Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (21 page)

I
was just bringing Lame Hans his lunch when he looked up at me excitedly.

“What do you see?” he demanded.

“I see a lame man waiting for his meal,” I answered.

He shook his head vigorously. “The game,” he said. “What about the game?”

“Same as always,” I said. “You’re sitting in your cell, the computer is right outside it, you’re playing white, and since the computer is an empty shell, you’re playing black, too.”

“No!” he yelled. “It moved on its own!”

“Hans, even if it still had a brain, it’s not plugged in.”

“I don’t care! It moved its Knight to King’s Bishop three!”

“Hans, it hasn’t moved a damned thing since you hid poor Gretchen inside it when you and Professor Baumeister attempted to defraud the others. And we all know that she suffocated. That’s why you’re here.”

“Just look!” yelled Lame Hans. He pushed his Queen’s Bishop forward, leaving her Rook unprotected—and while he held his hands up in the air to prove he wasn’t touching anything or leaning on the board, the Black Queen slowly slid on the diagonal and took the Rook.

“There’s someone inside,” I said with certainty.

“Look!” he urged me.

I pulled out the side panel, and could see nothing, but remembering how cleverly they had concealed Gretchen, I walked around the other side, removed that panel, found that I could see clear through to the far well, and then felt around inside it. There was no one there and, of course, no mechanical brain.

“Well?” demanded Lame Hans.

“I don’t know how you did it,” I admitted.

“I didn’t do anything!” he shouted at me. “The machine’s alive.”

He pushed a Pawn forward, and the machine responded by taking it with its Knight.

“I am the best chess player in all Bavaria,” said Lame Hans. “The machine is not only alive—it’s brilliant!”

Brilliant, I thought, but did not say. If the machine was indeed brilliant, then why was Lame Hans in his ongoing competition ahead by one hundred and sixty games to twenty-two? Why, time and again, did the machine succumb to Knight forks and fianchettoed Bishops, stumble into doubled Pawns two games out of three? The machine had its instances, to be sure—twenty-two of them in fact— but it was impossible to conceive of it as anything other than a dull refraction of Lame Hans’s madness.

Or so I thought. The thoughts of a jailer are not, however, profound by nature, and it is possible that I misunderstood the situation. Perhaps the brilliant Lame Hans had created a machine persona cunning enough to deliberately lose eight-ninths of the time, thereby inflating the already enormous ego of its perpetrator. Summers were hot in Bavaria, at the time of which I am writing, even hotter than they are now, a peak of solstice that fried brains and damaged reputations. The thoughts of a jailer are not to be dismissed; we see aspects of prisoners that they do not see themselves.

“It is time for another game,” Lame Hans said deliberately. “Please redistribute the board. I will not ask you this again. If your mind is to drift, let it be when you are not in my presence.”

Clumsily—I have never quite understood the initial posting of the thirty-two chess pieces even after all this time—I bent to the task. Lame Hans regarded me indolently, perched in the shadows of the cell. He called it his “Plato’s Cave.” Under no circumstance have I pursued this subject. It has something to do with idealization as opposed to the grim actuality furnished within the Bavarian compass, but I am not a reflective person (no jailer possibly could be and keep his position), and I leave Lame Hans to his own speculations. With some difficulty (“Queen takes her own color; Knights adjoin the Rooks on the first line,” I mumble subvocally) I completed the formation and pushed the board into proximity to the prisoner. Rubbing his hands, he contemplated the fresh formulation with delight. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“Of course I am ready. Go ahead.”

“Not this time,” Lame Hans said. “It is time now for you to play. You have the white pieces. Move.”

The invitation was unprecedented. Hans had never before asked my participation. I admit that I looked at him with some confusion. “I don’t understand,” I said. “It is your move. Both times.”

“This is the second series,” Lame Hans said. He moved in spindly, erratic fashion from the deep shadows to the front of his cage. “In the second series there are two participants. The previous series has reached its conclusion. It was mediated that the winner would be the first to achieve one hundred and sixty victories, and I have now done so. The machine is therefore eliminated, and it is time for you to take its place.”

This announcement was dismaying. I barely knew the rules of chess, as I have made clear—and in the role of human, entrapped opponent, Gretchen suffocated. While I am sturdier than Gretchen and considerably less naive, I have my own disability as well as only the shakiest command of chess. “I would rather not,” I said. “This was never provided.”

Perhaps I should explain the conditions. Bavarian tenets and folkways can be mystifying to tourists or the uninitiated. Through the years we have had occasional wavelets of visitors, some of them interested in mountain passages, others in hearty adventures in the local pubs and resorts. A few of them have been drawn by news of the legendary Lame Hans and his bizarre penitentiary in the aftermath of Gretchen’s horrible but rather necessary death. We are obliged to enact this strange tournament for their edification and ours. It is a laborious and stultifying circumstance, but I assumed my role without complaint. It had been my plan to abscond to the North and somehow change my life, but I had been embarrassingly caught at the border and returned in chains and humiliation to the authorities and, after a perfunctory trial, to my rather peculiar fate. I had not objected. There were worse penalties. The delectable Gretchen, for instance, had been sentenced to the machine and subsequent suffocation. I had in contract been given privileges of the cell block and occasional periods in default during which Lame Hans had been subject to interrogation, and I had been permitted to sleep or otherwise amuse myself. Of course, there were limits to my own freedom, and my life contained no more possibility than that of Lame Hans.

The good aspect of totalitarianism is that it grinds all of its subjects into a monotony of feeling and circumstance. Everything feels pretty much like everything else after a while. There is a glittering similarity and a fascinating restriction of emotional range that, once accepted, tends to pass rather quickly.

“There was never any intention to enlist me in place of the machine,” I point out. “I was never meant to be a participant.”

“Au contraire,” Lame Hans said. Sometimes he lurches into terrible French, a language he comprehends as poorly as I do chess. “Provisions were clear. You would enter at the conclusion of the one hundred and sixtieth victory for either side. You are white and therefore on move. I suggest an aggressive game. King’s Gambit? Of course it will be King’s Gambit declined.”

All of this rather tense and barely comprehensible exchange is taking place between a man in a musty corridor, barely pervaded by light, and another locked in a cell. The question of who is the prisoner, who the guardian, seems quite abstract at this moment.

“Gretchen suffocated,” I observed pointlessly.

“So she did. Life itself is a dismal affliction, an imposition upon us. We breathe, we do not breathe; it is all the same. Like totalitarianism. Life itself is a species of suffocation. We are now on the clock. An imaginary clock of course, but no less determinant for all of this. I await your move.”

I understood, finally, that the situation was somewhat more complex than I had previously thought. Bavaria is more than Bavarian: It is the world itself. This is a species of contemplation with which I had never been previously engaged.

In consequence and somewhat reluctantly, I moved the King’s Pawn two spaces. I know this much at least, and of the necessity to bring out the Queen’s Pawn on the subsequent move and the King’s Knight shortly thereafter. In the wake of this rather daring accommodation, I survey the board glumly, awaiting Lame Hans’s subsequent move. His eyes appear to glitter with purpose.

He moved his own King’s Pawn, folded his arms, stared at me. “Mate in ten moves,” he said. “By the way,” he added, “all of this is in your imagination.”

As if from a great distance, gasps and throttles come from somewhere behind him, deep in his cell.

Gretchen is suffocating again.

Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all- time leading award winner for short fiction. He has won five Hugos (from a record thirty-six nominations), a Nebula, and other major awards in the United States, France, Japan, Croatia, Poland, and Spain. He is the author of seventy-one novels, more than two hundred and fifty short stories, three screenplays, and is the editor of forty-one anthologies. His work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and he was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

Barry Malzberg is the author of more than ninety books and three hundred short stories, and is a former editor of both Amazing and Fantastic. A multiple Nebula and Hugo nominee, he won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel.