The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

“So it’s false.” “What isn’t?” “Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”

Rain hit the windows with a noise like the crackling of the logs on the fire. The view from the house at Ikroh, down the steep wooded slope to the fjord and across it to the mountains on the other side, was warped and distorted by the water running down the glass, and sometimes low clouds flowed round the turrets and cupolas of Gurgeh’s home, like wet smoke.

“Maybe I’m just disillusioned with games,” Gurgeh said, turning a carved game-piece over in his hands. “I used to think that context didn’t matter; a good game was a good game and there was a purity about manipulating rules that translated perfectly from society to society… but now I wonder. Take this; Deploy.” He nodded at the board in front of him. “This is foreign. Some backwater planet discovered just a few decades ago. They play this there and they bet on it; they make it important. But what do we have to bet with? What would be the point of my wagering Ikroh, say?”

“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.”

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 “The individual is obsolete.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.”

“They’re selected and used. Like game-pieces. They don’t count.” Gurgeh sounded impatient. He left the tall fireplace, returned to the couch. “Besides, I’m not one of them.”

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.

The conversation—if you could call it that—had become a game. The object was to keep talking; not to talk continuously, which any idiot could do, but to pause only when the young man was not signaling—through bodily or facial language, or actually starting to speak—that he wanted to cut in. Instead, Gurgeh would stop unexpectedly in the middle of a point, or after having just said something mildly insulting, but while still giving the impression he was going to keep talking. Also, Gurgeh was quoting almost verbatim from one of his own more famous papers on game-theory; an added insult, as the young man probably knew the text as well as he did.

“Oh, it’s all so wonderful in the Culture, isn’t it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing’s exploited, but there’s still luck and heartache and joy, there’s still chance and advantage and disadvantage.”

Mawhrin-Skel told him. It was almost enough. The girl struggled brilliantly to the very end, and deprived him on the final move. The Full Web fell apart, and he won by thirty-one points, two short of the Culture’s existing record.

The machine was mad. Anybody could make up anything they wanted; sound, moving pictures, smell, touch… there were machines that did just that. You could order them from a store and effectively paint whatever pictures—still or moving—you wanted, and with sufficient time and patience you could make it look as realistic as the real thing, recorded with an ordinary camera. You could simply make up any film sequence you wanted.

Some people used such machines just for fun or revenge, making up stories where appalling or just funny things happened to their enemies or their friends. Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible; in a society like the Culture, where next to nothing was forbidden, and both money and individual power had virtually ceased to exist, it was doubly irrelevant.

He tried to think calmly. What if the worst did happen? The Culture was generally rather disdainful of individual fame, and therefore equally uninterested in scandal—there

“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 people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and the Culture would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists.”

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.

He still didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. He had tried to think it through, to apply the same sort of cold, logical analysis to his own plight that he would normally bring to bear in a tricky situation in a game, but he just didn’t seem to be able to do so; it was as though that ability could look calmly only on distant, abstract problems, and was incapable of focusing on anything so intricately enmeshed with his own emotional state.

Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

Although it was only four kilometers in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometers, and the craft’s overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometers. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.

Flere-Imsaho was almost pathetically small—it could have hidden inside a pair of cupped hands—but there was something about it which made Gurgeh feel oddly uncomfortable in its presence.

He worked it out, or rather he woke up knowing, one morning, after a nightmare in which he’d been trapped inside a metal sphere and rolled around in some bizarre and cruel game.… Flere-Imsaho, with its spinning outer sections and its disc-like white casing, looked rather like a hidden-piece wafer from a Possession game.

As well as being a physical maze, it is constructed to be what one might call a moral and behavioristic labyrinth as well (its external appearance offers no clues to the internal lay-out, by the way; that’s just for show); the prisoner must make correct responses, act in certain approved ways, or he will get no further, and may even be put further back. In theory a perfectly good person can walk free of the labyrinth in a matter of days, while a totally bad person will never get out. To prevent overcrowding, there’s a time-limit which, if exceeded, results in the prisoner being transferred for life to a penal colony.”

“Sounds ingenious,” Gurgeh said. “Does it work?” “So they’d have us believe. In fact it’s used as an excuse for not giving people a proper trial, and anyway the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.”

“You’ll end up impressed; you’ll appreciate its savage beauty. No; I’m serious. You will. You’ll probably end up wanting to stay.

“Wonder why the Culture’s never genofixed that,” Za said, staring into his glass. “What?” “Being able to breathe through your dick.” Gurgeh thought. “Sneezing at certain moments could be messy.” Za laughed. “There might be compensations.”

“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.”

“An interesting point; if one assumes that one is not morally opposed to lying in the first place, especially when it is largely or significantly what we term self-interested rather than disinterested or compassionate lying, then—”

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.

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

Anyway, he was awash with a bittersweet flood of new and enhanced emotions; the terror of risk and possible defeat, the sheer exultation of the gamble that paid off and the campaign which triumphed; the horror of suddenly seeing a weakness in his position which could lose him the game; the surge of relief when nobody else noticed and there was time to plug the gap; the pulse of furious, gloating glee when he saw such a weakness in another’s game; and the sheer unbridled joy of victory.

Gurgeh almost laughed. “You’re saying my balls are some sort of state secret?” “Effectively. So we’re going to annoy the Empire anyway, even if you do let them operate on you.”

Gurgeh saw many cripples. They sat on street corners, selling trinkets, playing music on scratchy, squeaky instruments, or just begging. Some were blind, some had no arms, some had no legs. Gurgeh looked at the damaged people and felt dizzy; the gritty surface of the street beneath him seemed to tip and heave. For a moment it was as though the city, the planet, the whole Empire swirled around him in a frantic spinning tangle of nightmare shapes; a constellation of suffering and anguish, an infernal dance of agony and mutilation.

The man’s eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused photons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited for the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long-stilled moon.

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.”

“You see, Gurgeh, one can be on either side in the Empire. One can be the player, or one can be… played upon.”

“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 Culture, can’t you gatecrash?” “I suppose so,” Gurgeh conceded. “But nobody’d talk to you.”

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!

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

When it came to it, and the last of the opposition had surrendered, much of what Gurgeh had felt before disappeared.

Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.”

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?

There were some games that were best understood in four dimensions, but Gurgeh only cared about their own particular rules, and the general theories only meant anything to him as they applied specifically to those games.

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.

“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.”

“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?”

“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 could he say to this apex? Were they to argue metaphysics, here, now, with the imperfect tool of language, when they’d spent the last ten days devising the most perfect image of their competing philosophies they were capable of expressing, probably in any form?