Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

Beni watched his display for the slightest flicker, let his peripheral vision guide him. “We are your future. We let you exist in time.”

“Empowering each other. Yes, Beni. I like that. Like the fish and the fisher. Here for each other.”

“So let me get on with it, Arasty. You try to stop me. I try to reach the core chamber.”

“And what? Put your name up there with Ramirez’s. Scrawl it on the watch screen and hurry out again? Did he tell you he did that?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Did he tell you what else he did? Everything he did? You said Ramirez drew my face. Did he love me too, do you think? This image from an ancient age?”

Which part to answer? She was distracting him with her intriguing remarks, possibly giving deliberate untruths to unnerve him. “I’m not sure what he felt. Fascination. Determination to see you as the person who made this. Set this up for the future. It makes for a sort of intimacy. Something very powerful.”

“Intimacy. I’m flattered. I never expected this sort of-well-kinship across centuries.”

But Beni had stopped.

“What is it?” the phantom asked. “Worried that there’s no core chamber? No second peristyle?”

“I should have reached it. Show me the plan. The real one.”

“You’ve already seen it. Look.”

Again there was the alarm, the panic, terror surging up.

“You continue to make it more interesting.”

“It’s all I have, like you say. The chance to challenge, be entertained.”

Beni needed to talk it through. “One of the few things we learned from you Tastans was sealed comp technology.” He touched his scanner. “This can’t be tampered with, so you’ve interfered with my perceptual processes.”

He pressed a contact, randomized the grabs, sent surges through both equipment and self. He had practised this, did not flinch from the small electroshocks. The original tomb-plan came and went: single peristyle original, this new triple corridor display, double peristyle, single, double, triple-they flashed and flickered, cycled from one to the other.

It wasn’t his vision then-unless it was misinformation at the brain’s visual centre.

And when he looked at the phantom’s face, saw the smile under the black glass eyes, he understood her simple strategy.

“I can’t be sure now can I?”

Again, Ramirez’s words were there. Allow that the Stones have you.

Beni sighed as if in frustration and despair, closed his eyes, accessed, believed he accessed, the neural link Ramirez had given him, actually given him, a parting gift surgically implanted in the town clinic, a legacy from surrogate father to surrogate son.

The single peristyle configuration-classic Tastan grab-sat in the light of his mind’s eye. He was in the second length of corridor, so close to the chamber. He dared not linger over it in case she suspected. Again he sighed as if in frustration.

“Your decision?” she said.

“Excuse me?” Feigning bafflement, exhaustion, loss of resolve. Let her read those. The battle had been joined in earnest.

“On or back? I still may let you go. Perhaps with a souvenir as a reminder. Or perhaps none, provided you promise to come back and talk to me again. Keep me entertained.”

Was that a possibility he dared consider? This intercept-this tomb, to make the distinction-did seem different from all accounts, rhapsodizing, showing whimsy, negotiating, pretending to, taunting like this, first one mode then another, just as Ramirez had told him she would be.

“I’m your little egg-stealer, remember. We continue.”

“Hope is always beautiful,” she said.

Beni didn’t comment, strode on five, ten, twenty metres, surely into the tholos, but would not glance at his display now, nor at her, would not consult his link. He wanted her to court him, whatever came of it. This visit had to matter. But he was in the tholos, the skull chamber, he told himself. Had to be.

Finally she spoke, easily, losing no face by it, perhaps in a new mode, he couldn’t tell, though her question suggested it.

“So, little hunter, have you ever wondered why there are only 85 tombs? The Tastan culture lasted seven centuries, at least 35 generations. Why only 85 tombs?”

He didn’t understand all her words. Generations. “Tell me.”

“Guess.”

“No more games.”

“Entertainment, remember? There really are only my games here. I’ll reward you.”

“How?”

“Trust that I will. I’ll give you a clue. We were not necessarily royalty. Not rulers.”

It did intrigue him. “Another caste in your society?”

“In a sense. Go on.”

Beni fought to think, pressured by the changeless, vitreous dark, by the unchanging yellow fan of his lamp showing not the tholos but only more and more corridor, its glow whitened by the added glow of the figure floating, standing beside him, seeming to.

Tholos, maze, wherever he was, the intercept really did seem to want an answer.

“Our culture is five hundred years after yours,” he said.

“Good. Yes?”

“But”-he hated saying it-“is debased by comparison. Technologically.”

“Such finesse, little hunter.”

“You belonged to a scientist caste.”

“Wrong.”

“A holy order. Priests. Sacerdotes.”

“No.”

“Criminals being punished.”

“Fool!” She said it with incredible fury. The black eyes glittered. “Don’t you know any history? What happened to our culture?”

Beni was stunned by her vehemence, the unconcealed contempt. It told him something he did not yet understand.

“You vanished,” he said, and then, to show he did know some history, what Ramirez had told him, added: “Like the Mayans. The Anasazi. Your cities were abandoned, allowed to run down; most were reduced to slag by housekeeping programs-”

“So where did we go? Our millions? Our millions, Beni?”

What did she want him to say? And millions. The Tastan millions.

“Into these tombs?” The certainty of it amazed him. “All coded in. Immortal. You’re the guardians of your race! Eighty-five repositories but housing millions.”

Arasty’s expression may have been the result of holistic psychonic printing or just some simulated response selected from a housekeeping menu, but Beni saw what looked like genuine scorn, genuine revulsion. If it were a deception then it was a subtle one, something naked, seeming spontaneous, well beyond the disapproval and impatience it resembled.

What am I missing? Beni asked himself, and with it felt a conviction. She needs me to guess. It really is important that I do. But what did she-it-want him to say? He wanted to shout the question. Didn’t dare now. All he could think of was to show humility, self-effacement, and hope for patience.

“Please, Arasty, help me more. This is important.” He hoped the compliment, his respectful tone, would do it.

The phantom watched him sidelong with her dark eyes just as a human would, as if in fact a discrete entity deciding, not a defence intercept scanning precedents, selecting options.

“You really have no idea, do you? A great culture, possibly the greatest the world has known, reaches a point where it dismantles itself, gives way to a simpler, let’s say impoverished, less sophisticated successor. Why would they do it?”

“I can only think of two answers,” he said quickly, honestly. “There was some enemy…”

“You could say that.” The intercept’s eyes flashed with interest. “Or?”

“You gained by it. It had to be progress. Something you saw as better.” And he remembered what she’d said-impoverished-and barely dared utter the words. “You became us! ” Remembered what else she’d said: less sophisticated. “You simplified your culture, someone did, something, some ruling elite maybe, and became us-”