Wu Lin doffed her shawl and joined him on the stage. In immediate response, a second creature appeared in the hovering light beside him.
Magique manipulated the controls, and suddenly six aliens crowded the field. She joined them onstage, and now there were nine. Somehow they interacted with each other as if they were actually manipulated by nine different puppeteers: talking, rolling, jumping… Xavier and his assistants lending eccentric mime-like precision to their roles, populating an entire imaginary hive with a succession of simple shrugs and shoulder hunches.
Kendra was open-mouthed with amazement. These were masters at play. No… at work. They were calibrating the equipment, accustoming themselves to the reduced gravity. She felt honored to witness such a masterful display.
Xavier stopped, and stepped down from the platform. For all the exertion, she noted that his breathing was barely elevated. His eyes seemed distant. “Tomorrow, we’ll start looping the movement for the holos, the virt, and the bots. We’ll need to meet with the local players by day after. The gamers arrive in eight days.”
“Yes. Six P.M. adjusted local time.”
He mused. “NPCs arrive thirty hours earlier. We’ll need to be ready. I want a sleep cycle adjusted for Montreal winters.”
“Polarized dome, or artificial lighting? Whichever you prefer.”
She couldn’t help it-she was actually quite impressed by the little man’s artistic focus. Subtract the egotism, and despite his height she might have found him appealing.
He yawned. “I’d like to see where I’m sleeping now.”
“May I ask a personal question?”
“I did,” Xavier laughed. “Proceed.”
“Your father is still alive, isn’t he?”
He pressed his lips together tightly. “Yes.”
She paused, trying to work out the right way to ask the next question.
“Was he… worried about his calculations? The Aeros asteroid?”
His face tightened as well. “That’s one thing he never doubted. Did you? You had to have been… what… seven years old?”
“I still remember,” she said. “Everyone frightened. Your dad bounced this asteroid out of its course. It came within ten thousand miles of Earth. Something could have gone wrong. We can’t survive without Earth-”
“Not Dad. Not ever.” His smile was entirely too bright.
“I remember,” she said. “Yes. Well… shall we take a look at the maze itself?”
“Give us a few moments first, would you?”
Kendra nodded, and left them.
Wu Lin and Magique mimed their way through phrases of human and insectile body language, as well as a few that defied simple categorization. Then Xavier froze the images.
Panting, Magique flipped her red hair and waited for approval. Her hands babbled at Xavier.
“Good as anything I’ve ever worked on,” he replied. “First rate. Kinesthetics are a little better in California, but the auditory is spot on, and I think the visual might be superior. Feels lighter, somehow. Better depth and color correction at oblique angles. I think they modified some of the French waldo gear.”
“But is it good enough?” Wu Lin asked.
He nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m going to give them the time of their lives, and Angelique…” His smile went dreamy. “Oh, she and I have old matters to resolve. And Wayne Gibson… never in the history of the world has anyone traveled so far to be crushed so badly. My children… this is going to be fun.”
The Beehive dome was deceptive. Two hundred meters in diameter, it was smaller than the first major gaming dome, still active in California. Not large enough for a major event. Ages before, a meteor had plowed deep into an ancient maze of lava tunnels above a pool of dirty ice. Digging had not been the tricky part. Sealing the tunnel walls, making connections and barriers, creating an airtight lacework under a simple water shield, and knowing it was airtight, enough to bet lives… that was the hard part.
And now it was filled with a hundred major and countless minor bubbles of various sizes, distorted spheres of woven aluminum alloy. Doors and tubes linked the bubbles, but they would seal in case of a leak or blowout.
Five or six tall Lunies still worked scaffolding around the walls of a cavernous sphere. They paused to observe the visitors. Xavier ignored them.
“Of course,” Kendra said, “you’ll have a more complete tour later, and will be supervising the final work, but we wanted you to inspect the interior.”
He nodded. “We had a mock-up in Calgary, but the gravity… my, it really does make a difference.”
He jumped to the top of a huge, frilly mushroom and then up again. He scampered hand-over-hand up the wall, a performance that would have impressed the greatest rock climber who ever lived. Xavier’s gorgeous posse followed him up, climbing over frost that crumbled under their hands and rained down at Kendra. Again and despite herself, Kendra was impressed.
This was like playtime at the gifted weird kids class.
It was time to move on. Kendra said, “Your rooms are ready, and your luggage has already been deposited. Shall we go?” She led them away.
When hundreds of human beings breathe each other’s recycled air for months at a time, the opportunities for chemical or biological contagion are endless. Someone was checking the system at all times, and no one paid a bit of attention to the men in the blue suits.
Doug and Thomas Frost had watched everything, pretending to check wall conduits for the dome’s trace contaminant control system. They remained silent until after the little man and his assistants retreated to privacy.
“So… that was Xavier,” Doug said.
Thomas suppressed a nasty, quiet chuckle. “I wonder,” he said, “what he’d say if he knew how strange this game was really going to be?”
11
The twins were in the main Arrivals lounge a half hour prior to the shuttle’s drop from orbit. The silver and red capsule flexed its crab-like legs and blew a cloud of lunar dust against the view windows, then settled down as the pressure tunnel wriggled out like a metal snake and locked to its side. Five minutes later, the passengers disembarked and passed through the pressure locks into customs, where they were given opportunities to declare valuables. There were thirty-two passengers on this flight, six members of the press, twenty tourists, and six Lunies returning from mandatory Earth furlough.
The press declared their vid gear, Lunies declared luxury items ferried back from L5 or planet Earth, and most of the tourists declared only enough to deflect curiosity. On the way home, they’d have moon rocks and other mementos, but few carried anything worthy of note.
This was particularly true of the men and one cold-eyed woman who all wore Eddington Crater Tour buttons.
“Welcome,” Thomas said to the largest of them, a man he knew only as Shotz. “I hope the trip was pleasant.”
“All but the last few minutes,” Shotz said. His voice sounded like metal against metal. “The captain seemed to find it amusing to postpone deceleration until the last moment.”
If you didn’t do that, you ran out of fuel. Thomas didn’t say so.
The woman, a beefy redhead with piercing blue eyes, flexed her full red lips into a smile. “It would be interesting to have words with him.” Shotz turned his head slowly, gave her a disapproving glare. “Later,” she amended.
Another eleven quiet, cool-eyed men were clustered around these two. Thirteen in all. Thomas waited to see if any of them would initiate a conversation. It only took ten seconds to remind himself that these people were not here for words.
“Well. It is good to see you. Before your tour, we’ve arranged the interview you requested.”
“Mr. McCauley?” Shotz asked. Nothing wrong with using the name. Little remained a secret for long on the Moon. Anyone who cared to look would know that these people had visited the Fabrication hutch.