The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Ganver,” he said. “Mavin told me about Ganver. Or wrote about it, rather. She could never talk about it.”

  “I know. She showed me what she’d written. It was Ganver’s bone that stopped the Ghoul plague in Pfarb Durim. And Mavin found him in a scarlet egg, so she said. Peter, we have to try.”

  “I thought you didn’t like Eesties!”

  “I don’t like the Oracle kind. The maskers. The dressed-up ones, all full of false flourishes. One of them called themselves a—a . . .” I tried to find a human word for it. All I could come up with was “Brotherhood,” which wasn’t very close to the actual meaning. “They called themselves a ‘Brotherhood,’ Peter. But Ganver isn’t part of that. Couldn’t you feel it?”

  “No,” he said as he always did to such questions about what he could feel or not feel. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Guiding ourselves by that flash of brilliant color, we set off through the trees. When we came to the curving wall, both of us stood there, mouths open. It was huge. Bright. Scarlet as blood. Smooth as stone. Crystalline. Very much like the monuments outside Pfarb Durim, so Mavin had written. We circled it, warily, finding no opening at all. “Damn,” I whined. “We can’t get in!”

  “I don’t know why not,” said Peter, leaning himself against the egg and pushing. “It’s only a memory.” He went on pushing, whistling between his teeth. I stared at him for a moment, then leaned beside him, pushing along with him. At first it was hard, stony. Gradually it changed. It felt like pushing the side of a monstrous d’bor. Rubbery.

  Not immovable, not impenetrable, merely very, very resistant. When we were half-buried in the wall, I began to fear we might end up smothered inside it. Peter went on whistling. Then we fell through. “See,” he said in a cheerful voice as he picked himself up. “It yields to persistence.”

  I had a feeling I would learn to hate that phrase.

  The inside of the egg was as Mavin had described it. Many starshaped maintainers bustling about, polishing pedestals, faceting gravel in the walk, doing other things that I found mysterious and totally unfamiliar. The whirling flowers were there; the grass that cried; the gravel that repeated, “What, what,” just as Mavin had said. Even the tall pedestals were there at the end of the walk, but the first one, on which Ganver should have rested in an enigmatic red globe, was empty.

  We were not totally surprised when the voice addressed us from behind. “You followed me,” it said accusingly. We turned, stepping back involuntarily. This Eesty was very large, larger than it had seemed when assisting Queynt. It was also very troubled. The trouble was in the tone of its voice, in the way it stood before us, almost trembling. The vague facelike structure at its center showed nothing. Its voice did not come from there. It came from the creature itself, needing no lung, no mouth, no tongue.

  “Yes,” I replied, keeping it simple. “We followed you. We need you.”

  “How could you come here, into our dreams, our memories? Into our timeless place from which all times are spun? Is there no place you cannot come, you intruders, vandals, you who usurped our children’s heritage? Oh, humans, go away from here.”

  I would have sworn it was crying, such a tragic weeping it put me off and I could not answer.

  I heard the misery, but Peter didn’t. “We can’t,” he said. “My mother came to you. You helped her. Now I have come to you and you must help me. You must help me help the world you live in.”

  “Why must I?” it cried. “We have put that all away. We have let it go. Let come what will come!”

  For some reason this made me furiously angry. “Oh, very nice,” I snarled. “Cause this great tragedy, this death of a world, the world which bore you and nurtured you, and then simply turn your back. Go off into some dream dimension of your own. Selfish. Horrid. You’re responsible for this, Ganver. Your people did it. Your people, those Oracles, those beribboned mischief makers. They’re killing Lom. They are the ones who are killing Lom’s bao!” I still didn’t know what the word meant, but it was the right word to use. Before us the Eesty stiffened, became rigid, began to shake, shook for a time that seemed endless before crying out a sound.

  Around us the world trembled. The great egg quivered. I felt it roll. The sky cracked, broke, and blue distance showed through rents in the scarlet shell. Black lightning struck from the blue sky. A feeling like hard smoke went through me. A sound that tasted of` rotten flesh startled the air, and my skin felt sour, acid.

  We were standing in the forest. The egg was gone, all its parts and contents gone, there was only the giant Easty there, still as the light of a distant lamp, cold and far.

  “You have accused me of complicity,” it said in a chill, tiny voice. “You have accused Ganver.” There was a threat in that voice, a threat and a wounded pride so deep and massive it made me tremble, and I felt Peter’s hand shake a little in mine. That he had felt.

  Never mind. We had to go on. We had come too far not to.

  “We have accused you of betraying this world,” I said, struggling to keep the tremor out of my voice. “Of killing your parent.”

  Silence. Silence full of danger. In my hand, Peter’s fingers changed, became covered with horn. He was preparing to Shift, to defend himself and me if need be. The moment stretched into an endless, breathless age.

  “You need not think of weapons,” it said at last, contemptuously. “Ganver does not retaliate against infants, against children, against sillybeings.” It was thinking of small chattering birds, of tree rats in their nests. All of that was implicit in its voice.

  “Silly-beings may have more good sense in their simplicity than great minds in their pride.” I don’t know where the words came from. Out of something Murzy had said, I think. Or perhaps one of Cat Candleshy’s scholarly epigrams. Whatever their source, these words were the key. The word “pride” was the key.

  “You have accused. Among our people, we treat accusation seriously. We are accused seldom. Never by . . . others.” It meant inferiors. I was depressed. Mavin’s account of her meeting with Ganver had led me to expect something more understanding and godlike than this. It went on, “If you accuse, then you must judge.”

  “You let your accusers be your judges?” Peter, astounded.

  “Who else should be satisfied?” it asked. “If one’s accusers cannot be satisfied, what is justice?”

  “One’s accuser might be mad,” Peter suggested, very unwisely I thought, considering where we were. “Mad, and incapable of being satisfied.”

  This stopped it, but only for a moment. “We would deal otherwise with defective creatures,” it said very softly. “Are you defective?”

  “I believe we are not,” said Peter.”As a matter of fact, we may be far less defective than many.”

  “Of your kind,” it said. There was no sneer in its voice, but the words carried enough to shut Peter up.

  “How must we judge?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

  “You must see, experience, be one with the events which occurred. You must know. Feel. Only then can you judge.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Thuswise,” it said.

  It began to spin, spin and sing, words I could not afterward remember. It spun, and as it did, so did I, and Peter, both, up on our toes, spinning like Dervishes.

  “How?” I cried. “How?”

  “Can a human Dervish do anything which an Eesty cannot? They who were taught by us and then sought to usurp our functions? Can they do what we cannot?” There was anger there, and hurt. Even if I’d been able, I would not have pursued the subject, and I was not able. Dervishes could change the shapes and natures of other beings. I knew that. Mavin had said so. Evidently Eesties could do the same, for we were being spun, Peter and I, into Eesties, small copies of the great Eesty before us, small creatures otherwise identical to Great Ganver, who whirled and sang.

  “We go,” it cried, and we rolled away, spun away, sometimes one and sometimes the other, upon a roa
d that only Ganver could see. Scenes and events flickered by. I saw mountains in flame, heard seas in retreat, tasted monstrous creatures engaged in battle. Or was it a game? A dance? They fled at the corner of my—eyes? At the edge of my perception, rather. I still don’t know how Eesties see or hear or speak. Peter says the organs are spread all across the skin, that the creature senses the world with all of itself. So be it, however it was, that is the way it was for me. Time sped by, space sped by, I knew we were still in the Maze, still in the memory of Lom, and still in that place when we stopped at last.

  At the edge of a city.

  We stood upon our points at the top of a little hill, green with grass and decorated with flowers. Each group of blossoms had arranged itself, pink against deeper rose, blue against white, lower blooms at the outer edges, higher blooms to the center, all against a bush of glowing green. A perfection that made one’s breath stick in the throat. I had no throat, but the feeling was the same. A kind of hesitation in the pulse; an inner voice crying, “Look at me.”

  The white road beneath us went down into the city, became a spider’s web of roads running out in every direction. The city itself—I thought for a moment it was Pfarb Durim. Then I realized it couldn’t be. There was no cliff edge to the west of it. There were no walls. Only the shape of the doors and the style of the buildings had made me think of Pfarb Durim. That and the feeling of it, the feeling of elder times, of eternal stones, of history going back and back beyond any individual memory. Old, this city. Old, and as beautiful as the flowers upon the hill.

  “Look at me,” said the garden walls, carved and decorated with tiles, topped with graceful crenellations. “Look at me,” the towers calling, slender and tall as trees, girdled with mosaic brilliance. “Here,” the buildings directed, rising on colonnades of arches, making a welcoming shade at their edges. “Here.”

  And at the center of the city one tower higher than all the rest. It made me hurt to look at it, so tall it was and so perfect. White as milk, pure, undecorated except by its own perfect lines. At the top it rounded softly above a row of pointed arches opening into some high, secret room.

  It was dawn in this place. A brightness lay beneath the eastern rim of the world.

  “Listen, “ whispered Ganver. A bell in the tower rang.

  No. No. This was not a bell. The Bell in the Tower rang.

  The sound came from it like a color, not loudly, not vividly, softly as a flute sound, pure, pervasive, running out like a hue to stain the city and the hill on which we stood, out beyond us to the forests and the mountains, and beyond, to the edges of the world, until all within the world heard the sound, bathed in the color of the Bell. The Daylight Bell, painting the world. Within me something woke, stirred, looked around at the world with a feeling of enormous recognition, something there, within, which I had never recognized before. Beside me, Peter sighed, and I knew that within him, too, the wakening had come. From a door low in the beautiful Tower flew ambient flakes of light, settling onto every surface, every creature, on me, on all of us, and we glowed in that instant like angels.

  “Listen,” whispered Ganver.

  From the far northern reaches a sound came back, an echo, a resonance, soft as the first and as pure, slightly dissonant, pushing the color back from the north, past us upon the hill, into the city once more to leave it as it had been, and with it went the flakes of light to enter the tower once more. And at that instant, the first ray of the sun struck the Tower to shine, ivory gleaming, pure and trembling.

  “The Shadowbell,” I sighed, peering into the north, from which that second sound had come. “Shadowbell rings in the dark, Daylight Bell the dawn. In the towers hang the bells, now the Tower’s gone. . . .” But it was not gone in this time, not in this memory. Here, in the mind of Lom, the Tower still stood and the bells still rang. . . .

  And I stopped, distracted by a flood of recognition. I knew where I was! The line of hills was totally familiar. The way the land folded, the way the forest ran down into the valleys, the buildings before me in the city. I had seen them before; not as they were here, tall and beautiful, but as they had become: tumbled; broken.

  I had seen them not far from Stoneflight Demesne in the ruined city of the Old South Road, the city of the blind runners. It was here the Daylight Tower had stood, here the Daylight Bell had rung. Here. There. Here in memory. There in reality. I wanted to cry.

  “Come,” said Ganver.

  We went down into the city.

  I have had trouble describing that city. Among the skilled pawns there are musicians, singers, writers of tales. Some among them are called poets, and it is they who write lyrics for the singers, epics for chanting at banquets, or merely beautiful words to express things for which ordinary language is insufficient. I am no poet. I longed then for a poet, for someone to put words to what we saw. I have written these words over and over, trying to say what it was like. Any I write are not good enough. You must stretch beyond them. You must bring poet’s feeling to them, knowing the words are not enough in themselves.

  I had been in cities. Not many, true, but some. I was in Schooltown when I was young. And in Xammer, of course. And in our travels we had seen other cities and towns, all of them full of people and commerce of one kind or another. And in every city there is a feeling of—you see, here is where the words are hard for me—a feeling of irritation. Oh, it may not be great. But there is the need to step aside from another’s way and the need to avoid being bumped by or bumping others. People move without regard for one another sometimes, or even mistakenly in the belief they are regarding others. There are bruises and confrontations, and small itches of annoyance.

  There are hard places in cities. Places where cold winds flick past hard stone to catch one’s clothing and blow gritty dust into one’s eyes. Places where sound hits stone and reverberates more loudly than is comfortable. There are other noises, too, calls of vendors and shrieks of children, the scream of ungreased wheels, the rattle of wagons and pound of hooves. Cacophony, one might say. Not altogether unpleasant, most times. Sometimes unbearable.

  There is nastiness underfoot sometimes as well. Things spilled or fallen and left to rot. There is often a smell of decay. Of drains. Sometimes there is such crowding that there is irritation, and this makes fear or anger; and following fear comes meetings of councils to make regulations; and following regulations is further irritation at the laws that are made.

  Or dwellings. Consider dwellings. They become dirty and cluttered and hard to clean. There are animals that nest in corners and walls, and the animals harbor vermin that bite. And buildings make an interior darkness, a loss of sun and light. Stairs twist upon themselves in tangled steep ascents.

  Now imagine a city in which none of these things happens. A city in which the wind funnels away from the street, leaving only pleasant warmth behind. A city in which every room is light and airy, in which no vermin dwell. A city in which movement flows like water, with no eddies except purposeful ones, in which hard sounds are muted and pleasant sounds transmitted, in which the stones are as clean as grass and every wall sparkles with reflected light.

  Imagine a city in which one might hear either laughter and joy or tears of grief, but never the disquiet of anger. A city in which one might find music or quiet, as one chose, in which one might rejoice or sorrow at remembrance of friends lost, but in which even the sorrow had a sweetness.

  Imagine a city of angels. Imagine the city of the Daylight Tower. You will have to imagine it. I cannot describe it, even though we were in

  We lived there for some time, Ganver, Peter, and I. We ate there, getting fruits and edible plants from the vendors, drinking from the fountains. We went to concerts. We went to exhibitions of art and dance. The various creatures of Lom do dance, beautifully, and we saw some of those dances. Shadowpeople perched on the walls and sang. Eesties were everywhere. Other creatures came into the city sometimes, sat upon their hind legs and asked the vendors for fruit, and were given fr
uit or nuts or whatever they liked. There was no medium of exchange. All seemed to be carefully balanced, enough of everything but not too much. And each morning, just before dawn, the Daylight Bell rang in the Tower and everyone listened while the far, plangent sound of the Shadowbell returned. And each evening from the far north came the sound of the Shadowbell again, and a flight of shadows coming over the city like black birds, wanting to fall upon us. Then the Daylight Bell resonated to that distant sound with a pure tone of its own, and the shadows fled. Every morning light and dark. Every evening dark and light. A rhythm, a balance. “Tha one bell, tha two bell, that cannot ring alone.” So Murzy had said, long and long ago.

  And after a time in the city, we went one morning to the Temple at the base of the Daylight Tower, through the open portals of that place, into the shadowed solemnity within. A silver lamp stood on a high pedestal, lighting the place, and I knew it was from this lamp that the light came each morning at dawn and to this lamp the light returned when the Shadowbell rang. On another pedestal lay an open book, and from this book a choir of Shadowpeople sang, their voices as clear as the Bell itself. On the tessellated pave was a pool—oh, so familiar to me. A pool like the one where I had been initiated in the Citadel of the Sevens, glowing, running with light and shadow. It was surrounded by a low curb. Around the pool were joyfully solemn Eesties, who dipped long silver spoons into the ambient liquid and drew forth gleaming crystals to lay them upon the curb. Each of us Eesties gathered there ate one of the crystals and then spun our way out upon the northern road to carry the will of Lom, which the crystals had conveyed.

  We were not compelled to do so. Even as we were whirling along the northern road, busy as flood-chucks with our messages to every creature in the world, I realized that we were not compelled to carry those messages. We did it because we wanted to. It was good to do, and pleasurable, and right. We had felt that way before ever taking the crystals from the curb of the pool. We went on feeling that way. It was the Eesty feeling, the Lom feeling, the feeling of oneness. Bao.