“It’s not Mrs. Busby’s week to come in,” Rik said, getting up and pushing the screen away.
“Week?” Angela said, looking at him a little cockeyed. “And just who is Mrs. Busby?”
“The cleaning lady,” Rik said. “This is 1945. Men don’t clean up after themselves in 1945. Especially hard-bitten detective types.”
The look Angela threw him was heavily ironic as she ran a finger over the top of the green-painted filing cabinet and brought up some serious dust. “Well,” she said, “you’ve got this part of the fantasy down pat.” She dusted her hands off. “But this wasn’t what you were going to show me.”
Rik shook his head, grinning. “No,” he said, and got up. “Check these out.”
He snapped his fingers. At the preprogrammed audio cue, the system dressed this virtual version of him in the new robes he’d picked up from Lal. Quilted velvet whispered and tissue-of-orichalc gleamed in the buzzing pink neon from the movie house across the street as Rik spun once so that Angela could take it all in—the divided surcoat, the fabulous embroidery bespelled to glow in the gloom or smoke of the battlefield, the tailoring. “Nice, huh?”
Angela smiled one of those sideways smiles at him, meant to suggest that she was thinking things she wasn’t going to say. “You don’t look as silly as I thought you would,” she said after a moment, “so I’ll stop teasing you about your robes. I thought they’d look like some kind of kaftan.”
“For the battlefield? Wouldn’t make much sense,” Rik said. “Anyway, come on, let’s take a look at the new real estate. Game access, please?” he said to the system.
His office blinked out and left them standing in the blue- lit twilight of Omnitopia’s outer login area. In the sky above them, the white-glowing Alpha and Omega of the company’s logo were endlessly fading in and out through each other. In the middle distance, more or less on the ground or floor, the famous service-marked phrase,
Let’s go play!
, stretched from horizon to horizon. “Good afternoon, Rik,” said the control voice. “Welcome home. Identify your guest, please?”
“Angela,” Rik said. “Audit ticket one.”
“Noted,” said the control voice. “ID and audit ticket associated. Angela, welcome to Omnitopia! Would you please say hello so that the game management system will recognize you if you need to ask for help?”
Angela threw Rik a look, then said, “Hello, Omnitopia.”
“Thank you! Have a good visit.”
Around them the sky dissolved into darkness, and the City faded in around them like a scene out of a film. Rik had asked the program to put them down over by the side street where he’d stood after the battle around the Ring of Elich. Angela looked around at everything—the people and creatures heading in and out of the plaza, the buildings, the Ring itself—saying nothing for the moment. Rik watched her closely, hoping for a positive reaction. She’d never been in here before.
After a moment she let out a breath: a sigh. “This is bizarre,” she said. “It looks real.”
Somehow this wasn’t quite the response Rik had been expecting. “It does?” he said.
Angela nodded. Her expression was perplexed. “I thought this would be more—I don’t know, more artificial,” she said, as a small herd of pastel unicorns with demure little wings, cutesy butt-brands, and brightly colored backpacks wandered by them in a double line.
Some kind of school trip,
Rik thought. “It’s like people here
want
this to be real.”
“They do,” Rik said, “some of them.”
She gave him a look. “Should I be worrying about that?” Angela said.
“Probably not,” Rik said, pulling her over to him and hugging her one-armed.
“Ow!” Angela looked down between them at the object caught between her sweats and Rik’s gambeson. “Jeez, look at the size of that sword. Do you really need that thing in here?”
“Not here,” Rik said. “Not usually. Earlier, though—” He started walking them down toward the Ring while explaining about the fracas that had broken out the last time he was here.
Angela shook her head as they stood in line for one Ring portal behind a small crowd of people in futuristic spacesuits who were carefully checking their ray guns. “Sounds too much like hard work to me,” she said. “If I was going to come somewhere to play, it’d be playing. Not fighting!”
“There are plenty of worlds like that,” Rik said as the gate cleared in front of the spacemen, revealing a predawn sky filled with a huge edge-on galaxy that ran down toward a mountainous, icy horizon. “Beaches, forests, strictly recreational. I’d give you . . . oh, about five minutes in a place like that before you were wishing you were somewhere more interesting.”
The spacemen went their way, leaving the gate grayed out again as Rik and Angela stepped up to it. Rik patted the nearest trilithon by way of greeting and said, “Indigo, please.”
“Accessible now,” said the control voice, and the gate cleared down to that strange horizonless vista, in which a sun hung not above, but between you and the other side of the world.
“Wow, man, what
is
that?” said somebody from behind Rik.
He looked over his shoulder. There was a Gnarth standing there in very oversized jeans, cowboy boots, and a photographer’s vest, peering past Rik and Angela. “New Microcosm,” Rik said. “Not running yet.”
“Wow,” the Gnarth said in a very California-surfer-dude voice. “Gonna be a fighting world?”
“It’s looking that way,” Rik said.
“What’s it called?”
“Indigo.”
“Hey, let me know when it goes up,” the Gnarth said. He reached into the air and pulled out a little carved stone token, a manifestation of his username and contact information. This he handed to Rik. “Got a bunch of friends who like to get in early before the rush starts.”
Rik grinned at the idea that there would be a rush. “Thanks, friend. Have a good fight.” He pocketed the token, looked over at Angela. “Go ahead, just walk through.”
She nodded, went through the portal. He followed.
He’d tweaked the access locus so that they came out under the shade of a new forest Rik had installed that morning. Angela just stood there for a few seconds, looking up. Far across the interior of the world-globe, a crescent of night was sliding: deep inside it, faint and far away, were the lights of the campfires that Tom had suggested, too good an image not to implement. Angela turned around, surveying the nearer landscape of field and farm and forest, then looked over at Rik with an expression he couldn’t remember having seen on her in many years of marriage: complete astonishment. “You
made
this?”
“A lot of it’s modular,” Rik said. “It’s not so hard once you get the hang of it. . . .” But her expression was so odd that he let the explanation trail off.
“And people are going to live here?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Game-generated players mostly at first. But real-life players will move in eventually, start homesteading, staking out fighting fortresses and so on. And every time they do, I get a nickel. When they claim territory, or fight on it, or sell another player something, I get a little cut . . .”
“What are they going to do?”
“What, the players?”
“No, your characters—” Angela waved her hands as she looked around her. “Who will they be? Where did they come from? What’s their story?”
“I’m still working on that,” Rik said, and sat down on a nearby stone that he’d built there for the purpose. “I think they were probably brought here by aliens and left as an experiment. But the experiment has started having ideas of its own about what it’s for. And people who come here to campaign and don’t pay attention to the history of the place are going to get in trouble . . .”
She sat down on the rock beside him and stared out across the blue void to the other side of the interior world. After a moment she said, “You want some help with this?”
Rik was stunned. Angela had never shown any interest in Omnitopia before. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said; “I don’t want you to think I’m interfering—”
“Oh no! Not at all. It’s just that—”
“I never saw how
solid
this looked,” Angela said. “All of a sudden it seems like a place where you could tell stories, where interesting things could happen . . .”
She trailed off. “You sure you want me to get involved with this?” Angela said then. “I know this is what you do to relax, it’s important for a guy to have someplace where the family can’t go—especially the wife . . .”
“Are you crazy? You’re absolutely welcome here. Always.” Rik smiled at her. “It may just take me a little while to get my brains wrapped around the idea that you
want
to get involved! We need to get you a username, an account of your own. And there’s all this other stuff to take care of . . .”
Angela waved that away for the moment. “It’ll keep,” she said, looking around. “But I thought you told me things in here were broken.”
“They were. Extremely broken.” Rik shook his head, looking around him at the flowery meadow stretching away from the forest. “But now it’s all working, and I have no idea why.”
“Even though you built this?” Angela said.
“Please. I’m a beginner.” Rik stretched and stood up again, backing out into the meadow a little so that he could see a bit more of his new forest than the trees. The carpet of greenery ran gently up the curve of the world, the curvature beginning to show most emphatically about ten miles away. “Does that look too curvy to you?” he said.
Angela followed his glance, shrugged. “It all looks too curvy,” she said, “but I just got here. Give me a couple more visits.” She turned, blinked. “Oh, and one other thing.”
“What?”
“I thought you told me your world wasn’t open yet.”
“Microcosm,” Rik said. “It’s called a Microcosm. But, yeah, it’s not open—”
“Then who’s the guy?”
Rik stared. Then he recognized the figure slowly approaching them, It took him a moment, because the interloper was wearing a beat-up blue coverall instead of the rags and tatters Rik had seen him in last. Rik laughed, then. “Oh! That’s my guy who comes in to help with the heavy lifting.”
“What, the one from Quebec you told me about?”
“No, that’s Jean. He’s a mentor. This guy’s somebody I hired.”
That made Angela blink. “Wait. You have an employee?”
“Just inside the game,” Rik said as Dennis came shambling toward them. The boiler suit he was wearing was almost as disreputable as the suit-of-rags had been—spectacularly stained and paint-splattered—and Dennis’ flyaway shaggy gray hair looked even wilder now, as if he’d been consulting Einstein for fashion tips.
“Who is he?” Angela whispered. “What does he do?”
“Mostly so far I’ve got him transporting himself around the inside of the world, laying down place markers and giving me player-point-of-view feedback,” Rik said quietly. “It’s not hard work. He’s kind of a mercy hire.”
Angela brushed her bangs out of her eyes and glanced up at him, saying nothing for the moment: but Rik knew what she was thinking.
You’ve had this Microcosm for what, a day? And already you’re hiring people?
But she only smiled as Dennis came over to them, and said, “Hi there!”
To Rik’s astonishment, Dennis actually bowed to Angela, and then tugged his forelock. “Milady,” he said in that creaky voice.
“Dennis, this is my wife Angela,” Rik said. “She’s going to be doing some work on the Microcosm with me as we get things running in here.”
Those wrinkled little eyes looked up at Angela as if trying to add a new variable into an equation that was a touch too involved already: then glanced at Rik. “What kind of work, sir?”
Angela laughed. “Don’t ask him,” she said, “because he doesn’t know, and neither do I. We’ll figure it out as we go along. And maybe you can help me out a little, because I’m new at this.”
“Anything you need, milady,” Dennis said, “you just ask. Arnulf?” Rik was relieved not to suddenly find himself being called “milord.” “Dennis, how was the infrastructure behaving before we got here?”
“Just fine,” Dennis said. “Sun shining, gravity working, no problems anywhere I could see.”
“Great,” Rik said. “Though I still need to look at the logs. I only had a chance for a quick look, and I keep getting the feeling there was something I was missing. You have time to pass me the views for the new city sites that I asked you for?”
“Did that an hour ago,” Dennis said. “Anything else you need?”
Rik thought about all the system logs he still had to go through and restrained himself from moaning out loud: there was no point in letting Angela get the wrong idea about what working in here would be like.
And what
will
it be like?
he wondered—then pushed the thought aside for the moment. “Not right now,” he said. “Besides, no point in you getting overworked while we’re just getting started and I’m just learning the ropes. You must have stuff you want to be doing out in the Worlds!”
Dennis got a faraway look. “Haven’t been over to Geledann in a coupla months,” he said. “Not with some gold in my pouch, anyway. Think you can spare me for tonight?”
“Sure,” Rik said, “no problem. And thanks for what you’ve done today!”
Dennis nodded, tugged his forelock again at Angela, and vanished. “System management?” Rik said.
“How can I help, Rik?”
“Please credit Dennis with fifteen in gold, okay?”
“Done, Rik.”
Angela looked over at Rik with a slightly dubious expression. “What a weird little man,” she said. “Is he okay? I mean, is there some way to find out if he’s some kind of scammer or not?”
“Oh, sure,” Rik said, looking up at the sun, which was behaving itself nicely today: no jittering, no strange movements, but he wasn’t entirely sure he trusted it. “Every player’s got public history information, and even when they don’t make all the details public, game management makes sure you can see their master feedback score. Dennis is clean except for a couple of minor negatives—”