Iain Banks - The Player of Games

“I’ll be there in twenty seconds,” Chamlis said, closing the channel.

“Twenty-one point two,” Mawhrin-Skel said acidly, exactly twenty-one point two seconds later, as Chamlis appeared over the edge of the balcony, its casing dark against the cataract beyond. Chamlis turned its sensing band to the smaller machine.

“Thank you,” Chamlis said warmly. “I had a bet on with myself that I’d have you counting the seconds to my arrival.”

Mawhrin-Skel’s fields blazed brightly, painfully white, lighting up the entire balcony for a second; people stopped talking and turned; the music hesitated. The tiny drone seemed almost literally to shake with dumb rage.

“Fuck you!” it screeched at last, and seemed to disappear, leaving only an after-image of sun-bright blindness behind it in the night. The coals blazed bright, a wind whipped at clothes and hair, several of the paper lanterns bucked and shook and fell from the arches overhead; leaves and nightflowers drifted down from the two arches immediately over where Mawhrin-Skel had been floating.

Chamlis Amalk-ney, red with happiness, tipped to look up into the dark sky, where a small hole appeared briefly in the cloud cover. “Oh dear,” it said. “Do you think I said something to upset it?”

Gurgeh smiled and sat down at the game-set. “Did you plan that, Chamlis?”

Amalk-ney bowed in mid-air to the other drones, and to Boruelal. “Not exactly.” It turned to face Olz Hap, sitting on the far side of the game-web from Gurgeh. “Ah… by way of contrast: a fair human.”

The girl blushed, looked down. Boruelal made the introductions.

Stricken is played in a three-dimensional web stretched inside a metre cube. The traditional materials are taken from a certain animal on the planet of origin; cured tendon for the web, tusk ivory for the frame. The set Gurgeh and Olz Hap used was synthetic. They each put up their hinged screens, took the bags of hollow globes and coloured beads (nutshells and stones in the original) and selected the beads they wanted, locking them in the globes. The adjudicating drones ensured there was no possibility of anyone seeing which beads went into which shells. Then the man and the girl each took a handful of the little spheres and placed them in various places inside the web. The game had begun.

She was good. Gurgeh was impressed. Olz Hap was impetuous but canny, brave but not stupid. She was also very lucky. But there was luck and luck. Sometimes you could sniff it out, recognise things were going well and would probably continue to go well, and play to that. If things did keep going right, you profited extravagantly. If the luck didn’t persist, well, you just played the percentages.

The girl had that sort of luck, that night. She made the right guesses about Gurgeh’s pieces, capturing several strong beads in weak disguises; she anticipated moves he’d sealed in the Foretell shells; and she ignored the tempting traps and feints he set up.

Somehow he struggled on, coming up with desperate, improvised defences against each attack, but it was all too seat-of-the-pants, too extemporary and tactical. He wasn’t being allowed the time to develop his pieces or plan a strategy. He was responding, following, replying.

He preferred to have the initiative.

It was some time before he realised just how audacious the girl was being. She was going for a Full Web; the simultaneous capture of every remaining point in the game-space. She wasn’t just trying to win, she was trying to pull off a coup which only a handful of the game’s greatest players had ever accomplished, and which nobody in the Culture — to Gurgeh’s knowledge — had yet achieved. Gurgeh could hardly believe it, but it was what she was doing. She was sapping pieces but not obliterating them, then falling back; she was striking out through his own avenues of weakness, then holding there. She was inviting him to come back, of course, giving him a better chance of winning, and indeed of achieving the same momentous result, though with far less hope of doing so. But the self-confidence of it! The experience and even arrogance such a course implied!

He looked at the slight, calm-faced girl through the web of thin wires and little suspended spheres, and could not help but admire her ambition, her vaulting ability and self-belief. She was playing for the grand gesture, and to the gallery, not settling for a reasonable win, despite the fact that the reasonable win would be over a famous, respected game-player. And Boruelal had thought she might feel intimidated by him! Well, good for her.

Gurgeh sat forward, rubbing his beard, oblivious of the people now packing the balcony, silently watching the game.

He struggled back into it somehow. Partly luck, partly more skill than even he thought he possessed. The game was still poised for a Full Web victory, and she was still the most likely to achieve it, but at least his position looked less hopeless. Somebody brought him a glass of water and something to eat. He vaguely recalled being grateful.

The game went on. People came and went around him. The web held all his fortune; the little spheres, holding their secret treasures and threats, became like discrete parcels of life and death, single points of probability which could be guessed at but never known until they were challenged, opened, looked at. All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.

He no longer knew what body-made drugs washed through him, nor could he guess what the girl was using. He had lost all sense of self and time.

The game drifted for a few moves, as they both lost concentration, then came alive again. He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed.

He looked at that model, twisted it.

The game changed.

He saw a way to win. The Full Web remained a possibility. His, now. It all depended. Another twist. Yes; he would win. Almost certainly. But that was no longer enough. The Full Web beckoned, tantalisingly, seductively, entrancingly…

“Gurgeh?” Boruelal shook him. He looked up. There was a hint of dawn over the mountains. Boruelal’s face looked grey and sober. “Gurgeh; a break. It’s been six hours. Do you agree? A break, yes?”

He looked through the web at the pale, waxen face of the young girl. He gazed round in a sort of daze. Most of the people had gone. The paper lanterns had disappeared, too; he fell vaguely sorry to have missed the little ritual of throwing the glowing lamps over the terrace edge and watching them drift down to the forest.

Boruelal shook him once more. “Gurgeh?”

“Yes; a break. Yes, of course,” he croaked. He got up, stiff and sore, muscles protesting and joints creaking.

Chamlis had to stay with the game-set, to ensure the adjudication. Grey dawn spread across the sky. Somebody gave him some hot soup, which he sipped while he ate a few crackers and wandered through the quiet arcades for a while, where a few people slept or still sat and talked, or danced to quiet, recorded music. He leant on the balustrade above the kilometre drop, sipping and munching, dazed and vacant from the game, still playing and replaying it somewhere inside his head.

The lights of the towns and villages on the mist-strewn plain below, beyond the semi-circle of dark rain forest, looked pale and uncertain. Distant mountain tops shone pink and naked.

“Jernau Gurgeh?” a soft voice said.

He looked over the plain. The drone Mawhrin-Skel floated a metre from his face. “Mawhrin-Skel,” he said quietly.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“How goes the game?”

“Fine, thank you. I think I’ll win now… pretty sure in fact. But there’s just a chance I might win…” He felt himself smiling. “… famously.”