The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

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.