Blue Adept (25 page)

 
“But a planet can only have one axis of rotation! There can’t be two sets of poles!”

“There cannot be a square generated from a curve, alternatively.”

“Urn, yes.” Stile lapsed into thought. If he could get this one, he won the Round. But it baffled him as much as his square had baffled Noh. Was the west pole simply a matter of semantics, a new name for the north or south poles?
 
That seemed too simple. There really had to be a pole in addition to the conventional ones, to make it make sense.
 
Yet unless a planet could have two axes of rotation—

In the end, Stile had to give it up. He did not know where the west pole was. His advantage had disappeared.
 
They were even again. “Where?”

“Anticipation-hope you would solution it,” Noh said.
 
“Solve has eluded me for quantity of time.”

“You mean you don’t know the answer yourself?” Stile asked incredulously.

“Affirmation. I have inexplicably defaulted competition.
 
Negative expedience. Remorse.”

So Stile had won after all! Yet he wished he could have done it by solving the riddle. The west pole—where could it be? He might never know, and that was an aggravation.
 
Stile had been late in the Round Three roster, and now was early in the Round Four roster, as the Game Computer shifted things about to ensure fairness. Hence he had less than a day to wait. He spent much of that time sleeping, recovering from his excursion with the tanks and resting for possibly grueling forthcoming Games. He had been lucky so far; he could readily have lost the Football Game and the Riddle Game, and there was always the spectre of CHANCE to wash him out randomly. Most duffer players were fascinated by CHANCE; it was the great equalizer.
 
So he hoped he would encounter a reasonably experienced player, one who preferred to fight it out honestly. One who figured he had a chance to win by skill or a fortuitous event in a skill contest, like the referee’s miscall in the Football Game. But a true skill contest could be arduous, exhausting both participants so that the winner was at a disadvantage for the next Game.

If Stile’s employer discovered anything in the course of her investigation into the matter of the forged message-address, she did not confide it to him. That was the way of Citizens. They often treated serfs with superficial courtesy, but no followthrough. The Citizen he had encountered in Round One, the Rifleman, was an example; there had been no further communication from him. There was no such thing, in Proton law and custom, as a binding commitment by Citizen to serf. Everything went the other way.
 
Stile remained troubled by the continuing campaign against him by his anonymous enemy. At first he had thought this person had sent Sheen and then lasered his knees as a warning to get out of horseracing. But he had gotten out—and the threat continued. There had been a Citizen who was after him, but that had been effectively neutralized, and Sheen’s self-willed robot friends had verified that he was not the present offender. They had not been able to trace the source of the substituted address, because it had not been handled through any-computer circuits; it had been a “mechanical” act. But they had watched that particular Citizen, and knew that he was relatively innocent.

Someone wanted Stile dead—in Proton and in Phaze.
 
Perhaps it was the same person—a frame-traveler. There were a number of people who crossed the curtain regularly, as Stile himself did. Maybe that same one had killed Stile’s other self, the Blue Adept, and tried for Stile with less success. Probably another Adept; no lesser person could have done it. But who? The maker of golems—or the maker of amulets? Stile was becoming most eager to know.
 
If he beat the long odds and won the Tourney, he would have at his disposal the resources of a Citizen. Then he would be in a position to find out—and to take remedial action. That was the real imperative of his present drive.
 
He could not wash out of the Tourney and simply return to Phaze to court the Lady Blue—not when a curtain-crossing Adept was laying constant deathtraps for him. He had life-and-death riddles to solve first!

His Round Four opponent was a woman his own age: Hella, first Rung on the Age 35 ladder. Stile had qualified for the Tourney by being fifth on the male 35 ladder, but he was actually the top player of his age. Many top players remained deliberately low on their Game ladders, so as to avoid the annual Tourney draft of the top five. Hella, however, really was the top female player, whose tenure ended this year; she had been eager to enter the Tourney.
 
Nevertheless, she was not in Stile’s class. He could out-perform her in most of the physical Games and match her in the mental ones. If he got the numbers he would have no gallantry at all. He would choose PHYSICAL. If he had the letters he would have to go for TOOL, to put it into the boardgames block, where he retained the advantage over her.

Hella was a fit, statuesque woman, taller and heavier than Stile. She had half-length dark-blonde hair, slightly curly, and lips a little too thin. She looked like what she was: a healthy, cynical, hard-driving woman, nevertheless possessed of a not inconsiderable sex appeal. Larger men found her quite attractive, and she was said to be proficient at private games, the kind that men and women played off record. Stile had played her often, in random Games, but had never socialized with her. Most women did not get romantic about men who were smaller than themselves, and she was no exception. Stile himself had always been diffident about women, and remained so. Sheen was special, and not really a woman. The Lady Blue was special too—and Stile really found himself unable to forward his suit with her. She was his other self’s widow...
 

“I would rather not have come up against you,” Hella told him in the waiting room. “I’m already half out; a duffer caught me in CHANCE.”

“That’s the way it goes,” Stile said. “I have nothing against you, but I intend to put you away.”

“Of course,” she said. “If you get the numbers.”

“If I get the numbers,” he agreed.

Their summons came. Stile did not get the numbers.
 
Thus they landed in 2B, Tool-Assisted MENTAL GAMES. They played the sixteen choices of the subgrid and came to MAZE.

They adjourned to the Maze-section of the Game prem-ises. The Game Computer formed new mazes for each contest by sliding walls and panels along set channels; there was an extraordinary number of combinations, and it was not possible to anticipate the correct route through.
 
One person started from each end, and the first to complete the route won.

They took their places. Stile was designated blue, the convention for males, and Hella red, the convention for females. Had two males been competing, they would have been blue and green, or red and yellow for females. The Computer liked things orderly.

The starting buzzer sounded. Stile pushed through the blue door into the labyrinth. Inside the walls and floor were restful light gray, the ceiling a translucent illumination panel. As Stile’s weight came on the floor, it turned blue, panel by panel, and remained that way to show where he had been. Spectators could view this Game on vision screens in mockup form, the patterns developing in red and blue to show the progress of both competitors, appreciating the ironies of wrong turnings and near-approaches to each other.

Stile moved quickly down the hall, his blue trail keeping pace, until he came to the first division. He didn’t hesitate; he took the left passage. Further along, it divided again; this time he took the right passage. The general law of chance would make the right and left splits along the proper way come out about even; this was unreliable for short-term efforts, but still as good a rule to follow as any.

This passage convoluted, turned back on itself, and abruptly dead-ended. So much for general laws! Stile quickly reversed course, following his own blue trail, and took what had been the left passage. This twisted about and finally intersected his original blue trail—the first right turn he had ignored.

Oops—there had to be an odd number of passages available, for at least one led to the red door on the other side of the maze. If two led there, then there would be an even number—with two passages as yet untried. But that was unusual; spectators liked to have the two contestants meet somewhere in the center, and start frantically following each other’s trails, and the Game Computer usually obliged with such a design. He must have missed a passage in his hurry. First mistake, and he hoped it would not prove to be too expensive.

He checked the passage back to the blue door. Nothing there. Then he took off on the right-hand passage he had used to complete the loop. Sure enough, it divided; he had overlooked the other passage because it angled back the way he had come. He should have checked behind him as well as ahead; an elementary precaution. He was not playing well.

However, this was not necessarily time wasted. Hella would be working her way through from the other side, trying to intersect his blue trail that would lead her to the blue door. If he had a single path there, she would have no trouble. As it was, he had turned all paths blue, so she would have no hint; she might get lost, just as he had.
 
Sometimes, in these mazes, one person got nine-tenths of the way through, while the other floundered—and then the flounderer followed the other trail to victory while the nine-tenths person floundered. One could never tell.
 
He moved on down the new passage. It, too, divided; he moved left and followed new convolutions. This one did not seem to be dead-ending or intersecting itself; good.
 
Now he needed to intersect Hella’s trail before she intersected his.

Stile paused, listening. Yes—he heard her walking in the adjacent passage. That did not necessarily mean she was close; that passage could be a dead-end without connection to this one. Nevertheless, if he knew her location while she did not know his, that could be an advantage. He might sneak in and find her trail while she was still exploring a false lead, and hurry on to victory.

Then he heard her make a small, pleased exclamation.
 
Ouch—that could mean only one thing: she had intersected his trail. Which meant that he was probably the one on the dead-end.

Stile backtracked hastily and silently. Sure enough, her red path intersected his, where he had bypassed the last right passage, and ended there. She was hot on his blue trail, and going the right direction. He was in trouble!

Stile took off down the red trail. He had only two hopes: first that she had a fairly direct trail he could follow without confusion; second that she would get lost on his loops and dead-end.

His first hope was soon dashed; the red trail divided, and he did not know which one was good. He had to guess. He bore right, looped about, came close to the exit-region—and dead-ended. All the breaks were going against him! He hurried back, no longer bothering to be silent, and took the other trail. It wound about interminably, while at every moment he feared he would hear the clang of her exit and victory. It divided again; he bore right, sweating.
 
If he lost this simple Game to this woman, who really was not the player he was...

Then, abruptly, it was before him: the red door. Stile sprinted for it, suddenly convinced that Hella’s foot was on the sill of the blue door, that even half a second would wipe him out. In his mind’s ear he heard the toll of his loss.

He plunged through. The bell sounded. He had won! “Damn!” Hella exclaimed from the interior. She had after all gotten lost in his loop, and was nowhere close to the blue door. His alarm had been false.
 
Sheen was waiting as he emerged. “Take me away from here,” he told her, putting his arm about her slender waist.
 
He suffered another untoward image: Sheen lying torn apart after the tank chase. Yet there was no present evidence of that injury; she was all woman. “I’ve had enough of the Tourney for now!”

“There’ll be more than a day before your next match,” she said. “Time for you to catch your duel with the Herd Stallion in Phaze.”

“I might as well be right here in the Tourney!” he complained. “One contest after another.”

Neysa had taken off early to rehearse with her brother for the incipient exhibitions, at the Lady Blue’s behest. Stile was bothered about the hiatus in protection for the Lady, but was unable to object. She had remained within the castle, reasonably safe.

At the appropriate hour. Stile put his arm about the Lady’s supple waist and uttered a spell that jumped them both to the event. He was getting better at this sort of spell, but still would rather have traveled by conventional means, had there been time.

It was impressive. Eight or ten herds of unicorns had assembled for their competition; each Herd Stallion had his banner mounted at his camp and his subjects ranged about it. There was a tremendous open pasture upon which many hundreds of unicorns grazed. They sported all the colors of moons and rainbow, and were handsome specimens of equine flesh.

Yet there were many other creatures too. Werewolves ranged in small packs, carefully neutral in the sight of so much potential prey. No false growls here! Bats swooped from perch to perch and sailed high in the air in pursuit of insects. Humanoid figures of all types abounded.
 
A unicorn male trotted up to Stile and the Lady. In a moment he shifted to man-form, neatly attired in a khaki uniform. “Please identify thyself and party and accept an admittance tag.”