“All right,” he says. The game may prove valuable to her, a relaxing pastime, a timely distraction. She leads such a cloistered life, more so even than the rest of them, moving in complete tranquillity through her chaste existence, intimate with no one but her sister Yvonne, sixteen light-years away and receding into greater distances all the time.
He leads her toward the gaming tables. Noelle bridles only an instant as his hand touches her elbow, and then she relaxes with an obvious effort, allowing him to guide her across the room.
“This is aGo board,” the year-captain says. He takes her hand and gently presses it flat against the board, drawing it from side to side and then up and down, so she can get some idea of the area of the board and also of its feel. “It has nineteen horizontal lines, nineteen vertical lines. The stones are played on the intersections of these lines, not on the squares that the lines form.” He shows her the pattern of intersecting lines by moving the tips other fingers along them. They have been printed with a thick ink, and evidently she is able to discern their slight elevation above the flatness of the board, for when he releases her hand she slowly draws her fingertips along the lines herself, seemingly without difficulty.
“These nine dots are called stars,” he tells her. “They serve as orientation points.” He touches her fingertips to each of the nine stars in turn. They, too, are raised above the board by nothing more than a faint thickness of green ink, but it seems quite clear that she is able to feel them as easily as though they stood out in high relief. All of her senses must be extraordinarily sharp, by way of compensation for the one that is missing. “We give the lines in this direction numbers, from one to nineteen, and we give the lines going in the other direction letters, from A to T, leaving out I. Thus we have coordinates that allow us to identify positions on the board. This is B10, this is D18, this is J4, do you follow?” He puts the tip of one of her fingers on each of the locations he names. She responds with a smile and a nod. Even so, the year-captain feels despair. How can she ever commit the board to memory? It’s an impossible job. But Noelle looks untroubled as she runs her hand along the edges of the board, murmuring, “A, B, C,…”
The other games have halted. Everyone in the lounge is watching them. He guides her hand toward the two trays of stones, the black ones of polished slate and the white ones fashioned of clamshell, and shows her the traditional way of picking up a stone between two fingers and clapping it down against the board. The skin of her hand is cool and very smooth. The hand itself is slender and narrow, almost fragile-looking, but utterly unwavering. “The stronger player uses the white stones,” he says. “Black always moves first. The players take turns placing stones, one at a time, on any unoccupied intersection. Once a stone is placed it is never moved unless it is captured, in which case it is removed at once from the board.”
“And the purpose of the game?” she asks.
“To control the largest possible area with the smallest possible number of stones. You build walls. You try to surround your opponent’s pieces even while he’s trying to surround yours. The score is reckoned by counting the number of vacant intersections within your walls, plus the number of prisoners you have taken.” She is staring steadily in his direction, fixedly, an intense and almost exaggerated show of attention, all the more poignant for its pointlessness. Methodically the year-captain explains the actual technique of play to her: the placing of stones, the seizure of territory, the capture of opposing stones. He illustrates by setting up simulated situations on the board, calling out the location of each stone as he places it. “Black holds P12, Q12, R12, S12, T12 — got it?” A nod. “And also P11, P10, P9, Q8, R8, S8, T8. All right?” Another nod. “White holds—” Somehow she is able to visualize the positions; she repeats the patterns after him, and asks questions that show she sees the board clearly in her mind.
He wonders why he is so surprised. He has heard of blind chess players, good ones: they must be able to memorize the board and update their inner view of it with every move. Noelle must have the same kind of hypertrophied memory. But playingGo is not like playing chess. When a chess game begins, the first player to move is facing fewer than two dozen possible moves. InGo, there are 361 potential moves in the first turn. There are more possible ways for a game ofGo to unfold than there are atoms in the universe. The chessboard has just sixty-four squares, across which an ever-diminishing number of pieces is deployed, reducing and simplifying the number of options available to each player as the original thirty-two pieces dwindle down to a handful. The number ofGo pieces also diminishes gradually as the game proceeds, but their absence makes the patterns on the board more complicated rather than simpler during the unfolding battle for territory.
Even so, Noelle seems to be grasping the essentials. Within twenty minutes she appears to understand the basic ploys. And there is no question that she is able to hold the board firmly fixed on the internal screen of her mind. Several times, in describing maneuvers to her, the year-captain gives her an incorrect coordinate — the first time by accident, for the board is not actually marked with printed numbers and letters, and since it is a long time since he last has played, he misgauges the coordinates occasionally — and then twice more deliberately, to test her. Each time she corrects him, gently saying, “N13? Don’t you mean N12?”
At length she says, “I think I follow everything now. Would you like to play a game?”
In the baths later that day Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth discuss the year-captain’s putative sex life. It is one of their favorite speculative subjects. Most of the sex that goes on aboard the ship, and there is quite a good deal of it, takes place in complete openness, figuratively and often literally. These people are the product of a highly civilized, perhaps overcivilized, epoch. Very little is taboo to them. But the year-captain, unlike virtually everyone else on board, is scrupulous about his privacy.
“He doesn’t have any sex and he doesn’t want any,” Paco insists. “He was a monk just before he joined us, you know. That weird colony of meditating mystics up by the North Pole somewhere off the coast of Scandinavia. And a monk is still what he is, at heart. A man of ice through and through. It shows in his face, that lean and grim thin-lipped face with that little beard that he keeps cropped so short. And in his eyes, especially. Those terrible blue eyes. Lake the blue ice of a glacier, they are. They show you the interior of the man himself.”
“Wrong,” Elizabeth says. “Ice outside, fire within.”
“And you hold with those who favor fire,” Paco says jeeringly. “Don’t think I don’t listen when you start quoting poetry.”
Elizabeth, reddening down to her bony breast, sticks her tongue out at him.
“You’re in love with him,” Paco says. “Aren’t you, Lizzy?”
Instead of answering, she turns the tank nozzle toward him and douses him with a foaming spray of hot water. Paco, more amused than annoyed, snorts and bellows like a breaching walrus and rises with a powerful thrust of his elbows, launching himself toward her, catching her around the middle, pulling her down into the tank and pushing her head under water. Elizabeth thrashes about in his grasp, wildly wigwagging her lean delicate arms, then frantically kicking her long frail legs in the air as Paco, roaring with laughter, upends her. Heinz, who is elongated and lean, with a sly ever-smiling face and a slippery, practically hairless body, glides forward and jams Paco under the surface with her, and for a couple of moments all three of them are splashing chaotically, forming an incoherent tangle of writhing limbs, the pale, thin Nordic Elizabeth and the stocky, swarthy Latin Paco and the gleaming, beautiful Teutonic Heinz. Then they bob to the top all at once, laughing, gasping merrily for breath.