cobbles she was standing on, scuffed at them, and felt exactly what she would have felt if she’d scuffed her heels on the surface of some mittel-European old town’s street. “Ow . . .” she said.
“Sorry,” Dev said. “Mirabel says it’s a mistake to wear high heels to the Middle Ages. She wanted me to enable a terrain smoother in here, but the players overruled her. Never mind, not too much farther to go.”
They headed over to the towering stones of the Ring, making their way toward one of the great gray-swirling portals. “Where did you get the idea for this?” Delia said as they got onto more even paving, the huge gray slabs that surrounded the Ring proper.
“I have no idea,” Dev said. “It might have been something I read. There were always traditions that suggested the big trilithon rings had connotations to primitive people beyond just signaling a meeting place for religious ceremonies: that they were seen literally as gateways to other worlds, not just as symbols for the passage.”
Dev laughed under his breath. “Please,” he said. “I prefer to play a little bigger. I wouldn’t be big on mushroom rings and crop circles myself. But people do build them here in their Microcosms.” He shrugged. “To each his own.”
“But playing big,” said Delia, “that’s what it’s all been about for you, hasn’t it? Playing bigger than anyone else.”
Dev gave her one of those odd assessing looks of his: not expressionless, but so neutral it was tough to tell what might underlie it. “You know,” he said as they strolled along toward the Ring and fetched up at the end of a line of waiting players, “I guess that’s the automatic assumption. That I’m personally in competition with everyone else. I suppose our competition—there’s no other word for them, I guess—does feel that way.”
He let out a breath, looking up toward the head of the line. Up there Delia could see a group of latex-suited people carrying futuristic-looking beam weapons. They were intermingled with a crowd of what appeared to be giant sabertooth tigers—blue ones—and were chatting amiably with them. “It doesn’t occur to anybody,” Dev said, as the door cleared and showed the inside of what appeared to be a huge orbital habitat, “that I might be competing with myself. Trying to think bigger than I was able to think last week, plan something larger than I could have conceived of last month.”
“You could tell them that,” Delia said, “but it would probably be dismissed out of hand as just more altruistic Omnitopia guff.”
He grinned at her as the group up at the top of the line passed through the gate and it silvered out again. “Yeah,” he said, “I know. It’s a tough life.” He paused as the line moved up. One or two people in the group just ahead of them, five buzz-cut young men in arctic camo but apparently unarmed except for belt knives, glanced over their shoulders at Dev: then they saw the sticky name tag and looked away. Delia watched them with interest as they moved up to the massive stone lintel of the Ring portal and saluted it punctiliously. It cleared before them, revealing a screaming white wilderness of blowing snow, but they didn’t go through right away, and a couple of them looked back toward Delia and Dev again.
“Seriously, though,” Dev said, “there comes a point in this kind of endeavor where you just can’t win. People start to assume that everything you do and say is publicity—which it just can’t be; no human being can possibly be so single-minded—and no matter what you do, it’s used against you. Fail to be seen to be doing good works with your massive wealth, and people say you’re greedy. Allow yourself to be seen giving millions of bucks to charity, and people say you’re only doing it to avoid looking greedy. There comes a point where you have to try to stop listening to what people say about you, and just do what you feel is right.”
One of the arctic camo guys in front of them was waving frantically in their direction. Delia smiled a little to herself, amused to find that Dev’s certainties about his sticky badge would break down so quickly—and then stared as a trio of gigantic polar bears came racing up from behind her and Dev to join the others. Camo guys and bears plunged through the