God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  GO BACK, I told her, and pressed the REPEAT button. No luck.

  STOP RESISTING GRACE. She did not hesitate a second.

  Now the story turns terribly ugly. What does your Marty Macho do when he wants to assert some of the masculinity about which he isn’t sure? That’s right, he decides he’ll push the woman around a little, just to show her who’s boss. Our Marty Macho had some excuse. A long time ago she had told him not to let her leave, ever. But like all such general commands it had an implicit qualification: “unless I really want to.” Poor Lenrau was not yet experienced enough in the rhetoric of intimacy to catch the nuance.

  So he grabbed her, acting the way his warrior ethos said a man should act with a woman who was teasing. She tried to knee him and failed. Then she tried to bite his arm and succeeded. “Must you hurt a woman to be able to enter her?” she sneered.

  Then it turned brutal. The only word for what happened was rape, cruel, savage rape. I told him to stop, swore at him, promised him that he would rot in hell for all eternity. He kept right on, a rampaging madman, killing all he loved.

  She fought him every inch of the way. It was not sex or even power about which they were struggling on the floor like two jungle animals, but the other side of the coin of love. He was brutalizing her because he hated her and she was punching and kicking, scratching and clawing because she was being violated by a man she hated.

  I was shocked, horrified, furious, sick—so sick that I had to flee to the bathroom to vomit. When I returned he had left. B’Mella, a wounded mess of bruised limbs, torn garments, and bleeding body, lay sobbing hysterically on the floor.

  Bastard, I thought.

  She was more ready to forgive than I. “Lord Our God,” she prayed, “send him back with one word of sorrow and I will forgive him.”

  Now you turn generous.

  I went after him as he staggered out into the darkness, drunk with his own violence, and gave him every instruction I could think of. No luck. He hated himself too much. In fact, I had to knock the sword out of his hand at the local armory so he wouldn’t kill himself.

  Some folks who know this story insist that what Lenrau did was beyond forgiveness. Yes, they say, it was out of character; yes, he was under terrible strain; yes, he’s probably going to suffer hellishly for it; yes, she had goaded him into it. Yes to all of those comments, but it was still behavior that ought never to be forgiven.

  I won’t argue the issue. This story is not about forgiveness and reform, not mainly anyway. The point is that she wanted to forgive him as Jesus wanted to forgive Judas. I didn’t tell her to. It was her idea. Maybe it was false consciousness on her part, but it was her decision. He knew her well enough to understand that she was as quick to forgiveness as she was to anger, to comprehend that with B’Mella one word of sorrow would more than suffice.

  He wouldn’t do it. What happened to him was his punishment for not wanting to be forgiven.

  Back in their chamber, the pain on B’Mella’s scratched face slowly turned to anger and then a grim determination for revenge.

  After that, it was all strictly downhill.

  A couple of weeks of their time slipped by in the next few hours. I tried everything I could to shake them out of their lethargy and turn Lenrau and B’Mella away from the tragedy which, like a pair of Greeks, they seemed determined to stage. Nothing worked. The Duke hied himself to the houseboat on the lake and crooned mournful songs, neglecting to eat or sleep. Linco and Kaila, the latter more disconsolate with each passing day, were shunted aside. The silent Malvau continued to strum on his lute. N’Rasia, reverting to her earlier dull and dowdy self despite my warning that I wouldn’t tolerate it, stayed inside to avoid the heat.

  The Duchess huddled with the priests, particularly the Cardinal and the Troll.

  “The old ways are not always wrong, my lady.” The oil from the Cardinal’s voice was pure slime.

  “So?” She smeared paint recklessly on a furious storm scene.

  “The Lord Our God is often worshipped in spirit and truth, but not always.” He rubbed his long, thin fingers.

  “Indeed?” She reached for another brush.

  “There are times of crisis when we should return to the old ways. The crises come because the Lord Our God wishes us to remember his past wonders.”

  She paused in her work to consider him carefully.

  DO NOT LISTEN TO CARDINAL, I demanded.

  She brushed me off with a slight frown—about all I rated from her these days.

  “You mean some kind of magic?”

  She knew damn well what he meant—an excuse for vengeance on her husband. Sacrifice the Duke in the name of the common good. Do evil in the name of good. All political leaders do it well.

  “We mean no harm to My Lord Lenrau, poor man.” The Cardinal saw his chance for an opening and grabbed it. “No human sacrifices,” he smiled benignly, “we are too modern for that superstition.”

  “What do you intend?”

  “Merely to take him into custody, to imprison him under, ah, difficult conditions.” He bowed deeply from the waist. “That should placate the anger of the Lord Our God.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Surely we will not have to consider that possibility.”

  “I will think of it. Now begone.”

  Rudeness to the tempter is an excellent substitute for resisting temptation.

  Lenrau, poor demented man, was in deep trouble.

  Once more I instructed the 286 to make rain.

  CREATE RAIN. EXECUTE.

  IOF ERROR. IOF ERROR.

  DAMN YOU.

  DON’T TALK THAT WAY TO ME.

  Poor thing, it was beginning to think it was God.

  It became so hot that I felt dry and hot watching on the screen. The crops withered. The people became more lawless and contentious. Disaster seemed to be sitting on the mountaintops like a carrion bird, waiting to descend on a dying land.

  The Cardinal returned to B’Mella’s studio. The people were insisting that Lenrau must be “offered” on the night of the Four Moons. She hesitated. “He will not be harmed?”

  “Of course not, my lady. We venerate the poor man.”

  HE LIES, I insisted. HE’LL KILL ’RAU AND PART OF YOU KNOWS THAT.

  She did not even dismiss me with a frown. Rather she nodded slowly. “Tell the peasants that I regret what must be done, but it is necessary.”

  The Cardinal beamed. “They will seize him at dawn. We will have the offering when the moons come together. He will be imprisoned then, of course. Soon there will be rain.”

  Not if I can help it, he won’t be.

  I sent Kaila out to warn the Duke and plead with him. A waste of time. Lenrau wanted to expiate; an apology and a reconciliation would not be suffering enough. He must permit himself to die. Maybe he half believed by now, crazed from the heat and his fast, that his “degeneracy” was responsible for the drought.

  The social structure of their little world deteriorated. Save for the warriors, who fought or trained most of the time, and the priests and wizards and such like who wandered around like Vatican bureaucrats looking important, the ordinary people were mostly responsible hardworking peasants and burghers, a somewhat more colorful version of the early modern Netherlanders. They sang and danced rather more than the sober Dutch, but they worked hard, prayed devoutly, and were almost puritanically modest in their intimacies.

  However, as the heat worsened and rumors of an “offering” (which had not occurred for a long time) spread, work halted in the shops and the fields and the small craft factories. Drinking began early in the morning, and by noon everyone was drunk and the sexual revelries began, a continuous saturnalia which seemed to violate all the rules of these placid, industrious, sober people. Everyone, that is, but N’Rasia and Malvau, who seemed to have opted out of the scene completely. Their maiden daughter went off to live with some friends. The other children, their spouses, and the grandchildren stay
ed away.

  Everyone ignored the Lord Our God, for the interim me. No one prayed anymore before going to sleep at night, partly because they were too drunk or too besotted with sex to think about God and partly because it seemed that some other power, more ancient perhaps, or more modern, was being worshipped. My little world was flipping out. I wanted to terminate the game, but it was now much too late to quit. I had to do something. They were my people and I was their God. So I tried again.

  RETURN RANORA, I punched in the keyboard.

  Instead of an input/output error message I received an ambiguous SEARCHING.

  DON’T GIVE ME YOUR SEARCHING. I WANT HER NOW.

  SEARCHING, it responded implacably.

  Then as the sun rose for another terrible day, she reappeared, a somber, spiritless shadow of an ilel, dressed again in deepest black, walking like a ghost through the fields towards the city of the Duchess. The peasants and the burghers fell back in silent awe. The priests scurried to tell the Cardinal. Kaila hurried to her side, was ignored as if he did not exist, and then dutifully fell in step behind her. The Tinker Bell child was gone, replaced by a young, vest-pocket banshee.

  Gee, kid, you wanted me back to help you. What do we do now? Just you and me.

  There is trouble right here in River City, folks, real trouble.

  I searched her eyes for a spark of the old ilel as she approached B’Mella’s pavilion with the grim solemnity of Death in a Bergman film. Whatever the reason for her transformation, our Ariel was now a messenger of doom.

  Right into the pavilion she went, down a long corridor of screens past startled warrior guards and into B’Mella’s chamber. The Duchess was involved in an acute attack of nausea.

  Morning sickness. My infertility cure had worked. Nice. There would be an heir to both principalities and she would be rid of Lenrau. The ilel did not seem disposed to offer congratulations. She merely stood in the middle of the chamber and stared, her eyes as hard as obsidian. The Duchess, startled and spooked, greeted her formally.

  “You have returned to us then, good ilel?” Her voice shook in superstitious awe. Was the sprite returned to punish her for taking revenge on her husband?

  Her face a blank, like a permanently angry doll, Ranora raised her finger and pointed it at the Duchess in silent accusation.

  “You cannot frighten me, wicked child,” the Duchess sputtered. “I have nothing left to lose.”

  Ranora followed her for the rest of the day, seemingly immune to the heat despite her heavy black gown. She continued to point her relentlessly accusing finger, even when B’Mella was huddled with the Cardinal in the final stages of her conspiracy of revenge. The priests were afraid to bar an ilel from their pavilion, and the Duchess elected to pretend that the haunt was not dogging her every step. She was going ahead with her revenge no matter what the ilel thought.

  So bringing back the magic maiden had made no difference. The people were desperate enough to try anything. The Duke was worthless to himself and everyone else. The clergy were happily anticipating their return to power. The Duchess was about to take her revenge.

  It would be easy to have hated her then. She was a blind, stubborn, destructive fool. But, despite Somerset Maugham, it’s hard to hate someone you once loved. No matter how much I might have hated her, the poor woman probably hated herself more. The goodness that had always been within her was still there, locked up in a maximum-security prison of humiliation and outrage and rejected love. A single word of compunction from her husband would have dissolved the prison walls. But he was out at the lake, crooning his sad, mad songs and hoping for oblivion. Give him wings and put him in a tree and Seamus Heaney would appear to write the poems. Strange, I thought, that Ranora had not gone after him. Perhaps, like me, she had given up on him completely.

  At day’s end the ilel stalked out of the town in the same glum silence with which she had come. She dismissed the loyally following Kaila with a wave of her tiny hand. He looked as if he wanted to follow her; but, whatever the rules of his ministry to her, they forbade him to disobey. She disappeared into the forest. I suspended the game and tried desperately to think of a solution to the problem. What does God do when humans are completely intractable?

  He punts. Ridiculous, huh? But it was the only answer I could not think of.

  I activated the game again. There was nothing in the nature of creation or of the human condition that guaranteed a happy ending.

  There was only one hint of hope and I didn’t see how it made much difference: with a basket of bread and wine over her arm, N’Rasia approached her lute-playing husband in the garden of their pavilion and whispered in his ear.

  He looked up at her impatiently. “What point is there in that when it will all soon be over?”

  “We can die better,” she said. “And perhaps find the strength to live.”

  He nodded and off they went.

  Yes, if the priests took over, there would be a knife in both their backs very soon. I was no longer confident enough to say “not if I have anything to say about it.”

  THUNDERSTORM PLEASE. NOW. EXECUTE.

  I’M TRYING. EOF ERROR.

  I typed in a foul word which it purported not to understand.

  The tragic drama unrolled now with the same measured solemnity as the wedding had a few months before in their time, only yesterday in my time.

  At the end of the day, during the long twilight, shortly after Ranora had disappeared into the forest, a band of the lowest rank of priests, men who looked like convicts from a hospital for the criminally insane, appeared in the middle of the high meadow, at approximately the same place where the marriage ceremony had been performed, and began to construct a low-slung platform with a tent and portable building modules which looked very much like an Aztec sacrificial altar. A smaller group apprehended Kaila and Linco at dusk and locked them up in a pleasant but well-guarded little pavilion on the edge of B’Mella’s city.

  Another band crept into Malvau’s garden but found nothing. Their report did not seem to worry the Cardinal.

  “It does not matter. He is no longer important. We will apprehend him tomorrow.”

  In the farms on the edge of the mountains, fires burned all night and the drinking and the wenching were even wilder than usual. The women, usually more or less equal, were not given much choice about the random lovemaking, not that they seemed to want to choose. The moral fabric of these sturdy landholders was being torn asunder, but ritually, as if they were going through motions which, while pleasant enough, were more theatre than reality. As if they were living a ritual memory from the past rather than responding to a contemporary problem.

  I thought about an irrigation program. With all that snow up in the mountains …

  It was too late for that.

  Shortly before first light, after the brief hour or two of darkness, a band of twenty or so peasants, apparently more inebriated than the rest, surged down the mountain into the forest and, as if drawn by a magnet, headed for the side of the sullen lake where the mad king, like Sweeney of old, was crooning dirges for his own funeral.

  EXECUTE STORM, I demanded

  %$#@$%#, it replied helpfully.

  The drunken peasants, ignoring my repeated instructions to disperse, milled around outside the boat, shouting and cursing. Lenrau, perhaps realizing that they were not brave enough to come in to get him, walked out into the murk of another steamy dawn bravely and stupidly meeting his fate.

  FIGHT THE BASTARDS, I demanded.

  He wasn’t listening either.

  A squad of smartly uniformed clergy showed up and half carried, half dragged him to the meadow and tied him on the table which had been erected on the top of the platform. The sun was sizzling already. It would roast the poor Duke like St. Lawrence on the gridiron. Long before the nighttime ceremonies began, he’d be fried to a crisp. Either the peasants didn’t realize this or didn’t care.

  Someone has to help him, I thought. Who?

  ILEL H
ELP DUKE, I told the 286.

  Promptly, as if waiting off stage, Ranora, black hood now pulled over her head, materialized at the edge of the forest and walked solemnly across the field to the altar, as I was already calling it. The peasants fell back in superstitious terror as if a ghost were among them. She pulled off her black gown and covered the Duke with it like a sleeping child. From the short black shift she was wearing under the gown, she drew a flask of liquid and made him drink from it. His twisted body relaxed quickly—water and a painkiller. In the whole land only one partially supernatural being would give the once-popular Duke a sip of water.

  Poor dummy had brought it on himself, but I felt sorry for him. Neither the drought nor B’Mella’s barrenness was his fault. I had cured the one and made matters worse. Too bad I couldn’t somehow cure the other.

  In desperation I now tried the Three Stooges.

  DESTROY PLOT OF PRIESTS, I told them.

  The idea seemed to appeal. Their manic minds welcomed any new target for mayhem. They climbed one of the small mountains at the edge of the forest and laid out several long maps next to the huge rock that rested precariously on a ledge overlooking the meadow.

  “It should follow this path.” Larry sketched a thick black line through a series of ravines and hills. “Slice through the forest here,” he continued his line, “break into the meadow at this point,” he drew a big X, “and then blot out the high priest’s pavilion before he knows what is happening.”

  “Our little explosions will set it loose after all these centuries,” enthused Curly. “How splendid!”

  “What if we miss? Do we get another chance?” Moe wondered.

  “We do, if you push it back up.” Larry was already placing neat little packages at various points along the cliff.

  Their little packages exploded harmlessly, like wet firecrackers on the Fourth of July. One more “pfft!”

  I shouldn’t have expected anything from them. Every other experiment of theirs had been a dud, probably would have been even if I hadn’t intervened. Still, we needed something.