Diefenbaker had been run to earth in the wargamers’ conference room by Richard Faber, Bernard Buchanan, and two people he didn’t recognize, but who would turn out to be Far Brandonian correspondents, he was sure.
“I’m really glad I found you,” said Bernard Buchanan, still clutching his sheaf of computer printouts. “My parody is really coming along. In fact, I was hoping you might show it to Appin Dungannon …”
“Novibazaar!” said Richard Faber in his most non-negotiable voice.
“I have a question about the term ‘Brudhorc,’” said one of the strangers.
Diefenbaker tried to look patient. “I don’t have any of my Brandonian files with me at the moment …” he murmured.
“Are you free for breakfast?” asked Bernard Buchanan.
Dief was prevented from expressing the conviction that starvation would be preferable to dining with Bernard by the agitated appearance of Bill Fox in the doorway. “Dief, man, you gotta come now! Somebody’s yelling their head off in one of the upstairs halls, and it’s going to disturb half the hotel.”
The hostage was so relieved to be rescued from Far Brandonian politics that he nearly forgot to ask what the difficulty was, but at the last moment it occurred to him that the information might prove useful, and he inquired.
The messenger shrugged. “Beats me. Somebody on fourth is yelling about somebody having been murdered. They sent me to get you.”
A
s Dief hurried out of the elevator on the fourth floor, he saw that Miles Perry and most of the crowd from filksinging had already congregated in the hall. The central attraction was a shouting match between the cloaked
D&D
player and another member of the party. Off to one side a forlorn young woman in a white tunic and slacks was clutching a packet of tissues, and sobbing loudly.
“You killed him!” shouted the
D&D
player. “I can’t believe that. And they let you!”
Walter Diefenbaker, wise in the ways of cons, did not spare a glance in search of a lifeless body. Edging his way through the spectators, he planted himself between the two combatants, and waited for silence. When the recriminations had trailed away into a sullen silence, he said, “Do you realize
that you could get all of us tossed out of this hotel?”
Behind them, the sobbing continued unabated. Dief glanced over his shoulder. “Will somebody go and buy her a Coke?”
Marion slipped out of the crowd and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Come on,” she said. “You’ll feel better if you talk about it.”
The girl allowed herself to be led toward the elevator. “I didn’t know what they were going to do,” she sniffled. “But Mark is never going to believe that.”
“What did they do?” asked Marion.
“Well, Mark and I were going to get married tonight.”
“Your player characters?”
“Yes, of course. We’d been planning it for ages, and of course everybody who was in the game with us knew about it, and so did Jerry. He’s the Dungeon Master. So tonight when we started the ceremony, Daciano the Red Dwarf—that’s Phil Castellow’s player character—killed Wolfgang Bartok, who is Mark.”
Marion nodded sympathetically. “And you didn’t know.”
“No! But everybody else did. Phil must have been on the phone for hours setting all this up, and the DM had to have helped him. Before the ceremony, Daciano crept into Wolfgang’s room and killed him, and then, using the Shapechanging Talisman from an NPC cleric named Laurence Talbot, he assumed Wolfgang’s appearance.”
“Did you know about it before the ceremony?”
The “widow” frowned. “I did, of course, because as a player I hear Larry describing everything to
us, but the point is that my character, Arianna of the Golden Wood, couldn’t know that a switch had been made, so she had to go through with it in good faith. You have to play your character according to how they’d really act…”
Marion nodded as she thought, “And this, above all, to thine own self be true …” She didn’t think a handy quote from Shakespeare would be very comforting, though, so she didn’t mention it.
Diefenbaker was still talking soothingly to the recently deceased bridegroom, and the crowd, giving up hope of a fistfight, began to drift away.
“It was fair in the game,” erstwhile dwarf Phil Castellow insisted. “He should accept it as the will of the gods.”
“You are slime, Castellow!” hissed the late Wolfgang Bartok. He had come dressed for his “wedding” in a gold tunic and matching tights, and a short blue-velvet cloak, all of which clashed with his red tear-streaked face.
Jay Omega, deciding that Marion would come back to the filksinging to look for him, wandered back to Monk Malone’s room, where a band of faithful Celtophiles, mostly Scadians in medieval dress, still clustered around Donnie McRory. He had worked his way through “Annie Laurie” and “The Lewis Bridal Song,” and was just beginning “The Skye Boat Song,” when Anne Marie, the elfish Dragonrider, piped up.
“Do you have any songs about fantasy? We’re kind of into that.”
The others nodded. “You know. Dragons, fairies, ghosts.”
“Oh, aye?” said Donnie McRory. “Just average
Yanks, I thought you were.” Still, after years of performing, he saw an audience’s preferences as law, so he gave it a moment’s thought. As he looked up for inspiration, Jay Omega slipped in the door.
“What was that din down the hall?” McRory wanted to know.
Jay Omega reddened, hoping that he wasn’t about to be mistaken for a Martian. “Two of the fantasy gamers were arguing because one killed the other in the game.”
“Ah. Character assassination.” McRory grinned at his own joke. “Now getting back to this song you wanted. We have one about a soldier in the army of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s, and he’s on the point of death. Dying in England, far from his home in Scotland. So he tells his mate to go off without him, but that he’ll be the one home first, because he’ll be taking the way of the dead, the fairy route, which can be traveled in the twinkling of an eye.” He paused for effect, pleased at the rapt attention of his audience. “We call that fairy way the low road.”
“The low road,” murmured the circle of listeners, shivering under the spell.
“Right. And here is the song about it.” He strummed the guitar. “‘
You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road… ’
Well, before we go into that one, would somebody go and get me a beer?”
Elsewhere in the hotel, Richard Faber’s hands felt like the bottom of a beer bottle—cold, wet, and glassy—but his throat was dry. He was attempting the frightening and unfamiliar: a conversation with a human female approximately his own age. Brenda Lindenfeld was not, however, Richard Faber’s own weight: she could have made two of him, and
would still have had enough flesh left over to construct a standard-sized tapir. At the moment, this entire mountain of femininity was gazing at Faber with respectful attention, suggesting that it had been her life’s ambition to hear a detailed account of the Battle of Leningrad.
Still dressed in her velvet gown from the costume competition, Brenda was an impressive, if not attractive, figure. She spent most of her time in the wargames room, which was too monotonous for other women to bother with, and the lack of competition prevented unfavorable comparisons. Besides taking care to be the only woman in the room, she smiled a lot. She had decided that Richard Faber had potential; he was, in real estate terms, a real fixer-upper, a bargain for anyone willing to put a little effort into the project. His hair looked like the floor of a service station, and his clothes would have been rejected by a reputable charity, but these flaws were easily corrected, she thought, with praise and successful management. The fact that Richard Faber was an obnoxious bore was more worrisome, but even that could be an advantage. There was considerable security in the knowledge that no one else could possibly want him.
Brenda Lindenfeld felt that security should be valued, if not above rubies, then at least above pleasant companionship. She endured more trauma on a daily basis than the Hershey Chocolate Company could ever hope to assuage. Children stared at Brenda when she passed on the street; people made remarks about her in public, seeming not to care if she heard them. They seemed to think they were giving her constructive criticism, or perhaps alerting her to a hitherto overlooked
fact—as if it had somehow escaped her notice that she weighed two hundred and sixty-seven pounds.
Brenda Lindenfeld knew, all right. Her mother managed to mention it at least once at every meal, and her grandmother sent diet articles from
Family Circle
in her letters. Jobs other than those paying minimum wage, out of public view, were not open to her. People in high school hadn’t wanted to be seen in her company—nobody’s ego is secure enough in high school to allow a friendship with the class leper; guilt by association is the law of the teenager. So she cordially hated everyone in her class, and she ate to make up to herself for all the injuries she endured; and instead of having a social life, she read.
Brenda had discovered that reading is as close as you can come to teleporting. By identifying with the plucky elfin princess in a fantasy novel, Brenda achieved her own version of astral projection: she left the tank of flesh behind her, and lived for the duration of the book in free form, in a world where problems could be solved by magic and by sword-play, rather than by painful and boring exercise courses and diets of boiled rice.
When she turned twenty-three, still living at home and taking the occasional course at the community college to postpone Life Itself, as she thought of it, Brenda made another momentous discovery: a social life was possible. There were others like her. A hotel in Richmond had advertised a science fiction convention, featuring as special guest her favorite fantasy author, so Brenda had invented a speeding ticket to get the registration fee from her parents, and off she went.
The weekend had been a revelation. No one laughed. People in the fantasy seminars seemed to
judge her by what she said, rather than by her looks. Brenda was inspired. She had stayed up late in the conference room, listening to a discussion of group marriage as described in Heinlein’s book,
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
. When she read it later, she realized that the boy who defended it had completely misunderstood the concept, and she wondered how the author would have felt about his book being prized as a rationale for promiscuity. But that night Brenda agreed enthusiastically, even reverently with the speaker’s premise; she was thinking maybe he would like to get laid. She didn’t expect to have too many other chances.
That first encounter had been rather clammy and uncomfortable, and no relationship had come of it, since they had forgotten to exchange their real names, but Brenda knew that she was on the right track as far as life was concerned. Now work and the community college were simply time-killers between cons, a sop to her parents’ expectations. She kept changing majors so that no one could be sure when she was supposed to graduate. This term it was Day-Care Management. It ensured parental good will and free room and board, leaving Brenda considerable spare time to establish her real life, as the goddess Arianrhod in the world of Fandom.
Brenda’s latest project, Richard Faber, would pose no particular acquisition problem; and she was well aware of his other liabilities. As he continued to drone on about some stupid battle or other, she had sized him up sexually, and pronounced him not so much gay or straight as “ambidextrous”—in the literal sense of the word. It was the only option that had thus far afforded itself in Faber’s non-existent
social experience. Unless she miscalculated—and practice with other members of his species made that unlikely—Faber was an over-eager but terrified virgin, who should be good for about two minutes of frenzied but uninspired coupling, and for an infinite amount of gratitude and devotion thereafter. Brenda didn’t particularly enjoy sex, since all her experience thus far had followed this pattern, but like any pusher, she realized the value of the drug to the addict, and she profited from the affection that followed the high. It was quite amazing to her that such an inconsequential, messy little act could result in so much dependence and emotion. Quite magical, really. The goddess Arianrhod gloried in her mystic powers.
Thank god he knew so much about tactical warfare and diplomacy, Richard Faber was thinking. His explanation of the Battle of Leningrad had really fascinated this intelligent creature. At last, someone who respected him for his knowledge, someone who shared his interests. He grew more confident as he went along. She hadn’t questioned a single one of his theories! He had patted her hand once when she’d said, “How interesting,” and she hadn’t pulled it away. In the back of his mind Faber knew that he should be trying to track down Walter Diefenbaker to settle matters about Novibazaar, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Really, when you got up very close and looked into her large brown eyes, she wasn’t bad at all.
Finally, with more courage than it took to aim your Zero at an aircraft carrier, Richard Faber managed to say, “We could continue this discussion in my room if you like.” His palms felt like the sides of an aquarium.
For form’s sake, Brenda Lindenfeld hesitated. The less experience she permitted to show, the better the spell worked. “Well,” she said. “I suppose we could. I wouldn’t want us to disturb anyone out here, but I just have to hear the rest of this. It’s so interesting!” She hoped he wouldn’t expect her to know which war he was talking about.