Players at the Game of People (11 page)
Read Players at the Game of People Online
Authors: John Brunner
And who was that?
Dispirited, he went to Maud McConley's in Nassau for some skin-diving,
and while darting around coral reefs and enjoying his isolation and his
suspension in time as well as space noticed a head of long, pale hair
spread out in the water and his heart nearly stopped before he worked
out that the change of color due to being under water meant that this
was not the shade he had in mind.
What shade?
Alone in his magnificent hotel suite, masturbating with desultory lack
of interest, he thought the matter through and felt cheated, deceived,
betrayed.
That little girl whose life he so vividly remembered saving (and to hell
with Bill Harvey!): she was the key and clue. Blasé, he had grown immune
to most erotic stimuli; it was the readiest form of reward someone in his
position could request. But her brief kiss, so public and so shameless . . .
Merely recalling it made him climax, and the pang of that was promptly
followed by disgust. He kept thinking of a single word:
pervert
.
And went back to England to find a cloudy, hesitant summer as ill-defined
as his own state of mind. He half wished he might be called again, but
he had not yet claimed his reward for the last time, and so far he had
not thought of anything fresh he wanted to experience.
Besides, the occasions for being called were apparently growing
fewer. Maybe people were going out of style.
Or whatever.
Needing to kill time, he thought about reclaiming the Urraco from the
Park Lane underground car-park and revisiting some places he had liked
in the old days -- out in Kent, for example, where around Canterbury
there were country pubs he recalled with vague nostalgia. Maybe that
was worth doing; maybe it wasn't. He found himself half envying Irma for
her pride at being constantly involved with the jet set, and even Bill,
whose obsession with winning meant that he could get as excited over a
videotape of the Cup Final as over the match itself in real time. But
he himself had chosen to be a man of leisure. As the saying went, it
had seemed like a good idea at the time . . .
Well, as the other saying went, having made his bed he had to lie in it.
But it would certainly help if he learned to lie more convincingly.
Especially to himself.
The city, though, seemed even less endurable than usual, with its hordes
of child-beggars that he had to scatter with handfuls of change flung as
far out into the roadway as he could manage. The technique always worked,
because as soon as a fight broke out over who was to have the pound pieces,
their attention magically switched, but it was still a damnable nuisance,
and he was glad to see that the police were now patrolling in threes,
one being a radio operator, so that trouble could be nipped in the
bud. Moreover, there seemed to be a lot more of them than in the past.
But it was a shame there was so little traffic now. It might have run
some of the greedy devils over.
After only a short while, therefore, he decided to collect the car and
give himself a pleasanter impression of his homeland.
Part of Knightsbridge was closed; a neglected building had slumped into
the road and enforced a detour, and the police had put up anti-looter
barricades. Growing angrier by the minute, Godwin found himself constrained
to walk to Marble Arch and approach by the northern end of Park Lane,
where there had recently been a couple of bombings. The car-park,
reportedly, was intact, but while of course even if it had not been he
could have obtained another car without trouble, it would have been a
nuisance, and nuisances were what he was least in the mood for.
The Global Hotel, at any rate, had escaped the bombers, and the
commissionaire, Jackson, to whom he had been so generous in the
recent past was on duty and chatting with a woman of about fifty,
slender, wearing a bulky but lightweight black coat and black corduroy
pants. Spotting Godwin just as he was about to cross the road and enter
the car-park, he offered a salute and the woman beside him glanced around
and time stopped.
It's impossible!
It's insane!
But if that little one whom I recall as Greer had lived to --
The thought snapped off like a dry branch. It was not palatable to think
about the passage of time. He and his kind were outside it. When they
needed repairs they were serviced more efficiently than a car could be.
Time was not of their essence.
What we register is change. In the first flush of enthusiasm he had
actually said that to somebody (who?) and known it was right and in
consequence dismissed the matter for good and all.
No. More logical: in the course of a life any -- even an ordinary --
person sees so many other faces it must happen eventually that one
recalls another.
Therefore he disregarded the commissionaire's attempt at signaling and,
feigning not to have noticed, hastened toward the car-park, only to
find that the entrance he meant to go down by was closed thanks to a
bomb outrage, so he had to use another, further away.
More nuisance; more annoyance. He felt fuming.
But even worse: he felt scared. And that was not meant to be a possibility
in his world. It was among the exclusions. Hastily he produced the car
key from his pocket and showed it to the guards on duty at the barrier,
noticing that they were armed with pistols; he registered change. Grumpy,
they allowed him to proceed but warned that since he had left his car
here for so long its tank might be empty, thanks to thieves.
Peasants!
It was, naturally, full. The familiar roar of the engine resounded
comfortingly under the low concrete ceiling as he headed for the exit
. . . from which, as he suddenly realized, he was compelled to turn
north only. Hence he must again pass the front of the Global Hotel.
The charge plate he proffered when he drove out provoked satisfactorily
raised eyebrows, but that was a minor consolation. The same had happened
often enough already to glut his capacity for being amused by it.
What dismayed him was that Jackson was still talking to the woman,
and as soon as the Urraco appeared he pointed in its direction,
and coincidentally there was an almost impossible event: a delay at
the Oxford Street junction. It took two taxis and a bus and a collision
between two vegetable-laden handcarts to create it . . . but it had long
been a precept by which he abided that nothing in his world happened
without there being a reason.
And there was no way he could avoid the woman's lingering stare,
nor awareness of the change in her expression.
We register change
By now he had half made up his mind that the simple erotic content
of his latest memories accounted for his borderline obsession with
fair-haired women; there had been other similar cases in the past,
which wore away. But there was no mistake this time. She looked at him,
and he recognized on her face an expression impossible to misinterpret.
I know you.
The jam had broken; a posse of police had arrived with braying sirens
and overturned the interlocked carts, dumping their wares in the gutter,
so that an instant flock of beggars and scavengers materialized and,
for once tolerated, cleared the way. The taxis first, then his own car,
then the bus, were waved past with urgent gestures implying that it
would not matter in the slightest were a little animal matter mingled
with the vegetables.
Godwin agreed, and accelerated eastward.
Oxford Street having been for a long while closed to all traffic but buses
and taxis, and in any case being beset by homeless hawkers, peddlers, and
prostitutes, Godwin detoured via Wigmore Street and made his eventual way
to Holborn and the slums of the City, where squatters swarmed like ants in
the abandoned office blocks -- some bombed, some burned for the insurance,
some simply left to rot when the owning company collapsed. Hordes of ragged
and filthy children rushed out to celebrate this rare event, the passage
of a car, and when he halted more from force of habit than necessity at a
blind junction, they converged on him screaming for money and displaying
stump wrists and carefully cultivated sores.
He scared them off with a roar of his engine and thereafter crossed
intersections without slowing, blasting his horn.
Thinking of Sittingbourne, he turned south to A2. In Greenwich an armed
fascist patrol had set up a roadblock guarded by stern-faced boys with
stolen army guns wearing Union Jack armbands on their black leather
motorcycling jackets. Luckily a trio of policemen had paused to pass
the time of day with them and someone had cracked a good joke which made
them all chuckle. Barely glancing at him except to ensure he was white,
they waved him by.
As darkness fell he arrived at his destination, a half-timbered rambling
building which had been a coaching-inn and which the twentieth century
had evolved into a roadhouse. It boasted a fabulous wine list, report
said; Godwin dared not sample it, but he knew about its cuisine, and
progressed through Whitstable native oysters via saddle of mutton with
onion sauce and braised asparagus to steamed suet pudding and treacle,
deferentially served by black-jacketed waiters to the accompaniment
of quiet but unobtrusive music and the cheerful chatter of the other
diners. The place was as crowded as he had ever seen it, but it was
keeping up its standards. He overheard more than one person exclaiming
over the superb quality of the red Bordeaux.
But even as Godwin was preparing to relax after his meal with a cigar
and a cup of coffee, a familiar pressure started to build at the back
of his mind. Annoyed, he attempted to dismiss it from consciousness;
it was, of course, impossible. Somewhere, patience had come to an end.
And there was only one safe place to be when that happened. Home.
At least, he suspected that to be the case. He had never previously
thought much about the question. But then, he had never before been other
than eager for the reward it was his just entitlement to claim after a
successfully completed assignment. The very idea of stalling would have
puzzled him in the past -- indeed, it was puzzling to him now, though he
was all too hideously aware of the reason for his unprecedented reaction.
Damn Bill Harvey and his wartime recollections!
Damn the blond woman in Park Lane!
He scribbled an illegible signature on the bill, having forgotten by what
pseudonym they knew him here -- not that it mattered, for none of his
bills was ever presented for payment -- and hastened back to the car,
and back to London.
As though he were abruptly to be haunted by an earlier version of himself,
so deeply buried in the past as to have been virtually forgotten, he
realized as he approached his home that he was worrying about finding a
parking space in his street. Never before had he left the Urraco at his
own door. Without thinking much about the necessity to do otherwise, he
had simply accepted it as risky, perhaps because of what had happened
to other vehicles, the ruined Mark X Jaguar being only the latest
of dozens. But the pressure in his head was increasing, and now it
was peaking occasionally into pain and sending little bright shooting
lights across his field of vision. He was going to have no time to do
anything else.
Miraculously the very Jaguar he had been thinking about was gone when he
drove cautiously around the corner, leaving a handy vacancy immediately
in front of the house. He reversed into it thankfully and scrambled out
without bothering to lock up.
Nobody would really touch his car, would they? Nobody ever had done. Not
even during all that time in the Park Lane car-park when there were bomb
scares and police investigations.
Anyway, what the hell? There could always be another!
Half blind with pain by now, he rushed upstairs and, not sparing time to
turn the room on nor even to empty his bladder, he spent the last few
moments of individual awareness trying desperately to reach a decision
about his reward.
Then a dazzling inspiration struck him. Maybe he didn't have to choose.
Maybe what had happened to undermine his last reward was a way of
indicating that there were other possibilities he, with his limited
imagination, had never thought of. Had Irma requested her Sirian
plants? Had Hermann known in advance about Arikapanotulandaba's amazing
powers? When had Hugo & Diana experienced free fall?
Thankful, convinced, he surrendered.
It was dark. It was oppressively hot, but the air was dry. There was
a stink of excrement. He ached in all his limbs, he was parched with
thirst, his belly was acid with hunger, and there were sores around
his wrists and ankles due to thick leather straps, first sewn and then
riveted into place with copper rivets. Those on his legs hobbled him;
those on his arms prevented him even reaching behind to cleanse himself
after a motion. Also his scalp itched terribly.
He squatted on the floor of a room -- no, a cell -- too low for him to
stand up, too narrow for him to lie down at full stretch. The posture
in itself was not uncomfortable; all his life he had been accustomed to
sitting on the ground. But he wished he could walk more than two strides.
More details impinged on his awareness. He wore a foul, greasy garment,
too shapeless to be called a robe, which covered him from shoulders to
knees. He was accustomed to sandals protecting his feet, but they were
a forgotten luxury now. There were two small holes and one large in
the walls and floor of his cell: one serving to piss and shit into, one
admitting a little air -- but it was so small, he could not even thrust
his emaciated fist down it -- and one closed with a heavy and expensive
door, made of solid wood. The rest of the structure was of mud brick,
not kiln-fired, not even baked, only sun-dried. But it was enough of an
obstacle to contain such a weakling as a man.
From far away he heard the noise of a celebration: chanting, drumming,
beating of cymbals, punctuated with loud laughter. His mouth turned
bitterly down at the corners.
But that was ill-advised. That was stupid. That was dangerous. There was
a reason why he was here -- he firmly believed it -- and it was his duty
to endure patiently until understanding came. He forced his lips to shape
a smile, and between gapped and aching teeth he hummed a sacred melody
for the sake of its magical protective powers. A certain comfort came
upon him as he repeated it over and over, lulling his consciousness into
a state of vague, starvation-bred euphoria.
Dispirited, he went to Maud McConley's in Nassau for some skin-diving,
and while darting around coral reefs and enjoying his isolation and his
suspension in time as well as space noticed a head of long, pale hair
spread out in the water and his heart nearly stopped before he worked
out that the change of color due to being under water meant that this
was not the shade he had in mind.
What shade?
Alone in his magnificent hotel suite, masturbating with desultory lack
of interest, he thought the matter through and felt cheated, deceived,
betrayed.
That little girl whose life he so vividly remembered saving (and to hell
with Bill Harvey!): she was the key and clue. Blasé, he had grown immune
to most erotic stimuli; it was the readiest form of reward someone in his
position could request. But her brief kiss, so public and so shameless . . .
Merely recalling it made him climax, and the pang of that was promptly
followed by disgust. He kept thinking of a single word:
pervert
.
And went back to England to find a cloudy, hesitant summer as ill-defined
as his own state of mind. He half wished he might be called again, but
he had not yet claimed his reward for the last time, and so far he had
not thought of anything fresh he wanted to experience.
Besides, the occasions for being called were apparently growing
fewer. Maybe people were going out of style.
Or whatever.
Needing to kill time, he thought about reclaiming the Urraco from the
Park Lane underground car-park and revisiting some places he had liked
in the old days -- out in Kent, for example, where around Canterbury
there were country pubs he recalled with vague nostalgia. Maybe that
was worth doing; maybe it wasn't. He found himself half envying Irma for
her pride at being constantly involved with the jet set, and even Bill,
whose obsession with winning meant that he could get as excited over a
videotape of the Cup Final as over the match itself in real time. But
he himself had chosen to be a man of leisure. As the saying went, it
had seemed like a good idea at the time . . .
Well, as the other saying went, having made his bed he had to lie in it.
But it would certainly help if he learned to lie more convincingly.
Especially to himself.
The city, though, seemed even less endurable than usual, with its hordes
of child-beggars that he had to scatter with handfuls of change flung as
far out into the roadway as he could manage. The technique always worked,
because as soon as a fight broke out over who was to have the pound pieces,
their attention magically switched, but it was still a damnable nuisance,
and he was glad to see that the police were now patrolling in threes,
one being a radio operator, so that trouble could be nipped in the
bud. Moreover, there seemed to be a lot more of them than in the past.
But it was a shame there was so little traffic now. It might have run
some of the greedy devils over.
After only a short while, therefore, he decided to collect the car and
give himself a pleasanter impression of his homeland.
Part of Knightsbridge was closed; a neglected building had slumped into
the road and enforced a detour, and the police had put up anti-looter
barricades. Growing angrier by the minute, Godwin found himself constrained
to walk to Marble Arch and approach by the northern end of Park Lane,
where there had recently been a couple of bombings. The car-park,
reportedly, was intact, but while of course even if it had not been he
could have obtained another car without trouble, it would have been a
nuisance, and nuisances were what he was least in the mood for.
The Global Hotel, at any rate, had escaped the bombers, and the
commissionaire, Jackson, to whom he had been so generous in the
recent past was on duty and chatting with a woman of about fifty,
slender, wearing a bulky but lightweight black coat and black corduroy
pants. Spotting Godwin just as he was about to cross the road and enter
the car-park, he offered a salute and the woman beside him glanced around
and time stopped.
It's impossible!
It's insane!
But if that little one whom I recall as Greer had lived to --
The thought snapped off like a dry branch. It was not palatable to think
about the passage of time. He and his kind were outside it. When they
needed repairs they were serviced more efficiently than a car could be.
Time was not of their essence.
What we register is change. In the first flush of enthusiasm he had
actually said that to somebody (who?) and known it was right and in
consequence dismissed the matter for good and all.
No. More logical: in the course of a life any -- even an ordinary --
person sees so many other faces it must happen eventually that one
recalls another.
Therefore he disregarded the commissionaire's attempt at signaling and,
feigning not to have noticed, hastened toward the car-park, only to
find that the entrance he meant to go down by was closed thanks to a
bomb outrage, so he had to use another, further away.
More nuisance; more annoyance. He felt fuming.
But even worse: he felt scared. And that was not meant to be a possibility
in his world. It was among the exclusions. Hastily he produced the car
key from his pocket and showed it to the guards on duty at the barrier,
noticing that they were armed with pistols; he registered change. Grumpy,
they allowed him to proceed but warned that since he had left his car
here for so long its tank might be empty, thanks to thieves.
Peasants!
It was, naturally, full. The familiar roar of the engine resounded
comfortingly under the low concrete ceiling as he headed for the exit
. . . from which, as he suddenly realized, he was compelled to turn
north only. Hence he must again pass the front of the Global Hotel.
The charge plate he proffered when he drove out provoked satisfactorily
raised eyebrows, but that was a minor consolation. The same had happened
often enough already to glut his capacity for being amused by it.
What dismayed him was that Jackson was still talking to the woman,
and as soon as the Urraco appeared he pointed in its direction,
and coincidentally there was an almost impossible event: a delay at
the Oxford Street junction. It took two taxis and a bus and a collision
between two vegetable-laden handcarts to create it . . . but it had long
been a precept by which he abided that nothing in his world happened
without there being a reason.
And there was no way he could avoid the woman's lingering stare,
nor awareness of the change in her expression.
We register change
By now he had half made up his mind that the simple erotic content
of his latest memories accounted for his borderline obsession with
fair-haired women; there had been other similar cases in the past,
which wore away. But there was no mistake this time. She looked at him,
and he recognized on her face an expression impossible to misinterpret.
I know you.
The jam had broken; a posse of police had arrived with braying sirens
and overturned the interlocked carts, dumping their wares in the gutter,
so that an instant flock of beggars and scavengers materialized and,
for once tolerated, cleared the way. The taxis first, then his own car,
then the bus, were waved past with urgent gestures implying that it
would not matter in the slightest were a little animal matter mingled
with the vegetables.
Godwin agreed, and accelerated eastward.
Oxford Street having been for a long while closed to all traffic but buses
and taxis, and in any case being beset by homeless hawkers, peddlers, and
prostitutes, Godwin detoured via Wigmore Street and made his eventual way
to Holborn and the slums of the City, where squatters swarmed like ants in
the abandoned office blocks -- some bombed, some burned for the insurance,
some simply left to rot when the owning company collapsed. Hordes of ragged
and filthy children rushed out to celebrate this rare event, the passage
of a car, and when he halted more from force of habit than necessity at a
blind junction, they converged on him screaming for money and displaying
stump wrists and carefully cultivated sores.
He scared them off with a roar of his engine and thereafter crossed
intersections without slowing, blasting his horn.
Thinking of Sittingbourne, he turned south to A2. In Greenwich an armed
fascist patrol had set up a roadblock guarded by stern-faced boys with
stolen army guns wearing Union Jack armbands on their black leather
motorcycling jackets. Luckily a trio of policemen had paused to pass
the time of day with them and someone had cracked a good joke which made
them all chuckle. Barely glancing at him except to ensure he was white,
they waved him by.
As darkness fell he arrived at his destination, a half-timbered rambling
building which had been a coaching-inn and which the twentieth century
had evolved into a roadhouse. It boasted a fabulous wine list, report
said; Godwin dared not sample it, but he knew about its cuisine, and
progressed through Whitstable native oysters via saddle of mutton with
onion sauce and braised asparagus to steamed suet pudding and treacle,
deferentially served by black-jacketed waiters to the accompaniment
of quiet but unobtrusive music and the cheerful chatter of the other
diners. The place was as crowded as he had ever seen it, but it was
keeping up its standards. He overheard more than one person exclaiming
over the superb quality of the red Bordeaux.
But even as Godwin was preparing to relax after his meal with a cigar
and a cup of coffee, a familiar pressure started to build at the back
of his mind. Annoyed, he attempted to dismiss it from consciousness;
it was, of course, impossible. Somewhere, patience had come to an end.
And there was only one safe place to be when that happened. Home.
At least, he suspected that to be the case. He had never previously
thought much about the question. But then, he had never before been other
than eager for the reward it was his just entitlement to claim after a
successfully completed assignment. The very idea of stalling would have
puzzled him in the past -- indeed, it was puzzling to him now, though he
was all too hideously aware of the reason for his unprecedented reaction.
Damn Bill Harvey and his wartime recollections!
Damn the blond woman in Park Lane!
He scribbled an illegible signature on the bill, having forgotten by what
pseudonym they knew him here -- not that it mattered, for none of his
bills was ever presented for payment -- and hastened back to the car,
and back to London.
As though he were abruptly to be haunted by an earlier version of himself,
so deeply buried in the past as to have been virtually forgotten, he
realized as he approached his home that he was worrying about finding a
parking space in his street. Never before had he left the Urraco at his
own door. Without thinking much about the necessity to do otherwise, he
had simply accepted it as risky, perhaps because of what had happened
to other vehicles, the ruined Mark X Jaguar being only the latest
of dozens. But the pressure in his head was increasing, and now it
was peaking occasionally into pain and sending little bright shooting
lights across his field of vision. He was going to have no time to do
anything else.
Miraculously the very Jaguar he had been thinking about was gone when he
drove cautiously around the corner, leaving a handy vacancy immediately
in front of the house. He reversed into it thankfully and scrambled out
without bothering to lock up.
Nobody would really touch his car, would they? Nobody ever had done. Not
even during all that time in the Park Lane car-park when there were bomb
scares and police investigations.
Anyway, what the hell? There could always be another!
Half blind with pain by now, he rushed upstairs and, not sparing time to
turn the room on nor even to empty his bladder, he spent the last few
moments of individual awareness trying desperately to reach a decision
about his reward.
Then a dazzling inspiration struck him. Maybe he didn't have to choose.
Maybe what had happened to undermine his last reward was a way of
indicating that there were other possibilities he, with his limited
imagination, had never thought of. Had Irma requested her Sirian
plants? Had Hermann known in advance about Arikapanotulandaba's amazing
powers? When had Hugo & Diana experienced free fall?
Thankful, convinced, he surrendered.
It was dark. It was oppressively hot, but the air was dry. There was
a stink of excrement. He ached in all his limbs, he was parched with
thirst, his belly was acid with hunger, and there were sores around
his wrists and ankles due to thick leather straps, first sewn and then
riveted into place with copper rivets. Those on his legs hobbled him;
those on his arms prevented him even reaching behind to cleanse himself
after a motion. Also his scalp itched terribly.
He squatted on the floor of a room -- no, a cell -- too low for him to
stand up, too narrow for him to lie down at full stretch. The posture
in itself was not uncomfortable; all his life he had been accustomed to
sitting on the ground. But he wished he could walk more than two strides.
More details impinged on his awareness. He wore a foul, greasy garment,
too shapeless to be called a robe, which covered him from shoulders to
knees. He was accustomed to sandals protecting his feet, but they were
a forgotten luxury now. There were two small holes and one large in
the walls and floor of his cell: one serving to piss and shit into, one
admitting a little air -- but it was so small, he could not even thrust
his emaciated fist down it -- and one closed with a heavy and expensive
door, made of solid wood. The rest of the structure was of mud brick,
not kiln-fired, not even baked, only sun-dried. But it was enough of an
obstacle to contain such a weakling as a man.
From far away he heard the noise of a celebration: chanting, drumming,
beating of cymbals, punctuated with loud laughter. His mouth turned
bitterly down at the corners.
But that was ill-advised. That was stupid. That was dangerous. There was
a reason why he was here -- he firmly believed it -- and it was his duty
to endure patiently until understanding came. He forced his lips to shape
a smile, and between gapped and aching teeth he hummed a sacred melody
for the sake of its magical protective powers. A certain comfort came
upon him as he repeated it over and over, lulling his consciousness into
a state of vague, starvation-bred euphoria.
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