"When the world is shuffled, that gives us moving objects the chance to rearrange," quipped Ms. Pac-Man in the darkness. Deep blue corridors had perhaps never been her favorites, but they were now. They called to mind the essence of a different game, a creation thrilling and new. Perhaps they would be hers, the next time she was called to service. Perhaps the next game would take place between the complexes, in the labyrinths that now seemed more familiar.

"You had a lot of guilt. It’s gone now," said the ghost.

"I left it behind. I don’t know if I did it willingly."

"It doesn’t matter. Are we together now?"

Ms. Pac-Man stopped on a wall and looked fiercely down the corridors in each direction. She steeled herself. "We’re together now."

"Then I renounce my quest to kill your son. I never really wanted--"

"I know," said she.

"If I had been forced to kill any of you, I--"

"No," said Ms. Pac-Man. "Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know."

Inky drifted, detached, in the blue-flanked blackness.

"All right. It won’t happen now. I will never again chase you or your kin. I swear by everything."

"By everything?"

The ghost’s eyes flicked around. He turned back to her. "Everything we have," he said. Why not, after all?

In good time, the hard-working son returned to the coop. His parents were there to meet him. They were on opposite sides of the foyer and their eyes were fixed on him. They had been fighting; they were a couple no more, but there were some things for which they had to come together.

"Mom? Dad?"

"You’re done, son!" cried the father. "Are all the levels clear?"

"Every one," the son replied.

"Then we’ve all got the same right to be proud. Welcome home." And they met in a swirl of affection.

The next stage was something they were all looking forward to. Their own interpersonal dynamic had been vibrant, but it had nearly run its chapter. It needed fuel from the highest forces of the universe before much more could be said. Those forces acted in only one way--they gave new games to the victorious.

They’d celebrated with toys and pretzels. They’d raced around the empty room, cutting at deliberately odd angles to celebrate its open space. They’d created a new relay form out of thirty-degree turns that their scrying sense told them looked exquisite from above. They’d tired in time and left their home with well-exercised bodies and hearts, and they’d lingered by the entrance, looking outward. And they waited. And they waited until sleep came, and they dreamed of their next great challenge.

She woke before the others and she made her way to a valley she knew, a place that bridged the gap between two ghost destinations, places where complexes no longer stood, leaving nothing but a valley for its own sake. If not for its own, sake, then why at all? she asked. It was there she met Inky.

In this deep valley with the affliction that is the lack of a purpose from on high, Inky and Ms. Pac-Man moved in silence. She paused graciously to let him move ahead, but then slipped behind him and reversed course, so that he could follow her. Only she knew this valley, and only she had a destination in mind.

Ms. Pac-Man took Inky to a place near the center of the valley where four corridors met at the corners, forming a loop only four times the body length of either tryster to a side. Ms. Pac-Man did not enter the loop, however. She moved nearly to it and backed away, for she would not enter until the whole valley had been explored, whorl by whorl and row by row, to verify that no shorter loop was there to be found. Inky trailed behind her dutifully during this entire circuit, and the moods of the twosome waxed and shone like the rising sun they had never known. At last, having found no circuit briefer than twelve squares, they entered the loop, and when Ms. Pac-Man had traversed half its length, he entered as well. Around and around they moved, at equal rates that grew ever faster, as if dots were disappearing under their retreaded path.

This merry-go-round was the closest they could be to occupying the same space. With enough revolutions, they forgot the difference between what space they currently occupied and what space they occupied but a second and a trifle before, and the discovery that this last was the very space occupied by each dancer’s partner was a sublime breath of lightness. In the shortest loop of the valley, Ms. Pac-Man and Inky danced together, and they did this without touching, and without saying a word.

In time, Inky took the initiative he had lacked for so many years. He stepped up his pace and chased Ms. Pac-Man around the circle. The relative pacing of their disparity changed like a slightly skewed kaleidoscope, each treated to seeing the other at a new variety of speedy angles. He gained a full wall of the loop on her, and one more square, and then, daringly, one more, so that they were practically touching, and then she burst out of the loop and the two trickled out of the valley their separate ways, yet too interdependent in their choice of corridors to be considered truly separate. They met at the entrance to the valley and came to a stop. The energy that had been steadily spent began to pool in their cores, and it felt sweet and powerful.

"It’s time for us to join in the flesh, Inky," Ms Pac-Man whispered. "I need to know what you feel like."

"How I feel!" Inky responded.

"Why, yes! How you feel!"

"But--" The ghost turned his eyes upward, perhaps toward where he imagined a no longer extant Central Control Box to be.

"I know," said Ms. Pac-Man. If I touch you, I will die."

"Yes," he breathed.

"But I have three lives," she exclaimed.

"No," he whispered.

"Please," she said. "She had meant to say ‘Yes’, but had slipped. "So your touch is death. What of it? Let it be! I can take that shock more gallantly than any other I know. It would lift me up!"

"You can’t be serious!"

"Why not? This is something we can do twice. No, Inky, four times! Four wonderful times! Oh, we’ll have to plan carefully! Make a list, Inky, and check it against mine! These times will have to nourish us as well as other lovers are nourished, you realize! We’ll live in the memory of these times. Go on, Inky, make a list of all the questions you want answered about me, about the way it feels--the touch something like me. I’ll do the same for you! Then when we touch for the first time, we must be quick, and we must get all of those answers: those are what will keep us together! Once we know the answers, we’ll constantly long for what the next meeting will be like--a meeting where we won’t need to worry about getting answers, but only enjoying each other, nothing more! Oh, if only our meetings weren’t doomed to be so brief!"

"You think that little of your lives? You’ll let them go?"

"I’ll let them drop away onto you, I’ll let them wreathe you, even though I think the world of them. Oh, I hope I don’t forget everything when I die. I hope I don’t forget anything! Surely not the few moments we get to spend together--that would be too horrible! No, I’ll remember, I’m sure I will. And if I don’t, you can describe to me whatever I’ve forgotten. You will remember, in detail, won’t you? You have such a good memory. And then! And then, for the third time we’ll have to take action. I haven’t been active in years, but when I was, my game gave me an extra life when I reached ten thousand points. If I’m not chosen next, we’ll have to find some way to make me active! Together, we’ll earn me those ten thousand forbidden points, and then we’ll have earned our third embrace--we’ll be tired, but we’ll be so proud, and I don’t doubt it will be the happiest of all."

"And the fourth time? Do you have another secret source of lives?"

"Why--no. But I will have an old age, Inky. So will you. The time will surely come when the universe ceases to take an interest in us--can you feel that fact too, because I believe I always have. And then we’ll be old, and ready to end our lives, which we’ll have spend together, happy. Once we both agree we’ve gotten everything out of the way we could ever hope for, then we’ll touch again. We’ll let it end that way, Inky. I’ll perish amid you--I wouldn’t have it any other way. Oh, won’t it be glorious? Four times, four blissful times, and we’ll make them count for so much, won’t we?"

Inky moved in and out like a hand rocking a cradle, only the cradle was his lover’s eyes. "We don’t need to do that, Ms. Pac-Man."

"But--whyever should we not? I thought my plan was sound. What else can we do?"

Inky started, for the first time, to cry. His tears were shaded nearly as himself, just a shade lighter, which betrayed the illuminating quality of his emotion. His tears were shed with the transcendent joy that is the due of someone with the chance to avert a great sorrow. "We don’t need to do it that way," he repeated. "Let me be the one to die instead! I have no limit on my lives. Power pellets will allow you to touch me as often as you’d like. Only the supply of the world’s power pellets can limit our conjugality."

The eyes of Ms. Pac-Man grew tender with the simplicity of this sacrifice. Her love was childlike, she had known that for a while, but he had an intelligence that overpowered all her best-laid thoughts, and she loved it. "Of course," she said.

"I won’t be gone," his quiet voice said. "I’ll retreat into my eyes and fly away. Watching you. I’ll fly back to Central Control, wherever it may be, and rebuild myself. And then I’ll come back to you."

"Every time," said Ms. Pac-Man.

"Every time," said Inky.

"But will it hurt?" she asked, still flooded with pity.

"You’ve done it to me thousands of times before," Inky replied softly. But this was not strictly an answer, and he knew it. "Yes," he confided. "Yes, it has always hurt in the past. But that may all have been in my mind. It may have been my own pain of seeing my destined love grow distant from me after destroying my body. It may be that it will not hurt when I know it’s done out of love."

She turned from him. The thought of knowing his physical touch time and time again, without limit, was such a shift from the spartan marriage she had imagined that she was overcome. She fell warmly against the wall, millimeters from his hovering body, imagining it was him. He hummed with pleasure.

"I have to go, now," she said. "You know why, don’t you?"

"I know. I have the feeling too. It’s electric."

"You ought to feel it. You’ll be wanted too."

Inky floated gently and said nothing.

"Inky--let’s go together! We won’t be allowed to stay together, but we can make it a game to see how long we can try before we’re separated."

Inky moved forward, but bobbed back. His eyes were fixed tightly outward, in no particular direction.

"What is it?" Ms. Pac-Man asked, now worried.

"It feels different this time. It isn’t like it was before. I--"

"No."

"I don’t think I’m wanted."

"No! They can’t. It can’t be. I want you by me! I can’t do my best when I’m away from you for too long."

"You can try--you can use your longing--" Inky paused again, with a thought. "It’s because they know."

"Know? Know what?"

"They know that Pinky’s gone. They know that my allegiance has changed. They know they won’t have an entertaining game if it’s just about bout of us against them. It would be too unbalanced."

"They could add more ghosts. There are ways to make more ghosts, you know!"

"Not like Pinky."

She looked down, and looked up, and fled. Inky fled along behind her. They ran together until they were at the nexus in front of her home, where all complexes were easily accessible and within view. She expected her husband and son to be there, and they were. They seemed to have been chatting for some time.

"Took you long enough!" said Pac-Man Jr. "What were you doing, Mom? I thought you were waiting for this!"

"I was--I was. I’m glad we’re about to get moving again. And for the first time--all three of us! Imagine!"

Pac-Man smiled and revved forward. "No escaping me this time, Pepper! Not that you should really want to. We were meant to work together. In fact, I bet that’s just what we need. A bit of work! We were at each other’s throats because we were idle too long, that’s all. When we get back to doing what we do--why, we’ll be as close as twins again! Don’t you think so?"

"Ah--I don’t know! I can’t imagine--I can only hope."

"A little work. That’s all it’ll take. I can feel it getting closer!"

Pac-Man and his offspring tilted backward, their faces upward, sensing as they always did that it was from that direction the great changes came. Ms. Pac-Man looked behind her, but Inky was gone. Was it his own good sense keeping him away, or had it already begun?"

"I’m tingling," said Pac-Man Jr. "Do you think it’s giving me my missing life back, Mom? I dreamed of getting my missing life back!"

"I’m sure that’s what it is," said Mrs. Pac-Man, coming over to cuddle with her son.

"I can see something strange, Mom. It’s wide. It’s--it’s bright! What is it?"

"A thousand power pellets, all rolled into one," waxed Pac-Man. "A nebula of power. New, fresh power beyond all imagination--we’ll be able to eat through walls in this one, I’ll bet! We’ll be able to burn holes in the very blackness!"

Mrs. Pac-Man watched the sky blue light flood into her changing universe, and she thought of what the color meant to her, and mourned the fact that it would soon flood her consciousness, and no longer be special. And as the world of the Pac-Man family was transformed forever, she shed a trickle of tears, unnoticed.

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