The California Voodoo Game

13

"In my dreams mermaids often appear who want to drag me into the water… I am afraid…" — Gert Chesi, Voodoo, 1979

Thursday, July 21, 2059 — 12:10 P.M.

Acacia was jammed into the back of the drum-shaped elevator. At one side the Nommo stood gigantic, glowing, and alone. The Gamers about him shied from touching a probable god; else there might have been room to wiggle. As it was, Acacia had barely room to breathe.

My goodness six of us got killed off, she thought.

Coral, the Nommo, and two rows of Gamers stood between Acacia and Nigel Bishop. She kept a nervous eye on him. Her heartbeat accelerated every time she looked at him, and she was no longer sure exactly why.

"Reveal passage," S. J. Waters said dramatically.

Nigel and Acacia both echoed: "All Scouts cooperate," and in the crowded confines of the elevator, the Scouts reached out and joined hands. The elevator car turned to glass.

They were rising along the wall of a structure with the volume of a dozen Astrodomes, a hundred World Trade Centers, enough to swallow all the whales in the ocean. Hallways and ramps stretched off in all directions, marking off spaces that were larger than most buildings.

The elevator floor lurched under her feet. Acacia braced a hand against the wall, a flash of acro-claustrophobia driving all other thoughts from her mind. MIMIC shuddered violently, then faded into solid wall as the Scouts lost concentration.

"What the hell was that?" SJ muttered. "Thaddeus Dark?"

The shuddering faded out.

"Maybe just an old building," Acacia said, irritated by the tension in her voice. She had to get a grip. The Game was just starting, dammit, and they already had her rattled. Her initial adrenaline burn was wearing off, leaving behind a gritty residue of fatigue. Her second wind hadn't cut in yet.

The Scouts linked hands again. MIMIC returned, huge and frightening. How were they supposed to find anything in a building this size? The Scouts. They had to protect the Scouts, at all costs.

The coolly glowing ceiling swept down to give them a moment of darkness. Now the floors whipped by just a little too fast for them to see anything. Here was a tropical garden, here was the graveyard again; here a vast indoor pool, its silver surface roiled by… gone.

MIMIC had a shimmy to it. The car must be vibrating and then it lurched again. Gamers screamed as it tilted to a side, and they crashed into one another, sliding into the wall in a scramble of limbs and swords and staffs. The Scouts must have been maintaining their link, because MIMIC still surrounded their tiny transparent bubble; but the vast transparent cityscape was tilted and trembling. An ear-ripping, whining, metal-against-metal vibration made the car dance, as if the tilted car were grinding against the shaft walls. The floor dropped six inches, and Acacia was the first to scream as she looked back down.

Genuine fear lived in that elevator now; even Bishop searched the walls, seeking a way out.

Al the Barb was pasty-faced. "I'm dyin'," he gasped.

"Be polite," Tammi said. "Wait for me to kill you properly."

"Eat my-" The last word was lost in a scream, as the elevator clanged, dropped, and changed its tilt. The wall was solid again. Acacia was on the floor again. Arms reached past her nose as the Scouts doggedly attempted to regain their Reveal spell.

"This damned thing is coming apart!" Bishop muttered.

Acacia took emotional refuge in analysis. Al the Barb seemed mighty twitchy, but if memory served her right, his manic edge was as much shuck as his cowboy routine. She couldn't count on him to fold under pressure. Nor did she want him to, until they had a clearer idea of what they were up against.

Mouser, the little Thief who followed the Troglodykes around like a St. Bernard puppy, was grinning like a kid on a roller coaster, completely nerveless. Furthermore, despite his frailty, she knew that he could go for seventy-two hours without sleep, when there was a Game to be played.

The Reveal spell was flickering. MIMIC showed like hologram stills.

MIMIC's levels sank below them, giving hints of the building's complexity. Acacia was too busy keeping her stomach under control to do any mapping. She took what mental snapshots she could, storing away flashes of external detail, knowing that "Aces" Wilde would remember far better. Given the correct spells, "Aces" would reel back what she had seen as if it had been recorded.

Mouser was not likely to forget that she had killed him during Crystal Maze. Was there a way to manipulate that? Not yet…

Despite the chaos, Appelion had seen something. He was bursting with it. She'd seen Twan elbow him in the short ribs, warning him not to blurt secrets in the crowded elevator. What had he seen; what had Acacia missed?

The car slammed to a halt as if it had rammed a roof. The door slid up, grinding and protesting, on blue sky and a tilted horizon.

"Out! Get out!" Clavell yelled unnecessarily. They damn near trampled each other scrambling to safety, the elevator groaning behind them.

Mary-em was the last out. As her feet left the elevator floor, there came terrible sounds: shriek of old metal struts and braces giving up their rusty ghosts, cannon sounds of stressed cables snapping under immense tension. The car dropped from sight.

For a moment the silence was such that Mary-em crawled to the doorway to look. Then all hell broke loose in the elevator shaft.

The Gamers rolled away from the sounds, shaking their heads. Coral croaked, "I think I swallowed my gum."

Acacia heard laughter and water splashing behind her, and she turned.

A dozen giggling women stood hip-deep and flirted with a knot of men ashore. Music blared from hidden speakers: loud, heartthrob precise, but peppered with static. Off to the east were orchards of miniature orange trees, and fields of corn and wheat, and a pyramid-a featureless pyramid eight to ten meters tall, looking right at home in its cultivated fields, as if the whole set had wandered in from Mayan times.

They were on a roof, but a roof so huge that the edges formed a horizon. To the west the edge of the roof seemed to have crumbled, and the lagoon gushed over it.

A rooftop lagoon? Losing liquid at that rate? MIMIC had been built in an age when any form of power was subject to attack by various nut groups. Where had Meacham got his power?

Not hydroelectric, not in a desert. Not solar or wind; both were too weak. A nuclear plant? The Sierra Club would have freaked…

One of the revelers jogged toward them. A gaudy sarong flapped around his legs; a loop of seashells bounced around his neck. Otherwise he looked like a Westwood Beach surfer: whiteblond shaggy hair and beard, wide bronze sunglasses, a muscular bare torso. His miniature nose was peeling from sunburn.

"Nommo!" The surfer stopped, stared, then dropped hastily to his knees. "You bring strangers here. And this Mayombrera? Why?" He was angry, frightened. and fascinated.

"She brings you allies, Bobo," the Nommo said. "They may be the ones we need."

The man scratched carefully in his blond Jesus beard. He was still kneeling. "You're saying we can trust the Mayombreros?"

Their rescuer clucked in disgust. "Bobo, sometimes I think your mind is a few beads shy of a necklace. Of course we can't. But Coral's heart is pure. Trust the Gidget, not her people."

The Nommo moved another step closer to the waterfall. The sky above them was very blue. A hot, dry wind blew from the east.

Alphonse was the first one to speak up. "They can you Nommo. Are you a god?"

The Nommo laughed warmly. "No. We Nommo never claimed to be gods. The name is generic, by the way. My own name is Wannis."

"Can we trust you?"

Wannis grinned. "Believe only what you see," he said. His entire body began to shimmer, and Acacia suddenly realized that he had stepped back onto the water, hovering there rather disconcertingly. Beyond him was the edge of the roof, and the foaming waterfall.

His outline plastic. For an instant there was another shape, and then he had become six glowing feet of sleek muscular fins and tail.

That other shape… had she really seen… something like a catfish and something like a Catfish, ugly as sin. Then a dolphin leapt into the air, arced back down, and skipped across the water like a skimmed stone. It tail-danced at the crumbled edge of the roof, balancing at the edge of the roaring water. Wannis spoke, his voice rising into a buzzing Disney squeak. "Then again believe only half of what you see!"

Then it was over the edge, and gone.

Acacia noticed that, once again, they were surrounded.

At least these were more recognisable as voodoun. They wore peasant garb simple cloth with red and silver frills; jewelry of many shapes and sizes, made of gold and silver and polished shells. They'd come noisily; she'd heard it herself and ignored it. But why hadn't her Scouts…

Where was Corrinda?

She must have slipped away while Wannis was putting on his show. Off to investigate… what?

A huge, imposing brown-skinned woman with African features parted the crowd. When she walked, it was like a battleship cresting the waves. Bobo scampered hastily out of the way, then got to his feet. She didn't notice.

"And so," the enormous woman said. Her eyes sparkled in a nest of deep wrinkles. "The Mami Wata are friendly to you."

"Mami Wata?" Acacia asked.

"There are many, many names for the same creatures, the same gods. They are also called mermaids and Nommo." She laughed. The sound was broad and warm and genuine. "Whatever you call them, today we celebrate Their blessings. Come with me! You are our friends now."

Acacia wanted to let her guard down. She needed to! But magic walked here that wouldn't even register on a deep scan. She had to be careful beyond any ordinary sense of the word.

"I am Mamissa Kokoe," the big woman roared, "and I am what you would call the Fetish Priestess."

Some of the Adventurers introduced themselves. Coral hung back. Mamissa came to her, squatted, and brought her dark, flat face closer for an inspection. "You are not an outsider. Who are you, child?"

Coral seemed to draw into herself. "My name is Coral," she said in a strangled, little-girl voice. "They saved my life. They tried to save Tod, but he was like chipped beef, man."

Mamissa put her palms on her enormous knees and looked at the girl more closely, like a grown woman examining a doll. "Well. You come from the lower levels, don't you?"

Coral nodded nervously.

"And you helped these people, and you have no tribe now?"

Coral nodded again.

"I see. Well. These are hard times for you. If these newcomers had any power of their own…"

Mamissa and her followers led them across the rooftop. It was scattered with huts and small ponds and what seemed to be hundreds of acres of crops.

"What is this place?" Mary-em asked.

"This is our home. Some call it MIMIC. Some call it New Africa."

"The people down on the lower levels didn't seem to be very African," Mouser said. "If you pardon me for noticing."

Mamissa's massive frame shook with elemental laughter. It blended with the wind that rustled the leaves of sugar cane and whistled through stands of cornstalks and banana trees.

"Africa is in the heart, not the skin, little boy. The tribes of Africa are black, and white, and yellow." Acacia heard the words echoed in her earpieces and switched her belt pod to Record. These were notes from the Game Masters. You never knew what might be useful.

"Before the great disasters struck the world, the old gods warned the faithful, told us to come here. Taught us prayers to make the crops grow," said Mamissa Kokoe.

Nigel Bishop had shouldered in closer. "But there seem to be many

… ways to worship," he said.

"As there have always been."

They had emerged from the fields and were now walking through a network of huts. Potbellied half-naked children ran barefoot through the streets. All of them were nut-brown, by birth or exposure to desert sun. They seemed healthy and happy.

"Are you completely self-sufflcient here?"

"No." For an instant the smile wandered. "We need things from the lower levels. Most of us on the upper levels worship the gentler gods-we have even given up animal sacrifice."

"Sacrifice? "

Twan's ears had perked up at the word. They were surrounded by children now, coming out of the houses and the huts, curious as children always are.

Acacia found herself scratching a cornrowed head. Trevor Stone was sitting on his heels, whispering to a handful of the children, showing them something hand-sized that glittered. Many were coffee-skinned Hispanics, and they ran alongside the Adventurers laughing and smiling, rows of improbably white teeth gleaming, hands outstretched, touching strangeness.

"Pigs. Barnyard fowl. These are often sacrificed, and we have done away with some of it."

"Why?" Twan persisted.

"Greenpeace," Mamissa said soberly. "Save the chickens, man."

The ash-blond jogger-Bobo? — sprinted forward to block their path. "Mamissa," he said, "we cannot allow these strangers to witness our ceremonies!"

"Oh, hush your mouth. The Mami Wata have personally interceded. It would be rude to turn them away."

"You go too far!" Bobo called after them.

Mamissa paid no attention to him, and they continued on.

"You refuse to sacrifice to the gods, and now you allow strangers. You will bring grief on us all!"

So sacrificing to the gods was valuable, but they hadn't been doing their share of it? Acacia made a mental note, resolving to pay extra special attention. In all times and places, one must learn the religious laws.

Huts were clustered like coconuts just this side of a lagoon… wait. From this angle, the lagoon seemed an ocean. It stretched as far as the eye could see.

Acacia strode up to keep abreast of Mamissa; for all of her girth, the woman moved like a race walker. "What exactly is this ceremony?"

The village seemed to be gathering. The sun was high and sparkled on the waves rolling in toward the beach.

"The Mami Wata ceremony is a tribute to the water folk," Mamissa said. "If you would soothe your dreams, if you would know the future, if you would commune with the water spirits, you must participate." She turned and looked among the Adventurers. "What woman among you would join in the Mami Wata ceremony?"

Acacia weighed options for a moment and then stepped forward. "I will," she said.

"Waters," Poule snapped, and S. J. Waters stepped forward.

Mamissa shook her head. "No. Women only."

SJ shrugged at Evil Poule. Poule said, "Yeah. I thought your name might be lucky."

A high, moaning sound went up from the village, followed by a joyful keening. Perhaps fifty women rushed out of the huts. They were all races and colors and all half-naked.

Acacia watched Alphonse's eyes bug out. Here comes the main event, she thought. She had been expecting this.

With studied casualness she stripped down to her panties. Every movement was a calculated tease. The Army men had effectively turned to stone. Al the B.-paranoid as always-tried to keep his eyes moving, and failed. The Fool-Killer could have had him for free.

Gloriously long-limbed and bare-cheated, Acacia turned and glared at the men. Their eyes bugged like gigged frogs. "Well, what are you staring at, you knuckle-dragging mouth breathers?"

Adam's apples bobbed. Nervous perspiration glazed wrinkled brows. God, she thought. I love being a mammal.

The Mouser managed a weak reply. "Uh… she said we can't join in…"

Mamissa laughed heartily. "true, but if you would watch, or help, shed your clothing. Otherwise, stand back! And allow the Faithful to worship."

"I remember!" Al the B said suddenly. Slowly at first, then with a growing frenzy, Alphonse started to peel.

Other men were following suit. One could tell from their expressions-puzzled frowns or secretive grins-whether they'd read the material on the Mami Wata rites or were just following Al's lead.

Only two people actively complained. One was Major Terry Clavell. "I'm not doing this," he said stubbornly. "I just won't watch the ceremony, that's all. "

General Poule dropped his pants on his backpack, then his shirt, without taking his eyes off the native women gathering at the shore. He said, "Then I'd better watch. I might see something we need to know."

The other was a wrinkled, sun-dried nut of a woman, MaryMartha Corbett. "There's enough sufferin' in the world," she muttered, "without askin' perfectly nice folks in China and England to watch my peekaboos on wide screen." Uncharitably, perhaps, no one argued with her.

Top Nun hadn't complained, but wasn't disrobing, either.

"Oh, come on," Mouser said. "Give it a try."

"You don't know my husband," she said wistfully. "Would he be angry? Hoo-ha!"

Poule said, "Dammit, Waters, they're all staring at my belly."

"It isn't soft, it's just big, right? General, why don't you ask Bobo to punch it?"

"Because he looks bloody strong."

Far below their feet, Doris Whitman requested a stat run from Tony McWhirter. Tony ran through the complete list of twenty-four survivors and evaluated them for magic and resistance to spells. He came up with three names, all males.

Doris ran a quick randomizer series to select a victim. She patched through to the individual lines, punched his code, and began to speak.

For an instant, Alphonse thought that he was going crazy. "Hello," a rather sexy voice whispered breathily in his ear. "The gods, here. You have been chosen for a demonstration of our power. You will do exactly what we tell you to do, when we tell you to do it, or you will take twelve hit points of damage right now. If you understand, please nod your head."

Alphonse nodded enthusiastically.

"Good lad. This is what we want you to do…"

Nonworshipers had been pushed to the rear of the crowd, with nothing to see but the backs of heads.

Participants were all lined up at the water's edge now. The entire three-quarters-naked lot of them were swaying and chanting to music that seemed to surround them, to flow from everywhere, from nowhere, and filled them completely.

The water roiled at the shoreline. Near-naked Adventurers separated themselves from their clothed companions and joined the legion of screaming, leaping, wailing women on the beach.

The waves seemed almost alive. They beckoned.

Back near the huts, Major Terry Clavell gave a harsh, flat bark of laughter. "Seems to me that this is going to give The Girls an unfair advantage," he said unpleasantly.

"Philips crossed us. She tried to show how good she was," S. J. Waters said matter-of-factly. "Her timing was lousy."

"Waters," The major said curtly, "we've discussed all this before. I'm not interested in it now. Whatever fucking mermaid nonsense this is, I don't care. Someone has to remain ready for combat at all times. However…"

Mamissa looked over the clothed Adventurers and motioned several of them forward. She shook her rattle at them, and they began to glow. " Aide!" she chanted, dancing about them. "The Mayombreros have infected you. I can lift the spell, but it will be expensive."

The major sighed with resignation. "What will you take in exchange?"

"From you? Perhaps a cookpot. A piece of fine jewelry…" She looked at the ring on his finger and then at the watch on his wrist. "This will do very well."

The major grinned craftily. "I don't think so. You take my watch, muck up my time sense with a spell."

"We are your friends."

"That's what the last guys said. Listen. I'll give you money-"

And in the depths of Gaming Central, Elmo smiled. "I think you can forget Alphonse, dear. The good major just volunteered." His finger crept near the microphone. His wife restrained him.

"Not quite yet. We have to give him a chance."

S. J. Waters leaned over. "Major, this might not be the best idea, sir."

"This is another trap, dammit! It's some sort of associative magic." Clavell dug into his pack and brought out a handful of pretty golden squares: disinte grating jewelry that glimmered in the sunlight like a handful of rainbows. He held them out to Mamissa. "Look," he said earnestly. "Beautiful, aren't they? Much more valuable to my people-"

Her eyes flamed.

Elmo grinned. "Now?"

Doris nodded sweetly. "Yes, dear. You can possess him."

Elmo switched on the microphone. "Attention, Major-"

The major's eyes widened. He scotched at his ear.

Mamissa spat at the major's feet and moved on to Prez, exchanging a pinch of dust from a purse at her waist for a golden Zulu armband.

Elmo said, "Clavell, you have just made a major error. Unfortunately, it is not one which you can remedy. In five minutes, during the middle of the Mami Wata ceremony, you are going to become possessed. At my command you will seize a weapon, anything handy, and begin killing the other Gamers. If you kill three before they kill you, you will emerge from the possession unharmed. You are not to discriminate between members of your own team and members of other teams. The person nearest you. If we judge that you are bypassing your own teammates, we will diminish your hit points and kill you out of the Game. Nod if you understand."

The major gulped and nodded.

"Very good."

A ghostly shadow peeled away from Alphonse as the Mami Wata priestess dusted him.

"You may relax," the voice whispered in his ear. "the gods have changed their minds."

The priestess had taken his Boulder opal belt buckle! But he was glad he hadn't haggled. Only a fool would enter a Game without trade goods; he had more. He'd get Saray's gift back at the end of the Game.

There were other things to concern himself about or, perhaps, rejoice in. The gods were about to put some kitticombotty on the good major's ass.