The California Voodoo Game

3

As he opened the door, the sights and smells of backstage MIMIC hit Alex Griffin in the face. Smelting, lifting, loading, painting. Stenches, vibrations, roar, and whine. There were always a thousand minor jobs left undone until the last minute. Some were part of the California Voodoo Game, some were unrelated aspects of the Barsoom Project.

But Barsoom and Dream Park were part of the same thing, weren't they?

Share a Dream… Share the Future. That slogan, emblazoned on a billion stickers in a hundred different languages, had become a catchphrase, a battle hymn, a mantra for an entire generation of Earthlings.

A neat irony. Mars, the god of war, had brought peace. And Dream Park was a place of illusion, whereas the Barsoom Project would pound and carve the planet Mars into a habitable world: not an illusion at all.

Griffin remembered a conversation with Norman Vail, chief psychologist for Dream Park. Halfway through an excellent bottle of Tanaka "White Plum" '02, Vail had held forth on the mythic power of dreams.

"In dreams we walk through phantasmagoria, our judgment sleeping," he had said intensely. Vail was sixty-seven years old, but a superb exercise and nutritional regimen had bought him the health and appearance of a forty-five-year-old outdoorsman. His skin looked more weathered than wrinkled. Tonight his bright little blue eyes were a bit unfocused. "Our drowsy judgment cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, the possible from the absurd. An inanimate object rears from the mist, snarling. We greet it lovingly, and in the greeting transform it into a friend, an ally, to help us on our journey."

"Well, that's dreams for you." Alex took another sip. The wine virtually sang on his palate. Its bouquet was clear and warm, sweet to the teasing edge of cloying, but not an inch beyond.

"Alex, you see, but you do not observe. A poor trait for a detective."

Alex placed his hand at his waist and bowed without standing. He kicked his heels onto a footstool and surrendered. "Please instruct me, Holmes."

"Quite. Do you perceive the parallel between dream and human existence?" Vail leaned forward eagerly. "From the perspective of our covetous misery, our neighbor's chattel often seems the solution to our own poverty. Isn't the history of human interaction the conversion of neighbors into enemies? Or into nonhumans, that we might deprive them of said chattels, or life itself?"

"Ah… I'm not following you. Maybe you're a little drunker than I am. I'd better catch up." He poured himself another glass of Tanaka.

"The atom bomb was supposed to kill us all. I say it transformed us into a cave full of troglodytes, up to our knees in gasoline, armed with cigarette lighters. No option save learning the other man's grunts and clicks, eh?"

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

Vail looked peeved. "Don't you see?" He snatched the bottle from Alex's hand. Actually, it took two tries: he missed the first swipe. "The weapon of war creates the necessity for communication. The god of war becomes the symbol of peace. Five billion people, speaking a hundred languages, dream the same dreams at night. They seek to create their wealth, rather than loot it. Finding new friends in old enemies."

"My my. Aren't we in a philosophical mood this evening."

"Treasure it, heathen. You shan't see such again."

Alex had been warmed by Norman Vail's unusual burst of optimism. But when one came right down to it, wasn't Vail right?

Dreams were the ultimate intimate language. Mankind had always struggled to bring its dreams into reality. It mattered little whether they were fantasies of bloody conquest, yearnings for love, or hopes for a brave new world. Whatever the images and intent, man needed to dream, and to share those dreams.

And hadn't books, films, radio, and multivision paved the way for understanding?

Through them, a new vision of mankind had been forged.

Griffin remembered a holographic diorama at Carnation's Feed the World exhibit in Dream Park. The first image had been a Midwestern Dutch-American mother breast-feeding her baby. No sooner had the eye absorbed it than she began to darken, her eyes narrowing, her sun-blond hair drawn back into tight braids as she became African… and then Asian… and then Polynesian.

To the strains of music drawn from a hundred cultures and miraculously woven into a single skein, the concept of motherhood burst all cultural boundaries to strike a single nurturing chord. Through the cinematic eye the cornfields of Kansas became the rice paddies of Vietnam, then the banana plantations of Jamaica, and then a million acres of sugar cane in Hawaii. Earth became one vast farmland tilled by a billion calloused hands, feeding ten billion hungry mouths.

It was an image whose time had come.

Alex Griffin's thumbprint summoned a glass-walled elevator tube. He began to rise through the floors. He waved to workmen as he slid past them, dwarfed by the multileveled enormity of MIMIC.

Dream Park, like Disneyland before it, brought together all the myths of mankind and displayed them on a single stage. Cultural prejudice withered before such an onslaught of fantasy.

As individuals, human beings are weak and vulnerable. Families to tribes to nations were an inevitable progression. Mankind was ready to take the next step.

Why should Alex Griffin quit his job at Dream Park to control the North American headquarters of the Barsoom Project? Dream Park offered all the responsibility any one man could want.

The walls and floors buzzed and thrummed with activity. Elevator banks were being disguised behind secret doors and hidden panels. Workmen could ferry equipment up and down MIMIC, from one end to the other, without interrupting the Game to come.

At the bottom of MIMIC's central well, lights flashed and glittered like a flaming silver mine. Was that reality or illusion?

At the sixth floor Alex stepped out, then threw himself back against the wall as a synthesised voice chanted, "Please take care, wide load coming through."

An oval mosaic as immense and mysterious as a Mayan calendar hummed past, balanced impossibly on its edge upon a little robot cart. The cart flashed red lights and droned its ritual warning as it slid past, blithely made a ninety-degree turn, and trundled merrily on its way.

It had almost disappeared before he recognized the oval as a mask rendered in strips of hide and lengths of bone. It was ten feet high, striped and curlicued with dusky earth tones. Its lower teeth pierced the upper lip jaggedly.

It was hideous, then suddenly comical. The eyes were platters of ancient flattened cola cans, the nose a plastic crucifix stenciled with the name of a popular chain of motels. How many other bits of cultural effluviums could he spot?

The floors and walls jiggled as the Cowles Mach VIII speakers ran their testing sequences: peals of maniacal laughter, bursts of rain, jolts of thunder, the chilling rumble of a hundred thousand pairs of jackboots. Sudden sharp explosions and shrieks of agonized pain.

Far down the central well, cranes that looked like toys prepared shuttle bays for the coming Game. Just above Security, on level four, automated tractors plowed ground and workers planted tombstones in a voodoo graveyard.

Griffin trotted up four flights of stairs to the tenth level, which was now flooded waist-high with warm water. A pontoon catwalk bobbled around the edge. Balance was tricky, even more so since he was already drunk with the sights and sounds, the hot acid stench of burning metal.

Voodoo! Naked slaves praying for protection to dead gods, gods rotting in graves left half a world away. An impotent religion embraced by the lost and degraded. Why voodoo?

Because Richard Lopez, Game Master extraordinaire, loved the notion! As McWhirter explained it, voodoo was a cultural maze. It was African shamanism and pantheism touched with Muslim influences and transplanted to the New World. There it absorbed Christianity and eventually held millions of worshipers in thrall beneath the very noses of the oppressors. Eventually it found its way back to nineteenth-century Africa, carried by repatriated descendants of slaves. There it absorbed gods from India and Asia, and bounced back to America in the hearts of African immigrants. It ate everything, surrendered nothing.

As a coherent mythology, voodoo was a jellyfish interesting but difficult of purchase until Lopez had grafted in a spine from an obscure twentieth-century text… Tony had smiled mysteriously and would say no more.

From thirty feet away there came a blinding flash of light. A twenty-foot-long amorphous shape reared up from the water. It had no features; it had no detail. It was just a blot of dancing incandescence. It wavered like an obese sea serpent, for a moment resembling something half-man, half-crocodile…

Then with a wall-trembling belly flop it disappeared back into the pool. Wave generator, or underwater bomb, or just hologram and sound effects?

It burst up again, and this time Alex could make out vague details of form and feature. It was a bronze, taloned thing, or maybe a copper flame crawling in slow motion.

Crazy place. Alex Griffin walked lightly through a realm of devils and demons, slipping around the inner rim of the tenth floor. He thumbed a hidden panel and chuckled delightedly as it rotated to admit him into its shadowed secrets. Pink footlights guided him down a twisting staircase.

He passed a corridor recently sealed off: the engineers had yet to evaluate the quadrant's structural stability.

A chunky woman of indeterminate age prattled rapid-fire to an attentive circle of Cowles officials. She had very short black hair tucked under a construction cap. Her raiment was eccentrically diverse: ancient yellow ski pants, a blue velvet tunic belted at the waist with a bicycle chain, thong sandals cut from sheets of corrugated plastic.

A squatter.

For fifty years squatters had haunted MIMIC. They ate whatever they could find in its cupboards, sold whatever they could scavenge. It was squatters who had promoted the myth of radiation-spawned mutants.

When Cowles had actually begun to develop the project, there had been sticky legal problems. What belonged to whom? Did squatters have homestead rights? A few claimed to be descended from tenants marooned in the building. When Cowles lawyers took them seriously, suddenly everyone was descended from tenants.

The situation could have become comically complex, but a battalion of social workers and attorneys had moved in, offered schooling, jobs, vid-rights for the squatters' stories. In two sticky cases Cowles lawyers had demanded sixty years' back rent, and that fixed that. Dozens of the elder squatters had been hired to act as guides, experts on the Folly's structural stability.

The squatter peered at Griffln shrewdly as he passed. She was telling the senior engineer, "The floor in here is about twice as stable as you'd expect, seeing as the Snake's alive on level eight."

The senior engineer, a short round black man named Ashly Mgui-Smythe, wiped his forehead with a plaid handkerchief, then folded it prissily and tucked it into a back pocket. "You… said that the Snake was alive on eleven, and the floor turns out to be stable."

She cocked her head. "Welll… maybe it was gone by the time you got there. But it bit pretty sharp on eight, section two, now, didn't it? And it's here. I feel it."

Grudgingly, Mgui-Smythe nodded. "Eggers, give me another check on this level. Folktale or not, if they've got record of quake damage here, maybe we missed something."

"On it, Ash."

Mgui-Smythe turned around and brushed his fingertips against the wall. "Be safe-wall sector six off. I don't like the cracked floor." He traced a jagged line of ruptured concrete with his toe. The crack had been filled with a bonding compound, but it extended across the entire corridor, vanishing under the farwall. It made Griffin nervous, as well. "Check level eight, too. Hazardous Environment Game or not, losing Gamers is bad for business." His expression warmed. "Hello, Alex."

"Ashly. More squatter stories?"

Mgui-Smythe shrugged. "Can't take any chances." He glanced at his watch. "Thirty-eight hours to go."

"Gonna make it?" Alex's eyes sparked challenge.

"Two gets you five."

"Good enough for me." Griffln moved on. Moments later he reached a door labeled with an hourglass symbol in Day-Glo red, as eye-catching as a black widow's underbelly. Radiation. Griffln thumbed the lock and entered his apartment.

MIMIC was only eighteen minutes from Cowles Modular Community by tube, but a four-day Game was coming up. Alex preferred his sleeping quarters close and snug to the action. It had been easy enough to have his personal living pod skimmed in from CMC and hooked up to MIMIC's modular wall. Some small adjustments to the electrical fittings, a water line, fiber optics, and bang: instant home. In four days it would be flown back over the hill.

His kitchen, bathroom, and living room were standard issue. Bedroom and personal office were modular hookup, could be bolted down and shipped anywhere in the country in twenty-four hours. Meacham hadn't been wrong, he'd only been too early.

There were rooms to spare at MIMIC. This was a converted office, not one of those shaky monstrosities that slid up and down the modular wall on tracks, though Tony had had it touched up to look like the older shells.

In the two weeks Alex's module had been at MIMIC, Sharon was the first person he had entertained.

Quite a night. He still felt smug and steamy at the thought of it. All they had needed was bedroom and kitchen. And bedroom.

He stretched out on the mattress and felt it mold to fit him, felt it purr and knead.

Very little sleep last night. Like most first encounters, it had been a whirlwind evening, a veritable symphony of mutual exploration with a sinuous and greedy lady. He could always catch up on sleep-one rarely had so fine a reason to miss it.

He had four days off, and Dream Park was about to hold the greatest Game of all time. He and Sharon would share in it, not as Gamers, but to help maintain the illusion of reality for the players.

He ground his palms into his eyes and stared into the mirror across from his bed. A big, gangling stranger stared back at him, body taut from countless hours of training, a certain rakish hollowness surrounding the pale green eyes. They were algae green, emerald with hints of blue and black swirled together. The lips curled naturally into a smile just now, flat but not quite cynical.

Sharon's scent was still in the air. Quite distinctly, he remembered her legs, their silken warmth as he peeled her nylons away. She had whispered wordlessly, feverishly, as the two of them sank back onto his bed. It had molded to their bodies, adjusted to their thermal patterns, and given back precise waves of heat and vibration, the exact levels of firmness and fluidity necessary to maximize pleasure.

He was lost in the bed's undulations. Swept away in Sharon's pungency, the smell and taste of her, the way she whispered his name, or clung shuddering to him as she tumbled over the edge and into the long, long descent.

Dammit, he just plain adored her, even the imperfections. Assiduous study had found only two: a discolored molar at the top right of her mouth, and the featherlike remnant of an appendix scar. In every other way, the lady was just too damned perfect.

He remembered the flash of coolness in the moments directly afterward, when she turned away from him to light a cigarette.

A spark of light, followed by the brisk tang of contraband. She inhaled harshly.

"You ready to do three months in County?"

"You turning me in?" she asked. She made a rustling sound. "Want one? Tennessee Tornado." Her voice was cool. She had given him so much, so completely, almost submissively, but then something inside her drew a curtain, retreated into observer mode. That's all, folks.

"Later, maybe."

"I'll leave the pack."

The sound of an exhalation cut off all possible communication. Nothing special, or even unusual, in Griffin's life. Just an abrupt cessation to closeness, then a pat on the butt as she rose to shower.

Griffin felt a surge of panic, swiftly suppressed as he realised he wanted more.

He lay in darkness, absently scratching at an existential itch.

Postcoital irritation? His hand searched out and found the plastic pack of contraband tobacco. He shook one out halfway and slid it into his mouth. Found her lighter and sparked the cigarette into smoke. Drew shallowly at first. He savored the burn, the quick hot dizziness spreading out from his lungs.

And thought of her.

Sharon Crayne sat at ScanNet's console, doing what she had to do, what she had committed herself to do. For a moment, she thought of Alex Griffln, and her resolve weakened.

He was just a man, she told herself. Just another man who had used her body. And that made Griffin an animal, like all the others. Something to be used and then thrown aside. Maybe they could have been friends, but that potential had ended the moment he went for the bait, the moment he let her coax him into bed. The moment he had entered her, no matter how gently.

No friendship was possible, and yet her head sagged, and something inside her cried out in loneliness, in need ignored for years. There was something different about Alex, something good and gentle and strong. She was ashamed to have used his loneliness.

Just perhaps, if all went well, they could start over again. Perhaps, if he could forgive her for what she had to do, she could forgive him for what he had done. He needed someone, as she did. He didn't really love her, he was in love with the idea of love. Enthralled, and perhaps amazed, that he still believed in love.

And what did Sharon Crayne believe in?

She didn't know, and wouldn't have time to find out, not until her task was done. So for now, focus on that task. Let nothing interfere.

"I'm coming, sweetheart," she whispered. "Mommy's doing everything she can."