God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Then she bowed elaborately to the Duchess, who in turned bowed elaborately back. “Is that me?”

  The girl threw up her hands in a “sometimes” mime.

  “When I’m good?”

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  “Which isn’t very often?”

  The kid shook her finger in a “shame, shame” gesture.

  “I like the tune very much. Thank you. I’ll try to be good.”

  The kid clapped her hands, did a couple of handstands, and began to march across the meadow, switching her cute little rear end defiantly as she played “B’Mella’s tune.”

  The pipe, as I have said, was little more than an Irish tin whistle, but the child could make the most wondrous sounds come from it, almost as though it were an instrument from the fairie glen.

  I began to wonder whether she was some sort of elf from some tiny, upcountry meadow of this country, a survivor of their fairie past.

  “Ranora!” the Lord Kaila said firmly.

  She took the pipe out of her mouth, stared at him impatiently, hands on hips, little foot beating the turf rhythmically, obviously displeased.

  “Come here,” he ordered.

  She shook her head negatively, now a stubborn teen-aged brat.

  “Don’t embarrass me and the Lord Lenrau.”

  She sighed elaborately and with a great show of resigned displeasure stalked over to Kaila’s chair and sat stiffly at his feet, telling the whole world by the cold tilt of her shoulder that she was greatly displeased with this handsome young courtier.

  Five minutes later she was holding his hand.

  He was too young to be her father, didn’t look at all enough like her to be her brother, and didn’t act, not then at any rate, like her lover. No one, I suspected even then, would dare to be her master.

  So what was he?

  I would learn later on that when ilels rose up in that world and attached themselves to someone who “needed” an ilel, they also elected someone else to be their “protector” or “keeper” or “minder.” Or maybe the right word is “babysitter.”

  Poor Kaila had been given the nod. The courtly, scholarly humanist was stuck with a waif who was half child, half imp, half angel.

  How would you like to have had someone like that dropped on your doorstep when you were maybe twenty-two or twenty-three?

  Kaila seemed then to accept his mission with resigned good humor. As the story continued, however, his manner towards her changed subtly. More about that later.

  I began to think she was a kind of slave and adolescent mistress to the Duke. She brought him his breakfast on his couch in the morning, laid out the gown he was to wear, bathed him in his pool, massaged the back of his neck, made him eat his food, provided a late night hot toddy, turned out his portable hand lamp, and tucked him into bed when it was time for him to sleep.

  It soon became evident that she was neither a slave nor a concubine. Whatever the rules which regulated relationships with an ilel, she could hold his hand, kiss his forehead, caress his arm when she wished, but he dared not lay a finger on her. She was a mixture of Tinker Bell and Ariel, a sprite, an imp, a pixie (with small piquant features for the role), a female leprechaun, a trickster, a wise woman, a conscience, a sister, a daughter, a mother, and a haughty archangel.

  She was also pure hell when she was displeased; fortunately that didn’t seem to happen very often. In fact, her temper reminded me of Michele’s. Very much so. In the back of my head I began to wonder if there was some sort of connection.

  That’s a tough one. I haven’t figured it out yet.

  God help me if they’re in cahoots with each other, even unconsciously, across cosmos boundaries.

  The next day the ilel was back, still fascinated by the Duchess. While the warriors were shouting at one another, she would prance around the edge of the meadow and sit twenty yards away from B’Mella, arranging her red-and-white gown around herself carefully, like a properly trained parochial school graduate. She would then rest her tough little chin on her hand and stare admiringly at the Duchess.

  Again B’Mella blushed and looked away, somehow embarrassed by the sprite child’s attention. Then she stole a cautious peek. Ranora giggled happily. The Duchess turned away, suppressing with difficulty her own smile.

  The ritual became a daily affair, always disconcerting but pleasing the Duchess, who acted like a novice model under consideration by a trained professional. At least once a day Ranora would play her B’Mella theme. Unfailingly, the Duchess would turn her head away so that no one would see her tears.

  Ranora was clinically blunt with her Duke. “Master, you must win her to your marriage bed, penetrate her most vigorously but with proper respect, and make her pregnant. That will end all this foolish fighting.”

  “Is she not a foul-smelling whore?” Lenrau asked with the faint smile that his ilel always seemed to excite.

  “You like her.” Ranora jabbed a finger at him. “You can’t take your eyes off her. She likes you, too. I can tell.”

  “End the war on the couch?” Kaila asked tentatively—no other form of expression seemed to be permitted him when he was speaking to his lissome charge.

  “Where else?” She jumped up, drew her tiny pipe from her gown, and begin to play it and dance to a lascivious tune. “I think she’d be fun in bed.” The others laughed, it seemed to me, a trifle uneasily.

  “You wouldn’t have to sleep with her.” The Duke smiled wryly.

  “Don’t be vulgar,” the ilel fired back at him and stamped angrily out of the tent.

  “If you can endure her,” Kaila closed the book he was reading (he always had his head buried in his book), “you would have no trouble with B’Mella.”

  “I heard that!” Ranora bounced back in, blew a few cacophonous notes, and then stamped out again.

  “You are right.” Lenrau laughed. “B’Mella at her worst would not be that haughty,” his eyes glazed a bit, as though he were drifting to a faraway world, “and probably not that loving.”

  “That we do not know.” Kaila was ever the man of reason. “She has perhaps never been given a chance.”

  “Hmmn…”

  If I were in the Duke’s position I would have been meditating on that possibility. I’m sure he was preoccupied by something ineffable and distant.

  “She is attracted to the ilel…”

  “Can they attach themselves to two people at the same time?” The Duke struggled to return to his world.

  “It is written,” Kaila flipped open his huge folio book, “that five hundred years ago it may have happened.”

  “B’Mella was very courteous to her, was she not?”

  “Indeed.”

  “That,” the Duke sighed disconsolately, “would be all I need.”

  Neither of the two principals paid all that much attention to the negotiations, save when they had to intervene to maintain order. Rarely did they say anything, and, except for B’Mella’s rebuke to Lenrau when Ranora was misbehaving, never a word to each other.

  The Duchess would twist and turn nervously on her form-fitting chair, impatient, restless, bored. You thought she’d rather run through the forest or swim in one of the lakes or dance and sing with the ilel or fight another war—anything but endure any more tiresome talk.

  Her counterpart often seemed asleep or so abstracted in thought that he might as well be asleep. Kaila, or one of the other young courtiers who hung around him, would often have to nudge him to pay attention if something important was being said.

  Or Ranora would blow a soft little tune, a variation usually on her B’Mella theme.

  She also had a Lenrau theme which sounded as if it might have been lifted from Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” or Handel’s “See the Conquering Hero Comes.”

  It embarrassed the Duke enormously because he certainly didn’t see himself that way.

  “Well, I do,” she said flatly when he tried to register a mild protest. “And I play the tunes, you
don’t.”

  So there, too.

  After what seemed a particularly acrimonious negotiating session ended abruptly, as though someone had blown a whistle, everyone withdrew to their fabric palaces. I decided that I was after all the author of the story and I had let the plot get out of hand and turn dull, save for the appearance of the delightful but contentious ilel. It was time to reassert my authorship.

  That was the second turning point in my active intrusion into the God business.

  I suspended the game for a few moments and tried to think rationally about it. In the heat of the moment there wasn’t much time to think and, anyway, when Ranora was dancing around, thought was impossible.

  I was betting that the real issues between them were minimal and that like the Prots and the Teagues in Northern Ireland they were prisoners of a history over which they had little control. Maybe, I reasoned, if I focused a little more intently on the personalities of the principal figures I would be able to reverse the trend of history. Lenrau and B’Mella were the Duke and the Duchess, the hero and the heroine, the ones who really mattered. I had allowed myself to fixate on the process instead of attending to the principal characters—a major fault in a storyteller.

  I informed the 286 I wanted to observe Lenrau.

  He and Kaila and Ranora, the three of them in the most minimal of swimsuits (hers red-and-white striped and displaying a perfectly delightful little figure) were floating in a pool which seemed to keep them effortlessly on the surface—Dead Sea density. She leaped out of the pool as I joined them, did a number of quite impossible acrobatics, dove back in, and promptly shoved the heads of both the men underwater. Neither of them was in any mood to play. But Ranora wanted to play, so they both tried to dunk her and for their troubles were rewarded with vast lungfuls of water as she dove under them, surfaced behind them, and dunked them before they could lay a hand on her. Finally Kaila wrestled her if not into submission at least into powerlessness.

  “Game’s over, I win,” she announced brightly.

  Kaila released her, I noticed with a hint of reluctance. There was a glint of something in his eye which I thought not appropriate in a keeper of a vestal virgin. Did she catch it?

  Don’t they all. She showed no sign that she was pleased or displeased. She merely kept her distance from him for the rest of the pool session.

  Were you an ilel for life, I wondered?

  She began to devote her ministrations to the Duke.

  “You are so tired, Master.” She caressed the Duke’s weary brow.

  I thought that I wanted an ilel of my own.

  “We must not despair.” Kaila took her hand playfully. She let him hold it for a while and then slipped it away, but not without a hint of a promise that he might have it back later. “The master has kept us together in negotiations already longer than we have talked for three generations.”

  “Good master.” She patted the Duke’s forehead with her free hand. “I think the woman is as tired as you are and wants peace as much as you do and doesn’t know how to do it either and is very pretty and not at all a foul-smelling whore. I want to talk to her. I’ll tell her that you can hardly wait to get inside her thighs.”

  “You forget yourself.” The Duke pushed her hand away.

  “Ranora…” Kaila protested in vain.

  “And you forget yourself too,” she shouted, pulling his kinky hair kindly but firmly and dunking him briefly.

  He came up sputtering, but no longer angry.

  “I’m sorry, good Ranora,” he sighed and sank deeper into the pool. “Strangely I want peace, so badly that I cannot drive the desire away from me. I want peace more than I want a woman.…”

  The young one laughed at that. He frowned but continued. “It is true. And I want a woman again, too. It has been so long. I don’t know why the lust for peace is so powerful. They say I’m a coward. But perhaps the Lord Our God has put this desire for peace in me.”

  “And in her?” Kaila asked.

  “Who knows? She is but an animal.”

  “A sleek and desirable animal.” Ranora jabbed his ribs.

  “In truth,” he agreed.

  They lapsed into silence. I cut to the Duchess and found her at prayer.

  And felt my eyes pop out of my sockets.

  As I learned later, the people in this world removed their outer garments when they prayed, a sign of humility and dependence which caused no scandal (they are prudes most of the time) because prayer was a private, very private activity.

  However, my first view of herself in the undergarments of her culture (they would be a hot item at the exotic lingerie stores and would greatly delight your SF illustrators) took my breath away. I agreed with Ranora—she was no foul-scented whore.

  Not one of Boris’s more voluptuous dark women, but slender, almost thin, sleek, boyish at first glance, before you noted the slightly curving hips, the long elegant legs, the slightly convex belly, and the small, delicately shaped girlish breasts. At prayer all her arrogance vanished; she seemed a fragile little girl in the presence of a father whom she knew doted on her but whose ways were hard to comprehend.

  “What do you wish of me, Lord Our God?” She seemed to be speaking to me. “I wish to do your will in all things. All my life I have been taught that it is your will that I kill them and seek especially the death of the evil Lord Lenrau who is the agent in our world of your enemy, the Lord of Darkness. Now I see that he is a human like me and on his poor face the same anguish that I feel. He seems to have suffered even more. I should feel guilty, but I don’t: I want to make the pain leave him. I wanted to cuddle his poor weary head against my breasts. Is that wrong?”

  Not wrong, but remarkably honest.

  “In my heart I hear you demanding that I make peace with him. You tell me that I have always wanted the killing to end. How can this be? Are they not evil and your enemies?”

  MAKE PEACE, I told her.

  She heard me. “It is your will. I will try to turn my heart in your way. It is so strange.” She stood up and reached for a thin robe. “Yet, Lord Our God, I like the way this new rule of yours makes me feel.”

  She paused as she was belting her robe. “But, how does one make peace? I do not know. I have never done it before. You made me end the conflict, you force me to control those who want to fight again, but you will not show me what I am to do next.”

  WHO, ME? I typed in.

  WHAT? said the machine.

  “Yes, you.” She didn’t wait for the machine to translate. “Please!” Tears in her soft brown eyes. “What good are you if you don’t help me now?”

  What the hell?

  Thus far I had played peacemaker on instinct. I had kept them from killing off any more of one another. Now I had a choice: I could continue to be a spectator or I could begin to force my own solution on the Duke and the Duchess, a decision whose romantic implications should be clear to anyone who has ever read or written stories, even if it wasn’t to the two idiots themselves.

  It was, I told myself, only a story, a game, Nathan’s game. Besides, clever little Ranora saw the same ending.

  I didn’t ask then what would happen if we were both wrong.

  5

  The Malvau/N’Rasia Subplot

  I was being seduced rapidly by the God Game. And subtly. By the time I realized what was happening I was hooked. Eventually I had to go cold turkey to end my addiction, but that comes later.

  Let me illustrate what was happening to me at this stage of the story with a subplot, the sort of thing my publisher Tom Doherty and my editor Harriet McDougal and my agent Nat Sobel would insist, with every reason, ought to be in this story. The subplot concerns B’Mella’s aristocratic councilor Malvau, whom I realized was a key to shoving the negotiations off dead center, and his wife N’Rasia.

  I was already hooked on the game, enjoying my power (I mean, how many of you have put an end to a bloody war and forced the contesting parties to attend a peace conference?) and enjoying th
e game of manipulating people’s lives—for their own good, of course. I was also beginning to discover that, just like characters in one of my stories, the people who were cavorting through my Compaq 286 and on my big-screen Zenith would do what I wanted them to do sometimes not at all, other times with grave reluctance, and yet other times without my lifting a finger.

  I had yet to conceptualize my role in this game as a God figure and, I’ll admit it, it had not yet fully penetrated my consciousness that these were very probably real people.

  But even if it was much later in the game and I had a pretty good idea what I was doing, I would have leaned on Malvau and N’Rasia pretty much the way I did. The difference between me and the Other Person, I think (but who knows for sure), is that I knew what I wanted those two idjits to do but I didn’t know whether they would do it or, more important, whether it was good for them to do it. At the time I intruded myself into their crumbling relationship, I didn’t bother to ask such questions. They were characters in a story who would live more or less happily ever after if they did what I wanted them to do.

  Later when I realized that the God Game, for me at any rate, was more problematic, I went ahead with my pushing them around because … well, because not to act when you have the power to act is in fact a form of action.

  If you get to be God, no matter what you do, it matters.

  OK. Malvau (I can’t help it that his name sounds like a character from Shakespeare) was something like a cross between a Commissioner of Public Works and a States Attorney in B’Mella’s government. He was on the right side, i.e. the peace side, but he was also a pompous bastard if there ever was one. ’Ella listened to him respectfully, but with obvious impatience. I had a hunch he might have been a kind of tutor for her at an earlier age.