It was only then he realized quite how clever the little piece of jewelry was. He’d assumed it was just an illuminated still picture, but it wasn’t; he could remember how it had looked when he’d first seen it, and now the scene was different; the island continents on the daylight side were mostly different shapes to those he remembered, though he recognized a couple of them, near the dawn terminator. The bracelet was a moving representation of an Orbital; possibly even a crude clock.
He smiled in the darkness, turned away.
They all expected him to lose. Only he knew—or had known—he was a better player than they thought. But now he’d thrown away the chance of proving he was right and they were wrong.
“Fool, fool,” he whispered to himself in the darkness.
He couldn’t sleep. He got up, switched on the module-screen and told the machine to display his game. The Board of Origin appeared, thru-holoed in front of him. He sat there and stared at it, then he told the module to contact the ship.
It was a slow, dreamlike conversation, during which he gazed as though transfixed at the bright game-board seemingly stretching away from him, while waiting for his words to reach the distant warship, and then for its reply to come back.
“Jernau Gurgeh?”
“I want to know something, ship. Is there any way out of this?”
Stupid question. He could see the answer. His position was an inchoate mess; the only certain thing about it was that it was hopeless.
“Out of your present situation in the game?”
He sighed. What a waste of time. “Yes. Can you see a way?”
The frozen holo on the screen in front of him, his displayed position, was like some trapped moment of falling; the instant when the foot slips, the fingers lose their last strength, and the fatal, accelerating descent begins. He thought of satellites, forever falling, and the controlled stumble that bipeds call walking.
“You are more points behind than anybody who has ever come back to win in any Main Series game. You have already been defeated, they believe.”
Gurgeh waited for more. Silence. “Answer the question,” he told the ship. “You didn’t answer the question. Answer me.”
What was the ship playing at? Mess, mess, a total mess. His position was a swirling, amorphous, nebulous, almost barbaric welter of pieces and areas, battered and crumbling and falling away. Why was he even bothering to ask? Didn’t he trust his own judgment? Did he need a Mind to tell him? Would only that make it real?
“Yes, of course there is a way,” the ship said. “Many ways, in fact, though they are all unlikely, near impossible. But it can be done. There isn’t nearly enough time to—”
“Good night, ship,” he said, as the signal continued.
“—explain any of them in detail, but I think I can give you a general idea what to do, though of course just because it has to be such a synoptic appraisal, such a—”
“Sorry, ship; good night.” Gurgeh turned the channel off. It clicked once. After a little while the closing chime announced the ship had signed off too. Gurgeh looked at the holo image of the board again, then closed his eyes.
By morning he still had no idea what he was going to do. He hadn’t slept at all that night, just sat in front of the screen, staring at its displayed panorama of the game until the view was seemingly etched into his brain, and his eyes hurt with the strain. Later he’d eaten lightly and watched some of the broadcast entertainments the Empire fed the population with. It was a suitably mindless diversion.
Pequil arrived, smiling, and said how well Gurgeh had done to stay in contention at all, and how, personally, Pequil was sure that Gurgeh would do well in the second-series games for those knocked out of the Main Series, if he wished to take part. Of course, they were mostly of interest to those seeking promotion in their careers, and led no further, but Gurgeh might do better against other… ah, unfortunates. Anyway; he was still going to Echronedal to see the end of the games, and that was a great privilege, wasn’t it?
Gurgeh hardly spoke, just nodded now and again. They rode out to the hall, while Pequil went on and on about the great victory Nicosar had achieved in his first game the previous day; the Emperor-Regent was already on to the second board, the Board of Form.
The priest again asked Gurgeh to resign, and again Gurgeh said he wished to play. They all sat down around the great spread of board, and either dictated their moves to the club players, or made them themselves. Gurgeh sat for a long time before placing his first piece that morning; he rubbed the biotech between his hands for minutes, looking down, wide-eyed, at the board for so long the others thought he’d forgotten it was his turn, and asked the Adjudicator to remind him.
Gurgeh placed the piece. It was as though he saw two boards; one here in front of him and one engraved into his mind from the night before. The other players made their moves, gradually forcing Gurgeh back into one small area of the board, with only a couple of free pieces outside it, hunted and fleeing.
When it came, as he’d known it would without wanting to admit to himself that he did know, the… he could only think of it as a revelation… made him want to laugh. In fact he did rock back in his seat, head nodding. The priest looked at him expectantly, as though waiting for the stupid human to finally give up, but Gurgeh smiled over at the apex, selected the strongest cards from his dwindling supply, deposited them with the Adjudicator, and made his next move.
All he was banking on, it turned out, was the rest being too concerned with winning the game quickly. It was obvious that some sort of deal had been arranged which would let the priest win, and Gurgeh guessed that the others wouldn’t be playing at their best when they were competing for somebody else; it would not be their victory. They would not own it. Certainly, they didn’t have to play well; sheer weight of numbers could compensate for indifferent play.
But the moves could become a language, and Gurgeh thought he could speak that language now, well enough (tellingly) to lie in it… so he made his moves, and at one moment, with one move, seemed to be suggesting that he had given up… then with his next move he appeared to indicate he was determined to take one of several players down with him… or two of them… or a different one… the lies went on. There was no single message, but rather a succession of contradictory signals, pulling the syntax of the game to and fro and to and fro until the common understanding the other players had reached began to fatigue and tear and split.
In the midst of this, Gurgeh made some at first sight inconsequential, purposeless moves which—seemingly suddenly, apparently without any warning—threatened first a few, then several, then most of the troop-pieces of one player, but at the cost of making Gurgeh’s own forces more vulnerable. While that player panicked, the priest did what Gurgeh was relying on him doing, rushing into the attack. Over the next few moves, Gurgeh asked for the cards he’d deposited with the game official to be revealed. They acted rather like mines in a Possession game. The priest’s forces were variously destroyed, demoralized, random-move blinded, hopelessly weakened or turned over to Gurgeh or—in only a few cases—to some of the other players. The priest was left with almost nothing, forces scattering over the board like dead leaves.
In the confusion, Gurgeh watched the others, devoid of their leader, squabble over the scraps of power. One got into serious trouble; Gurgeh attacked, annihilated most of his forces and captured the rest, and then kept on attacking without even waiting to regroup.
He realized later he’d still been behind in points at that time, but the sheer momentum of his own resurrection from oblivion carried him on, spreading an unreasoning, hysterical, almost superstitiously intense panic among the others.
From that point on he made no more errors; his progress across the board became a combination of rout and triumphal procession. Perfectly adequate players were made to look like idiots as Gurgeh’s forces rampaged across their territories, consuming ground and material as though nothing could be easier or more natural.
Gu
rgeh finished the game on the Board of Origin before the evening session. He’d saved himself; he wasn’t just through to the next board, he was in the lead. The priest, who’d sat looking at the game-surface with an expression Gurgeh thought he’d have recognized as “stunned” even without his lessons in Azadian facial language, walked out of the hall without the customary end-of-game pleasantries, while the other players either said very little or were embarrassingly effusive about his performance.
A crowd of people clustered round Gurgeh; the club members, some press people and other players, some observing guests. Gurgeh felt oddly untouched by the surrounding, chattering apices. Crowding up to him, but still trying not to touch him, somehow their very numbers lent an air of unreality to the scene. Gurgeh was buried in questions, but he couldn’t answer any of them. He could hardly make them out as individual inquiries anyway; the apices all talked too fast. Flere-Imsaho floated in above the heads of the crowd, but despite trying to shout people down to gain their attention, all it succeeded in attracting was their hair, with its static. Gurgeh saw one apex try to push the machine out of his way, and receive an obviously unexpected and painful electric shock.
Pequil shoved his way through the crowd and bustled up to Gurgeh, but instead of coming to rescue the man, he told him he’d brought another twenty reporters with him. He touched Gurgeh without seeming to think about it, turning him to face some cameras.
More questions followed, but Gurgeh ignored them. He had to ask Pequil several times if he could leave before the apex had a path cleared to the door and the waiting car.
“Mr. Gurgee; let me add my congratulations,” Pequil said in the car. “I heard while I was in the office and came straight away. A famous victory.”
“Thank you,” Gurgeh said, slowly calming himself. He sat in the car’s plushly upholstered seat, looking out at the sunlit city. The car was air-conditioned, unlike the game-hall, but it was only now Gurgeh found himself sweating. He shivered.
“Me too,” Flere-Imsaho said. “You raised your game just in time.”
“Thank you, drone.”
“You were lucky as hell, too, mind you.”
“I trust you’ll let me arrange a proper press-conference, Mr. Gurgee,” Pequil said eagerly. “I’m sure you’re going to be quite famous after this, no matter what happens during the rest of the match. Heavens, you’ll be sharing leaders with the Emperor himself tonight!”
“No thanks,” Gurgeh said. “Don’t arrange anything.” He couldn’t think that he’d have anything useful to tell people. What was there to say? He’d won the game; he’d every chance of taking the match itself. He was anyway a little uncomfortable at the thought of his image and voice being broadcast all over the Empire, and his story, undoubtedly sensationalized, being told and retold and distorted by these people.
“Oh, but you must!” Pequil protested. “Everybody will want to see you! You don’t seem to realize what you’ve done; even if you lose the match you’ve established a new record! Nobody has ever come back from being so far behind! It was quite brilliant!”
“All the same,” Gurgeh said, suddenly feeling very tired, “I don’t want to be distracted. I have to concentrate. I have to rest.”
“Well,” Pequil said, looking crestfallen, “I see your point, but I warn you; you’re making a mistake. People will want to hear what you’ve got to say, and our press always gives the people what they want, no matter what the difficulties. They’ll just make it up. You’d be better off saying something yourself.”
Gurgeh shook his head, looked out at the traffic on the boulevard. “If people want to lie about me that’s a matter for their consciences. At least I don’t have to talk to them. I really could not care less what they say.”
Pequil looked at Gurgeh with an expression of astonishment, but said nothing. Flere-Imsaho made a chuckling noise over its constant hum.
* * *
Gurgeh talked it over with the ship. The Limiting Factor said that the game could probably have been won more elegantly, but what Gurgeh had done did represent one end of the spectrum of unlikely possibilities it had been going to sketch out the previous night. It congratulated him. He had played better than it had thought possible. It also asked him why he hadn’t listened after it had told him it could see a way out.
“All I wanted to know was that there was a way out.”
(Again the delay, the weight of time while his beamed words lanced beneath the matter-dimpled surface that was real space.)
“But I could have helped you,” said the ship. “I thought it was a bad sign when you refused my aid. I began to think you had given up in your mind, if not on the board.”
“I didn’t want help, ship.” He played with the Orbital bracelet, wondering absently if it portrayed any particular world, and if so, which. “I wanted hope.”
“I see,” the ship said, eventually.
“I wouldn’t accept it,” the drone said.
“You wouldn’t accept what?” Gurgeh asked, looking up from a holo-displayed board.
“Za’s invitation.” The tiny machine floated closer; it had discarded its bulky disguise now they were back inside the module.
Gurgeh looked coldly at it. “I didn’t notice it was addressed to you too.” Shohobohaum Za had sent a message congratulating Gurgeh and inviting him out for an evening’s entertainment.
“Well, it wasn’t; but I’m supposed to monitor everything—”
“Are you really?” Gurgeh turned back to the holospread before him. “Well you can stay here and monitor whatever you like while I go out on the town with Shohobohaum Za tonight.”
“You’ll regret it,” the drone told him. “You’ve been very sensible, staying in and not getting involved, but you’ll suffer for it if you do start gallivanting.”
“ ‘Gallivanting’?” Gurgeh stared at the drone, realizing only then how difficult it was to look something up and down when it was just a few centimeters high. “What are you, drone; my mother?”
“I’m just trying to be sensible about this,” the machine said, voice rising. “You’re in a strange society, you’re not the most worldly-wise of people, and Za certainly isn’t my idea of—”
“You opinionated box of junk!” Gurgeh said loudly, rising and switching off the holoscreen.
The drone jumped in midair; it backed off hastily. “Now, now, Jernau Gurgeh…”
“Don’t you ‘Now, now’ me, you patronizing adding machine. If I want to take an evening off, I will. And quite frankly the thought of some human company for a change is looking more attractive all the time.” He jabbed a finger at the machine. “Don’t read any more of my mail, and don’t bother about escorting Za and me this evening.” He walked quickly past it, heading for his cabin. “Now, I’m going to take a shower; why don’t you go watch some birds?”
The man left the module’s lounge. The little drone hovered steadily in midair for a while. “Oops,” it said to itself, eventually, then, with a shrug-like wobble, swooped away, fields vaguely rosy.
“Have some of this,” Za said. The car swept along the city streets beneath the erubescent skies of dusk.
Gurgeh took the flask and drank.
“Not quite grif,” Za told him, “but it does the job.” He took the flask back while Gurgeh coughed a little. “Did you let that grif get to you at the ball?”
“No,” Gurgeh admitted. “I bypassed it; wanted a clear head.”
“Aw heck,” Za said, looking downcast. “You mean I could have had more?” He shrugged, brightened, tapped Gurgeh on the elbow. “Hey; I never said; congratulations. On winning the game.”
“Thanks.”
“That showed them. Wow, did you give them a shock.” Za shook his head in admiration; his long brown hair swung across his loose tunic top like heavy smoke. “I had you filed as a prime-time loser, J-G, but you’re some kind of showman.” He winked one bright green eye at Gurgeh, and grinned.
Gurgeh looked uncertainly at Za’s beaming face for a
moment, then burst out laughing. He took the flask from Za’s hand and put it to his lips.
“To the showmen,” he said, and drank.
“Amen to that, my maestro.”
The Hole had been on the outskirts of the city once, but now it was just another part of one more urban district. The Hole was a set of vast artificial caverns burrowed out of the chalk centuries ago to store natural gas in; the gas had long since run out, the city ran on other forms of energy, and the set of huge, linked caves had been colonized, first by Groasnachek’s poor, then (by a slow process of osmosis and displacement, as though—gas or human—nothing ever really changed) by its criminals and outlaws, and finally, though not completely, by its effectively ghettoized aliens and their supporting cast of locals.
Gurgeh and Za’s car drove into what had once been a massive above-ground gas-storage cylinder; it had become the housing for a pair of spiraling ramps taking cars and other vehicles down into and up out of the Hole. In the center of the still mostly empty, ringingly echoing cylinder, a cluster of variously sized lifts slid up and down inside ramshackle frameworks of girders, tubing and beams.
The outer and inner surfaces of the ancient gasometer sparkled slatily under rainbow lights and the flickeringly unreal, grotesquely oversize images of advertizing holos. People milled about the surface level of the cavernous tower, and the air was full of shouting, screaming, haggling voices and the sound of laboring engines. Gurgeh watched the crowds and the stalls and stands slide by as the car dipped and started its long descent. A strange, half-sweet, half-acrid smell seeped through the car’s conditioning, like a sweaty breath from the place.
They quit the car in a long, low, crowded tunnel where the air was heavy with fumes and shouts. The gallery was choked with multifariously shaped and sized vehicles which rumbled and hissed and edged about among the swarmingly varied people like massive, clumsy animals wading in an insect sea. Za took Gurgeh by the hand as their car trundled toward the ascending ramp. They went bustling through the buffeting crowds of Azadians and other humanoids toward a limily-glowing tunnel mouth.
The Player of Games Page 18