The Player of Games

hanging over the board.

He saw then that he'd been fighting back much as Nicosar might have expected him to, trying to save pieces, to make reasonable, considered, conservative moves and, in a sense, to ignore the way Nicosar was kicking and slinging his pieces into battle and tearing strips of territory from his opponent like ribbons of tattered flesh. In a way, Gurgeh had been trying desperately not to play Nicosar; the Emperor was playing a rough, harsh, dictatorial and frequently inelegant game and had rightly assumed something in the Culture man would simply not want to be a part of it.

Gurgeh started to take stock, sizing up the possibilities while he played a few more inconsequential blocking moves to give himself time to think. The point of the game was to win; he'd been forgetting that. Nothing else mattered; nothing else hung on the outcome of the game either. The game was irrelevant, therefore it could be allowed to mean everything, and the only barrier he had to negotiate was that put up by his own feelings.

He had to reply, but how? Become the Culture? Another Empire?

He was already playing the part of the Culture, and it wasn't working — and how do you match an Emperor as an imperialist?

He stood there on the board, wearing his faintly ridiculous, gathered-up clothes, and was only distantly aware of everything else around him. He tried to tear his thoughts away from the game for a moment, looking round the great ribbed prow-hall of the castle, at the tall, open windows and the yellow cinderbud canopy outside; at the half-full banks of seats, at the imperial guards and the adjudicating officials, at the great black horn-shapes of the electronic screening equipment directly overhead, at the many people in their various clothes and guises. All translated into game-thought; all viewed as though through some powerful drug which distorted everything he saw into twisted analogs of its latching hold on his brain.

He thought of mirrors, and of reverser fields, which gave the more technically artificial but perceivably more real impression; mirror-writing was what it said; reversed writing was ordinary writing. He saw the closed torus of Flere-Imsaho's unreal Reality, remembered Chamlis Amalk-ney and its warning about deviousness; things which meant nothing and something; harmonics of his thought.

Click. Switch off/switch on. As though he was a machine. Fall off the edge of the catastrophe curve and never mind. He forgot everything and made the first move he saw.

He looked at the move he'd made. Nothing like what Nicosar would have done.

An archetypally Culture move. He felt his heart sink. He'd been hoping for something different, something better.

He looked again. Well, it was a Culture move, but at least it was an attacking Culture move; followed through, it would wreck his whole cautious strategy so far, but it was all he could do if he was to have even the glimmer of a chance of resisting Nicosar. Pretend there really was a lot at stake, pretend he was fighting for the whole Culture; set out to win, regardless, no matter…. At least he'd found a way to play, finally.

He knew he was going to lose, but it would not be a rout.

He gradually remodelled his whole game-plan to reflect the ethos of the Culture militant, trashing and abandoning whole areas of the board where the switch would not work, pulling back and regrouping and restructuring where it would; sacrificing where necessary, razing and scorching the ground where he had to. He didn't try to mimic Nicosar's crude but devastating attack-escape, return-invade strategy, but made his positions and his pieces in the image of a power that could eventually cope with such bludgeoning, if not now, then later, when it was ready.

He began to win a few points at last. The game was still lost, but there was still the Board of Becoming, where at last he might give Nicosar a fight.

Once or twice he caught a certain look on Nicosar's face, when he was close enough to read the apex's expression, that convinced him he'd done the right thing, even if it was something the Emperor had somehow expected. There was a recognition there now, in the apex's expression and on the board, and even a kind of respect in those moves; an acknowledgement that they were fighting on even terms.

Gurgeh was overcome by the sensation that he was like a wire with some terrible energy streaming through him; he was a great cloud poised to strike lightning over the board, a colossal wave tearing across the ocean towards the sleeping shore, a great pulse of molten energy from a planetary heart; a god with the power to destroy and create at will.

He had lost control of his own drug-glands; the mix of chemicals in his bloodstream had taken over, and his brain felt saturated with the one encompassing idea, like a fever; win, dominate, control; a set of angles defining one desire, the single absolute determination.

The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and sleeping and walking around… but it was all nothing; irrelevant. Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game.

He watched the rival forces surge and tide across the great board, and they spoke a strange language, sang a strange song that was at once a perfect set of harmonies and a battle to control the writing of the themes. What he saw in front of him was like a single huge organism; the pieces seemed to move as though with a will that was neither his nor the Emperor's, but something dictated finally by the game itself, an ultimate expression of its essence.

He saw it; he knew Nicosar saw it; but he doubted anybody else could. They were like a pair of secret lovers, secure and safe in their huge nest of a room, locked together before hundreds of people who looked on and who saw but who could not read and who would never guess what it was they were witnessing.

The game on the Board of Form came to an end. Gurgeh lost, but he had pulled back from the brink, and the advantage Nicosar would take to the Board of Becoming was far from decisive.

The two opponents separated, that act over, the final one yet to commence. Gurgeh left the prow-hall, exhausted and drained and gloriously happy, and slept for two days. The drone woke him.

'Gurgeh? Are you awake? Have you stopped being vague?'

'What are you talking about?'

'You; the game. What's going on? Even the ship couldn't work out what was happening on that board.' The drone floated above him, brown and grey, humming quietly. Gurgeh rubbed his eyes, blinked. It was morning; there were about ten days to go before the fire was due. Gurgeh felt as though he was waking from a dream more vivid and real than reality.

He yawned, sitting up. 'Have I been vague?'

'Does pain hurt? Is a supernova bright?'

Gurgeh stretched, smirking. 'Nicosar's taking it impersonally,' he said, getting up and padding to the window. He stepped out on to the balcony. Flere-Imsaho tutted and threw a robe around him.

'If you're going to start talking in riddles again…'

'What riddles?' Gurgeh drank in the mild air. He flexed his arms and shoulders again. 'Isn't this a fine old castle, drone?' he said, leaning on the stone rail and taking another deep breath. 'They know how to build castles, don't they?'

'I suppose they do, but Klaff wasn't built by the Empire. They took it off another humanoid species who used to hold a ceremony similar to the one the Empire holds to crown the Emperor. But don't change the subject. I asked you a question. What is that style? You've been very vague and strange the past few days; I could see you were concentrating so I didn't press the point, but I and the ship would like to be told.'

'Nicosar's taken on the part of the Empire; hence his style. I've had no choice but to become the Culture, hence mine. It's that simple.'

'It doesn't look it.'

'Tough. Think of it as a sort of mutual rape.'

'I think you should straighten out, Jernau Gurgeh.'

'I'm—' Gurgeh started to say, then stopped to check. He frowned in exasperation. 'I'm perfectly straight, you idiot! Now why don't you do something useful and order me some breakfast?'

'Yes, master,' Flere-Imsaho said sullenly, and dipped back inside the room. Gurgeh looked up into the empty board of blue sky, his mind already racing with plans for the game on the Board of Becoming.