God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m afraid that your beauty and your dedication overwhelm me,” I admitted. “It’s not that you are not appealing. Rather, you are almost too appealing.”

  “You made me that way.” She smiled wanly.

  “Sometimes,” I was trying hard, “God is overwhelmed by the appeal of the creatures he has made.”

  “Really?” She held out her hands in a gesture of happy delight.

  “Really,” I said. “After all, God is only human!”

  (Now before Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and the bully boys from the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith—as the Inquisition is euphemistically called these days—come after me with their thumbscrews and their heresy charges, I want to make four points.

  1. I realize that God is divine.

  2. I was in an altered state of consciousness.

  3. I was trying to talk my way out of a bad mess.

  4. If the incarnation means anything at all, in the terms of the Council of Chalcedon, it reveals the humanity of God: the Person who is God has a human nature. Right? Right. Anyway, in this context all I meant was that God is not inhuman, in the sense of subhuman.)

  “I know,” she said affectionately. “God needs us.”

  “What?” I demanded, shocked by her heresy.

  “The world is unredeemed,” she said enthusiastically, and God is in need of man to be a partner in completing, in aiding, in redeeming. Our lives are a divine need. The meaning of human existence is to satisfy the divine need for the redemption of the world.”

  “Rabbi Heschel…” I murmured.

  “Abraham Joshua Heschel.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “He’s in your preconscious. You’ve been reading John Merkle’s book.”

  “I’m dizzy.”

  She laughed adoringly. “Do I really do that to you?”

  “Indeed you do.”

  “Then you do love me!” She jumped up as though she were about to kiss me. Alas, she was much too respectful.

  The Duke acted like a mystic. This incredibly beautiful young woman was one, a God-haunted creature of light. No, not haunted as much as haunting.

  “That’s all I wanted to know.” She was glowing radiantly. “Now I don’t mind not being able to have Lenrau or Kaila. If it is for my happiness you will send me someone else. Oh, I love you so much …!”

  “Lenrau or Kaila?”

  “Of course, I loved them both. You must know that. But the Duke must marry the Duchess so that there will be peace, and Kaila is obsessed with that wonderful little imp. I am not jealous. No one can take you away from me.”

  Oh, God, I thought.

  Fortunately for me, the phone rang and I returned, however reluctantly, to ordinary consciousness.

  I never did figure out how she slipped from Morgan’s novel to mine.

  I went back to the game, wondering why I had not realized what she was. Had I been intimidated by her beauty?

  Who, me?

  The game was a welcome relief after the intensity of that glorious creature’s devotion. Sometimes, after all, it is heaven to be God.

  Anyway, the crops by which the country lived were slowly turning the fields white and purple, and the trees were blossoming in a rainbow outburst of delicate pastel colors. The land was preparing for the mating of the hero and the heroine—on the Feast of the Three Moons appropriately enough—by a glorious explosion of its fertile season, an explosion which seemed to impose a gentle tranquility on all those who lived in the land.

  The people were masters of color and ceremony. The rituals in both cities in preparation for the marriage—which was to take place on the field where the battle had been fought, only a few days ago in my time—reminded me of the carefully choreographed ceremonies of the Vatican, as solemn as the Vatican at any rate, but somewhat more languid and with a lot more ritual bathing than the Curia would tolerate.

  It seemed to me that the Duke and Duchess, together and separately, spent at least half of each day in sumptuous bathing pools while various choirs chanted slow, intoxicating hymns over them. They both were, by the way, more than adequately covered during these interludes. Their culture demanded prudery from their love in public manifestations.

  But the cultural norms did not prevent Ranora in her bits of peppermint-candy fabric and string from jumping without warning into their pools, and amid much laughter and fighting pushing both their heads under water.

  They joined in the merry fun, delighted by their sprite’s playfulness, but neither seemed to dare to dunk her saucy little head underwater.

  With the exceptions of the ritual cleansings, Lenrau and B’Mella stayed away from each other during the week of preparation; they were polite and distant when the rituals brought them together, both of them, I suspected, dying of frustration, a reaction which occasioned barely concealed giggles from their peppermint princess ilel who seemed to mock the solemnity of the festival with her clapping, feet-twitching exuberance.

  The two lovers did sneak off one spectacularly lovely evening when the rose-and-gold dusk seemed to go on forever. They had emerged from the third ritual bath of the day, this one in open air and beginning just at sunset, and stood at the edge of the pool, modestly cowering in vast towels while their attendants and the choirs packed in for the ceremony.

  “You smell like all the flowers of spring,” ’Rau said cautiously.

  She turned to him, dreamy-eyed. “You are so beautiful that my eyes dull all my other senses.”

  “And I was once told that I looked at you with lust!”

  “It is all right when a woman does it.” Giggle. “When we are properly mated I want to paint you totally naked.”

  He bowed his head in mild embarrassment. “It is flattering to be looked at so greedily by a woman … but also … disconcerting.”

  “I will disconcert you forever.” She looked around. “If only we could talk alone, away from all these people … and from that wondrous little imp.”

  “Now they will not leave us alone, in a few days they will isolate us. It is absurd…”

  “In my painting chamber in an hour?”

  “With my clothes off?”

  “Not now for that. Later.”

  Their tryst was limited to kisses of the sort with which ’Rau first deprived her of her dagger. There was, despite the pretext for the meeting, very little talk.

  “My dearest one, let us pray to the Lord Our God that our love never turn cold.”

  “And that when it does it will only be so that it may become even warmer.”

  A prudent and discreet prayer, in which she joined fervently.

  He touched her breasts beneath her gown. She did not push his hands away. “Be patient with me, my woman, I am not always the person you think I am.”

  She sighed with deep satisfaction. “The more I know who you are the more I will love you.”

  Their week of wedding preparations lasted my Monday afternoon and evening. There wasn’t much for me to do as my day wore on, because the ordinary dynamics of human love required little intervention from the Lord Our God, whether it be the Other Person or the Player of Nathan’s God Game.

  I did wonder if the Other Person approved of the way I was playing the game. Since She had pushed me stumbling and bumbling, first into the storyteller role and then into the port between two cosmoi, if She were not fully satisfied with my work, that was Her problem.

  You do your best, they told us in the seminary, and you leave the rest to God.

  Nonetheless I decided to look around to see what my various other creatures were doing.

  Malvau and N’Rasia were sleeping next to each other at as far a distance from each other as they could while still being on the same bed. As the love in the main plot waxed, their love had waned. What would ’Rau and ’Ella be like in fifteen years?

  Marriage is but keeping house,

  Sharing food and company

  What has this to do with love

  Of the body’s
beauty

  If love means affection, I

  love old trees, hats, coats and things

  Anything that’s been with me

  In my daily sufferings.

  That is how one loves a wife

  There’s a human interest too

  And a pity for the days

  We so soon live through

  What has this to do with love

  The anguish and the sharp despair

  The madness roving in the blood

  Because a girl or hill is fair

  I have stared upon a dawn

  And trembled like a man in love

  And in Love I was, and I

  Could not speak and could not move.

  Well, Walter James Turner was surely right, but only about one phase in the cycle. As another poet, Roger Staubach, put it in response to yet a third poet, one Broadway Joe Namath, the trick is to fall in love over and over again with the same woman.

  That, it seemed to me, was a modest enough hope for my hero and heroine, even if the chances seemed minuscule for yet another rebirth in love for the characters in what had become, despite my better judgment, the principal subplot.

  As for the other subplot, G’Ranne was gracefully disentangling herself from Kaila, both physically and psychologically, not displeased with the fire they had created between each other and certainly unwilling to hurt him, but well aware that there was no future for them together.

  She was, I concluded, a classy broad, and it was a shame that the constraints of my story didn’t permit me to know her better. That one, at any rate, would never appear with complaints in my dreams.

  ACCESS MAD SCIENTISTS.

  YOU MEAN THE THREE STOOGES?

  EXECUTE.

  I needed none of the 286’s wisecracks at the moment.

  Larry, Curly, and Moe were huddled over a small package in a room in one of the distant corners of Lenrau’s pavilion.

  “It will,” said Larry, “fit nicely under the altar.”

  Curly: “And destroy them both at the height of the ceremony.”

  Moe: “The climax of their marriage.”

  They laughed like certified lunatics.

  Larry: “It will destroy all of the priests.”

  Curly: “And most of the people.”

  Moe: “We will rule forever.”

  Right. A thousand-year reich.

  ZAP MECHANISM.

  EXECUTING.

  It didn’t even ask for details this time.

  The black box started to steam and glow and spin, this time like a Fourth of July Roman candle. The Three Stooges jumped out of the chamber and began to run.

  There was a derisive “pfft” sound. They hesitated, crept back to the door, and cautiously peered in. Where their precious black box had been, there was only a pool of liquid.

  “Hot,” said one, touching it.

  “Water,” mumbled another, tasting it.

  “Maybe we ought to quit and find ourselves some women, like the Duke has done.”

  “And not skinny wenches like her either.”

  So they closed up shop, temporarily.

  Not so elsewhere.

  ACCESS ADMIRAL.

  The priests were busily merging bureaucracies. Similar activity was happening all over the land as the two duchies, with what I thought was astonishing ease, worked out their combination into one. Both the Cardinal and the Admiral presided over the preliminary festivities of the marriage with éclat and enthusiasm. I did not trust either of them for a moment, however.

  The Admiral was rushing down a forest path by himself, late it would seem for a conspiratorial meeting.

  He would be real late. While I was watching and before I could lift a finger, a large shape loomed out of the night, raced behind him, and buried a knife in his back. The loquacious Admiral uttered not a word in protest.

  Stylo curiae.

  The next morning there was a more private ritual bathing, preceded this time by anointing with a substance which, to judge from B’Mella’s facial expression, was foul smelling.

  In the pond (the ceremony was outside in a lake with only one choir chanting away in the background) she giggled and whispered to her love, “Now I am a foul-smelling whore.”

  “You are not a whore,” he replied gallantly, “and there is only one smell of yours I know, and that I love.”

  “Dear sweet man…” Hesitation, deep breath, then a rush of words. “Where do you go when you go away, ’Rau?”

  Reassuringly she grabbed his arm, rather, I thought, to the displeasure of the clerics who were presiding over the ceremony.

  “You have noticed?”

  “How could I help but notice? I am not angry, only curious.”

  “I don’t know.” He sighed and patted her clinging fingers. “It is a wonderful land of colors and lights and peace and love. I … I do not think it interferes with what I must do in this land. If you wish me to stop…”

  “There is a woman there.”

  “Yes, but I do not see her face closely.”

  “What is she like?”

  “I draw closer to her each time … now she seems tall and slender and dark with breasts like mountain shadows at sunset.”

  “Silly.” She slipped her hand up and down his forearm.

  “It is true,” he insisted. “I have wondered for years who she is, and now I know that she is you.”

  Well, that will do for an explanation, but how do you live with a mystic who drifts away in search of you in another world when you’re right next to him?

  Was it our cosmos into which the Duke drifted, or another one with a cognate, perhaps, of B’Mella? Was he involved in another story there? Or had he perhaps become a participant in a distant cognate of Nathan’s God Game?

  The premarital festival went on. For a festival it was. The Duke and the Duchess were right: everyone except the sullen priests and wizards and viziers seemed overjoyed that love was replacing war. It all seemed too good to be true.

  It was.

  Why was I still playing the game since it looked like the required happy ending? Does not a good storyteller quit while he’s ahead?

  As a social scientist I was curious about the culture of this world. But that was a minor motive. Truth is that I was hooked on my characters, an occupational hazard of a storyteller/God. I was a little less sanguine about the outcome than was my friend and ally, the ilel Ranora. After all, the Duke and the Duchess both had been married before. His spouse had died of battle wounds, as had both B’Mella’s husbands. The casualty rate in the warrior class to which both the Duke and the Duchess belonged must have been terribly high. What was important, however, was that neither had produced children, a subject which caused some anxious whispering, even among such reasonable men as Linco and Kaila.

  “Don’t worry about that,” the ilel announced in one of her happy chariot rides between the two camps on the day before the wedding—the chariot pulled by the white animal decorated with red streamers that might have been a horse, but wasn’t quite.

  “We have to worry about it,” her “protector” insisted. “If there is not an heir…”

  In exasperation the pixie informed him, “Let’s worry about getting them married first. The poor dears are so frightened that we may have to drag them to their mating couch.” Then she flicked the reins and her red-and-white-striped chariot sped off like a teenager’s convertible buzzing Lakeview Avenue.

  The medical technology of their world (I don’t use planet because I think it is somehow our planet) was like most everything else, subtly different from ours. They had medications which seemed to be like our antibiotics and fairly elaborate inoculation systems—the bride and groom were given physical exams the day before the wedding and equipped with pills and injections—and seemed to have developed methods for healing wounds and replacing limbs far more sophisticated than anything we know. But there were no x-ray machines, in fact practically no machines at all in their hospitals, if that’s what you can call
the pavilions where their medical people worked. Families seemed to be small to medium sized, so they probably had some kind of fertility control, though the subject was never mentioned.

  I suspected that they had no notion of what to do about infertility and, except in the case of their Duke and Duchess, not much concern either. However, as the week of preparation before the wedding drew near, there was a lot of prayer being directed to the Lord Our God that the ducal couple be blessed with offspring. I figured I’d hang around until they were married and then push the TERMINATE GAME function key, appropriately F10. Whatever powers I might have among these possibly real people, curing infertility was certainly not one of them. Nathan’s parser was not that clever.

  Which showed how little I understood what was going on.

  Anyway, I decided I’d visit the bride and groom when they said their final prayers before departing their pavilions for the midnight marriage ceremony. Yeah, midnight, with tens of thousands of people and hundreds of choristers holding hand lanterns in the middle of what a little more than a week ago had been a field of battle. Their bodies were indeed to be a bridge to peace.

  Maybe.

  B’Mella was strutting around her suite in a fever of ill-tempered anxiety. She had reduced her nervous bevy of servants to frequent tears. Ranora, sitting crosslegged on a stack of cushions, giggled at each new outburst. Ilels were doubtless protected by a lot of taboos, but the taboos didn’t forbid looks that could kill, looks which sent the pretty little imp into new paroxysms of giggles.

  Then B’Mella dismissed the lot of them. Ranora bounded across the room to help her remove her robe.

  “When you marry, wicked little girl,” the Duchess said affectionately, “I will perform the same service for you.”

  Ranora laughed merrily and, robe in hand, scampered away into an antechamber.

  B’Mella knelt in front of me—the game seemed to have been arranged so that when they prayed, they faced directly into the camera, if camera it was. She sighed sadly, a Boris woman in purple-and-silver straps and lace facing a funeral instead of a wedding. Head bowed, shoulders drooping, she prayed with a voice in which one could hear the tears.