Already I was hooked on the God Game.
I didn’t know yet, however, that it was a God Game.
I did not bother to sort out the implications of what had happened. It was Nathan’s game all right, but now working on a different dimension of reality than a couple of decision trees, a big parser, and some extensive but crude graphics.
Did I still control it?
I rushed to my terminal and typed in MAKE PEACE <cr>.
WHO? flashed on the screen like a subtitle.
I should have pushed a function key first.
I pounded the D&D key.
(In the rest of this story, I’ll leave out the function keys most of the time and the carriage return signal always. The computer freak will read them in anyway and the noncomputer person doesn’t need them.)
Cut to B’Mella: “Signal a truce,” she said, looking as though she were about to become physically ill.
“But, Lady!” wailed one of the heavies around her. “We are winning! The evil Lord Lenrau will soon be dead.”
The woman hesitated. An expression of terrible hatred crossed her lovely face.
OFFER TRUCE I told the program and held down the REPEAT button.
EXECUTING flashed on the screen.
B’Mella sagged against a young woman who seemed to be some sort of lady-in-waiting. She forced words out of her lips as though she was spending her life’s blood.
“Offer a truce.”
Cut to Lenrau’s headquarters.
“It is a trick,” screamed one of his advisers. “The witch seeks to avoid her fate. Do not be deceived.”
The Duke glanced at him casually, as though he might be considering an interesting but unimportant insect. He looked back at the screen, hesitated, his face working with conflicting emotions. “She anticipated me, the foul whore. Very well. Let us see what she plans. Order a truce.”
The next scene was the battlefield. The soldiers on both sides paused in their mayhem, receiving some orders that I had not heard. They glanced at each other warily, not sure that they should stop the killing. Then some of them backed off, torn between obedience and blood lust.
A warrior in red armor removed the oblong-shaped helmet which seemed to be required of Lenrau’s warriors, shook out long black hair and began to push her colleagues away from combat positions. She had, I noted in passing, pale white skin and scorching blue eyes.
I figured I would give her a little help.
EXECUTE CLOUDBURST I typed in.
DO NOT KNOW CLOUDBURST it responded.
BIG THUNDERSTORM, REAL BIG.
EXECUTING.
The skies on my screen opened and the rain fell in torrents, making the downpour outside my house seem like a drizzle.
The opposing armies ran for cover, in the thick, twisted forests which lined the battlefield. Nothing like a rainstorm to take the steam out of mass mayhem.
Back to the Duke. “She’s proposing negotiations,” Lenrau breathed. “Is there a mistake? Is the rain disturbing the signals?”
Proposing negotiations? I didn’t tell her to do that. Did my instruction to make peace have a delayed impact? What were the rules of this crazy game? Were there any rules?
“It is a trick, my Lord,” the Kojak type dithered. “A trick. Demand hostages before we send anyone to negotiations.”
Lenrau nodded heavily. “Tell the whore,” he snapped at his screen, “that unless she sends hostages, we will not enter into negotiations.”
The poor man was confused. His world had suddenly come apart, so much so that his heart really wasn’t in the word “whore” when he used it of his enemy. For good measure, I typed out a new instruction after the D&D keystroke. CONTINUE MAKING PEACE.
ALREADY EXECUTING, the machine flashed back at me impatiently. Then the screen cleared and I had a close-up of B’Mella’s lovely face, calm, ravaged, beyond hope or despair, a Christian matron ready for the lions. Did they have Christians? Apparently they had a hell.
“The evil one demands hostages,” a shrill voice said behind her.
She nodded, but didn’t seem to hear.
“Shall we begin fighting again?” the shrill one asked hopefully, a woman’s voice I thought.
“Tell them,” her manner was cool, her face expressionless, “that I will offer myself as hostage.”
I was not altogether pleased with the lovely lady, even if by now I had fallen in love with her. It was my story, not hers, and this little bit of melodrama was, I thought, going too far too soon.
With its now customary persistent tenacity, the program switched me back to Lenrau, also a closeup. He was angry, his lips pursed tightly, his eyes hooded, a man whose patience had been pushed too far.
“Accept her offer and kill her”—Kojak again—”slowly and painfully as she deserves to die.”
The proposal appealed; a slow, cruel smile crossed Lenrau’s face. Hey, what was happening to my nice-guy, half-mystical Duke?
NEGOTIATE IN GOOD FAITH, NO HOSTAGES, I ordered.
I DO NOT KNOW FAITH.
You wouldn’t. SINCERELY.
NEGOTIATE SINCERELY?
EXECUTE, I pounded the keys.
The expression on Lenrau’s face changed. His eyes softened. He seemed mildly curious. “No, let’s begin the preliminary discussions on the battlefield without hostages. Maybe she is willing to end her crimes.”
“Do you believe that?” The young, black-haired man who came into view behind his shoulder was genial and handsome. I thumbed through my manual to find out who he was. No luck.
“I’m not sure,” Lenrau sighed. “That offer took courage. If I had accepted it and she came here, they would have killed her no matter what I said.”
“You want to meet her?” The young man, a friend, I gathered, raised an eyebrow. Of all the people who had appeared so far, he was the most relaxed and self-possessed, a young James Bond completely in command, but with far more gentle eyes than either Roger Moore or Sean Connery (as Bond, for in other films Connery’s gentle eyes are hard to match). He was, I would later find, not of the warrior caste that did the fighting, nor of the priestly caste that egged on the fighters, nor even of the political caste which sometimes advised peace and more often war, but of a class of courtiers and scholars, a handful of Renaissance men who wrote poems, played musical instruments, and did scholarly research.
Lenrau took off his helmet and ran his fingers through his tight curly hair.
“The ilel says I must.”
The other nodded. “The ilel is hard to resist.”
What was an ilel?
“Implacable.” Lenrau gave a small weary smile of tolerant amusement, a father with a charming if undisciplined child. “Maybe it’s time. How long, Kaila, has it been since our leaders have met each other face to face?”
“Three generations.” The young man was now in my list of good guys. “You’re right, ’Rau. Maybe it’s time.”
And it was time for me to remember that I had a SUSPEND GAME function key. The bloodshed had stopped, peacemaking had begun. Now I should figure out what kind of trick Nathan had pulled on me.
My battle with the Duke and the Duchess had lasted no more than a half hour, only long enough for the summer storm to sweep through our village and head for Notre Dame, where hopefully it would drench the Theology Department. Yet I was as spent as though I had sat through twelve films as scary as Halloween. My reactions had been purely instinctive. I was responsible for the people on the screen. I had to help them. It did not matter who they were or how I had been assigned responsibility for them. As the storm fled southwestward, I began to analyze what had happened. I didn’t like it.
Let me deal with your obvious objections first. Why didn’t I call Nathan?
Don’t be absurd. I did that as soon as the screen returned to pink and green. No answer. Then I remembered that he was sailing the Red Shift, his Petersen, to Chicago to prepare for the annual lemming charge to Mackinac. No Nathan for a week.
How do I know that the lightning didn’t strike me instead of the dish and that I was not temporarily round the bend, or more so than usual?
The answer is that during the next two days, while I was playing Nathan’s God Game, I waterskied with Bob and Michele, talked to my office in Chicago, my sister, my agent, and my publisher on the phone, and carried on a normal life, as they will testify. They all agree that I seemed preoccupied, as I do when writing a novel, but, in Michele’s finely honed phrase, “no more of an airhead than usual.”
Finally, can I prove that I didn’t make it all up?
I have tapes.
Yeah, videotapes. I thought to turn on the VCR towards the end of the game. They scared Nathan half to death as well they might; he found them so weird that he would have no part of using them even for marketing purposes. I’m not about to show them to you. In fact, they’re locked up in another country where U.S. government bureaucrats can’t get at them.
Why are they scary? Two reasons: the world on the tape is different enough from ours to terrify you. It’s one thing to imagine other worlds, like ours only a little different, and even to see these worlds in SF films. It’s another to have one invade your parlor or lab or classroom. The other reason is that no film you’ve ever seen dares to be as honest about human passion, love and hatred, as these tapes. The fury and the affection between Lenrau and B’Mella are not toned down the way we tone down raw human emotion when we depict it artistically. This latter reason is why the biologists and social scientists who came to our seminars unanimously agreed that we couldn’t show the tapes outside the controlled environment of a university.
And that was the reaction without a sound track. For some reason all the tape picked up was the visuals. It was worse when you heard them.
To a person, our colleagues found the love between the Duke and the Duchess more fearsome than their hatred.
I won’t show you the tapes. But if you’re sufficiently interested, I’ll give you the names of two scientists who have seen them. They’ll confirm this story for you, but most people don’t want it confirmed.
So what happened?
As best as we can figure it out, the linkage between my PC, Nathan’s game, the big screen TV, and the satellite dish, all messed up in the crazy system of connections that an electronic illiterate like me can put together without half trying, created or more likely invaded a “port” that was open to events happening elsewhere. I suppose that the world abounds with such “ports,” but they are rarely activated because they are rarely struck by lightning precisely when all the links are in place. As I see it, the key factors were the lightning bolt and Nathan’s game.
I’ll admit that at first I suspected that Nathan had actually broken through to the other world and was as usual using me as his guinea pig. But he denied it, and I believe him. He is an honest man, and moreover his terror at the passion between B’Mella and Lenrau was unfeigned.
So was I for a few hours of electronic fluke in touch with another planet?
I doubt it.
More likely another cosmos, one existing “adjacent” to ours but on different dimensions of time and space. The theoretical physicists postulate such “adjacent” universes to explain some of the bizarre things that happen as they go back in time towards Planck’s Wall (when the universe in which we live was only 10-42 seconds old). As one of those to whom we showed the tapes remarked, “My theory postulates such a realm. I don’t want it to really exist, however. It raises too many other questions.”
That’s just about what a distinguished Protestant theologian said. “It’s possible, but I don’t want it to be true.”
The Jesuit who watched the tapes, if you ask me, was wondering what B’Mella and Lenrau would do about the high-school education of any potential offspring.
That first evening, I turned the game back on after half an hour of dithering. The same amount of time had passed on the battlefield. In that part of my brain which was still thinking about Nathan, I congratulated him on that technical breakthrough.
The rained-soaked armies slowly backed off from one another and two men walked warily into the “no man’s land” between them as the deep purple sun began to race through the thick black clouds towards the mountains on one side of my screen and a string of misshapen moons slipped over the snow-capped mountains on the other side and quickly hid behind the cloud banks.
One of the truce makers was Kaila, the handsome young man who had stood next to Lenrau and recommended the cease-fire. The other was a tall, silver-haired aristocrat named Malvau from B’Mella’s court, a man whose every bone and muscle proclaimed that he was unbearably, intolerably distinguished.
They stared at one another in a long, tension-packed silence, as the rain streamed down both their faces. Some of the warriors began to finger their weapons nervously.
“I believe, most noble Lord Malvau,” the younger man bowed respectfully, “that our ancestors met on a field like this once before, though without the rain to mark the event.”
“A hundred and forty years ago.” Malvau sniffed haughtily. No bow from him.
“Actually a hundred and forty-two years ago.” Kaila’s second bow was a bit less than respectful.
“Our families have brought peace once before. Perhaps we can repeat the phenomenon.” He still looked down his nose, but a trifle less arrogantly. “They are, after all, older than the families of the Duke and the Duchess.”
“Yours, at least, appears to be continuing.” Kaila permitted himself a smile. “A beautiful wife, two lovely daughters, a handsome son, healthy grandchildren.”
“You continue your family’s reputation for clever words.” Malvau’s lips moved slightly, perhaps a smile. “I for my part wish to protect the health of my children and grandchildren from an even more disastrous war.”
“And perhaps to permit me enough life to sire children and even grandchildren of my own?”
“A most desirable possibility.” Again the slight movement of his lips, a little more this time.
They exchanged elaborate and convoluted flattery for a time. Out of consideration for their sincerity I decided to improve the weather a bit.
DELETE RAINSTORM.
EXECUTING.
It stopped instantly. I knew that eventually I would have to cope with why I was able to do that sort of thing. But I was too interested in how Malvau and Kaila would work out the details of the truce.
It wasn’t easy, despite their infinite—and as far as I could see sincere—courtesy. I suspected that both of them were conscious of the small delegations of warriors who were huddled within listening distance behind them and afraid to seem too accommodating.
The young woman with the long, black hair frowned angrily at each compliment. It was a shame, I thought, that her gloriously delicate features should be marred by anger. I wondered why someone who seemed to be a classic Celtic beauty would show up on this world.
As the compliments dragged on, the warrior delegations began to murmur uneasily. Malvau and Kaila hesitated. I started to wonder what I should do if the truce came apart. The woman warrior saved me the trouble. She turned on her colleagues and silenced them with a single furious glance. The warriors on the other side quieted down too.
The best that could be accomplished was an agreement that they would meet again tomorrow and that the armies would return to their quarters for the night. Both the negotiators seemed quite happy with this minute progress.
The warriors began to straggle away uncertainly from the battlefield, a soggy mass of partly disappointed and partly relieved fighters.
With rueful smiles the two lordly peacemakers bid each other farewell.
“We both live through another night, it would seem.” Kaila bowed again. “You will present my respects to the excellent Lady N’Rasia.”
“I will,” the older man absolutely would not bow, “with gratitude that I’m sure she too will feel.”
They both waited for several more moments, neither wanting to seem to be the first to leave. Finally Kaila bowed yet once more and walked off into the darkness, ignoring the stony-faced young woman in red armor who had lingered, intently watching his every move.
How come, you want to know, they spoke English pretty much like ours (though I’m the only one that can confirm it because of the absence of sound on the tapes), looked like us, and acted more or less the way we do? Why were their names the same as those of the Duke and Duchess (and all the other characters) in Nathan’s “interactive fiction”?
That one I can’t answer. I admit that its implications scare me. If they were for a few months of their existence part of a game I was playing, might we not be part of a game that someone in another adjacent cosmos is playing with us?
But maybe the question of the names is worded the wrong way. Maybe we should be asking how come Nathan’s game was modeled after their universe and not vice versa.
Another possibility is that the port was also a translator. The whole crowd of them could have been scaly septupeds (though I will resist the possibility that Ranora is such a creature) with whirling antennae, speaking in beeps. Maybe the accidental concatenation of linkages and currents enabled me not only to enter their cosmos as a game player but to perceive it in images and language I more or less understood.
To complicate the issue, they were not quite like us, and their world was different from ours in the sort of tiny ways that an SF writer would not imagine. They wore clothes that were early medieval or late Roman but made out of some synthetic material that is beyond our capability. They fought with swords and spears and primitive zap guns, but they had techniques of visual and audio communication that none of us could figure out or even perceive as operating. Possibly, but only possibly, telepathic. Their religion was important to them. In addition to “The Lord Our God,” whom both teams pictured as being on their side and with whom individuals seemed to relate on an “I/Thou” basis, they had a couple of castes of priests to whom I took an instant dislike, not because they were so different from us but because, alas, they had all our faults (I assigned some of the principal clerics names which matched those of some of the sociopaths who currently perform in the Roman Curia) and a lot less to do to justify their existence.
There seemed to be almost no formal worship ceremonies or ritual buildings, a simple religious system, it seemed, for such an elaborate priestly community.
The clergy, I theorize, represented an older religion most of whose doctrines (largely magical and superstitious) had been replaced by the more spiritual worship of the Lord Our God. The priests continued to provide the rituals for social and familial ceremonies but apparently had no teaching role. The Lord Our God on the other hand was worshipped privately with almost no formal ritual. He was addressed much like a passionately loving and indulgent parent, or even a sexual lover, in terms of endearing intimacy.
There were no statues or images involved in this prayer devotion. But neither was there any hesitancy in creating such images. Later I would see one of B’Mella’s paintings in which the Lord Our God was presented as a sexually aroused young man in his late teens clad in a bulging athletic supporter (like some of the Renaissance paintings of the Risen Jesus analyzed by Leo Steinberg). It did not seem to have shocked anyone. Nor did G’Ranne’s portrait of the Lord Our God as an elegantly dressed young matron in the advanced state of pregnancy. They had no problems, it would seem, with the androgyny of God. And no need for a theology to explain it.
Their world was “different” physically. It had trees and grass, mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, but the flora and fauna and the geology were not quite like ours. “That oak tree is a fooler,” a botanist told us. “It is almost a perfect oak tree.”
“How is it a fooler?”
“How? Oh, it’s not an oak tree at all. The ribs on the leaves are different, the bark is wrong, the branches are at angles that none of our oak trunks could possibly sustain. A nice imitation, though.”
“Or maybe ours are a nice imitation.”
He looked hard at me. “That is always possible, of course.”
Politically, they didn’t seem much different from us. Two tiny principalities in adjoining broad valleys with a high plain uniting them and providing an arena for warfare. I would guess that neither duchy numbered more than fifty thousand citizens, of whom most were farmers or stolid burghers in the two towns. The warriors who so enthusiastically slaughtered each other were a kind of nobility who had larger farms in the countryside—farms which others worked because the nobles were too busy doing each other in.
Their principal occupation, agriculture, baffled the expert we brought in. “Damn impressive yields, but I don’t know what the hell it is: I’m not even sure whether it’s a vegetable or an animal.” Some sophisticated manufacturing was done in buildings, or rather pavilions as I called them, all constructed with rainbow-colored, lightweight fabric, much like the glittering gowns they wore, but I never learned the exact nature of the manufacturing. I was too busy doing other things.
The politics were, one supposes, not unlike those of petty fiefdoms in early modern Italy. There would be only one exception to that generalization: at no time during my visit was there any reference to a world beyond the borders of the two duchies, no hint of an Empire of which they were a part or even of conflicts between great powers which would sometimes flow across their boundaries as did the wars of France and Spain in Renaissance Italy. If there was a “rest of the world” it didn’t seem to bother or interest them.
The two rivers which drained their circumscribed little environment must have emptied into something bigger, and they flowed in opposite directions, suggesting some kind of continental divide. Moreover, there had to be something beyond the massive mountain ranges, several of the snowcapped peaks at least twenty thousand feet high, which framed the two duchies. Yet I never heard a word about such other lands. It seemed that the produce in their valleys was sufficient to their needs (most families were at reproduction-level size, two, sometimes three, children) and they had no reason to be concerned about the rest of their planet. If planet it was.
“A clever imitation,” Nathan summed it up. “Hastily done, but not bad for a spur-of-the-moment job. When you stop to consider it, nothing is quite right, colors, shapes, angles, perspectives. But at first you are dazzled by the dramatic colors and hardly notice. The only problem is, why did whoever created that world permit it to be such an inaccurate reflection? If he could do it at all, he could have done it better.”
“Maybe,” I mused, filling up his glass of Baileys, “that’s a problem of translation. Perhaps our receiving mechanism has to adjust to signals, electronic or spiritual, which it doesn’t normally receive. Or perhaps only some of the signals get through. Or perhaps there is a mechanism, a censor—make the “c” a capital if you wish—that filters out information that we don’t need or shouldn’t have.”
“What kind of censor?” he demanded impatiently as though I was an undergrad retard or something.
“An author.”
I think I won that point. Anyway, since it’s my story and I’m God in it, I awarded the point to myself.
“It’s still a weird little place.” He shook his head in disapproval.
“Maybe that’s what they would think about our cosmos.”
Nathan didn’t like that much. Most of our scholarly colleagues wanted to think it was an elaborate cosmic hoax. But they were dealing only with the replays, not the reality.
The reality that first night was an uneasy peace that could explode into a bloody war again at a flick of a finger.