The Book Of Ian Watson, page 11
“But how does that affect us?” I asked.
“The first expedition got involved in the Game. Maybe they thought they’d dropped into a Las Vegas of the sky.”
“So what’s wrong?”
Captain Wang stared at me with a pained expression. “The fools lost us Ganymede, Mercury, and Luna. To the Krakens, as stakeholders for the Game. They lost us the Moon, man. The Moon.”
For a moment I too stared at him. Then, of course, I burst out laughing. Oh, they were marvelous. They’d been leading me along all this time. Cruel to a spacewrecked castaway, I suppose! But perhaps it was intended therapeutically. Perhaps I was showing signs of alienation, and needed a gigantic dig in the ribs.
Neither Wang nor Rosamundi followed suit, though. And the Highspacer Euclid was indeed fitted out with a kind of casino …
“That’s unenforceable,” I said. “It’s utter nonsense. These Spiders and Pangolins don’t have space navies, do they? You said they don’t fight.”
“They don’t. But then, neither do we.”
“They haven’t any way of getting to Sol system! And even if they could—well, I mean, Spidermen or Pangolins or Giant Squids dropping in on the Moon to collect rent! It’s a fantasy. A joke. Why are you treating it so seriously? Surely they realize that you can’t play board games with worlds?”
“But these aliens do. They play on Showdown, for Jackpot and Janus—and whatever any visitors choose to stake.”
And then I saw the flaw—or read it in their faces.
“You’re afraid that you’ll spark off an interplanetary war between Straight and Flush if you back out? You’ll have kicked the board over. Straight will beat up Flush, or the other way about. You’ll have destroyed an intelligent species. Yes, I see, instead of playing they’d do it for real! Tear each other to pieces.”
“We’re glad you’re quick on the uptake,” said Wang. “Yes indeed, we might trigger the mutual annihilation of two intelligent species who have found a crazy modus vivendi—a way of getting on together—and possibly even the trashing of the Krakens. We have to win our way out of this Game—and win it in such a way that we don’t win: one inch of Jackpot, one centimeter of Janus.”
“Of course, there’s a further problem,” added Rosamundi. “War greatly stimulates technical advances. If the Game turns into a war, Straight or Flush, or maybe both, will be hugely optimized technically. We’re going to drive the winner into High-space—we’ve shown them it can be done—and we’re going to rue it, because they’ll own Luna and Mercury, according to their rules. Preposterous as it is, we’ll have to build up a defense force ourselves. That’ll ruin everything. We’ll poison our souls.”
“Surely this game will have to come to an end some day? There’ll be the same problem. Put up or shut up.”
“It wouldn’t go interstellar, Mr. Cortina. That’s what the risk is now.”
“So get yourself down to the casino,” ordered Wang, “and limber up your wits. Everyone has to be in this, according to the umpires. The rules of the Game we’ll hypno into you presently. But you can regard it as something like planet-wide, role-playing Go in three dimensions with spherical topology. The number of possible plays five ahead at any moment vastly exceeds the number of electrons in the universe. We play,” sighed the Captain, “highly intuitively. With WorldGov’s blessing. We play, not for Luna, but for the survival of two or three alien species—and for our souls, as Bjornson says.”
He raised his hand as though blessing me. But he was only waving me from his cabin.
Touchdown on Showdown: on a single island in blue ocean, up in the northerly temperate zone. No other land is visible. Our nearest neighbors—excepting the Krakens—are the Spidermen up at their Arctic station two thousand klicks further north. The Pangolin station is on the equator, round the other side of the world from us.
The tiny nugget in the ocean swells into a cratered, eroded peak with skirts of lichen green and a thin ribbon of cliff-high coastal plain. Where a subsidiary crater has collapsed into the sea is a deep wide bowl-like harbor; that is the harbor of the Krakens. Above, is the Earth station.
It is another kind of marooning for me: a marooning with forty other people, true … but it bears a resemblance. It bears a resemblance.
So then, in the harbor roosts a shift of half a dozen enormous Krakens, like tentacled submarines at anchor. [Beware those tentacles. They can reach all the way up the cliff and sometimes do so, toying with the rock, stretching themselves—it seems—during the relative immobility of duty; or are they perhaps idly exploring the rather rare (to them) sensation of solid surface—the grain of the board which Spidermen and Pangolins and Earthfolk alike inhabit? We do not expose ourselves in the open.] The Krakens’ oval purple eyes watch underwater corn-screens—installed by Spider work teams. Their phosphor-mantles pulse color mosaics at the sensors around the screens. An interfacing of Hoylish decoders displays the changing state of play up in the Games Room, on the crater lip, as symbols in ranks of curved viewing tanks arranged in the shape of a great globe. We sit at our input consoles on tiers around this globe, like Olympian gods or perhaps like so many personified signs of the Zodiac brooding down upon a world. As do the Pangolins and Spidermen in their own stations. We are surveyed by Hoylish vid-eyes—tiny ornithopterous sensors flitting about like flies—for infringements of the Byzantine rules. The vid-eyes feed down by radio to a multiscreen in the harbor, watched by a Kraken amidst its other duties; Krakens have a pretty awesome channel capacity for information.
A million dots, red, white, and green, pulse in the viewing globe: the placement of the Kraken players skirmishing and wrestling notionally in the seas of Showdown—thickening, thinning, pincering, probing, massing into arabesque formations, three-dimensional patterns which my pre-hypnoed brain almost, but never quite, grasps.
I sit on tier three, above the eastern quadrant of the Northern Hemisphere, scanning my pieces. Real-time play is fairly slow, but not as slow as I’d imagined—and far subtler. By the rules, we aren’t allowed a pattern-seeking computer.
This is all a terrible fantasy! Krakens have no power over us—apart from the addictive compulsion of the Game—yet here we are ceding chunks of real estate in our own solar system eighteen light years away. And if we renege or back out we’ll cause a war that could wipe out one, two, or three species—and reap the whirlwind of that war ourselves. Yet if we go on playing, the Spidermen or Pangolins—or the Krakens as stakeholders—will some day own, us, in some abstract way. And one day they may, just may, come to collect. Which, of course, they won’t succeed in doing—because the whole idea is ludicrous—yet a splinter will have entered our souls once more: the splinter of defense, of the military.
All we know is that if someone from the other side of the world steps into your backyard and says “I own it,” however ridiculous this is, fierce ancient territorial reactions are going to be triggered, subtly altering the parameters of human society for the worse. Once you start building precautionary Highspace warships you might just start using them. How indeed do you train a military arm—unmilitaristically? Whence comes their esprit de corps?
Time to begin reinforcing a salient …
“Player Cortina,” I voice into the record. “Am staking zone two of Io, moon of Jupiter.” Much good may it do them to win part of Io, a moon they knew nothing of… until our first expedition blithely told them of all the moons and worlds we hold. I have to stake rather a lot of Io on a trivial move because Io is so bloody useless and dangerous. I could stake a couple of square klicks of Earth, instead; but WorldGov won’t let us.
“Rosamundi?”
Euclid, of course changed hands—and captains too—when we relieved the previous team. Another helpful rule. So here is Captain Wang, and Rosamundi Bjornson too. Rosamundi and I have time for a little gossip—overheard by a roving vid-eye—as we snatch an automated meal …
“Mr. Cortina?”
(I love you. I’m your wild card. I’m the joker who jumped into your pack from the void. … Do I really love you? It’s madness! I’ve merely imprinted on you, like a duckling newly hatched from the egg of my survival capsule …)
“Is this travel? I haven’t even seen a Pangolin or a Spiderman except on screens—and I daren’t go down to see the Krakens! We’re on the outside—utterly on the outside of things. We’re outsiders! Locked up inside this station like some kind of topological joke—in a goldfish bowl rotated through Highspace so that the outside is the inside.”
She watches me circumspectly. Is the goldfish bowl of my own mind cracking? Is water dripping down my face? No, it’s just sweat, that’s all. A sweat of love.
“I wonder whether there could be some higher arbitrating power in the universe—some court of cosmic appeal—that could conceivably rule in favor of the Pangolins or whoever is owning Luna? Some superbeing that could swoop down out of the Magellanic Clouds and hand over the title deeds? Having first written them, of course!” The notion of title deeds to moons and worlds so amuses me that it is only with difficulty that I avoid breaking up.
Rosamundi eyes me warily. “Consider, Mr. Cortina—”
“Victor, please, call me Victor.”
“Actually, Mr. Cortina, as you might have guessed by now your first name is one reason why Wang kept you on the Euclid. Gamblers need a spot of luck. What better luck than stumbling upon a man named Victor in the middle of the void? But it’s such bad luck to articulate your luck, don’t you think? Like telling a wish when you snap the wishbone. So I think I’ll call you Mr. Cortina, if you don’t mind.”
“So I’m just a mascot.” (Bitterly—full of self-pity.)
She shrugs. “Also a player. Now consider: we have no idea how the Krakens achieved their twin role of umpires and pieces in the Game. Their culture—if that’s the word for it—is hidden by miles of water. We don’t even know, Mr. Cortina, that the state of play represented in the view-tanks bears any relation to what the Krakens themselves are actually doing! Are one million Krakens really cruising the ocean at all those co-ordinates, or are they just simulating it? Perhaps they really are devious superintelligences.”
(Ah, your bright red hair, Rosamundi! The blood courses through my veins when I see you. And you cannot call me intimately by my name, or it would spoil our luck!)
She fans her hands: a hand of cards. Long slender tactile fingers … they will never touch me. She wears several synthdiamond rings, and nailpaint the same color as her hair. Red diamond fingers, a suit of ten. Unheartlike fingers. Heartless.
“They may be stakeholders—but they can’t set a tentacle on dead, dry Jackpot.”
“Maybe it’s like the collector who has his treasures locked up in a bank vault which he never visits? He knows he owns them. He masturbates over the knowledge. The knowledge is important, that’s all. The fact that the Pangolins and Spidermen seem to be the territory-collectors is the really clever part. They aren’t, no matter what the state of play seems to be. They’re both on a winning streak. But in the end the bank always wins. They’ve banked Jackpot and Janus. Maybe in the end they’ll have to start staking bits of Flush and Straight, then the whole damn shebang.”
“It doesn’t sound like superintelligent conduct to me. It sounds plain dumb.”
“No doubt a rabbit watching a human being swing a golf club to wham a little ball into a hole would think it was pretty dumb, if it could think so much. But actually, compared to the rabbit’s ‘sensible’ activities, the golfer is superintelligent—in a context of ritual behavior. Who knows how the superintelligent might amuse themselves?”
I nod at the hovering vid-eye. “Maybe they amuse themselves by watching us try to figure this out? What does WorldGov think of the superintelligence idea?”
“Not much. They’re mainly worried about us triggering war and genocide—and the aftermath. Plus the slight nuisance of bunches of aliens nominally owning bits of the solar system.”
“The Game’s hollow. Hollow,” I moan. (Moans of love for Rosamundi, whose diamonds trump my heart.)
She pats my hand—at last! “It gets to us all. But we have to persevere.”
The vid-eye loses interest in us and drifts away, disappearing through an air duct.
Yes, the game is hollow—but nobody has ever played it from the inside of the hollow!
Down to the Games Room go I, awakened by buzzer, haunted by hollowness, unfulfilled by Rosamundi’s love. I shall do something grand—a knight tilting at a dragon. I am holding a black box.
I clap my hands for attention.
“I’ve decided to play inside the sphere. I’m going to roll a viewtank out of the assembly and operate my pieces from inside.” Modestly, I display my black box. “I want to see the state of play from inside out.”
“That’s a bright idea,” says Wang. “In fact, that is one hell of an original idea. But—”
“If you’re worried about the isolation factor, I already spent nine months playing solitaire in a pod that was pretty much like a sense-dep tank by the end of the experience!”
Matsumoto, the second officer—a black belt or something in Go—searches his hypno-memories of the rules. “There does seem to be a loophole here.”
“Sure there’s a loophole,” I grin. “It’s in the center of this viewsphere, that’s where.”
There is even a round of applause. Of course, I haven’t told them the second part of my plan …
Around me the viewtanks of the waterworld, now concave, scintillate with a million sparks of red, white, and blue. My chair swivels, rocks, powers up and down. My own particular screen is tagged with gold tape to remind me which it is.
I’m in the survival pod again, alone in the void, playing for my sanity. But not quite alone: a vid-eye hovers, ornithopterically, behind me—always keeping behind me. A guy could go crazy locked in a room with a fly. But this is a discreet fly. It keeps out of the way and never buzzes, though I fancy—I fancy—it is inching closer to the back of my head.
I scan the pattern in all directions. Damn it, I still need eyes in the back of my head.
“Player Cortina,” I voice into the record. I rap out a whole series of plays, to build my network of Kraken-pieces (if they’re there at all, at the co-ordinates!). “Am staking subcrustal Luna, 5 klicks to 10 klicks depth.”
“Hey,” cries my earphone, “we’ve already lost Luna, dummy.”
“Can’t you hear? I’m staking subcrustal Luna. We’ve lost the surface, but who says we’ve lost the interior?”
Somebody is scrabbling at the outside of the tanks. I see the ghostly shape undulating through the sparks of play, like the shadow of a Kraken rolling in the depths.
“Reminder!” comes a synthesized umpire voice. “No player may be removed during the course of the Game by force majeure”
The scrabbling ceases.
And my pieces begin to shift position ever so slowly in the tank, jetting streamlined through the sea at three or four hundred klicks per hour. The Krakens have accepted my stake. It’s all legit. Looney legitimate! You can stake the insides of worlds. This is a whole new dimension indeed!
Rosamundi purrs in my earphone. “Mr. Cortina … Victor, you must stop. This is a very delicately balanced game. You’ve just unbalanced it almightily. That isn’t fair.” So the fair Rosamundi appeals to my better nature, does she?
I swing round in my seat, rocking it up and down in a sine curve like a satellite track orbiting the interior of a world rather than the space around it.
“You’ve destroyed the whole rationale of the Game, Victor. Perhaps you can withdraw your moves and your stake, if you appeal to the umpires personally?”
Actually, I am on the point of winning us back a few million square klicks of the surface of the Moon. I’m Victor, after all.
Wang’s voice cuts in. “The Pangolins and the Spidermen have both just protested most hotly. The Game is about territory. They can’t occupy stretches of the interior of Jackpot.”
“The Krakens are allowing it!”
“Because it’s never arisen. Only a madman would think of … I’m sorry, Mr. Cortina, I take that back.”
“If not a madman, then a genius?”
“If you like. But listen, this is a conflict-prevention game. Please request your moves and stakes withdrawn.”
“I’ll discuss it with the Krakens. That’s all.”
“Good man,” coos Rosamundi.
I push a blue button, which lights up—interfacing through Hoylish equipment down to the lightshow in the harbor.
“Umpires, I am staking interior surfaces. Please confirm that this is permissible?”
There is silence for a while. Then I get my synthvoice reply.
“It is permissible, because it is not specifically prohibited. But to compensate for your internalization of the Game, you must now provide a corresponding externalization capacity for the other competitors. You have opened a gateway to the insides of worlds; now you must open a gateway to what lies outside of the space occupied by worlds. For the sake of balance you must provide an entrée into Highspace for the other competitors.”
“What?”
“This, upon penalty of forfeiting the entire planetary surface of the Earth. You will still, of course, retain the interior below a depth of five kilometres.”
The blue button winks out.
There’s a lot of shouting outside the sphere of viewtanks now. Shouting for my blood. My God, they sound as though they’ve gone berserk out there. We don’t really have to forfeit the Earth … I mean, it’s all a game. I think I’ll let them cool down for an hour or so. Or would it be better to get it over with soon? Before positions get hardened?
Of course, WorldGov expressly prohibits the export of High-space travel technology. So Captain Wang has little choice in the matter. Now the Earth is gone, from shore to shining shore. Down to a depth of five kilometers. (Do we still own the Marianas Trench and the Tuscorara Deep? No. The five klick depth follows the contour lines of the solid surface.)
