The California Voodoo Game

Friday, July 22, 2059

Promptly at 6:00 A.M., the combined party of General Dynamics, Apple, and the Universities of California moved out of their comfortable quarters on the thirteenth level and began their descent.

At Griffin/Bobo's insistence, all utensils were cleaned, all beds made, and everything that was possible to place back in its correct position was so replaced.

They had, however, taken every grain of salt in the cupboards. There wasn't a tin of canned meat, a bag of hard candy, or a jar of pudding left behind. Griffin decided that there was no practical way to prevent such petty pilferage.

Once again, Acacia Garcia had slipped completely into Panthesilea mode, a dark and dangerous place, one that fascinated him in spite of his headache and fatigue.

Alex wasn't sure he had gotten any sleep the previous night. He may have slipped off now and then for a few moments, but the least sound, the hint of an approaching footstep, snapped him awake.

It made for a dreadful evening. He pulled himself out of Acacia's bag in the morning feeling as animate as a Yule log.

But the nine Adventurers in the caravan were moving along now, cautiously but steadily. The rate of attrition had been staggering. Doubtless there was worse to come.

Alex kept a sliver of attention reserved for Bishop. The man seemed completely involved in his Game. Absorbed, even-but there was something else, wasn't there? Some dark inner light, the relaxed smugness of the gambler who has rigged the table…

Alex's earpiece buzzed. He cupped it to isolate himself from outside conversation. "We've got two choices," Tony McWhirter said. "Army, or Bishop."

Alex whispered his reply, the throat mike filtering and amplifying. "Any link to Sharon?"

"Just that map. Most logical choice for cheater is Army, but they've always been straight arrows. I don't buy it. Sentimental choice for cheater is good old Bishop."

Griffin thought about that. "I don't completely trust Acacia. I think she's in trouble."

"Alex…"

"No, I don't think she knows anything about murder. I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing. Don't worry, I watched out for her last night."

"Right."

Griffin knew that wounded tone and the confusion of emotions that hid behind it. "Tony when this is over, you and I are going to have a long talk."

The chill was still there. "Any time." Then the line went dead.

Griffin caught up with Tammi: tall, blond, physically superb, and in the lead as usual. The halls were deserted, but there were sounds just up ahead.

Just beyond the next corner, electric candles flickered in a storefront window. Above the niche was a sign which said, in extremely neat script: Botica.

The Adventurers gathered around. After a swift huddle, Tammi, Acacia, and Bishop entered the store. After a moment's hesitation, Griffin entered, as well.

The room smelled like incense and peppermint. The walls were papered with glowing black-light posters in psychedelic array. From speakers in every corner of the room, heavily synthesized electric guitars bleated arrhythmically.

"What the hell is this?" Acacia asked.

Tammi examined a necklace of human teeth. "Looks like a cross between a santeria minimart and a head shop."

A very dark, slender woman with flowing dreadlocks, a flowered robe, and love beads glided from behind the counter. "Peace to you, brothers and sisters."

A thousand-odd geegaws crowded the room, everything from statues of saints to hash pipes.

There were Baggies of "smoking mixtures," various legal blends which, when set afire, smelled remarkably like illegal substances.

There were incense, and glass tubes, and voodoo dolls; there were cigarette papers in a hundred different flavors and configurations, eye-boggling posters in Day-Glo orange and violet, and jars of owl's claw. There were pamphlets on the cultivation of psychedelic mushroom, books on the Orishas, dog-eared volumes on flotation tanks, charts of energy meridian flow, and books on African mythology. There were tomes by Timothy Leary and Joseph Campbell, tiny gold-plated coke spoons, crystals, pyramid-power manuals, silver-plated razor blades, stash jewelry, one-hit minibongs, and other accoutrements.

"Last chance, heading down, man," the dreadlocked clerk said dreamily.

"What do you mean, 'last chance'?"

"Well, the Nommo like for the people around them to keep a clean head. And lower than that…" She clucked. "Gets deadly, mon. Like we do some trading."

She winked an eye, reached down under the counter, and brought up a pipe, made out of a humerus bone. "Now this pipe, she be special."

Bishop waved his hand over it, and it glowed. He turned back to Acacia. "We've got to have it, Panthesilea."

"How much?" she asked.

"Oh, no, she has no price." The storekeeper stuffed it with some herbal mixture and lit, putting away peacefully. "She sure is fine."

"All right… you won't take money. What will you take?"

"Riddle me," the woman said, her voice singsong. "Riddle me for your life, man, and the pipe, she might be yours."

"Riddle you…" Bishop smiled at the shopkeeper. "Does it have to be me?"

"You be afraid?"

"We have a better riddler."

"You be afraid."

Bishop wagged his head regretfully, controlling his irritation. "There is one far better suited than I. Captain Cipher?"

Cipher strutted forward. The dreadlocked shopkeeper examined him with interest.

"Ah, so you riddle with me?"

"Madam, I will."

The shopkeeper reached out a finger and drew a rectangle in the air. Thin, flaming red lines formed as she made even vertical and horizontal strokes. Four rows, four columns. She then brushed the top two boxes: they blazed red. The bottom two rows she similarly tinted green.

She gave them a toothy smile. Then she very carefully printed the following words so that each letter fell into one of the squares: R A T E Y O U R M I N D P A L

Cipher watched her carefully. "All right, now what?"

The shopkeeper licked the tip of her finger, reached out, and began to scramble up the letters. Her fingers moved faster and faster, sliding one square at a time. There was no sleight of hand, but her speed at the end was inhuman.

When she was finished, the squares read: R A I U M E L T R P Y A 0 D N

And the colors, of course, were thoroughly confused.

The shopkeeper grinned wickedly at him. "Three minutes to solve it, no less and no more "If failure is yours, then damnation's in store."

Captain Cipher reached out and nudged the Y experimentally.

When it responded, he began to move other pieces, faster and faster, building on the R in the top box, trying combinations on combinations.

Griffin watched the Adventurers who had crowded into the doorway. Quietly intent, they studied a master craftsman at work.

At thirty seconds, the box seemed no closer to being solved. At forty-five Cipher had RATE in the top box, and then… scramble scramble…

A minute and fifty seconds, and the puzzle looked nearly solved. It now read: R A T E Y O U R M I N D P L A

Cipher froze. His hands hovered motionless. A sheen of perspiration had appeared on his brow. Griffin's heart went out to him. Here, in front of all of his friends and the cameras…

Suddenly Cipher's eyes spread wide apart, and his fingers blurred. What in the hell? He was taking all of his carefully structured work apart. Griffin couldn't be sure, but it looked an awful lot as if he was running the previous moves backward, as though he had photographed the entire thing and had the moves stored away in his mind.

Why would he be doing that?

Then when Cipher had the letters in the RAIU MEL TRPY AODN configuration, with thirty seconds left, he went back to work, moved the R in the third line into position in the top lefthand square, and then zipped the other letters around and around the grid.

With five seconds left on the clock, the puzzle once again read: R A T E Y O U R M I N D P A L

And Cipher grinned. "You shifted the first and second R's," he panted. "Trick… kee! Milady, I nearly missed it. Change any two blocks, you change parity. With the second R in the top left square, it's hopeless, but your mind still wants to leave well enough alone, work around it. Gotcha."

The shopkeeper's smile was dazzling. "Very good, mon. The pipe, she is yours."

She handed Cipher the bone.

"Now," she said. "As long as you are here, would you care for any of my other items?"

There was a moment's pause, as if they couldn't believe their luck, then the Adventurers descended like locusts.

Bishop, Tammi, and Prez formed a protective shell about Cipher as he packed the pipe with herbs, then puffed it into life.

The smoke whirlpooled in front of them. Colors began to form…

Within black, oily-looking water, sleek and powerful fish shapes slid sensuously. There were human beings at the water's edge. They were looking at part of an indoor swimming pool, with diving boards and a tiled edge. The Adventurers could hear the beat, but not the melody, of half-familiar music.

"Our next stop," Twan said.

Tammi had a thought. "Wait. Try to find out where the other teams are."

Cipher puffed and puffed.

The image was faint at first, then swelled and became stronger.

Clavell and Poule might have been human spiders, trailing ropes down MIMIC's external wall. They jumped carefully, pushing out hard and then sliding down, legs braced and bent to absorb the shock.

Cipher choked on his smoke. "What in the hell are they-"

Bishop recovered first. "They're going straight down to the flooded levels. Don't you get it? They're going to get there first, and ambush us. We've got to move!"

The major and "Evil" Poule went down first, tightly, professionally, as if they had practiced the maneuver a thousand times.

In Poule's case, that might have been true. He may have grown a little soft in the intervening years, but there was clearly one hell of a man under those extra twenty pounds. He used a more traditional carabiner, hooked to the side of his belt. He wasn't able to use a classic rappelling position. Instead, in each hand he held a miniature Spider. The line was far too thin to control with his fingers. It would have cut his hands and thighs badly.

Clavell kicked out from the wall and bounced as he dropped about five yards. He swang back in, braked with his calves, and bounced out again.

Twenty feet to his left, just the other side of the crease, General Poule was similarly engaged and having the time of his life.

Clavell paused, looking down at the desert floor below him. Its patches of brown and tan and dull green spun lazily as he pivoted on the line. He sighed. Life was rarely so placid for him, even though he was a peacetime warrior. He longed for the simplicity of action. Long ago, Clavell had accepted the fact that peacetime was a time of boredom. If he did his job well, boredom was all he was going to get.

So peacetime it would be, because Clavell was, above all, a man who appreciated competence.

He would not, therefore, have appreciated the actions of the stock clerk at the Mountain High sporting goods store in Denver where he had purchased Falling Angels monofilament climbing cable.

The Army team was composed of military personnel, but was not directly sponsored by the government. Only in that way could Clavell claim any winnings as his own personal income, to split it with his team instead of with his ubiquitous Uncle Sugar.

The downside was that the Army wouldn't supply him with military equipment. Good civilian substitutes were generally available… but his request for 500 feet of climbing cable had reached Mountain High at a time when their stock was low. They didn't have four 500-foot lengths. What they had was three 500-foot lengths, and two 250-footers.

An enterprising clerk took it upon himself to epoxy together two 250s and repackage them.

And this was, although innocent, a major blunder. Falling Angels monofilament was made from single-crystal iron fibers bonded into an epoxy matrix, creating a thread of fantastic strength. The adhesive chosen by the clerk, while ordinarily enormously strong, simply reacted badly with the matrix, creating a weaker bond than that guaranteed by Altex Chemicals.

Altex had given very specific instructions, albeit in small print, not to use this particular cement on the variety of epoxy used to coat single-crystal cables.

When Clavell's Spider and weight hit the bond, the cable snapped.

He twisted in midair, wrenching his back as he flailed blindly for support. His left side slammed into a balcony railing, and the air woofed out of him. Pain exploded in his ribs as he rebounded, and he tumbled out toward the edge.

A frantically outflung hand found window-gutter: barely an inch and a half of shallow trench. Skin ripped on his fingers; his thumb felt broken; his lips and teeth and nose and toes banged against thick glass.

Hanging by his fingertips, face pressed to the glass, he blinked. The glass was slick and cold with spray from the waterfall. A capricious wind blinded him with freezing water. He blinked it away, unable to spare a hand to wipe with. He clung there, shoulder flaming, sight blurred, trying to remember the appropriate prayer.

He shivered, heart thundering in his chest.

Oh God, oh God would just have to do.

Alarm klaxons split the air. Wonderful. Dream Park to the rescue. With cameras. Decorated war-game hero makes idiot of self and team. Tape at eleven. For about one second he considered the advantages of simply letting go.

A hovercar hummed down from the roof, carrying a three-man emergency rescue team. Clavell, clinging to the gutter, watched its reflection in the glass and tried not to whimper. Desperately, he surveyed his options.

Below him were the immense raised stone letters that spelled out MIMIC. Much farther down, and to his right, cars from their maglev train lay like something assembled from an erector set, then destroyed in a fit of pique.

He gazed longingly at the hovercar. It represented safety, and life and the end of Army's chance in the California Voodoo Game.

All he had to do was nod, and they would take him in. They hovered there, faces masked with concern.

By God, he was going to finish this Game. He was going to win.

From the far side of the crease, Poule yelled, "Major! Are you all right?"

"Fine," Clavell lied blatantly. He panted, trying to catch his breath. What to do?

He tested the window. It was secure: no hope of getting in through there. He could just barely see Poule. The general had reached his target: an open bay for a missing modular capsule. The weather shield was down, but that wouldn't stop them.

He shifted his weight, trying to distribute the strain and keep his sore muscles from seizing up on him.

Nothing was broken. The right shoulder throbbed, but what the hell: one of the positive things about stark terror is its tendency to make almost any pain a minor annoyance. Come morning, the hounds of hell would romp in his joints, but tomorrow was another day.

He peered up along MIMIC's face. High above him were the concerned faces of his teammates. He wished he could wave at them. For that matter, he wished he could trade places with them.

A second aircar Cowles Security this time joined the first. They floated just far enough away to be out of camera view. It was still his show.

Thirty feet down and ten feet to his right was Poule, and the open bay.

Clavell began to inch toward his right along the gutter. There was a narrow, decorative ledge between the windows. It was just wide enough to rest his right toes upon, taking some of the weight off his fingers. He sobbed for breath, steadied himself, lifted his left foot. He pulled his belt knife with his left hand, reached down, and gingerly cut the laces. He slipped the shoe off and watched as it fell to the desert sand 130 long, long feet below.

The right foot required considerable contortions, but he finally managed to shed the second shoe. Toes sufficed to remove socks.

And then he was ready.

His every movement was coldly deliberate. There was no room for another error.

He wiggled his toes. They felt strong. Limber. It had been years since he had last free-climbed, but since boyhood, mountaineering had been a favorite hobby. He remembered years in Yellowstone National Park, climbing barefoot, his toes hardened through grueling summers under the tutelage of a favorite uncle.

Now his uncle was with him again.

"Terry, you've got the easy part. Goin' down's a cinch, long as you've got light. Here's what you do. Wall's your friend. Press into it, like a lizard. Every inch of yourself you get against it, that's another inch you don 't have to hold up.

"Reach out. Make sure you've got a good grip. Both hands, see…''

He had a good grip. The rain gutters and the weather etching on MIMIC's surface meant that there were a fair number of grips for hands and feet or, more accurately, fingers and toes.

All right. He reached out and down with his right foot, feeling along the wall for a grip. One thing about man-made buildings: they tended to be too regular, with too few handholds, but those holds were reliable. The letters were raised almost eighteen inches away from the building wall, enough room for a decent grip. His toes found the groove of the M and braced themselves. All right. The diagonal line slid slowly to the right, and he eased himself into it, as carefully as he had ever done anything in his life. He braced a knee to either side of it and slid as if it were a fireman's pole glued to the side of a cliff. He gasped as he touched the bottom of the notch, and braced himself there for a moment.

His knees hugged stone outcropping, his thighs already burning. All right. All right.

Slowly he released his death grip. Hugging the wall, he leaned carefully over to the opposite stroke. The last, vertical stroke had a little horizontal foot. His toes clawed for purchase on the cold stone, and he pushed himself across.

There was a two-foot gap between the M and the I stroke. Clavell braced himself between the letters, muscles cracking with the effort, sweat streaming down his face. Then he was wedged between the letters, heart hammering in his chest. He risked a glance at the desert floor beneath him.

And looked right back up. He felt dizzy and weak. He had to focus. All right. He stretched out with his right hand until he was braced between the bottom of the M and the I. Then he gingerly shifted himself across. Easy. Forget about the fall. There was plenty of room, right? He reached up and around, gripping the I. It was weathered, lots of gripping points for toes and fingers, and the gap between I and the next M was no farther. His wonderful Falling Angels gloves were designed to grip cable. They were absolutely nonslip, and they gave him a grip on the weathered stone that an octopus would envy. He loved those gloves. He planned to marry or, at the very least, have carnal knowledge of them as soon as his toes touched Mother Earth again.

The little crossbar on the bottom of the I gave him a chance to rest. He heaved for breath, feeling pitifully grateful.

He shimmied around the I and over to the second M.

Now came the tricky part.

General Poule was peering up at him but wasn't making a sound.

"Anchor yourself, General," Clavell called. "I think I can make it down from here, but I might need some help."

The general disappeared for a moment, and then was back.

"Lashed myself to a crossbeam. Come on down, Major."

Clavell gulped air and began to descend.

His toes searched for purchase. His gloved fingers clung to cracks that should have sliced them to ribbons.

Then his toes were hanging over space, over the upper lip of the yawning modular cavern.

And there were no more grips. He stretched his toes out, and General Poule still couldn't reach them safely.

Shit.

He began to swing, metronoming from side to side. There was a little slant to the wall here. Just enough to create a little friction. It would slow his descent, and he could get another handhold…

He threw himself sideways, belly and arms flat against the wall, sliding, fingers gripping to find the rain gutter above the modular opening. His fingers were numb and torn, but they still found a grip. His shoulder screamed. But he came to a stop.

Pain shot through his body, and he saw red, as if the strain had burst a capillary in his eye. Pain exploded in his shoulder. His fingers slipped, and panic overwhelmed him, control shattered as he realized he was falling But then "Evil" Poule's strong hands were on his legs, arms around his waist, under his arms, scooping him up and in to safety. "I think," Clavell gasped, "that I need to rest-"

Then the shock and fear and fatigue hit him all in a rush. The blood drained from his face, and Major Clavell fainted.