by Neal Asher
Time passed slowly as seated at the edge of the four hexagons Carroll waited for instructions, meanwhile watching distant pillars of smoke and distant combats, and listening to the clashing of weapons and to the screams. Julius and the Masai were sent elsewhere and no more opponents came against before the General contacted him.
‘Move to the red hexagon within your defensive perimeter.’
Carroll stood and obeyed, keeping to the other side of the hexagon away from the smoking and blackened remains of one of the Egyptians. As soon as he stood upon that hexagon the perimeter line disappeared with a brilliant flash.
‘Advance now as indicated by the light on your wristband.’
Carroll studied his wristband then moved to the yellow hexagon adjacent, and so advanced: the trident in his left hand, the sword in his right, and the morning star hanging by its thong from his belt.
And so advanced the nightmare.
The next two opponents matched against him – a turbaned fakir and shaven-headed Nubian – stood little chance against him. With both of them he threw the trident first to mortally wound then moved in to finish the job with the sword. On both occasions he felt sickened and relieved. After dealing with them he was sent chasing a yellow line again then set to defend four hexagons. This time no-one came up against him and after a wait of half an hour or more he was moved on a hexagon at a time. Now the game-board was changing as from hexagon to hexagon he had to step up a couple of inches and, far ahead, surrounded by pillars of smoke like bars, stood a small peak. When this peak became clearer to him through the hazy twilight he felt a vague stirring of recognition, of excitement, of deja vu. A shiver of horripilation ran up his back and for no immediately apparent reason he turned in the direction of his most recent combat. Standing near the blackened and smoking husk of a man was a spectral figure, a figure through which smoke passed undisturbed: the Clown.
Carroll stared at the figure for a moment then said, ‘Well?’
The Clown's reply gusted: rose and fell, advanced and retreated like a spring breeze. Carroll only caught a few of the words but the meaning came over clear.
‘...voice ... physical ... presence.’
The Clown's voice was as tenuous as his physical presence, this, Carroll realized was the essence of what he was being told.
‘You want to tell me something though,’ said Carroll.
By the movement of the Clown's lips Carroll could now see that he repeating something over and over again, and he damned himself for not taking the lip-reading course that had once been offered him.
‘Win... freedom...’ were the only words he heard, and as he heard those words the Clown faded out of existence. Carroll took the words one way only, and he fought.
A samurai died with the trident in his throat. A Zulu warrior died with the broken end of Carroll's sword in his ribs and provided Carroll with a knife which he threw at his next opponent, a Nubian, whose skull Carroll shattered with the morning star. At the foot of the peak he slew a Red Indian, but not before that one put a cut across his chest, and bleeding, he gazed up at what he presumed to be his destination.
The peak curved up like the roof of a pagoda or a Chinese hat. It rose in steps, each step being a hexagon, and these steps getting progressively higher. Here the concentrated fighting filled the air with thick smoke and the reek of burning flesh. And shortly Carroll contributed to it. Three smoking corpses marked the path he had been directed along up the slope. He was luckier than them, not just because he had won, but because he had something to fight for other than to prevent pain.
As Carroll jumped up the two foot step to the next occupied hexagon he hurled his trident at the half-seen figure thereon. There was a clang and the trident went spinning away through the smoke. Once on the hexagon Carroll advanced with a sword and dagger he had recently acquired. The Egyptian who faced him with a small mace and scimitar seemed familiar.
‘You,’ said Carroll.
‘You,’ Ramses mimicked, his smile haughty.
Carroll moved in, wary of thrown weapons.
‘It is a trick I use infrequently,’ said Ramses, on discerning the reason for Carroll’s wariness. ‘A trick that can only be used against someone who's guard is down.’
Carroll replied with a sweeping cut at Ramses’ head, followed by an attempt to plant the dagger in his gut. With a clang and a blur of steel the sword-blow was deflected, and Ramses casually dodged the knife. He then attacked with mace and scimitar in rapid succession. Steel rang and clattered and sparks flew from honed edges. He did not break through Carroll's guard though. In a moment they parted and circled.
‘You see, it would have been stupid of me to have thrown away one of my weapons. I would surely have been dead by now.’ The Egyptian was panting only slightly.
‘Do you want to escape from all this?’ Carroll countered. Ramses launched a sudden vicious attack which nearly broke through Carroll's guard. He only pulled back when Carroll managed to slice his arm..
‘I am a god!’ he yelled angrily, then punctuating his words with swipes of his mace and scimitar, ‘Where are my riches? Where... are... my... slaves?’
On the last word Carroll saw an opening and stabbed with his sword. The opening closed and he retreated with a cut on in arm in exactly the same place as the one he had given.
‘Cut for cut,’ said Ramses.
Carroll decided to try something.
‘The Clown knows,’ he said, ‘he knows of riches and slaves and men who claim to be gods.’ His words had more effect than his blows had been having.
Instead of carrying through an attack he had initiated Ramses pulled back with an expression of confused half-comprehension on his face. It had been a mistake to pull back at that point, one that Carroll took advantage of. His sword went in and out of the Pharoah's throat in an incarnadine splash. Ramses staggered back gurgling. As he sank to the ground he stared at Carroll accusingly.
‘I'm sorry,’ said Carroll, ‘but he said I should win,’ then he checked his wristband and moved on.
Nearing the top of the peak Carroll saw it was surmounted by one large hexagon. As he drew closer he spotted charred remains all around it, and even as he watched, a man rolled over the side sheathed in blood and flickers of nascent flame.
‘You have one opponent yet to face. Beat him and for the first time in seven hundred games Anubis will have been defeated. This could mean much for you, Jason Carroll,’ so said the General.
Seven hundred games, thought Carroll, so nice of him to let me know. It was a moment before he noticed the Clown standing nearby, and this time the words came clear.
‘This close, is enough,’ said the Clown, then began to fade away.
‘Wait!’ shouted Carroll, but the Clown was gone. Filled with trepidation Carroll hauled himself up onto the final hexagon.
The white top hexagon was three times the area of the ones below. At its centre, in a curious contorted framework of silver rods, was suspended a disc of translucent red material about four feet across with a hole through its centre. It appeared to be an expanded version of the discs the Reaper had possession of. It also looked like a gong. Carroll wracked his brains. When had he heard a gong being mentioned? He could not remember, and he did not have the time to try and remember, because his last opponent was coming for him.
He was an old man: short, balding, and wiry, with skin like that of a pickled walnut. White cataracts covered his eyes, and his head was turned slightly to one side as he listened to locate Carroll's position. He wore only a loincloth, and his only weapons were his spade-like hands and feet. Carroll felt his confidence undermined at once. He had seen all the films. This man could only be the master of some obscure martial art.
The old man shambled forwards, his legs bowed and his hands at his sides. Carroll moved to his left, taking his dagger in his right hand. The man was blind. How could he defend himself against a thrown blade? Carroll flipped the dagger over, caught it by its point, and threw. For a moment h
e thought it would find its target, but then the old man's hand blurred through the air and with a thwack the dagger skittered off the side of the hexagon. Carroll continued to move round the edge.
The old man, he noticed, was keeping between him and the gong. He did not attack; he merely maintained his position. Carroll decided that it was up to him to initiate violence, though he was reluctant to. He closed in, swinging his sword. The old man's hands blurred again and again turning away every cut Carroll tried to deliver. He did not see the blow that struck him in the chest. Suddenly found himself falling to the ground with a deep aching pain across his sternum and his breath whooshing out. As he hit the ground he realized he had lost his sword. He managed to push himself upright to search for it, in time to see it slashing through the air towards him. The thing he always remembered afterwards was that it hurt more when his head hit the ground than when it got separated from his body. Death came swiftly, but he still had time to see blood frothing from the neck of his own convulsing corpse.
Chapter Four
‘He cheats,’ said a voice out of the blackness.
‘Who?’ asked Carroll dreamily.
‘Anubis. You do not think that was a man you faced in the last hexagon do you?’
‘What was he then?’
‘It,’ corrected the voice Carroll now recognized as the Clown's, ‘it is a machine.’
‘A robot?’
‘The term android is preferable I think, as in a machine shaped like a human.’
Carroll made no reply as he became aware of redness slowly resolving into a strange landscape. He found himself sitting on a rock.
‘Who are you?’ he eventually asked.
‘I will tell you a story,’ said the Clown. His voice issued from all around. Carroll could not locate its source.
He interrupted. ‘Where are you?’
‘I am all around you. The information that is you has been entrapped by the information that is me, and mine exists in my soul disc.’
‘The gong,’ Carroll stated, and gazed out at the flat red land below the flat red sky. ‘This is not my body then... or rather, at this moment I do not have a body?’
‘The latter is correct. I thought you would be more comfortable holding your present form and thus created this representation for you.’
‘You are right’ this is more comfortable for me. Tell me your story, then.’
‘Once upon a time–’
‘Cut the crap.’
‘Very well,’ said the Clown with wry humour, then after a long pause continued, ‘Before your planet had even condensed out of the cloud of debris and gas that formed your solar system, when your sun was newly ignited and on its first circuit of the galaxy, there was an ageless being born of an mortal race, a sport, a mutation. This one lived for so long that, perhaps by chance, it was inevitable he would become a master of the arts of survival, and so he did. For him agelessness became practical immortality, nothing short of being caught in a supernova could destroy him, and so he lived, lived for eons – long enough to see the race that bore him slide into extinction.’
In his pretend body on the pretend rock Carroll found himself without any emotional response to the Clown's words. Here was a story too far from all he knew and understood. The Clown went on, his words falling into the pretend air like stones.
‘After this happened the immortal being cursed himself for not finding some way to have conferred immortality onto his fellows. He lived in loneliness for a time, and had he been less of a survivor he might have gone mad, but even that escape was denied him. He then he built himself a space ship and went in search of other intelligent life. He searched for time impossible for you to comprehend and all he found were the beginnings of life – worlds where the heights of evolutionary achievement were planktons and slimes. Eventually he ceased searching, and over those worlds he had found he set watchers, machines that sought, probed, and tested for sentient life, machines that sometimes accelerated the mechanism of evolution, and as they did this he set about building a titanic construct, for he now knew that the life born on those worlds would be mortal like his forebears...’
‘The construct he built was a disc around a sun; a home for untold billions. It was his intention to record the beings that would one day ascend from the life he had seen and place them in new ageless bodies on the disc, so that they would have time to develop, to evolve mentally into suitable companions for himself. And so he waited, unaware that he had already created sentient beings and that they plotted against him.’
‘Out of necessity he had built robots to help him; mechanical intelligences. As the millennia passed, they evolved into something more than he had made them. Through accident chance, copying errors in their programs they came to think of themselves as gods and they came to covet power. And so, as the first intelligences came to be on your planet, and as the first recordings were made, they set about making a recording of their builder and, before he could resurrect any of the intelligences recorded, they destroyed his ship, his body, and entrapped his life-field in the recording of himself so that he could not remake his body.’
A long silence ensued while Carroll digested that. What am I? He wondered. Am I a copy of a copy of a copy? What is Jason Carroll? Is he mind or is he soul? Does such a thing as the soul exist?
‘Recording,’ he repeated uneasily, ‘what am I? Do I have a soul? You said something about a soul disc...’
‘Does it matter? From year to year a living being is not the same being. The material of its body has been exchanged for different material. Its mind has decayed and found new ways of working. You are information continually undergoing change. That information is recorded. If you had a soul then it resides now in some heaven for I have never found such. Here the essence of you is a small disc made from one long information carrying molecule. I call them soul discs out of arbitrary choice. I see no better use for the word.’
Carroll could think of no reply. He did not believe in gods yet he found it difficult to visualize himself merely as information, yet, what was his DNA?
‘Robots,’ he said, getting back to the story, ‘I presume these are games players?’
The Clown answered him in a voice with something in it that made his spine crawl. ‘Yes, and now they play games with a few of the intelligences recorded. This must not continue.’
It was obvious to Carroll who the builder of the disc was so he asked the one question he now thought was expected of him. ‘How then do we discontinue it?’
‘I can do nothing but advise you between those times when my soul disc is rung, for now anyway. It is you, Jason Carroll, who must act.’
‘What can I do?’
‘You can destroy the present form of the Reaper and completely destroy the General. Once this is done you will have time to escape. You must take your soul disc and flee towards the sun.’
‘My soul disc,’ said Carroll, realizing now, ‘in that box on the arm of the Reaper's throne.’ He laughed. ‘And all I have to do is destroy the Reaper and the General. I hate to disappoint you but that is not all that simple –’
The Clown interrupted, ‘A gun is not a gun when it is a billet of metal and therefore is not a weapon. It is potentially a weapon though. Sulphur, potassium nitrate and charcoal are not gun powder when separate.’
‘Kruger asked for a gun, Ellery for a hand-grenade,’ said Carroll, catching the Clown's meaning immediately. ‘Is this why you've chosen me? My training, my knowledge?’
‘Yes, you are a resourceful man Jason Carroll, and you can find weapons where no other can. It is not often that one such as yourself is chosen for the game, as normally the four select those from eras where edged weapons were predominant. The Reaper chose so many from the twentieth century this time in an attempt to find a way to win, but of course with Anubis's android on the final hexagon the Reaper will not succeed.’
Carroll nodded. ‘So I junk the Reaper and the General and flee for the sunset. That's it?’
‘No, remember your soul disc, and be advised that they are indestructible and to each person his own seems blue.’
‘I'll do as you say then. What other choices do I have?’ said Carroll, standing up, ‘Now, how the Hell do I get out of here?’
‘Simple,’ said the Clown, and blackness descended like a falling wall.
Chapter Five
As before, there was a metallic taste in his mouth, and as before, a line of light appeared to one side of him. The door to the resurrection booth swung open and he stumbled out into unchanged twilight. Julius was waiting for him this time, and from the building came the sounds of shouting, drunken singing, and the occasional snatch of music, mournful music.
‘You are the last through,’ said the legionary, handing Carroll a skirt-like garment like the one he wore. Carroll donned it in a daze, befuddled by his conversation with the Clown and wondering just how he was going to deal with the Reaper and the General. He gazed across to where they stood facing each other – the Reaper on his throne and the General with his swagger stick tucked under his arm. It occurred to him then that knowing they were machines did not make facing dealing with them any easier. He knew just how effective a machine could be. His encounter with Anubis's android had shown him that. Then he laughed. Of course. Against the android he had only limited time and hand weapons. Now he could do better than that. With the perplexed legionary trailing behind he headed for the building. There was something he had to try.
Within the building the scene was the same as after the last game. Everyone was getting drunk and stoned and the air was redolent with the smokes from various narcotics. Carroll acknowledged Ellery, who shouted at him drunkenly then continued to deal the cards he held while puffing out clouds of cigar smoke. The card players, Carroll noted, were gambling with gold and silver coins, worthless here. He did not join them, and instead he went to his creation booth and typed in ‘Potassium Nitrate, 1lb’. The light on the side of the cylinder came on then went off and Carroll removed a sealed paper bag which he opened, dipped his finger in, and tasted. He then grinned and typed in for a couple of carrier bags then all sorts of other things that could be purchased from a chemist's shop. He then went on to get himself some more combat clothing as the garment Julius had given him was not his idea of dressed. When he had all he wanted, he glanced round at the legionary.
