PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner

by Players At The Game Of People (v5. 5) (html)

  There was a significance about the pause. But that was to be expected. Godwin gave a bald answer.

  “This is Ambrose Farr,” he said, turning. “Ambrose, this is Gorse. Just Gorse, at the moment.”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance!” Ambrose declared warmly, extending his right arm at full stretch and abbreviating contact with Gorse’s hand to a minimum. For the obviousness of this he was at once apologetic.

  “You’ll forgive me! But I carry a certain astral charge which is at risk of diminishment—not, of course, that one would suspect such a risk in the case of someone brought here by an old and good friend like him!”

  The not-quite-giggle added a string of extra exclamation marks to his statement. A heartbeat later, though, he was intensely businesslike in both tone and manner.

  “How wise of you, at all events, to consult an expert in nomenclature before settling on your permanent appellation. The careers, the entire lives, which I’ve seen ruined by an inappropriate choice… Perhaps you’ve never considered the point, though merely by looking at you I would deduce that you have, but I can state with conviction that the vibrations which resonate from names affect even such fundamental aspects of the personality as the way in which one regards oneself. How much wiser are those cultures which employ different names at different ages! How unfortunate is, let us say, a Helen who turns out to be fat and pimply rather than a queen for beauty, or a Dorothy whose parents resent her because they hoped she’d be a boy! Your selection, though, is Gorse: a prickly plant, with certain medicinal virtues, which in summer is capable of transforming mile upon square mile of landscape into a wonderland of brilliant yellow—already an inspiration. With overtones, regrettably, of deception and entrapment… Hmm! God, you have brought me a problem worthy of my steel. We shall devote entire attention to it, never fear. Come down into my sanctum that we may perform analyses.”

  He was standing, so it seemed, stock-still in the middle of the passageway. Nonetheless, as though responsive to his mere intention, two of the tarot-painted panels folded back: The Juggler and The Fool. Between them appeared the head of a stairway leading down to a dim-lit basement. A few wreaths of smoke wafted forth.

  “I must precede you,” he murmured, doing so. “There are certain barriers and rituals…”

  Producing—from his sleeve, or somewhere—an ebony wand capped at one end with silver, at the other with ivory, he descended the stairs, making signs at intervals. Gorse, biting her thumb, hung back, her eyes immensely wide. There seemed to be no limit to the depth the staircase reached.

  Losing patience, Godwin took her by the left arm and urged her ahead of him, and a few seconds later they were in what Ambrose referred to as his sanctum.

  It gave the appearance, once they were within it, of having neither roof nor walls: only a floor of cold irregular stone. At one place glowed a brazier on which reposed an alembic distilling a luminous fluid; at another, two human skeletons, male and female, were mounted to suggest that they were about to grapple, wrestler-fashion; elsewhere, floating in midair, hung a stuffed crocodile and a dried bat; beyond that, at first, there appeared to be no more than banks of fog.

  Then Ambrose turned on a light, and the illusion vanished. Instead of misty obstacles to vision, it was plain that the boundaries of the place were formed by ranks and layers of charts drawn on two-meter-square sheets of some transparent substance, which rustled at the slightest draft like dead leaves. Each consisted in a series of circles, sometimes concentric, sometimes overlapping, sometimes of alarming complexity and number, crossed with straight lines and marked with symbols in contrasting colors, mostly letters of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets but in some cases quite unfamiliar.

  But these were not the most astonishing feature of the place once it was possible to see it clearly.

  Ambrose had sat down in a sling back canvas chair beside a foursquare teak desk which might have come directly out of the headquarters of a multinational corporation anxious to maintain its executives’ illusions concerning their current status, on which was mounted an elaborate computer complex including a full-scale word-processing setup. One of the screens was visible from where Gorse and Godwin stood, and it was cycling a dozen rings of different colors around a central dot.

  Catching sight of it, Ambrose muttered an oath and hit a switch, then beamed falsely at his visitors.

  “So sorry! But they’re talking about a certain Royal Personage getting married, so I thought I’d just run through a few alternative sequences, but naturally, once one gets to that level, the interplay of conflicting possibilities attains alarming proportions, so I simply let it run, and…” A shrug. Then a winning smile. “You will forget you ever saw it, won’t you? Yes? Bless you. And, speaking of attaining alarming proportions, just let me tell Anders what I’m up to… Do sit down!”

  There were comfortable chairs for them, which they did not remember from a moment ago. It was all part of the scenario, but Gorse was trembling worse than ever as she lowered herself into hers. Meantime, Ambrose whispered to an invisible microphone. Then he was paying attention to them again, this time addressing Gorse directly.

  “I sense you have a question, young lady. May I answer it?”

  She swallowed hard, indicating the panels all about them. “What are these?”

  “What do you think they might be?” he countered with an affably avuncular air.

  “Uh… Well, they make me think of horoscope charts, but—”

  “God, you briefed her in advance!” Ambrose interrupted accusingly.

  Godwin sighed, leaned back, shook his head, feigned a smile.

  “In that case I’m impressed,” Ambrose said, leaning forward and interlinking his fingers. He had contrived to make his wand disappear without trace. “These are, let’s face it, a trifle more explicit than most such charts. For instance, I had been prepared for some few weeks to see God again, thanks to his.” He signaled, and a chart presented itself as though they were all on an automatic retrieval system—and instantly he snapped his fingers and it vanished again into the continually circulating background, while he bent a white-toothed smile on Godwin.

  “You know I would never show anybody your chart without your permission, save for such a fleeting instant… and that only because I am of course proud that I am privy to it! And, as I was about to say, even the most advanced of my—ah—fellow adepts would have trouble unraveling the coding it bears, because I take into account the totality of variables.” He patted the case of his word processor. “For instance, I imagine no one, even Della, drawing on the fullness of the oriental tradition, could match this”—once more, a chart floated into view and paused, and displayed a set of interlocking ring patterns so complicated they required color separations at the limit of human discrimination—“which I cast for a certain world-famous figure, who turned out to be remarkably keenly influenced by the lately discovered moon of Pluto. There is, however, a beat frequency which I suspect may be due to interference from the a steroidal belt, given that this induces a type of static, or background noise, owing to the sheer randomness of the interactions—except that actually, of course, it’s nonrandom, insofar as while the microcosmic world may be subject to the laws of chance, the macrocosmic isn’t— Ah, but I tend to ramble when I get away on my hobbyhorse. At least, though, I might be permitted to show you this, for an example of how I find myself obliged to seek distraction when the demands of my profession grow extreme… which, I must admit, they tend to do with gratifying frequency nowadays, since I am constantly being consulted by cabinet ministers and diplomats and the like, or their wives—nowadays I must surely say ‘spouses’—and their children, if that case applies, ha-hah! But at all events, I suspect you may not recognize this.”

  A chart appeared whose central element resembled the symbol for infinity: ∞. In red and yellow it gleamed from the middle of a series of tidily patterned elliptical rings, all of them far from the two which interlocked at the focus.


  These were green, yellow, reddish-brown and white.

  All the time he had been talking, music had continued; now it climaxed on a resounding chord of trumpets and trombones, and died away like a gasp.

  “No?” And without waiting for an answer: “I’m not surprised. This is the generalized chart for a species whose home planet orbits a double star in Cassiopeia, and they’re like oysters or maybe snails because they’re intermittently bisexual and— What am I thinking of? I meant to ask your data so the computer could chew them over for a while. I had a new chart all prepared because from God’s I knew he was about due to bring me someone complicated—won’t bother to demonstrate, but…” Now he was muttering and a plain chart was hovering before him.

  “Birth date, please. Time of day if you know it. Whatever you can tell me about your parents’ sexual habits—whether they fucked on weekends only or whether your father had to force your mother or whether he was more potent in the morning or at night or whether she felt more like it at certain phases of her menstrual cycle or anything. It’ll all go in here.” He swiveled to face the computer keyboard. “Because time of conception is also very useful in figuring out the astral forces which would have obtained.”

  Godwin, who had been through all this much too often, leaned back and disconnected. At some point Anders kissed him hello, but he wasn’t in the mood, or any mood.

  At long last Ambrose was saying, “Well?”

  “I’m not sure I like it,” Gorse answered doubtfully.

  “You don’t believe that a name resonates and creates beat frequencies with the astral forces working on a person?” Ambrose demanded. “I’ll prove it if you like! Here, where’s the chart for that one? When the Duchess of Anglia had her second son—the one born after the duke died—they baptized him with the same name as his father, stupid gits. If only they’d bothered to consult me…!”

  Appealing, Gorse turned her eyes to Godwin, who summoned his remaining forces and donned a smile.

  “What did you suggest?” he said in a conciliating tone.

  “He wants to call me Gorse Plenty!” Gorse said before Ambrose could rush to his own defense. “And it’s not a name I ever heard of and I don’t like it anyway!”

  “It’s right for you! It’s perfect!” Ambrose barked. He was on his feet by now, grossly offended.

  “It was Ambrose who gave me my name,” Godwin said placatingly, also rising. “And I’ve never regretted taking his advice.”

  “Precisely, and thank you! Any more than Cineraria Howe regretted it—and doesn’t everybody know her name from the television series she’s been in? As for County Barbarian, if it weren’t for me, even his gimmick of being a millionaire’s son wouldn’t have got his bunch of second-rate slags into the Top Twenty with the sort of material they were using! And I could multiply this list indefinitely! Didn’t you know CB’s original name was Edgar Bernard Brown? Heaven help us! If I wanted to write a five-syllable curse, I’d be hard put to it to improve on that one!”

  “Curse?” Gorse parried faintly.

  “What else do you call it when your initials spell ‘ebb’? That’s a downer—as my contacts among the youth generation inform me.” This with a sudden shy, almost boyish smile. “But you’ve struck lucky, I promise. Your friends at school must have had a clearer overall perception of your potential than you did yourself, let alone the teachers—or so-called teachers—you were forced to suffer under. As for your mother…!” This ended in an elaborate shudder. “Nonetheless, a counteragent to the harshness of the name you enjoy wearing will stand you in good stead in the long run. Apart from anything else, it will be memorable, and all the people who bear interchangeable names will envy you. True?”

  “Ambrose bestows good names,” Godwin said hastily. “His is the other name of Merlin, the magician.”

  “Right!” Ambrose crowed, clapping Godwin on the shoulder. “So when I say ‘Plenty’ is correct, you must remember: ‘Gorse’ is a sparse, repugnant plant, symbolic of deprivation. You want that? Of course not!”

  He switched out lights without moving, and all of a sudden the sanctum was dank and unbearable. Gorse moved toward where the stairs had been, her teeth audibly chattering.

  “This way,” Ambrose murmured. “We shall drink a glass of firewine to your acceptable appellation.”

  And indeed the steps were yards away, beyond the dried bat and immediately below. The stove had brewed its ichor and the alembic was dull gray; the odor of incense had given way to something vaguely putrid, as of cow-guts cast aside by a butcher, and overlooked.

  In a gracious room above Anders made them welcome, clad now in blue jeans and rope-soled sandals. From a crystal decanter he poured into crystal glasses four measures of something which fumed and glowed, neither red nor green but partway between.

  Ambrose gave a formal toast.

  “Long may it, soon may it, and may we live to enjoy it!”

  They drank in unison. Gorse had meant to sip, not gulp, but Anders was well trained—as Ragnar had been, and Per and Horst and Lars and all those others who bore echt-Aryan cognomens—and at precisely the right moment he contrived to jog her elbow and she swallowed the lot, even as Ambrose was stating didactically, “This so-called firewine is of course no more than a distillate of certain significant herbs whose governing planets relate to the subject, but you would have to travel far—you note my name, Farr?—before you found a match as regards appropriateness for this particular brew. Young lady, I wish you vast success from your identity, but I must withdraw because tomorrow I am to be consulted by an official of the United Nations whose wife disapproves—stupid bitch!—of his interest in my work, and to be absolutely and utterly frank, your mere presence as a female distorts the aura I am attempting to create in this house. Honestly, God, can you not choose your times better?”

  That was so absurd, ridiculous, and pointless a question, Godwin was shaken by it. He thought for a while, and at last ventured, “You mean Anders is nursing a hard-on.”

  “If his psychic energy were to be wasted on the air—!” protested Ambrose, making a gesture to encompass the collapse of universes.

  “I don’t choose my times,” Godwin said, and set his glass on the nearest table. “Gorse didn’t choose. Think about it. Thanks for the wine. But I think ‘Gorse Plenty’ will work out fine.

  “In case you were still worried.”

  There was a long pause during which Anders shrugged and turned to leave. Ambrose checked him with an affectionate arm linked about his neck.

  “What now, God? I promise, I am interested. But for the fact which you know about. I wish Aleister were here to speak on my behalf.”

  “You always wish that. It’s your way… But FYI: there are material considerations. Come on, Gorse, let’s get out of here. You haven’t even met Bill yet, and you must. After all, he’s going to be your landlord.”

  In the taxi which naturally they picked up within a few yards of Ambrose’s door she said to him fretfully, “I don’t understand.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “But I don’t!”—in a near wail. “You seem to know all these people, but who are they?”

  “People I’ve known for a long time.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” She hunched away from him. “What are you all? Some kind of group?”

  “Yes, in a sense, I suppose.”

  “Like the Rosicrucians?”

  Godwin stifled a laugh. In his gravest tone he said, “No, not in the least.”

  “Well, then…” She was biting her lower lip so hard it might bleed. “I wish I understood what was going on!”

  “You only need to understand the consequences.”

  “All the time you say things like that! This guy—what’s his name?—this Ambrose: he was full of double-talk, wasn’t he?”

  “You don’t have to take Ambrose too seriously.”

  “But a while ago you were saying I must!” She turned to him with her large eyes full of tear
s. “Or is it that you’re trying to brainwash me?”

  “Brainwashing is done by deprivation and lack of sleep and repetition of some kind of ideological message until the defences of the mind give way under the overload. They used it in Korean prisoner-of-war camps. They use it nowadays in Ulster police stations. The essential element is monotony. What, pray, is either monotonous or even predictable about what we’ve been doing? And I can testify that when I got through with you last night, you enjoyed several hours’ deep sleep. Did you know you snore?”

  “I don’t!”

  “Oh yes you do. Not very loudly, but with a kind of bubbly noise. You probably have a post-nasal drip that needs attention.”

  “You’re trying to make me follow a red herring! That isn’t what I’m talking about! I’ve read The Golden Ass, you know. A certain kind of shock can be just as efficacious as a prolonged period of deprivation in converting someone, and that’s what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? You’re trying to convert me to some sort of belief which— Golly! Excuse me!” Her words were dissolving into a colossal yawn.

  This soon? Even before arriving at Bill’s place? Well, perhaps it was all for the best. Godwin had no faintest notion what she was going on about, but he had spinal tremors which indicated bad news, and while it was unprecedented for the owners to be in such a hurry, it might well be for the best if she underwent a chastening experience right away. At least it would be better from his point of view than suffering through the usual load of crap—“Oh, all my life I’ve dreamed of guidance from on high!” or “Isn’t it fantastic to think that someone actually understands and can put to use the astral forces which surround us?” or, perhaps worst of the lot, “Doesn’t it just prove that when it’s properly attuned, the miracle which is the human mind is capable of concretizing anything our imagination has ever conceived of?”

  But all this making with the mouth was boring his balls off, and he earnestly looked forward to dumping Gorse and getting on with something he cared about. However, by this time she was not only yawning, but threatening to doze off, and with all possible respect to whoever was calling her, he had no wish to carry her bodily into the house when they reached their destination. So he talked rapidly and loudly.