The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

“It looks perverse and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”

The game of Azad is used not so much to determine which person will rule, but which tendency within the empire’s ruling class will have the upper hand, which branch of economic theory will be followed, which creeds will be recognized within the religious apparat, and which political policies will be followed.

The game is also used as an exam for both entry into and promotion within the empire’s religious, educational, civil administrational, judicial and military establishments.

difference between the sexes.” “There is now,” Worthil said. Gurgeh didn’t quite see what that meant, but the drone went on before he could ask any further questions.

each other.” “You mean, if you lose a game… you have… these things done to you?” “Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape.”

“Azad is not the sort of place it’s easy to think about coldly, Jernau Gurgeh. They have done things the average Culture person would find… unspeakable. A program of eugenic manipulation has lowered the average male and female intelligence; selective birth-control sterilization, area starvation, mass deportation and racially based taxation systems produced the equivalent of genocide, with the result that almost everybody on the home planet is the same color and build. Their treatment of alien captives, their societies and works is equally—”

one less ice age on Eä and it could conceivably have been the other way round.”

“Before you ask our friend what we’re passing over now,” Flere-Imsaho said, hovering and buzzing at Gurgeh’s elbow, “that’s called a shantytown, and it’s where the city draws its surplus unskilled labor from.” Gurgeh frowned at the bulkily disguised drone. Lo Pequil was standing beside Gurgeh on the rear ramp of the module, which had opened to make a sort of balcony. The city unrolled beneath them. “I thought we weren’t to use Marain in front of these people,” Gurgeh said to the machine. “Oh, we’re safe enough here; this guy’s bugged, but the module can neutralize that.” Gurgeh pointed at the shantytown. “What’s that?” he asked Pequil. “That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers.” “Driven off the land,” Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, “by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganization of the agricultural production apparatus.”

Hamin found the Culture’s sexual mores even more fascinating. He was at once delighted and outraged that the Culture regarded homosexuality, incest, sex-changing, hermaphrodicy and sexual characteristic alteration as just something else people did, like going on a cruise or changing their hairstyle. Hamin thought this must take all the fun out of things. Didn’t the Culture forbid anything? Gurgeh attempted to explain there were no written laws, but almost no crime anyway. There was the occasional crime of passion (as Hamin chose to call it), but little else. It was difficult to get away with anything anyway, when everybody had a terminal, but there were very few motives left, too. “But if someone kills somebody else?” Gurgeh shrugged. “They’re slap-droned.” “Ah! This sounds more like it. What does this drone do?” “Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.”

“You disgust me, Morat Gurgeh,” Nicosar said to the red glow in the west. “Your blind, insipid morality can’t even account for your own success here, and you treat this battle-game like some filthy dance. It is there to be fought and struggled against, and you’ve attempted to seduce it. You’ve perverted it; replaced our holy witnessing with your own foul pornography… you’ve soiled it… male.”