CHAPTER IX
GAMES: On the field, in the little shadows cast by motion, they strike at one another. It is difficult to make differentiation between them in the poor light; the teams are nothing but a struggling mass of men, some of them on the ground, others swirling around them. Try as I may I cannot concentrate my attention: my thoughts are elsewhere.
I do not wish to go to the Games. The Games repulse me. Nevertheless it has been insisted that I go there at least once; it has something to do, they assure me, with form. Form requires that I go to all the places that Scop has gone, that I touch the events that touch him. Only in that way can our cycles truly mesh; only in that fashion is it possible that I will be able to make recovery.
I did not want it to be this way. Looking at the men in the distance I understand their predicament in certain ways to be the match of my own; they have been caught by circumstances, plunged into a brutality which is not of their making but which nevertheless are the only gestures that may be theirs in order to survive. So it is for me; I did not want to do this but it was made clear that there was no alternative. If I were not to accept my fate, if I were not somewhere along the way to pursue and dissuade Scop from his terrible mission then civilization as we know it would fall. I could not bear this. I do not want civilization to fall. It is not much that we live in, I believe that Scop is right in saying this, but it is the only reality which we have and to that degree it must be cherished. Must be protected. I think.
I am in an isolated part of the stadium. This at least they have allowed me; to watch the Games by myself and behind glass. No sounds other than those I wish to hear through the controlled speakers assault me, no smells or winds from the field can touch me behind this glass. None of the onlookers will bother me with curses or with his own clumsy response to the Games, no one in an excess of identification will throw up on my lap. Somewhere across the field and if I wished I could throw a beam of light there and find him, somewhere far across the way Scop sits surrounded in the public sections seeing what I see now but I do not have to deal with him. They have given me the most elegant quarters available to one of my rank. That at least they have done for me. They could have done no more.
I know that they are dying on that field. Death is no abstraction to me no matter how reduced it may be for the participants. (There are those who say that they have no sensation whatsoever, that they are bred and trained for the Games and that their nerves have been severed, that the cerebral cortex itself has been reduced. There are others who say that this is a canard and that they are just like us but the Administrators say nothing at all leaving the argument essentially irresolute. I think that this is best for all of us; not to have that final knowledge that is of what it must be like for them. We will never know. It is a mystery.) But the death which they feel is less complex and extended than what is happening to me; what is for us, Scop has warned, is not the simple termination of life but its slow evisceration over the forty or fifty years that we have left to us until, at last, the machines and the temporals have won everything. This is what Scop says; that soon only they will remain; that the rest of us, like the participants in the Games, will be merely their functionaries. I do not know.
I do not know and I take this quiet moment in the sealed booth to at least put all of these thoughts away from me, in some different place. It is not necessary for me to have any awareness of the implications, I have been assured; it is only necessary that I do my job. Far out on the field they are struggling and dying but I have turned off the transistors and none of their cries, none of them at all, penetrate to these spaces.
I am alone; I am sealed in ice. There was a time and it was not so long ago when I was possessed of feeling; when Scop himself could give me feeling over and again but that is not so now. Much has been purged from me and willingly. I do not wish to feel.
I sit in the booth and watch the Games. “You can get out of this,” he said to me a long time ago. “You can be anything that you want to; you can change things and make them different. The future lies within you; now with the convertor the past itself can be changed.” His touch was insistent, his hands sliding against me in the night added their own pressure and insistence, at that moment it seemed possible. God help me, he reached me at that time: I will never tell them this but he made it seem as if it were so. “Help me,” he said, “help me and together the two of us will control the world.”
“I do not want to control the world.”
“Yes you do. To live is to want control; you must control in order to live. If you did not have this there would be utter chaos and you would not survive at all. Go that one last step, admit what you want it to be.”
“It will be the same,” I said to him, “no matter what you tell me, you know that it will never be any different.”
“That is not so. Trust me. Believe in me.”
“Unauthorized use of the convertor is illegal. The penalties are terrible. You cannot—”
“Yes I can,” he said. “Let me worry about that too. Let me deal with them. They no longer know what is going on, you see. Control has passed from their hands which means that they are dead and now we may come alive. I will be able to use the convertor. Do you care for me?”
That he would call upon emotion at a time like this! But of course that was always his way; there was nothing he would not call upon if he felt that it would help him. This may for all I know form a definition of greatness. He might have been a great man. But now like me he is at this field watching the Games and there is no more power that he can exert to change them than could I. I must understand this. “Caring has nothing to do with it,” I said. I was always sensible in all of the spaces of our connection; perhaps this is what destroyed us. I do not know. “What you ask is impossible.”
“Trust me if you care.”
“Trust has nothing to do with this.”
“Trust has everything to do with it,” he said. I felt his sex upon me, lying against my thigh, then making the absent motions toward penetration and I felt myself clench inside. “Now,” he said, “now.”
I squeezed shut, turned, cast him off me. “No,” I said, “no I will not deal with it that way. You cannot use this against me.”
His breath was full against my shoulder for a long time but he said nothing. In the darkness I could see the little rectangular outlines of the grid coming up and realized yet again that we live within iron. They have made us metal; we are the Convertor, we are the machines. Then he said, “You are crazy.”
“No I am not.”
“You do not understand what you are. They have done this to you. Step away and see it; see it clearly and what you have become.”
“No,” I said. On the field most of them are down now; I can see in the wreckage of that collision only a very few of them still standing and they are severely damaged, bracing themselves against falling. “No,” I said to him then, “I cannot help you. I will not work with you. It is hopeless, don’t you see that?”
He broke contact; I felt weightless in the bed. “I should have known,” he said, “but I held out hope even until now. That makes me a fool.”
“Go away,” I said. “Go away from me, please.” It seemed to me at that moment as I considered our past with complete and total objectivity that everything, all of it, had passed between us in small, huddled spaces, that we had never really done anything, that we had not been outside of this enclosure for a moment, had never been able to partake of those spaces which he said were possible and I was sickened as one must always be at moments of true insight; it is too much to deal with those hollow platitudes which turn out, as in the case of everyone else, to be at the center of existence. “Please go away now.”
“I’ll go,” he said, “I’ll go and never come back. I thought you were different,” he said after a while; I could hear the rustling of the clothing of his rank settling around him once again, “I thought that somehow you would not be like any of the others—”
“You said therewere no others.”
“In a way there weren’t. In a way you don’t matter either. You could have helped me,” he said. “Everything could have been different, could be different yet. But you won’t. You won’t do anything. You’re like everybody else. Don’t worry,” he said then, “I’m going to leave. I’ll just have to do it myself, that’s all. I’ll do it myself and it will be only that much harder but that is the way it is going to be,” and he was gone. I lay there in the darkness for a while, trying to deduce whether or not it made any difference being alone, whether in his absence I would feel differently about what he had said but I found that it did not and after a while passed into a watchful, uneasy sleep.
The field is cleared. It is time for the survivors to be taken to the wards; it is time for the harriers to come through on their one sweep; soon the final events of the day will begin. And somewhere over there in that slash of color which I can see as blood against the grey of concrete, somewhere over there, at this moment, Scop is thinking of me.