The Player of Games (31 page)

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that?' he whispered. The drone sidled closer. 'What? Those calls?' it said. 'Yes!' Gurgeh said, listening to the faint sound as it came and went on the soft, warm wind, wavering out of the darkness over the rustling heads of the giant cinderbuds. 'Animals,' Flere-Imsaho said, dimly silhouetted against the last fractions of light in the western sky. 'Big carnivores called troshae, mostly. Six-legged. You saw some from the Emperor's personal menagerie on the night of the ball. Remember?' Gurgeh nodded, still listening, fascinated, to the cries of the distant beasts. 'How do they escape the Incandescence?' 'Troshae run ahead, almost up to the fire-line, during the previous Great Month. The ones you're listening to couldn't run fast enough to escape even if they started now. They've been trapped and penned so they can be hunted for sport. That's why they're howling like that; they know the fire's coming and they want to get away.' Gurgeh said nothing, head turned to catch the faint sound of the doomed animals. Flere-Imsaho waited for a minute or so, but the man did not move, or ask anything else. The machine backed off, to return to Gurgeh's rooms. Just before it went through the door into the casue, it looked back at the man standing clutching the stone parapet at the far end of the little garden. He was crouched a little, head forward, motionless. It was quite dark now, and ordinary human eyes could not have picked out the quiet figure. The drone hesitated, then disappeared into the fortress.
Gurgeh hadn't thought Azad was the sort of game you could have an off-day in, certainly not an off-twenty-days. Discovering that it was came as a great disappointment. He'd studied many of Lo Tenyos Krowo's past games and had looked forward to playing the Intelligence chief. The apex's style was exciting, far more flamboyant - if occasionally more erratic - than that of any of the other top-flight players. It ought to have been a challenging, enjoyable match, but it wasn't. It was hateful, embarrassing, ignominious. Gurgeh annihilated Krowo. The burly, at first rather jovial and unconcerned-seeming apex made some awful, simple errors, and some that resulted from genuinely inspired, even brilliant play, but which in the end were just as disastrous. Sometimes, Gurgeh knew, you came up against somebody who, just by the way they played, caused you a lot more problems than they ought to, and sometimes, too, you found a game in which everything went badly, no matter how hard you tried, and regardless of your most piercing insights and incisive moves. The chief of Naval Intelligence seemed to have both problems at once. Gurgeh's game-style might have been designed to cause Krowo problems, and the apex's luck was almost non-existent. Gurgeh felt real sympathy for Krowo, who was obviously more upset at the manner than the fact of the defeat. They were both glad when it was over. Flere-Imsaho watched the man play during the closing stages of the match. It read each move as they appeared on the screen, and what it saw was something less like a game and more like an operation. Gurgeh the game-player, the
morat
, was taking his opponent apart. The apex was playing badly, true, but Gurgeh was off-handedly brilliant anyway. There was a callousness in his play that was new, too; something the drone had been half expecting but was still surprised to see so soon and so completely. It read the signs the man 's body and face held; annoyance, pity, anger, sorrow… and it read the play too, and saw nothing remotely similar. All it read was the ordered fury of a player working the boards and the pieces, the cards and the rules, like the familiar controls of some omnipotent machine. Another change, it thought. The man had altered, slipped deeper into the game and the society. It had been warned this might happen. One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behaviour, but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder. Marain was a synthetic language, designed to be phonetically and philosophically as expressive as the pan-human speech apparatus and the pan-human brain would allow. Flere-Imsaho suspected it was over-rated, but smarter minds than it had dreamt Marain up, and ten millennia later even the most rarefied and superior Minds still thought highly of the language, so it supposed it had to defer to their superior understanding. One of the Minds who'd briefed it had even compared Marain to Azad. That really was fanciful, but Flere-Imsaho had taken the point behind the hyperbole. Eächic was an ordinary, evolved language, with rooted assumptions which substituted sentimentality for compassion and aggression for cooperation. A comparatively innocent and sensitive soul like Gurgeh was bound to pick up some of its underlying ethical framework if he spoke it all the time. So now the man played like one of those carnivores he'd been listening to, stalking across the board, setting up traps and diversions and killing grounds; pouncing, pursuing, bringing down, consuming, absorbing… Flere-Imsaho shifted inside its disguise as though uncomfortable, then switched the screen off.
The day after Gurgeh's game with Krowo ended, he received a long letter from Chamlis Amalk-ney. He sat in his room and watched the old drone. It showed him views of Chiark while it gave him the latest news. Professor Boruelal still in retreat; Hafflis pregnant. Olz Hap away on a cruise with her first love, but coming back within the year to continue at the university. Chamlis still working on its history book. Gurgeh sat, watching and listening. Contact had censored the communication, blanking out bits which, Gurgeh assumed, showed that the landscape of Chiark was Orbital, not planetary. It annoyed him less than he'd have expected. He didn't enjoy the letter much. It all seemed so far away, so irrelevant. The ancient drone sounded hackneyed rather than wise or even friendly, and the people on the screen looked soft and stupid. Amalk-ney showed him Ikroh, and Gurgeh found himself angered at the fact that people came and stayed there every now and again. Who did they think they were? Yay Meristinoux didn't appear in the letter; she'd finally grown fed up with Blask and the Preashipleyl machine and left to pursue her landscaping career in [deleted]. She sent her love. When she left she'd started the viral change to become a man. There was one odd section, right at the end of the communication, apparently added after the main signal had been recorded. Chamlis was shown in the main lounge at Ikroh. 'Gurgeh,' it said, 'this arrived today; general delivery, unspecified sender, care of Special Circumstances.' The view began to pan across to where, if no interfering interloper had changed the furniture around, there ought to have been a table. The screen blanked out. Chamlis said. 'Our little friend. But quite lifeless. I've scanned it, and I had… [cut] send down its bugging team to take a look too. It's dead. Just a casing with no mind; like an intact human body with the brain neatly scooped out. There's a small cavity in the centre, where its mind must have been.' The visuals returned; the view panned round to Chamlis again. 'I can only assume the thing finally agreed to be restructured and they made it a new body. Odd they should send the old one here though. Let me know what you want done with it. Write soon. Hope this finds you well, and successful in whatever it is you're up to. Kindest re-' Gurgeh switched the screen off. He got up quickly, went to the window and looked out at the courtyard beneath, frowning. A smile spread slowly across his face. He laughed, silently, after a moment, then went over to the intercom and told his servant to bring some wine. He was just raising the glass to his lips when Flere-Imsaho floated in through the window, returning from another wildlife safari, its casing pale with dust. 'You look pleased with yourself,' it said. 'What's the toast?' Gurgeh gazed into the wine's amber depths and smiled. 'Absent friends,' he said, and drank.
The next match was a three game. Gurgeh was to face Yomonul Lu Rahsp, the star marshal imprisoned in the exoskeleton, and a youngish colonel, Lo Frag Traff. He knew that, going on form, they were both supposed to be inferior to Krowo, but the Intelligence chief had done so badly - he was unlikely to hold on to his post now - Gurgeh didn't think this was any indication he was going to have an easier game against his next two opponents than he'd had against the last one. On the contrary; it would be only natural for the two military men to gang up on him. Nicosar was to play the old star marshal, Vechesteder, and the defence minister, Jhilno. Gurgeh passed the days studying. Flere-Imsaho continued to explore. It told Gurgeh it had watched a whole region of the advancing fire-front being extinguished by a torrential rainstorm; it had revisited the area a couple of days later to find tinderplants re-igniting the dried vegetation. As an example of how integral the fire and the rest of the planet's ecology had become, the drone said, it was an impressive display. The court amused itself with hunts in the forest during the daylight hours and live or holo shows at night. Gurgeh found the entertainments predictable and tedious. The only faintly interesting ones were duels, usually males fighting each other, held in pits surrounded by banked circles of shouting, betting imperial officials and players. The duels were only occasionally to the death. Gurgeh suspected that things went on in the castle at night - entertainments of a different sort - which were inevitably fatal for at least one of the participants, and which he would not be welcome to attend or expected to hear about. However, the thought no longer worried him.
Lo Frag Traff was a young apex with a very obvious scar running from one brow down his cheek, almost to his mouth. He played quick, fierce games, and his career in the Imperial Star Army bore the same hallmarks. His most famous exploit had been the sacking of the Urutypaig Library. Traff had been in command of a small ground force in a war against a humanoid species; the war in space had been fought to a temporary stalemate, but through a combination of great military talent and a little luck Traff found himself in a position to threaten the species' capital city from the ground. The enemy had sued for peace, making it a condition of the treaty that their great library, famous throughout the civilised species of the Lesser Cloud, be left untouched. Traff knew that if he refused this condition the fight would go on, so he gave his word that not a letter, not a pixel, on the ancient microfiles would be destroyed, and they would be left
in situ.
Traff had orders from his star marshal that the library had to be destroyed. Nicosar himself had commanded this as one of his first edicts after coming to power; subject races had to understand that once they displeased the Emperor, nothing could prevent their punishment. While nobody in the Empire cared in the least about one of its loyal soldiers breaking an agreement with some bunch of aliens, Traff knew that giving your word was a sacred thing; nobody would ever trust him again if he went back on it. Traff already knew what he was going to do. He solved the problem by shuffling the library, sorting every word in it into alphabetical order and every pixel of every illustration into order of colour, shade and intensity. The original microfiles were wiped and re-recorded with volumes upon volumes of 'the's, 'it's, and 'and's; the illustrations were fields of pure colour. There were riots, of course, but Traff was in control by then, and as he explained to the incensed and - as it turned out, literally - suicidal guardians of the library, and to the Empire's Supreme Court, he had kept his word about not actually destroying or taking as booty a single word, image or file. Halfway through the game on the Board of Origin, Gurgeh realised something remarkable; Yomonul and Traff were playing each other, not him. They played as if they expected him to win anyway, and were battling for second place. Gurgeh had known there was little love lost between the two; Yomonul represented the old guard of the military and Traff the new wave of brash young adventurers. Yomonul was an exponent of negotiation and minimum-force, Traff of the moves that smite. Yomonul had a liberal view of other species; Traff was a xenophobe. The two came from traditionally opposed colleges, and all their differences were displayed quite overtly in their game-styles; Yomonul's was studied, careful and detached; Traff's was aggressive to the point of recklessness. Their attitude to the Emperor was different, too. Yomonul took a cool, practical view of the throne, while Traff was utterly loyal to Nicosar himself rather than the position he held. Each detested the beliefs of the other. Nevertheless, Gurgeh hadn't expected them to more or less disregard him and go straight for each other's throats. Once again, he felt slightly cheated that he wasn't getting a proper game. The only compensation was that the amount of venom in the play of the two warring military men was something to behold, undeniably impressive if distressingly self-defeating and wasteful. Gurgeh cruised through the game, quietly picking up points while the two soldiers fought. He was winning, but he couldn't help feeling the other two were getting much more out of the game than he was. He'd have expected they would use the physical option, but Nicosar himself had ordered that there be no betting during the match; he knew the two players were pathologically opposed, and didn't want to risk losing the military services of either. Gurgeh sat watching a table-screen during lunch on his third day on the Board of Origin. There were still a few minutes before play resumed and Gurgeh sat alone, watching the news-reports showing how well Lo Tenyos Krowo was doing in his game against Yomonul and Traff. Whoever had faked the apex's play - not Krowo himself, who'd refused to have anything to do with the subterfuge - was making a good job of impersonating the Intelligence chief's style. Gurgeh smiled a little. 'Contemplating your coming victory, Jernau Gurgeh?' Hamin said, easing himself into the seat across the table. Gurgeh turned the screen round. 'It's a little early for that, don't you think?' The old, bald apex peered at the screen, smiling thinly. 'Hmm. You think so?' He reached out, turned the screen off. 'Things change, Hamin.' 'Indeed they do, Gurgeh. But I think the course of this game will not. Yomonul and Traff will continue to ignore you and attack each other. You will win.' 'Well then,' Gurgeh said, looking at the dead screen. 'Krowo will get to play Nicosar.' 'Krowo may; we can devise a game to cover that. You must not.' '