Larry Niven - The Moon Maze Game

The dome rose before them, and the shuttle slowed. Darla had leaned into him more fully. He could feel her body heat even through his dress uniform.

“Ask me in, darlin’?” she asked.

“I’m not sure I could find my way without you.”

She giggled as the door opened. The hall outside was sealed to the side of the shuttle, the extending walkway firmly in place. “I assume my luggage is already here?”

“You assume correctly,” she said. “Twenty-one, and twenty-two. Here you are. Your thumb?”

He extended it, and she took hold of it, and pressed her lips against the pad. They were pillow soft, and quite warm.

Wayne’s throat felt thick. “I’m actually not sure I’m supposed to have anyone in the room with me… technically speaking, I’m on game time.”

Her smile was gamine, her bright green eyes twinkling at him. “These pods need permission for overnight guests,” she said. Then she pushed her thumb against the card. It flashed green. “See? I’m already clear.”

Questions instantly raced through his mind. When had she inserted her name in his file? Had she been so certain of herself? Or…

“Are you…?”

“Shhh,” she whispered, and shushed his words with a kiss. Her breath was peppermint and brandy. Then she pulled back. “I asked for you. That’s all you need to know.”

An NPC? On a mission of seduction? Was Xavier operating Off the Grid?

She shook her head. “We’re on our own time until morning,” she said.

“Is that the truth?” He came close enough to brush noses with her. She never blinked. “Are you friend… or foe?”

Her eyes were hot enough to melt glass. “Search me.”

Chris Foxworthy was floating on air. The halls of level four were almost deserted: It was between shift changes, and most people on the Moon drifted toward the time zones of their youth, all else being equal. Chris had grown up in California, and on the West Coast it was now two o’clock in the morning. In a little more than five hours, he’d be on the clock!

Gaming had been a part of his life long before he reached Luna and took a position as Kendra Griffin’s personal assistant. In California, either in commercial venues or hooked into the ’net wearing reality gear, he’d loved the international community of loons who would forgo a weekend’s sleep to be part of the latest Middle Earth or Berserker campaign. They were his folk, and in fact it was in the beginning of the Oort Cloud Game back in ’68, which began in a secret alien ship buried beneath the lunar surface, that he first fell in love with Earth’s Moon.

His first years on Luna had been as exciting as anyone could have hoped, but anything eventually becomes just another twenty-four hours, as the daily grind transforms the extraordinary into the commonplace. He’d thought about putting in for a billet on Ceres, when the first rumors about the Moon Maze Game filtered down through the ranks.

Flash forward two years, and Chris was pulling every string, calling in every favor, and cutting every corner to get on the NPC short list. Even then, he’d had to tap-dance his ass off. There was nothing easy about it, and even in a community as seen-it-all as the Lunies, a chance to participate in the first major off-planet game in history was intoxicating. Sure, there’d been some minor zero-gee LARPs on some of the stations and L5s, and there’d been brouhaha and global coverage, but this was different: a real gaming environment, top-notch players… This was for the history books, and Mrs. Foxworthy’s little boy Chris was in the middle of it.

The door to his sleep capsule sighed open, and Chris stepped in, having to slide sideways to slip past his costume, which hung next to the little bathroom stall.

He fingered it appreciatively, laughing to himself. All the NPCs had received their Victorian costumes days before, and attended a four-hour workshop on carriage and dance. Of course, they had received far more training than that for the days ahead, and he chortled at the thought.

Most of them would ride the shuttles to the gaming area fully masked. It was going to be Halloween tomorrow, and even the most sober Joes would have to work hard to keep the grins off their sorry faces.

The gamers would walk the halls, getting into mischief and then escaping into their anonymity. He could hardly wait.

Chris brushed his teeth and sealed himself into the shower stall. The hot water bounced back at him from angles highly unlikely under full gravity, and he happily scrubbed and scrubbed. For the next three days, a good bath would be hard to come by. The water clung like a sheath of jelly, but Chris was used to that. He used his hands like blades to scrape water off his limbs into the suction grills. He finished by letting the cyclone whip the moisture back into the vents, air drying.

He stood to look at himself in the mirror. Fit enough, thin, bit of a paunch but nothing to be ashamed of: abdominal muscles just didn’t work as hard up here, whether for breathing or posture, and it was common to see people with toned arms and great, low heart rates, and little potbellies. He was going to be fine.

Chris programmed his bed to start cooling a half hour before wakeup, and asked his clock to monitor his sleep rhythms to find the best time to awaken him within fifteen minutes of 8:00 A.M. lunar standard time. He was sliding into a mild dream state when his door chimed.

“Yes?” he asked as a sleepy-eyed man’s face appeared in his mirror.

“Costume change,” the man said. “You are chosen for an upgrade. It will only take a minute.”

The guy’s voice was vaguely accented, like middle European… Bulgaria or something. He hadn’t seen the guy before, but he figured the Dream Park people had to be sending up all kinds of new talent. No surprise there.

He opened his door. The guy stood maybe a centimeter shorter than Chris, but broader across the shoulders. The ready smile seemed a little too ready, as if he was trying to stay polite and focused after a long, long day.

Hell, he could empathize with that.

The man held a square box in his left hand, and a metal slip with his right. “Thumb here,” he said, and Chris stepped back as he stepped in, lowered his head as the door sighed shut. There was a brief, very brief moment when something in Chris’ mind said This doesn’t feel right Then he felt the arm slip around his neck, and knew he was in trouble.

But then, so was his attacker.

There were many favorite sports Lunies used to keep themselves fit, and one of the most popular was nullboxing. Actually, real nullboxing was performed in zero gravity, a combination of grappling and striking performed in a chaotic cluster of jabbing elbows, gripping hands and frantic head-butts. On the Moon, there was so little gravity that most boxing or karate-type footwork went to hell pretty fast, but the resistance of another live body made wrestling, and nullboxing training, a pretty intense way to get your PT points. And Chris had been there from the beginning, sweating and snarling through his workouts three times a week for the last three years.

And one thing he knew was that newbies, even those with grappling experience on Earth, took time to adjust to the change in gravity. An Earth-bound combat man would have to be ungodly strong and agile to turn a front somersault with a full-grown opponent on his back. Chris was neither. He simply knew that the move was possible, and the man who attacked him did not.

The effect was startling. When they went off their feet, his assailant was taken completely by surprise, and loosened his grip long enough for Chris to slam elbows back into his face.

Only the first one landed, but it was enough. In an adrenaline-crazed frenzy at a sixth of earth gravity, the two men exerted enough energy to send them flying into the walls at jarring speed.