by Larry Niven
“I ask you to be gentle with our young grubs, and to remember that the nurturance of tomorrow’s leaders is today’s greatest responsibility.”
Maud wiggled to find a more comfortable position in the chair, wincing as the helmet embraced her head. An instant later, the grubs “playing” game pieces commenced moving with purpose and apparent consciousness, shaking themselves and stretching as if from a prolonged slumber.
“How shall we begin our attack?” she asked. Her hands twisted in air, as if seeking control levers.
“Let’s try shelling the village,” Wayne said. “Soften them up a little.”
And she set herself to it.
“All right. Ah … burn down those villages.”
A thin current of moist air wafted through the room, but nothing else happened.
“It’s broken?” Scotty asked.
Wayne snapped his fingers. “The autopilot thinks you aren’t gaming hard enough. Rhyme it, Maud.”
She looked at Wayne as if he must be mad, but then laughed. With a level of theatricality she had not displayed in hours, Maud touched the tips of her fingers to her temples, and fluttered her eyelids closed.
“Children of Luna,” she whispered, “fulfill my desire. Use your strength and rain down fire!”
Their team’s little grubs mouthed the trigger strings controlling the cannons. The cannons roared, arcs of fire blazed above the field, and cannonballs the approximate size and heft of marshmallows sailed into the complex of buildings representing Luna.
With a fiery whoof they splintered or collapsed. Cannons on the lunar side popped, and some of the Earther buildings exploded.
Then the Martians weighed in, sending fire at either side, and the war was on.
* * *
Scotty set himself behind a foam pillar, wishing he had a better weapon than the crossbow. What he heard from inside the mansion drifted to him in bits of talk, incomprehensible.
The bubble wasn’t as big as it looked. The far landscape was hologram wallpaper, slick to the touch. Scotty prowled, looking for other doors. Nothing. Any exits must be within the mockup mansion—which wasn’t all there either.
Someone had to guard … but could Moresnot come through inside the mansion? The gamers would be shredded. Shouldn’t he be guarding Ali directly?
Twenty minutes had passed … and there was Wayne, taking too little care for cover while he looked for enemies. Scotty whistled from behind a tall brick-like chimney.
Wayne looked up. “How did you get up there?”
Scotty gestured around and up and over. “It’s not all that steep.”
“I relieve you,” Wayne said. “I took my shot. Earth lost. Mars and the Moon are still fighting.”
* * *
Sharmela was examining the game environs, perhaps measuring lines of sight.
“I think I see what the problem is,” she said finally. Her brown curls bounced as she nodded to herself. “We wasted shells hitting these buildings, but we’ve already seen that the Selenites are primarily an underground society. So there isn’t anything really valuable here.”
“So…?”
“So the Martians have been dealing with the Selenites a lot longer than we have. I think they’re strong enough to kick lunar butt, and the Selenites know it. So … they win against Luna, then invade us and die from germs?”
The plan seemed reasonable. Earth declined to engage as Mars attacked Luna, waiting until much of the destruction was already complete. Then and only then they joined the attack. The “floor” beneath the game seemed to open up, and smoke poured out: The Selenite society was destroyed.
But instead of the Martians sending walkers to invade Earth, they launched their assault from a distance, until the buildings were knocked apart, the grubs had retreated to safety, and all the little pieces scattered.
Maud groaned and said: “So to save us grief and pain, I beg you to begin again!” The battlefield shimmered and was whole: all holograms.
Just in case they had accidentally done the right thing, Maud looked around, hoping a door might open …
Nothing.
“Damn!” Mickey said, and slunk away, defeated. “I’ll take guard.”
Ali advised Maud next, and his attempt at a pincer assault came to no better a conclusion.
Scotty came in to find the boy in depression. “The Selenites split their army. I thought it was a mistake, but they ran a pincer on us. Chewed us up. When we got our cavalry as far as the left wall, the rest of the room lit up.” Ali gestured into a cratered moonscape. “Now we’re trying to figure this next part. We still have three sides, don’t we?”
“Martians there. Wells’ Martian tripod walkers and some big brained wrinkled critters. Selenites there, including a few we haven’t seen before. And those soldiers with us are human. Cavor himself must have played those.”
It was a roughly triangular distribution of troops. Three “front lines,” with a “no-man’s-land” in the middle, and battles along adjoining sides.
“I wish we had more time,” Wayne said.
Angelique said, “Yeah. And while you’re at it, butter brickle ice cream. Scotty, any suggestions?”
“Double cappuccino, one sugar. There must be a way…”
“No,” Darla said. “There doesn’t. This game could be dead. It might not know what to do, and we’re just burnin’ time. We could play this and never win. Or win, and it won’t make a lick of difference—we’re just waiting for the pirates to catch up with us.”
* * *
After watching the others flail about, Angelique had decided to try her hand.
East, by Angelique’s ornate compass, was the front door. And East was several ranks of grubs balanced elegantly on thick tails, dressed as British soldiers equipped with rifles and cannon, wagons, a railroad, and a steamship docked on the river.
South: Martian war tripods and other machines, and four spacecraft each built like a diseased potato with a hatch open at the nose. As the Martians marched onto the field, more emerged from the hatches.
North: A variety of creatures, all of the basic lunar insectoid design. They moved onto the field with various gaits.
West was unoccupied.
East: Maud got some soldiers moving in blocks, Angelique advising from the sides.
This time, they detected a weakness in the Martian war formation, a hesitation to engage they were able to exploit. Toy cannon roared, knocking down toy machines. When the hullabaloo was over … no door opened.
“Back to square one,” Angelique said in disgust.
* * *
Ali’s turn.
South: The Martian war machines were on the move. North: Four Lunie insectoids of varying shapes put their heads together and babbled in high-pitched gibberish, then set some much bigger creatures moving. Under Maud’s control, the humans declined engagement. The alien armies converged, fought, swarmed, died. Then all suddenly froze, and—
Reset.
* * *
Again and again the armies clashed, with Earth getting the worst of it until, by careful observation, flaws in the defense of Martian and Selenite became clearer.
Slowly, the Martians were driven back, Angelique directing their forces via the mystical Maud. Driving them back opened no door, but grubs toted new, shiny toys out of the darkness, and placed them among the ranks of Earth’s defenders.
“What is that?” Sharmela asked, pointing.
“I think we won something,” Wayne said. “This is different. We must have done something right.”
“Maybe…,” Darla offered, “we captured Martian war machines, took ’em apart and learned their stuff?”
“That would be something Cavor might think of, yes. A lesson for the Selenites.”
And now they were in the right position: Thundering pellets at both Mars and Moon, until their enemies were a smoking ruin. They heard a low, thrumming sound, like some ancient machinery stirring slowly to life …
And then nothing.
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“Dammit!” Angelique shrieked. “We won, dammit! We won! What in the hell are we supposed to do?”
Mickey came in. “I’ve been hearing sounds. I think that the pirates are working at the blocked door. What do we do?”
“Stay here,” Scotty said.
“He screwed us!” Wayne snarled. “Xavier snuck something past the IFGS, and we are frickin’ dead. We’re going to die, because he’s pissed at me.”
“Ah … why is he especially upset with you?” Scotty asked. “Anything we should know about?”
“He thinks I narked on him a long time ago.”
“And did you?”
“I’m not going to dignify that,” Wayne said.
“And you didn’t bet on the game, either, right?” No answer.
Scotty hopped down, looked at the game. It all seemed like a confusion of cast-iron pieces to him. Even though some of the pieces curled and crawled in aimless circles, seeking direction, they had run out of ideas. Earth had lost. Earth had pulled a draw. Earth had beaten Mars and stalemated Luna. Earth had beaten both Mars and Luna.
And no door had opened.
Frustration and fear were wrestling for control of his stomach. Could this really be it? If the pirates got through that door … and they would … the gamers were trapped here, and in a straight-up fight, they hadn’t a prayer.
But a last stand was better than no stand at all.
“Drag that topiary over next to the front door,” he shouted.
“The stuff is just foam. It won’t stop them.”
“If they blow the door, it might cushion the explosion. Listen,” he said. “They want Ali. The rest of you were just following my orders.”
“And why would I follow your orders?” Angelique snapped.
Scotty drew close, and said in a quiet voice: “Tell them that I swore I’d beat the shit out of you if you didn’t. They’ll believe you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that a—”
“I’m trying to save your life, lady. Let it go.”
Her mouth worked a few times without producing words. Then she broke eye contact.
Ali clutched at him. The boy’s eyes were frantic. “No!” he said, voice husky with fear. “I don’t want you to—”
“I’m in charge,” Scotty said.
“You…” Ali looked down. “The woman Celeste is insane. They will kill you.”
Scotty took Ali’s small hands in his own rough ones. “That’s the job,” he said, forcing his voice into a calm that he did not feel.
“You…” Ali’s eyes misted. “You…” Words failed him.
But Maud had found her voice. “Listen up,” she said, a spark of new excitement in her voice. “I may have figured something out.”
“What?” Angelique asked.
“I’m starting with the assumption that there is a solution to this, one that makes sense in context.” She sounded like a British schoolmarm. “The IFGS simply wouldn’t have let that dreadful Xavier back us into a corner without a way out.”
“All right…”
“Follow me. We went about this all wrong. This is a teaching game … for Selenites. That means that the lesson to be learned is for them. We can’t win by beating them, you see? We tried that.”
“What else is there?”
“Join them. The point of the game was of desperate importance to Cavor. Remember what he said? ‘Teach the young generation the rules they will need to thrive.’ New rules. For a new time—a time of human-Selenite cooperation.”
She paused, hands spread a little, eyes wide and mouth open in a smile, as if waiting for them to catch up with her.
And then, Angelique said it: “Truce?” She blinked. “Maud, you are either brilliant, or an idiot.”
“May I offer an opinion?” Mickey asked.
“When pigs fly,” Maud said. “Come on. Let’s be idiots, shall we?”
* * *
It looked as absurd as it felt. After requesting “reset” again, scouts from the army of Earth approached the Selenites with little white flags attached to their muskets, around the left side of no-man’s-land, as far from the Martians as possible.
They stood there, at Maud’s direction. There was nothing to be done but wait: Only the Earth forces moved at human command.
But at last, something happened: A caterpillar humped out from the lunar side, a white flag attached to one of its drooping antennae. Xavier’s idea of a joke, no doubt. Human and insectoid confabbed for a few seconds, and then the worm humped back to its own ranks.
“What?” Ali asked. “What is happening?”
Maud’s expression was serene, for the first time in the entire game, she seemed to be in control. “Watch,” she said.
She concentrated, waving her hands in arcane patterns, and the Earth forces turned toward the Martians, attacking with all force, and exposing their flank to the Selenites.
The Selenites did not betray them. Instead, they attacked the Martian forces it had lured into a ground assault, obliterating them, trusting Earth to protect them from the longe-range Martian response.
But the war machines had their mechanical hands full. Upgraded human defenses hammered at them, and grubs wearing little spaceship hats humped across the no-man’s-land and struck at the Martian home base.
The Martians broke, and Earth forces harried them home, inflicting terrible casualties.
The gamers were transfixed, panting as if they’d hiked a hill. The small war game was motionless … and then …
“We won. Where’s the door? Dammit!” cried Angelique.
“There,” Scotty said. He jogged back to the entrance. One of the mirrors was ajar. He swung it wide open. He knelt, as gamers crowded around him. “It’s a ramp. Steep.” He put his hand flat on a darkly shining surface. “Slippery. In fact … frictionless. We’re in for a ride.”
Angelique said, “Wayne, take point. Scotty, you go last, and facing backward. You get the crossbow. Everybody, hang on to your weapons! They could be right behind us. Ready?”
Wayne slid smoothly into the dark opening, air gun in hand. Angelique followed, and the rest, in haste.
36
The Moon Pool
1821 hours
Wayne dropped, cradling his crossbow in his arms, alert as if something very real and dangerous might be waiting for them. The tilted, twisted floor was very slick, but friction heat was still building up under his butt and shoulderblades.
He hit the water hard, and sank deep. Kicked away and leftward as Angelique dropped in behind him. The water was tepid. Not salty, but something … spent gunpowder? A taste of moondust.
His head broke the surface and he scooped water off his eyes and mouth, and looked around him quick.
The pool was a circle of Olympic size … a hemisphere, in fact, very deep in the center. A ledge ran all the way round under a tremendous volume of rock cave. The slide had dropped them near the middle of the pool.
“Get to the edge!” he cried. “If we’re standing and they’re floating, we can shoot them like sitting ducks!” He started swimming like mad.
Angelique popped up behind him. Others were following.
How much was real? This stone ledge, at least. It seemed to run all the way around, making a perfect swimming pool. Wayne heaved himself out. Water came with him, a sheath that drained slowly in lunar gravity.
The cavern was bathed in blue, a restless wave of azure light washing across the floors and ceiling. The entire room was gray unweathered rock. He was stunned by the size … until Wayne realized that it simply couldn’t be this large. It was larger than the largest caverns on Earth, with stalactites the size of Moon missiles depending from a ceiling high enough to shelter clouds. To the sides … well, there were no limits to the sides, so far as he could see. The room’s light dwindled away to shadows long before it revealed walls. Just … rock. Spars of rock like jagged teeth, broken jaws grinning and gaping at them in all directions.
How much was illusion?
/>
“Nervous?” Angelique heaved herself clear. Her crooked little smile had never seemed so endearing to him. She had watched him with Darla. Angelique had set the rules, from the very beginning. Had she come to regret them?
He turned to her. The others were still far enough behind that they had a moment of privacy. “Angelique,” he said. “Look. Whatever happens now … whatever happens in there, I just wanted to say … thank you.”
She seemed genuinely startled by this. “For what?”
“For the best game anyone ever played,” he said.
Their eyes held each other for a long time, and then she cupped his cheek in her hand. “Let’s play this out, partner. Time for good-byes later.”
“Not always,” he said.
* * *
A narrow rock path led up into gloom. The pirates of Neutral Moresnot must have exited the pool and entered the dome from here.
“Wow,” Ali said, rising from the water, Scotty Griffin close behind.
The pool shimmered with a deep and lovely blue light radiating up from the depths. Echoes sent wavelet sounds from every direction.
“I see something,” Maud said. And made a magical gesture with her hand. Her face blossomed into a bright, wide smile such as she had not displayed for at least twenty horrific hours. “The magic is working!”
“Holy shit!” Scotty said. Then paused. “That’s good, right?”
“When the gods are awake, please refrain from blaspheming,” Margie said piously.
Mickey waved them over to the left side, where, hidden in a tumble of rocks, they found strange-looking tumbles of steel cylinders and leather straps. It looked like a cross between traditional rebreather gear and a conch shell. And it was ruined, smashed and bent.
“What is this?” Wayne said, lifting one so that he could examine it more closely.
Scotty pulled it from his hands and examined it himself. “Well, under the plastic I think we have a local version of standard Euro Union search-and-rescue gear. The pirates found it before us, and trashed it.” He looked up. “Nobody’s using this.”
