They were both looking thoroughly dejected. I know my heart smote me. I suppose I wanted to make amends. That it was mostly my fault they were so dejected was plain. They both looked up warily, almost relieved I seemed friendly, but not sure I was. Maree went a little pink and said, “Nick’s still awash from breakfast, but I’d love a cup.”
The hotel had provided four cups, to go with the size of pot. Nick eyed them. “Me too. Who’s the fourth one for?”
“Nobody,” I said. We settled, sort of amicably, along the bench, looking out into the mirrors that lined the far wall. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” I found myself saying.
“So am I,” said Maree, with the gloomy sob prominent in her voice. “I’ve been thinking I probably said the unforgivable thing.”
“I wanted to make quite sure you didn’t believe it – that we secretly rule the world,” I said. This seemed to be the real reason I had sought the two of them out. That surprised me. “It caught me on the raw, because we do indeed do a fair amount of guiding and pushing and persuading when the need arises,” I said. “Sometimes we do tread a mighty thin line between persuading and ruling.”
“I thought you had to,” Nick said. “You must have to have rules about it.”
“Very strict ones,” I said.
“I wish I could make a computer game out of it,” he said wistfully. “But I bet I couldn’t. I tried to mention you to Dave – he runs the Games here – as an experiment, and I couldn’t. You did something to stop us. It wasn’t just threats, was it?”
It turned out that the reason they had run after me was Nick’s passionate desire to sell a couple of games he had invented. I have come across games submitted by kids before. They s
tink, frankly, and I had no reason to think Nick’s inventions were any different. But I was still wanting to make amends. I gave him a few names and addresses, which he wrote down rapturously.
While he wrote, Maree said, “There must be times when you can’t guide, or you know you mustn’t. It must have been like that in the World Wars. How does that work? It’s been worrying me.”
“It can be agonising,” I said, thinking of my current dealings with the Koryfonic Empire. “You just have to stand aside. Sometimes you get a directive to leave things alone, but sometimes you have to work out for yourself that there’s nothing you can do. There are times when you even have to go in and make things worse, knowing that millions of people—”
I stopped, because she had stopped attending. Her face was bright red and she was staring, one finger to the bridge of her glasses, at something across the room. Around us, the buzz of talk had died down considerably. I could hear gasps and murmurs. I looked at where Maree was staring and I know my mouth fell open.
Andrew was walking through the room – walking in that way of his, vague but single-minded, looking neither to right nor left, but somehow avoiding all obstacles, even people sprawled in his way, gazing up at him, and small children zigzagging across his path.
“Oh God!” Maree gasped sobbingly. “The fabulous Nordic type again!”
It looked as if every female in the place was saying, or thinking, the same. Even Janine had both hands clasped to her bleeding bosom and stared with the rest. Andrew certainly seemed healthier than when I last saw him. There was better colour in his face and he strode with a swing. But I never have the least idea what makes a man attractive to women. To me he was just my neighbour in a surprising holiday mood. I hadn’t realised he had meant to attend the Convention, but he had clearly paid at the door. He was even wearing convention-type clothes, more so than mine – a matter of a knee-length embroidered jacket in red and brown, and brown baggy pants that seemed to be cross-gartered. At any rate, red criss-cross bindings flashed forth with each of his purposeful strides, from knee to foot.
“Wonderful!” said Maree.
Nick jabbed my arm with his pen. “Look in the mirrors.”
I looked, up beyond Andrew, to Andrew’s reflection striding parallel through the reflection of the crowded room. Nick had noticed something I should have noticed myself. In the mirrors, Andrew wore a sort of navy blue battledress nipped in at the waist with a broad white canvas belt.
“It was like that when he came through yesterday,” Nick murmured. “Only it was ordinary clothes here, and a long overcoat like a tramp’s in the mirror.”
I was dumbfounded, for more than just one reason. Maree, beside me, moaned, “Oh. I wish I knew who he was!” and I realised that the reason I was not going to tell her had changed. When I first saw Andrew, I was not going to let on that I knew him out of pure, simple jealousy. Now I was not going to tell her because there was something very strange about my neighbour which it was my business as a Magid to investigate. Both reasons, and the fact that they were both true, held me rigid and dumb and staring, while Andrew strode on and strode out through the other end of the Grand Lobby.
Then I was galvanised. I leapt up and rushed after him.
I could not see Andrew anywhere. I could not even sense his presence. And I never learnt what makes good fantasy. I was too busy roving over the hotel hunting for him and trying to come to terms with that double realisation. Kicking myself. Why had I not realised that I had been wildly attracted to the sense of Maree that I had followed all over Bristol that time? Because she had annoyed me by mad behaviour that didn’t live up to my romantic expectations, I suppose. I had let that totally mess up my search for a new Magid. And on top of that, Andrew had been my neighbour for two years and I had not noticed anything wrong with him. I had had to have it pointed out by a teenage boy!
Such was my distraction that the nearest I got to the panel I had meant to attend was when I edged through an agitated knot of people outside the main hall clustering round Tina Gianetti.
“I tell you it’s a migraine!” Gianetti was yelling. I remember she looked very unwell.
“Nonsense, darling. You should know a hangover when you see one at your age,” said a man in a suit next to her – her agent? boyfriend? both? “Take another aspirin.”
“I tell you I am incapable of chairing this or any other panel today!” Gianetti screamed. “They’re all futile anyway. All they do is bitch.”
“Why not go in there and see how you do, Ms Gianetti?” Maxim was suggesting in the soothing tones of pure desperation, as I edged by.
Later on in my rovings, I learnt that this was what she did. I met Kees Punt in the sandwich bar. “And that was just about all she did,” he told me with his mouth full. “She leant back in her chair and let the speakers get on with it. It was a great joke, because each of them bobbed up and said that their own book was the only good fantasy ever written – except for the great Ted Mallory, who said he was not going to compete.”
“He had a hangover too, I think,” I said.