The Player of Games (34 page)

Limiting Factor
had suggested, he ended up in even more trouble; nothing was more guaranteed to cause you problems on an Azad board than trying to play in a way you didn't really believe in. He rose slowly, straightening his back, which was hardly sore now, and returned to his room. Flere-Imsaho was in front of the screen, watching a holo-display of an odd diagram. 'What are you doing?' Gurgeh said, lowering himself into a soft chair. The drone turned, addressing him in Marain. 'I worked out a way to disable the bugs; we can talk in Marain now. Isn't that good?' 'I suppose so,' Gurgeh said, still in Eächic. He picked up a small flat-screen to see what was happening in the Empire. 'Well you might at least use the language after I went to the trouble of jamming their bugs. It wasn't easy you know; I'm not designed for that sort of thing. I had to learn a lot of stuff from some of my own files about electronics and optics and listening fields and all that sort of technical stuff. I thought you'd be pleased.' 'Utterly and profoundly ecstatic,' Gurgeh said carefully, in Marain. He looked at the small screen. It told him of the new appointments, the crushing of an insurrection in a distant system, the progress of the game between Nicosar and Krowo - Krowo wasn't as far behind as Gurgeh was - the victory won by imperial troops against a race of monsters, and higher rates of pay for males who volunteered to join the Army. 'What
is
that you're looking at?' he said, looking briefly at the wall-screen, where Flere-Imsaho's strange torus turned slowly. 'Don't you recognise it?' the drone said, voice pitched to express surprise. 'I thought you would; it's a model of the Reality.' 'The - oh, yes.' Gurgeh nodded and went back to the small screen, where a group of asteroids was being bombarded by imperial battleships, to quell the insurrection. 'Four dimensions and all that.' He flicked through the sub-channels to the game programmes. A few of the second-series matches were still being played on Eä. 'Well, seven relevant dimensions actually, in the case of the Reality itself; one of those lines… are you listening?' 'Hmm? Oh yes.' The games on Eä were all in their last stages. The secondary games from Echronedal were still being analysed. '… one of those lines on the Reality represents our entire universe… surely you were taught all this?' 'Mm,' Gurgeh nodded. He had never been especially interested in spacial theory or hyperspace or hyperspheres or the like; none of it seemed to make any difference to how he lived, so what did it matter? There were some games that were best understood in four dimensions, but Gurgeh only cared about their own particular rules, and the general theories only meant anything to him as they applied specifically to those games. He pressed for another page on the small screen… to be confronted with a picture of himself, once more expressing his sadness at being knocked out of the games, wishing the people and Empire of Azad well and thanking everybody for having him. An announcer talked over his faded voice to say that Gurgeh had pulled out of the second-series games on Echronedal. Gurgeh smiled thinly, watching the official reality he'd agreed to be part of as it gradually built up and became accepted fact. He looked up briefly at the torus on the screen, and remembered something he'd puzzled over, years ago now. 'What's the difference between hyperspace and ultraspace?' he asked the drone. 'The ship mentioned ultraspace once and I never could work out what the hell it was talking about.' The drone tried to explain, using the holo-model of the Reality to illustrate. As ever, it over-explained, but Gurgeh got the idea, for what it was worth. Flere-Imsaho annoyed him that evening, chattering away in Marain all the time about anything and everything. After initially finding it rather needlessly complex, Gurgeh enjoyed hearing the language again, and discovered some pleasure in speaking it, but the drone's high, squeaky voice became tiring after a while. It only shut up while he had his customary rather negative and depressing game-analysis with the ship that evening, still in Marain. He had his best night's sleep since the day of the hunt, and woke feeling, for no good reason he could think of, that there might yet be a chance of turning the game around.
It took Gurgeh most of the morning's play to gradually work out what Nicosar was up to. When, eventually, he did, it took his breath away. The Emperor had set out to beat not just Gurgeh, but the whole Culture. There was no other way to describe his use of pieces, territory and cards; he had set up his whole side of the game as an Empire, the very image of Azad. Another revelation struck Gurgeh with a force almost as great; one reading - perhaps the best - of the way he'd always played was that he played as the Culture. He'd habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite profoundly peaceful. In all the games he'd played, the fight had always come to Gurgeh, initially. He'd thought of the period before as
preparing
for battle, but now he saw that if he'd been alone on the board he'd have done roughly the same, spreading slowly across the territories, consolidating gradually, calmly, economically… of course it had never happened; he always was attacked, and once the battle was joined he developed that conflict as assiduously and totally as before he'd tried to develop the patterns and potential of unthreatened pieces and undisputed territory. Every other player he'd competed against had unwittingly tried to adjust to this novel style in its own terms, and comprehensively failed. Nicosar was trying no such thing. He'd gone the other way, and made the board his Empire, complete and exact in every structural detail to the limits of definition the game's scale imposed. It stunned Gurgeh. The realisation burst on him like some slow sunrise turning nova, like a trickle of understanding becoming stream, river, tide;
tsunami.
His next few moves were automatic; reaction-moves, not properly thought-out parts of his strategy, limited and inadequate though it had been shown to be. His mouth had gone dry, his hands shook. Of course; this was what he'd been missing, this was the hidden facet, so open and blatant, and there for all to see, it was effectively invisible, too obvious for words or understanding. It was so simple, so elegant, so staggeringly ambitious but so fundamentally
practical
, and so much what Nicosar obviously thought the whole game to be about. No wonder he'd been so desperate to play this man from the Culture, if this was what he'd planned all along. Even the details Nicosar and only a handful of others in the Empire knew about the Culture and its true size and scope were there, included and displayed on the board, but probably utterly indecipherable to those who did not already know; the style of Nicosar's board Empire was of a complete thing fully shown, the assumptions about his opponent's forces were couched in terms of fractions of something greater. There was, too, a ruthlessness about the way the Emperor treated his own and his opponent's pieces which Gurgeh thought was almost a taunt; a tactic designed to disturb him. The Emperor sent pieces to their destruction with a sort of joyous callousness where Gurgeh would have hung back, attempting to prepare and build up. Where Gurgeh would have accepted surrender and conversion, Nicosar laid waste. The difference was slight in some ways - no good player simply squandered pieces or massacred purely for the sake of it - but the implication of applied brutality was there, like a flavour, like a stench, like a silent mist hanging over the board. He saw then that he'd been fighting back much as Nicosar might have expected him to, trying to save pieces, to make reasonable, considered, conservative moves and, in a sense, to ignore the way Nicosar was kicking and slinging his pieces into battle and tearing strips of territory from his opponent like ribbons of tattered flesh. In a way, Gurgeh had been trying desperately
not
to play Nicosar; the Emperor was playing a rough, harsh, dictatorial and frequently inelegant game and had rightly assumed something in the Culture man would simply not want to be a part of it. Gurgeh started to take stock, sizing up the possibilities while he played a few more inconsequential blocking moves to give himself time to think. The point of the game was to win; he'd been forgetting that. Nothing else mattered; nothing else hung on the outcome of the game either. The game was irrelevant, therefore it could be allowed to mean everything, and the only barrier he had to negotiate was that put up by his own feelings. He had to reply, but how? Become the Culture? Another Empire? He was already playing the part of the Culture, and it wasn't working - and how do you match an Emperor as an imperialist? He stood there on the board, wearing his faintly ridiculous, gathered-up clothes, and was only distantly aware of everything else around him. He tried to tear his thoughts away from the game for a moment, looking round the great ribbed prow-hall of the castle, at the tall, open windows and the yellow cinderbud canopy outside; at the half-f banks of seats, at the imperial guards and the adjudicating officials, at the great black horn-shapes of the electronic screening equipment directly overhead, at the many people in their various clothes and guises. All translated into game-thought; all viewed as though through some powerful drug which distorted everything he saw into twisted analogs of its latching hold on his brain. He thought of mirrors, and of reverser fields, which gave the more technically artificial but perceivably more real impression; mirror-writing was what it said; reversed writing was ordinary writing. He saw the closed torus of Flere-Imsaho's unreal Reality, remembered Chamlis Amalk-ney and its warning about deviousness; things which meant nothing and something; harmonics of his thought. Click. Switch off/switch on. As though he was a machine. Fall off the edge of the catastrophe curve and never mind. He forgot everything and made the first move he saw. He looked at the move he'd made. Nothing like what Nicosar would have done. An archetypally Culture move. He felt his heart sink. He'd been hoping for something different, something better. He looked again. Well, it was a Culture move, but at least it was an
attacking
Culture move; followed through, it would wreck his whole cautious strategy so far, but it was all he could do if he was to have even the glimmer of a chance of resisting Nicosar. Pretend there really was a lot at stake, pretend he was fighting for the whole Culture; set out to win, regardless, no matter…. At least he'd found a way to play, finally. He knew he was going to lose, but it would not be a rout. He gradually remodelled his whole game-plan to reflect the ethos of the Culture militant, trashing and abandoning whole areas of the board where the switch would not work, pulling back and regrouping and restructuring where it would; sacrificing where necessary, razing and scorching the ground where he had to. He didn't try to mimic Nicosar's crude but devastating attack-escape, return-invade strategy, but made his positions and his pieces in the image of a power that could eventually cope with such bludgeoning, if not now, then later, when it was ready. He began to win a few points at last. The game was still lost, but there was still the Board of Becoming, where at last he might give Nicosar a fight. Once or twice he caught a certain look on Nicosar's face, when he was close enough to read the apex's expression, that convinced him he'd done the right thing, even if it was something the Emperor had somehow expected. There was a recognition there now, in the apex's expression and on the board, and even a kind of respect in those moves; an acknowledgement that they were fighting on even terms. Gurgeh was overcome by the sensation that he was like a wire with some terrible energy streaming through him; he was a great cloud poised to strike lightning over the board, a colossal wave tearing across the ocean towards the sleeping shore, a great pulse of molten energy from a planetary heart; a god with the power to destroy and create at will. He had lost control of his own drug-glands; the mix of chemicals in his bloodstream had taken over, and his brain felt saturated with the one encompassing idea, like a fever; win, dominate, control; a set of angles defining one desire, the single absolute determination. The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and sleeping and walking around… but it was all nothing; irrelevant. Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game. He watched the rival forces surge and tide across the great board, and they spoke a strange language, sang a strange song that was at once a perfect set of harmonies and a battle to control the writing of the themes. What he saw in front of him was like a single huge organism; the pieces seemed to move as though with a will that was neither his nor the Emperor's, but something dictated finally by the game itself, an ultimate expression of its essence. He saw it; he knew Nicosar saw it; but he doubted anybody else could. They were like a pair of secret lovers, secure and safe in their huge nest of a room, locked together before hundreds of people who looked on and who saw but who could not read and who would never guess what it was they were witnessing. The game on the Board of Form came to an end. Gurgeh lost, but he had pulled back from the brink, and the advantage Nicosar would take to the Board of Becoming was far from decisive. The two opponents separated, that act over, the final one yet to commence. Gurgeh left the prow-hall, exhausted and drained and gloriously happy, and slept for two days. The drone woke him.
'Gurgeh? Are you awake? Have you stopped being vague?' 'What are you talking about?' 'You; the game. What's going on? Even the ship couldn't work out what was happening on that board.' The drone floated above him, brown and grey, humming quietly. Gurgeh rubbed his eyes, blinked. It was morning; there were about ten days to go before the fire was due. Gurgeh felt as though he was waking from a dream more vivid and real than reality. He yawned, sitting up. 'Have I been vague?' 'Does pain hurt? Is a supernova bright?' Gurgeh stretched, smirking. 'Nicosar's taking it impersonally,' he said, getting up and padding to the window. He stepped out on to the balcony. Flere-Imsaho tutted and threw a robe around him. 'If you're going to start talking in riddles again…' 'What riddles?' Gurgeh drank in the mild air. He flexed his arms and shoulders again. 'Isn't this a fine old castle, drone?' he said, leaning on the stone rail and taking another deep breath. 'They know how to build castles, don't they?' 'I suppose they do, but Klaff wasn't built by the Empire. They took it off another humanoid species who used to hold a ceremony similar to the one the Empire holds to crown the Emperor. But don't change the subject. I asked you a question. What