November 5, 2085
The lander arrived precisely on time: a spiderlegged caterpillar settling in a fountain of dust on a wide red double-spiral target pad. The shuttlecar rolled up against its side. Automated flanges locked into place. The doors opened in sequence, three sets, sealing behind the passengers as they boarded a car that looked like a silver sausage. The car ran them to the base airlock and another triple airlock.
At first Kendra saw only two exceptionally statuesque women striding down the ramp, one Asian with straight black shoulder-length hair, the other European with brilliant red hair of similar length and texture. Both were conspicuously muscular with fashionable fat padding. Then they stepped apart, revealing a tiny man-no more than five foot two-walking just behind them as if they were a royal guard.
Even in rumpled travel clothes, Xavier radiated theatricality. Somehow he transformed his typical newbie’s lunar clumsiness into performance art, bouncing and then awkwardly catching his balance with every other step. His escorts were better at it.
Still, she could tell that he struggled to remain unimpressed by his surroundings.
“Mr. Xavier?” Kendra asked.
“Just Xavier, please.” He was beautiful for a man, shaven-headed, with blond eyebrows capping a delicate face. His eyes were a brilliant blue, intense and intelligent. He was small-boned, barely rising to her shoulder, but already flirting with her. “My assistants are Wu Lin and Magique. Magique does not speak.”
“Welcome to Heinlein base,” Kendra said.
Xavier’s angelic little face split in a smile. “I have to admit I thought I’d been everywhere and seen everything. These last weeks have opened my eyes.”
Kendra and her holographic assistant exchanged an expression of surprise.
Kendra said, “We have a pretty tight schedule today, but we want to get you to the game center, and then to your rooms.”
He nodded. “That would be fine.”
They waited for the luggage pods to be loaded onto their vehicle, and then boarded a tube-car for the gaming center.
“I understand that we’ll have privacy?”
“Yes. Much nicer than the dormitories,” Kendra said. “Your own private crater.”
His answering smile was pornographic. “Perhaps you’d care to show it to me.”
“One crater’s pretty much like another,” she kept her voice light and pleasant. “Not luxurious, but hopefully adequate.”
He was staring out through the glass partition at glare-white and coal-black scenery. “Luxury is not imperative. My requirement is seclusion.”
“I’ve heard that gaming parties tend to run wild…”
He shook his small, perfectly formed head. “Not what you think. I can become… intensely emotional when I game. Lamps and chairs and waitrons and cleaner mechs can be at great risk. There is often… a bit of breakage. ‘To create you must first destroy.’ I believe Picasso said that.”
“‘ Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!’” She paused, then when Wu Lin seemed puzzled, added, “Dr. Seuss said that.”
Magique choked on a silent giggle. Xavier’s thin lips curled up in a smile.
“At any rate,” Kendra said, “if space is what you need, we have plenty of it.”
“So… Dr. Seuss,” Xavier said, nodding as if she had confirmed something. “Have you children?”
“No.”
“Married?”
Kendra said, “Once upon a time.”
The red-haired Magique smirked. She was gorgeous, and muscular with a fatty sheath, in the current European Union Fit/Fat style. The goal was to maintain a perfect blood pressure and immune profile, with the roundest curves possible. She signed to Wu Lin with her plump hands. Wu Lin giggled.
“How long have you been up here?” Xavier asked.
“Seven years.”
“And the ratio of women to men…?”
“We’re outnumbered. As you must know.” Kendra sighed. “I’m fine, thanks. No help needed on that front. While we’re at it, may I ask…? Magique said something that triggered merriment.”
Wu Lin nodded. “She said you look like a twentieth-century fitness model.” The redhead nodded happy agreement.
The trio radiated a cozy, slightly predatory sensuality. Kendra couldn’t resist visualizing a zero-gee anaconda ball, and suppressed a chill of revulsion. Maybe they just thought they were being polite, assuming she’d feel rejected without an invitation to the fun and games. Fortunately, they had reached their destination, and she was able to change the subject.
The Game Center was a dome, of course, the ceiling five meters high. The last few workers were still nipping and tucking, and the smell of fresh paint still tinged the air. Xavier bounced onto the central stage, stopped and looked around himself. He said, “Very similar to the Euro Dream Park unit.”
He waved his hands in an input field, and it calibrated. She’d thought she’d be edging her way out the door, but Xavier’s manner had become more professional the instant he began manipulating alien forms like stringless marionettes. His annoying, smarmy persona faded, and in its place appeared a virtuoso performer. Despite her irritation, she found the transformation fascinating.
A circular metal stage in the center of the room glowed, and a ball of yellow light levitated above it. Xavier bounced up the two steps to the platform. As he did, an insectoid alien bounded into the floating light field. When the little man shifted position, the insect followed his motions precisely. It wore a bandolier hung with weapons shaped to its big padded hands. It moved with an oddly disjointed grace. When Kendra glanced over at Xavier, he was performing the same odd dance.
Wu Lin doffed her shawl and joined him on the stage. In immediate response, a second creature appeared in the hovering light beside him.
Magique manipulated the controls, and suddenly six aliens crowded the field. She joined them onstage, and now there were nine. Somehow they interacted with each other as if they were actually manipulated by nine different puppeteers: talking, rolling, jumping… Xavier and his assistants lending eccentric mime-like precision to their roles, populating an entire imaginary hive with a succession of simple shrugs and shoulder hunches.
Kendra was open-mouthed with amazement. These were masters at play. No… at work. They were calibrating the equipment, accustoming themselves to the reduced gravity. She felt honored to witness such a masterful display.
Xavier stopped, and stepped down from the platform. For all the exertion, she noted that his breathing was barely elevated. His eyes seemed distant. “Tomorrow, we’ll start looping the movement for the holos, the virt, and the bots. We’ll need to meet with the local players by day after. The gamers arrive in eight days.”
“Yes. Six P.M. adjusted local time.”
He mused. “NPCs arrive thirty hours earlier. We’ll need to be ready. I want a sleep cycle adjusted for Montreal winters.”
“Polarized dome, or artificial lighting? Whichever you prefer.”
She couldn’t help it-she was actually quite impressed by the little man’s artistic focus. Subtract the egotism, and despite his height she might have found him appealing.
He yawned. “I’d like to see where I’m sleeping now.”
“May I ask a personal question?”
“I did,” Xavier laughed. “Proceed.”
“Your father is still alive, isn’t he?”
He pressed his lips together tightly. “Yes.”
She paused, trying to work out the right way to ask the next question.
“Was he… worried about his calculations? The Aeros asteroid?”
His face tightened as well. “That’s one thing he never doubted. Did you? You had to have been… what… seven years old?”
“I still remember,” she said. “Everyone frightened. Your dad bounced this asteroid out of its course. It came within ten thousand miles of Earth. Something could have gone wrong. We can’t survive without Earth-”
“Not Dad. Not ever.” His smile was entirely too bright.
“I remember,” she said. “Yes. Well… shall we take a look at the maze itself?”
“Give us a few moments first, would you?”
Kendra nodded, and left them.
Wu Lin and Magique mimed their way through phrases of human and insectile body language, as well as a few that defied simple categorization. Then Xavier froze the images.
Panting, Magique flipped her red hair and waited for approval. Her hands babbled at Xavier.
“Good as anything I’ve ever worked on,” he replied. “First rate. Kinesthetics are a little better in California, but the auditory is spot on, and I think the visual might be superior. Feels lighter, somehow. Better depth and color correction at oblique angles. I think they modified some of the French waldo gear.”
“But is it good enough?” Wu Lin asked.
He nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m going to give them the time of their lives, and Angelique…” His smile went dreamy. “Oh, she and I have old matters to resolve. And Wayne Gibson… never in the history of the world has anyone traveled so far to be crushed so badly. My children… this is going to be fun.”
The Beehive dome was deceptive. Two hundred meters in diameter, it was smaller than the first major gaming dome, still active in California. Not large enough for a major event. Ages before, a meteor had plowed deep into an ancient maze of lava tunnels above a pool of dirty ice. Digging had not been the tricky part. Sealing the tunnel walls, making connections and barriers, creating an airtight lacework under a simple water shield, and knowing it was airtight, enough to bet lives… that was the hard part.
And now it was filled with a hundred major and countless minor bubbles of various sizes, distorted spheres of woven aluminum alloy. Doors and tubes linked the bubbles, but they would seal in case of a leak or blowout.
Five or six tall Lunies still worked scaffolding around the walls of a cavernous sphere. They paused to observe the visitors. Xavier ignored them.
“Of course,” Kendra said, “you’ll have a more complete tour later, and will be supervising the final work, but we wanted you to inspect the interior.”
He nodded. “We had a mock-up in Calgary, but the gravity… my, it really does make a difference.”
He jumped to the top of a huge, frilly mushroom and then up again. He scampered hand-over-hand up the wall, a performance that would have impressed the greatest rock climber who ever lived. Xavier’s gorgeous posse followed him up, climbing over frost that crumbled under their hands and rained down at Kendra. Again and despite herself, Kendra was impressed.
This was like playtime at the gifted weird kids class.
It was time to move on. Kendra said, “Your rooms are ready, and your luggage has already been deposited. Shall we go?” She led them away.
When hundreds of human beings breathe each other’s recycled air for months at a time, the opportunities for chemical or biological contagion are endless. Someone was checking the system at all times, and no one paid a bit of attention to the men in the blue suits.
Doug and Thomas Frost had watched everything, pretending to check wall conduits for the dome’s trace contaminant control system. They remained silent until after the little man and his assistants retreated to privacy.
“So… that was Xavier,” Doug said.
Thomas suppressed a nasty, quiet chuckle. “I wonder,” he said, “what he’d say if he knew how strange this game was really going to be?”