With the cards in his or her band, a player could alter the emotions of another player, or sometimes of several others. Fear, hate, despair, hope, love, camaraderie, doubt, elation, paranoia; virtually every emotional state the human brain was capable of experiencing could be beamed at another player or used for oneself. From far enough away, or in a field shield close in, the game could look like a pastime for the deranged or the simple-minded. A player with an obviously strong hand might suddenly throw it in; somebody with nothing at all might gamble all the credits they had; people broke down weeping or started laughing uncontrollably; they might moan with love at a player known to be their worst enemy or claw at their restraining straps to free themselves for a murdering attack on their best friend.
Or they could kill themselves. Damage players never did get free from their chairs (should they ever do so, an Ishlorsinami would shoot them with a heavy stun gun) but they could destroy themselves. Each game console, from which the emotor units radiated the relevant emotions, on which the cards were played and where the players could see the time and the number of Lives they each had left, contained a small hollow button, inside which a needle filled with poison lay ready to inject any stabbing finger which pushed it.
Damage was one of those games in which it was unwise to make too many enemies. Only the very strong-willed indeed could defeat the urge to suicide implanted in their brains by a concerted attack of half a table of players.
At the finish of each hand of cards, when the money which had been gambled was taken by the player with the most card points, all the other players who had stayed with the betting lost a Life. When they had none left they were out of the game, as they would be if they ran out of money. The rules said the game ended when only one player had any Lives left, though in practice it finished when the remaining contestants agreed that if they stayed any longer they were likely to lose their own lives to whatever disaster was about to ensue. It could get very interesting at the end of a game when the moment of destruction was very close, the hand had gone on for some time, a great deal of money had been gambled on that one hand, and one or several players would not agree to call it a day; then the sophisticates really were separated from the simians, and it became even more a game of nerve. Quite a few of the best Damage players of the past had perished trying to out-dare and out-stay each other in such circumstances.
From a spectator’s point of view, Damage’s special attraction was that the closer you stood to the emotor unit of any particular player, the more of the emotions they were experiencing affected you directly, too. A whole subculture of people hooked on such third-hand feelings had grown up in the few hundred years since Damage had become such a select but popular game: the moties.
There were other groups playing Damage. The Players of the Eve of Destruction were simply the most famous and the richest. The moties could get their emotional fix in lots of places throughout the galaxy, but only in a full game, only on the edge of annihilation, only with the very best players (plus a few hopefuls) could the most intense experiences be obtained. It was one of these unfortunates Horza had impersonated when he had discovered that an access pass could not be had for less than twice the amount of money he had made on the shuttle. Bribing a door guard had been a lot cheaper.
The real moties were packed tightly behind the fence separating them from the Lives. Sixteen clumps of sweating, nervous-looking people – like the game players, mostly male – they jostled and pressed forward, trying to get near to the table, near to the Players.
Horza watched them as the cards were dealt by the chief Ishlorsinami. Moties jumped up and down, trying to see what was happening, and security guards fitted with baffle helmets to keep out the emotor pulses patrolled the perimeter of the fence, tapping nerver prods on their thighs or palms and watching warily.
‘. . . Sarble the Eye . . .’ somebody near by said, and Horza turned to see. A cadaverous-looking human lying on a couch behind and to Horza’s left was talking to another and pointing up to the terrace where the disturbance had occurred a few minutes earlier. Horza heard the words ‘Sarble’ and ‘caught’ a few more times from elsewhere around him as the news spread. He turned round to watch the game as the Players started to inspect their hands; the betting began. Horza thought it was a pity the reporter had been caught, but it might mean that the security guards relaxed a little, giving him a better chance of not being asked for his pass.
Horza was sitting a good fifty metres from the nearest player, a woman whose name he had heard mentioned but had forgotten. As the first hand progressed, only mild versions of what she was feeling and was being made to feel impinged upon his consciousness. Nevertheless, he didn’t enjoy the sensation, and switched on the lounger’s baffle field, using the small control set on one arm of the couch. Had he wanted, he could have cancelled the immediate effect of the player he just happened to be sitting behind and substituted the effects of any of the other emotor units on the table. The effect would have been nothing like as intense as what the moties or the Lives were experiencing, but it would certainly have given a good idea of what the Players were going through. Most of the other people around him were using their lounger’s controls in that way, flicking from one player to another in an attempt to judge the overall state of the game. Horza would concentrate on Kraiklyn’s broadcast emotions later, but for now he just wanted to settle in and get the general feel of the game.
Kraiklyn dropped out of the first hand early enough to be sure of avoiding losing a Life when it finished; with so few Lives of his own it was the wisest course unless he had a very strong hand. Horza watched the man carefully as he sat back in his seat and relaxed, his emotor unit dormant. Kraiklyn licked his lips and wiped his brow. Horza decided in the next hand he would eavesdrop on what Kraiklyn was going through, just to see what it was like.
The hand finished. Wilgre won. He waved, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. Some moties had fainted already; at the other end of the ellipsoid, in its cage, the rogothuyr snarled. Five Players lost Lives; five seated humans, sitting hopeless and despairing as the effects of the emotor fields still resounded in them, went suddenly slack in their chairs as their helmets sent a neural blast through their skulls strong enough to stun the Lives sitting around them and to make the nearest moties, and the Player each Life belonged to, flinch.
Ishlorsinami undid the restrainers on the dead humans’ seats and carried them away down the access ramp. The remaining Lives gradually recovered, but they sat as listless as before. The Ishlorsinami claimed they always checked that each volunteering Life was genuine, and that the drugs they gave them simply stopped them from becoming hysterical, but it was rumoured that there were ways round the Ishlorsinami screening process, and that some people had succeeded in disposing of their enemies by drugging or hypnotising them and ‘volunteering’ them for the game.
As the second hand began, and Horza switched on his couch monitor to experience Kraiklyn’s emotions, the white-haired woman came back down the aisle and resumed her place in front of Horza, at the front of the terrace, draping herself tiredly over the piece of furniture as though she was bored.
Horza did not know enough about Damage as a card game to be able to follow exactly what was going on with the cards, either by reading the various emotions being passed round the table, or by analysing each hand after it was finished – as the first hand was already being analysed by the hooting tripeds near him – when the cards as they had been dealt and played were flashed up on the arena’s internal broadcast circuits. But he tuned in to Kraiklyn’s feelings just to see what they were like.
The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was being hit from various directions. Some of the emotions were contradictory, which Horza guessed meant that there was no concerted effort being made on Kraiklyn; he was just taking most people’s secondary armament. There was a considerable urge to like Wilgre – that attractive blue colour . . . and with those four little comical feet, he couldn’t really be much
of a threat . . . A bit of a clown, really, for all his money . . . The woman sitting on Kraiklyn’s right, on the other hand, stripped to the waist, with no breasts, and a sheath for a ceremonial sword slung across her naked back: she was one to watch . . . But it was a laugh really . . . Nothing really matters; everything is just a joke; life is, the game is . . . one card’s pretty much like another when you come to think about it . . . For all it matters might as well throw the lot in the air. . . . It was nearly his turn to play . . . First that flat-chested bitch . . . boy, did he have a card he was going to hit her with . . .
Horza switched off again, unsure whether he was hearing Kraiklyn’s own thoughts about the woman, or ones somebody else was trying to get him to think about her.
He picked up Kraiklyn’s thoughts later on in the hand, when the woman was out and sitting back and relaxing, her eyes closed. (Horza looked briefly at the white-haired woman on the couch down in front of him; she was watching the game apparently, but one leg was slung over the side of her lounger, swinging to and fro, as though her mind was somewhere else.) Kraiklyn was feeling good. First of all that slut next to him was out, and he was sure it was because of some of the cards he had played, but also there was a sort of inner exhilaration . . . Here he was, playing with the best players in the galaxy . . . the Players. Him. Him . . . (a sudden inhibitory thought blocked out a name he was about to think) . . . and he really wasn’t doing that badly at all . . . He was keeping up . . . In fact this hand was looking pretty damn good . . . At last things were going right . . . He was going to win something . . . Too many things had . . . well, there was that . . . Think about the cards! (suddenly) Think about here and now! Yes, the cards . . . Let’s see . . . I can hit that fat blue oaf with . . . Horza switched off again.
He was sweating. He hadn’t fully realised the degree of feedback from the Player’s mind that was involved. He had thought it was just the emotions beamed at them; he hadn’t dreamed he would be so much in Kraiklyn’s mind. Yet this was only a taste of what Kraiklyn himself was getting full blast, and the moties and Lives behind him. Real feedback, only just under control, only just stopping from becoming the emotional equivalent of a loudspeaker howl, building to destruction. Now the Changer realised the attraction of the game, and why people had been known to go mad when playing it.
Much as he disliked the experience, Horza felt new respect for the man he intended at least to remove and replace, and most likely to kill.
Kraiklyn had a sort of advantage in as much as the thoughts and emotions being beamed back at him were at least partly emanating from his own mind, whereas the Lives and the moties had to put up with extremely powerful blasts of what was entirely somebody else’s way of feeling something. All the same, it had to take a considerable strength of character, or a vast amount of hard training, to be able to handle what Kraiklyn was obviously coping with. Horza switched back in again and thought, How do the moties stand it? And, Watch out; maybe this is how they started.
Kraiklyn lost the hand, two rounds of betting later. The half-blind albino, Neeporlax, was defeated, too, and the Suut raked in his winnings, his steel face glowing in the light reflected from the Aoish credits in front of him. Kraiklyn was slumped in his seat, feeling, Horza knew, like death. A pulse of a sort of resigned, almost grateful agony swept through Kraiklyn from behind as his first Life died, and Horza felt it, too. He and Kraiklyn both winced.
Horza switched off and looked at the time. Less than an hour had passed since he had bluffed his way past the guards at the outer doors of the arena. He had some food, on a low table by his couch, but he got up all the same and walked away from the table, up the terrace towards the nearest walkway, where food stalls and bars waited.
Security guards were checking passes. Horza saw them moving from person to person on the terrace. He kept his face to the front but flicked his eyes from side to side, watching the guards as they moved. One was almost directly in his path, bending to ask an old-looking female, who was lying on an airbed which blew perfumed fumes round her thin, exposed legs. She was sitting watching the game with a big smile on her face, and she took a while to notice the guard. Horza walked a little faster so that, when the guard straightened, he would be past her.
The old lady flashed her pass and turned quickly back to the game. The guard put out an arm in front of Horza.
‘May I see your pass, sir?’
Horza stopped and looked into the face of the young, burly woman. He looked back down to the couch he had been on.
‘I’m sorry, I think I left it down there. I’ll be back in a second; can I show it to you then? I’m in a bit of a hurry.’ He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and bent a little at the waist. ‘I got wrapped up in the last hand there. Too much to drink before the game started; always the same; never learn. All right?’ He put out his hands, looked a little sheepish, and made as if to clap the guard on her shoulders. He shifted his weight again. The guard looked down to where Horza had indicated he had left his pass.
‘For now, sir. I’ll look at it later. But you really shouldn’t go leaving it lying about. Don’t do it again.’
‘Right! Right! Thank you!’ Horza laughed and went off at a quick walk, onto the circular walkway and then to a toilet, just in case he was being watched. He washed his face and hands, listened to a drunk woman singing somewhere in the echoing room, then left by another exit and walked round to another terrace, where he got something else to eat and had a drink. He bribed his way into a different terrace again, this one even more expensive than the one he had been on originally, because it was next to the one which held Wilgre’s concubines. A soft wall of shining black material had been erected at the rear and sides of their terrace to keep out the nearer eyes, but their body scent wafted strongly over the terrace Horza now found himself on. Genofixed before conception not only to be stunningly attractive to a wide variety of humanoid males, the females in the harem also had highly accentuated aphrodisiac pheromones. Before Horza knew what was happening he had an erection and had started to sweat again. Most of the men and women around him were in a state of obvious sexual arousal, and those not plugged into the game on some sort of exotic double-fix were engaged in sexual foreplay or actual intercourse. Horza made his immune glands start up again, and walked stiffly to the front of the terrace, where five couches had been vacated by two males and three females, who were rolling around on the ground in front, just behind the restraining barrier. Clothes lay scattered on the terrace floor. Horza sat on one of the five free couches. A female head, beaded with sweat, appeared from the tangle of heaving bodies long enough to look at Horza and breathe, ‘Feel free; and if you would like to . . .’ Then her eyes rolled upwards and she moaned. Her head disappeared again.
Horza shook his head, swore and made his way out of the terrace. His attempt to recover the money he had spent bribing his way in was met with a pitying laugh.
Horza ended up sitting on a stool in front of a combined bar and betting stall. He ordered a drug bowl and made a small bet on Kraiklyn to win the next hand, while his body gradually freed itself of the effects of the concubines’ doctored sweat glands. His pulse lowered and his breathing shallowed; perspiration stopped rolling down his brow. He sipped his drug bowl and sniffed the fumes, while watching Kraiklyn lose first one and then another hand, though in the first one he pulled out early enough not to lose a Life. Nevertheless, he was down to one Life now. It was possible for a Damage player to gamble his own life if he had no other remaining behind him, but it was a rare thing, and in games where the very best met hopefuls, as in this one, the Ishlorsinami tended to forbid it.
The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was taking no chances. He dropped out of every game before he could lose a Life, obviously waiting for a hand that would be almost unbeatable before gambling for what might be the last time in the game. Horza ate. Horza drank. Horza sniffed. Sometimes he tried to look over at the terrace he had been on at first, where the bored-looking woman was
, but he couldn’t see for the lights. Now and again he looked up at the fighting animals on the trapezes. They were tired now, and injured. The elaborate choreography of their earlier movements was gone, and they were reduced to hanging grimly onto their trapeze with one limb and striking out at each other with the other clawed arm whenever they happened to come close enough. Drops of white blood fell like sparse snow and settled on an invisible force field twenty metres beneath them.
Gradually the Lives died. The game went on. Time, according to who you were, dragged or flashed by. The price of drinks and drugs and food went up slowly as the destruction time crept closer. Through the still transparent dome of the old arena the lights of departing shuttles blazed now and again. A fight broke out between two punters at the bar. Horza got up and moved away before the security guards came to break it up.
Horza counted his money. He had two Aoish credit Tenths left, plus some money credited to the negotiable cards, which were becoming harder and harder to use as the accepting computers in the Orbital’s financial network were closed down.
He leant on a restraining bar on a circular walkway, watching the game progress on the table below. Wilgre was leading; the Suut was just behind. They had both lost the same number of Lives, but the blue giant had more money. Two of the hopefuls had left the game, one after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the officiating Ishlorsinami that he could afford to gamble with his own life. Kraiklyn was still in there; but, from the close-up of his face which Horza caught on a monitor screen in a drug bar he passed, the Man was finding the going hard.
Horza toyed with one of the Aoish credit Tenths, wishing the game would end, or at least that Kraiklyn would get put out. The coin stuck to his hand, and he looked down into it. It was like looking into a tiny, infinite tube, lit from the very bottom. By bringing it up to your eye, with the other closed, you could experience vertigo.
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