Title: Agamemnon at Aulis
Author: Loren Cooper
Last saved by: Cooper, Loren W
Company: Hewlett Packard

Cooper                                                                                       Lives Of Ghosts/

The Lives Of Ghosts
And Other Shades of Memory

Loren W. Cooper

	The Lives Of Ghosts first appeared in Altair, July 1998. Also appeared in Eternity Online and the Proper Boskonian, 1998. Won the NESFA Short Story Contest in 1998.

	Lanikaula and the Powers of Lanai first appeared in Altair, January 1998.

	The Last Perfect Day was printed by Wolf Press in 1998.

	Agamemnon At Aulis	first appeared in Writers On The Web, 1998.

	Heart’s Reach first appeared in Millennium, 1997.

	Rule first appeared in Infinity Online, 1997.

	The Hubris Effect first appeared in Ibn Qirtaiba, 1996.

	The Fix first appeared in Masquerade, 1997.

	The Names Of Love first appeared in The Tales’ Realm, 1997.

	Soldier’s Home first appeared in Dark Planet, 1996.

	The Eyes Of Yesterday appeared in the first online convention at the Dominion, as a feature of Dubious Matter, 1995.

The Lives Of Ghosts

One

For a year that would see the beginning of one of humanity’s largest mass insanities, 1914 had a way of producing incongruously fine weather. And in Sarajevo, June 28, the crowds enjoyed the full measure of the sun’s beaming warmth. 
Had Leonidas been present to enjoy the day, even he would undoubtedly have been kindly inclined toward Apollo. I happen to know, since he mentioned the weather once after witnessing one of Ferdinand’s assassinations. Ferdinand himself must have made an impression, since Leonidas had been willing to admit, despite the fact that his gambit had failed that day, that Ferdinand did die well. 
Leonidas has always respected that sort of thing.
I wasn’t there as a Player this time, or even an Agent, though I had taken my turn on this dance floor before: successfully and unsuccessfully. Win some, lose some.
On this occasion, I had been invited to this particular Line by Richard of Gloucester on a private matter. Since I had no intention of bringing the Game into this Line, I dawdled idly, looking for Richard. He has always had a weakness for certain windmills, so I expected to see signs of some of his Agents sharpening his lancehead in a corner somewhere. Richard would charge full tilt at Sarajevo time after time, having racked up a larger total of saves for Ferdinand than any of us. I also kept an eye out for the opposition, since there were a number, Frederick among them, who were irritated at Richard’s penchant for nipping the whole thing in the bud. Frederick liked to let the entire game run well into the second quarter, then nudge events toward the Kaiser. Awfully nationalist of him, but he’s not a bad guy despite that.
I spotted movement in the upper floor of a dusty hotel on the edge of the parade route. Not as good for a sniper position, but it would have potential for observation. I decided to ease up there and see if Richard had taken it for a base of operations, or if one of the others could point me in Richard’s direction. Everyone should know that I had no intention of Playing, this time around, so if I could stay out of the crossfire, I should have no problems unless that room happened to belong to a bunch of outraged Serbs. And even if it did, the advanced armorsuit I wore under my clothing should stop all but the inconvenience of any weapons the natives would have at their disposal.
Considering the possibility of stumbling into a crossfire, I kept a cautious eye peeled as I stepped through the front door and the lobby beyond, but grinned when I saw Howard. Richard had a certain consistency in his choice of Agents that I couldn’t help but admire, and Sir John Howard is perhaps the best of a capable lot. I nodded to him, and he returned the barest fraction of a response, waving me up the stairs with a single curt gesture. 
My brow creased slightly as I absorbed this. I knew Sir John fairly well, and admired him as a study in the classical virtues as well as a good number of the modern ones. I took the stairs two at a time, suddenly concerned that this invitation of Richard’s had more serious implications. 
I stopped at the door and knocked before entering, both as a gesture of respect and because Richard was one of the most directly dangerous Players. Years of personal participation in the Game at a level most of the other Players never experience first hand (preferring to rely strictly on their Agents for the actual dirty deeds) had honed his already awesome personal competence to a level well beyond the mortal pale. Of all the Players only Musashi or Achilles stood any chance in hand to hand, though any number of subtler Players would never come that close in the first place.
“Come.”
I opened the door and entered the room slowly. The furniture had been rolled out of the way. Richard’s back faced me as he leaned on the sill, looking down over the gathering crowd. A naked broadsword leaned against the wall on one side of Richard, a bolt-action Mauser mirroring it on the other side. Noting these things, I waited for him to speak. Though I thought I expected the worst, he surprised me.
“Why did you do it?”
His voice had a certain deadness of tone that sent a shiver of adrenaline through my body. “What?”
He turned, and past him I could see a bulky silhouette shrug into an empty window in a building on the other side of the street. Then I saw the darkness in Richard’s eyes, and I knew myself for a dead man. “Richard...”
One hand drifted down to the hilt of the broadsword. 
I reached for the Fires, hoping to open a Corridor. If I could make him pursue me to my own ground, perhaps I stood some small chance of surviving this. My eyes widened in surprise as I felt a great cold where the Fires should have burned. I hadn’t known that it was possible to cut a player off from the Fires of Eternity.
He swept the sword up and across in a slash. 
I lunged toward the furniture, hooked a chair and threw it back as I felt the heat of blood curling down my ribs. My upper body felt chilled, not a positive sign, that damned sword having apparently peeled my armorsuit back as easily as it had opened my flesh. 
Well, hell, I didn’t have any exclusive rights to high technology, though I thought Richard more faithful to the Rules of Play than to bring OutLine technology into the Game, even if only in the form of a blade with a monofilament edge. 
On the other hand, killing another Player was considered something of a technical infraction as well. 
He backhanded the chair out of his way absently, his return stroke splintering the bones of my left forearm. 
I threw myself back, toward the window. I grabbed the rifle with my right hand as I twisted, rolling over the sill to hit and slide along the overhanging porch. I had an idle curiosity as to how I might be able to work the action of the rifle with only one arm. I didn’t even know if Richard had  loaded the damned thing, but taking it seemed like a good idea at the time. As I collected numerous splinters from the rough-cut shingles on my way to the ground, I caught a glimpse of that building across the street and saw the long tube extending out past the blowing curtains.
Funny, the things you remember after times like that. The scene remains frozen in my mind: Richard with one foot on the sill, his sword weeping my blood all over the shingled roof of the porch; the glint of sunlight along the barrel of the recoilless rifle across the street; myself, scrabbling down the incline, hopefully to drop into the street below and at least delay the inevitable, incredulously wondering what I could have done recently to piss anyone off this badly, much less Richard. 
Then I heard the hiss of the projectile as I rolled over the lip of the porch roof, and the building exploded. Everything lost focus for a while, and when I came back to consciousness I could smell scorched  meat. Most of the harsh smell probably came from me, since I seemed to be half-buried under a burning building. 
The sound of the fire consumed most of my attention, so I couldn’t tell if the crowd was gathering to try and pull anyone out of the fire, or if they were just opening bags of marshmallows. Either way, I didn’t really want to rely on the good will of my fellow man or their primitive medicine.
With the more mundane flames vying with Richard’s handiwork for what little remained of my hide, I reached for the Fires of Eternity again out of desperation. They came raging to my hand, and I spent most of my remaining strength opening the Corridor. I dragged myself into it carefully, leaving Ferdinand to his fate, and somnambulated as far as I could. On the ragged edges of consciousness, I headed for a certain Line that featured excessive kindness as one of its predominant traits, but I didn’t make it that far. 

Two

I woke in a white room, occupied by people clothed in white, lit by glaring white light. This hadn’t been exactly what I had in mind, but it was an improvement over the place I had just left.
One of the white-clad servants of the general weal must have seen some sign of life from my battered frame, since she stepped to my bedside and looked down at me kindly. “Feeling better?”
I smiled to hear English, and took quick stock. The numbness of pharmaceutical bliss swaddled me like a babe in rum-soaked cotton. I hated the feeling of weakness, but kept my smile. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a coach and team, and not one of those bloody horses missed a trick.”
Her eyebrows shot up above the mask, and I gauged that reaction. Nothing too remarkable, and what I could see of her indicated more affront at the profanity than surprise at the reference to horses. Probably not too far outside a main Line, then, which could be good or bad. I felt myself slipping, so I leaned back and closed my eyes against the cruel whites of that place. 
Perhaps the harsh angularity and slashing, merciless light brought it back to me, or maybe it was just the drugs. Old dreams, dark memories of a time I had thought to forget. I took plenty of time to prepare, in those days, with an extra suit of clothing ready and water available for washing. I took everything with me, of course, burying the incriminating evidence in the piles of rubbish in a nearby alley afterwards when they came too close.
 	They had moved with desperate speed, for this particular instance I had been caught early, chased away in the midst of taking my pleasure, and so I approached the street warily, studying the shadows surrounding me, that cloying darkness more familiar than any lover. The shadows were always with me then, even in the light, singing with the pounding in my skull. Brushing distastefully at clothing artfully dusted with refuse, I eased down toward the light, careful to avoid the piles of rubbish and thick streams of reeking waste seeping from them. 
The stench hung over me in a miasma so thick that I seemed to chew it as I breathed, so I paused, leaning against the rough brick for support and concealment. Men and women draped in their grimy best stood huddled in glare of  the hissing streetlight as large policemen questioned them with nervous intensity. I started to draw back, obeying some buried instinct, but a stocky public servant swathed in blue snapped his head around to the alley and lunged in my direction. “Dick, I thought you checked the alley!”
Startled, I spread my hands and staggered back. Bodies converged, rough hands closed on my arms, forced me against the wall, and searched me ruthlessly. Then they dragged me, blinking, out into the light. 
“Show me your hands!” The man’s white face didn’t match his harsh tone. 
I brought my hands forward into the light with a quiet hesitance not wholly contrived. The stocky policeman grabbed my wrists and rolled my hands, inspecting them. 
He shook his head. “Too clean. Nothing on him. Not our man.”
A collective sigh of relief went through the crowd. The policeman leaned forward and touched my face gently, his hand brushing the swelling bruise I had set across my own cheekbone with the edge of a rough wooden door. “God! Looks like someone’s done you up proper.”
I nodded as I felt the hands on me fall away. I turned my head, glancing down to where uniforms clustered thickly around an open door. Distantly, as my eyes traced the lines of familiar buildings, I heard someone retching.
“Did you see anyone? Hear anything?” 
I shook my head slowly.
The policeman ran a shaking hand across his eyes. “Damn. You gave us quite a scare, walking in on us like that. I see you’ve had a bad night of it. Well, it’s not been a good one for any of us, and worse for some. Go home now, guv. Sleep it off.”
I nodded, walked through the crowd and the policemen who stood at the edges. All of them, including the uniformed authorities, gave off a stench of fear that made my pulse quicken in response. I looked back once, where the uniforms gathered close like flies around rotting meat, and I felt the darkness swell to cover me like a cloak.
When I woke again, I tasted the foulness of my own mouth and grimaced. 
I hate drugs. 
I opened my eyes to see two men wearing severe dark suits. At the stiff formality clinging to their solid frames, I pegged them as instruments of the local law and decided to leave this place as soon as I could clear my head enough to bend the Fires to my will.
The cop on the left had that skeptical glint in his eye that most of them cultivate, while his partner had a cheerful smile on his face. He probably whistled merrily through his teeth while beating little old ladies in the kidneys with a telephone book.
The skeptical one started off. “Can you tell us what happened?”
I took the dumb route, and shook my head innocently. 
The cheerful one leaned forward. They needed to pick up a new routine. In my experience, alternating good cop and bad cop has been done to death. “Let’s start with your name.”
I wondered how far I should take this. “John.”
The cheerful one nodded encouragingly. “John who? You didn’t have any identification when you were admitted.”
“John Bull.”
“Good.” He smiled and bounced on his toes while his partner made notations on a small laptop. I noted that and narrowed my general vicinity on the Lines. English and this particular level of technology told me that I had dropped out closer to my current base of operations than that utopian paradise of milk, honey, and free advanced medicine I had originally had in mind.
This might not be as bad as I feared.
“Tell me, sir, do you remember your Social Security Number?”
Then again...
Since I didn’t even know how many digits they might have in their nasty little identification numbers, I had to shake my head again. 
The cheerful one’s face curdled slightly. He was disappointed in me, I could tell. His partner, on the other hand, brightened noticeably. He either loved a good mystery, or he was imagining the kinesthetic pleasure to be derived from the solid heft of a short length of rubber hose. 
The cheerful one rolled his shoulders like a strangler. “Do you remember any of your assailants?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Assailants?”
He nodded. “The doctor told me that you showed definite signs of having been attacked. Cut and burned. I was wondering if you might have any description for us.”
I bit my lip, hopefully painting an exacting portrait of a mortified victim. “I don’t really remember any of it. It was all so fast...”
They exchanged meaningful looks. “I see. Well, sir, if you need any assistance, or if you remember anything, be sure to call. We’re placing a guard outside your door, for your own protection.”
I felt better already.
After giving me one more good look, so that they would have something to compare with  their mugshot files, they left. Hoping that they amused themselves with that all night, I sat up slowly in bed. The room danced a minor jig, but steadied quickly. I have a strong system, and had placed it under enough strain in the past to know that I could open a Corridor, but that it might be better to wait. 
Then I felt the Fires flare around me, and I reached with instinctive fear, formed my own Corridor, and got the hell out of there, still dangling various tubes and sensors. I didn’t have many friends, and Richard could have survived. I did, after all. 
At any rate, I refused to gamble with what was left of my hide. 
I didn’t feel up to holding off determined opposition, so I hedged my bets and headed for my Mentor’s place. Even Richard wouldn’t strike at me there without at least declaring his reasons before the Assembly.

Three

I fled down the Corridors, dropping out at the marble gates of the estate. I walked through the unguarded gates that never closed and into the front gardens. Amidst the familiar faces focused in animated conversation as their feet followed the myriad paths wending their way through the fig trees and among the winding vines, I noted the less familiar features of those Players from later Lines. Late afternoon sun slanted down through air so crisp every breath felt like the first, lighting rainbows in the dancing waters of the fountains. 
I felt the eyes upon me, saw glances flicker and steps falter. Whatever had happened with Richard, the news had taken wing. Quite frankly, most of the Players here undoubtedly knew more about my situation than I did. My chances of putting my hands on any of that information, naturally, depended on what I had to trade. 
I set a fast pace, intending on reaching the sanctuary of the villa itself, when a stocky man in black stepped around a path. I looked into those bone-pale eyes and smiled in spite of myself. “Cain. It’s been long since we’ve met, and even longer since you’ve been here.”
Cain smiled as much as he ever does, which is to say minutely. “Jack. You’ve been busy.”
“Busier lately,” I said dryly, the name still bringing the sour twist to my stomach. “What brings you out of the wild places?”
His face relaxed back into the bland mask that was his usual expression. “It’s a dangerous time to be a Player, Jack. Remember that.”
I nodded as he walked on past me. I kept my own expression blank, but my thoughts were racing. Whatever brought Cain out of his den, it wasn’t anything as small as my own personal welfare. I knew him better than most, for we shared remorse and a certain distaste for the Game, but no one really knew Cain, and Cain held himself separate from the Players as well as the Game itself. As old as any who walked the Lines, the death of a Player certainly wouldn’t concern him unduly. 
Then a hand fell on my shoulder, and I turned, taking a half-step back, one hand reaching for the weapon I no longer carried. 
Scipio grinned at me. “Good idea, Jack. Get the habits back. You’ll be needing them.”
With anyone else, I’d be wondering if that were advice or a threat, but I knew Scipio well enough to know that his words had been in the nature of a warning. 
When Scipio Africanus and Cain himself both give you a warning in the space of five minutes, you’d damned well better sit up and notice. I could suddenly feel the draft through the thin fabric of the hospital gown, and for the first time in many years I found myself wishing for a weapon. I shrugged the desire away, but the tension settled over me like a cloud of electricity. I didn’t even feel safe on the grounds of the estate. 
I left the gardens behind, slipping through the atrium and into the main hall, dominated by the sunlight slanting down through the inpluvium and sparkling in the crystal waters below. Servants, either Agents as I had once been or old enemies serving out the terms of a lost wager, were the only visible people walking purposefully aside from myself. 
I attracted attention, naturally, but no one actually displayed anything other than casual interest. I saw Machiavelli placing bets with Hippocrates in one corner, and knew that the dapper Italian was about to lose at the dregs again. Solon nodded, chuckling at something Hammurabi had just said, and I resisted the urge to laugh myself as I saw that the Lawmaker’s magnificent beard had been sheared into the elegant Elizabethan style. Maybe he had a hot date with Elizabeth, or maybe he’d begun Playing again, or maybe he’d done it to see what kind of loose talk he could start. 
Then I saw her, reclining elegantly and deep in conversation with Philip of Macedon. I didn’t see Philip’s son about, but that didn’t surprise me. They didn’t get along.
Livia was as I remembered her: ageless, beautiful, as ruthless as any man to ever play the game and considerably more wily than most. I hesitated, not wanting to do anything uncouth. Livia would laugh off an assassination attempt over wine, but she considered a lack of courtesy the worst of all offenses. She remembered discourtesy.
Perhaps that’s one reason she’d never really enjoyed the company of the few Moderns I’d seen her meet. 
I felt a light touch at my shoulder, and looked up to see Mucius Scaevola. His leathery face was as unreadable as ever. “She has your old room ready for you, Jack. She’s been expecting you.”
I blew my breath out loosely through my cheeks, weakness beginning to settle through the adrenaline cloud. Mucius escorted me, which made me feel safer, but refused to touch me even when I staggered slightly. Some things are remarkably steady in the infinite variety of the Lines, and one of these is Mucius’ incorruptible stolidity. I felt strangely reassured by the fact of his honest disapproval of who I had been.
He closed the door gently behind me as I availed myself of the chilled fruit and wine. When I lay back on the couch, thinking of Livia and the days I left behind when she introduced me to the Fires and I graduated from Agent to Player, I thought of how she had used me, how she had made me see clearly what I had been, then gave me an alternative. I lived because of Livia, and I changed because of what she showed me about the man I had been and the man I could become.
It had been in a train station, the distant scream of the train throbbing in the cloying silence of my aching head. The pain had not yet retreated so far in those days, and the remorse had not yet grown. I lived it again, watching in my mind’s eye the movement of those distant figures in a possibility to be determined by the fortunes of the Game. 
I watch the two of them working from opposite ends, the woman closer to the boy than the man. Their faces share certain lines of desperate certainty that mark them for me even more clearly than the description Livia gave me. 
I didn’t know it then, but she’d had me working against one of Sargon’s gambits, and he’d never been subtle. He had given Livia a certain number of Agents to be set against me, and these two were the last. I had known his Agents’ descriptions; they had known nothing of me. Those were the rules of that particular Game.
I shift slightly in the crowd, watching the boy. A stocky lad in his early teens, this wager taking place long before he will guide Britain through her darkest hours, he has no knowledge of any of the Players or Agents, his pursuers or his protector. I have nothing of myself but a dark place in my mind that once drove me beyond the pale. I am Livia’s Agent, not yet a Player, not even a human being in the most important ways.
I walk casually through the crowd, knowing the time for movement, calculating the woman’s path and the swelling rumble of the onrushing train. I parallel her course, watching for that perfect moment, then fall in beside her, forcing her toward the edge of the platform with slow, deliberate footfalls. It takes her two steps to notice the careful alteration of her course, and by the time she turns to look up irritably at me, I plant one hand just under her ribcage and push smoothly. 
Only a few notice when she vanishes into the rolling thunder of the train, and none see me as I wind deliberately back, toward the boy. The man notices, and his pace quickens, but I have timed it carefully. As he lunges at the boy, I step past and pivot. One arm slides around his neck, the other rises from my pocket with a knife. The knife slides in neatly under the jaw, but he arches as he dies, and I feel the thin surgical steel of the precision blade snap. 
I release the handle of the knife, cursing under my breath, and roll his weight to my shoulder, walking him to an empty bench like some sodden companion. Almost no blood seeps from the wound, for I have struck well and quickly, and no one notices me in the press of the crowd as I leave him there, hunched loosely at the corner of the bench like a man who’s had to much to drink. 
I step into a nearby washroom, locking the door and taking the time to inspect myself carefully. I find a couple of spots of blood on my sleeve, another on my cravat. Cursing, I tear the cravat from my throat and bury it in the waste basket. I scrub quickly at my sleeve until the stains fade into the dark material. For an instant, staring into the pale eyes of the face in the mirror, a ghost of memory visits me, and I shudder as pieces of the past fall around me.
Remembering the things I have done, the man I have been, I know I will never remove the blood, so much blood, enough to bathe in, enough to drown in. As I look away from that mirror, in the moments before Livia opens the Corridor, I see the changes that have already been wrought within me. I fall to my knees, the weight of these memories too heavy to bear. And when Livia opens the Corridor she finds me there, curled on the floor and crying out for the mercy of death.
I think that’s when she decided I had potential as a Player. 

Four

Lying on Livia’s couch, fading into sleep, those memories preyed on me. In the days before Livia found me, I had gone deeper into the darkness than any man should, living always under the shadow of a nightmare rage.
I twisted under the merciless pressure of memory, perhaps I cried out, and the soft touch of a gentle hand brought me out of the dark recesses of my memories. I opened my eyes slowly, and Livia smiled down at me gently. “You’ve been busy, Jack.”
She spoke Latin flawlessly. My own schoolboy pigdin had sharpened in years of her service. Though she spoke a countless number of other tongues, she found them uniformly barbaric, an arrogance common to early players and probably one reason fewer and fewer Players joined our ranks as time rolled along its course of infinite variation.
I coughed and pulled myself upright, aching all over. “Not my choice.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? I heard you were Playing again not too terribly long before I heard about Mary and Richard.”
I frowned. A conversation with Livia can be more dangerous than a swordfight with the Duke of Gloucester. “Mary?”
“You hadn’t heard? Richard found the Queen of the Scots out on some quiet Line. Someone killed her. Someone with a knife. Someone who knew your style.”
My stomach spasmed within me, and Livia watched me closely as I retched. I understood, now, why Richard had tried to kill me. I pulled myself upright and met her gaze, teeth clenched. “No.”
She nodded quietly. “I didn’t think so, but I had to know. Richard was too tempting for the killer not to use, and there have been others.”
“Others?”
She watched me carefully. “Napoleon took a sniper’s bullet in yet another shot at Dien Bien Phu. Nelson tripped over Nobunaga’s head outside one of his favorite haunts. No one knows where the body is. The admiral disappeared shortly after telling me about it, and he hasn’t been seen since. Boudicca had an accident involving a spear, Mary went under the knife, and Richard disappeared in a ball of flame with you. That’s just a few, just the ones we know about. Others have vanished, and no bodies have yet been found. Whether they are hiding, or have already been taken more quietly, we have no way of knowing. Some of us had begun checking into things, and you were one of the few with the experience to do this kind of thing and keep it quiet. Suspicions about you generally died when you walked into Richard’s trap, but now that you’ve walked out you have once again become the focus of popular attention. Where have you been Playing?”
I heard the sharpness in her tone, and understood how serious the situation had become. “Up the Lines, on the edge of the Dead Zone.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What were you doing up there?”
“Testing some theories.” I resisted the urge to lick my lips. If I didn’t satisfy Livia’s curiosity, I was a dead man. “Pushing the balance, to see if I couldn’t narrow the Dead Zone. I wanted to see if I could save something out of all that death.”
Livy shook her head. “Idealistic. I’d thought you’d outgrown that. Not many points to be earned up the Line, none from threading your way through the crazed and the fools. Wars and politics, pivotal moments, there’s the points.”
I caught her eye. “And the death of the race? Not pivotal enough?”
She smirked and shifted to English. “Not clear enough. Too many causes. Stamp one terrorist group out, some damned fool mutates a killer disease in his home biobank and starts the ball rolling. People aren’t any crazier up there, there’s simply more of them with access to more destructive power. Besides, why waste time? They’re only ghosts. That’s the name of the Game. We juggle Lines of probability, wagering on the lives of ghosts. We are all that is real in this phantom place.”
I shook my head. “Further up the Lines, I’ve run across an idea that almost describes the Lines, and a part of that says that the observer influences those things he observes.”
Livia cocked her head, eyes bright. “So?”
“It cuts both ways. By choosing to observe, the observer chooses to exclude something else. What might that observer have seen if he weren’t looking so hard at his particular target? What would we be doing if we weren’t playing the Game? What would we see if we weren’t so busy fighting old battles once lost, repeating lessons never learned, or living our lives through people oblivious to our existence? Who are the ghosts, Livia? Us or them?”
Livia laughed quietly. “You’ve been spending too much time with Cain. The two of you sound much alike. If the fabric of History swirls about you such that you catch the eye of a Player, and the Fires do not consume you, then you are real. More real than all those others who will never ride the infinite variety of the Lines.”
“But is it right to spend our time Playing with all the myriad lives that come into our hands?”
Livia kissed me softly on the lips, then drew away to look me in the eye. “Too much philosophy, Jack. There is no morality, there is only possibility. We do what we are able to do. By doing, we make it right.”
I pulled back, shaking my head. “No. Or it applies equally well to the killer.”
Her face lost all expression, and she rose to her feet slowly. “He’s broken the rules of his peers, Jack. He must die. Hammurabi has called a meeting of all Players.” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I found a bomb, earlier.”
Cold shock touched me, and I hoped Livia believed me. She would have no mercy for the fool who violated the neutrality of her sanctuary. “What do you want me to do?”
Her gaze flicked to my face, then she smoothed my hair with an absent hand. “Relax, Jack.  This is just like old times, again. I have always been able to depend on you.”
She turned and left, closing the door gently behind her. I stood and checked the closet. She had hung a suit for me, so I dressed quickly, taking care with my arm. She would leave me an open path. I had cleared myself in her eyes, and she must have her suspicions as to who had done these things. She wanted me to act as her Agent in this. I had my own ideas, but I needed time to think, let it all work in my mind, and decide what to do if I did uncover the culprit without becoming the next victim.  
I reached, burned, and opened the door, stepping out of that place and into the frozen light of the Corridors. My steps carried me, winding in ever tightning gyres, ever down and in, until I came to the empty places at the far edges of the Lines. Several times along the way I paused, for I could have sworn I heard a light footfall, and felt a silent presence. Once I called out, but no one responded. If my shadow existed outside the darkness of my own mind, he could have taken my life at any time, but I came at last to the places I sought without mishap.
So many deaths; so many ways to die. I walked through battlefields silent but for the wailing of ghosts, occupied by the dead ranked as they had fallen, armor rusting on the field, terrible engines of destruction empty and impotent without the mind and hand of their makers to guide them. I stood bathed in the terrible glow yet undimmed so many years after death had blossomed like a thousand tiny suns, only shielded from the fires of that devastation by the Fires of Creation that made me a Player. Vast the wastelands that stretched over empty earths, deep the ferocity of the mindless things that tore still at the flesh of planets no longer cursed by life, endless the infinite malice and unquenchable thirst for death of this race, this thing called mankind.
I walked alone, but I could hear the ghosts of those places clearly, perhaps due to the ghosts I  carried with me. All the lives I had taken rose to lay cold hands on my spine as I walked, voices I had once stilled murmuring softly at my back. They walked always in my shadow, but I heard their tread most clearly in the still and silent places. 
Such burdens are the most difficult to carry.
I walked these futures in the company of ghosts, considering the unlimited capacity for good and evil which defines our humanity. I thought about my own past, the black hungers that had driven me to monstrous acts before Livia had found me at the end of my natural span and excised the malignancy in my brain which had tormented me and would soon have ended my life. And I thought of the work I had done here on these lonely Lines, trying to stem the tide, trying to blunt the rage enough for some few to survive. I had no more right to give them their lives in such an awful place than I had to take them when the knife rose and fell to delicate crimson notes, holding all London hostage to my own consuming fury in the days when I signed my notes to the police with the single name of Jack. 
Understand, I disagreed with the poets: it didn’t really matter to the people involved if the world ended with a bang or a whimper. Either way, dead is dead. 
I had come to see that people, whether in infinite progression or not, lived the lives they had been given. Who were we to decide which Line gained ascendance, to step in and interfere for a few points on a social scale? 
In that moment I saw the infinite length of the Lines, and as I considered the expanse of endless possibility, I knew what a distraction it would make. All of history to draw the observer’s eye, but from what would the eye be drawn? 
For one staggering instant I struck through the veil and opened my eyes to what lay beyond, so bright and shining, a light so pure as to consume all that beheld, a light that waited patiently to be noticed, the Light of Creation itself. Fear closed over me, and I turned away, and I knew what it meant to be damned.
 	With that thought, suspicions firmed, and I knew the killer.
The Fires swept up around me, and the Corridors swallowed me, and I heard nothing more out of my shadow as I walked puposefully down the halls of time, spanning epochs with every step. After an instant of time out of mind, I closed the Corridor behind me, walking slowly up through the thick grasses to the mouth of the cave. In all the times I had been here, I had never seen another human being. I had always thought he simply preferred it thus.
I stepped in, expecting to find him, and walked down the winding length of the ancient cave. I had never been this far inside his personal refuge, so the paintings caught me by surprise, but I knew them all. Most of the faces were familiar; others I hadn’t met. All had played the Game. Richard’s face was touched with sadness, Livia had the sharp eyes of a hawk, and Mucius wore his honesty like a crown. For an instant I saw each of them with the artist’s eye, knew them as he knew them, and loved them as he did. 
I felt a Corridor open above me, and met him at the mouth of the cave. He leaned against the rock face, a slight smile on his face, dressed all in black. He nodded. “Jack.”
I returned the gesture of respect. “Cain.”

Five

We stood side by side, facing down the slope, watching the grasses sway in the blowing wind. I broke the silence first. “Why, Cain?”
He grimaced. “I heard you were Playing again.”
I started to interrupt, but I stopped when he gave me a long look. “I had hopes for you. You knew what it meant to carry that deep ache around in your soul. You knew what it felt like to look back on the things you had done with loathing. I thought you knew responsibility. I thought  that you knew remorse. When I heard that you had taken a hand in the Game, I knew I had been wrong. The Lawmaker’s Game would never stop, more would join and meddle with the Lines, destroying lives on a whim. Those people, all their lives, are real. We are a dream they have in the dark places of their hearts. We have no right to use them so.”
I cursed, softly. “The Game hurts us more than them.”
He nodded. “I know. My mistake. I never should have brought the first ones to this place, and introduced them to the Fires. But I longed for company, to ease this endless procession of days. And I damned those who followed with a word and a gesture.”
He closed his eyes. “The slate must be wiped clean. I began this madness. I will end it.”
I laid my hand on his shoulder. “They know, by now. Livia does, at least. It won’t be so easy for you.”
He looked up me and laughed, blue eyes sparkling. “Won’t it? Livia is an intelligent woman, a masterful player, but young for the Game. How many bombs did she find? Hammurabi has called the Assembly as I hoped. He began the hunt, and I have finished it. Clean, swift, as it should be. I bore them no malice.”
I knew the truth when I heard it. “And I’m the last.”
He sighed. “I’m not strong enough, Jack. I can’t take the last step. I can’t bear the silence.”
We both felt the Corridor open at the same time and turned. Richard’s face had clenched into a mask of hate under the burns. I threw myself back, but he ignored me and lunged at Cain. Cain shrugged a pistol into one hand as Richard closed. I heard shots, saw the flurry of motion, and stepped forward. Richard fell, bleeding from chest and mouth.
I breathed deeply, watching Cain pull Richard’s sword out of his body. I heard Richard cough, a wet, tearing sound, and then he lay still. Watching Cain’s empty eyes, my hand closed on the pistol where it had fallen in the grass.
Cain swayed slightly as he stood, Richard’s sword dangling from one hand, blood darkening the black of his shirt. I raised the pistol slowly, the weapon impossibly light in my hands, seductively comfortable. Cain’s mouth twisted, his face hardening, his eyes burning into another place, another time. He raised the sword, moving with a dancer’s grace through the steps of that first murder, the movement he had created back when the world was new. The pistol felt steady in my hands, the report impossibly loud. 
He faltered, the dance falling away to incompletion, and raised his eyes to regard something I could not see. When he fell, the lines of pain and sadness had smoothed from his face, his expression open as I had never seen it, a smile curving his lips.
I buried them both in that place, down at the bottom of the hill where the grasses grow long and the winds speak in hushed voices.
Nothing remains of Livia’s estate. I looked, of course, but in all this passing time I’ve never seen another lost soul. If any of the Players survived, they’ve buried themselves so deeply in the Lines that I can not find them.
I remain alone, and wait.
I come back often to tend the graves and listen to the mournful winds singing in the heights. I keep the dust from the paintings and study those proud faces traced so lovingly by a master’s hand. 
I am a wandering spirit, walking continually the infinite Lines of Possibility, a hollow man filled with the dust of bitter memories. Perhaps in the depths of time I will forget, and repeat his mistake, and fill this place again with restless hearts and burning passion. Or I might remain alone in the silent places, thinking always of the consuming purity of the light I fear above all else. Or perhaps one day I will take that last step, leave these empty places behind, and walk out into the light. I will welcome that day when I weaken, and the darkness no longer comforts me; when I can at last let these burdens fall, and lay aside all the lives of my ghosts.