The Free Lunch Read online

  “Was it ugly?”

  “Huh?”

  “Everybody says shitting is gross, creepy, ugly. You hide in a closet to do it, so nobody will see. Was Smoky ugly when he was shitting?”

  “No!” He pictured it. “Actually, it was kind of beautiful, if you want to know the truth. I wish I could see him do it now.”

  She nodded. “Then you understand. Everybody says shitting is creepy—but if it’s somebody you love doing it, it’s beautiful to watch. It’s a part of them, so it’s a gift. So then—do you see?—shitting isn’t creepy: it’s just that everybody doesn’t love everybody. Enough.”

  “Let me think about that a minute,” he said. She did, waiting patiently in her cross-legged tailor’s seat. After a while he said, “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Stuff everybody thinks is creepy might not be creepy…if there’s enough love around.”

  A full-bore smile flashed and was gone, the first of hers he had ever seen, and now he knew what she had looked like at his age. “Gold star.”

  He nodded…took a deep breath, and leaned over the side again.

  He saw nearly at once this time that they didn’t really look a whole lot like maggots at all, really—not if you looked closely.

  For one thing, the countless trillions of swarming grains of rice below were not the pale yellow color his memory had imposed on them. Those near enough to a maintenance light to be seen clearly were all, he saw now, a soft pastel blue. His reptile brain relaxed a bit: almost nothing that lives is that color, and nothing dangerous.

  At this distance, they must all actually be much bigger than grains of rice. He guessed them at the size of a thumb. They were not all the same size, either. Just most of them.

  And they were not in fact swarming, technically. Not with the blind, mindless randomness of maggots; they were clearly all moving purposefully, each toward a destination of its own. Some were encumbered with things too small or shadowed to make out, either portaged on their backs or dragged behind them. In one spot he saw over two dozen of them cooperating to drag away something bulky. Someone’s lost camcorder…

  Now he understood. “They’re cleaning Penny Lane!”

  Annie’s voice was serene behind him now. “Cleaning, disinfecting, polishing, resetting, reconfiguring, repairing, restocking, repainting, maintaining…they’re healing it, Mike. Healing the damage people did to it without meaning to, without being able to help it. They do it every night. It’s happening all over Dreamworld, right now. Robots, minibots, microbots, even nanobots, all working in harmony—billions of them. I like to come up here, or a few other places, and watch them. Everything else in the universe falls apart—but Thomas Immega doesn’t allow entropy, in here. Those robots down there keep it out.”

  He watched them for a timeless time. “They’re not creepy at all,” he said at last. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  He sat upright on the limb again. “I thought it was, like, an army of people that fixed everything up again at night.”

  She nodded. “The management do contrive to give that impression to the public, without ever exactly saying so. Some civilians who didn’t know better might think little robot maggots were creepy, you know? There is a small army working here right now, underground—techs and engineers and set designers who forgot to go home and so on—but they’re mostly not allowed up on the set. You can’t trust ’em not to spill a cup of coffee or forget a power tool.”

  “Annie? The people that work here in the daytime…are they real?” He felt himself blushing. “Not the Cousins, I mean: I know they’re real. But, like, the Elves and Trolls and Leprechauns and…you know, the”—he hesitated—“all the little people. And the big ones that are magical, like Master Li. Are they real?”

  She grinned—not as good as her earlier smile, but now he knew what she’d looked like at twenty-five. “Ah—you want to learn all the secrets your first night. Are you sure?”

  “Well…” As any child of four knew, if a Dreamworld character chose to touch you—the Mother Thing, say, or one of the little people—they certainly seemed to be real enough. But if you touched one of them without invitation, as often as not they were liable to vanish like a burst soap bubble. It was one of the primary mysteries of Dreamworld, a subject of endless speculation, one of the principal evidences that Magic lived here. “Yeah.”

  “About fifty-fifty,” she said.

  He did some mental calculation and was stunned. “God, there must be—”

  “A significant fraction of the little people in North America work here,” she said. “And more from other places. Thomas Immega is our patron saint. You must have seen the size of the employee parking zone.”

  “Well, yeah, but how can you tell how many of those people wear overalls and how many put on costumes, when they get inside?”

  “Good point. No, the day shift is only about twenty percent Staff, twenty percent Cousins. The rest are all Cast.”

  “Wow.” To have the knowledge felt peculiar, as if someone had given him the address of Santa’s summer home. His mind skittered away. “I saw somebody die today.”

  The non sequitur did not throw her. “Tell me about it,” was all she said.

  So he did. She asked a lot of questions, and he ended up remembering it better than he’d thought he had, coming up with all sorts of details of what he’d seen, what he’d heard, what he’d felt. He decided he liked telling stuff to Annie. In the first place there was a heady quality to sitting in a forbidden place at night discussing death with an adult. This was Mike’s very first bull session. And in the second place, there was something about the way Annie listened that he liked. Grown-ups rarely listened to you; they mostly just paused between their own speeches to make sure you’d admired the last one. She heard what he said: you could tell from her questions.

  “I think the Cousin was right,” she said when he was done.

  “About her being lucky? Sure. Boy, to die in Dreamworld…”

  “A little less than fifty people have been that lucky, since they opened the doors, and by God I intend to be one of them. But it must be a special grace to go during Firefall.”

  “For some reason I wish I knew her name,” Mike said. “Is there a way I could find out, without taking a chance?”

  “Her name was Judith Grossman,” Annie said. “She was a poet from New York, and she is survived by two daughters and four grandchildren.”

  “You already knew about her?”

  “I know everything that happens in Dreamworld. I just wanted to know about her passing. How it was.”

  “Well…I don’t see how it could have been much better.”

  “They say the ones God loves most are the ones who die making love,” she said, “but I agree, her passing was almost as good. It doesn’t even surprise me anymore.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  She sighed. “Mike, I think of myself as a hardheaded realist. You have to be to live in a dreamworld. But there’s a statistical anomaly that almost tempts me to mysticism. Of the forty-six people I mentioned before that have died here, thirty-five went with, as near as I can find out, an absolute minimum of pain or fear. If it was an accident that got them, they never knew what hit them; the sick ones mostly seemed to either fall down on something soft or fail to get up from a comfortable seat. Half of ’em died actually smiling. And of the eleven exceptions…well, at least seven of them had it coming. They were either engaged in trying to hurt someone else, or had hurt someone badly outside and come in to hide. I saw three of those happen myself, and saw convincing evidence for the other seven. The other four, nobody knows what happened. I cling to those four exceptions.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I ever have to concede that a benign invisible spirit is in fact watching over Dreamworld, it’ll spoil the place for me. I might even have to leave.”

  “Huh. That’d make me want to stay.”

  “I understand. But I look at it this way. If there’s a ma
gic force that can help the good die happy and punish the wicked, and it’s only got time to cover one amusement park, I don’t think I want to have anything to do with it. I’ll go take my chances on the outside with the other peasants.”

  Mike wondered if he were that noble. Well, he could admire it, anyway. “I see what you mean.”

  “Do you think you can get to sleep, now?”

  He asked his body. “Yeah.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  He noticed that she rose slowly from her tailor’s seat, and realized she was exhausted. He pondered what, if anything, to say about that, and in the elevator came up with, “Annie? Thanks. I know I’m a pain.”

  She sighed theatrically. “Up all night with the baby, at my age.” Seeing his expression, she sobered. “Don’t worry about it, Mike. I’m glad you came. I hate like hell to admit it, and I’m not even sure I believe it, but this place was just beginning to get the tiniest bit dull.” She gifted him with another of those quick smiles. “I needed to see it again through your eyes.” She did an instant 180 and became stern. “Now go to bed.”

  He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. But once they got back home, he fell asleep with a warm feeling.

  C H A P T E R 4

  MEANWHILE IN MORDOR

  At about the same time, at the top of a tall tower a few thousand kilometers away, a morbidly obese man named Alonzo Haines glared at his state-of-the-art executive desk and told himself for the umpteenth time that the electronic office sucked.

  He was old enough and cranky enough—especially at this hour—to remember with fondness the days when people came to your office, in corpus, all the time. It was much easier to bully a live human being than any electronic avatar: a forceful personality does not digitize well. You can let your e-mail sit there in the box all day before acknowledging its existence, but the e-mail doesn’t know you’re keeping it waiting. You can’t discomfit a voice-mail message by interrupting it, or letting uncomfortable silences follow statements you don’t like. You can’t project menace properly over even the best vidphone. Oh, there were tricks for dominating, even at such removes, and Haines had mastered them all…but they just weren’t as intrinsically satisfying as seeing the other son of a bitch squirm on the far side of your desk, having him physically on your turf, smelling his discomfiture.

  Worst of all, the electronic gadgets were so damnably simple to use now, there was no real (publicly admissible) reason to have a personal secretary anymore. There was nobody around the office to intimidate during the day but his three executive assistants…and they just weren’t expendable enough for him to risk a good workout.

  Ah, but tonight, at two o’clock in the morning, there was hope.

  He watched it approaching on the security monitor on his desktop: Randall Conway, entering the empty office tower on schedule—not by way of the lobby, and without coming to the attention of any of the Tower Security personnel still on duty at this hour, just as Haines himself had entered ten minutes ago. As fit as Haines was fat, he moved with the graceful efficiency of a successful predator, which he was.

  This might go either way. There were two possible outcomes, both good. If Conway had called this late-night meeting to report failure, then humiliating him would be not only prudent but just. If not—if he actually had something—then he would be too valuable to offend without good reason, like the executive assistants…but on the bright side, Haines’s most cherished dreams would be about to come true.

  It was a win-win situation, really. He began to cheer up, or at least sulk less emphatically, as he always did at such times.

  He studied Conway’s face as the man rode up in the special elevator—a longish ride even at modern acceleration—but found no clues. Well, a perfect poker face was part of what Haines was paying him for. And after all, Conway probably knew, certainly must suspect, that his employer was watching him as he ascended to the penthouse eyrie: to wear a poker face was an admission of discomfort. Or might have been, if Conway’s face hadn’t looked like that all the time…

  Haines hated having to deal with Conway, for the man was almost as smart as he was, and just as murderous. But he had no choice. He needed someone like Conway, and Conway was the best someone-like-him there was: Haines’s best and only hope of destroying the despised Phillip Avery and all his works.

  He loathed Avery far more than he did Conway—perhaps more than anyone alive loathed anyone. Elisha Gray might have known such hatred, in his day: the man who filed his patent application for the telephone an hour and a half after Alexander Graham Bell. Except that Haines was even more aggrieved—because he, God damn it, had been first. Thrillworld, the violent fantasy-based theme park into which he had poured several fortunes, only one of them his own—committing himself irretrievably for life—had opened its doors to the world exactly four weeks before Thomas Immega and his dog Avery had opened up their damned Dreamworld…

  Just as the elevator began decelerating, Haines realized with a start that he had forgotten to disable the office’s recording gear, and hastily did so, wiping the last ten minutes for good measure. If Conway had succeeded, there must be no record of this conversation. And if he had failed, and was here for a reaming, Haines could always turn the cameras back on.

  The elevator opened, and Conway emerged like a panther from a cage. “I want a chair,” he said at once in that horridly husky voice.

  Haines could not be flustered by any serve, but this came close. He hated it when he had failed to think something through. “Of course,” he said. There actually was a visitor’s chair in the room, shoved well back out of the way, and he managed to find the button that would summon it to the proper position. Conway curled up in it without thanks. “We secure?” he rasped.

  “We’re not here,” Haines agreed.

  “I’ve got them,” Conway said without further preamble. “I don’t know exactly what I’ve got, yet—but I know I’ve got them.”

  Haines began the laborious task of preparing himself to be happy. Smiling, an otherwise useless grimace, sometimes helped, so he tried it. “Tell me about it. Did you find the Mother Elf?”

  “I found out she really exists, yes. But I don’t know where, or what she looks like, and it’s not important.”

  Haines was surprised; he’d been sure the Mother Elf was bullshit, folk myth. But—“Okay. What is?”

  “They got too many Trolls.”

  Haines was annoyed enough to go for the chill stare and overextended pause, which had made lesser men faint. It bounced off Conway, of course. “So what else is new?” he said finally. “That son of a bitch Avery has got practically every midget and dwarf on the planet under contract, so what? I already put lawyers on it: nothing we can do, antitrust, nothing. It’s perfectly legal for those bastards to lock up a whole minority group.”

  Conway was shaking his head. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Okay. What is?”

  “Every morning, four hundred and thirty-four midgets and dwarves walk into Dreamworld through the employee entrances for the day shift. Every afternoon this week, four hundred and forty walked out. Same for the night shift.”

  “Huh?”

  “They got too many Trolls.”

  Haines closed his eyes. “Jesus. A dozen a day. For at least the past week.”

  “You see what I mean? I got no idea what it means, yet. But whatever the hell they’re doing, there’s no way it could be innocent. Even before we know what it is, we got them by the balls.”

  “But what is it? You have any ideas?”

  “None I like much. Comic-book stuff. Some sort of fruitcake illegal immigration scam, maybe, or a new tax rip-off.”

  “Jesus,” Haines said again. “Could it possibly be some kind of, I don’t know, weird child-molesting thing? They kidnap the kids and, like, hypnotize them, and then dress ’em up and make ’em up like Elves and send ’em out to…” He trailed off, realizing it made no sense but reluctant to relinquish the fantas
y. Avery, buggering an Elf on the Six O’clock News…

  Conway shook his head. “There are never any customers unaccounted for. I checked six ways. And it’s never Elves, Leprechauns, or Dwarves. Just Trolls—at least so far.”

  Haines shook his own head. “I could never keep all those little bastards straight.”

  “There’s two kinds of little people in the world: midgets and dwarves. Midgets are the ones in proportion, that look like kids with adult faces; dwarves are the ones that are built weird. Over there, nice-looking midgets play Elves, ugly ones play Leprechauns; nice-looking dwarves are just called Dwarves, and ugly ones are Trolls. They got too many Trolls.”

  Haines frowned ferociously. “What the hell does it mean?” He stopped. “You’re right: what’s the difference? It’s got to be wrong, whatever it is. By God, I’ve got that bastard Avery.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you happen to notice this?”

  “I didn’t. A computer did. I had a general analysis program running on the orbital scans, looking for anomalies, anything we could nail them on. It worked.”

  Something in Haines resisted being this happy; he groped for an out. “You have this documented? I mean, nailed down?”

  “I can run you the orbital scans, and you can count the Trolls yourself.”

  “Our satellites or the government’s?”

  “Both. Tamperproof proof.”

  There was nothing for it. Haines felt his face rearranging itself in unaccustomed ways, producing the first grin it had worn since, five years earlier, an operative had brought him a photograph of Phillip Avery grunting on the toilet. “There is a God,” he said.

  “No,” Conway said. “There isn’t.”

  “Well, no. But sometimes you get lucky.”

  “Yes.”

  Haines knew his face was going to hurt in the morning, but he didn’t care. “Well, sometimes that’s almost as good.”

  Conway declined to argue the point. “How do you want to hit them with it?”

  “In a leisurely manner,” Haines said. “I am in no hurry at all. Avery’s mine now, but I still want to know everything before I take him. I want to know exactly what’s going on, and why, and for how long. I want to know about the frigging Mother Elf, too. In fact, I want to have a long talk with that little bitch.”