The Great Game

by Lavie Tidhar

  Which meant those probability world incursions had to stop.

  The observer felt quite cheerful now. Soon it would all be over and he'd be back where he belonged. The voices protested at this but he quietened them down. The reconfigured scanner was picking up the signal clearly now and he headed for it, no longer in a hurry, savouring these moments, his mission soon to end.

  Behind him, unobserved, for once, by the observer, a giant, malformed figure detached itself from the shadows and cautiously followed.

  From high above there was something intensely beautiful about the tripod machines. They moved with the long legs of giraffes, their movements surprisingly graceful over the city. Flames reflected in their metal carapace, the bulbous heads of them that sat over the moving legs. They were like squid, Smith thought, soaring, coming closer – like aquatic beings somehow propelled to stand upright, stretched over the horizon, their tentacles reaching down to the city, bashing it this way and that.

  Where had they come from? What strange world would manufacture such machines? Who drove them? Were there people inside or were the tripods themselves some sort of advanced automata, the bulbous compartments huge mechanical brains?

  He flew over them, like a bird, the wind tossing him this way and that, the city a long way down below. The harness held him but his hands gripped the bar of the glider, this thing that looked too fragile to survive the winds, too impossible to fly. We built that, he thought. There was pride in that.

  Below him the machines stalked the city, shivering sometimes in and out of existence, flickering like images on a screen. People down below, fleeing, were as small as insects. Smith alone was up there in the sky. No.

  That wasn't true.

  As he watched, dark clouds formed in the sky above the city, drifting closer.

  Airships, he realised.

  But what good could they do, against the tripods?

  He was level with the machines now, going lower, trying to locate the moving source, their middle. It would be a vehicle of some sort, he thought. It was hard to tell from above and the rising smoke made visibility difficult.

  The black airships were approaching more rapidly. The tripods seemed to ignore them.

  No. That, too, was wrong. As he watched, helpless to intervene, a burst of bright, terrible flame erupted from one of the tripods. It flew through the air, a roar of flame, and hit the nearest airship.

  For just a moment the ship was obscured from view. Then, a ball of flame erupted, the fire feeding, growing stronger, bigger, and Smith could only watch as the ship simply disintegrated there in mid-air.

  He cried out, but his voice was small and lost up there in the air. He dived, his anger becoming a bright white flame compacted inside him. Diving and rising, the sweat on his forehead mixing with the smoke, the soot, the wind lashing at him, diving, past the line of tripods and onwards and down, towards the source of it all, towards the unseen device.

  The observer moved unobserved amongst the hysterical, running humans. There seemed to be little control, little order left in this strange, barbarous city. It was as if the sight – not to mention the wholesale destruction – of those ancient lumbering machines, conjured out of who-knew-which antique probability universe, had entirely shut down human rationality.

  Yet not entirely, he saw. He watched humans organising themselves: makeshift medical clinics sprouting in the ruins of a shelled tavern, or in the middle of the road; groups composed of women, men, even children, organising to put out fires, carrying water, dashing into rubble to rescue trapped citizens.

  But the observer, always, was going into the heart of the disaster, where there was no time to organise, no time to do anything but try to flee. Behind him the city responded; like a living organism it was closing in on wounds, cauterising, bandaging, beginning the arduous process of healing itself. Cities, the observer knew, were in many ways living things, their inhabitants merely the cells or neurons that individually meant nothing, that only collectively formed an entity, singular and proud. The city would live; cities were hard to kill, harder than humans. The observer, a small undistinguished figure, moved through smoke and fire.

  He stopped several times. Each time he did a human had been trapped under the ruins, their life bleeding out of them, short and sweet and sharp. Each time, out of a desire to understand or that strange, unfamiliar consumption the Alice voice had called compassion, he extracted his needle and pushed it, his data-spike, deep into the hind-brain of the humans, extracting, preserving. It was an uncomfortable thing for him to feel.

  He was no longer an observer, he realised.

  He had become a participant.

  This was a familiar danger, the eventual fate of all observers like him. It was time to leave, to bring back what he'd found, before he was absorbed completely, before he became one of them, before they turned him.

  The observer walked through flame and soot and smoke and the unseen presence at his back followed. The observer passed underneath the giant legs of the moving tripods, dodging their steps, and his shadow followed, until they were approaching the device, the signal coming clear and loud now in the observer's mind.

  He was playing the great game, the observer thought, and a rapid, unexplained feeling of joy spiked through him, the great game of lizard and man and automaton, a game not of countries and species as the humans thought but a far bigger one, of planets and solar systems and quantum probabilities, and this was only the first move in a truly great game.

  For which even a galaxy was but one battlefield, one chessboard in a far larger and more complicated game.

  With joy and with compassion and with, at last, that simple need all creatures have, biological or mechanical it made no difference – the simple desire they all shared, the need to go home – the observer crossed dirt roads and paved, fallen buildings and ruined carriages, until he reached, at last, the source of all the mayhem.

  FORTY-THREE

  Smith was zooming low now, the tripod machines far in the circumference of influence, still moving, still flickering now and then–

  Down below flaming buildings and carts and people running, but his attention was on what stood out, on what felt wrong, that which did not belong–

  A black vehicle of unknown design or means of propulsion, moving slowly, its sides, matt black, absorbing the reflected flames, dampening them–

  A machine with no horses to drive it, and no steam engine, no stoker at the back, a sealed device with its occupancy unseen behind dark windows–

  A long, finned device, moving slowly, smoke and flame behind it–

  Smith, diving low, hovering now, the glider like a moth caught in the winds, the Tour Eiffel left far behind–

  Things that did not belong, things going against the general movement, like a small and unremarkable figure, a man with a wide-brimmed hat and economical movements, so unassuming and unremarkable as to become, to Smith, interesting indeed.

  Gliding, coming closer, catching up to that dark bulletshaped vehicle–

  And was that small figure down below–

  Smith dived sharply, ready to finish it, ready to do what was right. The glider, shuddering with the effort, sped towards the ground. Smith had caught up with the vehicle, then overtaken it. He crash-landed ahead of it, the impact with the ground jarring his bones, ringing him like a cracked bell. He lay there for a moment, the glider covering him like the wings of a butterfly. At last, drawing breath, Smith reached for the knife strapped to his leg, pulled it out, cut the harness rope. He pushed the harness off him, his every effort focused on this one simple act. The world around him shrank, it became just Smith, the hard road, the harness that bound him. At last it was done. The world expanded, gradually. He sat up. The black vehicle had stopped, a few feet away from him, he saw. It just sat there, a dark bullet shape, giving nothing away.

  Smith stared. How did the vehicle move? Where was its engine?

  The knife was still in his hand. It seemed useless against
that dark vehicle.

  All around him, in a circle whose circumference was an exact three miles, the giant tripods halted. They stood, motionless, like vast metal guardians over the burning city. Smith shifted the knife from one hand to the other. Waiting.

  It was suddenly very quiet.

  Footsteps, unhurried, approaching. Smith, watching–

  The figure that appeared was the one he had seen from the air, a small and rotund and unassuming fellow who resembled Smith himself. The shock of recognition passed through Smith, and he forced himself to be still. The figure he had last seen in Covent Garden, as he ran towards his friend, as he ran to the place the Lord Byron automata lay slain…

  He watched and waited and the black vehicle, too, was still, as if its occupants were waiting, and all around them, in a wide circle, the giant tripods stood still, as if they, too, were watching and waiting.

  A great calm settled then over Smith. He watched the other, so much like himself, a shadow being in a shadow world. You would not look at him twice, if you saw him in the street, or in a pub… Slowly, the other lifted his head, and the wide-brimmed hat that shadowed his face lifted. Moonlight and flames lit up the other's face, and Smith sucked in his breath sharply.

  Shadows and flames, playing tricks on the mind…

  For there was no face under that hat. A skeletal metal head, and eyes of blue flame, looked at Smith.

  "Erntemaschine," Smith whispered.

  Harvester…

  The other, as if acknowledging him, nodded, once. Then, startling Smith, his – its – mouth opened.

  The voice that came out of it knocked Smith back.

  "Smith! Get out of here – oh, you have no idea – it's a trap, he says that–"

  The voice cut off, as sudden as it had come.

  The voice was Alice's.

  Alice, who died in Bangkok.

  Harvester…

  And now a new voice came, a deeper voice, as familiar to Smith as Alice's had been.

  "Smith, you fulfilled the promise I had for you," the voice said.

  Smith whispered, "Mycroft…"

  "Dear boy, do not lose heart," the fat man said. Smith stared at the alien machine, this humanoid automaton, speaking in the dead voice of Mycroft Holmes.

  "Erntemaschine…" he said again, softly. Then, addressing his question to this being, or to Alice, he didn't know, he said, "Why a trap?"

  The Harvester did not reply. It was impossible to tell, on that skeletal metal face, but Smith had the impression he – it – was smiling.

  The doors of the black vehicle opened.

  They did so in silence, and simultaneously, there were two on each side, and the things that stepped out of them were–

  The knife Smith was still holding felt very small, and for the first time he truly felt his age.

  They, too, had been men once, the things that stepped out of that machine.

  Frankenstein-Jekyll monstrosities, subjected to the serum's nefarious influence. They dwarfed Smith and the other. Muscles bulged from their oversized clothes. Their eyes had a yellow, demented sheen. They wore metal collars around their unnaturally thick necks.

  Every now and then, Smith saw, the collars fizzled, hissed, small blue flames dancing around the metal, and each time the creatures' faces twisted with pain.

  They were being controlled, he realised.

  From within the vehicle.

  He tensed, waiting for whoever was inside to come out.

  But they never did.

  The four turned as one, their collars hissing. Facing Smith, and the other.

  And now, Smith saw, others had materialised around them, emerging from the frame of a ruined apartment building, from a baruch-landau parked innocently enough on the side of the road… One jumped down from the roof of a nearby building, the ground shaking as he hit it.

  The creatures surrounded Smith and the alien Harvester.

  The Harvester turned to Smith.

  "Smith, if this goes wrong…" She hesitated. Her voice was just as he remembered it. "I love you," she said.

  "I've always loved you, Alice," he said.

  She said, "I know."

  Smith looked at their attackers. So the whole thing had been a trap, just like Alice said. Not for him – he didn't rate himself valuable enough.

  No.

  A trap for that strange, alien being, that Harvester who truly did harvest the dead…

  He, Smith, was just in the way.

  And he did not rate his survival chances as being very high.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Flames in the distance, smoke spiralling up… The night was beautiful, order in destruction, the moon shone down, pockmarked, scarred, as scarred as Smith.

  The creatures surrounded Smith and the Harvester, closing them in, and now they made their move.

  Fight if you have to, as the Manual, long ago, had put it. Run if you don't.

  Though there was nowhere to run…

  Smith tensed but beside him the small, rotund alien machine seemed to relax, to become even more inconspicuous, even more anonymous and serene.

  "Alice? Mycroft?"

  They spoke in unison, not just the two of them but a multitude of voices who Smith didn't know, all absorbed by the Harvester, from that child in Bangkok to the lost souls swiftly and mercifully despatched in the burning city.

  "Everything," they said, their voices rising like the singing of birds, like rain falling, like the rustle of leaves and the hum of ancient, mysterious machinery. "Everything will be all right."

  Smith was not reassured. The creatures reached for him, one of them grabbed him in huge, meaty hands. The others went for the Harvester–

  The fingers applied enormous pressure, the pain was excruciating, Smith bit down a scream–

  Turned, the knife flashing, buried it deep into the creature's chest–

  Who sagged back in surprise or pain, it was hard to tell, momentarily releasing him–

  A hum rose around him, a strange ethereal sound, vibrations shaking the very air. The world seemed to slow down around Smith, to pause, the flames shuddering to a halt, the tripod machines frozen against an unmoving, enormous moon, the creatures moving sluggishly, bewildered, the black vehicle sitting there motionless, Smith's hand leaving the handle of his knife reluctantly, pulling away as though he were swimming through water…

  The hum rose like the wordless chant of a thousand monks. It came from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the air, in the flames, in the smoke and in the dead who lay all about them.

  In that stillness, that freezing of time and of the world, only the slight, monk-like figure of the Harvester moved normally, in real-time. It did not move hurriedly. It had an economy of movement, an assured, almost peaceful pace.

  Everything will be all right, Smith.

  The words rose in his mind, they were bubbles in water, and a strange peace came over Smith then. His world expanded outwards, beyond the city, beyond the Earth, past the moon and the planets and the sun and outwards still. Star systems rushed by, strange sights, engorged suns and empty spaces that swallowed the matter around them, clouds where stars were being born, red suns, dying, worlds beyond count…

  Everything will be all right.

  • • • •

  The observer felt that its time here on this curious world was coming to an end but was impressed by the human-laid trap, which suggested several things to him.

  That the humans, or some faction of humans, had indeed deducted the observer's arrival, and its purpose.

  And were determined to capture him, either to prevent him from achieving his mission, or to study him, or both.

  Which was exciting news to the observer, even though, having observed, as it were, an entire chain of circumstances and events – of people – that led him to the knowledge he would be observed, he would be deduced, this was still material evidence, and first-hand. A postscript to his report, he thought, almost fondly.

  There was little th
at was useful in the minds of the distorted humans, however. Whatever process they had undergone, this serum the observer had found mention of in several of the voices in his head, it had done irreparable damage to the complex, delicate webwork of their brains. He took from them with the same compassion he took from the dying he had met along the burning city, but there were no whole minds here, nothing but fragments, which he extracted with care.