Silence fell again in the room. Winters sighed at the depth of it. "All right, you two. I'm not going to throw you out of the Explorers, as much because I hate to waste valuable raw material as anything else. I emphasize the word 'raw.'"
He looked at them both, and they both looked at the carpet again, faces hot. But Leif looked up. "Thank you."
"Yes," Megan said.
"As for the rest of it--if in the near future we find a piece of business which is suited to your unique talents of nosiness, inability to take no for an answer, annoying persistence, and screwy thinking...." He smiled. "You'll be the first to hear about it from me. Now go away and compose yourselves for the press conference. Both of you better have the grace to conduct yourself like modest little Net Force Explorers or, by God, I'll...." He sighed. "Never mind. See what you do to me? A whole morning's worth of composure shot. Go on, get out of here."
They stood up. "And before you go," Winters said, "just this. There's nothing more fatal than believing a lie is the truth. Think of all the fatal lies you just saved the world from. Even with all the other things you got wrong, and did wrong...that's something you can be proud of."
They turned and went out, flashing each other just the quickest grin...though being careful not to let Winters see it.
"Oh, and one last thing."
They paused in the dilating doorway, looked over their shoulders.
Winters was shaking his head. "What the heck is a 'Balk the Screw'?"
Elsewhere, in a room with no windows, three Suits sat and looked at one another.
"It didn't work," said the man who sat at the head of the table.
"It did work," said another of the men, trying not to sound desperate. "It was only a matter of a few more days. The first announcement impacted the company's stock more and more severely as the media spread the news of the first attack around. A few more hours, the next couple of attacks, the next announcements, would have affected their stock so drastically that they would have had to stop trading. People would have deserted that environment in droves. But more important: The technology worked."
"It worked once," said the man at the head of the table. "They know about it now. It had to work and not be found. It's a cause celebre now. Everybody who's heard about this is going to be going through their databases, looking for evidence of non-presence or surrogacy among their users. This was a tremendous window of opportunity...but now it's shut."
Silence fell in the room. "Well," said the man who had tried not to sound desperate, and failed, "the necessary paperwork will be on your desk in the morning."
"Don't wait till the morning. Have it there in an hour. Clear your desk, and get out. If you go now, I'll have an excuse when Tokagawa gets here in the morning."
The third man in the suit got up and went away in great haste.
"So now what?" said the second man.
The first one shrugged. "We try another way," he said. "It's a shame. This one had possibilities. But it's made some suggestions for other possible routes of attack."
"Still...it's a shame we lost this one. Wars could have been fought inside a paradigm like this. Real wars..."
"But only as real as the controlling software makes them," said the first man with the slightest, chilliest smile. "What we've proven is that the present technology is insufficient to what we have in mind...not secure enough to convince our customers to use them instead of more conventional battlefields. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, because the assumption would be that when the next wave of technology comes along, it'll be watertight. And of course it won't be. We'll be there again, building in the 'back doors.' And from the beginning of the process, this time, rather than starting in the middle. Because of this failure, we'll be smarter. And those of us who aren't smarter, will be cleaning out their desks." He looked at the second man. "And where will you be?"
"If you'll excuse me," the second man said, rising to leave, "I have a phone call to make."
When he was gone, the first man sat and thought. Oh, well. Next time...for what man has devised, man can unravel and debase, and in any game, there's always a way to cheat, if you look hard enough.
Next time for sure....
At the very edge of Sarxos, the legends said, was a secret place. It had many names, but the one which was most frequently used was the shortest. It was the House of Rod.
Some Sarxonians, standing on the uttermost heights of the northeastern mountains of the North Continent, and looking westward in the clearest weather, claimed to have seen it there: a single island, a mighty mountain peak standing lone in the wild waters, far out in the Sunset Sea. Tales of the place abounded, though you were unlikely ever to meet anyone who had ever been there. The souls of the good departed went there, some of the stories said, and dwelt in bliss with Rod forever; other stories said that Rod Himself went there, on weekends, and looked out on the world that he had made, and found it good.
Few knew the truth of any of these stories. But Megan and Leif knew now.
It was a castle. That was more or less unavoidable. But there the resemblance stopped, for the place looked like it had been designed by an Angeleno architect who had had a bad dream about Schloss Neuschwanstein, and tried to execute a copy of it in a cross between Early Assyrian and Late Rococo. Green lawns were laid out around it, with tasteful flowerbeds full of asphodel. There was a small white beach where you could land a boat. It was said that the Elves liked to stop there, on their way into the West. "The True West, though," Rod said, amused. "This is the Fake West. You want the true one, you keep going the way you're going, straight off the planet, hang a right at the second moon, and straight after that, you can't miss it."
From the main body of the castle, one tall tower speared upward, with a balcony looking east. All the castle's windows looked east. All of Sarxos lay there, the cloud-capped mountains and the seas, the lakes, the distant glint of clouds reflecting back the sunset....
"Nice view, isn't it?" asked a voice behind Megan.
She turned around and nodded at Rod, who was holding a can of cola and looking out the window past her. "We get great sunsets here," he said, "but you can only see them from the tower."
"Personal reasons?" Megan said.
Rod looked resigned. "To the architect, maybe. My ex designed this place. She called it a 'feature.' I call it a nuisance. I think she just wanted to make sure I got plenty of exercise."
"Is it a long way up?"
"The traditional number of steps," Rod said, "three hundred and thirty-three. That's why I put in the elevator." He grinned.
Megan laughed, turning to look at all the people gathered in the big first-floor room. Nobody refused an invitation to a party like this, if they could help it--and who would want to help it? There were a lot of the "departed" around, players who had died in one way or another during gameplay, and every player who had ever been bounced. Shel Lookbehind was standing not far from the buffet table, happily discussing third-world reconstruction with Alla. There was Elblai, chatting amiably with Argath, whom she had never previously met in the flesh. "I'm just the honorary dear departed," she was saying cheerfully, "and believe me, I don't mind...." And some of the fortunate living of Sarxos were there, too. Some people weren't exactly clear why Megan and Leif were there, but weren't inclined to pry. Some--Sarxos support staff, or friends of Rod's--knew, or had a clue, and were keeping their mouths shut. "I can't go too public about it," Rod had said to Leif and Megan earlier. "You know why. There are people who'll twitch. But all the same...I wanted to say thanks."
Now Megan wandered over to the far side of her room, where her dad and mom were standing with drinks in hand, talking animatedly with Leif's mom and dad. As she came up, Megan's mother looked around them with a smile that was not as grim as it might have been, considering the talk that the two of them had had the day before. "So this is what it's all about, honey."
"Maybe not all, Mom. But...these are the people we were helping."
"Well...." Megan's mother rubbed the top of her daughter's head, an affectionate gesture that immediately caused Megan to try to smooth her hair back down into some semblance of order. "I guess you did good...."
"More than that," Elblai said, coming up behind Megan with her niece, both of them smiling at Megan. "I wanted to thank you again for what you did. It's rare enough that people just reach out to people, to try to help."
"I had to," Megan said. "We both had to." She looked over at Leif, in a desperate attempt to get some help with this embarrassing situation.
He just stood there and nodded.
"You should be very proud of your daughter," Elblai said, and Ellen's niece said to Megan, "I'm still feeling so stupid that I didn't believe you that night. If I had, it could have saved so much trouble."
"You were playing by the Rules," Megan said. "It's just the way it goes. The Rules take care of themselves."
"True enough," Elblai said. "Have you had some of those little sushi, the omelette things? They're really good."
"Omelette things?" Megan's father said, gave her an approving look, and headed off for the buffet table.
Megan went after him. "Daddy--"
"Hmm?"
"What are you writing right now??"
He smiled. "It's a history of the spice trade. Couldn't you tell?"
"You are not! You're making it up!"
"Of course I am. I have to get revenge on you somehow." He grinned. "Listen, Megan. I'm glad that what you were doing Thursday night really was important. Otherwise we would have had words. But after this, anything so important that it's likely to get you shot at...I claim the responsibility to hear about it first. Okay?" The look he turned on her was both annoyed and profoundly concerned, so that she found it impossible to be annoyed with him.
"Uh, yeah. Yeah, Dad."
"Good. Meanwhile, you can read what I'm doing when it's done. Next week sometime." He turned away, smiling. "Learning patience is good for you."
"I'm going to hack into your machine."
"You're welcome to try," he said with an evil grin, and went off to investigate the omelettes.
Megan headed off to where Leif was standing, looking out the window. "Want to go up the tower?"
"Sure, everybody else has been up there by now."
They made for the elevator. At the top of its run, it came out on a small, circular room with no apparent support between it and the pointed candle-snuffer roof on top. The last of the sunset was dying away westward. To the east, over Sarxos, the moon was coming up fat and full. The second moon came up off to one side, in the "passing lane," as it were, and crept steadily past the first one, heading upwards fast across the sky.
Far away, the moonlight glinted on the snows of the northeastern mountains. Above them, in the sky, the stars started to go off like fireworks.
There were oohs and aahs from downstairs. "Hey," said a casual voice from way down the stairwell, "they're my stars. I can blow them up if I want to. They grow back in the morning, anyway."
Far eastward, a winged shape came soaring. It grew bigger, and bigger, and impossibly bigger. "What is that?" Megan said.
Leif shook his head, and stared.
It came on, the huge shape, closer and closer, its great blackwebbed wings like thunderclouds against the darkening night. Right past the tower it banked, looking at them, an experience like being looked at by a low-space transport. The wind of its passing was a storm.
Those huge wings spread in a stall, flapped. The wind got worse for a moment, then settled as the king-basilisk lowered itself carefully to the peak of the mountain on which the House of Rod was built, made sure of its grip, and folded its wings down. It wrapped its long slender tail around the mountaintop for extra grip, and leaned its twenty-foot-long head right down to gaze thoughtfully at Leif and Megan out of sun-core eyes.
Down in the water, a sea monster put its head up on its long slender neck, followed by the requisite number of multiple loops, and bellowed defiance at the interloper. Lost in astonishment and admiration, Megan and Leif could only stare from one to the other.
"Welcome to my world," said the voice of Rod behind them, "where cheaters never prosper."
This time, Megan thought...and held her peace.
Table of Contents
Cover
Virtual Crime. Real Punishment
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgement
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
the Deadliest Game (1998) Page 18
