The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

with all sentient Culture constructs, its precise character had not been fully mapped out before its construction, but allowed to develop as the drone’s mind was put together. The Culture regarded this unpredictable factor in its production of conscious machines as the price to be paid for individuality, but the result was that not every drone so brought into being was entirely suitable for the tasks it had initially been designed for.

“You call it enjoyment to lose your house, your titles, your estates; your children maybe; to be expected to walk out onto the balcony with a gun and blow your brains out? That’s enjoyment? We’re well free of that. You want something you can’t have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can’t provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive.” Gurgeh remained silent, lit by the fire and the soft glow from the room’s concealed lighting. “You called yourself ‘Morat’ when you completed your name, but perhaps you aren’t the perfect game-player after all; perhaps you should have called yourself ‘Shequi’; gambler.”

“I…” The man seemed to have difficulty finding the right word. “I… exult when I win. It’s better than love, it’s better than sex or any glanding; it’s the only instant when I feel…”—he shook his head, his mouth tightened—“… real,” he said. “Me. The rest of the time… I feel a bit like that little ex–Special Circumstances drone, Mawhrin-Skel; as though I’ve had some sort of… birthright taken away from me.”

Why? he asked himself. Why did I do it? How could I have been so stupid? It had seemed a glamorous, enticingly dangerous thing at the time; a little crazy, but then, was he not different from other people? Was he not the great game-player and so allowed his eccentricities, granted the freedom to make his own rules? He hadn’t wanted self-glorification, not really. And he had already won the game; he just wanted somebody in the Culture to have completed a Full Web; hadn’t he? It wasn’t like him to cheat; he had never done it before; he would never do it again… how could Mawhrin-Skel do this to him? Why had he done it? Why couldn’t it just not have happened? Why didn’t they have time-travel, why couldn’t he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn’t able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision…

Of Course I Still Love You

Just Read the Instructions.”

“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” Hub said. “You been communicating with this ship behind my back, Gurgeh? The message is: ‘Nice to hear from you again.’”

“The dominant sex,” Worthil repeated. “Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent—power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance. The intermediate—or apex—sex you see standing in the middle there controls the society and the empire. Generally, the males are used as soldiers and the females as possessions. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea?”

Put in the crudest possible terms, whoever wins the game becomes emperor.”

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.

“The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.”

“It doesn’t have to be totally true,” the drone said, “but cause and effect are not perfectly polarized here; the set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they

make it so. It becomes true; it is willed into actuality. Anyway; they can’t be too far wrong, or the empire would not exist at all. It is by definition a volatile and unstable system; Azad—the game—would appear to be the force that holds it together.”

For the first time, the drone showed an aura, flashing briefly red. There was a laugh in its voice, too. “I wouldn’t expect you’d get very far trying that. No; the empire falls under the general definition of a ‘state,’ and the one thing states always try to do is to ensure their own existence in perpetuity. The idea of anybody from outside coming in and trying to take the empire over would fill them with horror. If you decide you want to go, and if you are able to learn the game sufficiently well during the voyage, then there might be a chance, we think, going on your past performance as a game-player, of you qualifying as a clerk in the civil service, or as an army lieutenant. Don’t forget; these people are surrounded by this game from birth. They have anti-agatic drugs, and the best players are about twice your own age. Even they, of course, are still learning.

The problem is that, as with all playground-bully mentalities, they’re quite profoundly frightened; xenophobic and paranoid at once. We daren’t let them know the extent and power of the Culture yet, in case the whole empire self-destructs… such things have happened before, though of course that was long before Contact itself was formed.

It is pure chance that we’ve met them when their civilization looks primitive to us; one less ice age on Eä and it could conceivably have been the other way round.”

But five years! All that time; not just away from here, but at least half, probably more, of that stretch spent with no time for keeping abreast of developments in other games, no time to read papers or write them, no time for anything except this one, absurd, obsessive game. He would change; he would be a different person at the end of it; he could not help but change, take on something of the game itself; that would be inevitable. And would he ever catch up again, once he came back? He would be forgotten; he would be away so long the rest of the game-playing Culture would just disregard him; he’d be a historical figure. And when he came back, would he be allowed to talk about it? Or would Contact’s seven-decade-long embargo continue?

“I need my obligation to Mawhrin-Skel discharged somehow,” Gurgeh said quietly. “I can’t leave here with it able to claim I didn’t try to help it.” The Contact drone seemed not to hear. Then it said, “Hmm. Well, we’ll see what we can do.”

“The thing to remember, Gurgeh,” the ship interrupted quickly, “is that their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. In the same way, everyone you meet will be conscious of both their position in society and their relationship to others around them.

“It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another

others by having to sell one’s labor or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the l...

He wasn’t sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them, a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods.

“What are they standing there for?” Gurgeh whispered to the drone in Eächic, low enough so that Pequil couldn’t hear. “Show,” the machine said. Gurgeh thought about this. “Show?” “Yes; to show that the Emperor is rich and important enough to have hundreds of flunkeys standing around doing nothing.” “Doesn’t everybody know that already?” The drone didn’t answer for a moment. Then it sighed. “You haven’t really cracked the psychology of wealth and power yet, have you, Jernau Gurgeh?”

Utter discretion and complete secrecy totally guaranteed; ask anybody.”

We pretend the robes aren’t bugged, and they pretend they haven’t heard anything. It’s a little game we play.”

“That’s all they do in theory, but in fact they’re more like surrogate noble families. Where the Empire gains over the usual bloodline set-up is they use the game to recruit the cleverest, most ruthless and manipulative apices from the whole population to run the show, rather than have to marry new blood into some stagnant aristocracy and hope for the best when the genes shake out. Actually quite a neat system; the game solves a lot.

“Jernau Gurgeh,” the machine said, making a sighing noise, “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. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.”

Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.

Everybody seemed to be treating him like a child. They happily decided what he need and need not be told, they kept things back from him that he ought to have been told, and when they did tell him they acted as if he should have known all the time.

“Why not?” Za’s arms flapped once. “I mean, have you never done something just… just because? I mean… it’s um… empathy. This is what the locals do, y’know. This is their way out; this is how they escape their place in the glorious imperial machine… and a fucking grand position it is to appreciate its finer points from too… it all makes sense, y’know, Gurgeh; I worked it out.” Za nodded wisely, tapped the side of his head very slowly with one limp finger. “Worked it out,” he repeated. “Think about it; the Culture’s all its…” The same finger made a twirling motion in the air. “… built-in glands; hundreds of secretions and thousands of effects, any combination you like and all for free… but the Empire, ah ha!” The finger pointed upward. “In the Empire you got to pay; escape is a commodity like anything else. And it’s this stuff; drink. Lowers the reaction time, makes the tears come easier…” Za put two swaying fingers to his cheeks. “… makes the fists come easier…” Now his hands were clenched, and he pretended to box; jabbing. “… and…” He shrugged. “… it eventually kills you.” He looked more or less at Gurgeh. “See?” He spread his arms wide again and then let them fall back limply on the seat. “Besides,” he said, in a suddenly weary voice. “I don’t have all the usual glands.”

In the game outside the game, Gurgeh thought the Games Bureau had made a mistake in pitching him against the first ten people to qualify. It appeared to make sense because it gave him no respite, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need any, and the tactic meant that his opponents were from different branches of the imperial tree, and thus harder to tempt with departmental inducements, as well as being less likely to know each other’s game-styles. He’d also discovered something called inter-service rivalry—he’d found records of some old games that didn’t seem to make sense until the ship described this odd phenomenon—and made special efforts to get the Admiralty men and the colonel at each other’s throats. They’d needed little prompting.

“The ship told you a guilty system recognizes no innocents. I’d say it does. It recognizes the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognizes the ‘sanctity’ of the body… but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having.” Flere-Imsaho paused, then floated toward Gurgeh, came very close to him. “Ah, but I’m preaching again, amn’t I? The excesses of youth. I’ve kept you up late. Maybe you’re ready for some sleep now; it’s been a long night, hasn’t it? I’ll leave you.” It turned and floated away. It stopped near the door again. “Good night,” it said.

Those few moves were like a series of kicks in the belly; they contained all the berserk energy the very best young players spasmodically exhibited; but marshaled, synchronized, sequenced and unleashed with a style and a savage grace no untamed beginner could have hoped to command. With the first move Bermoiya saw what the alien’s plan might be. With the next move he saw how good the plan was; with the next that the play might go on into the following day before the alien could finally be vanquished; with the next that he, Bermoiya, wasn’t in quite as unassailable a position as he’d thought… and with the following two that he still had a lot of work to do, and then that perhaps the play wouldn’t last until tomorrow after all. Bermoiya made his own moves again, trying every ploy and stratagem he’d learned in a century of game-playing; the disguised observation piece, the feint-within-the-feint using attack-pieces and card-stock; the premature use of the Board of Becoming element-pieces, making a swamp on the territories by the conjunction of Earth and Water… but nothing worked.

And saw nothing. No pity, no compassion, no spirit of kindness or sorrow. He looked into those eyes, and at first he thought of the look criminals had sometimes, when they’d been

sentenced to a quick death. It was a look of indifference; not despair, not hatred, but something flatter and more terrifying than either; a look of resignation, of all-hope-gone; a flag hoisted by a soul that no longer cared.

“Here we have many rules, and try to live according to the laws of God, Game and Empire. But one of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh.” Hamin 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!”

Gurgeh watched the dancers for a moment. Without looking away from them, he said, “I’ll play, rector; on Echronedal.” He tapped one ring on the rim of his glass, in time to the music. Hamin sighed. “Well, I have to tell you, Jernau Gurgeh, that we are worried.” He pulled on the pipe again, studied the glowing bowl. “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.”

The truth has already been decided.”

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!

Another change, it thought. The man had altered, slipped deeper into the game and the society. It had been warned this might happen. One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behavior, but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.

Eächic was an ordinary, evolved language, with rooted assumptions which substituted sentimentality for compassion and aggression for cooperation. A comparatively innocent and sensitive soul like Gurgeh was bound to pick up some of its underlying ethical framework if he spoke it all the time. So now the man played like one of those carnivores he’d been listening to, stalking across the board, setting up traps and diversions and killing grounds; pouncing, pursuing, bringing down, consuming, absorbing…

He didn’t enjoy the letter much. It all seemed so far away, so irrelevant. The ancient drone sounded hackneyed rather than wise or even friendly, and the people on the screen looked soft and stupid. Amalk-ney showed him Ikroh, and Gurgeh found himself angered at the fact that people came and stayed there every now and again. Who did they think they were?

Gurgeh passed the days studying. Flere-Imsaho continued to explore. It told Gurgeh it had watched a whole region of the advancing fire-front being extinguished by a torrential rainstorm; it had revisited the area a couple of days later to find tinderplants re-igniting the dried vegetation. As an example of how integral the fire and the rest of the planet’s ecology had become, the drone said, it was an impressive display.

Traff had been in command of a small ground force in a war against a human-oid species; the war in space had been fought to a temporary stalemate, but through a combination of great military talent and a little luck Traff found himself in a position to threaten the species’ capital city from the ground. The enemy had sued for peace, making it a condition of the treaty that their great library, famous throughout the civilized species of the Lesser Cloud, be left untouched. Traff knew that if he refused this condition the fight would go on, so he gave his word that not a letter, not a pixel, on the ancient microfiles would be destroyed, and they would be left in situ. Traff had orders from his star marshal that the library had to be destroyed. Nicosar himself had commanded this as one of his first edicts after coming to power; subject races had to understand that once they displeased the Emperor, nothing could prevent their punishment.

While nobody in the Empire cared in the least about one of its loyal soldiers breaking an agreement with some bunch of aliens, Traff knew that giving your word was a sacred thing; nobody would ever trust him again if he went back on it. Traff already knew what he was going to do. He solved the problem by shuffling the library, sorting every word in it into alphabetical order and every pixel of every illustration into order of color, shade and intensity. The original microfiles were wiped and re-recorded with volumes upon volumes of “the”s, “it”s, and “and”s; the illustrations were fields of pure color.

Nicosar played cautiously most of the time; then, suddenly, he’d strike out with some brilliant flowing series of moves that looked at first as though they’d been made by some gifted madman, before revealing themselves as the masterstrokes they were; perfect answers to the impossible questions they themselves posed.

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 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.

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.