The Free Lunch Read online

  An Escape…

  WHAT IF THE WORLD WAS SO terrible that your only hope for a happy life would be to hide away in the world’s greatest amusement park…Dreamworld? In The Free Lunch, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Spider Robinson transports us to Dreamworld, a place where everybody has fun, dreams can come true, and the only sadness is when they close for the night.

  With his perceptive grasp of human emotions and his deft hand at humor, Robinson masterfully tells the tale of Mike, a young teen who escapes our own dark, tormented near future into a dream—into Dreamworld. There he meets Annie, another refugee who has built a life in the underworld of this fantastic amusement park, perhaps the last vestige of innocence left in the world. But it is tainted by a dark secret—a ruthless competitor, who can’t possibly create an attraction that’s as much fun as Dreamworld, has decided that if he can’t beat Dreamworld, he might as well destroy it. There’s another threat to Dreamworld. Suddenly there are more trolls at the end of the day than were there in the morning…and nobody, not even Mike or Annie, knows where they’re from. But it’s up to them and their passion for preserving this last haven of joy in a world of horrors to save Dreamworld…and Earth’s future.

  BOOKS BY SPIDER ROBINSON

  Telempath

  * Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Antinomy

  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  * Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Mindkiller

  Melancholy Elephants

  Night of Power

  Callahan’s Secret

  Callahan and Company (omnibus)

  Time Pressure

  Callahan’s Lady

  Copyright Violation

  True Minds

  Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Kill the Editor

  Lady Slings the Booze

  The Callahan Touch

  Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  * Off the Wall at Callahan’s

  * Callahan’s Legacy

  Deathkiller (omnibus)

  Lifehouse

  * The Callahan Chronicals (omnibus)

  The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)

  User Friendly

  * The Free Lunch

  Callahan’s Key

  By Any Other Name

  * A Tor Book

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE FREE LUNCH

  Copyright © 2001 by Spider Robinson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  Design by Jane Adele Regina

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  The free lunch / Spider Robinson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-86524-4

  1. Runaway teenagers—Fiction. 2. Amusement parks—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O3156 F74 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  2001027196

  First Edition: August 2001

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR HERB VARLEY

  AND ALSO FOR

  DAVID GERROLD AND SUSAN ALLISON,

  UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATORS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began in 1984 as a conversation at a certain California theme park with my friend John Varley, and quickly swelled into a full-fledged literary collaboration. By the end of the day, with some help from bystander David Gerrold, we had our premise, lead characters, and title. Susan Allison of Ace Books then graciously suggested an excellent plot no one was using at the moment, which helped considerably. The next thing I knew, I was flying from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Eugene, Oregon, to spend a week hunkered down in the bunker with Herb—as I call John Varley for no particular reason—working on the book. (And wearing the same clothes all week: the airline lost my luggage, and Herb, unlike me, is built like a Viking chieftain.) We refined our characters, fleshed out our plot, defined our themes, and settled on a classic working method: we would alternate chapters, then each do a final rewrite of the total manuscript. I drew the first straw, typed out a first chapter, passed the ball to Herb, and flew home.

  Fifteen years later I broke down and inquired as to his progress, and there wasn’t any.

  Furthermore, Herb said, he had gone stale on the idea. Somehow. “It was your idea to start with—why don’t you write it yourself?” he suggested. “Oh, by the way, your luggage finally showed up. By now some of the stuff is almost in style.”

  And then—in the very next breath—he suggested another collaboration.

  You see why I love this man? So I won’t kill him.

  Well, the last one had turned out so well, what could I say? And so I’m pleased to report that Herb and I have begun another book together, tentatively titled The Little Spaceship That Could. (His original idea, this time.) We spent months of e-mail time plotting it and creating characters together, I completed the first chapter and sent it to him in May 1997…and I’m sure chapter 2 will arrive any day now. I’m holding my breath, in fact.

  Wish us luck…

  — Spider Robinson

  June 1998

  TANSTAAFL:

  there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

  —Robert Anson Heinlein

  It is often the fifth ace that makes all the difference

  between success and failure.

  —J. B. Morton

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  GOING UNDER

  CHAPTER 2

  UNDER

  CHAPTER 3

  SOAKING

  CHAPTER 4

  MEANWHILE IN MORDOR

  CHAPTER 5

  STOOLED TO THE ROGUE

  CHAPTER 6

  TOO MANY TROLLS

  CHAPTER 7

  DEBUGGING DREAMWORLD

  CHAPTER 8

  IGNORANT ARMIES

  CHAPTER 9

  ONLY A MOTHER

  CHAPTER 10

  INTO THE TOILET

  CHAPTER 11

  OUT OF KIN TROLL

  CHAPTER 12

  LIARS’ POKER

  CHAPTER 13

  HUNTING TIGER

  CHAPTER 14

  BAD TIMES

  CHAPTER 15

  TO BEAT THE BAND

  CHAPTER 16

  UNDER: THE CIRCUMSTANCES

  CHAPTER 17

  COMPLIMENTARY COMESTIBLES

  CHAPTER 18

  FIXING THE RACE

  C H A P T E R 1

  GOING UNDER

  The fourth time was the charm.

  At around sunset on a Monday, a well-dressed man in his late forties with a beard and old-fashioned eyeglasses surrendered his bracelet to the attendant and left Dreamworld, unaccompanied by children or other adults. He seemed to float through the exit turnstile, a dreamy smile pasted on his face. He looked, for the moment, much younger than his age. As he reached the edge of the parking lot, near the roped-off area where the evening crowd were lining up for admission, his visual-focus distance dropped back from infinity to things as near as the solar system, and he noticed the pastel sunset. It was more than he could bear. He stopped in his tracks, drew in a great bellyful of air, threw back his head, and bellowed to the
emerging stars, “Thomas Immega, you brilliant benevolent old son of a good woman, I love you!”

  There were giggles from some of the children who waited for admission, and warm smiles from some of the adults leaving along with him, but only one of the admitting attendants looked up from his work. He was new at the job.

  “I’m going to find out where they’ve got you planted,” the bearded man raved on, “and dig you up and kiss you right on the moldy lips. You did it right, Cousin!”

  The ticket taker could see how it must have been. The fellow had come to Dreamworld for the first time old. Jaded and cynical, he had been told what to expect but had not believed it. He had arrived expecting to sneer. Now, only hours later, he was stunned by his own monstrous arrogance, and terribly grateful to have been forgiven for it.

  The attendant felt nostalgia and kinship. He hoped the bearded man didn’t live too far away. If his home was outside practical commuting distance to Dreamworld, the bearded man was going to have to move. The way the attendant had.

  He yanked his attention back to his work; his own line was starting to build, and his supervisor would be offering him help in a minute. But part of his mind remained on the bearded man—who had completed first-stage decompression and was literally skipping toward his distant car now—and so distracted, the attendant failed to note that the chubby twelve-year-old before him had only one chin. He took her money, gave her her map and brochure, fastened a Dreamband around her thick little wrist with something less than his usual care, and passed her through the gate into Dreamworld without a second thought. He did notice that her smile of thanks was especially incandescent.

  He would have been somewhat puzzled to see it fade, thirty seconds later, as the flaw in her planning became clear to her.

  There were many places in Dreamworld where a child could be alone, and there were some places where she could be unobserved. But as far as the chubby girl knew, there was only one place she could be both alone and unobserved—and if she went in there, it might be too dangerous to come out again. She had not thought Phase Two through far enough—perhaps because subconsciously she had not truly expected Phase One to succeed.

  She wandered aimlessly around the Octagon—the football-field-sized commons from which all eight of the Paths of Dreamworld originated—for about ten minutes, trying to think of Plan B. The best she could do was Plan A Prime: go ahead as planned…and if it came apart, improvise.

  Her bladder cast the deciding vote. She chose the smallest and least popular of the eight available ladies’ rooms, the one way over by the path to the Bounding Main, and forced herself to go in.

  No one paid any attention to her. She lingered by the sink, looking at nothing at all, until the stall she wanted came free: the one nearest the door, with only one neighbor. Once safely locked inside it, she took off her blouse, turtleneck sweater, breasts, shoes, belly pack, and forearms.

  Now he was a twelve-year-old boy with makeup on. He slid his Dreamband off the wrist of his collapsed fake forearm and put it in his right-hand pocket. He opened the belly pack, took out his own shoes and a reasonably good counterfeit Dreamband, stuffed everything else into the pack, and zipped it back up. The sound reminded him of his bladder; he unzipped his fly to attend to the matter. At the last possible instant the lowered seat reminded him that girls didn’t pee standing up; he was able to cut off the flow in time, but it hurt. Feeling stupid and oddly ashamed, he turned around, sat, and did his business, trying not to wonder what the napkin disposal unit was.

  As he flushed, he blushed, realizing he had not remembered to make any toilet paper noises first. This was tricky…

  Now to escape. Improvise. If he could just get as far as the door undetected, he could tell anyone who saw him emerge that his kid sister had gotten sick, and then maybe he could fade away when they went in to help. He put his belly pack back on—outside his clothes, this time—and waited, listening hard to traffic sounds outside the stall. Finally he decided there were as few girls out there as there were going to be. About ten meters to the exit. Feet, don’t fail me now. He threw open the door—

  —and relaxed, seeing himself in the mirror opposite. He had forgotten about the wig and makeup. He no longer looked like the chubby effeminate girl who had come in…but he could pass as a skinny butch girl. He ignored the two girls present and made boldly for the exit. The visual barrier that was meant to keep dirty old men from peering in gave him three strides of concealment in which to whip the wig off and wipe at his makeup with it. Rehearsing his sick-sister lines, he jammed the wig into the belly pack, opened the door, and stepped out. Absolutely no one paid the slightest bit of attention to him.

  Of course. In Dreamworld, parents did not feel they had to stand guard while their children were using the toilet. Nothing untoward could possibly happen as long as they were wearing their Dreambands.

  That reminded him to remove the fake Dreamband he had fetched with him from his left-hand pocket and put it on, as unobtrusively as possible. God, he thought, I better steady down. Four—no, five oaf-outs already…and this was supposed to be the easy part!

  The hard part was coming up.

  BUT OF COURSE he had to wait for Firefall. None of the rides would be running until that was over. Everything in Dreamworld ground to a halt every night while it was in progress, and just about everything else within a radius of five kilometers. People dropped whatever they were doing to watch the incredible display of pyrotechnics, lasers, holograms, and kamikaze nanobots, no matter how many times they had seen it before. You stood and stared at all that fire cascading from the sky, all those different kinds of fire, and your busy chattering monkey mind fell silent, and whatever was in your heart came bubbling to the surface.

  He stood with the rest, and his heart threatened to boil over. There was too much compressed within it. He could not afford that, not yet. He knew how to go to a place in his mind where nothing could reach him—but it took great effort, and that particular muscle was nearly exhausted. He did it anyway. Maybe, if the gods were kind, it would be the last time for a while.

  He failed to notice when Firefall ended; where he was, fireworks were still going off. He was roused from his autohypnotic trance by a minor commotion near him. The way he phrased it to himself was a disturbance in The Force. He scanned the crowd around him and saw three smiling Cousins in their lemon jumpsuits converging from afar like yellow corpuscles, without apparent haste or urgency but covering ground fast. Behind them came two nonsmiling Dreamworld employees in street clothes: backstage personnel. For a paranoid instant he thought they were after him, but then located their target a few meters away: an adult, who had elected to watch Firefall reclining in a chaise lounge. Two Cousins were already kneeling beside her; she must have been taken ill. One of them moved, and he got his first clear look at the elderly woman’s face. Just then the lighting in the local area changed in a subtle way; within seconds they were all in shadow.

  But he had seen.

  He heard the nearer Cousin sigh, and murmur, “God, look at her smile.”

  “She doesn’t have to go home, now,” the other said softly. “Ever. I wouldn’t mind going like that myself, when it’s my time.”

  Then she looked up and saw him. She frowned, pasted a very good smile over it, put a finger to her lips, and addressed him in a stage whisper. “This poor lady’s exhausted—let’s let her nap a minute, okay?”

  He kept his face straight, nodded, and forced himself to leave the area nonchalantly, as though he had bought her story. The last thing he needed was a Cousin deciding he was traumatized, putting an arm around him, asking him questions for which he could no longer remember the lies he had prepared.

  He’d intended to dawdle for an hour or so after Firefall, going on a few of his favorite rides for the last time as a civilian. But all at once he felt he had been given a sign. Someone had died happy in Dreamworld. Time to finish the last detail, and then get this done.

  He drifted over towar
d the exit, picked out an attendant who looked sleepy, and tugged at his sleeve. “Mister,” he said, gesturing vaguely behind him, “the Cousin over there asked me to say he needs you for a minute.”

  “Thanks, son.” As he’d hoped, the attendant bought it and started away, looking around for a mythical Cousin. The genuine Dreamband was already in his hand; hastily he used the attendant’s abandoned wand to deactivate it, and dropped it into the bin with the rest. He had rehearsed this part many times; he was done well before the attendant stopped and glanced back for directions.

  “I guess he changed his mind,” he told the attendant. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” the man said, resuming his station. “Thanks anyway. You leaving now or what?”

  “No,” he said, “not for a while,” and went back inside.

  He stopped at the first trash can he encountered, rummaged in the belly pack for the folded-up hat and false nose, and stuffed them into his pants pockets. He zipped the pack back up, took it off, and dropped it in the trash.

  He felt an unexpected exhilaration as the lid swung closed. The last of the evidence was disposed of. The only remaining traces of his old life were the clothes he stood in. He was free as a bird…or the next best thing.

  HE TOOK THE path for the Enchanted Forest, and when he got there went straight to the Unicorn’s Glade ride. As he’d expected and hoped, the line was short, almost nonexistent. Less time to fidget and fret; fewer witnesses. Once they were inside and the cars were arriving, the crowd around him was so sparse that he was easily able to grab the seat he needed: the last one in the train. He pulled the safety bar up and composed his features into what he called his dweeb face. It worked; no one elected to sit with him. His heart began to pound with elation as the train eased into motion. This was going to work! The last hurdle had been passed, the last tricky part. From here it was as easy as falling off a log.

  And so of course he did just that. He picked his moment with great care, waiting until they emerged from the dark tunnel into the first lighted section, and everyone else would be most distracted by things ahead of them. He had already weaseled out from under the safety bar, put the fake Dreamband in his pocket, and put on his elf hat and false nose. But as he slipped over the side of his car and dashed for cover, he mistook a fake log for a real one, tried to hop up onto it, slipped off, and fell headlong.