Players at the Game of People Page 7

  "Where else?"

  "Fine! And I promise you" -- this to Gorse, across the intervening void -- "you not only won't but you can't regret deciding to have the Peasmarsh label on everything. There are certain principles transcending science which led us to design our trademark, and they resonate from anything it's printed on or even attached to. If you have even a trace of doubt concerning what we're saying, look around you. Si evidentiam requiris, circumspice! "

  "You mean," she responded in a voice full of excitement, "I could have a place like this?" She gazed about her; there were marble statues, floating flags of every conceivable color, water sculptures which maintained their unnervingly accurate course against all odds. Godwin had seen it so often, he was bored, though he did wish he could share her impressionability.

  "No, no!" exclaimed Hugo & Diana in dismay. "Not at all like this! This is mine! But you can certainly have what you want. Think it over. Make up your mind in due time. When you do, we promise I'll come and see it."

  In a lower, more confidential tone, she added, "But you must be sure to incorporate the power signs which act as channels for the magic. We've been telling God that for -- oh, ages and ages! And do you think we can get him to pay attention? Not on your what's-it! But never mind" -- with a sudden renewal of brilliant charm. "You do it the way you want, and have your kind of fun."

  Godwin, relieved at the chance to leave, signaled Gorse to rejoin him. She came slowly, relishing the weird sensation of floating, and as she arrived within range of his hand, which she caught at, she said, "Is it magic that pays for . . . ? Well, for all of this?"

  "Well, we don't," Hugo & Diana said, turning her back and pushing off into the empyrean and beginning to caress his clitoris with sighs and moans of pleasure. "Who could? Nobody could! It isn't to be bought, is it?"

  "But if -- " Gorse ventured obstinately. Godwin cut her short with a gesture and handed her the clothes she had been wearing when they got here. He noticed that as she donned each separate garment she looked at the Peasmarsh label in search of the magical symbols she had just been told about.

  Well, one couldn't expect everybody to grow up at once.

  "Let's go," he said finally, and led the way to the street. This being Sunday, and in Chelsea, poor weather had not prevented crowds of people from assembling in order to surge back and forth in aimless droves.

  As they walked toward where GodwIn knew a taxi would -- of course -- be cruising empty, Gorse's face grew paler and paler.

  "I never did anything so awful in my life!" she burst out at last.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know damned well!" She bit her lip as though to keep tears away. "I don't know what came over me!"

  "Not to worry," Godwin sighed. "Hugo & Diana has that effect on people. It's part of the package. Done with what they call pheromones, I gather."

  "But what sort of a creature is -- is it?"

  "Hermaphrodite, of course. Maybe one of these days you'll meet the surgeon who performed the transplants. Brilliant man."

  "Are you taking me to meet another monster now?"

  There was the taxi; Godwin hailed it, and resumed when they were inside.

  "We're going to see Ambrose Farr."

  "And what's he going to make me do that I don't want to?"

  "If you hadn't wanted to do what you did, you wouldn't have done it."

  "But I didn't!"

  Typical. Typical! Godwin sighed, doing his best to repress an outbreak of bad temper.

  "You want a name to go with Gorse. Ambrose is good at choosing names. He'll pick one for you."

  "And if T don't like it?"

  "You will."

  The mechanics went on, like cogwheels inexorably turning.

  "He will also do a great deal more than pick a name."

  "Such as what?"

  "Tell you who you are, and who you would be better off being."

  "But I know who I am!"

  "You may think you do. Ambrose will tell you if you're right."

  "And if he thinks I'm wrong?" -- resentfully.

  "He'll tell you that, too. Make for Putney, driver! I'll direct you when we get close."

  Improbably interpolated among tall modern buildings: a cottage with its garden running down to a towpath alongside the Thames. There was an iron gate, waist-high, set in the fence which bordered tidy twin strips of bright green lawn converging on the white façade under the red-tiled roof. Small round flower beds isolated clumps of tulips, hollyhocks and poppies. Creepers disposed with flawless symmetry ornamented the front wall's edges to left and right.

  Someone lived here who cared about minutiae.

  But at a second glance there were reasons why the prospect should be as it was.

  There were adequately few people who understood what kind of a glance they should give it the second time.

  Accordingly there was nobody who paid attention when Godwin marched Gorse up the path to the bright yellow front door.

  Except, naturally, the occupier.

  The door opened as usual to Godwin's touch and revealed a narrow hallway with a flagged floor. The flags, each a meter square, numbered twelve, and each bore a zodiacal sign, inlaid yellow on a deep red ground. The walls were divided into panels with dark brown wooden moldings; each panel displayed a card from the Bembo version of the tarot pack, including the otherwise lost The Devil and The Tower . Heady and intoxicating incense loaded the air with dense masses of perfume. Solemn organ music resounded at the edge of hearing.

  At the far end of the hallway a doorway flickered open and shut, and a fraction later another to the left: the former uttered, the latter received, a tall fair graceful boy clad only in a white shirt.

  Godwin halted on the flag displaying Libra. Following him, nervous, Gorse found herself on the one signing Virgo, just as there came a subtle increase in volume of the background music; also there was a change of register, so that a series of bright and lively phrases, mostly in triplets, overran the ground chords with a sparkling rivulet of treble tones.

  And there was their host: a tail man wearing a dark brown velvet suit which somehow contrived to give the impression of robes, even though it was splendidly cut to fit. At his throat was a lace jabot, and a white silk handkerchief cascaded from his breast pocket. He bore himself with the commanding air of full maturity, but it was impossible to judge his age, for his skin -- which was smoothly tanned -- was wrinkle-free except around the eyes, where one might detect laughter lines, and contrasting with his tan he had a leonine mane of swept-back hair which might, or might not, have been white rather than ash-blond. His voice was of a thrilling deepness, yet every now and then it turned up at the corners, so to say, as though a sternly engraved face on a statue were occasionally unable to resist hinting at a smile, and nearly but never completely implied a giggle.

  "My dear fellow!" he boomed as he advanced, both hands outstretched to clasp Godwin's right hand and his elbow in a single gesture. "It's been too long -- it always is too long! And who's your . . charming young friend?"

  There was a significance about the pause. But that was to be expected. Godwin gave a bald answer.

  "This is Ambrose Farr," he said, turning. "Ambrose, this is Gorse. Just Gorse, at the moment."

  "Delighted to make your acquaintance!" Ambrose declared warmly, extending his right arm at full stretch and abbreviating contact with Gorse's hand to a minimum. For the obviousness of this be was at once apologetic.

  "You'll forgive me! But I carry a certain astral charge which is at risk of diminishment -- not, of course, that one would suspect such a risk in the case of someone brought here by an old and good friend like him!"

  The not-quite-giggle added a string of extra exclamation marks to his statement. A heartbeat later, though, he was intensely businesslike in both tone and manner.

  "How wise of you, at all events, to consult an expert in nomenclature before settling on your permanent appellation. The careers, the entire lives, which I've seen ru
ined by an inappropriate choice . . . Perhaps you've never considered the point, though merely by looking at you I would deduce that you have, but I can state with conviction that the vibrations which resonate from names affect even such fundamental aspects of the personality as the way in which one regards oneself. How much wiser are those cultures which employ different names at different ages! How unfortunate is, let us say, a Helen who turns out to be fat and pimply rather than a queen for beauty, or a Dorothy whose parents resent her because they hoped she'd be a boy! Your selection, though, is Gorse: a prickly plant, with certain medicinal virtues, which in summer is capable of transforming mile upon square mile of landscape into a wonderland of brilliant yellow -- already an inspiration. With overtones, regrettably, of deception and entrapment . . . Hmm! God, you have brought me a problem worthy of my steel. We shall devote entire attention to it, never fear. Come down into my sanctum that we may perform analyses."

  He was standing, so it seemed, stock-still in the middle of the passageway. Nonetheless, as though responsive to his mere intention, two of the tarot-painted panels folded back: The Juggler and The Fool. Between them appeared the head of a stairway leading down to a dim-lit basement. A few wreaths of smoke wafted forth.

  "I must precede you," he murmured, doing so. "There are certain barriers and rituals . . ."

  Producing -- from his sleeve, or somewhere -- an ebony wand capped at one end with silver, at the other with ivory, he descended the stairs, making signs at intervals. Gorse, biting her thumb, hung back, her eyes immensely wide. There seemed to be no limit to the depth the staircase reached.

  Losing patience, Godwin took her by the left arm and urged her ahead of him, and a few seconds later they were in what Ambrose referred to as his sanctum.

  It gave the appearance, once they were within it, of having neither roof nor walls: only a floor of cold irregular stone. At one place glowed a brazier on which reposed an alembic distilling a luminous fluid; at another, two human skeletons, male and female, were mounted to suggest that they were about to grapple, wrestler-fashion; elsewhere, floating in midair, hung a stuffed crocodile and a dried bat; beyond that, at first, there appeared to be no more than banks of fog.

  Then Ambrose turned on a light, and the illusion vanished. Instead of misty obstacles to vision, it was plain that the boundaries of the place were formed by ranks and layers of charts drawn on two-meter-square sheets of some transparent substance, which rustled at the slightest draft like dead leaves. Each consisted in a series of circles, sometimes concentric, sometimes overlapping, sometimes of alarming complexity and number, crossed with straight lines and marked with symbols in contrasting colors, mostly letters of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets but in some cases quite unfamiliar.

  But these were not the most astonishing feature of the place once it was possible to see it clearly.

  Ambrose had sat down in a slingback canvas chair beside a foursquare teak desk which might have come directly out of the headquarters of a multinational corporation anxious to maintain its executives' illusions concerning their current status, on which was mounted an elaborate computer complex including a full-scale word-processing setup. One of the screens was visible from where Gorse and Godwin stood, and it was cycling a dozen rings of different colors around a central dot.

  Catching sight of it, Ambrose muttered an oath and hit a switch, then beamed falsely at his visitors.

  " So sorry! But they're talking about a certain Royal Personage getting married, so I thought I'd just run through a few alternative sequences, but naturally, once one gets to that level, the interplay of conflicting possibilities attains alarming proportions, so I simply let it run, and . . ." A shrug. Then a winning smile. "You will forget you ever saw it, won't you? Yes? Bless you. And, speaking of attaining alarming proportions, just let me tell Anders what I'm up to . . . Do sit down!"

  There were comfortable chairs for them, which they did not remember from a moment ago. It was all part of the scenario, but Gorse was trembling worse than ever as she lowered herself into hers. Meantime, Ambrose whispered to an invisible microphone. Then he was paying attention to them again, this time addressing Gorse directly.

  "I sense you have a question, young lady. May I answer it?"

  She swallowed hard, indicating the panels all about them. "What are these?"

  "What do you think they might be?" he countered with an affably avuncular air.

  "Uh . . . Well, they make me think of horoscope charts, but -- "

  "God, you briefed her in advance!" Ambrose interrupted accusingly.

  Godwin sighed, leaned back, shook his head, feigned a smile.

  "In that case I'm impressed," Ambrose said, leaning forward and interlinking his fingers. He had contrived to make his wand disappear without trace. "These are, let's face it, a trifle more explicit than most such charts. For instance, I had been prepared for some few weeks to see God again, thanks to his." He signaled, and a chart presented itself as though they were all on an automatic retrieval system -- and instantly he snapped his fingers and it vanished again into the continually circulating background, while he bent a white-toothed smile on Godwin.

  " You know I would never show anybody your chart without your permission, save for such a fleeting instant . . and that only because I am of course proud that I am privy to it! And, as I was about to say, even the most advanced of my -- ah -- fellow adepts would have trouble unraveling the coding it bears, because I take into account the totality of variables." He patted the case of his word processor. "For instance, I imagine no one, even Della, drawing on the fullness of the oriental tradition, could match tbis" -- once more, a chart floated into view and paused, and displayed a set of interlocking ring patterns so complicated they required color separations at the limit of human discrimination -- "which I cast for a certain world-famous figure, who turned out to be remarkably keenly influenced by the lately discovered moon of Pluto. There is, however, a beat frequency which I suspect may be due to interference from the asteroidal belt, given that this induces a type of static, or background noise, owing to the sheer randomness of the interactions -- except that actually, of course, it's non random, insofar as while the microcosmic world may be subject to the laws of chance, the macrocosmic isn't -- Ah, but I tend to ramble when I get away on my hobbyhorse. At least, though, I might be permitted to show you this, for an example of how I find myself obliged to seek distraction when the demands of my profession grow extreme . . . which, I must admit, they tend to do with gratifying frequency nowadays, since I am constantly being consulted by cabinet ministers and diplomats and the like, or their wives -- nowadays I must surely say 'spouses' -- and their children, if that case applies, ha-hah! But at all events, I suspect you may not recognize this ."

  A chart appeared whose central element resembled the symbol for infinity: ¤¤. In red and yellow it gleamed from the middle of a series of tidily patterned elliptical rings, all of them far from the two which interlocked at the focus.

  These were green, yellow, reddish-brown and white. All the time he had been talking, music had continued; now it climaxed on a resounding chord of trumpets and trombones, and, died away like a gasp.

  "No?" And without waiting for an answer: "I'm not surprised. This is the generalized chart for a species whose home planet orbits a double star in Cassiopeia, and they're like oysters or maybe snails because they're intermittently bisexual and -- What am I thinking of? I meant to ask your data so the computer could chew them over for a while. I had a new chart all prepared because from God's I knew he was about due to bring me someone complicated -- won't bother to demonstrate, but . . ." Now he was muttering and a plain chart was hovering before him.

  "Birth date, please. Time of day if you know it. Whatever you can tell me about your parents' sexual habits -- whether they fucked on weekends only or whether your father had to force your mother or whether he was more potent in the morning or at night or whether she felt more like it at certain phases of her menstrual cycle or anythi
ng . It'll all go in here." He swiveled to face the computer keyboard. "Because time of conception is also very useful in figuring out the astral forces which would have obtained."

  Godwin, who had been through all this much too often, leaned back and disconnected. At some point Anders kissed him hello, but he wasn't in the mood, or any mood.

  At long last Ambrose was saying, " Well?"

  "I'm not sure I like it," Gorse answered doubtfully.

  "You don't believe that a name resonates and creates beat frequencies with the astral forces working on a person?" Ambrose demanded. "I'll prove it if you like! Here, where's the chart for that one? When the Duchess of Anglia had her second son -- the one born after the duke died -- they baptized him with the same name as his father, stupid gits . If only they'd bothered to consult me . . . !"