Players at the Game of People by John Brunner Page A

her ground, clutching his hand tightly now.

"No, you've got to listen! Sometimes I've dreamed -- sometimes I've tried

with all my heart and soul to believe -- that my father who ran away when

I was still a baby wasn't my father. That one day it would turn out the

real one could never acknowledge me because he was married and a very

important figure in politics or something, maybe even someone royal,

only now his wife was dead and he could come and tell me the truth and

he'd take charge of me and straighten out my life" -- the words were

coming in a torrent now -- "and be masterful and of course because

we'd never known one another properly I'd find it impossible to think

of him as really being my father, he'd be just a man behaving the way

a man ought to behave, and his wife would have been frigid or ill or

something for years and years, so when we finally had the chance to be

alone together chemistry would sort of take over and -- "

She was flushing clear down to breast level and her free hand was hovering

suggestively over her bush and her voice was becoming low and breathy.

He shook free of her.

"Four minutes," he said. "And I would keep my promise to put you out in

the street naked. If you'd rather go back in the gutter and stay there."

She took half a step back, clenching her fists. "You weren't like this

last night!" she accused.

"You were so full of Dutch courage I don't know what you were like

yesterday. Apart from stupid. And that seems to hold good for this

morning as well, so -- "

"You bastard!"

"Have it your way." He bent over and gathered up the foul bundle of her

torn clothes and threw it at her. She made no attempt to catch it. "Put

them on and get out. Or don't bother, and still get out. You've had

your chance."

"You know bloody well I couldn't possibly do that!"

"Of course I do! So why are you still pretending that you can? "

There was a silence during which her face crumpled and she tried to find

somewhere to look that wouldn't make her start crying again: the bed,

the open wardrobe, the luxury suite of shower and bidet and toilet all

in matching avocado porcelain with gold-plated fitments, the incredible

window offering its view of subtropical beaches lined with palm trees

and fringed with white-foaming breakers.

Eventually, when he judged she had endured enough, he let his voice soften.

"Poor kid," he said. "Poor silly kid. Nobody ever made you choose for

yourself before, did they?"

Dumbly she shook her head, still trying to find a place to rest her gaze.

"It was all done for you. You didn't choose to be raised in a one-parent

family. You didn't choose to be sent to a boarding school. You didn't

really choose to run away from it. You were driven to that, weren't you?"

She nodded, screwing her eyes shut to prevent tears leaking from them.

She failed; they made snail tracks down her cheeks.

"And when you did take the only big decision of your life you discovered

you had no faintest notion how to cope with the real world. Isn't that

the long and the short of it? You thought you were going to see some

'real life' for once. You want that most of all. But you never had the

chance to learn what's real, did you? You were brought up to mistake

the fake for the genuine, the smart for the substantial, the fashionable

for the durable, the impressive for the thing worth having."

She had kept her eyes shut; now she was rocking back and forth on her

heels, making every motion into a nod that emphasized her agreement with

her entire body. Her fists were clenched before her at the level of her

waist, and her knuckles stood out pale against the rest of her hands.

"Which is why when you meet the real you think it's an acid flash!"

"But it can't be real!" she said doggedly, still with her eyes closed.

"I mean, a place like this in a street like this . . . !"

" Have it your way. I won't stop you. Get back to what you believe to be

the real world. Pick up those clothes