PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner

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

  “I didn’t,” Godwin said after a fractional hesitation. “It just sort of— Well, it came together in my mind.” He passed her a pair of chopsticks after removing their paper shroud and, taking another for himself, began to load her bowl with stir-fried beef.

  But behind the words there were sudden perceptions which frightened him. He could visualize her, alone in a bed-sitter after being used to the luxury of a Park Lane apartment, with her baby crying away the small hours. He could almost guess the label on the bottle where she sought relief.

  “Oh, the hell. Like to like, I suppose…” She dipped her chopsticks in the beef and, having tasted, ate voraciously for the next few minutes, while in the background the sound of traditional Hawaiian music—emanating from a radio next door—gave way to a disco beat and the tones of a DJ with a line in supposed-to-be-amusing local jokes.

  For the sake of appearances (and how much of the story of his life was summed up in that phrase, he realized with terrifying abruptness), Godwin dipped into the awabi and vegetables, leaving her the beef, since she so visibly enjoyed it. The respite was welcome, but not indefinite.

  With her mouth still full, but setting her chopsticks down, she said, “Not just because it’s making me drunk. Because it does this for me. I never had beer-fed beef until I went to California. Some arse hole of a TV producer wanted to impress me and took me to a restaurant where they served beef flown in daily from Kobe. It wasn’t half as good as this.”

  “You wanted to see if my—my illusion could match it?”

  “Illusion?” She gave a short harsh laugh. “This beats reality if it is illusion!”

  “I don’t know the difference,” Godwin said, and took a long swig of beer.

  “Is that literally true?” she murmured, taking out another cigarette. His exiguous appetite was used up; he leaned back, pushing away his bowl.

  “I live the way I live,” he said, for want of a better answer. “It’s what I chose.”

  “And what you hoped it would be?”

  He stiffened at the gibe; she luckily forbore to follow through her advantage, but reached for the ashtray without looking at him and went on, “Oh, I’ve seen too damned many rich people without a purpose to think of envying them any more. And the ones who are rich with a purpose are even worse. They’re almost always cruel. Even when they think they’re being kind, they’re bossy, they’re patronizing, they do their best to stifle individual enterprise among the people they patronize because they know better. Some of them,” she concluded bitterly, “even believe that they know best.”

  Godwin hesitated again before venturing his next comment, but it seemed that he had the measure of this strange woman, and that was reassuring—indeed, comforting. He had, without fully realizing it, been afraid that his long existence as a solitary had deprived him of the ability to assess other human beings. In this one case at least he was doing excellently.

  He said, “This sounds as though you’re arguing with Gorse.”

  She started so violently she almost spilled her beer; she had just made certain of the last of the saké.

  “You got to know her very well, didn’t you?” she snapped.

  “No.”

  “But—oh, hell! Why not?”

  “Because she talked more about you than about herself.”

  Barbara froze for an instant. “Is that true?” she demanded at length.

  “Yes.”

  “How can I be sure?”

  This was becoming boring again. Godwin said with what little patience he could still muster, “Just think about why people lie! It always has to do with gain. What could I possibly gain more than what I already have, by lying or any other means?”

  She regarded him levelly for a long while, her right hand caressing the tall, cool glass in which a trace of her beer remained. Every pass of her fingers wiped away more condensation, until the surface was clear and running wet.

  Finally she said, “Companions in adversity.”

  And braced herself for his reply, as for a slap in the face.

  Instead, he found himself gazing at her foolishly and saying, “What?”

  “Marlowe!”

  It crossed his mind to say fliply, “Oh, yes! Philip!” He canceled the impulse, and felt furious because she had put him at a loss. Why the hell did this woman, who had on her own admission led a life which climaxed in failure, retain the gift of taking him aback?

  He wished he had never seen her. He wished he had never craved a decoration for bravery. He wished he were dead.

  Or better: that she were.

  At last she put him out of his misery as she stubbed her cigarette into the cooling pile of uneaten vegetables.

  “Let’s get back where we came from. If we can.”

  “You don’t want your banana fritters?”

  “No.”

  “As you like, then.” He rose and turned back to the stairs.

  “Don’t you have to—?”

  “Pay?” He curled his lip in a sour smile. “I keep telling you, and you don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Don’t people notice?”

  “Very probably.”

  “Then—”

  “Then they assume we run a permanent charge account!” he snapped, and even that delay had been too long. For here came bustling Della again, just in time to prevent him having to answer Barbara’s half-whispered question:

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “You leave so soon? But you just got here!”

  “Della my love, it’s a big wide world and each of us must follow our own destiny.”

  “True, true!”—with a look of uncharacteristic solemnity. “But is your destiny truly leading you somewhere?”

  “I’ll be able to answer that when I arrive.”

  “Oh, wow!” She broke into a peal of laughter. “Aren’t you always the one with the sharp answer, God? Oh, yes! Let me kiss you, baby, incase it’s so many years again before we meet!”

  As she was planting a loud kiss on his cheek Barbara said caustically, “You can’t predict when that will be? He tells me you’re the best astrologer round here.”

  Della drew back, something feral coming into her expression as her hands curled into claws. Godwin had a faint recollection of hearing about her background: leader of a murderous interracial street gang when she was thirteen, determined to prove that just because her name was Portuguese she didn’t have to live out her life at the bottom of the Hawaiian totem pole…

  It would have been so much more fun to recruit her than bloody Gorse!

  But of course he hadn’t been given that assignment. He had stuck strictly to his own patch, dutifully, obediently.

  Were duty and obedience enough?

  He slapped that down, just as Della was getting set to do the same to Barbara, and hastily exclaimed, “Now, ladies!”

  “Lady?” Della repeated. “I never knew what it meant till I got old and bitter. And she didn’t make it even yet!”

  “But he”—from Barbara, with a nod at Godwin—“has a kind of old-fashioned charm, doesn’t he? A sort of… A sort of square charm?”

  That was better than tactful. It reduced Della’s scowl to a grin in no time at all, and she wound up embracing Barbara and insisting that she come back soon, without this pain-in-the-ass to drag her down. Barbara duly promised.

  And whispered behind her hand, “Get me out of here!”

  Half puzzled, yet half relieved, he took leave of Della and they made their way back up the stairs they had descended into her courtyard. He was preparing himself to answer what he thought of as Barbara’s unavoidable question—“What’s here when you aren’t?”—and finding himself ill-equipped when she stepped into the London apartment and glanced apprehensively behind her. The view was still Hawaiian.

  “Are we back where we started?” she demanded.

  “You mean: will you find London if you go to the street door?”

  “Of course that’s what I bloody mean!”

>   “Yes, you will.”

  “Then I want out!” She snatched up her jacket from the chair where it had been dumped. “I want to go back to a sane, familiar world, and I want to do it now!”

  “No!” Dismayed, he took a step toward her while a cascade of thought went pelting through his head, powered at the basic level by a single urge: if I never get to make it with the little girl who sucked my tongue in front of the palace, I should bloody well get to make it with this version!

  At some point it turned, however, into: I deserve to!

  And that didn’t make sense.

  He had to flee from that confrontation with himself and found a way in saying, “But why?”

  “I told you!”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Oh yes I fucking well did, and you were too thick to notice!”

  They were confronting each other like boxers and they were panting and they held their hands ready to curl into fists and they were almost dancing on their toes and the room was superbly—proudly—uncaring so that they bumped into stools and low tables and the corners of magazine racks while they circled.

  It was funny.

  Yes, of course it was. It was like a Laurel and Hardy film.

  He essayed a laugh and it came near to choking him, but it broke the deadlock. She said, “If you were trying to make an impression on me, you didn’t. But you told me what you’ve done and why I have to hate you.”

  Hate?

  Words so redolent of strong feeling were long unfamiliar to Godwin. All such emotions had been left by the wayside. He said foggily, “I never did anything to make you hate me.”

  “But you did.” She was drawing on her jacket, having made it to the side of the room nearest the way out. “That’s why I want to get away from here as soon as possible.” Looking about her, she shuddered at the sight of the splendid furniture, the luxury wall hangings, the vision of a Pacific summer which remained, clouded by smoke and mist, beyond the windows.

  “Stop talking in riddles!” Godwin raged, catching her by the arm. Oh, the temptation of anger! It was coming closer to his inner self with every passing second. To bruise; to beat up; to make bleed…

  But perhaps that was a sort of insurance for the owners?

  The idea was novel, and alarming, but it resonated with images from Hamish’s death. Godwin took a steely grip on himself and looked at Barbara afresh, as a woman, a handsome woman, a woman who had had the persistence—the guts, the bloody-mindedness—to struggle through a miserable life and somehow, nonetheless, create an identity, derived from nobody but herself and her own dreams.

  Whose dreams, he found he was asking himself, created me?

  At twenty, what had he known about real life? Had he even believed there was such a thing?

  “Let,” she said, between clenched teeth.

  “Me…

  “Go!”

  And drove his hand which held her arm downward against the thumb so that he exclaimed with pain. Before he recovered she was poised anew to inflict damage, this time with karate blows.

  She said, even as he realized he was looking at her unfist weapons, “I had to learn this. Sometimes men who couldn’t get it up thought I was to blame.”

  Use the flex on her! The thought came welling up from his subconscious, labeled URGENT.

  He disregarded it because he wanted to know why she was insulting him. He said so.

  “Why are you insulting me? Have I tried to rape you?”

  She was near the door now, eying it, afraid—visibly afraid—it would not open when she wanted to run through it. For as long as he cared to remember, being aware that something was impossible had been a cure for terror. Accordingly he spoke to set her mind at rest.

  “It’ll open. When I decide to let it.”

  And had the inverse effect from what he had intended. Until now she had maintained a mask of remarkable calm. At his words it began to crack.

  Edging ever closer to the door, regardless, she said in a thin voice, “Going to make me a prisoner, are you?”

  “Of course not! I just want to know—”

  “For Chrissakes, what is it this time?”

  And—what was it?

  Godwin stood foolishly comparing possible questions in his mind: “What do you think of me?” “Why are you so frightened of me?” “What have I done to make you so upset?” And the repeated one, “Why are you insulting me?”

  She reached the door and set her back to it, breathing hard.

  “Let me go,” she said. And added in a whisper, “Please.”

  That catalyzed his confused thoughts. He was able to say, “But why do you want to run away from me?”

  “Are you going to let me out?” was her retort.

  “But—” He took half a pace toward her, fists clenched, innocent of the least impulse toward violence; this was mere frustration. “But if you go now you may never know where your daughter is!”

  It felt like an inspiration. But she shook her head, her face very pale, her voice thin and tense.

  “If she’s turned into someone like you, I don’t want to know about it.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” he roared.

  “What the hell do you think I mean?” She had been fighting tears; now they spilled down her cheeks. “I never thought it was possible, I never dreamed it could be real, but now you’ve shown me, and like you say, it’s no more and no less real than anything else!”

  Straightening her back with a kind of pride, drawing herself to attention, though not straying from the door which, from where he stood, framed her as though she were a full-length portrait of herself, she stared at him with blazing eyes.

  “You’ve sold your soul, damn you, and for good measure you’ve sold my daughter’s too!”

  A few seconds later he heard himself saying feebly, “But it isn’t like that. That’s not the way of it at all.”

  Even as he spoke, he was conscious of uncertainty. Over the years since he made his bargain, since he realized what he had actually done with his life, he had had ample time to think and reflect and study. He had no need to earn a living; he was occasionally obliged to invent a new ambition, but that happened seldom, and once conceived, a single ambition often lasted him for several years.

  Echoing in the background of his mind, however, was the memory of how he had felt discarded—rejected—abandoned.

  Something in the eyes of this woman who (how? How?) corresponded to the child he had once rescued was telling him unwelcome news. Somehow—he groped for phrases that might explain her to him—somehow, despite all the suffering and the misjudgments and the privation she had told him about (and how close all that was to, yet how fantastically different from, the version recounted by Gorse!) she had found an identity.

  Nothing to do with a name; she had borne Gallon and Tupper and Simpkins and stuck to Barbara, the wild woman.

  Nothing to do with advantage in the world; she had known misery of the kind he fled from at twenty, ten years later in her life… and instead of fleeing from it, built on it.

  Something to do, perhaps, with pride?

  Do I have pride?

  He looked about him—looked anywhere in the grand apartment except at her—and asked, for the first time: “Did I create that? Did I earn it? Did I invent it or conceive it or design it?”

  And felt the chilling knowledge overtake him:

  Of course not. I simply accepted it when it was given.

  Who have I been all these years? And, worse yet:

  What have I been?

  He said at last, from a dry throat with a tongue that felt thicker than normal, “The door’s open. Leave if you want to.”

  She stood there, looking at him; a glint of light shone on her wet cheeks, and almost as though it were independent of her will, her left hand sought the door handle and turned it.

  Not all the way, though. She released it with a jerk.

  “But before I go,” she said in a thin, faraway voice, “you mus
t give me Dora’s address. At least!”

  At that moment he admired her more than anyone he had ever met, for he had finally reasoned out what she thought was happening to her. She believed herself to be in the jaws of hell. She believed herself to be the victim of a plot by Satan himself. And still she wanted to hear news of the daughter who so grandly mocked and spited her.

  “Were you raised as a Catholic?” he grated.

  “Oh, sure! Of course I was—eternal fires and the lot! And I thought I’d escaped from all that. I thought I’d been deluded by fairy tales. Until I met you, and now—oh, I take my oath on it—now I believe in the devil again, now I believe in the sale of souls!”

  “You see evil in me?” he said, in genuine astonishment.

  “See it?” She gave a harsh croaking laugh. “Hear it, smell it, taste it practically! I never met a monster before—I thought I had, but you’re real and the rest were just pretend!”

  “But why?” he barked. And she gave him the unanswerable response.

  “Because you don’t know what I mean when I tell you what you are!”

  After a short eternity he was saying again, with dogged persistence, “But it isn’t like that! It isn’t!”

  She had calmed a little; she had regained enough confidence to sidle away from the door, as though she had worked out that someone sold to the forces of evil need not be totally evil, any more than a lion is a predator directly after a filling meal. She drew closer, timorously, and took his hand.

  “I want to run and hide,” she said. “And—and it wouldn’t break my heart if I did lose Dora. I’ve expected her to cut loose and start her own life for years. I mean, it runs in the family. But there’s one thing I can’t stand, and that’s the way you look. Your face! It’s still the face of the man who saved my life, and he was called Ransome, and he must be old or dead by now and I can’t help thinking you’re him!”

  She took a deep gasping breath.

  “You wear the face of the man I fell in love with when I was ten. I wish it weren’t so. I wish I could throw away my memories. But I can’t. I’m haunted. Perhaps it’s because I know what it is to be haunted that I don’t want to rush out and slam the door on somebody who’s sold his soul.”