“We’ll be in this neighborhood for another day or so” (The man was walking away) “By the way, the music for our production was written by our guitarist, Charo—”
The dark-haired girl, pulling up the cloth case around her instrument, paused, smiled at Bron, then zipped it closed.
“The backdrop and costumes were by Dian—”
Who was apparently the hairy woman lugging the rolled mural over her shoulder: before she turned off down the alley, she gave him a grotesque, one-eyed grin.
“Our special effects were all devised by our tumbler, Windy—but I think he’s already getting set up at the next location. The solo voice that you first heard singing was recorded by Jon-Teshumi.”
One of the women held up what he realized was a small playback recorder.
“The production was coordinated by our manager, Hatti.”
“That’s me too,” the woman with the recorder said, then hurried after the others.
“And the entire production—” The guitarist (Charo?) spoke now, from the corner—“was conceived, written, produced, and directed by the Spike.” The guitarist grinned.
The Spike grinned—“Thank you, again—” and, with an arm around the guitarist’s shoulder, they were around the corner.
“It was great!” he called after them. “It was really—” He looked about the empty square, at the poster-splotched wall, at the other streets. Which way had he come? The emotion Bron had been fighting down suddenly surged. He did not shout out, No—! He lunged instead for the low archway and loped into the alley.
He had already turned at two intersections when his mind was wrenched away from what was going through it by the shambling figure that, thirty yards ahead, crossed from corner to corner, glanced at him—the eye; the chains; the sunken chest; the high coordinate lights made a red snarl of the hairy shoulder: this time it was the gorilla-ish man—and was gone.
At the corner, Bron looked but couldn’t see him. Were the Dumb Beasts, he wondered suddenly, also part of the charade? Somehow, the possibility was appalling. Wander around the u-1 until he found him? Or some other member of the sect? Or of the cast? But if the initial encounter had been theatrical prologue, how would he know the answer he got were not some equally theatrical coda? Meaningless communication? Meaningful ... ? Which one had she said?
He turned, breathed deeply, and hurried left—sure he was going wrong; till he came out on the familiar, plated walkway, three intersections down from where he’d entered.
And what had been going through his mind?
Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelarmronoriminos ... And ‘mu’ and ‘ro’ were the thirteenth and seventeenth syllables! From out memory’s detritus they had reachieved their places, fixed and certain.
Was it the brief drug? Or some resonance from the theater piece? Or simply chance? Walking slowly, strangely pensive, he reviewed the mumble again. In the swing between pleasantry and unpleasantness, the Spike’s laugh returned, either as something that effected, or that was, the transition.
The mumble rolled about his mind.
Then Bron frowned.
The third syllable ... and what about the ninth? With sure memory of the thirteenth and seventeenth, another came that he had not reviewed for years: The Instructor, at the last meeting of the Poor Children he had attended, had stood by his bench, correcting his pronunciation of those two syllables again and again and again and again and again and saying, finally, “You still don’t have them right,” and proceeded to the next novice. The class had recited the mumble, several more times, in unison: he had been able to hear that his own vowels, for those syllables, three and nine, were, indeed, off. Finally, he had looked at his lap, slurred over the whole thing; and hadn’t come to the next session. The truth, undercutting present pleasure—the new feeling (the Spike’s face flickered a moment, in memory, laughing) was somehow part of the first negative one he had tried to suppress back at the little square (the No—! he hadn’t shouted)—was that, having nothing to do with the thirteenth syllable, or the seventeenth, or the third, or the ninth, he had never, really, known the mantra.
All he had (once more the syllables began to play through) was something with which he could, as he had done with so much of his life, make do.
The realization (it wasn’t the drug; it was just the way things were) shivered his vision with leftover tears that—no, that wasn’t what she’d laughed at ... ?—he blinked, confusedly, back.
2. Solvable Games
The death at the center of such discourse is extraordinary and begins to let us see our own condition.
Bronze clasps, cast as clawing beasts, snapped back under Lawrence’s wrinkled thumbs. Lawrence opened out the meter-wide case.
“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 ...”