Kraiklyn had only managed to find three Lives; it didn't look as though he would be staying all that long in the game.

The white-haired woman in the reserved seat near the front of the terrace got up, stretched and walked up the terrace, between the couches and loungers, a bored expression on her face. Just as she drew level with Horza's couch, a commotion erupted on a terrace behind them. The woman stopped and looked. Horza turned round. Even through the quietfield he could hear a man shouting; what looked like a fight had broken out. A couple of security guards were trying to restrain two people rolling about on the floor. The crowd on the terrace had made a circle about the disturbance and were looking on, dividing their attention between the preparations for the Damage game and the fisticuffs on the terrace beside them. Eventually the two people on the floor were brought to their feet, but instead of both being restrained, only one was — a youngish man who looked vaguely familiar to Horza, though he appeared to have been disguising himself with a blond wig which was now slipping off his head.

The other person who had been fighting, another man, produced some sort of card from his clothes and showed it to the young man, who was still shouting. Then the two uniformed guards and the man who had brandished the card led the young man away. The man with the card took something small from behind one of the young man's ears as he was frog-marched off to an access tunnel. The young woman with the long white hair crossed her arms and walked on up the terrace. The circle of people on the terrace above closed again, like a hole in cloud.

Horza watched the woman weave her way through more couches until she left the terrace and he lost sight of her. He looked up. The duelling animals still spun and leapt; their white blood seemed to glow as it matted their shaggy hides. They snarled silently and scythed at each other with their long forelimbs, but their acrobatics and their aiming had deteriorated; they were starting to look tired and clumsy. Horza looked back to the game table; they were all ready, and the game was about to begin.

Damage was just a fancy card game: partly skill, partly luck and partly bluff. What made it interesting was not just the high sums involved, or even the fact that whenever a player lost a life he lost a Life — a living, breathing human being — but the use of complicated consciousness-altering two-way electronic fields around the game table.

With the cards in his or her band, a player could alter the emotions of another player, or sometimes of several others. Fear, hate, despair, hope, love, camaraderie, doubt, elation, paranoia; virtually every emotional state the human brain was capable of experiencing could be beamed at another player or used for oneself. From far enough away, or in a field shield close in, the game could look like a pastime for the deranged or the simple-minded. A player with an obviously strong hand might suddenly throw it in; somebody with nothing at all might gamble all the credits they had; people broke down weeping or started laughing uncontrollably; they might moan with love at a player known to be their worst enemy or claw at their restraining straps to free themselves for a murdering attack on their best friend.

Or they could kill themselves. Damage players never did get free from their chairs (should they ever do so, an Ishlorsinami would shoot them with a heavy stun gun) but they could destroy themselves. Each game console, from which the emotor units radiated the relevant emotions, on which the cards were played and where the players could see the time and the number of Lives they each had left, contained a small hollow button, inside which a needle filled with poison lay ready to inject any stabbing finger which pushed it.

Damage was one of those games in which it was unwise to make too many enemies. Only the very strong-willed indeed could defeat the urge to suicide implanted in their brains by a concerted attack of half a table of players.

At the finish of each hand of cards, when the money which had been gambled was taken by the player with the most card points, all the other players who had stayed with the betting lost a Life. When they had none left they were out of the game, as they would be if they ran out of money. The rules said the game ended when only one player had any Lives left, though in practice it finished when the remaining contestants agreed that if they stayed any longer they were likely to lose their own Lives to whatever disaster was about to ensue. It could get very interesting at the end of a game when the moment of destruction was very close, the hand had gone on for some time, a great deal of money had been gambled on that one hand, and one or several players would not agree to call it a day; then the sophisticates really were separated from the simians, and it became even more a game of nerve. Quite a few of the best Damage players of the past had perished trying to out-dare and out-stay each other in such circumstances.

From a spectator's point of view, Damage's special attraction was that the closer you stood to the emotor unit of any particular player, the more of the emotions they were experiencing affected you directly, too. A whole subculture of people hooked on such third-hand feelings had grown up in the few hundred years since Damage had become such a select but popular game: the moties.

There were other groups playing Damage. The Players of the Eve of Destruction were simply the most famous and the richest. The moties could get their emotional fix in lots of places throughout the galaxy, but only in a full game, only on the edge of annihilation, only with the very best players (plus a few hopefuls) could the most intense experiences be obtained. It was one of these unfortunates Horza had impersonated when he had discovered that an access pass could not be had for less than twice the amount of money he had made on the shuttle. Bribing a door guard had been a lot cheaper.

The real moties were packed tightly behind the fence separating them from the Lives. Sixteen clumps of sweating, nervous-looking people — like the game players, mostly male — they jostled and pressed forward, trying to get near to the table, near to the Players.

Horza watched them as the cards were dealt by the chief Ishlorsinami. Moties jumped up and down, trying to see what was happening, and security guards fitted with baffle helmets to keep out the emotor pulses patrolled the perimeter of the fence, tapping nerver prods on their thighs or palms and watching warily.

"… Sarble the Eye…" somebody near by said, and Horza turned to see. A cadaverous-looking human lying on a couch behind and to Horza's left was talking to another and pointing up to the terrace where the disturbance had occurred a few minutes earlier. Horza heard the words «Sarble» and «caught» a few more times from elsewhere around him as the news spread. He turned round to watch the game as the Players started to inspect their hands; the betting began. Horza thought it was a pity the reporter had been caught, but it might mean that the security guards relaxed a little, giving him a better chance of not being asked for his pass.

Horza was sitting a good fifty metres from the nearest player, a woman whose name he had heard mentioned but had forgotten. As the first hand progressed, only mild versions of what she was feeling and was being made to feel impinged upon his consciousness. Nevertheless, he didn't enjoy the sensation, and switched on the lounger's baffle field, using the small control set on one arm of the couch. Had he wanted, he could have cancelled the immediate effect of the player he just happened to be sitting behind and substituted the effects of any of the other emotor units on the table. The effect would have been nothing like as intense as what the moties or the Lives were experiencing, but it would certainly have given a good idea of what the Players were going through. Most of the other people around him were using their lounger's controls in that way, flicking from one player to another in an attempt to judge the overall state of the game. Horza would concentrate on Kraiklyn's broadcast emotions later, but for now he just wanted to settle in and get the general feel of the game.