by Larry Niven
Another eleven quiet, cool-eyed men were clustered around these two. Thirteen in all. Thomas waited to see if any of them would initiate a conversation. It only took ten seconds to remind himself that these people were not here for words.
“Well. It is good to see you. Before your tour, we’ve arranged the interview you requested.”
“Mr. McCauley?” Shotz asked. Nothing wrong with using the name. Little remained a secret for long on the Moon. Anyone who cared to look would know that these people had visited the Fabrication hutch.
The why and the how much of their visit, on the other hand, could remain mysterious.
The Brothers Frost led their very special guests to luggage claim, and from there to the maglev system. A car was just pulling out as they arrived at the platform, but there was nothing to worry about: Another would be along within ten minutes.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
12
Gamers
November 13, 2085
Considering everything that happened, and what the events of the Moon Maze Game came to symbolize, it is surprising that more lies aren’t told about how and when it all began.
In one sense, it all began on November 12, 2085, when the first load of gamers and tourists appeared at Heinlein pad number 8, on the shuttle from Lagrange Two.
The popular lie would be that it arrived with no fanfare, that nonessential tasks from Clavius to Mount Bullwinkle had not ground to a halt as Lunatics paused to watch the shuttle sink into a bloom of moondust.
The lie would be that the gamers and Non-Player Characters were not completely awed by their reception, reduced to appreciative murmurs even after transit in the shuttle. And chiefest among those attempting to remain nonchalant was Wayne Gibson.
Gibson had been unable to sleep at all for the last thirty-six hours, even knowing how desperately valuable dream time would be over the coming days.
He should have cocooned himself in his cabin. He should have wired himself into a d-web and let the ship computer coax him down into healing slumber. But then he couldn’t have watched the screens and haunted the shuttle’s narrow corridors and annoyed the pilots.
If he’d slept, he couldn’t have hung out with the other gamers and NPCs in the undersized lounge—and protocol be damned! There would be plenty of time to play prima donna once they touched down.
And what a group they were! The midsized Spider-class shuttle was snug, but up at the L2 point, they’d had a little time to just party and relax together.
As soon as the juddering had stopped, the captain’s voice sounded over the ship intercom, and his face appeared floating in the air above their webbed cots.
“And that little pull you’re feeling is all the gravity we’ve got in this neck of the woods. I want to welcome you all to Luna, Heinlein base, named for the twentieth-century science fiction author. If this is your final destination, I invite you to pick up your luggage at the immigration station. Hey! That kinda rhymes.”
Wayne grinned to himself, wondering how many times the captain had retreaded that lame little joke. It didn’t matter. All he wanted was a chance to get up and actually put his feet on … well, if not lunar soil, at least lunar concrete.
“And if you’re continuing on to one of the other bases … well, you still need to go through immigration. Your luggage will be examined separately, and taken to your transportation, whatever that may be. Welcome to Luna!”
The Fasten Your Web sign dimmed. All over the shuttle air seals audibly popped. The walls vibrated with cheers, his own louder than most.
You’re on the friggin’ Moon! The voice in his head boomed, still amazed.
Even after the invitation, after grueling weeks of training, after liftoff from Earth in the orbiter craft and the intervening stay at the L2 Hilton … some part of him still couldn’t believe it, had been holding his emotions in check.
You’re on the Moon.
He was almost afraid to stand up, so powerful was the unexpected wave of emotion. Why? Why did he feel so gut-slammed by all of this?
Angelique Chan, his beautiful room-if-not-bunkmate peered down over the edge of the upper berth and grinned at him. “Because you’ve looked at it all your life, silly.”
“How do you do that?” he asked, shaking his head.
Her smile became even more mysterious. Even upside down, her lustrous hair had taken its own sweet time descending to fringe her face. “Trade secrets. I tell you, and you tell two friends, and pretty soon no one needs me anymore.”
She performed a flipping roll-over only a Cirque du Soleil contortionist could ever have managed on Earth. She landed bouncing on her heels, taking a moment to catch her balance.
“Whoa!” She crouched, settled and then spun to face him. “Are we ready for this?”
“We’ve come an awful long way if we’re not,” he said.
“No … you don’t understand. You really don’t.”
“Then teach me,” he said.
“Everything until this moment? Just preparation.” She came near enough that he could feel her breath on his face, and smell its sweetness. “Everything we say, everything we do is about to be judged. Everyone is watching for advantage. The training is over—”
“But the game doesn’t start until tomorrow—”
“No!” she said fiercely, and grabbed his shoulders. “The game starts now, do you understand? Everything you see and hear that comes from another gamer, or a bribed NPC—”
“What?”
She scrunched up her face. “You’ve got to be kidding me. An NPC who takes a ‘suggestion’ from an associate of this gamer or that Game Master might be fined, or blackballed, but the game’s still lost. There is only one first lunar game, and I wouldn’t put anything past any of them.”
“You brought me here to distract the Man,” he said. “But you’re going to take my advice, too. I’ve come too far to shut my mouth.”
Her jaw worked, then tightened. She was listening.
“Too much emotion. Too much old history. Xavier will want to know that he beat us clean. Above board. I’d bet my socks on it.”
They’d had this conversation before. And until or unless there was definite evidence either way, they’d have it again. “Maybe,” she finally conceded. “Perhaps. We’ll see.”
* * *
During the last sleep cycle, a bundled parcel had been left before every door. Wayne unwrapped his. A tall black hat, with a golden cluster and feathered top. A red cloak with two vertical rows of silver buttons, gold chevrons and tasseled shoulders. An officer’s uniform. British, he reckoned.
It took him only three minutes to strip off his clothes and fit into the new garb, which was, despite its appearance, of some light and stretchy material that conformed to his body like spray paint.
Angelique had stripped her package open as well, but her costume was a well-tailored tan explorer’s costume, like something some proper Englishman might have worn on an expedition up the Congo. He doubted Dr. Livingstone had ever looked so edible. The fabric accentuated her form without exaggerating it.
She slipped on her pith helmet and gave it a jaunty slant. “What in the world is that little bastard up to?” she wondered, but he heard the excitement in her voice, in a way he had not in years. Just like the old days.
Hell. Win, lose or draw, this was going to be fun.
* * *
It only took Angelique and Wayne a combined total of twelve minutes to pack up their cabin possessions and stuff them into the scan-bags for pickup. Clothing was bundled to be scanned, and everyone wore similarly lightweight pseudo-period clothing. Most seemed British, or referenced some part of the British Empire. India. China. And … Africa? The sun never set, so they said.
When the next bell rang and their room door opened, Wayne and Angelique joined a line of thirty passengers in the hall outside.
Wayne fought excitement and a newly blossoming sense of claustrophobia. He’d bottled it up just fine for the past week, but no
w, so close to disembarking …
The explosion of relief and anticipation was almost overwhelming.
Angelique’s bound club of lustrous dark hair bounced and settled beneath her helmet’s rim with every step.
He became aware that the man behind him was chanting “The Moon, the Moon, the Moon…” in little breathless exhalations.
Wayne looked back. The guy’s name was Roger something. An NPC, he thought, wearing a white sailor uniform that would have seemed in place on a British frigate.
Roger stood about four inches shorter than Wayne, and had the kind of loose skin around his neck that suggested recent weight loss. The guy was bright-eyed and carrot-topped, radiated “gaming” from every pore. He sighed in exasperated joy as they locked eyes.
“Can you believe this? Everything automated and slick for the last two weeks, but the last two minutes just goes all to hell.”
“Way of the world, old boy.” Wayne grinned at himself. Unbidden, a creaky British accent had crept into his voice.
British Empire. Nineteenth century. Pay attention to the clues.
To his credit, Roger adjusted almost as quickly. “Never better,” he said.
The corridor was lined with costumed well-wishers. Some played their roles impeccably, but others seemed vaguely uncomfortable. He suspected this last group had little gaming experience. They’d be Lunies recruited as extras, playing their parts as best they could for unseen cameras.
Angelique was keeping her smile bright, but she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Damn. I’d hoped we’d have a little time before the”—a swift shift in tones as a brightly lipsticked woman of middle years materialized—“Junie Bug! How are you?”
The two women exchanged bobble-headed air kisses. Even Wayne recognized June Simmons, the publisher and head reporter for the Web’s largest gaming zine, Fan-Tasm. So Earth was sending up the A-team, not just leaving it to the local stringers to file workable stories.
Oddly, that thought pepped Wayne up. He found himself strutting through the doorway into the main hall, where they were hustled into elevators as guides chattered greeting.
A woman who looked as if she might have been Samoan, with beautiful strong curves and a good smile, greeted them in the foyer. “My name is Kendra Griffin, Chief of Operations of Heinlein base,” she said. “It is my honor to welcome you to our home.” She wore a lovely lace-frilled gown that reminded him of a water lily. It offset her golden skin beautifully, and would have been right in place on the lady accompanying a British officer to a regimental ball. “You are on the surface level, only one of seven floors, each disk-shaped and sunk into the lunar regolith to a total depth of four hundred feet. We’re going down to the third level. Your gear is going down to level five, and you’ll rejoin it later. Right now, we want to invite you to look at the chart right here—”
As they proceeded down the corridor, wisps of chamber music rose up to meet them.
The folks lining the hall seemed more … comfortable in their roles, and he suspected that more of these were genuine actors, Non-Player Characters, a few of them even imported up from Earth itself for the event.
Mickey and Maud Abernathy wore vaguely Middle Eastern garb. Did the British Empire have holdings in the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth century? Their Aladdin-esque pantaloons and flaring blouses certainly suggested as much.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “I’m not certain we’ve been introduced.”
Mickey smiled graciously. “The Abernathys,” she said. “We’ve just returned from a research expedition in Egypt, uncovering the lost temple of Solomon.”
Ah. Backstory right there. So, Xavier was letting them keep their names, but changing their histories. The Abernathys were an academic couple from Brighton (Mickey taught history, and Maud was a published fantasy novelist) who usually played as paired psychic sensitives. Saying they were recently returned from Egypt on a dig suggested that their IFGS points would manifest as a combination of human psi-ability and Oriental mysticism.
Marching at Wayne’s side was a plump woman in … what was that? The female version of a nineteenth-century British Raj military uniform? The actual insignias had been removed, but the style was right. He guessed a female soldier of fortune. The woman’s name was Sharmela Tamil, a Gold Ticket winner from Sri Lanka. Not an IFGS kingpin, but a loyal fan who had dropped her hundred bucks—or the local equivilent—in the lottery.
They entered a bank of elevators (oops! lifts) in which he was polite enough not to notice the anachronisms. There was a limit to what the IFGS could modify on the moon without infringing upon safety or utility.
The door slid shut. The elevator fell with a recorded rattle.
The most interesting personage packed in the little room with him traveled not on her feet, but in a capsule with twin five-inch treads. This would be Asako Tabata, the TechWitch herself, the girl who was probably the best pure gamer in the world. Five years ago she would have dominated the entire proceedings. In the intervening time, muscular dystrophy had finally caught up with Asako. It was a miracle she was there at all.
She couldn’t walk. Most certainly she could no longer climb, and that was a real pity, because Asako had been one of the IFGS’ finest wall crawlers. But by fan request and special dispensation, she was attending the first lunar game as an actual player, not merely an NPC. He wondered at the negotiations for that, and guessed that many of them had been commercial in nature. But how in the world did they justify such technology in a nineteenth-century game?
Time to find out.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “Do I know you?”
Her answering voice was partially synthesized, but you would have to listen very carefully to detect it. She played behind the shield of her isolation bubble. No longer able to breathe without mechanical assistance, she had invested over a million dollars of her lifetime winnings into the damnedest gaming costume imaginable. It was her life support unit, but the gleaming silver and gold capsule had both arms and wheels.
“Asako Tabata,” the speaker said. Behind her shield, she smiled as her lips moved. He had never met her, but had seen her in interviews and gaming vids, and the computer voice matched her own very closely. “Step-niece to the esteemed Prince Dakkar Nemo,” she said. “He himself fashioned my capsule, that I might join him exploring beneath the waves, despite my physical infirmities.”
Captain Nemo. Of course. A man of sufficient genius to develop an electrical submarine by the time of America’s civil war. Who could doubt that, if he had survived, he might not create something along the line of Asako’s life-support bubble? In all likelihood, she had only been given a bare outline. It would be her job to improvise in the days ahead, creating all the backstory she wished.
Asako was in her late fifties now, her face sharp-edged and pale. The wrinkles of time and woe had stolen much of her appealing waifishness, but when she smiled, he felt an almost absurd urge to bow.
And did so. “M’lady Tabata,” he said.
She couldn’t raise a hand—the disease had progressed too far for that. With a barely audible hum, the machine nodded her head for her. As the lecture progressed he scanned her treaded cocoon.
“You may not know me, but I know you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Her lips moved, but her voice sounded a bit augmented. “You are Lieutenant Wayne Gibson.” A pause for breath. “They say that in India, you saved an entire regiment during the late unpleasantness.”
She was feeding him. Late unpleasantness. He wondered what that referred to? So … he was British, and a war hero? “People exaggerate,” he murmured.
The elevator doors opened, and his claustrophobia vanished in a single sigh.
The room yawned, surely the most cavernous on the Moon. Its domed ceiling stretched high above them.
The walls were draped with gigantic red-white-and-blue Union Jack starbursts. A standing-room only crowd burst into applause as they entered. If he’d been non
plussed by the NPC-lined halls up top, what happened next was an absolute assault.
A banner stretching from one side of the room to another read: The Adventurer’s Club Welcomes Our Daring Crew!
Only then did Wayne look down. The floor was composed of some transparent material, plastic or glass or something else, set over a swimming pool or reservoir. The water was clear enough to see golden coral growing thirty feet beneath them … and even as he watched, a squadron of merfolk swam into view, a wedge of bronzed skin, emerald flippers and for the females, discretely positioned chest shells. He estimated about fifteen of them, but it was difficult to be certain because other guests obscured his view. The pyramid of swimmers fractured into smaller groups, then pairs. They scooted and somersaulted through the water, then reformed into a wedge and swam out of view.
All but one. One mermaid remained behind, a pug nose with blazing red hair and a fleshy, muscular body. Fit/Fat again. Looked good on her. She gazed up at him, and winked one emerald eye. Bubbles gushed from her lips as she mouthed the word: Later.
She swam away.
“Quite amazing,” a rotund fellow in Beefeater garb said. His handlebar mustache was slightly askew. “I believe Professor Challenger brought them back from Fiji.”
The room was filled with bejeweled and gowned celebrants, perhaps two hundred of them in a room that had probably never held more than a hundred and fifty. They displayed an array of costumes that must have occupied every amateur or freelance seamstress and tailor on the Moon for months. What a show!
“Hallo.” A tall, broad man in another red Beefeater uniform approached. His British accent was phony-thick, but dammit, at least he was trying. He looked like a fleshy John Wayne, with a receding hairline and strong laugh lines. The Duke approached with his hand extended, and Wayne automatically reached out in return. The very vaguest of recollections danced at the edge of memory.
“Good seeing you, sir!” the guy said. “Name’s Chris Foxworthy. Met you two years ago in the desert.” Ah. Vegas?