Still, the Citizen’s luck held. The man played indifferently, even poorly at times, but the fortune of the dice sustained him. When he had a clear advantage, he doubled, and Stile had to accept or forfeit the game. Then Stile had a brief run of luck—actually, skillful exploitation of the game situation—and doubled himself. “Double!” the Citizen said immediately when his own turn came, determined to have the last word and confident in his fortune. Now the doubling cube stood at eight.
“I understand a little squirt like you can use magic to snare some mighty fine-looking women,” the Citizen said as they played. “Even if they’re taller than you.”
“Many women are,” Stile agreed. References to his height did irritate him, but he had long since learned to conceal this. He was 1.5 meters tall, or an inch shy of five feet, in the archaic nomenclature of Phaze.
The Citizen’s infernal luck continued. There did seem to be something to his claim about being lucky; he had certainly had far superior throws of the dice, and in this game, supervised by the Game Computer, there could be no question of cheating. He was winning this game too, by a narrower margin than the last, but the eight on the doubling cube gave every piece magnified clout. The Citizen liked to double; maybe it related to his gambling urge.
“I guess there could be one really luscious doll who nevertheless married a dwarf,” the Citizen observed with a smirk. “I guess she could have been ensorcelled.”
“Must have been.” But despite his refusal to be baited about his recent marriage to the Lady Blue, Stile was losing. If this special ploy did not work, he would wash out of the Tourney. If only the luck would even out!
“Or maybe she has a hangup about midgets. Sort of like miscegenation. Some people get turned on that way.”
The Citizen was really trying! But Stile played on calmly. “Some do, I understand.”
“Or maybe pederasty. She likes to do it with children.”
But the effect of that malicious needle was abated by the Citizen’s choice of the wrong concept. It was generally applicable to the sexual motive of a male, not a female. Still, Stile would gladly have dumped this oaf down a deep well.
Stile lost this game too, down six men. Forty-eight more points against him, a cumulative total of sixty-four. Another game like this would finish him.
The luck turned at last and he won one. But he had only been able to double it once, and only picked up six points. Then the Citizen won again: eight men, redoubled, for thirty-two points. The score now stood at 96–6. The next game could finish it.
Still the Citizen’s amazing luck held. Had he, after all, found some way to cheat, to fix the dice? Stile doubted it; the Tourney precautions were too stringent, and this was an important game, with a large audience. The throws had to be legitimate. Science claimed that luck evened out in the long run; it was difficult to prove that in backgammon.
Stile’s situation was desperate. Yet there were ways. Stile knew how to play the back game specialty, and now was the time. When his position looked good, he doubled; when the Citizen was clearly ahead, he doubled. But the Citizen retained a general advantage, so Stile’s doublings seemed foolish.
Stile used the back game to interfere with the Citizen’s establishment on his home board. Because most of Stile’s men had been relegated to the bar, he had them in ready position to attack the Citizen’s men as they lined up for bearing off. This sort of situation could be a lot more volatile than many people thought. “Double,” Stile said, turning the cube.
“You’re crazy,” the Citizen said, redoubling in his turn.
Stile hit another blot. He needed more than this to recover a decent position, but it helped.
The Citizen threw double sixes. That moved his blotted man all the way from the bar to one space from the end. His luck was still more than sufficient to swamp whatever breaks Stile managed.
Stile doubled again, though he was still obviously behind. The Citizen, when his turn came, laughed and doubled once more. Now the cube stood at sixty-four, its maximum. “You really want to go down big, tyke!”
They were reduced to five men each; the rest had been borne off. The game was actually much closer than the Citizen realized. Stile had already won the advantage he sought. If the game had proceeded with only Stile’s first doubling, and he won by two men, all he would have would be four more points. If he lost by the same margin, however, the Citizen’s four points would put him at one hundred for final victory. But now the cube stood at sixty-four, so that a two-man win by the Citizen would give him the same victory by an unnecessary margin—while the same win by Stile would give him 128 points, at one stroke enough for his final victory. So he had in effect evened it up. Instead of being behind by ninety points, he had only to win two points. The Citizen had been foolish to permit the doubling to go to this level; he had thrown away a major advantage.
“I hear some of these animals can change to human form,” the Citizen said. “I guess an animal in the form of a woman could be a lot of fun to a lonely man.”
Was there anything this slob did not know about Phaze, or any limit to his crudity of insinuation? Stile allowed a little ire to show, deliberately. “It is a different frame, sir, with different natural laws. Those animals have human intelligence.”
The Citizen gleefully pounced on this. “So you have sampled the wares of the mares and the britches of the bitches!” He was hardly paying attention to the backgammon game in his voyeuristic lust. He wanted to make Stile angry and, in seeming success, he was letting the means preempt the ends. This was always ethically problematical, and often strategically unsound. The Citizen was setting himself up for a fall. If only the luck evened out!
Stile had a good roll of the dice. He hit two blots, and the Citizen hardly noticed. “I don’t see that it is any of your business, sir, no disrespect intended.”
“With animals!” the Citizen exclaimed, smiling broadly. “You admit it!”
“I don’t deny it, sir,” Stile said, obviously nettled.
“And did they bother to change form each time?” the Citizen demanded, almost drooling. He was hardly looking at the board, playing automatically and poorly. “Maybe sometimes a bitch stayed in her dog-form, just for the novelty?”
Stile wondered just what sort of bestiality lurked in the secret dreams of this nasty man. Perhaps this was the phenomenon of projection, in which a person with illicit desires projected the realization of certain acts onto others. The Citizen was giving himself away without realizing it.
Stile continued to parry him verbally, taking the worst of it, though he had the ability to reverse the onus at any time. He was tacitly egging the man on. Meanwhile, he exploited the rolls of the dice skillfully, and soon had gained a net advantage. The Citizen could have prevented this, had he been paying similar attention. But his morbid fascination with Stile’s supposed exploits with shape-changing females had done him in. By the time he became aware of the trap, it was too late; even his amazing luck could not make up for his squandered opportunities.
They entered the final stage, and both resumed bearing off men. For once Stile had better throws of the dice, and finished two men ahead.
It took a moment for the Citizen to absorb the significance. He had been so far ahead, he knew subjectively that it would take a prohibitively massive turn of fortune to deprive him of victory. No such turn had occurred. Now his eyes fixed on the number 64 at the top of the doubling cube, and he saw that this narrow margin of two pieces had at one stroke washed him out of the Tourney.
“You must visit Phaze some day, sir,” Stile said brightly. “I know just the bitch for you.”
CHAPTER 3
Honeymoon
Stile crossed the curtain at the usual place, emerging from the food-servicing hall to the deep forest of Phaze. In a moment a unicorn trotted up. But it wasn’t Neysa. This one was slightly larger, male, and his coat was deep dark blue except for the two red socks on his hind feet.
“Clip!” Stile exclaimed,
surprised. “I expected—”
The unicorn metamorphosed into a young man garbed in blue shirt, furry trousers, red socks, floppy hat, gloves, and boots. His resemblance to the unicorn was clear to anyone conversant with the forms. “She’s off getting bred, at long last. The Herd Stallion’s keeping her with the herd until she foals. That’s S.O.P.”
“Yes, of course,” Stile agreed, disappointed. He found his hidden clothes and dressed quickly; it would not do to travel naked here, though there was really no firm convention. He wanted only the best for Neysa, his best friend in this frame, yet he felt empty without her company. But he had made a deal with the Herd Stallion to release her for breeding when his mission of vengeance was finished; now that he had dispatched the Red Adept, it was time. Time for relaxation, recovery, and love. Time to be with the lovely Lady Blue.
“That was the funniest thing,” Clip said, evidently following the thrust of Stile’s thoughts. “Thou didst marry the Lady, then skipped off without even—”
“An idiosyncracy of the situation,” Stile said shortly. He had departed without consummating the marriage because of a prophecy that he would have a son by the Lady Blue; he knew he would survive the dangerous mission ahead of him if he only waited to generate that child thereafter, since such prophecies had the force of law. But now the barbs of the ugly Citizen were fresh in his mind, making this subject sensitive. “You’re volunteering to be my mount?”
“Neysa intimated gently that I’d get horned at the wrong end if I didn’t,” Clip admitted. “Besides, thou dost have interesting adventures.”
“I’m only going to honeymoon with my wife.”
“That’s what I mean.” Clip shifted to his natural form, his horn playing with the sound of a saxophone—a bar of the wedding march, trailing into a tune with risqué connotations.
Stile jumped on the unicorn’s back, landing deliberately hard. Clip blew out one more startled note and took off. The velocity of the unicorn was greater than that of the horse because it was enhanced by magic; yet the two types of creatures were closely akin. As Clip himself had put it, once: as close as men were to apes. Stile was uncertain what freighting accompanied that statement, but had never challenged it. Man had intelligence and science the ape lacked; unicorns had intelligence and magic the horses lacked.
Soon they emerged from the forest and were racing over the fields toward the moated castle that was the heart of the Blue Demesnes. “Dost thou happen to know how Clef from Proton fared?” Stile inquired. “I gave him the Platinum Flute and sent him to the Little Folk, but I’ve been too busy to follow further. I’m sure you’re up on all the news.”
Clip blew an affirmative note. He was the gossipy kind.
“Did Clef arrive safely?” Stile was interested in verifying the accuracy of his dream. The frames had always been firmly separated; if his dream were true, it meant that that separation was beginning to fuzz, at least for him.
The unicorn sounded yes again. His sax-horn was more mellow than Neysa’s harmonica-horn, though less clever on trills. Like her, he could almost speak in musical notes, making them sound like yes, no, maybe, and assorted other words, particularly colloquialisms. Actually, unicorns could express whole sentences in chords, but this was a separate mode that owed little to archaic English. Stile was coming to understand that language too, but his grasp of it was as yet insecure.
“Was he—is he by any chance the one the Platinum Elves called the Foreordained?”
Again the affirmative.
“Then that earthquake—we felt it in Proton—that was the shaking of the mountains when he played?” But this had become rhetorical; he had the answer. The frames had certainly juxtaposed in this respect. “I wonder what that means?”
Now Clip had no answer. No one except the Little Folk of the Mound knew the significance of the Foreordained. And the all-knowing Oracle, who answered only one question in the lifetime of each querist.
Yet the arrival of the Foreordained suggested that the end of Phaze was near, according to another prophecy. That bothered Stile; he had worked so hard to secure his place here. Was he to be denied it after all?
Well, he was determined to snatch what joy he might, in what time remained. On the cosmic scale, the end might be centuries distant. Magic prophecies were devious things, not to be trusted carelessly. People had died depending on misinterpreted omens.
That brought him back to the manner in which he had secured his own fortune by postponing his fathering of a son. He was eager to get on with it. He had loved the Lady Blue from the first time he had encountered her. He had never before met such a regal, intelligent, and desirable woman. But she was the widow of his other self, and that had made things awkward. Now she was his, and he would never leave her—except for one more necessary trip to the frame of Proton, to try for the final Round of the Tourney. It really was not as important to him as it once had seemed, but he had to give it his best try.
They galloped up to the prettily moated little castle. Stile vaulted off as they entered the courtyard. The Lady Blue, his vision of delight, rushed to his arms. She was of course garbed in blue: headdress, gown, slippers. She was all that he desired.
“Are we ready?” he inquired when the initial sweetness of the embrace eased.
“I have been ready since we wed, but thou didst depart in haste,” she said, teasing him.
“Never again, Lady!”
“Hinblue is saddled.”
“We have already traveled much of the eastern curtain. Shall we pick up at the Platinum Demesnes?”
She did not reproach him about his concern for Clef’s welfare, the obvious reason to pass the region of the Little Folk. “As my Lord Blue desires.”
“Wilt thou condone magic for the start?”
She nodded radiantly. “Magic is the substance of my Lord Adept.”
They mounted their steeds, and Stile played his good harmonica, summoning his magic. His Adept talent was governed by music and words, the music shaping the power, the words the application. Actually, his mind was the most important factor; the words mainly fixed the time of implementation. “Conduct us four,” he sang, “to the platinum shore.”
Clip snorted through his horn: shore?
But the magic was already taking hold. The four of them seemed to dissolve into liquid, sink into the ground, and flow rapidly along and through it south-southeast. In a moment they re-formed beside the Mound of the Platinum Elves. There was the fresh cairn of Serrilryan the werebitch, exactly as his vision-dream had shown it.
“Anything I visualize as a shore, is a shore,” Stile explained. “There does not have to be water.” But as it happened, there was some cloud cover here, thickest in the lower reaches, so that the descending forest disappeared into a sealike expanse of mist. They stood on a kind of shore. Almost, he thought he saw wolf shapes playing on the surface of that lake of mist.
“And we were conducted—like the electricity of Proton-frame,” the Lady commented. “Methought thou wouldst provide us with wings to fly.”
A dusky elf, garbed in platinum armor to shield his body from a possible ray of sunlight, appeared. He glanced up at Stile. “Welcome, Blue Adept and Lady,” he said.
“Thy manner of greeting has improved since last we visited,” the Lady Blue murmured mischievously.
“As well it might have,” the elf agreed. “We know thee now.”
He showed them into the Mound. Stile noted that the structure had been hastily repaired, with special shorings. Evidently the destruction wrought by the Foreordained’s Flute had not entirely demolished it. Stile hoped there had not been much loss of life in the collapse. Clip and Hinblue remained outside to graze the verdant, purple-tinted turf.
A deeply darkened and wrinkled elf awaited them inside. This was Pyreforge, chief of this tribe of Dark Elves. “Thy friend is indeed the Foreordained,” he said gravely. “Our trust in thee has been amply justified.”
“Now wilt thou tell the meaning?” Stile inq
uired. “We are on our honeymoon. Yet my curiosity compels.”
“Because thou art on thy honeymoon, I will tell thee only part,” the old elf said. “Too soon wilt thou learn the rest.”
“Nay! If it is to be the end of Phaze, I must know now.”
“It be not necessarily the end, but perhaps only a significant transition. That much remains opaque. But the decision is near—a fortnight hence, perhaps, no more than two. Take thy pleasure now, for there will come thy greatest challenge.”
“There is danger to my Lord Blue?” the Lady asked worriedly.
“To us all, Lady. How could we survive if our frame be doomed?”
“We can not head it off?” Stile asked.
“It will come in its own time. Therefore put it from thy mind; other powers are moving.”
Stile saw that Pyreforge would not answer directly on this subject, and the elf could not be pushed. “The Foreordained—what is his part in this? A title like that—”
“Our titles hardly relate to conventional human mythology or religion. This one merely means he was destined to appear at this time, when the curtain grows visible and tension mounts between the frames. The great Adepts of the past foresaw this crisis and foreordained this duty.”
“What duty?” Stile asked. “Clef is merely a musician. A fine one, granted, the best I know—but no warrior, no Adept. What can he do?”
“No Adept?” Pyreforge snorted. “As well claim the Platinum Flute be no instrument! He can play the dead to Heaven and crumble mountains by his melody—and these be only the fringes of his untrained power. Once we have trained him to full expertise—he is the Foreordained!”
So Earth mythology might not relate, but the implication of significance did. “So he is, after all, Adept? He seemed ordinary to me—but perhaps I did not hear him play in Phaze.”