century British Raj military uniform? The actual insignias had been removed, but the style was right. He guessed a female soldier of fortune. The woman’s name was Sharmela Tamil, a Gold Ticket winner from Sri Lanka. Not an IFGS kingpin, but a loyal fan who had dropped her hundred bucks-or the local equivilent-in the lottery.
They entered a bank of elevators (oops! lifts) in which he was polite enough not to notice the anachronisms. There was a limit to what the IFGS could modify on the moon without infringing upon safety or utility.
The door slid shut. The elevator fell with a recorded rattle.
The most interesting personage packed in the little room with him traveled not on her feet, but in a capsule with twin five-inch treads. This would be Asako Tabata, the TechWitch herself, the girl who was probably the best pure gamer in the world. Five years ago she would have dominated the entire proceedings. In the intervening time, muscular dystrophy had finally caught up with Asako. It was a miracle she was there at all.
She couldn’t walk. Most certainly she could no longer climb, and that was a real pity, because Asako had been one of the IFGS’ finest wall crawlers. But by fan request and special dispensation, she was attending the first lunar game as an actual player, not merely an NPC. He wondered at the negotiations for that, and guessed that many of them had been commercial in nature. But how in the world did they justify such technology in a nineteenth-century game?
Time to find out.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “Do I know you?”
Her answering voice was partially synthesized, but you would have to listen very carefully to detect it. She played behind the shield of her isolation bubble. No longer able to breathe without mechanical assistance, she had invested over a million dollars of her lifetime winnings into the damnedest gaming costume imaginable. It was her life support unit, but the gleaming silver and gold capsule had both arms and wheels.
“Asako Tabata,” the speaker said. Behind her shield, she smiled as her lips moved. He had never met her, but had seen her in interviews and gaming vids, and the computer voice matched her own very closely. “Step-niece to the esteemed Prince Dakkar Nemo,” she said. “He himself fashioned my capsule, that I might join him exploring beneath the waves, despite my physical infirmities.”
Captain Nemo. Of course. A man of sufficient genius to develop an electrical submarine by the time of America’s civil war. Who could doubt that, if he had survived, he might not create something along the line of Asako’s life-support bubble? In all likelihood, she had only been given a bare outline. It would be her job to improvise in the days ahead, creating all the backstory she wished.
Asako was in her late fifties now, her face sharp-edged and pale. The wrinkles of time and woe had stolen much of her appealing waifishness, but when she smiled, he felt an almost absurd urge to bow.
And did so. “M’lady Tabata,” he said.
She couldn’t raise a hand-the disease had progressed too far for that. With a barely audible hum, the machine nodded her head for her. As the lecture progressed he scanned her treaded cocoon.
“You may not know me, but I know you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Her lips moved, but her voice sounded a bit augmented. “You are Lieutenant Wayne Gibson.” A pause for breath. “They say that in India, you saved an entire regiment during the late unpleasantness.”
She was feeding him. Late unpleasantness. He wondered what that referred to? So… he was British, and a war hero? “People exaggerate,” he murmured.
The elevator doors opened, and his claustrophobia vanished in a single sigh.
The room yawned, surely the most cavernous on the Moon. Its domed ceiling stretched high above them.
The walls were draped with gigantic red-white-and-blue Union Jack starbursts. A standing-room only crowd burst into applause as they entered. If he’d been nonplussed by the NPC-lined halls up top, what happened next was an absolute assault.
A banner stretching from one side of the room to another read: The Adventurer’s Club Welcomes Our Daring Crew!
Only then did Wayne look down. The floor was composed of some transparent material, plastic or glass or something else, set over a swimming pool or reservoir. The water was clear enough to see golden coral growing thirty feet beneath them… and even as he watched, a squadron of merfolk swam into view, a wedge of bronzed skin, emerald flippers and for the females, discretely positioned chest shells. He estimated about fifteen of them, but it was difficult to be certain because other guests obscured his view. The pyramid of swimmers fractured into smaller groups, then pairs. They scooted and somersaulted through the water, then reformed into a wedge and swam out of view.
All but one. One mermaid remained behind, a pug nose with blazing red hair and a fleshy, muscular body. Fit/Fat again. Looked good on her. She gazed up at him, and winked one emerald eye. Bubbles gushed from her lips as she mouthed the word: Later.
She swam away.
“Quite amazing,” a rotund fellow in Beefeater garb said. His handlebar mustache was slightly askew. “I believe Professor Challenger brought them back from Fiji.”
The room was filled with bejeweled and gowned celebrants, perhaps two hundred of them in a room that had probably never held more than a hundred and fifty. They displayed an array of costumes that must have occupied every amateur or freelance seamstress and tailor on the Moon for months. What a show!
“Hallo.” A tall, broad man in another red Beefeater uniform approached. His British accent was phony-thick, but dammit, at least he was trying. He looked like a fleshy John Wayne, with a receding hairline and strong laugh lines. The Duke approached with his hand extended, and Wayne automatically reached out in return. The very vaguest of recollections danced at the edge of memory.
“Good seeing you, sir!” the guy said. “Name’s Chris Foxworthy. Met you two years ago in the desert.” Ah. Vegas?
“Had a good run with you there, and actually took honors.” So… he might have come through the low-level game there, and won a few points.
“Good man,” Wayne said. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I came when called, of course. But it was all so hush-hush. Do you know what the boffins are up to? They certainly have enough to work with, after… well, you know. The unpleasantness.”
Foxworthy wagged his head solemnly. “Sorry old boy. Not for me to say.”
A string quartet seated in the room’s corner began a Straus waltz and four pairs of NPCs danced with clockwork precision.
This was all just lovely. Clearly, they were already on camera. Performing a waltz in one-sixth gravity while pretending to be under Earth Normal was quite a trick. Not all of them succeeded, despite obvious practice. Sharmela Tamil had grabbed a female partner and joined the fun, but a too-enthusiastic spin launched them both into the air, to drift like autumn leaves. They looked just wonderful, as if they were floating.
He was certain that the broadcast and the inevitable edited video streams would be great hits.
An oddness presented itself: In the last five years he’d grown accustomed to the pop his knee made when he stood. Here, it didn’t. Less weight stress perhaps? He damned near pushed himself off the floor when he straightened, and noted that several of the others had the same tendency to bounce up when they moved.
“Have you met everyone?” Wayne asked, and steered Foxworthy over to Mickey and Maud Abernathy. Like Asako Tabata they were fiftyish now, and the last time he’d seen them before today had been in their Pushmi-Pullyu costume at a Dream Park New Year’s soiree. There was something different about them now, more than just the Middle Eastern costuming, and he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Mickey? Maud?” Mickey raised a haughty eyebrow. Right. Too much informality for nineteenth-century Britain. “Pardon. Mr. and Mrs. Abernathy? I would like to present Mr. Christopher Foxworthy-”
“Pleased to meet you,” Maud said.
“Charmed,” Mickey said. His accent was Cambridge layered over Cockney. Wayne suspected he’d been a scholarship kid. Maud, on the other hand, seemed veddy upper class.
“I suspect we’ll be seeing more of each other in the future,” Foxworthy said. In other words, despite his present costume, the guy was almost certainly an NPC who would be making their lives miserable in the coming days.
As they started their chitchat, he looked around the room, wondering where Angelique had gone. He became
