Players at the Game of People by John Brunner

"What?" he said again.

  "The flashes!"

  "Sounds as though you could do with coffee and a proper breakfast," he said, straightening and turning away. "If you mean an acid flash, you're not having one right now."

  She jerked her head full upright and stared to her left, across the field-sized expanse of the waterbed. The sun beamed down on sparkling white coralline sand beyond the window; the air was full of the hushing of gentle waves.

  "It can't be real!" she breathed. "It can't be!"

  "Have it your way," he sighed. "I'm putting sugar in your coffee whether you take it or not. No milk."

  "I don't usually -- " She bit the words off. "Thank you," she amended meekly, as though she had been taking stock of herself and realized that some quickly assimilable energy was advisable. But her eyes were fixed, like a hypnotized chicken's, on cloudless blue sky and foaming combers.

  The spell did not break until he brought her a mug of coffee and a platter of scrambled eggs dotted with the sharp green of fresh-cut chives. She took the former and looked at the latter with regret.

  "I never eat breakfast," she said defiantly.

  "Tomorrow you can do what you like. For the rest of your life you can do what you like, same as me. Today you do as you're told. It will be the last time."

  Uncertainly she set aside the empty glass and let him put a fork into her hand. But she made no attempt to start eating.

  "I don't understand. What do you mean, I can do what I like?"

  "What did you think you were going to do when you ran away from school? End up as a drunken floozie sucking off impotent Arabs?"

  "You're disgusting!"

  "Not half as disgusting as you were when you vomited all over yourself last night."

  She said flatly, "Now I know I am still getting flashes. I remember that. But either that isn't true or this isn't. I remember the horrible dark street. I remember the way my feet squelched in muck when I got out of the taxi. I remember the stink. It can't have been when I was coming here. Unless you took me somewhere while I was asleep."

  "You're here, where I brought you. Eat those eggs before they get cold."

  Mechanically she began to ply her fork. The first mouthful reminded her of the existence of appetite, and she cleared the plate. Her face, though, remained set in an unhappy frown, and between bites she cast cautious glances at the sunny view from the window, as though challenging the scene to go away.

  She said finally, "It must cost millions. So why here?"

  "Because I want it, and it doesn't." He took away the empty plate. "Get up, go pee and shit and take a shower, and get dressed."

  "What do I put on?" she snapped back. "You ruined the only clothes I had with me!"

  "Look in that wardrobe," he said, gesturing. "Plenty there to fit you. But hurry up."

  Very reluctantly, gathering the bed sheet for covering, she complied. But instead of heading for the toilet, she could not resist the temptation to walk to the window and stare out, raising one hand to shield her eyes against the brilliant sunshine.

  "You don't like it?"

  "It's beautiful! I just don't understand . . ." Her voice trailed away.

  "You wouldn't like to live somewhere like this?"

  "What a hope!" She gave a harsh laugh and turned her back to the window.

  "Is that what you thought you were heading for when you ran away? I'm still waiting for an answer from the last time I asked."

  "Oh, God . . . I didn't know what I wanted. I still don't know what I want. What the hell difference does it make? Nobody ever gets what he wants. She wants. Whatever the hell." Dispirited, she cast the sheet aside and stepped into the glass compartment.

  "Stop staring at me, you bloody voyeur," she added as she turned to sit down on the toilet "Much more of this and I'll be sorry I didn't stick with the Arabs."

  "Much more of this and you'll have to. I'm still waiting for my answer!"

  She disregarded him. There was a mirror so sited that by twisting around she could catch sight of her reflection. Raising her fingers to run them comb-fashion through her tousled hair, she said more to herself than to him, "Oh, God, I do look a mess. How the hell am I going to explain when I get home?"

  "If it's true your mother was a call girl, you won't have any trouble explaining."

  She jerked her head around to glare at him, flushing.

  "Where she lives isn't my home! I mean the place I'm living now. Where all my things are."

  "There are always more things."

  "It may be all right for you, but some of us have to bloody earn them!"

  "Some of us don't. You could be one of them. No need for you to go crawling back to some foul-mouthed pimp and beg forgiveness for having run out on the rich client he stuck you with last night."

  Godwin carefully refrained from hinting or even implying what was fundamentally obvious: that the taint of masochism already infected the core of her being. It was a standard precondition. Instead, he added -- before she had the chance for a retort -- "That can't have been what you were looking for! There must be something you're good at! Some talent you've always wanted to turn into a career! Something! "

  With elaborate casualness, making believe she was not in this exposed and vulnerable setting, she tore and slowly folded sheets of paper from the roll and wiped herself. Not looking anywhere near him, she said finally, "I want to be a designer."

  "What sort of designer?"

  "Textiles. Wallpapers. That sort of thing. I think I've got it in me. And I've always thought how marvelous it would be to walk into somewhere -- a four-star restaurant, some rich person's home, a set in a film studio -- and see my work all over the walls!"

  Her voice was taking on the color of genuine enthusiasm.

  "And not just on the walls. On the floor too, perhaps. The carpets or the tiles. The curtains, the furniture, the clothes!"

  Godwin gave a thoughtful nod. Yes, this one was going to take. It was an absolutely flawless combination. One push in the right direction -- the investment, as he had estimated, of about forty-eight hours' worth of his time -- and the job would be complete. Of course, there was the usual matter of convincing her about her new reality, but that was Hermann's problem, not his, and after that it would be plain sailing.

  Once again he found himself hankering after something at least a trifle more demanding. But that was pointless.

  She had flushed the toilet and was stepping into the shower. Checking, she glanced back.

  "You must think I'm an idiot. Don't you?"

  "No, if you've got it in you, it can start tomorrow. Or even today."

  She curled her lip at him.

  "No, I'm serious."

  He was sitting in a chair with splayed metal legs; if he tilted it far enough back, he could open the nearer of the wardrobes. At full stretch he slid its door aside.

  "When you've finished showering, you can take your pick of this lot. Do you like the idea?"

  She was staring in disbelief. "But -- but aren't those terribly expensive?"

  "What makes you think so?"

  "Well, they look like . . ." Eyes wide, lips wet because she had unconsciously licked them, she hesitated. "They look like the latest fashion."

  He jerked a brown tweed coat off its hanger and held it where she could read the label. It said Peasmarsh. Her eyes rounded.

  "I'll take you to see Hugo & Diana later on and get you a complete new outfit."

  "You know them?"

  "I know a lot of people."

  "But I can't possibly afford -- !"

  "There are always more things." This time he said it with the platitudinous flatness of a self-evident truth.

  "I still can't afford -- "

  "Who's asking you to? Get in that shower and make the most of it."

  Still she lingered, her eyes fixed on the ranked clothes. He said after a while, "You have exactly three choices. You put on your rags and tatters, stained with vomit, and return to the whorehouse you came from. Or y
ou do the same and go whining and begging back to your mother, or the school she sent you to, which amounts to the same thing, because you said last night your mother will be in America for at least another week. Or you can do as you like for the rest of your life, which will be long and healthy. It's up to you. But I shall in any case leave here in approximately five minutes, and whether I go where I'm next going on my own is for you to decide. At all events I shall certainly not let you stay here by yourself, even if it means putting you out in the street with nothing on. Is that clear?"

  He spoke with deliberate harshness. She drank in every word, and the moment he had finished, walked toward him and laid her right hand on his arm, smiling.

  "Do you know something?"

  "What the hell is it this time?"

  "I've never told anybody this before. Never in my whole life. Not my best friends."

  "Then it probably isn't worth saying. Get on and have a shower like I told you!"

  She stood her ground, clutching his hand tightly now.

  "No, you've got to listen! Sometimes I've dreamed -- sometimes I've tried with all my heart and soul to believe -- that my father who ran away when I was still a baby wasn't my father. That one day it would turn out the real one could never acknowledge me because he was married and a very important figure in politics or something, maybe even someone royal, only now his wife was dead and he could come and tell me the truth and he'd take charge of me and straighten out my life" -- the words were coming in a torrent now -- "and be masterful and of course because we'd never known one another properly I'd find it impossible to think of him as really being my father, he'd be just a man behaving the way a man ought to behave, and his wife would have been frigid or ill or something for years and years, so when we finally had the chance to be alone together chemistry would sort of take over and -- "

  She was flushing clear down to breast level and her free hand was hovering suggestively over her bush and her voice was becoming low and breathy. He shook free of her.

  "Four minutes," he said. "And I would keep my promise to put you out in the street naked. If you'd rather go back in the gutter and stay there."

  She took half a step back, clenching her fists. "You weren't like this last night!" she accused.

  "You were so full of Dutch courage I don't know what you were like yesterday. Apart from stupid. And that seems to hold good for this morning as well, so -- "

  "You bastard!"

  "Have it your way." He bent over and gathered up the foul bundle of her torn clothes and threw it at her. She made no attempt to catch it. "Put them on and get out. Or don't bother, and still get out. You've had your chance."

  "You know bloody well I couldn't possibly do that!"

  "Of course I do! So why are you still pretending that you can? "

  There was a silence during which her face crumpled and she tried to find somewhere to look that wouldn't make her start crying again: the bed, the open wardrobe, the luxury suite of shower and bidet and toilet all in matching avocado porcelain with gold-plated fitments, the incredible window offering its view of subtropical beaches lined with palm trees and fringed with white-foaming breakers.

  Eventually, when he judged she had endured enough, he let his voice soften.

  "Poor kid," he said. "Poor silly kid. Nobody ever made you choose for yourself before, did they?"

  Dumbly she shook her head, still trying to find a place to rest her gaze.

  "It was all done for you. You didn't choose to be raised in a one-parent family. You didn't choose to be sent to a boarding school. You didn't really choose to run away from it. You were driven to that, weren't you?"

  She nodded, screwing her eyes shut to prevent tears leaking from them. She failed; they made snail tracks down her cheeks.

  "And when you did take the only big decision of your life you discovered you had no faintest notion how to cope with the real world. Isn't that the long and the short of it? You thought you were going to see some 'real life' for once. You want that most of all. But you never had the chance to learn what's real, did you? You were brought up to mistake the fake for the genuine, the smart for the substantial, the fashionable for the durable, the impressive for the thing worth having."

  She had kept her eyes shut; now she was rocking back and forth on her heels, making every motion into a nod that emphasized her agreement with her entire body. Her fists were clenched before her at the level of her waist, and her knuckles stood out pale against the rest of her hands.

  "Which is why when you meet the real you think it's an acid flash!"

  "But it can't be real!" she said doggedly, still with her eyes closed. "I mean, a place like this in a street like this . . . !"

  " Have it your way. I won't stop you. Get back to what you believe to be the real world. Pick up those clothes and put them on!"

  Spinning on his heel, he slammed shut the wardrobe door.

  "No! No!" Terror rang in her voice; she raised her hands before her as to ward off a blow, and her eyes widened in the beginning of belief. Godwin noted these reactions with less than complete approval. Everything was going so fast, so predictably. There was no real challenge in his kind of work any more. If only he had been set to tackle someone relatively invulnerable

  But here he was, and here she was, and that was that. He was obliged to make the best of things.

  Rasping: "What the hell is unreal about my home? I suppose that bed's a fake, right? You spent all night on a patch of bare boards! And it's actually freezing cold in here and you've got goose pimples all over you! And I had the Peasmarsh labels made up and paid for them to be sewn into phony clothes your size specially so when you turned up I could impress you! And you didn't drink freshly squeezed orange juice and freshly brewed Blue Mountain coffee and you didn't fill your belly with free-range eggs scrambled with Cornish butter and chopped chives and you didn't wipe your stupid arse with tissue off that roll right there!"

  By now he was panting with the force of his diatribe and she was flinching and casting about as though in search of somewhere to hide.

  "Ah, shit!" he exploded by way of a climax. "I thought I was doing you a favor. Most people think it's kind of a favor to be offered their heart's desire. So you're different. So you'd rather wallow in the dirt until you rot."

  "No!" She clutched at him, the tears still streaming down; she was snuffling now, as her nose filled with fluid. "No, it's just that nobody ever gave me this kind of chance ever in my whole life before! I mean, you can't blame me for finding it unreal! Can you? Can you?"

  "Ah, hell . . I suppose not." With careful timing he put one arm around her and gave a squeeze; it coincided precisely with the next time she exhaled and obliged her to take an unusually deep breath.

  "Okay, make it ten minutes instead of five. But I warn you: you've already wasted half of them, and Hermann doesn't like to be kept waiting."

  Infinitely relieved, on the point of stepping under the shower at last, she hesitated.

  "Who's Hermann?"

  "Someone who can straighten out that mixed-up head of yours. Stop asking questions! If you can't learn to take things for granted, you won't make out in the world where I live. And you'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  "You think I could?"

  "That's up to you. From me you get today's help, and that is all!"

  Eyes bright now, lips pressed tight together for fear of letting out something else better unsaid, she turned the shower control at random and succeeded in half scalding herself. Godwin sighed. One of these days, one of these years, maybe he'd be called to tackle some really tough assignment, or at least an assignment which would feel as tough as those he had undertaken in the past.

  Maybe, though, that was inherently impossible now. Maybe he understood his techniques too well, deployed them with excessive facility

  No. That couldn't be the case. Surely not. So the next one, with a bit of luck, might occupy him for a reasonable length of time, give him a sense of working at full stretch, of
achievement, of fulfilment. But it wasn't, of course, for him to say.

  He could only hope, and hope that his hoping might be noticed.

  "You'll find knickers to fit you in that drawer," he said, pointing, when Gorse emerged from the shower frantically toweling down. "Two minutes to go. You'd better hurry."

  The weather was cool today, but dry. There was, of course, a cruising taxi at the end of the street; the driver spotted Godwin's signal and waited for him. They picked their way among a horde of bored Sunday-morning children, mostly inspecting rubbish to find out whether it was salable. One of the front wheels from the Mark X Jaguar had been stolen during the night.