The Mind Pool (19 page)

The great game preserves of Earth’s equatorial and polar regions still existed, but hunting was strictly forbidden. Blood lust had to find other outlets.
Adestis
was one of the most recent, and perhaps the best ever.

Dougal MacDougal loved
Adestis.
Lotos Sheldrake had never tried it until today, but she hated the very idea of it. She had come along as part of MacDougal’s safari only for her own purposes.

She clung to her bright-sided weapon and struggled across spongy ground after the Ambassador. The air was thick and humid, and it was filled with large, drifting spores that floated along easily in the hardly noticeable gravity. Lotos batted them away from her head and peered in front of her for a first sight of the group’s destination.

There it was. No more than a few minutes walk away, the enormous brown tower reached far up towards the grey sky. Already Lotos could see the first file of pale-bodied warriors moving nervously around the entrance holes. They were tasting the air, feeling the approach of danger with their sensitive antennas.

Dougal MacDougal strode confidently in front, heading straight for the giant round-topped citadel. The forty other party members followed, with Lotos bringing up the far rear.

She suspected that she had too much imagination for this sort of enterprise. Already she could visualize the curved jaws of the defending soldiers tight around her waist, or the sticky and madly irritant spray enveloping her. The projectile weapon that she was carrying would kill a warrior outright—
if
she aimed true and made a hit in the head or the even more vulnerable neck. A body shot would not do. The soldier might die eventually, but before it did so the creature’s dying reflexes would make it fight on, killing anything that did not smell and taste right. And the soldiers were only the first line of defense. Beyond them lay the dark interior tunnels, swarming with their own defenders loyal to the death. Surrender or acceptance of defeat was unthinkable to the inhabitants of the tower. For the attacking party to succeed, it would have to penetrate to the central chamber, and kill its giant occupant.

Dougal MacDougal led the way to the base of the structure. Avoiding the main entrances, he fired a thread-thin grapnel line to a point high above ground level. With a running pulley he hauled himself easily up, to many times his own height. In half a minute he was braced against the hard wall of the mound, chipping a secure foothold. The others followed, helping each other. There was little risk at this stage, since even a direct fall would not be fatal.

Clinging to the pulley line, half a dozen of the attacking group lifted sharp picks. They hacked at the hard cement of the mound until they had made an opening big enough to crawl through.

Far below, the soldiers were in total confusion. They ran here and there, touching each other with their antennae and criss-crossing the approach routes to the tunnel entrances. None thought to crawl up the side of the tower.

“All right.” MacDougal was panting and excited—far more enthusiastic for this than for anything in his official life. “That’s big enough. Everybody inside.”

Lotos scrambled through, last in the group. She found herself in a spiral tunnel that wound steeply down toward the middle of the fortress. There was an overpowering smell here, of chemical secretions and fungal growth, and the curving wall was made of the same hard cement. But the tunnel was deserted. They ran along it at top speed, until after a hundred steps the leaders skipped to a halt. Scores of defenders were emerging from side passages, blocking the way ahead.

“Shoot your way through.” MacDougal was waving his weapon around, as much a menace to his companions as to the enemy. “These are no real danger—but keep your eyes open for the soldiers. They’ll know any minute what we’re up to, and they’ll be after us.”

The projectile weapons were powerful enough to blow asunder the soft bodies of the workers. But there were hundreds of them. Progress became slower and slower, through a carnage of dying tower-dwellers. Lotos found herself skidding in disgust over layers of pallid flesh and greasy body fluids, losing her footing every few seconds. She was last of the group again, at least ten paces behind the rest. If the soldiers came from behind . . . but the big central chamber was in sight ahead.

Lotos paused to catch her breath. And heard from behind her the scrabble of hard claws on the tunnel wall.

She turned. Less than twenty paces away were seven warriors, approaching at top speed. She screamed a warning, lifted her weapon, and fired it on automatic. A stream of projectiles cut into the warriors. Four curled into death spasm, knotting their bodies on the hard floor of the tunnel.

But the other three were still coming. Lotos blew the head clean off one of them, and cut another in half with a hail of fire. The last one was too close. Before she could aim her weapon, mandibles as long as her arm reached forward to grip her at chest level. Their inner edges were sharp and as hard as steel.

Lotos’s arms were pinned to her side by the encircling jaws. She could not free her gun, or fire it at the soldier. She heard the others of the party shouting at her, but they could not get a shot at her attacker without hitting Lotos.

The pressure on her chest increased, from discomfort to impossible pain. Lotos could not breathe. She felt the bones in her arms crack—her ribs cave in—her heart flatten in her chest. In the final moment before she lost consciousness she bit down hard on the switch between her rear molars. As everything turned dark she felt a gush of blood in her throat, jetting up from her lungs into her gaping mouth . . .

THAT IS THE END OF
ADESTIS FOR
YOU.
Lotos was sweating and shivering in the balcony seat, the harsh voice sounding in her ear.
REMAIN SEATED AS A SPECTATOR IF YOU WISH. BUT YOUR FURTHER PARTICIPATION IS PROHIBITED.

She ripped off her headset and threw it aside, leaning over to stare down at the sandy arena below. The attack on the termite mound was continuing. With the conclusion of sensory contact, her own five-millimeter simulacrum had “died” down there. And just in time! Lotos was still in agony, still feeling the pressure on breaking ribs and cracking spine—still tasting blood in her mouth.
Adestis
did not let losers off easily. If she had failed to activate the Monitor switch, the chance of death from heart failure was better than one in four. In any case, the
pain
was real enough. It would go on for hours, even though she was out of the game. That realism was one perverse reason for the huge popularity of
Adestis.

Lotos glanced around her. Over half the forty participants had already returned. They were all alive, and clutching eyes, heads, or ribs—the soldier termites had their preferred targets. The other twenty players still wore their headsets and were crouched blindly in their places.

There was a gasp from Dougal MacDougal’s cowled figure, three seats away on Lotos Sheldrake’s right. It was followed by a boil of activity near the bottom of the ten-foot mound, far below the spectators’ gallery. Either the intruders had managed to kill the queen and they were fighting their way out, or the number of defenders had been too much for them and the attack was being abandoned. Tiny human-shaped figures, less than a dozen of them, came racing out of one of the tunnels at the base of the mound and scattered across the sandy plain. They were far from safe. Dozens of maddened termite soldiers were after them, dashing in from all sides.

The projectile weapons fired continuously—and uselessly. In less than thirty seconds all the figures were buried under swarms of furious defenders. One by one, the players around Lotos shuddered back to their own body consciousness.

THE QUEEN STILL LIVES,
said the harsh voice over the sound system.
YOU ARE DEFEATED AND THE GAME IS OVER THIS IS THE END OF
ADESTIS
FOR YOUR EXPEDITION.

Dougal MacDougal was slumped in his seat, groaning and clutching at his hips. A soldier must have taken him there and crushed his pelvis. After a few more seconds he sat up and stared around him. Unbelievably, he was grinning.

“Everybody got back?” he said. “Great. No casualties, and we’ll be better prepared next time. We came so damned
close.
I’ll bet we were within
twenty seconds
of the queen when those soldier reinforcements arrived. Talk about damned bad luck!”

“Talk about what you like, Dougal,” said a small, plump man in the uniform of a civilian liner captain. He was whey-faced, leaning far forward and nursing his genitals. “You get off on this stuff, but I’ll tell you one thing. You’ll never talk me into another one. It
hurts.
Do you realize where that soldier got hold of me?”

“Come on, Danny.” MacDougal was still grinning madly. “You’ll feel fine in an hour or two. The game’s the thing! We’ll be ready to try again tomorrow.”

“Without me.”

“Without me, too,” chimed in a tall, dark-haired woman who was rubbing tenderly at her neck. “You’re crazy, Dougal. I know they
tell
you it will be full sensories, but I didn’t have any idea
how
full. I was grabbed so I couldn’t move my jaw—couldn’t work the switch until the last possible moment. I thought I was dead.”

Lotos wiped the sweat from her forehead. She combed her hair carefully, controlled her breathing, and quietly slipped away out of the rear of the spectators’ chamber.

Her conversation with Dougal MacDougal was important, but it would have to wait. She had seen all of
Adestis
that she needed to, and more than she ever wanted to.

* * *

Lotos could have used half an hour to herself. She did not get it. When she arrived at her office Esro Mondrian was sitting in the visitors’ chair. He was staring at her Appointments calendar.

“If you’re looking for your name, Esro, you won’t find it on that.” Lotos slipped into her own seat. “I thought you were out on Oberon.”

“I was.” He did not look up. “Is it the end of the universe, Lotos? It must be. I think you have three hairs out of place.”

She shook her head.
“Adestis.”

“
You
played
Adestis
?” Now he was staring at her. “That amazes me. I must revise my opinion of you.”

“Cut it out, Esro. I didn’t do it for pleasure, and you know it.”

“It
wasn’t
pleasure?”

“It was disgusting, as you are well aware. I did it for information, and because I needed to catch the Ambassador for a private conversation—which I didn’t get. But I got something else.”

“About the game?”

“About the Ambassador.” She tapped a file on her desk. “I had a chance to check your suggestion.”

“You didn’t believe it before?”

“Let’s say, I believed it, but I had to check for myself. You are quite right. Dougal MacDougal is a latent masochist. Maybe not so latent, either. I saw him when
Adestis
was complete. We lost, but he was grinning all over his face when he must have been hurting like hell.”

“So you agree with me. It is terribly dangerous to have a masochist as humanity’s representative to the Stellar Group.”

“I agree. But you can’t change it—and neither can I. He’s too well established.”

“He has to be handled even more carefully than we thought. You are the only person who has that influence. You can persuade Dougal MacDougal to do anything you want.”

“Don’t try flattery, Esro. It doesn’t suit you. And I’m sure you didn’t come to talk about the Ambassador. What’s the real agenda?”

“I came to give you some information.”

“You never gave away anything in your life.” Lotos did not say it as a criticism. It was a compliment. She was the daughter of a hard-rock miner herself, raised in the dust-tunnels of Iapetus, and every step out had been a fight. By the time she was ten years old she was as tough and sharp as a drill bit. Lotos had evaluated her only asset. When she was thirteen, the calculated optimum age, she had carefully traded youth and virginity (innocence she had never had) for an escape from Iapetus.

She was never going back to a life like that. Never, never,
never.
And somewhere in Esro Mondrian, behind the refined tastes and formal manners, she could sense the same early struggle and the same determination.

“You don’t mean
give
,” she went on. “You mean
trade
information.”

“Say it however you like.” Mondrian paused, to choose his words carefully. “I know something. You will know it also, in just twenty-four hours. It will arrive over the Mattin Link communication system, addressed to Ambassador MacDougal. I will be giving you—or if you prefer, trading you—one full day of knowledge. You and I, alone in the solar system, will have that knowledge.”

“And where did
you
get it?” The question was automatic, but Lotos certainly did not expect an answer and Mondrian showed no sign of offering one. She dialled for two cups of sugared tea. “All right. I’ll bite. What’s on the line—apart from the hook?”

“The rogue Morgan Construct has been tracked down. I can tell you its location.”

“Ahhh.” Lotos’s eyes were sparkling. “Damn it, I’ve had not even a hint of this.”

“I know. You are furious.”

“I have every right to be. I’m going to fire the Ambassador’s information officer.”

“That’s up to you. But you should not do it just for this. There is no way that she—or anyone else—could possibly have learned what I just told you. I assume you are recording?”

Lotos nodded. “Personal system.”

“Keep it that way. I’m only going to say this once. Out near the Perimeter is a star system named Talitha—
Iota Ursae Majoris
in the catalogs. It is a binary, a little more than fifty lightyears away from here. The main star is stellar type A7 V, about ten times as bright as Sol. The others are a close binary pair of red dwarfs, very dim, only a thousandth as bright as the primary.

“We’ve known all that for quite a while. What we didn’t know, until the probes got there seventy years ago, was about the planetary system around the primary. Three gas giants, six smaller metal-rich planets. The probe reported evidence of life on one of the inner worlds. It was named
Travancore.
It is small, less than half of Earth’s mass, and it has flourishing native life-forms—vegetation and fungi, at least, and probably animals. The probe didn’t detect any evidence of intelligent life, so there was no great interest in immediate exploration. As a result we don’t know too much about the place.”