The night wasn’t finished. Caught up in the fever of the God Game, I intended to continue going around doing good.
The most subtle of all temptations.
I decided that I would look in on the high priest I called the Cardinal because of his red robes and ermine cape. He looked like a Cardinal from central casting, with a sharply cut, aristocratic face, long thin nose, thick wavy white hair—very much unlike the squat, ugly types who actually preside over the curial dicasteries. To my surprise, he was locked in a tête-à-tête with his counterpart from Lenrau’s priestly caste. There were others, two of them ancient, witchlike priestesses (the Other Person forgive me for it, but I coded them MOTHER SUPERIOR), huddled around a table in a dimly lit cave deep in the forest. There was a brazier burning incense, I guessed (remember, there was no smell in the story) in the corner, and a couple of sinister-looking snakes crawling around.
No spiders or black cats.
“There will be no peace,” the Cardinal said flatly.
“The ilel may force it,” croaked one of the priestesses.
“The ilel should be eliminated,” screeched the other.
“We must restrain her,” the Cardinal said prudently (Cardinals are always prudent), “not eliminate her. Firstly, she may be dangerous, secondly, there might be a terrible reaction to her death. Counterproductive. Thirdly, it may not be necessary.”
No remark that it would be evil. I said Cardinals were prudent, not necessarily virtuous.
“Kill her!” The Mothers Superior, sounding like the witches in Macbeth, cackled in unison. “Kill her!”
A couple of the snakes did a nifty little dance.
“They are right.” One of the men leaned forward on the table. “Noble Lord, she could frustrate all our plans. Peace will only be restored when the warrior class destroys itself and we resume our ancient rule of the land. She must die as they must die, for the good of all, even for their own good.”
“Kill her for her own good,” another cleric chimed in.
All this time, I was pushing my ABORT PLANS button and holding down the REPEAT key.
No impact. None whatever. I could force Malvau and N’Rasia into each other’s arms and bodies, but I couldn’t force these clowns to think twice about their plans to dispose of my Ranora. Conclusion: you can as an author shake those who are open to lust of one kind or another, but not those who are into power.
No wonder the Other Person has so much trouble with the Curia Romana.
So I told the Compaq, EXTINGUISH LIGHTS.
Bamm! Total darkness.
Cries, screeches, alarms.
KILL SNAKES.
The damn thing knew what a snake was. Of course, the parser knew about snakes from Adventure. There were three or four rapid explosive retorts and then a much louder blast.
Then frightened silence.
The light came back on.
“What happened?” The Cardinal was pale and shaking.
“The Lord Our God has struck us for planning to desecrate his ilel!” wailed one of the priests.
“Nonsense.” The Cardinal began to regain his cool. I doubt that he worried much about the Lord Our God.
“The snakes are gone, He’s taken our snakes.”
“Demons!” screeched the Mothers Superior.
“I said the ilel might be dangerous.” The Cardinal smoothed his robe. “Killing her would serve no useful purpose at this time. She cannot impose peace. Our true enemies, as always, are the warriors. If anyone is to be killed, it must be the Duke and Duchess. Together they could stand in the way of our return to power.”
“Kill them! Kill them!” yelled the witches.
“In due time, if necessary to restrain them,” the Cardinal said softly, “for their own good and for the good of the land, of course.”
Not if I can help it, you bastards.
The night, theirs as well as mine, wasn’t over yet.
I looked in briefly at Malvau and N’Rasia. They were huddled close together, hands affectionately resting on each other, peacefully and complacently sleeping. Well, score one anyway.
Then I reached for the SUSPEND GAME key, hesitated, and decided to have one last look around.
SCAN FOR TROUBLEMAKERS, I told the program.
EXECUTING.
It began to move rapidly across the countryside, over the forests and the lakes, down the rivers, up the sides of the mountains. Near the top of one mountain it focused in on a large hut in a snow-covered meadow.
What kind of troublemakers were messing around way up here?
The interior of the hut looked like a low-budget set for a film based on The Guns of Navarone. A group of very young warriors, under the command of the Three Stooges, were working on what I can only describe as a piece of heavy artillery—a big cannon, surrounded by computerlike consoles and several large cranes. The warriors wore the star of Lenrau’s army.
A number of fur-clad peasants were stumbling around carrying boxes and bags under the watchful eye of a warrior with a zap gun. Two men, apparently the leaders, were huddled over the largest console.
“It is aimed at her pavilion, is it not?”
“See how the lines intersect? Right at the whore’s bedroom.”
“Send the peasants into the snow,” the first one barked, rubbing his gloved hands together. “If our, ah, experiment is successful, we may dispose of them later.”
The poor people were herded out into the snow.
“We will destroy her, and then the Lord Lenrau will sweep into their city, and we will take power away from the effete Kaila and his weakling friends. You may have the honor of pressing the button, my friend.”
“First, let us make a final adjustment. It would not do to miss.” Someone spun a few wheels and the canon shifted ever so slightly.
I wasn’t going to try to reason with these clowns.
DESTROY CANON.
DO NOT KNOW CANON.
A spelling purist. CANNON. EXECUTE.
EXECUTING.
Did it ever.
The roof of the shed vanished in a cloud of dust, the cannon collapsed on the floor, crashing through its supports, a ball of fire exploded high in the sky, a noise like thunder trailed after it, and then the walls of the shed fell in on the wreckage of the mechanism.
FREE PEASANTS, I demanded.
One of the peasants complied with my instruction by bashing the guard over the head with a tree branch. He grabbed the zap gun and the whole crowd of peasants took off for the woods.
Inside the wreckage of the hut, the leaders were extricating themselves from the rubble.
“We will have to build it again,” one of them said, his breath turning to mist on the cold night air.
“Then we will rebuild it,” another replied calmly.
You just do that, fellas. I’ll be back.
A hundred yards down the mountain, I saw a white-clad figure on a white “horse.” Another plotter?
I told the machine to IDENTIFY RIDER.
G’RANNE. REPEAT G’RANNE.
I heard you the first time.
The ice maiden, in her element now, flipped the white scarf away from her face, rose-red now in the cold night air and pondered the rubble that Larry, Curly, and Moe had produced.
She turned and rode back down the mountain. What sort of devious game was that one playing?
Enough trouble for one night. I suspended the game.
Ranora danced in my dreams that night. Not B’Mella nor the somewhat outsize but nonetheless attractive N’Rasia, but the teenaged imp with the peppermint-candy clothes and her witty little pipe.
I think she said something like, “I’ll please my Master and darling Kaila—isn’t he totally cute?—and you too!”
She played her triumphal Lenrau theme and her gentle Kaila theme and then something, well, amused and tolerant, which she seemed to be assigning to me.
It was, of course, only a dream. And very different from my later dreams.
I think it was different, anyway. My altered states were already becoming confused.
The next morning I told myself that it was only a game, a storytelling game with a few extra fillips that writing an ordinary story didn’t have. Not quite so complete control of the material. Made it more interesting.
But nothing real.
So I picked up the adolescents, was reprimanded (by Michele) for being “grossly” late (five minutes), and headed for the lake. While Bobby and Lance skied double with the banana peels, Heidi watched them for the inevitable noisy collision. She was troubled because someone had asked her the day before “when the lifeguard would come” despite the fact that she was wearing her official whistle. Apparently he had never seen her daily confrontation with the hapless Joseph, a well-meaning and genial but maladroit young man who is always banished at the end of the confrontation. Michele sat across from me, looking reflective (a rare event) and humming a hauntingly familiar little tune.
The melody which had been played for me on the pipes in my dreams the night before.
“What’s that song, Michele?”
“Hmmn … oh, I don’t know.” She hummed it again like she was listening to it for the first time. “That one?”
“Yes.”
“Something I must have heard on the radio.”
“It doesn’t sound like rock.”
“Well, I’m not totally into rock.”
I told myself then that it was all in my imagination, that Nathan’s God Game was taking possession of me as a story does when I’m deeply involved in it.
After all, I had heard the tune in a dream, had I not? Not in the game.
And Michele was not really like Ranora. As positive and as outspoken indeed, but a bit older, less exuberant than an early teen, brown hair instead of blond. She didn’t play any musical instrument, much less a tin whistle. Equally bossy and definitive, seldom in error, never in doubt. Same stubborn jaw, but very different face (equally pretty, I add to protect my life).
Cognates, not identities, to use words I came up with later.
After skiing, I made a few phone calls and sat back to reflect on the game. I told myself that I was still in control, I could stop anytime I wanted to, I was not hooked on the plot or the characters. I could turn on the machine, press the TERMINATE GAME function key and that would be that.
However, I had to find out about that tune.
So on went the game.
FIND ILEL, I ordered the program.
It searched around in her usual haunts and finally found her strolling through the forest, where the birds seemed to be delighted by her imitations of their love calls, and occasionally singing in a language I did not understand.
Did the ilels come from elsewhere? No one had mentioned her family. Did they come over the mountains occasionally and intrude in the lives of these peoples and then perhaps disappear again? What kind of thoughts raced through her pretty little head?
At any rate she wasn’t playing the tune I had heard in my dream and on the ski boat.
She came to a little lake, apparently her destination, felt it with her fingers, nodded approvingly, glanced around to see if anyone was watching, threw off her clothes with a couple of quick movements, and dove into the water.
Her swimming stroke, a slightly off-key (like everything else in this world) variant of the Australian crawl, was strong and determined. This was not ministering to her master in the pool, this was serious exercise.
I let her swim and went to the kitchen to prepare a ham and cheese sandwich on rye bread and a chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce. I don’t know what would have happened if someone had come into my house and seen a naked girl swimming across a weird-looking lake in the middle of an odd forest on my big screen. I guess I had come to expect that there were rules written elsewhere that said I was not to be disturbed and that I was not to consider calling anyone else to play the game/write the story while I was working on it.
By the time I was finished with lunch she was out of the lake, lying on a slab of rock, her blond hair plastered against her head, greedily absorbing the warmth of the sun, looking quite chaste and virginal despite her nudity.
She picked up her pipe, blew a few notes, and then played the theme I had heard in my dreams.
“Well,” she looked directly at me. “What now?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You made me an ilel and sent me to that poor silly man,” a few more notes of the theme, “and told me to be obedient to Kaila…”
I never did. It was someone else. Don’t blame me. The Other Person …
“…and he won’t court that poor lovely lady and Kaila has begun to like me and I think I like him and they talk all the time and I can sing and dance and make faces and be good to him and that doesn’t bring peace at all and I don’t know what to do next and anyway what about Kaila?”
Gee, kid, don’t ask me.
She played the Kaila and Lenrau themes, mixing them up in an ill-fitting combination.
She sat up and made a face at me, disgusted.
Then she played the Lenrau and B’Mella themes and they didn’t fit either. She pounded the rock with her little fist.
“It’s all your fault. I’m only an ilel, not a princess or a politician or even a scholar like poor dear Kaila.” She grinned and played his theme. By itself it was wonderful. “Isn’t he cute? What am I supposed to do about him? I mean, I’m not afraid of him … or anything like that…”
She frowned, turned deadly serious, and knelt reverently on the slab. “I can’t deceive you. I’m terrified of him. He’s not going to hurt me or anything gross like that…” She paused as though that were an absurd notion. “I mean, he totally respects me. But…”
She grinned.
“I don’t like it when he looks at me like I’m a silly little girl, but I’m scared when he looks at me like I’m a woman. I’m not a woman yet, am I? I’m only a poor little ilel. I’m not old enough to drag him into my bed, am I?”
She was trying to manipulate me now.
“So what should I do? Like I know you want me to shove those two silly people together, but it isn’t working very well, is it? And what’s wrong with the Master anyway? Where does he go when his eyes glaze that way? I don’t know.”
She struggled to her feet and donned her red-and-white-striped bikini-type undergarments, as though more modesty was required for further conversation with God.
“Well?” she persisted when she was comfortably stretched out on the rock again.
DO WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO. I was playing the role of the Great Improviser or Master Model Fitter with a vengeance.
She sighed, “I know that. And I’ll do it, really I will, except that it’s hard being an ilel with such silly people. Anyway, you don’t mind if I complain occasionally, do you?” She smiled a wheedlingly attractive smile. “Just a little bit? I know you don’t!” She played my theme again and giggled when she was finished. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
What can I tell you?
SING AND DANCE AND MAKE PEOPLE SMILE AND LAUGH AND BE HAPPY, I typed in. THAT’S WHAT PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE FOR.
She considered me shrewdly, or rather she looked at the sky above her where the port between our worlds seemed to be located. “Are you always that way?”
AN IMPERTINENT QUESTION, YOUNG WOMAN.
“I know, but are you?”
AS LONG AS THERE ARE ILELS TO AMUSE ME.
She rolled over on her stomach and pounded the rock as she laughed.
I’d said the right words, I guess.
She put her gown back on, frolicked through the forest, playing with the birds and picking flowers, and ran the last hundred yards to the Duke’s pavilion.
Inside he was staring glumly at the sky. She kissed him and threw the garland she had made on the run around his neck.
“Happy today, noble Lord and Master?”
“As long as there are ilels to amuse me,” he replied with a brave smile.
That freaked her out completely.
In a way the conversation I didn’t have with Ranora was as decisive a turning point as my meddling in the marriage of ’Vau and ’Rasia the night before. I knew that this was not just a game and not just a story and that I was not merely a game player and a storyteller. Something totally weird was happening. People, most notably Ranora, were confusing me with Someone Else.
And I seemed, temporarily, to be playing that Someone Else’s game; and it wasn’t Nathan’s either.
And I was beginning to love it.
Next stop was Malvau’s.
He was fully dressed for his walk to the central pavilion. His wife, looking disheveled and abandoned, was still asleep. He paused above her, glanced down proudly, kissed her lips, and fondled her lightly. She opened her eyes, smiled warmly, and embraced him. Only after he had left did she shake her head in confusion, as though she were trying to drive away sleep and figure out what the hell had happened.
The clergy’s secret meeting cave was empty save for the conference table and the brazier.
ELIMINATE FURNITURE, I ordered.
A couple of rocks fell out of the wall and smashed the table and the brazier. Nice going.
Up in the mountains the renegade warriors were shivering despite the sunlight and lifting rocks off the wreckage of their cannon. I thought I’d have some more fun with them.
BREAK CANON.
IDO NOT …
I cut it off. CANNON.
The round tube cracked neatly in half. One half of it rolled off the braces on which it still rested and smashed into several more pieces. Larry, Curly, and Moe sat around the wreckage of their toy and wept as they shook in the cold. I actually felt kind of sorry for them. Nonetheless it served them right.
I was handing out justice with a fair and even hand, wasn’t I?
Then to B’Mella’s chamber where the dark Duchess was poring over several stacks of paper, marking them with a strange scrawl which was, I presume, her signature.
(Kenny, a political scientist like Nathan and a good friend of ours, was somewhat upset that I didn’t learn more at the seminar about the operation and function of the administrative elites in this world. “What’s the point,” he said with his usual Calvinist intensity, “in breaking through a cosmic barrier if you don’t find out how they run things in your neighboring cosmos?”
(That’s Kenny for you. No problem at all with the existence of another cosmos. The only problem for him is why I didn’t do something useful during the time I was more or less in charge. By useful he means, as befits the President of the SSRC, something that would add to the store of human social science knowledge. “Kenny,” I told him airily, “God is too busy to pay any attention to those things.”)
“Good morning, my lady.” Malvau smiled complacently and bowed. “I see you are at work early.”
“I must deal with this excrement before we have the excrement of the negotiations.” She glanced up at him. “You look very satisfied with yourself this morning, ’Vau. Bed another woman?”
“A very familiar woman, since you ask, my lady.” He looked so damn proud of himself that you would have thought that it was his idea instead of mine.
She leaned back in her chair, and put aside her trapezoidal-shaped writing implement. “N’Rasia?”
He bowed again and smiled quite happily. “Old loves are the best are they not? Especially when rediscovered?”
“Does she look as self-satisfied as you do?”
“I cannot answer for how I appear, my lady, but, since you ask, I must report that my mate seemed quite content when I left her this morning.”
A smile played at the corner of the Duchess’s lips, making her very lovely. “I must congratulate you both.” She half rose from her chair and kissed her blushing councilor on the cheek. “I hope your happiness continues.”
“We pray to the most high that it does … now, if I may make a suggestion about the negotiations?”
His suggestion was that since it was the Feast of the Two Moons the next night, she would invite Lenrau and a few of his aides to eat the sunset meal in her pavilion. He would be there along with a few of her advisers, Linco, and one or two others. They might over the fruit and wine arrive at some “principles.”
“With some good fortune, we could even establish groups which would sort out the more complicated issues that separate us.”
“If we can remember what they are.” She grinned wryly. “Cancel the other negotiations?”
“Oh, by no means. The heat can be radiated in public, the light shed in private.”
She nodded. “How very wise. The Lady N’Rasia will accompany you. We owe her a debt.”
“My wife is not concerned about such things…” he stammered.
“I want her here at the meal,” she waved away his objection. “If I say she is to be concerned, she will be concerned … but will they accept our invitation?”
“Would you, if it were reversed?”
“After some hesitation.”
He nodded wisely. “So will they.”
It was a near thing, however.
Ranora, naturally, clapped her hands, executed a joyous somersault. Kaila smiled pleasantly, as much enthusiasm as he ever displayed. But the warriors were against it and voted unanimously at a meeting (in which one of the men from Navarone on the mountain inveighed against the foul-smelling whore in language I will not repeat). G’Ranne, who seemed to have lost her power of speech, contented herself with watching Kaila intently.
The priests, horrified to learn of the invitation, whispered that it was sacrilege to eat the Meal of the Two Moons with blaspheming infidels; a delegation of prosperous overweight burghers from Lenrau’s city appeared towards the end of the day to register their fears and anxieties.
“She’ll kill you,” screeched a Mother Superior of the previous night. “She’ll kill all of you.”
“I hardly think so,” Kaila murmured gently.
Ranora stuck out her tongue behind the woman’s back.
“We could ask for hostages.” Lenrau cocked an eyebrow. “I’m sure she’ll offer herself again. No, the Lady may and doubtless does have her faults, but treachery is not one of them. The question is not safety. It’s whether any good can be accomplished.” He glanced at the stony face of the ilel who, arms akimbo, stood at the door of his chamber, building up to one of her towering temper tantrums. “Or perhaps whether it will do any harm.” She climbed down from the tantrum and smiled approvingly at him. “Kaila, will you convey to the Lady B’Mella our grateful acceptance of her most charming invitation? G’Ranne, will you accompany us to the dinner?”
The ice maiden was startled. “I have nothing to wear!”
“I’m sure that can be corrected.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
Smart move, coopt her.
“It will be the first time in four hundred and thirty-nine years that our leaders will eat the Meal of the Two Moons together.” The courtier could on occasion turn pedantic. “I shall tell her that too.”
“Doubtless she will be pleased to learn that,” the Duke smiled ruefully. “Also the first time in either of our lives.”
“Which is more important,” crowed Ranora.
So Kaila crossed the meadow, Ranora piping his way with a dramatic variation on his theme. She called forth the Duchess with a burst of sound that could have come from a trumpet, bowed very low when the Duchess emerged, then scampered away from the pavilion like an eighth grader who has broken a window in the public school.
“I cannot recall that the ilel is included in the invitation.” B’Mella found Kaila’s smile as hard to resist as anyone else and treated him with the same deferential reverence he accorded her.
“As you know, my lady, I am responsible for the spirited little wench. If I give an absolute order she will obey me.”
“I will not put that burden upon you, my lord. Indeed, I would be disappointed if the magic imp did not appear.”
“I think we will both agree that she would be intolerable if I told her that.… She is very fond of you, my lady.”
“I cannot imagine why.”
The courtier had the last word. “If you will permit me to say so, my lady, I can.”
It did not work out so easily for Malvau. His edgy wife, trying to pretend that nothing had happened the night before, greeted his return at the end of the day with perfunctory neglect. He in turn proclaimed pompously that the Lady B’Mella required her presence the next night at the Meal of the Two Moons.
Both of them were trying to return to their old ways. I began to wonder whether I’d made a mistake.
I also found, to my dismay, that they were no longer pawns to be manipulated in my story, but people I cared for. I was now emotionally involved in their evolving love/ hate connection. Dear God, or Dear Other Person, how the hell did I get into this?
“I despise that woman. At her age, no husband or children and no concern about either. I will not eat with her.” She was working herself up into an enormous rage, the kind I bet she’d used often in the past to control and dominate her husband. “Nor with that evil blasphemous pervert from the other side. It is a sacrilege the Lord Our God will abominate.”
’Vau had been, I think, of mixed mind about the invitation. On the one hand, proud that his wife had been invited, on the other fearing the negative reaction he thought he would encounter. I could see in his face, hesitant and weak, that he was about to agree with her and phony up an excuse through which the Duchess would instantly see.
DON’T LET HER DO IT, I advised.
He nodded, took her arm firmly, and said, “It is necessary for us to have a private talk, my dear.”
While the servants and their daughter watched wide-eyed, he virtually dragged her away from the tents and into the forest.
She was terrified, fearing I think that she would be beaten. Their society, like ours, has deadly violence lurking beneath the surface. I can’t judge whether there is more or less husband/wife violence on their side of the barrier. The wives over there, however, are generally in excellent physical condition and give as much as they get. Battered wives they have, and lots of battered husbands too. Perhaps these two had never physically punished each other—they had more effective ways of inflicting pain and humiliation. N’Rasia looked sure she would be hurt.
DON’T HIT HER, I warned him.
If he heard me, he didn’t show it. I guess he really had no intention of hitting her.
“Now listen to me, woman,” he said quietly, one hand digging into each of her arms, “and listen carefully. We have three children and five grandchildren, have we not? Good. And a virgin daughter we both love very much? Do you want her raped by warriors before the Feast of Four Moons? Do you want the heads of your grandchildren to be smashed against the rocks? Do you want you and your other daughter and your daughter-in-law to be stripped and sold on the auction block? You don’t? I thought not. You think those things can’t happen now, because they have not happened in fifty years? You think that only the warriors fight wars in our modern days? I tell you that we are on the edge of a return to barbarism. There are many who wish it, some who will stop at nothing to accomplish it. If this attempt at peace fails, the night will return again.”
“Why me?” She struggled to break free of his hold.
“Because the Lady requests it, because she realizes that she needs another woman at the dinner, because the woman should be the wife of one of her councilors, because you are attractive and, as I learned again to my delight last night, capable of great charm. If those are not enough reasons, then the final one is that I want you there.”
YOU’D BETTER ACCEPT, I warned her.
“Very well,” she said ungraciously. “I will obey.”
What came next was entirely his idea, not mine.
“No,” she exclaimed as he began, “not here, not now.”
He didn’t force her, though he wouldn’t let her out of his grasp either. But he knew all the skills of seduction and applied them to her with ruthless cunning. Probably, I reflected, as I bowed out of the picture, for the first time in their lives.
I ventured into their city and discovered that sentiment there had turned in favor of the meal with the other side. The people were dancing and singing and guzzling large amounts of wine. It was part of the festival, but also hope was in the air.
And hope between ’Vau and ’Rasia. When I checked in with them later, they were ambling back to their tent hand in hand, ’Rasia unabashedly wanton. The servants pretended not to notice. Their daughter rolled her eyes in astonishment.
“You must explain to me what I ought to know about tomorrow night,” she said respectfully to her husband as they ate their dinner. “You know so much more about these matters than I do.”
I glanced at my watch. Six o’clock. I had spent almost seven hours with the game and it had seemed no longer than seven minutes. I was completely hooked.
Didn’t I have something to do tonight? I glanced at the calendar. The Goggins were picking me up for supper in a half hour. I was barely ready when they arrived.
Now here’s where things get strange, real strange.