Read Online The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks - Free Book Online Page A

Gurgeh's button terminal beeped. 'Yes?' he said. Chamlis's voice spoke from the button. 'The fly-dropping just asked me to represent you in a Stricken adjudication. Do you want me to?' 'Yes, I'd like you to,' Gurgeh said, watching Mawhrin-Skel's fields flicker white with anger in front of him. '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