by J. S. Morin
“A… game room?” Esper ventured.
Mort towed Esper along through cramped aisles as her senses were assaulted from all sides. “The Merry Mayhem Arcade. Good place to dump a young wizard for a few hours’ peace and quiet—for the parents, that is. This place is louder than the inside of Carl’s head.”
“Seems awfully… sciencey.”
“It is. Good place for a wizard to learn self-control. You get games or magic—not both. You think I’d be able to play Astro-League Racer or Battle Minions if I hadn’t spent a good chunk of my youth in places like this? Not likely. I’d scramble the controls every time I tried.”
“So, somewhere in here I have a test to take…”
Mort nodded, craning his neck to scan over Esper’s head. “Just need to find your adversary.”
Esper fell into step as Mort released her arm to navigate the tight spaces between games, players, and watchful parents. The knot of noisy cabinet games gave way to an adjacent space filled with rows of miniature bowling alleys with ramps at the end and targets of numbered concentric rings. “How cute!” Esper stopped and hefted one of the palm-sized bowling balls.
“Play once your test is over.”
Chagrined, Esper returned the ball to its little rack and followed Mort into a section where the games tended toward the physical side. Some had motorcycle seats and screens; some had cordoned-off areas for a player to dance. One set of machines had a player bonking pop-up moles with a mallet. “Amy would be good at this one.”
Mort stopped and squinted at the setup. “Predictive vision would make it boring. Plus, look at the arcanalarm.” When Esper cocked her head in puzzlement, he pointed to a device perched atop the machine. It resembled a robotic hula dancer trapped in a bell jar—with a liberal helping of anthropomorphic imagination. “Overcomplicated geegaw that’s hypersensitive to magic. They’re all over this place. Some outside the machines, some jammed in the guts. Any of them pitches a tizzy if it sniffs magic.”
“How sensitive…?” Esper reached a finger toward the arcanalarm, imagining that she was actually poking it through the glass. It jerked away and bobbed back and forth, screaming in a trill of electronic beeps. Esper flinched back a step and looked around, hoping no one had noticed, but half the heads within view were pointed in her direction.
Mort slapped her hand. “Quit that. You’re making us both look like idiots. Come on.”
He took her to a row of table-under-glass games labeled pinball machines. The one he stopped at had a waist-high console partitioned off from the player. Inside was a miniature cowboy town with painted-on dusty streets and ramshackle wooden buildings rendered in plastic. There were numerous departures from the typical Ancient West motif, mostly in the form of pop-up targets, elastic bumpers, and electronic lights. Mort glided in front of the machine and switched to pedantic mode.
“Two flippers, one on either side, allow the player—in this case you—to affect change within the machine. That little silver ball will tend to roll downhill toward the trap at the near side. Your job is to keep it out of there as long as possible, scoring points doing this and that all over the place bouncing off things.”
Esper looked around but didn’t see any likely opponents. “So who am I playing against? Not you, I hope.”
“Me? Egad, I hate these things. This whole place gives me a headache sandwich with vertigo pudding on the side. I’m out of here as soon as you get situated. No, today you’re playing the machine.”
“It plays back?”
“No. You’re just trying for a maximum score. Every hit off something in there’s going to score you ten, fifty, a hundred points—you’ll figure out the specifics. You just need to keep going until the counter hits maximum. Just between you and me… you’re going to have to cheat.”
“Cheat? Shouldn’t you be warning me not to cheat, since you’ve basically admitted you’re not going to proctor this test?”
Mort patted the glass top of Esper’s opponent. “These things are rat bastards with some of the nastiest arcanalarms money can buy. This place might look tawdry, but these are some of science’s most ancient devices. They claim some of them contain glyphs salvaged from ancient magnets back on Earth. I’ve also got it on good authority that these things are rigged. You can’t beat them fair and square.”
“But how do I—?”
Mort plunked a bag into Esper’s hand. It clattered with the telltale sound of hardcoin terras. “There’s a hundred terras in there in quarter coins. At one coin per game, you’ve got a long afternoon ahead of you. Good luck.”
“But—” Before Esper could think of words to tether him, Mort escaped into the gaming throng.
Esper turned her attention to her opponent. Not quite what she expected for her final examination as a wizard. The machine had a name printed in bullet-riddled lettering across the top: Rustlers’ Gulch. “Well, Mr. Gulch. Looks like it’s you against me.” It occurred to her that Mort had dropped her off at pretty close to high noon. She wondered if it was a coincidence.
Hooking the bag of coins to her belt, Esper withdrew a quarter and searched until she found a slot to feed it into the pinball machine. There was a solid thunk from somewhere in the front of the machine. A quick search discovered a silvery ball loaded into a launch chute. Mort hadn’t gone into detail about how to start the game, but the ball was resting against a rubber-tipped rod that extended through the case to Esper’s side. Her side of the road was mushroomed into an obvious button. She pushed it.
The silvery ball rolled a few sluggish centimeters before coming to rest back on the rod. Esper hit it harder, and it went most of the way up. A third try, and the ball cleared the end of the chute. It dinged off a bumper, then another, each seeming to impart a bit of momentum beyond what Esper had expected. The ball whizzed and zipped, jangling out a discordant melody along the way. The scoreboard clacked as it tracked her point total. The ball’s momentum eventually carried it low on the table, and before Esper could think to find the flipper control buttons, it had gone down the ball drain.
The indicator on the scoreboard dropped from 3 to 2, and another ball spit into the chute. She had scored 12,575 points. It looked like the score she needed was a million.
With a resigned sigh, she located the flipper buttons on either side of the machine and slammed the launch button again. As she watched the ball’s trajectory, Esper rubbed at the sore spot on her palm where she’d hit the launcher. This was going to be a long, painful day. Briefly, she considered using a trickle of magic to heal her sore palm but decided not to do so mid-game for fear of setting off the arcanalarm. Instead, distracted by her own thoughts, she missed the flippers again and scored less than 8,000.
A voice from behind startled her as she was about to launch her final ball. “Mind a bit of advice?”
Esper turned to find a smiling bystander not two paces away. He had blue eyes and a dimpled chin and leaned against one of the pinball machines, watching her. A black turtleneck clung to him around the chest and biceps before billowing out into the wide-ended sleeves of a wizard. By the smooth face and dark, full head of hair, she guessed he couldn’t have been much more than twenty. After a conversation with Mort about her brain being two hundred years old, the way this newcomer looked at her made Esper feel young.
“The plunger. You can just pull it back and let the spring do the hard work.”
Esper remembered to breathe. “Oh. Thanks. I was wondering how much of that my hand could take.”
“Who was the old timer who dropped you off?”
Despite his casual tone, Esper knew fishing when she heard it. But today she was in no mood to nibble at bait. “My teacher. We’re not seeing each other, or anything like that.”
“So he’s smooth with the whole student/teacher thing? Guy that oozes that much Camelot, you’d think he’d insist on master/apprentice.” His smile never wavered as he talked.
“We negotiated it to teacher/apprentice. I’m Esper, by the way.” She he
ld out a hand. His was warm and soft, with a gentle grip.
“I’m Raybin, Raybin Tussaud. I work here.”
“Oh.”
His face fell. “What? You too fancy for a working man?”
Esper held up her hands. “No! Nothing like that. I just… well… my teacher wants me to beat this game, whatever it takes.”
Raybin broke into a grin. “You’ve never been to an arcade before, have you?”
“I got into the wizarding business fairly recently.”
“It’s fine. You’re supposed to cheat. Unless you want to be a pinball pro—if there is such a thing—what difference does it make if you can flip a flipper or pull a plunger just right? You gotta fool the arcanalarm in this thing. And lemme tell you, Rustler’s Gulch has a doozy. Your teacher’s got a mean streak.”
“Tell me about it…” Esper could have dredged up Mort stories that would have flattened Raybin’s dimples. “Thanks for the tip. I guess I’ll just see how much magic I can get away with.”
“If you need anything, give a yell.” He departed with a wink.
# # #
Rustler’s Gulch was Esper’s own personal O.K. Corral. There were no clocks in The Merry Mayhem Arcade, so she could only judge the passage of time by her growing hunger and dwindling supply of quarter-terra coins. If she had been subtle enough with her magic, she could have carried a pocket watch; but if she had that sort of control, she wouldn’t keep losing game after game of pinball to the grinning, painted cowboys flanking the score counter.
The fact that she’d named the painted cowboys Clint and Jasper, and that they harbored a grudge with her pappy, told Esper that she was beginning to lose perspective on the game. But every time the arcanalarm raised a ruckus and zeroed the score counter, she couldn’t help but blame Clint and Jasper for squealing to the sheriff. Here and there, Esper had managed to nudge a ball without getting caught. She would cajole it left or wheedle it to slow down a smidgen, and nothing untoward would happen. Then she’d try the same thing seconds later, and the arcanalarm would blare, making her jump out of her skin. The other patrons of the arcade had stopped glaring over at her each time it happened, resigned to outbursts from her machine every few minutes.
Rustlers’ Gulch wasn’t that hard of a game. Even without magical intervention she could sense progress in her judgment of the bounces and angles. She knew the speed the silver ball would have coming off Old Man Sneed’s fence or ricocheting off the bottles outside the Firewater Saloon. Due to her mathematics background, angling shots off different parts of the flippers made intuitive sense. But rounded bumpers and rapid rebounds added more chaos than Esper could control.
Raybin sidled up beside her as Esper seethed and reached for another quarter-terra coin. “Keep at it a year, you just might beat it legit.” He set down a large paper cup with a straw poking through the lid.
Esper eyed the drink, recalling many tongue-clucking lectures about accepting drinks from strange men. “What is it?”
“Raspberry soda-pop from the hotdog stand outside.”
Raybin didn’t look like the sort who’d drug a girl’s drink—for whatever that was worth. Then it occurred to her that if it came down to it, she could tear Raybin’s brain out through his ears. A brief chill pervaded her, and before she could explore that line of thought, Esper accepted the soda. Ice rattled inside as she lifted it to her lips. The liquid was refreshing, cooling her from parched throat to empty belly, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Mort should have warned her that she’d be stuck standing in front of a torture device all day.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. You’ve been pouring terras into my machine like you can bribe it for a win. Least I can do is help you recoup your losses.”
“It’s really not… the least I mean. You could have just watched and laughed at me.” Carl and Roddy would have paid admission to watch her flailing attempts.
“Why would I do a thing like that? I’m rooting for you.” A sudden dread filled Esper. Could it be that Raybin was Mort in disguise? She wouldn’t put it past the ornery old coot, but something told her that Raybin had a less than professional stake here.
“Why? What’s it to you if I win or lose? If I go broke, it’s more money for the arcade, right?”
Raybin rubbed his sculpted chin. “Good point. I need something to make this worth my while. How about this? I bet you dinner at Port ‘o Call I can tell you one little hint that’ll fix your problem.”
She and Mort had passed Port ‘o Call on the way in. It hadn’t looked fancy—just a seafood place with lobsters on the sign—but then neither did Raybin. Besides, if he had a secret to beating Rustlers’ Gulch, she was ready to try anything. “You’re on.”
He leaned close, and Esper smelled a woodsy aroma from his cologne. Who wore cologne to work in an arcade? The answer to that question seemed nearly as important as the hint Raybin whispered, tickling her neck with his breath. “The ball isn’t the only way to move the score wheels.”
Thoughts of cologne and seafood vanished as Esper straightened. What a fool she’d been.
She fed one final quarter into Clint and Jasper’s retirement fund and didn’t even pull back the plunger. Reaching mentally for the six digit-wheels on the score counter, she coaxed them each gently into the “9” position. The arcanalarm shrieked, and they returned to zeroes. Raybin met her reproachful glare with the same easy smile he’d shown her all afternoon. She tried again. And again. Something told her she was getting closer each time. She could almost envision the arcanalarm’s influence—the areas it was most vigilant and where its attention was lax. This felt more like wizarding than playing a silly cowboy game. The ball, the lights, the dings and beeps; it was all a distraction. On her sixth try, the score wheels settled into a high score, and the arcanalarm had nothing to say about it.
“You win.”
“I guess I owe you dinner.”
“Can I pick you up at 6:00?”
“What time is it now?” Esper had been on her feet for hours. She had probably worked up a sweat battling Clint and Jasper all afternoon. A shower was in order, and she should do something with her hair. Maybe tint her lips. A nice dress.
Raybin flicked open a gold pocket watch. “6:04. Sorry I’m late. You ready?” He offered Esper an arm.
Mort made that same gesture but was never so earnest. For the old wizard it was a handy way to keep her close by for protection and to show her around. Raybin looked like he meant it. And why wouldn’t he mean it? He’d spent hours flirting with her and finally conned her out of a free meal. Not everyone in the galaxy was part of a criminal syndicate with ulterior motives for getting out of bed in the morning. Most men were face value. And if Mort was due back at The Merry Mayhem Arcade long before a nice, quiet dinner for two would be over, so what?
# # #
Dinner was crab cakes and grilled asparagus, but the wine was the highlight of the meal. After a long and frustrating day, it made time stop and the rest of the world fade into the background. Despite the nautical decor and the scent of brine through the open windows, Esper and Raybin could have been dining in New York Prime for all the attention they paid their surroundings.
Raybin laughed. “A priestess? You?”
Setting down her wine glass, Esper held up a hand. “On my honor.”
“So what happened?”
Esper scrunched her nose and waved the question away. “Got mixed up with some unsavory sorts and turned into a wizard.” It wasn’t the most eloquent recounting of her recent past, but it summed things up more accurately than she’d care to admit. “How ‘bout you? How’d you end up on a half-terraformed moon, tending a game room?”
Raybin skewered a piece of crab cake and chewed it as he replied. “Subtlety is about all I’ve got going with my magic. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a terramancer—who didn’t when they were eight? Never graded out. Same for law enforcement, military service, and xeno relations. After I flunked o
ut of star-drive repair, my uncle found me this job. Light magical load. Drives most wizards batty being around so many arcanalarms. Perfect for my skill set. Plus, I like being around kids.” He grinned, cute as a puppy—a drunken puppy, anyway.
“So come clean.” Esper leaned forward across the table. “How many girls have you rescued from the pinball machines and brought here to impress?”
Raybin frowned and counted on his fingers, lips moving all the while. “One.”
Esper spurted wine back into her glass as she giggled, then stared at the wine glass accusingly. “Oh, you’re a cute guy, smart one. How many bottles of wine did you drink me?”
“You’re halfway through glass three.”
“How many is that in bottles?”
“Less than one… a lot less.”
Esper squeezed her eyes shut. That didn’t make any sense. How come everyone else got drunk on liters and liters of hard liquor, but she couldn’t finish a bottle before getting silly? Using the earliest form of magic she knew, Esper sped her metabolism, burning away hours’ worth of alcohol from her system. She hadn’t even noticed the room wobbling slowly until it stopped.
Feeling more like herself, Esper reached out and took Raybin by the hand. “Listen, you’re a nice guy. I just finished my apprenticeship tonight thanks to you. You got a place around here? Maybe we can take this somewhere more private?”
She had the satisfaction of seeing Raybin blush. He wasn’t half so drunk as she’d been a moment before. Spilling a pile of her remaining quarter-terra coins onto the table to cover the bill, she dragged Raybin toward the exit without waiting for a reply. Esper picked a direction on the boardwalk and moved. If Raybin wanted to navigate, he was welcome to start any time. For now, the sea air, chilled by unfamiliar moonlight, was all she needed. Breathing deep, it filled her lungs with freedom.
But Raybin tugged her back to reality, and he was too heavy to drag along. She stopped and looked up into his eyes, the whites standing in stark contrast, back lit against the night sky. “Wait. I can’t… I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t want to. It’s just…”