Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

Tears glimmered in the corners of Joanne’s eyes. “I don’t… I don’t believe you just… that was my…”

“Show’s canceled, Joanne.” Ray Junior, standing at the lunch counter behind them, spoke quietly. “Will you just take the man’s order?”

Joanne’s hands shook a little as she raised her pad and dutifully wrote down Chet’s order. Then she went around the table and copied down everyone else’s. Tom asked for blueberry pancakes, link sausage, rye toast; Garrett requested a western omelette, no fries or toast, and a large glass of milk.

Bill had lost his appetite; he only asked for a refill of his coffee.

Joanne snuffled a bit as she thanked no one in particular, then she turned away and marched on stiff legs back into the kitchen. No one said anything when Ray Junior came out a moment later with a brush and a plastic garbage sack. He avoided everyone’s gaze as he silently whisked away the debris, then he vanished through the swinging doors.

“Well…” Tom began.

“Well,” echoed Garrett.

Chet said nothing, slipped the tire iron beneath his chair, and picked up his coffee.

“Joanne’s a good kid,” Garrett added.

“That she is. That she is.”

“Leave her a good tip, guys. She deserves it.”

“Yeah, she certainly earns her money.”

“Hard-working lady.”

“Damn straight. That she is.”

More silence. Across the room, someone put a quarter in a jukebox. An old Johnny Cash song entered the diner. The door opened, allowing inside a cool autumn breeze; a heavyset driver sat down at the counter, took off his cap, and picked up the lunch menu. A sixteen-wheeler blew its air horn as it rumbled out of the lot, heading for parts unknown.

“So… Braves blew it again, didn’t they?”

“Yep. That they did.” Bill cleared his throat. “Now it’s football season.”

One of the best-known and most celebrated of Australian writers in any genre, the winner of eleven Ditmar Awards and three Aurealis Awards, Terry Dowling made his first sale in 1982, and has since made an international reputation for himself as a writer of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Primarily a short-story writer, he is the author of the linked collections Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach , and Wormwood, as well as other collections such as Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and Blackwater Days. He has also written the novels Beckoning Nightframe, His Own, the Star Alphecca, and The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse. As editor, he also produced The Essential Ellison, and, with Van Ikin, the anthology Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF. Born in Sydney, he now lives in Hunter’s Hill, New South Wales, Australia.

In the tense story that follows, he shows us that there are some games you can never stop playing, whether you want to or not.

THIS time was different. This time on his way past the tombs, Beni turned left, ignored the guard Stones of the nearer mounds and headed down the path through the trees to the wide low tumulus where her tomb was.

He granted that the Stones had him, though nothing showed it. The tumulus was quiet under the hot afternoon sun; the trees, the grass barely stirred; the fields stretched away to meet the sky. The only movement was the heat shimmer on the other tomb mounds and the endless pull of the sentry Stones.

The Nothing Stones were neither stones nor quite filled with nothing, though that was the sense they gave, all sixteen of them, low basaltic pillars two metres high, as wide as his shoulders, as deep as his thigh, standing in the usual henge circle around the foot of the tumulus itself.

Their onyx-black, outward-facing sides were filled with stars, converging points of light, and while Beni would not look into those glossy midnight fields, he knew that if he remained, if they didn’t have him already, the darkling, star-ridden massebots would solve his mysteries, totes and sly conditionings and come to snatch him away, pulling, pulling, grabbing at sight and mind, close obsidian in the hot afternoon.

Always assume the Stones have you, Ramirez had said, told him now in memory, the greatest tomb-robber of them all, and Beni did so, leaving it to his autonomic tote systems to sort out. If they had him in a trance loop, he’d probably soon know. He continued through the perimeter henge, leaving the deadly megaliths at his back, and headed down the access ramp to the black gulf of the doorway.

Doorway not door. None of the old tumulus tombs had ever had doors. Beni stood before the quiet, porcelain-smooth, darkened throat in the side of its vast, low hill and called out.

“Dormeuse! Dormeuse! You have a visitor!”

The words echoed against the ceramic, died. There was only stillness, silence again, smooth cool midnight before him, daylight and blazing summer behind.

Beni, tech’d and toted, wearing a flamer he’d been told he probably wouldn’t use, carrying a metre-long touchpole over his back as nearly all tomb-robbers did, just in case, now brought up his wrist display, saw what the optics gave.

Classic plan clear and sure. Free of the Stones too, if he could trust the readings. It was the standard schema confirmed by all the survivors (most of all by Ramirez himself, one of the very few to make it back totally unharmed) as the basic Tastan design: stretch of corridor, peristyle hall, corridor, burial chamber.

Simple. Direct. Two hundred metres, fifteen, another hundred, then the ten-metre circular chamber: the classic Tastan biocromlech. Simple. Linear. Very deadly.

For there would be traps, illusions, sensory and neural tricks. Standing there, Beni ran the latest figures again, unchanged, of course, since the last postings, but you never knew when new data might be collated and added-the town’s comp systems were constantly at it. Outright death with bodies recovered still stayed at 12% of annual penalties, selective maiming and stigma-the ‘souvenirs,’ 14% (but at least you returned), failure to return at all was still 63% (up 2% on last year’s average-things did change), failure to enter the tomb but believing so, 11%.

Beni cleared that, studied the simplified plan again-spinal access corridor (axial, porcelain-smooth), vertebrate peristyle (handsomely corbelled, and otherwise featureless but for the fourteen columns, seven to a side, and the intaglio relief on each of the back walls), more corridor, finally the central tholos, the skull chamber: unavoidable analogy and another of Ramirez’s terms, just as he had been the one to revive the old names: tholoi, tumuli, henge megaliths, cromlechs, dolmens, going through the old databases, going on about Celts, Myceneans, Etruscans, whoever they were, much older peoples than the Tastans.

Beni flicked random selections, chance plan superimpositions, hoping to trick any tomb override. The defences were clever but they were old.

No change. The classic plan remained. No apparent change.

What would Ramirez do now? Beni wondered again, again, again, putting it off, avoiding. And, finding that he was doing so, made himself take the first step, found the others easier, was soon leaving the square of warm daylight far behind. His cap-light struck out ahead, illuminating the corridor, the smooth and off-white walls; his footsteps echoed off the cool ceramic, carrying him into night, into the underworld of the vast low funerary hill.

“Dormeuse?” he called. “You have company, Dormeuse!” Called it over and over, as Ramirez suggested he do.

“Not so loud,” a voice finally said, and a host flashed on beside him, a startling mummiform of light, gaining resolution, female distinction. “I’m trying to sleep.”