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  GODPLAYERS 01

  GODPLAYERS

  Damien Broderick

  PROLOGUE

  There's a world I know where the women are a head taller than the men, and file their ferocious teeth to points. The men are just as fierce.

  A different world, yet the same, another earth, has luminous rings spread brilliantly across the whole sky, bright as a full moon. Those rings are all that remained of the moon when it fell chaotically too close to the world and got torn apart by tidal forces. There are no people there, only about twenty million different kinds of dinosaurs in a range of sizes and colors. Lots of them are meat eaters, with shockingly bad breath.

  On a third world, the people are lean and lightly furred. The pale pupils of their eyes are slitted vertically. I believe their remote ancestors, maybe fifteen million years ago, were the great Ice Age cats now extinct in our world. All the apes and humans are extinct in theirs. Has any of them managed the trick of slipping here through the mirrored cracks between the worlds? If so, perhaps they gave rise to legends of vampires or werewolves. I don't think any of them came here, though. They love the taste of simian blood, which is why the apes and humans are extinct in their earth. We'd have noticed them, trust me.

  On a fourth, the humans are gone, but machines are everywhere. Evolution by other means. Same old, same old, but different. Always different.

  And in all of them, by and by, we Players stroll, connive, or run for our lives. So do the K-machines, driven by malign motives we can scarcely guess at. I like to kill the bastards, I really do.

  The endless hazard, of course, is that they'll kill me first, and those I love. That's no abstract threat. I've been alive and I've been dead. Alive is better.

  Sorry, that sounds like cynical gallows humor. But I'm not being facetious. It's the literal and exact truth. I find it hard to recall the filthy noise and confusion of my death. It is simply too painful, and besides your synaptic web doesn't work terrifically well once your brain has been torn to shreds. Luckily, I've always been a cheerful if guarded fellow, equable under stress, buoyant and, you know, simply happy if I'm given half a chance. Even so, death is no picnic. Well, death is a picnic, but the dead tend to be the luckless meat in the sandwich.

  But I see I've jumped too far ahead too soon. Let me start again.

  ***

  I don't suppose I have the appearance of a Player in the Contest of Worlds. You wouldn't think it, to look at me. Well, that's not true, of course, since that's exactly how I look—but if you knew about us, you'd probably expect a Player to resemble premium Bruce Willis, all bruised muscles and weary but romantic hard-bitten sarcasm. Or maybe you'd think we look like those macho but insanely handsome Hollywood guys with ponytails who spend most of the day working up their lats and pecs and biceps, and fine-tuning their flashy karate kicks.

  Nah—I'm just this tall Aussie walking down the street, booting a loose plastic bottle top into the gutter, hands in my pockets, floppy hair in my brown eyes, looking a bit wary. True, I have a soft leather glove on my right hand, but people assume it's a personal quirk like a nosering, or a data wearable, or maybe that it hides a nasty burn, which I guess comes closest. Other than that, just another graduate philosophy student dressed in black: fashion uniform, in this place.

  Let me tell you how this thing came to pass. Start with Lune.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lune

  As she listened from a small side table to the house crooner sing "Moon River" in a smoky room of perfume and fumes of brandy and Scotch, something new snared Lune's attention. Not the low irritating stench of the deformer at the table near the front with his noisy cronies. Neither was it the expected tingle of a Contest Player's glamor—not quite, and it put her on edge. Guardedly she scanned the room, saw a young man approach the bar and order a drink. Shadowed, this tall, rangy man with the broad shoulders was presumably her Player: that dark hair, eyes brown as old gold.

  With a nod and smile he took his glass from the cornrowed barkeep, leaned his back against the polished timber countertop, surveying the crowd of revelers from behind those long dark sleepy lashes. He drank a little, held the glass easily. She pressed through the tables in the shadows, carrying an empty cocktail glass that had held only Perrier water. At the bar she stood beside him, accepted his relaxed, approving regard. The faintest penumbra of glamour. He narrowed his eyes, smiled faintly, gave her a slow secret smile. After a moment's beat he said, "Ember Seebeck."

  Now that she looked at him more closely, the apparent freshness of his youth was lost in the abrasions of time, in perhaps a thousand years of memories and bruising encounters with the worlds, with joys, pains, mortifications unimaginable to the young. It gave him depth, naturally, but experience enshrouded the clarity of the self as a shroud masked glamour.

  "You are very beautiful." He shifted his drink to his left hand, extended his right.

  "Thank you. Lune," she told him. "Lune Katha Sarit Sagara. You're hunting," she said. "So am I. I've been watching the creature over there." She frowned.

  He released her hand, watching her. "I wonder that we've never met."

  "So many worlds," she said, and found her tone had grown abruptly brittle, "so little time."

  Another cat smile. "What are you drinking?"

  "Shanghai Astor Hotel special this time, please."

  The barkeep frowned. "Boss don't like the hired help drinkin', even if customers treat 'em."

  "Thomas, I wouldn't want to get you in trouble. But I'm not working for Mr. Rogerson, not yet."

  "I'll chance it, if'n you will." He flashed her a grin. "I never heard of that cocktail, though, ma'am. Somethin' from New Orleans?"

  "Lot farther away than that. Jigger of cognac, teaspoon of maraschino," she said. "You have absinthe, of course? Half a jigger."

  He nodded, shrugged.

  "And an egg?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Two teaspoons of albumen, then. Shake them with half a teaspoon of lemon and some cracked ice. Top off with chilled soda, not too much."

  A man at the front table frowned over his shoulder, nudged the despoiler, a big-shouldered man in an expensive suit who looked like a prosperous bank manager. The fog-voiced torch singer seemed not to be bothered by their quiet exchanges, putting his heart and soul into "September Song." Lune took the glass, sipped, ignored them.

  Her eyes flicked to the front table, as did Ember's, and he nodded. She said mockingly, "Is it... mere coincidence... that we meet here?"

  "No such thing, as you know, my dear."

  "So we were meant to meet in this place, however belatedly?"

  "I would that it were so. Often I feel more like a chess piece than a Player of the Accord. You know, the 'destiny that shapes our ends—'"

  "'—Rough-hew them how we will.' Ember, that view," said Lune, ever the scholar, "was declared heretical in the Accord, avant la lettre." Not that this fact bothered her, for the Accord had been hammered out by Thomas Aquinas in 1271 in the Paris Chapterhouse of the Ensemble, long before the emerging physical and mathematical sciences of the Metric Renaissance had deepened sufficiently to show how ill-fitted his theological apparatus had been to the task. Still, tradition had its uses; one retained what worked, and worked around its encrusted shell.

  Ember shrugged.

  She had been expecting a companion in arms for this night's task, had depended on it. A small shudder passed through her.

  In a soft, velvet voice, Thomas told her, "Boss wants you up on stage now, Miss Lune. Good luck."

  "Thanks." She put the glass on the counter, walked through tables to the front. The room was small enough that she needed no mike. In the afternoon, she'd had a brief opportunity to run the house band through her audition repertoire; they nodded to her
now, offhand but friendly. They were good and knew it, even if the horn man was a little too eager for his solos. Half-cut after work, business types looked up blearily. The deformer thing stared at her with barely contained detestation. She nodded to the band leader, went into Dylan, Tom Waits, and finished with a wailing, pure-throated reading of Roy Orbison's "I Drove All Night" that woke up the salarymen and had them singing along in manic chorus.

  "You're good, babe," the sleazy manager said, trying to cop a feel. Faintly sweaty and pleased with herself, her throat dry, Lune chose not to injure him. She'd already done what she had to in order to draw just the right amount of attention to herself. Deftly she avoided his groping hand, smiled, shrugged. "Well, so anyway, yeah," he said, resigned, "you've got a gig here."

  "Thanks, Mr. Rogerson."

  "And no drinking with the customers."

  "Oh, were you going to pay me for tonight?"

  He frowned, twitched his eyes to one side. "Hey, tonight you can do what you like, honey. But if you're gonna screw the john, do it outside in the alley, not in here. This is a decent Mithran joint."

  She gave him a dazzling smile. "Thank you for the job, Mr. Rogerson. I'll be here tomorrow night at nine sharp." Knowing she would never see his puffy face again, nor his unpleasant cognate world, was satisfaction enough. By the time she had made her way back to the bar, swaying slightly as she passed the despoiler's table, Ember Seebeck had found them a table and set her cocktail on it.

  "You're brilliant," he told her.

  "I know. Thanks." The Astor wasn't up to Singapore standards, but Thomas had done his best. People were giving them unpleasant looks, even though the band had settled down to a drink of their own. "So are we going to kill that thing up front?"

  "I thought you'd know."

  "Nope. I guess this is an improv. Situational. The atmosphere's kind of dirty."

  "I don't think it's likely to happen in here."

  "The owner recommends that I take my johns out into the alley. Might have been a hint. Care to join me there?"

  "Nothing would please me more. Let's finish our drinks first."

  "Of course. Sometimes I'm paired with Maybelline Seebeck. Your sister, I take it."

  He shrugged. "One of them."

  She felt a burst of envy. "A large family."

  "As an old family riddle has it, 'Brothers and sisters have I ten, six doughty wenches, four strapping men.' Yeah, larger than the usual, these days, one of us for every month of the year. Then again, Mom and Pop had plenty of time."

  Something suddenly came clear. Maybe it was the jingle. Lune found herself chanting another, a childhood mnemonic for recalling months and holidays:

  "'Thirty-three days each from September, To June and July, fire to ember,'" and she nodded in his direction with a smile, which he acknowledged, "'Plus one extra day each for summer and winter, And every fourth year a leap-day to remember.'"

  Ember grinned broadly. "Exactly. Have to suppose they planned our birthdays with exquisite self-control. And you?"

  Me what? Oh, family. "A singleton, alas," Lune said. "I lost track of my parents when the Ensemble admitted me."

  "A good crowd, the Ensemble. A trifle jaded, perhaps. You'll bring them a breath of fresh air."

  "I'm not that young, Ember. But thank you. Shall we go?"

  "My pleasure." He crooked his arm, she placed her hand lightly there, and they made their way down the narrow curving stairway, more filthy looks and mutters attending their passage. Maybe nobody liked singers, but in that case why would they pay good pelf to sit here and drink? They went out the back way, into the alley, and waited for a minute or less holding hands decorously, watching the sky, the cobblestones, the polluted brick wall of a factory. The large man in the bank manager suit came out of the same door and instantly flung himself at them.

  "Filthy nigra slut," he shouted, and tried to strike her. Despite his slurred speech, he was not even slightly intoxicated, so that when Lune moved to evade his drunken blow it was not where she'd expected and caught her numbingly on the jaw. "You some kinda coon-fucker, you shithead," he was screaming at Ember. Dazed, she saw through a streaky haze Ember's arm extend. A small weapon made almost no sound, and the deformer fell to the cobbles, half his head blown away.

  "Crap!" he said, "Sorry, I was slow. Shouldn't have had that drink."

  "Never mind," Lune said. "Get hold of the bastard's feet, I'll find a nexus point." She spoke to the Schwelle operating system, and a threshold opened. With a noise like a fire hydrant hit by a truck, water smashed out at them, a torrent of blackness in the dark alley. It struck them both bent over, toppled them along the cobblestones, foamed and rushed, dragging the corpse out of their grip and flinging it high against the factory bricks. Lune, choking and drenched, screamed command words. The Schwelle closed, and the noise was cut by a tenth. Water surged back and forth along the alley, slapping walls, draining out into the nearest street and down gutters. Voices were yelping. A light went on above the club.

  "Mithra's bull!" Bedraggled and shocked, Ember was scrabbling through the ebbing tide to recapture their prize. Lune kicked off her shoes, gasping at the chill of the water. She helped him hoist the corpse into a fireman's lift.

  "Bastards must have found that nexus," Lune told him, "flooded the whole damned valley. Overkill, but effective."

  "Egypt? Indonesia?"

  "China. They like those gigantic hydraulic projects. Damn it, I was there only a decade ago."

  "Do you want me to find one?"

  "No, no, I have a dozen drop-offs. Just a moment." She was breathing heavily. So was Ember; the corpse was heavy and ungainly. She spoke another command. With a tearing noise, a fresh Schwelle opened in the darkness, with equal darkness beyond. At their back, Rogerson burst out from the club, a shotgun raised, ready for mayhem, followed by the K-machine's flunkies.

  "Shit, move it, Lune."

  "I'm gone," she said, and went across. He lumbered after her, weighed down, and she instantly closed the threshold. Another urban myth in the making. Lune hoped there had been fish or frogs carried in on the brief deluge. With a thud, Ember Seebeck dumped the dead thing off his shoulders. They stood beneath unfamiliar stars in a field of sweet clover. Somewhere nearby a large animal whuffled, maybe a mammal, maybe something stranger. An owl-like avian swooped overhead, eyes catching the moon's whiteness. It settled in a dark tree. Lune took a barefoot step, felt warmth creep into her toes, and a less appealing odor filled her nostrils.

  "As you put it so eloquently, shit," she said. "I really hate the countryside." She took a careful step backward and wiped her foot on soft clover.

  "The city doesn't seem such a great improvement," he said, laughing lightly. He had a penlight in his hand, examining the headless corpse. Blood and meat and other stuff more like the insides of a machine. Undoubtedly dead, if you imagine the things ever being alive to begin with. "I wonder why they tend to come stocked with such vile bigotry."

  Lune nodded her agreement. "They might as well wear T-shirts with branded signs like EVIL MOTHERFUCKER. One thing Maybelline and I offed was screaming about dirty dykes." She rolled her eyes.

  There was a moment's silence. The light went off. "Well, in May's case—"

  "You know perfectly well what I mean."

  "Yeah. Okay, let's take this across to your nexus, and hand it over to a disposer."

  They did that thing, and then she went home alone, despite some elegant pleading on Ember's part, had a long, relaxing soak, ate a scratch meal out of the fridge, watched some trash TV, slept for six hours.

  CHAPTER TWO

  August

  For me, though, it started with Tansy.

  I was studying medicine, not philosophy, about a million years ago after I got back to Australia from Chicago. I fell in love, fell out again, played some music, studied like a dog, and at the end of my third-year academics Great-aunt Tansy, with whom I'd shared a big old empty house since my parents disappeared over Thailand, waved me o
ff as I headed for the outback to do a little jackarooing. That's tending huge herds of beef cattle or sheep that roam across dry grassland spreads the size of small European nations. It's not done on horseback these days, not much. Helicopters and 4WDs are the preferred method. I learned to round up a few thousand head of cattle at a time from the back of a bounding Suzuki bike, 800 ccs and lean as a greyhound. On a blazing 41-degree-Celsius Summer Day (which in Chicago was Winter Day, or would be in a few hours' time when December 33 was done), I ate ritual damper and rum cake with the other jackaroos and two hotly pursued jillaroos, drinking Bundy rum and Coke and singing western laments. American West, that is. Nothing is more unnerving than hearing three black aboriginal stockmen whose ancestors had dwelled in that part of the country for upward of 50,000 years singing "The Streets of Laredo" in totally unself-conscious American hillbilly accents. That's how they heard it on the radio, that's the way they sang it.

  I drove home all one day and most of the night late in January in the old 4WD Pajero I'd won on a lucky hand of poker, with a swag of tax-free cash in each of my high-top R. M. Williams boots. At a drive-through booze shop I'd bought a bottle of Bundaberg Rum for myself, for old times' sake, and a bottle of premium sherry for Aunt Tansy. Dugald O'Brien, her old golden Labrador, met me joyously at the gate, tail wagging. How did he do it? Mysteriously, he always seemed to know when I'd be arriving, and welcomed me with his simple, blessed affection. I wondered if Tansy tipped him off, using her occult powers.

  "Do Good, my man," I told him, "likewise," and scratched his ears, then crouched to give him a proper hug, dropping my swag but holding the bottles carefully. The poor chap was growing old, and he limped a little as he followed me into the hallway.

  The comforting smells of Tansy's home welcomed me in like a warm memory. It made me embarrassed: I was grimy, and I'm sure I stank like a skunk. I found her in the enormous kitchen, gave her a kiss, deferring the hug for later, and told her I was headed upstairs for a shower. She lifted the remote with a floury hand and flipped off her TV set.