Raoul shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “Gotta take a real-world leak,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Sure,” Rik said. “You’ve got the address for my office. You can get into the ’cosm from there. I’ll leave the door open.”
“Right, be there in a sec.” Raoul vanished.
The others got up, gathered their things together. Tom called for the slate and scratched out everybody else’s tallies. There was a not very enthusiastic chorus of protest from Rik and Barbara. “No, no,” Tom said, “I did good on our last medivention. Still haven’t finished sorting out all the bonus points. Let me get this one.”
Rik thanked him: Barbara did her usual you-can’t-pay-for-me-against-my-will thing, then grinned and thanked him too. They made their way down the stairs, pressed a fifteen percent largesse in Meruvelt cashplaques on the chief wench, and headed out into the evening, making for the City Meadow ring.
Once they got there Rik paused for a moment in front of one grayed-out flagstone. “Game management?” he said.
“Good evening, Rik,” said the control voice, for his ears only. “What do you need?”
“Transport for four to my Microcosm,” he said. “Barbara and Tom here will come through with me. Raoul will be coming into my office in a few minutes: please let him into the Microcosm when he gets there.”
“Transports laid in,” said the control voice. “Access is open. Please step through.”
“This way, guys,” he said as the flagstone swirled gray, went clear. He stepped through.
The next moment he was standing to one side of his own small broken ring, a series of steel-and-electrum plates set into the solid stone shelf at the bottom of a broad cliff. He moved aside as first Barbara, then Tom, stepped into the space. They looked around them, and up, and Barbara gasped.
Something inside Rik leaped with pleasure.
Exactly the response I want from people in here for the first time,
he thought.
That’s
exactly
right!
And it had to be said that the inside world looked much better than it had originally. There was less land inside the hollow world now, and more sea: Rik had started to find the rich color of the oceans on the far side of the inner-world shell more and more seductive the more he worked with them. The brassy little sun shone down on the first piece of heavy furnishing Rik had done: away along the ridge of which the cliff behind them was part, perched on the ridge crest, stood a sheer-walled brazen castle keep, spired and towered, glittering in the eternal day.
“This is so . . . weird!” Barbara said. “But in a good way!”
Tom was looking around, nodding, at the endless expanse of fields and forests reaching away from them in all directions. “This is spectacular, man,” he said. “You built this in two
days
?”
“Well, a lot of it’s modular,” Rik said. “I still don’t have the slightest idea what to do about the GGCs, let alone what gameplay in here is going to look like or what it’s about—”
“Oh, you
have
to have wars,” Tom said. “Can you
imagine
what wars in here would look like? At night the sky wouldn’t have stars in it. It’d have
battles.”
He pointed up past the sun. “Think about it! All that way away—the enemy campfires, glittering—” He paused. “Wait a minute, do you ever get night in here?”
“Uh, I’m working on that. Some kind of selective screening.”
“What are you calling it?” Barbara said.
This was something that Rik had been arguing with himself about practically since he started, and had changed his mind a hundred times. He took a deep breath. “Indigo,” Rik said.
Barbara, looking up into that deep rich sky, nodded. “It works.”
“Well, it’s temporary,” Rik said. “I may come up with something better. It has to have its own history: the characters may not want their world to be named something that doesn’t make sense to them—”
Tom chuckled. “Secondary creation syndrome already,” he said. “They picked the right guy for this job, that’s for certain.”
“Wow,” said Raoul behind them.
They all turned as he walked out of the broken ring. Raoul was looking up into that astonishing sky, and for once his face was wearing an expression that Rick didn’t mind seeing there: it was unalloyed amazement.
“Wow,” he said again, as he came up with them. “What is it? A Dyson sphere?”
“No,” Rik said, “just a hollow Earthy kind of thing.”
“He’s calling it Indigo,” Barbara said. “Isn’t it fabulous?”
“What are you going to game in here?” Raoul said. “SF or fantasy?”
“I haven’t even started to get close to working that out yet,” Rik said. “It may take a while.”
“Rik?”
Barbara’s suddenly confused tone of voice surprised him. He turned to see that she was squinting up at the sky with a peculiar expression. “Is it just me,” she said, “or is the sun doing something?”
Rik squinted up too and was horrified to see that it was. It was flickering. Then the sun began very slowly to go dim, as if in the early stages of a brownout.
“You have an eclipse scheduled?” Tom said.
“No,” Rik said, “believe me! Just getting it turned on and looking the right size and shape took a little figuring. I wasn’t going to start playing around with dimmer switches at
this
early stage—”
Rik went on talking to them a little about the complexities of the WannaB language and the way the little modules didn’t always stick together the way you thought they should. But he was talking to distract himself from what the sun was doing. What he had hoped was some kind of momentary glitch was now proving to be no such thing. The sun was getting dimmer and dimmer, going almost ashen now . . .
It went out; and as it did, in its last pallid gasp of light, the landscape surrounding them dissolved itself. With a strange fizzing popping noise, like a lightbulb blowing out, everything went completely dark. Then, slowly, words of light stuttered back into existence up in the darkness:
THIS SPACE
FOR RENT
Rik was so chagrined he couldn’t even bring himself to curse. Tom chuckled, though the sound was sad and commiserating. “And all our dreams vanish into air, into thin air . . .” he said.
“Well, crap!” Rik finally said. “I thought I had it at least a
little
under control . . .”
“Possibly premature,” Raoul said. He clapped Rik on the back, not that the gesture made Rik feel all that consoled. “Well, you’ll get the hang of it. Or if you don’t, you can always sell it to a third-party broker. Assuming they don’t take it off you first . . .”
“They don’t do that,” Rik said. “Or so I’m told.”
“Well, this isn’t your fault!” Barbara said. “You just wanted us to see it right away. And who could blame you? Besides, we talked you into it. Doesn’t matter. It’s exciting, Rik! Keep us posted and let us know when you get it working again. I want to pop the virtual cork at your opening.”
“Yeah,” Rik said. “I’ll do that. Game management?”
“Here, Rik.”
“Can I have the door back into my office, please?”
In the darkness, a door opened on muted afternoon light that now seemed very bright indeed. Rik headed for it, the others following. In his office, they said their good-byes for the time being. “If there’s any problem with the meeting schedule,” Tom said to him as he made his way toward Rik’s outer office door, “give me a call.”
Rik shook his head. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. Barbara smooched him as she went past: Raoul patted his shoulder, heading after her. “See you guys later . . .”
“Later,” they all said. The door shut.
Rik stood there, looking at the shut door, and sighed.
He was tempted to go straight back into the Microcosm and start tinkering again.
But no,
he thought.
I promised Angela I wouldn’t be in here all day.
Damn it!
“Game management?”
“Here, Rik.”
He was about to say “Log off,” but stopped himself.
Not just yet.
“Ring of Elich, please.”
His office vanished. He was standing near the Ring.
Rik sighed and looked around him again. The plaza was back to normal, as far as he could see. Despite it being the middle of the night, the usual unending traffic was passing in and out of the Gate. He took a deep breath, turned his back to it and started to walk back to his normal ingress spot.
A few minutes’ walk,
he thought,
just to get rid of—
Of what? Of being pissed off at the Microcosm for crashing in front of everybody?
Well, yes. No point in taking that annoyance home and dumping it on Angela and the kids.
But that wasn’t all of it.
He paused briefly by the great statue of Lahirien the Excessively Far-Traveled, feeling the spray from the fountain, and then moved on.
Oh crap,
Rik thought,
why couldn’t Raoul have come in a few minutes later? Then he wouldn’t have seen anything but the bare substrate.
Of course the others would have told him what happened—
But as he thought about it, Rik became less sure. He remembered particularly that strangely sympathetic look from Tom. But in any case, Tom and Barbara would have been,
had
been, more understanding about it.
Anyway, it’s just some kind of software glitch! Get over it. It’s stupid to feel down about it
. Yet he
did
feel down. And worse, he felt obscurely like some kind of traitor. He couldn’t get Raoul’s initial expression in the Last Man out of his mind.
Betrayed!
it seemed to say.
How come you and not
me?
It’s not fair!
And even now Rik wanted to shout at him,
How should
I
know how come me? It doesn’t make any sense to me either!
But Jean-Marie had been clear enough about how many different factors were involved.
And it’s not my fault if Raoul is getting something wrong. He’s been so intense about what he’s been planning, about how it’s going to make all the difference for him when he gets a Microcosm. But does he ever really have
fun
in here anymore? Sure, we see him at group meetings, but he never has an independent campaign story to tell anymore. Who knows what he’s doing?
Does
he even campaign by himself anymore? And does anyone even ask?
And maybe that was part of the problem.
Are we just feeding into that attitude by letting him concentrate so much on his Microcosm obsession?
For that was exactly what Barbara had called it, once, before Raoul had turned up for another of their nights out.
He sighed as he made his way up through the beast market, empty and dark now, on up Hook Street in the torchlight, and onward into the quiet and dark of Troker’s Lane. There, at the mouth of Troker’s Lane, Rik paused, seeing something moving in the shadows.
What the heck?
Rik thought. He peered down into the darkness, but the flutter of the guttering torchlight was hard to see by. An animal?
No. Well, maybe not—
“Do you believe this?” said a grumpy voice down in the darkness. “The mess people leave behind them, you wouldn’t believe it. Didn’t any of them have mothers, do they just throw stuff around like this at home? I ask you—”
There was no telling who the little scratchy voice was asking, unless maybe it was Rik. “Uh, excuse me—” he said.
“Yeah, you too, probably some of this is yours,” said the little voice, “and now what, am I supposed to think you’re coming back here to pick it up again? I don’t think so—”
Rik blinked—not that he wasn’t doing enough of that in this bad light—and headed down toward the source of the voice. But all the time, his hand was on the knife at his belt; he was thinking that if things could get as broken loose as they had in the plaza around the Ring, what could happen in some back alley? He got closer to the shape, and with his free hand pulled loose one of the cressets from its wall holder, held it high—
Upturned eyes gleamed in the torchlight, then went dark again as the eyes turned away from him. Rik suddenly realized that he was looking at a little man who was busily picking up garbage from the street and tossing it into a rickety-looking wheelbarrow. He was wearing what looked like some slightly crazed attempt at a uniform, but one all made up of rags and tatters stitched or even tied together, as if the whole business had been assembled from the pickings of many rubbish heaps. Hanging by two pieces of frayed hempen rope over his shoulders, on his chest and his back the man wore a pair of crude cardboard signs on which had been scrawled the words OMNITOPIA SANITATION, and in smaller letters, YOUR GAME GOLD AT WORK.
Rik burst out laughing. “Guy,” he said, “why are you doing this? How hard up for gold
are
you? I’ll make a donation.”
The little old man gave him a cranky sidelong look, made a “Hmf” sound, and turned back to picking up garbage. After a moment he said, “Do I look hard up?”
“Well, jeez, man, this is hardly a high-end job,” Rik said. “Even a noob player wouldn’t do it for long. You run through your grubstake already?”
“Fifty thou doesn’t go very far in this world,” the little old garbage guy said, methodically picking up garbage and dropping it into his sack. “Every time you turn around, somebody’s hitting you with another fee. Subscriptions, virtual food, virtual booze: drip, drip, drip, it’s gone in a few weeks. You want clothes? Gotta pay for ’em. Want a horse? Want a magic flying unicorn? Somebody’s gonna soak you for ’em. A suit of armor? A really good sword? There goes ten thou. Want to join a decent guild so you can make some money? Bang, you wind up paying some other game grubber a big fat initiation fee. Might as well be in the real world.”
“One big difference,” said Rik. “No taxes here.”
The garbage guy made the “Hmf” sound again.
“This
month,” he said. “Read the news lately? State of Arizona’s trying to change that. Only thing slowing them down is they can’t figure out whether to try to tax it as player income or virtual property. Either way, you and I wind up paying. Bastards.” He straightened up, groaned, and looked down the cul-de-sac with a critical eye.