Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

I found Ed and I asked him if Lane had dropped out of the contest and he said no.

“MAYBE there’s a way you could find out if Anne is really scaping or if she’s a cheat,” I said to Mr. Sneeze.

“I don’t see how I could,” he said. “I can’t visit her, she has to visit me. And nobody visits me except you.” He hopped and jiggled in his five places. “I’d like it if I could meet Gloria and Lane.”

“Let’s not talk about Lane,” I said.

WHEN I saw Fearing again I couldn’t look at him. He was out talking to the people who came by in the morning, not in the microphone but one at a time, shaking hands and taking compliments like it was him doing the scaping.

There were only eight people left in the contest. Lane was still in it but I didn’t care.

I knew if I tried to sleep I would just lie there thinking. So I went to rinse out under my suit, which was getting pretty rank. I hadn’t been out of that suit since the contest started. In the bathroom I looked out the little window at the daylight and I thought about how I hadn’t been out of that building for five days either, no matter how much I’d gone to Mars and elsewhere.

I went back in and saw Gloria asleep and I thought all of a sudden that I should try to win.

But maybe that was just the idea coming over me that Gloria wasn’t going to.

I DIDN’T notice it right away because I went to other places first. Mr. Sneeze had made me promise I’d always have something new to tell him about so I always opened a few drawers. I went to a tank game but it was boring. Then I found a place called the American History Blood and Wax Museum and I stopped President Lincoln from getting murdered a couple of times. I tried to stop President Kennedy from getting murdered but if I stopped it one way it always happened a different way. I don’t know why.

So then I was going to tell Mr. Sneeze about it and that’s when I found out. I went into his drawer and touched the right numbers but what I got wasn’t the usual five pictures of the snowman. It was pieces of him but chopped up and stretched into thin white strips, around the edge of the black space, like a band of white light.

I said, “Mr. Sneeze?”

There wasn’t any voice.

I went out and came back in but it was the same. He couldn’t talk. The band of white strips got narrower and wider, like it was trying to move or talk. It looked a bit like a hand waving open and shut. But if he was still there he couldn’t talk.

I WOULD have taken my mask off then anyway, but the heat of my face and my tears forced me to.

I saw Fearing up front talking and I started for him without even getting my suit unclipped, so I tore up a few of my wires. I didn’t care, I knew I was out now. I went right out and tackled Fearing from behind. He wasn’t so big, anyway. Only his voice was big. I got him down on the floor.

“You killed him,” I said, and I punched him as hard as I could, but you know Kromer and Gilmartin were there holding my arms before I could hit him more than once. I just screamed at Fearing, “You killed him, you killed him.”

Fearing was smiling at me and wiping his mouth. “Your snowman malfunctioned, kid.”

“That’s a lie!”

“You were boring us to death with that snowman, you little punk. Give it a rest, for chrissake.”

I kept kicking out even though they had me pulled away from him. “I’ll kill you!” I said.

“Right,” said Fearing. “Throw him out of here.”

He never stopped smiling. Everything suited his plans, that was what I hated.

Kromer the big ape and Gilmartin pulled me outside into the sunlight and it was like a knife in my eyes. I couldn’t believe how bright it was. They tossed me down in the street and when I got up Kromer punched me, hard.

Then Gloria came outside. I don’t know how she found out, if she heard me screaming or if Ed woke her. Anyway she gave Kromer a pretty good punch in the side and said, “Leave him alone!”

Kromer was surprised and he moaned and I got away from him. Gloria punched him again. Then she turned around and gave Gilmartin a kick in the nuts and he went down. I’ll always remember in spite of what happened next that she gave those guys a couple they’d be feeling for a day or two.

THE gang who beat the crap out of us were a mix of the militia and some other guys from the town, including Lane’s boyfriend. Pretty funny that he’d take out his frustration on us, but that just shows you how good Fearing had that whole town wrapped around his finger.

OUTSIDE of town we found an old house that we could hide in and get some sleep. I slept longer than Gloria. When I woke up she was on the front steps rubbing a spoon back and forth on the pavement to make a sharp point, even though I could see it hurt her arm to do it.

“Well, we did get fed for a couple of days,” I said.

Gloria didn’t say anything.

“Let’s go up to San Francisco,” I said. “There’s a lot of lonely women there.”

I was making a joke of course.

Gloria looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that maybe I can get us in for once.”

Gloria didn’t laugh, but I knew she would later.

Be careful what you wish for, an old saying warns us, because you just might get it. The same applies to what games you play, as the wry little chiller that follows demonstrates-and who you play with .

One of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a co-winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in science fiction, with her 1991 novel White Queen; she has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Bold As Love; and she has received two World Fantasy Awards-for her story “The Grass Princess” and her collection Seven Tales and a Fable. Her other books include the novels North Wind, Flowerdust, Escape Plans, Divine Endurance, Phoenix Café, Castles Made of Sand, Stone Free, Midnight Lamp, Kairos, Life, Water in the Air, The Influence of Iron-wood, The Exchange, Dear Hill, Escape Plans, and The Hidden Ones, as well as more than sixteen young adult novels published under the name Ann Halam. Her too-infrequent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits, and in other magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short Stories, as well as Seven Tales and a Fable. She is also the author of the critical study, Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

THE earth walls of the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky; snow streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travelers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens… the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often visited in dreams.

She was a tall woman, dressed for riding in a kilt and harness of supple leather over brief close-fitting linen: a costume that left her sheeny, muscular limbs bare and outlined the taut, proud curves of breast and haunches. Her red hair was bound in a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Her sword was slung on her back, the great brazen hilt standing above her shoulder. Other guests were gathered by an open-air kitchen, in the orange-red of firelight and the smoke of roasting meat. She returned their stares coolly: She was accustomed to attracting attention. But she didn’t like what she saw. The host of the caravanserai came scuttling from the group by the fire. His manner was fawning. But his eyes measured, with a thief’s sly expertise, the worth of the sword she bore and the quality of Lemiak’s harness. Sonja tossed him a few coins and declined to join the company.