It was a slow, dreamlike conversation, during which he gazed as though transfixed at the bright game-board seemingly stretching away from him, while waiting for his words to reach the distant warship, and then for its reply to come back.
"Jernau Gurgeh?"
"I want to know something, ship. Is there any way out of this?" Stupid question. He could see the answer. His position was an inchoate mess; the only certain thing about it was that it was hopeless.
"Out of your present situation in the game?"
He sighed. What a waste of time. "Yes. Can you see a way?"
The frozen holo on the screen in front of him, his displayed position, was like some trapped moment of falling; the instant when the foot slips, the fingers lose their last strength, and the fatal, accelerating descent begins. He thought of satellites, forever falling, and the controlled stumble that bipeds call walking.
"You are more points behind than anybody who has ever come back to win in any Main Series game. You have already been defeated, they believe."
Gurgeh waited for more. Silence. "Answer the question," he told the ship. "You didn't answer the question. Answer me."
What was the ship playing at? Mess, mess, a total mess. His position was a swirling, amorphous, nebulous, almost barbaric welter of pieces and areas, battered and crumbling and falling away. Why was he even bothering to ask? Didn't he trust his own judgement? Did he need a Mind to tell him? Would only that make it real?
"Yes, of course there is a way," the ship said. "Many ways, in fact, though they are all unlikely, near impossible. But it can be done. There isn't nearly enough time to—"
"Goodnight, ship," he said, as the signal continued.
"— explain any of them in detail, but I think I can give you a general idea what to do, though of course just because it has to be such a synoptic appraisal, such a—"
"Sorry, ship; goodnight." Gurgeh turned the channel off. It clicked once. After a little while the closing chime announced the ship had signed off too. Gurgeh looked at the holo image of the board again, then closed his eyes.
By morning he still had no idea what he was going to do. He hadn't slept at all that night, just sat in front of the screen, staring at its displayed panorama of the game until the view was seemingly etched into his brain, and his eyes hurt with the strain. Later he'd eaten lightly and watched some of the broadcast entertainments the Empire fed the population with. It was a suitably mindless diversion.
Pequil arrived, smiling, and said how well Gurgeh had done to stay in contention at all, and how, personally, Pequil was sure that Gurgeh would do well in the second-series games for those knocked out of the Main Series, if he wished to take part. Of course, they were mostly of interest to those seeking promotion in their careers, and led no further, but Gurgeh might do better against other… ah, unfortunates. Anyway; he was still going to Echronedal to see the end of the games, and that was a great privilege, wasn't it?
Gurgeh hardly spoke, just nodded now and again. They rode out to the hall, while Pequil went on and on about the great victory Nicosar had achieved in his first game the previous day; the Emperor-Regent was already on to the second board, the Board of Form.
The priest again asked Gurgeh to resign, and again Gurgeh said he wished to play. They all sat down around the great spread of board, and either dictated their moves to the club players, or made them themselves. Gurgeh sat for a long time before placing his first piece that morning; he rubbed the biotech between his hands for minutes, looking down, wide-eyed, at the board for so long the others thought he'd forgotten it was his turn, and asked the Adjudicator to remind him.
Gurgeh placed the piece. It was as though he saw two boards; one here in front of him and one engraved into his mind from the night before. The other players made their moves, gradually forcing Gurgeh back into one small area of the board, with only a couple of free pieces outside it, hunted and fleeing.
When it came, as he'd known it would without wanting to admit to himself that he did know, the… he could only think of it as a revelation… made him want to laugh. In fact he did rock back in his seat, head nodding. The priest looked at him expectantly, as though waiting for the stupid human to finally give up, but Gurgeh smiled over at the apex, selected the strongest cards from his dwindling supply, deposited them with the Adjudicator, and made his next move.
All he was banking on, it turned out, was the rest being too concerned with winning the game quickly. It was obvious that some sort of deal had been arranged which would let the priest win, and Gurgeh guessed that the others wouldn't be playing at their best when they were competing for somebody else; it would not be their victory. They would not own it. Certainly, they didn't have to play well; sheer weight of numbers could compensate for indifferent play.
But the moves could become a language, and Gurgeh thought he could speak that language now, well enough (tellingly) to lie in it… so he made his moves, and at one moment, with one move, seemed to be suggesting that he had given up… then with his next move he appeared to indicate he was determined to take one of several players down with him… or two of them… or a different one… the lies went on. There was no single message, but rather a succession of contradictory signals, pulling the syntax of the game to and fro and to and fro until the common understanding the other players had reached began to fatigue and tear and split.
In the midst of this, Gurgeh made some at first sight inconsequential, purposeless moves which — seemingly suddenly, apparently without any warning — threatened first a few, then several, then most of the troop-pieces of one player, but at the cost of making Gurgeh's own forces more vulnerable. While that player panicked, the priest did what Gurgeh was relying on him doing, rushing into the attack. Over the next few moves, Gurgeh asked for the cards he'd deposited with the game official to be revealed. They acted rather like mines in a Possession game. The priest's forces were variously destroyed, demoralised, random-move blinded, hopelessly weakened or turned over to Gurgeh or — in only a few cases — to some of the other players. The priest was left with almost nothing, forces scattering over the board like dead leaves.
In the confusion, Gurgeh watched the others, devoid of their leader, squabble over the scraps of power. One got into serious trouble; Gurgeh attacked, annihilated most of his forces and captured the rest, and then kept on attacking without even waiting to regroup.
He realised later he'd still been behind in points at that time, but the sheer momentum of his own resurrection from oblivion carried him on, spreading an unreasoning, hysterical, almost superstitiously intense panic amongst the others.
From that point on he made no more errors; his progress across the board became a combination of rout and triumphal procession. Perfectly adequate players were made to look like idiots as Gurgeh's forces rampaged across their territories, consuming ground and material as though nothing could be easier or more natural.
Gurgeh finished the game on the Board of Origin before the evening session. He'd saved himself; he wasn't just through to the next board, he was in the lead. The priest, who'd sat looking at the game-surface with an expression Gurgeh thought he'd have recognised as «stunned» even without his lessons in Azadian facial language, walked out of the hall without the customary end-of-game pleasantries, while the other players either said very little or were embarrassingly effusive about his performance.
A crowd of people clustered round Gurgeh; the club members, some press people and other players, some observing guests. Gurgeh felt oddly untouched by the surrounding, chattering apices. Crowding up to him, but still trying not to touch him, somehow their very numbers lent an air of unreality to the scene. Gurgeh was buried in questions, but he couldn't answer any of them. He could hardly make them out as individual inquiries anyway; the apices all talked too fast. Flere-Imsaho floated in above the heads of the crowd, but despite trying to shout people down to gain their attention, all it succeeded in attracting was their hair, with its static. Gurgeh saw one apex try to push the machine out of his way, and receive an obviously unexpected and painful electric shock.