I dropped them off at their various stations after the skiing was finished: Heidi with her whistle at the beach (the secret of the whistle, I was told, to use it as little as possible), John Larkin at the clubhouse “Pav” where he served up the best hamburgers in Grand Beach, Lance and Bobby at their respective homes so they could “cash out” (go back to bed), Michele at the local Nautilus installation because “once you’re awake it’s totally silly to go back to bed.”
I then drove into New Buffalo to buy some salami and to pick up The New York Times (so as to learn what had officially happened in the world yesterday) at the Buffalo drugstore. Coming out, I encountered the States Attorney of the County of Cook and his near-teenaged daughter. (Her name is Nora but I don’t think she fits in the story. If she does, I don’t want to know about it.)
“Strange night in Grand Beach.” Rich Daley withdrew his unlighted cigar and smiled the most dazzling smile in American political life.
“Restless adolescent natives?”
“Restless everyone.”
“A lot of the drink taken?”
“Funny thing,” the cigar back in his mouth. “Less than usual. People were sort of laid back and relaxed, like they should be at a resort, instead of uptight. It should always be that way, shouldn’t it?”
“Sounds almost like a religious festival.”
“Just what I thought, peaceful, and,” big grin, “really sensual.”
“Heaven help us all when the Grand Beach Irish turn sensual.”
“Less work for my people if everyone was that way all the time.”
“My mommy,” Nora piped up with that mixture of affection and disrespect which only a kid that age can blend for a paternal parent, “says my daddy has turned psychic.”
“Really!” Only if several generations of acute political instincts made you psychic. Instinctively he could sniff a restless precinct.
“I don’t know … there was something funny last night … did you hear about the poor Hagans?”
“Only that there was a reconciliation.”
“No.” He shook his head. “They were mugged last night in Michigan City coming out of Maxime and Hymie’s. She’s in St. Joseph’s with a brain concussion. Still unconscious. Wrong time for them, just when things were beginning to straighten out.”
“I’ll stop by and see her.”
“I think they’d appreciate that very much.”
Was the port between our cosmoi opening wide? And if I suggested that to Rich, would he call the men in the white suits?
Probably not. He’d want to find out more about how the port worked.
But it was my game and my secret and up to me to control the influences which might be flowing back and forth. As you can see, I was now acting as if I thought I was God. However, I wasn’t quite ready to admit that to myself yet.
I drove well above the speed limit back to Grand Beach, so worried was I about what might have happened to Malvau and N’Rasia on the other side of Max Planck’s Wall.
On Lake View I discovered the remnants of Diamond (the village’s rock group) acting out for an imaginary video camera another chapter in the John Larkin disappearance. After one of their concerts at the clubhouse, Diamond had staged an imaginary TV interview with John in the midst of which someone set off firecrackers. Paul and Mike had immediately turned it into an assassination attempt and a long-running joke. Millions of dollars of reward were posted to find out who was behind the attempt and then to discover whether John was still alive. Rumors were spread that he had fled to Brazil. Other rumors insisted that his body had been found buried in a beach near São Paulo. John himself visited New Buffalo merchants and raspberry farmers, displaying pictures of himself, asking whether such a young man had been seen. (Almost always he had been seen, but the interviewee could not remember quite when.)
Great if slightly weird fun. But today they seemed to have become quite mad. Paul shoved an imaginary mike in my face. “Do you care to comment on the rumor that John Larkin is returning tonight from Brazil for a triumphant farewell concert?”
“Or,” Mike demanded, notebook in hand, “do you believe that he really is buried in that beach?”
“Not without Heidi’s permission.”
“Does she hold the secret to the John Larkin case?” John himself demanded of me.
“Dux femina facti,” I replied.
“Huh?”
“Cherchez la femme.”
“Heidi!”
“She’s the lifeguard.”
“One last question.” John, it occurred to me, bore a remarkable physical resemblance to Kaila. “Before we cherchez for her. Did you really visit John Larkin in Rio last year?”
“Salvador. He was living at the home of Calisans Neto, the famous artist.”
“Is that on the record?”
“He was alive and well and living in Bahia. That was a year ago of course.”
The camera crew raced off for the beach.
“Beware the whistle,” I yelled after them.
Diamond was a mad crew. They had never, however, been quite this mad. The port was wide open.
Back on the other side, however, the carefully orchestrated peace scenario had mostly fallen apart. I activated the game just as the Two Moon Meal was breaking up and followed ’Rasia and ’Vau through the soft night as they dreamily walked home, hand in hand, quietly proud of their achievement.
No one, I swore, was going to mess up the game plan I and my allies in this land had put together. I’d protect my two friends—friends and lovers they had surely become—from any random muggers.
I failed them completely, despite the fact that I was ready for trouble. It happened too quickly for my reactions to be any help. It was a random event, not even intended by anyone to be a disaster, a bit of the drink taken, an accident, and almost another war. For the first time I understood that random events—built into the algorithm by random numbers, of course—could undo the best laid plans of mice, men, and storytellers.
And possibly of God too.
You’ve probably figured out that their society was rather rigidly ritualistic. They had tried to confine violence to the warrior castes and sex to the elaborate and carefully prescribed day-end ritual. Remember everyone’s shock when Malvau mildly patted his wife’s rear end? Sex is too powerful a human phenomenon to be so completely contained, but retreats into the abundant privacy of the forests and lakes of the sort in which ’Vau and ’Rasia had engaged twice were rare events. Even they were ritual echoes of wedding night and honeymoon behavior, as I was soon to learn.
Under ordinary circumstances, then, the people in the land (I never learned whether it had any other name but “land”) were sober, self-controlled, responsible, even prudish people. Dull bourgeoisie, you might want to call them. On the various festival days they let off steam, eating and drinking and making love as though all three behaviors were going out of fashion.
Not everyone blew their lid. As we saw at the ducal meal, the style was light and festive, made so first by the radiance of N’Rasia (how that was acquired earlier in the day was another matter) and then by the divine zaniness of Ranora. But if you were wandering around the meadows and the woods late in the evening it was not unreasonable to assume that you were interested in the more extreme variety of festival behavior.
So ’Rasia and ’Vau encountered three very drunken warriors on the path from the Duchess’s pavilion to their own. Probably the men did not want rape; rather only some kissing and feeling. But ’Rasia was from the class that did not wander about on festival nights and surely had never been pawed without her consent by anyone but her husband. The men came suddenly out of the dark. One of them laughed cheerfully, grabbed the woman, and tossed her playfully to another. The third immobilized with broad arms the gamely struggling ’Vau.
I reacted as quickly as I could. STOP ASSAULT!
It didn’t have much effect. The big guy with ’Vau tossed him to the ground, the way Richard Dent of the Bea
rs sacks quarterbacks, leaving them dazed and motionless. The three of them then “played” with ’Rasia, as I suppose they had “played” with other, quite willing, women earlier in the evening. They kissed her and caressed her and tore at her gown and passed her back and forth with drunken laughter, all, as far as they were concerned, in the festive spirit of the late night.
She fought back like a tiger, kicking, clawing, biting, screaming. They were too drunk to notice that she wasn’t enjoying the game.
I continued to press the REPEAT key. Nothing happened. I changed the strategy. ZAP ASSAILANTS.
ERROR. ERROR. CANNOT ZAP ASSAILANTS WITHOUT INJURING MAJOR CHARACTER. ERROR ERROR.
Well, she had become a major character anyway, as she had wanted.
’Vau shook off his daze and charged back into the fray. The big man swept him out of the scene with a single blow of his tree-trunk arm. ’Rasia dug her teeth into his shoulder, biting hard.
He screamed like the proverbially stuck pig and tried to shake her loose. She clung to him like a Gila monster, scratching at his face while she continued to bite his shoulder. The other two, confused and tipsy, tore at her already ripped garments, not quite sure what was happening, but doing what seemed to them to be the natural thing on a festival night.
Finally, the big man, bleeding profusely, succeeded in throwing his counterattacker off him. He swung his uninjured arm, really intending nothing more than shoving her away. The furious, and, looking back on it, incredibly brave N’Rasia charged him and collided with that huge swinging tree trunk. She flew back, stumbled over her husband, fell violently to the ground, and lay still, unnaturally still. The three drunks took off as if the hounds of hell were in pursuit.
Which they soon would be.
ACCESS COPS, DUCHESS, I demanded.
The local cops, not much more efficient than the teenager harassers in Grand Beach and Long Beach, showed up quickly and dithered ineffectually. ’Vau regained consciousness sufficiently to mutter “warriors” and then freak out over the body of his prone and barely breathing wife.
Then the Duchess arrived and all hell broke loose. “Take them both to the medical tent. Tell the doctors I insist on their complete recovery.” Then to one of her sleepy-eyed woman staffers, “Assemble the warriors, we march for vengeance at once.”
Clever, you stupid little bitch, real clever.
By sunrise the two armies were assembled in the quondam peace meadow, ready to resume the war. Lenrau had heard at once that the Duchess was assembling her sleepy hungover warriors and he promptly did the same, not sure why the fight was to be resumed but not waiting to find out.
Cooler heads tried to prevail. Kaila and G’Ranne, the latter still instantly responsive to my commands, tried to talk to the Duchess and were summarily dismissed as “rapists,” hardly a fair charge against either of them. Poor old Linco dithered like the cops and tried to argue the perfectly reasonable position that there was no reason to believe that the warriors were on the other side. He was banished as a “senile old man.”
When my B’Mella loses her temper, she really loses it, a fact which would cause even greater trouble later on.
ACCESS ILEL, I cautiously recommended to my Compaq.
Without any difficulty it located Ranora in her tent, draped in a long black gown, pale and angry, kneeling on the floor, praying intensely.
STOP WAR, I told her, unwisely.
She looked up at me, made a terrible face of anger and disgust, and turned away.
HEY, IT’S NOT MY FAULT.
She resolutely refused to listen.
I tried B’Mella. STOP WAR, YOU LITTLE FOOL.
Her look of stony contempt was as bad as the ilel’s. As an author/God I was not having one of my better days.
The two armies were stomping restlessly, eager to be back at what they knew best. If you took a closer look, you would observe that many of them were not all that enthusiastic about resuming the war. They had, perhaps, learned to enjoy the little bit of peace they had.
G’Ranne, again at my suggestion, pleaded with the Duke to restrain his own anger. Larry, Curly, and Moe were dressed up in their fancy red armor plate, but restlessly watched the snow-covered mountains in the distance. They had discovered that it was more fun to play manic games than to actually fight.
I tried the medical pavilion. Malvau, his silver hair still stained with blood, one of his eyes terribly black, was hovering with a doctor over his unconscious wife. Her breathing seemed normal, maybe a little shallow; but the doctor types looked worried.
All we need is a long and lingering coma.
GET OUT THERE AND STOP THE DAMN FOOL WAR, I told him.
He shook his head, not so much declining the command as trying to think.
DO YOU WANT TO BLOW IT ALL? I demanded.
He sighed, straightened up, put his hand reassuringly on the shoulder of one of the doctor types, found a chariot outside the pavilion, and galloped rapidly to the battlefield.
The armies were approaching one another warily when he rode up to B’Mella’s position on the hill.
STOP THIS DAMN FOOL WAR, I told all and sundry.
The Duchess did not want to listen. I was too far away to hear what they were saying. ’Vau grabbed the Duchess and shook her like an unruly and irresponsible little girl, which of course she was.
Her eyes opened in furious surprise, she reached for her sword, and then dropped it back in its sheath.
STOP WAR! I demanded, pushing her function key.
She patted ’Vau’s arm, turned to an aide and whispered, “Signal truce.”
Lenrau was by this time distinctly unamused by the events of the day. “The Lord Our God condemn her truce,” he fumed. “It was her warriors, not ours, who assaulted the councilor and his wife. Continue the attack.”
Kaila and G’Ranne had to shake him back to sense. From the warm and gentle glances with which they favored each other, incidentally, and the occasional lingering touch, I concluded that they were having a love affair. The ice maiden was not, after all, made of ice, but perhaps of fire. And as for her perhaps not being a maiden any longer, that was their business and I proposed to leave them alone. I had more than enough problems as it was. I couldn’t help but notice, however, how radiantly lovely G’Ranne was.
So peace returned. No thanks to the ilel who had opted out of this one.
I was wiped out. Despite my morning exercise with the kids, I could not long survive this kind of tension. It was already three o’clock in the afternoon, Saturday afternoon at that, and all I’d done for hours was play the damn game, with the only effect being to keep my characters from killing one another. It had to stop soon.
Meanwhile something must be done about poor N’Rasia. She would surely blame me for what had happened. In the hospital pavilion I ordered, REVIVE N’RASIA.
EXECUTING.
Nothing happened. I pushed the REPEAT key.
EXECUTING.
She did not stir. The medical types were fretting and stewing. Malvau and the Duchess entered the chamber and appeared profoundly worried.
I leaned on the REPEAT key.
I/O ERROR. ATTEMPT TO GO BEYOND EOF.
In other words, it couldn’t revive her and was blaming me. But it gave me an idea.
ALL RIGHT, I told the truculent little imp in her red-and-white-striped tent, CURE N’RASIA.
“How?” she snarled, still very angry at me. And at that moment looking like Michele did when she was very angry. Boy, I was in real trouble.
PIPE HER BACK TO CONSCIOUSNESS.
She frowned, considering whether this absurdity was worth her notice. She pulled her pipe out from under her discarded prom dress (and I must report that unlike the rest of the people in this land, and very like the teenage women in our land, she maintained her quarters in a constant state of pure chaos) and blew a few notes on it tentatively, as if she were thinking about it.
Then she played the first few bars of the “N’Rasia theme,” nodded
her agreement, winked at me, and slipped out of the tent.
For reasons beyond me, she marched solemnly across the meadow and through the outer tents and pavilions in her black dress as though she were a banshee going to a funeral. It was, I suppose, a protest. We would see it again before the story was over.
Inside ’Rasia’s chamber, the whole family, including grandchildren, was assembled. The Duchess, clinging to poor old Linco (no longer presumably a senile fool), stood next to sad-faced ’Vau, whose hair was still stained with blood. Most of the other family members were weeping.
How late in your life they all discovered you, including, sadly, you yourself.
Ranora entered so softly that no one noticed. She slipped through the group, hugging the youngest daughter briefly as she moved her aside, and sat, crosslegged, next to the dying woman’s bed.
The others drew back, not quite sure what was happening, but wary of the supernatural influence which had entered the room.
Candidly, Ranora, grim-faced and clad in black, would be enough to scare the hell out of almost anyone.
She examined N’Rasia carefully, touched her face, lifted her eyelid, nodded, blew a few test notes on the pipe, and then started N’Rasia’s theme, now somehow far more melancholy than it had been only a few hours before.
I decided that the least I could do was help. I pushed the N’Rasia shift/function (still a minor character in that respect anyway) and instructed her, WAKE UP, KID, THERE’S A LOT OF WORK FOR YOU STILL TO DO.
“Sing with me.” The ilel lifted her lips from the pipe. “Wordless song.”
They joined in.
WAKE UP, DAMN YOU, I ordered and pushed the REPEAT button down.
Her eyelids flickered. Ranora leaned even closer and played the pipe next to her ear.
’Rasia’s eyelids flickered again, a little more vigorously.
I SAID WAKE UP. YOU’RE TOO IMPORTANT TO THE STORY NOW TO DIE.
Ranora changed the rhythm of her melody, jazzing it up, making it comic, demanding attention.
The injured woman opened her eyes, glanced around, lost her focus, then looked around again, smiling slightly.
Ranora jumped to her feet and turned the theme into a triumphal march as she sashayed around the bed. N’Rasia, still a classy broad, laughed.
God Game Page 13
