Dream Park

heat flow.

'That smells just too good, Cas.' The blonde's nose crinkled in delight. 'I can't take any more. I'm going to go right over there and dive in.'

'I'm afraid they might not pull you out. They'll just divvy you up with the other-I mean, with the pork. Ahem.'

Gwen's fingers drummed on her hips. 'Could you run that past me again, Ms. Spindleshanks?'

'Oh, no, I think that one is happy right where it is. Offle! Tony! Over here.'

The men made their way to the waiting ladies. 'Come on,' Acacia said after a firm hug, 'let's find a place to sit down.'

Oliver asked, 'Won't Chester want to debrief you?' Gwen stamped her foot. 'Oh, forget Chester for a minute. Let's have our own debriefing.'

He considered that. 'Done. It's not cheating to compare notes privately.'

They strolled past the thatch huts to a small stand of trees in view of the main square. They watched the preparations for the feast, and Tony laughed. Acacia pillowed her head against his shoulder as they sat, and nudged him with her small fist.

'What's so funny, cowboy?'

'I'm just wondering how much of that food isn't really there.' He stretched luxuriously and dropped one arm around her and pulled her closer. 'You know, I've almost stopped wondering which of the natives are real.'

'Glad to hear it,' Acacia murmured, playing in the grass with the toe of her shoe. 'Anyone you only see at a distance, anybody engaged in repetitious movement, and usually anyone you see killed violently, is a hologram. Lopez will use as many holograms as possible.'

'Why? Aren't holograms expensive?'

'So are actors. Remember, other Gaming parties are going to run this Game. The holograms are part of the package, but the ac­tors have to be replaced every time.'

Oliver lay on his stomach in the grass, watching the native chefs. He asked, 'What happened to you ladies whilst we were riddling with the savages?'

Acacia wagged a finger at him. 'You first.'

Oliver and Tony obliged by telling everything they could re­member. Gwen and Acacia listened intently, and finally agreed that they had received much the same.

'Trappings were a little different, though,' Gwen mused. 'There were three old women. One was in a trance the whole time. A younger woman translated for us. She's supposed to have been to missionary school as a girl.'

'They brief these actors pretty well.' Tony plucked a straw from the ground and stuck it playfully in Acacia's hair. 'It seems they can answer anything we ask.'

Acacia laughed. 'Don't be too impressed. I'm pretty sure Kasan wears a transceiver under that bushy hair. Whenever he stops to pray, or talks gibberish to one of the ‘natives,' or scratches his ear, he's talking to Lopez.'

'Is that legal? I mean, doesn't that put us in a vulnerable posi­tion?'

'Not really. The I.F.G.S. is watching Lopez pretty closely. I think Lopez considers himself clever enough to destroy us, and Chester particularly, without cheating.'

Oliver sniffed the air. The rich aroma of roasting vegetables and pork had drifted up to them. 'Ummm-um. Have you ever been very glad your name isn't Goldberg? It sure feels like dinnertime.' He started to get up, then hesitated. 'What time is it, anyway?'

Acacia dug into her backpack, bringing up a disk watch set in an antique silver dollar. 'I've got six-fifteen. Why?'

'Oh, just my devious mind. It's an hour and forty-five minutes before the Game closes down for the night. We're about to be treated to a banquet. Nothing drastic has happened for, oh, call it five hours. We're all pretty relaxed. Do you follow me?'

Gwen looked gloomy. 'Oh, Ollie. Sometimes I don't like the way you think. I hope you're wrong.'

'So do I.' Acacia's hand was straying over the hilt of her sword. 'But I wouldn't go Banco on it. Eyes open, troops.'

The serving plates were attractive silvery disks with the word 'Chevrolet' stencilled on the side. Offie laughed and nudged Gwen. 'Hubcaps.'

Gwen nodded and pointed a chubby arm toward the nearest hut. 'Look at that window. What's a glass window doing in a New Guinea village?'

Oliver squinted, scratching his head. 'You know, I didn't notice that before.'

'I think it's a truck windshield. Take a closer look around this place. A lot of it is patchwork like that.'

He began to see what she meant. The thatch roofs of several huts had been finished with canvas, and many of the natives' knives seemed jerryrigged from flattened tin cans. Most of the spears were bamboo, but a few were thin steel tubing with nastily sharpened points. Incongruously, the roofs of a couple of the huts sprouted broken remnants of television antennae, and come to think of it, weren't a few of the women wearing skirts made of parachute silk?

'Echoes of a Golden Age,' Ollie said soberly.

There were roast pork, yams, and leafy vegetables only S.J. could name. Although the meat had been tended largely by the women, it was divided and served by the men. Larry Garret, a Cleric almost as dark as the natives, passed around a hubcap full of steaming maize. It was golden, delicious, and its kernels dripped with some sort of liquefied fat. Garret told Oliver, 'If Lopez keeps feeding us like this, I don't care what he hits us with.'

'Amen to that, Brother.' Oliver muffled a belch. 'Pass me the beer, will you?' Garret handed him the big gourd. The beer was warm and flat, but Oliver quaffed it with evident pleasuro.

The Garners squatted or sat on the dirt and ate and talked and laughed. Some of the natives were eating too, but many just stood back and watched. Oliver had waved away the offer of lukewarm raw milk. 'No, I really don't think I'm ready for pig milk, thank you.' The native waiter had pretended not to understand and passed on. It was probably cow's or goat's milk, Ollie thought, but you never knew.

Some of the warriors were pushing something out on a plat­form. A massive television set with a broken screen. Gun-Person walked slowly out of his hut and raised his knobby arms. First the natives, then the Garners, fell silent.

He spoke for almost a minute. Then Kasan stood and trans­lated. 'Pigibidi wishes to demonstrate his own magic to the magi­cians here gathered, that they might see what once was, and un­derstand.' Polite applause greeted this announcement, and Kasan waited it out. 'Once this box brought us pictures and sounds from all over the world, yes, even beyond its edge. Our enemies have rendered it worthless, except when our great chief uses his own strength to animate it. See now his greatness.'

Pigibidi squatted on his heels, and began to chant, shuffling his feet in a strange rhythm. Now his chanting grew strong, now it dropped so low that they couldn't hear it at all. Slowly he uncoiled from his squat, mouth opened so wide that his facial wrinkles seemed to radiate outward from it like the rays of the sun. A gurgling howl rose from his throat. Tendons and veins stood out in bunches from the old man's neck as the howl reverberated from huts and trees.

In the bowels of the dead television set, merely a mid-twentieth-century flatscreen model with shattered tubes and a crusted inte­rior, a light began to grow. It pulsed like the mating glow of a firefly, shifted from red to orange to bright yellow, and the yellow curled from inside the set as a tongue of flame might leap from a fire, and there was suddenly a flat bank of opaque amber fog at least five times the size of the set.

The old man rolled his head in great circles. His eyes became glassy, his body trembled as if shaken by wind or cold. But he danced on.

Now the ground itself shook with the force of his incantations, and as it did, shapes formed in the smoke, dark winged shapes that seemed to wobble to the rhythms as they flew. There were perhaps a dozen small shapes within the cloud, flapping their

wings with seeming awkwardness, darting and climbing, becoming more solid by the second.

Gun-Person screamed and fell to the ground, twitching like one helpless in the grip of an epileptic seizure. He