Gurgeh looked up at the blank screen, eyes still wide and staring, but dry. He gazed, rocked backwards and forwards, and breathed deeply. There was sweat on his brow, and he shivered.
"Level Three is for the ruling elite only. Their strategic military signals are given the same encrypting status. I think you can see why.
"This is no special night, Gurgeh, no festival of sado-erotica. These things go out every evening…. There is more, but you've seen a representative cross-section."
Gurgeh nodded. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with some difficulty, took a few more deep breaths, rubbed his beard. He opened his mouth to speak, but the drone spoke first.
"One other thing. Something else they kept from you. I didn't know this myself until last night, when the ship mentioned it. Ever since you played Ram your opponents have been on various drugs as well. Cortex-keyed amphetamines at least, but they have far more sophisticated drugs which they use too. They have to inject, or ingest them; they don't have genofixed glands to manufacture drugs in their own bodies, but they certainly use them; most of the people you've been playing have had far more «artificial» chemicals and compounds in their bloodstream than you've had."
The drone made a sighing noise. The man was still staring at the dead screen. "That's it," the drone said. "I'm sorry if what I've shown you has upset you, Jernau Gurgeh, but I didn't want you to leave here thinking the Empire was just a few venerable game-players, some impressive architecture and a few glorified night-clubs. What you've seen tonight is also what it's about. And there's plenty in between that I can't show you; all the frustrations that affect the poor and the relatively well-off alike, caused simply because they live in a society where one is not free to do as one chooses. There's the journalist who can't write what he knows is the truth, the doctor who can't treat somebody in pain because they're the wrong sex… a million things every day, things that aren't as melodramatic and gross as what I've shown you, but which are still part of it, still some of the effects.
"The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises the «sanctity» of the body… but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having." Flere-Imsaho paused, then floated towards Gurgeh, came very close to him. "Ah, but I'm preaching again, aren't I? The excesses of youth. I've kept you up late. Maybe you're ready for some sleep now; it's been a long night, hasn't it? I'll leave you." It turned and floated away. It stopped near the door again. "Good night," it said.
Gurgeh cleared his throat. "Good night," he said, looking away from the dark screen at last. The drone dipped and disappeared.
Gurgeh sat down on a formseat. He stared at his feet for a while, then got up and walked outside the module, into the roof-garden. The dawn was just coming up. The city looked washed-out somehow, and cold. The many lights burned weakly, brilliance sapped by the calm blue vastness of the sky. A guard at the stairwell entrance coughed and stamped his feet, though Gurgeh could not see him.
He went back into the module and lay down on his bed. He lay in the darkness without closing his eyes, then closed his eyes and turned over, trying to sleep. He could not, and neither could he bring himself to secrete something that would make him sleep.
At last he got up and went back to the lounge where the screen was. He had the module access the game-channels, and sat there looking at his own game with Bermoiya for a long time, without moving or speaking, and without a single molecule of glanded drug in his bloodstream.
A prison ambulance stood outside the conference-centre. Gurgeh got out of the aircraft and walked straight into the game-hall. Pequil had to run to keep up with the man. The apex didn't understand the alien; he hadn't wanted to talk during the journey from the hotel to the conference-centre, whereas usually people in such a situation couldn't stop talking… and somehow he didn't seem to be frightened at all, though Pequil couldn't see how that could be. If he hadn't known the awkward, rather innocent alien better, he'd have thought it was anger he could read on that discoloured, hairy, pointed face.
Lo Prinest Bermoiya sat in a stoolseat just off the Board of Origin. Gurgeh stood on the board itself. He rubbed his beard with one long finger, then moved a couple of pieces. Bermoiya made his own moves, then when the action spread — as the alien tried desperately to wriggle out of his predicament — the judge had some amateur players make most of his moves for him. The alien remained on the board, making his own moves, scurrying to and fro like a giant, dark insect. Bermoiya couldn't see what the alien was playing at; his play seemed to be without purpose, and he made some moves which were either stupid mistakes or pointless sacrifices. Bermoiya mopped up some of the alien's tattered forces. After a while, he thought perhaps the male did have a plan, of sorts, but if so it must be a very obscure one. Perhaps there was some kind of odd, face-saving point the male was trying to make, while he still was a male.
Who knew what strange precepts governed an alien's behaviour at such a moment? The moves went on; inchoate, unreadable. They broke for lunch. They resumed.
Bermoiya didn't return to the stoolseat after the break; he stood at the side of the board, trying to work out what slippery, ungraspable plan the alien might have. It was like playing a ghost, now; it was as though they were competing on separate boards. He couldn't seem to get to grips with the male at all; his pieces kept slipping away from him, moving as though the man had anticipated his next move before he'd even thought of it.
What had happened to the alien? He'd played quite differently yesterday. Was he really receiving help from outside? Bermoiya felt himself start to sweat. There was no need for it; he was still well ahead, still poised for victory, but suddenly he began to sweat. He told himself it was nothing to worry about; a side-effect of some of the concentration boosters he'd taken over lunch.
Bermoiya made some moves which ought to settle what was going on; expose the alien's real plan, if he had one. No result. Bermoiya tried some more exploratory gestures, committing a little more to the attempt. Gurgeh attacked immediately.
Bermoiya had spent a hundred years learning and playing Azad, and he'd sat in courts of every level for half that time. He'd seen many violent outbursts by just-sentenced criminals, and watched — and even taken part in — games containing moves of great suddenness and ferocity. Nevertheless, the alien's next few moves contrived to be on a level more barbarous and wild than anything Bermoiya had witnessed, in either context. Without the experience of the courts, he felt he might have physically reeled.
Those few moves were like a series of kicks in the belly; they contained all the berserk energy the very best young players spasmodically exhibited; but marshalled, synchronised, sequenced and unleashed with a style and a savage grace no untamed beginner could have hoped to command. With the first move Bermoiya saw what the alien's plan might be. With the next move he saw how good the plan was; with the next that the play might go on into the following day before the alien could finally be vanquished; with the next that he, Bermoiya, wasn't in quite as unassailable a position as he'd thought… and with the following two that he still had a lot of work to do, and then that perhaps the play wouldn't last until tomorrow after all.
Bermoiya made his own moves again, trying every ploy and stratagem he'd learned in a century of game-playing; the disguised observation piece, the feint-within-the-feint using attack-pieces and card-stock; the premature use of the Board of Becoming element pieces, making a swamp on the territories by the conjunction of Earth and Water… but nothing worked.
He stood, just before the break, at the end of the afternoon session, and he looked at the alien. The hall was silent. The alien male stood in the middle of the board, staring impassively at some minor piece, rubbing at the hair on his face. He looked calm, unperturbed.
Bermoiya surveyed his own position. Everything was in a mess; there was nothing he
could do now. Beyond redemption. It was like some badly prepared, fundamentally flawed case, or some piece of equipment, three-quarters destroyed; there was no saving it; better to throw it out and start again.
But there was no starting again. He was going to be taken out of here and taken to hospital and spayed; he was going to lose that which made him what he was, and he would never be allowed to have it back; gone for ever. For ever.
Bermoiya couldn't hear the people in the hall. He couldn't see them, either, or see the board beneath his feet. All he could see was the alien male, standing tall and insect-like with his sharp-featured face and his angular body and stroking his furred face with one long, dark finger, the two-part nails at its tip showing the lighter skin beneath.
How could he look so unconcerned? Bermoiya fought the urge to scream; a great breath surged out of him. He thought how easy this had all looked this morning; how fine it had felt that not only would he be going to the Fire Planet for the final games, but also that he would be doing the Imperial Office a great favour at the same time. Now he thought that perhaps they had always known this might happen and they wanted him humiliated and brought down (for some reason he could not know, because he had always been loyal and conscientious. A mistake; it had to be a mistake…).
But why now? he thought, why now?
Why this time of all times, why this way, for this bet? Why had they wanted him to do this thing and make this wager when he had within him the seed of a child? Why?
The alien rubbed his furry face, pursed his strange lips as he looked down at some point on the board. Bermoiya began to stumble towards the male, oblivious of the obstacles in his way, trampling the biotechs and the other pieces under his feet and crashing over the raised pyramids of higher ground.
The male looked round at him, as though seeing him for the first time. Bermoiya felt himself stop. He gazed into the alien eyes.
And saw nothing. No pity, no compassion, no spirit of kindness or sorrow. He looked into those eyes, and at first he thought of the look criminals had sometimes, when they'd been sentenced to a quick death. It was a look of indifference; not despair, not hatred, but something flatter and more terrifying than either; a look of resignation, of all-hope-gone; a flag hoisted by a soul that no longer cared.
Yet although, in that instant of recognition, the doomed convict was the first image Bermoiya clutched at, he knew immediately it was not the fit one. He did not know what the fit one was. Perhaps it was unknowable.
Then he knew. And suddenly, for the first time in his life, he understood what it was for the condemned to look into his eyes.
He fell. To his knees at first, thudding down on to the board, cracking raised areas, then forward, on to his face, eyes level with the board, seeing it from the ground at last. He closed his eyes.
The Adjudicator and his helpers came over to him and gently lifted him; paramedics strapped him to the stretcher, sobbing quietly, and carried him outside to the prison ambulance.
Pequil stood amazed. He had never thought he would see an imperial judge break down like that. And in front of the alien! He had to run after the dark man; he was striding back out of the hall as quickly and quietly as he'd arrived: ignoring the hisses and shouts from the public galleries around him. They were in the aircar before even the press could catch up, speeding away from the game-hall.
Gurgeh, Pequil realised, had not said a single word the whole time they'd been in the hall.
Flere-Imsaho watched the man. It had expected more of a reaction, but he did nothing except sit at the screen, watching replays of all the games he'd played since he'd arrived. He wouldn't talk.
He would be going to Echronedal now, along with a hundred and nineteen other fourth-round single-game winners. As was usual after a bet of such severity had been honoured, the family of the now mutilated Bermoiya had resigned for him. Without moving a piece on either of the two remaining great boards, Gurgeh had won the match and his place on the Fire Planet.
Some twenty days remained between the end of Gurgeh's game against Bermoiya and the date when the imperial court's fleet departed for the twelve-day journey to Echronedal. Gurgeh had been invited to spend part of that time at an estate owned by Hamin, the rector of the ruling College of Candsev, and mentor to the Emperor. Flere-Imsaho had advised against it, but Gurgeh had accepted. They would leave tomorrow for the estate, a few hundred kilometres distant on an island in an inland sea.
Gurgeh was taking what the drone believed was an unhealthy, even perverse interest in what the news- and press-agencies were saying about him. The man seemed actually to relish the calumnies and invective poured upon him following his win over Bermoiya. Sometimes he smiled when he read or heard what they said about him, especially when the news-readers — in shocked, reverent tones — related what the alien Gurgey had caused to be done to Lo Prinest Bermoiya; a gentle, lenient judge with five wives and two husbands, though no children.
Gurgeh had also started to watch the channels which showed the imperial troops crushing the savages and infidels it was civilising in distant parts of the Empire. He had the module unscramble the higher-level military broadcasts which the services put out, it seemed, in a spirit of competition with the court's more highly encrypted entertainment channels.
The military broadcasts showed scenes of alien executions and tortures. Some showed the buildings and art-works of the recalcitrant or rebellious species being blown up or burned; things only very rarely shown on the standard news-channels if for no other reason than that all aliens were depicted as a matter of course as being uncivilised monsters, docile simpletons or greedy and treacherous subhumans, all categories incapable of producing high art and genuine civilisation. Sometimes, where physically possible, Azadian males — though never apices — were shown raping the savages.
It upset Flere-Imsaho that Gurgeh should enjoy watching such things, especially as it had been instrumental in introducing him to the scrambled broadcasts in the first place, but at least he didn't appear to find the sights sexually stimulating. He didn't dwell on them the way the drone knew Azadians tended to; he looked, registered, then flicked away again.
He still spent the majority of his time staring at the games shown on the screen. But the coded signals, and his own bad press, kept drawing him back, time and again, like a drug.
"But I don't like rings."
"It isn't a question of what you like, Jernau Gurgeh. When you go to Hamin's estate you'll be outside this module. I might not always be close by, and anyway I'm not a specialist in toxicology. You'll be eating their food and drinking their drink and they have some very clever chemists and exobiologists. But if you wear one of these on each hand — index finger preferably — you should be safe from poisoning; if you feel a single jab it means a non-lethal drug, such as a hallucinogen. Three jabs means somebody's out to waste you."
"What do two jabs mean?"
"I don't know! A malfunction, probably; now will you put them on?"
"They really don't suit me."
"Would a shroud?"
"They feel funny."
"Never mind, if they work."
"How about a magic amulet to ward off bullets?"
"Are you serious? I mean, if you are there is a passive-sensor impact-shield jewellery set on board, but they'd probably use CREWs—"
Gurgeh waved one (ringed) hand. "Oh, never mind." He sat down again, turning on a military-execution channel.
The drone found it difficult to talk to the man; he wouldn't listen. It attempted to explain that despite all the horrors he had seen in the city and on the screen there was still nothing the Culture could do that wouldn't do more harm than good. It tried to tell him that the Contact section, the whole Culture in fact, was like him, dressed in his cloak and standing unable to help the man lying injured in the street, that they had to stick to their disguise and wait until the moment was right… but either its arguments weren't getting through to him, or that wasn't what the man was thinking about, becau
se he made no response, and wouldn't enter into a discussion about it.
Flere-Imsaho didn't go out much during the days between the end of the game with Bermoiya and the journey to Hamin's estate. Instead it stayed in, with the man, worrying.
"Mr Gurgeh; I am pleased to meet you." The old apex put out his hand. Gurgeh grasped it. "I hope you had a pleasant flight here, yes?"
"We did, thank you," Gurgeh said. They stood on the roof of a low building set in luxuriant green vegetation and looking out over the calm waters of the inland sea. The house was almost submerged in the burgeoning greenery; only the roof was fully clear of the swaying treetops. Near by were paddocks full of riding animals, and from the various levels of the house long sweeping gantries, elegant and slim, soared out through the crowding trunks above the shady forest floor, giving access to the golden beaches and the pavilions and summer-houses of the estate. In the sky, huge sunlit clouds piled sparkling over the distant mainland.
"You say "we"," Hamin said, as they walked across the roof and liveried males took Gurgeh's baggage from the aircraft.
"The drone Flere-Imsaho and I," Gurgeh said, nodding to the bulky, buzzing machine at his shoulder.
"Ah yes," the old apex laughed, bald head reflecting the binary light. "The machine some people thought let you play so well." They descended to a long balcony set with many tables, where Hamin introduced Gurgeh — and the drone — to various people, mostly apices plus a few elegant females. There was only one person Gurgeh already knew; the smiling Lo Shav Olos put down a drink and rose from his table, taking Gurgeh's hand.
"Mr Gurgeh; how good to see you again. Your luck held out and your skill increased. A formidable achievement. Congratulations, once again." The apex's gaze flicked momentarily to Gurgeh's ringed fingers.
"Thank you. It was at a price I'd have willingly forgone."
The Player of Games c-2 Page 25