The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

civilization had been Contacted, two thousand years earlier—was limited in its appreciation, of course, but Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society’s games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul. Besides, barbarian societies had always intrigued him, even before their games had.

Looks like it’s heading for the GSV Unfortunate Conflict of Evidence, unless one of them’s trying to fool somebody.”

You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot. The Culture had theoretical total freedom of information; the catch was that consciousness was private, and information held in a Mind—as opposed to an unconscious system, like the Hub’s memory-banks—was regarded as part of the Mind’s being, and so as sacrosanct as the contents of a human brain; a Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.

“The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read the Instructions.”

“Well, it didn’t reply direct; it sent via its home GSV Youthful Indiscretion

“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

“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;

The GSV Little Rascal is heading out in this direction from

“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said. He turned, still holding his glass, to look at the old machine. It put a small package into his hand. “A present,” it said. Gurgeh looked at the small parcel; paper tied up with ribbon. “Just an old tradition,” Chamlis explained. “You open it when you’re under way.” “Thank you,” Gurgeh said, nodding slowly. He put the present into his jacket, then did something he rarely did with drones, and hugged the old machine, putting his arms round its aura fields. “Thank you, very very much.”

One hundred and one days after leaving Chiark, and well over two thousand light-years from the Orbital, the Limiting Factor made its rendezvous with the River class Superlifter Kiss My Ass.

“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 or 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 legal contract of ‘marriage’ to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favors by—” “Oh, ship, come on!” He laughed. He had done his own research into the Empire, reading its own histories and watching its explanatory recordings. The ship’s view of the Empire’s customs and institutions sounded biased and unfair and terribly Culture-prim. Flere-Imsaho

“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.”

He looked at the Emperor for a while. “Odd set-up, don’t you think? All that power belonging to one person.” “Seems a rather… potentially unstable way to run a society,” Gurgeh agreed.

These meatbrains are trying to probe me! Beautiful weather outside and a major migratory season just starting, but I’m locked up with a shower of heinous sentientophiles trying to violate me!” “Sorry, drone, but what can I do?

Gurgeh realized he hadn’t properly thought through the implications of the physical option. Even if he did win, how could he let another being be mutilated? If Bermoiya lost, it would be the end of him; career, family, everything. The Empire did not allow the regeneration or replacement of any wager-lost body parts; the judge’s loss would be permanent and possibly fatal; suicide was not unknown in such cases. Perhaps it would be best if Gurgeh did lose.

The trouble was he didn’t want to. He didn’t feel any personal animosity toward Bermoiya, but he desperately wanted to win this game, and the next one, and the one after that. He hadn’t realized how seductive Azad was when played in its home environment.

Gurgeh continued up the street. Screams came from high up in a grimy housing block on the far side of the street. “Just some apex beating up his woman. You know for millennia females were thought to have no effect on the heredity of the children they bore? They’ve known for five hundred years that they do; a viral DNA analogue which alters the genes a woman’s impregnated with. Nevertheless, under the law females are simply possessions. The penalty for murdering a woman is a year’s hard labor, for an apex. A female who kills an apex is tortured to death over a period of days. Death by Chemicals. Said to be one of the worst. Keep walking.”

He moaned. Gurgeh started forward and began to stoop. “Do not touch him!” The drone’s voice stopped Gurgeh like a brick wall. “If any of these people see your hands or face, you’re dead. You’re the wrong color, Gurgeh. Listen; a few hundred dark-skinned babies are still born each year, as the genes work themselves out. They’re supposed to be strangled and their bodies presented to the Eugenics Council

He’d been only mildly surprised that the Empire wanted to hide the material shown on the first level; a people so concerned with rank and protocol and clothed dignity might well want to restrict such things, harmless though they might be. The second level was different; he thought it gave the game away a little, and he could understand them being embarrassed about it. It was clear that the delight being taken in Level Two was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense. Level One had been about sex; this was about something the Empire obviously thought more of but could not disentangle from that act.

“Now Level Three,” the drone said. Gurgeh watched the screen. Flere-Imsaho watched Gurgeh.

What you’ve seen tonight is also what it’s about. And there’s plenty in between that I can’t show you; all the frustrations that affect the poor and the relatively well-off alike, caused simply because they live in a society where one is not free to do as one chooses. There’s the journalist who can’t write what he knows is the truth, the doctor who can’t treat somebody in pain because they’re the wrong sex… a million things every day, things that aren’t as melodramatic and gross as what I’ve shown you, but which are still part of it, still some of the effects. “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.”

“Very pleasant.” Gurgeh drank a little, watching the dancers arrange themselves onstage. “Even there, though,” Hamin said, “you are missing something. 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.”

well, there are other instruments, but can you understand now why that music sounds so… precious to those of us who know what has gone into the making of it?”

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.” “Is that all?”

“What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.” “Ah; but in your...

As for what Hamin told Gurgeh about the Empire, it only made him appreciate what Shohobohaum Za had said; that it was a gem, however vicious and indiscriminate its cutting edges might be. It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called “human nature”—the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural—when they were surrounded and subsumed by the self-created monster that was the Empire of Azad, and which displayed such a fierce instinct (Gurgeh could think of no other word) for self-preservation.

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

Just matter, switching energy of one sort or another. Switches. Memory. The random element that is chance and that is called choice: common denominators,

Echronedal, extravagantly sprinklered and doused, had been built to survive whatever terrible heat and screaming winds the planet’s bizarre ecology could provide, and it was in the greatest of those fortresses, Castle Klaff, that for the last three hundred standard years the final games of Azad had been played; timed to coincide, whenever possible, with the Incandescence.

Gurgeh shook his head, looking at the distant prisoner in his private prison. “It’s a mean old Empire, isn’t it, drone?” “Mean enough.… But if it ever tries to fuck with the Culture it’ll find out what mean really is.”

Gurgeh looked round in surprise at the machine. It floated, buzzing there, its bulky gray and brown casing looking hard and even sinister against the dull gleam of the empty suit of armor. “My, we’re in a combative mood this evening.” “I am. You’d better be.”

“Obviously not,” the drone said. “Good grief, man; the Culture’s been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you’ve mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.”

“Not yet. I hear you’re playing Lo Tenyos Krowo next.” “In four days. They say he’s very good.” “He is. He’s also one of the people who know all about the Culture.” Gurgeh glared at the machine. “What?”

“There are never fewer than eight people in the Empire who know where the Culture comes from, roughly what size it is, and our level of technological development.” “Really,” Gurgeh said through his teeth.

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.

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 couldn’t believe it. The game was over; couldn’t anybody see that? He looked despairingly around the faces of the officials, the spectators, the observers and Adjudicators. What was wrong with them all?

Imsaho was its usual concerned, annoying self, but it too hadn’t spotted anything, and still inquired how he thought the game was going. He lied. The Limiting Factor thought things were building up to a head. He didn’t bother to tell it. He’d expected more of the ship, though.

“Fair?” the Emperor shouted, coming to stand over Gurgeh, blocking the view of the distant fire. “Why does anything have to be fair? Is life fair?” He reached down and took Gurgeh by the hair, shaking his head. “Is it? Is it?” Gurgeh let the apex shake him. The Emperor let go of his hair after a moment, holding his hand as though he’d touched something dirty. Gurgeh cleared his throat. “No, life is not fair. Not intrinsically.” The apex turned away in exasperation, clutching again at the curled stone top of the battlements. “It’s something we can try to make it, though,” Gurgeh continued. “A goal we can aim for. You can choose to do so, or not. We have. I’m sorry you find us so repulsive for that.”

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

“Grrraaaaak!” Flere-Imsaho screamed. Its casing glowed dull red and started to smoke. Gurgeh watched, transfixed. Nicosar stood near the center of the boards, surrounded by his guards, smiling at Gurgeh.

Nicosar gave an inaudible sigh, drew himself up in front of Gurgeh, so that he seemed to fill the view in front of the man, and brought the sword slowly toward Gurgeh. Drone! he thought. But it was just a sooty scar on the far wall. Ship! But the implant under his tongue lay silent, and the Limiting Factor was still light-years away.

“First things first,” Flere-Imsaho said. “Allow me to introduce myself properly; my name is Sprant Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti, and I am not a library drone.”

Coming in ‘all guns blazing’ as you put it is almost never the right approach; Azad—the game itself—had to be discredited. It was what had held the Empire together all these years—the linchpin; but that made it the most vulnerable point, too.”

“Everything worked out a little more dramatically than we’d expected, I must admit, but it looks like all the analyses of your abilities and Nicosar’s weaknesses were just about right. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines.” “They

They’d crossed the Lesser Cloud and met with the Range class GSV So Much for Subtlety,