PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner

by Players At The Game Of People (v5. 5) (html)

  That provoked a wan smile. “An older house than mine! Whose members had the good sense to go out of business before they invented modern warfare.”

  It was known that there was a miniature factory in the palace, where bombs and shells were made by royal hands.

  “I understand you lost your parents in a recent raid,” the king continued after a brief hesitation.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  Pause. There were others waiting. Time to take a pace backward and again give the wrong-handed salute. It was returned, but distractedly. Another medal was on the red velvet pad; another name was being announced. It was over.

  But of course he had to make it seem much more dramatic for Mrs. Gallon and her children and all the strangers who came swarming around him as he regained the street. The little girls were dressed in their best, and it was pitiful, but they had at least been thoroughly scrubbed and their well-washed hair shone in the sunlight and they shared a waiflike prettiness which, if one looked hard, might be discerned also behind the tired mask of their mother’s features. He told them all about the ceremony, with a garnish of invented detail because truly he had not paid much attention to the furnishings or decorations of the room he had been in; he had looked only at the king and queen.

  Finally he said he had to go, and saluted Mrs. Gallon, who giggled and blushed, and rumpled the hair of each of the girls, leaving Greer to last. But she was not content to be patted on the head. She seized his hand as it approached and pulled him down and put her other arm behind his neck and astonished him with her precocity by kissing him open-mouthed, thrusting her tiny tongue between his teeth.

  “Greer!” her mother said in horror. “You mustn’t do that to the gentleman! I’m sorry, sir—she’s a real terror, that one, a proper caution! I’m sure I don’t know where she gets it from!”

  But the last thing Godwin wanted was for her to stop. The contact was incredibly erotic; sensation lanced down his spine like electric current, triggering every reflex on its way.

  Must, though. Must! He visualized headlines about indecent assault in broad daylight. Never mind that she committed it.

  Contenting himself with one answering passage of his tongue against hers, which conveniently trapped a trace of saliva that might otherwise have glistened on his chin—and irrelevantly remembering that he had expected to have a mustache—he hoisted Greer off her feet for a one-armed hug and grinned as he lowered her again.

  Thinking of infection, and countless thousands of girls of this generation who would be given complete sets of false teeth for a twenty-first-birthday present.

  “Not to worry, Mrs. Gallon!” he said in the heartiest tone he could conjure up. “I’m sure it’s kindly meant. You take care of yourself, young Greer, and one day you’ll make some man extremely happy, I’m convinced of it. And now”—he glanced around—“I really must go. There’s my bus!”

  Everybody knew buses were too precious to miss, these days. It was the right excuse. He went away.

  Returning home, he landed his Fouga Magistère—his current favorite of the available two-seater jet aircraft—at Stag Lane aerodrome and drove into central London in his Lamborghini Urraco. There was a reggae program playing on Capital Radio which served to distract him during the occasional traffic snarl-ups, but as ever he made excellent time; even the cowboys seemed reluctant to dice with a machine wearing that much horsepower. He dropped it off for a tune up, wash, and polish at the usual garage and completed his journey on foot, raising the collar of his coat against a gray drizzle, carefully shielding his medal and the newspaper cutting which authenticated it.

  So far nobody, he noted as he turned the corner of his home street, had turned up to collect the Jaguar Mark X which had been pushed into the curb when it ran out of petrol… how long ago? Long enough for piles of rubbish—ice-lolly wrappers, fish-and-chip paper, empty soft-drink cans—to have accumulated against its wheels. Its windscreen wipers and wing mirrors had been pilfered and kids had tried to start a spectacular fire by setting a match to cardboard piled under its tank, but by then it had been too dry to yield the hoped-for pyrotechnics; they had only managed to blister some of the paint.

  Shame about that.

  The rain was penetrating and the wind was chilly. As soon as he reached the upper floor of the house where he rented a room, he realized that what he needed was some bright warm sunshine. Carefully closing the door behind him—not that, in fact, even the old woman who owned the house and was over fond of gin and could be heard, until he shut the door, laughing her silly head off at some nondescript television comedy show, could have interrupted him without invitation… because that was one of the conditions—he peeled off his Dunn’s tweed hat and his Gannex raincoat (as patronized by a recent prime minister), and then his sweater and jeans and boots and socks and helped himself to a generous measure of José Cuervo tequila, complete with salt and lemon, en route to a refreshing shower. When he came out, sweating just enough not to want to don clothing again for the moment, he felt hungry. He lay down in sunshine, but with his head in shade, and ate a slice or two of smoked salmon with crisp fresh salad, washed down with a foaming mug of pilsner. Satisfied, he lit an El Rey del Mundo petit corona and debated where in his souvenir cabinet to put the George Medal and the accompanying scrap of newspaper dated 20th September 1940, two columns under a common headline saying LOCAL HEROES HONOURED AT PALACE; the left column gave a description of the award ceremony and a list of names, while the right one contained four passport-style photographs, the second of which was captioned Sqn. Ldr. G. Harpinshield, G.M. It was an excellent likeness. The photographer had gone to much trouble to capture the contrast between his pale, chiseled features and his dark eyes and hair.

  Eventually he concluded the medal would look best next to the Schneider Cup and hung it there, intending to pin the cutting alongside.

  Curiously enough, however, he found himself unable to rid his mind, every time he looked at it, of the memory of that scrawny little blond girl who had kissed him with a skill beyond her years. Indeed, the erotic associations were so fierce, he found his hand straying toward his crotch.

  Before he reached a decision, however, concerning either where to put the press cutting or whether to masturbate, he was startled by a yawn. And also a little dismayed. It was not ordinary to be overcome in this fashion quite so soon after one of his rewards.

  Still, there was no point in trying to resist—or he assumed there wasn’t; he had never made the attempt, and most likely never would. A little leeway was always permitted, and this time he used it to fold the press cutting carefully, slip it into an envelope, and pocket it. But that was all the margin he was given. Resigned, he switched off the room.

  Surrounded now by stained and faded wallpaper, with cobwebs in the corners and a layer of grease coating the sink which doubled as a washbasin, he lay down on the unmade, creaky, narrow single bed and closed his eyes.

  Time to pay.

  Both of that was mostly Thursdays, but it was obviously Saturday when came to himself again, his right calf aching in a manner that made him think of falling bombs and a child with fluffy fair hair, and his mouth and belly sour with a sensation forty-eight foul hours of self-indulgence deep, compound of overeating and overdrinking and far too many cigars. Without even bothering to activate the room again, he made for the sink and emptied his bladder and scrubbed his teeth so hard he made his gums sore, then gulped down a cup of powdered coffee and began to feel halfway normal, apart from the usual strains and bruises.

  Catching sight of himself in the room’s one fly-specked mirror, he grimaced. He looked more like fifty than his chosen thirty-two. A visit to Irma, therefore. No appointment necessary. His arrival would be taken for granted, as he took for granted the need for it. It was never pleasant, having her work him over, but awareness was burgeoning in his mind that tonight he had a task to perform: one of the tasks he was so superbly good at. He would far rather hav
e taken time out—gone to Bermuda or the Caribbean for a while, to recover from what had been done to his body—but he did, after all, have his George Medal.

  Fair do’s.

  Turning the room back on, he went to the wardrobe and found appropriate clothes: a white bomber jacket with gold stripes, new black trousers, black boots with thick elastic soles. Also on the table beside the enormous circular waterbed were dark glasses and the key to a room at the Global Hotel in Park Lane. Although he had never to his recollection been there, he knew he would be recognized when he arrived; it was part of the pattern.

  The room automatically shut itself down as he left. Outside, he found the early-evening weather overcast and damp. A bunch of kids, two black and four white, had taken over the Mark X Jaguar as a playhouse, someone having forced its doors. Oh, well…

  Only at the end of the street did he realize he had omitted to shave. But there must be a reason for that: style, trendiness…

  There was always a reason for everything he did, whether or not he understood it.

  At one of Bond Street’s most fashionable addresses there was not—naturally!—a sign to tell the world that here was where the Beautiful People spent most money on being made so. Word of mouth served infinitely better to support Irma’s cherished, and fulfilled, ambition.

  It being the day it was, nobody but one of her oldest acquaintances (friends? Somehow the concept rang false, but there it was, to be put up with) could have walked in and stated his, or her, requirements. She was, though, awaiting Godwin; they had known each other for quite a while.

  It was preferable not to put a number to the years.

  She looked him over in the high-ceilinged room, lit with pitiless fluorescents, where she plied her trade. She was a handsome, square-faced, ash-blond woman who had decided to appear forty and lay claim to fifty because of Signe Hasso in L’Éternel Retour… which, in fact, was the name of her shop. Her hobby, which dated back to the time when she was reading biology at university, was the raising of exotic plants. Currently she had a species which glowed with a rich deep sheen whenever it decided to cross the floor in search of a new location. She had half a dozen trays of earth set out, and electronic gear which provoked the response, and when Godwin came in, three of the things—plump, luscious, like cacti but luminous and far more graceful—were under way from one to another rooting site. The first was ruby-red, the next yellow, and the third shone with a vibrant blue.

  “Perfect timing!” Irma crowed as Godwin entered. “Aren’t they darling? Are they not perfectly and entirely darling?”

  She spoke with especial fervor. Almost all her clients—for obvious reasons—were forbidden to see and admire her treasures, and a visit from someone who was allowed to witness her achievement was to be exploited to the full.

  Godwin, though, was aching from head to toe. Whatever his body had had to put up with recently, it had taken a gigantic toll of his resources. As he stripped off his clothes and prepared to lie down under the apparatus which Irma was marshaling, he could only say curtly, “Yes—very pretty! But what happened to the Regulan plants you had before?”

  “Rigelian!” she corrected sharply, pushing him with a firm hand into the right position on the table, which was broad and white and cold, and very hard. “Yes, they were all very well in their way, but they couldn’t stand the nitrogen… or was it the carbon monoxide? No, that was the ones I had before… Oh, never mind!”—with a sketch for a laugh. “They are lovely, these, aren’t they?”

  “Gorgeous!” he said with feigned enthusiasm, shutting his eyes. “Where are they from?”

  “Oh, I don’t know! Somewhere interesting, I think… What have you been doing to yourself?”—as she probed and tested his body tissue. “I hope you’ve allowed plenty of time, because you don’t look in the least like you ought to at your age.”

  That was a gibe, and he resigned himself to it; it was deserved. It was Irma’s talent to correct him so that every time he came back he would always leave here looking precisely as someone of thirty-two ought currently to look.

  And not, of course, him alone.

  Her mood improved as soon as she set about her work, as always. While she was removing his surplus fat she began to hum, and by the time she got around to erasing his wrinkles—not just from his face, but from every inch of his skin—she was cheerful enough to start boasting.

  “Say, know who I had in here yesterday? Bruce Bastard-Bitch of the Claimjumpers! You know! This Aussie sick-rock group they’re all talking about now! Was he a mess! I swear, I don’t know what they get up to down under to ruin their bodies in such short order. Of course if they had”—archly—“guidance…!”

  Meantime she was readjusting his hairline to correspond with the present fashion and dehydrating him of a kilo of superfluous fluid. He could feel the tingling sensation as it flowed out through his pores, taking with it the fatigue products accumulated around his strains and bruises. He relaxed, and despite the discomfort began to feel quite sympathetic toward her. Almost, indeed, affectionate.

  “I suppose you do have to keep up that level of 17-ketosteroids, but it sure plays hell with your follicles,” she sighed as she checked his hormone count. It was one of her minor abilities, to be able to sigh at such length. But he tolerated it, just as he did her belief in being guided. It was, after all, one way of putting it…

  “Now let’s do something about the accommodation of that right eye of yours,” she continued, shuffling her machines around and bringing to bear one which focused a dim green light on his retina. “Oh, yes. Still a bit lazy, just as I thought. Won’t take a moment, though… What’s new with you, by the way?”

  “Oh, nothing much…” But it was scarcely worth the doing unless there were people he could tell, and there were so few of them. He came out with it directly.

  “I won the George Medal for rescuing a kid during the Blitz. I saved her life.”

  “You never!” But it wasn’t a contradiction, only an exclamation. “I always knew you had it in you! Well, well, you actually won a medal! Did you get it from the king in person?”

  “Yes. Want me to prove it with a press cutting?”

  Already on first recounting it seemed far away and irrelevant. His eye had been attended to and everything in the room, including the faint reflections on the bright white tiles as the plants wandered from soil tray to soil tray, gleaming amber now and russet and orange, was far too sharply in focus for his comfort. Next, he knew, needles would probe his neck and shoulder muscles, eliminating rheumatoid plaques, and after that she would set about the business of updating him. She was invariably meticulous; every time he left here, he looked exactly as a contemporary thirty-two-year-old should.

  But it was not always a pleasant experience.

  “A George Medal!” she was repeating, as though to savor the very shape of the words. “Well, well! God, I bet you wish you could go around telling everybody!”

  That idea was so patently absurd it was uncomfortable. Rolling over at her insistence so she could insert her needles, he caught sight of the plants again and said with an effort, “They certainly are very pretty, these new things of yours. Where did you say they came from?”

  “Oh—one of the planets of Sirius, I think,” she answered absently. “Just a second. Don’t move, don’t even breathe… Got it. Ah—yes, Sirius or somewhere. But you should see the big ones I have at home! Taller than me, and so graceful! You really ought to drop around sometime. What about tonight?”

  He knew and she knew what the response was sure to be, but he was glad to be able to say honestly, “I’m afraid not. I’m being called.”

  “I see. That’s why you’re here, hm?” she said with affected nonchalance. “Okay, there goes your rheumatism. Now we’ll service your face and hands and that’ll do.”

  Her voice betrayed her, though. It must have been a long while since she was called. Clearly she wasn’t relishing retirement. Moreover, since she and he dated back to about
the same time…

  But she put a brave face on it, and a moment later as she reorganized his eyebrows she was saying, “I’m going to win a trophy at the Chelsea Flower Show, you know. For gladioli, I think. And tomorrow—I mean on Monday—you’ll never guess who’s coming for the first time! Candida Bright! You know, the actress who just won the best-of-year award on ITV?”

  Not, of course, to enjoy this kind of treatment. Godwin said absently, “When?”

  “Oh, last month some time, I think. It was in the papers.”

  “No, I meant the trophy.”

  Even before the words were out, he realized how tactless they were. “Soon, let’s hope!” he added heartily as she stood back and indicated that he could get up and dress. The addition provoked a wan smile.

  She ushered him personally to the door and kissed him on both cheeks before letting him out into the street. As he strode away, she called, “Do remember what I said about dropping by some time, won’t you?”

  That obliged him to turn around and wave back and thus look at her again. He would much have preferred not to see her as she was with her defenses down: as other people were not privileged to see her, as she should never have been seen at all.

  For that insight, too, there was of course a reason.

  A proper caution.

  The evening was cool but at least it was dry. Godwin drove to the underground car-park in Park Lane and left the Urraco there, jingling the hotel key he had found. Crossing the road, he noticed that the whores and beggars were out in force tonight, though traffic was naturally as light as it always was nowadays. Half a dozen couples of police—one man, one woman—were trying to prevent people being accosted, but it was a job like painting the Forth Bridge. Driven from one spot, the nuisance rematerialized elsewhere a moment later.