Players at the Game of People

by John Brunner

  "Going out, sir?"

  "Not right away," Godwin said musingly, and contrived to slide a fiver into the man's hand. "But . . . Well, you saw Prince Rashad and Prince Afif leave some time ago with a couple of girls?"

  "Oh, yes! With Peggy and Gorse. I called them a cab."

  "Well, I'm going to be in the lounge bar for a while" -- with a jerk of his head. "I'd like to know when they come back. I take it they will come back? They have rooms here?"

  "The Imperial Suite on the second floor," Jackson confided. He had made the money vanish without so much as a rustle.

  "Fine. I'll sit where I can see you reflected in that glass door," Godwin said, having rapidly checked several possibilities in his mind's eye. "Give me a signal -- wave your arm up and down, or something -- as soon as you recognize them. Okay?"

  "Will do," Jackson said, and Godwin headed for the lounge.

  It was almost two hours before the signal came. Thirty cabs had drawn up -- for want of any better way to pass the time, Godwin had kept score -- and this was the thirty-first. The lounge barman was reading a newspaper and trying not to yawn; the lights were lowered in the foyer; outside, the last of the beggars had quit for the night.

  Godwin rose to his feet with electric rapidity and strode out through the automatic doors so fast they would not have had time to open for him. Jackson, though, was already treading on the sensor pad against the arrival of the princes and their women. The taxi was drawing away. Godwin shouted commandingly, "Hang on, driver! I want you!"

  Obediently the woman -- for it was a woman at the wheel -- braked and reversed.

  The girl who had been identified by the peculiar name of Gorse was red-eyed and looked as though she had been crying. Peggy was attempting to comfort her. Both the brothers wore expressions of thundercloud rage and were talking to one another in rapid Arabic, paying no more attention to the girls than to make sure they were not trying to cut and run.

  The moment they recognized Godwin, they halted in their tracks and flinched away from him. He closed on them with his fists raised to elbow height, wider apart than the width of his body, and the eyes of each fixed, fascinated, on one fist.

  "I told you," he said mildly. "I don't care what you get up to in wog-land, but here we don't buy and sell women!"

  And instead of punching, he kicked, leaping into the air like a ballet dancer. He caught Rashad first just below the left kneecap and the man crumpled with a yell; then he took Afif in the crotch and strode between the pair of them with one hand poised to catch Gorse by the elbow. With his other hand he hauled open the taxi's door, and seconds later they were safely inside. Reflex made the driver start up the instant the door shut.

  "Hey, I say!" she shouted over her shoulder. "I don't like what you just done! You get right out of this cab again, now! Or else I'll call a copper, understand?"

  But before she could brake to a halt, Godwin said, "They were going to sell her as a white slave!"

  Prompt on cue, the girl crumpled against his shoulder and began to utter huge gut-wrenching sobs.

  Before the driver could say anything else Godwin gave her his address and leaned back, stroking Gorse's soft dark hair with its incongruous silver streak as though he were comforting a little child.

  So far the whole episode had gone so smoothly he was already on the verge of being bored.

  When they were nearly at their destination Gorse sat up without warning and said slowly and clearly, "Please stop. I think I'm going to be sick."

  Godwin tapped on the glass partition behind the driver, who understood instantly and pulled in at the curb. Deftly he opened the door and thrust her head out just far enough, keeping his other arm around her to steady her. She uttered a gush of liquid that made the air stink of gin.

  Wiping her chin with a handkerchief, he sat her back and closed the door again, and they completed their journey without further incident.

  In his home street all but two of the lamps were out. She shivered noticeably as he helped her to the ground, having already passed the cab fare plus a generous tip to the driver. Slowly, through her alcoholic fog, she registered the high-piled rubbish in the gutters, the derelict cars, the dark faces of the houses where many windows had been broken and mended, after a fashion, with cardboard or sheets of plastic.

  "What have you brought me here for?" she demanded between a cry and a sob.

  "It's where I live," he answered, taking her arm and guiding her roughly up the steps of his home. She tried to rebel, tried to hang back -- but a fresh bout of nausea overcame her, and this time instead of spurting out, her vomit dribbled, staining the front of her clothes.

  Godwin waited with forced patience until the spasm passed, then urged her indoors. "You're not going anywhere in that state," he muttered. But she scarcely paid attention. She was gesturing at herself, shuddering.

  "I didn't mean to make such a mess of myself!" she wailed. "I'm so sorry, I'm so ashamed, I'm such a fool!"

  "Right."

  He got her up the stairs and into his room, turning it on as he opened the door. She was too befuddled with drink to notice its details, though he himself was rather pleased with them: his usual waterbed, some wall-sized enlargements of erotic pen-and-wash drawings by the French artist Bertrand, several more wardrobes than usual, and a cabinet of perfectly clear glass around the shower, bidet, and toilet bowl. Also the towels were black, a highly suitable color.

  Quiet music began, intermingled with the wash of waves on a beach, and the air was warm and fresh and the lamps, when they came on, shed the color of moonlight in irregular patches.

  Not bad.

  But he had other preoccupations. He said, "Get out of those filthy clothes."

  She had begun to cry again as they came upstairs. The brusqueness of his command snapped her back to awareness. She stared at him with a hurt, little-girl look.

  "I said get out of them! They reek of vomit!"

  "But -- but I only bought them day before yesterday! This is my best gear! I can't just . . ."

  The words tailed away as she gazed down at herself and realized just how much of a mess she had created. Before she could recover, he reached out with careful precision and tore the garments away from her: rr-rip, rr-rr-rip. He balled up the fabric and flung it in the direction of a waste bin.

  Her sandals had come off along with her satin trousers, so now all she wore was a pair of white panties, also -- as she realized when she noticed his glare of distaste -- soiled. She whimpered with self-loathing.

  "Get in there and clean yourself," he said, pointing at the glass cabinet.

  "But . . . !" She stared for a drink-extended moment at the clear glass walls; the door stood wide. Then she reasoned out that on the one hand there was no alternative, and on the other she could scarcely be more humiliated than she was already. Sullen, tears still trickling down from her red-rimmed eyes, she obeyed: emptied her bowels into the pan, flushed the mess away, squatted on the bidet and scrubbed as though trying to punish herself.

  "Here," he said, entering the compartment and handing her a glass half full of cloudy white fluid. "Drink this."

  She obeyed as though he were a doctor and she a patient totally committed to his care. When the glass was empty, he took it back and threw her a towel.

  "Dry yourself."

  "Have you -- have you something I can put on?" she dared to whisper.

  "Where do you think you're going?"

  He turned his back with deliberate contempt and, waiting for her to follow him out of the glass cage, sipped at a ballon of 1858 Armagnac, which had lost all its vinosity and tasted -- and smelled -- solely of the oak casks in which it had been matured prior to bottling. The flavor and the bouquet were unique; there was no other liquor like this in the world.

  Behind him he heard her crying cease. When she stepped back into the main room, the towel wrapped around her body and tucked in above her breasts, her eyes were sparkling.

  "It's incredible! What was it you gave m
e? I feel fine again!"

  "That's what it's for."

  "But it's amazing! I never heard of any medicine that could do that!"

  "I'm not surprised," he grunted. And wasn't; it was nowhere on sale. Nowhere on Earth, at any rate.

  Better or not, though, next moment her face fell. Her gaze had lit on the bundle of cloth he had torn from her.

  "That was all I had to wear," she said timidly. "All my other clothes are at the -- the house where I rent a room. Please lend me something so I can go home!"

  "No."

  She stared at him like a child astonished by a promised punishment which had suddenly turned out to be real. Her lips trembled on the brink of renewed sobs.

  He said harshly, "How much of tonight were you expecting to spend at home, you little tart?"

  "But I -- but I . . . !"

  Her last resistance crumbled. She dropped forward on her knees, her head in her hands, and the storm of sobbing which racked her this time was cathartic. Easing his way to a chair, he cajoled her gently closer so that she could rest her forehead on his lap while he stroked her hair, and piece by piece he assembled her story.

  Half of it was, predictably, a tissue of lies.

  She was eighteen. Her parents had divorced when she was so small she could scarcely remember her father, and into the bargain she hated the name he had bequeathed her -- "Simpkins! I mean honestly, who wants to be called Simpkins?" -- along with her given name, which was Dora -- "Isn't it the bloody end? Dora Simpkins!"

  Gorse was a nickname from school which she felt suited her. Currently she was looking for an adoptive surname to go with it. School was an extremely expensive private boarding school near Kenley, in Surrey, not because her father had been rich -- he was supposedly a ne'er-do-well and gambler with more charm than persistence -- nor because her mother had inherited money. On the contrary, although she had brought up her daughter single-handed, luckily having no other children to worry about, she came from an out-and-out working-class background and had clawed her way to financial success by any means to hand.

  "I'm following in her footsteps," Gorse said viciously. "And Granny's as well, though she's dead now."

  "Explain." He had let his hand wander from her hair to her nape; in a little while it would travel to her shoulders. Then he would lift her into his lap like a tired child, and explore the rest of her body. The rhythm he was employing was designedly hypnotic; every now and again he checked it for frequency against her pulse, which he felt on the side of her neck. It was slowing in a reassuring manner. There was going to be no trouble with this one. None at all.

  "Mum was a call girl," Gorse said sleepily. "She never said so straight out, but that's the only way she could possibly have met people like the ones she knows: MPs, company directors, television executives, artists, actors, poets . . . And she was only taking after Granny, same as me. I'm not supposed to know about it, but Granny was on the streets. Had to be. Granddad was captured in the war and died in a prison camp, and she had five children to look after. They were taken into care eventually and Mummy doesn't know what became of her brother and sisters. All split up. Scattered. Then Gran died and something happened to the records -- I think a bomb or something fell on the place where they were stored and they all got burnt. She advertised a few times but nothing happened . . ."

  This was of no particular interest. Godwin steered her back to the main line.

  Having led a colorful life, her mother was persuaded by a literary friend to try her hand at writing. Scornful at first, because she was effectively uneducated, she finally yielded, and her stories and her books of memoirs -- suitably censored -- proved financially successful. More and more she cared about her writing; less and less she had time for her daughter. She sent her to that expensive boarding school for, she claimed, the child's own benefit.

  "Hers!" Gorse said contemptuously. "Meant she could go gallivanting off to Hollywood and places and make lots of money and screw lots of handsome young men!"

  Hollywood in fact was where she was at present, and had been for two months on a scriptwriting assignment. She had left at the end of the Easter holidays, even though this summer term her daughter was due to face entrance exams for university.

  But there was something Gorse wasn't admitting. Being left wholly on her own to confront the stress of those exams was less than an adequate excuse for doing what she'd done. He coaxed her up on his lap and fondled her breasts, letting her murmur secretly against his ear as the warm breezes wafted off a nonexistent ocean and the music sank to a level as faint as its own echoes.

  Oh. Acid. He might have guessed.

  When she was fourteen, some spoiled upper-class bitch in the top form, thinking to show off as "clever" and "sophisticated," brought back a few tabs of LSD and gave them to those of the junior girls she had a crush on, or vice versa. Gorse had begged one and been given it.

  Which through a long and tortuous chain of associated self-justifications purported to explain why, immediately before her exams, she had run off to London determined to see some "real life" and wound up being given a room in a house chiefly occupied by prostitutes under the direction of a pimp with family connections or at any rate contacts in the Global Hotel. He had advanced her what felt like an awful lot of money -- to someone confined for three-quarters of the year in a boarding school, a thousand pounds must still sound like a small fortune -- and made it very clear that he expected repayment in full, and shortly. That was not all he had given her, moreover. Modeling herself, consciously or unconsciously, on the girl who had brought acid to school, she had accepted several offers of this and that and the other, not only from him but also from other girls in the house.

  All very typical. Godwin repressed the urge to yawn and turned her around on his lap so he could caress her clitoris. He made her come almost at once, and while she was still gazing at him in disbelief as though she had never before met a man prepared to concentrate on pleasuring instead of simply using her, he rose to his feet with both arms around her, as casually as though she weighed nothing, and dumped her into bed. The lights dimmed automatically as he joined her a moment later, having discarded his clothes in a few swift movements, and thereafter for half an hour he concentrated on exploiting her capacity for orgasm. It was extensive. She was purring when she went to sleep.

  As soon as she had dropped off he stole out of bed again and sat for a while in the chair he had left, pondering his ideal course of action. It took only a short while to reach his decision. Then he made the requisite arrangements.

  After that he should have felt the warm satisfaction of a job well done. To a limited extent he did, but it was all the same a trifle disappointing. He would have preferred a more demanding assignment -- perhaps one which would have lasted days, or better yet weeks, rather than one which promised to be complete in at most forty-eight hours. It was frankly boring to have become so good at his work. And what was he to look forward to as a reward? Half a dozen possibilities flickered through his mind, but he dismissed almost all of them at once. One did linger, but because it was overambitious and must involve great suffering he hesitated to settle on it: who'd want to win World War III?

  Well, maybe he would reach a decision when the time came. Several of his very best memories stemmed from a spur-of-the-moment choice.

  Having made sure that the room would be in the correct conformation for the morning, he sat and waited, sleep not being essential for him in this mode.

  When he woke her, placing a glass of orange juice beside the bed with a deliberately loud noise, she saw him first as she opened her eyes and stretched, and gave a sleepy smile. Then she registered the rest of what was in view.

  Two seconds . . . three . . . her face crumpled and she was weeping and diving for shelter under the coverlet.

  " Now what the hell's wrong with you?" he barked, pulling it aside. She curled into a fetal ball, striving to shut the world out with her palms. But she had to choose between eyes and ears and pre
ferred eyes, so he was able to reach her without shouting.

  Also she was moaning, and the moaning made a confused kind of sense.

  "When will they stop? Won't they ever stop? Oh, God !"

  "What?" And when, having waited long enough, he had had no answer, he forced her to sit up and pulled her hands away from her face.

  "Are you feeling hung over or something?" he demanded, not because he didn't know the answer to that one. "Here, drink this! It's fresh!"

  The urge to resist departed from her. Dull-faced, slow-moving as a marionette, she accepted the glass and cradled it in both hands, trying not to look anywhere except straight at it. She said after sipping it, "It just goes on and on. I never thought it would last so long. It's driving me insane."