Sam would spend a week there, three days here on Triton, and four days various other places, which is how his fortnights were divided up. At that, Bron (they were all, Bron, Sam, and Lawrence, drinking in one of the common room conversation niches) had challenged Sam (rather drunkenly): “Then what are you hanging out with a bunch of deadbeats, neurotics, mental retards, and nonaffectives like us for, six days a month? Does it make you feel superior? Do we remind you how wonderful you are?” (Several others in the commons had looked over; two, Bron could tell, were staunchly not looking.) Sam said, perfectly deadpan, “In the one-gender nonspecified co-ops, people tend to be a lot less political-minded. On the job, I’m in the middle of the Outer Satellite/Inner Worlds confusions twenty-nine hours a day. At one of your quote normal unquote co-ops, straight, gay, mixed, or single, it would be war talk all day long and I’d never have a moment’s peace.”
“You mean,” Bron had countered, “here at Serpent’s House we’re too tied up in ourselves to care what goes on in the rest of the universe?”
“You think so?” Sam asked, and considered: “I always thought we had a pretty good bunch of guys here.” And then, very wisely, Sam had excused himself from the argument—even Bron had to admit it was getting silly. And two hours later, Sam—in a way that didn’t seem wise or winning or ingratiating or anything unpleasant that Bron could put his finger on—stuck his head in Bron’s room, laughing, and said: “Have you seen that thing that Lawrence has down in the commons room?” (Which Bron, indeed, had already seen.) “You better get down there before it explodes or takes off or something!” Sam laughed again, and went off somewhere else. On his way back to the commons, Bron had wondered, uncomfortably, if one of the reasons he disliked Sam so much wasn’t simply because Lawrence thought Sam was the Universe’s gift to humanity. (Am I really jealous of a seventy-four-year-old homosexual who, once a month, gets falling-down drunk and tries to put the make on me? he asked himself at the commons room door. No, it was easier to be friendly to Sam three days every two weeks than to entertain that idea seriously.)
What Lawrence had laid out on the green baize table was the vlet game.
Sam said: “Can you play this one with the grid—” And lowered an eyebrow at Bron—“or are you beyond that now?”
Bron said: “Well, I don’t know if—”
But Lawrence reached for one of the toggles in the card drawer. Across the landscape, pin-points of light picked out a squared pattern, thirty-three by thirty-three. “Bron could do with a few more gridded games I expect—” For advanced players (Lawrence had explained two weeks ago when Sam was last in) the grid was only used for the final scoring, to decide who had taken exactly what territory. In the actual play, however, elementary players found it helpful in judging those all-important 0’s. Bron had been contemplating suggesting that they omit it this game. But there it was; and the cities had been placed, the encampments had been deployed. The plastic Sea Serpent had been put, bobbing, into the sea. The Beast leered from its lair; Lawrence’s soldiers were set up along the river bank, his peasants in their fields, his royalty gathered behind the lines, his magicians in their caves.
Bron said: “Sam, why don’t you play this one. I mean I’ve had the last two weeks to practice ...”
“No,” Sam said. “No, I want to watch. I’ve forgotten half the moves since Lawrence explained them to me anyway. Go on.” He took a meditative step backward and moved around to view the board from Bron’s side.
“Bron has been fretting over a new-found friend,” Lawrence said. “That’s why he’s being so sullen.”
“That’s just it.” Bron was annoyed at having his preoccupation labeled sullenness. “She didn’t seem very friendly to me at all.” He picked up the deck and shuffled, thinking: If that black bastard stands there staring over my shoulder the whole damn game—And resolved not to look up.
The hand Bron dealt himself was good. Carefully, he arranged the cards.
Lawrence rolled the dice out over the desert to begin play, bid five-royal, melded the Juggler with the Poet, discarded the three of Jewels and moved two of his cargo vessels out of the harbor into open waters.
Bron’s own throw yielded him a double six, a diamond three, with the three-eyed visage of Yildrith showing on the icosahedron. He covered Lawrence’s meld with the seven, eight, and nine of Storms, set the tiny mirrored screen, with the grinning face of Yildrith etched on it, four spaces ahead of Lawrence’s lead cargo ship, bid seven-common to cover Lawrence’s six-royal, discarded the Page of Dawn and took Lawrence’s three of Jewels with the Ace of Flames; his own caravan began the trek upriver toward the mountain pass at the Vale of K’hiri, where, due to the presence of a green Witch, all points scored there would be doubled.