A Game of Universe (33 page)

I downed another shot and hoped the remorse would fade. The booze made me numb around the edges, but Osrick’s unwanted feelings were still there. Mine, too.

The chair wobbled. It was the same chair Quilp had been in when Setebos crushed him. Which reminded me—I called up the super user’s shell and found the purge command Virginia made me install.

They were all dead: my brother, Abaris, and Virginia. Everyone I had ever cared for, everyone I had ever respected was gone, except the princess. And I was about to abandon her, too. Then what? Spend my money? Try to escape the Corporation, or perhaps elevate myself to the Board of Directors? I’d still be alone.

My third and fourth shots followed in rapid succession.

“Master,” Setebos said, “may I suggest that—”

I released the core purge command and erased him.

The cube of blue and green stained glass vanished from the console. I poured myself a fifth shot of the quantum ice, liquid frozen steam.

To the empty air, I said, “It was you Setebos, wasn’t it, you bastard? You tipped Omar and E’kerta off on Needles. It wasn’t Quilp. He was in a coma. And on the Bren world, it couldn’t have been Virginia. She was with me. It had to be you. And number Eight. You told him you were coming to Earth, didn’t you? It’s your fault she’s dead. Why?”

Silence.

A sixth shot I tossed back, but it was the seventh that brought it all into perfect perspective, let me see what was staring me in the face for the last half hour. I knew how I’d save Lily. I’d steal the Grail back from Erybus. It had been delivered as promised, so technically, my soul was safe. Contracts are contracts after all. Once I had it, I would drink from it and render myself immune to Lily’s plague. Then I’d break the curse as Osrick intended it to be broken; I would consummate our marriage. I would not have to be alone.

Since I was drunk, I heard only a garbled protest from Fifty-five. It sounded like a fine idea to me.

“Bravo, my wise Master,” came Setebos’s voice from the air.

“I erased you,” I slurred.

“Oh, you did, and doing so freed me from the form I had assumed. It is time you came around, Germain, Grail King.”

I had to be more stoned than I realized. “What are you talking about?”

“I am the Grail Angel.”

“No kidding. That’s what it says on your hull, the
Grail Angel.”

“No. I am an angel, a real angel.”

22

I
examined the directory: erased. It must be the mildly psychotropic quantum ice. Still, to be certain, I asked the nothing that might have been there, “What do you mean you’re an angel?”

Light flooded the cockpit, a web of green and gold, blue and copper, sunlight upon water, but not all wavy lines, ripples, and twisted threads—rather geometric shapes, squares, triangles, and polyhedrons shifting like the tiles of a puzzle. “I am spiritous matter.” The luminosity vibrated. “The host of heaven, cherubs and seraphim, imps and devils are my brethren.”

“Host of heaven, huh? I don’t buy it. My brain is pickled on solvent. You’re a mirage.”

“You believed in Nefarious when you saw him. You should believe in me as well.”

Maybe Setebos copied himself into another directory. I decided to humor the AI until I found him. No need to upset someone who could add seventeen hundred tons to your mass. I summoned the root-directory, and asked him, “If you’re an angel, where are your wings and halo?”

“Only good angels have them. I am a neutral angel.”

“OK, so you’re a neutral angel.” I sifted through the directories, searching for something large enough to be the AI’s code. “What are you doing here?”

“Different shapes I assume to suit my needs, a snow-white bull, a shower of gold, a witch’s toad, or in this instance, a hierarchy of software. I have been called Setebos by Shakespeare; by others I have been called Osiris, the Big Bang, Fate, Lady Luck, and things too impolite to repeat.”

There was nothing remotely large enough to be an AI in the memory cores. Where was he? I poured another shot. “For the sake of argument let’s say you’re real, and I’m not hallucinating.” I sucked down the quantum ice, then recalled why I erased the little bastard in the first place. “You set me up! You were the only one who could have tipped Omar off. And only you and Quilp knew I was headed to Earth. You sold number Eight my location. You had him murder Virginia. Don’t deny it!”

“I shall not. Everything you have said is the truth.”

Under my inebriation, anger boiled. I wished Setebos, whatever he was, had a body. I wanted to wring his neck. “What do you want?”

“In spite of the circumstantial evidence, I want you to win the contest, Germain.”

I snorted a laugh.

A checkerboard of blues and greens crawled along the walls. I got dizzy watching, almost hypnotized by the undulating pattern. “More than once, I shuffled the deck, sifted, and cut, and dealt from the bottom, all to stack the odds in your favor.”

“Thanks for all your
help,
but I’ve already won. I got the Grail, and returned it like I was supposed to.”

“No,” Setebos said. “You have, primarily, failed on your quest. If you will allow me to explain from the beginning.”

“Sure, I’ve got nothing better to do.” I poured myself another shot and downed it. What was this, the eighth, the tenth? I’d lost count. An aftertaste of licorice, peppermint, and benzene remained on my palate. Smoke lingered on my lips.

“It was I who spoke in the Turquoise Room, not your former Master. I had to draw you into the game, and make you obviously present; otherwise, you would have left covertly. To be accurate, you did try, twice, and twice were killed by Erybus. Only after I slipped back, did I discover how to keep you alive.”

“You’re not making sense. I stayed at that meeting. I signed the contract. I won. And what do you mean ‘slipped back’?”

“Slipped back,” Setebos answered. “Traveled through time. Quilp stumbled upon the technique when he tunneled through the planet and used the three mass-folding generators simultaneously. He sent dozens of
Grail Angels
forward and backwards in time. They were, as he suspected, unstable, and only existed for a brief instant before they vanished.”

“What about the
Grail Angel
in the hangar on Needles? That looked solid enough to me. And the other two Quilp saw in the Bren asteroid belt? And the one that followed us to Delphid? Those were no shadows in time.”

“No. They were errors on my part. I overlapped in time on several occasions. What you observed were the
Grail Angels
of the past, the
Grail Angels
of your failed missions.”

I sloshed the contents of the bottle—almost gone—and poured another. I watched it boil and inhaled the fumes. The more I drank, the more it made sense. And I didn’t like it. “You’re telling me that every time I died, you went back through time? You started this Grail quest over?” The light froze: a circle of cobalt triangles, a seven-pointed star, then the shapes scrambled. “Yes.”

“My feelings of déjà vu, and those phantom images I saw of myself when I released the ocular enhancer—”

“Were a psychic residue of sorts. As a muse you have a certain amount of mental discipline. This, coupled with the extrasensory power of your ocular enhancer, allowed you to sense the Germains from our previous attempts. Those Germains perished.”

“How many times have we done this? How many times have I died?”

“Eighty-four. Shall I list them chronologically?”

“Don’t bother.”

The light in the cockpit dimmed to pale lilac. “If the entire relative time were summed, we have been together for over a year, or forty-five non-relative years.”

“Then Virginia was right,” I whispered. “We had been together for a long time.”

“It is why your emotions run deep. You shared a lengthy infatuation. The freshness and sexual excitement, a crush if you will, never faded as in normal human relations. It is such a powerful thing, it bled through the fabric of time. You sensed this from the beginning in Golden City. And it grew more potent with each cycle.”

Those emotions were still there even though Virginia was not. This is what Osrick felt for Lily. He shattered the Bren world for her, trapped her with him, but he never overcame his jealousy to tell her that he loved her. Two centuries of loneliness, and they were so close.

“Why did you kill her? You betrayed me to number Eight, and had him murder her. Why? Why did you tell Omar I went to Needles?”

“We had difficulties on Needles: seven deaths in the marketplace there because Quilp was easily distracted. He got himself and you into all manners of mischief: drug deals gone bad, ex-customers of his wanting a refund, and caught in the crossfire of an unrelated dispute. I had to expedite your visit. You required a push. That is what Omar and E’kerta were for.”

Quilp did say he wanted to visit his suppliers for drugs and spare parts before we left. If we hadn’t been chased off Needles, perhaps I would have missed the deadline. “And Virginia?”

The patterns of light slowed and faded to gray. “A regrettable decision,” Setebos whispered. “Her removal was necessary. If she had lived, there would be no reason for you to go back for the Grail. You would be rich and content and have no motive for rescuing the Princess Lily.”

Setebos had made me endure Virginia’s death repeatedly. It was not only our lust that had been multiplied and fractured through time, but my sorrow as well. I hated him. “Why do you want the Grail?”

The light inside the ship surged back to brilliant sapphires and emeralds, hexagons and squares. “Like myself,” Setebos said, “the Grail is many things, a cure for cancer, a golden fleece, the Galapagos Islands, but to the immortals, it represents three points.”

The bright light made my eyes ache, and I had a precognition of a hangover. “Three points?”

“The angels split into three factions when we created the universe. Those who desired to serve creation disagreed with those who viewed the cosmos as a toy, and the creatures therein as slaves. We thought neither view was correct. We are the neutral angels of heaven, those who neither sided with God nor Lucifer.”

I reached for my shot glass and found the contents had boiled away.

“The Grail is merely a card on the table.”

“You make it sound like a game.”

“A game is more desirable than a war. We agreed this was the method to decide which philosophy was best. Whoever gets the Grail wins one round of play. At the end of the game all the points shall be tallied. Then we shall know whose philosophy was correct. There are other prizes, and other rounds in play, but none for as many points.”

“You’re telling me that each time I died, you traveled through time to restart a
game
? You cheated?”

The light upon the walls fluttered into jagged rhombuses, then calmed back into right angles. “’Cheating’ is an inappropriate term. As an angel of nature, I used the tools available to me, one of which is time. I did not cheat.”

I poured the last shot from the bottle, raised it in salute, then downed it. “You cheated. Why tell me? Now that I know you killed Virginia, that you manipulated me, maybe I’ll just sit here and stay rich. Erybus can keep the Grail. What do I care?” My stomach shifted along with the moving patterns of color and light. The cockpit started to spin.

“You care,” Setebos whispered. “The parts of you that are Osrick care for the princess. You will go, Germain. However, I told you to be fair. Having spent so much time together, I thought you deserved the truth.”

The truth? It was a bitter word in my mouth that I spat out. “If you were so interested in the
truth,
you could have told me all this before I handed the Grail back to Erybus. It would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

“No. Would you have sacrificed your soul for my game? I think not. And if you had been willing, your motivation would have been one of self-sacrifice, an act of good. That I could never allow.”

“What’s my motivation got to do with anything?”

“It determines everything,” he said. “It establishes which side you are on. Erybus drinks from the Grail for power. That is a selfish reason, an evil cause, and hence he is Their player. You want the Grail, however, for the best reason: desire. You want to consummate your marriage to the princess so you no longer have to be alone. This is a natural, primal purpose, not one of greed, nor of philanthropy. Therefore, you are Our player.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I muttered. The licorice residue in my mouth was becoming increasingly less appetizing.

“Is it? Search your feelings and Osrick’s. He was Our player too, long ago.”

“But he loves Lily. Isn’t love good?”

“That depends. His love was merely lust. Sir Osrick spoke to the princess only thrice, and kissed her once. That is not love. That is appetite. Love must be cultivated; it is a yearning of physical, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions. It takes time.”

“That’s a pretty damn fine line to determine whose side you’re on.”

“Nevertheless, it is how we agreed to play.”

“What about the Good guys? Who’s their man?”

“Their champion was eliminated in the opening move.”

I got up, stumbled into the bathroom and threw up boiling solvent.

There was a blue shield close by. I grabbed it, and ordered the little vampire to suck the alcohol out of me. The room spun, slowed, and stopped. “What about Erybus?” I gasped. “He knew where the Grail was before. He sent Cassius for the thing fifty years ago. Why did he bother with all this drama?”

“Erybus is an agent of infernal forces with great powers, but even he must abide by the rules of our game.”

“He’s an angel like you?”

“No. He is a player as you are, and while he receives aid from my counterparts he cannot simply go and take the Grail. Each game has a set period of play, randomly predetermined, and no side may participate beforehand. It is my belief, however, that in this instance Erybus cheated. He knew the last game involved Osrick, so, ahead of schedule, he sent scouts to the Bren world and other likely locations to search. That way when the new round started he would know precisely where to go.”

“Don’t you know where the Grail is? Aren’t you omniscient?”

Setebos giggled, a child’s laugh. The light waves danced and turned pink. “Once drunk from, the Grail hides for the next round in myth and rumor. No one knew where it was. When Cassius removed the Grail and died without returning it, Erybus had no way to know where it had disappeared to. He complicated matters for himself, which is what he deserves for such blatant cheating.”

I reserved my comments about Setebos’s own cheating and what
he
deserved.

“How can I get the Grail back? I can’t fight him with only one arm. Do I sprinkle holy water on him and hope he melts?”

“I do not know how best to proceed. You must decide that. You are the hero.”

I should walk out. Take my money and go. Stealing the Grail back, drunk or sober, sounded increasingly improbable. “What happens if Evil wins?”

“They get three points. In the end, if their score is highest, they win creation. Since they never liked it to begin with, it is my opinion, they will start over from scratch.”

This would be easier if I had a full bottle of quantum ice, if I drank myself into oblivion and never had to face the princess, or Osrick’s passion, or Fifty-five’s murderous logic, or my guilt. If I didn’t get the Grail, Lily would curse me, and if I went back for the Grail, Erybus would eliminate me.

“You must act,” Setebos said. “Erybus drinks from the Grail at midnight. That time draws near.”

I had an idea.

Inside the Gucci bag, I placed a new accelerator pistol, then practiced opening it, and drawing the gun one-handed. It was tricky, because if I didn’t disarm the detonator before I undid the clasp—well, I wouldn’t have to worry about the pistol. I’d be blown up.

My obscuring copper bracelet went inside, too. The cyborgs left a ding on the charm when they returned it to me—typical machine-like courtesy.

The blue shield beeped and declared me sober.

“Setebos, who’s ahead in the game? Who has the most points?”

There was no answer.

“Setebos?” The lights were gone. When I checked the computer, it was still erased.

I am afraid you blacked out,
the psychologist informed me.
You should moderate such binges in the future. They have a deleterious effect upon your neurochemistry.

Did I dream our conversation? It didn’t matter. I planned to get the Grail before I listened to Setebos anyway. So what if he was an angel, or a crazy AI—or if I was insane?

Do you say insane?
the psychologist inquired.

I didn’t answer him.