Consider Phlebas

7. A Game of Damage

“Damage — the game banned everywhere. Tonight, in that unprepossessing building across the square under the dome, they’ll gather: the Players of the Eve of Destruction… the most select group of rich psychotics in the human galaxy, here to play the game that is to real life what soap opera is to high tragedy.

“This is the bi-port city of Evanauth, Vavatch Orbital, the very same Vavatch Orbital that in about eleven standard hours from now is due to be blasted into its component atoms as the Idiran-Culture war in this part of the galaxy, near the Glittercliff and Sullen Gulf, reaches a new high in standing-by-your-principles-regardless and a new low in common sense. It’s that imminent destruction that’s attracted these scatological vultures here, not the famous Megaships or the azure-blue technological miracles of the Circlesea. No, these people are here because the whole Orbital is doomed to be blown away shortly, and they think it’s kind of amusing to play Damage — an ordinary card game with a few embellishments to make it attractive to the mentally disturbed — in places on the verge of annihilation.

“They’ve played on worlds about to suffer massive comet or meteorite strikes, in volcanic calderas about to blow, in cities due for nuclear bombardment in ritualistic wars, in asteroids heading for the centre of stars, in front of moving cliffs of ice or lava, inside mysterious alien spacecraft discovered empty and deserted and set on courses aiming them into black holes, in vast palaces about to be sacked by android mobs, and just about everywhere you can think of you’d rather not want to be immediately after the Players leave. It might seem like a strange sort of way to get your kicks, but it takes all sorts to make a galaxy, I guess.

“So here they’ve come, these hyper-rich dead-beats, in their rented ships or their own cruisers. Right now they’re sobering up and coming down, going through plastic surgery or behaviour therapy — or both — to make them acceptable in what passes for normal society, even in these rarefied circles, after months spent in whatever expensive and unlikely debauchery or perversion particularly appeals to them or happens to be in fashion at the moment. At the same time, they or their minions are scraping together their Aoish credits — all actual; no notes — and scouting hospitals, asylums and freeze-stores for new Lives.

“Here, too, have come the hangers-on — the Damage groupies, the fortune seekers, the past failures at the game desperate for another try if they can only raise the money and the Lives… and Damage’s very own special sort of human debris: the moties, victims of the game’s emotional fall-out; mind-junkies who only exist to lap at the crumbs of ecstasy and anguish falling from the lips of their heroes, the Players of the Game.

“Nobody knows exactly how all these different groups hear about the game or even how they all get here in time, but the word goes out to those who really need to or want to hear about it, and like ghouls they come, ready for the game and the destruction.

“Originally Damage was played on such occasions because only during the breakdown of law and morality, and the confusion and chaos normally surrounding Final Events, could the game be carried out in anything remotely resembling part of the civilised galaxy; which, believe it or not, the Players like to think they’re part of. Now the subsequent nova, world-busting or other cataclysm is seen as some sort of metaphysical symbol for the mortality of all things, and as the Lives involved in a Full Game are all volunteers, a lot of places — like good old pleasure-oriented, permissive Vavatch — let the game take place with official blessing from the authorities. Some people say it’s not the game it used to be, even that it’s become something of a media event, but I say it’s still a game for the mad and the bad; the rich and the uncaring, but not the careless; the unhinged… but well connected. People still die in Damage, and not just the Lives, either, or the Players.

“It’s been called the most decadent game in history. About all you can say in the game’s defence is that it, rather than reality, occupies the warped minds of some of the galaxy’s more twisted people; gods know what they would get up to if it wasn’t there. And if the game does any good apart from reminding us — as if we needed reminding — how crazy the bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform can become, it does occasionally remove one of the Players and frighten the rest for a while. In these arguably insane times, any lessening or attenuation of madness is maybe something to be grateful for.

“I’ll be filing another report again some time during the course of the game, from within the auditorium if I can get in there. But in the meantime, goodbye and take care. This is Sarble the Eye, Evanauth City, Vavatch.”

The image on the wrist screen of a man standing in sunlight on a plaza faded; the half-masked, youngish face disappearing.

Horza put his terminal screen back onto his cuff. The time display winked slowly with the countdown to Vavatch’s destruction.

Sarble the Eye, one of the most famous of the humanoid galaxy’s freelance reporters, and also one of the most successful at getting into places he wasn’t supposed to, would now probably be trying to enter the games hall — if he hadn’t got in already; the broadcast Horza had just watched had been recorded that afternoon. Doubtless Sarble would be in disguise, so Horza was glad he’d bribed his way in before the reporter’s broadcast went out and the security guards round the hall got even more wary; it had been hard enough as it was.

Horza, in his new guise as Kraiklyn, had posed as a motie — one of the emotional junkies who followed the erratic, secretive progress of the major game series round the more tawdry fringes of civilisation, having discovered that all but the most expensive reserved places had been sold out the day before. The five Aoish credit Tenths he had started out with that morning were now reduced to three; though he also had some money keyed into a couple of credit cards he’d bought. That currency would shrink in real value, though, as the destruction time drew nearer.

Horza took a deep, satisfying breath and looked around the big arena. He had climbed as high as he could up the banked steps, slopes and platforms, using the interval before the game began to get an overview of the whole thing.

The dome of the arena was transparent, showing stars and the bright shining line that was the Orbital’s far side, now in daylight. The lights of shuttles coming and going — mostly going — traced lines across the still points. Beneath the dome cover hung a smoky haze, lit with the popping lights of a small firework display. The air was filled, too, with the chanting of massed voices; a choir of scalecones stood banked on the far side of the auditorium. The humanoids forming the choir appeared identical in all but stature and in the tones they produced from their puffed-out chests and long necks. They seemed to be making the ambient racket, but as he looked around the arena Horza could make out the faint purple edges in the air where other, more localised sound fields held command, over smaller stages where dancers danced, singers sang, strippers stripped, boxers boxed, or people just stood around talking.

Banked all around, the paraphernalia of the game seethed like a vast storm. Maybe ten or even twenty thousand people, mostly humanoid but some utterly different, including not a few machines and drones, they sat or lay or walked or stood, watching magicians, jugglers, fighters, immolators, hypnotics, couplers, actors, orators and a hundred other types of entertainers all doing their turns. Tents had been pitched on some of the larger terraces; rows of seats and couches remained on others. Many small stages frazzled with lights, smoke and glittering holograms and soligrams. Horza saw a 3-D maze spread out over several terraces, full of tubes and angles, some clear, some opaque, some moving, some staying still. Shadows and forms moved inside.

A slow-motion animal trapeze act arced gradually overhead. Horza recognised the beasts performing it; it would become a combat act later on.

Some people walked by Horza: tall humanoids in fabulous clothes, glittering like a gaudy night city seen from the air. They chattered in almost inaudibly high voices, and from a network of fine, golden coloured tubes branching all around their bright red and dark purple faces, tiny puffs of incandescent gas pulsed out, wreathing their semi-scaled necks and naked shoulders, and trailing and dimming behind them in a fiery orange glow. Horza watched them pass. Their cloaks, flowing out behind as though hardly heavier than the air through which they moved, flickered with the image of an alien face, each cloak showing part of one huge moving image, as though a projector overhead was focused on the capes of the moving group. The orange gas touched Horza’s nostrils and his head swam for a second. He let his immune-glands deal with the narcotic, and continued to look around the arena.

The eye of the storm, the still, quiet spot, was so small it could easily have been missed in even a slow and attentive scan of the auditorium. It was not in the centre, but set at one end of the ellipsoid of level ground forming the lowest visible level of the arena. There, under a canopy of still dark lighting units, a round table stood, just about large enough to accommodate at its rim the sixteen large, differently styled chairs which each faced a wedge of colour fixed to the top of the table. A console set into the table itself faced each chair, on which straps and other restraining devices lay opened. Behind each of the seats lay an area of clear space on which small seats, twelve in all, were placed. A small fence separated them from the larger seats in front, and another fence cordoned off the set of twelve seats from a larger area behind where people, most of them moties, were already quietly waiting.

The game seemed to have been delayed. Horza sat down on what was either an over-designed seat or a rather unimaginative piece of sculpture. He was almost on the highest level of the terraces of the arena, with a good view over most of the rest. There was nobody near by. He reached deep inside his heavy blouse and peeled off some artificial skin from his abdomen. He rolled the skin into a ball and threw it into a large pot that held a small tree, just behind where he sat; then he checked the Aoish credit Tenths, the negotiable memory card, the pocket terminal and the light CRE pistol which had been hidden by the paunch of fake skin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a small, darkly dressed man approach. The man looked at Horza with his head tilted, from about five metres off, then came closer.

“Hey, you want to be a Life?”

“No. Goodbye,” Horza said. The small man sniffed and walked off, stopping further along the walkway to prod a shape lying near the edge of a narrow terrace. Horza looked over and saw a woman there raise her head groggily, then shake it slowly, moving sinuous lengths of bedraggled white hair. Her faced showed briefly in the light of an overhead spot; she was beautiful but looked very tired. The small man spoke to her again, but she shook her head and made a motion with one hand. The small man walked off.

The flight in the ex-Culture shuttle had been relatively uneventful; after some confusion, Horza had succeeded in patching through to the Orbital’s navigation system, discovered where he was in relation to the Olmedreca’s last known position, and set off to find whatever was left of the Megaship. He’d accessed a news service while gorging himself on Culture emergency rations, and found a report on the Olmedreca in the index. The pictures showed the ship, listing a little and fractionally bow-down, floating in a calm sea surrounded by ice, the first kilometre of its hull seemingly buried inside the huge tabular berg. Small aircraft and a few shuttles hovered and flew about the gigantic wreck, like flies above the carcass of a dinosaur. The commentary accompanying the visuals spoke of a mysterious second nuclear explosion aboard the craft. It also reported that when police craft had arrived, the Megaship had proved to be deserted.

Hearing that, Horza had immediately altered the shuttle’s destination, swinging the craft round, to head for Evanauth.

Horza had had three Tenths of an Aoish credit. He had sold the shuttle for five Tenths. It was absurdly cheap, especially given the imminent destruction of the Orbital, but he had been in a hurry, and the dealer who accepted the craft was certainly taking a risk handling the machine; it was very obviously a Culture design, the brain had equally obviously been shot out of it, so there could be little doubt it had been stolen. The Culture would treat the destruction of the craft’s consciousness as murder.

In three hours Horza had sold the shuttle, bought clothes, cards, a gun, a couple of terminals and some information. All except the information had been cheap.

Horza now knew that there was a craft answering the description of the Clear Air Turbulence on the Orbital, or rather underneath it, inside the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle called The Ends of Invention. He found that hard to believe, but there was no other craft it could be. According to the information agency, a ship fitting the CAT’s description had been brought on board by one of the Evanauth Port shipbuilders to have repairs made to its warping units; it had arrived under tow two days previously, with only its fusion motors working. He could not, however, find out its name or exact location.

It sounded to Horza like the CAT had been used to rescue the survivors of Kraiklyn’s band; it must have come over the O wall on remote control, using its warp units. It had picked the Free Company up, then hopped back over again, damaging its warp motors in the process.

He had also been unable to find out who the survivors might be, but assumed Kraiklyn must be one of them; nobody else could have brought the CAT over the Edgewall. He hoped he’d find Kraiklyn at the Damage game. Either way, Horza had decided to make for the CAT afterwards. He still intended to head for Schar’s World, and the Clear Air Turbulence was the most likely way of getting there. He hoped Yalson was alive. He also hoped it was true about The Ends of Invention being totally demilitarised, and the volume around Vavatch being free of Culture ships. After all this time he wouldn’t have put it past the Culture’s Minds to have found out about the CAT being in the same volume of space as The Hand of God 137 when it came under attack, and to have made a connection or two.

He sat back in the seat — or sculpture — and relaxed, letting the internal pattern of the motie drop from his mind and body. He had to start thinking like Kraiklyn again; he closed his eyes.

After a few minutes he could hear things starting to happen down in the lower reaches of the arena. He brought himself to and looked around. The white-haired woman who had been lying on the nearby terrace had got up; she was walking, a little unsteadily, down into the arena, her long, heavy dress sweeping over the steps. Horza got up, too, following quickly down the stairs in the wake of her perfume. She didn’t look at him when he skipped past her. She was fiddling with an askew tiara.

The lights were on over the coloured table where the game would be played. Some of the stages in the auditorium were starting to close up or go dim. People were gradually gravitating towards the game table, to the seats and loungers and standing areas overlooking it. In the glare of the overhead lights, tall figures in black robes moved slowly, checking pieces of the game equipment. They were the adjudicators: Ishlorsinami. The species was renowned for being the most unimaginative, humourless, prissy, honest and incorruptible group in the galaxy and they always officiated at Damage games because hardly anybody else could be trusted.

Horza stopped by a food stall to stock up on food and drink; he watched the game table and the figures around it while his order was prepared. The woman with the heavy dress and long white hair passed him, still going down the steps. Her tiara was almost straight, though her long, loose gown was crumpled. She yawned as she went past. Horza paid for his food with a card, then followed the woman again, going towards the growing crowd of people and machines starting to cluster all around the outer perimeter of the game area. The woman looked suspiciously at him when he half ran, half walked down the steps past her again.

Horza bribed his way into one of the better terraces. He pulled the hood of his heavy blouse out from the thick collar, stretching it over his forehead and out a little so that his face was in shadow. He didn’t want the real Kraiklyn to see him now. The terrace jutted out over lower ones, slanting down with an excellent view of the table itself and the gantries above. Most of the fenced areas around the table were visible too. Horza settled onto a soft lounger near a noisy group of extravagantly dressed tripedals who hooted a lot and kept spitting into a large pot in the centre of their group of gently rocking couches.

The Ishlorsinami seemed to have satisfied themselves that everything was working and was set up fairly. They walked down a ramp set into the surface of the arena’s ellipsoid floor. Some lights went off; a quietfield slowly cut off the sounds from the rest of the auditorium.

Horza took a quick look round. A few stages and sets still showed lights, but they were going out. The slow-motion animal trapeze act was still going on, though, high up in the darkness below the stars; the huge ponderous beasts were swinging through the air, field harnesses glittering. They somersaulted and twisted, but now as they did so, passing each other in mid-air, they reached out with their clawed paws, slashing slowly and silently at each other’s fur. Nobody else seemed to be watching.

Horza was surprised to see the woman he had passed twice on the stairs walk past him again and drape herself over a vacant couch which had been reserved near the front of the terrace. Somehow he hadn’t thought she would be rich enough to afford this area.

Without a fanfare or announcement, the Players of the Eve of Destruction appeared, coming up the ramp in the arena floor, led by a single Ishlorsinami. Horza checked his terminal; it was exactly seven hours standard to the Orbital’s destruction. Applause, cheers and, near Horza at least, loud hooting greeted the contestants, though the quietfields muffled everything. As they appeared from the shadows on the ramp, some of the Players acknowledged the crowd who had come to see them play, while other Players totally ignored them.

Horza recognised few of them. The ones he did know, or had at least heard of, were Ghalssel, Tengayet Doy-Suut, Wilgre and Neeporlax. Ghalssel of Ghalssel’s Raiders — probably the most successful of the Free Companies. Horza had heard the mercenary ship arrive from about eleven kilometres away, while he was making the deal with the shuttle saleswomen. She had frozen at the time; her eyes glazed. Horza didn’t like to ask whether she thought the noise was the Culture coming to destroy the Orbital a few hours early or just coming to get her for buying a hot shuttle craft.

Ghalssel was an average-looking man, stocky enough to be obviously from a high-G planet, but without the look of compressed power that most such people possessed. He was simply dressed and his head was clean shaven. Supposedly only a Damage game, where such things were banned, could force Ghalssel out of the suit he always wore.

Tengayet Doy-Suut was tall, very dark and also simply dressed. The Suut was the champion Damage Player, on both game average, wins and maximum credits. He had come from a recently Contacted planet twenty years before, and had been a champion player of games of chance and bluff there, too. That was where he had had his face removed and a stainless-steel mask grafted on; only the eyes looked alive: expressionless soft jewels set in the sculpted metal. The mask had a matt finish, to prevent his opponents seeing his cards reflected in his face.

Wilgre had to be helped up the ramp by some slaves from his retinue. The blue giant from Ozhleh, clad in a mirror robe, looked almost as though he was being rolled up the slope by the small humans behind, although the hem of his robe kicked out now and again to show where his four stubby legs were scrabbling to propel his great body up the ramp. In one of his two hands he held a large mirror, in the other a whip lead on the end of which a blinded rogothuyr — its four paws encrusted with precious metals, its snout encased in a platinum muzzle and its eyes replaced by emeralds — padded like a lithe nightmare in pure white. The animal’s giant head swept from side to side as it used its ultrasonic sense to map out its surroundings. On another terrace, almost opposite Horza’s, all thirty-two of Wilgre’s concubines threw aside their body veils and went down on their knees and elbows, worshipping their lord. He waved the mirror at them briefly. Virtually every magnifier and micro-camera smuggled into the auditorium also swivelled to focus on the thirty-two assorted females, reputedly the finest one-sex harem in the galaxy.

Neeporlax presented something of a contrast. The youth was a shambling, gaunt, shoddily clothed figure, blinking in the lights of the arena and clutching a soft toy. The boy was perhaps the second-best Damage Player in the galaxy, but he always gave his winnings away, and the average meterbed hotel would have thought twice about admitting him; he was diseased, half blind, incontinent and albino. His head was liable to shake out of control at an anxious moment in a game, but his hands held holocards as though the plastics had been set in rock. He, too, was assisted up the ramp, by a young girl who helped him to his seat, combed his hair and kissed his cheek, then went to stand in the area behind the twelve seats set immediately aft of the youth’s chair.

Wilgre raised one of his chubby blue hands and threw a few Hundredths at the crowd beyond the fences; people scrabbled for the coins. Wilgre always mixed in a few higher denominations as well. Once, at a game a few years previously inside a moon heading for a black hole, he had thrown a Billion away with the small change, disposing of perhaps a tenth of a per cent of his fortune with just one flick of the wrist. A decrepit asteroid tramp, who had just been turned down as a Life because he had only one arm, ended up buying his own planet.

The rest of the Players were a pretty varied-looking bunch as well; but with one exception, Horza didn’t recognise them. Three or four of the others were greeted with shouts and some fireworks, so presumably they were well known; the rest were either disliked or unknown. The last player to come up the ramp was Kraiklyn.

Horza settled back in his lounger, smiling. The Free Company leader had had a little temporary facial alteration done — probably pull-off — and his hair was dyed, but it was him all right. He wore a light-coloured one-piece fabric suit, he was clean shaven and his hair was brown. Perhaps the others on the CAT wouldn’t have recognised him, but Horza had studied the man — to see how he carried himself, how he walked, how the muscles in his face were set — and to the Changer, Kraiklyn stood out like a boulder in a pebble-field.

When all the Players were seated, their Lives were led in to sit on the seats immediately behind each Player.

The Lives were all humans; most already looked half dead anyway, though they were all physically whole. One by one they were taken to their seats, strapped in and helmeted. The lightweight black helmets covered their faces except for the eyes. Most slumped forward once they were strapped in; a few sat more upright, but none raised their eyes or looked round. All the regular Players had the full complement of Lives allowed; some had them specially bred, while others had their agents supply all they wanted. The less rich, not so well known Players, like Kraiklyn, had the sweepings of prisons and asylums, and a few paid depressives who had willed their share of any proceeds to somebody else. Often members of the Despondent sect could be persuaded to become Lives, either for free or for a donation to their cause, but Horza couldn’t see any of their distinctive tiered head-dresses or bleeding-eye symbols.

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 hand, 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.

Kraiklyn dropped out of the first hand early enough to be sure of avoiding losing a Life when it finished; with so few Lives of his own it was the wisest course unless he had a very strong hand. Horza watched the man carefully as he sat back in his seat and relaxed, his emotor unit dormant. Kraiklyn licked his lips and wiped his brow. Horza decided in the next hand he would eavesdrop on what Kraiklyn was going through, just to see what it was like.

The hand finished. Wilgre won. He waved, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. Some moties had fainted already; at the other end of the ellipsoid, in its cage, the rogothuyr snarled. Five Players lost Lives; five seated humans, sitting hopeless and despairing as the effects of the emotor fields still resounded in them, went suddenly slack in their chairs as their helmets sent a neural blast through their skulls strong enough to stun the Lives sitting around them and to make the nearest moties, and the Player each Life belonged to, flinch.

Ishlorsinami undid the restrainers on the dead humans’ seats and carried them away down the access ramp. The remaining Lives gradually recovered, but they sat as listless as before. The Ishlorsinami claimed they always checked that each volunteering Life was genuine, and that the drugs they gave them simply stopped them from becoming hysterical, but it was rumoured that there were ways round the Ishlorsinami screening process, and that some people had succeeded in disposing of their enemies by drugging or hypnotising them and “volunteering” them for the game.

As the second hand began, and Horza switched on his couch monitor to experience Kraiklyn’s emotions, the white-haired woman came back down the aisle and resumed her place in front of Horza, at the front of the terrace, draping herself tiredly over the piece of furniture as though she was bored.

Horza did not know enough about Damage as a card game to be able to follow exactly what was going on with the cards, either by reading the various emotions being passed round the table, or by analysing each hand after it was finished — as the first hand was already being analysed by the hooting tripeds near him — when the cards as they had been dealt and played were flashed up on the arena’s internal broadcast circuits. But he tuned in to Kraiklyn’s feelings just to see what they were like.

The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was being hit from various directions. Some of the emotions were contradictory, which Horza guessed meant that there was no concerted effort being made on Kraiklyn; he was just taking most people’s secondary armament. There was a considerable urge to like Wilgre — that attractive blue colour… and with those four little comical feet, he couldn’t really be much of a threat… A bit of a clown, really, for all his money… The woman sitting on Kraiklyn’s right, on the other hand, stripped to the waist, with no breasts, and a sheath for a ceremonial sword slung across her naked back: she was one to watch… But it was a laugh really… Nothing really matters; everything is just a joke; life is, the game is… one card’s pretty much like another when you come to think about it… For all it matters might as well throw the lot in the air… It was nearly his turn to play… First that flat-chested bitch… boy, did he have a card he was going to hit her with…

Horza switched off again, unsure whether he was hearing Kraiklyn’s own thoughts about the woman, or ones somebody else was trying to get him to think about her.

He picked up Kraiklyn’s thoughts later on in the hand, when the woman was out and sitting back and relaxing, her eyes closed. (Horza looked briefly at the white-haired woman on the couch down in front of him; she was watching the game apparently, but one leg was slung over the side of her lounger, swinging to and fro, as though her mind was somewhere else.) Kraiklyn was feeling good. First of all that slut next to him was out, and he was sure it was because of some of the cards he had played, but also there was a sort of inner exhilaration… Here he was, playing with the best players in the galaxy… the Players. Him. Him… (a sudden inhibitory thought blocked out a name he was about to think)… and he really wasn’t doing that badly at all… He was keeping up… In fact this hand was looking pretty damn good… At last things were going right… He was going to win something… Too many things had… well, there was that… Think about the cards! (suddenly) Think about here and now! Yes, the cards… Let’s see… I can hit that fat blue oaf with… Horza switched off again.

He was sweating. He hadn’t fully realised the degree of feedback from the Player’s mind that was involved. He had thought it was just the emotions beamed at them; he hadn’t dreamed he would be so much in Kraiklyn’s mind. Yet this was only a taste of what Kraiklyn himself was getting full blast, and the moties and Lives behind him. Real feedback, only just under control, only just stopping from becoming the emotional equivalent of a loudspeaker howl, building to destruction. Now the Changer realised the attraction of the game, and why people had been known to go mad when playing it.

Much as he disliked the experience, Horza felt new respect for the man he intended at least to remove and replace, and most likely to kill.

Kraiklyn had a sort of advantage in as much as the thoughts and emotions being beamed back at him were at least partly emanating from his own mind, whereas the Lives and the moties had to put up with extremely powerful blasts of what was entirely somebody else’s way of feeling something. All the same, it had to take a considerable strength of character, or a vast amount of hard training, to be able to handle what Kraiklyn was obviously coping with. Horza switched back in again and thought, How do the moties stand it? And, Watch out; maybe this is how they started.

Kraiklyn lost the hand, two rounds of betting later. The half-blind albino, Neeporlax, was defeated, too, and the Suut raked in his winnings, his steel face glowing in the light reflected from the Aoish credits in front of him. Kraiklyn was slumped in his seat, feeling, Horza knew, like death. A pulse of a sort of resigned, almost grateful agony swept through Kraiklyn from behind as his first Life died, and Horza felt it, too. He and Kraiklyn both winced.

Horza switched off and looked at the time. Less than an hour had passed since he had bluffed his way past the guards at the outer doors of the arena. He had some food, on a low table by his couch, but he got up all the same and walked away from the table, up the terrace towards the nearest walkway, where food stalls and bars waited.

Security guards were checking passes. Horza saw them moving from person to person on the terrace. He kept his face to the front but flicked his eyes from side to side, watching the guards as they moved. One was almost directly in his path, bending to ask an old-looking female, who was lying on an airbed which blew perfumed fumes round her thin, exposed legs. She was sitting watching the game with a big smile on her face, and she took a while to notice the guard. Horza walked a little faster so that, when the guard straightened, he would be past her.

The old lady flashed her pass and turned quickly back to the game. The guard put out an arm in front of Horza.

“May I see your pass, sir?”

Horza stopped and looked into the face of the young, burly woman. He looked back down to the couch he had been on.

“I’m sorry, I think I left it down there. I’ll be back in a second; can I show it to you then? I’m in a bit of a hurry.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and bent a little at the waist. “I got wrapped up in the last hand there. Too much to drink before the game started; always the same; never learn. All right?” He put out his hands, looked a little sheepish, and made as if to clap the guard on her shoulders. He shifted his weight again. The guard looked down to where Horza had indicated he had left his pass.

“For now, sir. I’ll look at it later. But you really shouldn’t go leaving it lying about. Don’t do it again.”

“Right! Right! Thank you!” Horza laughed and went off at a quick walk, onto the circular walkway and then to a toilet, just in case he was being watched. He washed his face and hands, listened to a drunk woman singing somewhere in the echoing room, then left by another exit and walked round to another terrace, where he got something else to eat and had a drink. He bribed his way into a different terrace again, this one even more expensive than the one he had been on originally, because it was next to the one which held Wilgre’s concubines. A soft wall of shining black material had been erected at the rear and sides of their terrace to keep out the nearer eyes, but their body scent wafted strongly over the terrace Horza now found himself on. Genofixed before conception not only to be stunningly attractive to a wide variety of humanoid males, the females in the harem also had highly accentuated aphrodisiac pheromones. Before Horza knew what was happening he had an erection and had started to sweat again. Most of the men and women around him were in a state of obvious sexual arousal, and those not plugged into the game on some sort of exotic double-fix were engaged in sexual foreplay or actual intercourse. Horza made his immune glands start up again, and walked stiffly to the front of the terrace, where five couches had been vacated by two males and three females, who were rolling around on the ground in front, just behind the restraining barrier. Clothes lay scattered on the terrace floor. Horza sat on one of the five free couches. A female head, beaded with sweat, appeared from the tangle of heaving bodies long enough to look at Horza and breathe, “Feel free; and if you would like to…” Then her eyes rolled upwards and she moaned. Her head disappeared again.

Horza shook his head, swore and made his way out of the terrace. His attempt to recover the money he had spent bribing his way in was met with a pitying laugh.

Horza ended up sitting on a stool in front of a combined bar and betting stall. He ordered a drug bowl and made a small bet on Kraiklyn to win the next hand, while his body gradually freed itself of the effects of the concubines’ doctored sweat glands. His pulse lowered and his breathing shallowed; perspiration stopped rolling down his brow. He sipped his drug bowl and sniffed the fumes, while watching Kraiklyn lose first one and then another hand, though in the first one he pulled out early enough not to lose a Life. Nevertheless, he was down to one Life now. It was possible for a Damage player to gamble his own life if he had no other remaining behind him, but it was a rare thing, and in games where the very best met hopefuls, as in this one, the Ishlorsinami tended to forbid it.

The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was taking no chances. He dropped out of every game before he could lose a Life, obviously waiting for a hand that would be almost unbeatable before gambling for what might be the last time in the game. Horza ate. Horza drank. Horza sniffed. Sometimes he tried to look over at the terrace he had been on at first, where the bored-looking woman was, but he couldn’t see for the lights. Now and again he looked up at the fighting animals on the trapezes. They were tired now, and injured. The elaborate choreography of their earlier movements was gone, and they were reduced to hanging grimly onto their trapeze with one limb and striking out at each other with the other clawed arm whenever they happened to come close enough. Drops of white blood fell like sparse snow and settled on an invisible force field twenty metres beneath them.

Gradually the Lives died. The game went on. Time, according to who you were, dragged or flashed by. The price of drinks and drugs and food went up slowly as the destruction time crept closer. Through the still transparent dome of the old arena the lights of departing shuttles blazed now and again. A fight broke out between two punters at the bar. Horza got up and moved away before the security guards came to break it up.

Horza counted his money. He had two Aoish credit Tenths left, plus some money credited to the negotiable cards, which were becoming harder and harder to use as the accepting computers in the Orbital’s financial network were closed down.

He leant on a restraining bar on a circular walkway, watching the game progress on the table below. Wilgre was leading; the Suut was just behind. They had both lost the same number of Lives, but the blue giant had more money. Two of the hopefuls had left the game, one after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the officiating Ishlorsinami that he could afford to gamble with his own life. Kraiklyn was still in there; but, from the close-up of his face which Horza caught on a monitor screen in a drug bar he passed, the Man was finding the going hard.

Horza toyed with one of the Aoish credit Tenths, wishing the game would end, or at least that Kraiklyn would get put out. The coin stuck to his hand, and he looked down into it. It was like looking into a tiny, infinite tube, lit from the very bottom. By bringing it up to your eye, with the other closed, you could experience vertigo.

The Aoish were a banker species, and the credits were their greatest invention. They were just about the only universally acceptable medium of exchange in existence, and each one entitled the holder to convert a coin into either a given weight of any stable element, an area on a free Orbital, or a computer of a given speed and capacity. The Aoish guaranteed the conversion and never defaulted, and although the rate of exchange could sometimes vary to a greater extent than was officially allowed for — as it had during the Idiran-Culture war — on the whole the real and theoretical value of the currency remained predictable enough for it to be a safe, secure hedge against uncertain times, rather than a speculator’s dream. Rumour — as ever, contrary enough to be suspiciously believable — had it that the group in the galaxy which possessed the greatest hoard of the coins was the Culture; the most militantly unmoneyed society on the civilised scene. Horza didn’t really believe that rumour either, though; in fact he thought that it was just the sort of rumour the Culture would spread about itself.

He pushed the coins away into a pocket inside his blouse as he saw Kraiklyn reaching to the centre of the game table and toss some coins into the large pile already there. Watching carefully now, the Changer made his way round to the nearest money-changer’s bar, got eight Hundredths for his single Tenth (an exorbitant rate of commission, even by Vavatch standards) and used some of the change to bribe his way into a terrace with some unoccupied couches. There he plugged into Kraiklyn’s thoughts.

Who are you? The question leapt out at him, into him.

The sensation was one of vertigo, a stunning dizziness, a vastly magnified equivalent of the disorientation which sometimes affects the eyes when they fasten on a simple and regular pattern, and the brain mistakes its distance from that pattern, the false focus seeming to pull at the eyes, muscles against nerves, reality against assumptions. His head did not swim; it seemed to sink, foundering, struggling.

Who are you? (Who am I?) Who are you?

Slam, slam, slam: the sound of the barrage falling, the sound of doors closing; attack and incarceration, explosion and collapse together.

Just a little accident. A slight mistake. One of those things. A game of Damage, and a high-tech impressionist… unfortunate combination. Two harmless chemicals which, when mixed—… Feedback, a howl like pain, and something breaking…

A mind between mirrors. He was drowning in his own reflection (something breaking), falling through. One fading part of him — the part which didn’t sleep? Yes? No? — screamed from down the deep, dark pit, as it fell: Changer… Changer… Change—… (eee)…

… The sound faded, whisper-quieted, became the wind-moan of stale air through dead trees on a barren midnight solstice, the soul’s midwinter in some calm, hard place.

He knew—

(Start again…)

Somebody knew that somewhere a man sat in a seat, in a big hall in a city in… on a big place, a big threatened place; and the man was playing… playing a game (a game which killed). The man still there, living and breathing… But his eyes did not see, his ears did not hear. He had one sense now: this one, inside here, fastened… inside here.

Whisper: Who am I?

There’d been a little accident (life a succession of same; evolution dependent on garbling; all progress a function of getting things wrong)…

He (and forget who this “he” is, just accept the nameless term while this equation works itself out)… he is the man in the chair in the hall on the big place, fallen somewhere inside himself, somewhere inside… another one. A double, a copy, somebody pretending to be him.

… But something wrong with this theory…

(Start again…)

Marshal forces.

Need clues, reference points, something to hold onto.

Memory of a cell dividing, seen in time lapse, the very start of independent life, though still dependent. Hold that image.

Words (names); need words.

Not yet, but… something about turning inside out; a place…

What am I looking for?

Mind.

Whose?

(Silence)

Whose?

(Silence)

Whose?…

(Silence)

(… Start again…)

Listen. This is shock. You were hit, hard. This is just some form of shock, and you’ll recover.

You are the man playing the game (as are we all)… Still something wrong, though, something both missing and added. Think of those vital errors; think of that dividing cell, same and not-same, the place that’s turned inside out, the cell cluster turning itself inside out, looking like a split brain (unsleeping, moving). Listen for somebody trying to talk to you…

(Silence)

(This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian:)

Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself?

The individual is the fruit of mistake; therefore only the process has validity… So who’s to speak for him?

The wind howls, empty of meaning, a soak for warmth, a cess for hope, distributing his body’s exhausted heat to the black skies, dissolving the salty flame of his life, chilling to the core, sapping and slowing. He feels himself falling again, and knows that this time it is a deeper plunge, to where the silence and the cold are absolute, and no voice cries out, not even this one.

(Howled like the wind:) Whoever cared enough to talk to me?

(Silence)

Whoever ever cared—

(Silence)

Who—?

(Whisper:) Listen: “The Jinmoti of—

… Bozlen Two.

Two. Somebody had spoken once. He was the Changer, he was the error, the imperfect copy.

He was playing a different game from the other one (but he still intended to take a life). He was watching, feeling what the other was feeling, but feeling more.

Horza. Kraiklyn.

Now he knew. The game was… Damage. The place was… a world where a ribbon of the original idea was turned inside out… an Orbital: Vavatch. The Mind in Schar’s World. Xoralundra. Balveda. The (and finding his hate, he hammered it into the wall of the pit, like a peg for a rope) Culture!

A breach in the cell wall; waters breaking; light freeing; illumination… leading to rebirth.

Weight and cold and bright, bright light…

… Shit. Bastards. Lost it all, thanks to a Pit of Self-Doubt Treble…

A wave of despondent fury swept over him, and something died.

Horza tore the flimsy headset away. He lay quivering on the couch, his eyes gummed and smarting, staring up at the auditorium lights and the two white fighting animals hanging half-dead from the trapezes overhead. He forced his eyes closed, then pulled them open again, away from the darkness.

Pit of Self-Doubt. Kraiklyn had been hit by cards which made the target player question their own identity. From the tenor of Kraiklyn’s thoughts before he’d pulled the headset off, Horza thought Kraiklyn hadn’t been too terrified by the effect, just disorientated. He’d been sufficiently distracted by the attack to lose the hand, and that was all his opponents had been aiming for. Kraiklyn was out of the game.

The effect on him, trying to be Kraiklyn but knowing he wasn’t, had been more severe. That was all it was. Any Changer would have had the same problem; he was certain…

The trembling began to fade. He sat up and swung his feet off the couch. He had to leave. Kraiklyn would be going, so he had to.

Pull yourself together, man.

He looked down to the playing table. The breastless woman had won. Kraiklyn glared at her as she raked in her winnings and his straps were unfastened. On the way out of the arena, Kraiklyn passed the limp, still warm body of his last Life as it was released from its seat.

He kicked the corpse; the crowd booed.

Horza stood up, turned and bumped into a hard, unyielding body.

“May I see that pass now, sir?” said the guard he’d lied to earlier.

He smiled nervously, aware that he was still trembling a little; his eyes were red, and his face was covered in sweat. The guard gazed steadily at him, her face expressionless. Some of the people on the terrace were watching them.

“I’m… sorry…” the Changer said slowly, patting his pockets with shaking hands. The guard put out her hand and took his left elbow.

“Perhaps you’d better—”

“Look,” Horza said, bending closer to her. “I… I haven’t got one. Would a bribe do?” He started to reach inside his blouse for the credits. The guard kicked up with her knee and twisted Horza’s left arm behind his back. It was all done in the most expert fashion, and Horza had to jump to ride the kick tolerably. He let his left shoulder disconnect and started to crumple, but not before his free hand had lightly scratched the guard’s face (and that, he realised as he fell, had been an instinctive reaction, nothing reasoned; for some reason he found this amusing).

The guard caught Horza’s other arm and pinned both his hands behind his back, using her lock-glove to secure them there. With her other hand she wiped blood from her cheek. Horza knelt on the terrace surface, moaning the way most people would have with an arm broken or dislocated.

“It’s all right, everybody; just a little problem over a pass. Please continue with your enjoyment,” the guard said. Then she pulled her arm up; the locked glove hauled Horza up, too. He yelped with pretended pain, and then, head down, was pushed up the steps to the walkway. “Seven three, seven three; male code green incoming walk seven spinwards,” the guard told her lapel mike.

Horza felt her start to weaken as soon as they got to the walkway. He couldn’t see any other guards yet. The pace of the woman behind him faltered and slowed. He heard her gasp, and a couple of drunks leaning on an auto-bar looked at them quizzically; one turned on his bar stool to watch.

“Seven… thr—” the guard began. Then her legs buckled. Horza was dragged down with her, the locked glove staying tight while the muscles in the woman’s body relaxed. He connected his shoulder again, twisted and heaved; the field filaments in the glove gave way, leaving him with livid bruises already starting to form on his wrists. The guard lay on her back on the walkway floor, her eyes closed, breathing lightly. Horza had scraped her with a non-lethal poison nail, he thought; anyway he had no time to wait and see. They were sure to come looking for the guard soon, and he couldn’t afford to let Kraiklyn get too far ahead of him. Whether he was heading back to the ship, as Horza expected he would, or staying to observe more of the game, Horza wanted to stay close.

His hood had fallen back during the fall. He pulled it forward, then hoisted the woman up, dragged her to the bar where the two drunks sat and heaved her onto a bar stool, putting his arms crossed on the bar in front and letting her head rest on them.

The drunk who had watched what had happened grinned at the Changer. Horza tried to grin back. “Look after her, now,” he said. He noticed a cloak at the foot of the other drunk’s bar stool and lifted it up, smiling at its owner, who was too busy ordering another drink to notice. Horza put the cloak round the woman guard’s shoulders, hiding her uniform. “In case she gets cold,” he told the first drunk, who nodded.

Horza walked off quietly. The other drunk, who hadn’t noticed the woman until then, got his drink from the flap in the counter in front of him, turned round to talk to his friend, noticed the woman draped across the bar, nudged her and said, “Hey, you like the cloak, uh? How about I get you a drink?”

Before he left the auditorium, Horza looked up. The fighting animals would fight no more. Beneath the shining hoop that was Vavatch’s far — and, at the moment, day — side, one beast lay, in a broad, shallow pool of milky blood, high in the air, its huge four-limbed frame an X poised over the proceedings beneath, the dark fur and heavy head gashed, white flecked. The other creature hung, swaying gently, from its trapeze; it dripped white blood and twisted slowly, hanging by one closed and locked set of talons, as dead as its fallen adversary.

Horza racked his brains, but could not recall the names of these strange beasts. He shook his head and hurried away.

He found the Players’ area. An Ishlorsinami stood by some double doors in a corridor deep underneath the arena surface. A small crowd of people and machines stood or sat around. Some were asking the silent Ishlorsinami questions; most were talking amongst themselves. Horza took a deep breath, then, waving one of his now useless negotiable account cards, elbowed his way through the crowd, saying, “Security; come on, out of the way there. Security!” People protested but moved. Horza planted himself in front of the tall Ishlorsinami. Steely eyes looked down at him from a thin, hard face. “You,” Horza said, snapping his fingers. “Where did that Player go? The one in the light one-piece suit, brown hair.” The tall humanoid hesitated. “Come on, man,” Horza said. “I’ve been chasing that card-sharp round half the galaxy. I don’t want to lose him now!”

The Ishlorsinami jerked his head in the direction of the corridor leading to the main arena entrance. “He just left.” The humanoid’s voice sounded like two pieces of broken glass being rubbed together. Horza winced, but nodded quickly and, pushing his way back through the crowd, ran up the corridor.

In the vestibule of the arena complex there was an even bigger crowd. Guards, wheeled security drones, private bodyguards, car drivers, shuttle pilots, city police; people with desperate looks waving negotiable cards; others listing those who were buying space on shuttle buses and hovers running out to the port area; people just hanging around waiting to see what was going to happen or hoping that an ordered taxi was about to show up; people just wandering around with lost expressions on their faces, their clothes torn and dishevelled; others with smiles, all confidence, clutching bulky bags and pouches to themselves and frequently accompanied by a hired guard of their own: they all milled around in the vast expanse of noisy, bustling space which led from the auditorium proper to the plaza outside, in the open air, under the stars and the bright line of the Orbital’s far side.

Pulling his hood further over his face, Horza pushed through a barricade of guards. They still seemed concerned with keeping people out, even at this late stage in the game and in the countdown to destruction, and he was not hindered. He looked over the swirling mass of heads, capes, helmets, casings and ornamentation, wondering how he was going to catch Kraiklyn in this lot, or even see him. A wedge of uniformed quadrupeds pushed past him, some tall dignitary carried on a litter in their midst. As Horza was still staggering, a soft pneumatic tyre rolled over his foot as a mobile bar touted its wares. “Would you like a drug-bowl cocktail, sir?” said the machine.

“Fuck off,” Horza told it, and he turned to head after the wedge of four-legged creatures making for the doors.

“Certainly, sir; dry, medium or—?”

Horza elbowed his way through the crowd after the quadrupeds. He caught up with them, and in their wake had an easy passage to the doors.

Outside, it was surprisingly cold. Horza saw his breath in front of him as he looked quickly around, trying to spot Kraiklyn. The crowd outside the arena was hardly less thick and rowdy than that inside. People hawked wares, sold tickets, staggered about, paced to and fro, tried to beg money from strangers, picked pockets, scanned the skies or peered down the broad spaces between buildings. A constant bright stream of machines appeared, roaring out of the sky or sweeping up the boulevards, stopped, and after taking people on, raced off again.

Horza just couldn’t see properly. He noticed a huge hire-guard: a three-metre-tall giant in a bulky suit, holding a large gun and looking about with a vacant expression on a broad, pale face. Wisps of bright red hair poked from underneath his helmet.

“You for hire?” Horza asked, doing a sort of breast stroke to get to the giant through a knot of people watching some fighting insects. The broad face nodded gravely, and the huge man came to attention.

“That I am,” the great voice rumbled.

“Here’s a Hundredth,” Horza said quickly, shoving a coin into the man’s glove, where it looked quite lost. “Let me up on your shoulders. I’m looking for somebody.”

“All right,” the man said, after a second’s thought. He bent down slowly on one knee, the rifle in his hand put out to steady him, butt first on the ground. Horza slung his legs over the giant’s shoulders. Without being asked, the man straightened and stood again, and Horza was hoisted high above the heads of the people in the crowd. He pulled the hood of the blouse over his face again, and scanned the mass of people for a figure in a light one-piece suit, although he knew that Kraiklyn might have changed by now, or even have left. A tight, nervous feeling of desperation was building in Horza’s belly. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter that much if he lost Kraiklyn now, that he could still make his way alone to the port area and so to the GSV that the Clear Air Turbulence was on; but his guts refused to be calmed. It was as though the atmosphere of the game, the terminal excitement of the Orbital, the city, the arena in their last hours, had altered his own body chemistry. He could have concentrated on it and made himself relax, but he couldn’t afford to do that now. He had to look for Kraiklyn.

He scanned the gaudy collection of individuals waiting in a cordoned area for shuttles, then recalled Kraiklyn’s thought about having wasted a lot of money. He looked away and surveyed the rest of the crowd.

He saw him. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was standing, his suit partly covered by a grey cloak, his arms folded and his feet apart, in a queue of people waiting to get buses and taxis, thirty metres away. Horza dipped forward and leant over until he was looking at the hire-guard’s upside-down face. “Thanks. You can put me down now.”

“I have no change,” the man rumbled as he stooped; the vibration went up through Horza’s body.

“That’s OK. Keep it.” Horza jumped off the guard’s shoulders. The giant shrugged as Horza ran, swerving and ducking to get past people, towards where he had seen Kraiklyn.

He had his terminal fastened to his left cuff; the time was minus two and a half hours. Horza squeezed and shoved and excused and apologised his way through the crowd, and on his way saw many people squinting at watches, terminals and screens, heard many little synthesised voices squawk the hour, and nervous humans repeat it.

There was the queue. It looked surprisingly orderly, Horza thought, then he noticed that it was being supervised by the same security guards who had been inside the arena. Kraiklyn was near the front of the queue now, and a bus had almost finished filling up. Road cars and hovers waited behind it. Kraiklyn pointed at one of them as a security guard with a notescreen talked to him.

Horza looked at the row of waiting people and guessed there must be several hundreds of them in it. If he were to join it he would lose Kraiklyn. He looked around quickly, wondering what other way there might be of following.

Somebody crashed into him from behind, and Horza turned round to the noise of shouting and voices and a press of brightly dressed people. A masked woman in a tight silver dress was shouting and screaming at a small, puzzled-looking man with long hair, clad only in intricate loops of dark green string. The woman shouted incoherently at the small man and struck out at him with her open hands; he backed off, shaking his head. People watched. Horza checked that he hadn’t had anything stolen when he was bumped into, then looked round again for some transport, or a taxi tout.

An aircraft flew overhead noisily and dropped leaflets written in a language Horza didn’t understand.

“…Sarble,” a transparent-skinned man said to a companion as they both squeezed out of the nearby crowd and went past Horza. The man was trying to look at a small terminal screen as he walked. Horza caught a glimpse of something which puzzled him. He turned his own terminal onto the appropriate channel.

He was watching what looked like the same incident he had seen for real in the auditorium a few hours earlier: the disturbance on the terrace above his own when he’d heard that Sarble the Eye had been caught by the security guards. Horza frowned and brought the screen on his cuff closer.

It was that same place, it was that incident, seen from almost exactly the same angle and apparent distance he’d watched it from. He grimaced at the screen, trying to imagine where the picture he was watching now could have been taken from. The scene ended and was replaced by candid shots of various eccentric-looking beings enjoying themselves in the auditorium, as the Damage game went on somewhere in the background.

… If I’d stood up, Horza thought, and moved over just a—

It was the woman.

The woman with the white hair he’d seen early on, standing in the highest part of the arena, fiddling with a tiara: she’d been on that same terrace, been standing by his lounger when the incident on the terrace above took place. She was Sarble the Eye. Probably the tiara was the camera and the person on the higher terrace was a decoy, a plant.

Horza snapped off the screen. He smiled, then shook his head as though to dislodge the small, useless revelation from the centre of his attention. He had to find some transport.

He started walking quickly through the crowd, threading his way through people in groups and lines and queues, looking for a free vehicle, an open door, a tout’s eyes. He caught a glimpse of the queue Kraiklyn was in. The CAT’s commander was at the open door of a red road car, apparently arguing with its driver and two other people in the queue.

Horza felt sick. He started to sweat; he wanted to kick out, to throw all the people crowding around him out of his path, away from him. He doubled back. He would have to risk trying to bribe his way into Kraiklyn’s queue at the front. He was five metres away from the queue when Kraiklyn and the two other people stopped arguing and got into the taxi, which drove off. As he turned his head to watch it go past, his stomach sinking, his fists clenching, Horza saw the white-haired woman again. She wore a hooded blue cloak, but the hood fell back as she squeezed out of the crowd to the edge of the road, where a tall man put his arm round her shoulders and waved into the plaza. She pulled the hood up again.

Horza put his hand into his pocket and onto the gun, then went forward towards the couple — just as a sleek, matt-black hover hissed out of the darkness and stopped beside them. Horza stepped forward quickly as the hover’s side door winged open and the woman who was Sarble the Eye stooped to enter.

Horza reached out and tapped the woman on the shoulder. She whirled round to face him. The tall man started towards him, and Horza shoved his hand forward and up in his pocket, so that the gun pressed out. The man stopped, looking down, uncertain; the woman froze, one foot on the door’s sill.

“I think you’re going my way,” Horza said quickly. “I know who you are.” He nodded at the woman. “I know about that thing you had on your head. All I want is a lift to the port. That’s all. No fuss.” He gestured with his head in the direction of the security guards at the head of the main queue.

The woman looked at the tall man, then at Horza. She stepped back slowly. “OK. After you.”

“No, you first.” Horza motioned with the hand in his pocket. The woman smiled, shrugged and got in, followed by the tall man and Horza.

“What’s he—?” began the driver, a fierce-looking bald woman.

“A guest,” Sarble told her. “Just drive.”

The hover rose. “Straight ahead,” Horza said. “Fast as you like. I’m looking for a red-coloured wheeled car.” He took the gun out of his pocket and pivoted round so that he faced Sarble the Eye and the tall man. The hover accelerated.

“I told you they put that ’cast out too soon,” the tall man hissed in a hoarse high voice. Sarble shrugged. Horza smiled, glancing occasionally out of the window at the traffic around the cab, but watching the other two people from the corner of his eye.

“Just bad luck,” Sarble said. “I kept bumping into this guy inside the place, too.”

“You really are Sarble, then?” Horza said to the woman. She didn’t look round and didn’t reply.

“Look,” the man said, turning to Horza, “we’ll take you to the port, if that’s where this red car’s going, but just don’t try anything. We’ll fight if we have to. I’m not afraid to die.” The tall man sounded frightened and angry at the same time; his yellow-white face looked like a child’s, about to cry.

“You’ve convinced me.” Horza grinned. “Now, why not watch out for the red car? Three wheels, four doors, driver, three people in the back. Can’t miss it.”

The tall man bit his lip. Horza motioned him to look forward, with a small movement of the gun.

“That it?” the bald-headed driver said. Horza saw the car she meant. It looked right.

“Yes. Follow it; not too close.” The hover dropped back a little.

They entered the port area. Cranes and gantries were lit in the distance; parked road vehicles, hovers and even light shuttles lay scattered on either side of the road. The car was just ahead now, following a couple of struggling hover buses up a shallow ramp. Their own hover’s engine laboured as they climbed.

The red car branched off the main route and followed a long curve of roadway, water glittering darkly on either side.

“Are you really Sarble?” Horza asked the white-haired woman, who still didn’t turn to him. “Was that you earlier, outside the hall? Or not? Is Sarble really lots of people?”

The people in the car said nothing. Horza just smiled, watching them carefully, but nodding and smiling to himself. There was silence in the hover, only the wind roaring.

The car left the roadway and angled down a fenced boulevard past huge gantries and the lit masses of towering machinery, then sped along a road lined on both sides with dark warehouses. It started to slow by the side of a small dock.

“Pull back,” Horza said. The bald-headed woman slowed the hover as the red car cruised by the dockside, under the square cages of crane legs.

The red car drew up by a brightly lit building. A pattern of lights revolving round the top of the construction spelt out “SUB-BASE ACCESS 54” in several languages.

“Fine. Stop,” Horza said. The hover stopped, sinking on its skirts. “Thanks.” Horza got out, still facing the man and the white-haired woman.

“You’re just lucky you didn’t try anything,” the man said angrily, nodding sharply, his eyes glistening.

“I know,” Horza said. “Bye now,” he winked at the white-haired woman. She turned and made what he suspected was an obscene gesture with one finger. The hover rose, blasted forward, then skidded round and roared off the way it had come. Horza looked back at the sub-plate shaft entrance, where the three people who had got out of the car stood silhouetted against the light inside. One of them might have looked back down the dock towards Horza; he wasn’t sure they did, but he shrank back into the shadows of the crane above him.

Two of the people at the access tube went into the building and disappeared. The third person, who might have been Kraiklyn, walked off towards the side of the dock.

Horza pocketed the gun again and hurried on, underneath another crane.

A roaring noise like the one that Sarble’s hover had made when it drew away from him — but much louder and deeper — came from inside the dock.

Lights and spray filled the sea-end of the dock as a huge air-cushion vehicle, similar in principle to but vastly bigger than the hover Horza had commandeered, swept in from the expanse of black ocean. Lit by starlight, by the glow of the Orbital’s daylight side arcing overhead and by the craft’s own lights, the billows of spray kicked up into the air with a milky luminescence. The big machine lumbered between the walls of the dock, its engines shrieking. Beyond it, out to sea, Horza could see another couple of clouds, also lit from inside by flashing lights. Fireworks burst from the leading craft as it came slowly up the dock. Horza could make out an expanse of windows, and what appeared to be people dancing inside. He looked back down the dockside; the man he was following was mounting the steps to a footbridge which crossed high over the dock. Horza ran quietly, ducking behind the legs of cranes and leaping over lengths of thick hawsers. The lights of the hover flashed on the dark superstructure of the cranes; the scream of the jets and impellers echoed between concrete walls.

As though pointing out the comparative crudity of the scene, a small craft — dark, and silent but for the tearing noise its passage made through the atmosphere — rushed overhead, zooming and disappearing into the night sky, specking once against the loop of the Orbital’s daytime surface. Horza gave it a glance, then watched the figure on the small bridge, lit by the flashing lights of the hover still making its lumbering way up the dock underneath. The second craft was just swinging into position outside the dock to follow it.

Horza came to the steps leading to the walkway of the narrow suspension bridge. The man, who walked like Kraiklyn and wore a grey cloak, was about halfway across. Horza couldn’t see much of what the terrain was like on the other side of the dock, but guessed he stood a good chance of losing his quarry if he let him get to the other side before he started after him. Probably the man — Kraiklyn, if it was him — had worked this out; Horza guessed he knew he was being followed. He set off across the bridge. It swayed slightly underneath him. The noise and lights of the giant hovercraft were almost underneath; the air filled with swirling dark spray, kicked up from the shallow water in the dock. The man didn’t look round at Horza, though he must have felt Horza’s footsteps swinging the bridge with his own.

The figure left the bridge at the far end. Horza lost sight of him and started running, the gun out in front of him, the air-cushion vehicle beneath blasting gusts of spray-soaked air about him, soaking him. Loud music blared from the craft, audible even through the scream of the engines. Horza skidded along the bridge at its end and ran quickly down the spiral steps to the dockside.

Something sailed out of the darkness under the spiral of steps and crashed into his face. Immediately afterwards something slammed into his back and the rear of his skull. He lay on something hard, groggily wondering what had happened, while lights swept over him, the air in his ears roared and roared, and music played somewhere. A bright light shone straight into his eyes, and the hood over his face was thrown back.

He heard a gasp: the gasp of a man tearing a hood away from a face only to see his own face staring back at him. (Who are you?) If that was what it was, then that man was vulnerable now, shocked for just a few seconds (Who am I?)… He had enough strength to kick up hard with one leg, forcing his arms up at the same time and grabbing some material, his shin connecting with a groin. The man started to go over Horza’s shoulders, heading for the dock; then Horza felt his own shoulders grasped, and as the man he held thumped to the ground to one side and behind him, he was pulled over—

Over the side of the dock; the man had landed right on the edge and had gone over, taking Horza with him. They were falling.

He was aware of lights, than shadow, the grip he had on the man’s cloak or suit and one hand still on his shoulder. Falling: how deep was the dock? The noise of wind. Listen for the sound of—

It was a double impact. He hit water, then something harder, in a crumpling collision of fluid and body. It was cold, and his neck ached. He was thrashing about, unsure which way was up, and groggy from the blows to his head; then something pulled at him. He punched out, hit something soft, then pulled upright and found himself standing in a little over a metre of water, staggering forward. It was bedlam — light and sound and spray everywhere, and somebody hanging onto him.

Horza flailed out again. Spray cleared momentarily, and he saw the wall of the dock a couple of metres to his right and, directly in front of him, the rear of the giant hovercraft, receding slowly five or six metres ahead. A powerful gust of oily, fiery air knocked him over, splashing into the water again. The spray closed over him. The hand let go, and he fell back through the water once more, going under.

Horza struggled upright in time to see his adversary heading off through the spray, following the slowly moving hovercraft up the dock. He tried to run, but the water was too deep; he had to force his legs forward in a slow-motion, nightmarish version of a run, angling his torso so that his weight carried him forward. With exaggerated twistings of his body from side to side he strode after the man in the grey cloak, using his hands like paddles in an attempt to gain speed. His head was reeling; his back, face and neck all hurt terribly, and his vision was blurred, but at least he was still chasing. The man in front seemed more anxious to get away than to stay and fight.

The blattering exhaust of the still moving hover blew another hole in the spray towards the two men, revealing the slab of stern rising above the bulbous wall of the machine’s skirt, bowing out from fully three metres above the surface of the water in the dock. First the man in front of him, and then Horza, was blown back by the pulse of hot, choking fumes. The water was getting shallower. Horza found that he could bring his legs out of the water far enough to wade faster. The noise and spray swept over them again, and for a moment Horza lost sight of his quarry; then the view ahead was clear, and he could see the big air-cushion vehicle on a dry area of concrete. The walls of the dock extended high on either side, but the water and the clouds of spray were almost gone. The man in front staggered to the brief ramp leading from the now only ankle-deep water onto the concrete, staggered and almost fell, then started running weakly after the hovercraft, now powering faster along the level concrete down the canyon of the dock.

Horza finally splashed out of the water and ran after the man, following the wetly flapping grey cloak.

The man stumbled, fell and rolled. As he started to rise Horza slammed into him, bowling them both over. He lashed out at the man’s face, shadowed in the light coming from behind him, but missed. The man kicked out at Horza, then tried to get away again. Horza threw himself at the man’s legs, bringing him down once more, the wet cloak flopping over his head. Horza scrambled over on all fours and rolled him over face up. It was Kraiklyn. He drew his hand back for a punch. The pale, shaved face underneath him was twisted in terror, put in shadow by some lights coming from behind Horza, where another great roaring noise was… Kraiklyn screamed, looking not at the man wearing his own real face, but behind him, above him. Horza whirled round.

A black mass blowing spray rushed towards him; lights blazed high above. A siren sounded, then the crushing black bulk was over him, hitting him, knocking him flat, pounding at his eardrums with noise and pressure, pressing, pressing, pressing… Horza heard a gurgling sound; he was being rammed into Kraiklyn’s chest; they were both being rubbed into the concrete as though by an immense thumb.

Another hovercraft; the second one in the line he’d seen.

Abruptly, with a single sweeping stroke of pain bruising him from feet to head, as if a giant was trying to sweep him up off the floor with a huge hard brush, the weight was lifted off. In its place was utter darkness, noise fit to burst skulls, and violent, turbulent, crushing air pressure.

They were under the skirts of the big vehicle. It was right above them, moving slowly forward or maybe — it was too dark to see anything — stationary over the concrete apron, perhaps about to settle on the concrete, crushing them.

As though it was just another part of the maelstrom of battering pain, a blow thudded into Horza’s ear, knocking him sideways in the darkness. He rolled on the rough concrete, pivoting on one elbow as soon as he could and bracing one leg while he struck out with the other in the direction the punch had come from; he felt his foot hit something yielding.

He got to his feet, ducking as he thought of whirling impeller blades just overhead. The eddies and vortices of hot oil-filled air rocked him like a small boat bobbing in a chopping sea. He felt like a puppet controlled by a drunk. He staggered forward, his arms out, and hit Kraiklyn. They started to fall again, and Horza let go, punching with all his might at the place he guessed the man’s head was. His fist crashed into bone, but he didn’t know where. He skipped back, in case there was a retaliatory kick or punch on its way. His ears were popping; his head felt tight. He could feel his eyes vibrating in their sockets; he thought he was deaf but he could feel a thudding in his chest and throat, making him breathless, making him choke and gasp. He could make out just a hint of a border of light all around them, as though they were under the middle of the hovercraft. He saw something, just an area of darkness, on that border, and lunged at it, swinging his foot from low down. Again he connected, and the dark part of the border disappeared.

He was blown off his feet by a crushing down-draught of air and tumbled bodily along the concrete, thumping into Kraiklyn where he lay on the ground after Horza’s last kick. Another punch hit Horza on the head, but it was weak and hardly hurt. Horza felt for and found Kraiklyn’s head. He lifted it and banged it off the concrete, then did it again. Kraiklyn struggled, but his hands beat uselessly off Horza’s shoulders and chest. The area of lightness beyond the dim shape on the ground was enlarging, coming closer. Horza banged Kraiklyn’s head against the concrete one more time, then threw himself flat. The rear edge of the skirt scrubbed over him; his ribs ached and his skull felt as though somebody was standing on it. Then it was over, and they were in the open air.

The big craft thundered on, trailing remnants of spray. There was another one fifty metres down the dock and heading towards him.

Kraiklyn was lying still, a couple of metres away.

Horza got up onto all fours and crawled over to the other man. He looked down into his eyes, which moved a little.

“I’m Horza! Horza!” he screamed, but couldn’t even hear anything himself.

He shook his head, and with a grimace of frustration on the face that was not really his own and which was the last thing the real Kraiklyn ever saw, he gripped the head of the man lying on the concrete and twisted it sharply, breaking the neck, just as he had broken Zallin’s.

He managed to drag the body to the side of the dock just in time to get out of the way of the third and last hovercraft. Its towering skirt bulged past two metres away from where he half lay, half sat, panting and sweating, his back against the cold wet concrete of the dock, his mouth open and his heart thudding.

He undressed Kraiklyn, took off the cloak and the light-coloured one-piece day suit he wore, then climbed out of his own torn blouse and bloody pantaloons and put on what Kraiklyn had been wearing. He took the ring Kraiklyn wore on the small finger of his right hand. He picked at his own hands, at the skin where palm became wrist. It came away cleanly, a layer of skin sloughing off his right hand from wrist to fingertips. He wiped Kraiklyn’s limp, pale right palm on a damp bit of clothing, then put the skin over it, pressing it down hard. He lifted the skin off carefully and positioned it back on his own hand. Then he repeated the operation using his left hand.

It was cold and it seemed to take a very long time and a lot of effort. Eventually, while the three big air-cushion vehicles were stopping and letting passengers off half a kilometre down the dock, Horza finally staggered to a ladder of metal rungs set into the concrete wall of the dock, and with shaking hands and quivering feet hauled himself to the top.

He lay for a while, then got up, climbed the spiral stairs to the small footbridge, staggered across it and down the other side, and entered the circular access building. Brightly dressed and excited people, just off the big hovers and still in a party mood, quietened when they saw him wait near the elevator doors for the capsule which would take them down to the spaceport area half a kilometre under their feet. Horza couldn’t hear very much, but he could see their anxious looks, sense the awkwardness he was causing with his battered, bloody face and his ripped, soaking clothes.

At last the elevator appeared. The party goers piled in, and Horza, supporting himself on the wall, stumbled in too. Somebody held his arm, helping him, and he nodded thanks. They said something which he heard as a distant rumble; he tried to smile and nod again. The elevator dropped.

The underside greeted them with an expanse of what looked like stars. Gradually, Horza realised it was the light-speckled top of a spacecraft larger than anything he’d ever seen or even heard about before; it had to be the demilitarised Culture ship, The Ends of Invention. He didn’t care what it was called, as long as he could get aboard and find the CAT.

The elevator had come to a halt in a transparent tube above a spherical reception area hanging in hard vacuum a hundred metres under the base of the Orbital. From the sphere, walkways and tube tunnels spread out in all directions, heading for the access gantries and open and closed docks of the port area itself. The doors to the closed docks, where ships could be worked on in pressurised conditions, were all open. The open docks themselves, where ships simply moored and airlocks were required, were empty. Replacing them all, directly underneath the spherical reception area, just as it was directly underneath almost the entire port area, was the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle The Ends of Invention. Its broad, flat top stretched for kilometre after kilometre in all directions, almost totally blocking out the view of space and stars beyond. Instead its top surface glittered with its own lights where various connections had been made with the access tubes and tunnels of the port.

He felt dizzy again, registering the sheer scale of the vast craft. He hadn’t seen a GSV before, far less been inside one. He knew of them and what they were for, but only now did he appreciate what an achievement they represented. This one was theoretically no longer part of the Culture; he knew it was demilitarised, stripped bare of most equipment, and without the Mind or Minds which would normally run it; but just the structure alone was enough to impress.

General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. They were more than just very big spaceships; they were habitats, universities, factories, museums, dockyards, libraries, even mobile exhibition centres. They represented the Culture — they were the Culture. Almost anything that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be done on a GSV. They could make anything the Culture was capable of making, contained all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated, carried or could construct specialised equipment of every imaginable type for every conceivable eventuality, and continually manufactured smaller ships: General Contact Units usually, warcraft now. Their complements were measured in millions at least. They crewed their offspring ships out of the gradual increase in their own population. Self-contained, self-sufficient, productive and, in peacetime at least, continually exchanging information, they were the Culture’s ambassadors, its most visible citizens and its technological and intellectual big guns. There was no need to travel from the galactic backwoods to some distant Culture home-planet to be amazed and impressed by the stunning scale and awesome power of the Culture; a GSV could bring the whole lot right up to your front door…

Horza followed the brightly dressed crowds through the bustling reception area. There were a few people in uniform, but they weren’t stopping anybody. Horza felt in a daze, as though he was only a passenger in his own body, and the drunken puppeteer he had felt in the control of earlier was now sobered up a little and guiding him through the crowds of people towards the doors of another elevator. He tried to clear his head by shaking it, but it hurt when he did that. His hearing was coming back very slowly.

He looked at his hands, then sloughed the imprinter-skin from his palms, rubbing it on each of the lapels of the daysuit until it rolled off and fell to the floor of the corridor.

When they got off the second elevator they were in the starship. The people dispersed through broad, pastel-shaded corridors with high ceilings. Horza looked one way then another, as the elevator capsule swished back up towards the reception sphere. A small drone floated towards him. It was the size and shape of a standard suit backpack, and Horza eyed it warily, uncertain whether it was a Culture device or not.

“Excuse me, are you all right?” the machine said. Its voice was robust but not unfriendly. Horza could just hear it.

“I’m lost,” Horza said, too loudly. “Lost,” he repeated, more quietly, so that he could hardly hear himself. He was aware that he was swaying a little as he stood there, and he could feel water trickling into his boots and dripping off the sodden cloak onto the soft, absorbent surface under his feet.

“Where do you want to go?” the drone asked.

“To a ship called…” Horza closed his eyes in weary desperation. He didn’t dare give the real name. “…The Beggar’s Bluff.”

The drone was silent for a second, then said, “I’m afraid there is no such craft aboard. Perhaps it is in the port area by itself, not on the Ends.”

“It’s an old Hronish assault ship,” Horza said tiredly, looking for somewhere to sit down. He spotted some seats set into the wall a few metres away and made his way over there. The drone followed him, lowering itself as he sat so that it was still at his eye level. “About a hundred metres long,” the Changer went on, no longer caring if he was giving some sort of game away. “It was being repaired by some port shipbuilders; had some damage to its warping units.”

“Ah. I think I have the one you want. It’s more or less straight down from here. I have no record of its name, but it sounds like the one you want. Can you manage to get there yourself, or shall I take you?”

“I don’t know if I can manage,” Horza said truthfully.

“Wait a moment.” The drone stayed floating silently in front of Horza for a moment or two; then it said, “Follow me, then. There is a traveltube just over here and down a deck.” The machine backed off and indicated the direction they should head in by extending a hazy field from its casing. Horza got up and followed it.

They went down a small open AG lift shaft, then crossed a large open area where some of the wheeled and skirted vehicles used on the Orbital had been stored; just a few examples, the drone explained, for posterity. The Ends already had a Megaship aboard, stored in one of its two General bays, thirteen kilometres below, in the bottom of the craft. Horza didn’t know whether to believe the drone or not.

On the far side of the hangar they came to another corridor, and there they entered a cylinder, about three metres in diameter and six long, which rolled its door closed, flicked to one side and was instantly sucked into a dark tunnel. Soft lights lit the interior. The drone explained that the windows were blanked out because, unless you were used to it, a capsule’s journey through a GSV could be unsettling, due both to its speed and to the suddenness of the changes of direction, which the eye saw but the body didn’t feel. Horza sat down heavily in one of the folding seats in the middle of the capsule, but only for a few seconds.

“Here we are. Smallbay 27492, in case you need it again. Innerlevel S-10-right. Goodbye.” The capsule door rolled down. Horza nodded to the drone and stepped out into a corridor with straight, transparent walls. The capsule door closed, and the machine vanished. He had a brief impression of it flickering past him, but it happened so fast he could have been wrong. Anyway, his vision was still blurred.

He looked to his right. Through the walls of the corridor he looked into clear air. Kilometres of it. There was some sort of roof high above, with just a suggestion of wispy clouds. A few tiny craft moved. Level with him, far enough away for the view to be both hazy and vast, were hangars: level after level after level of them. Bays, docks, hangars — call them what you wanted; they filled Horza’s sight for square kilometres, making him dizzy with the sheer scale of it all. His brain did a sort of double take, and he blinked and shook himself, but the view did not go away. Craft moved, lights went on or off, a layer of cloud far below made the view further down still more hazy, and something whizzed by the corridor Horza stood in: a ship, fully three hundred metres long. The ship passed along the level he was on, swooped, and far far away did a left turn, banking gracefully in the air to disappear into another bright and vast corridor which seemed to pass by at right angles to the one Horza stood staring at. In the other direction, the one that the ship had appeared from, was a wall, seemingly blank. Horza looked closer and rubbed his eyes; he saw that the wall had an orderly speckle of lights in a grid across it: thousands and thousands of windows and lights and balconies. Smaller craft flitted about its face, and the dots of traveltube capsules flashed across and up and down.

Horza couldn’t take much more. He looked to his left and saw a smooth ramp leading down underneath the tube the capsule travelled in. He stumbled down it, into the welcomingly small space of a two hundred metre long Smallbay.

Horza wanted to cry. The old ship sat on three short legs, square in the centre of the bay, a few bits and pieces of equipment scattered around it. There was nobody else in the bay that Horza could see, just machinery. The CAT looked old and battered, but intact and whole. It appeared that repairs were either finished or not yet started. The main hold lift was down, resting on the smooth white deck of the bay. Horza went over to it and saw a light ladder leading up into the brightness of the hold itself. A small insect landed briefly on his wrist. He flapped a hand at it as it flew off. How very untidy of the Culture, he thought absently, to allow an insect on board one of their sparkling vessels. Still, officially at least, the Ends was no longer the Culture’s. Wearily he climbed the ladder, hampered by the damp cloak and accompanied by the squelching noises coming from his boots.

The hold smelled familiar, though it looked oddly spacious with no shuttle in it. There was nobody about. He went up the stairs from the hold to the accommodation section. He walked along the corridor towards the mess, wondering who was alive, who was dead, what changes had been made, if any. It had only been three days, but he felt as though he had been away for years. He was almost at Yalson’s cabin when the door was quickly pulled open.

Yalson’s fair-haired head came out, an expression of surprise, even joy, starting to form on it. “Haw—” she said, then stopped, frowned at him, shook her head and muttered something, ducking back into her cabin. Horza had stopped.

He stood there, thinking he was glad she was alive, realising he hadn’t been walking properly — not like Kraiklyn. His tread had sounded like his own instead. A hand appeared from Yalson’s door as she pulled on a light robe, then she came out and stood in the corridor, looking at the man she thought was Kraiklyn, her hands on her hips. Her lean, hard face looked slightly concerned, but mostly wary. Horza hid his hand with the missing finger behind his back.

“What the hell happened to you?” she said.

“I got in a fight. What does it look like?” He got the voice right. They stood looking at each other.

“If you want any help—” she began. Horza shook his head.

“I’ll manage.”

Yalson nodded, half smiling, looking him up and down. “Yeah, all right. You manage, then.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, in the direction of the mess. “Your new recruit just brought her gear aboard. She’s waiting in the mess, though if you look in now she might not think it’s such a wonderful idea to join up.”

Horza nodded. Yalson shrugged, then turned and walked up the corridor, through the mess towards the bridge. Horza followed her. “Our glorious captain,” she said to somebody in the room as she went through. Horza hesitated at Kraiklyn’s cabin door, then went forward to stick his head round the door of the mess.

A woman was sitting at the far end of the mess table, her legs crossed over a chair in front of her. The screen was switched on above her as though she had been watching it; it showed a view of a Megaship being lifted bodily out of the water by hundreds of small lifter tugs clustered under and around it. They were recognisably antique Culture machines. The woman had turned from the sight, though, and was gazing towards Horza when he looked round the side of the door.

She was slim and tall and pale. She looked fit, and her black-coloured eyes were set in a face just starting to show worried surprise at the battered face looking at her from the doorway. She had on a light suit, the helmet of which lay on the table in front of her. A red bandanna was tied round her head, below the level of her close-cropped red hair. “Oh, Captain Kraiklyn,” she said, swinging her feet off the seat and leaning forward, her face showing shock and pity. “What happened?”

Horza tried to speak, but his throat was dry. He couldn’t believe what he saw. His lips worked and he licked them with a dry tongue. The woman started to rise from the table, but he put out one hand and gestured her to stay where she was. She sat slowly back down, and he managed to say, “I’m all right. See you later. Just… just stay… there.” Then he pushed himself away from the door and stumbled down the corridor to Kraiklyn’s cabin. The ring fitted into the door, and it swung open. He almost fell inside.

In something like a trance he closed the door, stood there looking at the far bulkhead for a while, then slowly sat down, on the floor.

He knew he was still stunned, he knew his vision was still blurred and he wasn’t hearing perfectly. He knew it was unlikely — or, if it wasn’t, then it was very bad news indeed, but he was sure; absolutely certain. As certain as he had been about Kraiklyn when he first walked up that ramp to the Damage table, into the arena.

As though he hadn’t had enough shocks for one evening, the sight of the woman sitting at the mess-room table had all but silenced him and stopped his mind from working. What was he going to do? He couldn’t think. The shock was still resounding through his mind; the image seemed stuck behind his eyes.

The woman in the mess room was Perosteck Balveda.