The Player of Games

castle's shadow across the canopy. Behind Gurgeh, the fortress lights were coming on.

Gurgeh looked out to the tan trunks of the great trees, and shook his head. He'd lost the game on the Board of Origin and now he was losing on the Board of Form.

He was missing something; some facet of the way Nicosar was playing was escaping him. He knew it, he was certain, but he couldn't work out what that facet was. He had a nagging suspicion it was something very simple, however complex its articulation on the boards might be. He ought to have spotted it, analysed and evaluated it long ago and turned it to his advantage, but for some reason — some reason intrinsic to his very understanding of the game, he felt sure — he could not. An aspect of his play seemed to have disappeared, and he was starting to think the knock to the head he'd taken during the hunt had affected him more than he'd first assumed.

But then, the ship didn't seem to have any better idea what he was doing wrong, either. Its advice always seemed to make sense at the time, but when Gurgeh got to the board he found he could never apply the ship's ideas. If he went against his instincts and forced himself to do as the Limiting Factor had suggested, he ended up in even more trouble; nothing was more guaranteed to cause you problems on an Azad board than trying to play in a way you didn't really believe in. He rose slowly, straightening his back, which was hardly sore now, and returned to his room. Flere-Imsaho was in front of the screen, watching a holo-display of an odd diagram.

'What are you doing?' Gurgeh said, lowering himself into a soft chair. The drone turned, addressing him in Marain.

'I worked out a way to disable the bugs; we can talk in Marain now. Isn't that good?'

'I suppose so,' Gurgeh said, still in Eachic. He picked up a small flat-screen to see what was happening in the Empire.

'Well you might at least use the language after I went to the trouble of jamming their bugs. It wasn't easy you know; I'm not designed for that sort of thing. I had to learn a lot of stuff from some of my own files about electronics and optics and listening fields and all that sort of technical stuff. I thought you'd be pleased.'

'Utterly and profoundly ecstatic,' Gurgeh said carefully, in Marain. He looked at the small screen. It told him of the new appointments, the crushing of an insurrection in a distant system, the progress of the game between Nicosar and Krowo — Krowo wasn't as far behind as Gurgeh was — the victory won by imperial troops against a race of monsters, and higher rates of pay for males who volunteered to join the Army. 'What is that you're looking at?' he said, looking briefly at the wall-screen, where Flere-Imsaho's strange torus turned slowly. 'Don't you recognise it?' the drone said, voice pitched to express surprise. 'I thought you would; it's a model of the Reality.'

'The — oh, yes.' Gurgeh nodded and went back to the small screen, where a group of asteroids was being bombarded by imperial battleships, to quell the insurrection. 'Four dimensions and all that.' He flicked through the sub-channels to the game programmes. A few of the second-series matches were still being played on Ea.

'Well, seven relevant dimensions actually, in the case of the Reality itself; one of those lines… are you listening?'

'Hmm? Oh yes.' The games on Ea were all in their last stages. The secondary games from Echronedal were still being analysed.

'… one of those lines on the Reality represents our entire universe… surely you were taught all this?'

'Mm,' Gurgeh nodded. He had never been especially interested in spacial theory or hyperspace or hyperspheres or the like; none of it seemed to make any difference to how he lived, so what did it matter? There were some games that were best understood in four dimensions, but Gurgeh only cared about their own particular rules, and the general theories only meant anything to him as they applied specifically to those games. He pressed for another page on the small screen… to be confronted with a picture of himself, once more expressing his sadness at being knocked out of the games, wishing the people and Empire of Azad well and thanking everybody for having him. An announcer talked over his faded voice to say that Gurgeh had pulled out of the second-series games on Echronedal. Gurgeh smiled thinly, watching the official reality he'd agreed to be part of as it gradually built up and became accepted fact.

He looked up briefly at the torus on the screen, and remembered something he'd puzzled over, years ago now. 'What's the difference between hyperspace and ultraspace?' he asked the drone. 'The ship mentioned ultraspace once and I never could work out what the hell it was talking about.'

The drone tried to explain, using the holo-model of the Reality to illustrate. As ever, it over-explained, but Gurgeh got the idea, for what it was worth.

Flere-Imsaho annoyed him that evening, chattering away in Marain all the time about anything and everything. After initially finding it rather needlessly complex, Gurgeh enjoyed hearing the language again, and discovered some pleasure in speaking it, but the drone's high, squeaky voice became tiring after a while. It only shut up while he had his customary rather negative and depressing game-analysis with the ship that evening, still in Marain.

He had his best night's sleep since the day of the hunt, and woke feeling, for no good reason he could think of, that there might yet be a chance of turning the game around.

It took Gurgeh most of the morning's play to gradually work out what Nicosar was up to. When, eventually, he did, it took his breath away. The Emperor had set out to beat not just Gurgeh, but the whole Culture. There was no other way to describe his use of pieces, territory and cards; he had set up his whole side of the game as an Empire, the very image of Azad.

Another revelation struck Gurgeh with a force almost as great; one reading — perhaps the best — of the way he'd always played was that he played as the Culture. He'd habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite profoundly peaceful.

In all the games he'd played, the fight had always come to Gurgeh, initially. He'd thought of the period before as preparing for battle, but now he saw that if he'd been alone on the board he'd have done roughly the same, spreading slowly across the territories, consolidating gradually, calmly, economically… of course it had never happened; he always was attacked, and once the battle was joined he developed that conflict as assiduously and totally as before he'd tried to develop the patterns and potential of unthreatened pieces and undisputed territory.

Every other player he'd competed against had unwittingly tried to adjust to this novel style in its own terms, and comprehensively failed. Nicosar was trying no such thing. He'd gone the other way, and made the board his Empire, complete and exact in every structural detail to the limits of definition the game's scale imposed.

It stunned Gurgeh. The realisation burst on him like some slow sunrise turning nova, like a trickle of understanding becoming stream, river, tide; tsunami. His next few moves were automatic; reaction-moves, not properly thought-out parts of his strategy, limited and inadequate though it had been shown to be. His mouth had gone dry, his hands shook.

Of course; this was what he'd been missing, this was the hidden facet, so open and blatant, and there for all to see, it was effectively invisible, too obvious for words or understanding. It was so simple, so elegant, so staggeringly ambitious but so fundamentally practical, and so much what Nicosar obviously thought the whole game to be about.

No wonder he'd been so desperate to play this man from the Culture, if this was what he'd planned all along.

Even the details Nicosar and only a handful of others in the Empire knew about the Culture and its true size and scope were there, included and displayed on the board, but probably utterly indecipherable to those who did not already know; the style of Nicosar's board Empire was of a complete thing fully shown, the assumptions about his opponent's forces were couched in terms of fractions of something greater.

There was, too, a ruthlessness about the way the Emperor treated his own and his opponent's pieces which Gurgeh thought was almost a taunt; a tactic designed to disturb him. The Emperor sent pieces to their destruction with a sort of joyous callousness where Gurgeh would have hung back, attempting to prepare and build up. Where Gurgeh would have accepted surrender and conversion, Nicosar laid waste.

The difference was slight in some ways — no good player simply squandered pieces or massacred purely for the sake of it — but the implication of applied brutality was there, like a flavour, like a stench, like a silent mist