Why was Yellow doing this? He was in hock to her again, and was getting to like her quite well as a person. It was as if his need brought out her better traits. Maybe she liked being part of a team, doing something worthwhile, earning the appreciation of others. It was something that few Adepts experienced.
The child Brown Adept also paid him a visit to wish him well. It seemed she felt a certain retroactive guilt for the use of a golem in the prior murder of Blue, and wanted to make an amend. Things were looking up.
But until he eliminated the Red Adept, nothing was settled. She must have been busy setting up new traps during the period of his convalescence. Then Sheen re-ported that Red had shown up in the Tourney. She too had made it to the rarefied Rounds, with a single loss. If both Red and Stile continued winning, they would eventually come up against each other there.
It happened in Round Twelve. This was hardly coincidence, at this point. Only six contestants remained, one of them undefeated. The bonus to the loser this time was twenty years tenure—a full extra term.
Stile’s thigh was now almost healed, and he had the incentive of his oath of vengeance. He was ready for Red. This was one situation she could neither escape nor cheat. By beating her here he would not only deny her Citizenship, he would wash her out of the Tourney—and since her murders of Hulk and Bluette had now come to Citizen attention, thanks to the investigation of Bluette’s Employer, she would be denied the bonus tenure. She would be exiled.
Stile pondered the meaning of this. He had wanted to kill her—yet his oath was merely to “make an end” of her. The Oracle had not predicted killing either; it had said Blue would destroy Red. Did exile constitute destruction? Perhaps. The Citizens had fairly sophisticated mechanisms to ensure that no exiled person ever returned to Proton; no worry about that aspect. At any rate, the more Stile contemplated the prospect of coldly killing another human being, the less he liked it. He simply was not a murderer. So if this was the meaning of oath and Oracle, he would accept it with a certain relief.
Red’s position was different. She needed to kill Stile. Because if he washed out of the Tourney at this point, he would have twenty years as a tenure serf to plot her destruction, assuming she made it through to Citizenship. He would have his power base on Phaze, where he would be safe from her mischief, and could locate her and make forays at any time. The powers of Citizenship were great, but eventually he would get her, and they both knew it. So she needed more than victory in the Tourney. There were ways to kill in the Games. The competitions were designed to be as safe as possible, but a person could have heart-failure during extraordinary physical exertion, or an anesthetic dart in pistol-dueling could be accidentally contaminated with a legal but lethal drug, or equipment could fail at a critical moment. She would surely try to arrange something like that, though it was prohibitively difficult under the experienced eye of the Game Computer. Stile, in turn, would try to prevent any such accident. There was little delay at this stage, since the Game facili-ties now had to support only three Games. The audience for each would be huge. Stile was spared the unpleasant-ness of having to converse with his enemy. They proceeded immediately to the grid.
Again he got the letters. Every time he really wanted the numbers, it seemed, the luck of the draw denied them, Stile did not try to play for Red’s weaknesses; he was not sure what they were, in Game terms. He played for his own strength: TOOL. He liked animals and worked well with them, but he wanted no more android-animal football games or dog-cat-rat games.
It came up 4A. She had gone for ART.
4A? He had selected B!
But his entry was clear; he had miskeyed. Of all the times to do that! This carelessness could cost him the match!
No time for recrimination. The Naked Arts related to Singing, Dancing, Pantomime, Story Telling, Poetry, Humor and the like: presentations before an audience. Stile was good enough at these things; presumably Red was too. She had probably been gridding for Sculpture in 4B; had Stile played correctly, that might have come to pass. With her life’s work in fashioning amulets, she was thoroughly experienced and skilled at that sort of thing. Of course he would not have let her have it; he would have thrown it into Music. Against Clef he had been in trouble; against Red he was pretty sure he would have a decisive advantage in Music. But of course she would not have let him have it, either, so they would have gridded into something else, that perhaps neither of them had much experience in, such as Writing. So he might be just as well on here. He was versed in most of the Naked Arts, and expert in some. If she wanted to match him in the generation of original free verse—
