"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - The California Voodoo Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Richard and Chi-Chi huddled silently against the bar. How long had it been
since Tony had seen them? Eight years? Chi-Chi was tall and slender even
when seated, the elegant curve of her back accentuated by a fluff-fringed
yellow
dress that clung like body paint. If anything, she looked younger and more
alive. Richard, smaller and darker, seemed shrunken. Could his health be a
liability in the coming Game?

No. Richard Lopez never gave less than one hundred percent. Never. It was
what made him great.

They were all great, in their individual waysтАФthe Lopezes with their
holograms and overall Game design, the Whitmans with their choreography
of Virtual mimes and Non-Player Characters.

Four Game Masters. And Tony made five. A junior member he might be, but,
by God, a member.

Tony's fingers tapped again. A window zoomed on the shoreline, framing
schools of bathers. All those Dream Park employees tended to cluster,
leaving lots of empty space. The roof was too big for them, dauntingly
large.

The water was green, covered with lily pads and shoals of moss. Pure
artifice, it looked as if half a thousand years of neglect had allowed a real
swamp to take over Meacham's toy bayou. But that was Game reality. In
truth there hadn't been water in the rooftop lake since the Quake of '95,
when the tilt of the roof changed and the lake emptied into the desert.

There had been several levels to the roof, even before the Quake. Now it
sagged to the west, and the whole western edge had collapsed. Twelve
thousand gallons a minute flowed from the swimming pool through a safety
grid and over the edge, plummeting two hundred feet to a fountain below.
What was the rate of evaporation? It boggled his mindтАФonly the power of
the Cowles fusion distillery in Long Beach could have furnished sufficient
cheap water to make the lake viable.

Tony zoomed in on the roof party: some of the celebrants were almost at
the edge, near the vine-camouflaged barricades. Narrow focus: he watched
them enjoy the view. Meacham's architects had never planned that
waterfall, either!

"Barsoom Project" was the designation for the projected terraforming of
Mars. The dead planet would gain a breathable atmosphere, arable land,
and enough water for an expanding human population. The Barsoom Project
would take
decades, and would involve the natural, industrial, and scientific resources
of almost every nation on Earth, but MIMIC would house the beginnings.
The vast spaces within Meacham's arcology, and the spaceport now being
built nearby, would be the Mars terraforming project for decades to come ...