The End of the Game Read Free Page B

through it, on the swing, as many counts as one could do. That’s only one rope tune, of course. There’s one about the first Eleven, and one about Larby Lanooly and a dozen more. Now that I am grown, wherever I go in the world, I hear children winging jax tunes or bounce-ball tunes or jumprope tunes, and they are the same in a dozen different tongues, the same all over the world.
    Stories, too. They used to tell me stories, the old dams. Especially Murzy. The one about Little Star and the Daylight Bell. She learned it when she was a girl from an old dam in Betand, but that story is told everywhere. How Little Star went wandering? You remember? And he came to the gobblermole, draggling in the earth. And he asks the gobblemole what he’s druggling for, and the mole says, “I’m druggling for the Daylight Bell.” Then when Little Star starts to druggle, too, Mole catches him and binds him up. And Little Star tricks him into getting loose, and binds him up, and demands a boon to let him go again. Remember the story? After the mole, he meets a d’bor wife grodgeling the water, and then a flitchhawk grimbling and grambling the air, and each of them is tricked into a boon. I loved that story. All children do.
    It was soon after the visit to the blind runners that I got sick. Cat Candleshy, one of the dams, said later it was probably some disease the runners had among them that our people had no resistance to. After a day or two of it, with me no better, and the fever burning hotter with each passing hour, old Murzy demanded a Healer be sent for. Through the haze of fever and pain, I remember Mother standing at the foot of my cot, her hair wild and lovely in the light from the window, saying impatiently, “There’s no need, Murzemire. She’ll get better or she won’t, and that’s all anyone can expect.” When they had shut the door behind her, Murzy cuddled me tight and said to hold on, she herself was going to Mip for the Healer. It seems she did, going completely on her own and sneaking the Healer back with her. She, the Healer, said she’d been fetched just in time. My lungs wheezed and sucked, and I couldn’t get air into them. She put her hands on me and reached down inside—I could feel it—to twist something or untwist it, whichever. It hurt. I remember yelling, partly from the pain, partly from the relief at being able to breathe again.
    She had to do it again, the day after, and it hurt again, but then I began to improve and the Healer merely sat by my bed, telling me stories about bodies. She told me of bones, and how the heart pumps the blood ‘round, and of the network of nerves from toetop to headtop, with tiny Elators flicking on the network to deliver messages. “Electrical,” she said, shaking her head in wonder at it all, “and chemical. Like lightning.”
    I remember sleepily asking her what they were called, the little Elators. She shook her head, laughing.
    “I call them nerve transmitters,” she said. “You might call them nerve Elators, if you like.” After that, I often thought of the little Elators in me, swift as storm, carrying their messages between my head and my fingers or toes.
    During my slow recovery, I remembered what Mother had said to Murzy. “She’ll get better or she won’t, and that’s all anyone can expect.” There was nothing unusual in her attitude or tone, neither more nor less interest about me than might have been there at any time previously. It was just then, every sense sharpened by the fever and the pain, that I understood the meaning of it. The meaning was, “Jinian will die or she won’t, and who cares?”
    I think I cried over this. There’s a vague memory of Murzy holding me on her lap in the rocking chair—me, a big girl of nine or ten—as though I were an infant. Later it didn’t seem so important. It was just the way things were, as thunder is loud or lightning unselective. No point arguing with the thunder or threatening the lightning. Just