The Squares of the City

John Brunner

Introduction

The story told by John Brunner in
The Squares of the City
held me spellbound from beginning to end. It had a special attraction for me because all the people in the book are chess-mad, and chess is my favorite pastime. But even the reader who knows nothing about the game will be thoroughly fascinated by this story in which the two chief political antagonists in a South American country attempt to direct the actions of their followers by using the unconscious but powerful influence of “subliminal perception,” a technique which may well threaten all our futures.

Under its baleful persuasion, members of the two hostile parties commit all sorts of crimes as they unknowingly carry out the actions suggested to them by a confidant of their leaders who is an expert in subliminal perception and who is the Director of the television network that controls The City. Only gradually does one realize that The City is a chessboard—its chief inhabitants taking actions that are the counterparts of moves in a vicious game of chess being played out by their leaders.

The author has added an ingenious twist to his story which will be particularly intriguing to chess fans. The game in which his characters move as living pieces has not been artificially designed by him to suit the progress of his plot. It had actually been played, move for move, some seventy years ago in a match for the world championship between the title holder, the American master William Steinitz, and the Russian master Mikhail Ivanovich Tchigorin.

—Edward Lasker, M.E., E.E.

Foreword

The setting is an imaginary South American country called Aguazul (somewhere around the place Venezuela occupies on the map). The country’s president, Juan Sebastian Vados, has recently built a magnificent new capital city—Ciudad de Vados—regarded as a wonder of the world by everyone except the peasantry who form the bulk of the country’s population. Vados is a benevolent dictator, very internationally minded but indisputably proud of his country—less so of its people. His right-hand man, Minister of the Interior Diaz, is also his chief opponent, for Diaz comes of native stock and resents the cost of building the new city when most of the population is poverty-stricken.

About the only thing that unites all classes in Aguazul is a love of chess, which is as much a national craze as it is, say, in Russia.

The country and the tense situation verging on revolution which is developing there are seen through the eyes of Boyd Hakluyt, a young Australian-born traffic analyst (an expert on the control of human and vehicular traffic) called in to cure by indirect means certain trouble spots which have come up in the magnificent new city: displaced peasants squatting in shantytowns and in areas of the city where they are reducing whole neighborhoods to tenement status. At first he believes he has merely been brought to do a straightforward job. Bit by bit he realizes he is being used as a political pawn in a struggle between Vados’s own faction (upper-class, white, international, and cosmopolitan) and Diaz’s (lower-class, mestizo to colored, native-born).

Following an introductory section, the action of the story goes
move for move with a famous chess game,
every piece on the board having a human counterpart. And the key to the entire story—which the narrator discovers when an attempt is made to “take” (i. e., kill) him in the course of the “game”—is that the disagreement between Vados’s faction and Diaz’s reached a point where civil war seemed inevitable, but neither of the leaders wanted it. On the suggestion of a brilliant theoretician and expert on the manipulation of human beings, author of famous original tracts on the science of government, who is now Minister of Communications in Aguazul, they have agreed to play a game of chess in real life, using people who do not know they are being influenced.

There is no reason why this should not be possible at the time when the book is set—about twenty-five years hence. Already the subtlety of advertising techniques, the study of subconscious influences on the conscious mind, and the deliberate formulation of public opinion by mass-media communication indicate the possibility.

Ever since Lewis Carroll wrote
Through the Looking Glass,
fantasy authors have been fascinated by the chess game fantasy. I honestly believe this is the most successful of its kind so far. All the moves of a real game are reflected in its action, yet I do not think there is any artificiality or contrivance apparent, and the story can be read on either of two levels—by the chess addict with the game beside him for reference, or by anyone else for its own sake.

John Brunner

I

On the flight down from Florida I talked with my seat companion—or, to be more exact, he talked at me. He was a European-born Jew in his middle fifties whose family had been thrown out by a Nazi invasion early in World War Two, but although he was very proud of the fact that he spoke with a European accent and said so at least a dozen times—“You have noticed my accent, of course!”—I didn’t manage to establish his actual place of origin.

He had not been “home” for four years, and in fact appeared to have spent much more time in the States than he had in Aguazul, but there was no questioning his fervor for his adopted country. He insisted on addressing the stewardess in ludicrously bad Spanish—worse even than mine—although on this route, of course, all the stewardesses spoke English, Spanish, and Portuguese with equal fluency. And when the plane was circling in toward landing, he almost climbed into my lap in an effort to point past me through the porthole and indicate locations of interest in Vados.

Eventually the stewardess commanded him sternly—in English—to fasten his seat belt. I think it was more the fact that she addressed him in a “foreign” language than the actual order that made him calm himself and sit down. After that I was able to close my mind, if not my ears, to his glowing descriptions.

I forebore to tell him (it would have been very unkind) that although I had never set foot in Vados, I almost certainly knew more about the city than he did—more indeed than any of its citizens who hadn’t deliberately tramped the streets for a week on end, exploring and observing. I knew that ten years or so before they had gone to a barren, rocky stretch of land and decreed that there should be a new capital city; they had built roads and put wild mountain torrents into concrete conduits and hoisted solar electricity generators into the surrounding hills, first on muleback and then by helicopter into places where even a mule could not scramble. Now it was a flourishing city of half a million people.

I had studied the essential structure of the city, too: developed organically from four gigantic plazas or squares, modulated by the three great traffic arteries—six-lane superhighways with ten-foot shoulders clear from Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquin on the coast, and Cuatrovientos, the oil center on which the wealth of Aguazul—and therefore the city—was ultimately based.

But, looking down on the reality as the plane nosed toward the airport cut in the mountainside, I felt a stir of my seat companion’s excitement.

For I suppose I had never before seen anything so completely of the twentieth century.

“Ten years ago,” I said to myself, “this was wasteland. Scrub. Rock. And now
look
at it.” A shiver of awe clambered down my spine. My feelings must have shown in my expression, for my companion chuckled.

“Magnifico,
no?” he said with a smirk of satisfaction, as though he himself had been responsible for the graceful towers, the splendid avenues, the richly flowering parks.

It did indeed look magnificent. But—if it was as good as it looked, I wouldn’t have been here. I hesitated over whether or not I should try to explain, and in the end said nothing.

When we parted in the customs hall of the air terminal, my temporary acquaintance insisted on shaking my hand and giving me his card. The name on it was Flores, with an address on Madison Avenue and another right here in Vados.

Flores.
Blum
? I wondered.
Rosenblum
? Possibly; the intervening years had smoothed out his vaunted European accent till it was cosmopolitan, featureless.

He was torn between a desire to continue bragging of his adopted homeland to a stranger and the wish to take his place in the citizens’ line at the customs desk, asserting his national rights. In the end the latter pull triumphed. But before we separated, his hand shot out and indicated a picture placed—not conspicuously, but visibly—behind the customs officers.

“That’s a great man!” he said impressively. “The man they named Vados for, of course.
El Presidente
!”

I was apparently the only alien aboard the plane this flight, and, as happens most places these days, the natives received precedence. I went to a bench across the narrow hall and lit a cigarette, composing myself to wait.

The hall was quiet, lined with sound-absorptive material; although the sun beat down pitilessly on the gray concrete of the runways outside, in here it was cool. The light came through high green louvers, and not a single fly buzzed through the still air. That in these latitudes was an achievement.

I occupied myself by looking at the picture. It was not only that I was interested in the appearance of a man who could have a city called after him in his own lifetime, and a capital city, moreover. He was also indirectly my new employer. Officially I would be responsible to the Ciudad de Vados city council, but Vados was mayor of the city as well as president of the republic, and from everything I had heard it seemed that what he said was what counted.

The portrait—which, of course, had no caption—showed
el Presidente
in a plain white suit. A thin black tie seemed to cut his chest into equal halves. His heavy-set body was carried erectly, in a military posture; he gave the impression of tallness, and I knew he was in fact over six feet. He had been taken gazing directly into the camera and so directly at me where I sat studying him. The picture was very well done and suggested a certain immediacy of presence. His face was very pale in contrast to his thin black moustache and smooth dark hair. He grasped a gold-knobbed swagger cane in both hands as if intending to twist the ends in opposite directions and make it as spiral as a piece of sugar-candy.

Juan Sebastian Vados. A lucky man, an astute man. And, Flores had claimed, a great man. Certainly a brilliant one: for more than twenty years now he had ruled Aguazul, and he had prosperity and contentment to show for it—not to mention Ciudad de Vados, the greatest showpiece of all.

I grew aware that I was being beckoned. I dropped my cigarette in a sand bowl and crossed the resilient floor to the customs desk. A porter trundled my bags down a roller conveyor to within reach of the official who had waved to me. This was a swarthy man in a severe black uniform with silver rank badges; his fingers were discolored with the blue chalk used for okaying passengers’ bags.

He glanced down at the passenger manifest and said in a bored tone,
“Quiere Vd. decirme su nombre
?”

“
Me llamo
Boyd Hakluyt,” I told him, reaching into my pocket for my passport. “
Habla Vd. inglés
?”

He put his elbow on the desk top, hand outstretched.
“Si,”
he agreed. “The señor is
Norteamericano
?”