Piers Anthony: Phaze Doubt

“And I, lacking your expertise in magic, can not do it without your cooperation.”

“Aye, no more than I can gain thy figures from Mischief.”

“Then what is the point? It changes nothing. I will not save your frames, and you will not save the BEMs. Our positions are consistent.”

“The point be that we have chips to bargain. An the Hectare had a choice, would they not choose to exit Proton?”

“Yes, of course! But you aren’t going to give them that choice.”

“Here be my challenge: play me a game. An thou dost win, I will provide magic to save the Hectare and those they choose to take with them, and thou and Echo. That be a half victory, but better than naught. An I win, thou dost release those figures.”

“But the stakes aren’t even!” Lysander protested, guiltily intrigued. “You aren’t offering victory against victory, but half against whole.”

“True. But our victory be not complete loss for the Hectare or thee. We will treat them fairly, and put thee in charge o’ integrating them into the society. We can use their skills. And we will make a spell to make thou fertile—“

“I’m with Echo. She can’t conceive.”

“An we do the magic, she can. Remember Nepe; she be child o’ machine.”

Lysander considered. It was true: the full victory for the natives would be only half a loss for the Hectare, while the full loss of the natives would be half a Hectare win. The stakes were fair. But did he have the authority to make such a deal?

“Be the Hectare not gamesmen?” Oresmite inquired. “Would they not let the game decide, an the stakes be even?”

“Yes, they would. But I can’t—“

“An the leader be incapacitated, who has authority?”

“The next in command. But—“

“An the leader be away or distracted, and the next in command learns aught that must needs be decided instantly, what then?”

“The next in command must act.”

“Does the authority for this matter then not devolve on thee, the only Hectare to know its nature in time to act?”

“Well, there is Weva—“

“Wouldst have her make the decision?”

“No! She’s on your side!”

“Then methinks it must be thee, unless my logic be in error.”

Lysander realized that the cunning old elf had him. He had been maneuvered into a position where the authority was his; a Hectare court would agree. He might lack the authority simply to decide the fate of the frames, but as a player in a game of decision—a case could be made.

“Agreed. But it must be a fair game.”

“Aye. We shall decide together. Or wouldst prefer to have Mischief decide?”

“No!” Then Lysander had to laugh. “No, we shall come to our own agreement. Only when both are satisfied will it be set.”

“Aye.” Oresmite smiled. “We have time.”

* * *

There followed several days of negotiations. Oresmite, being old and small, would not commit to any brute physical contests. Lysander, wary of the elf’s lifetime experience, rejected those that were culturally oriented. Intellectual games like chess or go were tempting, but Lysander wasn’t sure how much the elf might have played these to wile away the time, and Oresmite was nervous about Lysander’s analytic Hectare brain.

“Methinks we require a new game, ne’er before played,” the Chief remarked at last.

“Yes. So that neither experience nor special aptitude is likely to count.”

They brought the others in on it. The challenge: create a new, fair, playable but unplayed game whose outcome could not be certain.

The boredom evaporated as elves and human beings got to work. Proposals were made, analyzed, and rejected.

The key, as it turned out, came from an elf child. He had been listening to the stories of the history of magic before Phaze, when it had existed back on Earth. “Why not Merlin and the Witch?” he asked.

This was an episode recorded by T. H. White in a book titled Sword in the Stone but later excluded from a larger compendium, perhaps because it revealed too much about magic. Merlin had fought the witch by form changing, each trying to assume the form of a creature that could demolish the other. Merlin, sorely pressed, had won by becoming a germ that infected and killed the witch’s monster.

“But I can’t change forms!” Lysander protested.

“Nor can I, neither any elf,” Oresmite replied. “But we can in illusion.”

The illusion chamber was normally used to generate lovely vistas similar to those of the outside world, so as to lessen the claustrophobic restrictions of the caves. But it could be turned to any fancy. A person had only to take his place at one of the focal points and imagine something, and it was animated in the chamber. There were regular puppet shows, the puppets illusory but realistic, because complete living detail wasn’t expected in such creatures. Few could imagine sufficient detail to make an image seem truly realistic.

But if animals could be represented crudely, puppet-fashion, as pieces in a game, then it might be feasible. He could imagine a tiger, chasing the elf’s antelope. Only the elf would then imagine a dragon, and turn on the tiger. Then—

“But we’d just both wind up with the biggest, most ferocious monsters, and it would be a stalemate,” Lysander said. “Or as germs, trying to infect the other. I don’t think it would work as well as it did centuries ago on Earth.”

“Aye,” the Chief agreed. “It were a nice notion, but impractical.”

“Not necessarily,” Beman said. “Appropriately restrictive rules could make a fair game of it.”

“Agreed,” Nepe said. “Scientific rules applied to the magic. To prevent stalemates.”

“Then work it out,” Lysander said, intrigued by the notion of being able to change forms, if only in imagination. It was as close to magic as he could get, on his own. “If we like it, we’ll play it.”

They retired with a committee of elves to work it out. Next day they returned with the proposal for “Animals.” Oresmite and Lysander reviewed it and liked it. They had their game.

The Chief took the key position at one end of the chamber, and Lysander the one at the other end. At the sides sat elves and human beings holding pictures of assorted animals ranging from ladybugs to fire-breathing dragons. The animals were paired, with one of each kind at each side of the chamber. One side represented Lysander’s animals, the other the Chief’s, and they were even.

Each player had an iridium coin. They flipped them together. Lysander’s bounced, flipped, and settled down with the picture of an equine tail showing. The Chief’s coin spun and rolled, finally falling with a donkey’s head in view. The two did not match, which meant the result was odd rather than even, and that meant by prior agreement that Oresmite chose the first animal.

The Chief glanced at his pictures. One glowed, and its figure jumped off the paper to take its place in the chamber beside the pictures. It was a donkey, appropriately.

Lysander looked at his pictures. He focused on the unicorn, and it left its paper and hit the chamber floor running. It charged the donkey, its horn lowering to point forward.

The onus was on him, as predator, to dispatch the prey within one minute, or forfeit the game.

The donkey took off, running fleetly. The illusion expanded to fill in the surrounding terrain: a grassy plain, bordered by mountain ranges to north and south. It was a miniature of the frame of Phaze, with the seas at east and west and the dread Lattice at the center: the network of deep crevices in which demons lived. The animals were bounded by these natural features, and could not go beyond them. But there was plenty of room to maneuver.

The unicorn was faster than the donkey, and its horn was capable of making a lethal thrust. In thirty seconds Lysander had almost closed the gap. The donkey dodged, but so did the unicorn; the imagination that made the creatures go was limited by their natural abilities. The Chief had to act.