Tactics of Conquest

by Barry N. Malzberg

  The Overlords are authoritarian creatures; they take the rules of their contest quite seriously, and they would be quite unable to challenge a decision, mutually arrived at, to extend the series indefinitely through a series of draws. We might be able to play for the fate of the universe through several months or years, extending our tour indefinitely until finally one or the other of us would die of sickness or old age, throwing the plans of the Overlords into chaos. Meanwhile we could keep on going.

  I am a reasonably compassionate man and this thought has at least occurred to me. I know that the eventual outcome of our match can only be disastrous for half the population of the universe. Evil creatures by the billions are going to suffer and die when I vanquish their representative, and even though I am opposed to evil implacably, and have dedicated my life to its conquest—it was not a casual decision for me to represent the forces of light—it is still a rather painful thing for me to think of all those billions winked painfully out of existence, noisome as most of them must be. I am vaguely acquainted with theology, not by any means being one of those chess ignoramuses of whom you have often read who knows little beyond the confines of the board. I know that many of those who have been enlisted now in the cause of evil do not think of themselves as evil at all but have merely been arbitrarily assigned, unhappily caught up in circumstance. These creatures, being no less sentient than those whom I represent, have just cause for concern. In any event it has occurred to me at various points of our tour to make this proposal to Louis.

  “Look,” I could say to him, sitting in a rather plush, Earth-type lobby on a far star (the winking globes and lights above giving hideous reminders of what it was like to stay in the Hotel Lucerne in New York during one endless week’s tournament twenty years ago), “we can work this out together. We can draw games indefinitely. I They know little of the intricacies of master chess, I these Overlords, and in any event, it would be entirely fair by the rules of the game. Why not extend this?”

  “I won’t even think of it,” he would say (I know Louis so well that the conversation uncoils itself as easily as the moving out of Knight-and-Bishop preparatory to a castle). “Why should I collaborate with you at all? I’m going to destroy you.”

  “But you don’t understand, you fool, that I’m going to destroy you and in any event, whoever wins, many, many billions of creatures are going to die. Think of all the suffering.”

  “There will be no suffering. Anyway, that’s hardly my problem, is it? I’m merely doing a job.”

  “Listen, Louis, I’m trying to be reasonable about this. The fate of the universe is still in our hands, regardless of what the Overlords say. Besides, wouldn’t you like to extend the matches indefinitely? There are whole sectors of the universe I that we can see; it’s hardly an experience available to most Earthmen.”

  “I’m not interested in that,” he says stubbornly. Really, the man is impossible; a rigid, authoritarian personality, reaction-formation I think they call it. “That’s not my problem at all; my duty is to play out the match, represent the forces at my command, demolish you and bring an end to this.”

  “Really, Louis, you’re being most unreasonable. Don’t you understand that I’m going to beat you? Besides that, you represent the forces of evil.”

  “It’s not a question of what I represent. Remember, the Overlords have instructed us that it’s completely arbitrary: What we think of as good and evil mean nothing to them. Anyway, David, you haven’t got a chance in these matches. I’m already leading five games to two and I haven’t even attempted anything original yet.”

  “We could at least draw a couple of matches, couldn’t we? There hasn’t been a draw so far, which is very unusual in grandmaster chess. If you change your mind and come around to my way of thinking, it’s going to look strange to the Overlords if we start to draw without having established precedent. Let’s stalemate a few, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, David, but you do not understand the conditions.” A certain pomposity overtakes Louis at odd moments; it would assault him now. “You’re asking us to cheat by prior agreement and that’s against the rules. We could even be brought up on charges.”

  “By whom?”

  “By—”

  “There’s no governing body, there’s no federation, it’s all going to end.”

  “I’m sorry, David. You’re counseling collaboration. I have half a mind to go to the Overlords on this. They’d take strong action; in fact, you might be disqualified. You wouldn’t like that. You’d be in worse trouble than you are already.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “No, you are.”

  “You’re a pompous, officious fool. Don’t you have any loyalty to a fellow grandmaster?”

  “I’ll report you to the Overlords, David. I really will.”

  “I dare you to do it.”

  “I’ll recite the full contents of this conversation ‘to them. I’m sure they’ll be interested enough to want to take it up with you further. I have nothing more to say; you are no man of honor.”

  No. This would not work at all. It is clear why Louis and I can reach no arrangement. The match must go on its accustomed course, straight through to his destruction. Nevertheless, this must be said and in the network of the mind I will say it: I have tried. Surely I have tried. His condition is not my fault.

  Queen to Queen Bishop Three. Queen to Queen Bishop Three. While Louis vomits somewhere in a rear stall, the putrid waters of his intestines merging with the chemically treated fluids of the Deneb System, I contemplate this move. Louis has always had this tendency to develop his majors too rapidly; it is a serious failing. Commentators have noticed this. I have brought it to their attention.

  Well I remember how in the Berlin Interzonals Louis wedged open his Rook file with a stupid and premature castle which allowed Barker, his opponent, to penetrate to the seventh rank with his Queen. The mop up was deadly and almost immediate: A Rook doubled the Queen and placed Louis into almost immediate zugzwang and his resignation followed but five moves later. Barker (whose game has improved although still well below my level) discussed this with me later over cruller and tea, having accepted Louis’ collapse with a rare grace which touched me although I would rather that he had spat in the fool’s eyes.

  “He has aspects of brilliance,” Barker conceded, “but he cannot handle the majors properly. It is a pity.” He stuffed the cruller into his mouth, began to chew with a series of rather disgusting noises and gestures ... quite repulsive, really.

  “I think that his basic problem might be a lack of patience,” Barker said, “although again—” taking a sip of coffee, swilling it around, mingling the fluid with the crumbs of cruller, “—perhaps he overestimates his abilities and finds himself more surprised than any of us when time and again his premature attack with the majors finds itself most thwarted. Difficult to say,” Barker added, putting the cruller in the coffee, twirling it until it became encrusted with sugar and the fluid of the coffee, and then, opening his mouth wide, put the cruller into his mouth like sacrament, rubbing together his palms with a groan of satisfaction. “Don’t you think so?”

  It was difficult for me, sitting at the table in this rather crowded coffee shop at Bern, to keep a calm and inscrutable expression. But I tried. It is the very corporeality of life which I find repellent and this is one of the reasons why I find chess appealing: Here we have a highly abstract, coldly mathematical game devoid of odors, scents, implications, belches, coughs, sniffles, accusations and all of those elements which so contribute to the making of what non-masters erroneously call “real life.” There is a certain pleasure in abstraction; I would not diminish it.

  This aversion to the normally material waste-and-flow of mortality may be a little abnormal but it is abnormal only in the richer sense of the word, a deviation which raises me to a higher level altogether. So it was difficult, looking at Barker (who now having finished his cruller turned upon me a pair of eyes as brightly impenetrable
as a puppy’s), to keep good control over myself. “Perhaps,” I said, “perhaps. But then again he may be a weak player.”

  “Weakness is no excuse,” Barker said, extending a forefinger, licking it with a flourish, then, his tongue working like a butterfly’s, doing the same to the remaining fingers on his left hand. “There are good; players, weak players, brilliant players and unsound ones, but at all levels the personality will hold. Each game is an individual expression I of its maker; ten different weak players will be I weak in a different way and having done some I readings in psychology I think that our friend Louis suffers from a failure of self-confidence. Are you ill? You look sick; I hope that nothing has made you sick,” Barker said.

  But it was too late. Too late, too late: stomach churning like an engine missing cylinders I was rearing from the table, making my way to the lavatory located by the coffee shop, clutching bowels and intestines. Holding also I a terror born of the certainty that I was about to disgrace myself, I was able, tentatively, to make it all the way into that enclosure before losing lunch. The scar of that encounter, I wish to make quite clear, remains deep within me even though the information imported by Barker was quite useful and has helped me in further encounters with Louis. Beyond question he does indeed bring out the majors too quickly. He lacks self-confidence. This last move of his bespeaks that tendency more eloquently than ever I could.

  Louis has retired behind the screens now. Vivid images of his humiliation scuttle across my mind as I lean forward intently to the board, plotting out what will pin him further. But at that moment—

  Ah, well, chess is inconstancy, and there seems to be a kind of disturbance in the audience. I sense a fluttering. Billows of light cascade over the stage and there is a series of choking screams which necessarily rivet full attention. Concentration completely broken, I stare across that expanse of stage where I see that a large man has somehow broken the security cover and has rushed the stage, struggling with several guards. The guards are of various races; some are humanoid while others appear to be more exotic and the aspect of this man being surrounded by an alien and degenerated mass is quite shocking. It reminds me of certain magazine covers I recall from my difficult youth in which Humanity was seen to be Struggling in the Grip Of Disgusting Aliens. The aspect is so shocking and yet so interesting that the chess-pieces literally dwindle. Haze consumes them and I look at the intruder.

  He is trying rather desperately to flee the security personnel, but he cannot break their grip. Nevertheless, driven as he is by some demonic strength he is able to pull away just enough to close further ground between himself and me and all of the time he is talking, inexhaustibly talking.

  “You must stop this,” he says, “it’s totally unreasonable; we cannot go on this way.”

  Is this true? Conviction can sometimes carry the day; I give it credence, hunched over, saying nothing. This situation is the problem of the security personnel, of course, and not for anything would I interfere with them. I see that they have the intruder under at least partial control; he is trying to reach me but there is no way that he can break the wall of arms, legs, tentacles, appendages and horns which surround him and therefore he must settle for desperate bellows.

  “Something is terribly wrong!” he is shouting. “It’s not fair, it’s not right, do you understand, this match must now stop at once I” Then some aspect of his voice, his posture in struggle, connects and he becomes familiar to me. I remember who he is. Strange that I would not have known it immediately but I am of course under mental strain.

  He is a senior official of FIDE, the Federation International, which controls Earth-type chess. He is furious. “This is ridiculous!” he shrieks. He must have stolen aboard one of the spaceships, smuggling himself away like precious contraband. Then again, he may have won approval from the Overlords to come along as a representative of the International. Who is to know? “We have not approved this match,” he is saying, his honest face streaked with rage and pain. “We have not certified this competition; we have not selected these competitors. This match is being conducted in violation of the statutes which control and organize our great game itself!”

  Finally, at this last outburst, the guards establish some control over the struggling figure, and with a series of vicious clouts and punches, they hustle him off the stage. “I am going to protest!” he shouts. “The match is disallowed!” Then there is a thud and wholly discommoded he collapses, surrounded by a mass of guards, and is taken off the stage by a back exit.

  It is a horrifying breach of match etiquette, to rush the stage. It is further complicated by the fact that the felon is a representative of the governing body of chess on our planet. But the match must go on, and I am able with some difficulty to restrain rage. I rub my hands against one another, feeling the gnarled palms come into themselves with the aspect of chipped glass. I wring them, shake my head and attempt once again to project myself into the board.

  It is not as easy it was before, however, and momentarily the pieces shimmer, glisten, take on a different aspect, become almost gelatinous as if they were to melt and begin to run through the squares of the board in red and black. There is an instant when I think that I might faint, so horrifying has been this assault on my concentration.

  Instead I come to my feet, avoiding only at the last instant that deadly contact which would sweep the board from the table, and stagger toward the rear of the stage through haze and smoke (all races, all audiences smoke incessantly—time and again I have cited my asthma but they will not listen) and for a deadly moment kinesthetic sense, and memory itself, desert me. I am stumbling through an amorphous mix like an amnesiac animal, unable to deduce my identity or the reason for my being here.

  Then I find myself surrounded by Overlords, more of them than I have seen at any time heretofore. Ten or eleven of them have surrounded me, having leapt from their observation posts. Their tentacles grip. A projective device zooms in, cold steel glinting; undoubtedly a closeup of my tortured features is at this moment being beamed to billions throughout the universe. “I can’t take it,” I find myself groaning and gasping, “I simply can’t take it.”

  “Don’t worry about this,” an Overlord says, “a mistake.”

  “I’ve tried to be reasonable. I’ve tried to cooperate but I can’t have this kind of demonstration. I can’t have the stage being rushed by members of the audience. How can I concentrate?”

  “It is highly unfair,” another Overlord agrees. Their voices and personalities are interchangeable. I have never been able to successfully individuate them except by the numbers. Nevertheless I suspect that this one might well be my old friend Five who more than any of them has shown me the sympathy and understanding I am truly due.

  “We’ll see that this person is taken care of,” the Overlord says. “He must be severely disturbed.”

  “I mean,” I say, surrounded by tentacles, burying my forehead in a rosily purplish substance which feels like the scales of a fish, but obscurely comforting for all of that, “I’m doing the best I am able.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “It isn’t easy here. The least you can do is to give me a decent environment in which to play. How can I tolerate this otherwise? Consider my position and all of them out to get me anyway. I tell you, I can’t stand this any more at all!”

  “Of course you can’t stand it,” the same Overlord agrees sympathetically, “and there’s no reason why you should. I promise that this individual will be dealt with most severely.” There is a sense of murmured consultation among the many forms which surround me: seven I think it is, although in this enmeshing of tentacles and stalks it is difficult to enumerate, it might be as few as four and then again it might be as many as twelve. Who knows? The physical aspects of the Overlords have always been something about which I wished to remain ignorant; call me xenophobic and be gone. “Most severely,” the Overlord says once again. “And now I suggest that you put this most unfortunate incident out of m
ind and return to the board. Your clock is running, you know, and it would be unwise to use up time. We can’t stop the clocks simply because you’re having a breakdown.”

  “And besides,” I say as stumps and tentacles begin to prod me back toward the board, “it’s not even true what he’s saying; the match is being properly conducted under all FIDE rules.”

  “Of course it is, and you have no reason for concern.”

  “We’re using the clocks, we’re using seconds, and a team of referees, and we’re playing under all the approved conditions. He has no right, absolutely no right at all,” I point out, “to say that the match isn’t sanctioned.” My chair grates into my shins, I feel little stabs and shivers of pain. “The trouble with FIDE is that it’s a completely trivial organization,” I say, managing to sit once again while Overlords surround me, massage my shoulders protectively, bring cool cloths across my face, tickle the back of my neck. “They’re not interested in chess, in improving the structure of the game, they’re only interested in their miserable little prerogatives, in continuing to maintain a stranglehold over the game.”

  I shift nervously, aware that I am receiving a great deal of attention. “It’s a petty bureaucracy,” I say, “it’s completely arbitrary and stupid and I won’t have anything to do with it any more. Instead I’ll chart my own course. That’s what I’m going to do.”