SF writers, of course, men and women with much larger and more generous imaginations than I have, take such exchanges between alternative cosmoi for granted.
But this is not Speculative Fiction. This is an attempt at a sober report by a social scientist of what happened when he began to play an interactive fiction game of which he ought to have been more suspicious. I don’t have the imagination to do Speculative Fiction.
Anyway, I suspended the game to watch the ten o’clock news.
When I returned it was the next morning for them. The sun rose above the snow-covered mountains which I think were in the west end of their land, though I’m not sure, and quickly dried up the remainder of my admittedly excessive rainstorm. Kaila and Malvau trudged wearily into the no-man’s-land and sat on chairs which someone had arranged before their arrival. The young man carried a thick vellum book, his finger between two of the pages.
“A scholar’s wisdom?” Malvau cocked a skeptical politician’s eyebrow.
“A description of the arrangements for the peace conference a hundred and forty-two years ago.”
“It was a short peace.”
“Longer than any we have known.… Besides…”
“We can blame the format on our ancestors?” The movement of his lips was definitely a smile this time, though not an uncynical one.
“Your words, my Lord.”
Malvau leaned close to his opposite, so close that the listening warriors could not hear him. “How long do you think we have, my friend?”
“No longer than ten days.”
“If that.”
“Precisely.”
“Does your Duke accept this format?”
“He awaits the approval of your Duchess.” Kaila grimaced. “No doubt we will waste another day on this charade.… You have more experience in this than I do, my Lord; are we the only ones in the world who feel the urgency?”
“I think not.” Malvau rose, the book under his arm. “We are the only ones who are willing to admit openly how near the fire is.”
“The Lord Our God,” Kaila murmured with more than routine piety, “save and protect us.”
“In times past,” the older man replied, “He has not been responsive to similar prayers.”
I had yet to realize that in this other world, this cosmos down the street, they meant me.
Anyway it took two days of huffing and puffing, of the drawing of weapons, and the making of threats, of stony glares from the ice maiden and manic whispering among Larry, Curly, and Moe as I had dubbed her three buddies, of secret conversations between the clergy of both sides (who seemed to have no trouble joining forces, thus it always is with the bad guys), of temper tantrums from B’Mella and long interludes of daydreaming from Lenrau, before the negotiations began.
Not a moment too soon. Kaila collapsed into his bed, too exhausted and sick to attend the opening session, marked by interminable clerical chanting and even longer washing of hands, and Malvau, his dignity offended by the Duchess’s refusal to accept his recommendations quickly enough, had withdrawn to his courtyard to sulk and to ignore the not completely unattractive blond shrew to whom he was married.
The only men, in other words, with an admitted sense of urgency were absent from the negotiating table on the first day. The fire was even closer.
Kaila, gray and haggard, turned up the second morning, in time for the ilel’s dramatic arrival. The next day, after what might be considered an apology (“I cannot deal with all this excrement myself”) from the Duchess, Malvau, with singular ill grace it seemed to me, suspended his sulk.
I wondered whether they had any chance at all. It had not yet occurred to me that I was supposed to hurry the process along.
What process?
Let’s leave it as a tentative system of hypotheses for further research:
1. There exist neighboring cosmoi.
2. The physical barriers between our cosmos and the neighbor are at the present state of our knowledge impenetrable.
3. They may be impenetrable physically forever because they were produced/emerged/were created so early in the big bang as to be operating with a different set of elementary forces from those which function in our world or even to be the product of a completely different big bang. (Who knows how many times She struck the cosmic matches?)
4. However, since love may be responsible for all the big bangs, and mind and spirit may be able to transcend physical barriers, it is possible that subtle and unpredictable influences, often erratic, may flit across these physically impenetrable boundaries.
5. Perhaps these influences are frequent and for all their unpredictability growing more frequent.
I submit the previous five hypotheses, verifiable or falsifiable by further research, though God, you should excuse the expression, knows who will fund such research. However, my own personal experience, acquired while I was playing Nathan’s God Game, convinces me that they are all true and also convinces some of the scholars.
I include Nathan, of course; he’d like nothing more than to send some of my characters, most notably Ranora, who has some of the characteristics of his teenaged daughters/ princesses, on a promotion tour for the revised version of the game.
And of course for the upgrade two years from now, when they bring on line the optical disks.
With fifty thousand story lines.
If anyone could pull that off, Nathan could. I’d like to see her dance around him blowing a wicked theme on her pipe.
The final hypothesis? I have a lot of hunches and one bit of physical evidence:
6. Some individuals on the other side, at any rate at certain times in their lives, can frolic across the boundaries between our cosmoi (and many other cosmoi too, for that matter) with considerable and mostly benign effect.
I use the term “frolic” advisedly, because I suspect/feel/ intuit that either you dance across them the way a little kid dances down a beach on a warm summer day when the lake is warm and calm or you don’t do it at all.
I suspect further that those who can do it are virgin potential bearers of life. Not that there is anything less noble about a woman who has engaged in lovemaking or actually borne life. On the contrary, I think they have more dignity, and, all other things being equal, more inherent worth. But they represent a promise of life fulfilled. Creatures like Ranora symbolize a promise yet to be fulfilled and therefore have a certain, what to call it, freedom of movement which is appropriate for their phase of the life cycle, freedom of movement which makes Planck’s Wall look liked a beaded curtain.
Women like Ranora and, maybe, like Mary the Mother of Jesus.
Well, having laid out that highly speculative possibility and acknowledging that (a) I can’t prove it and (b) half the time I think it absurd and half the time I am utterly convinced that it is true, I must quickly add that even if it is true, it doesn’t begin to explain Ranora or the role she seized for herself, unasked and not infrequently unwanted, in Nathan’s God Game.
That however is not the issue at the moment. I did not think of myself as God for the people in the game, not in any real sense, until I was much further into it. When I paused for my reflection that night, I knew only that they needed me and I had to go back to them.
That brings us to the most important question of all, doesn’t it? OK, you have a port to an analogous cosmos which may be very like yours or may be similar only because of a hastily constructed translation system. OK, you’ve broken into it by an accident which gives you both access and comprehension. So how come you’re God? How come they have to do or want to do or usually but not always do what you tell them to do? How come the grace/free will game is being played out again with you (did I hear someone say “of all people”?) given the grace hand?
Beats me.
Maybe the situation in that place was so bad that they needed some special help and all the angels were busy elsewhere.
Wild?
Sure. But what can I tell you?
Author�
�s Note
“The traveler,” writes André Gide in The Counterfeiters, “having reached the top of the hill, sits down and looks about him before continuing his journey, which henceforward lies all downhill. He seeks to distinguish in the darkness, for night is falling, where the winding path he has chosen is leading him. So the undiscerning author stops a while to regain his breath, and wonders with some anxiety where his tale will take him.”
Gide then goes on to complain about his part-time narrator Edouard, who “has irritated me more than once … enraged me even.”
It is a natural reaction in the uneasy relationship between author and narrator, inevitable given the propensity of narrators to take stories away from the author. “Marcel” drove Proust out of his story, even converting Proust’s homosexual lover Agostino into the young woman Albertine. In later life, Joyce ruefully confessed that he had given Stephen a hard time; in fact, as is obvious, the exact opposite is the case. Joseph Conrad, we know, was driven up the wall by the loquacious Marlowe.
Hence readers of this story will not be surprised that I am already irritated with the narrator’s sly hints that he is me and with his clever schemes to take the story away from me.
As Michele observed when she read the story (the real Michele, four years older, four inches taller, and talking English as she always did instead of teen talk), “I totally like the leading character.”
“The Duke?”
In full seriousness, “No, the narrator.”
“He’s not me.”
“I know that.”
I warn all readers against his pretensions. Consider how long it takes him to realize that I have cast him in the God role. Does that sound like me? Could anyone with a Ph.D. be that dumb?
In terms something like that does every author complain about the narrator with whom he is stuck, does every Other Person complain about the narrator with whom He is forced to work in order to manifest His wisdom and goodness.
Or Hers.
4
An Ilel Plays Her Pipe
Ranora’s arrival on the second day of negotiations is branded into my imagination for as long as that dimension of my personality may survive. She added a Wonderland dimension to the story. I was Alice and she was the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Red Queen all rolled into one cute little package.
I think if she could testify (maybe I should say when she decides to testify) she’d claim I was Humpty-Dumpty too.
I couldn’t figure out why the game needed her. Or the worlds, ours and theirs. On the other hand, maybe both cosmoi need as many ilels as they can find.
I had the impression as I played the God Game that need, unspecific perhaps but powerful, was driving the game. Their world needed ours for a few months (a week or two of our time, but the time was all fouled up—sometimes the game was in real time, occasionally it was slower than real time and often much faster; I have no explanation for that). And they, especially the Duke and the Duchess, needed me.
Arguably it was the other way around. Maybe our world, in the persons of a score or so of befuddled scholars, needed exposure to their world. Maybe I needed B’Mella and Lenrau.
To be perfectly fair I should tell you about the parapsychologist. It was my idea to call him in. Our University, of course, does not permit parapsychology on the campus, so he had to fly in from Elsewhere. He puffed mysteriously on his pipe for several minutes after we’d run the last tape.
“Possible,” he finally murmured.
“What’s possible?”
“That these tapes are the result of a strongly psychic imagination sending out electronic energies which create visual images. We have been able to do it in a minor way in the lab. Nothing like these, of course, but still…”
I am, for the record, utterly devoid of psychic powers.
But, as the man said, still …
Finally, to end the speculation and get back to the story, I can’t believe that coming to know Ranora was an accident. I still hear her pipe late at night. Or I think I do.
By that second day of negotiations, they had rigged up tents at either side of a clearing in one of their oak-that-wasn’t-oak forests. Maybe I should call them pavilions because they were luxurious portable palaces. These people did not live poorly. They sat on plush lounges, which adapted to their body shapes, in glistening pastel gowns on either side of the clearing and went through the rituals that they considered negotiation—mostly shouting invective at one another and suggesting how they would carve one another up when the battle began again. They had rather unkind words for one another’s leaders too, of which “foul-smelling whore” and “cowardly degenerate” were the mildest. It was hard to figure out what the issues in the conflict were. Some small tracts of land, fishing rights on a lake, and memories of unsettled vendettas from long ago. The exchange was curiously artificial. It seemed as stylized as black teenagers doing the “dozens” with each other. But then someone would rise to his feet and rush across the meadow, waving his (or her, because this was strictly an equal-opportunity war) sword or spear in the air.
One leader or the other would raise a hand and the charge would stop. I couldn’t tell when these alarums and excursions were serious and when they were not. I had the feeling that the rituals had been played out before. But the young man had said earlier that Lenrau had never seen B’Mella. He wasn’t seeing much of her now either. Her face was partially veiled by the collar of her magnificent glowing blue-green robe and he didn’t look at her anyway.
I began to wonder what I was supposed to do next. I had imposed a truce on this world and forced the warring factions to negotiate; was I supposed to resolve the conflict too? How?
I felt like a benign British monarch who had forced the Prots and the Teagues in Belfast or Derry to sit down to talk with each other and now was baffled that mere negotiation didn’t lead to peace.
How odd of them.
There was, however, Ranora to provide entertainment. How can I describe her? A luscious little middle-adolescent blonde in a short red-and-white peppermint-candy gown with a matching hood, pert nose, dancing blue eyes, an acrobat’s responsive body, and a face which seemed to be made of rubber putty, but which, in its rare repose, was delicately lovely.
She emerged from the woods and marched straight across the middle of the meadow, blowing a dissonant melody on a small pipe, not unlike an Irish tin whistle in appearance but with a much greater range of sounds, also red-and-white striped.
The exchange of insults stopped and everyone listened silently as she reversed direction and paraded right back across the meadow to the edge of the woods whence she had come. Instead of disappearing into the woods she flounced up towards B’Mella’s throne, sat imperiously in the shade of one of those almost oak trees, tucked her legs under her, modestly arranged her gown, and, occasionally experimenting with a theme melody, stared boldly and I thought affectionately at the Duchess.
B’Mella turned crimson and tried to avert her eyes from the outrageous child. More notes on the pipe, demanding attention. B’Mella motioned the girl to come closer. She mimed a giggle, shook her head elaborately, and continued to stare and experiment with her pipe. The Duchess acted like a woman who had been captured on Candid Camera.
Like most warriors, this crowd was not strong on wit, but they knew they were being ridiculed. The debate continued with a little less vigor. The girl with the pipe refused to permit it to become serious. Whenever a warrior would start shouting, she would accompany him on her pipe with a mocking melody. Some of the victims had the good grace to laugh, others looked like they wanted to strangle her.
Malvau rose with considerable solemnity towards the end of the cloudless afternoon to deliver his daily summary, which normally was enough to put everyone, even his Lady, to sleep.
“We have a rare opportunity,” he began, “for peace. You all know that either we will have peace now or the war will overflow from the warrior class and spread to all our peoples. The fields will be burned,
the cities destroyed, women raped, men tortured to death, children mutilated and killed, as it was written that it happened in the time of the evil Duke Franon. Perhaps those of us who are warriors are not tired of combat. What else can we do? Our people are amused by the conflict much as though it were an athletic match, but they too know how dangerous it will shortly become. Can we not find the will for peace that will end forever this conflict which has no sense, no point, no reason, other than its own continuation?”
The girl leaped to her feet and began to do approving somersaults and cartwheels, like an Olympic gymnastics champion.
Kaila rose from the other side, handsome, casual, self-possessed.
“My distinguished colleague, the noble Lord Malvau speaks only the truth. Why must we fight? Cannot we become friends, fellow citizens, even perhaps some of us lovers? We are the same people, we worship the same God…”
“Blasphemy,” shouted a tall, white-haired, handsome chief priest (dressed in crimson and ermine) on B’Mella’s side. “Your God is the prince of darkness.”
“And you are an effeminate coward,” yelled a one-armed woman warrior.
“Your Duchess is a foul-smelling whore.”
“Your Duke is a degenerate pervert.”
G’Ranne the ice maiden said nothing. Her silence at insult time was rather un-Irish behavior.
The peppermint-candy girl did not elect to be quiet, however. On the contrary, she exploded with fury. She bounded across the meadow blowing vulgar insults on the contestants.
B’Mella lost her temper. “Lord Lenrau, are you so weak and ineffectual that you cannot control this obstreperous child?”
The obstreperous child wheeled on the Duchess and favored her with a rude and insulting melody, then removed the pipe from her mouth and made a rude face.
The Duchess, to my astonishment, did not reach for her own sword or order someone to remove the offending young woman. Instead she smiled graciously. “Small one, we must have our arguments first, before we can make peace. Come here.”
The small one, pipe in one hand, rested her hands on her hips and considered the Duchess gravely. Then she shook her head and giggled. Instead of responding to the Duchess’s invitation, she lifted the pipe back to her lips and played a sweet little melody, so lovely that it reduced everyone to reverent silence; she paused, considered what she had played, and played it over, making a few adjustments the second time.
God Game Page 5
