Gurgeh started to take stock, sizing up the possibilities while he played a few more inconsequential blocking moves to give himself time to think. The point of the game was to win; he'd been forgetting that. Nothing else mattered; nothing else hung on the outcome of the game either. The game was irrelevant, therefore it could be allowed to mean everything, and the only barrier he had to negotiate was that put up by his own feelings.
He had to reply, but how? Become the Culture? Another Empire?
He was already playing the part of the Culture, and it wasn't working — and how do you match an Emperor as an imperialist?
He stood there on the board, wearing his faintly ridiculous, gathered-up clothes, and was only distantly aware of everything else around him. He tried to tear his thoughts away from the game for a moment, looking round the great ribbed prow-hall of the castle, at the tall, open windows and the yellow cinderbud canopy outside; at the half-full banks of seats, at the imperial guards and the adjudicating officials, at the great black horn-shapes of the electronic screening equipment directly overhead, at the many people in their various clothes and guises. All translated into game-thought; all viewed as though through some powerful drug which distorted everything he saw into twisted analogs of its latching hold on his brain.
He thought of mirrors, and of reverser fields, which gave the more technically artificial but perceivably more real impression; mirror-writing was what it said; reversed writing was ordinary writing. He saw the closed torus of Flere-Imsaho's unreal Reality, remembered Chamlis Amalk-ney and its warning about deviousness; things which meant nothing and something; harmonics of his thought.
Click. Switch off/switch on. As though he was a machine. Fall off the edge of the catastrophe curve and never mind. He forgot everything and made the first move he saw.
He looked at the move he'd made. Nothing like what Nicosar would have done.
An archetypally Culture move. He felt his heart sink. He'd been hoping for something different, something better.
He looked again. Well, it was a Culture move, but at least it was an attacking Culture move; followed through, it would wreck his whole cautious strategy so far, but it was all he could do if he was to have even the glimmer of a chance of resisting Nicosar. Pretend there really was a lot at stake, pretend he was fighting for the whole Culture; set out to win, regardless, no matter…. At least he'd found a way to play, finally.
He knew he was going to lose, but it would not be a rout.
He gradually remodelled his whole game-plan to reflect the ethos of the Culture militant, trashing and abandoning whole areas of the board where the switch would not work, pulling back and regrouping and restructuring where it would; sacrificing where necessary, razing and scorching the ground where he had to. He didn't try to mimic Nicosar's crude but devastating attack-escape, return-invade strategy, but made his positions and his pieces in the image of a power that could eventually cope with such bludgeoning, if not now, then later, when it was ready.
He began to win a few points at last. The game was still lost, but there was still the Board of Becoming, where at last he might give Nicosar a fight.
Once or twice he caught a certain look on Nicosar's face, when he was close enough to read the apex's expression, that convinced him he'd done the right thing, even if it was something the Emperor had somehow expected. There was a recognition there now, in the apex's expression and on the board, and even a kind of respect in those moves; an acknowledgement that they were fighting on even terms.
Gurgeh was overcome by the sensation that he was like a wire with some terrible energy streaming through him; he was a great cloud poised to strike lightning over the board, a colossal wave tearing across the ocean towards the sleeping shore, a great pulse of molten energy from a planetary heart; a god with the power to destroy and create at will.
He had lost control of his own drug-glands; the mix of chemicals in his bloodstream had taken over, and his brain felt saturated with the one encompassing idea, like a fever; win, dominate, control; a set of angles defining one desire, the single absolute determination.
The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and sleeping and walking around… but it was all nothing; irrelevant. Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game.
He watched the rival forces surge and tide across the great board, and they spoke a strange language, sang a strange song that was at once a perfect set of harmonies and a battle to control the writing of the themes. What he saw in front of him was like a single huge organism; the pieces seemed to move as though with a will that was neither his nor the Emperor's, but something dictated finally by the game itself, an ultimate expression of its essence.
He saw it; he knew Nicosar saw it; but he doubted anybody else could. They were like a pair of secret lovers, secure and safe in their huge nest of a room, locked together before hundreds of people who looked on and who saw but who could not read and who would never guess what it was they were witnessing.
The game on the Board of Form came to an end. Gurgeh lost, but he had pulled back from the brink, and the advantage Nicosar would take to the Board of Becoming was far from decisive.
The two opponents separated, that act over, the final one yet to commence. Gurgeh left the prow-hall, exhausted and drained and gloriously happy, and slept for two days. The drone woke him.
"Gurgeh? Are you awake? Have you stopped being vague?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You; the game. What's going on? Even the ship couldn't work out what was happening on that board." The drone floated above him, brown and grey, humming quietly. Gurgeh rubbed his eyes, blinked. It was morning; there were about ten days to go before the fire was due. Gurgeh felt as though he was waking from a dream more vivid and real than reality.
He yawned, sitting up. "Have I been vague?"
"Does pain hurt? Is a supernova bright?"
Gurgeh stretched, smirking. "Nicosar's taking it impersonally," he said, getting up and padding to the window. He stepped out on to the balcony. Flere-Imsaho tutted and threw a robe around him.
"If you're going to start talking in riddles again…"
"What riddles?" Gurgeh drank in the mild air. He flexed his arms and shoulders again. "Isn't this a fine old castle, drone?" he said, leaning on the stone rail and taking another deep breath. "They know how to build castles, don't they?"
"I suppose they do, but Klaff wasn't built by the Empire. They took it off another humanoid species who used to hold a ceremony similar to the one the Empire holds to crown the Emperor. But don't change the subject. I asked you a question. What is that style? You've been very vague and strange the past few days; I could see you were concentrating so I didn't press the point, but I and the ship would like to be told."
"Nicosar's taken on the part of the Empire; hence his style. I've had no choice but to become the Culture, hence mine. It's that simple."
"It doesn't look it."
"Tough. Think of it as a sort of mutual rape."
"I think you should straighten out, Jernau Gurgeh."
"I'm—" Gurgeh started to say, then stopped to check. He frowned in exasperation. "I'm perfectly straight, you idiot! Now why don't you do something useful and order me some breakfast?"
"Yes, master," Flere-Imsaho said sullenly, and dipped back inside the room. Gurgeh looked up into the empty board of blue sky, his mind already racing with plans for the game on the Board of Becoming.
Flere-Imsaho watched the man grow even more intense and absorbed in the days between the second and final games. He hardly seemed to hear anything that was said to him; he had to be reminded to eat and sleep. The drone wouldn't have believed it, but twice it saw the man sitting with an expression of pain on his face, staring at nothing. Doing a remote ultrasound scan, the drone had discovered the man's bladder was full to bursting; he ha
d to be told when to pee! He spent all day, every day, gazing intently at nothing, or feverishly studying replays of old games. And though he might have been briefly undrugged after his long sleep, immediately thereafter he started glanding again, and didn't stop. The drone used its Effector to monitor the man's brainwaves and found that even when he appeared to sleep, it wasn't really sleep; controlled lucid dreaming was what it seemed to be. His drug-glands were obviously working furiously all the time, and for the first time there were more tell-tale signs of intense drug-use on Gurgeh's body than there were on his opponent's.
How could he play in such a state? Had it been up to Flere-Imsaho, it would have stopped the man playing there and then. But it had its orders. It had a part to play, and it had played it, and all it could do now was wait and see what happened.
More people attended the start of the game on the Board of Becoming than had attended the previous two; the other game-players were still trying to work out what was going on in this strange, complicated, unfathomable game, and wanted to see what would happen on this final board, where the Emperor started with a considerable advantage, but on which the alien was known to be especially good.
Gurgeh dived back into the game, an amphibian into welcoming water. For a few moves he just gloried in the feeling of returning home to his element and the sheer joy of the contest, taking delight in a flexing of his strengths and powers, the readying tension of the pieces and places; then he curved out from that playing to the serious business of the building and the hunting, the making and linking and the destroying and cutting; the searching and destroying.
The board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassably fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar's beliefs and his together. Image of their minds; a hologram of pure coherence, burning like a standing wave of fire across the board, a perfect map of the landscapes of thought and faith within their heads.
He began the slow move that was defeat and victory together before he even knew it himself. Nothing so subtle, so complex, so beautiful had ever been seen on an Azad board. He believed that; he knew that. He would make it the truth.
The game went on.
Breaks, days, evenings, conversations, meals; they came and went in another dimension; a monochrome thing, a flat, grainy image. He was somewhere else entirely. Another dimension, another image. His skull was a blister with a board inside it, his outside self just another piece to be shuffled here and there.
He didn't talk to Nicosar, but they conversed, they carried out the most exquisitely textured exchange of mood and feeling through those pieces which they moved and were moved by; a song, a dance, a perfect poem. People filled the game-room every day now, engrossed in the fabulously perplexing work taking shape before them; trying to read that poem, see deeper into this moving picture, listen to this symphony, touch this living sculpture, and so understand it.
It goes on until it ends, Gurgeh thought to himself one day, and at the same time as the banality of the thought struck him, he saw that it was over. The climax had been reached. It was done, destroyed, could be no more. It was not finished, but it was over. A terrible sadness swamped him, took hold of him like a piece and made him sway and nearly fall, so that he had to walk to his stoolseat and pull himself on to it like an old man.
"Oh…" he heard himself say.
He looked at Nicosar, but the Emperor hadn't seen it yet. He was looking at element-cards, trying to work out a way to alter the terrain ahead of his next advance.
Gurgeh couldn't believe it. The game was over; couldn't anybody see that? He looked despairingly around the faces of the officials, the spectators, the observers and Adjudicators. What was wrong with them all? He looked back at the board, hoping desperately that he might have missed something, made some mistake that meant there was still something Nicosar could do, that the perfect dance might last a little longer. He could see nothing; it was done. He looked at the time shown on the point-board. It was nearly time to break for the day. It was a dark evening outside. He tried to remember what day it was. The fire was due very soon, wasn't it? Perhaps tonight, or tomorrow. Perhaps it had already been? No; even he would have noticed. The great high windows of the prow-hall were still unshuttered, looking out into the darkness where the huge cinderbuds waited, heavy with fruit.
Over over over. His — their — beautiful game over; dead. What had he done? He put his clenched hands over his mouth. Nicosar, you fool! The Emperor had fallen for it, taken the bait, entered the run and followed it to be torn apart near the high stand, storms of splinters before the fire.
Empires had fallen to barbarians before, and no doubt would again. Gurgeh knew all this from his childhood. Culture children were taught such things. The barbarians invade, and are taken over. Not always; some empires dissolve and cease, but many absorb; many take the barbarians in and end up conquering them. They make them live like the people they set out to take over. The architecture of the system channels them, beguiles them, seduces and transforms them, demanding from them what they could not before have given but slowly grow to offer. The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
The Culture had become the Empire, the Empire the barbarians. Nicosar looked triumphant, pieces everywhere, adapting and taking and changing and moving in for the kill. But it would be their own death-change; they could not survive as they were; wasn't that obvious? They would become Gurgeh's, or neutrals, their rebirth his to deliver. Over.
A prickling sensation began behind his nose and he sat back, overcome by the sadness of the game's ending, and waiting for tears.
None came. A suitable reprimand from his body, for using the elements so well, and water so much. He would drown Nicosar's attacks; the Emperor played with fire, and would be extinguished. No tears for him.
Something left Gurgeh, just ebbed away, burned out, relaxing its grip on him. The room was cool, filled with a spirit fragrance, and the rustling sound of the cinderbud canopy outside, beyond the tall, wide windows. People talked quietly in the galleries.
He looked around, and saw Hamin sitting in the college seats. The old apex looked shrunken and doll-like; a tiny withered husk of what he'd been, face lined and body misshapen. Gurgeh stared at him. Was this one of their ghosts? Had he been there all the time? Was he still alive? The unbearably old apex seemed to be staring fixedly at the centre of the board, and for one absurd instant Gurgeh thought the old creature was already dead and they'd brought his desiccated body into the prow-hall as some sort of trophy, a final ignominy.
Then the horn sounded for the end of the evening's play, and two imperial guards came and wheeled the dying apex away. The shrunken, grizzled head looked briefly in his direction.
Gurgeh felt as though he'd been somewhere far away, on a great journey he'd just returned from. He looked at Nicosar, consulting with a couple of his advisors as the Adjudicators noted the closing positions and the people in the galleries stood up and started chattering. Did he imagine that Nicosar looked concerned, even worried? Perhaps so. He felt suddenly very sorry for the Emperor, for all of them; for everybody.
He sighed, and it was like the last breath of some great storm that had passed through him. He stretched his arms and legs, stood again. He looked at the board. Yes; over. He'd done it. There was much left to do, a lot still to happen, but Nicosar would lose. He could choose how he lost; fall forward and be absorbed, fall back and be taken over, go berserk and raze everything… but his board-Empire was finished.
He met the Emperor's gaze for a moment. He could see from the expression there that Nicosar hadn't fully realised yet, but he knew the apex was reading him in return and could probably see the change in the man, sense the sense of victory… Gurgeh lowered his gaze from that hard sight, and turned away and walked out of the hall. There was no acclaim, there were no congratulations. Nobody else could see. Flere-Imsaho
was its usual concerned, annoying self, but it too hadn't spotted anything, and still inquired how he thought the game was going. He lied. The Limiting Factor thought things were building up to a head. He didn't bother to tell it. He'd expected more of the ship, though.
He ate alone, mind blank. He spent the evening swimming in a pool deep inside the castle, carved out of the rock spur the fortress had been built upon. He was alone; everybody else had gone to the castle towers and the higher battlements, or had taken to aircars, watching the distant glow in the sky to the west, where the Incandescence had begun.
Gurgeh swam until he felt tired, then dried, dressed in trous, shirt and a light jacket, and went for a walk round the castle's curtain wall.
The night was dark under a covering of cloud; the great cinderbuds, higher than the outer walls, closed off the distant light of the approaching Incandescence. Imperial guards were out, ensuring that nobody started the fire early; Gurgeh had to prove to them he wasn't carrying anything which could produce a spark or flame before they would let him out of the castle, where shutters were being readied and the walkways were damp from tests of the sprinkler systems.
The cinderbuds creaked and rustled in the windless gloom, exposing new, tinder-dry surfaces to the rich air, bark-layers unpeeling from the great bulbs of flammable liquid that hung beneath their topmost branches. The night air was saturated by the heady stench of their sap.
A hushed feeling layover the ancient fortress; a religious mood of awed anticipation which even Gurgeh would experience as a tangible change in the place. The swooshings of returning aircars, coming in over a damped-down swathe of forest to the castle, reminded Gurgeh that everybody was supposed to be in the castle by midnight, and he went back slowly, drinking in the atmosphere of still expectation like something precious that could not last for long, or perhaps ever be again.
Still, he wasn't tired; the pleasant fatigue from his swim had become just a sort of background tingle in his body, and so when he climbed the stairs to the level of his room, he didn't stop, but kept going up, even as the horn sounded to announce midnight.
The Player of Games c-2 Page 32
