The gameplayers of zan, p.1
The Gameplayers of Zan, page 1
part #2 of The Book of the Ler Series
The Gameplayers of Zan
Book 2 of the Ler Trilogy
Copyright ©, 1977, by M. A. Foster
BOOK ONE
Instar Cellae Sylvestris
ONE
NOVEMBER 1, 2550
Processes have uses; it is also important to realize that fascination with a process can grow, there being no automatic check against this, until the bemusement obscures the intended results of the original procedure. This is the easiest trait of all to observe in others and the hardest to see and act upon in ourselves. We shall speak of obsessions with results upon another day.
—The Game Texts
One always makes an identification of self in terms of a matrix of otherness, never saying simply “there am I,” but always with the implicit definition “there am I in relation to allothers I can know.” And so now alone as she could not imagine anyone ever being, there was only herself. She could nolonger measure who she was; only refer to a whatshe-hadbeen, which she suspected either was no longer valid, or elsewas now based on distorted memories. There was herself, the memory, the whole of her life and all the things she had seenand done. There was also imagination, projections of fantasies of hopes and fears, the projections of her mind into allthe places and circumstances she could never be in actuality.She balanced delicately between that which was and that which might have been. The impossible now. There was nothing else.
The present is never still, but a moving line between two points; in moving there is direction, source, destination. But with all references removed, by which one can measure mo tion, there was no longer any sense at all of the bridge of motion in time connecting the past with the future. They existed, of course: her memory and imagination reassured her of that; it was that she could no longer imagine quite how she related to those quantities. She was adrift in her own mind.
She could review the circumstances easily enough; in fact,she had already done so a number of times, perhaps severalhundred times, seeking an alternative, a flaw, a slip, some error she could at least feel guilty about, or blame on someoneelse. But it was all as impervious as armor plate, there was nochink anywhere in the fearsome blankness of existentials. Sheimagined she felt like someone who had stepped into an elevator at exactly the moment when all of its safety devices failed: accidents happen which are in fact not the fault of their victim. She had been caught near the scene of the mission for which she had been sent. For which she had volunteered. It now seemed in hindsight that her life had alwaysbeen a series of closing doors, not opening ones, of narrowingpassages and shrinking rooms. And this was the last door andthe last room. There was no passage. It ended here, whereverhere was.
Near the Museum of Ancient Technologies, yes. There wasnothing that could link her to the apparent vandalism that had destroyed beyond repair two obscure instruments left behind from the age of petroleum exploitation. Left behind, likeastrolabes left behind from a rude era of ships powered bythe wind they caught in their sails; left behind as the wavesleft shells, relics of life, on the beach. Artifacts of a vanished art, for there was no oil worth exploring for anymore. Yet ofall those who might have been there, nearby, only she had been ler, deep into human lands beyond the reservation, andshe had not had, even for herself, a convincing explanationfor what she had been doing there. It was natural that theyconnect her with the damaged instruments. Her only remaining defense had been to remain quiet and somewhat passive,giving them nothing, not a name, not a reason.
They had conveyed her to their headquarters; others, intheir turn, had taken her farther, to a large urban area, to abuilding, to a room within the building. Everything seemedunmemorable, bland; there had been no way to memorize directions or landmarks. Everything was featureless, or nearlyso, as much so as could be managed. Then came the interrogators. They had been insistent, but considerate and subtle,masters of their arts. They had been firm, not especially unpleasant, and above all persuasive. She had said nothing.Only repeated in her soft voice that they should notify theShuren Braid—hostel-keepers by the main entry into the reservation, close under the Institute—that they had picked up alost girl. They had agreed to do so immediately, and were very polite. She knew they hadn’t No one came for her.
There had been a lack of overt threats, and there had never been any mention of anything like torture. She had notbeen fooled. She was too wise in her own ways not to knowthat people who hold all the cards have all the strengths andnone of the weaknesses, and that they do not need to rant, rave, shout, pace up and down making histrionic gestures, parading about to turn suddenly, shouting bombast and threats.Or interrupting the silences with harangues and hectoring.No. They had no need to intimidate: these are acts that characterize an interrogator who is more interested in fondlingthe power he holds than in digging out the information he ispaid to get.
Her story had been transparently flimsy, but she had repeated it anyway. She had been lost, she said, after a little exploration, and had been trying to get back by dead reckoning.She had never been in the Museum. She was sure they sawthrough that, but she stayed with it, however skillfully theytried to steer her into other areas. She thought that it hadbeen easy to resist the gentle but constant, tidelike pressure,compared with other experiences in which she could draw analogs. But under her own sense of self-confidence, she could see that her visitors were in fact extraordinarily skillfulamong their own kind, others of the humans, the forerunners.One untrained would have broken in hours under them, and all without a single raised angry voice, a single twinge ofpain. She couldn’t really determine exactly how long it hadgone on. There had been frosted windows, but the light shining through them was gray and never changed; she never knew if she was seeing filtered light, or some artificial light. Itgrew dark through those windows regularly, and there had been conspicuous clocks in the room with her, but she suspected that in a subtle world the obvious was mutable. Sheknew the rates of things; that had been part of her skill, hertraining, and she could sense subtle fluctuations of rate. But
they had allowed her to sleep when she had been tired, eatwhen she had been hungry, wash when she had felt dirty. Shelearned nothing from those experiences—the noise levels wereprecisely uniform whatever her position.
She maintained her silence and her evasion as long as shecould. After all, there had been some other close calls, and always before she had been able to bluff her way out. Butperhaps those had not been so skillful as these, who seemed to sense the presence of deeper secrets in her silences, a presence that teased them, kept them at it. So despite the easymanners, the almost-pleasant sessions, the easy, relaxed interrogations, they smelled a secret They didn’t know if it hadanything to do with the original issue or not—they were not,she could see, not that perceptive. That had ceased to matter… . The girl has secrets and will not talk: dig them outand we’ll see.
Their closeness to the truth terrified her, their knowledgeof the basic relational needs of people, ler and human alike(after all, they were not all that different), shook her to herfoundations, and their physical presence overpowered her. Toher eyes, no matter how often she had seen them before, humans were harsh, angular, hairy creatures whose tempers were at best uncertain. She herself was almost to her full bodily growth, but they were all larger than she, taller, heavier. She imagined that the larger ones must weigh almosttwostone. They were wild, primitive beings who, in her view,were not yet tamed, although the logical, factual part of hermind knew well enough that most of them thought of themselves as rather effete and overcivilized. And now she was in the very midst of them, completely in their power, separatedfrom her own intricate and carefully structured environment.One step closer to the ancient and unforgiving wild, to theprimal chaos, to the world, left long ago, of tooth and claw,sinew and strength.
Here, in the city, the tooth was covered and the claw wassheathed, but neither had been removed, nor had been the will that had animated them. So, in the end, they had finallytired of her and their little game, and politely, always politely,suggested that she take a little rest, that she refresh herself, inthe box. The box! Everything they did in their world revolvedaround a box, as it was called in the slang of the day. Thebox was a simulator. A training device with a controlled environment. Some were crude and simple. Others were so fearfully complex they were fully capable of denying the
evidence of one’s senses. So did one have a job to learn? In thebox! Bad habits and antisocial traits? In the box. Criminals? Eliminate them or put them in the box. And likewise with oddsuspects who are obviously covering up something, who refusefor days to answer the most simple questions. In the box. Behavior changed by the classical methodology of the cult of behaviorism, orthodox as the dawn. They never questioned ends,and why should they when they had a means that worked sowell and so consistently? In the box. They could transform bytheir simulator alchemy a misanthrope into a philanthropist,an artist into a salesman who won prizes, a satyr or nymphomaniac into a celibate philosopher, and an autistic child into afaith healer. Those who had never been able to cope weretransformed into veritable paragons of efficiency. And forthose who held to their silences, there was the remedy of totalisolation.
They shot her from behind with a dart; that alone, in itself,filled her with a sense of evil: they used a weapon that leftthe hand! The dart contained a drug that paralyzed her butleft her conscious. She felt a bee sting at the back of her neck. Then, nothing. She could neither move nor feel. This part of her memory was clear and bright. Then they had gently placed her onto a little wheeled cart and
And after that, after they had looked enough, they hadcarefully and tenderly placed her within some enclosure: from its smell she thought it was a machine, but with a human fear-scent veneered over it as well, a dark place that disturbed her. She heard them refer to it as a sensory deprivation unit She heard some more talk as they set the machineup, and fitted her into its bowels, so that she could deduce what the machine was. The unit was a life-support system thatmaintained a constant temperature and controlled all the inputs and outputs of the body. And some extra things: it caused total anesthesia of the sensory and motor systems, andwhat functions it didn’t control, it monitored. It could speedor slow her heartbeat It created and maintained a sensory en
vironment of exactly and precisely zero.
Her universe now. Dark, odorless, weightless, sensationless.She felt nothing, was a disembodied mind. If the absence ofdiscomfort could be said to be comfortable, then it was comfortable. There was no sensation whatsoever. She could remember being placed in it, but afterward had come the darkness and the silence. An unknowable span of time hadpassed since then. Sometimes she thought that it had been only minutes since then, or at best perhaps an hour or so. Other times, she felt weary and thought of years, of growingold, of reaching elderhood in the box, or else being prolongedas an adolescent-phase infertile ler forever, as the monitoringsensors either disregarded or suppressed the hormone chemistry of her reproductive system, which she knew to be different from the human. She suspected the machine thought shehad some disorder and was trying to cure her! But the time.Minutes or years. She didn’t know the difference anymore.The reality of the now expanded to enormous distances, gulfsshe could not imagine.
So now she could not avoid the realization that in the end it had not mattered how effective or ineffective her passivedefiance had been. She had been confident at first, althoughshe admitted to some fright and self-concern; yet she must face the fact that, to this point, she was losing this one, andthat she was facing a path with only one way to go, no exitand no place in which to turn around.
At first, the box had been easy, almost pleasant. She
couldn’t believe this was a threat: after all, all it did was al
low one to be lazy and to daydream, which people wanted to
do anyway, but somehow never found the time. She had a
number of open-ended practices which were primarily cere
bral in nature, and which served admirably here, in the box.
So at first she renewed her sense of defiance; it had served
her well before she had been caught, and so it would serve
her now. After her initial adjustments to the new environment had been made, she started out by spending her wakingtimes playing the Zan, a game of large scope and interestingsubtleties. At first she left all the virtuoso play to herself, herside, but later this seemed too easy, no matter how complexshe made the play, so she began to elaborate and embroiderthe antagonist side as well, carrying both sides simultaneously. This had been some challenge, for she had played beforeprimarily in the protagonist team role; in any event, it kepther occupied.
She also tried her hand at dramatization, making up or recalling tales she had heard before. This was more challenging,as the ler did not produce plays on the stage, but either readthem or listened to a storyteller, the practice of which was considered one of the ler social graces. She admitted to a deficiency at the telling end, but she had always listened well,and now the habit initially served her well. They favoredtragedy, borrowing freely from human sources and presentingthem as they were, or else changing the names of all the characters to ler names and proceeding from there; they alsomade up dramas of their own according to a complicated setof storytelling rules, and these could occur in various culturalmatrices. So it was that she made up and remembered, perfecting her powers of visualization. She recalled great dramaswhose roots were openly acknowledged to be from the forerunners: Trephetas and Casilda, essentially a tale of lustthwarted by rigid social conventions. She liked that one, for itreminded her, at a certain remove, of a situation which applied somewhat to herself. She also recalled Thurso, with its violet-eyed female antagonist, which always made an audience of ler listeners gasp with horror; ler eyes were invariablylightly and subtly colored, definitive colors almost never beingseen, such traits indicating a force of will which could not beborne without tragic consequence to all around the possessor.Tamar Cauldwett and The Women of Point Sur pleased herwith their studied intricacies and soaring flights of emotion.There was a famous ler version of Tamar, changed somewhat in details, called Tamvardir the Insibling, which in some ways was an improvement over the original.
She moved from realistic, if highly emotional tragedies, tomore fantastic dramas, Ericord the Tyrant, the scary Siege of Kark, and the wierdly beautiful The King of Shent. And then the pure ler dramas, some of which had been adapted fromhuman legends and tales: The Revenge of the Hifzer Vlandimlar, Hunsimber the Beast, Schaf Meth Vor, better known perhaps as Science and Revolution, and Damvidhlan, Baethshevban, and Hurthayyan, the last of which she found herself recoiling from somewhat, as she tended now to identify herself with the victim Hurthayyan.
Being ler, she possessed almost total recall; therefore she could also replay at her leisure pleasurable experiences, moments of beauty or sweetness in her past life. She could alsoproject daydreams, imagined and desired scenes about herself,in the future or the past. With the memory, she could remember far back, virtually to infancy, but back of that was a feared region in which the smoothly cycling lines of memorybecame tangled and confused, and further back knotted, and further, blurred. The infant did not remember the womb because it had not been awake. Now, here, in this dark place—this box, this sensory deprivation unit—the lines of time hadonce more become confused and blurred, and she sensed that another womb had been imposed upon her. The lines were uncertain. She slept. She dreamed.
Like the rest of the lermen, her memory had always been aresource to her, a close friend, a reference. She knew that the farther up the evolutionary ladder a creature had climbed, the more it projected itself into the awareness of time. People, the natural humans and the forced ler alike, had beena giant step forward in this dimension. Yet now and here inthe unmeasurable and unknowable time of the box, her memory, from overuse, had come to resemble some ancient recording—full of the noises of boredom and weariness. Scratchy and worn. The fidelity of reproduction was slippingand random noise was gradually swamping coherences. Information theory and the brain. Memorv in living creatures was not a static thing, fixed in specific sites, like some mechanical computer, but a dynamic, living, moving quantity, a flying body of abstraction moving through the billionsof cells and synapses exactly as a bird in the medium of air,dependent on thp motion to define it in its function. Holistic.
