“Here, too, have come the hangers-on — the Damage groupies, the fortune seekers, the past failures at the game desperate for another try if they can only raise the money and the Lives… and Damage’s very own special sort of human debris: the moties, victims of the game’s emotional fall-out; mind-junkies who only exist to lap at the crumbs of ecstasy and anguish falling from the lips of their heroes, the Players of the Game.
“Nobody knows exactly how all these different groups hear about the game or even how they all get here in time, but the word goes out to those who really need to or want to hear about it, and like ghouls they come, ready for the game and the destruction.
“Originally Damage was played on such occasions because only during the breakdown of law and morality, and the confusion and chaos normally surrounding Final Events, could the game be carried out in anything remotely resembling part of the civilised galaxy; which, believe it or not, the Players like to think they’re part of. Now the subsequent nova, world-busting or other cataclysm is seen as some sort of metaphysical symbol for the mortality of all things, and as the Lives involved in a Full Game are all volunteers, a lot of places — like good old pleasure-oriented, permissive Vavatch — let the game take place with official blessing from the authorities. Some people say it’s not the game it used to be, even that it’s become something of a media event, but I say it’s still a game for the mad and the bad; the rich and the uncaring, but not the careless; the unhinged… but well connected. People still die in Damage, and not just the Lives, either, or the Players.
“It’s been called the most decadent game in history. About all you can say in the game’s defence is that it, rather than reality, occupies the warped minds of some of the galaxy’s more twisted people; gods know what they would get up to if it wasn’t there. And if the game does any good apart from reminding us — as if we needed reminding — how crazy the bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform can become, it does occasionally remove one of the Players and frighten the rest for a while. In these arguably insane times, any lessening or attenuation of madness is maybe something to be grateful for.
“I’ll be filing another report again some time during the course of the game, from within the auditorium if I can get in there. But in the meantime, goodbye and take care. This is Sarble the Eye, Evanauth City, Vavatch.”
The image on the wrist screen of a man standing in sunlight on a plaza faded; the half-masked, youngish face disappearing.
Horza put his terminal screen back onto his cuff. The time display winked slowly with the countdown to Vavatch’s destruction.
Sarble the Eye, one of the most famous of the humanoid galaxy’s freelance reporters, and also one of the most successful at getting into places he wasn’t supposed to, would now probably be trying to enter the games hall — if he hadn’t got in already; the broadcast Horza had just watched had been recorded that afternoon. Doubtless Sarble would be in disguise, so Horza was glad he’d bribed his way in before the reporter’s broadcast went out and the security guards round the hall got even more wary; it had been hard enough as it was.
Horza, in his new guise as Kraiklyn, had posed as a motie — one of the emotional junkies who followed the erratic, secretive progress of the major game series round the more tawdry fringes of civilisation, having discovered that all but the most expensive reserved places had been sold out the day before. The five Aoish credit Tenths he had started out with that morning were now reduced to three; though he also had some money keyed into a couple of credit cards he’d bought. That currency would shrink in real value, though, as the destruction time drew nearer.
Horza took a deep, satisfying breath and looked around the big arena. He had climbed as high as he could up the banked steps, slopes and platforms, using the interval before the game began to get an overview of the whole thing.
The dome of the arena was transparent, showing stars and the bright shining line that was the Orbital’s far side, now in daylight. The lights of shuttles coming and going — mostly going — traced lines across the still points. Beneath the dome cover hung a smoky haze, lit with the popping lights of a small firework display. The air was filled, too, with the chanting of massed voices; a choir of scalecones stood banked on the far side of the auditorium. The humanoids forming the choir appeared identical in all but stature and in the tones they produced from their puffed-out chests and long necks. They seemed to be making the ambient racket, but as he looked around the arena Horza could make out the faint purple edges in the air where other, more localised sound fields held command, over smaller stages where dancers danced, singers sang, strippers stripped, boxers boxed, or people just stood around talking.
Banked all around, the paraphernalia of the game seethed like a vast storm. Maybe ten or even twenty thousand people, mostly humanoid but some utterly different, including not a few machines and drones, they sat or lay or walked or stood, watching magicians, jugglers, fighters, immolators, hypnotics, couplers, actors, orators and a hundred other types of entertainers all doing their turns. Tents had been pitched on some of the larger terraces; rows of seats and couches remained on others. Many small stages frazzled with lights, smoke and glittering holograms and soligrams. Horza saw a 3-D maze spread out over several terraces, full of tubes and angles, some clear, some opaque, some moving, some staying still. Shadows and forms moved inside.
A slow-motion animal trapeze act arced gradually overhead. Horza recognised the beasts performing it; it would become a combat act later on.
Some people walked by Horza: tall humanoids in fabulous clothes, glittering like a gaudy night city seen from the air. They chattered in almost inaudibly high voices, and from a network of fine, golden coloured tubes branching all around their bright red and dark purple faces, tiny puffs of incandescent gas pulsed out, wreathing their semi-scaled necks and naked shoulders, and trailing and dimming behind them in a fiery orange glow. Horza watched them pass. Their cloaks, flowing out behind as though hardly heavier than the air through which they moved, flickered with the image of an alien face, each cloak showing part of one huge moving image, as though a projector overhead was focused on the capes of the moving group. The orange gas touched Horza’s nostrils and his head swam for a second. He let his immune-glands deal with the narcotic, and continued to look around the arena.
The eye of the storm, the still, quiet spot, was so small it could easily have been missed in even a slow and attentive scan of the auditorium. It was not in the centre, but set at one end of the ellipsoid of level ground forming the lowest visible level of the arena. There, under a canopy of still dark lighting units, a round table stood, just about large enough to accommodate at its rim the sixteen large, differently styled chairs which each faced a wedge of colour fixed to the top of the table. A console set into the table itself faced each chair, on which straps and other restraining devices lay opened. Behind each of the seats lay an area of clear space on which small seats, twelve in all, were placed. A small fence separated them from the larger seats in front, and another fence cordoned off the set of twelve seats from a larger area behind where people, most of them moties, were already quietly waiting.
The game seemed to have been delayed. Horza sat down on what was either an over-designed seat or a rather unimaginative piece of sculpture. He was almost on the highest level of the terraces of the arena, with a good view over most of the rest. There was nobody near by. He reached deep inside his heavy blouse and peeled off some artificial skin from his abdomen. He rolled the skin into a ball and threw it into a large pot that held a small tree, just behind where he sat; then he checked the Aoish credit Tenths, the negotiable memory card, the pocket terminal and the light CRE pistol which had been hidden by the paunch of fake skin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a small, darkly dressed man approach. The man looked at Horza with his head tilted, from about five metres off, then came closer.