The Deadliest Game

4

They finally wound up in the Scrag End again. It was closed when they got there, empty except for a young man who took care of the door.

A slit in the door came open. “Show him what I gave you,” said the dwarf.

Megan held up the ruby token for the doorman to see. His eyes, seen through the slit, widened. The slit closed, and the door opened for them.

Inside, as they went in, the young man was looking with utter astonishment at Megan. “You?”

“No, no, him,” she said, indicating the dwarf. Except that he wasn’t a dwarf anymore.

Suddenly a tallish guy was standing there, in jeans and a T-shirt and somewhat beat-up-looking sneakers: a big-boned man, somewhere in his early middle years, with curly unruly hair and a curly beard and brown eyes, the kindliest eyes Megan thought she had ever seen. “Listen,” said Rodrigues to the young man, “I know you’d love to talk to me, but I need to talk to these people just now, and it’s urgent. Can I come back and see you next week — would that be okay?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, fine,” said the young man. “You’ll make sure you shut the door when you go out.”

“No problem.”

The doorkeeper went out the front door, and closed it behind him.

Chris stood there for a moment, then picked up the bolt and dropped it in place, and came back to sit at the rearmost table, where they had sat with Wayland.

Leif, sitting there staring at Rodrigues, was still having trouble coping with it all. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is. There’s no faking this.” Chris gave the token on the table a little push. “I always anticipated that sometimes I would need to make my presence known, so I made sure there was a way for players to know it was me, one that couldn’t be faked.”

Megan nodded. “Why were you following us?” she said.

“Because you’ve something to do with these bounces, don’t you?”

She and Leif stared at Rodrigues in complete shock. “No, I don’t mean that you’re involved with them!” Rodrigues said. “But you’ve been hanging around with some people who may have been involved…haven’t you? And one of them — Ellen. Elblai—”

“Yes. We were with her just last night.”

“So I saw from the game logs. And the descriptions of you that her niece gave me were quite precise.” Rodrigues sat back. “So I thought I would have a look at you myself — this was before Elblai, mind you — and then followed you here. I had the system alert me when you came back into gameplay.”

“I have to tell you,” said Leif, “we’re not just doing this for fun. We’re with the Explorers…we’re with Net Force.”

“Net Force, yeah,” Rodrigues said, and leaned forward on the table, running his hands through his hair. “Yeah, I’ve had some people from there in here already today. Naturally the Elblai situation brought them in, and I’m glad they came. But I don’t know what they can do. I’m not sure what any of us can do.”

He sounded despondent. Megan said, “Whoever has been doing this…they can’t be doing it tracelessly. And they have been leaving some clues behind…we think. It’s only a matter of time before we, or the senior Net Force operatives, work out—”

Rodrigues looked up. “Time,” he said. “How much of that do we have before this person bounces someone else? And does it violently? The early bounces, the smash-and-ruin bounces, those were bad enough. But attempted murder? This is not the kind of thing I wanted happening in my game.”

“We know,” Leif said. “We didn’t think so either. So we came in and started looking around to see what we could find out.”

“The same here,” said Rodrigues. “But I didn’t expect to get flung at a wall.”

“Sorry,” Megan said, blushing hot. “I thought you were—”

“Some little creep dwarf,” said Rodrigues, grinning. “Yes. He’s a favorite of mine, Gobbo.”

“Is he the character you run, then?” said Leif.

“One of about twenty,” Rodrigues said. “Some of them are fairly quiet…some of them are pretty outrageous. They give me a chance to wander around and interact with people in different ways…and make sure they’re playing the game correctly.” He smiled a little. “One of the pleasures of playing God. Or Rod.” The smile got more ironic.

“But the past few months, I’ve been doing it more with an eye to seeing what I can find out about these bounces. It’s not just that I don’t like my creation being used this way…which I don’t. But Sarxos has always had a reputation as a safe place, a place where the Game was played fairly…not one of those fly-by-night operations where the gamesmaster changes the rules on you without warning. And it’s not just a game, of course. It’s a consumer-driven operation. You have to treat your customers right. If word gets out that this kind of thing is starting to happen — if there’s even one more instance of an attack like the one on Elblai — it’s going to do immense damage to the game. It could be shut down. I leave to your imagination the kind of legal trouble that could ensue. The bottom-line boys at the parent company would not be happy with me, not at all.”

Leif was studying the table with a rather noncommittal look on his face. “Look,” Rodrigues said, just a little sharply, “I’m already a millionaire so many times over that it’s not even fun counting it at night anymore when I need to fall asleep. I have a great privilege: I get to do what I love to make my living. There’s nothing better than that. But there are more important things than my pleasure, and a whole lot more important than money. If there’s no other way to stop this, I’ll damn well see the game shut down. A lot of people disappointed is better than a few people dead. And that’s where it’s heading, if you ask me. I wish to God I was wrong, but I’m a pessimist at heart — that’s why I’m such a good designer.”

He sighed. “Anyhow, I’ve told the Net Force people that I’ll cooperate with them every way I can. The company won’t let me give them the game logs directly — they’re moaning about proprietary information — but I can read them and pass excerpted information on. They were asking about yours, by the way.”

Megan nodded. “We know. There’s e-mail going out shortly — if it hasn’t already gone — giving my release.”

“Okay, that’s fine. You, too?” He looked at Leif.

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“What about your game logs?” Leif said suddenly.

Rodrigues looked at him. Megan briefly felt as if she wished the Earth would open and swallow her.

“How do you mean?”

“The Net Force people may suggest to you,” Leif said in a very even and almost gentle voice, “that one possibility is that you might have been involved with these bounces.”

“Now why would I do a thing like that?” Rodrigues said, looking at Leif strangely.

“I have no idea,” Leif said, “and I don’t believe it myself. But…” He shrugged.

“Well,” said Rodrigues, “as for that, the game servers keep track of me exactly the way they do of everyone else. You can never tell, I might go crazy and try to sabotage the code.” He made that ironic “fat-chance” expression that seemed to appear on his face about once every couple of minutes. “The server logs will confirm when I was in here…which frankly is most of my waking hours. If I’m not doing maintenance on bugs, which contrary to popular belief pop up constantly, then I’m in the game itself, walking up and down to see who’s naughty and who’s nice. There’s fortunately no way to forge that information.”

Megan looked at Leif, and Leif looked back. They both wondered just how true that statement was. Then they turned back to the task at hand. “You know,” Megan said, “we were talking about a more structured way to conduct our search.” She took a few moments to explain to him the roundabout train of logic they had been following. “But there’s a possibility here,” she said. “The logs.”

Leif looked at her. “The server logs,” Megan said. “They keep track of everybody who’s playing, everybody who’s in the game. But also — by process of elimination — they’ll show you when everyone who’s a player is not in the game. And the bounces — the physical attacks on equipment, and in Elblai’s case, on people — happened when the player committing the attacks was physically not in the game. If we could run a search through the computers…”

Rodrigues looked at her a little sadly. “Do you know,” he said, “how many hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of people might be out of the game at any given moment? You’re going to have to find some other criterion to sort by, and cut down the size of that sample.”

“We’ve got several other sets of criteria,” Leif said. “In fact, we’ve got one six-name list I’d really like to run against the server logs.”

“Which six names?”

“Orieta, Hunsal, Balk the Screw…”

Rodrigues shook his head. “Where do they get some of these names…”

“…Rutin, Walse, and Lateran.”

“Huh,” Rodrigues said. “All generals and war-leaders, huh? How did you get interested in these particular names?”

Leif told him.

“Well,” Rodrigues said, “those six we certainly should be able to check.”

“Do you have all the times of the actual attacks?” Megan said.

“Oh, yes, believe me.” Rodrigues laced his fingers together, leaned his chin on them. “Game intervention.”

“Listening.”

“This is the boss.”

“Verified.”

“Access the real-world timings of attacks on bounced players.”

“Accessed. Holding in store.”

“Access server records for game usage for the following players: Hunsal, Rutin, Orieta, Walse, Balk the Screw, and Lateran.”

“Accessed. Holding in store.”

“Compare.”

“Comparing. Criteria?”

“Identify which players were outside the game at the times of the attacks.”

Leif and Megan held very still.

“Walse, outside at attack one, attack three. Orieta, outside at attack five. Balk the Screw, outside at attack seven. All other players were in-game at all times of attack.”

Megan and Leif looked at each other.

Leif made a face. “That didn’t work — I was hoping for something a bit more clear-cut. All the others were playing.”

“So the computer says.”

“What are the chances it could be wrong?” said Leif. “Or that its programming or its logs could have been tampered with?”

Rodrigues laughed softly. “It’s a nice try,” he said, “but you have no idea how stringently controlled our system is, or how ruthlessly access to it is managed. The computer itself writes code. We have no human programmers handling that anymore. The machine’s plenty heuristic enough to handle it, and besides, there’s umpty billion lines of code to deal with. No number of humans, monkeys, or other primates chained to keyboards could possibly work fast enough to meet the system’s needs. I just tell the machinery what’s needed, and it does it. No one else has access to code, or to the server logs, except a couple of people at the parent company. And there’s no way they’d be involved with this…they handle the logs only for archival purposes. Everything’s encrypted anyway, the same as the private-play keys and so forth.”

“So there’s no way that those could be tampered with.”

“No. Believe me,” Rodrigues said, “we have a lot of interest from other parties who’ve used Sarxos, its code and its basic structure, as a testbed for other kinds of simulations, ones which aren’t public. We keep our operation tight as a drum because of those affiliations.”

“But those people who were out during the attacks,” Megan said. “There’s no telling where they were, then—”

“Well, there is, to a certain extent,” Rodrigues said, “because you can check the logs and see how soon they came back in again. Game intervention.”

“Listening.”

“Look at excerpted logs. Note if any of these players was absent from play for more than…one hour.”

“Walse. Absent for four hours thirteen minutes.”

“And returned to gameplay again.”

“Yes.”

“There’s only one problem,” said Rodrigues, getting a slightly unfocused look, which suggested to Megan that he was looking at some kind of display in the air that he could see and they couldn’t. “The first attack was in Austin, Texas, and Walse lives in Ulan Bator. Even a nearspace transport isn’t going to be able to get you from Outer Mongolia to Texas in four hours. For one thing, there’re no direct flights. Think how many times you’d have to change.” He shook his head. “No, that won’t work.”

He sat back, folding his arms. “It’s possible,” he said, “that the line of reasoning you’re following isn’t really a valid one.”

“It’s all we’ve got,” said Megan.

“Listen, I’m not trying to put you down,” said Rodrigues. “I haven’t got anything better. I’ve tried processing this data every way I could, and I’m stumped. I’m really hoping that your Net Force people can do something for me now, because I’m at my wits’ end. I’ll tell you, though — when we catch whoever this is—”

“When,” Megan said, and smiled a little. She liked the sound of certainty…but all the same it made her sad. She kept thinking of Elblai.

“Have you heard anything about Elblai — Ellen?” she said.

“She’s out of surgery,” Rodrigues said, “but she’s still not conscious. She’s on my mind.” He sighed. “Listen, though. I have to thank you two for wanting to help, for trying to make a difference. Is there anything I can do for you?”

Megan shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

Leif said suddenly, “We could use some extra transit allowance. I’ve blown a lot of mine on this.”

Rodrigues chuckled. “You’re going to keep working on this problem?”

They nodded.

“Uh, consider your accounts open-ended until this is sorted out. Game intervention—”

“Listening.”

“This is the boss. See to it that characters Brown Meg and Leif Hedge-wizard have open accounts from this time stamp until further notice from me.”

“Done.”

“One less thing for you to worry about anyway.”

He sighed, looking down at his folded hands on the table, then looked up again. “I love this place,” he said. “You should have seen it when it started. Little, scratchy, sketchy, video-only universe. You could have fitted the whole thing into a PC.” He laughed. “Then it got out of hand. They do that, supposedly, worlds: get out of the control of their creators. Now I’ve got something like four million users…. people inhabiting a world. People who really seem to think it’s special.” More soft laughter. “I got an e-mail from somebody a few months ago saying that we should petition the government to get them to let us terraform Mars, and set up Sarxos there. I get a lot of mail from people who’d like to move. I mean, this…” He thumped the table gently. “This is pretty real, pretty good. You can eat here, drink here, sleep here, fight here…do all kinds of things here. But you can’t stay. People have started saying that they want to stay here…live here.”

He shook his head. “The only thing I didn’t foresee…. is that people would start doing things to each other in the real world based on what they do or don’t do here. This has never been a peaceful place. It wasn’t built to be a peaceful place. It’s a war game! Though peace keeps breaking out…and that always surprised me, that people wanted to live here, not just campaign all over the countryside and fight each other to a standstill. But now…it’s like the serpent has gotten into Eden. I don’t like this serpent. I want to stomp its ugly head.”

“So do we,” said Megan.

“I know. That’s why we’re having this conversation.”

“We intend,” Leif said, “to keep going…until we find the serpent. And stomp it.”

“Do,” Rodrigues said. “This kind of abuse, if it once takes root and it’s not dealt with immediately…it’s going to tear this world apart. I don’t want to see that.” He looked around him at the splintery walls, and the tattered thatch of the roof, and the cobblestones and the stuff spilled on them. “I don’t want all this to vanish. This, and the mountain ranges where the basilisks nest, and the oceans with the sea monsters in them, and the moonlight…the stars…the people who come to my world to play…I don’t want to see it all collapsed and put away in a box. I want it to outlive me. That would be a good immortality, to have a world that kept going while its maker was gone, or in hiding….” He smiled a little. “Sort of like what we have now, out there in the physical world.”

Rodrigues looked at them, intense. “Do what you can…but be careful. If you’re going to do this, I can’t be responsible…you signed the waiver when you came in.”

“We’re pretty good at responsible,” Megan said. “We’ll manage.”

“Okay. Here, take this.” He reached into his pocket and came out with another token with the S on it: not ruby, this one, but plain gold, or at least it looked like it. “You’re going to be working together, so just take this one then. If you need something from the system — information about other players, within reason, or extra abilities — you’re a wizard, you know the kind of things I mean — query the system. It’ll give them to you. This also com-links to me or my account. You can leave me e-mail, or talk to me if I’m in the game.”

“Hey, thanks. This is really—”

“Don’t thank me. I should be thanking you for what you’re doing. There are a few others like you who’re making discreet inquiries. I figure the more of us who’re looking, the better it is. But in the meantime, just be careful.”

“We will,” Leif said.

Rodrigues stood up. “Okay…it’s getting late at home where I am. I’ve gotta go. Thanks again.”

They nodded to him. Rodrigues sketched a little wave at them…then, with a pop of displaced air, vanished.

Leif and Megan looked at each other. “Not Lateran,” Leif said. “Merde.”

“Back to the drawing board…” said Megan.

They got up and left the Scrag End, carefully closing the door behind them.

Wayland was waiting for them in the marketplace in the morning, all packed up and ready to go. He had on what Leif remembered as his “traveling hat,” a large floppy one with a bedraggled feather that made him look like a cross between a run-down Musketeer and an unemployed Norse god. “I haven’t been up to the High House yet today,” he said, leading them up into the next circle of the city, “but there shouldn’t be any trouble with finding old Tald the majordomo. He’ll get you in to see the Lord right enough. Fettick isn’t as standoffish as some of them are, anyway. No big ceremonies up in these parts. People wouldn’t stand for it.”

“I thought they liked ceremonies up here,” Leif said. “There’s the Winterfest, after all, when they burn the straw man, and the Spring Madness, when everybody has to get drunk for three days.”

“Probably old Tald wouldn’t care for that,” Wayland said, going through the gate leading up into the next circle, and waving at some acquaintance up the road as they went along. “But he’s all right, he won’t give you trouble.”

Megan glanced at Wayland, a little lost by the sudden obliquity. But he was turning through another gate ahead of them, with Leif behind him. She shrugged and went on after them.

The innermost wall of Errint was the old castle itself, built of glacier-boulders that had been sliced neatly into blocks as if they had been so much cheese. “How the Old People did that, we still don’t know,” Wayland said, looking up at the walls. “No kind of magic you can get these days.”

“Might’ve been lasers,” Megan said, looking at the smoothness of the cuts, and the way the surfaces were glazed without being polished. Inside, she was thinking with some admiration of the creativity of a man who could take the time to leave details like this all over his world: not just elaborate or unusual workmanship, but mysteries and puzzles to work over at any of several levels — the place itself could be the subject of hours of cheerful pastime as you tried to work out whether Rod had just tossed in some detail as a throwaway, or meant you to mull it over and find some hidden meaning therein. And there was always the possible joke that there was no meaning: the kind of joke that Megan suspected a Creator might be inclined to pull.

“It’s pretty enough, that’s for sure,” Wayland said, and led them up to the gates of the castle, which were open. Out in its front courtyard, people were spreading out laundry to dry in the sun, and a big florid man in dark blue was walking around and visibly bossing everybody, waving his hands, giving directions. As the three of them walked in, he immediately boomed at Wayland, “No vacancies, good smith, there are no further employment opportunities here!”

“Master Tald,” Wayland said, “don’t you start shouting. These people are here on business!”

“What kind of business?”

“Better ask them,” Wayland said.

Leif bowed politely enough to the majordomo and said, “Sir, if possible we need to see Lord Fettick, on a matter of some urgency.”

“Now, I don’t know about that, young man, he’s very busy today.”

“You think it was magic they used on these stones?” Megan said suddenly to Wayland, pointing up at the closest wall. Wayland turned to follow the gesture, and as she did so, Leif slipped the token out of his pocket and showed it briefly to Tald.

Tald’s eyes got wide. “Well,” he said, “it’s early yet, and I doubt the first appointments will be along for some time. Come on, then, young sir, young lady.”

“Hard to say,” Wayland was saying as Leif pocketed the token again, “at this end of time…”

“I guess so,” Megan said. “Look, Wayland, we may be a while.”

“I’ll be down in the marketplace then,” he said, “or I won’t.” He waved at them, and set off through the gates again.

Leif threw Megan a briefly questioning glance as they followed the majordomo up through the castle door proper, and up a winding stairway that started making its way up around the walls of the central, circular tower. Megan shook her head, and shrugged.

The second floor was one big airy room, rather like the keep in Minsar, except that all the tapestries seemed to have been taken down for the summer. With the weather fairly warm and pleasant here this time of year, it was not a problem. The majordomo ushered them into the middle of the room, where there were a table and a chair, and in the chair, a man.

“Lord Fettick,” said Tald, “these two travelers come on urgent business, bearing the sigil of Rod.”

The man in the chair looked up, somewhat surprised, then rose to greet them — old-fashioned courtesy, which Leif and Megan both answered with bows. “Really? Then bring them a couple of chairs, please, and make them comfortable. And excuse yourself.”

Tald bustled about, bringing a couple of light ropewood chairs, which he placed on the far side of the table, and then departed. The man gestured them to the chairs. Leif and Megan sat down.

Megan reflected that she had never actually met someone wearing rose-tinted glasses before, since she knew very few people who actually elected to wear glasses at all, the state of laser surgery being what it was. But here was Fettick wearing them, a tall, slim, somewhat bemused-looking man in a gabardine, which was the height of style for the fourteenth century, but to Megan’s eyes mostly looked like a cross between a monk’s habit and a bathrobe. It’s probably pretty comfortable, though, she thought.

If this was the High House’s throne room, it wasn’t over-decorated. Indeed, the throne was more of a comfy chair — a rather overstuffed one — and it was pulled up to what was probably usually used as a formal dining table, but was now in intensive use as a desk. The beautiful polished ebony surface was almost completely covered with all manner of paperwork and parchments and rolled-up books and sewn-up books, quills and pens and styli and tablets. It looked like an explosion in an old and eclectic library.

“Sir,” Leif said, “thank you for taking the time to see us.”

“Well, you’re welcome…briefly. I hope you understand I’m very busy this morning, and I don’t have a lot of time.” He waved vaguely at the desk.

“We understand entirely,” said Leif. “Sir, do you recognize this token?” He held up the golden coin that Rodrigues had given them.

Fettick fixed a somewhat skeptical look on it. “Game intervention,” he said softly, and whispered something to the computer. It whispered back, inaudibly.

His eyebrows went up. He whispered again. Then he said, “Has Rod Almighty actually been here?”

“Yes, sir. We saw him last night. He sends his regards,” Leif said, which, while not strictly true, struck him as something Rod probably would have said.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to talk to us about a matter which was concerning us…and that’s why we’ve come to see you,” Leif said.

“Sir,” Megan said, “your forces were in conflict with those of King Argath of Orxen not too long ago.”

“Yes.” Fettick sat down, and a small smile with a slightly feral edge crossed his face. Suddenly he didn’t look quite so feckless. “Yes, we won, didn’t we?”

“Yes, you did. The problem right now, sir, is that anyone who fought a battle against Argath and won appears to be in danger of being — excuse me, I must use the indelicate word—‘bounced.’”

Fettick’s eyes went wide for a moment. “It is indelicate,” he said. And then he looked again at the pocket into which Leif had stuffed the token. “Still, you have that…so I guess we can talk about such things as the Outside. Do you mean that the lady who got bounced the other day was—”

“She was about to have a battle with Argath. She would have won. She was bounced quite near the time when she would have begun fighting. Others have been, too — usually after the battle. But now this kind of thing seems to have started happening before the fact.”

“Is Argath responsible, or is it one of his people, or—”

“No one knows. All we’ve noticed is the connection. And so we’re warning people who have fought with Argath recently, and come out the better, that they should look to their security. Here and elsewhere.”

“And take what kind of precautions?” said Fettick.

Leif and Megan looked at each other. “Uh—” Megan said.

“Exercise more than usual care in your comings and goings,” Leif said. This drill he knew well enough, from his father’s diplomatic connections. “If you have routines in your travel or outside work, vary them. If you have trips scheduled that are really unnecessary, don’t make them. Check out your living space, make sure there are no objects in it that you didn’t put there, that you don’t recognize.”

“Stay inside?” said Fettick. “Opaque the windows? Lock the doors?”

Leif looked at him, and thought maybe it might be wiser to be quiet for a moment.

Fettick sat in his chair again, lacing his fingers over his robe. “Young sir,” he said. “Do you know what I do for my living…‘out there’?”

Leif shook his head. He hadn’t quarried that deeply into Fettick’s background.

“I collect garbage,” said Lord Fettick, “in Duluth, Minnesota. And my line of work requires that I repeat my routine flawlessly, twice a week, on each of three routes. ‘Varying’ a garbage pickup route would be looked on, at the management levels above mine, with grave displeasure.” He sighed. “And yes, I know how that lady was bounced the other night. It was tragic. Have you heard anything about how she’s doing?”

“Still in the hospital,” Leif said, “and no news on when she might be likely to regain consciousness.”

“Yes. Well,” said Fettick. “She was on her way to the store, I think, when someone came along and knocked her car off the road. I work in medium to heavy traffic all day, every day, and if someone wants to kill or maim me, believe me, they’ll have no trouble doing it. My main concern is that they might miss me, and kill one of my workmates. And it sounds, from what you’re telling me, that there’s pretty much nothing that can be done to solve the problem at its root at the moment, that those of us who’re targeted have already committed the offense which has caused the targeting, and there’s nothing we can do to make amends.”

“Probably not,” Leif said.

“That being the case,” said Lord Fettick, “I can either spend the days from now until this person comes after me in a haze of fear, trying to protect against who knows what attack, from no one knows what direction — or I can get on with my life and refuse to be terrified. That’s usually the way to deal with terrorists, isn’t it?”

“While that is, ethically, a superior position,” Megan said softly, “practically, it sometimes has little effect on the terrorists, who count on something like it among proud or brave people. The terrorists have a nasty tendency to go ahead and try to blow you up anyway.”

“Well, let them come,” said Fettick. “I’m going to sit tight and do my job. There, and here.”

The tall slender man got up and came around his desk toward them. “I’ll tell you something for free,” he said. “I’ve had it. Two nights now, two nights of my good gameplay time, which costs me enough on my salary, Argath’s miserable lackey the Duke has been in here making merry with his pestilent little dwarf, ogling my daughter, eating me out of house and home, drinking all my best wine, trying to make me think a dynastic marriage to him is a good idea. Nasty superannuated creature. And here he’s sat, these two nights, trying his best to blackmail me. Or worse, to browbeat me. Trying to sign me up for an alliance in which I have no interest, and one for which I would be condemned from one end of the Northeast to the other, an alliance with a man who attacked my country, attacked me, not eight months ago! The cheapest, nastiest kind of protection racket. And I have to sit here, and mouth platitudes at him for politics’ sake — don’t think I don’t know at least that much about statecraft. I’m about up to here with pressure! I don’t need a life like that. It’s just not worth living.”

He sat back and sighed, looking down at the floor for a moment. “I will take reasonable precautions,” he said. “But no more. Whoever is behind this, I refuse to allow them to control my life. But I do thank you,” he said, “for going out of your way to warn me. I take it there are other stops on your itinerary.”

“Yes,” Megan said. “Duchess Morn—”

Fettick burst out laughing. “You’re going to bring her the same message you’ve brought me?”

“In essence,” said Megan.

“Do you have armor?”

She and Leif looked at each other. “Are we likely to need it?”

“If you’re going to tell her she has to vary her daily routine, you’ll need a testudo at least,” Fettick said. “Well, I wish you luck. I understand that you really do mean well…and if, as I think, you’re somehow involved with the attempt to find out who has been bouncing people, I wish you all the luck you can use. Now I have to get on with things here. But are you sure you won’t stay for breakfast?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Leif said. “Thank you, though. We should get straight on to Duchess Morn’s.”

“Sure you don’t want to think twice about the armor?”

Leif smiled slightly. “I think we’ll manage.”

They bowed to Fettick and headed out.

They looked around in the marketplace, before making their transit, but found that Wayland had already left. No one was sure exactly when. “Oh, well,” Leif said. “We’ll hear from him. Ready for transit?”

“Yup. Same size circle?”

“Same locus.”

“Ready. Cover your ears, we’ve got an altitude change.”

The world went black and white and phosphene-filled, and Megan swallowed to pop her ears, and swallowed again. They finally agreed to pop, and she looked down on a landscape as different from Errint as night from day. Everything in sight was flatland, a low swampy oxbowed river delta in which countless pools and trickles of water glittered and shone in the morning. Reeds stood up everywhere, and red-winged blackbirds and orioles perched on the reeds, swaying and singing in the wind that stroked through the reed-beds. In the center of everything was a great platform built on massive piles sunk into the water, and on the platform was a huge wooden house, turreted and towered like a castle. A wooden road was laid to it across the watery landscape, ending in a drawbridge and a steep switchback causeway that led up to the platform.

The two of them began to walk down the wooden path to the Duchess’s castle. As they went, Megan slapped an opportunistic mosquito and said, “Were you noticing Wayland this morning?”

“Huh? Not particularly.”

“Maybe it was just me,” Megan said, “but there was something, a little, I don’t know…a little ‘off’ about him this morning. He seemed distracted somehow.”

“I noticed you distracting him, all right. Where did that come from?”

“It occurred to me that we might not want everybody and his brother to know about the token,” Megan said. “For one thing, it’s a good way to get it stolen. By the way, let me have it for a while.”

“Sure.” Leif handed it over.

“For another…” Megan trailed off. “You notice the way he was answering questions?”

“No. Why?”

Megan shrugged. “Just that I kept getting back these answers that were kind of general, or…I don’t know…not really germane to what was said….”

“Maybe he has trouble hearing,” Leif said.

“Oh, come on.”

“No, seriously. If it’s nerve damage causing the hearing problem, not even virtuality can do much about it, supposedly. He might not be hearing us right. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen with hearing aids.”

“Huh.” Megan thought about that. “And it’s not really something you’d ask about, I guess.”

“You sure you’re not imagining it?”

Megan gave him a look, and then rubbed her eyes. She was feeling a little grainy around the edges, possibly from all the transits. “Oh, I don’t know…maybe I am. Or maybe he was just distracted. God knows I am at the moment. Anything’s possible.” She sighed.

But just a little while later, as they walked, Megan thought about what she had said, and the answers she had gotten back, and finally she thought, No. No, it was real enough. He’s just a little off, somehow. Not concentrating…I guess anybody can be distracted, even when they’re playing. Though for what people pay to play in here, you’d think they’d go get the distractedness out of their systems before they waste the money.

She thought for a moment more, then said quietly as they walked, “Game intervention.”

“Listening.”

“Do you detect your boss’ token here?”

“Concessionary token is detected. How can I help you?”

“The player called Wayland. Is he real or generated?”

“Do you mean, is the player human?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, the player is human.”

“Huh. Finished,” Megan said, and shoved the token back in her pocket. I hate it when this computer tells me things I don’t want to hear.

“I see the guards up on the walls have noticed us,” Leif said. “Look at all those crossbows.”

“Maybe this is what we really needed that armor for,” Megan said as they came to the far end of the drawbridge, under the shadow of its gatehouses.

“Too late to go back now,” Leif said, entirely too cheerfully for someone who had so many weapons trained on him.

“I don’t know,” Megan said softly, as guards began to pour down out of the gatehouses and onto the castle side of the drawbridge. “Late breakfast is beginning to look real good.”

Megan stepped out of Sarxos into her personal space to find a pile of e-mail waiting — all kinds of things that needed to be handled, and she just wasn’t up to it. Too many disappointments, too much excitement. Too many things hadn’t worked.

She blinked herself out of the personal space, feeling intensely weary…and also feeling as if she had been hit all over her body with a baseball bat. Stress… As she stood up from the chair, she glanced at the clock. 0516. Ooooh…it can’t be that late…can it?

Yes, it can….

Megan left the office and went off into the kitchen, groaning a little as she moved. Somebody had thoughtfully left her tea-making things out, and a banana on the counter.

Dad, she thought, and smiled slightly. Bananas are good for all-nighters, he always said. The potassium helps keep your brain working. And since he pulled so many all-nighters himself, he would know.

There had been fewer repercussions regarding Megan’s skipping “family night” than she had feared. Her dad had clearly understood that something important was going on. He had apparently spoken to her mom about it as well, and hadn’t asked Megan any questions about it…which was kind of him, and typical. But there would be questions today, all right. She was going to have to explain what was going on…and she dreaded that. She knew that what she hadn’t told Winters, her dad would quickly deduce, and he would tell her to forget about the bouncing problems in Sarxos and let Net Force handle it. If he told her that, she would have to do what he said. Megan respected him that much, at least.

Still….

She put the kettle on the stove and turned the burner on under it, peeled the banana, and sat down at the kitchen table, eating reflectively. For about the tenth time she began going over again, in her head, the lines of investigation she and Leif had been following. It was hard to think, though. She was really tired, and the image of Duchess Morn, laughing at them uproariously, kept intruding.

She and Leif hadn’t exactly needed armor to deal with her. Maybe Fettick had been overstating that end of things. But Morn’s good-natured scorn at the idea that someone might be about to bounce her was like enough to Fettick’s to be its twin. Morn was in her seventies, small and skinny and tough as old boot leather, and intensely funny. Fierce, Megan thought. She found herself wishing that when she hit seventy, she could be something like that.

“Let them try to get me,” had been Morn’s attitude about the whole thing. She was satisfied that her computer was secure enough, that her life was well enough protected. But even if it hadn’t been, Megan thought, Morn had the total fearlessness of someone who reckons that she’s lived her life well, for a long time, and is not afraid to “check out” if that is the card that falls in front of her when the next deal comes along. Megan and Leif had gone away from Woodhouse with their ears full of an old lady’s amused scolding of those who had the nerve to intrude in her personal business. And then both of them had had to get out of Sarxos, because school was coming up later in the day, and they were both dead tired, though they’d hated to admit it to each other.

“I’ve had a long day,” Megan had said to Leif. “But I may be back in here later. Leave Chris’s token with me, okay?”

“No problem,” Leif had said. He’d handed it to her and disappeared, looking as tired as Megan felt, and more dejected.

So there the thing sat, on her “desk” in her virtual workspace. Now, as she finished the banana and the kettle started shrieking, Megan got up hurriedly to shut it up, and thought about the token again.

Not Lateran. She still couldn’t get over that. It just seemed wrong. But Sherlock Holmes was whispering in her ear: Eliminate the impossible, and what you have left is the truth. Or at least possible.

Five-thirty. I can’t believe I was in there all night. But…She raised her eyebrows, sighed at herself, poured boiling water into her teacup, then went into the small bathroom off the kitchen, wetted a washcloth with cold water, and just plastered it over her eyes for a moment. The chill of it on her face was something of a shock, a welcome one.

Megan let it rest there for a moment, and looked at the faint lights moving inside her eyelids, phosphene byproducts of how tired her eyes were. Then she peeled the washcloth off, left it by the sink, and went in to get her tea.

Megan sat down, sipped at it gingerly, and started to go over things one more time. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she’d missed something about the server logs. But then Leif seemed to think they’d exploited everything they could from examining that set of information, and she was willing enough to bow to his expertise in this area. There must be something else, she thought. Something we’ve missed…

But the back of her mind kept going back to the server logs, and wouldn’t be appeased. It’s just brain fugue, Megan thought to herself after a while, sipping at the tea again, and burning herself again. I’m like a rat going down a tunnel with no cheese in it, again and again. It was the same kind of behavior she made fun of in her mother when her mother put the car keys down and later couldn’t find them, and kept checking the same spot over and over and over, even though she knew perfectly well by now that they weren’t there. I’m no better than she is.

The tea was beginning to cool enough to drink. Megan sipped at it one more time. I feel so grungy. What’m I going to wear to school today? I haven’t checked the laundry situation in days.

Then she swore softly, got up again, and headed straight back into the office.

She went over to the desk and pushed yet another pile of books off to one side. Baedeker’s Handbook for London, 1875? Fungi of the World? Taste of the East? What, he wants to go back in time for a curry now? With mushrooms in it, I guess. She sat down in the implant chair again and lined the implant up.

There was Rhea’s ochre surface spread out before her, all powdered blue with new-blown snow from one of the nearby methane vents, and there was Saturn hanging golden and uncommunicative in the long cold darkness, like a message delivered and unread. All that e-mail…. Megan thought. “Computer? Chair, please.” The chair appeared. “Show me what’s come in.”

The icons of about fifteen messages appeared in the air before her, some holding still, some rotating gently, some vibrating up and down as an indication of their urgency. The urgent ones were in the majority — though as Megan read through the mail, she found once again that other people’s definitions of urgency didn’t usually match hers. Two more mails from Carrie Henderson, who really really wanted her to do something that Megan didn’t bother finish listening to. Yet another unnecessary notice about the SATs. Someone selling subscriptions to a new virtual news service, a demo account of which began playing itself noisily in one corner of her space, showing her a smoke-filled expanse stitched with the burning lines of battlefield lasers, a firefight going on in some dark place in Africa. She wished she had a hammer to hit the sender with. Instead, Megan just told the machine to turn the demo off, and went back to reducing the clutter, icon by icon.

Several failed connects of attempted live chat…Well, she routinely refused chat while she was in Sarxos. J. Simpson? Who’s that? She shook her head. You did sometimes get requests to chat from people you’d never seen or heard of before. Probably it was someone she’d run into in the game who wanted to follow up on something.

She opened the messages, but they had nothing but the characteristic “failed message, chat refused” tag inside them. Oh, well, Megan thought. As her mother usually said, if it was important, they’d call back. If it wasn’t important, they’d call back.

Maybe whoever this is left some mail inside Sarxos, Megan thought. “Computer? Sarxos log-in.”

“Working.”

Her own area didn’t go away, but went shadowy while the Sarxos logo and copyright notices displayed themselves burning in the air before her as usual, and her scores and last-play times came up. “Resume from previous extraction point?” said the computer. “Or start new area play?”

“Another alternative.”

“State it, please.”

“Do you recognize this token?” She picked up Rodrigues’s golden sigil, tossing it in her hand.

“Concessionary token recognized. How can I help you?”

Down the same old tunnel, Megan thought, resigned. “Identify attempted chat connections to my account from 1830 local last night to 0515 today.”

A moment’s silence. “No connections from within Sarxos.”

“Okay.” J. Simpson. She shook her head. “Any e-mail waiting?”

“No e-mail.”

So Wayland had come up with nothing new. “I want access to server logs,” Megan said.

“That access is allowed with your token. Which logs would you like to see?”

“Logs for players Rutin, Walse, Hunsal, Orieta, Balk the Screw, and Lateran.”

“Specify mode. Audio? Text? Graphical?”

“Graphics, please,” Megan said. Her eyes weren’t up to reading much text at the moment.

“What span of time?”

“The last—” Megan waved her hand, not really caring. “Four months.”

“Working.”

Six separate bar graphs stacked themselves up in the air in front of Megan, looking something like a long detailing of what the Dow Jones index might have been doing for the last quarter. Each upright bar was a twenty-four-hour period; in it, as a series of bright vertical dashes stitched down the darker “bar,” was a representation of the number of hours that the person in question had been in Sarxos playing.

The six players were serious ones. Not one of them seemed to have played less than four hours a day, for all four months. Some of them had played six, or eight, routinely. Some of them had repeated stretches, especially at weekends or around holidays, when they were in the game for fourteen hours a day, or more. I wonder where they’ve been getting their massage programs from, Megan thought, stretching her aching body. Jeez, I thought I was fairly serious about the game. But these people are obsessed.

For amusement, she said to the computer, “Put up the matching server log for Brown Meg.”

It came up. She breathed out a rueful laugh. Over the last few days, her usage, staggered as it was, had become almost as obsessive as theirs. Dad’s gonna have words with me, she thought. And as for Mom…no, let’s not even think about it right now.

“Display matching server usage for Leif Hedge-wizard,” Megan said. Another bar graph appeared below hers. His usage looked a lot like hers, for the past few days. He’s no better.

And there was the tunnel, still with no cheese in it. She made a face at herself, and said, “Oh, go on, display server usage for Lateran.”

It came up. Lateran was as bad as any of them. Worse. Another mad one, in and out constantly. “Display usage for Argath.”

Argath, strangely, wasn’t in as much as Megan would have thought. His usage over the past several months actually looked more like her usual pattern, though it had been busier than usual the past few days. It didn’t seem normal, somehow…but then, what was normal usage for a Sarxos player? Was there any such thing? Probably not.

Megan raised her eyebrows at the thought, and said to the computer, “Display usage pattern for — oh, Wayland—”

His pattern came up under Argath’s. Megan sipped at her tea again, which she had “brought” into the virtual space with her, and sat gazing a little blearily at all the bar graphs hanging there glowing in the air in front of her. I should go out and do the cold-washcloth trick again, she thought, blinking.

And then she stopped, and looked at the graphs again: not the way she normally would have, but with her eyes squinted shut a little bit, as they had been before.

Lateran’s graph looked a lot like Wayland’s.

In the general patterning, the way the dashes and blank spaces fell…there were a lot more dashes, times “in,” than there were empty spaces. Lateran’s graph made Megan wonder a little more as she looked at each twenty-four-hour period and realized how much of it was taken up by gameplay. Most of it. A whole lot of it. And if you compared the end of one day with the beginning of the next — as often as not, they ran right into one another. Well, midnight. Peak game time, after all.

But that wasn’t it. Twelve-hour stretches. Fourteen, sixteen sometimes. The pattern repeated, cycling backward very slowly through the four-month period. Six hours in, twenty minutes out. Eight hours in, one hour out. Two hours in, an hour out. Five hours in—

The pattern definitely repeated. And Lateran’s timings were beyond “obsessed.” They were positively pathological. When does he sleep? Megan wondered. More to the point, when does he work? Even if you worked at home, you’d have a hard time keeping up a schedule like this. Without getting fired, anyway…

“Computer.”

“Listening.”

“User profile on player Lateran.”

“Your concessionary token does not allow that access. Please consult with Chris Rodrigues for further information.”

“What time is it for Chris Rodrigues?” Megan said.

“0242.”

He’s on the West Coast somewhere. I’m not going to wake him up at quarter of three in the morning. Unless… “Is Chris in the game at the moment?”

“No.”

I’ll have to wait. She looked again at Lateran’s server log. If this person has a job, it has to be done at home. But even if it is, it can’t be more than part-time…not with this kind of usage. And it’s not a child. Sarxos’s age limit, because of the violence, was sixteen and up. So Lateran has to either be in school or some kind of work…. She shook her head. The usage didn’t make sense.

And Megan looked down at Wayland’s usage. It really was very much like Lateran’s. Six hours on, two hours off…eight hours on, two hours off…seven hours on…And the pattern repeated, and cycled slowly backward through the four-month period. They’re a little out of synch. Not exactly alike, but… She shook her head.

But the strange way that Wayland had sounded this morning was still on Megan’s mind. A very peculiar suspicion began to grow in her. It was impossible, of course, because Wayland’s server log and Lateran’s server log showed them as often being on line at the same time…and you couldn’t play two characters at once.

Could you?

“Computer,” Megan said.

“Listening.”

“Maximum number of characters played by any one Sarxos user.”

“Thirty-two.”

“What’s the user’s name?”

“That information is not available to you with your present concessionary token. Please consult Chris Rodrigues for further information.”

“Yeah, yeah. Access the records of player Lateran.”

“Records accessed: holding in store.”

“How many other characters does the person playing Lateran play?”

“Five.”

“Is one of them ‘Wayland’?”

Silence for a moment, then: “Yes.”

Megan flushed hot and then cold with the confirmation. “Listen,” she said, as a whole group of horrible possibilities started opening up in front of her. Now her job was to start limiting them. “With this token, can I access Chris Rodrigues’s file of attempted and successful bounces on Sarxos players?”

“That access is allowed.”

“Access the file, please, and hold it in store.”

“Done.”

“Display the bounce periods on a similar bar graph. Star each one.”

The computer did so. Each bright star of a bounce “timing” was superimposed on a dark translucent bar corresponding to the graphs above.

“Pull down the graphs for Lateran and Wayland. Superimpose them on the ‘bounce’ chart.”

Obediently, the computer did so. All the bounces, including the latest one with Elblai, fell inside time periods when both Wayland and Lateran were reported to be in the game.

But it’s impossible, Megan thought, horror and triumph beginning to rise in her together. It’s impossible. Both those logs for Wayland and Lateran can’t be true. They can’t both be there at once. But if one of them was—

“Computer!”

“Listening.”

“Is it possible for a player to play two characters at once during the same game period?”

“Only sequentially. Simultaneous play of multiple characters has been ruled out by the designer and is illegal in the system.”

They’re the same player. They’re both there at the same time. They can’t be. And the computer hasn’t noticed, because it’s not trained to notice.

Someone’s found a way to fake being in the system.

“It’s too important,” she whispered. “Computer, I need to talk to Chris Rodrigues right now. This is an emergency.”

There was a moment’s silence, and the computer said, “Chris is not answering his page. Please try again later.”

“This is an emergency,” Megan said. “Don’t you understand me?”

“The system understands ‘emergency,’” the computer said, “but has no authority from a concessionary token of the type presently in your possession to contact him at this time. Please try again later.”

It’s him, she thought. The bouncer. It’s him.

Oh, shit…!

“Do you wish to leave a message for Chris Rodrigues?”

Megan opened her mouth, then shut it again as another thought occurred. “No,” she said.

“What other services do you require?”

Megan sat there looking at all those bar graphs. “Show me the other server logs,” she said, “the same period, for all the other characters played by the player who plays Wayland and Lateran.”

“Working.” Three more graphs appeared. The first and the third very closely matched the patterns of Wayland’s and Lateran’s. There were some minor differences in the timing, and the patterns were slightly more elaborate, but again, these characters spent too much time in the system to be realistic, and again, they cycled slowly backwards over the four-month period. Automatic, Megan thought. No question of it.

The middle usage-graph looked more real. Three hours in, twenty hours out. Four hours in, thirty-five hours out…a more scanty usage pattern. Not a dillie, but not obsessed either.

Megan let her eyes go unfocused again, a good way to make sure you were seeing the pattern you thought you were. The similarities were too strong among all the questionable graphs to possibly be a coincidence.

“Store display,” Megan said.

“File name?”

“Megan-and-Leif-One. Can I copy this display to e-mail?”

“Yes.”

“Copy to player Leif Hedge-wizard.”

“Done. Holding for pickup.”

“Copy it to him out of the system as well.”

“Message dispatched to the Net at 0554 local.”

Now what do I do?

Megan swallowed, had to do it again. Her mouth was dry. Lateran. We were right. I know we were right. The new up-and-coming young general… She smiled a little grimly. Something of an analyst. And something of a danger, to judge by this. Anyone who could invent a way to fool a virtual-reality system into thinking they were there when they weren’t…

More to the point, Megan thought, why would they waste the technique in here? It’s only a game. True, there were people who felt that Sarxos was a life-or-death matter, who spent almost all their waking hours in it, who lived it and slept it and ate it and drank it and, as Chris said, wanted to move in. But this, though…Megan shook her head. This is someone willing to use, or possibly invent, a technology whose whole purpose is to exploit the basic issue of presence in a virtual environment.

She had always believed that the “fingerprint” you left in the Net by your presence with an implant attached was indelible and uncounterfeitable. It was one of the truisms on which safe use of the Net was built: that you were who your implant said you were, that you were where you claimed to be, when you claimed to be. The implant hooked to your own physicality supposedly made authentification of your actions in the Net final and certain. But somebody — Wayland? Lateran? Whoever this person really was had found a way to be “there” when they weren’t there. While their genuine physicality was somewhere else, doing something else. Breaking into someone’s house and smashing their computer…running a middle-aged grandmother off the road and into a pole.

What next?

And all for the sake of a game.

Or was that all it was? For the implications of such a technology were horrific.

Megan shuddered, swallowed again, her mouth still dry. There’s still no proof. This is still circumstantial evidence.

But it’s real good circumstantial evidence, and it’s gonna raise a lot of questions.

Now what?

To the computer, she said, “Store the graphs…remove them from my workspace. Copy the file to James Winters at Net Force.”

“Done.”

Megan sat and looked at Saturn out the window.

He’ll know, of course. We told him to his face, what we were investigating, what our suspicions were. Even about Lateran. He knows we’re onto him.

It’s not Fettick and Morn we should be worried about. It’s us.

And it’s not like we’re that hard to find either. Megan thought. Schedules that we don’t vary. Known addresses. She smiled a wry smile.

I need to get hold of Winters right now. But—

And then she stopped.

What was in her mind was the image of Wayland, Lateran, whoever ran him — coming here, coming after her. Or coming after Leif. It was all too easy to get addresses and phone numbers and all kinds of “personal” information off the Net. But at the same time—

Why do I need to worry? Megan thought, her mouth starting to undry itself a little. We’ve got the standard number of defensive firearms here, and I know how to use them all. Someone comes up to me in the street, or tries to get physical with me—She smiled grimly. No, I think I’d like to hand this one — we’d like to hand this one — to Winters, on a plate….

Well, I can’t do that. Gotta go by the book. But that doesn’t mean I should just sit here waiting for it to happen, for Wayland to come after me….

She looked again thoughtfully at those attempted chat contacts. J. Simpson, she thought. Where are you, J. Simpson?

“Sarxos computer,” she said. “Thank you. Log out.”

“You’re welcome, Brown Meg. Enjoy your day.” The copyright notice came and went in a flash of crimson.

“Computer,” Megan said. “Access e-mail address for J. Simpson. Open new mail….”

And she smiled.

Leif popped into his stave-house workspace and sat down on the Danish Modern couch, rubbing his eyes. “Mail?” he said to his computer.

“Loads of it, oh, my lord and master. How do you want it? Important first? Dull first? In order of receipt?”

“Yeah, the last,” Leif said, and rubbed his eyes again. He felt deathly tired.

He had thought he would sleep like a log (however logs slept) when he got out of Sarxos last night. But instead he’d tossed, and turned, and hadn’t been able to get settled. Something was bothering him, something he couldn’t identify, something he’d missed.

Not Lateran. Sukin syn, it’s not Lateran. He couldn’t get rid of the thought. And he was thinking about Wayland, too. What Megan had been saying. “A ‘canned’ quality…”

An e-mail about some event his mother wanted him to attend was playing. “Look,” he said to the machine, “put it all on hold for a moment.”

“Okay.”

Leif thought back to other encounters he had had with Wayland, right back to the very first ones he’d had with him. The man had seemed a little eccentric…but you got that with people in Sarxos, sometimes. The more Leif thought about those conversations, though, the more what Megan had said began to ring true. And a player could play back his own experiences, if he’d thought to save them.

Leif smiled grimly. He was something of a packrat, and tended to archive everything, until his father started complaining that there was no room left in the machine for business. “Listen,” Leif said, “get my Sarxos archives.”

“Their machine’s on the line, Boss,” said his own computer, “and the things it’s saying about you, I wouldn’t want to repeat. The storage space you use—!”

“Yeah, I pay for it. Never mind. Listen, I want to hear all the conversations I’ve had with the character ‘Wayland.’”

“Right you are.”

He started listening. By the third conversation, he had already begun to pick up repetitions of phrases. Not just because they were familiar — but because they were spoken in exactly the same intonation every time. The hair began to rise on the back of his neck. Another phrase: “Now that is very interesting.” Repeated again, a couple of months later: “Now that is very interesting.” The very same intonation. And a third time: perfect, the same timing, to the second.

But then…he played the record of his and Megan’s conversation with Wayland. “Now that is very interesting.”

A different intonation. Much more amused…and definitely more aware.

He swallowed, and looked up at something vibrating just off to one side. It was one of the pieces of e-mail…and it had Megan’s address on it.

“Dammit. Open that!” he said to the computer.

It did. Leif found himself looking at a series of stacked bar graphs. They were people’s server logs, compared by time. They were—

His mouth fell open as he looked at the last logs at the bottom of the stack: two sets, superimposed over one another, and the stars, which marked the timings of all the bounces there had been in the last few months, laid over them.

Leif’s throat seized. He couldn’t even swear. There were no words bad enough for what he saw there.

We were right. It was Lateran.

And Lateran is Wayland, too. And Wayland is “canned,” somehow. We’ve been hearing preprogrammed phrases….

Except last night. Now this is very interesting…and Wayland’s smile.

Where’s Megan?!

He didn’t have her voice com-code. They’d never needed it; all their contacts had been through the Net.

“Computer! Get Megan on chat.”

“She’s not available, Boss.”

“Log in to Sarxos. Look for her there.”

He waited through intolerable seconds while the machine logged in, while the logo and the copyright notices displayed. After a moment, his machine said, “Not there, Boss.”

He couldn’t find out when she’d last been there either, because he didn’t have the token. She had it.

With the weight of the information in front of him, the data that she now had — with the memory of their meeting last night with Wayland, the information that he now knew they had — and the fact that Leif couldn’t find her — it all came together, and suddenly Leif knew what had happened: what, if he was lucky, was just now happening.

Then he started to swear, calling first Megan, and then Wayland, things in Russian that would doubtless have sent his mother straight up the wall if she’d heard them. He was seized with the complete helplessness of being virtual when you desperately needed to be concrete: his total inability to be in Washington, right then, when he was actually stuck in New York.

Leif shouted at the computer, “James Winters! Net Force emergency! Immediate connect!”

A slightly bleary voice said, “Winters—”

Leif gasped for breath, and then shouted:

“HELP!”

She sent the e-mail, and she waited…and nothing happened. Some sensible person is still asleep at seven in the morning, she thought. Why not?

Finally, Megan gave up on waiting. It was getting late. She went upstairs and had her shower and got dressed, keeping as quiet as she could because her dad had plainly been up late, working in some other room besides the office, and had turned in. Her mom, as so often happened, was already gone. The brothers hadn’t stayed over last night — one had had med-surg nursing rounds early the next morning, and the other had been complaining about an impending final exam in a course called Advanced Stressed Concrete 302. They had both made themselves scarce after dinner.

She came down again, thought about another cup of tea, and decided against it. There was nothing happening at school today that would really be important…but that was no reason not to go. All her schoolwork was ready. The portable was charged up, all the necessary data solids carrying her reference texts were in her bag. And her ride’s horn sounded outside.

Megan grabbed the bag and the portable, dropped her keycard in her pocket, slapped the front door to lock-behind, and breezed out, heard the door clock closed and the lock set, tested it to make sure it was shut tight, turned—

— and simply found him there, standing in front of her, reaching out with something black in his hand.

Reflex saved Megan, nothing else. She flung herself off to one side as he grabbed for her, and threw her bag at him, knocking him back a little. Megan felt the subdued hiss and sizzle of a body-field deranger close by. One solid touch and her bioelectricity would go briefly crazy, enough to drop her where she stood, “shorted out.” The thing’s effective range was about four feet. Megan hit the ground rolling, rolled to her feet, got up, and danced away from the man across the front lawn, intent on keeping him far away from her. He dashed at her again, and again Megan backed off, though it really annoyed her to do so.

Half of her was scared out of her wits. The rest of her was absorbed in the business of the dance. Don’t let him close, stay out of range—and behind, in her brain, a leisurely running commentary seemed to be going on. Heard the horn, where’s your ride, that’s not the right car, same make, though, maybe even same year, how did he—

How long had he suspected that she and Leif were on his trail? How closely had he been watching them? Leif, she thought, why didn’t I—!

The man jumped at her again, not speaking. She almost wished that he would shout, would say something. About five-foot-nine, said another part of the mind, clinical: medium build, gray sweatshirt, jeans, black loafers, white socks — white socks?? Jeez — big nose. Mustache. Eyes — eyes—She couldn’t tell the color from here, and she wasn’t going to get close enough to find out. Big hands, very big hands: a face surprisingly slack and still for all the action they were going through, dancing around on the lawn at seven-forty-five in the morning, and why isn’t anyone noticing this, why aren’t the neighbors—?! Megan opened her mouth to scream as loudly as she could—

And then she realized that he had thrown away the deranger, and had something else in his hand, with which he was taking aim—

She never felt the blast from the sonic hit her. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground and couldn’t move a muscle in her body. All this was making something of a mockery of all the training she’d had, all the good advice from her self-defense instructor. Locked out of the house, nowhere to run, no time to get away, no time—

The man leaned over her, his face not quite expressionless — just somewhat annoyed at the trouble she had caused him — as he started to pick her up, haul her up to a vaguely seated position, preparatory, she knew, to him picking her up and putting her in that car to take her away. Never let an attacker take you anywhere, one of her self-defense instructors had said, in a tone more urgent than she could remember him ever having used before. The only reason someone wants to take you somewhere is to make you a hostage, or to rape or kill you in private. Make them do it in public, if they’re going to do it. It may be awful, but it’s better than being dead—

Do something, she said to her throat, her lungs. Scream! Big breath, now scream! But the big breath just would not come in, and the scream came out “huh, huh.” The scream was all in her head, only in her head, and Megan was briefly lost in a paroxysm of rage and fear, but only briefly because — this was strange — the scream was in the air over her head—

The man looked up, startled, at the dark shape dropping toward him like a stone from the sky. He glanced down at Megan again, his eyes just briefly narrowed with intent, and moved his hand—

— and then fell sideways, hard, next to her and partly on top of her. She heard the awful thick thud as his head hit the ground. It had been dry, the lawn was fairly brown and the ground was hard—

Megan fell back, staring straight up. She couldn’t turn her head, could only hear the scream of the engine, the ringing in her ears. And then could have broken right down and wept, though not with fear, of course not, with relief, at the sound of all the footsteps all around her, at the sight, just out of the corner of one eye, of the beautiful black Net Force craft with its gold stripe down the side, and the police craft landing behind it—

— and the sight of James Winters suddenly looming above her, and saying to the medical people, “She’s okay, thank God, she just took some sonic, come on, give her a hand. And as for him—”

He looked down past the narrowing cone of vision that was all Megan had left at the moment. “Here’s our bouncer,” said Winters, in a voice fierce with anger and satisfaction. “Lock him up.”

It took several days for the excitement to die down. Megan spent a couple of them in the hospital — sonics are not something you just walk away from — and a third day talking to the police and to the Net Force people who came by to see her, including Winters, and to Leif, who came down from New York.

Everyone was treating her very gently, as if she might break. For the first day, she didn’t mind it so much. The second day, it was only occasionally annoying. But by the third day, it began to get on her nerves, and she said so, forcefully, to several different people. Even Winters, finally.

“She’ll be all right,” she heard him say to the nurse outside her door as he headed off. He turned, pointed at her. “But the day you get out of here — you and him—” He pointed at Leif. “My office, ten o’clock.”

“I’ll be in New York,” Leif said hopefully.

“What, is your computer broken? Ten o’clock.”

And he was gone.

Megan sat back in the comfortable chair in the corner — they’d let her out of bed at this point — and said to Leif, “Were the Net Force people in with you this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Did they give you any more technical detail on how they thought Mr. Simpson, or Wallace, or Duvalier”—he had had several aliases, it turned out—“was managing to fool the system into thinking he wasn’t there when he was, and vice versa?”

Leif shook his head. “I have to confess, I’m not real strong on the technical side of it. He apparently had a second implant which he had somehow taught to fake being connected to his body. Don’t ask me how you do that…they’re apparently real interested. And he had it running an ‘expert program,’ an aware-system routine.”

Leif leaned on the windowsill. “This is real old stuff. You ever hear of a program called RACTER? One of my uncles knew the guy who wrote it.”

Megan shook her head.

“The name was short for ‘Raconteur,’” Leif said. “It was a descendant of those old Turing-test programs, the ones meant to fake being human, enough to pass in conversation, anyway. RACTER was meant to convince you that you were shooting the breeze with somebody, just casually. Simpson, or whatever his name is, had done a tailored ‘aware’ program for Sarxos, one that could hold moderately good conversations with people in his persona…and get away with it. It’s no surprise it worked, I guess. You just automatically assume, when you’re in Sarxos, that whoever you’re talking to is either a real player, or generated by the game itself…and sometimes game-generated people do act up a little bit. Even Sarxos has bugs, after all. And it looks like our guy had four of these programs running, sometimes all at once. The fifth ‘self’ would be him, turning up here and there, servicing the various personas to make sure that everyone thought they were who they were supposed to be…while he went about the rest of his business: being Lateran, and getting rid of the people who he thought were getting in Lateran’s way, one by one.”

“Do they have any idea why he bounced Elblai so hard?”

Leif shook his head. “The police psychiatrists have been talking to him, but I think the general feeling is that Elblai just put too much pressure on him. He cracked. He might have been going that way for a while. Shel had been putting a lot of pressure on him…but not as much as Elblai did. It just all got too much for him. But he’d been very careful, very canny. Covering his tracks for a long time…lots more than four months, apparently.” Leif made a bemused face. “I don’t think anything the shrinks can come up with is going to help him when he comes to trial, though. Hit and run, attempted manslaughter, various burglaries and destruction of property, and in your case, attempted murder…I doubt we’ll see him in Sarxos again anytime soon. Or anywhere else.”

Leif looked at her, folding his arms and turning away from the window. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said.

“Yeah, well, if it weren’t for you, I might not be okay.”

“I was terrified that I was going to be too late.”

“I thought that I might be about to be late, too,” Megan said, “in the less-usual sense of the word. Look…let’s just forget it. There are more important things to worry about now.”

“Oh?”

“The day after tomorrow,” Megan said, “at ten o’clock…”

When the hour came, Megan and Leif were sitting, virtually, in James Winters’s office; but not being there physically did not make their presence any more comfortable for them.

His desk was neat. There were a couple of tidy piles of printouts laid in front of him, a couple of data-storage solids off to one side. Winters looked up from the paperwork, and his face was very cool.

“I need to talk to you two a little bit,” he said, “about responsibility.”

They both sat mute. It didn’t seem like a good time to argue the point.

“I had conversations with both of you regarding this problem,” he said. “Do you remember those conversations?”

“Uh, yes,” Megan said.

“Yes,” said Leif.

Winters looked particularly closely at Megan. “Are you sure you remember it now? Because your actions since then are such as to suggest that you had a profound incident of amnesia. I’d be really tempted to suggest that your parents take you down to the NP center at Washington U for the purpose of what my father, in the ancient days, would have called ‘having your head felt.’ If you can demonstrate some physical pathology to support the way you acted, it would make my life a whole lot easier.”

Megan’s face positively simmered with embarrassment.

“No, huh? I was afraid not. Why did you not do as I requested?” Winters said. “Granted, it wasn’t an order, you’re not under my orders…but normally, requests of this kind from a senior Net Force official to a Net Force Explorer can be considered as having some force.”

Megan looked at the floor and swallowed. “I thought the situation wasn’t as dangerous as you thought it was,” she said finally, looking up again. “I thought Leif and I could handle it.”

“The thought didn’t possibly cross your mind that you would like to really look good?”

“Uh. Yes. Yes, it did.”

“And what about you?” Winters said to Leif.

“Yes,” Leif said. “I thought we could handle it. And I thought it would be really neat to handle this ourselves, before the senior members got involved.”

“So.” Winters looked at him. “You weren’t thinking of sparing us danger, or trouble, not specifically.”

“No.”

“Time, maybe,” Megan said.

“And glory?” Winters said softly.

“A little,” said Leif.

Winters sat back. “You two are nothing if not an easy debrief. Well, I’ve had time to look over all the logs. There’s no question of your tenacity. And I have to say I smell dedication here. Got your teeth into it, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t want to let go,” Megan said.

“We started a job,” Leif said softly. “When you spoke to us…we weren’t finished. We wanted to finish.”

Winters sat still, looking down at the paper on his desk. He reached out to the corner of the stack, riffling the many pages. “There has been a certain amount of pressure from above,” he said, “to simply chuck you two out of the Explorers as a liability. The example of recklessness and disrespect for authority which your actions of the last few days suggest is not thought to be a good one for the rest of the Explorers. Because news will get out about what happened — it always gets out — and there’s concern that other Explorers, in their youth and inexperience, will start thinking that this kind of behavior might actually be appropriate. We’ve managed to do a certain amount of damage limitation, but…” He rolled his eyes. “That little scene on your front lawn did not help, Megan. Details of what happened, and what you were involved with, are invariably going to leak out. I’m hoping for your sakes that there are no legal repercussions. When you’re doing what we’ve suggested you do, we have some slight power to protect you. When you’re not…”

Winters glanced at the ceiling as if asking silently for help, and shook his head. “Meanwhile, I have to figure out what to do with you…because there’s pressure being brought to bear on us from more than one source. There are people in this organization who tell me that the analysis which brought you to your conclusions was a nice piece of lateral thinking, and they would look forward to working with you at some later date. And if I throw you out now, that’s going to make that option fairly difficult. Yet at the same time, there are other people shaking their heads and saying, ‘Throw them the hell out!’ So what do I do? Any suggestions?”

He looked at them. Leif opened his mouth, shut it again. “Go ahead,” said Winters. “I don’t see how you can make it any worse for yourself than it already is.”

“Keep us on,” Leif said, “but on probation.”

“What does probation look like to you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You?” Winters looked at Megan. “Any ideas?”

“Only a question.” She swallowed. “What happens to full Net Force professionals when they do this kind of thing?”

“Mostly they get cashiered,” Winters said grimly. “Only extraordinary extenuating circumstances sometimes manage to save them. Can you suggest any in your case?”

“That we’ve uncovered possibly one of the most dangerous trends in thirty years’ worth of virtual experience?” Leif said, just a touch innocently.

Winters gave him a sidelong look, and allowed out just one thin grudging smile. Leif saw it and knew, instantly, that they had him, that it was going to be all right. Not comfortable…but all right.

“That is, fortunately for you, true,” Winters said. “Up until now, the whole virtuality system has been predicated on the certainty that transactions carried out remotely via implant were genuine. Now, suddenly, all that is thrown into confusion. There’s hardly a part of the Net that this doesn’t touch. All authentication protocols everywhere are going to have to be looked at, made proof against the kind of subversion that your Sarxonian friend managed to devise. With whose help, we’re not sure…but it’s being looked into. Sarxos has been a testing ground for some technologies that various countries are interested in. When someone starts interfering with that particular game…well, alarm bells ring. They’ll ring for a long time.

“But leaving that aside for the moment, this incident has been a wake-up call for a lot of people who felt their systems were secure. Sarxos has a very highly-thought-of proprietary security system. The discovery that it was being subverted in this manner, filled with spurious data, and no one suspected that this had been going on for months, perhaps many months…it came as quite a shock. If Sarxos could be subverted this way, so could many other carefully built proprietary systems. Banking systems. Securities clearing systems. ‘Smart’ systems that handle various aspects of national security for nations around the world. Weapons control systems…” Winters trailed off.

“It doesn’t bear thinking about, the amount of redesign that’s going to have to be done. Except that we have to think about it now, thanks to you.” The narrow smile went crooked. “There are probably more managers and systems analysts and hardware and software jockeys cursing your names at the moment than you’ll ever have again, if you’re lucky. And the same people are blessing you. If you were to die right now, no telling which direction you’d go.”

He sat back. “Meanwhile…Sarxos itself…” He picked up one of the pieces of paper from the top of the stack, looked at it, and put it aside. “Sarxos has possibly just survived as a company because of what you’ve done. It’s been a major profit-maker for its parent firm, and the attack on that player, along with the inability to catch the person who did it, was beginning to affect the company’s performance in the market. The Law of the Market is, ‘Know when they’re greedy, know when they’re scared.’ Sarxos’s stockholders got scared, and the market started losing confidence in the company. Their stock’s value plummeted all over the world, everywhere it traded.

“Now, the game’s designer, who is a man not exactly without some political pull due to being at least half a Croesus’s worth of rich, has asked us to give you every possible consideration in what we do. The parent company’s CEO has weighed in on your side, an astonishing event for a man who was widely thought not to care if the Big Bad Wolf was about to eat his grandmother unless at the time she happened to be carrying a bag full of his stock options.

“The police in Bloomington are very happy with you, because your suspect’s testimony has led them straight to the rented vehicle used in that lady’s hit-and-run. The FBI is happy, because the same suspect has now confessed to offenses in several states — he’s attempting to cut some sort of plea-bargain deal, but I don’t know how much good this is going to do him. There are several organizations that neither you nor I should know about who are also happy, for reasons which they either won’t tell me, or I’m not at liberty to discuss. And a general wave of unbridled goodwill seems to be sweeping the planet at the moment on your behalf.”

His voice was very dry. “It’s slightly bizarre. People who normally couldn’t be bothered to give other people the time of day are asking us to be lenient with you.” Winters sat back and looked at them. “Frankly, I think they’re misunderstanding exactly what you did, in some cases, or why you did it, in other cases…but still, some of them have a point.”

Leif stole a glance at Megan. She was holding very still. “All of this being the case,” Winters said, “I really doubt if sacrificing you on the altar of blind obedience is going to do anyone any good. I would just as soon leave the option open that, someday, you might possibly serve with the — what’s the phrase I heard used? ‘Grownups’?”

Megan squirmed. So did Leif. “Do you read minds?” Megan said abruptly.

Winters looked at her and raised an eyebrow, then said, “Not usually. It makes my head hurt. Faces are more than sufficient. As for the rest of it…”

Winters raised his eyebrows, pushed back in his chair, pushed the report away from him a little bit. “Something you are going to have to understand, should you come to work with the ‘grownups,’ should you eventually reach that beatific state yourself, is that your work as part of a team is not necessarily about being ‘right,’ and there is a very, very small gap between being ‘right’ and being ‘righteous.’ The latter state can be fatal. The distance between the two is enough to get you killed, or your partner killed, or some innocent person around you killed.” He looked over at Megan. “What if your father had come down in the middle of that attack a few days ago? What if one of your brothers had stumbled into it?”

Megan was staring at the floor again, her face burning. “All right,” Winters said. “I’m not going to belabor the point. You seem at least vaguely conscious of the implications. But at the same time, the question also applies to you.” He turned to Leif. “You were next on the list. He had the address of your school. He would have found you there. He would either have tried to take you away, and possibly succeeded — in which case we would have found you in a ditch somewhere, or a river — or he would have tried to deal with you on the spot. There are any number of ways he could have done it, and any number of ways he could have killed one of your schoolmates ‘accidentally’ at the same time. Responsibility,” Winters said. “It would have been yours.”

Leif, too, became very interested in the carpet. “Someday it may be you,” Winters said. “All I can offer you, at the moment, is how this feels right now: this shame, this guilt, this fear. All I can do is tell you that this is infinitely better than what you will feel when, because of your disobeying an order, one of your mates goes down in the line of duty. A death with no meaning: or something worse than death.”

The room was very still. “Speaking of which,” Winters said, sitting forward a little again. “Your friend Ellen—”

“Elblai! How is she?” Megan said.

“She woke up this morning,” Winters said. “She’s been told what’s going on — she insisted on being told, apparently. They say she’s going to be all right. But she’s apparently extremely annoyed about some battle that she missed with this…” He leaned toward the desk, looked at another of the papers in the stack. “This ‘Argath’ person. Who, by the way, turns out to be completely uninvolved in all of this.”

“We thought so,” Leif said.

“Yes, you did. Which was interesting, considering how little hard data you had to go on. But hunches come into our line of work, as well as hardware…and riding the hunch on the short rein is definitely a talent we can use.”

“Why did he do it?” Megan said.

“Who? Oh, you mean Simpson of the many aliases?”

Winters sat back in his chair. Quite without warning, a man sitting in a chair appeared in the corner of Winters’s office. The man was wearing prison clothes — plain blue coveralls — and the same unmoved expression that Megan had seen on his face when he was pointing a weapon at her. She resisted the urge to shiver.

“I never win,” the man said, in a flat voice that matched the affectless face — and Megan was suddenly glad that he hadn’t spoken to her during the assault. He sounded like a robot in this holoclip. “I mean, I never used to win. But now, in Sarxos…I win all the time. No one was as clever as I was. No one knows strategy the way I do.”

“Especially when you were playing all those different characters,” said a quiet voice, just out of frame, probably a psychiatrist. Or a psych program, Megan thought.

“How else could I be all the people I am? How else could all of them win? Not just me,” Simpson said. “I may be the main one…but winning, winning matters so much. My dad always used to say, ‘It isn’t how you play the game; it’s whether you win or lose.’ Then he died—” Only now did that face show any emotion at all: a flash of pure rage so uncontaminated by maturity or experience that you would have sworn the three-year-old owner was about to throw himself on the ground in a full-scale tantrum, screaming and turning blue. Except that the three-year-old was in his early forties. “I won lots of times,” the voice said, calm again, the face’s expression seamlessly sealed over, “and I was going to keep winning, too. All of me were — all the people who’re inside. And I’ll win again, someday, even though I’m out of the game now. Sooner or later, I’ll win again….”

The figure in the chair winked out, leaving Megan and Leif looking at each other in a combination of pity, fear, and revulsion. “We no longer use the phrase ‘crazy as a jaybird,’” Winters said, “but if we did, I would say that fella’s a good candidate for the description. It’ll take the therapists a long time to work their way down to the bottom of his difficulties…but I would say multiple-personality disorder is part of the clinical picture, complicated by an inability to tell reality from a game…or to understand that a game is for playing.”

Silence fell again in the room. Winters sighed at the depth of it. “All right, you two. I’m not going to throw you out of the Explorers, as much because I hate to waste valuable raw material as anything else. I emphasize the word ‘raw.’”

He looked at them both, and they both looked at the carpet again, faces hot. But Leif looked up. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” Megan said.

“As for the rest of it — if in the near future we find a piece of business which is suited to your unique talents of nosiness, inability to take no for an answer, annoying persistence, and screwy thinking….” He smiled. “You’ll be the first to hear about it from me. Now go away and compose yourselves for the press conference. Both of you better have the grace to conduct yourself like modest little Net Force Explorers or, by God, I’ll….” He sighed. “Never mind. See what you do to me? A whole morning’s worth of composure shot. Go on, get out of here.”

They stood up. “And before you go,” Winters said, “just this. There’s nothing more fatal than believing a lie is the truth. Think of all the fatal lies you just saved the world from. Even with all the other things you got wrong, and did wrong…that’s something you can be proud of.”

They turned and went out, flashing each other just the quickest grin…though being careful not to let Winters see it.

“Oh, and one last thing.”

They paused in the dilating doorway, looked over their shoulders.

Winters was shaking his head. “What the heck is a ‘Balk the Screw’?”

Elsewhere, in a room with no windows, three Suits sat and looked at one another.

“It didn’t work,” said the man who sat at the head of the table.

“It did work,” said another of the men, trying not to sound desperate. “It was only a matter of a few more days. The first announcement impacted the company’s stock more and more severely as the media spread the news of the first attack around. A few more hours, the next couple of attacks, the next announcements, would have affected their stock so drastically that they would have had to stop trading. People would have deserted that environment in droves. But more important: The technology worked.”

“It worked once,” said the man at the head of the table. “They know about it now. It had to work and not be found. It’s a cause celebre now. Everybody who’s heard about this is going to be going through their databases, looking for evidence of non-presence or surrogacy among their users. This was a tremendous window of opportunity…but now it’s shut.”

Silence fell in the room. “Well,” said the man who had tried not to sound desperate, and failed, “the necessary paperwork will be on your desk in the morning.”

“Don’t wait till the morning. Have it there in an hour. Clear your desk, and get out. If you go now, I’ll have an excuse when Tokagawa gets here in the morning.”

The third man in the suit got up and went away in great haste.

“So now what?” said the second man.

The first one shrugged. “We try another way,” he said. “It’s a shame. This one had possibilities. But it’s made some suggestions for other possible routes of attack.”

“Still…it’s a shame we lost this one. Wars could have been fought inside a paradigm like this. Real wars…”

“But only as real as the controlling software makes them,” said the first man with the slightest, chilliest smile. “What we’ve proven is that the present technology is insufficient to what we have in mind…not secure enough to convince our customers to use them instead of more conventional battlefields. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, because the assumption would be that when the next wave of technology comes along, it’ll be watertight. And of course it won’t be. We’ll be there again, building in the ‘back doors.’ And from the beginning of the process, this time, rather than starting in the middle. Because of this failure, we’ll be smarter. And those of us who aren’t smarter, will be cleaning out their desks.” He looked at the second man. “And where will you be?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the second man said, rising to leave, “I have a phone call to make.”

When he was gone, the first man sat and thought. Oh, well. Next time…for what man has devised, man can unravel and debase, and in any game, there’s always a way to cheat, if you look hard enough.

Next time for sure….

At the very edge of Sarxos, the legends said, was a secret place. It had many names, but the one which was most frequently used was the shortest. It was the House of Rod.

Some Sarxonians, standing on the uttermost heights of the northeastern mountains of the North Continent, and looking westward in the clearest weather, claimed to have seen it there: a single island, a mighty mountain peak standing lone in the wild waters, far out in the Sunset Sea. Tales of the place abounded, though you were unlikely ever to meet anyone who had ever been there. The souls of the good departed went there, some of the stories said, and dwelt in bliss with Rod forever; other stories said that Rod Himself went there, on weekends, and looked out on the world that he had made, and found it good.

Few knew the truth of any of these stories. But Megan and Leif knew now.

It was a castle. That was more or less unavoidable. But there the resemblance stopped, for the place looked like it had been designed by an Angeleno architect who had had a bad dream about Schloss Neuschwanstein, and tried to execute a copy of it in a cross between Early Assyrian and Late Rococo. Green lawns were laid out around it, with tasteful flowerbeds full of asphodel. There was a small white beach where you could land a boat. It was said that the Elves liked to stop there, on their way into the West. “The True West, though,” Rod said, amused. “This is the Fake West. You want the true one, you keep going the way you’re going, straight off the planet, hang a right at the second moon, and straight after that, you can’t miss it.”

From the main body of the castle, one tall tower speared upward, with a balcony looking east. All the castle’s windows looked east. All of Sarxos lay there, the cloud-capped mountains and the seas, the lakes, the distant glint of clouds reflecting back the sunset….

“Nice view, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind Megan.

She turned around and nodded at Rod, who was holding a can of cola and looking out the window past her. “We get great sunsets here,” he said, “but you can only see them from the tower.”

“Personal reasons?” Megan said.

Rod looked resigned. “To the architect, maybe. My ex designed this place. She called it a ‘feature.’ I call it a nuisance. I think she just wanted to make sure I got plenty of exercise.”

“Is it a long way up?”

“The traditional number of steps,” Rod said, “three hundred and thirty-three. That’s why I put in the elevator.” He grinned.

Megan laughed, turning to look at all the people gathered in the big first-floor room. Nobody refused an invitation to a party like this, if they could help it — and who would want to help it? There were a lot of the “departed” around, players who had died in one way or another during gameplay, and every player who had ever been bounced. Shel Lookbehind was standing not far from the buffet table, happily discussing third-world reconstruction with Alla. There was Elblai, chatting amiably with Argath, whom she had never previously met in the flesh. “I’m just the honorary dear departed,” she was saying cheerfully, “and believe me, I don’t mind….” And some of the fortunate living of Sarxos were there, too. Some people weren’t exactly clear why Megan and Leif were there, but weren’t inclined to pry. Some — Sarxos support staff, or friends of Rod’s — knew, or had a clue, and were keeping their mouths shut. “I can’t go too public about it,” Rod had said to Leif and Megan earlier. “You know why. There are people who’ll twitch. But all the same…I wanted to say thanks.”

Now Megan wandered over to the far side of her room, where her dad and mom were standing with drinks in hand, talking animatedly with Leif’s mom and dad. As she came up, Megan’s mother looked around them with a smile that was not as grim as it might have been, considering the talk that the two of them had had the day before. “So this is what it’s all about, honey.”

“Maybe not all, Mom. But…these are the people we were helping.”

“Well….” Megan’s mother rubbed the top of her daughter’s head, an affectionate gesture that immediately caused Megan to try to smooth her hair back down into some semblance of order. “I guess you did good….”

“More than that,” Elblai said, coming up behind Megan with her niece, both of them smiling at Megan. “I wanted to thank you again for what you did. It’s rare enough that people just reach out to people, to try to help.”

“I had to,” Megan said. “We both had to.” She looked over at Leif, in a desperate attempt to get some help with this embarrassing situation.

He just stood there and nodded.

“You should be very proud of your daughter,” Elblai said, and Ellen’s niece said to Megan, “I’m still feeling so stupid that I didn’t believe you that night. If I had, it could have saved so much trouble.”

“You were playing by the Rules,” Megan said. “It’s just the way it goes. The Rules take care of themselves.”

“True enough,” Elblai said. “Have you had some of those little sushi, the omelette things? They’re really good.”

“Omelette things?” Megan’s father said, gave her an approving look, and headed off for the buffet table.

Megan went after him. “Daddy—”

“Hmm?”

“What are you writing right now??”

He smiled. “It’s a history of the spice trade. Couldn’t you tell?”

“You are not! You’re making it up!”

“Of course I am. I have to get revenge on you somehow.” He grinned. “Listen, Megan. I’m glad that what you were doing Thursday night really was important. Otherwise we would have had words. But after this, anything so important that it’s likely to get you shot at…I claim the responsibility to hear about it first. Okay?” The look he turned on her was both annoyed and profoundly concerned, so that she found it impossible to be annoyed with him.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, Dad.”

“Good. Meanwhile, you can read what I’m doing when it’s done. Next week sometime.” He turned away, smiling. “Learning patience is good for you.”

“I’m going to hack into your machine.”

“You’re welcome to try,” he said with an evil grin, and went off to investigate the omelettes.

Megan headed off to where Leif was standing, looking out the window. “Want to go up the tower?”

“Sure, everybody else has been up there by now.”

They made for the elevator. At the top of its run, it came out on a small, circular room with no apparent support between it and the pointed candle-snuffer roof on top. The last of the sunset was dying away westward. To the east, over Sarxos, the moon was coming up fat and full. The second moon came up off to one side, in the “passing lane,” as it were, and crept steadily past the first one, heading upwards fast across the sky.

Far away, the moonlight glinted on the snows of the northeastern mountains. Above them, in the sky, the stars started to go off like fireworks.

There were oohs and aahs from downstairs. “Hey,” said a casual voice from way down the stairwell, “they’re my stars. I can blow them up if I want to. They grow back in the morning, anyway.”

Far eastward, a winged shape came soaring. It grew bigger, and bigger, and impossibly bigger. “What is that?” Megan said.

Leif shook his head, and stared.

It came on, the huge shape, closer and closer, its great blackwebbed wings like thunderclouds against the darkening night. Right past the tower it banked, looking at them, an experience like being looked at by a low-space transport. The wind of its passing was a storm.

Those huge wings spread in a stall, flapped. The wind got worse for a moment, then settled as the king-basilisk lowered itself carefully to the peak of the mountain on which the House of Rod was built, made sure of its grip, and folded its wings down. It wrapped its long slender tail around the mountaintop for extra grip, and leaned its twenty-foot-long head right down to gaze thoughtfully at Leif and Megan out of sun-core eyes.

Down in the water, a sea monster put its head up on its long slender neck, followed by the requisite number of multiple loops, and bellowed defiance at the interloper. Lost in astonishment and admiration, Megan and Leif could only stare from one to the other.

“Welcome to my world,” said the voice of Rod behind them, “where cheaters never prosper.”

This time, Megan thought…and held her peace.