Timothy Zahn - Cascade Point

What kind of escape mechanism had he set up when he invented this net? He hadn't consciously made one, of course; he'd been the world-builder on that game, and getting out of the net had been everyone else's problem. But he must have had some ideas.

"Aha!" he yelled out loud, slapping the table that held his keyboard.

RH = HUNTING KNIFE, LH = HELIUM TANK; OPEN VALVE .2, SPRAY FOR 2 SECON KNIFE AND FRONT OF NET

It did the trick. The expanding jet of helium froze the targeted vines into brittle, nonsticky rods and protected the knife from any of the other vines it happened to touch. A little experimentation showed him that he could get away with just cooling the knife, and within five minutes he was free of the net. He'd emptied one helium tank in the process, but the other still held enough to inflate his balloons at least once more. A very fair trade, he decided. Laser again in his right hand, and with one eye on the overhead branches, he continued on into the woods.

—

"I don't understand this at all," the Drymnu said, clearly bewildered. "Where is the world Doomheim that this simulation refers to? Is this journey part of the racial history, or is it a plan for the future?"

"It is neither," the Sirrachat answered, still watching Elliot's progress on the Drymnu's monitoring equipment. "This is what fragmented races call a game. It's a stylized form of competition engaged in between two or more members of the race. There is nothing corresponding to games in our own cultures, just as other forms of intraracial competition are absent. Each game has an object or a goal and a set of rules which mimic, after a fashion, the laws of nature. In fact, the game is a sort of simplified universe, limited in both space and time, where the members engage in combat of a specified mode."

"To what end? Why create a new universe when a real one already exists?" "There are three reasons that I know of. First, it allows the members to engage in a safe conflict, one which threatens the life and health of neither member. Recall that the race is caught between two conflicting goals: the goal of each member to gain for himself, even at the expense of others; and the goal of the race as a whole to survive. Games help to channel the members' competitive drives."

"But that leaves less of this drive for the race to use for useful purposes," the Drymnu objected.

"You are beginning to understand," the Sirrachat said. "Its progress is thus much slower than it otherwise would be. The second reason is related to the first: Games allow the members to achieve a goal of success in a very short time."

"Are fragmented races so impatient, then? The stars hold the promise of great successes to all who reach them. Even in this planetary system there are goals to be achieved."

"You are not thinking like a fragmented race," the Sirrachat reminded him gently. "Many of the goals you have in mind would take longer than a given member's lifetime to accomplish. Bear in mind that each member feels the same desire for victory that we as complete races feel. You, I am sure, could feel only limited satisfaction in one of my victories, one which you yourself did not directly contribute to; in the same way, a fragmented race's victories do not wholly satisfy the needs of its members. Games help to fill this gap. And note an important side effect: Not only do games blunt the race's drive, but they absorb a great deal of its scientific and technological growth. Consider the work that has gone into the game we are watching, the time and resources that would otherwise have been used for other purposes. The members who designed the equipment and those who are the actual players all have skills of imagination and intelligence which would be vital to the development of the stardrive."

"I see." The Drymnu paused again. "You mentioned a third reason for games."

"Yes, I did."

—

Slightly surprised he was still alive, Elliot stepped out from under the last tree and stood once more on a vast plain. The forest had been grueling. No fewer than eight attacks had been launched at him, some of them back to back. He'd won all of them, but at high cost. His weaponry had been reduced to ten seconds' worth of laser fire and two concussion grenades, plus his hunting knife. His armor was damaged in several places, his left arm was injured and could only be moved at half speed, and he was limping from a piece of one of his own fragmentation grenades in his ankle. The Orion Nomad was in bad shape, and there was still at least a kilometer to go.

Ahead of him, dotting the plain, were thirty or so large humpbacked creatures, apparently grazing. With his binoculars, Elliot took a moment to study their small heads, flat vegetarian teeth, and defense-oriented porcupinelike quills. Clearly, they were not predators, and chances were they wouldn't attack unless he spooked them. Taking a deep breath, and one more look into the woods behind him, he limped carefully forward.

Several of the creatures paused in their meal to glare as he passed slowly among them, but none of them made any move against him. He was about twenty meters past the last one, and beginning to breathe again, when a group of six tigers broke from the woods toward him.

They were not exactly Earth-type tigers, of course; Elliot had given them that name after a run-in with three of the species in the forest, a battle he'd barely survived. With his injuries and shrinking power supply, he knew he'd never win another fight. And to make matters worse, the quilled animals were also apparently afraid of the tigers, for they had abandoned their grazing and were running from the predators... running straight at Elliot. It was a toss-up whether they would trample him to death before the tigers could get to him.

There was no time for conscious thought. Elliot's next move was one of pure reflex. Snatching a concussion grenade, he armed it and tossed it to land directly in front of the lead quillback. The creature went down, stunned or killed by the blast, and its startled companions stopped abruptly, some even turning to run in the opposite direction. Seconds later, the tigers reached them.

And there was instant pandemonium. Elliot, completely forgotten in the clash, kept moving, making for the edge of the plain as fast as he could. The sounds of the battle were fading behind him as he topped a rise—and barely managed to stop in time. Just past the rise was a three-meter drop into a twenty-meter-wide gully running across his line of travel. A gully filled with literally millions of moving black spots.

Army ants, or their equivalent.

Elliot wiped a sudden layer of sweat off his forehead. For some reason forever lost in his past, masses of insects horrified him as even tigers couldn't do, and even seeing them on a TV screen was enough to make him feel shaky. But he couldn't stop now. Across a gray mud flat directly ahead of him, nestled among some stubby bushes and the ubiquitous cattail plants, was the squat egg-shape that was his lifter. Opening the stopcock of his remaining helium tank, he filled the balloons and floated to a height of a few centimeters. Taking a deep breath, he fired a short burst from his jets and drifted over the ants.

His progress was slow, due mainly to a mild headwind, and—largely to avoid looking at the ants—he found himself studying the gray ground ahead. The closer he got, the less it looked like a mud flat, and the more like quicksand. It was, at least, an easy theory to test. Taking his compass, he tossed it ahead of him into the middle of the flat area. It hit with a muffled splat and slowly sank from sight.

So Elliot would simply continue flying over it, instead of landing as he had originally planned. But even as he made that decision, a memory tugged at his mind. Normally, he would have ignored it... but this had already happened twice on Doomheim. He had best be ready.