Burning Bright

Lioe settled herself at a console in one of the club’s workrooms, her fingers moving easily over the controls, probing the club’s extensive libraries for ideas for a new scenario. It would be nice to pursue some of the ideas from Ixion’s Wheel—particularly Avellar’s bid for the throne, dependent as it was on the same psionics that had been banned throughout the Imperium. Avellar, tied to his surviving clone-siblings by a telepathic link, was potentially a fascinating character, though she would have to find a player who could be relied on to avoid Gamer angst. Ambidexter could do it, she thought, if he was still playing. She shook that thought away. Ambidexter was no longer a player; there was no use pining over what might have been. Avellar’s bid for the throne would provide the most interesting resolution to the unstable political and emotional balance within the Game itself; his plot had ties to all the other versions and variants of the Game, could pull it all together into one final, complete scenario that would take years to run. She could see how it could be structured, how to use Avellar to bring in each strand of the Game, all the plots that had evolved and mutated from the original scenario—they were linked anyway, so intermingled that a schematic of the Game looked more like a snarled web of string than a normal variant tree. But Avellar, or, more precisely, Avellar’s bid to take the throne, could untangle it all, and bring the situation to a final resolution.

And that, of course, was the problem, and the main reason she would never float that grand scenario. To follow that line would mean coming dangerously close to the end of the Game. About the only convention that was held sacrosanct by every Gamer was that no scenario could be allowed to tip the balance between Rebellion and Imperium: to change that would be to change the Game itself. It wouldn’t be the end, not really, a voice whispered, just the start of a new Game, but that was almost as unacceptable. She had been told, years ago, when she was just starting out in the Game, that she had too much of a taste for endings. She sighed, and touched the key sequence that would load another file into her Gameboard—Shadows had given her unlimited copy privileges—and got the double beep that warned her that the datasphere was reaching capacity. She sighed again, released it from the read/write slot, and fumbled in her carryall until she found the case of disks she had bought that morning. She fitted a new one into place, touched keys again, and saw the monitor screen shift to the familiar transmission pattern.

She leaned back in her chair, watching the patterns change, and wondered what she would do for another scenario. Ixion’s Wheel was fun, but neither last night’s session nor any of the off-line test sessions back on Callixte had been quite what she wanted. There was always somebody who wouldn’t play the templates the way they were written, or something to throw off the balance she had imagined. Maybe a different set of players would do better, or maybe a different scenario—something in the Court Life variant, say, secret rebels working at court—would give her what she was looking for, would give her the perfect session that no one would ever want to rewrite.

She turned her thoughts away from that impossibility—the point of the Game was that everything could be rewritten, that the main points of the evolving story could only be arrived at by concensus, the acceptance of large numbers of one’s peers—and flipped a secondary screen to the in-house narrowcast. One of the house notables was running Ixion’s Wheel already, and she paused for a moment, touched keys to bring up the audio feed.

“—but can you be trusted to support the Rebellion, my lord?” a voice said, and she winced, and flipped the screen away. She hadn’t expected the players to be very good, playing in a low-level session like this one, but that was the kind of Gamer dialogue that she particularly disliked.