God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “All I told her was make up a tune. Aren’t you a little young for N’Rasia?”

  “No one is too young or too old for such a woman.” He shook his head sadly. “Don’t worry. I would not hurt her.”

  “You’d better not.”

  “What sense is there in it all?” His hand lingered on ’Rasia’s face. “This glorious creature endures terrible agonies in her transformation and now she will likely be destroyed with the rest of us. Would it not be better to have left her as she was? Why force the change on her for so brief a time?”

  “Moments of grace,” I was echoing Shags’s theology, I think, “are worth centuries. Moreover, she forced the change on me. Finally, no one is going to destroy her if I can help it.”

  He looked at me oddly. I turned off the light and we went back to my office.

  “What’s your problem tonight?” I beat him to my chair. “Do you want a drink?”

  “I would end up in another bed, I fear.”

  “All over between you and G’Ranne?”

  “Oh yes. She was very grateful and would care for me always.” He seemed uninterested in the subject. “I taught her so much about love. But we were not meant for one another. The act of love seemed a dead metaphor for love itself. You understand, surely?”

  “Well, I won’t debate about it, but Robert Graves has an ending that belies the beginning of that poem.” And how did he know Robert Graves? “I thought you two might be well matched. She’s a lot more than the ice maiden I first took her to be.”

  “Oh yes.” He smiled mechanically. “She will do very well, even with men. If anyone lives in our land.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Why did you leave?” His chin slumped on his chest. “The story was not finished.”

  “Certainly it’s finished. I can’t be expected to stay around forever. I told my tale, now it’s up to the Other Person to assume proper responsibility.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “The Duke and the Duchess are married and they must live happily ever after on their own. So must all of you. As for you and the ilel…”

  “That’s a childish dream long abandoned.” He dismissed my Ranora with a crisp movement of his hand. “I have matured greatly since then. It was a foolish request,” he smiled wanly, “for which I apologize. Tonight I am much more serious. We cannot live happily ever after, even in the terms of your obstreperous Blackie Ryan, unless you return.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not fully understand. I simply know that for some reason you have abandoned us in many ways and we will soon perish. All of us, our land, everything.”

  “What has gone wrong?”

  “I am not permitted to tell you.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Is the Duchess pregnant? Where is the ilel?”

  “I don’t know why I can’t answer questions. I do not make the rules. You made them … or whoever put you in charge. You can only know what is happening when you are with us. These … these meetings, I use the only word I can find, these dreams which are more than dreams, are only hints.”

  “Nathan’s game…” I said half to myself. “You access them only through the port.”

  “Yet,” he continued, a scholar puzzled by a problem even when he faced disaster, “I do not understand them either. Why am I in the dreams? Why is she, admirable woman that she is or has become or however she is to be described?”

  “Beats me.”

  “We need you,” he pleaded desperately. “Please come back while there is still time.”

  I would have argued the point with him, but he began to fade out. Or rather this time I began to fade out. Everything seemed black for a long time and then I woke up to a crisp summer morning, whitecaps on the lake, a brisk breeze blowing out of the northeast, sailboats already dancing along the shore, and cruisers moving northward. We’d have a few such perfect days and then the humidity would return.

  No second dream of G’Ranne?

  The first one wasn’t a dream; it was an eruption of my preconscious during an altered state of consciousness induced by self-hypnosis. Dreams you can suppress. Did she come to me in a dream that night, her smile of love a plea for my return with no pressure and no demands? Did I repress the dream?

  Had I been repressing dreams about her all my life? Was she a sacrament of God for me instead of the other way around?

  What can I tell you?

  Anyway, a more forceful appeal was still to come.

  I could find no trace of my dream visitors, not even a hint that anyone had slept in the perfectly made bed in the guest bedroom.

  They were dream creatures surely. Liquor could only appear, disappear, and reappear that way in dreams. They were different from other dream creatures, however, in that they were far more rational in their conversations with me, save for their unshakable conviction that I was a God or possibly the Lord Our God. They were also more vivid. Who can remember dream conversations the way I remembered my dialogues with them?

  Possibly, I surmised, returning even more exhausted than usual from my ski adventures, they represented a different altered state of consciousness, related to dreams but bridging the boundaries between different cosmoi and occurring only to those who were somehow involved in crossing the boundaries through a temporary port.

  I wasn’t sure what that explanation meant since it was mostly academic happy talk, but it seemed satisfying for the moment. Then I realized that N’Rasia claimed to have been dream linked with Joan Hagan. If any of this was true …

  If my recreated N’Rasia was filling Joan Hagan’s head with erotic images, the links couldn’t be all bad could they?

  Why was I so hesitant about resuming the game?

  Ever play with a Ouija board? It’s fun at first, a harmless game. Jokes, suggestive remarks, little digs at one another. Then something or someone else seems to take control of the game, something powerful and angry and frightening. If you’re smart you stop. Maybe it’s something deep down inside yourself or one of the other players, but it’s still terrifying and who needs it? Especially since there is a hint that if you keep fooling around with the darn thing, it might just take over your life.

  That’s the way I was beginning to feel about Nathan’s God Game.

  Read some of the literature about those who become deeply involved in psychic research. There’s a strong propensity for them to freak out. Permanently.

  To be blunt about it, I was scared. I was afraid of the power the God Game gave me. I wasn’t sure what it might do to me. I didn’t want any more of that control of people’s lives. They were not, at least probably not, characters in one of my stories but real people. I did not want to play games with the destiny of real people.

  To be fair to the revised game, the one you can buy at your local software store, there is no evidence that my experience has been any more than an isolated and non replicated event. We were not able to replicate it on the experimental version either, no matter how hard we tried.

  Still, well, maybe some of the players have experienced the same phenomenon and are afraid to report it. One of the purposes of this book is to assure such players that it has happened before and that it can be benign.

  From which it does not follow, I hasten to add, that it is inevitably and always benign.

  Now for the most scary part. Like totally scary.

  Ed McKenna and Mike Rochford came over that evening for supper and for a discussion of the next step in the opera Ed and I were writing. I made my fruit salad, which is my sole culinary accomplishment but more than presentable, and served some of the better local Tabor Hill wine. It was a sober gathering because we had serious work to accomplish.

  I stress these points, because it is necessary to report that I was wide awake when the call came, there were people present when I took the call, and they can testify to my end of the conversation, which they thought was a bit odd.

  The phone rang just as I was serving the raspberry tea
. A collect call for anyone from “Michele.”

  “Hi,” I said cheerfully, “how’s Ohio?”

  “I can’t come back,” she said grimly, “unless you come back.”

  “What?”

  “You have to come back first.”

  “I don’t have to come back anywhere, Michele. I’m in Grand Beach. You’re in Ohio. You’ll be back this weekend to ski with us. What’s wrong with you?”

  “That’s totally not right. Don’t be an airhead. Do what you’re supposed to do, then I can come back and we’ll make everything OK again.”

  “This is Michele?”

  “Of course it is. Who else would it be, anyway?”

  “Not … not Ranora?”

  Silence. Then like in a fog, “Who’s Ranora?”

  “An ilel.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. You’re coming home from Ohio this weekend, right?”

  “Ohio? Where’s that?”

  “You’re visiting Rick?”

  “Who?”

  Oh, oh.

  “Where are you calling from, Michele?”

  “You have to come back, you totally have to come back. We won’t even have a hopeful ending unless you’re here to help me. Will you, please? Before it’s too late?”

  Was she drinking? No, Michele doesn’t drink and she doesn’t do drugs.

  “Promise?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “That’s like really excellent. I have to go, I’m totally cashed. Thanks. Bye.”

  “A strange conversation,” Mike said tentatively. “Ranora is an odd name.”

  “Remember when and where you heard it.”

  I kept remarkably cool for the rest of their visit and talked rationally and competently about our opera.

  My mind, however, was racing. The ilel, somehow, had skipped over Max Planck’s Wall and was communicating to me through Michele.

  Moreover she had calmly informed me that she needed me to finish her plans. Not that I needed her. And insisted that I’d better hurry.

  OK. There were some loose ends that needed to be tidied up. We’d finish the game this time for good and then cut the link, close the port, resurface Planck’s Wall.

  Right?

  Right.

  14

  Trouble Right Here in River City

  After Ed and Mike left, I turned on the system, reactivated the game, and promptly went to the Duchess’s pavilion.

  I had to find out whether she was pregnant, didn’t I?

  She wasn’t there. It turned out that it was the month in which the joint rule was exercised from the Duke’s pavilion. OK. I had some catching up to do.

  INQUIRE DUCHESS PREGNANT.

  DO NOT KNOW PREGNANT.

  WITH CHILD.

  EXECUTING.

  Then a few seconds later, NEGATIVE. NEGATIVE.

  Once is enough, idiot.

  That was only part of what had gone wrong, though an important part.

  The time frame had speeded up. Only a day in my world, but several months in theirs, long enough for the poor idjits to fall out of love with one another, or think they had.

  They were still sharing the same bed, though as far as I could tell from discreet peeking, without much enthusiasm or passion. There were no major conflicts between them, save for the absence of signs of progeny, just the little battles which destroy love in the friction of any intimacy. He was too withdrawn, preoccupied, too mystical, she was too domineering, prickly, and obsessed with the details of politics. He was late for everything, she could not control her snide nasty mouth. Typical human marriage after the first few months when the glow has worn off the nightly romp.

  The troubles in their world were no longer political but climatological. It had not rained since the wedding and the annual crop was in peril, for the first time in decades. The priests were scurrying around badmouthing Lenrau and hinting that the threatened infertility of the fields was the result of the infertility of the marriage bed. That, they whispered, was all Lenrau’s fault. The marriage was a blasphemy, displeasing to the Lord Our God.

  No way, I said, but no one was listening to me.

  It took me awhile to figure out the obvious. Impotency. No wonder Lenrau was humiliated and herself furious.

  How could you be impotent with a woman like her in bed with you?

  A professional celibate’s question, I suppose. On her grim days, and now they all seemed grim, she would scare most men back into the latency period of their lives.

  Castrating?

  Yeah, that will do as a description.

  The worst change was that there was no trace of the ilel. Kaila wandered around the administrative pavilion like a puppy who had lost his person. No one else mentioned her.

  FIND ILEL, I told my PC.

  DO NOT KNOW ILEL, it said.

  RANORA, I typed in impatiently.

  ERROR, ERROR!

  I tried again. FIND RANORA.

  INPUT OUTPUT ERROR. ATTEMPT TO OPEN FILE ALREADY OPEN.

  I knew better than to try to argue with a computer giving that message. I felt a chill of doom. Was the imp child dead? If someone had killed her, they would pay—only God for a couple of days and already into the vengeance-and-wrath business.

  Or was she away in Ohio?

  Kaila did not seem in mourning exactly, more like a man pining for someone who was away on a long journey and might or might not return. That speculation was a little more consoling but not much.

  So the priests, apparently now merged into one caste regardless of which duchy they came from, continued to intrigue against Lenrau. In the shops and the market places, in the cafes and the taverns, among the anxious farmers watching their gorgeous fields turn brown and dry, they whispered that it would not rain unless Lenrau was “offered up.” I didn’t know what that meant but I didn’t like the sound of it. The Cardinal was now completely in command and went about under the protection of a giant straight from Boris’s nightmares always standing behind him. I called him the Troll because that’s what he seemed to be—well, part troll and part small-time Mafia hit man or crooked southeast-side Irish precinct captain.

  Neither Lenrau nor B’Mella were praying at night anymore. They did not talk to each other or to the Lord Their God. Nor were they willing to listen to my orders pounded out now frantically on the 286 keyboard. The Duke was locked up in his Willy Weakling persona. Somehow it didn’t quite fit him, although he seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for himself.

  Look, he was a physically strong man, capable on the record of decisive action, personal heroism and spectacular performance in bed. Why had he geeked out, as Michele or Bob would have put it?

  My guess was that he was ashamed of or maybe uncertain about the poet and visionary part of his character. He was supposed to be a warrior, not a poet, right? The lovely lady had married a great warrior, right? OK, she had approved of the other part of him, but she didn’t know what it meant. What happens if she finds out she has a part-time flake on her hands?

  What probably happens, even if she isn’t Irish and hence doesn’t come from a tradition where to be a really good king or warrior you have to be a mystic and poet, is that she melts completely and adores her husband. But the only way that will ever happen is if he opens up to her. And he’s not about to do that.

  In the meantime we have to fend off the Cardinal and his crowd who want to do the poor man in. Moreover, we have to do it without our local Ariel.

  I checked out Malvau. Like Kaila he seemed to have withdrawn from the political game, sitting in the garden all day, every day, strumming on a lute and rarely talking to his wife, who didn’t have much to say herself.

  I supposed that I could reactivate both Kaila and Malvau if necessary, but for what goal? No point in doing anything until I formed a strategy.

  My first idea was obvious.

  END DROUGHT.

  ERROR. ERROR. INSUFFICIENT MOISTURE AT PRESEN
T.

  Damn.

  HOW SOON SUFFICIENT MOISTURE?

  IMPOSSIBLE TO ESTIMATE.

  Oh, great.

  My second idea was a stroke of genius, incompetent genius.

  The answer to the problem seemed to be a pregnancy. But how was I supposed to handle that? I thought about it and decided that if you’re playing God on a temporary basis you can get away with anything. After all, doesn’t Paul Scott in the Raj Quartet cause three different women to become pregnant the first time they have intercourse? And none of the readers complained, did they? If you’re God, you’re God, right?

  But what if your best intentions as God go wrong?

  I had a lot to learn yet, and the game was dangerously near its end.

  Anyway, it was a very hot night, with only a few hours of darkness, and the windows were open in the Ducal bedroom. My two friends, both soaking with perspiration, were lying on their bed, covers thrown off, as far away from each other as they could get without rolling on the floor—a not infrequent position for human men and women, especially when it’s hot and they’re irritable. Not without some hesitation, I typed out the fatal instruction:

  IMPREGNATE DUCHESS.

  I expected an argument from the PC, but it went along promptly: EXECUTING.

  “I love you, ’Ella,” he says to her, still strictly from Terry Timid.

  She snorted derisively and turned on her side so that her back was facing him. He started to caress her back lightly. She pushed his hand away.

  “Can we not be as we once were?”

  “I am tired, leave me alone.”

  My fingers poised over the keyboard. Not quite the time. He had to court her again. Easy enough for God to say.

  He touched a breast very tentatively, too tentatively if you want my uninformed opinion. She shoved his hand away again. “I said leave me alone.”

  I am no expert in these matters, God (you should excuse the expression) knows; but now was not the time to turn amorous, poor idjit.

  LEAVE DUCHESS ALONE, I insisted.

  He wouldn’t listen. His next move was, let us say, considerably more forward and very ill advised. She hit him. I pushed the REPEAT button. He tried to kiss her, she hit him again, jumped out of the bed and grabbed for her undergarment. “If you won’t let me sleep here, then I will find another bed.”