Red’s position was different. She needed to kill Stile. Because if he washed out of the Tourney at this point, he would have twenty years as a tenure serf to plot her destruction, assuming she made it through to Citizenship. He would have his power base on Phaze, where he would be safe from her mischief, and could locate her and make forays at any time. The powers of Citizenship were great, but eventually he would get her, and they both knew it. So she needed more than victory in the Tourney. There were ways to kill in the Games. The competitions were designed to be as safe as possible, but a person could have heart-failure during extraordinary physical exertion, or an anesthetic dart in pistol-dueling could be accidentally contaminated with a legal but lethal drug, or equipment could fail at a critical moment. She would surely try to arrange something like that, though it was prohibitively difficult under the experienced eye of the Game Computer. Stile, in turn, would try to prevent any such accident. There was little delay at this stage, since the Game facili-ties now had to support only three Games. The audience for each would be huge. Stile was spared the unpleasant-ness of having to converse with his enemy. They proceeded immediately to the grid.
Again he got the letters. Every time he really wanted the numbers, it seemed, the luck of the draw denied them, Stile did not try to play for Red’s weaknesses; he was not sure what they were, in Game terms. He played for his own strength: TOOL. He liked animals and worked well with them, but he wanted no more android-animal football games or dog-cat-rat games.
It came up 4A. She had gone for ART.
4A? He had selected B!
But his entry was clear; he had miskeyed. Of all the times to do that! This carelessness could cost him the match!
No time for recrimination. The Naked Arts related to Singing, Dancing, Pantomime, Story Telling, Poetry, Humor and the like: presentations before an audience. Stile was good enough at these things; presumably Red was too. She had probably been gridding for Sculpture in 4B; had Stile played correctly, that might have come to pass. With her life’s work in fashioning amulets, she was thoroughly experienced and skilled at that sort of thing. Of course he would not have let her have it; he would have thrown it into Music. Against Clef he had been in trouble; against Red he was pretty sure he would have a decisive advantage in Music. But of course she would not have let him have it, either, so they would have gridded into something else, that perhaps neither of them had much experience in, such as Writing. So he might be just as well on here. He was versed in most of the Naked Arts, and expert in some. If she wanted to match him in the generation of original free verse—
But the grid turned up Dance. All right—he could dance too. Did she have some particular specialty, like the classical minuet? He did not care to risk that; better to throw it into a more creative form, where his imagination could score. Not Ballet, because his thigh injury could interfere, but perhaps something loosely related.
In the end it came to a structured free-form dramatic dance, paradoxical as that seemed. It had a script with set maneuvers, rather like a ballet, but within that frame the particular interpretations were left to the players. It was costumed; in this case it was considered that apparel was useful for effect without being a necessary tool. NAKED did not refer to the absence of clothing, since all serfs lacked that; it simply meant that a particular Game could be played without any device like a bat or computer or hunting dog. So for this nakedness, the participants were clothed, for the benefit of the audience. Stile, recently acclimatized to the conventions of Phaze, was able to take this in stride. Red of course had no difficulty at all. All in all, he felt reasonably well off. The Computer established the script. It had a good Ele of diverse story lines, and varied them enough so that there were few repeats in a given year. This did mean that some play-themes were fairly unusual, but that was all part of the challenge.
This one was based on a tale of the Arabian Nights, “The Afreet’s Beauty Contest.” Citizens tended to favor Arabian motifs, associating with the presumed opulence of ninth- and twentieth-century Arabian culture. Stile had the role of Kamar Al Zaman, a bachelor prince, and Red the part of Princess Budur, Moon of Moons. Stile was not familiar with this particular story, but had a foreboding about it. These Arabian tales could get pretty fundamental. This one was obviously a romance, and the last thing he could stomach was a Game of Love with the enemy he had sworn to destroy. But there was no clean way out, now.
The Computer was the Narrator and stage director. A panel of performing-arts critics was the judge. They would take into consideration the responses of the audience, but would not be bound by it; it was known that audiences often had illiterate tastes and colossal ignorances. Stile was satisfied with this; it meant his performance would be judged on its esthetic merits rather than on his size or Red’s appearance.
Maybe, too, he was foolishly buoyed by his last experience with such a panel, in connection with the harmonica duet. He knew something like that was unlikely to happen again; still...
They took their places on the darkened stage. The light came on in Stile’s part of the set. It was not a fancy Arabian setting, to his surprise, but a simple two-level pseudo-stone alcove.
“Kamar AI Zaman, an Arabian prince, has been con-fined to his chamber by his father the King because Kamar refuses to marry any of the eligible girls of the kingdom or any of the princesses of friendly neighboring Idngdoms. The King wishes to ensure the continuance of the royal line, and harbors a nagging suspicion that his son may be gay, so has taken stringent measures to force the issue and to conceal the situation from the public. Prince Kamar submits to this humiliation with genteel grace. He now does the Dance of the Unbowed Head, symbolizing his determination to pursue his own life without regard for the dictates of royal fashion.”
Suddenly Stile liked this tale better. He could dance this theme! He believed in individual freedom and initiative—especially since he had discovered what life was like in Phaze. Even when an infallible Oracle set a particular fate, man’s ingenuity could shape it into something profitable. Stile was a prince, in the terms of Phaze—and a peasant, in the terms of Proton. His participation in the Tourney, he realized now, was motivated by his desire to change his status. To become a prince.
Stile danced. His archaic costume was designed for dancing rather than for any historical accuracy. He wore white tights that left his legs completely free, and a flowing blue cape that flung out when he whirled. It was fun; he developed his presentation as he did it, showing his defiance of the system, his fierce will-to-succeed. It was Stile against the frame of Proton, Stile against adversity. He spun and leaped and spread his arms in the universal gestures of defiance, and finally wound down to passivity; for he was after all Kamar, imprisoned in the tower like a common serf for daring to choose his own mode of living and loving. No one could appreciate his defiance, here in the dark tower, and this made it empty. Except for the audience. It was large, and it applauded vigorously when Stile finished. Maybe this was a rote-response, clapping because that was what was supposed to be done; but Stile hoped that he had in fact conveyed a mood that all of them could understand. Serf against Citizen ...