Larry Niven - The California Voodoo Game

To the strains of music drawn from a hundred cultures and miraculously woven into a single skein, the concept of motherhood burst all cultural boundaries to strike a single nurturing chord. Through the cinematic eye the cornfields of Kansas became the rice paddies of Vietnam, then the banana plantations of Jamaica, and then a million acres of sugar cane in Hawaii. Earth became one vast farmland tilled by a billion calloused hands, feeding ten billion hungry mouths.

It was an image whose time had come.

Alex Griffin's thumbprint summoned a glass-walled elevator tube. He began to rise through the floors. He waved to workmen as he slid past them, dwarfed by the multileveled enormity of MIMIC.

Dream Park, like Disneyland before it, brought together all the myths of mankind and displayed them on a single stage. Cultural prejudice withered before such an onslaught of fantasy.

As individuals, human beings are weak and vulnerable. Families to tribes to nations were an inevitable progression. Mankind was ready to take the next step.

Why should Alex Griffin quit his job at Dream Park to control the North American headquarters of the Barsoom Project? Dream Park offered all the responsibility any one man could want.

The walls and floors buzzed and thrummed with activity. Elevator banks were being disguised behind secret doors and hidden panels. Workmen could ferry equipment up and down MIMIC, from one end to the other, without interrupting the Game to come.

At the bottom of MIMIC's central well, lights flashed and glittered like a flaming silver mine. Was that reality or illusion?

At the sixth floor Alex stepped out, then threw himself back against the wall as a synthesised voice chanted, "Please take care, wide load coming through."

An oval mosaic as immense and mysterious as a Mayan calendar hummed past, balanced impossibly on its edge upon a little robot cart. The cart flashed red lights and droned its ritual warning as it slid past, blithely made a ninety-degree turn, and trundled merrily on its way.

It had almost disappeared before he recognized the oval as a mask rendered in strips of hide and lengths of bone. It was ten feet high, striped and curlicued with dusky earth tones. Its lower teeth pierced the upper lip jaggedly.

It was hideous, then suddenly comical. The eyes were platters of ancient flattened cola cans, the nose a plastic crucifix stenciled with the name of a popular chain of motels. How many other bits of cultural effluviums could he spot?

The floors and walls jiggled as the Cowles Mach VIII speakers ran their testing sequences: peals of maniacal laughter, bursts of rain, jolts of thunder, the chilling rumble of a hundred thousand pairs of jackboots. Sudden sharp explosions and shrieks of agonized pain.

Far down the central well, cranes that looked like toys prepared shuttle bays for the coming Game. Just above Security, on level four, automated tractors plowed ground and workers planted tombstones in a voodoo graveyard.

Griffin trotted up four flights of stairs to the tenth level, which was now flooded waist-high with warm water. A pontoon catwalk bobbled around the edge. Balance was tricky, even more so since he was already drunk with the sights and sounds, the hot acid stench of burning metal.

Voodoo! Naked slaves praying for protection to dead gods, gods rotting in graves left half a world away. An impotent religion embraced by the lost and degraded. Why voodoo?

Because Richard Lopez, Game Master extraordinaire, loved the notion! As McWhirter explained it, voodoo was a cultural maze. It was African shamanism and pantheism touched with Muslim influences and transplanted to the New World. There it absorbed Christianity and eventually held millions of worshipers in thrall beneath the very noses of the oppressors. Eventually it found its way back to nineteenth-century Africa, carried by repatriated descendants of slaves. There it absorbed gods from India and Asia, and bounced back to America in the hearts of African immigrants. It ate everything, surrendered nothing.

As a coherent mythology, voodoo was a jellyfish interesting but difficult of purchase until Lopez had grafted in a spine from an obscure twentieth-century text… Tony had smiled mysteriously and would say no more.

From thirty feet away there came a blinding flash of light. A twenty-foot-long amorphous shape reared up from the water. It had no features; it had no detail. It was just a blot of dancing incandescence. It wavered like an obese sea serpent, for a moment resembling something half-man, half-crocodile…

Then with a wall-trembling belly flop it disappeared back into the pool. Wave generator, or underwater bomb, or just hologram and sound effects?

It burst up again, and this time Alex could make out vague details of form and feature. It was a bronze, taloned thing, or maybe a copper flame crawling in slow motion.

Crazy place. Alex Griffin walked lightly through a realm of devils and demons, slipping around the inner rim of the tenth floor. He thumbed a hidden panel and chuckled delightedly as it rotated to admit him into its shadowed secrets. Pink footlights guided him down a twisting staircase.

He passed a corridor recently sealed off: the engineers had yet to evaluate the quadrant's structural stability.

A chunky woman of indeterminate age prattled rapid-fire to an attentive circle of Cowles officials. She had very short black hair tucked under a construction cap. Her raiment was eccentrically diverse: ancient yellow ski pants, a blue velvet tunic belted at the waist with a bicycle chain, thong sandals cut from sheets of corrugated plastic.

A squatter.

For fifty years squatters had haunted MIMIC. They ate whatever they could find in its cupboards, sold whatever they could scavenge. It was squatters who had promoted the myth of radiation-spawned mutants.

When Cowles had actually begun to develop the project, there had been sticky legal problems. What belonged to whom? Did squatters have homestead rights? A few claimed to be descended from tenants marooned in the building. When Cowles lawyers took them seriously, suddenly everyone was descended from tenants.

The situation could have become comically complex, but a battalion of social workers and attorneys had moved in, offered schooling, jobs, vid-rights for the squatters' stories. In two sticky cases Cowles lawyers had demanded sixty years' back rent, and that fixed that. Dozens of the elder squatters had been hired to act as guides, experts on the Folly's structural stability.

The squatter peered at Griffln shrewdly as he passed. She was telling the senior engineer, "The floor in here is about twice as stable as you'd expect, seeing as the Snake's alive on level eight."

The senior engineer, a short round black man named Ashly Mgui-Smythe, wiped his forehead with a plaid handkerchief, then folded it prissily and tucked it into a back pocket. "You… said that the Snake was alive on eleven, and the floor turns out to be stable."

She cocked her head. "Welll… maybe it was gone by the time you got there. But it bit pretty sharp on eight, section two, now, didn't it? And it's here. I feel it."

Grudgingly, Mgui-Smythe nodded. "Eggers, give me another check on this level. Folktale or not, if they've got record of quake damage here, maybe we missed something."

"On it, Ash."

Mgui-Smythe turned around and brushed his fingertips against the wall. "Be safe-wall sector six off. I don't like the cracked floor." He traced a jagged line of ruptured concrete with his toe. The crack had been filled with a bonding compound, but it extended across the entire corridor, vanishing under the farwall. It made Griffin nervous, as well. "Check level eight, too. Hazardous Environment Game or not, losing Gamers is bad for business." His expression warmed. "Hello, Alex."