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Thirty-Two

 

It seemed as if only about fifteen minutes had passed when the Games Master reappeared in her seat. Carol wondered if her conference had been so brief or if perhaps time here was flexible—an hour in some conference room fitting into a quarter hour here. But if so, why not an hour in the conference room to two minutes here, or zero minutes? Or why not a telepathic conference without leaving?

Apparently the place had its own rules and limits; it would be interesting to know what they were. Clearly, they were much different from those she was used to. For one thing, she was here, and Jerry and Ole. Yet she clearly remembered the helicopter, the automatic weapons fire, bullets slamming her, and falling into the snow. Then she had looked down at her body and watched the snow turn red—black, actually, by starlight. Her body had looked really, really dead, like something dumped there, and she'd thought it was interesting that she could look at it like that without feeling upset.

Next she'd checked the bodies of Jerry and Ole. Ole—himself, not his body—had joined her. Jerry had still been hanging in there, his heart pumping. When it stopped, all three together had gained elevation, a few thousand feet of it.

It was beautiful—the night, the snow, the wilderness island spread beneath them. And after their psychic experiences under Vic's and Ole's "counseling," they had found no trauma in death. In fact, for a few minutes they did not think to look for Vic and the others; importances had altered somewhat, and they had enjoyed a purely spiritual experience.

Now here she sat in what appeared to be her old body. It wasn't, though; although it did feel the same, it wasn't bullet-torn. She wondered what sort of punishment they visited on dead people here, but somehow the question didn't trouble her.

"All right," said the Games Master, interrupting Carol's thoughts, "court is now in session." She looked at Vic. "Mr. Merlin, the Board of Adjudications has found that you did not act illegally—far more boldly than we are accustomed to, but not illegally. You are therefore, of course, not guilty. On the same grounds, Misters Sigurdsson, David, and Diacono are likewise not guilty."

Ole stood and applauded, grinning broadly, his tall rawboned frame looking hard and vigorous, not at all dead, the sound of his big hands loud in the room. Jerry stood, too, and Carol, joining him in applause. Paul smiled, and Vic grinned as if amused as well as pleased; still seated, they added to the clapping.

The Games Master did not gavel them down, nor tell the master-at-arms to bring order. Instead, she waited mildly for the ten-second outburst to end on its own. When it had, she spoke again.

"Now," she said, "the court will examine the remaining issues, commencing with the charges against Gandy and Alfred." Her eyes went to the two guardians where they sat side by side looking altogether unconcerned. "You have been accused of malfeasance. Alfred, I am dropping the charges against you because the Court has determined that the persons you allowed into the generator room did not act illegally there." She glanced at Vic and Paul, then back at the guardians. "And, of course, their entering was no crime in itself; anyone who has the power to enter is free to, at his or her own risk.

"However, Gandy, the charge against you still stands. It appears that you took an effective partisan role in this contest. How do you plead?"

Gandy sat with arms folded, seemingly unworried. "Not guilty. I took no partisan action."

"You gave useful information to one side in the contest."

"Granted. But I was not partisan. I would have given any permissible information to the other side, too, if they'd asked for it. In fact, I was rather surprised that they didn't at least come to learn what I had told their opponents. Considering their abilities, I presumed they knew that their opposition had been through the gate."

The Games Master shook her head. "Not a valid defense. The information given to the Merlin group was vital to their success and not otherwise available to them. It was the single action which decided the contest, or at least, without which they could not have won. On the other hand, the Shark group did not need your information. They drew the correct conclusion without it."

Vic's Texas voice came in when she had finished. "Be all right if I say something about that?"

"If it is relevant."

"I could have found out where the surprise generator was without Gandy's help."

Her eyebrows rose. "Then why did you go to the Sipapu Gate?"

"Two main reasons. First off, I'd made a lot of progress on counseling techniques, since I'd been through a gate before. My first two times through a gate, it hit me pretty hard, and it really kicked back on me afterwards, physically and mentally. And it felt as if, to handle the surprise generator, I'd need to take at least one of these new folks along through whatever gate was the one. Besides which, we'd need to be able to operate when we got there. That meant we needed a test run, and Sipapu was the handiest gate.

"But if Gandy hadn't told us, I could have found out anyway. What he did didn't make that much difference."

"And how," asked the Games Master, "would you have found out?"

"You asked a while ago how I'd accessed the information I gave here. I said I got it by looking. I'd have gotten this information the same way, if I'd needed to; it just would have taken me maybe two or three days. Or maybe less, depending on how things worked out. I already knew the location of eight gates, and before we went to Sipapu, I put my attention inside each of them, one after another, looking for anything that looked like it didn't belong there. I looked backwards at them so I was seeing them in the past; that way, I wouldn't disturb their guardians. But I didn't find anything that looked promising.

"If Gandy hadn't told us where it was, the next thing I'd have done was check out other places where the pattern indicated there ought to be gates. And if the surprise generator wasn't at any of them, I'd have extended the pattern..."

"Thank you, Mr. Merlin," the Games Master interrupted, "I see the procedure. An obvious and workable approach for someone who knows as much as you. You have made remarkable advances. I'm amazed you survived your early research, booby-trapped as the area is. I would have expected it to lead to insanity or death instead of to workable procedures."

She turned her attention to the Guardian of Sipapu. "Gandy, I find you not guilty of malfeasance."

"Wait a minute!" Shark protested. "What do you mean, 'not guilty?' He had no way of knowing that Merlin could do those things! He took sides!"

"There is a saying on your world," the Games Master answered mildly, " 'no harm, no foul.' On the same basis, it is results we evaluate here. There are no accidents, there is no luck. There are only results—the combined effects of scripts, intentions, knowing and actions. And in truth, knowing goes far beyond the concept of knowing usually recognized within the Tikh Cheki Matrix."

She turned then to Kurt Hardman, who sat glum and apparently inattentive. "Mr. Hardman, the Court has decided to remand your case to a referee's hearing."

With that, Kurt Hardman simply disappeared—presumably, Carol decided, to reappear in the office of some referee.

"And now," the Games Master continued, "the Court will decide what to do about the disconnection of the so-called surprise generator, chaos generator, confusion generator—call it what you will.

"The fact is that the players of Tikh Cheki, in their billions, have become used to the richness of troublesome surprises which the surprise generator has provided. In fact, it would long ago have been taken off-line, had there not been rather general approval of its effects. Therefore, it is the preliminary consideration of this court that it should be put back on line." She looked at Vic. "Are there any comments or objections?"

It was Jerry who spoke. "Yeah, I've got an objection. The damned thing was about ready to destroy the world. Now, I know there'd be a replacement world, and everybody who lost their body when the present reality blew would be eligible for a new one, if they wanted, as bodies became available."

He pointed a finger like a gun at the Games Master. "But I'd like to know just what the hell constitutes that 'general approval' you talked about. I don't recall hearing about any survey, let alone a vote.

"Vic told us that at the end of each cycle, the reality generator gets reprogrammed to, ah, correct what seemed to need correction in the previous matrix. Is that the way it works?"

The Games Master's eyes were on him intently. "Basically, yes."

"He also told us that with each reprogramming, the rules become more restrictive, and the level of play—I don't recall just how he put it, but the way it came across to me was, it got grungier. Less rich. Is that right?"

"I suppose it could be looked at that way. It is a viable point of view."

"So why? Why is it that way? What the hell is going on to make it like that?"

Her mildness had changed now, the apparent boredom beneath it replaced by growing interest. "You are the one who is pulling this string," she said. "Continue pulling, and tell us what you find."

"You bet," he said. "So in each cycle, humankind starts from scratch. Some of us. Others say to hell with it and quit playing—go outside the matrix and watch, like McBee. Or maybe hang out, waiting till the matrix has enough bodies so there's one for them; or try a different sector or universe somewhere. Right?

"And over time here we build things back up. What are we building toward? Some level we want that we think is desirable. And we have to do this against obstacles for it to be interesting. So we try this and that—religion, philosophy, science, what have you—and bit by bit, we gain."

His eyes fixed the Games Master in her seat. "And then what the hell happens? The surprise generator speeds up and blows the whole damn thing! What the hell kind of a game is that, where you can't win? People have even stopped thinking we can make it! When we start to get close, our progress jabs all those painful other times when we were starting to win and then had the world end on us. Down underneath we expect it all to collapse again."

Suddenly Jerry grinned, a big now-I-got-it kind of grin. For a moment he said nothing, until the Games Master prodded him. "Mr. Connor, you seem to have had a major realization. I trust you aren't going to keep us waiting for it."

"I might." His grin didn't reduce a bit. "But I won't. The Lords of Chaos, Prank and Associates—whatever—fooled hell out of us, and I bet they're laughing right now, wherever they got hauled off to. They put in the chaos generator knowing damn well that the difficulties it added to games would make things a lot more interesting. And correct me if I'm wrong, but we'd been playing games for trilennia before Tikh Cheki, until we had ennui out the kazoo! We'd learned that things had to be really challenging to keep our interest over the long haul; otherwise, forever would be unbearable.

"So okay, you were right: People didn't want to scrap the surprise generator.

"But there's one thing wrong: the surprise generator is a trap! It lets mankind think he's coming along—three steps forward and two and nine-tenths back, but he's coming along. And then, whammo!

"What's wrong with the surprise generator is simply that it accelerates every time we reach the point where we're really threatening to win as a species! So all you need to do is fix it so it doesn't accelerate; then you put it back on line. That way we keep our barriers, our degree of difficulty, but give ourselves a chance to actually advance to a whole new level of activity."

He looked around the table. "And that's all I've got. Don't ask me how to do it. I imagine you've got engineers who can solve that for us."

He sat back down. This time there was no applause, but Vic and Ole, Carol and Paul, grinned and glowed at him. Then Vic stood up.

"I'm pretty sure it won't be any big deal to do that. Like I said before, I'll bet just about anything that the accelerator was added on after the surprise generator had been on line a while. It's a module that was sort of plugged in on the top. Check it out and see if that's not the way it was."

The Games Master stood. "Thank you, Jerry Connor and Victor Merlin." Her eyes fixed on Jerry. "I believe you have provided us with the proper resolution of the problem.

"Court is recessed while I have the generator and module examined. When that has been done, I believe we can make a final disposition of the entire matter and get on with other activities."

 

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