“What I mean,” Bron said, as the case’s wooden back, inlaid with ivory and walnut, clacked to the common-room’s baize table, “is, how are you even supposed to know if you like something like that ... ?” He gazed over the board: within the teak rim, in three dimensions, the landscape spread, mountains to the left, ocean to the right. The jungle between was cut here by a narrow, double-rutted road, there by a mazy river. A tongue of desert wound from behind the steeper crags, alongside the ragged quarry. Drifting in from the border, small waves inched the glassy sea till, near shore, they broke, foaming. Along the beach, wrinkling spume slid up and out, up and out. “Do you see?” Bron insisted. “I mean, you understand my point?” The river’s silver, leaving the mountains, poured over a little waterfall, bright as falling mica. A darker green blush crossed the jungle: a micro-breeze, disturbing the tops of micro-trees. “There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts—I mean, if there is such a sect. But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real? / don’t know how big their endowment was ... and maybe the ‘endowment’ was part of the theater’ too.”
“Well, her name is certainly familiar—”
“Is it?” Bron asked in the quiet commons. “The Spike?”
“Very.” Lawrence assembled the astral cube: the six six-by-six plastic squares, stacked on brass stilts, made a three dimensional, transparent playing space to the right of the main board, on which all demonic, mythical, magical, and astral battles were enacted. “You don’t follow such things. I do. I even think I’ve heard something about the Dumb Beasts—they’re the fragments of some bizarre sect that used to go by just a very long number?”
“She told me some nonsense like that.”
“I can’t remember where I heard about them—that’s not the sort of thing I do follow—so I can’t swear to the validity of your beasts for you. But the Spike, at any rate, is quite real. I’ve always wanted to see one of her productions. I rather envy you—There: That’s all together. Would you get the cards out of the side drawer, please?”
Bron looked around the side of the vlet case, pulled out the long, narrow drawer. He picked up the tooled leather dice-cup; the five dice clicked hollowly. Thrown, three would be black with white pips, one transparent with diamond pips, and the fifth, not cubic, but scarlet and icosahedral, had seven faces blank (Usually benign in play, occasionally they could prove, if you threw one at the wrong time, disastrous); the others showed thirteen alien constellations, picked out in black and gold.
Bron set the cup down and fingered up the thick pack. He unwrapped the blue silk cloth from around it. Along the napkin’s edge, gold threads embroidered:
—the rather difficult modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system (Lawrence had not taught him that yet; he knew only that θ was a measurement of strategic angles of attack [over different sorts of terrain N, M, and A] and that small ones netted more points than large ones) proceeded. As he pulled back the blue corner, two cards slid to the table. He picked them up—the Wizard of Rocks and the Child Empress—and squared them with the deck. “Lawrence, the point is, even if he wasn’t a member of their company—I mean, there was a woman member of the sect who definitely was with them—unless that was just makeup too. It was as though, suddenly, I couldn’t trust anything ...”
Lawrence opened the drawer on the other side of the case and took out a handful of the small, mirrored and transparent screens (some etched with the same, alien constellations, some with different), set them upright beside the board, then reached back in for the playing pieces: carved foot soldiers, mounted men, model army-encampments; and, from this same drawer, two miniature cities, with their tiny streets, squares, and markets: one of these he put in its place in the mountains, the second he set by the shore. “I don’t see why you’re so busy dissecting all this—” Lawrence took up one red foot soldier, one green one, sat back in his chair, put the pieces behind his back—“when it seems to me all that’s happened is, in an otherwise dull day, you’ve had—from the way you described it—something of an aesthetic experience.” (Bron was thinking that seventy-four-year-olds should either get bodily regeneration treatments or not sit around the co-op common rooms stark naked—another thought he decided to suppress: it was Lawrence’s right to dress or not dress any way he felt like. But why, he found himself wondering, was it so easy to suppress some negative thoughts while others just proliferated?—like all those that had been forming about that theater woman, the Spike: which, essentially, was what he had been avoiding talking about for the last quarter of an hour.) Lawrence said: “If you were asking for advice, which you’re not, I’d say why don’t you just leave it at that. If you don’t mind comments, which I must assume you don’t, because despite all my other comments, you’re still talking to me and haven’t merely wandered away—” Lawrence brought his fists together above the mountains—“I can only suspect that, because you haven’t left it at that—the only logically tenable conclusion—there probably is more to it than that. At least as far as you’re concerned. Choose—”
Bron tapped Lawrence’s left fist.
The fist (Bron thought: Perhaps it’s simply because Lawrence is my friend) turned over, opened: a scarlet foot soldier.
“That’s you,” Lawrence said.
Bron took the piece, looked around at the other side of the case, and began to pick the scarlet pieces from their green velvet drawer. He stopped with the piece called the Beast between his thumb and forefinger, regarded it: the miniature, hulking figure, with its metal claws and plastic eyes, was not particularly dumb: during certain gambits, the speaker grill beside the dice-cup drawer would yield up the creature’s roar, as well as the terrified shouts of its attackers. Bron turned it in his fingers, pondering, smiling, wondering what else he might say to Lawrence other than “yes”—
“Freddie,” Lawrence said to the naked ten-year-old, who had wandered up to the table to stare (his head was shaved; his eyes were blue, were wide; he wore myriad bright-stoned rings, three, four, and five to a finger; and he was sucking the fore and middle-ones; the skin at one corner of his mouth was bright with saliva), “what are you staring at?”
“That,” Freddie said around his knuckles, nodding at the board.
“Why don’t you guys go to a nice, mixed-sex co-op, where there may be a few other children and, maybe, other people to take care of you?”
“Flossie likes it here,” Freddie said. His cheeks went back to their slow pulsing as Flossie (a head [also shaved] and a half taller, eyes as wide [and as blue], hands heavy with even more rings) came up to stand just behind Freddie’s shoulders.
Flossie stared.
Freddie stared.
Then Flossie’s brightly-ringed hand pulled Freddie’s from his mouth. “Don’t do that.”
Freddie’s hand went down long enough to scratch his stomach, then came back up: two wet fingers, a near dozen rings between them, slid back into his mouth.
Six months ago, Bron had just assumed that the two, who lived in adjacent rooms at the end of his corridor, were lovers; later, he’d decided they were merely brothers. Lawrence, with his ability to ferret out the gossipy truth, had finally revealed the story: Flossie, who was twenty-three and Freddie’s father, was severely mentally retarded. He had brought his ten-year-old son with him from a Cailisto-Port commune because there was a very good training and medical institute for the mentally handicapped here in Tethys. (The gemstones in those rings were oveonic, crystalline memory units, which, while they did not completely compensate for Flossie’s neurological defects, certainly helped; Flossie wore different rings for different situations. Freddie wore the rest. Bron had noticed Flossie often switched off with his son.) Who, or where, a mother was, neither seemed to care or know. From commune to co-op and back again, Flossie had raised Freddie since infancy. (“And he’s rather bright,” Lawrence had commented, “though with that finger-sucking, I think he suffers socially.”) Their names had been Lawrence’s idea (“An arcane literary reference as far beyond you as it is beyond them,” Lawrence had explained when Bron had requested explanation), codified when the two had started using them themselves. All right, what were their real names, then? someone had asked. Save their twenty-two digit government identity numbers, no one (they explained), had ever bothered to suggest any before which they particularly liked (“Which,” said Lawrence, “is merely a comment on the narrowness of the worldlets we live among.”).