She said nothing, eyes still fixed on the coin. I held it up between thumb and forefinger for her to see more closely, then crushed it back down into my fist, squeezed it until I thought skin might bleed. “Or I take the white,” I went on. “Become the Gamesmaster, the guardian of reason, of logical outcomes and rational thought, the ultimate utilitarian for whom the death of millions is merely statistics, pieces on the board…and the old, unfamiliar words as truth, hope, justice, love…merely patterns of human behaviour to exploit for a more reasoned end. In theory the idea is appealing: I see why you took the offer. But you see,” – my finger tightened against the trigger – “the Gameshouse killed my wife. She was wonderful; she was simply wonderful. And the Gameshouse made her a monster, so in love with the game that she would rather die than be set free. I loved her. I loved her. But I find in this present circumstance, constrained as I am by the rules of the game, that I no longer know what mercy is.”
I pinched the coin between thumb and index finger, balanced it on top of my closed fist.
“You wouldn’t,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t.”
“I see nothing but bad choices,” I replied.
“You are a player: you choose between bad choices all the time.”
“What would you have me choose now? To kill my wife? To kill myself? To let the game go on? What could you live with?”
“There is no guilt in the game, only the board…”
“There was me!” I screamed, voice cutting through her words, gun shaking in my hand. “There was me! You took the white and I was left behind; you read the board but you didn’t see me!”
The coin wobbled on top of my fist, ready to fall; she raised her hands, steady, calm, spoke quickly. “I see you, Silver, I see exactly who you are. You are a player, a great player, there is no higher aim. The house, the game, the game, everything calculated, logic, reason, intellect, every move, every piece – we play the game, we calculate the vectors of the human soul and by playing, we make it better. We make people better.”
“No,” I replied. “We make them pieces or we make them players. That isn’t better.”
“It is – but it is. It is rational where rage isn’t, logical where love is not; I never loved you.” The words fell and I flinched, but the coin was still balanced on my hand, the gun still ready to fire. Her voice rose, higher, begging: “I never loved you; you were just a piece, so shoot me, shoot me, just shoot me but don’t do it like this, don’t decide on…on a whim! On chance!” She spat the word, veil billowing about her face with fury at the sound.
I smiled, remembered someone else’s words. “Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.”
Her hands were shaking but her voice, when she finally spoke, was stunned and cold. She said, “You won’t do it. I never loved you; only the game. You are a player. You won’t do it.”
I smiled again, stared into the empty whiteness where a person should have been, and for a moment saw myself stood there, dressed in that same veil. The image seemed laughable: why did I need a veil, who had burned away every piece of my soul so long ago? What was there that is human about me left which I could possibly need to hide?
(A memory of the ferry to Saint-Malo. Why are you crying? Why are you crying?)
(A policeman, gunned down in the dark. They are not my orders. They are not orders I recognise within the boundaries of the law.)
(Thene, her black and white cat coiling around a stranger’s legs, looking for attention. Who was that stranger, smiling at her there, eating omelettes with too much syrup? He had my face but no name, but if I concentrate it seems to me that I remember and…)
… there. There is he is. He reads a book on the beaches of Palmarin while children dance around him asking for money, money, American, money?
He crosses the Mongolian steppe with a family that knows itself to be the centre of the world, listens to the mothers whisper stories of the stars.
There is a man fleeing from the fighting in Jammu eating noodles with a pilot and her mother as he flies to Taipei playing dominos with strangers in Russia sat watching the waterfall in the mountains of Spain.
There he is, this man without a name, and as I look at him from this distant, cold place where now I have come, it seems for a moment that I am him, and he is me, and that after all, he does have a name.
“My name is Silver,” I said, softly at first, then again, a little louder. “My name is Silver.”
I raised my head again, looked straight into the whiteness where my wife’s face should have been. “I am a player. I am also something else.”
I slipped my thumb under the little coin, felt its weight on top of the nail.
“You won’t do it,” she breathed. “You won’t.”
I smiled, and was content. “My love,” I replied, “how little you know about people.”
I let the coin fly.
Chapter 39
The coin turns, the coin turns, the coin turns.
When it lands the world will change, and the house will fall or the house will stand, and she will live or she will die, and I will wear the white, or diminish and die of mortal old age.
Sometimes life deals a bad hand, and the prize was not worth the price you paid. Sometimes there is nothing in a choice.
The coin turns, the coin turns, the coin turns.
I am Silver, who played the Gameshouse and won. Did love, if love was a thing I felt, lessen or increase the odds of my success? Would a colder man have taken fewer risks, or sacrificed fewer lives, if he was not led by some nameless passion in his heart? Or is love only weakness, which reason shall erode, has eroded, has driven wholly from my heart?
I look inwards and I see only memories and deeds, and they too begin to fade.
A player has no need to be a person.
A player has no need for a name.
The coin turns.
There are greater games yet to be played, and the pieces we move across the board of this existence will not feel our white fingers touch them, will not know that their will was ours, their lives at our command, until maybe the very last, when they look back on their lives and wonder why. Why the currents of their lives pushed them left when they could have gone right.
They will call it chance, the people of this world, and for the most part they will be mistaken.
For the most part.
The coin turns; where it falls, nobody knows.
The coin turns, empires rise and empires fall, men live and men die, babies scream and dead men sigh; the world changes but people are always and are never the same.
The coin turns, the coin turns.
I am Silver.
I choose humanity.
The coin turns.
Claire North is the pen name for the Carnegie-nominated Catherine Webb. Her previous novel, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, the Waterstones Book Club and the Radio 2 Book Club. Catherine currently works as a theatre lighting designer and is a fan of big cities, urban magic, Thai food and graffiti-spotting. She lives in London. Find her on Twitter as @ClaireNorth42.
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Claire North, Gamehouse 03 - The Master
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