Rik went through the gate and headed across the cobbled plaza, shuddering at the thought. He wondered yet again how some people could spend all their spare time in Microcosms like SinTwo and GulaGula—which were all about not just eating, but eating entirely too much—and come out again still able to cope. The thought of places where you could purposely turn off your appestat and eat constantly, for hours, without any side effects, always struck him as faintly disgusting. But no laws were being broken there, and it was people’s own business what they did . . .
As for me,
he thought, turning into one little street that was lined with cookshops and restaurants,
a sausage or two won’t do any damage at all.
About halfway down the street Rik could see the glow in the windows of the House of the Last Man Standing, his crowd’s preferred tavern. It was well away from the busy heart of town, but the prices were better down here, and the Last Man had a name for being popular with the locals as well as with the quick- turnover battle-following crowd.
He pushed in the broad iron-bound door and glanced around. The Last Man’s front room was high-ceilinged for an in-town inn, with the second floor apparently converted to a gallery in some earlier era: some people thought this might have been a coaching inn at some earlier time and had had its courtyard enclosed. At any rate, now there were two levels to drink and dine on—the big downstairs floor and the upstairs gallery level, where you could hang over the railing and pelt people you didn’t like with beef bones.
As the door closed, a bone whizzed past Rik and bounced on the flagstoned floor in front of him. Instantly a mereworm dashed out from under one of the nearby tables, snatched it up, and made off with it, roasting the bone with a tiny jet of firebreath as it went. Rik looked up at the sound of laughter and saw Tom and Barbara and Raoul, all in MediMages Without Frontiers post-battle garb, sitting at a table for four up in the gallery wing nearest the door. “You’re late!” Barbara shouted.
“Two
days
late!” Tom called down.
“Oh, come on, it’s only one,” Rik called up to them, and headed for the stairs.
When he got up into the gallery, his mouth started to water immediately, because they hadn’t waited for him, and the order had just arrived. The fourth place setting, with the typical oversized napkin and the Meruvelter two-tined fork, had a big sausage platter on it, and a hunk of brown fennel bread, and beside it was a huge mug of the local whitebrew beer, like one of the Belgian wheat beers. “Oh, you guys,” Rik said as he plunked down on the bench beside Barbara, “you have no idea how good this looks. Barb, how’s the little one?”
Barbara rolled her blue eyes and pushed the long braid of blonde hair back. “Not a big problem,” she said. “We got the tooth capped. Just a temporary—it’s too soon to put a permanent one on, apparently. Where have you been? Did they make you go back to work or something?”
“Uh, no—”
“Hey, let him eat something,” Tom said. Here and in the real world he was a big broad dark-haired guy with a mustache, always jovial: Rik couldn’t recall ever having seen him frown, not even in the middle of a battle when people around him were bleeding and screaming. A look of intent interest was all he ever showed. “Mustard?”
“Thanks—”
For a while they settled into small talk, which relieved Rik as he tucked into his sausages. There was some discussion of the last battle they’d all been in together, down in the Kargash Peninsula, where forces of the Southern Oligarchy, which was trying to consolidate the other sovereignties of Meruvelt’s southern continent “You mean ‘annex, ’ ” Barbara had said once, “or ‘overrun—’ ”) had come up against a cavalry force of the South Outlands Union, a united force of various small kingdoms or sovereignties which were not up for being overrun just yet. The Oligarchy forces had come off badly, having been tricked by their enemies into attacking under less than ideal circumstances (“Uphill?” Tom said, incredulous. “What kind of noob thing is
that?
”) and were now spoiling for another encounter with the smaller and more mobile force that had made them look so stupid.
“So where are they thinking of having it?” Rik said.
“You haven’t seen it on the feeds already?” Raoul said. He had finished his food and was leaning back in his chair, idly stabbing his wine-stained cork place mat with the two-tined fork.
Rik shook his head. “Been a little busy,” he said.
And now you’re going to have to tell him why,
he thought, reaching for the mustard pot again as he started dismembering his second sausage. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like Raoul. He was one of the original members of their MediMages circle, part of it for nearly three years now, a tall, lean, rangy, redheaded point of stability in a gaming world where people could slide in and out without warning when real life interfered. He was a nice enough guy, affable enough off the battlefield, only irascible when on it, and effective at what he did regardless of his mood. But there was always something strangely guarded about him, and Raoul didn’t talk much about his home life or his business in the real world.
That was of course his privilege: but the way he slid away from the subjects just bothered Rik sometimes. What Raoul did want to talk about was in-game life: especially all the research he’d been doing, all this while, for the Microcosm he was going to build someday. The plans for his ’cosm changed repeatedly, but the enthusiasm never did. None of them rode him too hard about this, and all of them nodded enthusiastically and pretended interest whenever the subject came up, because they all knew for how many, many months Raoul had been trying to get the Microcosm people to notice him . . . without success.
“What?” Tom said. “Nothing bad, I hope.”
“No,” Rik said, spearing another bit of sausage and dunking it in the mustard.
Might as well get it over with, because it’s not gonna get any better . . .
Barbara looked at him oddly. “What?” she said. “Nothing’s wrong with Angela, is it? Or the kids?”
“Oh, no! No. It’s just that—” He popped that last bit of sausage in, chewed, swallowed. “I got knighted,” he said.
Tom’s mouth dropped open. Barbara’s eyes went wide. Raoul—
—smiled. There was a deliberateness to the expression that instantly creeped Rik out, but there was nothing he could do about that now. Tom’s grin was spreading from ear to ear. “Knighted as in
Microcosm
knighting?” he said. “As in
MicroLeveling?
”
“Uh,” Rik said, “yeah.”
Barbara whooped and then waved for the attention of one of the servers down on the floor level, a lady in standard “wench” garb.
“Beer!”
she shouted.
The serving lady made a bored “yeah, yeah, be there in a minute” gesture and went off toward the kitchen. Rik glanced from her back to the others, and finally to Raoul. That smile was still there. It looked tight. Rik forced himself to smile too, as if he wasn’t seeing anything wrong.
“Good God, congratulations,” Raoul said. “How the heck did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” Rik said. “I swear! At first I thought they’d made a mistake, mixed me up with someone else—”
He started telling the story, trying not to sound too excited about it, because all the time there was Raoul with that smile. Yet at the same time the excitement started to get the better of him eventually as the others pressed him with questions, as the new pitcher of beer arrived and flowed, and as even Raoul started to get into the spirit of it, curious at first then eventually even starting to look approving. Rik tried to keep away from the technical details, at least partly because he wasn’t too clear on some of them himself. But Tom and Barbara were interested in far less technical matters.
“Gonna build yourself a Philosopher’s ’cosm?” Tom said and grinned.
Rik shook his head. “Oh, please,” Rik said. He caught the eye of another of the servers down on the floor and gestured at her—they’d already run through that second pitcher of beer. Then he grinned at Tom, because he’d felt it was inevitable that somebody would bring this up eventually. The Omnitopia message boards were full of stories about people who’d supposedly succeeded in building Microcosms that were secretly and cunningly engineered to produce abnormal amounts of gaming gold. “It’s an urban myth. You ever actually talk to someone who personally knows a player who’s done it? It’s always a friend of a friend of a cousin of a coworker halfway around the planet. Anyway, like Omnitopia would let people mess with their economy like that!”
“Yeah,” Barbara said. “The Gnomes’d come after them.” There was snickering around the table, for the Gnomes at least were no urban myth. They were the inhabitants and guardians of Rhaetia Secunda, a Macrocosm devoted entirely to gameplay in the fiduciary mode. There wannabe brokers and tycoons could play with a duplicate virtual version of Earth’s finances, riding the so-called Real-World markets as if they were a game and collecting percentages of game gold for correct prediction and manipulation of stocks and futures. But attempted cheating was very much frowned upon, and the fighting skills of the savage bankers and killer accountants of Rhaetia Secunda’s capital city Turicum were legendary across the Macrocosms. Rarely a month went by without some fraudulent Microcosm being invaded and ravaged by hordes of Doom Brokers under the command of the dreadful Chief Gnome, Bloomberg the Terrible.
“I hear,” said Tom, “that the Gnomes aren’t GGCs. They’re employees from Omnitopia financial security.” He grinned. “The kind of people who feel about red ink the way everybody else does about blood.”
“Yeah, and isn’t Bloomberg supposed to actually be the chief of Omnitopia financial or something?” Barbara said. “What’s the word I’m looking for? The head honcho.”
“CFO?” Tom said.
“That’s it.”
“Heard that,” Rik said, “but the PR types won’t comment. Probably wouldn’t even if it were true.
Especially
if it were true.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t care about Philosopher’s ’cosms. I don’t even have that much time to think about the Microcosm right now. I was going to sit down and have a think about it when I wound up in the middle of the craziness down by the Ring of Elich—”
“What?” Tom said. “What craziness?”
Then
that
story had to be told, leaving general astonishment and shock in its wake. “I never thought something like that could happen!” Tom said. “City ought to do something. What a mess!”
“Yeah,” Rik said. “It’s not something you’d want to get caught in on your way somewhere serious, like a battle elsewhere.”
Raoul was shaking his head, looking bemused. “Can’t believe it,” he said. “You mean that now you’ve got a ’cosm, you’re still going to have time to waste patching people’s characters back together?”
There was something about the tone, or the phrasing, that got under Rik’s skin a little. “Hey,” Rik said, trying hard to keep his tone even, “give me a break, huh, Raoul? I’m a player. That’s not going to stop.”
“Probably why he got the accolade in the first place,” Barbara said, sounding as nettled as Rik felt but would not show that he did. “They notice things, I hear. Have the cojones to be happy for him, why don’t you?”
There was a little silence after that. Raoul got interested in his beer. “I want to see,” said Tom after a moment, and called up a feed window to hang at the end of the table. News of the attack was all over the feeds by now, so there was no problem in finding a replay of it from one of many gamers who’d been in the area when it happened. Then Barb caught sight of Rik in one of the feeds, and some more time was spent hunting down other player POVs to find ones that showed a better view of what Rik was doing.
“You could always ask
me!”
Rik protested, starting to feel a little too much like the center of attention at this point. “I was there.”
“Yeah, no argument,” Tom said, “but how often do we get to see somebody we know make the news? Just shut up and let us enjoy it.”
Fortunately that didn’t go on for too much longer. Barb started getting a yen for dessert, and one of the Last Man’s famous skyberry pies with hot cream was called for, divvied up, and demolished. “This is wild,” Tom said as they were finishing it. “We’re gonna have to schedule
another
meeting to get our planning sorted out for this next campaign. Have to be in the next few days, too: the Union isn’t going to wait forever to hit Southern again—they’ve got the initiative now. And if I was Southern, I’d want to hit them first.”
Then the business of syncing everybody’s schedules came up again, never an easy one: work nights were always problematic, and family commitments had to be worked around. More windows were called up around the table, showing appointment calendars and schedule spreadsheets, and the normal squabbling and bargaining ensued.
“Okay,” Tom said at last. “Two days from now?”
“That’s the big new-rollout night, isn’t it?” Raoul said.
“Yeah,” Barbara said. “Good night for it, though. The City’ll be crawling with noobs, and a lot of people will be staying out of the ’cosms to avoid the crowds. Or because they don’t want a sensitive campaign to get caught in some giant disk crash if the rollout doesn’t work out right.” She grinned. “We can meet here, out of the way, and take our time figuring out who we’re going to sell our services to.”
That met with general agreement, which was good, as it was getting to be time for Rik to head back home to real life. But it also gave Raoul the opening to ask the question that Rik had been both eagerly awaiting and dreading: “Well, Mister Leveler, when do we get to see it?”
“Well—” Suddenly Rik was a mass of second thoughts. “It’s barely even started. Just a shell.”
“Oh, come on, Rik!” Barbara said. “You know you want to.”
Tom gave Rik a wry look. “Might as well get it over with,” he said.
Sometimes,
Rik thought,
he can be unusually perceptive.
“Okay,” Rik said. “Let’s finish up here and I’ll show you what I’ve got.”