A blind, two-footed jump isn't the best way to start down stairs. Diacono caught a heel on the edge of the fourth step and pitched forward heavily, brushing Ole as he hit. Fortunately, there were only two more steps to fall, and Frank was nothing if not durable.
"You okay?" asked Vic.
Frank got slowly to his knees and examined the heels of his hands, which were somewhat sore from the fall, then looked around. They were in a wide corridor lit by softly luminous walls and ceiling. The gate was not a round hole above them—not from this side—but a wide, recessed, vertical door, open into blackness. This side of reality seemed to have little to do with the terrain they had just left. The corridor's ceiling, about fifteen feet high, would have been well above the level of the canyon bottom on the other side.
Getting to his feet, Diacono rotated his shoulders. "Yeah, I'm fine. A lot better than if I'd landed in that spring." He turned to Ole. "Sorry I bumped into you."
The Icelander grinned at him. "That's okay. I'm yust glad you didn't land on top of me." He looked at Vic, "V'at now?"
"We'll go this way." Vic pointed. "That's where we found the guardian before. He's the guardian, the commanding officer, and I don't know what else. We'll see what we can learn from him."
After about a hundred feet, the corridor turned. Ahead they could see several hundred feet farther to the next turn, the walls unmarked. "Are we underground," Frank asked, "or inside a building? There don't seem to be any windows."
"At one time it was camouflaged to look like a small mountain," Vic answered. "During the wizard wars. Actually, it was a fortress then. That was when people played their games and held their wars in this reality, a number of cycles back."
"Are ve illegal in here?" Ole asked. "Are ve likely to run into a security patrol?"
"As far as I know, if we can get in, we're okay. I'm pretty sure the guardian knew we were coming, at least as soon as we got close; I don't know how far out his sphere of detection goes. But if he didn't want us to get in, he'd probably have let us know before we tried the gate, or maybe bounced us back out."
Vic slowed, as if to finish talking before they arrived at wherever they were going. "There's hardly any staff in these places anymore," he continued. "They seem to pretty much run themselves. The big security forces that used to be necessary left a long time ago. They recycled into what Tory and I call the everyday side, to have something interesting to do. Forever is a long time to sit around twiddling your thumbs.
"And when they recycled, most of them forgot all about this place, as far as conscious memory is concerned. I've run into three of them on the everyday side, from one installation or another. Two of them were Noeties or ex-Noeties who were looking for a session and found me. That's how I learned about this particular gate: one of them remembered it in session."
"But othervise they don't remember?"
"Not usually. In the arcade universe—behind the curtain, where the being really is—it seems like we always know. But on the stage, the playground—in the video game itself—they almost never know.
"Now and then certain ones cycle back to the generator side of reality for a lifetime or so, and they remember while they're here, of course. They come back to tend the generator and help maintain the matrix—to keep reality going. But the technology that built the generator was tremendously advanced; their machinery apparently doesn't take much maintenance."
"How long has it been here?" Frank asked.
"Through quite a few cycles of reality; quite a few renewals."
They turned a corner; just ahead was an open door in one wall. "That's it," Vic said, and they went in.
Somehow, Frank realized, he'd carried around the idea that the guardian would be an Indian. Yet he was surprised to see what appeared to be a large, burly Indian looking at him across a desk with a computer terminal.
"Back again?" the Indian said to Vic. "You look like the trip through the gate was a lot easier on you this time."
Vic chuckled. "Like a walk in the park. I've learned a lot since the last time; it made quite a difference."
The guardian's eyes moved to Ole for a moment, and then to Frank. "You guys keep dangerous company," he said lightly. His shrewd eyes evaluated them, then he turned back to Vic. "What brought you back here?"
"I suppose you know how things are going on the other side," Vic replied.
"To hell in a handbasket."
"We think we know why. There's a surprise generator—or maybe chaos generator would be a better term—that's patched into the matrix generator somewhere, and it's accelerating. It's driving more and more people to do crazy things, pushing the whole system toward critical.
"So what we want to do is get it disconnected."
The big Indian leaned back in his chair. "You really have learned some things since last time! You can call me Gandy, incidentally." His attention focused inward for a moment, then back. "And you want the surprise generator disconnected."
"That's all right, isn't it?"
"Yeah, as far as I can see, if you can do it for yourselves. No one on staff will do anything partisan. What do you want to disconnect it for?"
"If we don't, The matrix is going to discontinue in about six months."
"If you do disconnect it," Gandy replied, "things are going to get pretty dull out there. Not as dull as this side, but pretty dull. I'll grant you that people might like that for a while, but they'd get tired of it before long.
"Besides, reality could use a good overhaul."
"Every overhaul I've looked at," Vic countered, "set up a new reality that turned out to be worse, and shorter-lived, than the one before.
"Every overhaul degrades the playing conditions a little more: Shut it down, put more restrictions into the program, crank it up again, and there we go, climbing for a while. Then crash!
"Every cycle, toward the end, starts to get it together—every one I've reviewed, anyway. Then things start to go to hell really fast, the system goes critical, and that's it."
Gandy eyed Vic appraisingly. "For someone from the other side," Gandy said, "you've come up with a hell of a lot of information. What you're suggesting is nothing but an overhaul of sorts itself."
"Not really," said Vic. "It's the removal of an unauthorized addition to the equipment. And I'll be surprised if it requires shutting down the matrix to do it. Apparently it got put on line without shutting it down." He paused, holding the guardian's eyes. "People out there might like the chance to upgrade things in the existing matrix—not have to go back to the cave and dig roots again, or transmigrate to other sectors."
Gandy leaned forward on his elbows, peering interestedly across at Vic. "The surprise generator may have been unauthorized when it was patched in," he said, "but it's been left on line through several overhauls. That amounts to de facto approval. And it's certainly added something valuable to the conditions of play."
Vic shook his head firmly. "The people who installed it got extradited back to wherever they came from, as too destructive to be loose. That ought to tell us something."
"Then you know who installed it."
"I know who must have. They've been sabotaging this universe almost from the beginning. They got pulled out of here nine years ago, all seven of them, and for the first time we've got a chance to get off this built-and-bust roller coaster."
The guardian leaned back, thick fingers laced over a generous abdomen. "I keep having to upgrade my opinion of you. So what do you want me to do—that I'm allowed to?"
"We'd like whoever's in charge to disconnect the surprise generator. He wouldn't be taking sides. The Seven have been extradited; there's really only one side left."
Gandy shook his head. "The Seven are gone, but they passed their game on to four lower-echelon people, so there are still two sides. That means I'm very limited in what I can do for you. Anyway, it's not at this station."
Ole spoke now before Vic could. "Okay then, so v'ere is it? Maybe ve can do the yob ourselves."
Gandy arched his eyebrows, then shrugged. "Your game, your choice. Okay, I can tell you where it is, all right: fourteen hundred miles from here in another hard-to-find place. Not as hard as it's been sometimes, though, when it was under a couple thousand feet of ice. Getting there alive may be the hard part."
Gandy's fingers moved over his computer keyboard. After a moment, one wall became a holographic field, showing a curved, three-dimensional map of central North America, while the room illumination dimmed for better contrast. A blinking red light, like a computer cursor, ran across it and stopped on a long island in Lake Superior. Isle Royale, Frank recognized, a wilderness park. The island grew until it occupied a large part of the wall, showing ridges and forests, like an idealized stratospheric view. The cursor now sat on one of the high points of the island's long central ridge—the gate location, Diacono realized. His eyes examined its surroundings for landmarks—a bay, streams, several inland lakes near the cursor.
"And that," said Gandy, "is all I can do for you on this." He waited a few seconds longer, letting them imprint the image; then switched off the holograph and grinned. "You guys have a real war on your hands. I'd say you have a chance—about one in, oh, call it one in ten. Maybe even one in four; I keep underestimating you. If the Seven were still around, that would be one in a trillion, but you've still got some pretty heavy-duty enemies.
"Now, I want you guys to get out of here before I say or do somediing I'm not allowed to, and get myself in trouble."
"Just one more thing," Vic said.
The Indian face scowled, then the scowl dissolved into a grin, which was replaced in turn by a laugh. "One more, then—maybe. Depending on what it is. Let's hear it."
"Are they limited to conventional weapons against us?" Vic asked. "So far it seems like it. And I include 'conventional paranormal' in conventional."
The grin changed to a closed-mouth smile. "If they attack you with anything that's not all right, they forfeit; that goes without saying. It would put them out of the picture immediately, and the result of their incorrect action would be corrected. But that leaves them plenty of legitimate means, including the use of, ah, certain quite sophisticated equipment that combines, um, felicitous combinations of components developed in this cycle—some things The Seven left them."
The eyes narrowed, glittering. "And that's all I'm going to say: Now out! You're straining my neutrality!"
Without knowing how they got there, they found themselves in the corridor. They started for the gate, talking as they walked.
"How did we do?" Frank asked. "Pretty well?"
"Real well," said Vic. "I'd hoped it would turn out that well, but I didn't know. The processes we used to get ready were really effective, and we found out where the surprise generator is." He nodded. "Yep. We did real well."
"Do you think the enemy—whoever that is—do you think they know ve been here?" Ole asked. "If they do, I'll bet they try to hit us going out. It vould be bad news if they made a bunch of rock fall on us in the canyon."
"Would that come under the heading of 'legitimate weapons?' " Frank put in.
"I don't know where the line is between okay and not okay," Vic admitted, "but considering what they were throwing at Ole when he was driving out from L.A., they could probably use a rockfall if it didn't require tractor or pressor beams or anything like that.
"But they may not know we're here. If they knew where we were going, it seems like they'd have tried to stop us coming in. I don't know."
"Maybe they thought the gate would stop us."
"Could be. Anyway, as far as rockfalls or anything else is concerned, we'll just have to handle things as they come up—the way Ole did driving out here."
"Ya," the Icelander said, "but I hope ve don't have to dodge no avalanche."
When they reached the gate, Frank followed Vic up the stairs with Ole bringing up the rear. There was nothing to it. Atop the mound of Sipapu, Frank too could see the steps leading down now, perhaps because they'd become real to him.
All in all, he told himself, this wasn't bad at all, not half bad. I think I'm going to like this game.