In space, where communication was still tricky and where, more importantly, I was cut off from the Garden. No matter how much space travel I did, that was one thing I couldn’t get used to, and didn’t like at all, at all—especially this time, because the invitation had been now or never, with a hoversine at my door, barely time to pack, and no time to learn anything about my host beyond what everyone knew. I’d have liked to get to the Garden to graze for him. I knew I was only cut off for a few days subjective time and almost none in real time, but it made me more nervous than the idea of heads-up poker with one of the wealthiest men who’d ever lived. I tried to put it out of my mind and enjoy the trip.
The me of just a few hundred years ago would have been excited as hell to be traveling through space, much less through artificially created wormholes and mathematical abstractions that ought not to exist. The me of a few thousand years ago would have been trembling, curled up on the floor, and making his clothes damp with sweat and possibly other fluids. The me of now relaxed, let the seat roll back and adjust itself to his form, and closed his eyes as we made our way to Homefree.
Just under a week later subjective time, the Lady Gaga—a huge, elegantly misshapen transport owned by Sandow Travelcorp and full of travellers and with all the comforts of etc.—made a stop just to let me out. That made me squirm a bit. At the bottom of the jump-tube, there was a professional greeter who professionally greeted me, and if there was a hair out of place on her head I couldn’t find it. It was only later that I realized that her dress, hair-style, language, accent, and manners were all right out of the twenty-first century (or maybe the twentieth; it was after the internal combustion engine but before interstellar travel, all right?).
She told me her name was Sylvia and that my suitcase would be taken to my room, and asked if I needed some time to refresh myself. If she had said “wanted” I would have said yes, but I took the hint and shook my head. The weather was perfect. This was Homefree, also called Sandow’s World, and he was not only absurdly rich, but a worldscaper; between the two, the weather would always be what he wanted it to be. Here, where the Lady Gaga had docked, we stood on a beach of pink sand that ran for what looked like a mile or more before meeting a blue, blue, oh my god blue ocean full of the sort of waves that made me wonder why no one was surfing. But almost no one surfed anymore, anywhere, and almost no one came to Homefree.
Sandow’s world was whatever he wanted it to be, here and everywhere. While I’d never want him for an enemy, here, where the very dirt could be seen as an extension of his nervous system, I most certainly wouldn’t want him for an enemy. Opponent, of course, was different.
There was a hoversine nearby, the twin of the one that had brought me to the ship. I got in, and Sylvia sat across from me and pointed out the sights. The trip, which couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, brought us from the beach, past a mountain, and eventually into the middle of a forest. Nice trick, that.
We got out, and she led me along a path in the woods until we reached a glade surrounded by deciduous trees in which a poker table with three chairs sat looking absurd. Next to it was a sandy-haired alien dressed all in white, standing almost as if at attention. He had a couple of extra arms, and if I kept up on things, I could tell you what species he was.
“This is Tony, the dealer,” she said. “I’ll leave you in his care. Mr. Sandow will be along presently.”
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s been a pleasure getting to know you.”
She pretended not to catch the irony. She climbed back into the vehicle, which silently rose, turned, and headed off.
I shook hands with Tony; his smile was automatic and professional; a lot like hers. He used his upper right hand to shake, and that may or may not have meant something. Next to each chair was a small table laden with fruits and chocolates, an ash tray, and a place for a beverage. I’d have bet money that, somewhere just out of sight, was a full bar; and that there were concealed microphones so that a bartender—human, no doubt—would be able to hear and fulfill any orders in seconds.
“Feel free to sit,” he said in English with no trace of an accent.
Position doesn’t matter heads-up, of course, so I took the closest chair, stood next to it, and waited. He appeared in less than a minute.
Francis Sandow, one of the hundred wealthiest people in the Galaxy, looked a lot like a college student. He wore sneakers, jeans, and a Beatles tee-shirt from the Sergeant Pepper era. His hair was light brown and well-kept, his eyes were blue, he was clean-shaven. He walked up to me with his hand out, and I took it. His hand-shake was firm.
“Phil,” he said.
“Mr. Sandow.”
“Call me Frank,” he said. “I have no choice but to call you Phil, as there isn’t a last name recorded anywhere.”
“Phil is fine,” I said.
He sat down, and so did I. “Or rather,” he said, “many last names are recorded, but none of them go with Phil.”
I kept my face neutral. “As I said, Phil is fine.”
He nodded without taking his eyes off my face.
“Drink?”
“I’d take a ginger ale.”
He nodded, and seconds later an extremely attractive young woman wearing very little appeared from between two trees. She was holding a tray with two glasses on it. I looked at her, then at Sandow.
“Based on the costumes worn by cocktail waitresses at Mandaly Bay, approximately 1990,” he said.
“Based on, or an exact replica?”
He shrugged and smiled a little.
The waitress gave us our drinks—he had something in a brandy snifter—and went away. I manfully resisted the urge to watch her leave.
He turned to Tony and gave a slight nod. The dealer reached under the table and pulled out a familiar-looking lacquered wooden box. Sandow opened it. “Cigar?” he said.
“No, thank you.”
“Mind if I have one?”
“Not at all.”
He withdrew one and lit it with an archaic cigarette lighter. A light breeze came up, blowing the smoke directly back behind him; I didn’t think that was an accident.
He removed a roll of bills—actual, physical bills—from a pocket and handed them to Tony in exchange for chips. I handed Tony my card and eyeprinted the receipt, surrendering almost twenty percent of my bankroll. And if you think that wasn’t scary, you’ve never played poker professionally. Tony pushed some chips to me across the authentic, antique speedcloth.
“How was the trip?”
“Comfortable,” I said. “Restful. Luxurious.”
“The food was all right?”
“Better than all right.”
“Good to hear. But you’ve lived in luxury at some point, haven’t you, Phil?”
“Not often, or for very long. We live pretty simply now.”
“We?”
“My wife and I.”
“Oh,” he said. “You’re married? You should have brought her along.”
“I would have,” I said, “but you didn’t want me to.”
His eyebrows rose a little. “Now, what makes you say that?”
“Sylvia said my suitcase would be taken to my room.”
“And?”
“She said suitcase, not suitcases. You can’t be following me closely enough to know I only brought one suitcase and not know about Ren. Not to mention your remarks about my name. If you didn’t invite her, it was deliberate.”
He smiled a little and nodded to Tony. “Let’s cut for the button,” he said.
I wasn’t at all surprised that we were using real, actual, hold-each-one-in-your-hand playing cards. They brought back memories. The poker variant was Third Box. I opened the first hand to three blinds without looking at my cards, just to see what he’d do; he studied his hand for a while, then threw it away. The next hand I looked at, raised again; he let me have that one, too. Since he seemed willing to be pushed around, I did so, and in five hands, I knew I was a much better card pl
ayer than he was. Whatever he’d been doing for the last thousand years, he hadn’t been living and breathing poker.
“You’re very aggressive,” he said.
No, you’re just passive, I didn’t say. I smiled and waited for the next hand.
People say you can learn a lot about someone by the way he plays poker, and that’s true, but it isn’t as simple as some would have you believe. Devious or straightforward, passive or aggressive, loose or tight: those were key elements of someone’s game, but they don’t directly translate to what the person is like outside the game. My point is, if I picked up on elements of Sandow’s personality, that was fine; but right now I was just concentrating on how he played cards. And if you think that because he was on the passive side as a player he was passive as a person, you’re being an idiot.
He opened a hand, and I was sufficiently confident I was beat to throw mine away. I stole a couple more, then he opened again, I came over the top, and he thought for a long time, studying me, then mucked.
“You were in a big hurry to get me here,” I said.
“That’s the thing about wealth,” he said. “You can indulge yourself without waiting. If I get in the mood to play poker with one of the best, I can find out who that is and get him here in less than a day.”
A little later, we both had hands; he undercharged me for a draw, I hit, and got a decent payoff.
“You like being rich?”
“That’s an odd question,” he said. “Did you?”
I resisted the urge to squirm. That remark, the name business—was he probing at me? Trying to learn things he’d been unable to learn otherwise? And why did he care? Then again, I might just be over-reacting. I kept the thoughts out of my voice, face, body.
“Haven’t done it much,” I said. “I like not being scared about running out of money. That part is good. Raise.”
He mucked. “Yeah, beyond that it’s indulgence. For me, it just sort of happened. I did what I wanted, and it ended up producing—he gestured around himself—“all of this.”
“So you indulge yourself?”
“Are you judging me, Phil?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I were in your position.”
I threw away a good hand when he opened big, because it wasn’t quite good enough.
“No, you don’t. Wealth was never a goal of mine. Still isn’t, really.”
“What is?”
“Building. Making. Creating. Leaving something worthwhile behind. I’ll call the blind.”
“Laudable,” I said. “Raise.”
“Maybe. Call. Don’t you feel the same way?”
“I don’t think of it as creating something new as much as improving what already exists.”
He nodded thoughtfully and checked. I bet and he called again. I’d take the chance that he was trapping me; he struck me as a more straight-forward player than that.
“Still worthwhile,” he said.
“I think so.”
He looked at his hand, hesitated, then said, “I’m all-in.”
“Call.”
He laid his hand down. “I caught my second pair.”
“Yeah, I got a set.”
“Ouch. Well played. Do you give lessons?” he asked.
“I just did.”
He chuckled.
I said, “All right, Frank. So, it’s obvious you didn’t bring me here for poker. What have I just been paid for?”
“Are you hungry?”
I nodded.
“Good. We’ll talk about it over dinner. You may as well cash in. Want bills, or shall we send credits?”
“Sending credits is fine.”
Tony refused a tip, saying it was already included in his wages. It’s kind of fun when, after being alive as long as I have, you can have a new experience.
Dinner was served outdoors on a grassy patch next to a brook, with enough candles to make me think of a Buddhist monastery. I could see the guy’s house from there, and if I had a house like that, I’d hang out in it once in a while. A fellow of the same species as Tony served deviled eggs, asparagus with truffles in seasoned butter, roast chicken ala L’Ami Louis, and crepe Suzette. I had two glasses of a burgundy that must have cost more than I’d just won; he had a chocolate milk shake.
When the server or the chef or whoever he was left us alone, Sandow lit another cigar; I declined again. We both had a golden colored desert wine, and he said, “So, Phil. I have a question.”
“Yes, Frank?”
“What was Jesus actually like?”
I feel pretty sure my face gave nothing away, but my heart hammered at me, and I immediately began going through the Fibonacci sequence in my head.
“Hey,” he said, clapping his hands in my direction. “Over here. I need you here, Phil.”
He wasn’t going to let me engage my fore-brain. Unless he thought I was trying to graze. Either way, it meant he knew things about me he couldn’t know. His earlier remarks seemed more sinister now. I was scared.
“How much do you know?” I asked him.
He reached into his pants pocket, extracted what looked like an antique $1 bill, and put it into his other pocket. “I just lost a bet with myself,” he said. “I was guessing that would be question two, after you asked who else knew, with question three being how I know.”
“You were right about question three,” I said.
“I know about the exobrain you were just trying to reach,” he said, “and some of what you people have done through history. And you are old enough to have known Jesus.”
He knew about the Garden; yes, he’d thought I was going to graze, and he’d been interrupting me so I couldn’t. Well, all right. I was in his world—literally and figuratively—and my heart was still pounding. Time. Time and knowledge. All right.
I said, “Did you actually want to know about him, or more precisely, them? Or was it just supposed to be a shocker?”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing more, but it was mostly just to cue you in that I knew about the Incrementalists, and your exobrain, and your talent.”
Yeah, he did. A hell of a way to let me know, too. I’d done that myself: the shocking statement out of nowhere. It was a pretty common technique, for example, when recruiting: you meet someone who thinks you’re a stranger, then you reveal that you know that he’s not a stranger at all. Sometimes I’d do it to gauge the recruit’s reaction, other times to communicate as much possible as quickly as possible. Was I being recruited? Or evaluated? If so, for what?
“Who else does know?” I asked him.
“No one. And I’ll keep it that way, as long you don’t do what you do to me. What do you call it again?”
“Meddling. Meddlework.”
He chuckled and drew on his cigar, his face momentarily vanishing in a cloud of blue smoke. “Good term for it,” he said.
“I won’t meddle with you,” I told him.
“Then I’ll make sure no one besides me learns about you. Besides,” he gestured with the cigar, “it isn’t as if I don’t like what you do, what you’ve done. I do. This lousy, screwed up universe would be even lousier and more screwed up without you guys.”
“We like to think so,” I said. “How did you find out about me? Us?”
“You told me. Eleven hundred years ago, you told everyone. Remember?”
I used a bad word.
“I have access to a lot of information,” he said. “Not as much as you have, but a lot. I was digging around, looking for something else, and you showed up, and then I dug some more, and found out where you’d left the information out in plain view.”
“It was supposed to be taken as a metaphor. We didn’t think anyone would believe it,” I said. “I mean, not in the literal sense.”
“Back then, no one did. But this isn’t back then, and I’m not anyone.”
“What do you want?”
“Your help.”
“With?”
“I want to
rebuild the Earth as it was three thousand, one hundred years ago.”
“You’re a worldscaper,” I said.
“Oh, sorry, I assumed you knew.”
“I did. It’s just that I didn’t put it together. I mean, you can actually do that.”
“Yeah. And I intend to.”
“What happens to the present Earth?”
“Such as it is?”
“Yeah, such as it is.”
“Nothing. I don’t plan to touch it. I’m going off into a different part of the galaxy, but there’s a lovely G3 star there. I’ve already started forming the planet. I’ll send out word. There are plenty of re-creationists around who’d love to colonize a place like that.”
“Why three thousand one hundred years?”
“Because that’s as far back as your memory goes,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Will you help me?”
“You want access to the Garden. You want me to help you learn things you couldn’t otherwise, to get as close as possible to the old Earth. Is that it?”
“Exactly.”
“Why?” I asked.
He caught my eye and held it, cigar forgotten in his hand. “To see if we can do it right this time,” he said.
I nodded. “I’ll help you,” I told him.
*
We entered his “house” eventually, and I was shown to a room about the size of the house Ren and I lived in. He left me there, saying he’d see me tomorrow. I unpacked and relaxed. I wondered if the room were bugged. From what I knew of Sandow, it wouldn’t be, but it didn’t matter that much anyway. I sat down and stretched my legs out. This was a pretty new Second for me, and was considerably shorter than my previous had been, so my feet seemed too close. A strange feeling, but one I’d had before.
For the first time, I had the chance to get to the Garden. I didn’t right away, however. I checked the time-translator and found I still had almost two standard hours before the rendezvous, so I set an alarm for an hour and forty-five minutes and caught a nap.
I nap when I can; it’s one of my great pleasures.
I woke up, but didn’t enter my own Garden. I closed my eyes, and heard the distinctive, never to be forgotten sound of ocean waves breaking against rocks; and the tartness of good apple cider tantalized my tongue, and there I was: not my Garden, but our Garden. It was a place the like of which had never existed before Ren and I created it, and the like of which no one else had ever created, and there’s a whole story in that, too. But for now we’ll just say that Ren and I could meet in our shared Garden.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 2