RUY LOPEZ: Standard opening attack for White, supposedly invented by a Spanish priest with nothing more useful to do in the Dark Ages. This attack involves a penetration of the center by the King and Queen’s Pawns with the subsequent rapid opening of the Bishop file, from which squares the Knights may control the center. Direct and powerful attack meant to march down the board; it is easily defeated by a Sicilian defense in which the advance of the pieces is blocked. Now in partial disfavor, the Ruy Lopez has been displaced by the modernists. It is still often seen in amateur games. The Ruy Lopez is capable of producing a Fool’s Mate against an inexperienced or nervous player who might fail to note positioning of the Queen and King’s Bishop.
SICILIAN DEFENSE: A common refutation of the Ruy Lopez, employed by many experts and well within the technical facilities of all grandmasters. (See RUY LOPEZ.)
VENUS: Third planet of the Sol system on which the fifth game (P—K4, P—K4; B—B4, QN—R4; Q—B3, QN—QB3; Q X B MATE) was played.
ZUGZWANG: Commonly, “move-bound”; that situation in which a player has established a strong defense but is now on the move, and is confronted with the fact that every move he makes will expose him to attack. No matter what the helpless player does, the move will cost him the game. He wishes that he could dispense with the move; he wishes that the intolerable metronome of chess (Move–move, Move–move, Move–move) could be broken. But no matter what he does he must return again and again to that same realization: that his carefully prepared defense will be torn apart and by his own hand. His destruction resides within himself and he can do nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent it; no matter what he does his game is coming apart.
Now he is trying to figure a way out of the trap; perhaps he could leave the table and have some lice and conversation, and return as if he had already moved, smiling winsomely, shrugging his shoulders. But the intolerable, implacable referee will not be fooled, there is no way to fool him; always there is that figure of the referee who controls the universe of chess. No way around it, the trap is complete; now the player knows that he is doomed and as he rises from the table, palms flat to board, his eyes sweeping the surroundings with a mixture of peril and glee (because there is something almost sensual about disaster), he sees his opponent, the blank, empty eyes of his opponent waiting for the move that will give him the game. Their eyes mesh, features blend together into a gelatinous mix that makes them indistinguishable. Fleeing from the hall, burbling small cries, the man in zugzwang understands at last the truth. Nothing, nothing, nothing is ever to be done about that or the clock of his mortality.
EPILOGUE
Coming out of that deadly faint in the junkyard, looking at the wreckage beyond us, contemplating the wreckage within, I turned upon Louis, seeing in his eyes what I took to be the oldest, boldest, coldest knowledge of all: that he had possessed me, and in digging within had known not only the secrets of the flesh but some more intricate and corrupt condition, something which in the parting of me he had discovered and would now know, beyond refutation, for all time. It was all that I could do to bear the intensity of his gaze (or perhaps I am thinking only of the intensity of my own knowledge at this point). He was not looking at me at all. In fact I am fairly clear on this point: He was not looking at me, had rolled half away from me, an arm poised across his eyes, lying on his back, respiring in a shallow way, small convolutions of his legs and thighs the only indications of that catastrophic entrance. How could I have thought that he was looking at me? How could I possibly have imagined that he was looking at me when in truth he was looking deep within and the two of us, like fish dumped from an aquarium, were rolling on the carpet of the world, withdrawn into the deadly rattling postures of life’s release? I must try to keep my reflection of these events as straightforward as possible. I must never, never substitute the imagined for the real.
“It can’t be,” I said. “You can’t have done this to me, it’s impossible, I won’t accept it,” and similar youthful, fervent denials. It is important to say that I had never pictured my virginity, my precocity, my innocence ripped from me in quite such a humiliating fashion, nor, even in my most devilish fantasies, had I conceived that it would be Louis who would be the perpetrator. “I tell you, it never happened, I won’t accept the fact that it happened, I deny, I deny.” He rolled then, poised on haunches, looking, slavering dog-fashion, down at the wreckage of the junkyard. All history and desire was reclaimed in those artifacts which lay across one another, ruined slag at the place of all resting. “This can’t be happening,” I said. As these protestations and youthful misdirections came burbling from me a mad and cunning idea began to take shape within for the first time: If I said that it never happened, if I paid no notice to it, then in any true sense it would not have happened. We are able to make our realities in life, as over the chessboard, in the patterns which we impose upon our own consciousness. “No,” I said again in a slightly firmer tone. “No, it never happened at all, Louis, and that’s all there is to it.” Of course his cooperation would be necessary; I saw this even then. “I’m quite sure that you’ll agree with me.”
“No,” he said, “no, you’re wrong, it did happen. It cannot be denied.” All of this in a flat monotone, no inflection whatsoever. “I’m afraid that the move has been made, David, and it’s touch-move, touch-move.” This set him off into a horrid and uncontrollable series of giggles, the giggles restoring life to his limbs, arc to his inert form. Then he had sprung to his feet, was hovering over me, his eyes agleam with an insight as perilous as mine although one hundred and eighty degrees removed. “You’re going to have to live with it,” he said. “You’re going to have to accept it. It happened and it was always meant to happen and furthermore I did it to you, you remember that.” This outburst drove me quite mad, or at least it made me somewhat less stable than I might have been otherwise. I was on my feet too then, arms extended, pulling and wrenching at him, the contact of his flesh more familiar to me in the efforts I made to strike him than ever I could have wanted. I said, “It never happened, it never happened, I deny all of it,” and he said, “A move made once is not a move retracted, under the international rules of gamesmanship and the grandmaster code. Once something is touched it must remain “touched, you must move the piece to a new position,” and slavering obscenities I leapt at him, going for that small, white spot of throat where I knew the immutable heart of the jugular itself beat, reaching out to tear his pulse from his body—
And I leapt over him, passed through space and beyond, and fell a sheer, clear distance into the ooze, hitting with knees and splayed palms. As the birds of Canarsie wheeled in position from this aspect I saw something else: the 1947 Pontiac was on fire, some unseen workman’s torch had gotten it, and the sparks from the car danced and flew, the metal shivered and contracted upon itself; the vast, brutal sheet metal of the body itself contracted within ... and as I watched in amazement the car shrank upon itself like the layers of some tormented thing in an oven shriveling back upon one another. The body drew tighter and tighter into itself until what had once been a conveyance was now an agonized ball with a circumference of no more than three feet. Some ultimate sadness, final understanding, drove the shrieks from my throat ... as that mottled ball rolled upon itself on the ground like a tortured animal and finally came to rest, to coldness, hammered in upon itself so that in all the spaces of the world no one would have ever known that it had contained anything but flame and then ruptured steel.
Barry N. Malzberg (1939–)
Barry N. Malzberg is an American writer, editor and agent, whose prolific career has spanned numerous genres – most notably crime and science fiction. Malzberg was particularly active in the science fiction scene of the early seventies, although he became disillusioned with the market forces defining the field, and has rarely published SF works since. His most recent activity in the field has been in the form of advice columns for writers in the quarterly magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Ameri
ca. Barry N. Malzberg has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Barry N. Malzberg 1974
All rights reserved.
The right of Barry N. Malzberg to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10230 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Tactics of Conquest Page 14