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 third-hand 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 near by 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 metres 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 cancelled 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 ellipsoid, in its cage, the rogothuyr snarled. Five Players lost Lives; five seated humans, sitting hopeless and despairing as the effects of the emotor fields still resounded in them, went suddenly slack in their chairs as their helmets sent a neural blast through their skulls strong enough to stun the Lives sitting around them and to make the nearest moties, and the Player each Life belonged to, flinch.
Ishlorsinami undid the restrainers on the dead humans’ seats and carried them away down the access ramp. The remaining Lives gradually recovered, but they sat as listless as before. The Ishlorsinami claimed they always checked that each volunteering Life was genuine, and that the drugs they gave them simply stopped them from becoming hysterical, but it was rumoured that there were ways round the Ishlorsinami screening process, and that some people had succeeded in disposing of their enemies by drugging or hypnotising them and “volunteering” them for the game.
As the second hand began, and Horza switched on his couch monitor to experience Kraiklyn’s emotions, the white-haired woman came back down the aisle and resumed her place in front of Horza, at the front of the terrace, draping herself tiredly over the piece of furniture as though she was bored.