by Larry Niven
Coral's mirrored brother assured the Adventurers that there were comestibles on the twelfth level. Griffin watched Twan wrestle with that one: her partner, Tammi, was hot for the challenge. Their teammates were exhausted.
"And what kind of danger do you see?" Twan asked.
Tod's image did its best to keep them on track. "Nothing too gnarly, dudes."
Tammi made an anxious-puppy sound to Twan. Twan shook her head regretfully.
"Oh, all right," the warrior Trog sighed, giving in. "No more challenges today."
"Praise the Lord," Top Nun said, and pulled on an apron. She began to rummage through the kitchen.
Bishop sprang the lock on a closet door and grinned in satisfaction at three sets of diving equipment inside. "We're in luck," he said. "My partners were carrying the scubas when they-" Forefinger across throat.
Prez frowned. "You found diving equipment in the Gaming areas?"
"Yes. It follows that we are to do some diving, yes? There was probably treasure in the lake, topside. There is talk of 'flooded levels' at the tenth and eleventh. Anybody noticed that we're starting to run into technology? Better be ready, eh?"
He prowled through the suites. Everyone was slowing down. Eyelids drooped with fatigue. The aroma of cooking food filled the suites. If he dropped a little of his own control, Bishop could feel his own fatigue. But there was still so much to do…
So he dove into the cooking with great good humor, whipping up a batch of dinner omelets that had Mati and Prez cooing in admiration. Cooking was, after all, just another skill, another way to display excellence.
And excellence is my business, Bishop hummed to himself. My only business.
Alex sat against the wall with his knees drawn up to his chest. He had done his own cooking for so long that the prospect of sampling someone else's-especially Bishop's-actually made him nervous.
The apartment was one of a double suite. It was the most that he could do to keep them confined to this area. "Bobo" had relayed a stern warning: "The gods do not take mischief lightly. Take what you need, but leave offerings, and leave things exactly as you found them."
Weary nods all around.
There was a joint recreation room between the two suites. Twan and Tammi set their sleeping bags near a central fireplace there.
Prez took the first watch, to be relieved in two hours by Tammi. Official down-time was declared.
Tony McWhirter got back to Gaming Central, somewhat surprised by the general air of bemusement. " Que pasa, Sis?" he asked one of his assistants.
"Welll…" "Sis" was a lantern-jawed, rawboned Oklahoman. With another thirty pounds he could probably place third in a Conan the Barbarian look-alike contest. "Looks like Bishop just found another way to break the rules."
Tony rolled his eyes. "What is it this time?"
Sis explained. Tony's first impulse was disbelief; his second, admiration. "Never thought I'd see kamikaze Gamers. We'd better find out who those rooms belong to. Offer compensation out of the discretionary fund. Full reimbursement for any foodstuffs-hell, and housekeeping for a month. Aarrrgh!"
Sis was startled. "Tony?"
"Bishop's found scuba. They won't have to go back to the roof. Dammit! They'll miss the fish. All that frigging work and they're going to miss the fish." He saw Sis staring and said, "Never mind. Anything else?" An isolated dot in an external hallway caught his attention; he pointed. "That?"
"That's Tammi Romati's kid, Mouser," Sis said. "Wanna playback?" Sis made magic; the scene wound back at terrific speed. "This is just before they broke into the apartment."
Mouser, carried between Twan and Tammi, lost his patchy red glow: healing spells had taken effect.
Tammi watched for the monster, while Mouser shared secrets with Twan. "Appelion said to look for an obelisk, right? This one would have to be about the size of the Washington Monument. And the door's on this level! If-"
Twan laid her finger across Mouser's lips, her eyes sparkling. She slipped Oggun's Necklace over his head. "You're the only one who can do it. I believe in you, Mouser."
The boy glowed with pride.
The allies trooped through the forbidden door. The Troglodykes lagged, with Tammi and Twan carrying the Mouser's weight. As they passed through, Mouser dropped back… and then like a Thief, back the way they had come…
Tony said, "Solved it, did he? Bright kid. I wonder if Bishop knows? Those ladies hold everyone's attention. You hardly notice any of the other Trogs."
"They've been whittled down to four. Bishop'll know the kid's gone. Believe it."
"Maybe. Thanks, Sis." Tony swung his chair around and watched the Gamers as they prowled through the suites in present time. Prez had barricaded the door. Food was warming on the stove. Showers were running.
These folks were down for the night.
A parallel display detailed the actions of the seven survivors of the Tex-Mits and Army teams. They were skulking toward the fourteenth level, with nothing between them and their dinner cache. It would take them an hour to eat. Dinner was heavy on the protein, designed to make them feel logy, to encourage sleep.
A third display showed the Mouser moving toward a circular door. It was set flush to that tilted wall; nobody but a Thief would have seen it. The Mouser was injured, with lowered hit points, but he was wearing the necklace and carrying one of the magic mirrors-enough magic to light a city. The door was close, but a towering monster made of trash was closer yet. Would the Thief's power protect him?
Tony's body cried for sleep, but this was what he lived for. He watched.
With myriad creaks and groans, the trash monster had shoehorned itself into the wall again. Only its flattened-tin eyes still shifted, comically huge. They were looking right at the Mouser.
The Mouser was a statue, perhaps of a Viking, a small warrior propped on his spear. His nose twitched, itching to sneeze. He kept the air moving in and out, without turbulence. He was the image of Wisdom, or maybe of Calm, a statue whose pedestal resembled the enameled white brick of a washer-dryer.
The monster's eyes swiveled away, glacially slow.
The Mouser dropped softly to the concrete and moved away like a snake. There was no cover here-nothing to protect him but his Thief's talent as augmented by Twan's spell. In moments he was beneath the faintly glowing circle on the tilted wall.
Virtual imagery revealed a tiny hole, a niche big enough to admit, say, a forefinger. It was maybe six feet above the floor.
Mouser pulled a set of probes from his pouch. He selected one, then stretched his arms straight up and began to work on the lock.
He clicked about in the hole, but he couldn't see what he was doing, and couldn't really feel what he was doing, with his arms straight up like that. He felt silly. This wasn't working…
The trash monster shrieked like an automobile being crushed. It began to pull itself out of the frieze.
Mouser's head whipped frantically around. He needed a new idea, and fast. In a shadowed corner there lay a fallen statue, a copper bust of some queen of the dead. He scampered over to the head and pushed it back under the circular door. It felt like papier-mache, much lighter than he had expected, but it supported his weight.
Now he could see into the lock while he probed.
The trash monster strode toward him.
Craaack. Rrrrip crrrunch…
He had no time. And then, when it was almost too late, he remembered something: the Necklace of Oggun. This was a physical talisman, a warrior's talisman. Maybe he was thinking too damned much like a Thief?
He twisted his thin lips into his best approximation of a fighting snarl and smashed his fist into the door.
And through the surface.
God dam.
He swung the other fist, and that penetrated, too. Emboldened by success, he ripped the door from its hinges and sent it rolling at the oncoming terror. It struck the monster's thick stubby knees; the trash monster went down in a shapeless heap. Mouser giggled and clapped his han
ds with glee.
He could hardly wait for puberty. Strength was great.
He stepped inside.
He was nose to nose with a blank flat surface, without even a sign of a lock to be picked.
The trash monster was getting up.
Mouser looked up and realised that he was at the bottom of about forty feet of near-vertical shaft. A set of knobs could serve as a ladder, badly, he decided. But the trash monster was about to reach through the shredded doorway. Mouser's thews swelled, anticipating the challenge Then a Thief's good common sense reasserted itself. He shifted his bow into a more comfortable position across his back and scampered up the shaft like a little monkey.
The knobs were finished to provide good traction, better for climbing than he had feared. Better still, ten feet up they became indented rungs, even more secure. He was panting a little by the time he reached the top and found himself facing another circular doorway and three glowing buttons. With his free hand he fished out a small, ornate mirror.
"Appelion? Wakey wakey."
A swirl of smoke, then a small silent flash of lightning. Appelion's frozen face reappeared, eyelashes dappled with frost. "The dead sleep soundly, Mouser. What have you done this time?"
"Listen: there was an airlock in the base of the obelisk at the sixth level. I climbed up the shaft, and I'm hanging at the top now." He looked down over his shoulder. It was a long way to the bottom. "I should be about to enter the tip, which should be the control cabin. The tip of an obelisk is a pyramid, and there was a pyramid on the roof."
"Ni-ice!"
"Yeah. Anything you'd like to warn me about before I open that door?"
"You're ahead of me, actually. Pyramids have deadfalls, right? Watch out for security. And if you didn't close the outer door, the inner door of an airlock shouldn't open."
"Aargh. Okay, stand by." Mouser tucked the mirror in a vest pocket. "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah." Muffled.
Mouser looked down at the bottom of the shaft, to the ruined doorway. Crap. No way to seal that now. "I'm going to use brute force."
"You?"
"Twan gave me the necklace from the jewelry store." Mouser set himself, then slammed the heel of his hand at the thick circle of door. The door ripped free and fell inward with an almighty clatter.
A slanting beam of sunlight lit his way as he moved inside.
The interior was a maze of stairs and platforms at different levels. A grillwork elevator shaft ran up the wall, and Mouser cautiously stepped onto the platform. There were two glyphs on the elevator's wall, one reminiscent of sky, the other of earth. Cautiously, he brought his palm near the "sky" symbol. The symbol glowed orange, and the elevator began to rise.
He rose past storage tanks, and weird computeresque constructs of ceramic glass, and what might have been huge engines. When he reached the top, the platform sighed to a halt. Mouser disembarked and found himself in the main cabin.
It was more than just a control center-it was living quarters, as well. On the platforms-he counted nine-were banks of equipment in a horseshoe array, primitive hardware compared to what one might find in a Gaming Central; and flat couches.
One of the couches had an occupant. It was held in place by a score of flexible white straps: a web of seat belts. It might as well have been mummy wrappings; the occupant wasn't going anywhere. It was a skeleton. A catfish skeleton, it looked like, though with an uncharacteristically large skull and a wide hollow spine, and odd pocks along the bones of the jaw.
The pilot had worn a crown of sorts: an ellipse of gold studded with gems half-covered its long, capacious skull.
Sunlight poured through a slit of a window, high up. Mouser climbed to that level and looked out. Then he pulled out the mirror and faced it through the window.
"Appelion?"
"Excellent, kid. You're on the roof!"
"But of course. The tip of an obelisk is a pyramid, I always say."
"Everybody loves a smart aleck, I always say. What's next?"
"There's a crown. It's sitting on the skeleton of a Nommo, maybe the pilot or captain. Maybe it runs the ship, direct nerve induction or like that, but it looks just like every crown you've ever seen. I'm going to take it."
"Careful, kid," the dead man cautioned. "This has all been too easy, so far."
"Watch this, Unc."
Mouser doffed his cloak and spread it on the elevator platform; he was going to need some cushioning for the next stunt.
Then he tiptoed back to the crown. Deep breath… shield his hand with his soft cap…
In a single smooth motion, he snatched the crown, flicked it into the elevator, and dove after it.
Something slapped his heels.
He rolled into the platform before he looked behind him.
The captain's bones were wearing translucent flesh. Hot damn, a Nommo zombie! Ectoplasmic tendrils writhed around the mouth. The thing's tail swiped futilely at where Mouser had been; and then it flopped off the couch and humped toward him.
Mouser pushed the lower button. He set the crown on his head, then reached for his bow. Try everything.
The elevator began to descend.
He heard a babbling; his vision was obscured by green linesketches and pink hieroglyphics. The crown must be trying to talk to hirn. He snatched it off; he couldn't handle distractions now.
The dead Nommo flopped through the doorway and braced itself in the shaft with its tendrils, crawling after him. He held his breath. It was going to be a close race…
He nocked an arrow and aimed, prepared to sell his life dearly. The mass of a zombie Catfish dropped toward him, sank as if through water and light bathed his feet.
The falling elevator had given him the top twenty inches of lower doorway. He rolled through it, landed on hands and feet, and kept rolling.
Ghost-tendrils groped out through the widening opening. Mouser could see the Nommo trying to slide under the door. In a moment it would be through. Mouser ran to the ladder, whooping.
24
A Lie
A fire roared in the recroom's artificial fireplace, throwing vaguely human shadows onto the walls. Griffin sat with his back to a bookcase, finishing an omelet. He hated to admit it, but Bishop was a hell of a cook.
A soft voice above him asked, "Mind if I sit down, Bobo?"
Before he could answer, Acacia sat down next to him, balancing a plate of food on her knees.
"So," Alex said. "Your name is Panthesilea?"
"Yes. I come from the domed cities, an enclave far to the east. We came in peace." Her brown eyes were soft. "I come in peace, Bobo."
She chewed thoroughly, giving it her full attention. "I was wondering… if there is more than one reason for your presence."
Alex's tongue teased a scrap of bacon from between his teeth. He should have felt numb at Acacia's proximity, but instead the sensation was closer to dry heat.
"Duty," he said, vaguely disassociated. "I am here for duty."
"And not adventure? Or love?"
In the recreation room behind them, Top Nun had found a guitar and was beginning to strum. He hadn't noticed when it started, but his ears perked up when she said, "I've got one for you, Cipher. Listen to this-" Lentia has a large one, and so has cousin Luce. Eliza Izas a small one, though large enough for use. Beneath a soft and glossy curl, each Lass has one in front. To find it in an animal you at the tail must hunt…
Acacia grinned. "Mali's riddling Captain Cipher again. It won't do her any good."
"He's good?"
"He's a freak. He's got no practical skills at all, but throw him into a trivia game, or funny math, and there's no one better." She caught herself. "And he is a mighty Wizard."
"The world needs more magic," Alex said, a little surprised at himself. Hermaphrodites have none; Mermaids are minus, too. Nell Gwynn possessed a double share if books we read are true. It's used by all in Nuptial Bliss, in Carnal Pleasures found. Destroy it, Life becomes extinct, the world is but a sound�
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Acacia had finished her food, and she daubed at her mouth with the corner of a napkin. She stood and extended her hand to Alex. "Walk with me?"
"Wait one," he said, and whispered, "Tony?"
A cricket-voice in his ear said, "Here."
"Watch Bishop."
"Absolutely. "
"And get an inventory on these apartments."
"Got it. Out."
"Ready," he told her. Lasciviousness here has its sources, Harlots its use apply. Without it Lust has never been, and even Love would die. Now tell me what this wonder is, but pause before you guess it. If you are mother, maid, or man, I swear you don't possess it."
Cipher lazily said, "The letter L." And Top Nun groaned.
Acacia laughed and led Alex out.
She collected her bedroll in both arms and threw her head back, hipshot, in an attitude of naked challenge.
Alex followed her out into the hallway and down past the other bedroom, into a modular living room.
The modular capsule hadn't been fitted in. Acacia punched up the safety code, and the weather wall rolled up, exposing blue-black desert sky and night-grey mountains.
Stars clustered beneath and above them in uncountable thousands, like handfuls of diamond dust floating on a warm pool of oil.
Acacia busied herself in creating a nest, pulling together cushions, a mattress, pillows, and her bedroll. Finally she sat down, drawing him to sit next to her.
"Hello, stranger," she said, suddenly shy. She seemed a little smaller, more vulnerable.
"Am I talking to Acacia or Panthesilea?"
"Acacia. You're not here to play, Alex. What is this?"
Alex sighed. Relief was surely not the proper emotion, but it was as if the burden of maintaining an impossible deceit had lifted from him. He stretched; his shoulders relaxed; his spine seemed to expand upward. Acacia watched in astonishment.
"I need to know, and I need to know now," he said bluntly. "Was Bishop with you Tuesday night?"
"Part of the time." She kept her voice even. "I came in late. Then he went out, and came back in. There were a lot of parties going, Alex."