THREE

HARI SLID A hand inside the back of his toga, reaching for the ripple of scar at his lumbar vertebrae. He massaged it fiercely through his chiton, trying to rub away the ache; his back felt as if he were lying on a rock the size of his fist. That dull pressure was as dim and rounded as painkillers could make it without knocking him out altogether. He had work to do.

His scar always hurt when he was at work these days; maybe it was this goddamn new chair. It had looked good in the catalog, but somehow he couldn’t get comfortable. His back usually started to ache while he rode his private lift down to his office—buried in the bedrock below the San Francisco Studio Center—anticipatory twinges shooting up into his shoulders while the lift sank its silent three stories. The ache would grow all day long, most days; usually it was bearable.

Lately it had been brutal.

This goddamn chair . . .

I should have kept Kollberg’s, he thought. He was a sack of fucking maggots, but he knew how to be comfortable.

One of the first things he’d done, when he’d finally won his struggle to actually direct the operations of the SF Studio, was redecorate his office.

It was something he’d always been—vaguely, more or less—planning to do, ever since the Studio installed him here six years ago. At first, he’d taken a very real malicious pleasure in sitting inside Arturo Kollberg’s office suite, in using the disgraced former Chairman’s chair, his desk, staring at the ocean through Kollberg’s Sony repeater. But that kind of petty shit swiftly pales. Kollberg’s office furniture had been rounded, organic, womblike, no sharp corners anywhere—kind of like Kollberg himself. Hari had loathed this office just as he’d loathed its former occupant, but for years it hadn’t occurred to him that he could change it just because he didn’t like it.

It had, in fact, never occurred to him that Kollberg had chosen his own furnishings; things look different to a man who grew up Labor. This wasn’t just the office where the Chairman worked, it was the Chairman’s Office. It had seemed to him a sort of mythic sanctum, like the throne room of an Overworld king, its trappings dictated by millennial tradition rather than the whim of its occupant.

It was funny, now—looking back on it, he could only shake his head with a rueful smile. He’d always had a guilty suspicion that this office wasn’t really his, that he had been installed here as a piece of replaceable equipment, a temporary plug-in until a real Chairman came along to take the job. Like a Fool King in the Kirischan spring carnival, everyone would pretend he was in charge only so long as he didn’t try to make any laws.

The Chairman’s office was now a place of dark-grained paneling, deep pile carpet, an immense wraparound desk of burled walnut imported from Overworld, walls lined with heavy bookshelves filled with real books. He had a few plays, a few histories, but nearly all fiction in leather-bound editions: fantasies, mysteries, even some socially irresponsible, slightly risky works from the vanished genre of science fiction. Most of them had been brought out from the vault on Marc Vilo’s estate. If anyone asked—say, the Board of Governors, or even the Social Police—Hari could claim that he culled the old novels for Adventure ideas; it gave him a perfect excuse to maintain a collection here that he could never have kept at home.

The only problem was, his fucking back still hurt.

The analgesics he used helped a little, but not much. The Studio doctors wouldn’t give him anything stronger; they didn’t really believe he was in pain. One of them would occasionally remind him that the touch/pain receptors around his wound had been severed when his bypass was installed—which was true; the scar itself was numb as a slice of steak—and that he really couldn’t be hurting, not there.

He was willing to allow that the pain might be psychosomatic. So what? It still hurt.

Hari had given up arguing with them. Instead, he carried a small bottle of grey-market meperidine hydrochloride in his purse, which not only took the edge off the pain of his back, but dulled the pain of his life, as well.

And if it was all in his head, why did it hurt worse now, when he could sit in a chair that he liked? His new chair was an old-fashioned high-backed swivel, upholstered in calfskin over gel-pack stuffing, more expensive and better designed than the one in his study in the Abbey. It should have been more comfortable than his goddamn bed, let alone that shapeless blob of a chair he’d inherited from Kollberg.

He forced his attention back to the display of his deskscreen, which was filled with the latest inspection reports from the mining colony in Transdeia. He’d heard some disturbing rumors about shit going on over there; Garrette, the Overworld Company’s Viceroy, was ruthless as a child molester, and some people were saying he had been turning a blind eye to Transdeian pogroms against subhumans on the duchy’s borders. So Hari could fantasize about a surprise inspection, dream of writing a report that would really stick Garrette’s head in the shitpot, and it would keep him happy enough for an hour or two—

The annunciator on his deskscreen bleeped for attention.

He jumped a little, then shook his head and thumbed the acceptor. His itinerary vanished behind an image of his secretary’s weasely face. “Yeah, Gayle?”

“It’s the soap booth, Administrator. They say it’s urgent.”

“Put them through.”

“Right away, sir.”

The view changed to a nervous-looking man in tech whites.

“Uh, Chairman Michaelson, sorry to bother you—”

“Forget it, technician. What’s up?”

“Uh, well, we got Rossi’s visuals back. He’s awake, and he doesn’t seem injured . . .”

“Mm, that’s good news.”

Francis Rossi was in one of Hari’s pet projects, his Interlocking Serial Program. The ISP involved ten different Actors, all doing three-month shifts in Ankhana. Instead of the usual seven- to ten-day Adventure, their first-handers could sign on for any length of time, from a few hours to a month, and they could even switch back and forth between all the different Actors in the ISP. This let the Actors lead something resembling normal lives in their Overworld personae, let them develop significant relationships with natives and with each other, since they didn’t have the pressure of maintaining slam-bang action-packed-adventure every minute. It made their experiences deeper and more emotionally powerful, without the endless violence that other Studios used to artificially generate excitement.

The critics loved it; the audiences were somewhat less enthusiastic—they called it by a derisive epithet that dated back to the early twentieth century: soap opera—but Hari intended to stick with it as long as he could.

Hari thought of it as a kinder, gentler form of Acting, less repugnant than the wholesale slaughter that had made Caine, for example, so successful—and it was certainly easier on the Actors. He’d been afraid Frank Rossi was going to be the ISP’s first fatality in two years.

On Overworld, Rossi was known as J’Than, a freelance bounty hunter loosely affiliated with the Ankhanan private security service Underground Investigations. His story arc was usually the most action-oriented of the entire ISP. J’Than projected a carefully cultivated facade of hardboiled amorality; Hari had personally created the character, and had made Rossi read The Maltese Falcon, The Underground Man, and The Last Good Kiss.

J’Than had been nearing the end of his current three-month story arc, tracing a gang of politically connected slavers. Last night, he’d swung a freelance security gig at the hottest society show in Ankhana: The Nasty Little Princess at Alien Games, which in its very first week was already being declared the hit of the decade. He’d bribed his way past the off-duty PatrolFolk who guarded the private boxes.

After that, it had been far too easy.

The whore assigned to that box had been very forthcoming; human, long-legged and beautiful, she had dropped dazzling hints of where she might be able to lead him, and had followed with a truly spectacular blowjob. With her raven hair splayed across his loins and his penis buried deep in her throat, he never heard the box’s door open behind him. He didn’t even know he was in trouble until a bag went over his head and its drawstring mouth closed around his neck tighter than the whore’s lips around his cock.

When his unknown assailant choked him out, the techs in the soap booth switched his audience over to another Actor in a related storyline, also present at the premiere. When Rossi wasn’t immediately strangled to death, two impromptu betting pools sprang up, one predicting the time and the other the method of his eventual demise. But by 1000 this morning, he was still alive, and still unconscious.

“Okay, he’s awake, great,” Hari said. “Switch his audience back.” Why were they bothering him with this? They knew what to do—all this was SOP, covered in the ISP guidelines that were posted on each screen in the techbooth. “Thanks for the report, technician.”

“Uh, Administrator, wait—that’s not, I mean, I think there might be a problem . . .”

Hari sighed. “All right. Go ahead.”

The tech explained. They had been casually monitoring Rossi’s telemetry, waiting for him to wake up. They had the usual instructions: to switch his audience back to his storyline when he recovered consciousness. When the hero is taken by the bad guys, something interesting usually follows, whether it be a climactic confrontation with the main villain or a simple death by torture.

But Francis Rossi woke up in a forest.

And not in a forest, too. His transponder signature clearly still came from Ankhana—from Alientown, in fact: almost certainly from inside Alien Games.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes, sir; all diagnostics check out. Uh, you think I could pipe his POV through to your desk, sir? It’s easier to just show you than it is to explain.”

“Yeah, sure,” Hari said, frowning. “Put him on.”

The image on his deskscreen became noontime in a forest, in the midst of a sort of jumbled shantytown, built of woodland scraps—

Populated with elvish corpses.

Rossi’s POV rolled smoothly through the shambles, as though he were mounted on wheels and someone pushed him from behind. The bodies lay strewn haphazardly in the clear areas, some fresh as beef in a slaughterhouse, some blackened with decay, bellies swollen to bursting with internal gases. Rossi’s involuntary retching echoed in the booth.

Hari’s mouth compressed into a grim line, and he reflected that being confined to a desk job had its advantages: Caine had been in places like that more than once, and he had a vivid memory of how they smell.

The belly of one of the corpses burst with a sound like a wet, sloppy fart. Rossi’s POV panned right and left, showing the extent of the carnage—bodies everywhere, some hacked to pieces, most just dead—and then dollied forward once again.

It was that motion, that familiar net-feature swing of POV, that gave it away. Hari’s fingers began to tingle. With one startling intuitive leap, he understood exactly what was happening. Whoever had Rossi was using him like a video camera.

This was bad; for Rossi, this was about as bad as it could get.

They know he’s an Actor.

Garbled, hissing semiwords came over the techbooth’s speakers, the broken half phrases of the mainframe’s translation protocol struggling with an unfamiliar language. The telemetry readout of Rossi’s heart rate and adrenal production had shot deep into the red end of the scale, dangerously high. “What’s that language?” Hari asked. “You have analysis yet?”

“The TP doesn’t recognize it, sir. Maybe some kind of elvish dialect, you think?”

Elvish dialect my ass, Hari thought. “Look at his telemetry. I think Rossi understands, even if the TP doesn’t. He’s scared out of his fucking mind—he’s not even monologuing, for Christ’s sake. Frank’s a pro; it takes more than some rotting bodies to make him forget his Soliloquy.”

Now the view on the POV screen swung to its first image of a living creature: a bald, sickly looking elf with no eyebrows, tall and broad shouldered for his race. He wore a simple, new-looking shift of clean white, belted at the waist over leggings of forest brown. He walked toward Rossi with a peculiar staggering limp, as though his legs didn’t work well and he had to throw his weight from side to side to keep his feet under him.

When he spoke, the techbooth speakers muttered gibberish.

“Who’s this guy?” Hari asked.

“Don’t know, sir. We’ve seen him once already. He seems to be the captor.”

Hari stared at the screen. “Close the translator.”

“Sir?”

“Shut down the translation protocol.”

“But sir, then the computer won’t have a chance to analyze the phoneme—”

“Listen to me, you idiot. This whole thing is staged, you get it? He’s not in a forest, he’s in Ankhana. At Alien Games. This is a little play, and we’re the audience. They’re sending us a message, and they damn well sure wouldn’t go to this much trouble and then use a language we can’t understand. Close the fucking translator.”

“Yes, sir.”

Closing the program silenced the speakers for two or three seconds; then they came on again with the elf’s unfiltered voice, exactly as it fell on Rossi’s ears.

“. . . no reason to bother showing you what you already know you’re doing to us, here on the borders of Transdeia: the murders of our people, and the rape of our land by your mining machines . . .”

The mikes on the techs’ screens in the booth were sensitive enough that Hari could hear them both whisper Holy crap in perfect unison.

Yeah, he thought. That about sums it up.

The mysterious dialect spoken by the bald, sickly looking elf with no eyebrows was easy to understand.

It was English.

THE SOLE DEFENDER of the part-time goddess was the crooked knight. He was the reflection of knighthood in a cracked mirror, and what he did, he did backward.

The crooked knight wore no armor, and he did not care for swords. He was small and thin, ugly and graceless. He could not ride a warhorse, and no squire would serve him. He was a deceiver, a manipulator, his life built upon a lie.

His strength was the strength of ten, because his heart was stained with corruption.