The Player of Games

whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural — when they were surrounded and subsumed by the self-created monster that was the Empire of Azad, and which displayed such a fierce instinct (Gurgeh could think of no other word) for self-preservation.

The Empire wanted to survive; it was like an animal, a massive, powerful body that would only let certain cells or viruses survive within it and as a matter of course killed off any and all others, automatically and unthinkingly. Hamin himself used this analogy when he compared revolutionaries to cancer. Gurgeh tried to say that single cells were single cells, while a conscious collection of hundreds of billions of them — or a conscious device made from arrays of picocircuitry, for that matter — was simply incomparable… but Hamin refused to listen. It was Gurgeh, not he, who'd missed the point.

The rest of the time Gurgeh spent walking in the forest, or swimming in the warm, slack sea. The slow rhythm of Hamin's house was built around meals, and Gurgeh learned to take great care in dressing for these, eating them, talking to the guests — old and new, as people came and went — and relaxing afterwards, bloated and spacy, continuing to talk, and watching the deliberate entertainment of — usually — erotic dances, and the involuntary cabaret of changing sexual alliances amongst the guests, dancers, servants and house staff. Gurgeh was enticed many times, but never tempted. He found the Azadian females more and more attractive all the time, and not just physically… but used his genofixed glands in a negative, even contrary way, to stay carnally sober in the midst of the subtly exhibited orgy around him.

A pleasant enough few days. The rings did not jab him, and nobody shot at him. He and Flere-Imsaho got back safely to the module on the roof of the Grand Hotel a couple of days before the Imperial Fleet was due to depart for Echronedal. Gurgeh and the drone would have preferred to take the module, which was perfectly capable of making the crossing by itself, but Contact had forbidden that — the effect on the Admiralty of discovering that something no larger than a lifeboat could outstrip their battlecruisers was not something to be contemplated — and the Empire had refused permission for the alien machine to be conveyed inside an imperial craft. So Gurgeh would have to make the journey with the Fleet like everybody else.

'You think you've got problems,' Flere-Imsaho said bitterly. 'They'll be watching us all the time; on the liner during the crossing and then once we're in the castle. That means I've got to stay inside this ridiculous disguise all day and all night until the games are over. Why couldn't you have lost in the first round like you were supposed to? We could have told them where to insert their Fire Planet and been back on a GSV by now.'

'Oh, shut up, machine.'

As it turned out, they needn't have returned to the module; there was nothing more to take or pack. He stood in the small lounge, fiddling with the Orbital bracelet on his wrist and realising he was looking forward to the coming games on Echronedal more than he had any of the others. The pressure would be off; he wouldn't have to face the opprobrium of the press and the Empire's ghastly general public, he could cooperate with the Empire to produce a convincing piece of fake news, and the likelihood of more physical option bets had thereby been reduced almost to zero. He was going to enjoy himself…

Flere-Imsaho was glad to see the man was getting over the effects of seeing behind the screen the Empire showed its guests; he was much as he'd been before, and the days at Hamin's estate seemed to have relaxed him. It could see a small change in him though; something it could not quite pin down, but which it knew was there.

They didn't see Shohobohaum Za again. He'd left on a tour 'upcountry', wherever that was. He sent his regards, and a message in Marain to the effect that if Gurgeh could lay his mitts on some fresh grif…

Before they left, Gurgeh asked the module about the girl he'd met at the grand ball, months earlier. He couldn't remember her name, but if the module could provide a list of the females who'd survived the first round, he was sure he'd recognise hers… the module got confused, but Flere-Imsaho told them both to forget it.

No women had made it to the second round.

Pequil came with them to the shuttleport. His arm was fully healed. Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho bade farewell to the module; it climbed into the sky for a rendezvous with the distant Limiting Factor. They said goodbye to Pequil too — he took Gurgeh's hand in both of his — and then the man and the drone boarded the shuttle.

Gurgeh watched Groasnachek as it fell away beneath them. The city tilted as he was thrown back into his seat; the whole view swung and juddered as the shuttlecraft powered into the hazy skies.

Gradually all the patterns and the shapes came out, revealed for a while before the increasing distance, the city's own vapours, dust and grime, and the altering angle of their climb took it all away.

For all the jumble, it looked momentarily peaceful and ordered in its parts. The distance made its individual, local confusions and dislocations disappear, and from a certain height, where little ever dallied, and almost everything just passed through, it looked exactly like a great, mindless, spreading organism.

3. Machina Ex Machina

So far so average. Our game-player's lucked out again. I guess you can see he's a changed man, though. These humans!

I'm going to be consistent, however. I haven't told you who I am so far, and I'm not going to tell you now, either. Maybe later.

Maybe.

Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that's not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that's all it can be. I get so frustrated with people who can't see this!

Even a human should be able to understand it's obvious.

The result is what matters, not how it's achieved (unless, of course, the process of achieving is itself a series of results). What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? (Let's not even think about a Mind mind.) Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfils the same task.

Just matter, switching energy of one sort or another.

Switches. Memory. The random element that is chance and that is called choice: common denominators, all.

I say again; you is what you done. Dynamic (mis)behaviourism, that's my creed.

Gurgeh? His switches are working funny. He's thinking differently, acting uncharacteristically. He is a different person. He's seen the worst that meatgrinder of a city could provide, and he just took it personally, and took his revenge.

Now he's spaceborne again, head crammed full of Azad rules, his brain adapted and adapting to the swirling, switching patterns of that seductive, encompassing, feral set of rules and possibilities, and being carted through space towards the Empire's most creakily symbolic shrine: Echronedal; the place of the standing wave of flame; the Fire Planet.

But will our hero prevail? Can he possibly prevail? And what would constitute winning, anyway?

How much has the man still got to learn? What will he make of such knowledge? More to the point, what will it make of him?

Wait and see. It'll work itself out, in time.

Take it from there, maestro…

Echronedal was twenty light years from Ea. Halfway there the Imperial Fleet left the region of dust that lay between Ea's system and the direction of the main galaxy, and so that vast armed spiral was spread over half the sky like a million jewels caught in a whirlpool.