John Brunner - The Squares of the City

But this dramatization of chess, with the living pieces moving according to carefully rehearsed patterns, was something infinitely more impressive than any stunt.

It was a long game, though—eighty or ninety moves—even shorn of the thinking time it must have needed in the actual tournament. I’m not a good enough player to appreciate the fine points of end-game play, and long before the forces on either side were reduced to two pawns and a rook I was feeling as restive as I had when watching Cordoban take on Dr. Mayor after dinner at the TV center.

I noticed that I was not completely alone in growing restive. In the opening stages the play was interesting enough as simple spectacle: pieces not being moved dropped to one knee to facilitate the audience’s view, and there were pauses at intervals to emphasize a particularly skilled piece of development. Usually there was a spattering of applause when this happened, and once there was a burst of approving cries as well. The taking of a piece was pantomimed with short daggers, and the victim was then carried from the board by two pawns of the opposing side and dumped on the lawn. The whole thing took place almost in silence, aside from the tap of the drum which signaled each move, and the occasional clapping.

But once the slow routine of the end game set in, with the pawns solemnly moving their one square forward in monotonous alternation, almost everyone except Garcia and a few others (Garcia himself, I noticed, was reliving the game in an agony of nervousness) adopted polite but bored expressions and signaled more and more often to the hovering waiters for a tray of drinks.

The most noticeable exceptions to this rule, aside from Garcia, were President Vados and Diaz. Vados watched with as much attention as a fan at a Melbourne test (the likeness reminded me that sometime I ought to go home and see another Shield match—sometime); Diaz, on the other hand, seemed to be watching Vados almost as closely as the game itself.

Once, when the game had been halted for a particular move to sink in, Vados happened to glance at his Minister of the Interior. Their eyes met. A muscle in Vados’s cheek tensed suddenly. Diaz’s hands clenched, with deliberation, as if squeezing something that wasn’t there. The tableau lasted a few seconds; then both at once looked back toward the game, with a suspicion of guilt, like children pretending they hadn’t been disobedient.

There had been dislike in their expressions. Or perhaps not dislike, no. Something nearer to—nearer to hatred, and yet tempered with a mutual respect. I thought of all the stories I’d heard about their rivalry. Well, there it was, burning brightly. And unless habit had enabled them to control it, it was violent enough to break loose.

The pieces finished their complicated maneuverings; the white king dropped to his knees and bent his head. The black king stepped from the board, bowed before Garcia, and gave him the dagger from his side, before escorting him across the board to administer the coup de grace in pantomime. Vados led the applause, and Garcia stood between the two tall kings smiling and nervously fingering his spectacles.

Then Diaz looked at Vados again. This time he smiled: a great loose-lipped smile that exposed a broken tooth.

Beside me, Senora Cortes gathered herself together with a sigh.

“Well, that’s over,” she said with satisfaction. “Now we only have to join the line of people waiting to say good-bye to the president, and we can get away.”

“ ‘Belita!” interrupted her husband, a distant look in his eyes. “You’re going back to the studios, aren’t you? I want to stay and have a word with Pablo about that king’s knight development in the opening—I haven’t seen him use it before.”

“Very well,” said Senora Cortes composedly. “I’ll see you at home tonight.”

Cortes pushed his way through the dissolving crowd; servants rerolled the chessboard and carted it away; I went to receive Vados’s nod of dismissal and returned to my car.

This was a cock-eyed country, I was thinking as I drove away down the road to the city. Chess champions for public heroes; public opinion molded by subliminal perception, without any great effort made to conceal the fact; primitive squalor next door to buildings as modern as tomorrow. What a weird city this “child” of Vados’s had turned out to be…

And what was I to make of this subliminal perception business, anyway? Maria Posador had been right to assume—as she had—that I would react against it; yet now I had been told by Cortes that he had himself made appalling discoveries in the shantytowns, and Cortes struck me as a man not only of high intelligence but of a certain old-fashioned rectitude, a man to whom telling a lie, no matter how worthy a cause it furthered, would be repulsive. Again, in all honesty, I must reserve judgment, I told myself. And, in the same moment, I wondered how much of that impulse was true honesty, how much simple unwillingness to commit myself beyond the bounds of the field in which I was skilled.

It became clear as I reentered the city that since the frightened reaction of last night and this morning life had swung back toward normality; at any rate, there was a liveliness of the kind that was customary on saint’s day evenings, with many people in the bars and restaurants, and occasional groups of musicians playing in the squares and on street corners. In a vague hope that I might likewise get back to normal, I collected my camera and notebooks and went out into the market quarter again.

But here the stamp of the panic that had followed the Guerrero killing was impressed heavily even now. The streets were quiet; a municipal street sprinkler had been through them, and the surface of the road was shiny with recent wet.

I passed a small shrine set in the wall of one of the houses—a crude clay statuette of the Virgin, with a niche around it and a shelf with some candle spikes in front. There were several candles guttering here, one of them with a notice stuck on it. I lifted the sheet of paper and read it.

“For the soul of Mario Guerrero,” it said in Spanish. “He was killed by those”—then a word I couldn’t understand but which I presumed to be an obscenity—”Indians who themselves are without souls.”

“Ay!” said a harsh voice from across the street. “No toce!” I swung my head. Two ruffian-type men stepped from a dark doorway opposite, each carrying a heavy cudgel. I teased myself as they approached.

“Que hace Vd.?” said one of them threateningly. The other, after scrutinizing my face closely, motioned to his companion to lower his club.

“ Es el Senor Hakluyt, no?” he said. “I have seen your honor on the television. Apologies, senor—we set that candle there as a warning and a reminder to these peasants that the death of Mario Guerrero”—he crossed himself—”will not go unavenged. It will be well, if you desire peace, not to come this way again.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said shortly, and made at a smart pace for the end of the street. If I was going to have to contend with belligerent supporters of the Citizens’ Party, I might equally well get involved with Tezol’s faction, and no contract was going to make me risk my life in a street brawl. As a concession to duty, I went back to the main traffic nexus and spent a couple of hours counting the flow, before deciding to call it a day and going to bed.

I really needed at least another week’s work before progressing to a digest of my results; on the other hand, with the city in its present abnormal condition I would probably be fouling up my averages if I combined current data with what I already had. Rather than waste time, therefore, I settled down for the next two days at the traffic department, converting vehicle counts into computer data and running them, setting limits to my parameters, and developing the first approximations for the terms in my main equations. Owing to the relatively small quantity of data I had to hand, I went through the job rather more quickly than I really liked. But Angers was much impressed when, at noon on Friday, he found me actually sketching a diagram of a tentative revised layout for the market area.