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 gray, 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 onto 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 is that style? You’ve been very vague and strange the past few days; I could see you were concentrating so I didn’t press the point, but I and the ship would like to be told.”
“Nicosar’s taken on the part of the Empire; hence his style. I’ve had no choice but to become the Culture, hence mine. It’s that simple.”
“It doesn’t look it.”
“Tough. Think of it as a sort of mutual rape.”
“I think you should straighten out, Jernau Gurgeh.”
“I’m—” Gurgeh started to say, then stopped to check. He frowned in exasperation. “I’m perfectly straight, you idiot! Now why don’t you do something useful and order me some breakfast?”
“Yes, master,” Flere-Imsaho said sullenly, and dipped back inside the room. Gurgeh looked up into the empty board of blue sky, his mind already racing with plans for the game on the Board of Becoming.
Flere-Imsaho watched the man grow even more intense and absorbed in the days between the second and final games. He hardly seemed to hear anything that was said to him; he had to be reminded to eat and sleep. The drone wouldn’t have believed it, but twice it saw the man sitting with an expression of pain on his face, staring at nothing. Doing a remote ultrasound scan, the drone had discovered the man’s bladder was full to bursting; he had to be told when to pee! He spent all day, every day, gazing intently at nothing, or feverishly studying replays of old games. And though he might have been briefly undrugged after his long sleep, immediately thereafter he started glanding again, and didn’t stop. The drone used its Effector to monitor the man’s brainwaves and found that even when he appeared to sleep, it wasn’t really sleep; controlled lucid dreaming was what it seemed to be. His drug-glands were obviously working furiously all the time, and for the first time there were more tell-tale signs of intense drug-use on Gurgeh’s body than there were on his opponent’s.
How could he play in such a state? Had it been up to Flere-Imsaho, it would have stopped the man playing there and then. But it had its orders. It had a part to play, and it had played it, and all it could do now was wait and see what happened.
More people attended the start of the game on the Board of Becoming than had attended the previous two; the other game-players were still trying to work out what was going on in this strange, complicated, unfathomable game, and wanted to see what would happen on this final board, where the Emperor started with a considerable advantage, but on which the alien was known to be especially good.
Gurgeh dived back into the game, an amphibian into welcoming water. For a few moves he just gloried in the feeling of returning home to his element and the sheer joy of the contest, taking delight in a flexing of his strengths and powers, the readying tension of the pieces and places; then he curved out from that playing to the serious business of the building and the hunting, the making and linking and the destroying and cutting; the searching and destroying.
The board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassably fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar’s beliefs and his together. Image of their minds; a hologram of pure coherence, burning like a standing wave of fire across the board, a perfect map of the landscapes of thought and faith within their heads.
He began the slow move that was defeat and victory together before he even knew it himself. Nothing so subtle, so complex, so beautiful had ever been seen on an Azad board. He believed that; he knew that. He would make it the truth.
The game went on.
Breaks, days, evenings, conversations, meals; they came and went in another dimension; a monochrome thing, a flat, grainy image. He was somewhere else entirely. Another dimension, another image. His skull was a blister with a board inside it, his outside self just another piece to be shuffled here and there.
He didn’t talk to Nicosar, but they conversed, they carried out the most exquisitely textured exchange of mood and feeling through those pieces which they moved and were moved by; a song, a dance, a perfect poem. People filled the game-room every day now, engrossed in the fabulously perplexing work taking shape before them; trying to read that poem, see deeper into this moving picture, listen to this symphony, touch this living sculpture, and so understand it.
It goes on until it ends, Gurgeh thought to himself one day, and at the same time as the banality of the thought struck him, he saw that it was over. The climax had been reached. It was done, destroyed, could be no more. It was not finished, but it was over. A terrible sadness swamped him, took hold of him like a piece and made him sway and nearly fall, so that he had to walk to his stoolseat and pull himself onto it like an old man.
“Oh…” he heard himself say.
He looked at Nicosar, but the Emperor hadn’t seen it yet. He was looking at element-cards, trying to work out a way to alter the terrain ahead of his next advance.
Gurgeh couldn’t believe it. The game was over; couldn’t anybody see that? He looked despairingly around the faces of the officials, the spectators, the observers and Adjudicators. What was wrong with them all? He looked back at the board, hoping desperately that he might have missed something, made some mistake that meant there was still something Nicosar could do, that the perfect dance might last a little longer. He could see nothing; it w
as done. He looked at the time shown on the point-board. It was nearly time to break for the day. It was a dark evening outside. He tried to remember what day it was. The fire was due very soon, wasn’t it? Perhaps tonight, or tomorrow. Perhaps it had already been? No; even he would have noticed. The great high windows of the prow-hall were still unshuttered, looking out into the darkness where the huge cinderbuds waited, heavy with fruit.
Over over over. His—their—beautiful game over; dead. What had he done? He put his clenched hands over his mouth. Nicosar, you fool! The Emperor had fallen for it, taken the bait, entered the run and followed it to be torn apart near the high stand, storms of splinters before the fire.
Empires had fallen to barbarians before, and no doubt would again. Gurgeh knew all this from his childhood. Culture children were taught such things. The barbarians invade, and are taken over. Not always; some empires dissolve and cease, but many absorb; many take the barbarians in and end up conquering them. They make them live like the people they set out to take over. The architecture of the system channels them, beguiles them, seduces and transforms them, demanding from them what they could not before have given but slowly grow to offer. The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
The Culture had become the Empire, the Empire the barbarians. Nicosar looked triumphant, pieces everywhere, adapting and taking and changing and moving in for the kill. But it would be their own death-change; they could not survive as they were; wasn’t that obvious? They would become Gurgeh’s, or neutrals, their rebirth his to deliver. Over.
A prickling sensation began behind his nose and he sat back, overcome by the sadness of the game’s ending, and waiting for tears.
None came. A suitable reprimand from his body, for using the elements so well, and water so much. He would drown Nicosar’s attacks; the Emperor played with fire, and would be extinguished. No tears for him.
Something left Gurgeh, just ebbed away, burned out, relaxing its grip on him. The room was cool, filled with a spirit fragrance, and the rustling sound of the cinderbud canopy outside, beyond the tall, wide windows. People talked quietly in the galleries.
He looked around, and saw Hamin sitting in the college seats. The old apex looked shrunken and doll-like; a tiny withered husk of what he’d been, face lined and body misshapen. Gurgeh stared at him. Was this one of their ghosts? Had he been there all the time? Was he still alive? The unbearably old apex seemed to be staring fixedly at the center of the board, and for one absurd instant Gurgeh thought the old creature was already dead and they’d brought his desiccated body into the prow-hall as some sort of trophy, a final ignominy.
Then the horn sounded for the end of the evening’s play, and two imperial guards came and wheeled the dying apex away. The shrunken, grizzled head looked briefly in his direction.
Gurgeh felt as though he’d been somewhere far away, on a great journey he’d just returned from. He looked at Nicosar, consulting with a couple of his advisors as the Adjudicators noted the closing positions and the people in the galleries stood up and started chattering. Did he imagine that Nicosar looked concerned, even worried? Perhaps so. He felt suddenly very sorry for the Emperor, for all of them; for everybody.
He sighed, and it was like the last breath of some great storm that had passed through him. He stretched his arms and legs, stood again. He looked at the board. Yes; over. He’d done it. There was much left to do, a lot still to happen, but Nicosar would lose. He could choose how he lost; fall forward and be absorbed, fall back and be taken over, go berserk and raze everything… but his board-Empire was finished.
He met the Emperor’s gaze for a moment. He could see from the expression there that Nicosar hadn’t fully realized yet, but he knew the apex was reading him in return and could probably see the change in the man, sense the sense of victory… Gurgeh lowered his gaze from that hard sight, and turned away and walked out of the hall.
There was no acclaim, there were no congratulations. Nobody else could see. Flere-Imsaho was its usual concerned, annoying self, but it too hadn’t spotted anything, and still inquired how he thought the game was going. He lied. The Limiting Factor thought things were building up to a head. He didn’t bother to tell it. He’d expected more of the ship, though.
He ate alone, mind blank. He spent the evening swimming in a pool deep inside the castle, carved out of the rock spur the fortress had been built upon. He was alone; everybody else had gone to the castle towers and the higher battlements, or had taken to aircars, watching the distant glow in the sky to the west, where the Incandescence had begun.
Gurgeh swam until he felt tired, then dried, dressed in trous, shirt and a light jacket, and went for a walk round the castle’s curtain wall.
The night was dark under a covering of cloud; the great cinderbuds, higher than the outer walls, closed off the distant light of the approaching Incandescence. Imperial guards were out, ensuring that nobody started the fire early; Gurgeh had to prove to them he wasn’t carrying anything which could produce a spark or flame before they would let him out of the castle, where shutters were being readied and the walkways were damp from tests of the sprinkler systems.
The cinderbuds creaked and rustled in the windless gloom, exposing new, tinder-dry surfaces to the rich air, bark-layers unpeeling from the great bulbs of flammable liquid that hung beneath their topmost branches. The night air was saturated by the heady stench of their sap.
A hushed feeling lay over the ancient fortress; a religious mood of awed anticipation which even Gurgeh would experience as a tangible change in the place. The swooshings of returning aircars, coming in over a damped-down swathe of forest to the castle, reminded Gurgeh that everybody was supposed to be in the castle by midnight, and he went back slowly, drinking in the atmosphere of still expectation like something precious that could not last for long, or perhaps ever be again.
Still, he wasn’t tired; the pleasant fatigue from his swim had become just a sort of background tingle in his body, and so when he climbed the stairs to the level of his room, he didn’t stop, but kept going up, even as the horn sounded to announce midnight.
Gurgeh came out at last onto a high battlement beneath a stubby tower. The circular walkway was damp and dark. He looked to the west, where a dim, fuzzy red glow lit up the edge of the sky. The Incandescence was still far away, below the horizon, its glare reflecting off the overcast like some livid artificial sunset. Despite that light, Gurgeh was conscious of the depth and stillness of the night as it settled round the castle, quieting it. He found a door in the tower and climbed to its machicolated summit. He leaned on the stonework and looked out into the north, where the low hills lay. He listened to the dripping of a leaking sprinkler somewhere beneath him, and the barely audible rustlings of the cinderbuds as they prepared for their own destruction. The hills were quite invisible; he gave up trying to make them out and turned again to that barely curved band of dark red in the west.
A horn sounded somewhere in the castle, then another and another. There were other noises too; distant shouting and running footsteps, as though the castle was waking up again. He wondered what was going on. He pulled the thin jacket closed, suddenly feeling the coolness of the night, as a light easterly breeze started up.
The sadness he’d felt during the day had not fully left him; rather it had sunk in, become something less obvious but more integral. How beautiful that game had been; how much he had enjoyed it, exulted in it… but only by trying to bring about its cessation, only by ensuring that that joy would be short-lived. He wondered if Nicosar had realized yet; he must have had a suspicion, at least. He sat down on a small stone bench.
Gurgeh realized suddenly that he would miss Nicosar. He felt closer to the Emperor, in some ways, than he had ever felt to anybody; that game had been a deep intimacy, a sharing of experience and sensation Gurgeh doubted any other relationship could match.
He sighed, eventually, got up from the bench and
went to the parapet again, looking down to the paved walk at the foot of the tower. There were two imperial guards standing there, dimly visible by the light spilling from the tower’s open door. Their pale faces were tipped up, looking at him. He wasn’t sure whether to wave or not. One of them lifted his arm; a bright light shone up at Gurgeh, who shielded his eyes. A third, smaller, darker figure Gurgeh hadn’t noticed before moved toward the tower and entered it through the lit doorway. The torch beam switched off. The two guards took up positions on either side of the tower door.
Steps sounded within the tower. Gurgeh sat on the stone bench again and waited.
“Morat Gurgeh, good evening.” It was Nicosar; the dark, slightly stooped figure of the Emperor of Azad climbed up out of the tower.
“Your Highness—”
“Sit down, Gurgeh,” the quiet voice said. Nicosar joined Gurgeh on the bench, his face like an indistinct white moon in front of him, lit only by the faint glow from the tower’s stairwell. Gurgeh wondered if Nicosar could see him at all. The moon-face turned away from him, looking toward the horizon-wide smudge of carmine. “There has been an attempt on my life, Gurgeh,” the Emperor said quietly.
“An…” Gurgeh began, appalled. “Are you all right, Your Highness?”
The moon-face swung back. “I am unharmed.” The apex held up one hand. “Please; no ‘Your Highness’ now. We’re alone; there is no breach of protocol. I wanted to explain to you personally why the castle is under martial law. The Imperial Guard have taken over all commands. I do not anticipate another attack, but one must take care.”
“But who would do this? Who would attack you?”
Nicosar looked to the north and the unseen hills. “We believe the culprits may have tried to escape along the viaduct to the reservoir lakes, so I’ve sent some guards there too.” He turned slowly back to the man, and his voice was soft. “That’s an interesting situation you’ve got me in, Morat Gurgeh.”