* * *
Days later, when the game had been scheduled, I called the cyborg to me. I saw him in my office, a large room with deep scarlet carpeting, where my glass flower sits by the great window that overlooks my battlements and the swamp town below.
His face was without expression. Of course, of course. “You summoned me, Cyrain of Ash.”
“The game is set,” I told him. “Four days from today.”
“I am pleased,” he said.
“Would you like to see the prizes?” I offered him the files; the boy, the girl, the hatchling.
He glanced at them briefly, without interest.
“I am told,” I said to him, “that you have spent a lot of time wandering these past days. Inside my castle, and outside in the town and the swamps.
“True,” he said. “I do not sleep. Knowledge is my diversion, my addiction. I was curious to learn what sort of place this was.”
Smiling, I said, “And what sort of place is it, cyborg?”
He could not smile, nor frown. His tone was even, polite. “A vile place,” he said. “A place of despair and degradation.”
“A place of eternal, undying hope,” I said.
“A place of sickness, of the body and the soul.”
“A place where the sick grow well,” I countered.
“And where the well grow sick,” the cyborg said. “A place of death.”
“A place of life,” I said. “Isn’t that why you came? For life?”
“And death,” he said. “I have told you, they are the same.”
I leaned forward. “And I have told you, they are very different. You make harsh judgments, cyborg. Rigidity is to be expected in a machine, but this fine, precious moral sensitivity is not.”
“Only my body is machine,” he said.
I picked up his file. “That is not my understanding,” I said. “Where is your morality in regard to lying? Especially so transparent a lie?” I opened the file flat on my desk. “I’ve had a few interesting reports from my Apostles. You’ve been extraordinarily cooperative.”
“If you wish to play the game of mind, you cannot offend the painlord,” he said.
I smiled. “I’m not as easily offended as you might think.” I searched through the reports. “Doctor Lyman did a full scan on you. He finds you an ingenious construct. And made entire of plastic and metal. There is nothing organic left inside you, cyborg. Or should I call you robot? Can computers play the game of mind, I wonder? We will certainly find out. You have three of them, I see. A small one in what should be your brain case that attends to motor functions, sensory input and internal monitoring, a much larger library unit occupying most of your lower torso, and a crystal matrix in your chest.” I looked up. “Your heart, cyborg?”
“My mind,” he said. “Ask your Doctor Lyman, and he will tell of other cases like mine. What is a human mind? Memories. Memories are data. Character, personality, individual volition. Those are programming. It is possible to imprint the whole of a human mind upon a crystal matrix computer.”
“And trap the soul in the crystal?” I said. “Do you believe in souls?”
“Do you?” he asked.
“I must. I am mistress of the game of mind. It would seem to be required of me.” I turned to the other reports my Apostles had assembled on this construct who called himself Kleronomas. “Deish Green-9 interfaced with you. He says you have a system of incredible sophistication, that the speed of your circuitry greatly exceeds human thought, that your library contains far more accessible information than any single organic brain could retain even were it able to make full use of its capacity, and that the mind and memories locked within that crystal matrix are that of one Joachim Kleronomas. He swears to that.”
The cyborg said nothing. Perhaps he might have smiled then, had he the capacity.
“On the other hand,” I said, “my scholar Alta-k-Nahr assures me that Kleronomas is dead seven hundred years. Who am I to believe?”
“Whomever you choose,” he said indifferently.
“I might hold you here and send to Avalon for confirmation,” I said. I grinned. “A thirty-year voyage in, thirty more years back out. Say a year to research the question. Can you wait sixty-one years to play, cyborg?”
“As long as necessary,” he said.
“Shayalla says you are thoroughly asexual.”
“That capacity was lost from the day they remade me,” he said. “My interest in the subject lingered for some centuries afterwards, but finally that too faded. If I choose, I have access to a full range of erotic memories of the days when I wore organic flesh. They remain as fresh as the day they were entered into my computer. Once locked in crystal, memories cannot fade, as with a human brain. They are there, waiting to be tapped. But for centuries now, I have had no inclination to recall them.”
I was intrigued. “You cannot forget,” I said.
“I can erase,” he said. “I can choose not to remember.”
“If you are among the winners in our little game of mind, you will regain your sexuality.”
“I am aware of that. It will be an interesting experience. Perhaps then I will choose to tap those ancient memories.”
“Yes,” I said, delighted. “You’ll begin to use them, and at precisely the same instant you will begin to forget them. There is a loss there, cyborg, as sharp as your gain.”
“Gain or loss. Living and dying. I have told you, Cyrain, they cannot be separated.”
“I don’t accept that,” I said. It was at issue with all I believe, all I am; his repetition of the lie annoyed me. “Braje says you cannot be affected by drugs or disease. Obvious. You could be dismantled, though. Several of my Apostles have offered to dispose of you, at my command. My aliens are especially bloodthirsty, it seems.”
“I have no blood,” he said. Sardonic? Or was it all the power of suggestion?
“Your lubricants might suffice,” I said dryly. “Tr’k’nn’r would test your capacity for pain. AanTerg Moonscorer, my g’vhern aerialist, has offered to drop you from a great height.”
“That would be an unconscionable crime by nest standards.”
“Yes and no,” I said. “A nestborn g’vhern would be aghast at the suggestion that flight be thus perverted. My Apostle, on the other hand, would be more aghast at the suggestion of birth control. Flapping those oily leather wings you’ll find the mind of a half-sane cripple from New Rome. This is Croan’dhenni. We are not as we seem.”
“So it appears.”
“Jonas has offered to destroy you too, in a less dramatic but equally effective fashion. He’s my largest Apostle. Deformed by runaway glands. The patron saint of advanced automatic weaponry, and my chief of security.”
“Obviously you have declined these offers,” the cyborg said.
I leaned back. “Obviously,” I said, “though I always reserve the right to change my mind.”
“I am a player,” he said. “I have paid Khar Dorian, have bribed the Croan’dhic port-guards, have paid your major-domo and yourself. Inwards, on Lilith and Cymeranth and Shrike and other worlds where they speak of this black palace and its half-mythical mistress, they say that your players are treated with fairness.”
“Wrong,” I said. “I am never fair, cyborg. Sometimes I am just. When the whim takes me.”
“Do you threaten all your players as you have threatened me?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted. “I’m making a special exception in your case.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you’re dangerous,” I said, smiling. We had come to the heart of it at last. I shuffled through all my Apostolic bulls, and extracted the last of them, the most important. “At least one of my Apostles you have never met, but he knows you, cyborg, knows you better than you would dream.”
The cyborg said nothing.
“My pet telepath,” I said. “Sebastian Cayle. He’s blind and twisted and I keep him in a big jar, but he has his uses. He can probe through walls. He has stroked the crystals of your mind, friend, and tripped the binary synapses of your id. His report is a bit cryptic, but admirably terse.” I slid it across the desk for the cyborg to read.
A haunted labyrinth of thought. The steel ghost. The truth within the lie, life in death and death in life. He will take everything from you if he can. Kill him now.
“You are ignoring his advice,” the cyborg said.
“I am,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a mystery, one I plan to solve when we play the game of mind. Because you’re a challenge, and it has been a long time since I was challenged. Because you dare to judge me and dream of destroying me, and it has been ages since anyone found the courage to do either of those things.”