The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.” “You are a throwback,” Chamlis told him. “The game’s the thing. That’s the conventional wisdom, isn’t it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with.”

“This is not a heroic age,” he told the drone, staring at the fire. “The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.”

Flere-Imsaho, with its spinning outer sections and its disc-like white casing, looked rather like a hidden-piece wafer from a Possession game.

“Their Royal Highness had to take up the Royal Chain after the Emperor Molsce sadly died two years ago. As second-best player during the last games, Our Worship Nicosar was elevated to the throne. But I have no doubt they will remain there!”

the game solves a lot. I can see it lasting; Contact seems to think it’s all going to fall apart at the seams one day, but I doubt it myself. This lot could outlast us.

That sense of the epic had left him now. All he felt at this moment was that he, like Shohobohaum Za or Flere-Imsaho, was just another social misfit and this whole, spectacularly seedy Empire had been thrown to him like a scrap. Somewhere, he was sure, Minds were loafing in hyperspace within the field-fabric of some great ship, laughing.

He hardly thought it mattered what their social system was; it simply looked so crassly, rigidly over-organized.

it is only that it is more difficult for either—” The woman broke off and brought her head up with a sudden, startling look. “—for either of the lesser sexes to learn, because all the great colleges must take only apex scholars.”

They don’t know how weak or strong you are.

“a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it.

As the adage said; falling never killed anybody; it was when you stopped…

Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance…

waved the pipe-stem round the tables of people. “Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are—ha!”—Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe—“no more than robots!”

You see, we gain a great deal of pleasure from knowing at what cost this music is bought. You see the stringed instrument; the one on the left with the eight strings?” Gurgeh nodded. Hamin said, “I can tell you that each of those steel strings has strangled a man. You see that white pipe at the back, played by the male?” “The pipe shaped like a bone?” Hamin laughed. “A female’s femur, removed without anesthetic.”

One can be the player, or one can be… played upon.”

“Worried about the effect your getting any further in the game would have on the morale of our people. So many of them are just simple folk; it is our duty to shield them from the harsh realities, sometimes. And what harsher reality can there be than the realization that most of one’s kin are gullible, cruel and foolish? They would not understand that a stranger, an alien, can come here and do so well at the holy game. We here—those of us in the court and the colleges—might not be so concerned, but we have to keep the ordinary, decent… I would even go as far as to say innocent people in mind, Mr. Gurgeh, and what we have to do in that respect, what we sometimes have to take responsibility for, does not always make us happy. But we know our duty, and we will do it; for them, and for our Emperor.”

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!

mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.”

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 match 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

The board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassably fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar’s beliefs and his together. Image of their minds; a hologram of pure coherence, burning like a standing wave of fire across the board, a perfect map of the landscapes of thought and faith within their heads.

strong survive. That’s what life teaches us, Gurgeh, that’s what the game shows us. Struggle to prevail; fight to prove worth. These are no hollow phrases; they are truth!”

What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition? That Azad could be so much more than a mere battle, if it was used to articulate, to communicate, to define…? He’d done all that, said all that, and said it better than he ever could now.

which means—or meant—the Empire has had some sort of contact with another advanced civilization. I’ve scanned what’s left of the equipment; could be Homomda stuff. Anyway, the ship’ll load it for further analysis.”