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"Yeah, yeah," said the four, their elation at retrieving the first piece tempered by their narrow escape and their sudden startling transition into the whiteness not five seconds after Paul had set down the first Vasyn-piece.
"Is the other piece gonna be that crazy?" demanded John.
~THE PYAR GODS WILL DO THEIR BEST TO PUT IT IN A WORLD THAT WILL CAUSE YOU MAXIMUM TROUBLE,~ Squeaky said loftily.
"When are we going after the next piece?" asked Paul.
+WHENEVER THE— + There was a hiss from Squeaky, and the deep voice started over. +SORRY, WHENEVER WE FIND IT.+
The four wondered at this slip, but they couldn't think of anything to accuse the shapes of. Instead, George held out his left hand for display and said, "What happened to me ring? Why couldn't I change?"
"WHAT—SHIT." Ringo had forgotten about his noisy mental voice. He tried to whisper "WHAT HAPPENED WITH ME?" but sounded like a shouting whisperer, so he gave up and continued in his "normal" tone of thought, "DID I REALLY TELEPORT OR DID YOU SAVE ME?"
The enormous faceless shape of Squeaky seemed to gaze down at the four with stern disapproval. ~THESE ARE NOT THINGS WE CAN TELL YOU. YOU MUST FIND OUT FOR YOURSELVES.~
George bristled. "Rubbish! How're we supposed to find this bloody thing for you if our magic goes haywire for no reason?"
~IT IS AGAINST THE RULES.~
"WHAT RULES?" the four demanded, being mostly drowned out by Ringo.
[WHAT RULES?]
The four looked at the female shape, but she wasn't parroting them; she sounded just as puzzled and angry as they were. [WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, JEFT?] she demanded of Squeaky.
Squeaky gave her a contemptuous glance—it was amazing how much detail those faceless shapes could convey—and turned his shoulder to her. ~WE ARE OUT OF TIME. WHEN WE FIND THE NEXT PIECE IS WHEN YOU WILL NEXT SEE US— ~
[GET YOUR HAND OFF THAT KEYBOARD!]
Although the shapes didn't move, the sound of a slap reverberated through the white space, and as if from a mile away there was a yelp of pain. The shape of Squeaky shrank a little. Satisfied, the female shape said [GEORGE, AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL THE RING HAS A SMALL FLAW IN IT. IT'LL STICK PERHAPS ONE TIME OUT OF A HUNDRED, BUT IT'LL ALWAYS WORK EVENTUALLY.]
Not pleased, George looked at his white hand. The ring, also drained of color in this thought-world, was just barely visible on his finger. "How long does it stick for?"
[THAT WE DON'T KNOW. I'D ASSUME HOWEVER LONG IT STUCK THAT FIRST TIME.]
George threw up his hands. "That's just bloody spectacular! Can't you fix it or get me another one or something?"
+IT'S NOT THAT BAD,+ the deep voice said cheerfully. The four got the impression that he'd been enjoying Squeaky's pain. +THAT FLAW IS ALSO LETTING YOU BECOME THINGS IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO LET YOU BECOME, LIKE THAT WINGED HORSE. YOU WERE ONLY SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO DO NORMAL ANIMALS. SO IT'S A GOOD TRADE-OFF.+
"I suppose," George said dubiously.
"WHAT ABOUT ME?" asked Ringo, and the woman delighted him by saying: [YOU SEEM TO BE A LATENT TELEPORTER. THAT BAD SCARE YOU HAD TRIGGERED IT. BUT WHETHER YOU'LL EVER GET CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF IT IS ANYONE'S GUESS. SOME PEOPLE NEVER DO. BUT KEEP TRYING.]
"HOW?"
[YOU HAD THE RIGHT IDEA BEFORE—JUST KEEP VISUALIZING WHERE YOU WANT TO GO AND PUSH YOURSELF OVER.]
Squeaky sniffed. ~ARE WE QUITE FINISHED SPOILING MYSTERIES? GOODBYE, THEN.~
The four faded out of the whiteness.
*
+Geez, Shag, did you have to hit me that hard? I'm gonna bruise!+
[Why, Jeft, why in the name of every god in every universe—WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL THEM ABOUT THEIR MAGIC?]
~I knew we shouldn't have talked to them again. Because they're supposed to find out that stuff for themselves! Geez, you might as well go down and pick up the second piece yourself.~ [Supposed to? Since when? Whose rules are you going by?]
+I might also point out that this is a job, not a game. Don't you think we should do our best to help them succeed? I don't really want to get sued for non-completion if they fail.+
~Look, Varx, the gods can't sue us. The characters got forced into this job. That's illegal even here. They try to sue us, we threaten to let the characters know what's really been going on, and the gods'll pay us off to keep 'em quiet. We can't lose either way.~
+Excuse me for injecting a little sanity into your logic, but I don't want gods pissed off at me whether the law is on my side or not.+
~Geez, Varx the mighty worrier! Don't worry. Everything'll work out. I promise.~
[I would appreciate your not conveniently ignoring me any more.]
~Oh, come on, Shag, sometimes you gotta keep secrets from your characters for their own good. I mean, now that Ringo knows he might 'port out of danger, he might not get scared enough to trigger it. You know, he'll just sit there and say `Ha ha, I'll vanish and be safe!' and he won't.~
[Well… well… what about George? What good would it have done not to let him know?]
~We got him all nervous when he doesn't need to be. That one-in-a-hundred business is awfully unlikely. The ring might not stick again for a year. But now he's gonna go around worried and not using the ring. What if he gets rid of it?~
[Um… I didn't think of that.]
~Trust me, guys. I've been doing this a long time. I don't put characters into a campaign so they can die.~
+By the way, Jeft, did the gods say anything about their progress in finding the second piece?+
~Just that they're not making much. They thought it could be as long as a C'hovite month—you know, forty days.~
+Oh, holes.+
***
Roughly a month had passed since the four had fetched the first piece. None of them was quite sure just how much time had gone by, as they neither had kept count of the days nor knew the C'hovite date on which they'd returned.
But this was perhaps the least of the problems plaguing John as he sat cross-legged at the edge of the cliff and looked out at the ocean. His wings hung loosely from his back, their tips trailing in the grass, hiding from backside observers the fact that he was completely naked and sitting on a piece of form-fitting ice. At his side sat a half-full cloth bag of apples, and his mouth was full most of the time. Every so often he threw a core over the cliff and took another fruit.
He was so lost in thought that he was genuinely surprised to hear someone coming up behind him. Immediately, he knew from the combination of the total water in the person, the amount of water in the air displaced, the heaviness of the tread, and the height of the sound of breathing, exactly who it was. "Hi, Ring," he said without turning round.
"Hi." Ringo dropped down to sit on John's right. In contrast to John, he'd adopted full Baravadan dress, from his bright monochrome silky clothes (today he was all in green) to his very small blackwood-handled dagger in its sheath on his belt. He'd raided the treasure cellar for half a dozen interesting rings, plus a single sapphire-teardrop earring that dangled from his left ear. His most striking bit of decoration, however, was the pair of black "sunglasses" carved from a single piece of obsidian—including the lenses—that he wore constantly to hide the fact that he was walking around with his eyes shut.
John glanced at Ringo, who was something of a rare sight outside the house these days, and waited for him to say something. But Ringo seemed content to remain silent, and though he seemed to be looking out to sea, who could tell where his thoughts really were? So John returned to staring at the sea himself. Absently he took an apple and crunched away at it, barely tasting it.
When he had nothing but a core left, he said, "Isn't the horizon on the sea pretty? The blue sky touchin' the blue water. That's me, y'know. Everything blue is me."
He didn't expect Ringo to respond, so was mildly surprised when the other said, "So they're yer blues."
John snorted appreciatively but did not smile. "Yoko is the Ocean Child, so what does that make me?"
"Chicken of the Sea?"
This time John did smile. "Good thing I can carry a tuna.…" But his good mood evaporated quickly, and he chewed his lower lip. "Is Lyndess okay?" Pause. "She's fine. She was fine yesterday, and she's fine today."
John sighed, only slightly comforted. "I wish they'd send us after that second piece. I'd like to get her out of Ketawful. Sometimes I think I should just swim over there and pick her up—I know how long it'd take," he added to his chest. "Sorry," he said to Ringo, who was startled enough by this exchange to turn his head in John's direction. "The Kansael's gettin' opinionated." "It is?"
"Yeah, it talks to me a lot these days." John touched the water charm, and just for a second his face grew content. "I don't mind, really. Sometimes it wakes me up, though."
"What's it say?" Ringo asked, fascinated.
"Stuff about water. Things I could do if I wanted. Like this." John patted the ice he sat on.
"Feel it."
Ringo touched it with a finger. "It's warm."
"Yeah, I raised the melting point. It's hard to do, but I don't have to pay attention to it now." John half-smiled. "The Kansael really likes me. It said it's never been this smart before."
"Because you're so smart?"
"No, because I'm so strong. Ironic, ain't it?" John spread his arms and gazed down at his body. "Look at me, I've never been in near this kind of shape. I've got muscles on me toes, for Christ's sake. I'm all lumpy." He sounded disgusted with himself. "Pretty dreadful," Ringo agreed sarcastically. "Bugger off. I like it—you know I do. It's just that lately it gets all mixed up with worry about Lyndess and Yoko and Sean and gettin' home and feelin' like I've sold out because I bitch about bein' a puppet but I don't do anything about it…." John slumped. "Not much we can do, really, except sit back and enjoy it," Ringo said. He leaned back on his hands and stuck his legs out so that his feet jutted out over the cliff edge. "And there's a lot to enjoy, y'know."
"Here, that won't be comfortable for long," John murmured, and he stuck his hand behind Ringo's back. A chunk of warm ice appeared in his palm and quickly grew into a slab big enough for Ringo to lean back upon in comfort. "Thanks," said Ringo, drawing his arms in and settling back.
A massive
John hitched himself around on his ice block and made faces at George, who was walking slowly out of the forest, filming the other two with a small, primitive, black-and-white, 8mm movie camera he'd bought in New Zork by selling his Baravadan pocket change to a jeweler. He wore a black Baravadan shirt and his original jeans.
"Do something interesting!" yelled George, but before anyone did, he took the camera away from his eye. "Half a sec, out of film." He strolled on over to the other two, neatly extracting the used reel as he walked. Transferring the reel to the same hand that held the camera, in his other hand he *ping* seemingly summoned a yellow film box and a black marker pen out of thin air. In reality, he had become himself with those items in his hand. He gave the camera to John to hold, wrote details on the film box—"Number 57," he murmured—put the used reel in the box, *ping* sent the box and the pen into limbo, *ping* made a fresh box appear in his hand, took out the unused reel, and *ping* put the empty box away.
"Have you figured out how much your 'closet' can hold, then?" John asked as he handed the camera back to George.
George shook his head. "I've got 167 reels of film, 40 batteries, six changes of clothes, some money, the location bar, and a potted plant in there right now, and I've had lots of other crap in there. So far I've been able to get anything in if I can actually pick it up, no matter how much else I've got in there." He started putting the new reel of film in the camera.
"Have you figured out where it all stays? Is it inside you all tiny or somethin'? Is it in the ring?"
"I dunno. Not sure I want to know." George's reply was a little testy; he didn't care to expound upon the mechanics of his ring past a certain point. The others well knew he hadn't used it, except for little things like the closet that didn't change him, since they'd returned from New Zork.
The sound of cheering filled the air.
John rolled his eyes. "Got up the courage to touch it again, did they?"
"Yeah," said Ringo.
John made a rude finger gesture toward the far end of the lawn, where the first Vasyn-piece towered pink and majestic. Originally Paul had dropped it near the front door of the house, but that proved to be a bad idea when the four woke up one day to find about thirty light-skinned pilgrims camped round the statue. Apparently, Aurion and Sarekyl had been just two of a substantial number of Raleka who had prudently decamped to Baravada when the Idris began massacring them. Now the real-honest-to-Gods-true Vasyn drew them like flies to a pie, or perhaps roaches to a roach motel, since they never left, except for a handful on food detail. Maybe they'd integrated themselves into Baravadan life before—they certainly looked healthier than the average Ketafan, if not much taller—but now they were reverting to Ketafan behavior en masse, as could be determined by the growing stench and filth of their camp. And growing size; from that relatively modest thirty souls, the crowd had expanded to more than a hundred, with more trickling in every day. Needless to say, Paul had hustled the Vasyn-piece as far away from the house as possible.
Besides being noxious, the Raleka pilgrims were noisy, often breaking into song in the middle of the night or cheering wildly when one of them made a supplication to the statue and dared to touch it. They also took as many personal effects of the four as they could steal, though the house's defenses were still up, so they were limited to rocks and clods of dirt upon which one of the four had tread. The pilgrims occasionally fought one another for possession of these precious artifacts. Fortunately, they didn't bother the four directly, just gazed upon them with the same hands-off veneration they gave the Vasyn. But being worshipped by someone five feet away who smelled like a sick goat wasn't much of an improvement over being directly harassed.
Of course, the four tried to chase the pilgrims off with requests, pleas, threats, and finally brute force. But they might as well have herded cats for all the success they had. With a truly Baravadan disregard for their safety, the Raleka simply sat where they were while things flew over their heads or water drenched them. If a pilgrim was picked up and deposited elsewhere, he or she simply came back as soon as possible. Obviously, nothing short of outright massacre or substantial feats of engineering was going to dislodge the Raleka. So the four threw up their hands in defeat and resolved to ignore the pilgrims as much as possible. They took what comfort they could in the knowledge that the situation was temporary and the pilgrims weren't nearly as intrusive as they might have been.
As the cheering died down, George finished putting in the film and said, "I think I'll see if I can get them to do it again for the camera." He raised the camera to his eye and trotted off toward the encampment.
When he was out of earshot and too distance to bother watching, John resumed his original position facing the ocean and said to Ringo, "What a cheat that ring turned out to be. I'm amazed he even uses it for that closet stuff." Little wisps of steam wafted up from John's head, visible signs of his anger. "He still has to help fix that fuckin' Aspirin, and he can't even enjoy it any more. What if he gets stuck permanently as somethin' dreadful?" He noticed an apple core that he'd dropped next to his seat, and he picked it up and threw it over the cliff.
A few moments later it flew back over the edge of the cliff and landed in John's lap. "Litterbug," said Ringo.
"Showoff," John retorted. He held the apple core up to the light as if it were a precious gem. Between his fingers, the apple core shriveled and shrank and stiffened, became as brittle as a dry twig. He snapped it in two and crumbled it into powder, which he blew off his fingers in a little cinnamon-colored cloud. Then he gave a little humorless laugh. "Getting' used to this, aren't we. Oh, Jesus." He vigorously wiped his hand on his thigh, as if to wipe away the taint of the magic he'd just used. "We're in a gilded cage, mate. All the magic in the world don't change that."
Ringo made a little noise of dissent. "There's a lot more gold on this cage than in some we've been in."
"Oh, fuck, man, I know. Obviously it's better than bein' a slave without the magic. Just ask George! And I know everything in life's a tradeoff. We traded our private lives for money and success. That's okay. We wanted that. We worked for that. The difference here is we didn't ask for this. It was forced on us."
"Would you've gone through all this if you'd been asked first, then?"
John shrugged, which spread his wings slightly with a faint, pleasant rustle of feathers. "Probably. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not if I'd known Yoko was gonna be left behind."
"I would've," Ringo said firmly. "I wouldn't've missed this for anything."
A little surprised by the force of this statement, John said, "You like it that much?"
"John… It's not… I'm…." Words failed Ringo. He took a deep breath. When next he spoke, his voice had a distinct touch of awe in it. "John, I'm so aware of things now. Everything's so sharp and clear…. I feel like I understand the way the world's put together. You know, for the first time in my life I feel like I matter, like I'm—like I'm part of the universe." John eyed him sardonically. "That's not surprisin' after that totally ordinary life you led." "I've had the whole world in me head," Ringo continued dreamily, not hearing John. "And I've been looking into space. Did you know we've got four moons, not just two? And the stars! John, a whole ceiling of stars, they're all colors, red and blue and orange and yellow and even green—and the sun, I can look directly at the sun, I can see big arches of fire streaming out of it…. then back down, way down, way down—I can see molecules, John, even atoms, little bursts of energy—everything's so beautiful, everything fits together.… Anyway, for that," Ringo concluded, abruptly matter-of-fact, "I'll do anything they want me to."
They were silent for a few minutes. Then John grinned sadly. "You know, I used to say that all I had to do was look at you and I'd know we weren't gods. I can't do that anymore."
*
Suddenly, with a familiar and almost blinding transition, John and Ringo found themselves sitting in the white room again. A moment later, Paul and George popped in, the former crouching as if he had been caught about to jump—as, indeed, he had been—the latter without his camera.
Paul recovered nicely and stood up tall. "Have they found it, then?"
+I'VE GOT SOME VASYNATING NEWS FOR YOU GUYS.…+
[To Be Continued October 1, 1998 (or there abouts)]
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