“You of all people know what a miserable and vile woman I am—arrogant, proud, ill-tempered, vindictive, moody, vicious. You must put up with me all the time. I do not know why you permit me to exist. Now this poor dear man, so sweet and gentle and loving and so easy for me to twist in knots, will have to endure my evil almost as much as you do. It would be better if you slay me this night instead of sending me to his wedding couch.”
She paused as though she expected the lightning bolt.
No way, kid.
She continued to wait.
MARRY LENRAU AND LOVE HIM, I typed in.
She lifted her tear-filled eyes, smoky-brown swamps. “I do love him. That is why I fear to marry him and destroy him.”
I pushed the REPEAT key.
“Very well. You know, since you know all things, how eager I am for his couch. You drive me to what I want more than I have ever wanted anything.”
What the hell was I supposed to say now?
BE GRATEFUL FOR YOUR LOVE.
Sobs, near hysterics. “I am grateful, I am. But you must promise to transform me so that I will be a good wife … and mother.”
NO FREE LUNCHES, I told her, getting into the swing of things now.
I DO NOT KNOW LUNCH, the dumb PC insisted.
SMALL MIDDAY MEAL.
“You always have been humorous with me.” She smiled through her tears. “I understand that I must work hard. But you will help me, I know you will.” She did not require an answer because she clapped her hands. “Now I must call this magic child whom you have sent to my man and me, lest she choke from holding her breath.” She giggled, temporarily a child like Ranora again.
That worthy flew into the room, dashed out again, and returned with the vast purple gown, inside of which she had almost disappeared. Bustling about importantly she helped the poor Duchess attire herself for her wedding, making sure, by the way, that the gown was as low as it could be without falling off.
“Some day this will happen to you,” the Duchess warned. Both young women giggled and, my eyes smarting for some reason, I cut to Lenrau’s pavilion with a touch on the DUKE key.
Morale was not especially high there either. Lenrau wasn’t crying, but he had buried his face in his hands and was pressing his fingers against his temples as if he were afraid his brains would tumble out of his head if he did not restrain them.
The wedding robe which Ranora had chosen for him (of course she made the choice) was stark vanilla white laced with thick threads of gold, his brief loincloth made of the same material, well matched for both the public ceremony and the private consummation. I was sure that B’Mella would dote on him.
If he showed up, that is.
That did not seem at all certain. His long silence after I wandered in, so to speak, was broken by a loud groan. “Lord Our God, this is folly.”
Yeah?
“I cannot pray, even on the night of my marriage to a woman I adore. Why am I such a worthless, impractical dreamer, preoccupied by fantasies I cannot name even to myself?”
Don’t ask me, fella. If your fantasies are not about her tonight, they didn’t check your hormones during that physical.
“She is in my dreams, as you know. I can think of no one else since I first saw her. But the dreams are…” he moaned again “… vague and fantastical, not what a ruler should imagine. She at least will be able to rule. My dreams, my melancholy, my nightmares, the songs I hear in my head will not harm our people. But she deserves a man, not a dreamer.…”
Would you believe a man who dreams?
“Release me from my promise to her. I will fail her as I have failed all the others.”
NO WAY, I typed in on the keyboard.
“I miss her every minute, but I will destroy her like the others. I am a foolish, empty dreamer and poet…”
MYSTIC, I observed.
He removed his face from his hands, handsome agony, and stared up at me. “That’s what the ilel says, but my beloved deserves better than that.”
She doesn’t even know you’re a poet, you geek. LOVE DUCHESS, I told him.
“I do love her,” he insisted. “I can’t live without her.”
What was I supposed to say to that?
“I will be good in bed with her.” He smiled, mildly satisfied with his masculinity.
Hooray for you, buster.
“But I am not at heart a warrior. I should not be Duke.”
So that’s it. Let me see. Aha: YOUR PEOPLE NEED WISDOM, NOT WAR. YOUR WOMAN NEEDS A WISE MAN, NOT A WARRIOR.
He laughed, amused, but also bitter and ironic. “I doubt that either they or she know it.” He struggled to his feet, ready to go forth to meet his destiny.
TEACH THEM, I pounded out on the keyboard. What’s the point in being God unless you have the last word?
“I will try,” he sighed, “but I will need much help from you.” He hefted the massive wedding robe over his strong solid shoulders.
I CAN’T DO WHAT YOU WON’T DO, I informed him with wonderful theological precision. BESIDES, THERE IS NOT ANOTHER MAN IN THIS WORLD WHO WOULD THINK IT AN UNHAPPY FATE TO GO TO THE DESTINY TO WHICH YOU GO TONIGHT.
He smiled, a genuinely charming, boyish smile. “For tonight, at least, it will be a pleasant fate.” He hummed a song, a love song, I’m sure, as he pushed aside a screen and joined his entourage for the journey into the warm night. I supposed that he had written the song himself; where my ancestors came from, it was thought to be a great grace to have a king who was also a bard.
Despite the heat, the ceremony was impressive. They didn’t use rings, but the bride and the groom, nervous, solemn, and sweating, exchanged vows, clasping each other’s right arms below the elbows, kind of like an athletic team before a game. I don’t know what they said, because the ceremony, presided over with notable éclat by the beaming Linco, was in an archaic language which I could not understand, though the hymns sound something like the Old Slavonic hymns the choir used to sing in the seminary.
It was all very beautiful, but kind of ponderous, the one light touch being the inevitable Ranora, trying to keep a straight face for the occasion and quite pleased with herself in a formal version of her peppermint-candy garb—form fitting and with a décolletage almost as extreme as that she had imposed on the now misty-eyed Duchess. Her solemnity endured only to the end of the ceremony when she began to dance. She presided over the dancing throngs till sunrise, long after the bride and groom retreated to a special little pavilion erected for them by the same lake where they had first loved each other. The ilel was so busy with her dancing that she merely waved goodbye to them—with a hint of anxiety on her pert little face.
So you have your doubts too, small one.
’Rau did indeed sing for B’Mella. On the tiny beach by the side of the lake, he sang the love song he had hummed when he went forth to claim and be claimed. She did, as expected and required, melt into his arms. They went through the motions of praying to me inside their tent, two sweaty, exhausted young bodies, pretending to be devout and to beg me for help, when they had very different things on their mind.
They were timid and gentle with each other and I bade them farewell. The Other Person maybe had the right to be a voyeur, but I didn’t.
In another part of the land, G’Ranne shook her head in sad refusal to Kaila. He knew it was coming. He knelt to her in gratitude and, gallantly as always, took his leave.
And as the sun rose, N’Rasia and Malvau staged a wild fight, beating and pounding each other with manic fury. I think he had the worst of it.
Well, they can’t all live happily ever after, can they?
Now you see why I didn’t press the TERMINATE GAME button after the wedding ceremony. Lenrau and B’Mella were no longer two characters in a fantasy, larger than life perhaps but one-dimensional. They were flawed but appealing human beings with more awareness of their own limitations than I would have believed possible. They were both nearly paralyzed by self-hatred which, if they weren’t ca
reful, would destroy them and their marriage. A typical pair of human newlyweds in other words. Why else be God unless you can help such folks?
So, although I told myself it was time to bow out of their lives, I did not press F10, but only F5, SUSPEND GAME. I pretended I would not be back but I knew I would. They needed me, you see.
Not that I expected them to cooperate with my grace.
See how far gone I was?
Author’s Note
Perhaps I have been too hard on the narrator. I would not have you think that I condemn him. On the contrary, I am rather fond of him. After all, he does represent me a good deal of the time. He is, you might say, my sacrament. Like all sacraments, he both represents me and does not represent me. I am moderately satisfied with him in this regard, but he is often such an inadequate sacrament. However, what can an author do?
In any event, you must not let him persuade you that this story to which he obtusely attaches a premature happy ending is a story about a story about a story. O’Brien, Fowles, Gide, Twain all tell a story about storytelling, they write a novel about a novelist writing a novel. The narrator adds that he is writing a novel about a novel about how God writes the novels which are our lives. He thinks that he has described something very complex. Actually the matter is much more complex than he imagines. Listen to Aldous Huxley, long before Derrida and the deconstructionists, as he describes the reflections of a novelist about whom he is writing a novel:
“Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations which may be interesting at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make variations on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second and so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which there is another Quaker holding another box of oats on which etc etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction times.”
As my narrator knows well, that might be theoretically interesting, but no one would read it. My narrator’s fictional publishers, who may or may not correspond to real characters, would quite properly reject such a novel.
Yet to be consistent the narrator ought to acknowledge that he is the creation of the author who also has created, through the narrator, the God whom the narrator pretends to describe by putting himself in a Godlike position. Thus there is necessarily at least a story about a story about a story about a story.
And what if I who intrude with these wise observations am also the narrator created by another author?
Does it go on to infinity as Huxley suggests?
Or only to Infinity, where in the words of Harry Truman, the buck—in this case responsibility for the story (or Story)—stops.
13
Ranora Leaps Over the Wall
Nothing much changed that week at Grand Beach. Michele left for Ohio to see her boyfriend amid universal lamentation—well, Bobby said that it would be quieter around the house. Heidi took over as censor of language on the ski boat. A horrendous July heat wave swept up from the Gulf of Mexico with humidity so thick you had to fight your way through it on the streets. The Cubs, astonishingly, continued to win. The papers began to carry news about the Bears, which meant summer was nearing an end; but I refused to read about them.
Anyway, I played with data analysis, talking to the DEC 20 at the University with my TRS-12, slept reasonably free from nightmares, suffered through my days of humiliation with the young skiers (one day in the rain, no less; weather doesn’t stop truly dedicated skiers), agreed with the others that the ski boat was quieter without Michele, but not that much quieter because, as the boys said, Heidi took up a lot of the slack. I also swam in my pool, read books about French deconstructionists, and slept peacefully each night with no dreams that I cared to remember.
Nathan, back from a presentable finish in the Mackinac race (second in class, fifth in fleet), phoned to asked about the Duke and Duchess game.
I told him my preliminary reactions and argued that he had to put in a menu-driven character-creation option. “You don’t have to insist that they create their characters beforehand, but it should be available for advanced players.”
“Duke and Duchess anyway.” I could hear him scribbling away at the other end of the line.
“And others if they want to be really advanced.”
“Right, once we introduce that patch it ought not to be hard to make it expandable. Especially on the 80386 generation. They are fabulous, four times as fast and twice as much ROM and RAM. With a coprocessor and a 50k hard disk, of course. State of the art.”
“’Til next year.”
“Change characters in the middle of the game?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“I mean suppose you make the Duke a, well, let’s say he’s kind of Celtic and he drinks a lot. But then halfway through the game you learn that he has an ascetic dimension of his personality and you want to add that too.”
“Why?” Despite the heat wave, I was shivering.
“Well, you yourself told me that you tried to create Maureen in The Cardinal Sins as evil and she resolutely insisted on being good. Most interesting character in the story, if you ask me.”
“And Melissa Jean Ryan in Rite of Spring starts out as a spoiled Stanford freshman and ends up as the Sherlock Holmes who upstages even the great Blackie Ryan.”
“Right. I haven’t read that yet.”
“You can build in a menu which enables a character to impose development on an author in the course of a game?”
“That’s a strange way of putting it, but theoretically I don’t see why not. You’d need more memory. Maybe we’d use it in an advanced version for those who have a fifty-megabyte disk.”
See what I mean? Pure genius.
“What about a character in a minor subplot who tries to intrude into a major subplot?”
“Wow! Hey, that’s exciting! I don’t know whether we can do it, but it’d really be state of the art. Let me talk to Tex.”
“You’d be approaching the real craft of fiction writing with that innovation.” I hesitated. “You might tell your programmer to read Mantissa and At Swim Two Birds.”
“At what?”
“It’s a weird Irish novel by an alcoholic Irish genius named Flann O’Brien. John Fowles in Mantissa sort of refers back to it.”
“Yeah.” He was scribbling away at the other end. “You did mention them when I brought the game over. You’ll be glad to know that we have an Irish programmer working on it. Named Shanahan.”
“Really.”
“How did your game end?”
“The Duke and the Duchess married and live happily after.”
“Romantic.”
“What else?”
“It’s over then?”
“Well, not quite. I’ve suspended it for a while.”
“After all this time? Wow! What a market! If you are hooked, what about ordinary people!”
Right, ordinary people.
After the conversation I wondered what was happening in the land on the other side of Planck’s Wall. Was B’Mella pregnant?
I wandered downstairs to ponder my Rube Goldberg link with the “adjoining” world or whatever it was. No, my job was done. They would live happily ever after. That was a foregone conclusion. Authors are not responsible for what happens to their characters after the stories are finished. That’s what John Gregory Dunne told me when I protested the ending of Dutch Shea Junior. My sister and I insisted that Dutch didn’t pull the trigger. Dunne said he thought Dutch did pull the trigger, but that as author his opinion about what happened after the end of the book was not more important than anyone else’s.
I rejected this categorically. My characters live on after a story is finished. Lawyer Eileen Kane from Patience of a Saint was appointed a federal judge the year after the story was supposed to end. I told my family and friends about this promotion for the green-eyed attorney. Some understood what I meant, others thought I’d flipped out.
“She’s not real. She’s just a character in your stories.”
“She is a character in my stories and she is real in that world.”
Moreover, since I am hopelessly in love with Eileen and her husband Red Kane doesn’t mind, not after what I did for them, she’ll be back, gorgeous in black judicial robes, in other stories.
So I was not violating my own principles. Yet it is one thing to keep in touch with what is happening in a character’s life and even to keep open the possibility of reentering their life at a later date, and quite another to return to the existing story to make sure that everything went well after the original hopeful but not totally happy ending.
The most an honest storyteller can promise is a hopeful ending. As Blackie Ryan once remarked, “‘They all live happily ever after’ means they only have three serious fights a week and refuse to talk to one another only one day a week.”
We had enough reason to think that was a likely future for ’Rau and ’Ella, didn’t we?
But was she pregnant?
That was more important for their happy ending than it was for most.
Could I have an impact on fertility in the other world? Wasn’t that taking my God function a little too seriously?
On the other hand Red and Eileen Kane did manage to start another baby—a belated but most welcome little Redmond Junior—on their second honeymoon in Grand Cayman. A storyteller can make a lot happen to his characters if he wants to.
But through a computer game in what might be a real world, somewhere else?
I had meddled enough.
And Norman’s programmer was a Shanahan, huh? Did s/he have an assistant named Furriskey?
One of the neighbors phoned to say that the Hagans had their first session with the family therapist and that it had not helped. Tom had moved out and Joan was seeing a divorce lawyer first thing in the morning. They both were blaming not the therapist, but me.
God Game Page 21
