The True Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Tomorrow," I said wearily. "There is no sense worrying at it now. We have other things to do."

  And, indeed, there was enough to do for the evening. King Kelver and I would make his obligatory visit to the Mirrormen, he ostentatiously, I secretly to guard him. With many pricked fingers and scratched arms, we hacked enough thorn for a fire. The King had speared two ground-running birds which we roasted and ate with hard bread and dried fruit. The abyss had stopped us early, so that we had finished our meal before dark, the light falling red behind the line of mountains beyond Graywater. We were gazing at the sky thinking our own gloomy thoughts when the giant strode into our view against the bleeding light.

  He was coming toward us. As we had seen him from the gentle valley of the Boneview River, so we saw him again, this time from a frontal view. He strode toward us, towering against the sky, shredding and fraying at his edges as though blown by a great wind, ever renewing his outline, his gigantic integrity of shape and purpose. The sun sank behind him; stars showed through him as he stalked toward the place where we sat wordless and awed. There was something so familiar about him, something so close to recognition. I strained at the thought, but it would not come.

  At last the giant came so close the shape of him was lost. We felt the cold, ill wind blow around us, heard that agonized voice, "Kinsman, kinsman, find the wind…" and then it had gone on past. We turned to follow its progress over the abyss and beyond where it changed, tumbled, seethed into another shape, a tall, whirling funnel of darkness which poured down into some hidden pocket of the world.

  In that instant I saw what I had not seen before, how the shredding edges of the great form resembled a furry pelt, ends flying, how the great shape shifted, Shifted…

  "Thandbar," said two voices at once. Mine, and Queynt's.

  There was a long silence full of waiting and strain. Then Queynt said, "It is fitting I should recognize him, Peter. I knew him. Now, how it is that you would know him?"

  I was not sure that I should answer. Silkhands gave me no help, merely staring at me owl-like across the fire. It was Jinian who finally said, "Tell him, Peter. If you cannot trust Queynt, you cannot trust any in this world and we may as well give up."

  It was there, then, in the dusk of the Waeneye, beside a dying fire that I set the Gamesmen of Barish upon a flat stone, reserving only the blue of Windlow to my secret self. They stood under the eyes of all, but it was only Vitior Vulpas Queynt who leaned above them with tears flowing down his face as he touched them one by one. I wanted to strike him, wanted to seize the Gamesmen and flee into the dark. I could feel the serpent within, knotting and writhing. Only Jinian's eyes upon me, her hand upon my knee, kept me quiet as the man picked them up, turned them, called them by name.

  Oh, Gamelords, but they were mine. Mine. Not his.

  In a little time, the worst of the feeling faded, and I was able to speak and think again. I had to tell him I could speak with them. Read them, and he looked at me then with such awe I felt uncomfortable.

  I tried to explain. "It is my brain they use to think with, Queynt. Otherwise they are as when they were made. I have been under the mountain of the magicians. I have seen how they are made. Have you?"

  "Oh, yes, Gamesman," he affirmed, no longer joking or voluble. "I have been beneath the mountain. I went there last some decades ago to search for Barish."

  We waited. He seemed to debate with himself whether we should be enlightened or not. At last it was Jinian again who spoke, as she had to me. "Queynt, we've trusted you. You've hinted to us and hinted to us a hundred times asking if we know what you hope we know. Now is time to set all mystery aside. There may have been reasons to stay hidden, but they are in the past. Now we must trust one another."

  "Barish and I," he said, "were brothers."

  He stood to walk to the side of the abyss, stood there peering northward as he talked, seeming not to like the sight of our faces. "We came to this world together. You know that story. If you do not, it is not important now…

  "Well, let it be said. We came, Barish and I, and a host of others. We came to serve a lie. There were wives who were loved and children who were loved and a world approaching war with another world which neither would win-well. Some powerful persons of that world sought to send certain loved ones away to safety. They needed an excuse. A fiction. A lie…

  "There was a woman, a girl. Didir. Some thought she could read minds. Others thought not. The people of her home place were afraid of her, true, naming her Demon and Devil. The powerful men of the place said they would send researchers away to another place to find out about this strange Talent she had. `In later time it may prove useful. However, the research may be long, so it will be necessary to send support staff and agriculturists and bio-engineers and technologists and so on and so on.' Their wives were the agriculturists and their children the bioengineers. Among them were a few, a very few, who really knew something about such matters."

  "You," said Jinian. "And Barish."

  "I," he admitted, "and Barish. And a few others, though most of the so called scientists were second rate academics caught in a strange web of vanity and ambition. They stayed under the mountain, caught up in their dreams of research-research on `monsters.' When we would not let them have Didir, they created monsters of their own. And we, the rest of us, came out from the mountain into this new, supposedly uninhabited world…"

  "Supposedly," prompted Jinian.

  "Well, supposedly. There were living things here. There were intelligent creatures here. There was material the bio-engineers could use, mixes, crosses, deliberate and inadvertent. Children began to be born with many Talents. The Talent of Didir proved to be real. Barish said it was simply evolution, a natural evolution of the race. I said no, it was this world, this place."

  He was silent for so long after that that Jinian had to prompt him again.

  The rest of us were silent, afraid if we spoke we might stop him, interrupt his disclosure and never learn what he would tell us.

  "Well, the poor fools stayed under the mountain. The Talents began to be born, and to grow, and feed on one another. Some were good people. Others were truly monsters. Barish was always an activist. He decided to intervene, to make plans…

  "He stole one of the transport machines, disassembled it, brought it here to the wastes. Then he sought out the best of the emerging Talents, seduced them with hope and high promises, and brought them here. There were twelve with Barish, the Council. They made plans. They would accumulate those among the Gamesmen who had notions of justice, accumulate them like seed grain, and when the time came, they would plant that crop for a mighty harvest."

  He returned to us by the fire, shivering, though the night was not yet that cold. "It was not enough to plan a great future if one might not be alive to see it. So he asked me to work with him to develop a strain of people who would be immune to the Talents of Gamesmen and immutable through time. Well, we had longevity drugs and maintenance machines as well as the transport machines themselves. It gave us centuries to work. When there were enough of the Immutables, Barish made a contract with them. They were to find the good seed among the Gamesmen and communicate those names to those under the mountain. Those under the mountain would have them picked up, blued, and stored in the ice caverns. He got their agreement very simply, by playing on their fears. He told the `magicians' that those identified were a danger to them, a danger to be removed but preserved as a later source of power. They believed Barish. Everyone believed Barish.

  "And so, the Immutables became the `Council.' Up until the death of Riddle's grandfather, some eighty years ago. The chain was broken then. We may never know why."

  "And Barish himself," prompted Jinian as I was about to do so.

  "And Barish himself lay down beside the eleven others he had brought up here to Barish's Keep. Once every hundred years the Immutables were to come and wake him, bringing with them some brain-dead body which he might occupy in order that his own not age, for
he wished to save his lifespan for the great utopian time which was to come. And once every hundred years I met him in Learner, he in one guise or another, I always as Queynt, to talk of this world and its future. Once a century we would argue about the methods he had chosen, I urging him to waken his stored multitudes and learn from those who had been here before he came; he saying that there were not yet enough, to give him just another hundred years…"

  "Until?" I asked, knowing the story was almost at an end.

  "Until some eighty years ago I came to Learner to meet him only to find it in ruins. No Barish. Until I came up here to find his Keep, where I had been only once before, to find tumbled stone and Wind's Bones, abysses and fallen mountains. I went to Dindindaroo to ask Riddle-the current Riddle of that time-where Barish was. Dindindaroo was in ruins, Riddle dead, the new Riddle ignorant of the very name of Barish.

  "I grieved. I went against my judgment and kept up his work. I became the new Council as Riddle had been before me. I sent my hundreds into the icy caverns. I waited for Barish. He did not return. And then, at last, a year ago the mountain of magicians went up in fire and I knew Barish would not come again of himself.

  "He lies upon this mountain, or he is gone. I seek him. You seek him. And we must find him because where he lies is the only machine which can restore Barish's multitude to life once more. If this thing is not done, he will have lived and died to no purpose, and I will have been party to a very grave miscalculation…"

  I believed him. We all did. There was no fantastic pretense in him now, no egregious eccentricism. He was only one, like us, driven by old loyalties and a sense of what could be good and right. If Windlow had been there, he would have taken the man by the hand and reassured him, so I did it, wordlessly, hoping he would understand. It seems he did, for he said, "Your purpose is like mine. If you have been guided here by songs, by Seers, by a giant form striding to the north, well-if there is anything of Barish remaining, he will be trying to reach me."

  "As Thandbar tries to reach his kindred," I said. "His is the only Gamesman I have never touched. His was my own Talent, so I never called upon him."

  "I never knew that any living thing or any known device could reach what lies preserved within the blues," said Queynt. "Though some once said that travelers between the stars sometimes wakened with a memory of dreams. Who knows? I don't. I know very little."

  "Do you know how you have lived this thousand years?" asked Jinian. "While I am much inclined to trust you, Vitior Queynt, this is one thing about you I find unbelievable."

  "I have lived this long by learning," he said, "from shadowpeople and gnarlibars and krylobos and eestnies. You have not seen eestnies, but they were here before we came and would teach you, too, if you asked. Barish had not the patience for it, so he said. Then, too, he kept thinking I would die. He will be offended I have not."

  Well, we had enough to chew on for one night. King Kelver went back along our trail to appear as a Mirrorman. He retrieved the cap at the same time, and my help was not needed. It seemed that the Elator or the Mirrorman suspected nothing.

  When morning came, Queynt suggested that Jinian and I take Yittleby and Yattleby and continue the search across the chasm. "The birds can leap the abyss," he said. "If the rest of us stay here or spend some time seeking a trail, it will delay those behind us a bit more. Perhaps we will spend a day or two searching off in different directions while you and Jinian go in the direction we believe correct." It seemed as good an idea as any other, so I Dragoned across, carrying Jinian, then showed myself high in the air to let the followers know that the abyss had been crossed by Dragon. The others were scattered among the rocks, seeming to seek a way through the maze. From my height, I could see several, and I knew they could follow us whenever they felt it wise to do so. Delay, obfuscation, Game and more Game. I was as weary of it as possible to be.

  Yittleby and Yattleby had leaped the chasm, galloping to the very edge to launch themselves up and out with ecstatic cries, long legs extended before them, for all the world like boys vying with one another in the long jump. They were saddled, which surprised me, and they knelt at our approach to let us mount. Then it was only necessary to hang on while they lurched upright and began their matched, unvarying stride toward the north. They would bear no bit or bridle. One or two attempts to guide them taught me merely to point in the direction I wanted to go.

  Late in the day I saw a fallen stone with a waysign painted upon it. By matching the stone to its broken pedestal, I could see which way the arrow had originally pointed, and I indicated that direction to Yittleby. She ignored me. I tapped her on the neck, sat back in startlement as the huge beak swung around to face me. "Krerk," she said, stamping one taloned foot. "Krerk."

  At that moment I heard a harsh, rumbling roar as of a great rockslide. As it went on, rumbling and roaring, I realized it was not the sound of stone. "Gnarlibar?" I whispered.

  "Krerk," both birds agreed, turning away from the line I had indicated. When the sound changed in intensity, the birds again changed direction, ascending a pile of rough stones. Halfway up they knelt and shook us off, gesturing with their beaks in an unmistakable communication. "Go on and see," they were saying. "Take a good look." They crouched where they were as we crawled to the top of the pile.

  Below us was a kind of natural amphitheatre, broken at each compass point by a road entering the flat. Assembled on the slopes of the place were some hundreds of the shadow-people, their chatter and bell sounds almost inaudible beneath the ceaseless roaring. In the center of the place a single, gigantic krylobos danced, one twice the height of Yittleby or Yattleby, feet kicking high, feather topknot flying, wing-arms extended in a fever of wild leaping and finger snapping. The roaring grew even louder, and through the four road entrances of the place came four beasts.

  Jinian clutched at me. My only thought was that this was what Chance had wanted me to Shift to and he had been quite mad. They were like badgers, low, short-legged, very wide. They were furry, had no tails, had a wide head split from side to side by a mouth so enormous either Yittleby or Yattleby would have fit within it as one bite. They came leat, that is to say, from the four directions at once, each uttering that mountainshattering roar. The giant krylobos went on dancing. Queynt's two birds came to crouch beside us, conversing in low krerks of approval, whether at the dance, the dancer, or the attack, I could not tell.

  As the gnarlibars reached the center, the krylobos leapt upward, high, wing-fingers snapping, long legs drawn up tight to his body, neck whipping in a circular motion. Yittleby said to Yattleby, "Kerawh," in a tone indicating approval. "Whit kerch," Yattleby agreed, settling himself more comfortably.

  The gnarlibars whirled, spinning outward, each counter-clockwise, in an incredible dance as uniform in motion as though they had been four bodies with one mind. The krylobos dropped into the circle they had left among them, spun, cried a long, complicated call, and then launched upward once more as the four completed their turn and collided at the center in a whirling frenzy of fur.

  "Krylobos, bos, bos," cried the shadowmen over an ecstasy of flute and bell sounds. "Gnarlibar, bar, bar," called another faction, cheering the beasts as they spun once more and retreated. In the center the enormous bird continued his dance, her dance, wing-fingers snapping like whip cracks, taloned feet spinning and turning. "Bos, bos, bos," said Yittleby, conversationally. I had raised up to get a better view, and she brought her beak down sharply upon my head. "Whit kerch," she instructed. I understood. I was to keep low.

  The circus went on. I did not understand the rules, but it was evidently a very fine contest of its kind. When the gnarlibars withdrew after an hour or so, roaring still in a way to shake the stones, Yittleby and Yattleby rose to lead us down into the amphitheatre. Almost at once I heard familiar voices crying, "Peter, eater, ter, ter," and my legs were seized in a tight embrace. Flute sound trilled, there was much shrieking and singing in which I caught a few familiar words of the shadow language. One
small figure pounded itself proudly upon its chest and said, "Proom. Proom." I remembered him and introduced Jinian with much ceremony. She was immediately surrounded by her own coterie all crying "Jinian, ian, an an," to her evident discomfort.

  "What is it?" she asked. "What's going on?"

  "It looks rather like a festival," I suggested. "I was told once that the shadowpeople are fond of such things. Some here have traveled a long way from the place I met them."

  I felt a hard tug at one leg and looked down into another familiar little face, fangs glistening in the light. They had never come out into the light when I had traveled with them before. Was it that they felt safe among the krylobos and the gnarlibars? Or that a time of festival was somehow different for them? Whatever the answer, my wide-eared friend was busy communicating in the way he knew, acting it out. He was going walky, walky, pointing to the north, patting me and pointing. I nodded, turned, walky walked myself toward the north, going nowhere. He opened his hands, so human a gesture that Jinian laughed. "What for?" he was saying. "Why?"

  Inspiration struck me. I held out a hand, "Wait," then peered into the south, hand over eyes. The shadowpeople turned, peered with me. At first there was nothing as the sun dropped lower. Then, just as I was beginning to think it would not come, there was the giant striding upon the wind toward us once more. I pointed, cried out. Jinian pointed, exclaimed. All the shadowpeople chattered and jumped up and down.

  "Andibar, bar, bar," they chanted. "Andibar!"

  Jinian and I were astonished. "The sound is so very close," she said. "They mean Thandbar!"

  "Andibar," they agreed, nodding their heads. We waited while the giant approached, dissolved into wind and mist around us, then went on to the north. I cried out to the shadowpeople, pointed, made walky, walky. Aha, they cried, louder than words. Aha. They were around me, pushing, running off to the north and returning, indicating by every action that they knew the way well. We went among them, propelled by their eagerness.