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“What did you inscribe?”
He had waited in the vault mesmerized by the stain while Ivy dictated the final message to the Order, which then inscribed the pie sheet and inserted it into the Oopsah in the same place as Ivy’s sheet in the last iteration. They snapped off two upper corners of the frame of the Oopsah, bent back the vertical members, inserted the sheet along with Zranga’s original sheets from the last iteration, and reassembled the frame. Mutt had no idea what she had written.
She began the inscription, encrypted by displacements of pi and e and prefaced by the word “pie”:
To my future self. You must kill Arvin and Kitla. They are not your parents. You are the daughter of Yarly and Prudence. You were taken from them after their spiking and given to the Inta. They are agents of Muglair and will thwart Tobor’s plot, which must succeed to save the planet. They sabotaged the great door and stopped the assassination. You must leave Harmour before Tobor returns. You are pregnant. You must go to the Edge. You know who will be there. He is the seventh son of the seventh son, and your only hope. You may read no further until the 2nd of Skitton, and you must read on that date. The Arland official weather reports will provide substitution numbers.
These were the exact words she had written in the prior iteration and decoded in the clean room while Zranga was on the Silent Sea. “Pie” was a personal code she had developed for amusement during those long boring days in the den on Lane Navachi. She could not change these words in the new inscription without risk of changing the immediate future in the next iteration, which could lead to her losing Mutt and Hope and release Tobor from the binds of determinism. Nothing could be different until after Hope was conceived. The Second of Skitton was well after her birth. After this date Ivy could change the future without losing her family. The prior Ivy had not known what would happen between her reading of the Oopsah and the Second of Skitton. But she understood that gains needed to be consolidated, so if by that date the future had gone well she had a mechanism for protecting it in future iterations. All she had to do was not change the first message and the future would proceed identically up until reading of the next message. Ivy had not understood the phrase “seventh son” when she read it in the clean room. Her prior self knew that this was Interior code for sons of the martyrs, and that the seventh son of the seventh son was the child of Outin and Paxa, but her current self had not learned this expression. She also had not understood that she was the Controller.
She had believed Tobor was still the Controller and she was sneaking in secret instructions, even though she had replaced his new instructions with his prior ones thereby trapping him in a loop and robbing him of the power to change destiny. She did add one line to his prior instructions, strangely out of place, telling him in his own voice to share the Oopsah with his wife before departing for the Silent Sea. Her prior self, the one who somehow managed to insinuate herself into the vault to inscribe the pie sheet and replace Tobor’s new inscriptions, had not understood that the eternal change was occurring. She had not had time in that life to think through the consequences of her actions or to write detailed instructions for her current self. She had only an intuition to seek Mutt Ogga which she now believed was her mother’s guiding spirit.
“We must go,” Ivy said.
“Where?” Mutt asked
“Do not ask questions.”
Hope was pushing a beetle around with a stick on the dirt floor. Ivy picked her up.
“My sweet child, you are going to have a play date.”
Hope seemed dazed by the swiftness of her mother’s capture. Ivy was carrying her satchel which tended to balance Hope’s weight. Mutt followed her silently to the Ooson tent where she deposited their daughter. She kissed her on the forehead and promised to return soon. She did not announce the play date to Varun’s parents.
“Can I now ask questions?” Mutt asked as they hurried toward the church.
“Please, Mutt, I need you now. Do not ask questions.”
Ivy walked through the mahogany doors of the church into the nave. The father was speaking with parishioners about a personal problem.
“Father, you will take me to the crypt.”
“What is this?” the father asked.
“You will take me to the crypt now.”
“I can do no such thing.”
Ivy was mulling her options. There was only one. Hope was with the Ooson children. She was alone in the tent with her husband. Prudence was not going to save her. She had died on that spike leaving Ivy forever bereft. Prudence could no more protect her today than when the Morvens gave her to Tobor. That sin which had so ruined her life was now the only chance of salvation. They had three days remaining and she had to act now.
“Mutt, there is no choice. You must let me go to Tobor.”
“He will never honor a promise.”
“Have we an alternative?”
He was silent. He could not contemplate giving his wife to another man. He had not fully known her himself since the Notches. He could no longer love her if she emerged from Tobor’s tent carrying his seed.
“I cannot, Ivy. My love for you is too deep.”
“What you feel is not love. It is possessiveness. I wanted a true Hutman and I got one, the blessings and the baggage. You must move beyond concerns for my purity. You know my history. By no choice of mine I could not give you virginity. But what I gave you was far more meaningful. I chose you as my first and only love and will never choose another.”
“But you would now choose Tobor.”
“This is not about choice. It is about Hope. She has no future in this world. If the Oopsah is not rewritten she will have no future in any world.”
“Are there not lines you would not cross regardless of consequence? Would you kill Hope to save the world?”
“Great news!” Garan was excited. “You must read the board.”
Mutt followed him to the notices and saw amidst exclamation points the breaking news that Muglair had relented. A cooperation force from Arland was on its way to the Flume. Together the armies of the great nations would lay giant metal cylinders across the rush of water, stopping the flow and saving the planet. This was what Garan needed, hope for his family. His days in Irla had been the blackest of his life as he became increasingly convinced he would lose his wife and precious children to Muglair’s madness. Mutt smiled weakly then forced a generous grin.
“This is wonderful, my friend. Let us have hope for the future, that our children may live long and prosperous lives.”
Mutt appreciated the burden Ivy carried so long by herself. How could he tell Garan what he knew? This had all happened before. The historical events now transpiring were outside their sphere of influence. Even with knowledge the destruction could not be averted. The Flume had been an unstoppable force for countless iterations and the draining of the Silent Sea would end no differently this time. The fate of the world was determined. The only effect of knowledge was to eliminate the last shred of hope, however irrational it might be, that things might turn out differently.
“Mutt, I cannot conceive another child in this world. I have suffered enough, and caused enough suffering, not to compound it.”
He was wounded. He could not believe she loved him if she did not want him physically. If he could accept her for who she was after all the recent revelations, could not she receive him as his wife? He wanted to argue but felt that would be more humiliating. Begging for scraps was worse than lying silently in the cool Leland air fantasizing about the rhubarb girl who undoubtedly never would have rejected him. How many children would they have by now? Three at least. They would have their own house, maybe even a spread like his childhood home, and all the people he grew up with, the extended community from which he had been so precipitously torn by his commitment to Ivy, would be there to love and comfort him. The rhubarb girl was no Ivy, he had to admit that even in his jilted state, but Ivy was no Shivaree. She could not substitute for a whole people; she could not replace his home. All he had received from their marriage was a brief shining moment in the Notches followed by endless misery and knowledge no human was designed to bear. How could she not love him enough to be his wife after all they had been through?
Ivy sensed he was brooding and turned to face him.
“Mutt, you must not hate me. Please love me and respect the pain I am suffering. I will be your wife again. But for now I will find comfort only if you hold me tenderly. I am sorry if I am selfish. I will one day again think of you first. But today please think of me and allow me time to heal.” Mutt re-spooned with her, wanting to accept her words but in his heart feeling rejected. He wanted to release right here in her presence so she would understand how difficult it was for him to hold her and not mate. Ivy already knew this but could not bring herself to couple. She loved the man dearly but did not want to feel used, and being with him now would be subordinating her body to his animal need. He was quiet and trying to be tender through his bitter pain, the sweet man. The situation was untenable.
Mutt awoke in a borrowed tent. Ivy was sleeping on a separate haysack on the other side wearing a sundress, her shoulders wrapped in a shawl. She did not have a gown. She was on her side with her back turned to him, her calves protruding from the dress, her hands pressed between her knees. He had always found her attractive sleeping. She seemed so helpless, so innocent. He wanted to protect her. His mind was still spinning from the revelations of the Oopsah. He could not understand how the world could be constructed this way. Should not each iteration be different? If you threw a stick off the edge into outer space, how could that stick somehow make it back into the next version of the planet? He was sure that things would have to be different, that each iteration would change even without the knowledge contained in the Oopsah. And why could people not act differently even if everything was the same? He thought that people had the power to choose their actions and that this meant the future was undetermined until such choices were made. Ivy stirred. She turned over and looked at him, feeling desolate. Mutt had not abandoned her even after learning her horrible secrets, but she could feel that his love had waned, that he could not feel the same toward her. It made her feel ashamed, as if she were at fault for what others had done to her. Perhaps it did not matter whether she was a victim. There are some things that taint simply by changing what you are, whether or not you choose them. If she were a leper, he would feel differently toward her. It would not matter that she did not ask for the disease. And if she were the wife of Tobor Zranga, it did not matter that her parents bartered her to the monster for his pleasure. Once he had her, she was ruined in the eyes of a Hutman, a girl robbed of her most precious virtue, her purity. Ivy did not want to live with this stigma. She wanted to rise above it but could not without Mutt’s acceptance. He looked at her with a pained expression. He was not thinking at all about her prior marriage.
“How can the world work like this?” he asked. “It seems like such a cruel trick. Everything in all creation is just an illusion, a parlor game always ending with the same result. Until somebody else comes along to change the rules. All those people who lived and died in the past, they were just acting out a script that was already written. I thought that I could make decisions that would change my life, that there was right and wrong, that by choosing right I was making the world a better place. Now I feel no better than a machine, just cogs and wheels without a soul.”
Mutt drew a deep breath and entered the tent. It was a circular space formed by canvas wrapped around log poles with a conical roof supported by a central pole, the shape of a Hutman dwelling. A crude desk sat to one side consisting of a flat plate of scrap metal bolted onto a frame of tree limbs, with a section of a tree trunk turned on its side for a chair. On the table rested a pile of papers illuminated by the dim lantern. Mutt sat on the trunk and looked at the papers. They were weighted down by a standard copy of the Oopsah, the one in wide circulation. He felt that he should flip through this copy first. He was familiar with its passages, hundreds of pages of descriptions of ancient events in terse language mixed with talk of God and angels. He knew the latter chapters would turn to a story of revelations, of how the Oopsah had descended from heaven and revealed the future to all who would read it. He thumbed through these familiar pages telling how the world would be destroyed by dark forces and of a future prophet who would be sent by God in the end times with the power to steer humanity to salvation. It was the sacred duty of all who read the Oopsah to preserve the course of history so that this prophet, the Controller, would receive creation in its ordained state. For only the Controller was granted the power of salvation, and failure to bequeath to Him his destiny would deprive him of that power. Mutt sat the Oopsah down and picked up the top sheet of decoding paper which was covered in handwriting. It was a continuation of the original style of the Oopsah, a series of terse descriptions of historic events. He read of battles and plagues and natural disasters in times past, of the tribulations of humanity in less forgiving eras. He read the story of how Boca and his wife were cast over the side of Arland and founded the civilization of Skava. He learned how the Silent Sea poured over the edge and wiped out the Chuff as punishment for their wicked deeds. He read how Adja united the tribes of Arland and commenced the era of peace, ending only when Savi allied with the Skavians to declare war, rending Arland asunder. Mutt was confused about what he was reading. Why was this not in the standard text? Had Zranga really been the first to decode these words? Who put them into code in the first place? He lifted a large stack of papers to see whether the later writings contained any answers. They were more of the same, a continuing recitation of ancient history. Some of it began to coincide with the history he had been taught in school. These were apparently contemporary accounts of what historians and archeologists later reconstructed from other sources.
He began flipping through the pages more rapidly. His eyes fell on a page that looked different. He froze. It began:
“To my future self.”
Mutt re-read these words multiple times before his eyes moved forward to the next line:
“You are reading this because I failed.”
The flap to the Ooson tent pulled back. Mutt stood in the opening staring inside with an expression of stoic indifference Ivy had never seen on his face. She was alone with Hope and the Ooson children who were tossing around a cloth ball filled with sand.
“I have come for Hope.”
Ivy clutched her daughter defensively, fearful of losing her forever. She was stabbed by Mutt’s eyes so justified was his anger. She released her grasp. “Darling, your father is here. Go to him.” She could not drive a wedge between her child and her husband. Hope ran to Mutt and he picked her up by the armpits and rested her on a forearm. He wanted to take Hope and disappear into the shadows without a word, leaving Ivy with the wrenching sensation she may never see her daughter again. But he lacked that level of depravity. Whatever she had done, the mother and child needed one another dearly and it was a bond he could not sever.
“I will return her tomorrow.” He left.
Ivy sat on the floor, her back against a large cushion, suffering an impenetrable blackness, oblivious to the tossing of the ball and the shrieks of the Ooson children. She was forsaken when she met Mutt. She was forsaken now. Only this was worse. The man she loved was here in Irla hating her passionately, for good reason, and she could not explain her actions. What she had done she would do again. It was the only way, their only chance at redemption, but there was no way he could understand. He was bound by conventional reality and could only see that the woman he loved, the woman for whom he had abandoned Shivaree, the woman for whom he had risked so much in Skava, had betrayed him mercilessly, had taken their magical love and trashed it for convenience, that he was not important to her, that everything she had ever done was a lie. She could not live with herself so horrific was the guilt, but if only he could understand … The thought trailed off. There was no way he could learn half the truth, the convenient half that justified her treachery. Once he knew her motivations, he would know the full story, he would learn who she was, and his love would be crushed for other reasons. Ivy was in a position as impossible as that day she sat forlornly on the Edge waiting for Mutt, only this time there was no Mutt to catch her. She decided he had to know. What he hated her for now he could be made to understand. What he might despise her for next, once all knowledge was revealed, was not her fault. If she must live with his rejection it should be for the truth. She held out hope he could love her again even with full knowledge. For all the evil she had committed she was convinced she was an innocent, that all of her actions were justified by extraordinary circumstances not of her making, that her decisions had been the right ones in extreme conditions.
She felt like a fool for causing such a scene but a bigger fool for agreeing to the wedding in the first place. She had believed her former boss when he said Mutt and Hope were dead. And she knew that he was the only person who could resurrect her family. For Tobor Zranga had been anointed the Controller. He held power over such things. She read it herself in the Oopsah. Her life was already ruined, she had thought, and she could suffer the horror of an unholy marriage in the short time remaining if it would save those she loved. But now Hope was here, breathing and laughing in her miniature perfection, and Mutt was gone to no one knew where. She was overcome with shame that the man she loved was roaming the land of long shadows pondering her horrific betrayal. If only he could know; if only he could understand. Ivy Morven viewed her life as a staircase to hell with each new episode another step down. She thought she had found heaven in the Notches but that was only a rise over an obstacle on the path to perdition, an arch descending on the far side to blacker depths. It was only a point of comparison to make more precipitous her subsequent decline. But she had Hope, she had the joy of her child, she would not be alone. With horror she realized that Hope was just another arch to make more painful the next descent, the final step, for they were all going to die victims of Muglair’s ambitions, and she would not have the comfort of believing that by some miracle Hope might live, for their deaths were ordained.
Ivy needed to be a mother again and the transition required her to quash these thoughts. With the child came a million things to do and she resolved to do each one flawlessly. She had made such a fool of herself in the dance hall she could only restore her good standing by exemplary effort. More importantly she had to re-establish herself as Hope’s mother after such a long separation. Ivy had not even observed the child’s birthday which, by no coincidence, was the wedding date. But a party could be held later and she resolved to invite all the children she could find for a celebration of her daughter, to establish her new life in the tent city of Irla and to reforge the bond with her child. Hope joined her mother in the Ooson tent, where Ivy helped care for Varun and his sisters and found comfort and safety in the family’s companionship. The tent city lacked legal authority and a young woman could not live alone without risk from opportunistic prowlers. She frequently took the children to the parks of Irla so the parents could have time to themselves, a gift she could not enjoy with her own husband. On one such occasion Arna became pregnant, an act of defiance on a planet counting down to destruction, a validation of life Ivy wished to emulate in her weaker moments, if only she had her other half to take advantage. With the Oosons, Inta refugees from Skava, she found that the distractions and affections and annoyances of family life staved off her darker moments. But she could never sleep an honest hour without the sheltering arm of her husband, her mind tormented by the horrors of Harmour and Dunder, visions of the apocalypse, the cruel fate that awaited her afterwards. The Oosons gazed upon her with horror when she awoke from tortured dreams murmuring of bloody spikes and unholy love and bayoneted children. She said things about the Oopsah they could not comprehend yet sounded so awful they refused to repeat back to her. She would cry as she returned to consciousness begging their forgiveness, then within minutes immerse herself in the lives of the children, feeding and clothing, wiping and sponging, playing and singing, finding meaning in the nurture of small beings.
Computer Space wasn’t the key to the kind of Ali Baba–type riches Bushnell knew were within his grasp. Only three thousand machines were made and fewer than a thousand were distributed. Few at the penny arcades and bars wanted to play. The fact that the saucers made an annoying, high- pitched whine when they emitted laser beams probably didn’t help the game’s popularity. Yet the fifties retro futuristic machine made it to the silver screen to be forever part of the B-grade science fiction message movie Soylent Green. In its
thirty seconds of fame, there was much sexual innuendo as a giggling and ravishing Leigh Taylor- Young begged her much older gift giver to “come on and play” Computer Space. Then she begins to kiss him. It was the kind of scene that led a young moviegoing nerd to fantasize.
Bushnell and Dabney each put $250 into their Syzygy company, but a California roofing contractor already bore the odd moniker. Undaunted, Bushnell changed the name immediately. He loved Go, the strategy- oriented game from ancient China—everything from the way the smooth stone game pieces felt to the way the board looked. So for his company’s name, Bushnell settled upon a word from Go, the game he loved so much: Atari. The definition is the equivalent of the word “check” in chess but also means “you are about to become engulfed.”
The twenty- seven- year- old’s first employee was a former Ampex engineer, twenty- two- year- old Allan Alcorn. Alcorn was a genial, hefty award- winning high school football player with a carefully trimmed beard. Obsessed with learning, he was an engineering whiz with a bachelor of science degree out of the University of California Berkeley, who worked his way through college by fixing TVs while the older guys in the local shop got drunk and played cards in the back room. Alcorn, who grew up on the corner of Haight and
Ashbury, enjoyed the San Francisco psychedelic music scene, and fell in love with computers in college. But he had a mischievous side and almost got in trouble for hacking into and using a college professor’s access, which was very expensive at the time.
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