plugged
into the game on some sort of exotic double-fix were engaged in sexual foreplay or actual intercourse. Horza made his immune
glands
start up again, and walked stiffly to the front of the terrace, where five couches had been vacated by two males and
three females, who were
rolling around on the ground in front, just behind the restraining barrier. Clothes lay scattered
on the terrace floor. Horza sat on one of the five
free couches. A female head, beaded with sweat, appeared from the tangle
of heaving bodies long enough to look at Horza and breathe, “Feel
free; and if you would like to…" Then her eyes rolled upward
and she moaned. Her head disappeared again.
Horza shook his head, swore and made his way out of the terrace. His attempt to recover the money he had spent bribing his
way in was
met with a pitying laugh.
Horza ended up sitting on a stool in front of a combined bar and betting stall. He ordered a drug bowl and made a small bet
on Kraiklyn to
win the next hand, while his body gradually freed itself of the effects of the concubines’ doctored sweat glands.
His pulse lowered and his
breathing shallowed; perspiration stopped rolling down his brow. He sipped his drug bowl and sniffed
the fumes, while watching Kraiklyn lose
first one and then another hand, though in the first one he pulled out early enough
not to lose a Life. Nevertheless, he was down to one Life now.
It was possible for a Damage player to gamble his own life
if he had no other remaining behind him, but it was a rare thing, and in games where
the very best met hopefuls, as in this
one, the Ishlorsinami tended to forbid it.
The captain of the
Clear Air Turbulence
was taking no chances. He dropped out of every game before he could lose a Life, obviously
waiting for a hand that would
be almost unbeatable before gambling for what might be the last time in the game. Horza ate. Horza drank. Horza
sniffed. Sometimes
he tried to look over at the terrace he had been on at first, where the bored-looking woman was, but he couldn’t see for the
lights. Now and again he looked up at the fighting animals on the trapezes. They were tired now, and injured. The elaborate
choreography of
their earlier movements was gone, and they were reduced to hanging grimly on to their trapeze with one limb
and striking out at each other with
the other clawed arm whenever they happened to come close enough. Drops of white blood
fell like sparse snow and settled on an invisible
force field twenty meters beneath them.
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 leaned 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. Rumor—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 civilized scene. Horza didn’t really believe that rumor
either,
though; in fact he thought that it was just the sort of rumor the Culture would spread about itself.
He pushed the coins away into a pocket inside his blouse as he saw Kraiklyn reaching to the center 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.