The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Back in the desert, we went to the monument. “It feels very sad around here,” I said. “So this is the direction we want to go.” Mutter mutter. He sounded disgusted.

  “What?” I asked him. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I was just saying it was an odd direction. Go five paces angry, turn grief-stricken, and take ten paces in a generally sad direction.”

  “It may come to that.” He meant it to be funny, but it wasn’t. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “Not really. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “How come I can feel it and you can’t?”

  “Because that’s your Talent. Empathy. That’s how you talk all those beast languages. You empathize and just naturally understand them. This is just another kind of language.” He was feeling around the base of the monument, walking to and away from it, circling away from me to the left. “You understand these things on a nonverbal level. . . .”

  He didn’t come around the other side. I waited, carefully not moving. Silence. No Peter. Only the wind. My teeth were clenched so tightly that my jaw ached. I kept telling myself he was all right, had always been all right, would always be all right. There was a small sighing, as of a door swinging open or closed, and in a moment he backed into me. “Found it,” he said, taking me by the hand and tugging me forward once more.

  And we came out in the village of Betand as it had been a thousand years before.

  Not that I knew that right away. What we saw was so raw and strange that neither of us tried to identify it. We did, however, catalog it as we stared. One street, dirt—mud, rather—deeply rutted and hideously ugly. Two stark wooden buildings with signs saying they sold farm stock. Other wooden stores, some a little grayer, which sold equipment. Small groups of people in the street, families with children, some with a few horses or zeller, most with carts piled high with household goods. A tavern; The Blue Fustigar. Even then I didn’t identify the place.

  It wasn’t until I turned to see Vitior Vulpas Queynt emerging from the tavern that I knew where I was. It was Queynt, not one whit different in height and size than when I had seen him last, and yet in some way much younger looking. It was the expression on his face. Dissatisfaction. Annoyance. His expression was less like the Queynt I knew and more like Peter, full of jittery impatience. A much less poised expression than he wore now. “Queynt,” I said.

  He did not see us. Did not hear me. He went past us as though we had been smoke. Behind him came a depressed-looking couple with a child, the woman calling, “Sir, sir.”

  That’s when I knew where we were. Betand. The beginning of the city of Betand. When man was young upon Lom, scarcely come, and the rolling stars were driving him from the Shadowmarches.

  Peter had already figured it out. He was busy stripping leaves from a bush, seeing whether he could make them stay off. He couldn’t. “Newer,” he breathed at me, his eyes unfocused. “This memory is newer. The newer the memory, the less effect we can have on it. What does it have to do with grief?”

  “Not grief. Destruction.” I waved at the forests that stretched up the northern hills toward the marches. Everywhere were the stumps of trees in cleared fields. “That’s the common thread, Peter. You said it yourself. You used the word ‘traumatic.’ The world was injured during each of those episodes. Destruction in the temple. Destruction of the monuments on the desert. Destruction of the forests here.” I was right. None of it had really been about dying at all, and I wanted to cry. This wouldn’t lead us where we needed to go.

  He must have seen my face. He pulled me close and we stood there for a long, wordless minute, me with my head on his chest, both of us watching Queynt talk to the couple. Then they went away. Queynt went back into the tavern. After a while he came out. We followed him around for a while, and after what seemed to be the better part of a day, he started out of town to the north. All this time we’d been waiting for the story to start over, and it hadn’t started over yet.

  “If this is an ‘event,’ it’s a very long one,” Peter said. “Does that mean it’s important?”

  “Who’s to say? I remember some things from my childhood in complete, exquisite detail, and so far as I know, they don’t mean anything. Except to me, of course. And you, maybe. Someday I’ll tell you.” He smiled at me, teasingly, and I knew he did it just to cheer me. “Do you want to go after him?”

  “Peter, I’m not sure we have enough to eat. Somehow I thought there’d be food in here. You know. Roots. Berries. I didn’t expect it all to be shadows and pictures.”

  He shook his head at me, being practical as he sometimes was, most surprisingly. “It can’t be all shadows, Jinian. It’s substantial. The Maze is substantial. You can see things growing in it from outside. Some of it has to be real. Like your brain. If’ you could walk around inside your own brain, you might be able to see the ideas, but you’d still be walking on something real. Cells. Flesh. Something.” He reached out and stripped leaves and fruit from a thrilp bush beside the path, moodily waiting for it to dissolve.

  And it didn’t. It lay there in his hand, dripping juice, smelling very ripe and real. I laughed. Couldn’t help it, I guess, he looked so discomfited. Mouth open. He had just told me some of it had to be real, but he hadn’t expected it to be the tree he was working at. My strained laughter made him laugh in turn, somewhat ruefully. He picked a hatful of thrilps, stowed them in his pack, and started after Queynt’s receding form, far in the northern distance.

  “Don’t know about you, Jinian, but I’m going to see whether he told us the truth or not.”

  I ran to catch up. It seemed an insane, completely random thing to do, unlikely to lead us anywhere helpful. And yet—I had done the guidance spell, Heart’s Blood, Road Dust, lead-me-where-it-would. There had been those ripe thrilps, almost like an answer to a prayer. And there had been grief in Lom’s mind, grief about something. Perhaps this road was not as unlikely as it seemed.

  2

  MEMORY

  I have in recent years often reflected upon memory. One takes it so for granted. One remembers with such facile infallibility. And one finds with such shock—at least it was a shock to me—that memory isn’t truth.

  This occurred to me first when I read Peter’s account of our meeting and the events around that time. The big things that happened were there, seen from a slightly different angle, perhaps, but intact. I remembered the Wind’s Eve and so did he. I remembered the Battle of the Bones, and in general he remembered it as I did. But many of the small things were totally different. I did not hear things he heard, even though we stood side by side when they were said. I did not see things he saw. And conversely, of course, I saw and heard things he did not. It struck me then, an interesting reflection without particular import, and I resolved in future not to be too insistent upon the truth of my own memories. I thought of the way Murzy had recalled old events. “I remember it this way,” she said. “I remember it this way, but on reflection, I think so and so must have happened, and even that may not be true.”

  I thought of the subject again as we followed the memory of Vitior Vulpas Queynt into the Shadowmarches. It wasn’t very long since he had told us the story of that journey—what had it been? A handful of days, no more, since we had been cozy in the tower room at Bloome, listening to his reminiscences. And now we followed him upon that same journey as remembered by another mind, as remembered by the world that held him and that, for some reason, dignified this event with absolute clarity in every detail. The farther we went, the more convinced I was that we had come upon the right trail all unwittingly.

  Peter kept experimenting as we went, testing which parts of our environment were real and which mere images. I gave him one clue to the nature of our surroundings when I told him somewhat impatiently to stop picking rainhat berries because I was stuffed.

  “It’s been hours since I gave you the last one,” he complained. He had generously given me most of them, over my objections.

  “It can’t have bee
n,” I muttered. “I can still taste them. Really, Peter. It was only a moment ago.”

  “No. It was when we crossed that last stream. All the way down this slope and through that forest at the foot of it. . . .”

  It struck us both, simultaneously. Memory time, subjective time, might not be the same as “real” time, stomach time. I put a finger on my pulse and counted as we followed Queynt across several leagues of forest. A few hundred pulses, more or less, for a lengthy journey that should have taken thousands of heartbeats. Peter was counting his breaths. We shook our heads at each other in disbelief, but Peter did stop picking berries. “Space,” he muttered at me. “We’re probably not walking as far as we think we are.”

  “It certainly hasn’t tired me any,” I admitted. “All of this is probably happening in quite a small place in the Maze.”

  “One would think large memories would take larger spaces,” he objected, but he didn’t go on to say why. I thought privately that large memories might simply be more dense than others. Or perhaps they thin out with time. Probably a thousand years is no time at all for Lom. Which for a human being is a fairly discouraging thought in some respects and a very encouraging one in others. One hates to think that all of existence is trivial. It is better to be even a small part of something very large than a sizable part of nothing much.

  We went along, Queynt stopping from time to time to talk with settlers, giving some of them money, waving his arms, talking persuasively. All of this was much as he had remembered it, except for the sadness. He hadn’t remembered the sadness, and Peter didn’t feel it. I seemed to be the only beneficiary, and I could have done well without it. When the tears started flowing down my face like a river, Peter took time to dry my face and make tender sounds, which helped a little. After that, I held on to his hand. The fact he couldn’t feel the pervasive emotion seemed to ameliorate it somewhat. There was a certain hard pragmatism about Peter—probably inherited from his mother, Mavin, since I hadn’t noticed it in his father, Himaggery, very much—that cut through sentimentality like a knife. Sometimes I hated it, but now I blessed him for it.

  Lom remembered night, and night came. Lom remembered morning, and morning came. Lom remembered the rocky height Queynt had described. There were more trees than he had mentioned, more and closer. His rendition on the wood instrument was less expert and more plaintive than he had told us, and the tears flowed down my face again. By the time three days had passed and the Shadowperson moved out of the trees to stand singing upon the moor, I was in full flood. The beauty of what ensued evidently had captured the world’s attention as it did mine, enough at least to distract it from its sadness. There was no sadness in that singing, and it was more glorious in Lom’s memory than it could possibly have been in reality.

  We sat upon the moor for several days, which was probably not really more than an hour or two. We saw the gift of the blue crystals from Shadowperson to Queynt. Queynt had said they were small; he had showed them to us, and they were quite small, no larger around than the nail of my littlest finger. Lom remembered them as large, glowing, a sapphire radiance that the Shadowman could barely hold in his two cupped hands.

  “You were right, Jinian,” Peter told me, awe-stricken. “The world considered those blue crystals to be important. Terribly important.” We followed Queynt and the Shadowman as they went north to meet the Eesties.

  We saw the Eesties.

  And Peter had to hold me to keep me from running.

  Ever since my recent captivity in the cavern of the giants, I’d had this horror of the Oracle—Oracles, one or many. Every time I thought of the creature or his minions, my mouth went dry and the Dagger of Daggerhawk burned on my thigh as though it were made of hot coals. I thought of trickery and evil. I thought of pain and malice. Long ago in Chimmerdong I’d taken food from the creature’s hands, and it had pretended a mocking friendship while it toyed with me. More recently it had plotted my death. In Chimmerdong it had put a dreadful weapon in my hands; in the cavern of the giants, it had set that weapon outside my reach. In short, it had played with me, trifled with me, amused itself with me, and I hated it.

  So now, deep in the remembered dark of the Shadowmarches, two Eesties came out of the shade to stand before Vitior Vulpas Queynt, and I shuddered at the sight. They wore ribbons and precursive suggestions of that fanciful cloak the Oracle had worn, and they, too, had faces painted upon their upper ends. They were as like the Oracle as one thrilp is like another, each unique, perhaps, but still instantly recognizable as what it was.

  They didn’t see me fall apart in incipient hysterics. Peter did, catching me as I was about to flee, holding me while the shivering stopped. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “They—they look like the Oracle.”

  “They can’t both be the Oracle,” he said in a reasonable voice. “And unless they live forever—which I suppose is remotely possible—then it’s likely neither of them is.”

  “You—you don’t understand,” I stammered irrationally. “I don’t think it matters which individual was the Oracle. I think they all are, so to speak. All. Each. Like a hive of warnets. If one knows me, then all of them do.”

  “Perfectly possible,” he said calmly, “but not then.”

  Which was true. They might all know me now, whenever now was, but they had not known me then, a thousand years ago, when Queynt had walked upon the marches. For which, in that moment, I was extremely thankful.

  Queynt, on the other hand, had nothing to be thankful for. He had not told us they had trussed him up, which they had. And he had not told us what they had said to one another in their own language, because he hadn’t known. I, on the other hand, looking on, could understand every word, both when they talked to him and when they talked to one another. Which meant Lom had understood it, too.

  They began by accusing him of being of a filthy race that carried destruction with it. Queynt apologized for this but said many humans were trying to rise above their destructive natures. The Eesties twitted him then, comparing him to the Shadowpeople, whom they seemed to hold in contempt. Shadowpeople, who were no more than beasts, no more than animals, who aspired to “elevation,” who were “above themselves.”

  They wanted him to leave the world and take all mankind with him. So much was obvious. Through it all, Queynt was calm, fairly reasonable, polite. He kept trying to understand them. He didn’t hear what they said to one another, however.

  “How could Lom claim to find bao in this filth?”

  “How could we be so little thought of that these would be set beside us?”

  “This stinking thing.”

  “This animal.”

  “No better than a pombi.” “No more bao than a thrilpat.” “We should loose the shadow on them. . . .”

  The meaning conveyed by bao wouldn’t translate for me. It meant something like allness or wholeness or completion, used as a noun. Bao was both a thing and a quality. Something Lom had. Something they, the Eesties, had and we, humans, did not. Presumably. At least so they shouted as they tore at Queynt with insulting words.

  Back among the trees there was a great, curved shell, bright red, like the egg of some monstrous bird. Every now and then the Eesties would look nervously in that direction, as though something slept inside it. After a time, another one came out of the trees, larger than the first two, and then the three of them began to touch Queynt, fumble at him, look through his pouch and pack.

  When they found the blue crystals in his pouch, they went mad. For a moment I forgot they had not killed him in reality, they seemed so likely to do so here in memory. I started looking for a rock, reaching for the Dagger, anything at all to protect Queynt from their wrath.

  “How could he have this? We had them all!” they screamed.

  “How did it come by this? They were stored in the monsters’ cavern.” A wrathful bellow.

  “Traitors! One of the Brotherhood [Fraternity? Society? Conspiracy?] has betrayed ....

  All the time they were striking
him, working themselves up into a fury. Though I knew they had not killed him, still I began to worry that history might be playing itself wrongly. I reached for the Dagger.

  Then the cry came, enormous and aching. I understood it clearly. “Halt. Stop. Hold it right there.”

  The Eesties froze. Queynt was rolled into a ball on the ground, still tied, hands covering his neck. The cry came again. One of the three said, “Ganver,” in a strangled voice. They left Queynt, rolled away from him like naughty boys caught at mischief, running away, afraid to own what they had done, what they had almost done.

  And another Eesty came from the direction of the great egg. Much larger, this one, and with no paint or ribbons. Merely a great, starshaped thing with a suggestion of face at its center. No expression. I could not tell whether it was sad or angry. It leaned toward Queynt, moved about him, untied him. It cried again, a great, accusing cry with all the woes of the world laden in it, turned and looked directly into my eyes, itself eyeless, then rolled away toward the scarlet egg again.

  And Queynt, patted into consciousness by several of the Shadowpeople who had come from the trees, was on his feet, brushing himself off, looking pale and bruised but somehow indomitable.

  “It saw me,” I said to Peter. “That last Eesty, the one that yelled. It saw me.”

  “Jinian!” He was sympathetic, pat-patting my shoulder, thinking I was losing my control once more.

  “Really, Peter. Honestly. It saw me! Let’s follow it.” This was unlike me, but I was having a very strong hunch.

  “If we lose Queynt, we may not be able to find our way back to Betand, and from there to the desert, and from there-”

  “We’ll be able to find Betand. And if we didn’t, all we’d have to do is come back here and Queynt would show up here eventually. Again.” I wasn’t sure of this at all. This particular “event” didn’t feel like the others. It wasn’t nearly as discrete and repetitive. None of which mattered at the moment. “Please, Peter. Let’s follow it.”