John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“To listen to him, senor—and we listened, for he had been at my right hand for twenty years nearly—you would have said he was a foolish mystic, a clairvoyant claiming to foretell the future. But we had seen what he could do already, and we agreed. If we had not agreed, we should have split Aguazul apart, and like the dog in the fable of Aesop that dropped its bone in the river through greed, we should have lost all that we were fighting to save.

“But no one else knew, Senor Hakluyt. Until you, no one else in the world knew what was being done.”

“I don’t see how it could be possible ?”I said helplessly. “People—people are—”

“You find it humiliating that you, too, have been employed as a piece on the board.” Vados looked at me unblinkingly. “I understand. But you may take comfort, for you are also the first and only to see what was being done. It is truly quite simple—so simple it can be done without the person knowing there has been a change in his life. Or so I believed, so we believed.

“We needed first a people which is well and firmly ruled. We had that; there is order and law in force in Ciudad de Vados.

“A division into sides was also simple. As you shrewdly say, a partial division exists into black and white, or more nearly darker and lighter. But we selected our pieces where their sympathies lay—some, like Brown, the lawyer, though white-skinned and foreigners, were with the black pieces and with Diaz; some others, although native-born, sided by prejudice with the Citizens of Vados Party and thus with the white cause.

“Then we had to agree that certain pieces should be allotted roles equivalent to the power of the pieces on the actual board. Thus Alejandro Mayor himself— I am sure he did not see what would befall him—was my Queen, the most powerful piece on the board, and wielded equivalent-power affecting everyone in the country, through the television, the radio, and the newspaper Liberdad. And we also agreed that should a piece be taken, it must be rendered incapable of further influencing the real world. That meant—”

“That meant death,” I said. I was looking at some of the names on the files before me. Fats Brown was dead; Felipe Mendoza was dead; Mario Guerrero was dead…

“For some, it meant death,” agreed Vados grayly. “Not for all. After the first few I felt this was worse than—but no matter, it is finished now. Yes, I was saying, it was then amazingly easy to predict and to coerce one’s pieces. Let us take a very clever thing which Diaz did against me. He wished to—to take Mario Guerrero. He knew Guerrero despised and hated Francis, that if they were brought together, Guerrero would insult him, and that if he insulted Francis’s skin, Francis would strike him in uncontrolled rage. Had Francis not killed Guerrero with his fist, moreover, he would in all probability have sought him out afterwards and killed him then, for every previous time he had been so insulted he had grown insanely violent. He had left two countries because of this… I had hardly believed that people were so uncomplicated!”

“What about me, then?”

“Oh, you obeyed orders, you furnished me with plans which we demanded, in some ways you reacted as foreseen— but you were sometimes so difficult! We thought you would dislike Brown, who was so unlike you and who so much hated distinctions of race. Instead, you became friendly with him. And Maria Posador, widow of the defeated rival, widow of him who had not built this city of which you thought so highly—we expected you to be as ice one to the other, perhaps that you would approach her as a beautiful woman and be repelled and insulted by her. But there again, no! So I was faced with an irremediable weakness in one of my pieces, which Diaz might too readily have exploited. In consequence, I moved you only a few times. But in the end the weakness turned against Diaz, and in seeking to take you from the board and also to abide by the agreement that each piece should take what it took, he was forced to an unwieldy contrivance—and it failed.”

“You—you were aware of who the other’s pieces were?”

“All but the pawns we knew of beforehand. We agreed at the beginning that the power and value of pawns vary with the progress of the game, and that therefore we should name our pawns, one to the other, as they came into play. But the officers we named first of all, and agreed on their powers; that took long, even with Alejo as arbitrator.”

“You mean Diaz allowed one of his opponent’s pieces to act as—as referee?”

Vados shrugged. “I think we understood,” he said in low tones, “that what Alejo cared about was not that one or the other of us should emerge the victor, but that the game should be played. It was to him an ultimate goal; whatever the result, nothing in life would ever mean so much to him again.”

“Then he deserved what he got.”

“Perhaps he did.”

I reverted to my questioning. “But I don’t see how you could move a piece!” I said despairingly. “How was—how was I moved from square to square?”

“Oh, you were very difficult, senor! The others—they almost moved themselves. I knew, for instance, that Judge Romero would condemn the suit against Guerrero as political trickery, because he had dined with me the night before and I had heard it from him. If he had not produced the idea himself, I would have guided him in that direction. And then I knew always what Alejo would broadcast, for although he did not know how the game was progressing—that was a secret between Estebin Diaz and myself—he knew of its existence and acted as I advised him. So likewise did Diaz with Cristoforo Mendoza and Tiempo. I knew that Angers hated Brown, regarding him as a traitor, for he was white and English-speaking and had married an Indian woman and gave his services to Sigueiras. Many times it was not necessary to order one piece or another to move—not directly to order it. It sufficed to give a single piece of information or advice and allow it to work in their minds as leaven works in dough. So, to bring about the downfall of Jose Dalban, I had to do no more than advise Luis Arrio that he—or perhaps an agent of his—had burned down the television center. This was true! Then, said Arrio, if the police will do nothing against him, I will act myself by destroying his business—and he did. But before God, I did not foresee that he would kill himself!”

“And you mean you solemnly stuck to the rules of the game when you knew perfectly well that Dalban had done that—and killed Mayor in doing it?” My voice cracked on the last word. “You mean you let it go so far that you actually stopped the police from going after Dalban so that Arrio could get at him instead?”

“Yes, I do assure you, we would study the board as it was; we would select the next move to make, make it—disregarding what the person concerned did of his own accord, because we had to justify every single move one to the other and show how it was effected. Then we would change the position of the pieces here and wait for the next move to be made. The game in fact was played out there in the city—that board in the locked cabinet served merely as a reference.”

He looked now worn out, as though he had undergone a terrific physical strain. His voice had been getting steadily lower, so that now I had to lean forward in my chair to catch his final words.

“We kept faith with each other,” he muttered. “We moved always according to the rules.”

I felt altogether helpless. For no reason except chance, without my demanding it, I suddenly found myself in a position of power over this man who had power I could scarcely believe—and had used it.