Consider Phlebas (27 page)

Gradually the Lives died. The game went on. Time, according to who you were, dragged or flashed by. The price of drinks and drugs and food went up slowly as the destruction time crept closer. Through the still transparent dome of the old arena the lights of departing shuttles blazed now and again. A fight broke out between two punters at the bar. Horza got up and moved away before the security guards came to break it up.

Horza counted his money. He had two Aoish credit Tenths left, plus some money credited to the negotiable cards, which were becoming harder and harder to use as the accepting computers in the Orbital’s financial network were closed down.

He leant on a restraining bar on a circular walkway, watching the game progress on the table below. Wilgre was leading; the Suut was just behind. They had both lost the same number of Lives, but the blue giant had more money. Two of the hopefuls had left the game, one after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the officiating Ishlorsinami that he could afford to gamble with his own life. Kraiklyn was still in there; but, from the close-up of his face which Horza caught on a monitor screen in a drug bar he passed, the Man was finding the going hard.

Horza toyed with one of the Aoish credit Tenths, wishing the game would end, or at least that Kraiklyn would get put out. The coin stuck to his hand, and he looked down into it. It was like looking into a tiny, infinite tube, lit from the very bottom. By bringing it up to your eye, with the other closed, you could experience vertigo.

The Aoish were a banker species, and the credits were their greatest invention. They were just about the only universally acceptable medium of exchange in existence, and each one entitled the holder to convert a coin into either a given weight of any stable element, an area on a free Orbital, or a computer of a given speed and capacity. The Aoish guaranteed the conversion and never defaulted, and although the rate of exchange could sometimes vary to a greater extent than was officially allowed for - as it had during the Idiran-Culture war - on the whole the real and theoretical value of the currency remained predictable enough for it to be a safe, secure hedge against uncertain times, rather than a speculator’s dream. Rumour - as ever, contrary enough to be suspiciously believable - had it that the group in the galaxy which possessed the greatest hoard of the coins was the Culture; the most militantly unmoneyed society on the civilised scene. Horza didn’t really believe that rumour either, though; in fact he thought that it was just the sort of rumour the Culture would spread about itself.

He pushed the coins away into a pocket inside his blouse as he saw Kraiklyn reaching to the centre of the game table and toss some coins into the large pile already there. Watching carefully now, the Changer made his way round to the nearest money-changer’s bar, got eight Hundredths for his single Tenth (an exorbitant rate of commission, even by Vavatch standards) and used some of the change to bribe his way into a terrace with some unoccupied couches. There he plugged into Kraiklyn’s thoughts.

Who are you? The question leapt out at him, into him.

The sensation was one of vertigo, a stunning dizziness, a vastly magnified equivalent of the disorientation which sometimes affects the eyes when they fasten on a simple and regular pattern, and the brain mistakes its distance from that pattern, the false focus seeming to pull at the eyes, muscles against nerves, reality against assumptions. His head did not swim; it seemed to sink, foundering, struggling.

Who are you? (Who am I?) Who are you?

Slam, slam, slam: the sound of the barrage falling, the sound of doors closing; attack and incarceration, explosion and collapse together.

Just a little accident. A slight mistake. One of those things. A game of Damage, and a high-tech impressionist . . . unfortunate combination. Two harmless chemicals which, when mixed - . . . Feedback, a howl like pain, and something breaking . . .

A mind between mirrors. He was drowning in his own reflection (something breaking), falling through. One fading part of him - the part which didn’t sleep? Yes? No? - screamed from down the deep, dark pit, as it fell: Changer . . . Changer . . . Change - . . . (eee) . . .

. . . The sound faded, whisper-quieted, became the wind-moan of stale air through dead trees on a barren midnight solstice, the soul’s midwinter in some calm, hard place.

He knew -

(Start again . . . )

Somebody knew that somewhere a man sat in a seat, in a big hall in a city in . . . on a big place, a big threatened place; and the man was playing . . . playing a game (a game which killed). The man still there, living and breathing . . . But his eyes did not see, his ears did not hear. He had one sense now: this one, inside here, fastened . . . inside here.

Whisper: Who am I?

There’d been a little accident (life a succession of same; evolution dependent on garbling; all progress a function of getting things wrong) . . .

He (and forget who this ‘he’ is, just accept the nameless term while this equation works itself out) . . . he is the man in the chair in the hall on the big place, fallen somewhere inside himself, somewhere inside . . . another one. A double, a copy, somebody pretending to be him.

. . . But something wrong with this theory . . .

(Start again . . . .)

Marshal forces.

Need clues, reference points, something to hold onto.

Memory of a cell dividing, seen in time lapse, the very start of independent life, though still dependent. Hold that image.

Words (names); need words.

Not yet, but . . . something about turning inside out; a place . . .

What am I looking for?

Mind.

Whose?

(Silence)

Whose?

(Silence)

Whose? . . .

(Silence)

( . . . Start again. . . . )

Listen. This is shock. You were hit, hard. This is just some form of shock, and you’ll recover.

You are the man playing the game (as are we all) . . . Still something wrong, though, something both missing and added. Think of those vital errors; think of that dividing cell, same and not-same, the place that’s turned inside out, the cell cluster turning itself inside out, looking like a split brain (unsleeping, moving). Listen for somebody trying to talk to you. . . .

(Silence)

(This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian:)

Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself?

The individual is the fruit of mistake; therefore only the process has validity . . . So who’s to speak for him?

The wind howls, empty of meaning, a soak for warmth, a cess for hope, distributing his body’s exhausted heat to the black skies, dissolving the salty flame of his life, chilling to the core, sapping and slowing. He feels himself falling again, and knows that this time it is a deeper plunge, to where the silence and the cold are absolute, and no voice cries out, not even this one.

(Howled like the wind:) Whoever cared enough to talk to me?

(Silence)

Whoever ever cared -

(Silence)

Who - ?

(Whisper:) Listen: ‘The Jinmoti of - ‘

. . . Bozlen Two.

Two. Somebody had spoken once. He was the Changer, he was the error, the imperfect copy.

He was playing a different game from the other one (but he still intended to take a life). He was watching, feeling what the other was feeling, but feeling more.

Horza. Kraiklyn.

Now he knew. The game was . . . Damage. The place was . . . a world where a ribbon of the original idea was turned inside out . . . an Orbital: Vavatch. The Mind in Schar’s World. Xoralundra. Balveda. The (and finding his hate, he hammered it into the wall of the pit, like a peg for a rope) Culture!

A breach in the cell wall; waters breaking; light freeing; illumination . . . leading to rebirth.

Weight and cold and bright, bright light . . .

. . . Shit. Bastards. Lost it all, thanks to a Pit of Self-Doubt Treble . . .

A wave of despondent fury swept over him, and something died.

Horza tore the flimsy headset away. He lay quivering on the couch, his eyes gummed and smarting, staring up at the auditorium lights and the two white fighting animals hanging half-dead from the trapezes overhead. He forced his eyes closed, then pulled them open again, away from the darkness.

Pit of Self-Doubt. Kraiklyn had been hit by cards which made the target player question their own identity. From the tenor of Kraiklyn’s thoughts before he’d pulled the headset off, Horza thought Kraiklyn hadn’t been too terrified by the effect, just disorientated. He’d been sufficiently distracted by the attack to lose the hand, and that was all his opponents had been aiming for. Kraiklyn was out of the game.

The effect on him, trying to be Kraiklyn but knowing he wasn’t, had been more severe. That was all it was. Any Changer would have had the same problem; he was certain . . .

The trembling began to fade. He sat up and swung his feet off the couch. He had to leave. Kraiklyn would be going, so he had to.

Pull yourself together, man.

He looked down to the playing table. The breastless woman had won. Kraiklyn glared at her as she raked in her winnings and his straps were unfastened. On the way out of the arena, Kraiklyn passed the limp, still warm body of his last Life as it was released from its seat.

He kicked the corpse; the crowd booed.

Horza stood up, turned and bumped into a hard, unyielding body.

‘May I see that pass now, sir?’ said the guard he’d lied to earlier.

He smiled nervously, aware that he was still trembling a little; his eyes were red, and his face was covered in sweat. The guard gazed steadily at him, her face expressionless. Some of the people on the terrace were watching them.

‘I’m . . . sorry . . . ‘ the Changer said slowly, patting his pockets with shaking hands. The guard put out her hand and took his left elbow.

‘Perhaps you’d better - ‘

‘Look,’ Horza said, bending closer to her. ‘I . . . I haven’t got one. Would a bribe do?’ He started to reach inside his blouse for the credits. The guard kicked up with her knee and twisted Horza’s left arm behind his back. It was all done in the most expert fashion, and Horza had to jump to ride the kick tolerably. He let his left shoulder disconnect and started to crumple, but not before his free hand had lightly scratched the guard’s face (and that, he realised as he fell, had been an instinctive reaction, nothing reasoned; for some reason he found this amusing).

The guard caught Horza’s other arm and pinned both his hands behind his back, using her lock-glove to secure them there. With her other hand she wiped blood from her cheek. Horza knelt on the terrace surface, moaning the way most people would have with an arm broken or dislocated.

‘It’s all right, everybody; just a little problem over a pass. Please continue with your enjoyment,’ the guard said. Then she pulled her arm up; the locked glove hauled Horza up, too. He yelped with pretended pain, and then, head down, was pushed up the steps to the walkway. ‘Seven three, seven three; male code green incoming walk seven spinwards,’ the guard told her lapel mike.

Horza felt her start to weaken as soon as they got to the walkway. He couldn’t see any other guards yet. The pace of the woman behind him faltered and slowed. He heard her gasp, and a couple of drunks leaning on an auto-bar looked at them quizzically; once turned on his bar stool to watch.

‘Seven . . . thr - ‘ the guard began. Then her legs buckled. Horza was dragged down with her, the locked glove staying tight while the muscles in the woman’s body relaxed. He connected his shoulder again, twisted and heaved; the field filaments in the glove gave way, leaving him with livid bruises already starting to form on his wrists. The guard lay on her back on the walkway floor, her eyes closed, breathing lightly. Horza had scraped her with a non-lethal poison nail, he thought; anyway he had no time to wait and see. They were sure to come looking for the guard soon, and he couldn’t afford to let Kraiklyn get too far ahead of him. Whether he was heading back to the ship, as Horza expected he would, or staying to observe more of the game, Horza wanted to stay close.

His hood had fallen back during the fall. He pulled it forward, then hoisted the woman up, dragged her to the bar where the two drunks sat and heaved her onto a bar stool, putting his arms crossed on the bar in front and letting her head rest on them.

The drunk who had watched what had happened grinned at the Changer. Horza tried to grin back. ‘Look after her, now,’ he said. He noticed a cloak at the foot of the other drunk’s bar stool and lifted it up, smiling at its owner, who was too busy ordering another drink to notice. Horza put the cloak round the woman guard’s shoulders, hiding her uniform. ‘In case she gets cold,’ he told the first drunk, who nodded.

Horza walked off quietly. The other drunk, who hadn’t noticed the woman until then, got his drink from the flap in the counter in front of him, turned round to talk to his friend, noticed the woman draped across the bar, nudged her and said, ‘Hey, you like the cloak, uh? How about I get you a drink?’

Before he left the auditorium, Horza looked up. The fighting animals would fight no more. Beneath the shining hoop that was Vavatch’s far - and, at the moment, day - side, one beast lay, in a broad, shallow pool of milky blood, high in the air, its huge four-limbed frame an X poised over the proceedings beneath, the dark fur and heavy head gashed, white flecked. The other creature hung, swaying gently, from its trapeze; it dripped white blood and twisted slowly, hanging by one closed and locked set of talons, as dead as its fallen adversary.

Horza racked his brains, but could not recall the names of these strange beasts. He shook his head and hurried away.

He found the Players’ area. An Ishlorsinami stood by some double doors in a corridor deep underneath the arena surface. A small crowd of people and machines stood or sat around. Some were asking the silent Ishlorsinami questions; most were talking amongst themselves. Horza took a deep breath, then, waving one of his now useless negotiable account cards, elbowed his way through the crowd, saying, ‘Security; come on, out of the way there. Security!’ People protested but moved. Horza planted himself in front of the tall Ishlorsinami. Steely eyes looked down at him from a thin, hard face. ‘You,’ Horza said, snapping his fingers. ‘Where did that Player go? The one in the light one-piece suit, brown hair.’ The tall humanoid hesitated. ‘Come on, man,’ Horza said. ‘I’ve been chasing that card-sharp round half the galaxy. I don’t want to lose him now!’