Kevin J Anderson (10 page)

"Are you going to bring out any other old characters, Mel?" Tyrone asked.

David wanted to shake Tyrone and shout at him to face the reality of their situation. But Tyrone just didn't
understand
.

Melanie glanced at Tyrone, considering, then her eyes lit up. "Any character we've introduced before is fair game. David's not going to pull any punches." She refused to look at him. "So I'm going to use everything I can think of. David captured Jules Verne and the Sitnaltan weapon. We have to find weapons of our own."

David resented how she automatically included Scott and Tyrone in her conflict with him ― unless Melanie was speaking of her own characters when she said "we." David couldn't tell.

"I ― " Scott said, then paused. He took off his glasses; his eyes looked small without the thick lenses. He seemed vulnerable and uncertain of what he wanted to say.

"I've been thinking about this mixup with the Game and our world. There's really no way we can deny it. Not after the Barrier River, and the explosion last week."

He nodded toward the blue hexagons on the map and the blasted parts around Scartaris's battlefield. The force released from that struggle had damaged Tyrone's kitchen table and burned David's hands.

"So if
this
is really going on ― " Scott said the word 'this' as if it encompassed everything. "Then I have to worry about something else. The Sitnaltan Weapon that Verne and Frankenstein built, that
I
directed them to build ... they made it from the ship that David and Tyrone created out of their imaginations. The power source they took couldn't have been totally real. And yet it couldn't have been totally imaginary either."

He stopped for a moment, as if waiting for the others to understand the implications.

"If it's part real and part imaginary, the Sitnaltan weapon may be a lot more devastating than we know." He swallowed. David could see him struggling with the concept in his own mind. "What if it's
more
than enough to destroy Gamearth? What if it can backlash outside the map? What if it's enough to destroy
us
too?"

Tyrone groaned comically. "This is boggling my mind!"

David ignored him and felt a shiver up his spine. That fear had been tickling the back of his mind, but he had not faced it until now. He remembered times when he didn't seem to have complete control over his own characters. If Siryyk the manticore wanted to detonate the weapon now that he had Verne captive, David wasn't sure he could stop it.

He let his voice fall to a whisper. "I'm beginning to wonder just who created who."

Melanie looked at him in a rare moment of rapport, but then the defiance returned to her eyes. "Or is it mutual now? Are we and the Game so intertwined that we can't survive without each other?"

――――

"Once we have finished gathering data, we are by no means finished with our research. In fact, the work has only begun, because then we must discover how to apply that information for our own benefit."

― Dirac, Charter of the Sitnaltan Council of

Patent Givers

Mayer felt sore from riding the bicycle. She wobbled along the path, unsteady on the hard tires but impressed by the distance she had already covered. She still had several hexagons to go before she reached the Outsiders' ship.

Only a few hours after leaving Sitnalta, Mayer's legs already ached from the effort of pedaling and steering over the bumpy terrain. Her dark hair streamed with sweat in the sunshine. She had spent too many hours in her tower workroom, pacing back and forth, thinking, scrawling designs in chalk on the dark wall ― and not enough time exercising her body.

With determination, Mayer pushed her legs down, applied force to the pedals, which turned the gear, pulling the chain and rotating the wheels, and carried her forward. Simple exhaustion wasn't going to stop her.

The black bicycle had been welded together from scrap piping, one of several prototypes developed by her father Dirac in his younger days; but the invention never caught on in Sitnalta. Probably, Mayer now thought, because the thing had never been designed with the comfort of its rider in mind. The seat was a flat metal triangle with rounded corners and two rigid springs that made each bump feel like a blow to her buttocks. The minimal padding did little to ease the ride.

But it would take a team of engineers to get a steam-engine car up the winding paths Mayer knew she would be traveling. The initial Sitnaltan research team to the Outsiders' ship had needed strong characters to hoist and lift their vehicles around sharp corners in the mountain terrain. Mayer could never do that by herself, and so she was left to her own abilities. She could travel faster with the bicycle than by walking.

She rolled across a hex-line from flat grassland into abrupt mountain terrain. Mayer began to puff as the quest-path took a steep upward turn. After only a short while of this, she stopped and dismounted from the bicycle, letting it fall to the dry grass and rocky earth.

Mayer patted her thighs, stamped her feet, and flexed her hands to keep the blood circulating. She blinked and turned to look behind her, across two flat hexagons of grassland sprawling toward the intricate city of Sitnalta.

A bird flew up from the grass, and Mayer squinted her eyes, studying the shape of its wings, the color of its markings. She tried to recall the proper genus and species name, though biology had never been her strongest talent. Professor Frankenstein would have known instantly.

Mayer's face shrank into a sour expression at the thought of the dark-eyed professor. He had disappointed her and angered her at the same time. After the destruction of the manufactories by the cruel force that seeped up through the Sitnaltan streets, Frankenstein had vowed to find a way of combating the invisible enemy.

Straight-backed and on fire with determination, Mayer went to the professors' workshop. Here Frankenstein and Verne had created so many inventions that even the Council of Patent Givers could not keep up with them all. She burst through the door without knocking and stood watching the dark inventor.

He continued pacing around the cluttered room without even looking up at her. Mayer saw a thousand different inventions, some disassembled to be repaired, some half-constructed and then abandoned, not because they would not work but because the professors had grown more interested in something else.

Frankenstein had knocked half-finished gadgets to the floor, ignoring any damage he might do to them. He simply needed more table space. Diagrams of human anatomy and large drawings of muscles and joints were pinned up on the walls and lying on the table in stacks. Scattered dissection reports of nervous systems poked out from other piles beside scrawled treatises on how different parts of the body worked.

Professor Frankenstein had always been fascinated with living things and how they worked. He had spent much of his early solo effort in creating mechanical automatons, imitations of living things. Metal fish swam in the fountain pools, moving mechanical arms assembled items in the hazardous areas of the manufactories, claws picked up castings too hot to handle.

In the jumbled workroom, Mayer's dark eyes were wide and fascinated as she drank in all the details. "I've come to help you, Professor."

He turned, startled into annoyance by the distraction. "I don't need any help. I didn't ask for any."

Mayer leaned with both hands on the edge of Frankenstein's work table. The sharp windings of a screw stung her palm; she brushed it aside. "You work better with a partner. I know I can help you. Haven't I proven I can do it? Look at all my own inventions. I'm as angry about this ... this intrusion as you are ― let me contribute."

Frankenstein's shoulders slumped, and his face took on a weary expression. "Yes, I did work well with Verne. With
Verne
. But he's gone. Now I work alone."

Anger welled up inside Mayer. She drove herself as hard as any character. She would be a good match for Professor Frankenstein, if only he would let her. "Professor, I must insist ― "

Frankenstein picked up a metal plate and tossed it to the floor among the scattered debris there. The crash and clatter startled Mayer; she heard something break, the tinkle of glass shards falling to the floor. The professor glared at her, and she saw how angry he was, how absorbed he had been in his own work.

"Please leave!"

"You vowed to rescue Sitnalta from this invisible force. It's been happening four times a day. Different buildings, different parts of the city. We've got to find a way to stop it."

"I will," Frankenstein said, "if you stop bothering me. Don't you see how difficult this is going to be?"

"Let me help!" Her head pounded with the intensity of her desire, but she felt that she had already lost.

"You can help by going away. If you have a brilliant idea, put it into practice yourself. You're a good inventor. Right now I've got my own idea."

Pointedly ignoring her further, he sat down on a stool and dragged papers in front of him, rearranging them on the table. He let his face show exhaustion and anguish deeper than anything Mayer expected. "I need to do it this way. This time. Now please ― let me work."

Mayer felt her lips trembling as she tried to contain her disappointment. "It's something to do with what you and Verne learned at the Outsiders' ship, isn't it? The information that you won't tell anyone."

He shook his head, but continued to stare at his drawings. "No. It isn't that."

Mayer knew otherwise. She thought she could tell when he was lying. She stormed out of the professor's workroom without another word, but in her mind she made promises to herself. She knew where to go. She would have to do it alone. She would have to hurry, before the invisible force continued to make the Sitnaltans destroy themselves....

It had been chilly that morning when she set out on the bicycle. The sluggish sea mist still crept through the hex-cobbled streets until the dawn grew strong enough to burn it off. Mayer pedaled out through the main gates as Sitnalta began to stir for the morning. Many characters had left their own research projects to help clean up destroyed buildings from the previous day's manipulations and to begin rebuilding efforts. They did not say to each other that the evil compulsion could make it all wasted effort at any time.

Mayer pedaled off along the quest-path, pushing herself to get to the Outsiders' ship as fast as possible. She didn't know how the travel restrictions spelled out in Rule #5 would affect her progress on a bicycle ― she would need to keep track and contribute more data to the Sitnaltan collection of information.

As she rested beside her bicycle on the mountain terrain, Mayer felt her leg muscles shaking, her body prickling from sweat. She took a drink from a small water flask and then shrugged the pack off her shoulders.

Crawling out of her warm outer clothing, Mayer felt the breeze cool the sweat on her skin, raising a few goosebumps. Once she started riding uphill again, the effort would keep her warm enough. She tucked the discarded clothing inside her pack without bothering to fold it, cramming it into any pocket of space. With a deep indrawn breath, she shouldered the pack again and righted her clumsy bicycle.

Mayer set off again, puffing and pedaling up the steep slope but making steady progress.

She had marked on her own small map exactly where to find the ruins of the ship, which lay crashed next to an abandoned Slac fortress. The first Sitnaltan expedition had left the excavation site the morning after Professor Verne rode off alone. Frankenstein had declared their mission over and ordered them to pack up and depart immediately, giving no explanation. Not until later, through hints, did the professor tell about his and Verne's dream from the Outsider Scott, showing them how to create a devastating weapon with what remained in the wreckage in the ship.

After they had finished, Frankenstein used a firepit in the old Slac fortress to burn all their plans and notes, so that no other character might know about the weapon they had developed. Mayer and many others in Sitnalta found this attitude appalling. Professors Verne and Frankenstein had created enormous numbers of inventions ― they had always shared every detail, every nuance. Just the thought of them destroying information that was common property, by law, of all characters caused friction with the other inventors.

Frankenstein remained firm, though. He and Verne had made a vow ― this was one invention they would not share. Not ever.

Returning to the ship, Mayer would find a way to learn what they had learned, or some other means to fight for Sitnalta. She remembered the words the Vailret had said as he confronted her on the docks at night, just before he and blind Paenar had stolen Verne's
Nautilus
sub-marine boat.

"
You tinker with your calculating machines and street-cleaning engines, but when faced with a problem your technology may not be able to solve, you dismiss it as something not to be considered,
" Vailret had said. "
Scrap your frivolous gadgets and invent something to stop this thing! If we fail, all of Gamearth could be depending on you.
"

Mayer had no idea if Vailret had been successful on his journey to the island, though the dragon Tryos had not been seen again. She didn't know what had happened to their greater enemy, Scartaris ― but Verne had disappeared with his secret weapon, and even Frankenstein didn't know what had gone wrong.

The force corrupting Sitnalta might have something to do with Scartaris, or the Outsiders, or the rumored end of the Game. Their own detectors showed nothing, and Mayer had no idea. But she would take Vailret's challenge and try to invent something to counteract the danger.

Her dark eyes glazed with the effort to keep pushing uphill, focusing only on the quest-path before her. Her skin was flushed, her face set in the obsessive expression she thought might be like the one she saw so often on Professor Frankenstein's face. He was one of the greatest inventors since Maxwell. But he apparently did not have the same admiration for her, since he spurned her assistance.