The Aoish were a banker species, and the credits were their greatest invention. They were just about the only universally acceptable medium of exchange in existence, and each one entitled the holder to convert a coin into either a given weight of any stable element, an area on a free Orbital, or a computer of a given speed and capacity. The Aoish guaranteed the conversion and never defaulted, and although the rate of exchange could sometimes vary to a greater extent than was officially allowed for – as it had during the Idiran–Culture war – on the whole the real and theoretical value of the currency remained predictable enough for it to be a safe, secure hedge against uncertain times, rather than a speculator’s dream. Rumour – as ever, contrary enough to be suspiciously believable – had it that the group in the galaxy which possessed the greatest hoard of the coins was the Culture; the most militantly unmoneyed society on the civilised scene. Horza didn’t really believe that rumour either, though; in fact he thought that it was just the sort of rumour the Culture would spread about itself.
He pushed the coins away into a pocket inside his blouse as he saw Kraiklyn reaching to the centre of the game table and toss some coins into the large pile already there. Watching carefully now, the Changer made his way round to the nearest money-changer’s bar, got eight Hundredths for his single Tenth (an exorbitant rate of commission, even by Vavatch standards) and used some of the change to bribe his way into a terrace with some unoccupied couches. There he plugged into Kraiklyn’s thoughts.
Who are you? The question leapt out at him, into him.
The sensation was one of vertigo, a stunning dizziness, a vastly magnified equivalent of the disorientation which sometimes affects the eyes when they fasten on a simple and regular pattern, and the brain mistakes its distance from that pattern, the false focus seeming to pull at the eyes, muscles against nerves, reality against assumptions. His head did not swim; it seemed to sink, foundering, struggling.
Who are you? (Who am I?) Who are you?
Slam, slam, slam: the sound of the barrage falling, the sound of doors closing; attack and incarceration, explosion and collapse together.
Just a little accident. A slight mistake. One of those things. A game of Damage, and a high-tech impressionist . . . unfortunate combination. Two harmless chemicals which, when mixed— . . . Feedback, a howl like pain, and something breaking . . .
A mind between mirrors. He was drowning in his own reflection (something breaking), falling through. One fading part of him – the part which didn’t sleep? Yes? No? – screamed from down the deep, dark pit, as it fell: Changer . . . Changer . . . Change— . . . (eee) . . .
. . . The sound faded, whisper-quieted, became the wind-moan of stale air through dead trees on a barren midnight solstice, the soul’s midwinter in some calm, hard place.
He knew—
(Start again . . .)
Somebody knew that somewhere a man sat in a seat, in a big hall in a city in . . . on a big place, a big threatened place; and the man was playing . . . playing a game (a game which killed). The man still there, living and breathing . . . But his eyes did not see, his ears did not hear. He had one sense now: this one, inside here, fastened . . . inside here.
Whisper: Who am I?
There’d been a little accident (life a succession of same; evolution dependent on gambling; all progress a function of getting things wrong) . . .
He (and forget who this ‘he’ is, just accept the nameless term while this equation works itself out) . . . he is the man in the chair in the hall on the big place, fallen somewhere inside himself, somewhere inside . . . another one. A double, a copy, somebody pretending to be him.
. . . But something wrong with this theory . . .
(Start again . . .)
Marshal forces.
Need clues, reference points, something to hold onto.
Memory of a cell dividing, seen in time lapse, the very start of independent life, though still dependent. Hold that image.
Words (names); need words.
Not yet, but . . . something about turning inside out; a place . . .
What am I looking for?
Mind.
Whose?
(Silence)
Whose?
(Silence)
Whose? . . .
(Silence)
(. . . Start again . . .)
Listen. This is shock. You were hit, hard. This is just some form of shock, and you’ll recover.
You are the man playing the game (as are we all) . . . Still something wrong, though, something both missing and added. Think of those vital errors; think of that dividing cell, same and not-same, the place that’s turned inside out, the cell cluster turning itself inside out, looking like a split brain (unsleeping, moving). Listen for somebody trying to talk to you . . .
(Silence)
(This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian:)
Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself?
The individual is the fruit of mistake; therefore only the process has validity . . . So who’s to speak for him?
The wind howls, empty of meaning, a soak for warmth, a cess for hope, distributing his body’s exhausted heat to the black skies, dissolving the salty flame of his life, chilling to the core, sapping and slowing. He feels himself falling again, and knows that this time it is a deeper plunge, to where the silence and the cold are absolute, and no voice cries out, not even this one.
(Howled like the wind:) Whoever cared enough to talk to me?
(Silence)
Whoever ever cared—
(Silence)
Who—?
(Whisper:) Listen: ‘The Jinmoti of—’
. . . Bozlen Two.
Two. Somebody had spoken once. He was the Changer, he was the error, the imperfect copy.
He was playing a different game from the other one (but he still intended to take a life). He was watching, feeling what the other was feeling, but feeling more.
Horza. Kraiklyn.
Now he knew. The game was . . . Damage. The place was . . . a world where a ribbon of the original idea was turned inside out . . . an Orbital: Vavatch. The Mind in Schar’s World. Xoralundra. Balveda. The (and finding his hate, he hammered it into the wall of the pit, like a peg for a rope) Culture!
A breach in the cell wall; waters breaking; light freeing; illumination . . . leading to
rebirth.
Weight and cold and bright, bright light . . .
. . . Shit. Bastards. Lost it all, thanks to a Pit of Self-Doubt treble . . . A wave of despondent fury swept over him, and something died.
Horza tore the flimsy headset away. He lay quivering on the couch, his eyes gummed and smarting, staring up at the auditorium lights and the two white fighting animals hanging half-dead from the trapezes overhead. He forced his eyes closed, then pulled them open again, away from the darkness.
Pit of Self-Doubt. Kraiklyn had been hit by cards which made the target player question their own identity. From the tenor of Kraiklyn’s thoughts before he’d pulled the headset off, Horza thought Kraiklyn hadn’t been too terrified by the effect, just disorientated. He’d been sufficiently distracted by the attack to lose the hand, and that was all his opponents had been aiming for. Kraiklyn was out of the game.
The effect on him, trying to be Kraiklyn but knowing he wasn’t, had been more severe. That was all it was. Any Changer would have had the same problem; he was certain . . .
The trembling began to fade. He sat up and swung his feet off the couch. He had to leave. Kraiklyn would be going, so he had to.
Pull yourself together, man.
He looked down to the playing table. The breastless woman had won. Kraiklyn glared at her as she raked in her winnings and his straps were unfastened. On the way out of the arena, Kraiklyn passed the limp, still warm body of his last Life as it was releas
ed from its seat.
He kicked the corpse; the crowd booed.
Horza stood up, turned and bumped into a hard, unyielding body.
‘May I see that pass now, sir?’ said the guard he’d lied to earlier.
He smiled nervously, aware that he was still trembling a little; his eyes were red, and his face was covered in sweat. The guard gazed steadily at him, her face expressionless. Some of the people on the terrace were watching them.
‘I’m . . . sorry . . .’ the Changer said slowly, patting his pockets with shaking hands. The guard put out her hand and took his left elbow.
‘Perhaps you’d better—’
‘Look,’ Horza said, bending closer to her. ‘I . . . I haven’t got one. Would a bribe do?’ He started to reach inside his blouse for the credits. The guard kicked up with her knee and twisted Horza’s left arm behind his back. It was all done in the most expert fashion, and Horza had to jump to ride the kick tolerably. He let his left shoulder disconnect and started to crumple, but not before his free hand had lightly scratched the guard’s face (and that, he realised as he fell, had been an instinctive reaction, nothing reasoned; for some reason he found this amusing).
The guard caught Horza’s other arm and pinned both his hands behind his back, using her lock-glove to secure them there. With her other hand she wiped blood from her cheek. Horza knelt on the terrace surface, moaning the way most people would have with an arm broken or dislocated.
‘It’s all right, everybody; just a little problem over a pass. Please continue with your enjoyment,’ the guard said. Then she pulled her arm up; the locked glove hauled Horza up, too. He yelped with pretended pain, and then, head down, was pushed up the steps to the walkway. ‘Seven three, seven three; male code green incoming walk seven spinwards,’ the guard told her lapel mike.
Horza felt her start to weaken as soon as they got to the walkway. He couldn’t see any other guards yet. The pace of the woman behind him faltered and slowed. He heard her gasp, and a couple of drunks leaning on an auto-bar looked at them quizzically; one turned on his bar stool to watch.
‘Seven . . . thr—’ the guard began. Then her legs buckled. Horza was dragged down with her, the locked glove staying tight while the muscles in the woman’s body relaxed. He connected his shoulder again, twisted and heaved; the field filaments in the glove gave way, leaving him with livid bruises already starting to form on his wrists. The guard lay on her back on the walkway floor, her eyes closed, breathing lightly. Horza had scraped her with a non-lethal poison nail, he thought; anyway he had no time to wait and see. They were sure to come looking for the guard soon, and he couldn’t afford to let Kraiklyn get too far ahead of him. Whether he was heading back to the ship, as Horza expected he would, or staying to observe more of the game, Horza wanted to stay close.
His hood had fallen back during the fall. He pulled it forward, then hoisted the woman up, dragged her to the bar where the two drunks sat and heaved her onto a bar stool, putting her arms crossed on the bar in front and letting her head rest on them.
The drunk who had watched what had happened grinned at the Changer. Horza tried to grin back. ‘Look after her, now,’ he said. He noticed a cloak at the foot of the other drunk’s bar stool and lifted it up, smiling at its owner, who was too busy ordering another drink to notice. Horza put the cloak round the woman guard’s shoulders, hiding her uniform. ‘In case she gets cold,’ he told the first drunk, who nodded.
Horza walked off quietly. The other drunk, who hadn’t noticed the woman until then, got his drink from the flap in the counter in front of him, turned round to talk to his friend, noticed the woman draped across the bar, nudged her and said, ‘Hey, you like the cloak, uh? How about I get you a drink?’
Before he left the auditorium, Horza looked up. The fighting animals would fight no more. Beneath the shining hoop that was Vavatch’s far – and, at the moment, day – side, one beast lay, in a broad, shallow pool of milky blood, high in the air, its huge four-limbed frame an X poised over the proceedings beneath, the dark fur and heavy head gashed, white flecked. The other creature hung, swaying gently, from its trapeze; it dripped white blood and twisted slowly, hanging by one closed and locked set of talons, as dead as its fallen adversary.
Horza racked his brains, but could not recall the names of these strange beasts. He shook his head and hurried away.
He found the Players’ area. An Ishlorsinami stood by some double doors in a corridor deep underneath the arena surface. A small crowd of people and machines stood or sat around. Some were asking the silent Ishlorsinami questions; most were talking amongst themselves. Horza took a deep breath, then, waving one of his now useless negotiable account cards, elbowed his way through the crowd, saying, ‘Security; come on, out of the way there. Security!’ People protested but moved. Horza planted himself in front of the tall Ishlorsinami. Steely eyes looked down at him from a thin, hard face. ‘You,’ Horza said, snapping his fingers. ‘Where did that Player go? The one in the light one-piece suit, brown hair.’ The tall humanoid hesitated. ‘Come on, man,’ Horza said. ‘I’ve been chasing that card-sharp round half the galaxy. I don’t want to lose him now!’
The Ishlorsinami jerked his head in the direction of the corridor leading to the main arena entrance. ‘He just left.’ The humanoid’s voice sounded like two pieces of broken glass being rubbed together. Horza winced, but nodded quickly and, pushing his way back through the crowd, ran up the corridor.
In the vestibule of the arena complex there was an even bigger crowd. Guards, wheeled security drones, private bodyguards, car drivers, shuttle pilots, city police; people with desperate looks waving negotiable cards; others listing those who were buying space on shuttle buses and hovers running out to the port area; people just hanging around waiting to see what was going to happen or hoping that an ordered taxi was about to show up; people just wandering around with lost expressions on their faces, their clothes torn and dishevelled; others with smiles, all confidence, clutching bulky bags and pouches to themselves and frequently accompanied by a hired guard of their own: they all milled around in the vast expanse of noisy, bustling space which led from the auditorium proper to the plaza outside, in the open air, under the stars and the bright line of the Orbital’s far side.
Pulling his hood further over his face, Horza pushed through a barricade of guards. They still seemed concerned with keeping people out, even at this late stage in the game and in the countdown to destruction, and he was not hindered. He looked over the swirling mass of heads, capes, helmets, casings and ornamentation, wondering how he was going to catch Kraiklyn in this lot, or even see him. A wedge of uniformed quadrupeds pushed past him, some tall dignitary carried on a litter in their midst. As Horza was still staggering, a soft pneumatic tyre rolled over his foot as a mobile bar touted its wares. ‘Would you like a drug-bowl cocktail, sir?’ said the machine.
‘Fuck off,’ Horza told it, and he turned to head after the wedge of four-legged creatures making for the doors.
‘Certainly, sir; dry, medium or—?’
Horza elbowed his way through the crowd after the quadrupeds. He caught up with them, and in their wake had an easy passage to the doors.
Outside, it was surprisingly cold. Horza saw his breath in front of him as he looked quickly around, trying to spot Kraiklyn. The crowd outside the arena was hardly less thick and rowdy than that inside. People hawked wares, sold tickets, staggered about, paced to and fro, tried to beg money from strangers, picked pockets, scanned the skies or peered down the broad spaces between buildings. A constant bright stream of machines appeared, roaring out of the sky or sweeping up the boulevards, stopped, and after taking people on, raced off again.
Horza just couldn’t see properly. He noticed a huge hire-guard: a three-metre-tall giant in a bulky suit, holding a large gun and looking about with a vacant expression on a broad, pale face. Wisps of bright red hair poked from underneath his helmet.
‘You for hire?’ Horza asked, doing a sor
t of breast stroke to get to the giant through a knot of people watching some fighting insects. The broad face nodded gravely, and the huge man came to attention.
‘That I am,’ the great voice rumbled.
‘Here’s a Hundredth,’ Horza said quickly, shoving a coin into the man’s glove, where it looked quite lost. ‘Let me up on your shoulders. I’m looking for somebody.’
‘All right,’ the man said, after a second’s thought. He bent down slowly on one knee, the rifle in his hand put out to steady him, butt first on the ground. Horza slung his legs over the giant’s shoulders. Without being asked, the man straightened and stood again, and Horza was hoisted high above the heads of the people in the crowd. He pulled the hood of the blouse over his face again, and scanned the mass of people for a figure in a light one-piece suit, although he knew that Kraiklyn might have changed by now, or even have left. A tight, nervous feeling of desperation was building in Horza’s belly. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter that much if he lost Kraiklyn now, that he could still make his way alone to the port area and so to the GSV that the Clear Air Turbulence was on; but his guts refused to be calmed. It was as though the atmosphere of the game, the terminal excitement of the Orbital, the city, the arena in their last hours, had altered his own body chemistry. He could have concentrated on it and made himself relax, but he couldn’t afford to do that now. He had to look for Kraiklyn.
He scanned the gaudy collection of individuals waiting in a cordoned area for shuttles, then recalled Kraiklyn’s thought about having wasted a lot of money. He looked away and surveyed the rest of the crowd.
He saw him. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was standing, his suit partly covered by a grey cloak, his arms folded and his feet apart, in a queue of people waiting to get buses and taxis, thirty metres away. Horza dipped forward and leant over until he was looking at the hire-guard’s upside-down face. ‘Thanks. You can put me down now.’
‘I have no change,’ the man rumbled as he stooped; the vibration went up through Horza’s body.
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