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Eleven

 

Jerry had gone to bed early—they all had—then found he wasn't sleepy. Part of it was that, with his broken arm, he couldn't lie on his stomach, which was his best position for going to sleep. But mostly his mind was too restless. So he got up from his pallet: on the living room floor and tiptoed out, careful not to waken Ole or Frank or Bill Van Wyk.

Carol and Sharon had been put up in the guest bedroom. And the two Merlin sons, Kelly and Norman, had returned home to their rooms from some undefined weekend project at Bourdon Electronics, where they still worked, commuting forty miles daily each way. So the male visitors had been bedded down on foam pads.

Jerry's watch said it was only eleven, but standing there by the pickups, looking around, it already felt colder than winter nights in L.A., as if it might even frost by morning. The sky was black and rich with stars, the Milky Way a white swath across its depths.

He started to walk; he would hike down the road, out of the canyon onto the broad desert basin. The exercise, he told himself, would do him good, and bed was no place to sort out his thoughts.

It had been the damnedest day of his life, even more so than the previous three. He'd been exposed to a whole new... He groped for the word. Cosmology? Cosmogony? A whole new theory of what the universe was and how it came to be. It was so fantastic that he'd have rejected it out of hand a few days earlier. Now, with it, things made sense that otherwise made no sense at all.

The video game universe.

And like Ole had said, if it was bullshit, at least he was having something different for a vacation than fishing at Puerto Peñasco.

Tomorrow, one of them—Vic or Tory or maybe Ole—would be giving him a "session," some kind of mental preparation that Vic had developed that would, among other effects, enable a person to go through a gate. There would be several such sessions. So far, Jerry didn't know gate from goat—not that kind of gate. And crossing to "the other side of reality" was too unreal to him even to feel nervous about. Intellectually he accepted it: his recent experiences had loosened his old preconceptions, and besides, it was real to Ole. But at the gut level, it was too remote to impinge on him.

Ole had been shut up with Vic for almost four hours. Meanwhile, Tory had drawn some diagrams on a chalkboard for the rest of them, and talked to them about what was done in sessions, and what it was all about. Then she'd answered questions. After that they'd amused themselves by browsing through the Merlin bookshelves.

According to Tory, operating a body was a sort of team thing. It wasn't as simple as "you've got a body" or "you are a body." A long time ago—a whole lot of lifetimes ago—they'd lived in a different universe, and each of them had had a body they could use to go around in and have experiences and sensations through. They hadn't needed bodies—they could create sensations subjectively and feel them without a body. But it got to be the thing to do: wear a body.

And over time they got into games and surprises using bodies. And into making things more and more difficult to do, so they'd be more interesting and challenging. Finally, they weren't really operating bodies directly anymore. They'd ride around in them, with a sort of crew operating them, each crew made up of semi-independent entities. And each crew member had the potential to get into disagreement and even feuds with the other crew members, depending on the handicaps they and you had drawn and the penalties laid on you.

And the body and its crew members were here in this reality. But you, the captain, just had a sort of extension of yourself in this reality. Most of you was out of sight and forgotten in a totally different universe from your body. Not just on the other side of reality, but in a totally different universe.

It was harder than playing Pac Man, too, because you didn't have control levers or buttons. All you had in this universe was your attention, and your intention, and your awareness. The crew ran the body, based on a kind of rough script or life plan, sort of an outline that the scriptmaster entity filled in as he went. The only way most people had of influencing what the crew did was by intending, and by putting their attention on things. And one of the problems was that most people's crews had two script entities, two navigators, so to speak, each of whom was likely to have different ideas about the script.

You couldn't force your crew; very few people could even talk to it. You simply experienced the emotions and sensations of life under your script, and did what you could toward controlling things by putting your attention on what you wanted to do or be or have. What you wanted to have was the master factor; be and do tended to fall into line with have.

And using attention was tricky, too, because if you put heavy attention on something—tried to force something—it skidded away from you. It worked best when done lightly, the lighter the better.

All this had sounded to Jerry like a hell of a way to run a ship or live a life. He'd asked Tory who'd written his script, and she'd said you ordinarily picked one out of a kind of script library between lives, and maybe modified it. Then your script entities had the job of trying to adjust it later as you and your crew went along through life, to fit what you ran into and what you put your attention on. Scripts generally tended to become pretty confused even early in life.

What Vic or Tory or the newly trained Ole would do with him tomorrow was help him cull and revise parts of his script, get rid of certain control machinery he was operating under, and clean up his crew members of their rivalries and gripes. The idea was to reach the point where he could tell his crew what he wanted and have them pay attention to him.

It occurred to Jerry, walking down the dirt road beneath the stars, that the sane thing to do would be to get in Ole's Caddy and get the hell away from there. But the notion had neither fire nor force. Because, as wild and crazy as all this was, at least the part about the reality generator fitted the events of the past three days better than any conventional wisdom. And Van Wyk and Madame Tanya were right: you couldn't run away from it. The future on Earth was damned short unless, as McBee had put it, they won the game. So the least he could do was hang around and see what tomorrow brought.

When Ole had come out of his session with Vic, the old Icelander looked five or ten years younger. He'd had a good grin before, but right then he'd looked as if he'd just eaten the universe. Then Ole had taken Carol in one room, and Vic had gone into another with Diacono. Tory had taken Sharon into the old bunkhouse, each carrying a chair. He and Bill would have to wait till tomorrow. And he had felt what? Jealousy, because he had to wait!

Diacono had come out looking like a different man—cocky instead of restrained; cheerful instead of sober. Sharon had been next, and came out looking totally in charge of herself, but he didn't know her well enough to say how much of a difference that was. Finally, Carol had come out. Previously there'd been a certain sense of childlike vulnerability about her, a certain shyness, although it had decreased after Ole had handled the thing between Kevin and her. Now the little-girl shyness seemed to be gone. She'd looked around the room with bright calm eyes, as if she were seeing things newly and differently.

Tomorrow would be his turn.

He was introspecting too strongly to notice much around him at the time, and didn't see Carol below the road, sitting on the trunk of a fallen cottonwood uprooted by some past flooding of the creek.

"Hi, Lefty!" she called. "Couldn't get to sleep?"

He jerked out of his reverie and walked down to her. "Hi. How come you called me Lefty? Do I look like a ghost?"

She laughed, her eyes night-shadowed but somehow bright. "No," she said, "but with your right arm in a sling, it seemed to fit."

"What happened in there today?" he asked. "What was it like?"

"It doesn't describe well. Good though. Rough in spots, but good. You'll find out tomorrow."

"What does it feel like, now that you've done it?"

"Good enough that I don't want to go to sleep yet. Good enough that I look forward to more of it tomorrow." She patted the tree trunk beside her, and he sat.

"What did you think of Tory's lecture?" he asked. "And the stuff Vic told us before that?"

Her face was near his in the night, half turned to him. "It felt weird at the time," she answered. "Too for out. But it seemed as if I should go along with it for a while and give it a chance. Now it feels lots more real to me. Lots more."

"Why? What makes it feel more real now?"

She was grinning. "You're never going to figure it out tonight, so there's no point in trying to explain it." Her eyes were on his, suddenly playful. "Besides, there must be something better to do on a beautiful night like this."

He stared, surprised, but only for a moment uncertain. Reaching across her with his left arm, he drew her close and kissed her, his lips exploring softly at first, then more firmly as she responded. After a minute or so she disengaged his arm and they stood up, to walk slowly back toward the buildings, holding hands, not talking much. Instead of going into the ranch house, she led him into the empty bunkhouse.

* * *

From their assumed location in and above and around the Caddy, Lefty and Leo watched the couple go in. It stirred vague sexual feelings, despite their having no bodies, but the feelings were without intensity. They were content for the present with their condition, and they realized now that they could recycle if they wished—withdraw to the mezzanine and arrange to become the "souls" for newborn baby bodies and begin a new life.

But they had decided to stay, to help Ole and the others in whatever ways they could. They'd eavesdropped on lectures and sessions during the day just past, and the result was to make them relatively powerful, as ghosts go. Further, they realized that this little group of humans was undertaking to undo exactly what had destroyed their recent lives. The knowledge gave them both interest and a sense of purpose.

Now, with unexpressed agreement, they lifted upward past the box elders and windmills and beyond, to float gently above the canyon and enjoy the view. The night was softening with the newly risen, somewhat gibbous moon. Without bodies, their perceptions could have been somewhat different as they looked with a 360-degree viewpoint over the desert and hills, but mostly they translated and experienced their surroundings rather as if they still saw through eyes.

Still, they perceived things that eyes might not have. Thus they saw a glowing golden spheroid appear a little distance away, above the crest of a ridge. After watching it for a moment, they approached it curiously, cautiously. Cautiously because, though its beauty drew them and they felt nothing they identified as a threat, it did not feel quite right.

A light flow of friendliness came from it, and it projected toward them what looked like the inner cylinder of a vacuum bottle that appeared transparent in the moonlight. Inside the bottle it was blacker than the night sky, but it was a blackness scintillant with stars, as if it held a universe within.

They were intrigued. The golden spheroid flowed a gentle sense of approval, as if their curiosity was acceptable, and the two ghosts jointly surrounded the bottle to examine it more closely. With a suddenness that exceeded their speed of awareness, Lefty and Leo both were sucked into it. Inside were no stars; those had been artifice. There were only themselves, tiny now like two fireflies flitting sluggishly against the field that was the bottle.

The beautiful golden spheroid turned into what looked like a small oily cloud and drew the bottle into itself. Then the cloud flicked away and was gone.

 

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Framed