The California Voodoo Game

7

Wednesday, July 20, 2059 — 11:00 P.M.

Alex Griffin dialed through a series of nine preprogrammed illusions. An igloo next to an ice hole, a castle and moat, a tropical isle and moonlit inlet, an alien world with a vast red sun and a foamy, crimson sea… Each had its own sour smell, its own irritating soundtrack.

He dialed 0. Once again he faced bare walls, a bed mat with rounded corners, a rug/floor with a wide, wild range of textures, a big oval sunken spa with shower heads above it. There were enough hooks, magnets, and suction devices to support a whole wonderful world of sexcessories. An alcove was stocked with sensory skin-quits, direct-nerve-induction stuff.

There was a hole chipped into one wall, high up, the size of his smallest toe. Below it on the rug was a trace of powdered plaster. Vacuuming would have picked it up: it had to be fresh.

Here in this dreary little box, Sharon Crayne had died.

The service door stood open. Local cops streamed in and out, searching, checking, finding little, trying to pretend not to notice his anguish. Failing.

Within the featureless cube of the Mate 'N' Switch building was an open, central well. It was lined with catwalks and resembled the backstage or substage at a Broadway show, or maybe a low-level Gaming area. Gaming Dome X?

The pleasure palace was shut down while Moshe Osterreich, Yucca Valley's understaffed, overworked sheriff, attempted to extract information from the staff of Mate 'N' Switch.

Sharon's body was gone, removed by the county coroner. Again Alex scanned the room, shrinking from its stark and vulgar utility, and found no excuse to edit the pictures in his mind.

Sharon had checked in of her own will, in health, unaccompanied. He-surely not she, or they, though the evidence showed nothing of… He had entered sometime later, and together they had romped in the big bed.

Afterward, the lover had left. Sharon, perhaps tipsy and too relaxed after being well laid-though there was no evidence of alcohol or other funny chemicals-had taken a bath. Her foot slipped, and her head cracked into the rim. It was flush with the floor, but nothing else was hard enough to raise a bruise. She must have flipped like a gymnast.

Momentum had carried her rolling into the bath…

More likely: Thumbs. Ouch! She rubs her head, curses, and slides into the sunken tub. Arms wrap around her head. She's making a keening squeak of rage and pain, like when she stubbed her little toe against the doorjamb in Griffin's mobile apartment. Doesn't know how badly she's been hurt. Blood leaks into brain tissue, shorting signals. Her head slips under the water…

Hours later, shortly after checkout time, a maintenance crew finds her as dead and cold as the water around her.

Who, then? Whom did she meet?

Alex tried to retain a modicum of professionalism, but it wasn't working. "I'm getting out of here, Moshe," he said to Osterreich.

The sheriff was a thin, wiry man with Groucho Marx eyebrows and a hawklike nose. "It's been a long day for you, Alex," he said. "Usual six A.M. roust?"

"Up at five. I'm beat, but I can't sleep. Not yet. See you later."

Alex shouldered his way through the door and fled to his skimmer. His blunt fingers dug into the dashboard.

He was under control. You have to stay under control, or life will eat you.

He said, "Home," thinking that the skimmer would take him to Cowles Modular Community, not really remembering that the beacon had been reassigned to MIMIC. The vehicle rose to its legal altitude of two hundred meters and hummed out across Yucca Valley, the community surrounding Dream Valley.

The Town that Cowles Built.

The car more or less drove itself, leaving him no distractions. He needed to put his mind somewhere; there were too many questions.

As security chief of Dream Park, he had immense leverage in Yucca Valley, but the truth was, he had no real right to interfere with Osterreich's investigation.

But Sharon had died in that sleazy sex shop after a sleazy assignation. Her life would be sieved by the minds guiding the Barsoom Project. Griffin's relationship with her would be dissected and analyzed. If, at the end, her only business at the Mate 'N' Switch had been the scratching of a physical itch, they would hand back the fragments of his memory, say "Sorry," and let him carry them meekly away.

Griffin guided his skimmer in toward MIMIC's rooftop landing pad. It was almost midnight, and the roof parties had died. A few robots scooted about picking up trash. He stepped out of the car. As soon as he slammed the door, it took off again, spiraling up and over the lip of the roof, down to the parking structure at MIMIC's base.

The elevator sank down toward the security hutch. Griffin was still brooding.

God. So fast. Everything had fallen.

She meant so much to me, and so quickly…

And he hated himself for the next thought: Got under my skin quick, didn't she?

At the Security Center he found Hasegawa and a couple of other people. The room was mostly empty. Condolences had already been offered, but were offered again.

A cold wedge of pepperoni pizza stared at him from a cardboard coffin. What little nudge of hunger he might have felt vanished instantly.

Mitch was offering coffee. Alex sniffed it. Tasted it, glad that his ulcer hadn't bothered him recently.

Hadn't, in fact, since meeting Sharon.

Splash. Coffee stain on the cuff. Shit.

Numbly, he mopped it up.

Sharon. What were you doing in that place? Your tastes weren't that exotic. Why couldn't you have met him in your room? Or his?

Because they work here. At MIMIC. She didn't want me to know.

Griffin's eyes wanted to water. He clenched his eyelids against the sting.

A buzzing sound penetrated his concentration, and he punched up the line. "Griffin."

"Osterreich here."

"Yeah, Moshe. Go ahead."

"We have the preliminary coroner scan. Full workup in about five hours."

"Pump it through. "

Sharon Crayne appeared onscreen. First the usual stats of inches and pounds. Then scars, muscle tone, apparent age. Makeup and recent beauty treatments. The prescription of her contact lenses. The plastic pin in her left wrist.

More intimacies: the nutritional content of her last meal. An ounce and a half of dark rum imbibed an hour before death. No other funny chemicals whatever.

And…

There was no semen in her vagina. Or her throat, or anus… or anywhere on her body… or anywhere in the room.

Okay, Mr. X hadn't screwed her yet. Maybe she was getting ready for him.

But the bed pad was wrinkled. Had it been used?

He studied the report. Traces of her perfume and body oils, a few cells, a strand of hair…

But no one else's. Nothing at all that didn't match her. Not male, or female, and as for the llama and the spayed gerbil… nothing.

Did she check in to masturbate, or what?

What were you doing there, Sharon? What was in the wall?

All right. Let's think this through. You had an assignation with a married man. You were in love…

Alex's ego wouldn't allow him to think that. There had been no one in her heart. There had been room for him. He knew it. He'd felt it. It had to be true.

Then Sharon: You wanted to call the affair off. You agreed to meet him one last time. You The hole in the wall was right for a wide-angle scan. Sharon could have gotten her hands on a pinhead camera.

All right. You wanted… he wanted? Sharon checked into the motel. She would have had time to mount the camera. He wouldn't.

She wanted evidence. Information…

And that other, nasty thought coiled and hissed in his hindbrain. She got under your skin mighty fast, didn't she, Griff?

You let her into the security lines, past your defences faster than you had to, because she was going to be taking over in two weeks. So she had access.

To what?

May I? she had asked.

"Playback," he said. "Last access Sharon Crayne date July nineteenth security files."

There was a momentary pause-more, he suspected, for the psychological benefit of the user than from any need of the system. Then the screen flashed NO ACCESS CODE THAT DATE SHARON CRAYNE.

He thought of Sharon poring over the files. A smile struggled to surface, succeeded but lost its warmth along the way. It hung there on his mouth, cold and lifeless.

How long have you been dead now, Sharon? Thirteen, fourteen hours? And a file that doesn't exist is the last thing that you looked at.

The smile was deathlocked onto his face. He felt ghastly.

Somebody walked by his workstation and dropped a plastic data sheet off next to him. With an unoccupied splinter of attention he heard a rustle. saw a shadowy figure, heard somebody talking behind him.

He refused to come up from his search, even when he felt the hand on his shoulder.

"Griff!" Tony said louder this time.

Alex jerked and stared up at the sympathetic face above him. For the first time, it was Griffin who looked away, who couldn't meet and hold his gaze.

"You want to know what Sharon was looking at last?"

"Just… want to look at it."

"I can do better than that. I have a complete playback loop. Every word, every command. Sometimes you get a weird effect in programming and can't figure out how you did it, so you'd like to go back and-" Tony sat next to Alex, and his fingers became a blur. "-watch over your own shoulder…"

Alex, still numbed, watched without enthusiasm. He wanted to tell Tony to go away.

"Funny," Tony said. "I can't pull up her visual…"

"Why would that be?"

"She may have put a block on it? Let's see the keystrokes." Tony continued to work while Alex watched. "I've still got some tricks."

"Breaking and entering type tricks?"

"I'm shocked, shocked that you would-" The structures of MIMIC began to appear. The view rotated, then zoomed in. "-accuse me of such a… preposterous… There."

Suddenly Alex was watching Sharon again, and his heart broke.

She was totally absorbed in her work, busy, typing and writing occasionally, triggering some of the inputs with eye and head movements alone. She was alive, and he knew that he loved her. The urge to reach out and touch her, to speak the words he had never spoken, lashed him like a bitter wind.

"Griff, it looks like she called up the ScanNet system for the entire Gaming area."

Tony pulled back to a broader image of MIMIC, encompassing all nineteen floors. Some of the corridors flashed red: Sharon had been into them.

"Here, here, and here," Alex said, "we have the radiation signs."

"Why would she want those locations?"

"Don't those signs seal out Gamers?"

"They do. Strongest mantrap in IFGS: cost of opening that door by any means, one absolute death. No saving throws, no defence."

"Cute notion," Alex said. "Yours?"

"Doris and El." Tony sat back, and watched the play. "You know, Alex…"

"What?"

"We don't have a playback from the correct angle, but the way she's doing this reminds me of something."

"What?"

"Well, it's the way she's acting. The pattern. Trying to block the record, that too. She's recording ScanNet sensor locations."

"Maybe she wanted to look at the whole thing later, at her leisure. "

Tony chose his next words carefully. "Maybe, but why not just have it pumped into her room?"

Alex sat stonily.

"Sorry, Griff. I didn't mean to imply anything…"

The air around Alex seemed to crackle. "Go ahead. What were you about to say?"

"We'll… say I saw this. Say I didn't know Sharon, which I don't. Say I didn't know she was your friend."

"Will you cut the bullshit?"

Suddenly, unmistakably, the potential for physical violence normally submerged deep within Alex Griffin was quite close to the surface. Tony considered backing off. Instead he said, "I'd say she was recording this to give to someone else."

And there was a bugging device in the wall at the motel.

"We don't have any sound," Alex said, controlled again. "It looked to me as if she was saying something. Can you get that for me again?"

Tony tapped out commands. They were looking at Sharon's mouth. Griffin moved his lips along with her. "I'm coming, sweetheart. Mommy's doing everything she can."

Tony McWhirter froze. "What the hell?"

Alex stood. "Thank you, Tony."

"Sure," Tony said, still confused. "Any time."

Alex left the room.

Tony McWhirter let six seconds pass before he exhaled again. His armpits felt damp and clammy.

In Chino there were men who spent their whole lives at the edge of violence. Tony had never seen Alex Griffin like that. It disoriented him to learn that the man was human after all.

And, drown it, if he was thinking what Tony had already thought, it was no wonder.