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.
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 garbling; 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 released 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).
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