Larry Niven - The California Voodoo Game

Tuesday, September 27, 2059

The house was a rambling, Spanish-style two-story dwelling with a red tile roof and enormous bay windows looking out over a cliff above the Malibu beach. It belonged to Millicent Summers, and although she had tried for years to get Alex Griffin out for a week, this was the first time he had accepted the invitation.

The sun was minutes above the horizon, swathed in orange clouds, so that Alex could look almost directly at it. Millicent and Tony seemed as torpid as he, lounging in wet swimsuits and dampening terrycloth robes, listening to the hard, steady roll of the waves below.

Alex felt exposed. There was a part of him that wanted to go back to Dream Park, to its safety and consistency. To be able to reach out and touch a button and change the image: now a beach; now a mountainscape; now the far side of the moon.

But you couldn't control the tides. You rode them, or avoided them, or they drowned you.

They were all pleasantly tired after a day of snorkeling and swimming and roaming in the hills. Smelling real air, chasing real birds. Running on a real beach. Watching the sun set on a real horizon.

He felt so small.

"I don't know," Tony was saying. "I know what I want to do. I know what Cass wants. I just don't know if I can give her a chance."

"Then don't do it for her," Millicent said. "Do it for yourself. You have a chance to see whether there was ever anything there. If it doesn't work, fine, but let it be real this time."

Do it for yourself, she thought. And if you don't know who you are? Then you'd better the hell find out. There's always someone ready and willing to fill an empty cup.

Alex donned a happy expression as Acacia Garcia came back from Millicent's house with a platter of margaritas. Alex tasted his, licked at the salt along the rim, and said, "Compliments to the mixologist."

Acacia dimpled. She was thinner, by maybe six pounds. She had lost some of the sass, and her cheekbones were a little too sharp. Her hair often looked a tad disarrayed, as if she had only fussed with it as an afterthought. Some of the carefully cultivated seduction ploys were still in evidence, but the frayed edges were showing. And often, she caught herself in mid-posture, mid-calculated sigh, mid-knowing wink and stopped.

Shorn of her artifice, there was something wistful about Acacia. She was still an exquisitely lovely woman, but she seemed… frailer somehow. And loud noises or sudden shadows made her flinch.

Tony took his drink, and her hand. She sat next to him on the lounge chair. They didn't speak; they hadn't spoken much around Alex or Millicent, but they had taken long walks together, and after four days at the beach house, Tony had moved into her room.

He stood, still holding her hand, and motioned with his head toward a cut stone path winding down to the beach. She nodded, and they started toward it and then she stopped. Acacia turned and faced Alex, as she often had over the last five days, and during the weeks since the end of California Voodoo. She looked as if she might be about to say something: "Thank you," perhaps, or "I've changed," or

… maybe something else. Alex couldn't guess. Apparently Acacia couldn't, either; she just broke eye contact and led Tony to the stairs and down to the beach, where they would walk together, talking, until long after dark.

"What do you think?" Millicent asked finally.

"I think that they'll be together as long as Acacia is frightened."

"Of Bishop?"

He nodded.

"Should she be?"

"He's a pretty scaly guy," he said, trying to be light about it. Despite the attempt, his mood darkened. He stretched his right hand out, examining the fingers. "I still have trouble typing. Swimming today, my ribs felt full of broken china."

"I'll bet you're glad you put breakaway glass on the patio." She grinned. She could see that he was still locked in that memory-not a pleasant place to be. "How long will it take to heal, Alex? Not your body. I mean inside. Where you feel beaten."

"Millicent, you know I threw that fight."

She sipped. "Uh-huh."

"I used Sun-tzu against him. 'It is inferior to destroy an army it is better to capture it.' We'll end up with the entire Ecuador connection."

Millicent said nothing. He was annoyed with himself for rushing to fill the silence with more words.

"Mill, I planned it all. Between Vail and Lopez and Tony, we knew that he would have multiple copies. He went mountain climbing before the final assault. The bastard put one in my own apartment! By the time we found it, Tony and the tech boys had already cracked the cipher on the disk he left in the reactor. We put in our own version of the data. He had to come for it-MIMIC was all sewn up."

"And?" She was watching him. She was listening to his words but paying attention to his expression. His ears burned.

"Anyone who tries to use the ScanNet data gets mousetrapped. After that, nobody will trust Bishop. Even if he recovers a genuine copy of the data, who'd buy it? They've lost everything. With any luck, they'll kill him." The word "kill" was spoken too flatly, with too much control, and Millicent knew.

"It hurts you, doesn't it?"

"Millie, for Christ sakes…"

"Naaah." Her voice tautened. "Bishop scared you, Alex. He was too smart, too fast, too strong. You had your little schoolboy turn at him, and he drop-kicked you through a plate-glass window-"

"I wore a cup-"

"Shut up!" Her intensity was shocking. She had turned away from him. Alex reached out and turned her face. A tear had formed in her right eye and she tried to blink it away. "You listen to me, Alex. It's time you learned what everybody else knows."

Alex felt a great void open within him, and he stood, face a mask. "I'm not sure I want to hear this."

Millicent locked glares with him, and before her sudden, unaccountable fierceness, he had no defence.

And he sat down.

"Bishop," Millicent said, "is the perfect loner. Trusts no one. Uses everyone, and everything. Life is a game, and the only rule is to win. And there's some part of you that envies him that, that total freedom. What you've never considered is the cost."

"What cost?" he muttered.

"Love. Friends." She took his hand. "Family. Alex, you could have been Nigel Bishop. All you'd need is to live in constant fear. To see the whole world as a battleground. He beat you in the battles and you beat him in the war because you're stronger than he is."

He looked at her quizzically. "Stronger?"

"Why can't you see it? Don't you know how much courage it takes to care? To let other human beings in? Bishop is what he is because he has no options. You had me, and Tony, and Harmony, and even Vail, dammit. You had family. We care about each other. And together, we took him apart. Why do you think that you have to do it all yourself?"

"Because…" The next thought was stuck within him. Unspeakably anachronistic. And too damned real.

Millicent's eyes softened. "Because that's what a 'man' does?" He couldn't look at her. "Well, you're not a man. Look at me! You're not a unit-you're a human being. A 'man' is just part of what you are. Don't throw the rest away, like Bishop has, Alex. Don't throw the people who love you away. Let us in."

He still didn't, couldn't, face her. Alex felt as if that void within him had suddenly widened. As if he were tumbling now, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

A cold breeze blew in from under the dying sun, and he began to shake. "I need a blanket," he said lamely.

"Alex?" Her voice was low, almost a whisper. "I watched you hurt yourself with Sharon, and with Acacia, and I think sometimes that you only open yourself when you know it won't work."

The sun was lower now, and the orange of the clouds had deepened. More of them had clustered there, obscuring what little light remained in the day. "Seems like that," he said finally, almost to himself.