How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  We heard the children laughing. At 6:00, four boys came up the stairs with boxes of food: cheese, roast hams, apples, bread, radishes, fried potatoes. In my box was one bottle of apple brandy and four glasses. Each box even had a tiny rice cake. I had eaten such cakes twice before. The children left, happy, happy to be eating the food we had hoarded so long.

  I sat and poured the brandy. The food and brandy took away much of the cold. We put the food we could not eat into one box and set the other three on the fire. They made a bright blaze.

  At 7:00 the moon went down. The Chin let out one great shout. We stood quickly and looked over the walls. Sirikit fit an arrow to her bow. Nuam took up the Chin bow. Amphan drew her knife. I held my gun ready.

  But the Chin stood still in the wind, in the drifting snow, in the cold. Bangkok was slowly turning to the sun. The Chin will attack now, before dawn, I thought.

  But they did not. The light grew. The Chin shimmered in the predawn haze. I rubbed my eyes — too much brandy, too much good food, not enough sleep, not enough sleep for months. I had not wanted to be tired when the Chin came.

  The wind grew with the light. It whipped the snow into stinging bits of ice. We could only squint at the Chin. We had to keep the fire built high to keep it alive — it burned so fast in the wind and so much snow blew into it. The wind whipped the hair of the dead Chin below us. When the first arc of the sun broke above the horizon east of Bangkok, the Chin gave another shout and charged the walls.

  “Don’t waste arrows!” I shouted above the Chin’s shouting. I could fire my gun before Sirikit and Nuam could shoot their arrows. None of the Chin I shot at dropped — the gun was not working. I had no new powerpac to put in it. The Chin skimmed along the tops of the drifts, seldom breaking through the crust. They were at the walls with ladders. I helped Amphan dump oil on a ladder full of men, but the oil crackled only on the bodies of the dead Chin we had shot the night before, did not stop the Chin on the ladder. Sirikit fell back with an arrow in her chest. I knelt to pull it out, but the arrow faded at my touch. Sirikit tore at her clothes to look at her skin. There was no hurt.

  The sun was nearly up. We could see the plains before the walls, covered with Chin. I drew my knife and lunged at a Chin coming over the battlements — big, strong, white in his furs — but he was not there. I was not seeing clearly. I had to see clearly. Chin were on the walls. Sirikit, Nuam, Amphan, and I stood together, back to back. Amphan stabbed a Chin with her knife. I tried shooting my gun again. No Chin fell. They circled us, jeering.

  “This is a Chin trick!” I said.

  The Chin suddenly looked at the sun, looked without shading their eyes. The sun lifted above the horizon. The Chin stared at the sun, shouting again and again. Some of them wept. Amphan put her hands over her ears, but the shouting grew fainter. The Chin began to fade in the light. “You have won,” the Chin on the walls with us whispered. “You have won.”

  The Chin crowded back in the shadows of the battlements and the walls. As the light grew, all the Chin faded and were gone. The plains were empty of Chin. There were no Chin on the plains, no ladders against the walls, no Chin in the shadows. Birds circled the plains over the smokeless Chin camps. Wind sighed across the drifts and hissed in the willows.

  A Thai flag was raised, suddenly, above the Chin camp north of us. It fluttered in tatters — white, blue, and green. A great Thai shout went up from the walls of Bangkok. Men and women climbed over the walls and ran toward the Chin camp. Sirikit tied our rope around a merlon, and we climbed down into the snow and ran to the Chin camp.

  It was filled with dead, frozen Chin. Some lay alone in the snow. Others lay on top of each other under the scraps of burned tent our guerrillas had left them. We stood in the middle of the Chin camp and looked at the bodies. I thought of the thousands of Chin we had killed at Chiang Mai, Chainat, Chulalongkorn, and Bangkok.

  “The Chin could not admit defeat, even in death,” Amphan said.

  But we had not defeated them. The cold had, and their lack of food, and their supplies suitable for only a quick campaign designed to take our cities, and their disbelief that we would give them lands the sea had left.

  One dead Chin lay wrapped in yellow robes.

  Monks, nurses, children, and old men and women climbed onto the walls of Bangkok and shouted to us, waved to us. Nuam and Amphan waved back.

  The tracks of the few Chin who had survived the night led north. Thai guerrillas, black specks on the white plains, followed those tracks. The rest of us waited for the army from Ayutthaya-by-the-Sea before going north to find what we would find. In three months it would be spring. We’d need the provinces with their fields of winter wheat.

  The women and I pulled coats and boots from the dead Chin and walked back to the walls. Three old women helped pull us up our rope to the top. Nuam picked up the box of food we had not eaten. “We need this now,” she said. Sirikit picked up the bows, the quivers of arrows, the knives. I took one of the tins of oil in my left hand. Amphan carried two others. We walked down the stairs.

  Children were in the streets, shouting. Old men and women were running to them, hugging them. “We have won,” they shouted, happy. I stopped to watch three nine-year-old boys play takraw. Two were good at keeping the ball in the air without using their hands. I had not played takraw for a year. The third boy kicked the ball in my direction. I kicked it back and walked on after Sirikit, Nuam, and Amphan.

  We carried our things to the house the army had given us by the wall, then went back to the battlements for the Chin coats, the rope, the pot. Amphan kicked out the fire.

  “We should take you to a doctor,” Nuam said, looking at my shoulder.

  “Later,” I said. I only wanted sleep. I only wanted to sleep after fighting the Chin, sleep in a room without shadows where I could not hear old men shout that we had won.

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  SECOND LIVES

  I gave my mother and father their second lives two days before doing it became impossible, two days before Arath’s armies took the city. My parents thanked me with a public dinner in a temple garth at which they served real meat. I never saw my parents again. When I had children, they were supposed to do the same for me.

  The next morning I felt sick, but the temple sewers quit working and all the other initiates and I were assigned to help carry buckets of old blood up the stairs to the surface where we dumped them on the east lawns. Thousands crowding around the temple in the crush ahead of Arath’s advance could watch us. Few would. Some of those who did left.

  We worked through the day, let off only for meals. In the night, Arath’s troops took the ridges west of us, but they stopped the shelling. The night was quiet. None of us were allowed to sleep. Our shoulders and arms ached. My legs were caked with blood.

  On one trip up, before dawn, Lieutenant Hazael, of the temple guard, stood waiting for us. He made us stop, and Niram spilled his buckets on the steps. The lieutenant didn’t care. He jerked up the sleeves of our tunics to read the numbers tattooed on our arms, and when he read mine he stiffened, ordered me to follow him, and started down the steps.

  I followed. He shoved me ahead of him into the temple guard headquarters and pushed me into a side room. Two priests and the Head Vivifier — an old man, very pale and stooped that night; I had seen him twice before — sat waiting there. The vivifier slammed shut a book he was reading, squinted at me, and looked at Hazael. “You trust him?”

  “He has carried out every order given him — faithfully,” Hazael said with a touch of sarcasm I thought very insolent.

  “Send him.” The vivifier stood up and walked out, clutching the book to his chest, helped by one of the priests. The other priest shoved something into Hazael’s hands as he left. Hazael gave it to me. It was a photograph of an old man with a long gray beard and a red scar that ran straight across his forehead.

  “Could you recognize that man if you saw him?” Hazael demanded.

  “Yes, sir.”
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br />   “Then find him. Bring him to me. He is in the temple already, and he must not enter the Head Vivifier’s chambers. Get to him before he reaches the third level.”

  “But —”

  “Find him! There are reasons for sending you. I need my men in other places.”

  I moved to the door, but he pulled me back. “Take this. Show it to the priests as you go down.”

  He handed me a rectangular metal chip with patterns of green dots blinking on it. I put it in my tunic pocket and started out. He stopped me again.

  “You might need this,” he said curtly, handing me a gun on a belt. “Tie it inside your tunic where it can’t be seen but where you can get to it easily.”

  “I’ve never fired one.”

  “Take it! He won’t know that.”

  I strapped the gun inside my tunic and left. Hazael stood in the doorway and watched me go. I stopped at the fountain and tried to wash off some of the blood but it was no use, so I forced my way through the crowd on the temple steps just as I was.

  “You can’t come through here,” a temple guard at the top sneered, and he shoved me back down a few steps. I took out the chip and handed it to him. He looked surprised, held it up to watch the lights blink, and finally gave it back and let me in.

  I knew the way the old man would have to take — I had gone that way with my parents. People lined both sides of the great hall that led to the stairway down. Most were old, and most family groups had at least one young man or woman — a son or a niece — with them (it cost more without a young relative, and there were more risks).They all stared at me in silence. I stared back at the old men. None of them had the scar of the man in the photograph.

  The priests and vestals on the second level clustered around me after I showed one of them the chip. One vestal wept when she saw it. No one would tell me what it meant to them. I thought it was just getting me through the temple without the company of adults — a pass. A few priests remembered seeing the man in the photograph. They all thought he was just ahead in the line somewhere, but no one would take me to him.

  Finally, an attendant in the dressing rooms told me the old man had already gone into one of the chapels. I did not know what to do. I could not interrupt the meetings. Still, I hurried to the chapel hallway. The first four chapels were empty — the people in them had gone down to the third level. So I waited by the door of the fifth chapel. Through it I could hear a high vestal chant the Litany for New Life, a litany that spoke of the responsibilities sixty or seventy additional years of life would bring. When she finished, all the people in the chapel sang a hymn and the door opened. I watched the people file through it. He was not with them. I watched by the sixth chapel, but he did not come out of there either, and so on through six more chapels. He had evidently been in one of the first four.

  The priest in that last chapel looked scared when I showed him the chip and the photograph. He rushed me to the stairs leading to the third level. I asked him if he would go down with me and help me find the man, but he said he could spare me no more time and hurried away.

  The waiting rooms on the third level were crowded. The old man was not in any of them. So I walked to the Doors of Life. Emeralds set in them gleamed in a green burst out of the darkness of the hall. A special guard of priests stood there. They had just let the man in my photograph through the doors. As they opened them for me, one of the guards bolted down the hall for the stairs; the others cursed him. But after they clanged the doors shut behind me, I could hear more steps running away to the stairs.

  I stood in the doorway looking down at the rugs. I realized that my hand was inside my tunic clutching the gun, but my hand was shaking, and I knew that just then I could not pull out the gun and hold it. Still, I could not run away. Hazael had told the Head Vivifier that I did everything they asked — faithfully. So I forced myself to look up. Three people sat in the room: an old woman holding a little black-haired girl, and the man I sought. A door across from me opened. A vivifier in his scarlet robes stepped in from his chambers, called the name of the woman, and led her and the little girl out. I was alone with the man.

  “Sir,” I said.

  He would not look up.

  “Sir, you must come back out with me.”

  He still would not look up. “I’m too close,” he said hoarsely. “They would never let me go anywhere else now.”

  I did not understand. “But they would, sir. They sent me for you.”

  The old man ran a finger along the scar on his forehead. “You’re just a boy!”

  I managed to draw the gun, and I activated it. The sound made him start. He clutched the arms of the chair he sat in, still looking determinedly at the floor.

  “Don’t let me see the gun. Put it back — hide it! Don’t you know what will happen if I see it?”

  His knuckles where he gripped the chair were white; his face was very white.

  “Why can’t you look at me?” I asked.

  “Because they can see everything I see. Put the gun away.”

  I put it back.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t have time to work with my ears,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Arath’s doctors, of course. Why do you think you were sent to get me?”

  “Arath’s doctors can see what you see?”

  “No! His generals — Arath himself for all I know. His doctors put the transmitters in my eyes.”

  “In your eyes!”

  Again he fingered the scar on his forehead. “You don’t know what else they put in me, do you.”

  I said nothing. I did not know. He kept rubbing the scar. “Leave this place, boy,” he whispered. “You might yet get to the surface.”

  Then I knew, but I could not move. “Why did you let them put it in you?” I stammered.

  “They would have killed my family. They probably killed them anyway.”

  I hugged the gun tight against my stomach so it could not fall on the floor for the man to see.

  “You’re thinking Arath’s people are horrible, aren’t you?” he asked.

  I said nothing.

  “Is what they did to me worse than what your people did to you — sending you, a boy, after me to make the bomb detonate before it could damage the heart of their temple?”

  I could move.

  I pushed open the door and ran down the hall. People stood crammed around the stairs, trying to get out. The chip had explained to the temple workers behind me what was happening, and they had told the people. I shouted for the people to follow me up the stairs we used to carry out the blood. Some did.

  I was nearly to the surface when the first explosion came. The bomb in the old man was more powerful than Hazael, the Head Vivifier, or anyone had imagined. The roar made my ears hurt for days; when I got outside my clothes were on fire. I fell on the grass and rolled in the blood we had dumped. I heard more explosions. The ground around me began to sag. I scrambled up and ran down to the trees by the river.

  As soon as the temple exploded, Arath’s troops began shelling the city again. I could hear bombs exploding on the temple hill. I tried to run along the river, but the brush hurt my burns too much. I stopped on the bank, set down the gun, pulled off my tunic, and waded out in the water to cool my burns and to try to rinse the blood out of the tunic. Only then did I realize I was crying, and I made myself stop.

  Except for the shelling, I could hear no other sound. Soon I could not hear even that. I could not hear the water swirl around me or the birds cry out in the dark trees before the dawn. I clapped my hands by my ears, but it was no use. I could not hear.

  I saw an uprooted tree floating by a little farther out. I went back to the shore for the gun and waded out to the tree. It had been partly burned. Some explosion upstream had knocked it in the river. I climbed on it and wrung the water out of my tunic, wrapped the gun in it and tied the tunic to a branch. The chip fell out of the pocket into my hand, the green lights still blinking. I threw it as far as I could.
I pushed the tree toward the current and crawled partway up the half-submerged trunk and lay down hidden by branches and leaves. I did not look back.

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  SOFT IN THE WORLD, AND BRIGHT

  This is how it began: I stumbled. But it wasn’t just a stumble. I knew that. My right leg “felt” tingly — no, “felt” as if tiny pinpricks of my mind’s awareness about my knee were disappearing, as if the knee itself were disappearing atom by atom in a sudden rush.

  Mary! I shouted the thought in my mind, but she didn’t answer, and I could not access her virtual reality in my mind to find her. I was shut out of it. But she could stop this — she was the artificial intelligence networked through my nerves and my brain to give me my body. I thought maybe that’s why she didn’t answer me. Maybe she was trying to stop my body from disintegrating from my consciousness and she couldn’t answer me because it took all of her efforts.

  I had stopped walking and was standing in the middle of a broad flight of stairs leading down to breakfast, and people were staring. I looked across at the handrail against the wall and took a step toward it with my left leg. I could walk with it. My left leg worked. I dragged my right leg along and got to the handrail and the bottom of the stairs and a table where I sat and rubbed my knee. My hands could feel my knee, but my knee couldn’t feel my hands on it.

  Mary, I thought. What’s happening?

  But she didn’t answer, and a golden robot with its ruby, multifaceted eyes stood next to my table to take my order and I couldn’t think what to tell it.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Addison?” it asked.

  It knew me because it was linked to the hotel’s central intelligence which was linked to the station’s central intelligence which knew all about me: that I was actually no more than a brain in a body that wouldn’t work without the AI they put inside me after I broke my neck and found I was allergic to the neural-regeneration drugs, that I couldn’t actually feel anything, it was the AI giving my mind the illusion of feeling, that I couldn’t breathe on my own, or speak, or control my urination, or be a man among other men who can walk and breathe and hold their urine, and that every eight years I had to have the AI replaced because the programs would become corrupted, and that it was Mary’s eighth year and they would erase her out of my mind and I didn’t want her to go because I loved her.