15

The Feast of the Four Moons

CREATE HUGE RAINSTORM, I told the 286, hoping that there was finally enough moisture somewhere in the world.

EXECUTING.

Well, it didn’t say no.

HURRY UP, I insisted.

TIME REQUIRED.

HOW MUCH TIME REQUIRED? I snapped back stubbornly.

CANNOT ESTIMATE.

On the horizon of my screen, a cloud appeared, then another. Like a storm over Lake Michigan.

Later in the day, the clergy found Malvau and N’Rasia, who were packing up after their night of fun and games. Both of them fought like wild animals. Three of the priests finally immobilized ’Vau while another one beat him unconscious. ’Rasia dove into the lake and swam underwater beyond their reach.

“She is unimportant,” said the leader of the squad. “Do not bother with her.”

You may live to regret that decision, I thought. But what could one, admittedly attractive, grandmother do against a whole civilization gone mad?

Back in the meadow, glaring balefully at the mob of peasants, the ilel stood guard at the altar like a widow at an Irish wake. For much of the afternoon it was a standoff; they were too frightened to risk the supernatural furies at her disposal, and she did not waver either from the glare of the sunlight or from the threatening calls from the crowd. The sun was soon partially covered by a thin haze as clouds began to build up behind the high mountains on the sunset side of the country, giant, foreboding thunderheads. The mob pointed at the clouds and shouted enthusiastically. The gods, they seemed to think, would reward them with rain soon after the offering was finished.

You are in for a big surprise, guys, if this God has anything to say about it.

I was now totally converted to a God of fury and wrath. I would zap them all if I had to, even if I didn’t have to, just for the pure hell of it. Their malice called to heaven, that is to me, for vengeance.

I’d delete the lot of them.

It grew darker as the afternoon continued, a tornado sky, the kind which when I was a boy made me wonder whether the end of the world was at hand. I thought about that. Before I was finished, the end of their world might be at hand. Obliterate the whole miserable lot of them.

A squad of the chaingang-fugitive clergy showed up and ringed the platform and its fierce little guardian. She pointed a warning finger at them and they stumbled back a few paces but kept their circle tight. When I did my zapping, anyone who laid a finger on her would be the first to go.

In the distance a few idle, tentative shreds of lightning danced along the top of the tallest mountain. A shiver ran through the mob. You’d better be scared, guys, you haven’t seen anything yet. Wait till I work havoc among the cedar trees, if you have any cedar trees in this miserable world.

As I was expecting, the Cardinal and the Troll showed up with a splendidly uniformed guard of priests in maroon and white. A coup was taking place. After they had disposed of Lenrau, B’Mella and her unborn child would be disposed of quietly, and the clergy would set up their own neat profitable little Ayatollah theocracy from which the Lord Our God, who apparently didn’t require priests in this world, would be properly excluded.

Well, you’re all in for a little surprise. Mess with me, will you? Just wait till my storm gets up a proper head of steam.

If either Lenrau or B’Mella were functioning properly, they would have seen this coup coming and headed it off, but they were both tied up in knots with their foolish emotional problems. The only barrier now was the brave little teenager, pointing her finger of doom at the Cardinal.

And an unarmed middle-aged woman, soaking wet, somewhere in the forest.

The baddies had too much invested in their coup to be slowed down by such a frail and weaponless obstacle as Ranora. The Cardinal gave an order. A squad of his thugs, as nervous as cops around a cornered hijacker, crept up the stairs to the top of the platform and grabbed her. She did not come quietly. Standing her ground, she kicked the first one in the groin, hacked at the neck of the second, and then went down under an avalanche of sweating, grunting, punching hoods. A cry of shrill terror raced through the mob. What happens to those guilty of sacrilege?

MASSIVE LIGHTNING, I told my 286.

Four or five streaks of nasty blue light cut across the black sky. Mess with my messenger, will they?

The spectacular display saved poor Ranora for the time being. She would have been raped and murdered on the spot if the priests themselves had not been quite so superstitious. The Cardinal looked like he was about to order her death, and then hesitated. I’m sure that the rumbling thunder didn’t scare him. But he did not want to push his men too far yet. Kill the Duke, then the Duchess, then cut the throat of this obnoxious little brat. Still kicking and screaming, she was carried off to the maroon pavilion of the high priest. Her cloak was dragged off Lenrau’s silent, motionless body; it didn’t matter anymore; there was not enough sun to burn him.

I called on the machine for more donner and blitzen, just to warn them that I didn’t want her hurt in that pavilion.

There was enough electricity in the air by the time it grew dark for me to unleash a good sized storm; however, I wanted the biggest downpour in their meteorological history, if they had such a history. Now I was thinking coolly and clearly, improving every minute at the God Game (the Other Person already had an eternity of practice). No more hasty and ineffective uses of power.

Timing, I figured, was of the essence of being God, especially since you had more of it than anyone else. I accessed the Cardinal’s pavilion to make certain that no one was hurting my teenager. They had her gagged and strapped down and her shift was in tatters, but no one was taking the risk of coming too close to her. As long as she was in no immediate danger, I would prolong my intervention till the last possible moment when everyone was on site and my storm had built up a maximum head of steam; I also wanted to give B’Mella a chance to redeem herself. If Ranora was at risk, however, all bets were off. She was the only one in the whole place I still liked. She had prior claim on my power. Maybe like all the others she was a product of my own preconsciousness, but she was part of the preconscious which produced my favorite people.

The evening dragged on into night, lightning slicing across the sky, thunder rumbling threateningly, the priests and the increasing masses of people chanting antiphonally in the archaic language which had been used at the wedding, reminding me of the Latin office for the dead in Gregorian chant.

Finally the Duchess appeared, along with Linco, Malvau, G’Ranne, and Kaila, all bound, and Ranora bound and gagged. The Cardinal was planning to wipe out all his enemies at one fell swoop. The mobs of people who were now jammed into the plain were intoxicated with drink and the self-hypnotic chants. Kill everyone now and begin a new era.

My heart sank when I saw B’Mella. She looked sick, exhausted, depressed, and spaced out. Someone had slipped her a mickey. Perhaps she thought that at the last minute she could turn away the destructiveness of her revenge. Now they had taken the power of choice away from her. She had sown the winds of vengeance and had been deprived of the power to stop the whirlwinds from reaping that vengeance for her. One of the thugs half pushed, half helped her up the stairs to where her husband’s bound body lay, seemingly unconscious, on its rough altar of sacrifice.

In the old fantasy stories it’s the girl who is saved from sacrifice at the last minute. Reverse scenario, except the woman had been drugged, first by her own pernicious hatred and now by some mind-bending narcotic.

SAVE DUKE, I typed in after pressing her function key.

She stirred listlessly, as though she heard but was not interested or could not comprehend.

OK. We do plan B.

BEGIN BIG STORM, I ordered the PC.

ERROR, ERROR, it replied.

NATURE ERROR?

DOWNPOUR ORDERED NOT READY.

HOW SOON?

CANNOT ESTIMATE.

OK, Captain Kirk, what now?

I had cut it too closely. God or not, I could not produce a downpour before the elements were ready, lots of noise and light, yes, but these only confirmed the priests’ version of things: as soon as you kill the Duke, there will be rain. I was playing the Cardinal’s game.

His eyes calculating shrewdly, he studied the sky. He would not cut it too fine. Kill off the Duke and maybe some of the others for good measure and then wait till the storm, my storm, began.

He gave a signal. The choir of priests sang more rapidly, their psalmody rising to a shrill frenzy. The crowds responded hysterically, shaking their hand lamps so that the whole plain glittered as if it were being crisscrossed by hordes of giant, inebriated fireflies.

I pushed all my function keys, SAVE DUKE, and held down the REPEAT button. No dice, save for some savage squeals from Ranora.

Clever and evil men were not only frustrating God’s plans, they were twisting them to their own purposes. So what would the Other Person do now?

B’Mella seemed to try to concentrate, to focus her eyes, to comprehend what was happening, and gave up in a mixture of resignation and despair.

It’s all your fault, you evil little bitch. Wait till I have a chance to settle with you.

Already I had built my own judgment seat.

The Cardinal gave another signal. The beat of the singing rose now to hysterical frenzy, demanding a climax of destruction. Drums began to roll, drowning out the thunder. He drew a long dagger from his belt and held it high over Lenrau’s body. The Troll unsheathed a big, heavy sword and lifted it into the air like a toothpick.

I pushed the DUCHESS key in desperation. SAVE DUKE.

I finally got through to her and once more played into the hands of the bad guys.

She was too sick, too groggy, and too confused to act rationally. Awkwardly, like a woman in a dream, she staggered to her husband’s side and threw herself protectively over his body. A loud gasp of horror swept from one end of the plain to the other. The Cardinal grinned cheerfully and nodded his head, the singing and the drumbeating soared to a crescendo of intolerable intensity, a ruler scratching a cosmic blackboard. Their weapons rose to the highest possible point over the two bodies.

Think of something quick.

ZAP PRIESTS, I assaulted my keyboard with frantic fingers.

WHICH PRIESTS?

DELETE CARDINAL KROL.

I DO NOT KNOW CARDINAL KROL.

Lucky you.

The singing stopped. In the deadly silence the weapons started their downward arc.

DELETE CARDINAL, TROLL.

EXECUTING.

It seemed like two-thirds of eternity, but it must have been only a millisecond. The first thunderbolt began way up at the top of the highest and most distant mountain and, with the speed of light, roared in an unerring line straight towards the altar, like the old Burlington Zephyr silver train racing through Lisle at 5:30. It exploded around the altar just as two weapons seemed to strike. Giant blue sparks, a thousand el cars’ third rails, leaped in every direction. Thunder roared like an erupting volcano over the plain, echoing and reechoing and then reechoing again against the mountains. Long before the echoes stopped, another bolt of lightning crackled against the base of the altar. And another. And another.

Between the blinding explosions, I saw that the Cardinal and his hideous troll were not present anymore. Where they had been standing, there was nothing at all.

DELETE EXECUTED.

Mess with the Lord Our God, will you?

CEASE FIRE, I demanded.

The thunder kept rolling back and forth between the mountain ranges, and the crowd was screaming as if it expected the earth to swallow them up—which might just be the next trick if it were needed. On the altar, prostrate still and probably scared stiff, were the two causes of all this mess, still, it seemed, present and probably alive.

Then something completely unpredictable happened. Instead of fleeing in panic, the goon squad of priests at the foot of the altar surged up the steps.

ZAP ALL PRIESTS, I ordered.

ZAP TEMPORARILY EXHAUSTED. EXECUTING RAIN.

Did it ever execute rain!

It seemed that someone (me of course, who else?) had upturned a bottomless bucket and poured all the water in the world on the meadow and its inhabitants. Need a bit of rain for your crops, do you? You can count on the Lord Your God.

The first batch of goons were swept away from the altar platform by the downpour, but they quickly regrouped and with grim care began to climb it again.

Now what do you do? These guys aren’t supposed to be heroes.

Ever hear of the bravery which comes from despair?

I noticed that the poor little ilel, a soaking wet doll, was still struggling with her bonds.

RELEASE RANORA.

From out of the crowd, a hooded figure appeared and, so deftly that no one noticed, slit the ropes binding the ilel. N’Rasia had her major role at last.

With instant reflexes, like a halfback who sees daylight, Ranora scampered up the slippery steps, each one now a minor waterfall, grabbed the Cardinal’s charred dagger, pushed B’Mella unceremoniously off her husband, and cut the Duke’s ropes.

SAVE DUCHESS, ILEL, I told the Duke.

He burst off the altar like a berserker, swept up the Troll’s mammoth blade with a mighty sweep of what must have been cramped and aching arms, and sent the first wave of the goons tumbling down the slippery steps. Lightning burst across the sky, creating blue reflections against his wet and glistening body. He swung again and the thunder pounded behind him. Dubiously the crowd of clerical goons pondered another charge. The Cardinal’s dagger held truculently between both her hands, the Duchess rose up next to him.

Anyone want to fight?

Water was streaming down his battered but still solid, muscular body, and his face was shining with the glow of battle light. The lightning, thunder, and swirling winds seemed to be background for the resurrection of his masculine warrior power. The band of goons formed up a few yards away from him, preparing for another charge.

As though he had all the time in the world, he turned to his wife, smiled, touched her cheek gently, and asked an affectionate, almost joking, question which was drowned out in the discordant chorus of sounds.

She nodded. Gently but firmly, he moved her from his left side back a few paces on the platform and turned to face the encroaching band of thugs again, his sword raised in grim defiance. I am Lenrau, he seemed to be saying; maybe I’m a mystic and a dreamer and not much of a Duke, but you threaten my woman and our child at peril of your lives. The attackers who had inched closer to him stopped.

In the meantime tidal waves of panic swept across the huge throng. The rain had doused most of their lamps and the roaring thunder and crackling thunderbolts sent them rushing in terror towards the forests and the roads back to their homes and towns.

DELETE PANIC, I told them and the mad race for safety slowed but did not stop. The back rows of priests cast aside their swords and spears and ran too, leaving the score of goons who had been the Cardinal’s personal guard by themselves to stand off Lenrau.

He had another ally. As soon as she had freed the Duke, Ranora darted down the steps, grabbed a dagger from a paralyzed guard, and with the help of N’Rasia, who had thrown back her hood and whose gold-and-silver hair shone like a halo in the lightning flashes, cut the ropes binding Kaila and Malvau and the others. I am prepared to swear that N’Rasia winked at her husband.

Straight as an arrow, the ilel raced to G’Ranne and cut her bonds. Ruffling little sister’s hair again, the warrior woman grabbed a sword from a startled priest, and, her own black hair waving in the wind and rain like a pirate’s flag, chased a couple of squads of the enemy away. Some of the other warriors, including of course the Three Stooges, rallied to her side. Her face glowing in the lightning flashes, she began to close in on the altar, her tiny army following close behind.

N’Rasia and Ranora scurried among the milling mob freeing the other friends of the Duke and pressing spears and swords into their hands. Ranora barked a crisp command, a waterlogged little demon with only a shred of cloth clinging to her tiny body, and formed up her band, closing in on the flank of those who were preparing for another charge at the Duke.

Lightning continued to crackle and sizzle around the plain. The thunder blasts followed immediately after each flash—the center of the storm was upon them. Rain poured out of the sky like a gigantic waterfall.

With his left arm, Lenrau brushed the water out of his eyes and, swordpoint in front of him, walked lightly down the stairs. One of the goons thrust with a mighty two-handed swipe of a huge broadsword. Lenrau deftly brushed the blow aside as if a mosquito had buzzed at him. The goon’s blade leaped out of his hand, spun through the air, and fell ten yards away.

The man backed away from Lenrau’s swordpoint, broke, and ran. Rather against orders, B’Mella, knife still tightly clasped in both hands, slipped down one step and then another, a strategic reserve for her husband. The ilel’s squad moved cautiously in to attack from the flank, and G’Ranne’s warriors, like a mob of angry pirates, swarmed in on the other side.

For a dramatic moment, while the lightning ripped all around, there was no motion on or by the altar. Everyone was frozen as if in a giant sculpture of warfare in the rain.

I didn’t want any of the good guys to get hurt, particularly nutty little Ranora who had a Balaclava gleam in her eyes. I could simply eradicate all the priests with a few well-placed lightning bolts. But if you’re going to be good at the God business, you have to learn restraint.

PRIESTS FLEE, I instructed the keyboard.

Lightning hit the top of the altar again, dangerously close to B’Mella. It was all the clerics needed. They dropped their swords and took off like the Sioux in the old films (if not quite in reality) when the U.S. Cavalry rode over the hill.

Lenrau smiled briefly, signaled G’Ranne to throw a protective cordon around the altar, turned and led Ranora and her band up the slippery steps, placed his weapon on the altar where he had almost died, and enveloped his rain-drenched wife in his arms.

CROWD GO HOME, I told the machine. It was time to wrap this game up.

The Duke and the Duchess both talked at once, pouring out a torrent of grief, remorse, guilt, affection, and admiration.

My Crooked Lines were working pretty well, all things considered.

“Well.” Hands on hips, modesty now provided only by her energy and enthusiasm, Ranora was trying to control her merry laughter reborn from days gone by. “If you’re finished with all that, you might apologize to the Lord Our God too!”

Still clinging to each other and with streams of rain pouring off their bodies like flash floods, Lenrau and B’Mella tried to tell me that they were sorry, that they would begin again, and that it was my responsibility to see that this time all went well between them. So it is with humans when they are reborn—God gets little of the credit and much of the blame.

Suddenly, just as they were running out of prayers, Lenrau broke down and started to sob, his tears mixing with the rain, his body quivering in syncopation with the exploding thunder. Real men didn’t seem to cry in their culture either. But poet/kings have to be able to cry. Finn MacCool and Cuchulain and that bunch used to go on week-long crying jags.

’Course these people weren’t Irish. Not that I knew of, anyway. (Except G’Ranne, who somehow was in the wrong story.) ’Ella, nevertheless, did a very Irish-woman thing. However much she may have been shocked at the sight of a warrior weeping in public, she took his head gently in her hands, laid it against her breasts, and, while the lightning flashed around them and the thunder roared, sang to him the song he composed for her on their wedding night.

Nice going, kid. God will not give up on you after all.

They had learned something, perhaps enough so that the next time they were in the down phase of the cycle of their love, they would cling to each other again instead of fleeing from each other; then a few more times around the course and they would be sufficiently practiced at the art of creating a rebirth of love so that they would be truly and permanently man and wife.

Not bad for a novice at the game of the Crooked Lines.

Malvau’s arm was draped around the shoulders of his heroine/wife, who seemed to be ruefully looking in my direction. No rewrites possible anymore.

Well, you wanted the big time, kid.

Ranora, thank God (the Other Person, not me), was the ilel of old. Unimpeded by the absence of clothes, she scurried up and down the line of loyalists standing respectfully on the steps of the altar, hugging and kissing them and cavorting in a happy dance as she played a hornpipe on an imaginary pipe. Kaila was the first one she kissed, lightly and respectfully, as befit a relationship between an ilel and her Protector. Then, after she’d gone down the line and bestowed an especially fierce hug on the laughing G’Ranne, as if she had second thoughts, she bounced back to him and embraced him passionately.

The surprised young man, admirable and proper as always, was overcome with delight, an impossible dream suddenly coming true. He was very reluctant to let her naked little body out of his arms. She didn’t seem very eager to leave either. Ah, the poor man would never have a day’s peace for the rest of his life.

Then, remembering her obligations, she danced up the steps, clapped her hands for attention, and announced imperiously, “Also you should thank the Lord Our God for sending you such a perfect ilel as Ranora.”

“We thank you, Lord Our God,” B’Mella said dutifully, raising her eyes again towards me, “for sending us…”

“A wonderful imp child,” Lenrau had recovered his cool, “to remind us how to laugh.”

Everyone’s tears dissolved into laughter. Ranora flew across the altar platform, a bird sailing blithely through a rainstorm, and threw herself upon her patrons, hugging them both and laughing with them as if she felt that her laughter and her embrace might bind them together forever.

Even the thunder seemed to join their laughter.

Dutiful ruler that she was, B’Mella wrapped her cloak around the ilel. Our vestal virgins must maintain a modicum of modesty.

Enough crooked lines for one night. I pushed the TERMINATE function key and quickly disconnected the PC from its link to the TV system. Then I removed the Alpha 10 from its slot in the Bernouli box and put it on a shelf where it would be safe.

The last image before their world faded off my screen was a close-up of the tearstained, joyous face of G’Ranne, radiant in the light of the four converging moons which had elbowed their way through the clouds: Teresa emerging in the light of Mount Carmel after the Dark Night of the Soul.

If I had saved her life along with the others, she must have thought, I did love her after all.

Ah, my beloved, you spoke truth. Authors need characters, God needs people; but it takes such tiny gifts, crumbs from my table, to make you happy. Thus all the greater my need for you.

I sank into my gray chair, so exhausted that I barely had the strength to pour myself an extra large glass of Baileys Irish Cream.

“It’s a good thing for us,” Nathan would say smugly later, “that the Other Person can’t quit.”

“She has had more practice. Anyway you don’t believe in Her.”

“The God I don’t believe in,” Nathan leaned forward with a happy grin, “is a He, and I’m glad that He can’t quit merely because the game gets rough. What will happen to all those people now that you have deserted them?”

“Nothing more than what happens to my characters when I finish a story. I still worry about them, but I’m not responsible for them. My grace doesn’t have to war with their free will.”

“You abandoned them,” Nathan insisted, glad for the rare advantage he had in our own ongoing game.

“They’re being watched over,” said his wife Elisa (a saintly woman, God knows, to put up with what she has to put up with and, though I’ll be in grave trouble for saying it, slightly ahead of Nathan in the fitness game). “Who made the lightning strike your dish in the first place?”

An interesting point, I admitted.

“And remember what Nathan means in Hebrew?”

“All right, what does Nathan mean in Hebrew?”

“‘Given’— maybe you’d say ‘Grace’!”

Tell me about it.

That’s about all. I played the game a couple of dozen more times, with another Alpha 10 of course, and never did get that ending again. Nathan claims that it is a possible ending but that it requires extraordinary concentration and that possibly the animated blips don’t excite the kind of commitment required for such concentration.

The game has sold very well (the Red Shift has been replaced by a newer, bigger, and allegedly faster boat). Nathan’s marketing people are using Boris’s art now. He’s done a good job on Lenrau and B’Mella, although he hasn’t quite captured them. But Ranora is perfect, a blond pixie wrapped in peppermint candy with snapping eyes and a determined little jaw jutting comically to the sky.

They have renamed it the God Game.

The Hagans are back together, and she seems to glow much of the time. It’s still a rocky pilgrimage for them. One or the other dashes off to a divorce lawyer almost every month. Rumors have it that they see Doctor Shanahan and “someone else out at Loyola.” So maybe the dreams worked.

Michele?

“Like, I didn’t phone you. I mean I had a dream I called you, but no way did I really phone you.”

“What did you say in the dream?”

Frown. “I wanted you to do something. I don’t remember what it was.”

“Did I do it?”

“Of course!”

Sometimes at night, as I say, I hear the pipe outside my window forty-seven stories above the Magnificent Mile. It sounds like the Menuetto in Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade (K. 320), only a little kinkier.

Maybe, on the other hand, I am only imagining it.

Despite our seminar, I’m not sure I understand any of what happened. I did receive a week ago a picture of an infant—not a photograph exactly, rather something which seemed to have been burned on the paper. The kid might have B’Mella’s deep brown eyes, but I’m probably kidding myself. Sometimes when you hold the envelope the right way, you might think that it could be red-and-white striped.

The Alpha 10 which has every move of the game recorded remains quietly on the shelf in my office at Grand Beach, a mute reminder that it’s hell to be God.

I ran the Alpha 10 data through one of Nathan’s graph-making programs, and it produced a rather curious map, which one of my water-skiing friends adapted for me. (I guess it’s pretty much like the other cosmos, though my cartographer claims that in the original version of the story I had the sun rising and setting in the same place!)

The Alpha 10 is also a chance to play the real game again. Sure, it’s hell to be God. It’s also fun to be God. You are loved by a lot of wonderful people; which is probably why God, the Other Person that is, doesn’t quit.

As for Nathan, well, I intend to get even (of course). I am part of a conspiracy to teach him what it is like to have to play God to a group of fractious humans, to have far more responsibility than you have power.

We’re going to make him departmental chairman.