Her hip was stiff when she walked, and he was concerned. But her eyes were as bright as ever. It was difficult to waste too much sympathy on her. Chances were that she would run him into the ground.
She'd left him time to answer, and he hadn't. "Been traveling," she said, and rolled onto her back. "Still a lot of mountains that I haven't tried. K-4 in Tibet."
"Everest?"
"New. Been done too much. You know exactly what you're up against. I prefer a different kind of challenge. K-4 without oxygen is perfect. After Patrick died-"
"Sorry to hear-"
She waved his sympathy away. "What can I say? We both knew that it was coming, but that doesn't make things a whole lot easier. I stayed away from Gaming for a while. Wanted to do something real."
"So the mountains?"
"So the mountains."
SJ drained his pod of soft drink and groped about in the metal locker, looking for another one. "My Engineer was killed out," he said finally. "I came back as a killer cyborg-"
"The Cyberyakuza Game."
"Who's telling this? They put me back in the game as a cyborg. Kill Gamers. But I ran across a metaprogramming disk that could have left me running the whole city like it was part of my body!"
"Hospitals?"
"That, too. I could have regrown my body. I violated my programming. Ran for the nearest phone booth. It was smashed flat. Walked toward the Control Center. Cyborgs cut me off. I was so tired, I crawled into a booth that was blinking error messages because I just couldn't go any farther. And it erased my program."
Mary-em said nodding.
"I'd have made it if I wasn't such a potato. Six years building him, and bang, dead-dead, no more Engineer. I'd been spending my life in front of a terminal. So I joined the Army. And they half killed me, but I'd win this time. And now they've got me Gaming again. And what brought you back, Mary-em?"
"This Game," she said. "You can laugh, but… I had a feeling about California Voodoo. That it might be special. Then I found out you'd be here, and Acacia, and I've played with Tammi and Twan…" She sighed contentedly. "It feels like family," she said.
SJ considered making a mocking comment, but saw how very serious she was, and thought again. Instead, he raised his second pod and said, " Salud, then. To family. I'm glad you came." He had said it just to say something, but as soon as the words left his lips, SJ realized he had spoken the truth.
22
The Obelisk
On the twelfth floor, stalks of corn and sheaves of wheat grew from hydroponic tanks, beneath a network of track-mounted lights. Goats and chickens roamed placidly between the rows of tanks, occasionally chased from the checkered tiles back to a grazing pen by healthy-looking barefoot children.
The air was scented with the mouth-watering aroma of Mexican food. Spanish guitar and castanets and the almost-inaudible heartbeat rhythm of drums pattered from a loudspeaker.
Everything was very clean. The hydroponic tanks were capped with glass, and pale green lights flared irregularly in the rows, perhaps sterilising or driving away insects.
As the Adventurers approached, muscular young men appeared, blocking their path. They wore lab smocks and carried clipboards. Pens were tucked behind their ears, and their breast pockets were jammed with pencils. They also carried twenty-four-inch black batons.
Tammi raised her hand. "We come in peace."
A young, pale woman in a lab smock pushed through the guards and answered her coolly. "Greetings. We are a simple farming people, senorita." She was plain and fair-skinned, her hair pulled back severely in twin braids.
"I see. And can you perhaps spare us a little food?"
"Oh, no, senorita. We are obliged to our neighbors down the way. We give them chickens, goats, and grain, and they refrain from eating our children." She seemed to consider a new thought. "But if you could help us with them, then it is possible that we would then have food to give you."
"This augurs not well," Prez whispered.
Corrinda agreed. "If we have to fight, why not here and now?"
Acacia watched Corrinda's face. It was, increasingly, a mask of strain. Damn it. That knee must be killing her.
"No way," Bishop said. "Major faux pas. Even the gods can only fight defensively. Clear cue for our own behavior. We march."
Tammi and Twan nodded agreement.
"Tell us of your enemy," Nigel said. "Describe them."
"Oh, senor, they are very fierce, and they eat people." She shuddered as if it were just too terrible to relate.
Nigel waited, but she said no more. "Very well. Can you draw us a map?"
"Yes. Juan!"
A tall, broadly built young man stepped forward and conversed with the girl in rapid-fire Spanish. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and scratched a series of lines on it, involving a big square with a piece missing from one corner.
Lab Smock translated his explanations and then said, "Juan says that the path is dangerous, but that if you are brave and strong, you may succeed. May Orisha-Oko go with you."
"Prez" Coolidge, Zulu Warrior, led the way. The remaining Adventurers stretched out in a line behind him. The village bordered on an air well. The railing was rectangular; a blank wall bit a piece out of one corner. Looking over the railing,
Mouser could see the neon glitter of the Mall several floors below, and the well dropping a couple of stories farther than that.
Graffiti and pictoglyphs marred the walls, many of them representing sun and crops and meat animals, speaking to simple peasant concerns.
But as they traveled around the Mall's edge the Latin flavor changed, becoming something else, something older and more sinister.
A forty-five-degree turn took them past an unmarred stretch of blank wall. Mouser trailed and, unobserved, reached out to brush his hand along the surface. It was ceramic, but not brick: smooth and hard, perhaps too hard to take frescoes, and easy to clean of paint or charcoal clubbings. Not quite vertical, it leaned back at five degrees or so.
The path turned again, and there were more graffiti carved painfully into soft stone. The symbols looked older than contemporary Mexican Mayan, perhaps. Angular, jutting faces and spear-carrying warriors in frieze. But the wall behind them, Mouser saw, was as smooth as glass and tilted at five degrees from vertical.
Virtual imaging his Thief's power showed him a small round door thirty yards down; but Bishop was leading them in the opposite direction.
Mouser brushed Tammi's elbow. He whistled a single, very low note and then pointed by shifting his eyes. Her gaze followed his and registered comprehension.
Her nod was barely perceptible, just a hairline tilt of her jaw. But it told him everything that he needed to know.
The floor beneath their feet throbbed with an odd, distant beat. Irregular and yet organically steady. Perhaps a stuttering piece of machinery. Perhaps something else.
They descended into night. What little illumination there was struck busts and statues lining the corridor and cast a tangled, prickly forest of shadows.
"I've seen this one before," Bishop mused. The thing was five feet high, and balanced on a diamond-shaped bras
s stand. It was a warrior's mask, with a broad, curved axeblade ornament projecting from the helmet. The face was strong and severe.
"Where?" Prez asked. "No, wait. My… citadel had a collection of art from the old world." He squeezed his eyes shut, then looked again.
"From Gabon," he said. "A people called the Bakota."
There was another a little farther on. This was a complete figure, squatting with its hands in a prayerlike position. Prez had no comment.
Bishop ran a hundred images past closed lids. "Bayaka people. Zaire."
Prez nodded approval. "You know the motherland, my brother."
Bishop's smile glittered, and it was too dark to see how devoid of warmth or humor his eyes truly were. "Like coming home, isn't it?" He clapped Prez on the back, thinking, Jigaboo.
Prez held up a hand. "We've got something up here-"
And there was a scream behind them.
They turned in time to see Mouser lifted off his feet, carried up and toward the ceiling by fanged shadows.
Instantly, Corrinda snatched her bow and notched an arrow. She aimed carefully and fired it into the shadow figures flitting around Mouser. It struck one, to no effect.
"Quick!" she yelled, and handed a fistful of arrows to Top Nun.
The little cleric screamed, "You should pardon, God-no time for the whole shmeer. Bless these arrows!" and handed them back. Corrinda took aim and fired one after another.
The wounded shadows fluttered like crippled bats; they lowered the screaming Mouser back to the deck. He was covered with wounds, great claw marks that wept blood.
Top Nun immediately hunched over the wounded Thief and began to glow. Tammi asked, "Healing?"
"I should be playing dominoes, maybe? Excuse me for asking, but is all this trouble worth it for a little nosh? Could we maybe find a nice deli?"
Prez examined another frieze and crooked his finger at Tammi. "I don 'I like this."
"What have we got?"
It was a collage of metal and plastic, an impressionistic rendering of a head with two faces, a braided topknot of hair linking the foreheads. Eyes were inset hollows; teeth splayed out from angrily parted lips.