The Player of Games Read online

  Praise for Iain M. Banks

  “Banks is a phenomenon… writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.”

  —William Gibson

  “There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness.”

  —The Times

  “Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy—the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more.”

  —NME

  “Staggering imaginative energy.”

  —Independent

  “Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.”

  —New York Times

  “The Culture Books are not technological just-so stories. They’re about faith in the future, about the belief that societies can make sense of themselves, can have fun doing so, can live by Good Works, and can do so in circumstances far removed from our own little circle of western civilization.”

  —Wired

  “An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them.”

  —Time Out

  “Pyrotechnic, action-filled, satiric, outlandish, deep and frivolous all at once, these bravura space operas… juggle galactic scale… with a revelatory energy rarely matched in speculative fiction.”

  —Science Fiction Weekly

  “Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth.”

  —New York Review of Science Fiction

  By Iain M. Banks

  Consider Phlebas

  The Player of Games

  Use of Weapons

  The State of the Art

  Against a Dark Background

  Feersum Endjinn

  Excession

  Inversions

  Look to Windward

  The Algebraist

  Matter

  By Iain Banks

  The Wasp Factory

  Walking on Glass

  The Bridge

  Espedair Street

  Canal Dreams

  The Crow Road

  Complicity

  Whit

  A Song of Stone

  The Business

  Dead Air

  The Steep Approach to Garbadale

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1988 by Iain M. Banks

  Excerpt from Matter copyright © 2008 by Iain M. Banks

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/orbitbooks

  First eBook Edition: December 2009

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Ltd.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09586-0

  Contents

  Copyright

  1: Culture Plate

  2: Imperium

  3: Machina Ex Machina

  4: The Passed Pawn

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of MATTER

  1

  Culture Plate

  This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.

  Me? I’ll tell you about me later.

  This is how the story begins.

  Dust drifted with each footstep. He limped across the desert, following the suited figure in front. The gun was quiet in his hands. They must be nearly there; the noise of distant surf boomed through the helmet soundfield. They were approaching a tall dune, from which they ought to be able to see the coast. Somehow he had survived; he had not expected to.

  It was bright and hot and dry outside, but inside the suit he was shielded from the sun and the baking air; cosseted and cool. One edge of the helmet visor was dark, where it had taken a hit, and the right leg flexed awkwardly, also damaged, making him limp, but otherwise he’d been lucky. The last time they’d been attacked had been a kilometer back, and now they were nearly out of range.

  The flight of missiles cleared the nearest ridge in a glittering arc. He saw them late because of the damaged visor. He thought the missiles had already started firing, but it was only the sunlight reflecting on their sleek bodies. The flight dipped and swung together, like a flock of birds.

  When they did start firing it was signaled by strobing red pulses of light. He raised his gun to fire back; the other suited figures in the group had already started firing. Some dived to the dusty desert floor, others dropped to one knee. He was the only one standing.

  The missiles swerved again, turning all at once and then splitting up to take different directions. Dust puffed around his feet as shots fell close. He tried to aim at one of the small machines, but they moved startlingly quickly, and the gun felt large and awkward in his hands. His suit chimed over the distant noise of firing and the shouts of the other people; lights winked inside the helmet, detailing the damage. The suit shook and his right leg went suddenly numb.

  “Wake up, Gurgeh!” Yay laughed, alongside him. She swiveled on one knee as two of the small missiles swung suddenly at their section of the group, sensing that was where it was weakest. Gurgeh saw the machines coming, but the gun sang wildly in his hands, and seemed always to be aiming at where the missiles had just been. The two machines darted for the space between him and Yay. One of the missiles flashed once and disintegrated; Yay shouted, exulting. The other missile swung between them; she lashed out with her foot, trying to kick it. Gurgeh turned awkwardly to fire at it, accidentally scattering fire over Yay’s suit as he did so. He heard her cry out and then curse. She staggered, but brought the gun round; fountains of dust burst around the second missile as it turned to face them again, its red pulses lighting up his suit and filling his visor with darkness. He felt numb from the neck down and crumpled to the ground. It went black and very quiet.

  “You are dead,” a crisp little voice told him.

  He lay on the unseen desert floor. He could hear distant, muffled noises, sense vibrations from the ground. He heard his own heart beat, and the ebb and flow of his breath. He tried to hold his breathing and slow his heart, but he was paralyzed, imprisoned, without control.

  His nose itched. It was impossible to scratch it. What am I doing here? he asked himself.

  Sensation returned. People were talking, and he was staring through the visor at the flattened desert dust a centimeter in front of his nose. Before he could move, somebody pulled him up by one arm.

  He unlatched his helmet. Yay Meristinoux, also bare-headed, stood looking at him and shaking her head. Her hands were on her hips, her gun swung from one wrist. “You were terrible,” she said, though not unkindly. She had the face of a beautiful child, but the slow, deep voice was knowing and roguish; a low-slung voice.

  The others sat around on the rocks and dust, talking. A few were heading back to the club house. Yay picked up Gurgeh’s gun and presented it to him. He scratched his nose, then shook his head, refusing to take the weapon.

  “Yay,” he told her, “this is for children.”

  She paused, slung her gun over one shoulder, and shrugged (and the muzzles of both guns swung in the
sunlight, glinting momentarily, and he saw the speeding line of missiles again, and was dizzy for a second).

  “So?” she said. “It isn’t boring. You said you were bored; I thought you might enjoy a shoot.”

  He dusted himself down and turned back toward the club house. Yay walked alongside. Recovery drones drifted past them, collecting the components of the destructed machines.

  “It’s infantile, Yay. Why fritter your time away with this nonsense?”

  They stopped at the top of the dune. The low club house lay a hundred meters away, between them and the golden sand and snow-white surf. The sea was bright under the high sun.

  “Don’t be so pompous,” she told him. Her short brown hair moved in the same wind which blew the tops from the falling waves and sent the resulting spray curling back out to sea. She stooped to where some pieces of a shattered missile lay half buried in the dune, picked them up, blew sand grains off the shining surfaces, and turned the components over in her hands. “I enjoy it,” she said. “I enjoy the sort of games you like, but… I enjoy this too.” She looked puzzled. “This is a game. Don’t you get any pleasure from this sort of thing?”

  “No. And neither will you, after a while.”

  She shrugged easily. “Till then, then.” She handed him the parts of the disintegrated machine. He inspected them while a group of young men passed, heading for the firing ranges.

  “Mr. Gurgeh?” One of the young males stopped, looking at Gurgeh quizzically. A fleeting expression of annoyance passed across the older man’s face, to be replaced by the amused tolerance Yay had seen before in such situations. “Jernau Morat Gurgeh?” the young man said, still not quite sure.

  “Guilty.” Gurgeh smiled gracefully and—Yay saw—straightened his back fractionally, drawing himself up a little. The younger man’s face lit up. He executed a quick, formal bow. Gurgeh and Yay exchanged glances.

  “An honor to meet you, Mr. Gurgeh,” the young man said, smiling widely. “My name’s Shuro… I’m…” He laughed. “I follow all your games; I have a complete set of your theoretical works on file…”

  Gurgeh nodded. “How comprehensive of you.”

  “Really. I’d be honored if, any time you’re here, you’d play me at… well, anything. Deploy is probably my best game; I play off three points, but—”

  “Whereas my handicap, regrettably, is lack of time,” Gurgeh said. “But, certainly, if the chance ever arises, I shall be happy to play you.” He gave a hint of a nod to the younger man. “A pleasure to have met you.”

  The young man flushed and backed off, smiling. “The pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Gurgeh.… Goodbye… goodbye.”He smiled awkwardly, then turned and walked off to join his companions.

  Yay watched him go. “You enjoy all that stuff, don’t you, Gurgeh?” she grinned.

  “Not at all,” he said briskly. “It’s annoying.”

  Yay continued to watch the young man walking away, looking him up and down as he tramped off through the sand. She sighed.

  “But what about you?” Gurgeh looked with distaste at the pieces of missile in his hands. “Do you enjoy all this… destruction?”

  “It’s hardly destruction,” Yay drawled. “The missiles are explosively dismantled, not destroyed. I can put one of those things back together in half an hour.”

  “So it’s false.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”

  Yay’s mouth twisted in irony. She said, “I can see we have a long way to go before we understand each other, Gurgeh.”

  “Then let me help you.”

  “Be your protégée?”

  “Yes.”

  Yay looked away, to where the rollers fell against the golden beach, and then back again. As the wind blew and the surf pounded, she reached slowly behind her head and brought the suit’s helmet over, clicking it into place. He was left staring at the reflection of his own face in her visor. He ran one hand through the black locks of his hair.

  Yay flicked her visor up. “I’ll see you, Gurgeh. Chamlis and I are coming round to your place the day after tomorrow, aren’t we?”

  “If you want.”

  “I want.” She winked at him and walked back down the slope of sand. He watched her go. She handed his gun to a recovery drone as it passed her, loaded with glittering metallic debris.

  Gurgeh stood for a moment, holding the bits of wrecked machine. Then he let the fragments drop back to the barren sand.

  He could smell the earth and the trees around the shallow lake beneath the balcony. It was a cloudy night and very dark, just a hint of glow directly above, where the clouds were lit by the shining Plates of the Orbital’s distant daylight side. Waves lapped in the darkness, loud slappings against the hulls of unseen boats. Lights twinkled round the edges of the lake, where low college buildings were set among the trees. The party was a presence at his back, something unseen, surging like the sound and smell of thunder from the faculty building; music and laughter and the scents of perfumes and food and exotic, unidentifiable fumes.

  The rush of Sharp Blue surrounded him, invaded him. The fragrances on the warm night air, spilling from the line of opened doors behind, carried on the tide of noise the people made, became like separate strands of air, fibers unraveling from a rope, each with its own distinct color and presence. The fibers became like packets of soil, something to be rubbed between his fingers; absorbed, identified.

  There: that red-black scent of roasted meat; blood-quickening, salivatory; tempting and vaguely disagreeable at the same time as separate parts of his brain assessed the odor. The animal root smelled fuel; protein-rich food; the mid-brain trunk registered dead, incinerated cells… while the canopy of forebrain ignored both signals, because it knew his belly was full, and the roast meat cultivated.

  He could detect the sea, too; a brine smell from ten or more kilometers away over the plain and the shallow downs, another threaded connection, like the net and web of rivers and canals that linked the dark lake to the restless, flowing ocean beyond the fragrant grasslands and the scented forests.

  Sharp Blue was a game-player’s secretion, a product of standard genofixed Culture glands sitting in Gurgeh’s lower skull, beneath the ancient, animal-evolved lower reaches of his brain. The panoply of internally manufactured drugs the vast majority of Culture individuals were capable of choosing from comprised up to three hundred different compounds of varying degrees of popularity and sophistication; Sharp Blue was one of the least used because it brought no direct pleasure and required considerable concentration to produce. But it was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier; not a sensory enhancer or a sexual stimulant or a physiological booster.

  And he didn’t need it.

  That was what was revealed, as soon as the first rush died away and the plateau phase took over. The lad he was about to play, whose previous match of Four-Colors he had just watched, had a deceptive style, but an easily mastered one. It looked impressive, but it was mostly show; fashionable, intricate, but hollow and delicate too; finally vulnerable. Gurgeh listened to the sounds of the party and the sounds of the lake waters and the sounds coming from the other university buildings on the far side of the lake. The memory of the young man’s playing style remained clear.

  Dispense with it, he decided there and then. Let the spell collapse.

  Something inside him relaxed, like a ghost limb untensed; a mind-trick. The spell, the brain’s equivalent of some tiny, crude, looping sub-program, collapsed, simply ceased to be said.

  He stood on the terrace by the lake for a while, then turned and went back into the party.

  “Jernau Gurgeh. I thought you’d run off.”

  He turned to face the small drone which had floated up to him as he re-entered the richly furnished hall. People stood talking, or clustered around game-boards a
nd tables beneath the great banners of ancient tapestries. There were dozens of drones in the room too, some playing, some watching, some talking to humans, a few in the formal, lattice-like arrangements which meant they were communicating by transceiver. Mawhrin-Skel, the drone which had addressed him, was by far the smallest of the machines present; it could have sat comfortably on a pair of hands. Its aura field held shifting hints of gray and brown within the band of formal blue. It looked like a model of an intricate and old-fashioned spacecraft.

  Gurgeh scowled at the machine as it followed him through the crowds of people to the Four-Colors table.

  “I thought perhaps this toddler had scared you,” the drone said, as Gurgeh arrived at the young man’s game-table and sat down in a tall, heavily ornamented wooden chair hurriedly vacated by his just-beaten predecessor. The drone had spoken loudly enough for the “toddler” concerned—a tousle-haired man of about thirty or so—to hear. The young man’s face looked hurt.

  Gurgeh sensed the people around him grow a little quieter. Mawhrin-Skel’s aura fields switched to a mixture of red and brown; humorous pleasure, and displeasure, together; a contrary signal close to a direct insult.

  “Ignore this machine,” Gurgeh told the young man, acknowledging his nod. “It likes to annoy people.” He pulled his chair in, adjusted his old, unfashionably loose and wide-sleeved jacket. “I’m Jernau Gurgeh. And you?”

  “Stemli Fors,” the young man said, gulping a little.

  “Pleased to meet you. Now; what color are you taking?”

  “Aah… green.”

  “Fine.” Gurgeh sat back. He paused, then waved at the board. “Well, after you.”

  The young man called Stemli Fors made his first move. Gurgeh sat forward to make his, and the drone Mawhrin-Skel settled on his shoulder, humming to itself. Gurgeh tapped the machine’s casing with one finger, and it floated off a little way. For the rest of the match it mimicked the snicking sound the point-hinged pyramids made as they were clicked over.

  Gurgeh beat the young man easily. He even finessed the finish a little, taking advantage of Fors’s confusion to produce a pretty pattern at the end, sweeping one piece round four diagonals in a machine-gun clatter of rotating pyramids, drawing the outline of a square across the board, in red, like a wound. Several people clapped; others muttered appreciatively. Gurgeh thanked the young man and stood up.