Gurgeh had spun the dials on his single hidden-piece wafer and put it face down on the table without looking at it; he had no more idea where that piece was than Mr Dreltram. It might turn out to be in an illegal position, which could well lose him the game, or (less likely) it might turn up in a strategically useful place deep inside his opponent's territory. Gurgeh liked playing this way, if it wasn't a serious game; as well as giving his opponent a probably needed extra advantage, it made the game as a whole more interesting and less predictable; added an extra spice to the proceedings.
He supposed he ought to find out where the piece was; the eighty-move point was fast approaching when the piece had to be revealed anyway.
He couldn't see his hidden-piece wafer. He looked over the card and wafer-strewn table. Mr Dreltram was not the most tidy of players; his cards and wafers and unused or removed pieces were scattered over most of the table, including the part supposed to be Gurgeh's. A gust of wind when they'd entered a tunnel an hour earlier had almost blown some of the lighter cards away, and they'd weighed them down with goblets and lead-glass paperweights; these added to the impression of confusion, as did Mr Dreltram's quaint, if rather affected, custom of noting down all the moves by hand on a scratch tablet (he claimed the built-in memory on a board had broken down on him once, and lost him all record of one of the best games he'd ever played). Gurgeh started lifting bits and pieces up, humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer.
He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr Dreltram behind him, looking oddly awkward. Gurgeh frowned as Mr Dreltram, just returned from the bathroom, his eyes wide with the mixture of drugs he was glanding, and followed by a tray bearing drinks, sat down again, staring at Gurgeh's hands.
It was only then, as the tray set the glasses on the table, that Gurgeh realised the cards he happened to be holding, which he had lifted up to look for his hidden-piece wafer, were Mr Dreltram's remaining mine-cards. Gurgeh looked at them — they were still face down; he hadn't seen where the mines were — and understood what Mr Dreltram must be thinking.
He put the cards back where he'd found them. "I'm very sorry," he laughed, "I was looking for my hidden piece."
He saw it, even as he spoke the words. The circular wafer was lying, uncovered, almost right in front of him on the table. "Ah," he said, and only then felt the blood rise to his face. "Here it is. Hmm. Couldn't see it for looking at it."
He laughed again, and as he did so felt a strange, clutching sensation coursing through him, seeming to squeeze his guts in something between terror and ecstasy. He had never experienced anything like it. The closest any sensation had ever come, he thought (suddenly, clearly), had been when he was still a boy and he'd experienced his first orgasm, at the hands of a girl a few years older than him. Crude, purely human-basic, like a single instrument picking out a simple theme a note at a time (compared to the drug-gland-boosted symphonies sex would later become), that first time had nevertheless been one of his most memorable experiences; not just because it was then novel, but because it seemed to open up a whole new fascinating world, an entirely different type of sensation and being. It had been the same when he'd played his first competition game, as a child, representing Chiark against another Orbital's junior team, and it would be the same again when his drug-glands matured, a few years after puberty.
Mr Dreltram laughed too, and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
Gurgeh played furiously for the next few moves, and had to be reminded by his opponent when the eighty-move deadline came up. Gurgeh turned over his hidden piece without having checked it first, risking it occupying the same square as one of his revealed pieces. The hidden piece, on a sixteen-hundred-to-one chance, turned up in the same position as the Heart; the piece the whole game was about; the piece one's opponent was trying to take possession of.
Gurgeh stared at the intersection where his well-defended Heart piece sat, then again at the coordinates he'd dialled at random on to the wafer, two hours earlier. They were the same, there was no doubt. If he" d looked a move earlier, he could have moved the Heart out of danger, but he hadn't. He'd lost both pieces; and with the Heart lost, the game was lost; he'd lost.
"Oh, bad luck," Mr preltram said, clearing his throat.
Gurgeh nodded. "I believe it's customary, at such moments of disaster, for the defeated player to be given the Heart as a keepsake," he said, fingering the lost piece.
"Um… so I understand," Mr Dreltram said, obviously at once embarrassed on Gurgeh's behalf, and delighted at his good fortune. Gurgeh nodded. He put the Heart down, lifted the ceramic wafer which had betrayed him. "I'd rather have this, I think." He held it up to Mr Dreltram, who nodded.
"Well, of course. I mean, why not; I certainly wouldn't object."
The train rolled quietly into a tunnel, slowing for a station set in the caverns inside the mountain.
"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games — those which can be played in any sense «perfectly», such as grid, Prallian scope, "nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions — can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine sentience societies.
"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time."
Gurgeh gave an ironic bow to the young man who'd approached him with an idea for a game. The fellow looked nonplussed. He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak. Gurgeh was waiting for this; as he had on the last five or six occasions when the young man had tried to say something, Gurgeh interrupted him before he'd even started. "I'm quite serious, you know; there is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain. The same lessons can be learned, the same skills acquired, at the only levels that really matter." He paused again. He could see the drone Mawhrin-Skel floating towards him over the heads of the people thronging the broad plaza.
The main concert was over. The mountain summits around Tronze echoed to the sounds of various smaller bands as people gravitated towards the specific musical forms they preferred; some formal, some improvised, some for dancing, some for experiencing under a specific drug-trance. It was a warm, cloudy night; a little farside light shone a milky halo directly overhead on the high overcast. Tronze, the largest town on both the Plate and the Orbital, had been built on the edge of the Gevant Plate's great central massif, at the point where the kilometre-high Lake Tronze flowed over the lip of the plateau and tumbled its waters towards the plain below, where they fell as a permanent downpour into the rain forest.
Tronze was the home of fewer than a hundred thousand people, but to Gurgeh it still felt too crowded, despite its spacious houses and squares, its sweeping galleries and plazas and t
erraces, its thousands of houseboats and its elegant, bridge-linked towers. Tronze, for all the fact that Chiark was a fairly recent Orbital, only a thousand or so years old, was already almost as big as any Orbital community ever grew; the Culture's real cities were its great ships, the General Systems Vehicles. Orbitals were its rustic hinterland, where people liked to spread themselves out with plenty of elbow room. In terms of scale, when compared to one of the larger GSVs containing billions of people, Tronze was barely a village.
Gurgeh usually attended the Tronze Sixty-fourth Day concert. And he was usually buttonholed by enthusiasts. Normally Gurgeh was civil, if occasionally abrupt. Tonight, after the fiasco on the train, and that strange, exciting, shaming pulse of emotion he'd experienced as a result of being thought to cheat, not to mention the slight nervousness he felt because he'd heard the girl off the GSV Cargo Cult was indeed here in Tronze this evening and looking forward to meeting him, he was in no mood to suffer fools gladly.
Not that the unlucky young male was necessarily a complete idiot; all he'd done was sketch out what had been, after all, not a bad idea for a game; but Gurgeh had fallen on him like an avalanche. The conversation — if you could call it that — had become a game.
The object was to keep talking; not to talk continuously, which any idiot could do, but to pause only when the young man was not signalling — through bodily or facial language, or actually starting to speak — that he wanted to cut in. Instead, Gurgeh would stop unexpectedly in the middle of a point, or after having just said something mildly insulting, but while still giving the impression he was going to keep talking. Also, Gurgeh was quoting almost verbatim from one of his own more famous papers on game-theory; an added insult, as the young man probably knew the text as well as he did. "To imply," Gurgeh continued, as the young man's mouth started to open again, "that one can remove the element of luck, chance, happenstance in life by—"
"Jernau Gurgeh, not interrupting anything, am I?" Mawhrin-Skel said.
"Nothing of note," Gurgeh said, turning to face the small machine. "How are you, Mawhrin-Skel? Been up to any fresh mischief?"
"Nothing of note," the tiny drone echoed, as the young man Gurgeh had been talking to sidled off. Gurgeh sat in a creeper-covered pergola positioned close to one edge of the plaza, near the observation platforms which reached out over the broad curtain of the falls, where spray rose from the rapids lying between the lip of the lake and the vertical drop to the forest a kilometre below. The roaring falls provided a background wash of white noise.
"I've found your young adversary," the small drone announced. It extended one softly glowing blue field and plucked a nightflower from a growing vine.
"Hmm?" Gurgeh said. "Oh, the young, ah… Stricken player?"
"That's right," Mawhrin-Skel said evenly, "the young, ah… Stricken player." It folded some of the nightflower's petals back, straining them on the plucked stem.
"I heard she was here," Gurgeh said.
"She's at Hafflis's table. Shall we go and meet her?"
"Why not?" Gurgeh stood; the machine floated away.
"Nervous?" Mawhrin-Skel asked as they headed through the crowds towards one of the raised terraces level with the lake, where Hafflis's apartments were.
"Nervous?" Gurgeh said. "Of a child?"
Mawhrin-Skel floated silently for a moment or two as Gurgeh climbed some steps — Gurgeh nodded and said hello to a few people then the machine came close to him and said quietly, as it slowly stripped the petals from the dying blossom, "Want me to tell you your heart rate, skin receptivity level, pheromone signature, neuron function-state…?" Its voice trailed off as Gurgeh came to a halt, half-way up the flight of broad steps.
He turned to face the drone, looking through half-hooded eyes at the tiny machine. Music drifted over the lake, and the air was full of the nightflowers" musky scent. The lighting set into the stone balustrades lit the game-player's face from underneath. People flooding down the steps from the terrace above, laughing and joking, parted round the man like waters round a rock, and — Mawhrin-Skel noticed — went oddly quiet as they did so. After a few seconds, as Gurgeh stood there, silent, breathing evenly, the little drone made a shuckling noise.
"Not bad," it said. "Not bad at all. I can't tell just yet what you're glanding, but that's a very impressive degree of control. Everything parameter-centred, near as damn. Except your neuron function-state; that's even less like normal than usual, but then your average civilian drone probably couldn't spot that. Well done."
"Don't let me detain you, Mawhrin-Skel," Gurgeh said coldly. "I'm sure you can find something else to amuse you besides watching me play a game." He continued up the broad steps.
"Nothing currently on this Orbital is capable of detaining me, dear Mr Gurgeh," the drone said matter-of-factly, tearing the last of the petals from the nightflower. It dropped the husk in the water channel which ran along the top of the balustrade.
"Gurgeh, good to see you. Come; sit down."
Estray Hafflis's party of thirty or so people sat round a huge, rectangular stone table set on a balcony jutting out over the falls and covered by stone arches strung with nightflower vines and softly shining paper lanterns; there were music-players at one end, sitting on the edge of the great slab with drums and strings and air instruments; they were laughing and playing mostly for themselves, each trying to play too fast for the others to follow.
Set into the centre of the table was a long narrow pit full of glowing coals; a kind of miniaturised bucket-line trundled above the fire, carrying little meat and vegetable pieces from one end of the table to the other; they were skewered on to the line at one end by one of Haftlis's children, and removed at the other end, wrapped in edible paper and thrown with a fair degree of accuracy to anybody who wanted them, by Hafflis's youngest, who was only six. Hafflis was unusual in having had seven children; normally people bore one and fathered one. The Culture frowned on such profligacy, but Hafflis just liked being pregnant. He was in a male stage at the moment, however, having changed a few years earlier.
He and Gurgeh exchanged pleasantries, then Hafflis showed the game-player to a seat beside Professor Boruelal, who was grinning happily and swaying in her seat. She wore a long black and white robe, and when she saw Gurgeh kissed him noisily on the lips. She attempted to kiss Mawhrin-Skel too, but it flicked away.
She laughed, and speared a half-done piece of meat from the line over the centre of the table with a long fork. "Gurgeh! Meet the lovely Olz Hap! Olz; Jernau Gurgeh. Come on; shake hands!"
Gurgeh sat down, taking the small, pale hand of the frightened-looking girl on Boruelal's right. She was wearing something dark and shapeless, and was in her early teens, at most. He smiled with a slight frown, glancing at the professor, trying to share the joke of her inebria with the young blonde girl, but Olz Hap was looking at his hand, not his face. She let her hand be touched but then withdrew it almost immediately. She sat on her hands and stared at her plate.
Boruelal breathed deeply, seeming to gather herself together. She took a drink from a tall glass in front of her.
"Well," she said, looking at Gurgeh as though he'd only just appeared. "How are you, Jernau?"
"Well enough." He watched Mawhrin-Skel manoeuvre itself beside Olz Hap, floating over the table beside her plate, fields all formal blue and green friendliness.
"Good evening," he heard the drone say in its most avuncular voice. The girl brought her head up to look at the machine, and Gurgeh listened to their conversation at the same time as he and Boruelal talked.
"Hello."
"Well enough to play a game of Stricken?"
"Mawhrin-Skel's the name. Olz Hap, am I right?"
"I think so, Professor. Are you well enough to invigilate?"
"Yes. How do you do."
"Fuck me, no; drunk as a desert spring. Have to get somebody else. Suppose I could come down in time but… naa…"
"Oh, ah, shake fields with me, eh? That's very sweet of you; so few peo
ple bother. How nice to meet you. We've all heard so much."
"How about the young lady herself?"
"Oh. Oh dear."
"What?"
"What's wrong? Have I said something wrong?"
"Is she ready to play?"
"No, it's just—"
"Play what?"
"Ah; you're shy. You needn't be. Nobody'll force you to play. Least of all Gurgeh, believe me."
"The game, Boruelal."
"Well, I—"
"What, do you mean now?"
"I wouldn't worry, if I were you. Really."
"Now; or any time."
"Well I don't know. Let's ask her! Hey, kid…"
"Bor—" Gurgeh began, but the professor had already turned to the girl.
"Olz; want to play this game, then?"
The young girl looked straight at Gurgeh. Her eyes were bright in the glare of the line of fire running down the centre of the table. "If Mr Gurgeh would like to, yes."
Mawhrin-Skel's fields glowed red with pleasure, momentarily brighter than the coals. "Oh good," it said. "A fight."
Hafflis had loaned his own ancient Stricken set out; it took a few minutes for a supply drone to bring one from a town store. They set it up at one end of the balcony, by the edge overlooking the roaring white falls. Professor Boruelal fumbled with her terminal and put in a request for some adjudicating drones to oversee the match; Stricken was susceptible to high-tech cheating, and a serious game required that steps be taken to ensure nothing underhand went on. A drone visiting from Chiark Hub volunteered, as did a Manufactury drone from the shipyard under the massif. One of the university's own machines would represent Olz Hap.
The Player of Games c-2 Page 5