… and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m still waiting. Does this mean that I shan’t die now, or that I shall?
Life or death in a finger’s twitch, a single nerve-pulse, just one perhaps not fully willed decision by some jealous irrelevant one-credit sick-head, a hundred millennia from home…).
The apex backed away, gesturing imploringly, pathetically to At-sen, and at Gurgeh and Inclate. He came forward and kicked At-sen, once, in the back, with no great force, making her cry out, then turned and ran, shouting incoherently and throwing the gun down to the floor. Gurgeh ran after him, vaulting over At-sen. The apex disappeared down a dark spiral staircase at the far end of the curved passage. Gurgeh started to follow, then stopped. The sound of clattering footsteps died away. He went back to the jade-lit corridor.
A door was open; soft citrine light spilled out.
There was a short hall, a bathroom off, then the room. It was small, and mirrored everywhere; even the soft floor rippled with unsteady reflections the color of honey. He walked in, at the center of a vanishing army of reflected Gurgehs.
At-sen sat on a translucent bed, forlorn in her wrecked gray dress, head down and sobbing while Inclate, kneeling by her, arm round the crying woman’s shoulders, whispered gently. Their images proliferated about the shining walls of the room. He hesitated, glanced back at the door. At-sen looked up at him, tears streaming.
“Oh, Jernow!” She held out one shaking hand. He squatted by the bedside, his arm round her as she quivered, while both women cried.
He stroked At-sen’s back.
She put her head on his shoulder, and her lips were warm and strange on his neck; Inclate left the bed, padded to the door and closed it, then joined the man and the woman, dropping the oil-film dress to the mirror-floor in a glistening pool of iridescence.
Shohobohaum Za arrived a minute later, kicking the door in, walking smartly into the middle of the mirrored room (so that an infinitude of Zas repeated and repeated their way across that cheating space), and glared round, ignoring the three people on the bed.
Inclate and At-sen froze, hands at Gurgeh’s clothing-ties and buttons. Gurgeh was momentarily shocked, then tried to assume an urbane expression. Za looked at the wall behind Gurgeh, who followed his gaze; he found himself looking at his own reflection; face dark, hair mussed, clothes half undone. Za leapt across the bed, kicking into the image.
The wall shattered in a chorus of screams; the mirror-glass cascaded to reveal a dark and shallow room behind, and a small machine on a tripod, pointing into the mirror-room. Inclate and At-sen sprang off the bed and raced out; Inclate grabbed her dress on the way.
Za took the tiny camera off its tripod and looked at it. “Record only, thank goodness; no transmitter.” He stuffed the machine into a pocket, then turned and grinned at Gurgeh. “Put it back in the holster, game-player. We got to run!”
They ran. Down the jade passage toward the same spiral steps At-sen’s abductor had taken. Za stooped as he ran, scooping up the gun the apex had dropped and Gurgeh had forgotten about. It was inspected, tried and discarded within a couple of seconds. They got to the spiral steps and leapt up them.
Another corridor, darkly russet. Music boomed above. Za skidded to a stop as two large apices ran toward them. “Oops,” Za said, doing an about-turn. He shoved Gurgeh back to the stairs and they ran up again, coming out in a dark space full of the beating, pulsing music; light blazed to one side. Footsteps hammered up the stairs. Za turned and kicked down into the stairwell with one foot, producing an explosive yelp and a sudden clatter.
A thin blue beam freckled the darkness, lancing from the stairwell and bursting yellow flame and orange sparks somewhere overhead. Za dodged away. “Fucking artillery indeed.” He nodded past Gurgeh toward the light. “Exit stage center, maestro.”
They ran out onto the stage, flooded with sunlight brilliance. A bulky male in the center of the stage turned resentfully as they thundered out from the wings; the audience yelled abuse. Then the expression on the near-naked bruise artiste’s face switched from vexation to stunned surprise.
Gurgeh almost fell; he did stop, dead still.
… to gaze, again, at his own face.
It was printed, twice life-size, in a bloody rainbow of contusions, on the torso of the dumbstruck performer. Gurgeh stared, expression mirroring the amazement on the tubby artiste’s face.
“No time for art now, Jernau.” Za pulled him away, dragged him to the front of the stage and threw him off. He dived after him.
They landed on top of a group of protesting Azadian males, tumbling them to the ground. Za hauled Gurgeh to his feet, then nearly fell again as a blow struck the back of his head. He turned and lashed out with one foot, fending off another punch with one arm. Gurgeh felt himself twirled round; he found himself facing a large, angry male with blood on his face. The man drew his arm back, made a fist of his hand (so that Gurgeh thought; stone! from the game of elements).
The man seemed to move very slowly.
Gurgeh had time to think what to do.
He brought his knee up into the male’s groin and heel-palmed his face. He shook the falling man’s grip free, ducked a blow from another male, and saw Za elbow yet another Azadian in the face.
Then they were sprinting away again. Za roared and waved his hands as he ran for an exit. Gurgeh fought a strange urge to laugh at this, but the tactic seemed to work; people parted for them like water round the bows of a boat.
They sat in a small, open-ceilinged bar, deep in the maze-like clutter of the main gallery, under a solid sky of chalky pearl. Shohobohaum Za was dismantling the camera he’d discovered behind the false mirror, teasing its delicate components apart with a humming, toothpick-size instrument. Gurgeh dabbed at a graze on his cheek, incurred when Za had thrown him from the stage.
“Na, my fault, game-player. I should have known. Inclate’s brother’s in Security, and At-sen’s got an expensive habit. Nice kids, but a bad combination, and not exactly what I asked for. Damn lucky for your ass one of my sweeties dropped a slice-jewel-card and wouldn’t play anything else without it. Ah well; half a fuck’s better than none at all.”
He prized another piece out of the camera body; there was a crackle and a little flash. Za poked dubiously at the smoking casing.
“How did you know where to find us?” Gurgeh asked. He felt like a fool, but less embarrassed than he’d have expected.
“Knowledge, guesswork and luck, game-player. There are places in that club you go when you want to roll somebody, other places where you can question them, or kill them, or hook them on something… or take their picture. I was just hoping it was lights-action time and not something worse.” He shook his head, peered at the camera. “I should have known though. Ought to have guessed. Getting too damn trusting.”
Gurgeh shrugged, sipped at his hot liquor and studied the guttering candle on the counter in front of them. “I was the one who was suckered. But who?” He looked at Za. “Why?”
“The state, Gurgeh,” Za said, prodding at the camera again. “Because they want to have something on you, just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case you keep surprising them and winning games. It’s insurance. You heard of that? No? Never mind. It’s like gambling in reverse.” Za held the camera with one hand, straining at part of it with the thin instrument. A hatch popped open. Za looked happy, and extracted a coin-sized disk from the guts of the machine. He held it up to the light, where it glinted nacreously. “Your holiday snaps,” Za told Gurgeh.
He adjusted something at the end of the toothpick, so that the little disk stuck to the instrument’s point as though glued there, then held the tiny polychromatic coin over the candle flame until it sizzled and smoked and hissed, and finally fell in dull flakes onto the wax.
“Sorry you couldn’t have that as a souvenir,” Za said.
Gurgeh shook his head. “Something I’d rather forget.”
“Ah, never mind. I
’ll get those two bitches though,” Za grinned. “They owe me one for free. Several, in fact.” Za looked happy at the thought.
“Is that all?” Gurgeh asked.
“Hey; they were just playing their parts. No malice involved. Worth a spanking at most.” Za waggled his eyebrows lasciviously.
Gurgeh sighed.
When they went back to the transit gallery to order their car, Za waved at some bulky, severely casual males and apices waiting in the lime-lit tunnel, and tossed one of them what was left of the camera. The apex caught it, and turned away along with the others.
The car arrived minutes later.
“And what time do you call this? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? You’ve got a game to play tomorrow, you know. Just look at the state of your clothes! And where did you pick up that graze? What have you—”
“Machine.” Gurgeh yawned, throwing his jacket down onto a seat in the lounge. “Go fuck yourself.”
The following morning, Flere-Imsaho wasn’t talking to him. It joined him in the module lounge just as the call came through that Pequil had arrived with the car, but when Gurgeh said hello, it ignored him, and traveled down in the hotel elevator studiously humming and crackling even louder than usual. It was similarly uncommunicative in the car. Gurgeh decided he could live with this.
“Gurgee, you have hurt yourself.” Pequil looked with concern at the graze over Gurgeh’s cheek.
“Yes,” Gurgeh smiled, stroking his beard. “I cut myself shaving.”
It was attrition time on the Board of Form.
Gurgeh was up against the other nine players from the start, until it became too obvious that was what was happening. He’d used the advantage accrued on the previous board to set up a small, dense and almost impregnable enclave; he just sat in there for two days, letting the others beat up against it. Done properly, this would have broken him, but his opponents were trying not to look too concerted in their actions, so attacked a few at a time. They were anyway each fearful of weakening themselves over-much in case they were pounced upon by the others.
By the end of those two days, a couple of the news-agencies were saying it was unfair and discourteous to the stranger to gang up on him.
Flere-Imsaho—over its huff by then and talking to him again—reckoned this reaction might be genuine and unprompted, but was more likely to be the result of imperial pressure. Certainly it thought the Church—which had doubtless been instructing the priest as well as financing the deals he’d been making with the other players—had been leaned on by the Imperial Office. Whatever, on the third day the massed attacks against Gurgeh fell away and the game resumed a more normal course.
The game-hall was crowded with people. There were many more paying spectators, numerous invited guests had changed venue to come and see the alien play, and the press-agencies had sent extra reporters and cameras. The club players, under the stewardship of the Adjudicator, succeeded in keeping the crowd quiet, so Gurgeh didn’t find the extra people caused any great distraction during the game. It was difficult to move around the hall during the breaks though; people were constantly accosting him, asking him questions, or just wanting to look at him.
Pequil was there most of the time, but seemed more taken up with going in front of the cameras himself than shielding Gurgeh from all the people wanting to talk to him. At least he helped to divert the attentions of the news-people and let Gurgeh concentrate on the game.
Over the next couple of days, Gurgeh noticed a subtle change in the way the priest was playing, and, to a lesser degree, in the game-style of another two players.
Gurgeh had taken three players right out of the game; another three had been taken by the priest, without much of a fight. The remaining two apices had established their own small enclaves on the board and were taking comparatively little part in the wider game. Gurgeh was playing well, if not at quite the pitch he had when he’d won on the Board of Origin. He ought to be defeating the priest and the other two fairly easily. He was, indeed, gradually prevailing, but very slowly. The priest was playing better than he had before, especially at the beginning of each session, which made Gurgeh think that the apex was getting some high-grade help during the breaks. The same applied to the other two players, though they were presumably being less extensively briefed.
When the end came, though, on the fifth day of the game, it was sudden, and the priest’s play simply collapsed. The other two players resigned. More adulation followed, and the news-agencies began to run editorials worrying that somebody from Outside could do so well. Some of the more sensational releases even carried stories that the alien from the Culture was using some sort of supernatural sense or illegal technical device. They’d found out Flere-Imsaho’s name and mentioned it as the possible source of Gurgeh’s illicit skill.
“They’re calling me a computer,” the drone wailed.
“And they’re calling me a cheat,” Gurgeh said, thoughtfully. “Life is cruel, as they keep saying here.”
“Here they are correct.”
The last game, on the Board of Becoming, the one Gurgeh felt most at home on, was a romp. The priest had filed a special objective plan with the Adjudicator before the game commenced, something he was entitled to do as the player with the second largest number of points. He was effectively playing for second place; although he would be out of the Main Series, he would have a chance to re-enter it if he won his next two games in the second series.
Gurgeh suspected this was a ruse, and played very cautiously at first, waiting for either the mass attack or some cunning individual set-piece. But the others seemed to be playing almost aimlessly, and even the priest seemed to be making the sort of slightly mechanical moves he’d been making in the first game. When Gurgeh made a few light, exploratory attacks, he found little opposition. He divided his forces in half and went on a full-scale raid into the territory of the priest, just for the sheer hell of it. The priest panicked and hardly made one good move after that; by the end of the session he was in danger of being wiped out.
After the break Gurgeh was attacked by all the others, while the priest struggled, pinned against one edge of the board. Gurgeh took the hint. He gave the priest room to maneuver and let him attack two of the weaker players to regain his position on the board. The game finished with Gurgeh established over most of the board and the others either eradicated or confined to small, strategically irrelevant areas. Gurgeh had no particular interest in fighting the game out to the bitter end, and anyway guessed that if he tried to do so the others would form a united opposition, no matter how obvious it was they were working together; Gurgeh was being offered victory, but he would suffer if he tried to be greedy, or vindictive. The status quo was agreed; the game ended. The priest came second on points, just.
Pequil congratulated him again, outside the hall. He’d reached the second round of the Main Series; he was one of only twelve hundred First Winners and twice that number of Qualifiers. He would now play against one person in the second round. Again, the apex begged Gurgeh to give a news-conference, and again Gurgeh refused.
“But you must! What are you trying to do? If you don’t say something soon you’ll turn them against you; this enigmatic stuff won’t do forever, you know. You’re the underdog at the moment; don’t lose that!”
“Pequil,” Gurgeh said, fully aware he was insulting the apex by addressing him so, “I have no intention of speaking to anybody about my game, and what they choose to say or think about me is irrelevant. I am here to play the game and nothing else.”
“You are our guest,” Pequil said coldly.
“And you are my hosts.” Gurgeh turned and walked away from the official, and the ride back in the car was completed in silence, save for Flere-Imsaho’s humming, which occasionally sounded to Gurgeh as if it barely concealed a chuckling laugh.
“Now the trouble starts.”
“Why do you say that, ship?” It was night. The rear doors of the module lay open. Gurgeh could hea
r the distant buzz of the police hoverplane stationed over the hotel to keep news-agency craft away; the smell of the city, warm and spicy and smoky, drifted in too. Gurgeh was studying a set-piece problem in a single game, and taking notes. This seemed to be the best way of talking to the Limiting Factor with the time-delay; talk, then switch off and consider the problem while the HS light flashed to and fro; then, when the reply came, switch back to speech mode; it was almost like having a real conversation.
“Because now you have to show your moral cards. It’s the single match, so you have to define your first principles, register your philosophical premises. Therefore you’ll have to give them some of the things you believe in. I believe this could prove troublesome.”
“Ship,” Gurgeh said, writing some notes on a scratch tablet as he studied the holo in front of him, “I’m not sure I have any beliefs.”
“I think you do, Jernau Gurgeh, and the Imperial Game Bureau will want to know what they are, for the record; I’m afraid you’ll have to think of something.”
“Why should I? What does it matter? I can’t win any posts or ranks, I’m not going to gain any power out of this, so what difference does it make what I believe in? I know they need to find out what people in power think, but I just want to play the game.”
“Yes, but they will need to know for their statistics. Your views may not matter a jot in terms of the elective properties of the game, but they do need to keep a record of what sort of player wins what sort of match… besides which, they will be interested in what sort of extremist politics you give credence to.”
Gurgeh looked at the screen camera. “Extremist politics? What are you talking about?”
“Jernau Gurgeh,” the machine said, making a sighing noise, “a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.”