"So it seems. I'm sure my encounter with Clef was not coincidental. It was-foreordained. And my dream of his progress-there has to be some reason for that. I suspect he and I are destined to meet again."

"You could never stay out of mischief," she agreed.

"Now it's time to get ready for your Tourney match."

"Did anyone ever tell you you are inhumanly practical? The end of the split infinity may be in the offing, and you pack me off to a Game."

"Your match is foreordained too," she said complacently.

CHAPTER 2 - Backgammon.

It was Round Thirteen of the annual Tourney. Only three players remained, two with one loss each. These two had to play each other; the loser would be eliminated from the Tourney, and the winner would meet the single undefeated player.

The two who played were as different as seemed possible. One was a huge, fat, middle-aged man in voluminous and princely robes inset with glittering gems. The other was a tiny naked man, muscular and t, in his thirties. "Ah, Stile," the clothed man said affably. "I was hoping to encounter you."

"You know of me, sir?"

"I always research my prospective opponents, serf. You have been extremely busy recently. You have been chasing around the landscape, crashing vehicles, and disappearing between Rounds."

Stile was noncommittal. "My time between Rounds is my own, sir."

"Except for what that girl robot demands. Is it fun making time with a s.e.xy machine?"

Stile knew the Citizen was trying to rattle him, to get him tangled up emotionally so that he could not concentrate properly on the Game. It was a familiar technique. Stile could not return the favor because all Citizens were virtually anonymous to serfs, and in any event a serf could not treat a Citizen with disrespect. So Stile would have to take it-and play his best regardless. He was experienced at this sort of thing; the Citizen would probably rattle himself before he got to Stile.

It was time for the grid. Each man stood on one side of the unit, looking at the screen. There were sixteen boxes facing Stile, labeled across the top: 1. PHYSICAL 2. MENTAL 3. CHANCE 4. ARTS, and down the side: A. NAKED B. TOOL C. MACHINE D. ANIMAL. Stile's panel was lighted by the letters.

"That was a very neat stunt you worked, last Round," the Citizen remarked. "Making that Amazon throw away her win. Of course you know you won't be able to trick me that way."

"Of course not, sir." Stile touched the TOOL indication.

That was his line of greatest strength. The subgrid showed: 3B, Tool-a.s.sisted Chance. Stile groaned inwardly. The CHANCE column was the bane of good players. It was difficult to make his skill count here. "You don't like it, huh?" the Citizen taunted. "Figure it to come up another slot machine, wash you out painlessly, eh?"

This man really had researched Stile's prior Games of the Tourney. The lone Game Stile had lost had been just that way. "I am not partial to it, sir." As long as he handled the needling without heat, he was gaining.

"Well, I'm partial to it! Know why? Because I'm lucky. Try me on poker. Stile; I'll come up with a full house and tromp you. Try me on blackjack; I'm all twenty-ones. The breaks always go my way! That scares you, huh?" The Citizen protested too much. That could indicate weakness-or could be a ruse. Stile actually could handle himself in games of chance; often there was more skill than showed. He would try for a suitable variant. "Luck is impartial, sir."

"You believe that? You fool! Try me on dice, if you doubt!"

Stile made his selection. The Citizen had already made his. The third grid showed: Board Games of Chance. "Okay, sucker, try me on Monopoly!" the Citizen urged. But when they played it through, it came up backgammon. "My favorite!" the Citizen exclaimed. "Dice and betting! Watch me move!"

Stile thought he was bluffing. That bluff would be called. Stile was expert at backgammon. It was only technically a game of luck; skill was critical.

They adjourned to the boardroom. The table was ready. There was no physical audience; the holograph would take care of that.

"Now you know this game represents a year," the Citizen said. "Twenty-four points for the hours of the day, thirty pieces for the days of the month, twelve points in each half-section for the months in the year."

"And the seven spots on the opposites of a die are the days of the week," Stile said. "The two dice are day and night. It hardly matches the symbolism of the ordinary deck of playing cards or the figures of the chess set-sir." They were playing a variant deriving in part from Acey Deucy, traditionally a navy game. The games of Mother Earth had continued to evolve in the fashion of human society, with some variants prospering and others becoming extinct. In this one, no pieces were placed on the board at the start; all started from the bar. It was not necessary to enter all fifteen pieces on the board before advancing the leaders. Yet it was still backgammon, the "back game," with pieces constantly being sent back to the bar while they ran the gauntlet of opposing pieces. People were apt to a.s.sume that a given game had an eternally fixed set of rules, when in fact there were endless variations. Stile had often obtained an advantage by steering a familiar game into an unfamiliar channel.

The Citizen was, as he claimed, lucky. He won the lead, then forged ahead with double sixes, while Stile had to settle for a two-to-one throw of the dice. Doubles were valuable in backgammon, because each die could be used twice. Thus the citizen's throw enabled him to enter four men to the sixth point, while Stile entered only two. This continued fairly steadily; the Citizen soon had all fifteen men entered and well advanced, while Stile was slower. Soon the two forces interacted. The Citizen hit the first blot-in layman's language, he placed one of his men on the spot occupied by one of Stile's men. That sent Stile's man home to the bar, the starting place. "Sent you home to your s.l.u.t machine, didn't I?" he chortled. "Oh, let there be no moaning at the bar!" That was a literary allusion to an ancient poem by Tennyson of Earth. Stile was conversant with historical literature, but made no response. The Citizen was showing pseudoerudition; he was not the type to know any but the most fashionable of quotes, and he had gotten this one wrong. The correct line was, "and may there be no moaning of the bar." Yet, mentally. Stile filled in the remainder: "when I put out to sea." Tennyson had then been late in life, knowing he would die before too long. That poem, Crossing the Bar, had been a kind of personal epitaph. When he put out to sea, in the figurative fashion of the Norse boats for the dead, he hoped to see his Pilot, the Deity, face to face. Those left behind in life should feel no sorrow for him, for he, like the werewolf, had found his ideal resting place. It was generally best to read the full works of past literary figures, and to understand their backgrounds, rather than to memorize quotes out of con text. But it was no use to go into all that with this great boor and bore of a Citizen.

Well, Stile intended to send this obnoxious Citizen out to sea. It was already apparent that the man was not a top player; he depended on his luck too heavily, and on a basic strategy of "making" points-of setting up two or more men on a point, so that the opponent could neither land there nor hit a blot. Luck and conservative play-a good enough strategy for most occasions. Three out of four times, a winning strategy.

But Stile was not an ordinary player. He depended not on luck but on skill. Luck tended to equalize, especially on an extended series, while skill was constant. That was what gave the superior player the advantage, even in a game of chance. It was necessary to take risks in order to progress most efficiently. There would be some losses because of these risks, but, overall, that efficiency would pay off. Stile was already grasping the weakness of the Citizen's mode of play. Probably the man had an imperfect notion of the strategy of the doubling cube-and that could make all the difference, regardless of his vaunted luck. Soon the Citizen had a number of men in his home board, ready to be borne off. The first player who bore off all fifteen men would win the game, but not necessarily the Round. This modification was scored by points; each man left in play when the opponent finished was one point. One hundred points was the Game. It could take several games to acc.u.mulate the total. The key was to minimize one's losses in a losing game, and maximize one's winnings in a winning game. That was where the doubling cube came in.

Best to test the man's level, however. Stile needed to have a very clear notion of his opponent's vulnerability, because the Citizen was not a complete duffer; he was" just good enough to be dangerous. Luck did play an important part in backgammon, just as muscle did in wrestling; it had to be taken into account. Stile rolled 3-2. As it happened, he was able to enter two men and hit blots on the second and third points. It was a good break, for the Citizen left few blots he could possibly avoid. Thus Stile's 2 and 3 dice canceled the effect of c.u.mulative scores of twenty-one and twenty-two on the Citizen's dice. Stile was making his limited luck match the effect of his opponent's good luck. It was a matter of superior management.

But the Citizen was hardly paying attention to the moves. He was trying to undermine Stile's confidence, convinced that even in a game of chance, a person's certainty counted most. "A number of people have been wondering where you disappear to between Rounds, little man. You seem to walk down a certain service corridor, and never emerge at the far end. Hours or even days later you emerge, going the opposite direction. It is a food-machine service corridor, yet you show no sign of feasting. Now how can a man disappear from the board, like a piece being sent to the bar? It is a mystery."

Stile continued playing. "People enjoy mysteries, sir." The dice rolled; the men advanced. The Citizen's luck held; he was gaining despite imperfect play.

"Mysteries exist only to be resolved. It is possible that you have discovered something fantastic, like a curtain that separates fact from fantasy? That you pa.s.s through this invisible barrier to a world where you imagine you are important instead of insignificant?"

So the man had done fairly thorough research into Stile's Phaze existence too. Still, Stile refused to be baited.

"No doubt, sir."

"And can it really be true that in that fantasy you ride a unicorn mare and a.s.sociate with vampires and were wolves?"

"In fantasy, anything is possible," Stile said.

"Double," the Citizen said, turning the doubling cube to two.

Now the game drew to a dose. The Citizen finished first; Stile was left with eight men on the board. Doubled, that was sixteen points against him.

They set up for the second game, since they were not yet dose to the one hundred points necessary for the finish. The Citizen was obnoxiously affable; he liked winning. Stile hoped he would get careless as well as overconfident. With luck, the Citizen might even distract himself at a key time by his determined effort to unnerve Stile. Still, the Citizen's luck held. The man played indifferently, even poorly at times, but the fortune of the dice sustained him. When he had a clear advantage, he doubled, and Stile had to accept or forfeit the game. Then Stile had a brief run of luck-actually, skillful exploitation of the game situation-and doubled himself.

"Double!" the Citizen said immediately when his own turn came, determined to have the last word and confident in his fortune. Now the doubling cube stood at eight. "I understand a little squirt like you can use magic to snare some mighty fine-looking women," the Citizen said as they played. "Even if they're taller than you."

"Many women are," Stile agreed. References to his height did irritate him, but he had long since learned to conceal this. He was 1.5 meters tall, or an inch shy of five feet, in the archaic nomenclature of Phaze. The Citizen's infernal luck continued. There did seem to be something to his claim about being lucky; he had certainly had far superior throws of the dice, and in this game, supervised by the Game Computer, there could be no question of cheating. He was winning this game too, by a narrower margin than the last, but the eight on the doubling cube gave every piece magnified clout. The Citizen liked to double; maybe it related to his gambling urge.

"I guess there could be one really luscious doll who nevertheless married a dwarf," the Citizen observed with a smirk. "I guess she could have been ensorcelled."

"Must have been." But despite his refusal to be baited about his recent marriage to the Lady Blue, Stile was losing. If this special ploy did not work, he would wash out of the Tourney. If only the luck would even out!

"Or maybe she has a hangup about midgets. Sort of like miscegenation. Some people get turned on that way." The Citizen was really trying! But Stile played on calmly. "Some do, I understand."

"Or maybe pederasty. She likes to do it with children." But the effect of that malicious needle was abated by the Citizen's choice of the wrong concept. It was generally applicable to the s.e.xual motive of a male, not a female. Still, Stile would gladly have dumped this oaf down a deep well.

Stile lost this game too, down six men. Forty-eight more points against him, a c.u.mulative total of sixty-four. An other game like this would finish him.

The luck turned at last and he won one. But he had only been able to double it once, and only picked up six points. Then the Citizen won again: eight men, redoubled, for thirty-two points. The score now stood at 96-6. The next game could finish it.

Still the Citizen's amazing luck held. Had he, after all, found some way to cheat, to fix the dice? Stile doubted it; the Tourney precautions were too stringent, and this was an important game, with a large audience. The throws had to be legitimate. Science claimed that luck evened out in the long run; it was difficult to prove that in backgammon. Stile's situation was desperate. Yet there were ways. Stile knew how to play the back game specialty, and now was the time. When his position looked good, he doubled; when the Citizen was clearly ahead, he doubled. But the Citizen retained a general advantage, so Stile's doublings seemed foolish.

Stile used the back game to interfere with the Citizen's establishment on his home board. Because most of Stile's men had been relegated to the bar, he had them in ready position to attack the Citizen's men as they lined up for bearing off. This sort of situation could be a lot more volatile than many people thought. "Double," Stile said, turning the cube.

"You're crazy," the Citizen said, redoubling in his turn. Stile hit another blot. He needed more than this to recover a decent position, but it helped. The Citizen threw double sixes. That moved his blotted man all the way from the bar to one s.p.a.ce from the end. His luck was still more than sufficient to swamp whatever breaks Stile managed.

Stile doubled again, though he was still obviously behind. The Citizen, when his turn came, laughed and doubled once more. Now the cube stood at sixty-four, its maximum. "You really want to go down big, tyke!" They were reduced to five men each; the rest had been borne off. The game was actually much closer than the Citizen realized. Stile had already won the advantage he sought. If the game had proceeded with only Stile's first doubling, and he won by two men, all he would have would be four more points. If he lost by the same margin, however, the Citizen's four points would put him at one hundred for final victory. But now the cube stood at sixty four, so that a two-man win by the Citizen would give him the same victory by an unnecessary margin-while the same win by Stile would give him 128 points, at one stroke enough for his final victory. So he had in effect evened it up. Instead of being behind by ninety points, he had only to win two points. The Citizen had been foolish to permit the doubling to go to this level; he had thrown away a major advantage.

"I hear some of these animals can change to human form," the Citizen said. "I guess an animal in the form of a woman could be a lot of fun to a lonely man." Was there anything this slob did not know about Phaze, or any limit to his crudity of insinuation? Stile allowed a little ire to show, deliberately.

"It is a different frame, sir, with different natural laws. Those animals have human intelligence."

The Citizen gleefully pounced on this. "So you have sampled the wares of the mares and the britches of the b.i.t.c.hes!" He was hardly paying attention to the backgammon game in his voyeuristic l.u.s.t. He wanted to make Stile angry and, in seeming success, he was letting the means preempt the ends. This was always ethically problematical, and often strategically unsound. The Citizen was setting himself up for a fall. If only the luck evened out!

Stile had a good roll of the dice. He hit two blots, and the Citizen hardly noticed. "I don't see that it is any of your business, sir, no disrespect intended."

"With animals!" the Citizen exclaimed, smiling broadly.

"You admit it!"

"I don't deny it, sir," Stile said, obviously nettled.

"And did they bother to change form each time?" the Citizen demanded, almost drooling. He was hardly looking at the board, playing automatically and poorly. "Maybe sometimes a b.i.t.c.h stayed in her dog-form, just for the novelty?"

Stile wondered just what sort of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity lurked in the secret dreams of this nasty man. Perhaps this was the phenomenon of projection, in which a person with illicit desires projected the realization of certain acts onto others. The Citizen was giving himself away without realizing it. Stile continued to parry him verbally, taking the worst of it, though he had the ability to reverse the onus at any time. He was tacitly egging the man on. Meanwhile, he exploited the rolls of the dice skillfully, and soon had gained a net advantage. The Citizen could have prevented this, had he been paying similar attention. But his morbid fascination with Stile's supposed exploits with shape-changing females had done him in. By the time he became aware of the trap, it was too late; even his amazing luck could not make up for his squandered opportunities. They entered the final stage, and both resumed bearing off men. For once Stile had better throws of the dice, and finished two men ahead.

It took a moment for the Citizen to absorb the significance. He had been so far ahead, he knew subjectively that it would take a prohibitively ma.s.sive turn of fortune to deprive him of victory. No such turn had occurred. Now his eyes fixed on the number 64 at the top of the doubling cube, and he saw that this narrow margin of two pieces had at one stroke washed him out of the Tourney.

"You must visit Phaze some day, sir," Stile said brightly. "I know just the b.i.t.c.h for you."

CHAPTER 3 - Honeymoon.

Stile crossed the curtain at the usual place, emerging from the food-servicing hall to the deep forest of Phaze. In a moment a unicorn trotted up. But it wasn't Neysa. This one was slightly larger, male, and his coat was deep dark blue except for the two red socks on his hind feet.

"Clip!" Stile exclaimed, surprised. "I expected-" The unicorn metamorphosed into a young man garbed in blue shirt, furry trousers, red socks, floppy hat, gloves, and boots. His resemblance to the unicorn was clear to anyone conversant with the forms.

"She's off getting bred, at long last. The Herd Stallion's keeping her with the herd until she foals. That's S.O.P."

"Yes, of course," Stile agreed, disappointed. He found his hidden clothes and dressed quickly; it would not do to travel naked here, though there was really no firm convention. He wanted only the best for Neysa, his best friend in this frame, yet he felt empty without her company. But he had made a deal with the Herd Stallion to release her for breeding when his mission of vengeance was finished; now that he had dispatched the Red Adept, it was time. Time for relaxation, recovery, and love. Time to be with the lovely Lady Blue.

"That was the funniest thing," Clip said, evidently following the thrust of Stile's thoughts. "Thou didst marry the Lady, then skipped off without even-"

"An idiosyncracy of the situation," Stile said shortly. He had departed without consummating the marriage be cause of a prophecy that he would have a son by the Lady Blue; he knew he would survive the dangerous mission ahead of him if he only waited to generate that child thereafter, since such prophecies had the force of law. But now the barbs of the ugly Citizen were fresh in his mind, making this subject sensitive. "You're volunteering to be my mount?"

"Neysa intimated gently that I'd get homed at the wrong end if I didn't," Clip admitted. "Besides, thou dost have interesting adventures."

"I'm only going to honeymoon with my wife."

"That's what I mean." Clip shifted to his natural form, his horn playing with the sound of a saxophone-a bar of the wedding march, trailing into a tune with risque connotations.

Stile jumped on the unicorn's back, landing deliberately hard. Clip blew out one more startled note and took off. The velocity of the unicorn was greater than that of the horse because it was enhanced by magic; yet the two types of creatures were closely akin. As Clip himself had put it, once: as dose as men were to apes. Stile was uncertain what freighting accompanied that statement, but had never challenged it. Man had intelligence and science the ape lacked; unicorns had intelligence and magic the horses lacked.

Soon they emerged from the forest and were racing over the fields toward the moated castle that was the heart of the Blue Demesnes. "Dost thou happen to know how Clef from Proton fared?" Stile inquired. "I gave him the Platinum Flute and sent him to the Little Folk, but I've been too busy to follow further. I'm sure you're up on all the news."

Clip blew an affirmative note. He was the gossipy kind. "Did Clef arrive safely?" Stile was interested in verifying the accuracy of his dream. The frames had always been firmly separated; if his dream were true, it meant that that separation was beginning to fuzz, at least for him. The unicorn sounded yes again. His sax-hom was more mellow than Neysa's harmonica-horn, though less clever on trills. Like her, he could almost speak in musical notes, making them sound like yes, no, maybe, and a.s.sorted other words, particularly colloquialisms. Actually, uni corns could express whole sentences in chords, but this was a separate mode that owed little to archaic English. Stile was coming to understand that language too, but his grasp of it was as yet insecure.

"Was he-is he by any chance the one the Platinum Elves called the Foreordained?"

Again the affirmative.

"Then that earthquake-we felt it in Proton-that was the shaking of the mountains when he played?" But this had become rhetorical; he had the answer. The frames had certainly juxtaposed in this respect. "I wonder what that means?"

Now Clip had no answer. No one except the Little Folk of the Mound knew the significance of the Foreordained. And the all-knowing Oracle, who answered only one question in the lifetime of each querist.

Yet the arrival of the Foreordained suggested that the end of Phaze was near, according to another prophecy. That bothered Stile; he had worked so hard to secure his place here. Was he to be denied it after all? Well, he was determined to s.n.a.t.c.h what joy he might, in what time remained. On the cosmic scale, the end might be centuries distant. Magic prophecies were devious things, not to be trusted carelessly. People had died depending on misinterpreted omens.

That brought him back to the manner in which he had secured his own fortune by postponing his fathering of a son. He was eager to get on with it. He had loved the Lady Blue from the first time he had encountered her. He had never before met such a regal, intelligent, and desirable woman. But she was the widow of his other self, and that had made things awkward. Now she was his, and he would never leave her-except for one more necessary trip to the frame of Proton, to try for the final Round of the Tourney. It really was not as important to him as it once had seemed, but he had to give it his best try. They galloped up to the prettily moated little castle. Stile vaulted off as they entered the courtyard. The Lady Blue, his vision of delight, rushed to his arms. She was of course garbed in blue: headdress, gown, slippers. She was all that he desired.

"Are we ready?" he inquired when the initial sweetness of the embrace eased.

"I have been ready since we wed, but thou didst depart in haste," she said, teasing him.

"Never again, Lady!"

"Hinblue is saddled."

"We have already traveled much of the eastern curtain. Shall we pick up at the Platinum Demesnes?"

She did not reproach him about his concern for Clef's welfare, the obvious reason to pa.s.s the region of the Little Folk. "As my Lord Blue desires."

"Wilt thou condone magic for the start?" She nodded radiantly. "Magic is the substance of my Lord Adept."

They mounted their steeds, and Stile played his good harmonica, summoning his magic. His Adept talent was governed by music and words, the music shaping the power, the words the application. Actually, his mind was the most important factor; the words mainly fixed the time of implementation. "Conduct us four," he sang "to the platinum sh.o.r.e." Clip snorted through his horn: sh.o.r.e?

But the magic was already taking hold. The four of them seemed to dissolve into liquid, sink into the ground, and flow rapidly along and through it south-southeast. In a moment they re-formed beside the Mound of the Platinum Elves. There was the fresh cairn of Serrilryan the were b.i.t.c.h, exactly as his vision-dream had shown it. "Anything I visualize as a sh.o.r.e, is a sh.o.r.e," Stile explained. "There does not have to be water." But as it happened, there was some cloud cover here, thickest in the lower reaches, so that the descending forest disappeared into a sealike expanse of mist. They stood on a kind of sh.o.r.e. Almost, he thought he saw wolf shapes playing on the surface of that lake of mist.

"And we were conducted-like the electricity of Proton frame," the Lady commented. "Methought thou wouldst provide us with wings to fly."

A dusky elf, garbed in platinum armor to shield his body from a possible ray of sunlight, appeared. He glanced up at Stile. "Welcome, Blue Adept and Lady," he said.

"Thy manner of greeting has improved since last we visited," the Lady Blue murmured mischievously.

"As well it might have," the elf agreed. "We know thee now."