Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

“Hate to meet that glitch in the dark,” Dr. Vail said, just behind him.

Vail was sipping at a cup of coffee. The aroma was heavenly. Alex took odd satisfaction that Vail didn’t look quite so damned hearty at eleven at night. “Glad you made it, Doe. Yeah, I don’t believe it either.”

“It’s worse,” Cary said glumly. “We have an Actor stranded in the game. What’s going on in there?”

“Stranded… right. The monster did stalk her, it’s obvious. Was it supposed to stalk somebody else? Because-”

“Yes, Yarnall, the National Guardsman, later tonight. Now he’s in there with no script. Mr. Griffin, he’s a recovering alcoholic. He’s in there as an Actor, but it was supposed to be therapy too. This Game, we’re watching the Actors as well as the Gamers.”

Vail said, “Maybe we can work on a player’s head better if he thinks he knows the script. It’s worth a try, and we’re trying it this run.”

“What are the other Gamers doing? I mean, right now.”

“Eating,” Vail said. “In an ordinary Game this would be their down time, their rest and meal time. Because this is a Fat Ripper, we’re using this to program. The Game is still live, it’s just a different phase.”

“Show me.”

The Gamers were all sitting around eating, and it was a queer spectacle indeed, reminiscent of nothing if not the banquet sequence at the end of Through the Looking-Glass.

The food on their plates was… alive. It was smiling at them, occasionally talking back to them. Some Gamers seemed to have adjusted; others had pushed their plates aside, appetite vanished.

The computer was coding and recognizing the players so that their names and ID numbers appeared below their images.

Yarnall was quiet. He seemed to be uneasy, restless, and Griffin could understand why. He should have been home by now. On the other hand, salary-wise he was probably on Golden Time.

Marty and Charlene Dula were sharing a flat-topped rock for a table. They seemed companionable enough, but didn’t have much to say to each other.

A hefty guy named Max Sands looked uncomfortable too. He kept casting eyes at one of the Dream Park temporary Actors: Gwen Ryder Norliss, an Actress in the Game. She was garbed as an Eskimo, and she was sitting next to a warrior with the same last name… a husband. Sands would be suffering from thwarted lust. Griffin could sympathize.

He keyed in the audio.

Orson Sands: “The thing is, we’re carrying gear from Falling Angel. The frames in some of our backpacks, the medicines, this”-he hefted a spool of thin line-”that Eviane was carrying: it’s all magical. It’s all been run around the world enough times to make the Cabal sick with envy.”

Gwen Ryder: “That’s wonderful, but don’t underestimate the Cabal.”

Kevin Titus was the skinniest one out there. Alex winced at the sharpness of cheekbones under tightly stretched skin. Bone-thin fingers leafed through a somewhat dog-eared folder: “Did you see this? My dossier has changed. It read different this morning.”

Someone said, “You’re crazy.” But there was a brief flurry of files, and yelps of amusement as the Gamers discovered that the print in every file had miraculously changed.

Kevin brayed victoriously. “Switched! Mine talks about Pewitu, taboos. I can’t kill a seal until it’s on the land.” He pulled a hand-held computer from an inner pocket, started one-finger typing on it. “Sounds easy enough,” he said distractedly. “What about you, Trianna?”

There was a lot of energy in that glance. Trianna didn’t seem to notice. “My friendly-ghost assistant is named Kaspar. Clerk from Oregon, white, died in Nome in 1910. Shot. I mustn’t eat eggs, but I can eat the birds after they hatch. Yucko! If we follow these taboos, do you think we can win?”

She was looking at Johnny Welsh, but Kevin answered. “Why not? We kicked their butts first time we saw ‘em. We’ll do it again.” He tucked his computer away.

Max: “But did Eviane break a taboo or something? I don’t understand why it went after her like that.”

As he talked, Max cut into what looked like a swordfish steak, and it squealed on his plate. A face formed in the grain of the steak, and said, “Will you please pay attention to me? Try not to talk so much while you’re eating? Do you have any idea how irritating it is to be eaten by somebody who doesn’t pay any attention to you?”

Johnny Welsh cocked an eyebrow at Max’s plate. “I’ve had dates like you.”

Trianna hit him in the side of the head with a balled napkin.

Max glared at his swordfish. “Now listen. We had a fight. You lost.”

“That’s no excuse for rudeness. I died to keep you alive, and one day you will die to feed my ancestors. Think about it, mister.”

Alice, pudding! Pudding, Alice! Remove the Pudding!

The campfire conversation began to chill.

Vail chuckled maliciously. “A perfect example. It is unconscious and emotional ingestion of food, drugs, alcohol, whatever-for other than conscious motivations, that gets people most deeply in trouble. The more respectful attention you pay to your body and the things you put in it, the less likely you are to abuse it.”

“That’s really interesting, but not what I need.” Alex wished Vail would stop waving his coffee around. The smell was driving him nuts. Then again, Dream Park’s mad psychiatrist might be ghoulish enough to do it deliberately, studying Griffin’s conditioned responses.

Alex gritted his teeth and punched in Marty’s “silent” code, knowing that a steady vibratory trill would alert the security man.

Hippogryph waited a few seconds and then got up and moved away from the others. He walked toward where a line of scrubby bushes shaped a crescent moon; but he turned aside before he reached it. The curve of the hill hid him when he took out his communications kit.

“Marty. What happened out there with this Eviane woman?”

“She was stomped by a ghastly. Griff, we just lost somebody. It’s no big thing.”

“Marty, you don’t get it. No one is supposed to be killed out of a Fat Ripper!”

Beat. “What?”

“This isn’t a Game for points. You read the material. This is a Game to teach people lessons. Why should she get killed out? She didn’t make a mistake. Later on you’ll have opportunities to get killed out if you make a mistake, but not now. What point would there be?”

“I… all right, I see the logic. I suppose this is a secret?”

“You bet. We don’t want everybody knowing we have a problem.”

Marty must have heard the impatience in his voice. “I’m slow catching up, boss. They rap me half to death.”

In truth, Marty looked exhausted. It would not do to forget that others besides Alex Griffin might be having problems. “How are you, Marty? Are you going to get through this?”

“We warriors will carry out our duty, 0 Griffin. Besides, the worst part must be over. Have you been watching, Griff?”

He hadn’t, but Marty would surely expect him to. “A little.”

“That scene in the sauna, the smokehouse? Most of us are overweight, Griff, and we all look like it with our clothes off, and I looked just like them. I felt so… fat.”

“Any sign of trouble? Aside from terminal embarrassment, I mean..?“

“No. Nobody’s trying to off Ambassador Arbenz’s niece, far as I can tell. Gruff, it’s hard to tell what’s funny in this environment. I should have been told that we can’t be killed out.”

“I wasn’t told till this morning. I might have told you, and then you’d have been too relaxed. You’ll be too relaxed, unless you watch yourself.”

“So how did it happen to Eviane?”

“The one thing that I do know is that Eviane-her real name is Michelle Sturgeon-was in Dream Park before, and her file has been sealed.”