His anguish was almost too painful to watch.
“What do you want from me?” he asked finally.
Ollie’s voice was kind. “Just the truth, Kevin.”
“If I eat too much I’ll have to throw up.” He said it as if the admission had cost him skin.
Kevin was afraid, literally afraid to cross that gap to where the others sat eating, bathed in golden light.
Slowly, Trianna came to her feet. Tears still slicked her face. She held her arms out to Kevin, and Gwen could almost see lines of strange magnetism connecting the two of them. As if they were bizarre mirror-images of each other. The fat lady and the skeleton boy, prides of the side-show.
No one said a word. There was no sound, and then Kevin made a soft, wet, desperate sound, and stumbled across the gap, dancing on air, into Trianna’s comforting arms.
One by one they went through it. Gwen was relieved to note that nobody tried to test the boundaries. It might have been interesting to try keeping Max Sands from charging across that bridge. He could carry her and Ollie without much of a second thought. Carry, or dump them over the side.
But at last they were all seated, eating, actually enjoying the meal Dream Park had set for them. The pears were crisp and flavorful, and the cheddar cheese was so sharp it almost singed her tongue. Gwen herself loved pears. It was easy to respect a good pear, because a bad pear was so bad.
Johnny Welsh was drinking coffee from a paper cup thoughtfully provided by the Gods, and chewing on a makeshift cheese sandwich. He looked as if he had died and gone to heaven. Everyone ate more slowly than they had at breakfast. Maybe the excellence of the food and drink had something to do with that. Something, but not all.
Johnny belched contentedly. “Java blend,” he said. “Last coffee I had was on the tube out from Denver.” He made a face.
Hippogryph was willing. “That bad?”
“Let’s put it this way. I had the concierge send it out to a lab. Got a call back saying ‘Congratulations, your moose is pregnant.’”
Hippogryph sprayed a mouthful of grape juice, narrowly missing Kevin, who lunged out of the way. “Jeeze—will you watch your timing?” Kevin said plaintively.
Johnny smiled wickedly. “Sorry about that.”
Orson popped open one of the cans, drank, and made a face at Snow Goose. “You brought me all the way to Hell for sugar-free 7-Up?”
They sat in a circle on a stone bridge over the pit of infinity. Max looked a little distant, wistful, that massive, muscular body sagging somewhat in repose. Gwen wondered what he was thinking. There was no way for Dream Park magic to give her that piece of information.
Yet.
They were on the move again, and the trail began to lead gently downward. The air was chilling, and the wind plucked at Max’s face and hair more fiercely.
Part of it was his imagination. The howl of the wind had increased more than its velocity. The temperature had only dropped a few degrees.
The path grew narrower and narrower, and then the walls were well within reach, rock glazed with ice. The wind was a hollow, reedlike whistle in their ears. Moods recently elevated by a fine meal went edgy. They gripped their weapons tightly and walked single file.
At first, the cries might have been mistaken for a trick of the wind. Then Max heard them for what they were—the endless moaning and shrieking of the Eskimo damned.
So far there was nothing to see. Light had diminished to a murky dusk.
Then a glowing aurora illuminated the scene, and Max felt the pit of his stomach tighten.
Naked men and women stumbled blindly through deep snow. One man staggered across jagged rocks with a caribou lashed across his shoulders. His feet were torn and bleeding. Blood trailed down his back from a gash along the caribou’s ribs. The caribou kicked and wriggled in nightmarish slow-motion.
Snow Goose stiffened, then ran jerkily to a spot where a stone wall caused the path to branch. An Eskimo was lashed to the wall with leather thongs. Butterflies fluttered around his head, and he snapped at them with his teeth. He caught one and ate it. Other Eskimos were bound identically. Their movements were sluggish and awkward as they lunged uselessly against their fetters.
“Wood Owl!” Snow Goose cried.
He looked up at her dully. “Who . . . ? Who is there?” Then she stepped closer, and his eyes focused. His lips curved, making a small sad smile. “Snow Goose. It is you. How did you die?”
“No, Wood Owl. I come with friends. We fight to destroy the Cabal.”
He nodded. A butterfly fluttered too close to his mouth. He snapped it out of the air, and chewed thoughtfully. “Could use a little salt.”
“What’s it like being dead?” Hebert asked.
“Not bad, really,” Wood Owl answered after a moment’s consideration. “Like waiting for a tax refund, only slower.” He looked at Snow Goose regretfully. “I would not have made you a good mate, but I loved you.”
“You died for me. So you were a lousy hunter. I turned vegetarian at ASU. No problem.”
“When you see your father again? Tell him I’ve seen cousin Gray Otter. We can stop wondering about why Gray Otter’s wife cut his throat and drowned herself. Seems he was sharing furs with Weeping Walrus when he was supposed to be fishing.”
“Soap operas in Hell,” Bowles mused. “The mind boggles.”
“Death will not release you,” Wood Owl agreed.
Snow Goose smiled bravely, and they continued on. Max kept looking back at Wood Owl, lashed to his stone and snapping at the cluster of butterflies around his face, until they rounded the corner of the wall.
Hell was a small place, evidently. The next group of damned they encountered were all half-naked women. Blue lines and dots made patterns on their faces. They cried, holding their hands out to the travelers, and begging in a language that he couldn’t understand.
“What was their sin?” Max asked Snow Goose.
“They have bad tattoos.”
Orson’s jaw dropped, and he looked at the Eskimo dead with new interest. Studying their tattoos, of course. Max said, “That’s pretty minor. What kind of Gods are these?”
“Petty, like all Gods. On the other hand, there’s no penalty at all for masturbation.”
“I’m changing religion,” Kevin said positively. “Obviously, I have strong Eskimo blood and never knew it.”
The women were all black-haired and sullen, except for a woman in her thirties, with flaming red hair, who hung numbly in her bonds. Her green eyes were partially unfocused. Slowly, she lifted her head. “Who . . . ?”
Max cried, “Eviane!”
Her confusion lasted only a moment; recognition following swiftly. “My comrades,” Eviane said. Tears streaked her face. “I knew you would come for me. Even Hell couldn’t keep us apart.”
Chapter Eighteen
RESEARCH AND
DEVELOPMENT
Transit time from Security to Research and Development, on the far side of the park, was about forty-five seconds when Alex could catch the right routing.
There was the gentle bump as his shuttle capsule hit the bottom of the vertical tube, a moment’s hesitation as the gyros rotated the capsule, and then a shush as he accelerated, like a bullet fired beneath the thriving metropolis that was Dream Park.
For some of the trip, the clear walls of the shuttle revealed nothing save an occasional flash of light.
The maintenance shops were along this route. The Chief of Maintenance liked the transit tubes through her sector to be clear, so that she could see the shuttles streaking past.
Six years ago, a study had given Maintenance the greatest efficiency level of any department in Dream Park. This was considered puzzling. Someone noted that instead of the green or blue worn by maintenance personnel in the other companies, the Dream Park crew wore white, more like a doctor’s gown than the uniform of one who keeps pipes and wires humming.
Sandy Khresla, a chunky little woman with a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, w
as the pipe-smoking head of the division. When someone asked her why she chose such untraditional garb, she smiled as if she had been watching her clock and her calendar, wondering when the big brains would get around to asking that question.
“We service the veins and arteries of Dream Park,” she said around a mouthful of sweet, quasi-contraband Turkish smoke. “You guys are the brains or the arms, and transportation is the legs. But we’re the heart. Without us, everything dies.”
* * *
Alex Griffin remembered that story as Sandy’s offices flashed by. Three white uniforms huddled in conversation. A pair of eyes flicked in his direction, then indifferently away.
He thought of all the people who took their jobs so damned seriously, toiling for seventeen and twenty hours a day, who often had to be pried away from their desks and terminals. They believed in the dream. How would they feel if they knew? What if they knew of his mission?
The capsule shushed to a halt in the basement of R&D, quieted for a moment as it was switched to a rail, and then began to rise. The shuttles sat up to four people, and were completely modular, capable of hooking onto either the vertical or diagonal tracks that could take them anywhere in the Park.
An insanely complex machine. There were problems with such complexity, of course. The more complex a machine is, the more vulnerable it is to sabotage or simple breakdown. Obviously Fekesh had implanted a cancer somewhere in the organism that was Dream Park. Alex hoped it had not yet metastasized.
The shuttle door clicked open. Alex stretched his legs and pushed himself out.
He was standing on his head in the middle of a desert. Date palms hung by their roots below the horizon. A slow-moving line of camels walked upside down in the distance.
Alex stopped, checking his sense of balance. He didn’t think he’d fallen over. So he took a few cautious steps in that direction, to see if the perspective would shift.
It didn’t. He looked down at his feet. He was standing on a cloud. Arms stretched up to their maximum buried his hands in intangible sand.
“Hello? Is anyone here?”
No answer, but he thought that he heard a cough. The sun was beating up with unnatural ferocity, but there was no heat. It felt more like the air conditioning was turned up to full, possibly as a minor side effect of turning the entire region upside down. Dream Park had finally figured out a way to make the Sahara livable. How much would Fekesh pay for that?
“Hello? This is Alex Griffin from Security.”
“Oh, shit,” someone said from behind a shimmering dune. The entire illusion flickered, then died.
He was standing right side up in the hall, surrounded by gleaming Formica floors and fluorescent ceilings and all of the usual floating video boards and packed trophy cases. The only unusual thing was the holo projection device out in the middle of the hallway, inverted and poking halfway out of a door.
Curious, Alex approached cautiously. “Ah—hello? What exactly are you doing?”
The young man wiggling from under the machine was brown-eyed and innocent, with long wavy brown hair and an engaging thin-lipped smile. He looked more like a fullback than a lab tech, and was dressed in a pair of blue denim overalls. He spread his hands in supplication. “I don’t know who the hell built this thing,” he said, “but the only way you can reach the main processor is from the bottom. The function keys are on the top. I’m having a wonderful time.”
The device was a standard holo projection unit, an older model, vaguely reminiscent of an old planetarium projector.
“Can I help you with something?” the young man asked.
“I’m looking for Dr. Izumi.”
“Oh, yeah—” He twisted over from his uncomfortable position and pointed down the hall. “Third door to the left. Think he’s in Bioworks today.”
As Alex walked away, man and machine vanished again into the desert, and the young man said “Eureka!” a second before the entire machine shorted out. A colorful stream of adjectives and gerunds followed Alex down the hall.
The second door to the left was standing open. In the midst of a lab filled with monitors, cameras, and floodlights, a human skeleton sat calmly on a folding canvas chair. It turned and looked at Alex, and said, “Yes, can I help you?”
Alex managed a rather lopsided smile, searching for the human being operating the armature. “Ah . . . yes. I’m looking for Dr. Izumi.”
The skeleton clicked its teeth in a bizarre rictus that might have been a smile. How would you know if a skeleton was smiling? It was the lip articulation that made most of a “smile” happen.
It stood up and stalked across the room like something out of a nightmare. It held out a bony hand.
All right, he’d go along with the joke, and as soon as the hand went through his, he would declare the joke over and force Izumi to get down to business.
His fingers closed on warm flesh—and then dissolved. The flesh of his hand ended at the wrist, and two sets of finger bones intertwined.
He gritted his teeth.
The skeleton laughed heartily. “That was priceless,” it said. “Just the expression on your face. Excuse me.”
It turned its head. Alex expected to hear a creak of tortured bone, but what he got instead was that bemused, cultured voice saying, “Izumi. Save program two-eight-internal and mute.”
The air shimmered, and Tom Izumi appeared. He was of medium height, with straight black hair and an incongruously small mouth. For an embarrassing moment, he reminded Griffin of a villain from an old Dick Tracy comic strip, the kind whose physical features mirrored and indicated their criminal tendencies.
“What in the hell was that?” Griffin asked.
“A real-time holographic medical analysis simulator. Utilizes ultrasound projectors built into the walls.”
“Don’t you need lasers to make a hologram?”
“Heavens no. Any form of energy that can be carried by waves: sound, light, microwaves, or X-rays.”
“Whatever happened to ‘turn your head and cough’?”
“There’s a ton of diagnostic devices in here. I’ve been scanned up and down and sideways. We just create a three-dimensional model and project it onto the patient.”
“What kind of . . . ah, depth? I guess ‘depth’ is the word I’m looking for.”
“Oh, we can adjust it to any level. Izumi, circulation.” His skin disappeared. Alex looked into a coursing network of veins and arteries, with the contracting fist-sized muscle of Izumi’s heart pulsing queasily in stage center. The room behind the missing flesh shimmered as if he was seeing it through a heat mirage.
“Could you disappear entirely?”
“Here, in the room? Sure. Could I play invisible man out in the street? Nobody’s miniaturized the equipment that far, but I suppose it’s possible. The problem would be in reproducing every conceivable angle, so that anyone looking from any direction would see what he expects to see. A little adjustment for focus, maybe . . .” He became thoughtful. “Come back next month.”
“Great.” A security chief’s worst nightmare, available next month from the gentle lunatics at Research and Development. “Mind turning that off? It’s giving me a headache.”
“Sure.” Izumi smiled toothily, and appeared, fully clothed.
“You’re Alex Griffin,” he said. “Tomisuburo Izumi.”
Alex shook the man’s hand again. It was soft, like a baby’s. There was something curiously childlike about the man. He had that soft round cheekiness, without the angularity which normally intrudes during adolescence. There was no trace of a beard, and the black hair was undisciplined. The eyes didn’t fit in that face. Dark and deep-set, they were fiercely intelligent. “What can I do for you?”
“I don’t feel comfortable in a room with so many scans hooked up to it. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”
Izumi thought for a moment. “There’s the party room. Come on.” Izumi carefully locked the door behind them and escorted him down the hall.
“Party room?” Alex asked.
“Yes. Our rotation doesn’t come up until two in the morning. Australia and Canada will keep things going most of the day.”
“What’s the record?”
“Nonstop holo party, thirteen months. With the feeds we’ve got right now, there’s no reason to assume that it will ever stop. We’re at eight months and cruising.”
They stopped in front of a small green door with the legend: “Environmental stress workshop. Please sign in.” Alex stifled a laugh as Izumi thumbed the door open, and they entered.
The room buzzed with activity. People laughed, drank, ate from a buffet table. A couple in the far corner were dancing a rumba. Some of the guests looked a little tired. They raised their glasses as Izumi closed the door, and a male voice said, “Tommy y’old slacker! G’day, ey? Good to see you. Who’s the straight?”
“This is Alex Griffin, Chief of Security here. Griffin, meet Robin Schultz.”
He was short and a bit pudgy, with a magnificent sandy beard. He tilted a bit as he stood up. “Welcome to the party, mate. Shake hands if I could, but you know how it is.”
Alex was overwhelmed with curiosity. “Where are you sending from?”
“University of Melbourne, old love. Plasma physics. We’ve had to shuffle the party around from one lab to the other this week. It’s been hysteric.”
“Why?”
“Rules. Officially, no one’s supposed to know. Unofficially, it’s the biggest open secret on campus, and they queue up waiting for us to drop a line.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, we only have to host for the next twelve hours. Then Canada takes over. Be glad too. Three days ago, I was the only person here for two whole hours. Lonely, of course, but hey! The party must go on!”
“Listen, Robin,” Izumi said, “I need a quiet conversation with Mr. Griffin, and this is the best place here, so we’re going to drop off line for a while.”
Dream Park [2] The Barsoom Project Page 19