Tactics of Conquest Read online

  Five turned upon me then a look both querulous and penetrating, allowing the silence to magnify itself over a period, a veritable hush falling over my little suite (to say nothing of the bed in which I was lying) while he pondered all of my aspects hopefully.

  “I hope you’re not trying to make problems,” he said.

  “Oh no,” I said a little too eagerly, “no, I’m not trying to make things difficult at all; I just don’t feel well.”

  “Because we have an enormous stake in these matches,” Five said. “After all, you must realize that we are poising our entire future plans upon how you and your opponent do, David.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “You were both carefully selected from many billions to carry on the contest and you had better not fail us now. We don’t like failures.”

  “I understand that,” I said. Already I regretted the haste of my action, to say nothing of how impulsively I had arrived at it. Throwing a match through feigned illness suddenly struck me as a rather stupid idea considering, as Five had pointed out, the stakes involved. But then again, as I have noted, I was already too deeply committed to my posture to back out without embarrassing results. “I’m sure that I’ll feel better within a day or so.”

  “A day is not satisfactory.”

  “In fact it might only be hours,” I said, backing away but still stubborn. “I can’t just leap out of bed, you know. Perhaps the match could be set back—”

  “I’m really afraid not,” Five said. “We’re on a tight schedule with these matches, as you know. Commitments have already been made: One hundred and fifty billion intelligent creatures of all species are participating through a complicated communications network and any delay in the matches would have catastrophic results at this time. Also,” Five added rather dourly, “also, we have our own problems, scheduling commitments and so on, of which you must be well aware. If it does go to the final game, the forty-one-match series must be completed by a certain date. Our stay in this universe, you see, is severely affecting laws of entropy and geophysics with which I won’t bore you. If we overstay the period we risk destroying the very fabric of your universe which, as you know, is merely a small and trivial cosmology to us but rather important to you. Also, we would die here with you.”

  “All right,” I said, “very well.” It occurred to me, and not for the first time I must admit (everything going on has happened at least twice before), that all of the Overlords, but particularly Five, tend to have a rather melodramatic streak. Like grandmasters themselves, they build up issues out of all proportion to their real worth. It is very difficult for a man in my position to play chess for the outcome of the universe, in short, but this was insignificant to the Overlords. I had a dilemma.

  “All right,” I said again, tossing the sheets rather petulantly and then trying to sit, “if that’s the way you feel about it I’ll try to compete. But I must warn you that I’m just not in top form and that there’s a good likelihood that I’ll lose the game. Perhaps I’ll lose a whole series of games. One must be in top physical condition to play successfully; it’s an athletic endeavor, as you know, so I can hardly promise you a fair contest.”

  The Overlords believe in fairness. They have insignificant morals, true, but have insisted from the beginning that this must be a fair contest, an even match, that we must play at a serious and spirited level, otherwise the exercise will be worthless. So I knew that this would strike Five in an area of grave vulnerability.

  “Very well,” he said and indeed did appear shaken. “We will take that into account, the fact of your illness and that you will perhaps be unable to perform at the best level. Still and all ... the matches must go on.”

  “Only if I am well.”

  “Regardless of your health.”

  “Perhaps you ought to check with the others on this. They might agree to a stay.”

  “I do not know that it is necessary to consult with others,” Five said, rather sharply. “The decisions are to be made by me alone; in the society which we have evolved there are only leaders, no followers, no committees, and I am perfectly able to make a decision which will be binding upon all of us. So, you will play,” Five concluded on that same pitch of controlled hysteria which I had noted in the examining physician, “you will play the matches! The matches will go on I” He stood abruptly, leaving the room in a rather undignified scuttle, allowing the door to bang in the Denebian breeze which wafted through the hallway.

  Ah, well; slowly and grudgingly I began my ablutions preparatory to leaving for the Antares Cluster. It seemed to me that it was not fair for Five to be so imperious about the matter, but on the other hand it also occurred to me in that I simultaneity of vision reserved for truly great minds that the game must go on, the great series of games to decide the outcome of all possibility; and that when one is functioning at such a high level of consequence it is not always possible to invoke the personal touch. The personal touch. Thinking this way I began to feel better and in due course my garb was donned, my ablutions (I urinated, defecated noisily, gargled, to be specific) completed and I went outside to find certain Overlords—Six, Three, Seven and Twenty-One, I believe—waiting for me. They took me quickly to the spaceport. Although I moped rather sullenly early on, I soon found that my enthusiasm and my sense of conviction returned. By the halfway point of the long flight I had taken out my omnipresent pocket chess set and worked through a series of variations to the Nizimov-Indian Defense which had caught me in the seventh game. Nirazo-Indian defense, please excuse, very difficult to keep all of these arcane formulations quite at the tip of the tongue or penpoint.

  In other words, getting me to this fifteenth match was difficult for the Overlords. More difficult for them than this, however, was the decision which I reached on the flight: Since they would not cooperate with me, well, then, I would repay in kind.

  My original intention, good-hearted and benign as everyone knows, was to string out these matches to the forty-first game, the last possible moment. I have nothing against that sector of the universe, that way of life which my opponent represents. I consider it to have the same validity as my own side, and the specter of billions of innocent creatures being slaughtered egregiously by the arrogant Overlords simply because their representative was an inferior player ... this spectacle of injustice, barbarism, madness most distressed me. Apocalypse may be a sanctifying gesture but there is much blood in it.

  So I wanted to extend their lifetime for as long as possible. Why not? Also I wanted to give the Overlords every chance possible to destroy themselves—maybe the damned matches would simply go away. Perhaps the Overlords might wink out of our universe with the same abruptness with which they winked in. They kept on talking about their laws of entropy and mysterious geophysical forces; possibly an extension of their stay might result in obliteration. I hope. At least, it seemed like a sensible idea and I wanted if possible to go on to the very end, to game forty-one, before my victory, in order to give this nightmare time to dissolve. Is this not sane?

  But no more. I have reached that decision.

  I will change my way of life: If the Overlords refuse to tolerate my position, if my hapless opponent continues to decline, then responsibility will finally shift from me. My ultimate responsibility, after all, is to that half of the universe which I have been called upon to represent: the forces of moderation, light, reason, justice, compassion, etc., and I must no longer confuse polarities. Therefore the decision I have made on the Antares flight is to be implemented; from now on I play without restraint. I intend to destroy my opponent, to smash, pulverize, and humiliate him and by proxy his damned Overlords (they are as much Louis’ fault as mine) and then bring this wretched series to a conclusion. I am behind nine games to five: I intend to win twenty-one to five. Sixteen games, thirty-two days from now, the series will be over. Having been stretched to the ultimate of patience I am now convinced only of this: Gentlemen, I will fulfill my commitments.

  So he
re I am. Here I am in the Antares Cluster, another of that damned set of planets and stars through which our series, like a mad, bedraggled member of dismembered or discredited royalty, has wandered these weeks. From Saturn to Alpha Centauri, from Sirius to the Cluster of the Pleiades, my opponent and I have wandered, surrounded by chess sets, chess writings, Overlords, travel consultants, reporters, crewmen, technicians, and equipment, through uncharted light years in the billions. Our little whores’ colony has trundled through the first fifteen of the forty-one high bidders for the Match of the Universe.

  On Saturn my opponent had had a cold; the idiot blew sniffles and snot from his nose turned rabbity by his congestion with a quivering forefinger. On Betelgeuse a strange epidemic which caused yellowing and drying of the external genitalia (I did not want to know too much about this) made it necessary for us to play in strict quarantine. In the Pleiades I lost my temper over a missed fianchetto and drank too much. On the Dog Star a referee died in the midst of a match, emitting a strange bark (appropriate for the Dog Star), and collapsing in a gangrenous fit on the floor amidst a little halo of extra chess pieces with which he had been playing ... oh, this series has been chock-full of events, but really it has had a sameness, a repetition of the constants, the same enclosures, the same uttermost delimitation of space.

  It used to be the same way in the old days, so I was prepared for this. Pulling little odd clumps and patches of recollection as one might remove the skin from a diseased animal, I know the sameness: Rio de Janeiro one week and Moscow the next; a stopover in Bern for the Interzonals and a series of exhibitions in the Americas. Then up to Iceland for a simultaneous exhibition (two hundred and fifty dollars plus expenses), into Poland to observe the quarter-finals of the Junior Masters and lecture; here, there, and everywhere but always the same board, the same pieces, the same mad, twinkling eyes refracted across the board. Certainly life is being lived now at a more intense and psychotic pitch. It is quite one thing to move over a world lacking a sense of locale but I talk now of the universe itself.

  Nevertheless, life goes on and here we are in the Cluster.

  Here we sit in this huge auditorium, my opponent and I, I and my opponent, Louis showing little corpuscles of red and blue floating under the stricken white of his face as he focuses himself upon the board in a kind of shuddering attention. His fingers twitch. I have known Louis all or most of my life but truly a depersonalization has occurred since this madness began, and now it is hard to think of him as old Louis, foolish, piggish Louis. He is merely the opponent even though the Overlords constantly try to build up the human interest aspects through the media, encouraging articles about our personal habits as well as the relationship we are supposed to have had in our youth. Photographs are taken, preferences are asked; sometimes I could shriek. I will not allow myself to think of the pig as a person now—the killer instinct is what counts in championship chess—and so I merely watch his swarthy little body across the board. A faint, deadly mask of purpose extrudes itself over his clumsy, honest features.

  Well, he has taken a full twenty minutes on the clock for this opening: this almost unprecedented. It is possible to take twenty minutes to reply to an opening but when one has the first move it is customary to plot out the nature of the attack the evening before and to then start briskly, confidently, building up time on the clock which can be more judiciously applied later. Nevertheless, Louis has fallen into some confusion; it is clear that he does not feel well—a benevolent utter stupidity masks his features now. When he entered the hall several of the Overlords had to push/pull him to the table, conferring nervously with tentacles, and when he collapsed into the chair, sitting numbly before the pieces for twenty minutes, I am sure that it occurred to the Overlords (and to an audience of many billions—and to me) that the man might be very ill.

  In fact, I was waiting for a physician, perhaps the very one who attended me, to come from the side and minister to him, pop or probe an eyeball for refraction of light, but no, no, Louis sat alone, untended, and I was alone, untended, and after a long time a forefinger came out almost imperceptibly from that gnarled, riven, ruined hand of his and he pushed a pawn in the customary manner, raising his eyebrows, looking up at me when the move was complete with a mad little gleam of purpose, and in that light I divined his cunning scheme. He was trying to reduce me to blubbering uncertainty by stalling.

  Rumors of my breakdown must have reached him—how could they not? we all travel together although of course we are kept strictly separated by the Overlords—and he was playing upon it in the hope that I might go, literally, to pieces on the stage and in front of some fifty-five billion. How truly cunning of him! How intuitive and vicious! Of course this could not happen. Not for nothing have I competed at the highest level for forty years; not for nothing have I learned the tricks and maneuvers of our deadly game. I stared back at the fool impassively and in due time his face began to shrink like an aging flower, fallen upon itself in little petals and clusters of woe, and then I looked at the board fully, willing him away, bringing upon it the range of concentration. I would now destroy him.

  Pawn to King Four.

  He would open with his standard King’s Pawn. He would be looking for a transposition into the Ruy Lopez at the earliest time and I have known this not only in life but in dreams as far as I can remember: The very shape, the very odor of his game was apparent to me in those dreams. Looking at his impermeable skull, at the blankness of those eyes, it was as if I could glare through to absolute purpose and this was horrifying. I was not prepared for it.

  It was as if I was glimpsing the little ropes and tentacles of possibility by which we all live, strung through the dead or dying meat of the brain locked within his skull, and I became nauseated from too much insight. It was necessary for me to return my attention to the board which I did in little glimmers and shimmers of attention until the nausea passed and in the fullness of concentration I was able to plan my attack.

  Throughout the capacious auditorium there are murmurs. As in the first instants surrounding true sleep, I am conscious of them as waves of sound: sometimes assaulting, sometimes receding, carrying me further and further into the darkest heart of possibility, a sea of voices at all times surrounding me, carrying me onward. I am amply conscious of them but there are times—now is one—when they literally overtake and so I look up from the board, peering the other way, staring into that vast, dissonant buzz, the amorphous forms beyond, wishing that they would keep quiet.

  I would leap from the board, cursing, make an exhibition of myself once again but I cannot do it. I cannot risk yet another scene lest I gain a reputation for instability. In the early matches, for instance, I protested all the time. I objected to audience noises, objected to the shading of the lights, complained about the behavior of the referees, argued about the weight of the pieces, threatened to withdraw from the match unless terms were met, gave unauthorized interviews and so on—but none of these ploys were able to gain me more than a few instants’ silence and respect before the alarming breach of manners would start again. I am afraid that I struck some observers as insane in those early matches. Comments on psychopathology reached me; I struck fear into the hearts of those who were dependent upon me to save their way of life. This was unfair since I am not at all temperamental, merely a sweet-natured if rather idiosyncratic fellow who must at all times be able to concentrate ... but once labeled, twice endangered, and it was necessary for me to demonstrate in many small ways after these difficult early matches that I was not unnerved.

  Signing autographs in the lobbies, giving interviews for the intergalactic press, putting on a pleasing public face for the sake of a sympathetic press, helped people forget about my earlier displays. That was the intention, in any event. Certainly, failed or successful, it is too late for me to worry about any of that now. Rather, I bring down the curtain in my mind just as I was able to do from the age of eight, when my chess career began, and rivet my fullest attention upon the
board. Always, it must come to this.

  In this concentration I vaguely sense that Louis has left the board, has wandered backstage, as both of us do, to sip at the trays of wines put out for our refreshment, nibble then at the pungent little cheeses and the fauna of a hundred thousand worlds—the glutton. No one eats as he does; he belches continually. But I must decide what to do with the maddening King’s Pawn, an opening which fifteen hundred years after the invention of the game still has not been solved to the limit of its possibilities. Chess is a trapdoor into uncertainty; standard openings keep that door shut Perhaps the Overlords have a similar problem.

  Surely they must for even now, at the fifteenth game of the match, having lived with this situation for months, it is difficult indeed to deduce their purposes: whether they are, as they say, the controlling forces of limitless space and time (of which our universe itself comprises a tiny segment) or whether, horrifyingly, the Overlords may merely be the agents of another race about whom we know nothing and who are merely using the bureaucracy of these empurpled creatures to administer a solution. I have been thinking along these lines recently; surely this must be psychotic. I would reject this line of thought but it hardly matters anyway; the outcome will be the same, Louis will be defeated.

  Still, it would be better if I knew that the Overlords were as they presented themselves, and not merely a cosmic crew of civil servants come to work upon a niggling problem in the Old District. This line of thought will not be pursued. No further. Not in the midst of a complex Ruy Lopez. Forget it. I am sorry that I got into this to begin with.

  INTERREGNUM: King’s Rook

  Once, when I was twenty-one, still among the youngest of the grandmasters, a group of the others thought that it might be amusing for them to deposit a prostitute in my hotel room, thus initiating me into the wonders of sex. Of course I knew their purpose and was ready for the moment myself. Therefore I left my door unlocked and open so that their prostitute could enter quietly and without attracting undue attention.