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 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?
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
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.
