“You mean they tortured him?”
“Only a little. He’s old and they had to keep him alive for whatever punishment the Emperor decided on. The apex exo-controller and some other henchman have been impaled, the plea-bargaining crony’s getting caged in the forest to await the Incandescence, and Hamin’s being deprived of AGe drugs; he’ll be dead in forty or fifty days.”
Gurgeh shook his head. “Hamin… I didn’t think he was that frightened of me.”
“Well, he’s old. They have funny ideas sometimes.”
“Do you think I’m safe now?”
“Yes. The Emperor wants you alive so he can destroy you on the Azad boards. Nobody else would dare harm you. You can concentrate on the game. Anyway, I’ll look after you.”
Gurgeh looked, disbelievingly, at the buzzing drone.
He could detect no trace of irony in its voice.
Gurgeh and Nicosar started the first of the lesser games three days later. There was a curious atmosphere about the final match; a sense of anti-climax pervaded Castle Klaff. Normally this last contest was the culmination of six years’ work and preparation in the Empire; the very apotheosis of all that Azad was and stood for. This time, the imperial continuance was already settled. Nicosar had ensured his next Great Year of rule when he’d beaten Vechesteder and Jhilno, though, as far as the rest of the Empire knew, the Emperor still had to play Krowo to decide who wore the imperial crown. Even if Gurgeh did win the game, it would make no difference, save for some wounded imperial pride. The court and the Bureau would put it down to experience, and make sure they didn’t invite anymore decadent but sneaky aliens to take part in the holy game.
Gurgeh suspected that many of the people still in the fortress would as soon have left Echronedal to head back to Eä, but the coronation ceremony and the religious confirmation still had to be witnessed, and nobody would be allowed to leave Echronedal until the fire had passed and the Emperor had risen from its embers.
Probably only Gurgeh and Nicosar were really looking forward to the match; even the observing game-players and analysts were disheartened at the prospect of witnessing a game they were already barred from discussing, even among themselves. All Gurgeh’s games past the point he had supposedly been knocked out were taboo subjects. They did not exist. The Imperial Games Bureau was already hard at work concocting an official final match between Nicosar and Krowo. Judging by their previous efforts, Gurgeh expected it to be entirely convincing. It might lack the ultimate spark of genius, but it would pass.
So everything was already settled. The Empire had new star marshals (though a little shuffling would be required to replace Yomonul), new generals and admirals, archbishops, ministers and judges. The course of the Empire was set, and with very little change from the previous bearing. Nicosar would continue with his present policies; the premises of the various winners indicated little discontent or new thinking. The courtiers and officials could therefore breathe easily again, knowing nothing would alter too much, and their positions were as secure as they’d ever be. So, instead of the usual tension surrounding the final game, there was an atmosphere more like that of an exhibition match. Only the two contestants were treating it as a real contest.
Gurgeh was immediately impressed by Nicosar’s play. The Emperor didn’t stop rising in Gurgeh’s estimation; the more he studied the apex’s play the more he realized just how powerful and complete an opponent he was facing. He would need to be more than lucky to beat Nicosar; he would need to be somebody else. From the beginning he tried to concentrate on not being trounced rather than actually defeating the Emperor.
Nicosar played cautiously most of the time; then, suddenly, he’d strike out with some brilliant flowing series of moves that looked at first as though they’d been made by some gifted madman, before revealing themselves as the masterstrokes they were; perfect answers to the impossible questions they themselves posed.
Gurgeh did his best to anticipate these devastating fusions of guile and power, and to find replies to them once they’d begun, but by the time the minor games were over, thirty days or so before the fire was due, Nicosar had a considerable advantage in pieces and cards to carry over to the first of the three great boards. Gurgeh suspected his only chance was to hold out as best he could on the first two boards and hope that he might pull something back on the final one.
The cinderbuds towered around the castle, rising like a slow tide of gold about the walls. Gurgeh sat in the same small garden he’d visited before. Then he’d been able to look out over the cinderbuds to the distant horizon; now the view ended twenty meters away at the first of the great yellow leaf-heads. Late sunlight spread the castle’s shadow across the canopy. Behind Gurgeh, the fortress lights were coming on.
Gurgeh looked out to the tan trunks of the great trees, and shook his head. He’d lost the game on the Board of Origin and now he was losing on the Board of Form.
He was missing something; some facet of the way Nicosar was playing was escaping him. He knew it, he was certain, but he couldn’t work out what that facet was. He had a nagging suspicion it was something very simple, however complex its articulation on the boards might be. He ought to have spotted it, analyzed and evaluated it long ago and turned it to his advantage, but for some reason—some reason intrinsic to his very understanding of the game, he felt sure—he could not. An aspect of his play seemed to have disappeared, and he was starting to think the knock to the head he’d taken during the hunt had affected him more than he’d first assumed.
But then, the ship didn’t seem to have any better idea what he was doing wrong, either. Its advice always seemed to make sense at the time, but when Gurgeh got to the board he found he could never apply the ship’s ideas. If he went against his instincts and forced himself to do as the 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 recognize 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 programs. 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 fr
om Echronedal were still being analyzed.
“… 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 spatial 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 match 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 realization 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 flavor, 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-full 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 wa
s 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 remodeled 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 acknowledgment 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 toward 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.