Nothing much changed that week at Grand Beach. Michele left for Ohio to see her boyfriend amid universal lamentation—well, Bobby said that it would be quieter around the house. Heidi took over as censor of language on the ski boat. A horrendous July heat wave swept up from the Gulf of Mexico with humidity so thick you had to fight your way through it on the streets. The Cubs, astonishingly, continued to win. The papers began to carry news about the Bears, which meant summer was nearing an end; but I refused to read about them.
Anyway, I played with data analysis, talking to the DEC 20 at the University with my TRS-12, slept reasonably free from nightmares, suffered through my days of humiliation with the young skiers (one day in the rain, no less; weather doesn’t stop truly dedicated skiers), agreed with the others that the ski boat was quieter without Michele, but not that much quieter because, as the boys said, Heidi took up a lot of the slack. I also swam in my pool, read books about French deconstructionists, and slept peacefully each night with no dreams that I cared to remember.
Nathan, back from a presentable finish in the Mackinac race (second in class, fifth in fleet), phoned to asked about the Duke and Duchess game.
I told him my preliminary reactions and argued that he had to put in a menu-driven character-creation option. “You don’t have to insist that they create their characters beforehand, but it should be available for advanced players.”
“Duke and Duchess anyway.” I could hear him scribbling away at the other end of the line.
“And others if they want to be really advanced.”
“Right, once we introduce that patch it ought not to be hard to make it expandable. Especially on the 80386 generation. They are fabulous, four times as fast and twice as much ROM and RAM. With a coprocessor and a 50k hard disk, of course. State of the art.”
“’Til next year.”
“Change characters in the middle of the game?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“I mean suppose you make the Duke a, well, let’s say he’s kind of Celtic and he drinks a lot. But then halfway through the game you learn that he has an ascetic dimension of his personality and you want to add that too.”
“Why?” Despite the heat wave, I was shivering.
“Well, you yourself told me that you tried to create Maureen in The Cardinal Sins as evil and she resolutely insisted on being good. Most interesting character in the story, if you ask me.”
“And Melissa Jean Ryan in Rite of Spring starts out as a spoiled Stanford freshman and ends up as the Sherlock Holmes who upstages even the great Blackie Ryan.”
“Right. I haven’t read that yet.”
“You can build in a menu which enables a character to impose development on an author in the course of a game?”
“That’s a strange way of putting it, but theoretically I don’t see why not. You’d need more memory. Maybe we’d use it in an advanced version for those who have a fifty-megabyte disk.”
See what I mean? Pure genius.
“What about a character in a minor subplot who tries to intrude into a major subplot?”
“Wow! Hey, that’s exciting! I don’t know whether we can do it, but it’d really be state of the art. Let me talk to Tex.”
“You’d be approaching the real craft of fiction writing with that innovation.” I hesitated. “You might tell your programmer to read Mantissa and At Swim Two Birds.”
“At what?”
“It’s a weird Irish novel by an alcoholic Irish genius named Flann O’Brien. John Fowles in Mantissa sort of refers back to it.”
“Yeah.” He was scribbling away at the other end. “You did mention them when I brought the game over. You’ll be glad to know that we have an Irish programmer working on it. Named Shanahan.”
“Really.”
“How did your game end?”
“The Duke and the Duchess married and live happily after.”
“Romantic.”
“What else?”
“It’s over then?”
“Well, not quite. I’ve suspended it for a while.”
“After all this time? Wow! What a market! If you are hooked, what about ordinary people!”
Right, ordinary people.
After the conversation I wondered what was happening in the land on the other side of Planck’s Wall. Was B’Mella pregnant?
I wandered downstairs to ponder my Rube Goldberg link with the “adjoining” world or whatever it was. No, my job was done. They would live happily ever after. That was a foregone conclusion. Authors are not responsible for what happens to their characters after the stories are finished. That’s what John Gregory Dunne told me when I protested the ending of Dutch Shea Junior. My sister and I insisted that Dutch didn’t pull the trigger. Dunne said he thought Dutch did pull the trigger, but that as author his opinion about what happened after the end of the book was not more important than anyone else’s.
I rejected this categorically. My characters live on after a story is finished. Lawyer Eileen Kane from Patience of a Saint was appointed a federal judge the year after the story was supposed to end. I told my family and friends about this promotion for the green-eyed attorney. Some understood what I meant, others thought I’d flipped out.
“She’s not real. She’s just a character in your stories.”
“She is a character in my stories and she is real in that world.”
Moreover, since I am hopelessly in love with Eileen and her husband Red Kane doesn’t mind, not after what I did for them, she’ll be back, gorgeous in black judicial robes, in other stories.
So I was not violating my own principles. Yet it is one thing to keep in touch with what is happening in a character’s life and even to keep open the possibility of reentering their life at a later date, and quite another to return to the existing story to make sure that everything went well after the original hopeful but not totally happy ending.
The most an honest storyteller can promise is a hopeful ending. As Blackie Ryan once remarked, “‘They all live happily ever after’ means they only have three serious fights a week and refuse to talk to one another only one day a week.”
We had enough reason to think that was a likely future for ’Rau and ’Ella, didn’t we?
But was she pregnant?
That was more important for their happy ending than it was for most.
Could I have an impact on fertility in the other world? Wasn’t that taking my God function a little too seriously?
On the other hand Red and Eileen Kane did manage to start another baby—a belated but most welcome little Redmond Junior—on their second honeymoon in Grand Cayman. A storyteller can make a lot happen to his characters if he wants to.
But through a computer game in what might be a real world, somewhere else?
I had meddled enough.
And Norman’s programmer was a Shanahan, huh? Did s/he have an assistant named Furriskey?
One of the neighbors phoned to say that the Hagans had their first session with the family therapist and that it had not helped. Tom had moved out and Joan was seeing a divorce lawyer first thing in the morning. They both were blaming not the therapist, but me.
That’s what you get when you meddle in a small way, when you play God by indirection and by listening to people talk out their problems. You play God and you become a scapegoat.
What would happen if you played God in a big way and people messed up their lives anyway?
Shanahan and the jury vote on it and the razor’s the boy.
Or, if you’re safe from that fate because you’re immortal or because you live in another world, they’ll still blame you and rant against you for the rest of their life.
It’s not easy being God.
They had made their marriage bed—let them sleep in it. They were on their own. The rest was up to the Other Person.
Looking back on it with the wondrous wisdom which comes from hindsight, I can see that there were too many loose ends dangling where I thought the story had ended.
Another perfectly splendid Lake Michigan storm roared across from Chicago, shook the trees, rattled the windows, illumined the sky, drenched everything, and swept on towards South Bend trailing a wake of humidity-smashing coolness. I turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows wide. It would be a night for sleeping with a blanket.
No lightning struck my satellite disk. The Other Person was not ready to make my decisions for me.
I went to bed restless and uneasy. Was she pregnant? What had happened to Ranora? Had the clerical conspiracies continued? What, I thought, as I fell asleep, had become of Malvau and N’Rasia, about whom I’d almost forgotten?
I woke from a deep but anxious sleep to find someone in bed with me. Obviously a dream. Still, one is entitled to one’s comforts even in one’s dreams. So I pushed the other away.
And discovered in the act of pushing that the other was a woman. Now that showed bad taste on her part. I knew who it was before I turned on the light.
Her eyes fluttered open, she looked at me, gasped in horror and jumped out of the bed, hands crossed in front of her breasts. Only after she was standing, shaking with terror, did she glance down to see if she was wearing her short purple kilt.
She was.
“What are you doing in my bed?” she screamed.
“Look around, N’Rasia. Is this your chamber?”
“Oh no. It’s yours. You are in my dreams again. It is because I prayed so hard to you tonight.”
“You’re in my dream, or we wouldn’t be in my house.”
“This is your house?” She looked around. “It is very nice … may I have some of your wine?”
“You’ll get drunk again.”
“I promise I won’t, and I will clean the glasses too.”
“All right.” Baileys, always readily available in a dream, was there on my bedstand.
“Not that. The real wine, the one your other creatures drink.”
“Jameson’s.”
She nodded.
Well at least she hadn’t asked for the twelve-year special reserve. Or for my very limited supply of Bushmill’s Black Label.
So the Jameson’s bottle materialized where the Baileys had been and two old-fashioned tumblers replaced the cordial glasses. I poured her a modest shot, and a tiny sip for myself, because unlike my characters I don’t drink whiskey, not even with the “e” in it.
“With the frozen water, please,” she asked meekly, shivering from the winds that were coming through my open window.
“It is customary in our world to consume this wine straight up.”
“Straight up?” One arm ineffectually covering her breasts, she reached for the glass with the other.
“That means without the frozen water.”
She nodded, sipped the drink, made a terrible face, shut her eyes, and gulped.
“It is very powerful wine.” She licked her lips. “And it makes me feel very warm.”
“Not warm enough for you to stand there like that.” I found a Chicago Cubs jacket in my closet and handed it to her. “You’ll get a cramp in your arms standing that way. Put this on and sit down.”
She admired the color of the jacket, slipped it on, but did not at first fasten the buttons.
“Do you like me this way?”
“In purple and blue?”
“No. I am no longer slightly overweight. I was furious when you described me that way.”
“You were slightly overweight. I liked you that way too. I created you so of course I like you.”
“Love me?”
“Sure.”
“Love me more now that I am thin?”
“Love is love. You are an attractive woman.” No way you can win in this game of compliment soliciting, not even if you’re a creator. “Now you are even more attractive. And you can button up the jacket.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the boss and because you’d never make such a display of yourself in your own world.”
“I’m in your dream world now. And I don’t have any secrets from you.”
“A few more minutes and you’ll go into a guilt fit. You’re beautiful when you’re overtly provocative, but it’s not your style, except with your husband and then probably not enough. Anyway, button up.”
She did, halfway. “I will never be slightly overweight again,” she said fiercely. “I hate myself when I am fat.”
“You were never fat,” I insisted. Then, having learned some skills at the game over the years, I added, “Now you’re dazzling.”
“Good.” She sat on the chair behind my desk and filled the glass with Jameson’s, having somehow removed the bottle from my custody.
“Go easy on that stuff, it’s dangerous.”
“Of course. I am pleased you are pleased with me.”
Well, there was one way to end it: give her another injunction. “You’re just about perfect now, as I’m sure Malvau would agree.”
“He cannot keep his hands off me,” she boasted, half pleased and half angry.
“Understandably. But you should not lose any more weight. Then you would look gaunt.”
Did they have anorexics in that land? Was she the type?
“I will obey,” she said dutifully. “Even if you permitted me to be beaten by those terrible men and then forgot about me.”
“That was not my fault…”
“You were there and you let it happen.”
“I cannot prevent random accidents.”
“Certainly you can.”
“Look, ’Rasia,” I walked over to the desk, tilted her head back, and kissed her lips. “I love you. I created you, you seduced me, and I have fallen in love with you, a most improbable event, but it’s what has happened. I would protect you from the slightest harm if I could. I can’t eliminate all the evils in your land. Is that clear?”
She swallowed a big gulp of Jameson’s. “Yes.” Tears in her eyes. “Thank you for the kiss. I know I’m not worthy of it.”
Dear God in heaven, will the self-hatred ever stop?
“If you weren’t I wouldn’t have kissed you … You certainly fought those so-and-so’s fiercely that night.”
“So my husband says,” she smiled proudly. “I cannot believe it of myself.”
“You went after him pretty hot and heavy too, the night of the marriage of the Duke and the Duchess.”
She buried her face on my desk. “I am so ashamed. You have forgiven me for that?”
“The question is whether poor ’Vau has forgiven you.”
She straightened up wearily. “I suppose so. He seemed almost to enjoy the fight. I won, of course.”
“Doubtless.”
“He even seems proud that I fight. It is impossible.”
“Maybe there is some anger, deep down, because of the attack in the woods.”
“No, no.” She waved that away with a slightly tipsy gesture of her empty glass. “The child piped that away too.”
“She merely awakened you.”
“When you were losing interest in me and devoting all your time to B’Mella, she came to our pavilion and told me she would pipe away the anger. I did not realize I had any. It was so wonderful when she was finished.”
‘Nora with her pipe was turning into a medical resource.
“So what are your complaints this visit?”
“I want to go back to what I was.”
“To what you were when?”
“When I was a dull middle-aged matron, a shallow character in a minor subplot, perhaps even one her husband would leave for a woman who was younger and more vital.”
“My men don’t do that sort of thing.”
“All right. I still want you to change my part in the story.”
“Make you fat again?”
She scrunched down in her Cub jacket and laughed guiltily. Part of the laugh was the drink that had taken, but part of it was a new aspect of this ever-changing woman: a slightly bawdy, self-deprecating wit. “Everything but that. Can’t I choose?”
“You chose once. Anyway, even if I could rewrite the story and even if I would, if I kept the weight off you, your husband would still have a hard time not pawing you.”
“I want to change back,” she said stubbornly, filling her glass again. “I do not want to be who I am now.”
“Look, woman, you elbowed your way into my dreams, demanded a bigger part, told me, in effect, you wanted to be someone important. So on one day I made you an enticing lover, a gracious hostess, a subject for beautiful music, and a brave fighter. Now you’re complaining.”
“I am none of those things,” she said bitterly. “They think I am, but I am not.”
“Yes, you are. Unless those qualities were already in you in some way that maybe I didn’t even see, they never could have emerged in the story. It took the ilel to see you as you really are.”
“I don’t want to be that.”
“Too bad.”
She sighed. “My husband used to ignore me, now he adores me. I can do nothing wrong. Even when I am rude and shallow and nasty, he still thinks I am perfect. He will not leave me alone.”
“I thought you were fighting.”
“Of course, we’re fighting, stupid…” Hand to tipsy mouth in dismay. “I am so sorry…”
“You’re entitled to your feelings.”
“Well, we are fighting. We cannot live with each other in peace and we cannot live without each other. The fights are … unimportant. It is the endless adoration. I cannot stand it. I am merely an aging grandmother…”
“With a wonderful thin waistline and flat belly.”
“… with no depth, and no wisdom, and no great skills. I do not want the responsibility.”
“You have it, kid. Like it or not. I loved you before, but I love you more now. I even love your struggle. It delights me to see you fight against your new self. Keep it up. It makes a wonderful plot line.”
“Bastard,” she shouted.
She put down her glass, being careful not to spill any of the precious liquid—admirable frugality—and rushed across the room at me, pounding my chest with solid fists. Poor ’Vau, if this sort of thing happened every night. The attack ceased almost as soon as it began and she was sobbing in my arms.
Poor dear woman. But she got herself out on this limb, she belonged there and no way was she going to be given a chance to go back. I understood ’Vau’s attitude. Even her fury was a delight.
“You cannot possibly love me.” She disentangled herself and went back to her drink.
“If I didn’t love you, I’d zap you for that assault.”
“You’re as bad as my husband. He even admires my temper tantrums.”
“Understandably.”
“My children, my grandchildren, everyone—they expect me to be the woman in that God-condemned melody. I cannot do it, I cannot be her. I will not.”
“You can and you will.” I found that I was shaken by the experience of holding her in my arms. Small wonder. “The complaint, my beloved, is really that it’s hard and uncertain. You must try every day and you do not know from one day to the next what will happen with you or anyone else, especially Malvau, whom you must be driving out of his mind.”
“It is so hard in our land now. Everything is going wrong. He is under such strain. I am no help. He needs what he thinks I am, not what I really am.”
“You’re wasting your time. What I have written I have written.”
She poured herself another drink. “Did you stay for our orgy?”
“Of course not.”
“You should have. I was very good. Very.” She preened herself, but shakily.
“I can believe it.”
“Sex,” she began to lecture like an inebriated associate professor describing his doctoral dissertation to junior faculty at a cocktail party, “is comic. Anyone who doesn’t understand that,” a gesture dismissing them into Lake Michigan, “is a fool. There must be delicacy in it, but dignity is impossible. You understand? Impossible. My man is so dignified and important—his family background you know—it was difficult for him to give himself over to the comic indignity of sex. Well,” mildly lascivious smile, “I taught him to laugh when he is with me and now he is a much better lover, and a better politician too.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment.”
“Yes, I am quite good now.”
“Indeed. You want me to write that out of the story?”
“What!”
“You can’t pick and choose. If you want to go back to the person you were before you forced your way out of a minor subplot, then you will have to put on weight again, a suggestion to which you did not take kindly a few moments ago, and give up your newfound sexual prowess.”
“You wouldn’t dare.” She searched for fury but couldn’t quite remember where she had put it before her last drink.
“I was only pointing out the logic of your request.”
“You love me too much to do that to me.” She hiccuped with delicacy and dignity and returned to her theme. “I am much better than that fool.”
“What fool?”
“You know.” She waved a hand vaguely. “The frigid one on your side. I tell her what to do. She will not listen.”
“You talk to Joan?”
“Joan? Yes, what a strange name. J’Oan? She is a fool.”
“How do you talk to her?”
The Jameson’s was having its full effect. “Hmmn … Oh, in dreams, how else? I have very good dreams with her. She will not listen to me, however.”
“Your dreams or her dreams?”
“You should know, I don’t.” She swayed again. “I do not feel very well.”
“Small wonder. You tell her to have an orgy with her husband?”
“Oh no.” She tried an expression of exaggerated surprise. “Not yet. Well…” Impish grin, worthy of an ilel, “I give little hints.”
“So you should have one with your husband again.”
“No!” Instantly she was completely sober. “I will not give myself over to his lust like that ever again.”
“His lust?”
“Of course.”
“You were just telling me how good you were.”
“I was … now I am very sick. Will I die?”
“Hardly. Just too much of the creature taken. Before you pass out, let me warn you that I’ll not back down one bit. You’re terribly appealing when you plead with me. I like you that way. I love you when you struggle, so you’re going to have to keep on with your struggle. And I won’t guarantee the outcome because that would take the struggle away. Understand?”
She slumped over against my desk. “I knew you’d say that … where can I be very, very sick?”
I managed to get her to the bathroom, where she was very sick indeed and at great length. Then I forced her into the shower, wrapped her in a terry robe, and mostly carried her to a bed in one of the guest rooms.
“Silly stupid little cow,” she murmured.
“You’ll be all right.”
“I will do another orgy,” the words were now so slurred that I could barely make them out. “If you want.”
“Not what I want; what you and he want.”
“He wants. All the time.”
“You don’t?”
“Afraid, always afraid of everything.” I pulled a light blanket over her. Even in the dream world, you can be cold. “Still love me?”
“Still love you.”
She looked likely to make a comparison with someone else and then, drunk or not, thought better of it. “Kiss me again?”
So I kissed her again, tucked her in, and turned off the light.
Wow, as Nathan would say.
John Fowles complains about how impossible it is to avoid fornication with your woman characters. Maybe it’s my different background and life history, but I love them too much to take advantage of them. They are powerlessly dependent on you for their being, their life, their freedom. Such vulnerability generates love, indeed, enormous love, but also such respect that you feel (well, I feel) like their father or mother. Or maybe both.
Anyway, I cleaned up the bathroom, brought the empty Jameson’s bottle downstairs, cleaned my old-fashioned tumblers and put them away, and climbed back up to bed. It had been an exhausting dream, if that’s what it was.
No rest for the wicked that night, however. Kaila, ashen-faced in his usual black gown with silver trim, was waiting for me. He was reading Wendy’s other book Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, but with the inattention of a man who reads to keep other concerns off his mind.
“Well, this is my lucky night.” My sigh sounded exactly like that of Blackie Ryan. “Two of you in one dream.”
“There is someone else? Who?” He jumped up.
“Sorry, only N’Rasia.”
“Only is not the right word. Where is she? May I see her?”
Why not?
“If it is a dream,” he seemed puzzled, “why is she asleep?”
“Aren’t we all, presumably?”
“Yes, but…”
“A bit too much of the creature taken.”
“Huh?”
“Too much of our strong wine.”
“Ah.” He stroked her face lightly. “A truly superb woman. One of your finer creatures. You must be very proud of her.”
“I am.”
“No one would have suspected what was within her.” His hand rested on her cheek. “Not until you told the ilel to search into her soul.”
“All I told her was make up a tune. Aren’t you a little young for N’Rasia?”
“No one is too young or too old for such a woman.” He shook his head sadly. “Don’t worry. I would not hurt her.”
“You’d better not.”
“What sense is there in it all?” His hand lingered on ’Rasia’s face. “This glorious creature endures terrible agonies in her transformation and now she will likely be destroyed with the rest of us. Would it not be better to have left her as she was? Why force the change on her for so brief a time?”
“Moments of grace,” I was echoing Shags’s theology, I think, “are worth centuries. Moreover, she forced the change on me. Finally, no one is going to destroy her if I can help it.”
He looked at me oddly. I turned off the light and we went back to my office.
“What’s your problem tonight?” I beat him to my chair. “Do you want a drink?”
“I would end up in another bed, I fear.”
“All over between you and G’Ranne?”
“Oh yes. She was very grateful and would care for me always.” He seemed uninterested in the subject. “I taught her so much about love. But we were not meant for one another. The act of love seemed a dead metaphor for love itself. You understand, surely?”
“Well, I won’t debate about it, but Robert Graves has an ending that belies the beginning of that poem.” And how did he know Robert Graves? “I thought you two might be well matched. She’s a lot more than the ice maiden I first took her to be.”
“Oh yes.” He smiled mechanically. “She will do very well, even with men. If anyone lives in our land.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Why did you leave?” His chin slumped on his chest. “The story was not finished.”
“Certainly it’s finished. I can’t be expected to stay around forever. I told my tale, now it’s up to the Other Person to assume proper responsibility.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“The Duke and the Duchess are married and they must live happily ever after on their own. So must all of you. As for you and the ilel…”
“That’s a childish dream long abandoned.” He dismissed my Ranora with a crisp movement of his hand. “I have matured greatly since then. It was a foolish request,” he smiled wanly, “for which I apologize. Tonight I am much more serious. We cannot live happily ever after, even in the terms of your obstreperous Blackie Ryan, unless you return.”
“Why?”
“I do not fully understand. I simply know that for some reason you have abandoned us in many ways and we will soon perish. All of us, our land, everything.”
“What has gone wrong?”
“I am not permitted to tell you.”
“That’s ridiculous. Is the Duchess pregnant? Where is the ilel?”
“I don’t know why I can’t answer questions. I do not make the rules. You made them … or whoever put you in charge. You can only know what is happening when you are with us. These … these meetings, I use the only word I can find, these dreams which are more than dreams, are only hints.”
“Nathan’s game…” I said half to myself. “You access them only through the port.”
“Yet,” he continued, a scholar puzzled by a problem even when he faced disaster, “I do not understand them either. Why am I in the dreams? Why is she, admirable woman that she is or has become or however she is to be described?”
“Beats me.”
“We need you,” he pleaded desperately. “Please come back while there is still time.”
I would have argued the point with him, but he began to fade out. Or rather this time I began to fade out. Everything seemed black for a long time and then I woke up to a crisp summer morning, whitecaps on the lake, a brisk breeze blowing out of the northeast, sailboats already dancing along the shore, and cruisers moving northward. We’d have a few such perfect days and then the humidity would return.
No second dream of G’Ranne?
The first one wasn’t a dream; it was an eruption of my preconscious during an altered state of consciousness induced by self-hypnosis. Dreams you can suppress. Did she come to me in a dream that night, her smile of love a plea for my return with no pressure and no demands? Did I repress the dream?
Had I been repressing dreams about her all my life? Was she a sacrament of God for me instead of the other way around?
What can I tell you?
Anyway, a more forceful appeal was still to come.
I could find no trace of my dream visitors, not even a hint that anyone had slept in the perfectly made bed in the guest bedroom.
They were dream creatures surely. Liquor could only appear, disappear, and reappear that way in dreams. They were different from other dream creatures, however, in that they were far more rational in their conversations with me, save for their unshakable conviction that I was a God or possibly the Lord Our God. They were also more vivid. Who can remember dream conversations the way I remembered my dialogues with them?
Possibly, I surmised, returning even more exhausted than usual from my ski adventures, they represented a different altered state of consciousness, related to dreams but bridging the boundaries between different cosmoi and occurring only to those who were somehow involved in crossing the boundaries through a temporary port.
I wasn’t sure what that explanation meant since it was mostly academic happy talk, but it seemed satisfying for the moment. Then I realized that N’Rasia claimed to have been dream linked with Joan Hagan. If any of this was true …
If my recreated N’Rasia was filling Joan Hagan’s head with erotic images, the links couldn’t be all bad could they?
Why was I so hesitant about resuming the game?
Ever play with a Ouija board? It’s fun at first, a harmless game. Jokes, suggestive remarks, little digs at one another. Then something or someone else seems to take control of the game, something powerful and angry and frightening. If you’re smart you stop. Maybe it’s something deep down inside yourself or one of the other players, but it’s still terrifying and who needs it? Especially since there is a hint that if you keep fooling around with the darn thing, it might just take over your life.
That’s the way I was beginning to feel about Nathan’s God Game.
Read some of the literature about those who become deeply involved in psychic research. There’s a strong propensity for them to freak out. Permanently.
To be blunt about it, I was scared. I was afraid of the power the God Game gave me. I wasn’t sure what it might do to me. I didn’t want any more of that control of people’s lives. They were not, at least probably not, characters in one of my stories but real people. I did not want to play games with the destiny of real people.
To be fair to the revised game, the one you can buy at your local software store, there is no evidence that my experience has been any more than an isolated and non replicated event. We were not able to replicate it on the experimental version either, no matter how hard we tried.
Still, well, maybe some of the players have experienced the same phenomenon and are afraid to report it. One of the purposes of this book is to assure such players that it has happened before and that it can be benign.
From which it does not follow, I hasten to add, that it is inevitably and always benign.
Now for the most scary part. Like totally scary.
Ed McKenna and Mike Rochford came over that evening for supper and for a discussion of the next step in the opera Ed and I were writing. I made my fruit salad, which is my sole culinary accomplishment but more than presentable, and served some of the better local Tabor Hill wine. It was a sober gathering because we had serious work to accomplish.
I stress these points, because it is necessary to report that I was wide awake when the call came, there were people present when I took the call, and they can testify to my end of the conversation, which they thought was a bit odd.
The phone rang just as I was serving the raspberry tea. A collect call for anyone from “Michele.”
“Hi,” I said cheerfully, “how’s Ohio?”
“I can’t come back,” she said grimly, “unless you come back.”
“What?”
“You have to come back first.”
“I don’t have to come back anywhere, Michele. I’m in Grand Beach. You’re in Ohio. You’ll be back this weekend to ski with us. What’s wrong with you?”
“That’s totally not right. Don’t be an airhead. Do what you’re supposed to do, then I can come back and we’ll make everything OK again.”
“This is Michele?”
“Of course it is. Who else would it be, anyway?”
“Not … not Ranora?”
Silence. Then like in a fog, “Who’s Ranora?”
“An ilel.”
“A what?”
“Never mind. You’re coming home from Ohio this weekend, right?”
“Ohio? Where’s that?”
“You’re visiting Rick?”
“Who?”
Oh, oh.
“Where are you calling from, Michele?”
“You have to come back, you totally have to come back. We won’t even have a hopeful ending unless you’re here to help me. Will you, please? Before it’s too late?”
Was she drinking? No, Michele doesn’t drink and she doesn’t do drugs.
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s like really excellent. I have to go, I’m totally cashed. Thanks. Bye.”
“A strange conversation,” Mike said tentatively. “Ranora is an odd name.”
“Remember when and where you heard it.”
I kept remarkably cool for the rest of their visit and talked rationally and competently about our opera.
My mind, however, was racing. The ilel, somehow, had skipped over Max Planck’s Wall and was communicating to me through Michele.
Moreover she had calmly informed me that she needed me to finish her plans. Not that I needed her. And insisted that I’d better hurry.
OK. There were some loose ends that needed to be tidied up. We’d finish the game this time for good and then cut the link, close the port, resurface Planck’s Wall.
Right?
Right.