Capricorn Games

by Robert Silverberg

Nikki stepped into the conical field of the ultra-sonic cleanser, wriggling so that the unheard droning out of the machine’s stubby snout could more effectively shear her skin of dead epidermal tissue, globules of dried sweat, dabs of yesterday’s scents, and other debris; after three minutes she emerged clean, bouncy, ready for the party. She programmed her party outfit: green buskins, lemon-yellow tunic of gauzy film, pale orange cape soft as a clam’s mantle, and nothing underneath but Nikki—smooth, glistening, satiny Nikki. Her body was tuned and fit. The party was in her honor, though she was the only one who knew that. Today was her birthday, the seventh of January, 1999: twenty-four years old, no sign yet of bodily decay. Old Steiner had gathered an extraordinary assortment of guests: he promised to display a reader of minds, a billionaire, an authentic Byzantine duke, an Arab rabbi, a man who had married his own daughter, and other marvels. All of these, of course, subordinate to the true guest of honor, the evening’s prize, the real birthday boy, the lion of the season—the celebrated Nicholson, who had lived a thousand years and who said he could help others to do the same. Nikki… Nicholson. Happy assonance, portending close harmony. You will show me, dear Nicholson, how I can live forever and never grow old. A cozy soothing idea.

The sky beyond the sleek curve of her window was black, snow-dappled; she imagined she could hear the rusty howl of the wind and feel the sway of the frost-gripped building, ninety stories high. This was the worst winter she had ever known. Snow fell almost every day, a planetary snow, a global shiver, not even sparing the tropics. Ice hard as iron bands bound the streets of New York. Walls were slippery, the air had a cutting edge. Tonight Jupiter gleamed fiercely in the blackness like a diamond in a raven’s forehead. Thank God she didn’t have to go outside. She could wait out the winter within this tower. The mail came by pneumatic tube. The penthouse restaurant fed her. She had friends on a dozen floors. The building was a world, warm, snug. Let it snow. Let the sour gales come. Nikki checked herself in the all-around mirror: very nice, very very nice. Sweet filmy yellow folds. Hint of thigh, hint of breasts. More than a hint when there’s a light-source behind her. She glowed. Fluffed her short glossy black hair. Dab of scent. Everyone loved her. Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved. It was nine o’clock.

“Upstairs,” she said to the elevator. “Steiner’s place.”

“Eighty-eighth floor,” the elevator said.

“I know that. You’re so sweet.”

Music in the hallway: Mozart, crystalline and sinuous. The door to Steiner’s apartment was a half-barrel of chromed steel, like the entrance to a bank vault. Nikki smiled into the scanner. The barrel revolved. Steiner held his hands like cups, centimeters from her chest, by way of greeting. “Beautiful,” he murmured.

“So glad you asked me to come.”

“Practically everybody’s here already. It’s a wonderful party, love.”

She kissed his shaggy cheek. In October they had met in the elevator. He was past sixty and looked less than forty. When she touched his body she perceived it as an object encased in milky ice, like a mammoth fresh out of the Siberian permafrost. They had been lovers for two weeks. Autumn had given way to winter and Nikki had passed out of his life, but he had kept his word about the parties: here she was, invited.

“Alexius Ducas,” said a short, wide man with a dense black beard, parted in the middle. He bowed. A good flourish. Steiner evaporated and she was in the keeping of the Byzantine duke. He maneuvered her at once across the thick white carpet to a place where clusters of spotlights, sprouting like angry fungi from the wall, revealed the contours of her body. Others turned to look. Duke Alexius favored her with a heavy stare. But she felt no excitement. Byzantium had been over for a long time. He brought her a goblet of chilled green wine and said, “Are you ever in the Aegean Sea? My family has its ancestral castle on an island eighteen kilometers east of—”

“Excuse me, but which is the man named Nicholson?”

“Nicholson is merely the name he currently uses. He claims to have had a shop in Constantinople during the reign of my ancestor the Basileus Manuel Comnenus.” A patronizing click, tongue on teeth. “Only a shopkeeper.” The Byzantine eyes sparkled ferociously. “How beautiful you are!”

“Which one is he?”

“There. By the couch.”

Nikki saw only a wall of backs. She tilted to the left and peered. No use. She would get to him later. Alexius Ducas continued to offer her his body with his eyes. She whispered languidly, “Tell me all about Byzantium.”

He got as far as Constantine the Great before he bored her. She finished her wine, and, coyly extending the glass, persuaded a smooth young man passing by to refill it for her. The Byzantine looked sad. “The empire then was divided,” he said, “among—”

“This is my birthday,” she announced.

“Yours also? My congratulations. Are you as old as-”

“Not nearly. Not by half. I won’t even be five hundred for some time,” she said, and turned to take her glass. The smooth young man did not wait to be captured. The party engulfed him like an avalanche. Sixty, eighty guests, all in motion. The draperies were pulled back, revealing the full fury of the snowstorm. No one was watching it. Steiner’s apartment was like a movie set: great porcelain garden stools, Ming or even Sung; walls painted with flat sheets of bronze and scarlet; pre-Columbian artifacts in spotlit niches; sculptures like aluminum spiderwebs; Durer etchings—the loot of the ages. Squat shaven-headed servants, Mayans or Khmers or perhaps Olmecs, circulated impassively offering trays of delicacies: caviar, sea urchins, bits of roasted meat, tiny sausages, burritos in startling chili sauce. Hands darted unceasingly from trays to lips. This was a gathering of life-eaters, world-swallowers. Duke Alexius was stroking her arm. “I will leave at midnight,” he said gently. “It would be a delight if you left with me.”

“I have other plans,” she told him.

“Even so.” He bowed courteously, outwardly undisappointed.

“Possibly another time. My card?” It appeared as if by magic in his hand: a sliver of tawny cardboard, elaborately engraved. She put it in her purse and the room swallowed him. Instantly a big, wild-eyed man took his place before her. “You’ve never heard of me,” he began.

“Is that a boast or an apology?”

“I’m quite ordinary. I work for Steiner. He thought it would be amusing to invite me to one of his parties.”

“What do you do?”

“Invoices and debarkations. isn’t this an amazing place?”

“What’s your sign?” Nikki asked him.

“Libra.”

“I’m Capricorn. Tonight’s my birthday as well as his. If you’re really Libra, you’re wasting your time with me. Do you have a name?”

“Martin Bliss.”

“Nikki.”

“There isn’t any Mrs. Bliss, hah-hah.”

Nikki licked her lips. “I’m hungry. Would you get me some canapes?”

She was gone as soon as he moved toward the food. Circumnavigating the long room—past the string quintet, past the bartender’s throne, past the window—until she had a good view of the man called Nicholson. He didn’t disappoint her. He was slender, supple, not tall, strong in the shoulders. A man of presence and authority. She wanted to put her lips to him and suck immortality out. His head was a flat triangle, brutal cheekbones, thin lips, dark mat of curly hair, no beard, no mustache. His eyes were keen, electric, intolerably wise. He must have seen everything twice, at the very least. Nikki had read his book. Everyone had. He had been a king, a lama, a slave trader, a slave. Always taking pains to conceal his implausible longevity, now offering his terrible secret freely to the members of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Why had he chosen to surface and reveal himself? Because this is the necessary moment of revelation, he had said. When he must stand forth as what he is, so that he might impart his gift to others, lest he lose it. Lest he lose it. At the stroke of the new century he must share his prize of life. A dozen people surrounded him, catching his glow. He glanced through a palisade of shoulders and locked his eyes on hers; Nikki felt impaled, exalted, chosen. Warmth spread through her loins like a river of molten tungsten, like a stream of hot honey. She started to go to him. A corpse got in her way. Death’s-head, parchment skin, nightmare eyes. A scaly hand brushed her bare biceps. A frightful eroded voice croaked, “How old do you think I am?”

“Oh, God!”

“How old?”

“Two thousand?”

“I’m fifty-eight. I won’t live to see fifty-nine. Here, smoke one of these.”

With trembling hands he offered her a tiny ivory tube. There was a Gothic monogram near one end—FXB—and a translucent green capsule at the other. She pressed the capsule, and a flickering blue flame sprouted. She inhaled. “What is it?” she asked.

“My own mixture. Soma Number Five. You like it?”

“I’m smeared,” she said. “Absolutely smeared. Oh, God!” The walls were flowing. The snow had turned to tinfoil. An instant hit. The corpse had a golden halo. Dollar signs rose into view like stigmata on his furrowed forehead. She heard the crash of the surf, the roar of the waves. The deck was heaving. The masts were cracking. Woman overboard! she cried, and heard her inaudible voice disappearing down a tunnel of echoes, boingg boingg boingg. She clutched at his frail wrists. “You bastard, what did you do to me?”

“I’m Francis Xavier Byrne.”

Oh. The billionaire. Byrne Industries, the great conglomerate. Steiner had promised her a billionaire tonight.

“Are you going to die soon?” she asked.

“No later than Easter. Money can’t help me now. I’m a walking metastasis.” He opened his ruffled shirt. Something bright and metallic, like chain mail, covered his chest. “Life-support system,” he confided. “It operates me. Take it off for half an hour and I’d be finished. Are you a Capricorn?”

“How did you know?”

“I may be dying, but I’m not stupid. You have the Capricorn gleam in your eyes. What am I?”

She hesitated. His eyes were gleaming too. Self-made man, fantastic business sense, energy, arrogance. Capricorn, of course. No, too easy. “Leo,” she said.

“No. Try again.” He pressed another monogrammed tube into her hand and strode away. She hadn’t yet come down from the last one, although the most flamboyant effects had ebbed. Party guests swirled and flowed around her. She no longer could see Nicholson. The snow seemed to be turning to hail, little hard particles spattering the vast windows and leaving white abraded tracks: or were her perceptions merely sharper? The roar of conversation seemed to rise and fall as if someone were adjusting a volume control. The lights fluctuated in a counterpointed rhythm. She felt dizzy. A tray of golden cocktails went past her and she hissed, “Where’s the bathroom?”

Down the hall. Five strangers clustered outside it, talking in scaly whispers. She floated through them, grabbed the sink’s cold edge, thrust her face to the oval concave mirror. A death’s-head. Parchment skin, nightmare eyes. No! No! She blinked and her own features reappeared. Shivering, she made an effort to pull herself together. The medicine cabinet held a tempting collection of drugs, Steiner’s all-purpose remedies. Without looking at labels Nikki seized a handful of vials and gobbled pills at random. A flat red one, a tapering green one, a succulent yellow gelatin capsule. Maybe headache remedies, maybe hallucinogens. Who knows, who cares? We Capricorns are not always as cautious as you think.

Someone knocked at the bathroom door. She answered and found the bland, hopeful face of Martin Bliss hovering near the ceiling. Eyes protruding faintly, cheeks florid. “They said you were sick. Can I do anything for you?” So kind, so sweet. She touched his arm, grazed his cheek with her lips. Beyond him in the hall stood a broad-bodied man with close-cropped blond hair, glacial blue eyes, a plump perfect face. His smile was intense and brilliant. “That’s easy,” he said. “Capricorn.”

“You can guess my—” She stopped, stunned. “Sign?” she finished, voice very small. “How did you do that? Oh.”

“Yes. I’m that one.”

She felt more than naked, stripped down to the ganglia, to the synapses. “What’s the trick?”

“No trick. I listen. I hear.”

“You hear people thinking?”

“More or less. Do you think it’s a party game?” He was beautiful but terrifying, like a Samurai sword in motion. She wanted him but she didn’t dare. He’s got my number, she thought. I would never have any secrets from him. He said sadly, “I don’t mind that. I know I frighten a lot of people. Some don’t care.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tom,” he said. “Hello, Nikki.”

“I feel very sorry for you.”

“Not really. You can kid yourself if you need to. But you can’t kid me. Anyway, you don’t sleep with men you feel sorry for.”

I don’t sleep with you.”

“You will,” he said.

“I thought you were just a mind-reader. They didn’t tell me you did prophecies too.”

He leaned close and smiled. The smile demolished her. She had to fight to keep from falling. “I’ve got your number, all right,” he said in a low, harsh voice. “I’ll call you next Tuesday.” As he walked away he said, “You’re wrong. I’m a Virgo. Believe it or not.”

Nikki returned, numb, to the living room. “… the figure of the mandala,” Nicholson was saying. His voice was dark, focused, a pure basso cantante. “The essential thing that every mandala has is a center—the place where everything is born, the eye of God’s mind, the heart of darkness and of light, the core of the storm. All right. You must move toward the center, find the vortex at the boundary of Yang and Yin, place yourself right at the mandala’s midpoint. Center yourself. Do you follow the metaphor? Center yourself at now, the eternal now. To move off-center is to move forward toward death, backward toward birth, always the fatal polar swings. But if you’re capable of positioning yourself constantly at the focus of the mandala, right on center, you have access to the fountain of renewal, you become an organism capable of constant self-healing, constant self-replenishment, constant expansion into regions beyond self. Do you follow? The power of… ”

Steiner, at her elbow, said tenderly, “How beautiful you are in the first moments of erotic fixation.”

“It’s a marvelous party.”

“Are you meeting interesting people?”

“Is there any other kind?” she asked.

Nicholson abruptly detached himself from the circle of his audience and strode across the room, alone, in a quick decisive knight’s move toward the bar. Nikki, hurrying to intercept him, collided with a shaven-headed tray-bearing servant. The tray slid smoothly from the man’s thick fingertips and launched itself into the air like a spinning shield; a rainfall of skewered meat in an oily green curry sauce spattered the white carpet. The servant was utterly motionless. He stood frozen like some sort of Mexican stone idol, thick-necked, flat-nosed, for a long painful moment; then he turned his head slowly to the left and regretfully contemplated his rigid outspread hand, shorn of its tray; finally he swung his head toward Nikki, and his normally expressionless granite face took on for a quick flickering instant a look of total hatred, a coruscating emanation of contempt and disgust that faded immediately. He laughed: hu-hu-hu, a neighing snicker. His superiority was overwhelming. Nikki floundered in quicksands of humiliation. Hastily she escaped, a zig and a zag, around the tumbled goodies and across to the bar. Nicholson, still by himself. Her face went crimson. She felt short of breath. Hunting for words, tongue all thumbs. Finally, in a catapulting blurt: “Happy birthday!”

“Thank you,” he said solemnly.

“Are you enjoying your birthday?”

“Very much.”

“I’m amazed that they don’t bore you. I mean, having had so many of them.”

“I don’t bore easily.” He was awesomely calm, drawing on some bottomless reservoir of patience. He gave her a look that was at the same time warm and impersonal. “I find everything interesting,” he said.

“That’s curious. I said more or less the same thing to Steiner just a few minutes ago. You know, it’s my birthday too.”

“Really?”

“The seventh of January, 1975 for me.”

“Hello, 1975. I’m—” He laughed. “It sounds absolutely absurd, doesn’t it?”

“The seventh of January, 982.”

“You’ve been doing your homework.”

“I’ve read your book,” she said. “Can I make a silly remark? My God, you don’t look like you’re a thousand and seventeen years old.”

“How should I look?”

“More like him,” she said, indicating Francis Xavier Byrne. Nicholson chuckled. She wondered if he liked her. Maybe. Maybe. Nikki risked some eye contact. He was hardly a centimeter taller than she was, which made it a terrifyingly intimate experience. He regarded her steadily, centeredly; she imagined a throbbing mandala surrounding him, luminous turquoise spokes emanating from his heart, radiant red and green spiderweb rings connecting them. Reaching from her loins, she threw a loop of desire around him. Her eyes were explicit. His were veiled. She felt him calmly retreating. Take me inside, she pleaded, take me to one of the back rooms. Pour life into me. She said, “How will you choose the people you’re going to instruct in the secret?”

“Intuitively.”

“Refusing anybody who asks directly, of course.”

“Refusing anybody who asks.”

“Did you ask?”

“You said you read my book.”

“Oh. Yes. I remember—you didn’t know what was happening, you didn’t understand anything until it was over.”

“I was a simple lad,” he said. “That was a long time ago.” His eyes were alive again. He’s drawn to me. He sees that I’m his kind, that I deserve him. Capricorn, Capricorn, Capricorn, you and me, he-goat and she-goat. Play my game, Cap. “How are you named?” he asked.

“Nikki.”

“A beautiful name. A beautiful woman.”

The emptiness of the compliments devastated her. She realized she had arrived with mysterious suddenness at a necessary point of tactical withdrawal; retreat was obligatory, lest she push too hard and destroy the tenuous contact so tensely established. She thanked him with a glance and gracefully slipped away, pivoting toward Martin Bliss, slipping her arm through his. Bliss quivered at the gesture, glowed, leaped into a higher energy state. She resonated to his vibrations, going up and up. She was at the heart of the party, the center of the mandala: standing flat-footed, legs slightly apart, making her body a polar axis, with lines of force zooming up out of the earth, up through the basement levels of this building, up the eighty-eight stories of it, up through her sex, her heart, her head. This is how it must feel, she thought, when undyingness is conferred on you. A moment of spontaneous grace, the kindling of an inner light. She looked love at poor sappy Bliss. You dear heart, you dumb walking pun. The string quintet made molten sounds. “What is that?” she asked. “Brahms?” Bliss offered to find out. Alone, she was vulnerable to Francis Xavier Byrne, who brought her down with a single cadaverous glance.

“Have you guessed it yet?” he asked. “The sign.”

She stared through his ragged cancerous body, blazing with decomposition. “Scorpio,” she told him hoarsely.

“Right! Right!” He pulled a pendant from his breast and draped its golden chain over her head. “For you,” he rasped, and fled. She fondled it. A smooth green stone. Jade? Emerald? Lightly engraved on its domed face was the looped cross, the crux ansata. Beautiful. The gift of life, from the dying man. She waved fondly to him across a forest of heads and winked. Bliss returned.

“They’re playing something by Schoenberg,” he reported. “Verklarte Nacht.”

“How lovely.” She flipped the pendant and let it fall back against her breasts. “Do you like it?”

“I’m sure you didn’t have it a moment ago.”

“It sprouted,” she told him. She felt high, but not as high as she had been just after leaving Nicholson. That sense of herself as focal point had departed. The party seemed chaotic. Couples were forming, dissolving, reforming; shadowy figures were stealing away in twos and threes toward the bedrooms; the servants were more obsessively thrusting their trays of drinks and snacks at the remaining guests; the hall had reverted to snow, and feathery masses silently struck the windows, sticking there, revealing their glistening mandalic structures for painfully brief moments before they deliquesced. Nikki struggled to regain her centered position. She indulged in a cheering fantasy: Nicholson coming to her, formally touching her cheek, telling her, “You will be one of the elect.” In less than twelve months the time would come for him to gather with his seven still unnamed disciples to see in the new century, and he would take their hands into his hands, he would pump the vitality of the undying into their bodies, sharing with them the secret that had been shared with him a thousand years ago. Who? Who? Who? Me. Me. Me. But where had Nicholson gone? His aura, his glow, that cone of imaginary light that had appeared to surround him—nowhere.

A man in a lacquered orange wig began furiously to quarrel, almost under Nikki’s nose, with a much younger woman wearing festoons of bioluminescent pearls. Man and wife, evidently. They were both sharp-featured, with glossy, protuberant eyes, rigid faces, cheek muscles working intensely. Live together long enough, come to look alike. Their dispute had a stale, ritualistic flavor, as though they had staged it all too many times before. They were explaining to each other the events that had caused the quarrel, interpreting them, recapitulating them, shading them, justifying, attacking, defending—you said this because and that led me to respond that way because… no, on the contrary, I said this because you said that—all of it in a quiet screechy tone, sickening, agonizing, pure death.

“He’s her biological father,” a man next to Nikki said. “She was one of the first of the in vitro babies, and he was the donor, and five years ago he tracked her down and married her. A loophole in the law.” Five years? They sounded as if they had been married for fifty. Walls of pain and boredom encased them. Only their eyes were alive. Nikki found it impossible to imagine those two in bed, bodies entwined in the act of love. Act of love, she thought, and laughed. Where was Nicholson? Duke Alexius, flushed and sweat-beaded, bowed to her. “I will leave soon,” he announced, and she received the announcement gravely but without reacting, as though he had merely commented on the fluctuations of the storm, or had spoken in Greek. He bowed again and went away. Nicholson? Nicholson? She grew calm again, finding her center. He will come to me when he is ready. There was contact between us, and it was real and good.

Bliss, beside her, gestured and said, “A rabbi of Syrian birth, formerly Muslim, highly regarded among Jewish theologians.”

She nodded but didn’t look.

“An astronaut just back from Mars. I’ve never seen anyone’s skin tanned quite that color.”

The astronaut held no interest for her. She worked at kicking herself back into high. The party was approaching a climactic moment, she felt, a time when commitments were being made and decisions taken. The clink of ice in glasses, the foggy vapors of psychedelic inhalants, the press of warm flesh all about her—she was wired into everything, she was alive and receptive, she was entering into the twitching hour, the hour of galvanic jerks. She grew wild and reckless. Impulsively she kissed Bliss, straining on tiptoes, jabbing her tongue deep into his startled mouth. Then she broke free. Someone was playing with the lights: they grew redder, then gained force and zoomed to blue-white ferocity. Far across the room a crowd was surging and billowing around the fallen figure of Francis Xavier Byrne, slumped loose-jointedly against the base of the bar. His eyes were open but glassy. Nicholson crouched over him, reaching into his shirt, making delicate adjustments of the controls of the chain mail beneath. “It’s all right,” Steiner was saying. “Give him some air. It’s all right!” Confusion. Hubbub. A torrent of tangled input.

“—they say there’s been a permanent change in the weather patterns. Colder winters from now on, because of accumulations of dust in the atmosphere that screen the sun’s rays. Until we freeze altogether by around the year 2200—”

“—but the carbon dioxide is supposed to start a greenhouse effect that’s causing warmer weather, I thought, and—”

“—the proposal to generate electric power from—”

“—the San Andreas fault—”

“—financed by debentures convertible into—”

“—capsules of botulism toxin—”

“—to be distributed at a ratio of one per thousand families, throughout Greenland and the Kamchatka Metropolitan Area—”

“—in the sixteenth century, when you could actually hope to found your own empire in some unknown part of the—”

“—unresolved conflicts of Capricorn personality—”

“—intense concentration and meditation upon the completed mandala so that the contents of the work are transferred to and identified with the mind and body of the beholder. I mean, technically what occurs is the reabsorption of cosmic forces. In the process of construction these forces—”

“—butterflies, which are no longer to be found anywhere in—”

“—were projected out from the chaos of the unconscious, in the process of absorption, the powers are drawn back in again—”

“—reflecting transformations of the DNA in the light-collecting organ, which—”

“—the snow—”

“—a thousand years, can you imagine that? And—”

“—her body—”

“—formerly a toad—”

“—just back from Mars, and there’s that look in his eye—”

“Hold me,” Nikki said. “Just hold me. I’m very dizzy.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Just hold me.” She pressed against cool sweet-smelling fabric. His chest unyielding beneath it. Steiner. Very male. He steadied her, but only for a moment. Other responsibilities summoned him. When he released her, she swayed. He beckoned to someone else, blond, soft-faced. The mind reader, Tom. Passing her along the chain from man to man.

“You feel better now,” the telepath told her.

“Are you positive of that?”

“Very.”

“Can you read any mind in the room?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Even his?”

Again a nod. “He’s the clearest of all. He’s been using it so long, all the channels are worn deep.”

“Then he really is a thousand years old?”

“You didn’t believe it?”

Nikki shrugged. “Sometimes I don’t know what I believe.”

“He’s old.”

“You’d be the one to know.”

“He’s a phenomenon. He’s absolutely extraordinary.” A pause—quick, stabbing. “Would you like to see into his mind?”

“How can I?”

“I’ll patch you right in, if you’d like me to.” His glacial eyes flashed sudden mischievous warmth. “Yes?”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“You’re very sure. You’re curious as hell. Don’t kid me. Don’t play games, Nikki. You want to see into him.”

“Maybe.” Grudgingly.

“You do. Believe me, you do. Here. Relax, let your shoulders slump a little, loosen up, make yourself receptive, and I’ll establish the link.”

“Wait,” she said.

But it was too late. The mind reader serenely parted her consciousness like Moses doing the Red Sea and rammed something into her forehead, something thick but insubstantial, a truncheon of fog. She quivered and recoiled. She felt violated. It was like her first time in bed, in that moment when all the fooling around at last was over, the kissing and the nibbling and the stroking, and suddenly there was this object deep inside her body. She had never forgotten that sense of being impaled. But of course it had been not only an intrusion but also a source of ecstasy. As was this. The object within her was the consciousness of Nicholson. In wonder she explored its surface, rigid and weathered, pitted with the myriad ablations of reentry. Ran her trembling hands over its bronzy roughness. Remained outside it. Tom, the mind reader, gave her a nudge. Go on, go on. Deeper. Don’t hold back. She folded herself around Nicholson and drifted into him like ectoplasm seeping into sand. Suddenly she lost her bearings. The discrete and impermeable boundary marking the end of her self and the beginning of his became indistinct. It was impossible to distinguish between her experiences and his, nor could she separate the pulsations of her nervous system from the impulses traveling along his. Phantom memories assailed and engulfed her. She was transformed into a node of pure perception: a steady, cool, isolated eye, surveying and recording. Images flashed. She was toiling upward along a dazzling snowy crest, with jagged Himalayan fangs hanging above her in the white sky and a warm-muzzled yak snuffling wearily at her side.

A platoon of swarthy little men accompanied her, slanty eyes, heavy coats, thick boots. The stink of rancid butter, the cutting edge of an impossible wind: and there, gleaming in the sudden sunlight, a pile of fire-bright yellow plaster with a thousand winking windows, a building, a lamasery strung along a mountain ridge. The nasal sound of distant horns and trumpets. The hoarse chanting of lotus-legged monks. What were they chanting? Om? Om? Om! Om, and flies buzzed around her nose, and she lay hunkered in a flimsy canoe, coursing silently down a midnight river in the heart of Africa, drowning in humidity. Brawny naked men with purple-black skins crouching close. Sweaty fronds dangling from flamboyantly excessive shrubbery; the snouts of crocodiles rising out of the dark water like toothy flowers; great nauseating orchids blossoming high in the smooth-shanked trees. And on shore, five white men in Elizabethan costume, wide-brimmed hats, drooping sweaty collars, lace, fancy buckles, curling red beards. Errol Flynn as Sir Francis Drake, blunderbuss dangling in crook of arm. The white men laughing, beckoning, shouting to the men in the canoe. Am I slave or slavemaster? No answer. Only a blurring and a new vision: autumn leaves blowing across the open doorways of straw-thatched huts, shivering oxen crouched in bare stubble-strewn fields, grim long-mustachioed men with close-cropped hair riding diagonal courses toward the horizon. Crusaders, are they? Or warriors of Hungary on their way to meet the dread Mongols? Defenders of the imperiled Anglo-Saxon realm against the Norman invaders? They could be any of these. But always that steady cool eye, always that unmoving consciousness at the center of every scene. Him, eternal, all-enduring. And then: the train rolling westward, belching white smoke, the plains unrolling infinityward, the big brown fierce-eyed bison standing in shaggy clumps along the right of way, the man with turbulent shoulder-length hair laughing, slapping a twenty-dollar gold piece on the table. Picking up his rifle—a.50-caliber breech-loading Springfield—he aims casually through the door of the moving train, he squeezes off a shot, another, another. Three shaggy brown corpses beside the tracks, and the train rolls onward, honking raucously.

Her arm and shoulder tingled with the impact of those shots. Then: a fetid waterfront, bales of cloves and peppers and cinnamon, small brown-skinned men in turbans and loincloths arguing under a terrible sun. Tiny irregular silver coins glittering in the palm of her hand. The jabber of some Malabar dialect counterpointed with fluid mocking Portuguese. Do we sail now with Vasco da Gama? Perhaps. And then a gray Teutonic street, windswept, medieval, bleak Lutheran faces scowling from leaded windows. And then the Gobi steppe, with horsemen and campfires and dark tents. And then New York City, unmistakably New York City, with square black automobiles scurrying between the stubby skyscrapers like glossy beetles, a scene out of some silent movie. And then. And then. Everywhere, everything, all times, all places, a discontinuous flow of events but always that clarity of vision, that rock-steady perception, that solid mind at the center, that unshakeable identity, that unchanging self—with whom I am inextricably enmeshed—

There was no “I,” there was no “he,” there was only the one ever-perceiving point of view. But abruptly she felt a change of focus, a distancing effect, a separation of self and self, so that she was looking at him as he lived his many lives, seeing him from the outside, seeing him plainly changing identities as others might change clothing, growing beards and mustaches, shaving them, cropping his hair, letting his hair grow, adopting new fashions, learning languages, forging documents. She saw him in all his thousand years of guises and subterfuges, saw him real and unified and centered beneath his obligatory camouflages—and saw him seeing her.

Instantly contact broke. She staggered. Arms caught her. She pulled away from the smiling plump-faced blond man, muttering, “What have you done? You didn’t tell me you’d show me to him.”

“How else can there be a linkage?” the telepath asked.

“You didn’t tell me. You should have told me.” Everything was lost. She couldn’t bear to be in the same room as Nicholson now. Tom reached for her, but she stumbled past him, stepping on people. They winked up at her. Someone stroked her leg. She forced her way through improbable laocoons, three women and two servants, five men and a tablecloth. A glass door, a gleaming silvery handle: she pushed. Out onto the terrace. The purity of the gale might cleanse her. Behind her, faint gasps, a few shrill screams, annoyed expostulations: “Close that thing!” She slammed it. Alone in the night, eighty-eight stories above street level, she offered herself to the storm. Her filmy tunic shielded her not at all. Snowflakes burned against her breasts. Her nipples hardened and rose like fiery beacons, jutting against the soft fabric. The snow stung her throat, her shoulders, her arms. Far below, the wind churned newly fallen crystals into spiral galaxies. The street was invisible. Thermal confusions brought updrafts that seized the edge of her tunic and whipped it outward from her body. Fierce, cold particles of hair were driven into her bare pale thighs. She stood with her back to the party. Did anyone in there notice her? Would someone think she was contemplating suicide and come rushing gallantly out to save her? Capricorns didn’t commit suicide. They might threaten it, yes, they might even tell themselves quite earnestly that they were really going to do it, but it was only a game, only a game. No one came to her. She didn’t turn. Gripping the railing, she fought to calm herself.

No use. Not even the bitter air could help. Frost in her eyelashes, snow on her lips. The pendant Byrne had given her blazed between her breasts. The air was white with a throbbing green underglow. It seared her eyes. She was off-center and floundering. She felt herself still reverberating through the centuries, going back and forth across the orbit of Nicholson’s interminable life. What year is this? Is it 1386, 1912, 1532, 1779, 1043, 1977, 1235, 1129, 1836? So many centuries. So many lives. And yet always the one true self, changeless, unchangeable.

Gradually the resonances died away. Nicholson’s unending epochs no longer filled her mind with terrible noise. She began to shiver, not from fear but merely from cold, and tugged at her moist tunic, trying to shield her nakedness. Melting snow left hot clammy tracks across her breasts and belly. A halo of steam surrounded her. Her heart pounded.

She wondered if what she had experienced had been genuine contact with Nicholson’s soul, or rather only some trick of Tom’s, a simulation of contact. Was it possible, after all, even for Tom to create a linkage between two non-telepathic minds such as hers and Nicholson’s? Maybe Tom had fabricated it all himself, using images borrowed from Nicholson’s book.

In that case there might still be hope for her.

A delusion, she knew. A fantasy born of the desperate optimism of the hopeless. But nevertheless—

She found the handle, let herself back into the party. A gust accompanied her, sweeping snow inward. People stared. She was like death arriving at the feast. Doglike, she shook off the searing snowflakes. Her clothes were wet and stuck to her skin; she might as well have been naked. “You poor shivering thing,” a woman said. She pulled Nikki into a tight embrace. It was the sharp-faced woman, the bulgy-eyed bottle-born one, bride of her own father. Her hands traveled swiftly over Nikki’s body, caressing her breasts, touching her check, her forearm, her haunch. “Come inside with me,” she crooned. “I’ll make you warm.” Her lips grazed Nikki’s. A playful tongue sought them.

For a moment, needing the warmth, Nikki gave herself to the embrace. Then she pulled away. “No,” she said. “Some other time. Please.” Wriggling free, she started across the room. An endless journey. Like crossing the Sahara by pogo stick. Voices, faces, laughter. A dryness in her throat. Then she was in front of Nicholson.

Well. Now or never

“I have to talk to you,” she said.

“Of course.” His eyes were merciless. No wrath in them, not even disdain, only an incredible patience more terrifying than anger or scorn. She would not let herself bend before that cool level gaze.

She said, “A few minutes ago, did you have an odd experience, a sense that someone was—well, looking into your mind? I know it sounds foolish, but—?”

“Yes. It happened.” So calm. How did he stay that close to his center? That unwavering eye, that uniquely self-contained self, perceiving all: the lamasery, the slave depot, the railroad train, everything, all time gone by, all time to come—how did he manage to be so tranquil? She knew she never could learn such calmness. She knew he knew it. He has my number all right. She found that she was looking at his cheekbones, at his forehead, at his lips. Not into his eyes.

“You have the wrong image of me,” she told him.

“It isn’t an image,” he said. “What I have is you.”

“No.”

“Face yourself, Nikki. If you can figure out where to look.” He laughed. Gently, but she was demolished.

An odd thing, then. She forced herself to stare into his eyes and felt a snapping of awareness from one mode into some other, and he turned into an old man. That mask of changeless early maturity dissolved and she saw the frightening yellowed eyes, the maze of furrows and gullies, the toothless gums, the drooling lips, the hollow throat, the self beneath the face. A thousand years, a thousand years! And every moment of those thousand years was visible. “You’re old,” she whispered. “You disgust me. I wouldn’t want to be like you, not for anything!” She backed away, shaking. “An old, old, old man. All a masquerade!”

He smiled. “Isn’t that pathetic?”

“Me or you? Me or you?”

He didn’t answer. She was bewildered. When she was five paces away from him there came another snapping of awareness, a second changing of phase, and suddenly he was himself again, taut-skinned, erect, appearing to be perhaps thirty-five years old. A globe of silence hung between them. The force of his rejection was withering. She summoned her last strength for a parting glare. I didn’t want you either, friend, not any single part of you. He saluted cordially. Dismissal.

Martin Bliss, grinning vacantly, stood near the bar. “Let’s go,” she said savagely. “Take me home!”

“But—”

“It’s just a few floors below.” She thrust her arm through his. He blinked, shrugged, fell into step.

“I’ll call you Tuesday, Nikki,” Tom said as they swept past him.

Downstairs, on her home turf, she felt better. In the bedroom they quickly dropped their clothes. His body was pink, hairy, serviceable. She turned the bed on, and it began to murmur and throb. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.

“Twenty-six?” Bliss said vaguely.

“Bastard!” She pulled him down on top of her. Her hands raked his skin. Her thighs parted. Go on. Like an animal, she thought. Like an animal! She was getting older moment by moment, she was dying in his arms.

“You’re much better than I expected,” she said eventually.

He looked down, baffled, amazed. “You could have chosen anyone at that party. Anyone.”

“Almost anyone,” she said.

When he was asleep she slipped out of bed. Snow was still falling. She heard the thunk of bullets and the whine of wounded bison. She heard the clangor of swords on shields. She heard lamas chanting: Om, Om, Om. No sleep for her this night, none. The clock was ticking like a bomb. The century was flowing remorselessly toward its finish. She checked her face for wrinkles in the bathroom mirror. Smooth, smooth, all smooth under the blue fluorescent glow. Her eyes looked bloody. Her nipples were still hard. She took a little alabaster jar from one of the bathroom cabinets and three slender red capsules fell out of it, into her palm. Happy birthday, dear Nikki, happy birthday to you. She swallowed all three. Went back to bed. Waited, listening to the slap of snow on glass, for the visions to come and carry her away.

Content

Capricorn Games
by Robert Silverberg