Kevin J Anderson - Gamearth #3 Games End (The Gamearth Trilogy)

Game's End

by Kevin J. Anderson

Copyright (c)1990 by Kevin J. Anderson

Fictionwise

www.Fictionwise.com

Science Fiction

David kept watching the clock. As Sunday afternoon ticked toward evening, fear grew inside him, echoes of nightmares and impossible things. Tonight they would play the Game again or it would play them.

The empty house buzzed with silence. David opened the curtains, showing the gray afternoon and the cold drizzle outside. Every once in a while, a gust of wind rattled the windows. The house felt fragile, as if at any moment some powerful outside being might crush the walls and sweep him away.

As he had done to characters on Gamearth.

David thought of the flat, colorful game-board that Melanie had painted. For the past two years, he and Melanie and Scott and Tyrone had acted out their adventures on Gamearth, following rules they had created and adapted from other game systems. They enjoyed their quests for treasure, their battles, their magic. They had fun. That was the primary rule they all agreed on to have fun.

But as the four of them poured their imaginations into the world, built generation after generation of characters, backstitched history and made the entire place whole and real in their minds. The players created a synergy with their imagination, a force that had pushed their made-up world into a life of its own.

And Gamearth began to strike back at them.

David saw this sooner than any of the others. He suggested they all stop playing before it went further, before it got out of control. But the other players out-voted him. Scott, with his technical "Mister Science" mind, simply could not believe that anything supernatural would happen. Tyrone, with his delight in the game, noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

Melanie, though, recognized the same thing David did but she ignored what could happen if Gamearth continued to grow in power, continued to gain its own identity. No, Melanie wanted to nurture it, watch in amazement as the Game took over their lives, breaking free from the restrictions the players placed on it. David had seen her eyes glaze over as Gamearth exerted its survival instinct on her.

David tried to create ways to squelch their creation, and Melanie fought against him with her characters. She placed them in conflict with everything he tried to do to save himself, to save them all. She refused to listen when he tried to explain it to her. David felt a shudder of desperation run through him.

The house felt gloomy from the cold and wet outside. David went to the fireplace and busied himself starting a fire, using some of the fragrant wood they kept in a cardboard box beside the hearth. He thought about turning the stereo on, but decided he would rather think in silence.

He lived with his dad, except for a few weeks in July when he went upstate to stay with his mother in her house trailer. Somehow he had escaped the game last summer, but perhaps Gamearth had not grown strong enough then.

David's parents had been separated for three years, talking coldly on the phone every few months; but they had never gone through the actual process of getting divorced. Both of his parents kept their feelings so well shuttered from him that David felt isolated even from the conflict. At times he thought he might actually enjoy it if they tried to make him take sides.

But instead, all his mother did was engage him in pleasant, empty conversations about girlfriends and movies; and his father just voiced stern reproofs about David's falling grades in the last semester when the Game had started to take over. But David's father seemed to be saying those things out of an obligation he felt, not from any deep concern.

David sighed and crumpled a few sheets of old newspaper. He piled kindling and other debris from the bottom of the box on top of the paper.

His dad had gone away for the weekend on a business trip, asking David if it was all right to be left alone. His tone left unvoiced the comment that even if David did express an objection, his father wasn't really willing to change his plans anyway.

But David certainly didn't mind being alone this night, when they would play the Game. He felt terrified of what might happen, but he didn't want anyone else there to watch. No other ... outsiders.

He reached for the long fireplace matches, then he turned on the gas lighter below the logs. Hissing blue flames swirled up to lick against the bark. He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Over the past two weeks, Gamearth had gotten more vicious in its retaliation, going beyond subtle hints and turning instead to blatant displays of its growing power over the real world. Showing how it could defeat them.

Melanie's characters Delrael and Vailret had gone on a quest to create a vast river as a barrier between the east and west sides of the map. As that had happened, the four outside players watched a blue line suddenly trace across the painted wooden game-board where the flow of water would have gone. Then, in the battle at the end of the evening, the dice started rolling by themselves, bouncing up and down. By magic, the magic they had put into Gamearth.

During the following week, all four players experienced identical dreams, watching other parts of the Game unfold even when they were not playing. The Sorcerer Enrod took the Fire Stone and tried to destroy the land on the other side of the Barrier River, only to be stopped by the Deathspirits. They had never played out that scenario yet all of them remembered it.

David had planted a creature called Scartaris on the map a force to absorb the energy from Gamearth, to bring it back to where it was merely a role-playing game, where it was safe : just a painted map and made-up characters, all put together for fun.

But Gamearth reached out and played Melanie like a puppet. She bent and twisted the rules in ways that David had not considered. In secret, she had added a part of their real world into one of her characters, a golem named Journeyman, like another ancient character, the Stranger Unlooked-For, who had ruined David's first attempt at defeating Gamearth.

But that had been before David got serious about his own mission. And now that he understood some things, he could use the same tactics.

David cleared away the family room floor, made an open spot where they would play that night. It was his turn to host. The fire snapped. The earth-tone carpeting seemed to absorb the warmth. A gust of wind rattled the windows again.

Gamearth was waiting. It was anxious to play, to manipulate them again. And as it became real by itself, Gamearth would no doubt come out to this world, the real world, and begin to Play them. Gamearth would retaliate for all those things that David and the other players had done to their imaginary characters.

He could not let that happen.

David considered simply not showing up. If he didn't play, then the others couldn't play and Gamearth could not go on. It was the four of them, the synergy of the four distinct personalities that came together to play, week after week that had caused Gamearth to come alive. If he didn't play, the same ingredients wouldn't be there.

David frowned, then ran his hands through his dark hair, finding his fingers damp with perspiration. As chilly as it was outside, he still felt sweat from his own fear.

This could be simpler than all his plans to incapacitate Gamearth. His attack with Scartaris had weakened the Game greatly. The map itself was fragile now, and he sensed that Gamearth grew ready to use desperate measures.

If he was here when the others arrived, together they would somehow convince him to keep playing. He knew it. They had always done that before. But if he cancelled the game, claimed that he was sick not too difficult, since he had been having nightmares all week. Inside his head he envisioned Gamearth characters looking more vivid and solid to him than any of the people he truly knew.