Kevin J Anderson (25 page)

She stood up, cracking the stiffness from her joints and spine. Her eyes had gummed shut, and she blinked several times, pawing at her face. Mayer didn't admit to herself how miserable she felt. None of that mattered. She had work to do.

The first Sitnaltan team had left the ship before they finished their work. Though Mayer was only one character, one pair of hands and one set of crude tools that she had managed to improvise from among the debris, she would find the answer in here somewhere. She could still save her city.

Sitnalta held the future for all of Gamearth. Human characters imagined progressive ways to solve their problems without relying on magic and superstition. Mayer knew their ultimate destiny, though many Sitnaltans did not understand it yet, not even her own father.

Several years before, Mayer had proposed an idea that she felt would mark Sitnalta's mission on Gamearth. She was young, with a handful of inventions already to her credit. Because she was the daughter of Dirac, he succeeded in getting her a hearing before the Council of Patent Givers.

When she stood before the gathered professors, she felt nervousness wheedle its way into her stomach. Seated men and women carried storming ideas behind their eyes; just the sight of them filled her with awe. She had always imagined herself someday being part of this auspicious body. Now she had to make a good first impression.

Dirac stood at his podium and smiled, fluttering his hands. He looked foolish, but that was his personality and his manner. Everyone understood that.

"My daughter proposes a topic for debate," Dirac said. "I don't know what it is myself, but she assures me it is of great importance." He smiled and drummed his short fingers on the podium. "Very well, Mayer, let us hear it."

Mayer drew herself up and tossed her head. Her short dark hair fell neatly into place. She maintained a serious expression, controlling her emotions. She wanted to emulate the fire she saw in Professor Frankenstein's eyes, the passion he had for his ideas. She stepped forward.

"Remember to clear your throat!" Dirac whispered as he brushed past her. "Or they won't take you seriously!"

She cleared her throat, then began her speech. She had rehearsed it a dozen times already.

"Distinguished inventors of Sitnalta, let me begin by telling you a story you already know. The race of old Sorcerers ruled Gamearth with magic's iron hand. After they had brought destruction to the map, they gathered their remaining magic together and forced themselves to ... to evolve. They transformed their collective consciousness into a set of enormous gestalt beings, the Earthspirits and Deathspirits. They called this magical process the 'Transition' ― a rather technical term for a very unscientific process."

She stopped and looked around the tiered chamber. Some of the professors shifted restlessly. Sitnaltans rarely paid heed to tales of uninteresting events of the past. Magical deeds, whether failures or successes, simply had no pertinence to their lives.

"Now," Mayer continued, "we Sitnaltans pride ourselves in establishing that anything the primitive magic users could accomplish, we can do equally well or better with our own inventions. No need for hands waving and gibberish-mumbling spells. We can do it with science.

"I believe that we of Sitnalta should focus our efforts into finding a way, through the Rules of science, to create such a Transition for
us
, for human characters. It will free our minds from the bonds of the map and launch us forward into the future. It is a destiny that all human characters should hold proud. Imagine the challenge!"

Mayer raised her head a little and half-closed her eyes in reverence as she finished. The other professors murmured among themselves. She felt relieved for that at least: her greatest fear had been that the Council of Patent Givers would greet her proposal with total silence. She had at least sparked a debate.

Professor Darwin rapped his palm on the polished railing in front of him, signalling that he wished to make a comment. "What Mayer suggests is interesting. The characters best equipped to survive on Gamearth will indeed survive. But I am a bit skeptical of this drastic path, since evolution must be a gradual process to adapt and change. This sudden 'transition' may be to rapid for any of us to endure."

Mayer looked to see her father's reaction, and in surprise she saw that he knitted his eyebrows, trying to fight back a scowl.

"Mayer, you must remember," he said, "that we know nearly nothing about this Transition the old Sorcerers inflicted upon themselves. In order for us to create an improved technological substitute, we must know all the details about the process we are trying to emulate. None of us has wasted our time studying the way mumbo-jumbo spells operate on the rest of the map. Our efforts are focused toward driving the stain of magic away! What you suggest smacks a little too much of sorcery and gobbledegook to me. I'm not sure our technology is fitted to this purpose."

Professor Clarke cleared his throat and stood up. He was a tall man with an broad face and thick black spectacles. "You are splitting hairs, Dirac," he said. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The other Council members broke into a hubbub of discussion. Dirac allowed this to continue for a few moments, then rapped his hands on the podium again.

"My daughter had given us an interesting theoretical idea to ponder. At the moment it is eminently impractical, for we do not know enough about the Rules or about magic to implement it."

Then he smiled at her, and she hated him for it. "But it does show good imagination, and many of us had worse ideas as our first experience with the Council. She is still young, but I think she shows promise."

He began to clap for her. Mayer's skin flushed as she turned away. The scattered applause in the Council of Patent Givers seemed like mocking laughter to her ears.

She is still young.

She would show them.

Mayer spent that day digging out a half-buried corridor deep beneath the ground where the ship had come to rest. The other cabins she uncovered bore nothing but small items of furniture and nonfunctional gadgets she could not decipher. As she worked, she hummed and mumbled to herself.

Gamearth had begun to fall apart. If she found a way for the characters of Sitnalta to emulate the Transition, Mayer could free them from much more than just the invisible manipulator beneath the city.

She thought of the Outsiders playing their games, creating a race of characters, the old Sorcerers, who used their magic in the Transition. The Spirits then supposedly went off to create their own worlds and play their own games.

Something about that idea disturbed Mayer, tickled the back of her mind. But then she drove down into the caked dust with her digging implement and heard a
clang
where no wall should have been.

Mayer stopped as the echo died away, muffled in the dirt and debris. She smiled, suspecting she had encountered something significant ... exactly what she had been hoping to find. Mayer wanted to use both hands and claw the dirt away as fast as she could, but she forced herself to be calm, to be patient. She didn't want to damage any part of what she found. The anticipation felt delicious.

Mayer uncovered the great hinge of a heavy bulkhead door with a round locking valve set in the center like a steering wheel. As she brushed the dirt away, she saw that the door was a dull brownish red ― it had probably been bright as an alarm once. Her thrill grew.

During the first expedition, she had uncovered the ship's control room. Professors Frankenstein and Verne had dismantled it to form their mysterious weapon. Now she had found something else.

Mayer used both hands to grip the locking valve and attempted to turn it. She had to use her digging implement as a lever to crack the seal. She cranked the round wheel until a hissing sound burst from the door as it unseated from its airtight jamb.

Had she perhaps found the living quarters of the Outsiders? That didn't make sense, for the Outsiders had not truly come here, only sent manifestations of themselves because they were
real
. And the Game was not.

Somehow this ship sat on not just the technological fringe between science and magic, but some sort of pocket between Gamearth and
reality
. Perhaps the Rules lay bent and twisted here.

Maybe she was about to see what the old Sorcerers saw when they suddenly became the great Spirits.

Mayer pulled open the heavy metal door, closed her eyes, then stepped into the darkness. Silvery light shimmered around her as she entered the chamber.

Mayer stood in a hall of mirrors.

Each angled facet of the wall carried its own crystalline reflection. Mayer stepped deeper and saw thousands of images of herself unfold, reflected, bounced back. Each of the mirrors had angled the reflections on top of each other, overlapping, extending into a kaleidoscope of infinite images within images within images. Though she stood alone, Mayer felt surrounded by an enormous crowd of herself. Her dark eyes widened in awe as she turned around, staring.

Then she noticed that the images were not all the same. Some appeared subtly different in her bodily position, her motions, the clothes she wore. In one she saw long dark hair, in another she saw a scar on her face. In some her expression appeared lined with deep sadness and trauma; in others, filled with delight.

Mayer blinked with shock, as did most of her images. She couldn't tell which image truly reflected herself. But these were all images of her, all Mayer, but all different, an unending series of Mayer characters.

"Is this some sort of game?" she said out loud. Her voice echoed much more than it should have, as if a thousand overlapping Mayer images had each spoken the same thing.

She considered a cruel trick the Outsiders might play, toying with their own creations. Except ― one set of their creations had evolved and gone on to play their own games, to create their own characters.

As Mayer stopped and looked into the endless versions of herself, she felt the intuition exploding in her mind. One of her other images spoke before she could form the words.

"It goes on and on. In both directions!"

Another image interrupted. "The Outsiders create the old Sorcerers. The old Sorcerers go on the Transition, and then they create their own games, their own characters ... who then go on to create their games."

"And on and on," said a new Mayer. "We're seeing only a few links in an endless chain."

"The Outsiders themselves must have some sort of gods, some external Players that manipulate their actions. And those gods in turn have
their
versions of the Outsiders."

"It never ends!" several Mayers said at the same moment.

"The only thing that remains throughout," Mayer said herself, and the other images stopped to listen to her, "is the Game! It's all a Game, the whole universe, no matter who we are or what level we play in. The Game moves through ― a game within a game."

"Within a game."

"Within a game."

The phrase repeated and echoed, growing stronger and louder as if each version of Mayer had to say the same thing.

One of the mirrors shattered, sending shards of glass spilling outward, falling to the floor as the image of that Mayer vanished, leaving only a flat black spot on the wall.

"Within a game."

Another mirror shattered, and another. Flying glass filled the air. The explosions grew louder as the mirrors crumbled. Images of Mayer disappeared.

She turned, covering her ears, trying to duck her head to keep the glass away from her eyes. The door behind her had vanished. She saw nothing, only the mirrors as they smashed again and again. Mayer tried to run, but she had no place to go.

"Within a game."

A mirror beside her broke, and a long dagger of glass bounced next to her feet, but somehow she didn't cut herself. One reflection of Mayer ― with long hair braided in green ribbons ― shrank back with a shocked expression on her face, and then she too shattered.

In the black void behind the mirror stood a young man, his form wavering as if he could barely remember himself. His clothes appeared wet. His eyes were wide and shining, as if they knew too much from within. "Only you and I understand," he said to her.

Mayer froze in utter terror, completely without understanding ― or perhaps understanding too much. She opened her mouth to scream.

"Let me show you the way out," Lellyn said and extended a hand to her. "Out of the Game."

And then Mayer felt the razor of pain bursting through her entire body, as she herself shattered.

――――

ICE FORTRESS

"I won't care about the Game after I am gone, so long as I have fun while I'm here. I want to die a hero."

― Cayon, in a quest-telling at the village gaming hall

The Game held no interest for Delrael anymore. He sat listlessly polishing and sharpening his sword. The rest of his army bustled about, preparing for their surprise attack on Siryyk's approaching horde.

Now that the avalanche had destroyed the quest-path along the side of the cliff, the monster army would have to ascend the steep bluffs overlooking the canyon. Delrael's army waited out of sight. Siryyk would walk right into the trap.

Normally, Delrael would have been excited at the prospect of such an easy surprise blow. But all he could think of was the distant cannon explosion; all he could see was the sliding rock, the scrambling Black Falcon figures helpless on the narrow ledge, and the avalanche crushing them all away.

Now he had lost his father twice.

Romm came up to him. "The monster army is moving. They're already climbing the slope. I'm sure they don't know we're here." He paused, as if waiting for Delrael to say something else, but Delrael only looked at him.

Romm continued. "We've got the first line of defenses set up. All the archers are ready. The other fighters are anxious ― this is the first battle for most of them, you know."