Free The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford Page B

embodied for Sikes the ancient concept of an angel. It was a custom of good luck that one must jump upward from the smaller buildings to the tallest, Shiva Tower, and from there kick off and ascend to touch the inner apex of the dome. This they each did, encouraged and applauded by the other. Methina and Sikes held hands and performed midair somersaults together. They flew, laughing, arms flapping, like Earth birds above the fields.
    After the gravity replicators had been restored to their standard settings and the city lights had been turned down to the merest glow, the two found themselves alone in a clearing of a small thicket of woods, an island of green out in the golden wheat field. They lay on the ground while above, way out past the clear boundary of the dome, a spiraled galaxy turned slowly like a milky pin-wheel in a cosmic breeze. Pieces of space debris occasionally collided with the invisible force field surrounding Aldebaran and these shards of creation disintegrated in showers of orange sparks.
    The two Maize players had long since lost interest in using their tongues for speech and were now twining them heatedly; their bodies locked in a tight embrace. Off came their clothes. But just at the moment of fruition, Sikes panting like a robot worker suffering a power surge, Methina put her palms against his chest and held him back.
    â€œFirst, you must give me the secret of the Winner’s Conceit,” she whispered.
    Sikes, who had imagined himself taking the technique smugly to the grave, who had long daydreamed of future generations puzzling over the riddle of the move, spewed forth the strategy with its placement of kernels, its series of moves and when to perform them with each of the basic types of labyrinths. “You must distract the opponent,” he grunted, “by letting her take the lead, clouding her mind with the winner’s conceit.”
    â€œAll right,” she said and removed her palms, but it was too late. Sikes lurched inelegantly forward once with bad aim, his kernels scattering everywhere.
    She dressed quickly and left him there on the ground weeping, for now it had become clear to him that he had squandered the treasure of his secret and never so much as entered the labyrinth.
    In the days that followed, Sikes could not return to Maize. The game was finished for him. When he would try to force himself to contemplate strategies he had been assiduously building in his mind for months, they were crowded out by the image of Methina’s beauty and the somatic memory of her naked body. He did not know where she lived, but she had told him that she worked at the fission plant. One afternoon he left the fields early without telling his superiors and went to wait for her outside the plant’s entrance.
    He watched the workers exit, filled with the excitement that he would again see her. But she never materialized. Going down into the plant, he found the office and gave her name, inquiring as to what shift she worked. Since the secretary was a devotee of Maize and was impressed to be speaking with Sikes, she told him that there was no one with that name among the workers. Methina had lied to him. For a moment he felt lost, but then reassured himself with the thought that Aldebaran was an island from which there was no escape.
    He began looking for her everywhere in the city, at the café, in the museums, along the shore of the lake. He had forsaken his job in the fields, dodging calls from his superiors. With each passing day, he succumbed more and more to a growing sense of melancholy. He began to believe that she had been merely a figment of his imagination generated by his own loneliness until, one day on the observation deck of Shiva Tower, he ran into Porleman, another aficionado of the game.
    â€œWhere have you been, Sikes?” asked the thin, horse-faced man.
    â€œI’m out of the Maize,” he said.
    â€œJust in time,” said Porleman. “There is a