by Larry Niven
Tony said, "Finding buttons is Bishop's peculiar talent."
Harmony drummed his fingers. "So the only question remaining is, How did he know Sharon Crayne's vulnerable spot? And what the hell does he want? Two questions."
"Acacia Garcia, too," Tony said. "He hunted her down. She was a way to learn about Griffin, or get to Griffin. Or… distract Griffin. And she likes dangerous men."
"Shit," Harmony said quietly. "But what about Ms. Crayne?"
"We came up with something interesting," Millicent said. She consulted her own sheaf of notes. "Six years ago, in March of '53, Sharon Crayne belonged to an organization called ASA. Tony and I got into some of Bishop's bank transactions. We didn't find any guilty associations, but did reveal a series of small deposits to the account of an organisation called ASA, during the same time period."
"And what does ASA stand for?"
Vail chose his words carefully. "There once existed an Adult Survivors of Abuse. Primarily a support network for incest survivors. Disbanded now."
Harmony sat back in his chair. "Bishop?"
"Mmm."
"Dr. Vail, isn't that stretching coincidence a little?"
"Not particularly. Our Nigel Bishop sounds to me like a smiling sociopath. Incapable of forming any truly significant relationships, but brilliant. That kind of brilliance, omnicompetence perhaps, combined with perceiving the entire realm of human endeavor as a game, a win-lose proposition… implies an extremely stressful childhood. I picture a little boy who was never loved for who he was, only what he did."
"What he did…" McWhirter whispered.
"Yes," Vail said dryly. "And for whom. Without knowing more it would be difficult to say. But if he was an adult survivor of incest, I would guess that the incest was perpetrated upon him by an aunt, an elder sister, even his mother. That he did everything to please her, and she used the dual positions of authority figure and lover to manipulate him, forcing him to perform like a puppet. That the relationship was eventually discovered and ended, leaving him emotionally devastated, with a terrible ambivalence toward female sexuality. I'd think he's tried to control and subvert women ever since."
Harmony interrupted. "So Bishop is just trying to win the Game? For that he killed Sharon Crayne?"
Tony was shaking his head violently. Vail said, "According to McWhirter and Lopez, whose judgments we must rely upon in these matters, he couldn't win, and should have known it. He lost his own team possibly by design. He has no talismans. He can't force Army to win. Whatever he wants, it's not in the Game. "
"Then what is this all about?" Harmony looked ready to explode.
"This is where we ran down," Tony said. "What did he want that was outside the Gaming area? He broke every rule to get there. Maybe he's stealing something."
"It would have to be small," Harmony said. "Gamers don't carry much out of the Games, do they?"
Tony shook his head. "What's in MIMIC to steal?"
"Some of the spaces have been modified. Some computer systems are in, but there isn't much in them yet."
"He could put taps on them. Now, before ScanNet goes fully operational."
"All right, then," Vail said, getting into the game. "Industrial plans? Equipment? Sabotage?"
Millicent looked uneasy. ''Sabotage? Where's the profit in that?"
Harmony cleared his throat. "You throw another country behind schedule. They can't make their deadline. Come next bidding time, you might look a whole lot better. In the long term, it could be Ecuador against Sri Lanka for the ground site of an orbital tether."
"All right," Vail said finally. "We'll have to get Griffin in on this. When is the next rest break?"
"I don't know, but soon," Harmony said. "They've got to be dead." He grinned wearily. "Which is appropriate. Their next stop is a graveyard."
34
Baron Samedi
Friday, July 22, 2059 — 5:00 P.M.
Steam rose from the wet graves like a pall, and the nine remaining Gamers, and their one remaining guide, plodded through the muck with hands up to their noses. The entire fourth level reeked of corruption.
It had taken two hours for them to creep down from the ninth level. Through stairways and hallways, avoiding things that shambled in the distance or groaned in the depths, they followed a Virtual trail of green arrows. At the end of that trail they found the graveyard, where their adventure had begun a day and a half earlier.
Muck had seeped down from the ninth level. The floor was sopping and slippery. Partially decomposed, inhuman corpses had washed from the graves and lay moist and rotting in the park lanes. Eyeless sockets stared at them; tongueless mouths screamed in silence.
Acacia held her sword ever at the ready. Captain Cipher had much of their salt supply. He sprinkled bits of it, just a pinch, on each corpse that they passed. Where the salt fell, a puff of smoke rose, reeking of corruption.
A trill of laughter wafted from across the boneyard, a sound even more inhuman than the warped and withered objects around them.
"Oh… so clever you are," a voice called. The word "are" dissolved from vowel sound into insane laughter. "You have salt, and salt stops my people. So clever…"
"Twenty-toed Moses," Cipher said. "I wish they'd hurry up and attack. I don't know how much more of this-"
"Shhh."
Most of the fourth level had been a park of some kind, a place where people might have come on holiday, to celebrate, to picnic. Now it was a place of stinking death, of corpses that clawed their way back from perdition.
"What do you think?" Tammi inspected one of the skeletons. "It looks like it was changing into one of the crocodile things." Tammi wore the Nommo crown. The Warrior-woman had powerful magic now. With the crown and the Necklace of Oggun, she was the single most powerful Adventurer.
They had tried spells to waken Mary-em's godling child, but it never stirred. "He's just a baby," Mary-em said sheepishly. "Maybe he's just taking a nap."
The entire caravan of Adventurers was suffused with Top Nun's saffron, protective radiance; it illumined the landscape, as well. The blasted, ruined graveyard was so depressing, Acacia almost wished the light would go out.
Captain Cipher's tuneless voice rang out: "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to die we go-"
"Is that your voice?" Al asked wearily, "or did you have beans for lunch?"
With a sudden rumble, a tombstone rose out of the muck. A man-sized ball of cobwebs bubbled out of the mud in front of it and then began to unfurl. Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, a human being stepped forth from the ball and smiled.
He had been a man. He was part skeleton, and through gaps in his body and tattered greatcoat they could see the tombstone behind him. He had been of African blood, but there remained precious little blood in him, or flesh for it to course through.
He bowed expansively. "Welcome to my domain," he said. "I am Baron Samedi."
"Lord of the dead," Acacia murmured.
He flexed stiltlike legs and bowed creakily. He held his hand out for hers. She held out her hand nervously, and the rotting thing touched its protruding teeth to her softness. There was just a hint of warm, sticky breath against her skin, and then he straightened.
She had regained her composure. "Did you send the crocodile things to attack the Nommo?"
"No," he said, smiling. "I watch. I enjoy the spectacle."
"Of what?"
"Of… life. All life ends here, in my domain. I enjoy watching the living ones try to forestall it for a few hours, or days, or years. It means nothing. All ends here, you know. I serve Babalu-Aye. He should have protected the dead from the
Mayombreros, but they have greater power now. Much greater. My master has become their servant." His voice was a delighted whisper.
"Where is your master?" she asked.
"Bound. Perhaps no longer my master. We shall see."
Top Nun crept up and whispered in Acacia's ear, " Babalu-Aye. Protector of the sick."
"What do you think?"
"But without any real loyalty."
"So how could it have loyalty? It's just a golem, a robot, a made thing. Any energy that sustains it-"
"Energy…"
Top Nun's brown eyes narrowed shrewdly. "The reactor?"
Baron Samedi stood aside, cackling, waving them on their way.
The graveyard steamed as the Adventurers entered it; mud sloshed around their ankles. The trees were as bare as wheat fields in winter, and canted sideways. A dim wind whistled through the naked branches.
A scream behind them. Panthesilea saw Top Nun, eyes rolled up in her head, ankle grabbed by something from under the muck.
Panthesilea was on her in a second, hacking and slashing at the loose soil. Top Nun screamed, "by!" and light exploded around them both, driving the attacker back into the ground. She staggered back, panting. The rest of the Adventurers set themselves in circular array.
Here they came: crawling up from under the ground, up from the slime, creatures half human corpse and half crocodile, in states of hideous decomposition.
The Adventurers fought for their lives.
The creatures were no larger than men, but they writhed from the earth like maggots from meat, in apparently endless profusion.
But there was a new factor now: Acacia and the rest of her compatriots had survived the worst that the Mayombreros could throw at them, and their power had increased as a result.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger…
Captain Cipher still had salt. He flung it, chanting at the top of his voice. Where it touched the corpsodiles, their skin blistered and peeled back. A sword or staff stroke on a salt wound caused the unfortunate creature to die a second swift agonizing death.
Griffin, shoulder to shoulder with Bishop, watched the man go into high gear. His sword was a flicker of liquid light. Griffin swirled his own borrowed blade in narrow arcs, smashing the corpsodiles until there was a wall of bodies (There was no real resistance to the creatures. Almost as if they were phantoms…)
— and finally there was no more movement from the graves. No movement, but a low moaning sound that came from everywhere and originated nowhere, filling the room.
"Something's coming," Acacia whispered. "Oh, shit, I don't like this."
"Stay strong," Tammi said tersely.
At first there was nothing but empty graves and stacked zombie crocs, then two pony-sized black figures came bounding along the park path toward them. Dogs. Brutes. Two-hundred-pounders, pit bulls the size of mastiffs. They stopped, hovered out of range of the Adventurers' weapons.
A shape appeared at the top of the hill, dimly backlit by a dying street lamp. A one-legged man on crutches. Slowly, painfully, he made his way to them. Every step was an effort.
He was an old, old black man, and the dogs at his sides seemed more guardians than pets. They sniffed at Tammi, and at Mary-em. When they nuzzled her tummy, one of them sat on the ground and rolled over to expose its belly. She bent and scratched.
Real dog, by God.
"You have destroyed many of the undead," the old man said. "You are powerful. I think not powerful enough for what you try to do. But powerful."
Captain Cipher piped up. "Are you Babalu-Aye?"
"I have taken that guise, yes. You know the truth about us now. You saved, or fought to save, many dogs. I love dogs. They are my friends. And you have weakened the bonds that hold me. I offer to you this."
He held out one of the battered wooden crutches to Top Nun. "It magnifies the power of healing. You will need this before your task is through."
Top Nun slipped the crutch under her arm. It was dark, stained, heavily knotted wood. Her protective glow amped up until it was almost uncomfortably bright. With a wave of her hand, she brought it down to a milder level. She turned back to Babalu-Aye but he, and the dogs, had disappeared.
"Such a mensch," she whispered, and fingered the talisman softly.
A decision was made: with Top Nun's new protective power at their command, they would take a final break, preparing for their ultimate assault.
They found a gazebo, a rickety white framework in the middle of the desolation, and the Adventurers shucked their backpacks and sat heavily, as though the fatigue had flooded over them in sudden waves.
Griffin was watching carefully. Nigel Bishop seemed to have no desire to relate to Acacia, or to Griffin, either. Alex would have liked it better if one or the other of them had been killed out of the Game. He had to get out for a conference, and he needed an ally. There was only one choice.
He walked over to where Mary-em sat, unfolding her bedroll. She was gazing across the mud-flat graveyard, the scene of recent battle, one hand resting gently over the unborn child within her.
"May I sit?"
The little woman glanced at him slyly. "Absolutely."
"Better still. Can we go for a little walk?"
"Could be dangerous. Could be buggies about."
"We need privacy."
"I'm a mother now-" she started, then saw how serious he was. She hitched herself up, following him out of the gazebo. They found a bench a hundred feet away and sat.
Alex pressed his earpiece. "Message for Tony," he said clearly. "McWhirter. This is an emergency time-out, security matter. See we're not disturbed."
There was a pause. "McWhirter isn't here, chief," Mitch Hasagawa said, "but I'll pass the word along."
Mary-em was watching him shrewdly. "So. What is it this time?"
He laughed. "I keep messing up your Games, don't I?"
"Is that why you're here?"
"No, but you know that I'm the head of Security, and Acacia knows, and… Bishop knows."
"Uh-huh. Cut to the chase, Griffy."
He sighed. "Right. Bishop has conspired to fix this Game somehow. Acacia is in on it, or was. That's not all. Someone died.''
Her eyes narrowed in unspoken question.
"A security officer for Cowles Industries. Bishop might have been involved. If Acacia can implicate him…"
Mary-em was thoughtful. "A Game like this wouldn't be a bad opportunity to take someone out."
"I want you to stay close to Acacia. Don't let her out of your sight. I know that Bishop wouldn't try anything with a witness."
She nodded, her nut-brown face crinkling. "You've got it."
Bishop watched as Griffin and Mary-em and Acacia did their little minuet. And laughed to himself. He excused himself from the group to do a little scouting. There was no reason not to, and Acacia's relief was a delight to see. He walked out into dhe graveyard, then disappeared into the shadows beyond.
35
Conference
Friday, July 22, 2059 — 5:46 P.M.
Griffln found one of the hidden wall panels and thumbprinted for entrance. It slid back, admitting him to a sealed corridor. A second door yielded to him, and he entered a deserted offlce. He flicked on one of the monitors and punched up Harmony's number.
Harmony appeared in the air in front of him, looking startled. "Man, you look like hell. When was the last time you slept?"
"I got some sleep last night," Griffln said lamely. If he looked half as dead as he felt, they should have played him alongside Baron Samedi.
Millicent's image appeared, followed by Tony and Richard Lopez. Griffin wasn't happy about that, but it took only a minute to understand the sense of it.
"Mr. Lopez," he said finally. "We assume you will hold the following discussion in strictest confidence?"
"Of course." Lopez's image flickered a bit, and Alex adjusted it.
"All right. Thaddeus, what have we got?"
Griffln fought to maintain concentration while Harmony brought him up to date. God. All he
wanted to do was crawl under a bush somewhere and sleep. "So Bishop might have known Sharon. Big coincidence. And he can't con himself into believing he could pull off this Army thing? Because that was the obvious…"
Tony shook his head, an emphatic negative.
Richard Lopez spoke carefully. "Understand, Mr. Griffin, that much of Bishop's strategy originates in his reverence for Sun-tzu's The Art of War. One reason that The Art of War is so easy to computer-model is that it suggests a very specific set of reactions certain stimuli. For instance: 'If you outnumber the opponent by a factor of ten, surround them. When five times greater, attack them. When two times greater, scatter them. When fewer in number, avoid them,' and so on. The combination of reactions creates infinite tactical variety. The basic reactions are If-Then propositions. At the very core is the constant reminder to never do what the opponent expects."
"Reasonable enough."
"But do you really understand it? The American military officer who came closest to Sun-tzu was probably Douglas MacArthur. During his Philippine campaign in World War II, he committed to retaking Manila. 'I shall return,' and so forth. The Japanese had prepared a series of reinforced military obstacles on his way there and he simply leapfrogged over them, never engaged at all. This strategy is typical of Sun-tzu. Bishop has had months to study your defences, and is probably prepared to leapfrog them."
"How?"
Lopez shrugged. "It will probably be conceptual in nature. You are already swimming in supposition, which has clouded your perceptions."
Griffin sat back, thinking hard. First, Bishop is just playing the Game, with Acacia as a lover. Then he's arranged to win with Acacia throwing the Game. Then he 's throwing the Game to Army, with Acacia's help. Then maybe he's not interested in the Game at all but if not the Game…
"We're wondering if he's after something in MIMIC, Alex," Harmony said.
"Then he's already got it."
"You know this, Alex?"
"Close… Bishop's turned flaky. He's just playing now. Whatever he wanted… Please stand by," Griffin said apologetically, and put Lopez and McWhirter on hold. Both of their images fizzled out.