5
Ganymede: 2072 A.D.
The Great War was over. It ended just four months after it had begun, in a final cataclysm that shattered the solar system and reshaped it into a new form. Its aftermath would reverberate down the centuries. It was the war to end wars.
Except that wars still went on. This particular one was fought without armies, without hardware, without bloodshed, without reinforcements or mercy or remorse. Its warriors would probably never meet. They were unlikely to know their adversaries' real names, since the Puzzle Network permitted—and encouraged—anonymity.
But the Masters of the Net did not need names. They knew each other very well, at the profound mental level where battles were engaged.
Bat, just two years in the Masters' division, was learning fast. He had advanced to the point where he could recognize a puzzle designed by Claudius, a five-time champion, as surely as if she (he was convinced that Claudius was a woman) had signed her name. She took a unique delight in misdirection, layer after layer of it. Four weeks earlier, Bat had set his own trap, hoping to exploit that misdirection and turn it into a weakness. He was convinced that he had caught her—until she sent back the correct solution, with an added note, "Old age and treachery will defeat youth and skill. Keep trying."
He would. Most of the other Masters fell far short of Claudius, and all of them had their own strange quirks. He would recognize Attoboy, Simple Simon, Gaslight Tattoo, Pack Rat, James the Rose, and Sneak Attack, no matter where or how they appeared, or under what name.
But the Puzzle Network could still offer surprises. One was appearing now, filling his display with four complicated three-dimensional sets of interlocking donuts. The accompanying text read, "Specify connectivity: simply connected or multiply connected?" It was signed Ghost Boy.
The name was unfamiliar, but that meant nothing. Claudius, when she was in an unusually vicious mood, was likely to sign on as Xantippe. Bat normally signed on as Megachirops, but presented his word puzzles as Thersites. The puzzle, not the name, was the thing, the only thing; and this one was a major oddity. The structures were so clearly multiply connected that no one with any self-respect would offer this as a problem at the Masters' level. That suggested two things: First, the puzzle was not what it seemed; and second, a new and distinctive personality had been added to the game.
Rule number one of the Puzzle Network: Use all of the information available to you. Rule number two: There is no such thing as cheating. Bat had his own Rule number three: Know thy enemy. He had a trick that he suspected might be his alone.
First, he checked the response time for Ghost Boy's net access. As he had hoped, it was only a few milliseconds. Therefore, Ghost Boy was somewhere on Ganymede, rather than being an off-world entry. Bat knew the style of the dozen Ganymede Masters. It was unthinkable that Ghost Boy could emerge as a new Master, without years of experience on the Puzzle Network.
And that led to only one possible conclusion: Ghost Boy had been in the net for some time, but he had been promoted recently to the Senior League.
Bat took the next logical step. He did what no self-respecting Master would ever do. He went slumming, dropping down to the Journeyman level in the network and scanning back in time over the past two years.
No sign of Ghost Boy as either a proposer or solver of any puzzles. Which left only the Journeyman puzzles themselves, hundreds and hundreds of them.
Sorting through them was going to take some time. Bat raided his own Bat Cave sweetmeat hoard for orange jujubes, peppermint bonbons, and chocolates, returned to his terminal, and settled happily down to work. It was the middle of the night. No one was going to disturb him. Given a good puzzle like this, with its promise of yet another puzzle if he solved it, the idea of boredom or fatigue was unthinkable.
* * *
Five hours later, he had it. A dozen Journeyman puzzles involved odd topological elements similar to those of Ghost Boy's problem. They were hard to solve, and it was even more difficult to imagine how someone of the Journeyman class had managed to dream them up in the first place. But each puzzle had been proposed by a player named The Snark, and the most recent came three months ago.
Obviously, The Snark and Ghost Boy were one and the same. He had changed his name when he moved to the Masters' level. And just as obviously, the earlier puzzles were going to tell Bat enough about the workings of Ghost Boy's mind to solve the most recent one.
But not easily. It was another two hours before Bat groaned, raised his eyes to stare at the ceiling, and whispered a single word: "Dimensionality!"
The Snark was devising his puzzles in spaces of a higher dimension, the fourth or fifth or higher, and then projecting down to three dimensions. The way to solve them was to reverse the process, imagining Ghost Boy's sets of interlocking figures as cross sections of some higher-dimensional structure.
It still wasn't easy to solve this latest one, but now it was possible. Bat stared at nothing until he was sure that the entire puzzle construct, viewed in four dimensions, had no holes or reentry features. Finally, he wrote that the puzzle was "simply connected in 4-D," signed his solution Megachirops, and sent it off.
He didn't expect a reply. For one thing, it was many hours into the standard Ganymede sleep cycle; for another, Puzzle Network protocol did not call for answers.
It was a shock for him to find a message popping into his display area, just a couple of minutes later. It read: "Hey! You're not supposed to solve me that fast!" And then, an even bigger surprise, a smiling face appeared above the message.
"Hi," the face said. "I'm Ghost Boy."
"So I deduced." There was a silence, while Bat stared in astonishment at the display. It was not a surprise to find that a Master on the Puzzle Network was young—the mental agility of youth was an asset—but this was ridiculous. Ghost Boy was a kid. He was thin and gawky, with freckles and a big nose, and he had no sign of facial hair. He looked even younger than Bat! And Bat knew that he himself was a rare prodigy.
"My name's Spook Belman," Ghost Boy said. "You see how it goes, I'm Ghost Boy now and I used to be The Snark."
Didn't Belman know anything at all about Puzzle Network manners? He was not only intruding, but also explaining. Bat tried to make allowances for the gaucherie of a newcomer. "I know," he said. "I caught both allusions from your name, thank you."
"Well?" The kid's grin faded, and he frowned. "Aren't you going to return the compliment?"
"What compliment?"
"Your name. Tell me your real name. And turn on the visuals, so I can take a look at you."
Unbelievable. "I prefer not to."
"Well, you're a real sourpuss, aren't you." Spook Belman glared out from the display. "I guessed you were pretty young, from your style, and I thought maybe the two of us could get together and compare notes on the old fogies. But you sound like one of the old fogies yourself. That puzzle I set was supposed to stop anyone on the Network for a few days. Seems I was wrong, about it and about you. How old are you, anyway?"
"My age is of no possible concern to you." Bat paused. He never met with anyone if he could avoid it, but this was one of the rare moments when he might question his choice of lifestyle. He added grudgingly, "I am sixteen years old."
"So I was right! But you sound like you're sixteen going on a thousand. I'm sure you don't care to know it, but I'm fifteen." Spook Belman was still doing his best to be friendly, but it sounded like an uphill fight. "Look, I had another reason for connecting to you. I was going to do this anyway, even if you hadn't solved my puzzle. I wanted to ask: How come your puzzles involve the war so often?"
He had said the magic word. Bat had been all set to break the connection. Now he said slowly, "It is a special interest of mine—"
"Mine too!"
"—since I believe that it will prove to be the defining event for our century, and for many centuries to come."
"But you lot weren't even in it." Spook waved his arm around, including in "you lot" the whole of Ganymede. "You were so far away, how could you possibly know what went on? Did you live in the Inner System before the war started?"
"Certainly not." Bat quivered at the prospect. The thought of an open sky gave him the willies. He would not, without coercion, venture so high as even the outer levels of Ganymede. "There are more rational ways of obtaining information, without blundering around all over the solar system. Only a fool would choose to visit Earth or Mars— still less, choose to live there, even before their destruction."
"You think so, do you?" Spook sneered out of the display. Bat had touched some exposed nerve, and Spook's conciliatory manner was discarded. "Well, that just shows how little you know. I was going to give you some real good stuff about the war, material no one else out here on Ganymede has ever seen or knows exists. Firsthand experience. But you think you know everything. You don't want to meet, you don't want to be seen." He paused, as though he were making some difficult decision. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to send you something, a couple of extracts from a data file. You take a look at them, Megachirops, or whatever your real name is. And if after you've seen them, you decide maybe you don't know all about everything, then you can give me a call."
Abruptly, he was gone, his frowning visage fading from the display. Bat puffed out his full cheeks. So much for Ghost Boy.
Good riddance. He surely didn't know anything about the war that Bat had not already discovered for himself. He couldn't possibly. Bat had drained every source of information on Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the Belt, in addition to tapping whatever was available on Ganymede and Callisto. There was nothing more to be found in any of the data banks.
But suppose that Ghost Boy, against all the odds, had managed to locate something that was not in the banks . . .
The rest of Ganymede was waking up. Bat was expected to go places and do things. Like studying. But he could not resist.
He queried his access unit. Sure enough, a new file was being transferred to his personal directory. A big one, calling for the use of full derived reality. Bat summoned the file, and calmed himself as he waited for the environment to establish itself.
Against the standard blandishments of men or women, he believed himself invulnerable. There were, however, other forms of beguilement and seduction.
* * *
As elsewhere in life, in derived reality you got what you paid for. Bat had experienced a dozen different environments through the Puzzle Network. In the cheapest of them, only the people felt real (and sometimes not even they did). The rest of the surroundings were grainy and poorly defined, as though you could push your fist right through the furniture. The perspective was usually off, providing lopsided doors and walls. Sometimes you would find a dark patch, where part of the field of view had been omitted entirely from the synthesis.
At the other end of the scale, the best environments were completely self-consistent and perfectly scaled. There was a feeling of solidity, a palpable quality to the surroundings that justified the term "derived reality." The synthesizers of such high-quality environments were professionals, and they were good.
But they were never this good.
This was real, as real as dinner.
Bat was hurrying along a dark-walled tunnel, dragging someone with him. People were everywhere. Most of them were moving forward, but some sat slumped wearily against the walls. The light was dim and flickering, the air thick and hot and filled with a fine powder that made his eyes water. The ground shook beneath his feet.
His body felt most peculiar. It was terribly heavy, dragged down by a powerful gravitational field. It was also unnaturally shaped. There were organs, interior and exterior, which had no right to be there. He was in a female body, which was towing along behind her a small boy, not much more than half her size.
Before he could adapt to that strangeness, the whole environment changed. The woman was no longer underground in a high-gravity world. She was now in free fall. There was no danger that she would float away, because she was wedged in between the same small boy and the hard arm of a seat. Beyond the boy sat a big man, and beyond him, through a viewport, Bat recognized a familiar image. It was Earth's Moon, visible through the ship's port, in the crescent phase—the face of the Moon as seen from Earth, as it had been before the war. Most of that face was dark, but on the illuminated limb he recognized the patterns of dark, smooth maria and cratered uplands.
And then it changed again.
A bright spark of blue light appeared. It was followed at once by another, then another. A burning line was etching itself into the Moon's shadowed disk.
Bat, himself and yet not himself, felt the hair bristle on the back of his head. He knew exactly what he and his alter ego were seeing. That was the Armageddon Defense Line, exploding along its whole length like a line of firecrackers, as it was attacked by the fusion fires of modified Diabelli Omnivores. He was witnessing the very moment of the Belt's first attack, when the conflict changed from a war of words to a war of deadly weapons. Within the next few minutes, the whole Northern Hemisphere of Earth, together with its nine billion people, would die.
He had read about this a hundred times. But this time he was here, in person, an eyewitness. He waited, as the field of view turned, to take in the broad face of Earth, no more than a few thousand kilometers away. A first bright spark glowed on its nightside, grew . . .
And vanished, together with everything else. The data file had ended, derived reality was gone, and Bat was sitting in his chair staring expectantly at nothing.
He ground his teeth in frustration. Spook Belman had done this deliberately; Bat knew it. Spook had more, he must have, but he had cut off the file at the very moment when he knew it was most interesting to Bat.
The irritation and the mystery did not end there. A person might be present at the event, as Spook Belman claimed to have been present. He might even record it. But no recording could capture the sensory detail that Bat had just experienced. And it was sensory detail as experienced not by Spook Belman, but by a woman.
Ghost Boy had some other trick up his sleeve, some way of turning experience into derived reality.
Bat admitted the galling truth: Belman had found his weak spot—Bat's overwhelming curiosity. To satisfy that, he would have to call Spook back and reveal his own identity. It felt like groveling. It was groveling. He could imagine Spook now, sitting there complacently waiting for Bat's capitulation.
Bat reached out for the communication pad, then drew back. The temptation was terrible, but he would not give Spook Belman an easy victory. He would resist as long as he possibly could—and hope that before he weakened, Spook would again call him.
* * *
There was no way for Bat to divine that Ghost Boy, still sitting at the other end of the communication line, was feeling far from complacent. In fact, Spook was facing up to the consequences of his own rash action, and he did not like what he saw. When his sister found out what he had shown Megachirops . . .
He had let his pride and anger get the better of him. In sending those data files to Megachirops, he had guaranteed that he would soon be in more trouble than he cared to think about.