The Player of Games (19 page)

In the afternoon they played on a couple of the smaller boards in a series of single games to decide order of precedence. Gurgeh knew he was good at both these games, and easily beat the others. Only the priest seemed upset by this. There was another break, for dinner, during which Pequil arrived unofficially, on his way home from the office. He expressed his pleased surprise at how well Gurgeh was doing, and even patted him on the arm before he left. The early-evening session was a formality; all that happened was that they were told by the game-officials - amateurs from a local club, with one imperial official in charge - the exact configuration and order of play for the following day, on the Board of Origin. As had now become obvious, Gurgeh was going to start with a considerable advantage.
Sitting in the back of the car with only Flere-Imsaho for company, and feeling quite pleased with himself, Gurgeh watched the city go by in the violet light of dusk. 'Not too bad, I suppose,' the drone said, humming only a little as it lay on the seat by Gurgeh. 'I'd contact the ship tonight if I were you, to discuss what you're going to do tomorrow.' 'Would you really?' 'Yes. You're going to need all the help you can get. They'll gang up on you tomorrow; bound to. This is where you lose out, of course; if any of them were in this situation they'd be getting in touch with one or more of the less well-placed players and doing a deal with them to go for-' 'Yes, but as you never seem to tire of telling me, they would all demean themselves doing anything of the sort with me. On the other hand though, with your encouragement and the
Limiting Factor
's help, how can I lose?' The drone was silent.
Gurgeh got in touch with the ship that night. Flere-Imsaho had declared itself bored; it had discarded its casing, gone black-body, and floated off unseen into the night to visit a city park where there were some nocturnal birds. Gurgeh talked over his plans with the
Limiting Factor
, but the time delay of almost a minute made the conversation with the distant warship a slow business. The ship had some good suggestions, though. Gurgeh was certain that at this level at least he must be getting far better advice from the ship than any of his immediate opponents were receiving from their advisors, aides and mentors. Probably only the top hundred or so players, those directly sponsored and supported by the leading colleges, would have access to such informed help. This thought cheered him further, and he went to bed happy. Three days later, just as play was closing after the early-evening session, Gurgeh looked at the Board of Origin and realised he was going to be put out of the game.
Everything had gone well at first. He'd been pleased with his handling of the pieces, and sure he'd had a more subtle appreciation of the game's strategic balance. With his superiority in position and forces resulting from his successes during the early stages, he'd been confident he was going to win, and so stay in the Main Series to play in the second round, of single games. Then, on the third morning, he realised he had been overconfident, and his concentration had lapsed. What had looked like a series of unconnected moves by most of the other players suddenly became a coordinated mass attack, with the priest at its head. He'd panicked and they'd trounced him. Now he was a dead man. The priest came up to Gurgeh when the session's play was over and Gurgeh was still sitting in his high stoolseat, looking down at the shambles on the board and wondering what had gone wrong. The apex asked the man if he was willing to concede; it was the conventional course when somebody was so far behind in pieces and territory, and there was less shame attached to an honourable admission of defeat than to a stubborn refusal to face reality which only dragged the game out longer for one's opponents. Gurgeh looked at the priest, then at Flere-Imsaho, who'd been allowed into the hall once the play had ended. The machine wobbled a little in front of him, humming mightily and fairly buzzing with static. 'What do you think, drone?' he said tiredly. 'I think the sooner you get out of those ridiculous clothes, the better,' the machine said. The priest, whose own robes were a more gaudy version of Gurgeh's, glanced angrily at the humming machine, but said nothing. Gurgeh looked at the board again, then at the priest. He took a long, sighing breath and opened his mouth, but before he could speak Flere-Imsaho said, 'So I think you should go back to the hotel and get changed and relax and give yourself an opportunity to think.' Gurgeh nodded his head slowly, rubbing his beard and looking at the mess of tangled fortunes on the Board of Origin. He told the priest he'd see him tomorrow.
'There's nothing I can do; they've won,' he told the drone once they were back in the module. 'If you say so. Why not ask the ship?' Gurgeh contacted the
Limiting Factor
to give it the bad news. It commiserated, and, rather than come up with any helpful ideas, told him exactly where he'd gone wrong, going into considerable detail. Gurgeh thanked it with little good grace, and went to bed dispirited, wishing he'd resigned when the priest had asked him. Flere-Imsaho had gone off exploring the city again. Gurgeh lay in the darkness, the module quiet around him. He wondered what they'd really sent him here for. What did Contact actually expect him to do? Had he been sent to be humiliated, and so reassure the Empire the Culture was unlikely to be any threat to it? It seemed as likely as anything else. He could imagine Chiark Hub rattling off figures about the colossal amount of energy expended in sending him all this way… and even the Culture, even Contact, would think twice about doing all it had just to provide one citizen with a glorified adventure holiday. The Culture didn't use money as such, but it also didn't want to be
too
conspicuously extravagant with matter and energy, either (so inelegant to be wasteful). But to keep the Empire satisfied that the Culture was just a joke, no threat… how much was that worth? He turned over in the bed, switched on the floatfield, adjusted its resistance, tried to sleep, turned this way and that, adjusted the field again but still could not get comfortable, and so, eventually, turned it off. He saw the slight glow from the bracelet Chamlis had given him, shining by the bedside. He picked the thin band up, turning it over in his hands. The tiny Orbital was bright in the darkness, lighting up his fingers and the covers on the bed. He gazed at its daylight surface and the microscopic whorls of weather systems over blue sea and duncoloured land. He really ought to write to Chamlis, say thank you. It was only then he realised quite how clever the little piece of jewellery was. He'd assumed it was just an illuminated still picture, but it wasn't; he could remember how it had looked when he'd first seen it, and now the scene was different; the island continents on the daylight side were mostly different shapes to those he remembered, though he recognised a couple of them, near the dawn terminator. The bracelet was a moving representation of an Orbital; possibly even a crude clock. He smiled in the darkness, turned away. They all expected him to lose. Only he knew - or had known - he was a better player than they thought. But now he'd thrown away the chance of proving he was right and they were wrong. 'Fool, fool,' he whispered to himself in the darkness. He couldn't sleep. He got up, switched on the module-screen and told the machine to display his game. The Board of Origin appeared, thru-holoed in front of him. He sat there and stared at it, then he told the module to contact the ship. It was a slow, dreamlike conversation, during which he gazed as though transfixed at the bright game-board seemingly stretching away from him, while waiting for his words to reach the distant warship, and then for its reply to come back. 'Jernau Gurgeh?' 'I want to know something, ship. Is there any way out of this?' Stupid question. He could see the answer. His position was an inchoate mess; the only certain thing about it was that it was hopeless. 'Out of your present situation in the game?' He sighed. What a waste of time. 'Yes. Can you see a way?' The frozen holo on the screen in front of him, his displayed position, was like some trapped moment of falling; the instant when the foot slips, the fingers lose their last strength, and the fatal, accelerating descent begins. He thought of satellites, forever falling, and the controlled stumble that bipeds call walking. 'You are more points behind than anybody who has ever come back to win in any Main Series game. You have already been defeated, they believe.' Gurgeh waited for more. Silence. 'Answer the question,' he told the ship. 'You didn't answer the question. Answer me.' What was the ship playing at? Mess, mess, a total mess. His position was a swirling, amorphous, nebulous, almost barbaric welter of pieces and areas, battered and crumbling and falling away. Why was he even bothering to ask? Didn't he trust his own judgement? Did he need a Mind to tell him? Would only that make it real? 'Yes, of course there is a way,' the ship said. 'Many ways, in fact, though they are all unlikely, near impossible. But it can be done. There isn't nearly enough time to-' 'Goodnight, ship,' he said, as the signal continued. '- explain any of them in detail, but I think I can give you a general idea what to do, though of course just because it has to be such a synoptic appraisal, such a-' 'Sorry, ship; goodnight.' Gurgeh turned the channel off. It clicked once. After a little while the closing chime announced the ship had signed off too. Gurgeh looked at the holo image of the board again, then closed his eyes.
By morning he still had no idea what he was going to do. He hadn't slept at all that night, just sat in front of the screen, staring at its displayed panorama of the game until the view was seemingly etched into his brain, and his eyes hurt with the strain. Later he'd eaten lightly and watched some of the broadcast entertainments the Empire fed the population with. It was a suitably mindless diversion. Pequil arrived, smiling, and said how well Gurgeh had done to stay in contention at all, and how, personally, Pequil was sure that Gurgeh would do well in the second-series games for those knocked out of the Main Series, if he wished to take part. Of course, they were mostly of interest to those seeking promotion in their careers, and led no further, but Gurgeh might do better against other… ah, unfortunates. Anyway; he was still going to Echronedal to see the end of the games, and that was a great privilege, wasn't it? Gurgeh hardly spoke, just nodded now and again. They rode out to the hall, while Pequil went on and on about the great victory Nicosar had achieved in his first game the previous day; the Emperor-Regent was already on to the second board, the Board of Form.
The priest again asked Gurgeh to resign, and again Gurgeh said he wished to play. They all sat down around the great spread of board, and either dictated their moves to the club players, or made them themselves. Gurgeh sat for a long time before placing his first piece that morning; he rubbed the biotech between his hands for minutes, looking down, wide-eyed, at the board for so long the others thought he'd forgotten it was his turn, and asked the Adjudicator to remind him. Gurgeh placed the piece. It was as though he saw two boards; one here in front of him and one engraved into his mind from the night before. The other players made their moves, gradually forcing Gurgeh back into one small area of the board, with only a couple of free pieces outside it, hunted and fleeing. When it came, as he'd known it would without wanting to admit to himself that he did know, the… he could only think of it as a revelation… made him want to laugh. In fact he did rock back in his seat, head nodding. The priest looked at him expectantly, as though waiting for the stupid human to finally give up, but Gurgeh smiled over at the apex, selected the strongest cards from his dwindling supply, deposited them with the Adjudicator, and made his next move. All he was banking on, it turned out, was the rest being too concerned with winning the game quickly. It was obvious that some sort of deal had been arranged which would let the priest win, and Gurgeh guessed that the others wouldn't be playing at their best when they were competing for somebody else; it would not be
their
victory. They would not own it. Certainly, they didn't have to play well; sheer weight of numbers could compensate for indifferent play. But the moves could become a language, and Gurgeh thought he could speak that language now, well enough (tellingly) to lie in it… so he made his moves, and at one moment, with one move, seemed to be suggesting that he had given up… then with his next move he appeared to indicate he was determined to take one of several players down with him… or two of them… or a different one… the lies went on. There was no single message, but rather a succession of contradictory signals, pulling the syntax of the game to and fro and to and fro until the common understanding the other players had reached began to fatigue and tear and split. In the midst of this, Gurgeh made some at first sight inconsequential, purposeless moves which - seemingly suddenly, apparently without any warning - threatened first a few, then several, then most of the troop-pieces of one player, but at the cost of making Gurgeh's own forces more vulnerable. While that player panicked, the priest did what Gurgeh was relying on him doing, rushing into the attack. Over the next few moves, Gurgeh asked for the cards he'd deposited with the game official to be revealed. They acted rather like mines in a Possession game. The priest's forces were variously destroyed, demoralised, random-move blinded, hopelessly weakened or turned over to Gurgeh or - in only a few cases - to some of the other players. The priest was left with almost nothing, forces scattering over the board like dead leaves. In the confusion, Gurgeh watched the others, devoid of their leader, squabble over the scraps of power. One got into serious trouble; Gurgeh attacked, annihilated most of his forces and captured the rest, and then kept on attacking without even waiting to regroup. He realised later he'd still been behind in points at that time, but the sheer momentum of his own resurrection from oblivion carried him on, spreading an unreasoning, hysterical, almost superstitiously intense panic amongst the others. From that point on he made no more errors; his progress across the board became a combination of rout and triumphal procession. Perfectly adequate players were made to look like idiots as Gurgeh's forces rampaged across their territories, consuming ground and material as though nothing could be easier or more natural. Gurgeh finished the game on the Board of Origin before the evening session. He'd saved himself; he wasn't just through to the next board, he was in the lead. The priest, who'd sat looking at the game-surface with an expression Gurgeh thought he'd have recognised as 'stunned' even without his lessons in Azadian facial language, walked out of the hall without the customary end-of-game pleasantries, while the other players either said very little or were embarrassingly effusive about his performance. A crowd of people clustered round Gurgeh; the club members, some press people and other players, some observing guests. Gurgeh felt oddly untouched by the surrounding, chattering apices. Crowding up to him, but still trying not to touch him, somehow their very numbers lent an air of unreality to the scene. Gurgeh was buried in questions, but he couldn't answer any of them. He could hardly make them out as individual inquiries anyway; the apices all talked too fast. Flere-Imsaho floated in above the heads of the crowd, but despite trying to shout people down to gain their attention, all it succeeded in attracting was their hair, with its static. Gurgeh saw one apex try to push the machine out of his way, and receive an obviously unexpected and painful electric shock. Pequil shoved his way through the crowd and bustled up to Gurgeh, but instead of coming to rescue the man, he told him he'd brought another twenty reporters with him. He touched Gurgeh without seeming to think about it, turning him to face some cameras. More questions followed, but Gurgeh ignored them. He had to ask Pequil several times if he could leave before the apex had a path cleared to the door and the waiting car. 'Mr Gurgee; let me add my congratulations.' Pequil said in the car. 'I heard while I was in the office and came straight away. A famous victory.' 'Thank you,' Gurgeh said, slowly calming himself. He sat in the car's plushly upholstered seat, looking out at the sunlit city. The car was air-conditioned, unlike the game-hall, but it was only now Gurgeh found himself sweating. He shivered. 'Me too,' Flere-Imsaho said. 'You raised your game just in time.' 'Thank you, drone.' 'You were lucky as hell, too, mind you.' 'I trust you'll let me arrange a proper press-conference, Mr Gurgee,' Pequil said eagerly. 'I'm sure you're going to be quite famous after this, no matter what happens during the rest of the match. Heavens, you'll be sharing leaders with the Emperor himself tonight!' 'No thanks,' Gurgeh said. 'Don't arrange anything.' He couldn't think that he'd have anything useful to tell people. What was there to say? He'd won the game; he'd every chance of taking the match itself. He was anyway a little uncomfortable at the thought of his image and voice being broadcast all over the Empire, and his story, undoubtedly sensationalised, being told and retold and distorted by these people. 'Oh but you must!' Pequil protested. 'Everybody will want to see you! You don't seem to realise what you've done; even if you lose the match you've established a new record!