Delia watched another crowd of ape-men come charging toward her and forced herself to stand still and let it happen. “That’s unusual,” she said.
“Not at all,” said Dev. “This one’s a special services universe—there are hundreds of them scattered around Omnitopia. People find a niche that no one else has filled, and then step in and fill it, and even make some beer money out of it. Or a lot more than beer money.” He looked around him with amusement. “Sorry, this was a whim too, as I haven’t been in here in a while. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to get over your concerns about betraying any of your secret motivations and actually suggest somewhere you’d like to go? Instead of these boring, you know, gamey kind of places.”
He grinned at her. It was straightforward teasing, not at all hostile. Once again Delia felt annoyed with herself at being so easily engaged. “Well,” she said finally. “Have you got anything . . .” She hesitated. “Elizabethan?”
“Ah,” Dev said. There was a curious sound of approval to the word. “I have the very thing. System management?”
There was a slight pause. Delia looked at Dev and was astounded by his sudden expression of concern. “Here, Dev.”
Dev’s face sealed over again. “Gloriana, if you would. Take us to the waypoint denoted as White Cliffs.”
“Timing, Dev?”
He smiled. The look was rather tight. “Most popular as of today midnight Eastern.”
The space around them went dark.
When it went bright again, the light was almost blinding by contrast. They were standing on a high promontory above a windy sea. Far away at the edge of things, looking east into a sky full of thin, feathery clouds, if you stared hard, you could just make out a low line of color between sky and sea—not bright, not dark, just different from the water or the air. Underfoot was a hard short turf, very green, very dry. Delia turned, seeing nothing but sea, and more sea, all around, hearing nothing but silence, feeling nothing but a thin cold air flowing up from the water far below.
But on the fourth side the turf rose away to meet the sky, and from that direction came a rumbling—a low and subtle pounding in the ground, soft at first but growing. Delia glanced over at Dev, who was standing beside her on the hill, hugging himself against the cold and looking like a man who waits grimly for something he’s seen coming for a long time.
The mutter and rumble in the ground started transmitting itself up Delia’s legs. Once some time back when on a vacation in California she’d felt an earthquake—not one of the “short sharp shock” ones that makes you think a truck has hit your house, but a rolling one, starting out softly, growing in strength until chandeliers swayed and bookshelves wiggled and things danced off shelves onto the floor and shattered. This felt like one of those, except more localized, as if the epicenter was very close by or even right under her feet. For the moment, it didn’t knock her askew. Delia spaced her feet out and braced herself.
There started to be noise in the air as well. A mutter, a grumble, like the auditory version of what she was feeling; it grew as the vibration did. Then, almost shockingly, she saw something come up over the rise on the landward side.
They were the points of pikes. After them came the length of the pikes themselves, terrible things, stiletto knife-points meant to impale an enemy while still twenty feet away. Then came banners, mostly homemade things from the look of them, silk clumsily sewn, red and blue in quarters. And then the men carrying them—and surprisingly, a lot of women too: Delia didn’t remember seeing anything about that in the histories. But here they came, by hundreds, and more than hundreds, thousands, people gazing both at the cold sea to the southward and behind them at someone who was still on the way.
And shortly another group came up over the hill, more armed men and women, but in more formal armor. Delia thought she recognized the scene now, and against her will her pulse began speeding up. Behind the newcomers came a great cross-mounted banner in a design that Delia had until now seen only in museums: the arms called England Ancient, three gold lions on red, three gold fleurs-delis on blue, quartered on the banner. And riding under it, surrounded by people dressed in steel with drawn swords, came a figure in splendid attire; a glittering dress all oversewn with beads and gems, topped with a breastplate that suddenly gleamed ferocious and blinding as the sun came out from behind those high clouds. The horse the woman rode was white, and her hair was red, done in a high strange style that nonetheless suited her high pale forehead and those amazing, piercing blue eyes.
That great crowd stopped on the hillcrest overlooking the sea and surrounded the woman. She turned her back on Delia and Dev—for her they did not exist. “I am come amongst you,” she said loudly to the troops pressing in around her, “not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust!”
A long low growl of anger and approbation went up from the vast crowd still massing on the upland down behind her. They knew what she was going to say—she was reading their hearts, they didn’t need to hear the words. “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” she cried to them, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a King of England, too—and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any other prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm! I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field—”
Delia’s hair began to stir around her face as the great defiant speech out of the depths of time went on. Out on the water, the wind was rising. Slowly she turned toward it. There was a darkness at the back of that wind, huddled down low against the horizon and hinting at a mass of shadowy sails. Seeing it, the crowd behind them started to roar defiance: a low slow sound like the thunder getting its ire up. The armada was coming. But here the people who defied it would make their stand, and some of them would go on to board the ships that could now be seen lying out waiting for the attackers as the wind lifted the low seaward mist: ships as black as the enemy’s, but some of them now starting to glow with dull red fire as the defenders set them alight and sent them into the armada’s path.
“They reenact this? Regularly?” she said.
“Constantly,” Dev said, stepping up beside her and watching as the fireships made use of the local current and swung into the heart of the first attacking group of ships. “Or rather, they fight it again and again, exploring the outcomes implied by the weather and the currents.” He rubbed his arms harder against the cold as the wind rose. “The speech didn’t happen here, of course. It was up by Tilbury, closer to where the ships were leaving. But this is overwhelmingly where our players like to see it. Here they take a break from balancing their checkbooks or feeding their kids or doing their homework or whatever, and live another life for a while.”
“A second life?” Delia said, sly.
Dev gave her a look. “Why limit the numbers?” he said. “How many lives will you restrict yourself to? If you need rest from the first one, why not have several—or as many as it takes for you to learn how to live the first one correctly? It’s not all escape, you know. Some of it is practice.”
She couldn’t think of anything to say to that as the crowd up behind them quieted, watching the great battle that was starting to enact itself out on the water. “This is why they come,” Dev said. “They’re hunting their dreams. Not the great life-dreams that only living can make, but the ones you seek for relaxation, the ones you wish you could see come true in your spare time. They’re hunting the things that have made humanity great in the past, and trying to figure out the ones that will make it worth being human in the future.”
He fell silent then, seemingly lost in thought, or in contemplation of the southern horizon, which the smoke of the fire of the ships was beginning to obscure. From that direction, slow and low, like irregular drumbeats, then more quickly, the so
und of cannonade began. Delia turned again and watched as the crowd up on the rise slowly started to flow down the slope around them, heading for the best view over the water, muttering to each other like people who’ve come in late to a sports event that’s heating up more quickly than they thought. Many glances were thrown at her and Dev, but no one spoke to him.
A young dark-skinned man with an Asian look to him stopped by Delia and looked at her curiously. “Your first time, lady?” he said in a pronounced Bollywood accent.
“Uh, yes.”
“Don’t let it be your last,” he said. “Sometimes we stir it up a little more. But everyone’s feeling traditionalist today.” He grinned a blinding white grin at her, threw Dev a passing glance, and moved on.
“I just might,” she said under her breath.
She hadn’t expected Dev to catch that, but he did. “Like the look of it?” he asked.
“Uh,” Delia said, “yes.”
He smiled. “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “A whole lot of people have it bad for this period. Such a flowering of the arts and sciences—and so many fascinating personalities. You couldn’t make a lot of this period’s people up: no one would believe you.”
“But these people—” Delia said, glancing at the crowd around them. “How many people are playing in this scenario at the moment?”
Dev got a listening look. “Three hundred forty thousand, two hundred and eight,” he said, “on eight servers scattered across four continents. It’s a whole world, you know, sited in the same period, not just Elizabeth’s England. Plenty of room for everybody. In fact, this is one of the Macrocosms we’re expanding in the rollout . . . there’s so much demand. Ten more servers, all enabled for the new enhanced sensory equipment. Everybody wants to eat in Elizabeth’s time. Not to mention go to the theater. There’s this hot new playwright working in London right now, just tossing off hit after hit. You can’t even get standing room in the Globe most nights . . .” He smiled. “But after we expand, there’ll always be room for one more. You have no idea how many people we have auditioning to be extras in the plays right now. And the present holder of the Gates Seat for Studies in English Literature at Oxford just turned in his last tweaks on the ZOUNDS Rude Language syntax manager for this Macrocosm.” He got a wicked look. “I’d book in a visit if I were you.”
The space around them cleared a little, and Delia looked toward the cliff edge at the throng watching the first stages of the unfolding sea battle. “What’s weird,” she said, “is that every one of these people who saw you knew who you were, and not one of them spoke to you.”
“You didn’t believe me earlier,” Dev said.
“No.”
He shrugged. “What you didn’t understand is that this is a culture, and not just a game anymore. At least, depending on how things go in the next couple of hours.”
She blinked. “What?” she said. “How does it depend, exactly?”
“Well,” Dev said, “there’s our share price to take into account, and various other things. You’ll have noticed the campus was a little busy today—”
Delia nodded. “There was some stuff on the wires this morning—”
“Yes, there was,” he said. “In fact—” And then he stopped, because the little neon Bluebird of Happiness, which had somewhat faded into the background for the last few minutes while asleep on Dev’s shoulder, was now quite bright indeed and was whispering in Dev’s ear. “Excuse me a moment,” he said to Delia, and listened.
She watched him idly, waiting to see how his face might change. But there were no changes she could read. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Tell him I’ll be with them shortly.”
Oh well, Delia thought, there goes the chance of any more interview material. But then she saw something in his face that took her by surprise: pure alarm.
“Really,” Dev said. There were a few moments’ more silence. “Did he now?”
A longer silence. “All right,” he said. “I’ll look into it. As long as you’re clear that we’re sure about this.”
The Little Bird seemed to Delia to acquire an unusually freaked-out look in its little dark eyes. “Yeah, it’d be hard to argue with that,” Dev said. “All right. Yeah. Ten minutes. Thanks.”
The Little Bird put its head back under its wing, but not before it had given Delia a most piercing glance. Dev looked at her.
“So,” he said, “circumstances have rescued me from having to spend an hour looking over color swatches today. For which I thank you. But now we have to discuss something else.”
“If it’s about the cover dummy—” she said.
“Dummies may be involved,” Dev said, “but not in any way either of us anticipated.” He grimaced. “First I should say that I understand how there can be some tension when you suddenly find yourself serving two masters. Without one of them knowing about it, I mean.”
Delia could suddenly feel sweat popping out all over her. She cursed her antiperspirant and desperately hoped that nothing much showed, then immediately wondered if virtual sweat showed at all.
“For example,” Dev said, “in the present economic climate, we’re all wondering whether our next paycheck is necessarily a guaranteed thing. So when your boss sends you over here to do some interviews, and someone else comes in behind him and offers you even more to do some industrial espionage—planting a device or so here, pumping some employees there—well, it’s perhaps understandable that you might think about the balloon payment coming due on your apartment, and say to yourself, What the heck? Who’s going to know?”
Delia felt the blood rushing away from her face and started wondering whether this too would translate into the virtual experience.
“The problem with this,” Dev said, “is that here on campus we have some of the most passionate and committed hardware geeks existing anywhere on the planet. And I’m afraid that your secondary source—possibly overly concerned with corporate cost cutting issues—has given you some very underachieving software with which to pass in your reports. Especially when somebody gets overenthusiastic, as they did last night when you were out up to your elbows in ribs at Urban Barbecue with the Flackery crowd, and hacks the access we gave you so that it has access to protected security routines . . . then pipes the data somewhere else way off campus.”
Delia didn’t even breathe.
“So,” Dev said. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
She swallowed. “Let me off with a warning?”
He bent an unusually dark look on her. “Normally I’d feel that a gift for irony is a useful attribute in a journalist,” Dev said, “but right now I strongly suggest that you not push your luck.”
Delia held still and concentrated on not saying anything else stupid.
“Now I suppose,” Dev said, pushing his hands into his pockets, “that what you’re suggesting would probably sort very nicely with the corporate image. Joss would be pleased, I’m sure. But the truth of the matter is that somebody’s attacking my company today, trying to rip off millions of my dollars, not to mention ruining my players’ virtual experience. And, leaving aside what happened last night, here you arrive in the middle of it and start feeding what you think is sensitive material—oh, come on, my people didn’t play you that completely, did they? Yes, they did, and they all get raises, assuming I have anything to give them raises with tomorrow, those little scalawags—feeding secrets to Phil Sorensen! And to someone else whose name we’re not sure of yet, but we will be by the end of the day. But Delia . . . Delia Harrington . . .” He sighed. “There’s a name that’ll be all over the news this evening. And one that will never appear over a byline again at any publication more elevated than the Podunk Plain Dealer and Grain Silo News.”
Delia could find nothing useful to say.
“Phil,” Dev said, looking at her from under what suddenly seemed unnaturally threatening eyebrows, “is a smart man. But cheap. He was never willing to swing out and spend what it really took to fund a project, which is why
he’s where he is today. And he is certainly not going to spend one red cent saving your reputation or your job, not when he sees—or thinks he sees—how sloppy you were. Nor in such a mood will he care that your present situation is the fault of someone in his own security structure who got overzealous and used you because he knew the boss was using you and probably wouldn’t give a damn.”
Dev heaved a sigh. “But, you know, I too had a mortgage once. I too had spotty freelance work. I know how it can warp your brain when you see that the fridge is empty and you don’t know how you’re going to fill it again. So I am going to send you out to keep doing what you were doing when you first came here, while I contemplate whether to turn Jim Margoulies loose on you or just pitch your sorry little ass out onto Mill Avenue with a press release detailing the good work you’ve done here the past day or so. Because, by God, if Time magazine can screw with my share price, I can sure as hell screw with theirs, and the ghost of Henry Luce be damned!”
Delia just stood there.
“Well?” Dev said.
Delia’s mouth was dry. It took her a long while to get the words out. “I’m sorry.”
“We’ll see,” Dev said. “System management?’
There was another of those strange long pauses. “Here—Dev.”
She saw his Adam’s apple go up and down as he swallowed. “Please exit Miss Harrington to the number two comm suite in the PR building in ten seconds,” he said.
“Working—Dev.”
He glared at Delia. She shivered. She had never thought to see so ferocious, so terrible a look from this previously calm, affable man. “Just be clear,” Dev said, and waved an arm around him at the chalk cliffs, the high cloud-tattered sky, the smoke on the horizon, the pale queen watching it all on horseback atop the hill, the armored people watching it from the bottom. “This is what you’ve been helping to put a nail in. Not a cream puff corporate magnate. Not an overvalued trophy wife. Not a rich-bitch baby girl who’ll never know a hungry night—and what baby girl should? But this. These people. Their beer money, their one night out, their moment of freedom from a day of toil. I hope you’re happy.”