couldn’t see any of their distinctive tiered
head-dresses or bleeding-eye symbols.
Kraiklyn had only managed to find three Lives; it didn’t look as though he would be staying all that long in the game.
The white-haired woman in the reserved seat near the front of the terrace got up, stretched and walked up the terrace, between
the couches
and loungers, a bored expression on her face. Just as she drew level with Horza’s couch, a commotion erupted on
a terrace behind them. The
woman stopped and looked. Horza turned round. Even through the quietfield he could hear a man shouting;
what looked like a fight had broken
out. A couple of security guards were trying to restrain two people rolling about on the
floor. The crowd on the terrace had made a circle about
the disturbance and were looking on, dividing their attention between
the preparations for the Damage game and the fisticuffs on the terrace
beside them. Eventually the two people on the floor
were brought to their feet, but instead of both being restrained, only one was—a youngish
man who looked vaguely familiar
to Horza, though he appeared to have been disguising himself with a blond wig which was now slipping off his
head.
The other person who had been fighting, another man, produced some sort of card from his clothes and showed it to the young
man, who
was still shouting. Then the two uniformed guards and the man who had brandished the card led the young man away.
The man with the card
took something small from behind one of the young man’s ears as he was frog-marched off to an access
tunnel. The young woman with the long
white hair crossed her arms and walked on up the terrace. The circle of people on the
terrace above closed again, like a hole in cloud.
Horza watched the woman weave her way through more couches until she left the terrace and he lost sight of her. He looked
up. The dueling
animals still spun and leapt; their white blood seemed to glow as it matted their shaggy hides. They snarled
silently and scythed at each other
with their long forelimbs, but their acrobatics and their aiming had deteriorated; they
were starting to look tired and clumsy. Horza looked back
to the game table; they were all ready, and the game was about to
begin.
Damage was just a fancy card game: partly skill, partly luck and partly bluff. What made it interesting was not just the high
sums involved, or
even the fact that whenever a player lost a life he lost a Life—a living, breathing human being—but the
use of complicated consciousness-
altering two-way electronic fields around the game table.
With the cards in his or her hand, a player could alter the emotions of another player, or sometimes of several others. Fear,
hate, despair,
hope, love, camaraderie, doubt, elation, paranoia; virtually every emotional state the human brain was capable
of experiencing could be
beamed at another player or used for oneself. From far enough away, or in a field shield close in,
the game could look like a pastime for the
deranged or the simple-minded. A player with an obviously strong hand might suddenly
throw it in; somebody with nothing at all might gamble
all the credits they had; people broke down weeping or started laughing
uncontrollably; they might moan with love at a player known to be their
worst enemy or claw at their restraining straps to
free themselves for a murdering attack on their best friend.
Or they could kill themselves. Damage players never did get free from their chairs (should they ever do so, an Ishlorsinami
would shoot
them with a heavy stun gun) but they could destroy themselves. Each game console, from which the emotor units
radiated the relevant
emotions, on which the cards were played and where the players could see the time and the number of
Lives they each had left, contained a
small hollow button, inside which a needle filled with poison lay ready to inject any
stabbing finger which pushed it.
Damage was one of those games in which it was unwise to make too many enemies. Only the very strong-willed indeed could defeat
the
urge to suicide implanted in their brains by a concerted attack of half a table of players.
At the finish of each hand of cards, when the money which had been gambled was taken by the player with the most card points,
all the
other players who had stayed with the betting lost a Life. When they had none left they were out of the game, as they
would be if they ran out of
money. The rules said the game ended when only one player had any Lives left, though in practice
it finished when the remaining contestants
agreed that if they stayed any longer they were likely to lose their own Lives
to whatever disaster was about to ensue. It could get very
interesting at the end of a game when the moment of destruction
was very close, the hand had gone on for some time, a great deal of money
had been gambled on that one hand, and one or several
players would not agree to call it a day; then the sophisticates really were separated
from the simians, and it became even
more a game of nerve. Quite a few of the best Damage players of the past had perished trying to out-
dare and out-stay each
other in such circumstances.
From a spectator’s point of view, Damage’s special attraction was that the closer you stood to the emotor unit of any particular
player, the
more of the emotions they were experiencing affected you directly, too. A whole subculture of people hooked on
such thirdhand feelings had
grown up in the few hundred years since Damage had become such a select but popular game: the
moties.
There were other groups playing Damage. The Players of the Eve of Destruction were simply the most famous and the richest.
The moties
could get their emotional fix in lots of places throughout the galaxy, but only in a full game, only on the edge
of annihilation, only with the very best
players (plus a few hopefuls) could the most intense experiences be obtained. It
was one of these unfortunates Horza had impersonated when
he had discovered that an access pass could not be had for less
than twice the amount of money he had made on the shuttle. Bribing a door
guard had been a lot cheaper.
The real moties were packed tightly behind the fence separating them from the Lives. Sixteen clumps of sweating, nervous-looking
people
—like the game players, mostly male—they jostled and pressed forward, trying to get near to the table, near to the Players.
Horza watched them as the cards were dealt by the chief Ishlorsinami. Moties jumped up and down, trying to see what was happening,
and
security guards fitted with baffle helmets to keep out the emotor pulses patrolled the perimeter of the fence, tapping
nerver prods on their thighs
or palms and watching warily.
“… Sarble the Eye…" somebody nearby said, and Horza turned to see. A cadaverous-looking human lying on a couch behind and
to
Horza’s left was talking to another and pointing up to the terrace where the disturbance had occurred a few minutes earlier.
Horza heard the
words “Sarble" and “caught" a few more times from elsewhere around him as the news spread. He turned round
to watch the game as the
Players started to inspect their hands; the betting began. Horza thought it was a pity the reporter
had been caught, but it might mean that the
security guards relaxed a little, giving him a better chance of not being asked
for his pass.
Horza was sitting a good fifty meters from the nearest player, a woman whose name he had heard mentioned but had forgotten.
As the first
hand progressed, only mild versions of what she was feeling and was being made to feel impinged upon his consciousness.
Nevertheless, he
didn’t enjoy the sensation, and switched on the lounger’s baffle field, using the small control set on one
arm of the couch. Had he wanted, he
could have canceled the immediate effect of the player he just happened to be sitting
behind and substituted the effects of any of the other
emotor units on the table. The effect would have been nothing like
as intense as what the moties or the Lives were experiencing, but it would
certainly have given a good idea of what the Players
were going through. Most of the other people around him were using their lounger’s
controls in that way, flicking from one
player to another in an attempt to judge the overall state of the game. Horza would concentrate on
Kraiklyn’s broadcast emotions
later, but for now he just wanted to settle in and get the general feel of the game.
Kraiklyn dropped out of the first hand early enough to be sure of avoiding losing a Life when it finished; with so few Lives
of his own it was
the wisest course unless he had a very strong hand. Horza watched the man carefully as he sat back in his
seat and relaxed, his emotor unit
dormant. Kraiklyn licked his lips and wiped his brow. Horza decided in the next hand he
would eavesdrop on what Kraiklyn was going through,
just to see what it was like.
The hand finished. Wilgre won. He waved, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. Some moties had fainted already; at the other
end of the