Tactics of Conquest (4 page)

“So much for that,” I said when I was done, my Rook now moved to the sixth rank, her Queen wiped off the board, “so much for any of that, now you may take your equipment and go.” I felt a massive disinterest within me as we untangled. I went immediately over to the pocket board and in an excess of concentration worked out the final moves of the Immortal Game, paying no attention to her as she reassembled her clothing, restuffed her valise and so on. I held my position of inattention while she went to the door, struggling with the locks, finally opening the door into the dank alley of corridor. “I will tell them,” she said, “I will tell them what you have done with me,” and then she went quickly, leaving me to my own devices. My elaborate unconcern faded only when I was definitely sure that she had left the hallway. I went to the door, put my entire weight against it and rooted it closed like a rodent, then snapped the locks and went to the bed where I shook convulsively for quite a while, finally deciding that it would be best to don my relaxation suit again and try to think of this no more.

After some time, the next day I think it was, my colleagues asked me rather shyly and with many private glances how my evening had been spent, and I said that it was all right but I still preferred chess (which was only half a lie since I
wholly preferred chess). This was some thirty years and two months before the Overlords summoned me to my great and final mission and I give this only in order to yield one of those personal insights which I have been assured are so important to maintain human interest. Actually the event was insignificant.

It is a routine reply move in the Ruy Lopez; it is a move nevertheless with brilliant possibilities. It avoids the dangerous and untrustworthy Queen’s Gambit which, either accepted or declined, is a holy terror; it functions as a blocking response to the dangerous advance of the Pawn to King Five; it shows a brisk willingness to join the issue while actually risking nothing. It is my preferred move in situations of this sort and many articles have been published in the specialist magazines pointing out; that I have brought the Black Pawn to King Four to its highest excess of ramification in this century. It is for this reason as well as many others that the Overlords must have picked me to represent the forces of light.

The way in which I was selected might require some elucidation. In order for one to sympathize with my position as well as vicariously participate in the struggle, exposition of this sort cannot be neglected and I am eager at all times to please. (I should say that these notes are being transcribed directly from the mouthpiece within my neck which was surgically implanted at the start of the games in order that my reflections and recollections would be available to all of the universe,
as well as to the Overlords, for posterity; notes of the match, so to speak. All that I have to do is to talk to myself in a high, inaudible shriek and through the miracle of advanced technology everything is automatically transcribed by stylus by a team of experts located on Sirius. Of this I have been informed.)

Indeed, being summoned by the Overlords gave me rather a turn but I was able to understand eventually that there was no easier way to do it. One moment I was in my pajamas in Warsaw, yawning and scratching myself, thinking of all the events of the sections that day which had put me into third place alone in clean, challenging position below Still (whose game had improved enormously in thirty years and two months). The next moment I was in some damp enclosure infected with murk, confronted by a purple, ten-tacled creature whose rather human eyes looked at me in a stolid but satisfied way. “Ah,” the creature said, “I see that the contact has been made, and not a moment too soon, I might add.” It burbled with satisfaction (or at least my anthropomorphic consciousness inferred that this was a satisfied burble; actually it might have been a whine of displeasure at my appearance, although this is hard to say). The important point is that the creature was quite repulsive and horrifying and it took all of my self-control and inner strength, qualities developed through thirty-one years of international grandmaster chess, not to lose control in that void and disgrace myself. “Sit down,” the creature said.

“Where am I?” I asked. “And who are you, and what is going on, and what is this all about, and so on?” Routine queries all of them, questions one might expect from an amazed and discommoded
consciousness, but I must admit that there was little fervor in the questioning and indeed I had no more interest in the prospective answers than the creature might have had in responding to them, for indeed he seemed rather distracted. “All right,” I said rather petulantly, “so be it. Don’t tell me anything. I just want you to know that if I can’t compete tomorrow I’ll not only lose the best chance I’ve ever had of advancing to the Interzonals, I’ll completely destroy their scheduling. Games will be lost by forfeit; audiences will be disappointed; revenues collected will have to be returned and the impoverished grandmasters of Warsaw will have to continue to live in disgrace.”

Saying this I folded my arms rather sullenly and stared through the murk trying to find some familiar object or geographical site by which I might be able to position myself but it was quite hopeless. It is hard to describe the surroundings except to say that there was little terrestrial about them (I can doubly confirm this now that I have had the opportunity to investigate the extra-terrestrial artifacts of the universe more closely). “So be it,” I said and closed my eyes, opening them immediately as a vivid flare of light penetrated my eyeballs, affording a good jolt of pain.

“I’m sorry,” the creature said in its perfect if rather flat English, “but you cannot withdraw. Our time is very limited and we are, in addition to this, already severely behind schedule. I am here to advise you that you have been recruited for an important chess match upon which the outcome of the universe will be decided. You may call me One since I am the first of our race whom you have met. There will be others, and as a group you may refer to us as the Overlords.” The
creature went on from there to give expository details which I have already discussed: the fact that the universe had reached a difficult point in its development and the Overlords found it necessary to hasten a decision; the fact that the universe which might be understood by my intelligence was in a perpetual struggle between the forces of good and evil, and had now reached a perilous state of imbalance where the two contending forces were evenly matched and could be expected to struggle to no real conclusion for many millennia; the decision of the Overlords that the process could be accelerated through an arbitrary chess match between players representing the two contending forces, at the end of which the winning side could be assumed to have scored a clear victory and the Overlords would then put the other side out of business through the use of incendiary and entropic devices far too complex to be gone into at this time. “You have been selected as one of the representatives,” the Overlord concluded, “and at this moment the other representative, similarly recruited, is being talked to. Which would you rather represent? Good or evil?”

I admit that I was rather stunned. “I don’t understand that at all,” I said.

“Oh,” the Overlord said, with a very human shrug, “I forget the system under which you people live, the ethos which penetrates the universe of which I am speaking, the forces and highly charged emotions behind those two qualities. Actually, you know, it’s completely arbitrary. Good, evil—the point is that they are implacably opposed forces in your universe and the struggle and structure of existence comes from contention between those two poles. Actually, we go completely
beyond such concepts. They are quite arbitrary, you know. It makes no difference; the important thing, alas, is just to get that struggle over with. Which would you rather have? You were recruited first by a millisecond, so you have first choice.”

“You mean we’re truly going to play for the fate of the universe?”

“Exactly,” the Overlord said, “a forty-one-game chess match to be broadcast throughout all the civilized sectors of your universe so that everyone may witness it; coverage by all races, media, and so on. Consider it an opportunity.”

“But why chess? Why me? Why this planet?”

“Because chess in the judgment we have made is ideal for such a final judgment; it is a, methodical game with absolutely no element of luck and therefore there can be no complaints by the loser that he was unjustly handled. Chess is known only to your planet, and to answer your other question, we wanted two accomplished chess players who were as evenly matched as possible. According to studies carried out over a long period of time by our excellent statisticians, your opponent and you are the most evenly matched living chess players. There’s not a bit of difference between you. No other two chess players are as close in true and potential abilities. There’s no other reason.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s quite astonishing.” Events of this sort are always quite astonishing, compounded by the fact that for all my brilliant, logical play I have a rather superstitious and intuitive cast of mind which enabled me to take this rather amazing interview in context. “Who is my opponent?”

“Louis Wilson,” the Overlord said. “You know him rather well, of course.”

“Louis Wilson!” I said. “Why, that’s absolutely amazing! We grew up together.”

“We know that.”

“I’ve been playing on the grandmaster circuit with Louis for over three decades. How can I possibly play against him for the fate of the universe?”

“Why not?” the Overlord said and brushed the query away with a casual tentacle. “It’s better to get involved in crucial issues with friends than with enemies, isn’t it? Besides, you know his game quite well, I take it.”

“That’s absolutely astonishing,” I said, noticing a thin, high odor, not unpleasant but strangely sweet and sticky in the nostrils. “Is that cyanide?” I asked.

“I’m afraid it is,” the Overlord said regretfully. “We had to select a mutually agreeable environment for this first interview; later on we can build up your tolerance to our atmosphere, of course, but for the moment it was felt necessary to arrive at a compromise of low cyanide content for myself but, unfortunately, rather high for you. We’ll have to get you out of here, I fear; you’re apt to collapse within a few moments. We still want to know whether you’d rather play for good or evil, however.”

“I’d rather play for good,” I said firmly, “if that’s all the same to you. I certainly wouldn’t want to represent the forces of entropy.”

The Overlord shrugged delicately and said, “As you please.”

“Am I going back to Warsaw now?”

“Oh no. I’m afraid that that tournament has already been disbanded. You are going to be transported
to an excellent terrestrial-type environment on the settled moon of Titan, satellite of Saturn, and from there preparations for the match will be made, the match to begin tomorrow on your time schedule. I’m afraid that we’re quite behind schedule as I told you,” the Overlord said. Then I was whisked away from there at such horrifying speed and with such intensity that my next recollection is of the panelling in the room on Titan which, as the Overlord had promised, was indeed quite terrestrial.

From that moment on I was enmeshed in preparations for the match. I had my own set of seconds, of course, all provided by the Overlords, who did their best to make me comfortable. I also had my own crew of technicians and dieticians and physicians to make my lot easier, and I understand that Louis did as well. Media and publicity, however, were cooperative efforts; the press releases and biographies during the match emanated from the same set of offices on Sirius to avoid what the Overlord told me would otherwise have been wasteful duplication.

It is odd that of all people, Louis and I should be thrust into such juxtaposition. There are elements of irony here, and the publicity materials have not been shy of those ironies. Although I am a much better player than Louis (stupidly the Overlords got it all wrong; I do not see how our abilities can be compared; he is a plodding, methodical player whereas I am inventive and brilliant, and he has never competed for a world championship whereas I got to the quarter-finals a quarter of a century ago and was defeated only after a stupid blunder which I will not rehash at this point), there is no question of the similarity
of our backgrounds, a co-mingling of history and purpose which even now amazes me.

We grew up together in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York; we began to play competitive chess at the same time; we advanced in the spectrum of the chess hierarchy at graduated intervals only weeks apart, and ultimately we traveled through the world together, our careers paralleling, dovetailing with stunning occlusion. All along, of course, it was well known by those who really followed the game that I was a far superior player to Louis and that indeed he had fastened himself upon me, sheer doppelganger, leaching from me the greatest of my own techniques in order to improve his own mediocre game, his defenses and strategies copied from me, even his public image, a mixture of gruffness and deference, stolen from my own personality (which is, nevertheless, far more pleasing than his, to say nothing of the fact that I am also a much handsomer man).

I do not wish to give the impression that I am fond of Louis. Although from the very beginning our careers and personal lives have meshed strikingly, I consider him to be nothing more than a parasite. Indeed I believe that his very decision to be a chess master was one appropriated from me; he showed no interest in entering the National Juniors, for instance, until I declared my own intention, and it was not until I obtained from the Roxbury Press a contract for
Fianchetto and Fork: Bishop Versus Knight
that he expressed interest in becoming an author and obtained a publisher for his own miserable
To Castle or Not to Castle: The Intricacies of Defense.

It has always been this way; there have been times, in truth, when I thought that Louis might
not be a discrete personality so much as a horrid extension of myself, a phantom, a creation, a literal extension of my own desire not to be lonely, which had led me to create another of similar will and intention with such cleverness that the dop-pelganger could literally pass itself off in the world as an actuality. But one look at Louis twitching over a chessboard in mutual competition, one glance at him shrugging his shoulders and toying with his massive beard while feeding pigeons in Mallorca, and I realized that this was sheer mega-lomaniacal fantasy. It would be nice, but the sheerest vanity, to think that I had invented Louis. He exists as and of himself; he is no less real than I and the unfortunate insight which I have had recently is that he might have selected defense of the forces of evil even if given a choice (this he was not; he had to take what was left), because Louis all of our lives has represented evil to me: corrupt, scuttling, foolish, apologetic, sanctimonious evil cutting into all the corners of existence and painting it with dull little strokes. I would not be surprised to know that this creature engages in devil-worship—having never had an original thought or creation in his life he would be bound to be an admirer of Satan.