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.'
'Ashly. More squatter stories?'
Mgui-Smythe shrugged. 'Can't take any chances.' He glanced at his watch. 'Thirty-eight hours to go.'
'Gonna make it?' Alex's eyes sparked challenge.
'Two gets you five.'
'Good enough for me.' Griffln moved on. Moments later he reached a door labeled with an hourglass symbol in Day-Glo red, as eye-catching as a black widow's underbelly. Radiation. Griffln thumbed the lock and entered his apartment.
MIMIC was only eighteen minutes from Cowles Modular Community by tube, but a four-day Game was coming up. Alex preferred his sleeping quarters close and snug to the action. It had been easy enough to have his personal living pod skimmed in from CMC and hooked up to MIMIC's modular wall. Some small adjustments to the electrical fittings, a water line, fiber optics, and bang: instant home. In four days it would be flown back over the hill.
His kitchen, bathroom, and living room were standard issue. Bedroom and personal office were modular hookup, could be bolted down and shipped anywhere in the country in twenty-four hours. Meacham hadn't been wrong, he'd only been too early.
There were rooms to spare at MIMIC. This was a converted office, not one of those shaky monstrosities that slid up and down the modular wall on tracks, though Tony had had it touched up to look like the older shells.
In the two weeks Alex's module had been at MIMIC, Sharon was the first person he had entertained.
Quite a night. He still felt smug and steamy at the thought of it. All they had needed was bedroom and kitchen. And bedroom.
He stretched out on the mattress and felt it mold to fit him, felt it purr and knead.
Very little sleep last night. Like most first encounters, it had been a whirlwind evening, a veritable symphony of mutual exploration with a sinuous and greedy lady. He could always catch up on sleep-one rarely had so fine a reason to miss it.
He had four days off, and Dream Park was about to hold the greatest Game of all time. He and Sharon would share in it, not as Gamers, but to help maintain the illusion of reality for the players.
He ground his palms into his eyes and stared into the mirror across from his bed. A big, gangling stranger stared back at him, body taut from countless hours of training, a certain rakish hollowness surrounding the pale green eyes. They were algae green, emerald with hints of blue and black swirled together. The lips curled naturally into a smile just now, flat but not quite cynical.
Sharon's scent was still in the air. Quite distinctly, he remembered her legs, their silken warmth as he peeled her nylons away. She had whispered wordlessly, feverishly, as the two of them sank back onto his bed. It had molded to their bodies, adjusted to their thermal patterns, and given back precise waves of heat and vibration, the exact levels of firmness and fluidity necessary to maximize pleasure.
He was lost in the bed's undulations. Swept away in Sharon's pungency, the smell and taste of her, the way she whispered his name, or clung shuddering to him as she tumbled over the edge and into the long, long descent.
Dammit, he just plain adored her, even the imperfections. Assiduous study had found only two: a discolored molar at the top right of her mouth, and the featherlike remnant of an appendix scar. In every other way, the lady was just too damned perfect.
He remembered the flash of coolness in the moments directly afterward, when she turned away from him to light a cigarette.
A spark of light, followed by the brisk tang of contraband. She inhaled harshly.
'You ready to do three months in County?'
'You turning me in?' she asked. She made a rustling sound. 'Want one? Tennessee Tornado.' Her voice was cool. She had given him so much, so completely, almost submissively, but then something inside her drew a curtain, retreated into observer mode. That's all, folks.
'Later, maybe.'
'I'll leave the pack.'
The sound of an exhalation cut off all possible communication. Nothing special, or even unusual, in Griffin's life. Just an abrupt cessation to closeness, then a pat on the butt as she rose to shower.
Griffin felt a surge of panic, swiftly suppressed as he realised he wanted more.
He lay in darkness, absently scratching at an existential itch.
Postcoital irritation? His hand searched out and found the plastic pack of contraband tobacco. He shook one out halfway and slid it into his mouth. Found her lighter and sparked the cigarette into smoke. Drew shallowly at
