The Player of Games

1. Culture Plate

This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh”. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.

Me? I’ll tell you about me later.

This is how the story begins.

Dust drifted with each footstep. He limped across the desert, following the suited figure in front. The gun was quiet in his hands. They must be nearly there; the noise of distant surf boomed through the helmet soundfield. They were approaching a tall dune, from which they ought to be able to see the coast. Somehow he had survived; he had not expected to.

It was bright and hot and dry outside, but inside the suit he was shielded from the sun and the baking air; cosseted and cool. One edge of the helmet visor was dark, where it had taken a hit, and the right leg flexed awkwardly, also damaged, making him limp, but otherwise he’d been lucky. The last time they’d been attacked had been a kilometre back, and now they were nearly out of range.

The flight of missiles cleared the nearest ridge in a glittering arc. He saw them late because of the damaged visor. He thought the missiles had already started firing, but it was only the sunlight reflecting on their sleek bodies. The flight dipped and swung together, like a flock of birds.

When they did start firing it was signalled by strobing red pulses of light. He raised his gun to fire back; the other suited figures in the group had already started firing. Some dived to the dusty desert floor, others dropped to one knee. He was the only one standing.

The missiles swerved again, turning all at once and then splitting up to take different directions. Dust puffed around his feet as shots fell close. He tried to aim at one of the small machines, but they moved startlingly quickly, and the gun felt large and awkward in his hands. His suit chimed over the distant noise of firing and the shouts of the other people; lights winked inside the helmet, detailing the damage. The suit shook and his right leg went suddenly numb.

“Wake up, Gurgeh!” Yay laughed, alongside him. She swivelled on one knee as two of the small missiles swung suddenly at their section of the group, sensing that was where it was weakest. Gurgeh saw the machines coming, but the gun sang wildly in his hands, and seemed always to be aiming at where the missiles had just been. The two machines darted for the space between him and Yay. One of the missiles flashed once and disintegrated; Yay shouted, exulting. The other missile swung between them; she lashed out with her foot, trying to kick it. Gurgeh turned awkwardly to fire at it, accidentally scattering fire over Yay’s suit as he did so. He heard her cry out and then curse. She staggered, but brought the gun round; fountains of dust burst around the second missile as it turned to face them again, its red pulses lighting up his suit and filling his visor with darkness. He felt numb from the neck down and crumpled to the ground. It went black and very quiet.

“You are dead,” a crisp little voice told him.

He lay on the unseen desert floor. He could hear distant, muffled noises, sense vibrations from the ground. He heard his own heart beat, and the ebb and flow of his breath. He tried to hold his breathing and slow his heart, but he was paralysed, imprisoned, without control.

His nose itched. It was impossible to scratch it. What am I doing here? he asked himself.

Sensation returned. People were talking, and he was staring through the visor at the flattened desert dust a centimetre in front of his nose. Before he could move, somebody pulled him up by one arm.

He unlatched his helmet. Yay Meristinoux, also bare-headed, stood looking at him and shaking her head. Her hands were on her hips, her gun swung from one wrist. “You were terrible,” she said, though not unkindly. She had the face of a beautiful child, but the slow, deep voice was knowing and roguish; a low-slung voice.

The others sat around on the rocks and dust, talking. A few were heading back to the club house. Yay picked up Gurgeh’s gun and presented it to him. He scratched his nose, then shook his head, refusing to take the weapon.

“Yay,” he told her, “this is for children.”

She paused, slung her gun over one shoulder, and shrugged (and the muzzles of both guns swung in the sunlight, glinting momentarily, and he saw the speeding line of missiles again, and was dizzy for a second).

“So?” she said. “It isn’t boring. You said you were bored; I thought you might enjoy a shoot.”

He dusted himself down and turned back towards the club house. Yay walked alongside. Recovery drones drifted past them, collecting the components of the destructed machines.

“It’s infantile, Yay. Why fritter your time away with this nonsense?”

They stopped at the top of the dune. The low club house lay a hundred metres away, between them and the golden sand and snow-white surf. The sea was bright under the high sun.

“Don’t be so pompous,” she told him. Her short brown hair moved in the same wind which blew the tops from the falling waves and sent the resulting spray curling back out to sea. She stooped to where some pieces of a shattered missile lay half buried in the dune, picked them up, blew sand grains off the shining surfaces, and turned the components over in her hands. “I enjoy it,” she said. “I enjoy the sort of games you like, but… I enjoy this too.” She looked puzzled. “This is a game. Don’t you get any pleasure from this sort of thing?”

“No. And neither will you, after a while.”

She shrugged easily. “Till then, then.” She handed him the parts of the disintegrated machine. He inspected them while a group of young men passed, heading for the firing ranges.

“Mr Gurgeh?” One of the young males stopped, looking at Gurgeh quizzically. A fleeting expression of annoyance passed across the older man’s face, to be replaced by the amused tolerance Yay had seen before in such situations. “Jernau Morat Gurgeh?” the young man said, still not quite sure.

“Guilty.” Gurgeh smiled gracefully and — Yay saw — straightened his back fractionally, drawing himself up a little. The younger man’s face lit up. He executed a quick, formal bow. Gurgeh and Yay exchanged glances.

“An honour to meet you, Mr Gurgeh,” the young man said, smiling widely. “My name’s Shuro… I’m…” He laughed. “I follow all your games; I have a complete set of your theoretical works on file…”

Gurgeh nodded. “How comprehensive of you.”

“Really. I’d be honoured if, any time you’re here, you’d play me at… well, anything. Deploy is probably my best game; I play off three points, but—”

“Whereas my handicap, regrettably, is lack of time,” Gurgeh said. “But, certainly, if the chance ever arises, I shall be happy to play you.” He gave a hint of a nod to the younger man. “A pleasure to have met you.”

The young man flushed and backed off, smiling. “The pleasure’s all mine, Mr Gurgeh… Goodbye… goodbye.” He smiled awkwardly, then turned and walked off to join his companions.

Yay watched him go. “You enjoy all that stuff, don’t you, Gurgeh?” she grinned.

“Not at all,” he said briskly. “It’s annoying.”

Yay continued to watch the young man walking away, looking him up and down as he tramped off through the sand. She sighed.

“But what about you?” Gurgeh looked with distaste at the pieces of missile in his hands. “Do you enjoy all this… destruction?”

“It’s hardly destruction,” Yay drawled. “The missiles are explosively dismantled, not destroyed. I can put one of those things back together in half an hour.”

“So it’s false.”

“What isn’t?”

“Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”

Yay’s mouth twisted in irony. She said, “I can see we have a long way to go before we understand each other, Gurgeh.”

“Then let me help you.”

“Be your protégée?”

“Yes.”

Yay looked away, to where the rollers fell against the golden beach, and then back again. As the wind blew and the surf pounded, she reached slowly behind her head and brought the suit’s helmet over, clicking it into place. He was left staring at the reflection of his own face in her visor. He ran one hand through the black locks of his hair.

Yay flicked her visor up. “I’ll see you, Gurgeh. Chamlis and I are coming round to your place the day after tomorrow, aren’t we?”

“If you want.”

“I want.” She winked at him and walked back down the slope of sand. He watched her go. She handed his gun to a recovery drone as it passed her, loaded with glittering metallic debris.

Gurgeh stood for a moment, holding the bits of wrecked machine. Then he let the fragments drop back to the barren sand.

He could smell the earth and the trees around the shallow lake beneath the balcony. It was a cloudy night and very dark, just a hint of glow directly above, where the clouds were lit by the shining Plates of the Orbital’s distant daylight side. Waves lapped in the darkness, loud slappings against the hulls of unseen boats. Lights twinkled round the edges of the lake, where low college buildings were set amongst the trees. The party was a presence at his back, something unseen, surging like the sound and smell of thunder from the faculty building; music and laughter and the scents of perfumes and food and exotic, unidentifiable fumes.

The rush of Sharp Blue surrounded him, invaded him. The fragrances on the warm night air, spilling from the line of opened doors behind, carried on the tide of noise the people made, became like separate strands of air, fibres unravelling from a rope, each with its own distinct colour and presence. The fibres became like packets of soil, something to be rubbed between his fingers; absorbed, identified.

There: that red-black scent of roasted meat; blood-quickening, salivatory; tempting and vaguely disagreeable at the same time as separate parts of his brain assessed the odour. The animal root smelled fuel; protein-rich food; the mid-brain trunk registered dead, incinerated cells… while the canopy of forebrain ignored both signals, because it knew his belly was full, and the roast meat cultivated.

He could detect the sea, too; a brine smell from ten or more kilometres away over the plain and the shallow downs, another threaded connection, like the net and web of rivers and canals that linked the dark lake to the restless, flowing ocean beyond the fragrant grasslands and the scented forests.

Sharp Blue was a game-player’s secretion, a product of standard genofixed Culture glands sitting in Gurgeh’s lower skull, beneath the ancient, animal-evolved lower reaches of his brain. The panoply of internally manufactured drugs the vast majority of Culture individuals were capable of choosing from comprised up to three hundred different compounds of varying degrees of popularity and sophistication; Sharp Blue was one of the least used because it brought no direct pleasure and required considerable concentration to produce. But it was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier; not a sensory enhancer or a sexual stimulant or a physiological booster.

And he didn’t need it.

That was what was revealed, as soon as the first rush died away and the plateau phase took over. The lad he was about to play, whose previous game of Four-Colours he had just watched, had a deceptive style, but an easily mastered one. It looked impressive, but it was mostly show; fashionable, intricate, but hollow and delicate too; finally vulnerable. Gurgeh listened to the sounds of the party and the sounds of the lake waters and the sounds coming from the other university buildings on the far side of the lake. The memory of the young man’s playing style remained clear.

Dispense with it, he decided there and then. Let the spell collapse. Something inside him relaxed, like a ghost limb untensed; a mind-trick. The spell, the brain’s equivalent of some tiny, crude, looping sub-programme collapsed, simply ceased to be said.

He stood on the terrace by the lake for a while, then turned and went back into the party.

“Jernau Gurgeh. I thought you’d run off.”

He turned to face the small drone which had floated up to him as he re-entered the richly furnished hall. People stood talking, or clustered around game-boards and tables beneath the great banners of ancient tapestries. There were dozens of drones in the room too, some playing, some watching, some talking to humans, a few in the formal, lattice-like arrangements which meant they were communicating by transceiver. Mawhrin-Skel, the drone which had addressed him, was by far the smallest of the machines present; it could have sat comfortably on a pair of hands. Its aura field held shifting hints of grey and brown within the band of formal blue. It looked like a model of an intricate and old-fashioned spacecraft.

Gurgeh scowled at the machine as it followed him through the crowds of people to the Four-Colours table.

“I thought perhaps this toddler had scared you,” the drone said, as Gurgeh arrived at the young man’s game-table and sat down in a tall, heavily ornamented wooden chair hurriedly vacated by his just-beaten predecessor. The drone had spoken loudly enough for the “toddler” concerned — a tousle-haired man of about thirty or so — to hear. The young man’s face looked hurt.

Gurgeh sensed the people around him grow a little quieter. Mawhrin-Skel’s aura fields switched to a mixture of red and brown; humorous pleasure, and displeasure, together; a contrary signal close to a direct insult.

“Ignore this machine,” Gurgeh told the young man, acknowledging his nod. “It likes to annoy people.” He pulled his chair in, adjusted his old, unfashionably loose and wide-sleeved jacket. “I’m Jernau Gurgeh. And you?”

“Stemli Fors,” the young man said, gulping a little.

“Pleased to meet you. Now; what colour are you taking?”

“Aah… green.”

“Fine.” Gurgeh sat back. He paused, then waved at the board. “Well, after you.”

The young man called Stemli Fors made his first move. Gurgeh sat forward to make his, and the drone Mawhrin-Skel settled on his shoulder, humming to itself. Gurgeh tapped the machine’s casing with one finger, and it floated off a little way. For the rest of the game it mimicked the snicking sound the point-hinged pyramids made as they were clicked over.

Gurgeh beat the young man easily. He even finessed the finish a little, taking advantage of Fors’s confusion to produce a pretty pattern at the end, sweeping one piece round four diagonals in a machine-gun clatter of rotating pyramids, drawing the outline of a square across the board, in red, like a wound. Several people clapped; others muttered appreciatively. Gurgeh thanked the young man and stood up.

“Cheap trick,” Mawhrin-Skel said, for all to hear. “The kid was easy meat. You’re losing your touch.” Its field flashed bright red, and it bounced through the air, over people’s heads and away.

Gurgeh shook his head, then strode off.

The little drone annoyed and amused him in almost equal parts. It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people. No doubt it had swept off to annoy somebody else now. Gurgeh nodded to a few people as he moved through the crowd. He saw the drone Chamlis Amalk-ney by a long, low table, talking to one of the less insufferable professors. Gurgeh went over to them, taking a drink from a waiting tray as it floated past.

“Ah, my friend…” Chamlis Amalk-ney said. The elderly drone was a metre and a half tall and over half a metre wide and deep, its plain casing matt with the accumulated wear of millennia. It turned its sensing band towards him. “The professor and I were just talking about you.”

Professor Boruelal’s severe expression translated into an ironic smile. “Fresh from another victory, Jernau Gurgeh?”

“Does it show?” he said, raising the glass to his lips.

“I have learned to recognise the signs,” the professor said. She was twice Gurgeh’s age, well into her second century, but still tall and handsome and striking. Her skin was pale and her hair was white, as it always had been, and cropped. “Another of my students humiliated?”

Gurgeh shrugged. He drained the glass, looked round for a tray to put it on.

“Allow me,” Chamlis Amalk-ney murmured, gently taking the glass from his hand and placing it on a passing tray a good three metres away. Its yellow-tinged field brought back a full glass of the same rich wine. Gurgeh accepted it.

Boruelal wore a dark suit of soft fabric, lightened at throat and knees by delicate silver chains. Her feet were bare, which Gurgeh thought did not set off the outfit as — say — a pair of heeled boots might have done. But it was the most minor of eccentricities compared to those of some of the university staff. Gurgeh smiled, looking down at the woman’s toes, tan upon the blond wooden flooring.

“You’re so destructive, Gurgeh,” Boruelal told him. “Why not help us instead? Become part of the facility instead of an itinerant guest lecturer?”

“I’ve told you, Professor; I’m too busy. I have more than enough games to play, papers to write, letters to answer, guest trips to make… and besides… I’d get bored. I bore easily, you know,” Gurgeh said, and looked away.

“Jernau Gurgeh would make a very bad teacher,” Chamlis Amalk-ney agreed. “If a student failed to understand something immediately, no matter how complicated and involved, Gurgeh would immediately lose all patience and quite probably pour their drink over them… if nothing worse.”

“So I’ve heard.” The professor nodded gravely.

“That was a year ago,” Gurgeh said, frowning. “And Yay deserved it.” He scowled at the old drone.

“Well,” the professor said, looking momentarily at Chamlis, “perhaps we have found a match for you, Jernau Gurgeh. There’s a young—” Then there was a crash in the distance, and the background noise in the hall increased. They each turned at the sound of people shouting.

“Oh, not another commotion,” the professor said tiredly.

Already that evening, one of the younger lecturers had lost control of a pet bird, which had gone screeching and stooping through the hall, tangling in the hair of several people before the drone Mawhrin-Skel intercepted the animal in mid-air and knocked it unconscious, much to the chagrin of most of the people at the party.

“What now?” Boruelal sighed. “Excuse me.” She absently left glass and savoury on Chamlis Amalk-ney’s broad, flat top and moved off, excusing her way through the crowd towards the source of the upheaval.

Chamlis’s aura flickered a displeased grey-white. It set the glass down noisily on the table and threw the savoury into a distant bin. “It’s that dreadful machine Mawhrin-Skel,” Chamlis said testily.

Gurgeh looked over the crowd to where all the noise was coming from. “Really?” he said. “What, causing all the rumpus?”

“I really don’t know why you find it so appealing,” the old drone said. It picked up Boruelal’s glass again and poured the pale gold wine out into an outstretched field, so that the liquid lay cupped in mid-air, as though in an invisible glass.

“It amuses me,” Gurgeh replied. He looked at Chamlis. “Boruelal said something about finding a match for me. Was that what you were talking about earlier?”

“Yes it was. Some new student they’ve found; a GSV cabin-brat with a gift for Stricken.”

Gurgeh raised one eyebrow. Stricken was one of the more complex games in his repertoire. It was also one of his best. There were other human players in the Culture who could beat him — though they were all specialists at the game, not general game-players as he was — but not one of them could guarantee a win, and they were few and far between, probably only ten in the whole population.

“So, who is this talented infant?” The noise on the far side of the room had lessened.

“It’s a young woman,” Chamlis said, slopping the field-held liquid about and letting it dribble through thin strands of hollow, invisible force. “Just arrived here; came off the Cargo Cult; still settling in.”

The General Systems Vehicle Cargo Cult had stopped off at Chiark Orbital ten days earlier, and left only two days ago. Gurgeh had played a few multiple exhibition matches on the craft (and been secretly delighted that they had been clean sweeps; he hadn’t been beaten in any of the various games), but he hadn’t played Stricken at all. A few of his opponents had mentioned something about a supposedly brilliant (though shy) young game-player on the Vehicle, but he or she hadn’t turned up as far as Gurgeh knew, and he’d assumed the reports of this prodigy’s powers were much exaggerated. Ship people tended to have a quaint pride in their craft; they liked to feel that even though they had been beaten by the great game-player, their vessel still had the measure of him, somewhere (of course, the ship itself did, but that didn’t count; they meant people; humans, or 1.0 value drones).

“You are a mischievous and contrary device,” Boruelal said to the drone Mawhrin-Skel, floating at her shoulder, its aura field orange with well-being, but circled with little purple motes of unconvincing contrition.

“Oh,” Mawhrin-Skel said brightly, “do you really think so?”

“Talk to this appalling machine, Jernau Gurgeh,” the professor said, frowning momentarily at the top of Chamlis Amalk-ney’s casing, then picking up a fresh glass. (Chamlis poured the liquid it had been playing with into Boruelal’s original glass and replaced it on the table.)

“What have you been doing now?” Gurgeh asked Mawhrin-Skel as it floated near his face.

“Anatomy lesson,” it said, its fields collapsing to a mixture of formal blue and brown ill-humour.

“A chirlip was found on the terrace,” Boruelal explained, looking accusingly at the little drone. “It was wounded. Somebody brought it in, and Mawhrin-Skel offered to treat it.”

“I wasn’t busy,” Mawhrin-Skel interjected, reasonably.

“It killed and dissected it in front of all the people,” the professor sighed. “They were most upset.”

“It would have died from shock anyway,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “They’re fascinating creatures, chirlips. Those cute little fur-folds conceal partially cantilevered bones, and the looped digestive system is quite fascinating.”

“But not when people are eating,” Boruelal said, selecting another savoury from the tray. “It was still moving,” she added glumly. She ate the savoury.

“Residual synaptic capacitance,” explained Mawhrin-Skel.

“Or ‘Bad Taste’ as we machines call it,” Chamlis Amalk-ney said.

“An expert in that, are you, Amalk-ney?” Mawhrin-Skel inquired.

“I bow to your superior talents in that field,” Chamlis snapped back.

Gurgeh smiled. Chamlis Amalk-ney was an old — and ancient — friend; the drone had been constructed over four thousand years ago (it claimed it had forgotten the exact date, and nobody had ever been impolite enough to search out the truth). Gurgeh had known the drone all his life; it had been a friend of the family for centuries.

Mawhrin-Skel was a more recent acquaintance. The irascible, ill-mannered little machine had arrived on Chiark Orbital only a couple of hundred days earlier; another untypical character attracted there by the world’s exaggerated reputation for eccentricity.

Mawhrin-Skel had been designed as a Special Circumstances drone for the Culture’s Contact section; effectively a military machine with a variety of sophisticated, hardened sensory and weapons systems which would have been quite unnecessary and useless on the majority of drones. As with all sentient Culture constructs, its precise character had not been fully mapped out before its construction, but allowed to develop as the drone’s mind was put together. The Culture regarded this unpredictable factor in its production of conscious machines as the price to be paid for individuality, but the result was that not every drone so brought into being was entirely suitable for the tasks it had initially been designed for.

Mawhrin-Skel was one such rogue drone. Its personality — it had been decided — wasn’t right for Contact, not even for Special Circumstances. It was unstable, belligerent and insensitive. (And those were only the grounds it had chosen to tell people it had failed on.) It had been given the choice of radical personality alteration, in which it would have had little or no say in its own eventual character, or a life outside Contact, with its personality intact but its weapons and its more complex communications and sensory systems removed to bring it down to something nearer the level of a standard drone.

It had, bitterly, chosen the latter. And it had made its way to Chiark Orbital, where it hoped it might fit in.

“Meatbrain,” Mawhrin-Skel told Chamlis Amalk-ney, and zoomed off towards the line of open windows. The older drone’s aura field flashed white with anger and a bright, rippling spot of rainbow light revealed that it was using its tight-beam transceiver to communicate with the departing machine. Mawhrin-Skel stopped in mid-air; turned. Gurgeh held his breath, wondering what Chamlis could have said, and what the smaller drone might say in reply, knowing that it wouldn’t bother to keep its remarks secret, as Chamlis had.

“What I resent,” it said slowly, from a couple of metres away, “is not what I have lost, but what I have gained, in coming — even remotely — to resemble fatigued, path-polished geriatrics like you, who haven’t even got the human decency to die when they’re obsolete. You’re a waste of matter, Amalk-ney.”

Mawhrin-Skel became a mirrored sphere, and in that ostentatiously uncommunicable mode swept out of the hall into the darkness.

“Cretinous whelp,” Chamlis said, fields frosty blue.

Boruelal shrugged. “I feel sorry for it.”

“I don’t,” Gurgeh said. “I think it has a wonderful time.” He turned to the professor. “When do I get to meet your young Stricken genius? Not hiding her away to train her, are you?”

“No, we’re just giving her time to adjust.” Boruelal picked at her teeth with the pointed end of the savoury stick. “From what I can gather the girl had rather a sheltered upbringing. Sounds like she hardly left the GSV; she must feel odd being here. Also, she isn’t here to do game-theory, Jernau Gurgeh, I’d better point that out. She’s going to study philosophy.”

Gurgeh looked suitably surprised.

“A sheltered upbringing?” Chamlis Amalk-ney said. “On a GSV?” Its gunmetal aura indicated puzzlement.

“She’s shy.”

“She’d have to be.”

“I must meet her,” said Gurgeh.

“You will,” Boruelal said. “Soon, maybe; she said she might come with me to Tronze for the next concert. Hafflis runs a game there, doesn’t he?”

“Usually,” Gurgeh agreed.

“Maybe she’ll play you there. But don’t be surprised if you just intimidate her.”

“I shall be the epitome of gentle good grace,” Gurgeh assured her.

Boruelal nodded thoughtfully. She gazed out over the party and looked distracted for a second as a large cheer sounded from the centre of the hall.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I think I detect a nascent commotion.” She moved away. Chamlis Amalk-ney shifted aside, to avoid being used as a table again; the professor took her glass with her.

“Did you meet Yay this morning?” Chamlis asked Gurgeh.

He nodded. “She had me dressed up in a suit, toting a gun and shooting at toy missiles which ‘explosively dismantled’ themselves.”

“You didn’t enjoy it.”

“Not at all. I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle.”

“Well, such diversions aren’t for everybody. She was just trying to be helpful. You’d said you were feeling restless, looking for something new.”

“Well, that wasn’t it,” Gurgeh said, and felt suddenly, inexplicably, saddened.

He and Chamlis watched as people began to move past them, heading towards the long line of windows which opened on to the terrace. There was a dull, buzzing sensation inside the man’s head; he had entirely forgotten that coming down from Sharp Blue required a degree of internal monitoring if you were to avoid an uncomfortable hangover. He watched the people pass with a slight feeling of nausea.

“Must be time for the fireworks,” Chamlis said.

“Yes… let’s get some fresh air, shall we?”

“Just what I need,” Chamlis said, aura dully red.

Gurgeh put his glass down, and together he and the old drone joined the flow of people spilling from the bright, tapestry-hung hall on to the floodlit terrace facing the dark lake.

Rain hit the windows with a noise like the crackling of the logs on the fire. The view from the house at Ikroh, down the steep wooded slope to the fjord and across it to the mountains on the other side, was warped and distorted by the water running down the glass, and sometimes low clouds flowed round the turrets and cupolas of Gurgeh’s home, like wet smoke.

Yay Meristinoux took a large wrought-iron poker from the hearth and, putting one booted foot up on the elaborately carved stone of the fire surround and one pale brown hand on the rope-like edge of the massive mantelpiece, stabbed at one of the spitting logs lying burning in the grate. Sparks flew up the tall chimney to meet the falling rain. Chamlis Amalk-ney was floating near the window, watching the dull grey clouds.

The wooden door set into one corner of the room swung open and Gurgeh appeared, bearing a tray with hot drinks. He wore a loose, light robe over dark, baggy trousers; slippers made small slapping noises on his feet as he crossed the room. He put the tray down, looked at Yay. “Thought of a move yet?”

Yay crossed over to look morosely at the game-board, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “I think you’ve won.”

“Look,” Gurgeh said, adjusting a few of the pieces. His hands moved quickly, like a magician’s, over the board, though Yay followed every move. She nodded.

“Yes, I see. But” —she tapped a hex Gurgeh had repositioned one of her pieces on, so giving her a potentially winning formation— “only if I’d double-secured that blocking piece two moves earlier.” She sat down on the couch, taking her drink with her. Raising her glass to the quietly smiling man on the opposite couch, she said, “Cheers. To the victor.”

“You almost won,” Gurgeh told her. “Forty-four moves; you’re getting very good.”

“Relatively,” Yay said, drinking. “Only relatively.” She lay back on the deep couch while Gurgeh put the pieces back to their starting positions and Chamlis Amalk-ney drifted over to float not-quite-between them. “You know,” Yay said, looking at the ornate ceiling, “I always like the way this house smells, Gurgeh.” She turned to look at the drone. “Don’t you, Chamlis?”

The machine’s aura field dipped briefly to one side; a drone shrug. “Yes. Probably because the wood our host is burning is bonise; it was developed millennia ago by the old Waverian civilisation specifically for its fragrance when ignited.”

“Yes, well, it’s a nice smell,” Yay said, getting up and going back to the windows. She shook her head. “Sure as shit rains a lot here though, Gurgeh.”

“It’s the mountains,” the man explained.

Yay glanced round, one eyebrow arched. “You don’t say?”

Gurgeh smiled and smoothed one hand over his neatly trimmed beard. “How is the landscaping going, Yay?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She shook her head at the continuing downpour. “What weather.” She tossed her drink back. “No wonder you live by yourself, Gurgeh.”

“Oh, that isn’t the rain, Yay,” Gurgeh said. “That’s me. Nobody can stand to live with me for long.”

“He means,” Chamlis said, “that he couldn’t stand to live for long with anybody.”

“I’d believe either,” Yay said, coming back to the couch again. She sat cross-legged on it and played with one of the pieces on the game-board. “What did you think of the game, Chamlis?”

“You have reached the likely limits of your technical ability, but your flair continues to develop. I doubt you’ll ever beat Gurgeh, though.”

“Hey,” Yay said, pretending injured pride. “I’m just a junior; I’ll improve.” She tapped one set of fingernails against the other, and made a tutting noise with her mouth. “Like I’m told I will at landscaping.”

“You having problems?” Chamlis said.

Yay looked as though she hadn’t heard for a moment, then sighed, lay back on the couch. “Yeah… that asshole Elrstrid and that prissy fucking Preashipleyl machine. They’re so… unadventurous. They just won’t listen.”

“What won’t they listen to?”

“Ideas!” Yay shouted at the ceiling. “Something different, something not so goddamn conservative for a change. Just because I’m young they won’t pay attention.”

“I thought they were pleased with your work,” Chamlis said. Gurgeh was sitting back in his couch, swilling the drink in his glass round and just watching Yay.

“Oh they like me to do all the easy stuff,” Yay said, sounding suddenly tired. “Stick up a range or two, carve out a couple of lakes… but I’m talking about the overall plan; real radical stuff. All we’re doing is building just another next-door Plate. Could be one of a million anywhere in the galaxy. What’s the point of that?”

“So people can live on it?” Chamlis suggested, fields rosy.

“People can live anywhere!” Yay said, levering herself up from the couch to look at the drone with her bright green eyes. “There’s no shortage of Plates; I’m talking about art!”

“What did you have in mind?” Gurgeh asked.

“How about,” Yay said, “magnetic fields under the base material and magnetised islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn’t that sound more exciting?”

“More exciting than what?” Gurgeh asked.

“More exciting than this!” Meristinoux leapt up and went over to the window. She tapped the ancient pane. “Look at that; you might as well be on a planet. Seas and hills and rain. Wouldn’t you rather live on a floating island, sailing through the air over the water?”

“What if the islands collide?” Chamlis asked.

“What if they do?” Yay turned to look at the man and the machine. It was getting still darker outside, and the room lights were slowly brightening. She shrugged. “Anyway; you could make it so they didn’t… but don’t you think it’s a wonderful idea? Why should one old woman and a machine be able to stop me?”

“Well,” Chamlis said, “I know the Preashipleyl machine, and if it thought your idea was good it wouldn’t just ignore it; it’s had a lot of experience, and—”

“Yeah,” Yay said, “too much experience.”

“That isn’t possible, young lady,” the drone said.

Yay Meristinoux took a deep breath, and seemed about to argue, but just spread her arms wide and rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. “We’ll see,” she said.

The afternoon, which had been steadily darkening until then, was suddenly lit up on the far side of the fjord by a bright splash of sunlight filtering through the clouds and the easing rain. The room slowly filled with a watery glow, and the house lights dimmed again. Wind moved the tops of the dripping trees. “Ah,” Yay said, stretching her back and flexing her arms. “Not to worry.” She inspected the landscape outside critically. “Hell; I’m going for a run,” she announced. She headed for the door in the corner of the room, pulling off first one boot, then the other, throwing the waistcoat over a chair, and unbuttoning her blouse. “You’ll see.” She wagged a finger at Gurgeh and Chamlis. “Floating islands; their time has come.”

Chamlis said nothing. Gurgeh looked sceptical. Yay left.

Chamlis went to the window. It watched the girl — down to a pair of shorts now — run out along the path leading down from the house, between the lawns and the forest. She waved once, without looking back, and disappeared into the woods. Chamlis flickered its fields in response, even though Yay couldn’t see.

“She’s handsome,” it said.

Gurgeh sat back in the couch. “She makes me feel old.”

“Oh, don’t you start feeling sorry for yourself,” Chamlis said, floating back from the window.

Gurgeh looked at the hearth stones. “Everything seems… grey at the moment, Chamlis. Sometimes I start to think I’m repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing’s worth playing for anyway.”

“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said matter-of-factly, and did something it rarely did, actually settling physically into the couch, letting it take its weight. “Settle up; are we talking about games, or life?”

Gurgeh put his dark-curled head back and laughed.

“Games,” Chamlis went on, “have been your life. If they’re starting to pall, I’d understand you might not be so happy with anything else.”

“Maybe I’m just disillusioned with games,” Gurgeh said, turning a carved game-piece over in his hands. “I used to think that context didn’t matter; a good game was a good game and there was a purity about manipulating rules that translated perfectly from society to society… but now I wonder. Take this; Deploy.” He nodded at the board in front of him. “This is foreign. Some backwater planet discovered just a few decades ago. They play this there and they bet on it; they make it important. But what do we have to bet with? What would be the point of my wagering Ikroh, say?”

“Yay wouldn’t take the bet, certainly,” Chamlis said, amused. “She thinks it rains too much.”

“But you see? If somebody wanted a house like this they’d already have had one built; if they wanted anything in the house” — Gurgeh gestured round the room— “they’d have ordered it; they’d have it. With no money, no possessions, a large part of the enjoyment the people who invented this game experienced when they played it just disappears.”

“You call it enjoyment to lose your house, your titles, your estates; your children maybe; to be expected to walk out on to the balcony with a gun and blow your brains out? That’s enjoyment? We’re well free of that. You want something you can’t have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can’t provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive.” Gurgeh remained silent, lit by the fire and the soft glow from the room’s concealed lighting. “You called yourself ‘Morat’ when you completed your name, but perhaps you aren’t the perfect game-player after all; perhaps you should have called yourself ‘Shequi’; gambler.”

“You know,” Gurgeh said slowly, his voice hardly louder than the crackling logs in the fire, “I’m actually slightly afraid of playing this young kid.” He glanced at the drone. “Really. Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.” He looked quickly, briefly up at the machine again, as though ashamed. “But every now and again, I do worry about losing; I think, what if there’s some kid — especially some kid, somebody younger and just naturally more talented — out there, able to take that away from me. That worries me. The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.”

“You are a throwback,” Chamlis told him. “The game’s the thing. That’s the conventional wisdom, isn’t it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with.”

Gurgeh nodded slowly. “So they say. So everybody else believes.”

“But not you?”

“I…” The man seemed to have difficulty finding the right word. “I… exult when I win. It’s better than love, it’s better than sex or any glanding; it’s the only instant when I feel…” — he shook his head, his mouth tightened — “… real,” he said. “Me. The rest of the time… I feel a bit like that little ex-Special Circumstances drone, Mawhrin-Skel; as though I’ve had some sort of… birthright taken away from me.”

“Ah, is that the affinity you feel?” Chamlis said coldly, aura to match. “I wondered what you saw in that appalling machine.”

“Bitterness,” Gurgeh said, sitting back again. “That’s what I see in it. It has novelty value, at least.” He got up and went to the fire, prodding at the logs with the wrought-iron poker and placing another piece of wood on, handling the log awkwardly with heavy tongs.

“This is not a heroic age,” he told the drone, staring at the fire. “The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect any more.”

“Contact uses individuals,” Chamlis pointed out. “It puts people into younger societies who have a dramatic and decisive effect on the fates of entire meta-civilisations. They’re usually ‘mercenaries,’, not Culture, but they’re human, they’re people.”

“They’re selected and used. Like game-pieces. They don’t count.” Gurgeh sounded impatient. He left the tall fireplace, returned to the couch. “Besides, I’m not one of them.”

“So have yourself stored until a more heroic age does arrive.”

“Huh,” Gurgeh said, sitting again. “If it ever does. It would seem too much like cheating, anyway.”

The drone Chamlis Amalk-ney listened to the rain and the fire. “Well,” it said slowly, “if it’s novelty value you want, Contact — never mind SC — are the people to go to.”

“I have no intention of applying to join Contact,” Gurgeh said, coming back to the couch. “Being cooped up in a GCU with a bunch of gung-ho do-gooders searching for barbarians to teach is not my idea of either enjoyment or fulfilment.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant that Contact had the best Minds, the most information. They might be able to come up with some ideas. Any time I’ve ever been involved with them they’ve got things done. It’s a last resort, mind you.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re tricky. Devious. They’re gamblers, too; and used to winning.”

“Hmm,” Gurgeh said, and stroked his dark beard. “I wouldn’t know how to go about it,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Chamlis said. “Anyway; I have my own connections there; I’d—”

A door slammed. “Holy shit it’s cold out there!” Yay burst into the room, shaking herself. Her arms were clenched across her chest and her thin shorts were stuck to her thighs; her whole body was quivering. Gurgeh got up from the couch.

“Come here to the fire,” Chamlis told the girl. Yay stood shivering in front of the window, dripping water. “Don’t just stand there,” Chamlis told Gurgeh. “Fetch a towel.”

Gurgeh looked critically at the machine, then left the room.

By the time he came back, Chamlis had persuaded Yay to kneel in front of the fire; a bowed field over the nape of her neck held her head down to the heat, while another field brushed her hair. Little drops of water fell from her drenched curls to the hearth, hissing on the hot flag stones.

Chamlis took the towel from Gurgeh’s hands, and the man watched as the machine moved the towel over the young woman’s body. He looked away at one point, shaking his head, and sat down on the couch again, sighing.

“Your feet are filthy,” he told the girl.

“Ah, it was a good run though,” Yay laughed from beneath the towel.

With much blowing and whistling and “brr-brrs”, Yay was dried. She kept the towel wrapped round her and sat, legs drawn up, on the couch. “I’m famished,” she announced suddenly. “Mind if I make myself something to-?”

“Let me,” Gurgeh said. He went through the corner door, reappearing briefly to drape Yay’s hide trous over the same chair she’d left the waistcoat on.

“What were you talking about?” Yay asked Chamlis.

“Gurgeh’s disaffection.”

“Do any good?”

“I don’t know,” the drone admitted.

Yay retrieved her clothes and dressed quickly. She sat in front of the fire for a while, watching it as the day’s light faded and the room lights came up.

Gurgeh brought a tray in loaded with sweetmeats and drinks.

Once Yay and Gurgeh had eaten, the three of them played a complicated card-game of the type Gurgeh liked best; one that involved bluff and just a little luck. They were in the middle of the game when friends of Yay’s and Gurgeh’s arrived, their aircraft touching down on a house lawn Gurgeh would rather they hadn’t used. They came in bright and noisy and laughing; Chamlis retreated to a corner by the window.

Gurgeh played the good host, keeping his guests supplied with refreshments. He brought a fresh glass to Yay where she stood, listening with a group of others, to a couple of people arguing about education.

“Are you leaving with this lot, Yay?” Gurgeh leant back against the tapestried wall behind, dropping his voice a little so that Yay had to turn away from the discussion, to face him.

“Maybe,” she said slowly. Her face glowed in the light of the fire. “You’re going to ask me to stay again, aren’t you?” She swilled her drink around in her glass, watching it.

“Oh,” Gurgeh said, shaking his head and looking up at the ceiling, “I doubt it. I get bored going through the same old moves and responses.”

Yay smiled. “You never know,” she said. “One day I might change my mind. You shouldn’t let it bother you, Gurgeh. It’s almost an honour.”

“You mean to be such an exception?”

“Mmm.” She drank.

“I don’t understand you,” he told her.

“Because I turn you down?”

“Because you don’t turn anybody else down.”

“Not so consistently.” Yay nodded, frowning at her drink.

“So; why not?” There. He’d finally said it.

Yay pursed her lips. “Because,” she said, looking up at him, “it matters to you.”

“Ah,” he nodded, looking down, rubbing his beard. “I should have feigned indifference.” He looked straight at her. “Really, Yay.”

“I feel you want to… take me,” Yay said, “like a piece, like an area. To be had; to be… possessed.” Suddenly she looked very puzzled. “There’s something very… I don’t know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You’ve never changed sex, have you?” He shook his head. “Or slept with a man?” Another shake. “I thought so,” Yay said. “You’re strange, Gurgeh.” She drained her glass.

“Because I don’t find men attractive?”

“Yes; you’re a man!” She laughed.

“Should I be attracted to myself, then?”

Yay studied him for a while, a small smile flickering on her face. Then she laughed and looked down. “Well, not physically, anyway.” She grinned at him and handed him her empty glass. Gurgeh refilled it; she returned back to the others.

Gurgeh left Yay arguing about the place of geology in Culture education policy, and went to talk to Ren Myglan, a young woman he’d been hoping would call in that evening.

One of the people had brought a pet; a proto-sentient Styglian enumerator which padded round the room, counting under its slightly fishy breath. The slim, three-limbed animal, blond-haired and waist-high, with no discernible head but lots of meaningful bulges, started counting people; there were twenty-three in the room. Then it began counting articles of furniture, after which it concentrated on legs. It wandered up to Gurgeh and Ren Myglan. Gurgeh looked down at the animal peering at his feet and making vague, swaying, pawing motions at his slippers. He tapped it with his toe. “Say six,” the enumerator muttered, wandering off. Gurgeh went on talking to the woman.

After a few minutes, standing near her, talking, occasionally moving a little closer, he was whispering into her ear, and once or twice he reached round behind her, to run his fingers down her spine through the silky dress she wore.

“I said I’d go on with the others,” she told him quietly, looking down, biting her lip, and putting her hand behind her, holding his where it rubbed at the small of her back.

“Some boring band, some singer, performing for everybody?” he chided gently, taking his hand away, smiling. “You deserve more individual attention, Ren.”

She laughed quietly, nudging him.

Eventually she left the room, and didn’t return. Gurgeh strolled over to where Yay was gesticulating wildly and extolling the virtues of life on floating magnetic islands, then saw Chamlis in the corner, studiously ignoring the three-legged pet, which was staring up at the machine and trying to scratch one of its bulges without falling over. He shooed the beast away and talked to Chamlis for a while.

Finally the crowd of people left, clutching bottles and a few raided trays of sweetmeats. The aircraft hissed into the night.

Gurgeh, Yay and Chamlis finished their card-game; Gurgeh won.

“Well, I have to go,” Yay said, standing and stretching. “Chamlis?”

“Also. I’ll come with you; we can share a car.”

Gurgeh saw them to the house elevator. Yay buttoned her cloak. Chamlis turned to Gurgeh. “Want me to say anything to Contact?” Gurgeh, who’d been absently looking up the stairs leading to the main house, looked puzzledly at Chamlis. So did Yay. “Oh, yes,” Gurgeh said, smiling. He shrugged. “Why not? See what our betters can come up with. What have I got to lose?” He laughed.

“I love to see you happy,” Yay said, kissing him lightly. She stepped into the elevator; Chamlis followed her. Yay winked at Gurgeh as the door closed. “My regards to Ren,” she grinned.

Gurgeh stared at the closed door for a moment, then shook his head, smiling to himself. He went back to the lounge, where a couple of the house remote-drones were tidying up; everything seemed back in place, as it should be. He went over to the game-board set between the dark couches, and adjusted one of the Deploy pieces so that it sat in the centre of its starting hexagon, then looked at the couch where Yay had sat after she’d come back from her run. There was a fading patch of dampness there, dark on dark. He put his hand out hesitantly, touched it, sniffed his fingers, then laughed at himself. He took an umbrella and went out to inspect the damage done to the lawn by the aircraft, before returning to the house, where a light in the squat main tower told that Ren was waiting for him.

The elevator dropped two hundred metres through the mountain, then through the bedrock underneath; it slowed to cycle through a rotate-lock and gently lowered itself through the metre of ultradense base material to stop underneath the Orbital Plate in a transit gallery, where a couple of underground cars waited and the outside screens showed sunlight blazing up on to the Plate base. Yay and Chamlis got into a car, told it where they wanted to go, and sat down as it unlocked itself, turned and accelerated away.

“Contact?” Yay said to Chamlis. The floor of the small car hid the sun, and beyond the sidescreens stars shone sharply. The car whizzed by some of the arrays of the vital but generally indecipherably obscure equipment that hung beneath every Plate. “Did I hear the name of the great benign bogy being mentioned?”

“I suggested Gurgeh might contact Contact,” Chamlis said. It floated to a screen. The screen detached itself, still showing the view outside, and floated up the car wall until the decimetre of space its thickness had occupied in the skin of the vehicle was revealed. Where the screen had pretended to be a window was now a real window; a slab of transparent crystal with hard vacuum and the rest of the universe on the other side. Chamlis looked out at the stars. “It occurred to me they might have some ideas; something to occupy him.”

“I thought you were wary of Contact?”

“I am, generally, but I know a few of the Minds; I still have some connections… I’d trust them to help, I think.”

“I don’t know,” Yay said. “We’re all taking this awful seriously; he’ll come out of it. He’s got friends. Nothing too terrible’s going to happen to him as long as his pals are around.”

“Hmm,” the drone said. The car stopped at one of the elevator tubes serving the village where Chamlis Amalk-ney lived. “Will we see you in Tronze?” the drone asked.

“No, I’ve a site conference that evening,” Yay said. “And then there’s a young fellow I saw at the shoot the other day… I’ve arranged to bump into him that night.” She grinned.

“I see,” Chamlis said. “Lapsing into predatory mode, eh? Well, enjoy your bumping.”

“I’ll try,” Yay laughed. She and the drone bade each other goodnight, then Chamlis went through the car’s lock — its ancient, minutely battered casing suddenly bright in the blast of sunlight from underneath — and went straight up the elevator tube, without waiting for a lift. Yay smiled and shook her head at such geriatric precocity, as the car pulled away again.

Ren slept on, half covered by a sheet. Her black hair spilled across the top of the bed. Gurgeh sat at his occasional desk near the balcony windows, looking out at the night. The rain had passed, the clouds thinned and separated, and now the light of the stars and the four Plates on the far, balancing side of the Chiark Orbital — three million kilometres away and with their inner faces in daylight — cast a silvery sheen on the passing clouds and made the dark fjord waters glitter.

He turned on the deskpad, pressed its calibrated margin a few times until he found the relevant publications, then read for a while; papers on game-theory by other respected players, reviews of some of their games, analyses of new games and promising players.

He opened the windows later and stepped out on to the circular balcony, shivering a little as the cool night air touched his nakedness. He’d taken his pocket terminal with him, and braved the cold for a while, talking to the dark trees and the silent fjord, dictating a new paper on old games.

When he went back in, Ren Myglan was still asleep, but breathing quickly and erratically. Intrigued, he went over to her and crouched down by the side of the bed, looking intently at her face as it twitched and contorted in her sleep. Her breath laboured in her throat and down her delicate nose, and her nostrils flared.

Gurgeh squatted like that for some minutes, with an odd expression on his face, somewhere between a sneer and a sad smile, wondering — with a sense of vague frustration, even regret — what sort of nightmares the young woman must be having, to make her quiver and pant and whimper so.

The next two days passed relatively uneventfully. He spent most of the time reading papers by other players and theorists, and finished a paper of his own which he’d started the night Ren Myglan stayed. Ren had left during breakfast the next morning, after an argument; he liked to work during breakfast, she’d wanted to talk. He’d suspected she was just tetchy after not sleeping well.

He caught up on some correspondence. Mostly it was in the form of requests; to visit other worlds, take part in great tournaments, write papers, comment on new games, become a teacher/lecturer/professor in various educational establishments, be a guest on any one of several GSVs, take on such-and-such a child prodigy… it was a long list.

He turned them all down. It gave him a rather pleasant feeling.

There was a communication from a GCU which claimed to have discovered a world on which there was a game based on the precise topography of individual snowflakes; a game which, for that reason, was never played on the same board twice. Gurgeh had never heard of such a game, and could find no mention of it in the usually up-to-date files Contact collated for people like him. He suspected the game was a fake — GCUs were notoriously mischievous — but sent a considered and germain (if also rather ironic) reply, because the joke, if it was a joke, appealed to him.

He watched a gliding competition over the mountains and cliffs on the far side of the fjord.

He turned on the house holoscreen and watched a recently made entertainment he’d heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had expected to despise its preposterousness, but found it quite amusing. He sketched out a glacier game, based on what sort of minerals could be gouged from rocks, what mountains destroyed, rivers dammed, landscapes created and bays blocked if — as in the entertainment — glaciers could liquefy and re-freeze parts of themselves at will. The game was diverting enough, but contained nothing original; he abandoned it after an hour or so.

He spent much of the next day swimming in Ikroh’s basement pool; when doing the backstroke, he dictated as well, his pocket terminal tracking up and down the pool with him, just overhead.

In the late afternoon a woman and her young daughter came riding through the forest and stopped off at Ikroh. Neither of them showed any sign of having heard of him; they just happened to be passing. He invited them to stay for a drink, and made them a late lunch; they tethered their tall, panting mounts in the shade at the side of the house, where the drones gave them water. He advised the woman on the most scenic route to take when she and her daughter resumed their journey, and gave the child a piece from a highly ornamented Bataos set she’d admired.

He took dinner on the terrace, the terminal screen open and showing the pages of an ancient barbarian treatise on games. The book — a millennium old when the civilisation had been Contacted, two thousand years earlier — was limited in its appreciation, of course, but Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society’s games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul. Besides, barbarian societies had always intrigued him, even before their games had.

The book was interesting. He rested his eyes watching the sun going down, then went back to it as the darkness deepened. The house drones brought him drinks, a heavier jacket, a light snack, as he requested them. He told the house to refuse all incoming calls.

The terrace lights gradually brightened. Chiark’s farside shone whitely overhead, coating everything in silver; stars twinkled in a cloudless sky. Gurgeh read on.

The terminal beeped. He looked severely at the camera eye set in one corner of the screen. “House,” he said, “are you going deaf?”

“Please forgive the over-ride,” a rather officious and unapologetic voice Gurgeh did not recognise said from the screen. “Am I talking to Chiark-Gevantsa Jernau Morat Gurgeh dam Hassease?”

Gurgeh stared dubiously at the screen eye. He hadn’t heard his full name pronounced for years. “Yes.”

“My name is Loash Armasco-Iap Wu-Handrahen Xato Koum.”

Gurgeh raised one eyebrow. “Well, that should be easy enough to remember.”

“Might I interrupt you, sir?”

“You already have. What do you want?”

“To talk with you. Despite my over-ride, this does not constitute an emergency, but I can only talk to you directly this evening. I am here representing the Contact Section, at the request of Dastaveb Chamlis Amalk-ney Ep-Handra Thedreiskre Ostlehoorp. May I approach you?”

“Providing you can stay off the full names, yes,” Gurgeh said.

“I shall be there directly.”

Gurgeh snapped the screen shut. He tapped the pen-like terminal on the edge of the wooden table and looked out over the dark fjord, watching the dim lights of the few houses on the far shore.

He heard a roaring noise in the sky, and looked up to see a farside-lit vapour-trail overhead, steeply angled and pointing to the slope uphill from Ikroh. There was a muffled bang over the forest above the house, and a noise like a sudden gust of wind, then, zooming round the side of the house, came a small drone, its fields bright blue and striped yellow.

It drifted over towards Gurgeh. The machine was about the same size as Mawhrin-Skel; it could, Gurgeh thought, have sat comfortably in the rectangular sandwich plate on the table. Its gunmetal casing looked a little more complicated and knobbly than Mawhrin-Skel’s.

“Good evening,” Gurgeh said as the small machine cleared the terrace wall.

It settled down on the table, by the sandwich plate. “Good evening, Morat Gurgeh.”

“Contact, eh?” Gurgeh said, putting his terminal into a pocket in his robe. “That was quick. I was only talking to Chamlis the night before last.”

“I happened to be in the volume,” the machine explained in its clipped voice, “in transit — between the GCU Flexible Demeanour and the GSV Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence, aboard the (D)ROU Zealot. As the nearest Contact operative, I was the obvious choice to visit you. However, as I say, I can only stay for a short time.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Gurgeh said.

“Yes; you have such a charming Orbital here. Perhaps some other time.”

“Well, I hope it hasn’t been a wasted journey for you, Loash… I wasn’t really expecting an audience with a Contact operative. My friend Chamlis just thought Contact might… I don’t know; have something interesting which wasn’t in general circulation. I expected nothing at all, or just information. Might I ask just what you’re doing here?” He leant forward, putting both elbows on the table, leaning over the small machine. There was one sandwich left on the plate just in front of the drone. Gurgeh took it and ate, munching and looking at the machine.

“Certainly. I am here to ascertain just how open to suggestions you are. Contact might be able to find you something which would interest you.”

“A game?”

“I have been given to understand it is connected with a game.”

“That does not mean you have to play one with me,” Gurgeh said, brushing his hands free of crumbs over the plate. A few crumbs flew towards the drone, as he’d hoped they might, but it fielded each one, flicking them neatly to the centre of the plate in front of it.

“All I know, sir, is that Contact might have found something to interest you. I believe it to be connected with a game. I am instructed to discover how willing you might be to travel. I therefore assume the game — if such it is — is to be played in a location besides Chiark.”

“Travel?” Gurgeh said. He sat back. “Where? How far? How long?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“Well, try approximately.”

“I would not like to guess. How long would you be prepared to spend away from home?”

Gurgeh’s eyes narrowed. The longest he’d spent away from Chiark had been when he’d gone on a cruise once, thirty years earlier. He hadn’t enjoyed it especially. He’d gone more because it was the done thing to travel at that age than because he’d wanted to. The different stellar systems had been spectacular, but you could see just as good a view on a holoscreen, and he still didn’t really understand what people saw in actually having been in any particular system. He’d planned to spend a few years on that cruise, but gave up after one.

Gurgeh rubbed his beard. “Perhaps half a year or so; it’s hard to say without knowing the details. Say that, though; say half a year… not that I can see it’s necessary. Local colour rarely adds that much to a game.”

“Normally, true.” The machine paused. “I understand this might be rather a complicated game; it might take a while to learn. It is likely you would have to devote yourself to it for some time.”

“I’m sure I’ll manage,” Gurgeh said. The longest it had taken him to learn any game had been three days; he hadn’t forgotten any rule of any game in all his life, nor ever had to learn one twice.

“Very well,” the small drone said suddenly, “on that basis, I shall report back. Farewell, Morat Gurgeh.” It started to accelerate into the sky.

Gurgeh looked up at it, mouth open. He resisted the urge to jump up. “Is that it?” he said.

The small machine stopped a couple of metres up. “That’s all I’m allowed to talk about. I’ve asked you what I was supposed to ask you. Now I report back. Why, is there anything else you would like to know I might be able to help you with?”

“Yes,” Gurgeh said, annoyed now. “Do I get to hear anything else about whatever and wherever it is you’re talking about?”

The machine seemed to waver in the air. Its fields hadn’t changed since its arrival. Eventually, it said, “Jernau Gurgeh?”

There was a long moment when they were both silent. Gurgeh stared at the machine, then stood up, put both hands on his hips and his head to one side and shouted, “Yes?”

“… Probably not,” the drone snapped, and instantly rose straight up, fields flicking off. He heard the roaring noise and saw the vapour-trail form; it was a single tiny cloud at first because he was right underneath it, then it lengthened slowly for a few seconds, before suddenly ceasing to grow. He shook his head.

He took out the pocket terminal. “House,” he said. “Raise that drone.” He continued to stare into the sky.

“Which drone, Jernau?” the house said. “Chamlis?”

He stared at the terminal. “No! That little scumbag from Contact; Loash Armasco-Iap Wu-Handrahen Xato Koum, that’s who! The one that was just here!”

“Just here?” the house said, in its Puzzled voice.

Gurgeh sagged. He sat down. “You didn’t see or hear anything just now?”

“Nothing but silence for the last eleven minutes, Gurgeh, since you told me to hold all calls. There have been two of those since, but—”

“Never mind,” Gurgeh sighed. “Get me Hub.”

“Hub here; Makil Stra-bey Mind subsection. Jernau Gurgeh; what can we do for you?”

Gurgeh was still looking at the sky overhead, partly because that was where the Contact drone had gone (the thin vapour-trail was starting to expand and drift), and partly because people tended to look in the direction of the Hub when they were talking to it.

He noticed the extra star just before it started to move. The light-point was near the trailing end of the little drone’s farside-lit contrail. He frowned. Almost immediately, it moved; only moderately fast at first, then too quickly for the eye to anticipate.

It disappeared. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Hub, has a Contact ship just left here?”

“Doing so even as we speak, Gurgeh. The (Demilitarised) Rapid Offensive Unit—”

“Zealot,” Gurgeh said.

“Ho-ho! It was you, was it? We thought it was going to take months to work that one out. You’ve just seen a Private visit, game-player Gurgeh; Contact business; not for us to know. Wow, were we inquisitive though. Very glamorous, Jernau, if we may say so. That ship crash-stopped from at least forty kilolights and swerved twenty years… just for a five-minute chat with you, it would seem. That is serious energy usage… especially as it’s accelerating away just as fast. Look at that kid go… oh, sorry; you can’t. Well, take it from us; we’re impressed. Care to tell a humble Hub Mind subsection what it was all about?”

“Any chance of contacting the ship?” Gurgeh said, ignoring the question.

“Dragging away like that? Business end pointed straight back at a mere civilian machine like ourselves…?” The Hub Mind sounded amused. “Yeah… we suppose so.”

“I want a drone on it called Loash Armasco-Iap Wu-Handrahen Xato Koum.”

“Holy shit, Gurgeh, what are you tangling with here? Handrahen? Xato? That’s equiv-tech espionage-level SC nomenclature. Heavy messing… Shit… We’ll try… Just a moment.”

Gurgeh waited in silence for a few seconds.

“Nothing,” the voice from the terminal said. “Gurgeh, this is Hub Entire speaking here; not a subsection; all of me. That ship’s acknowledging but it’s claiming there is no drone of that name or anything like it aboard.”

Gurgeh slumped back in the seat. His neck was stiff. He looked down from the stars, down at the table. “You don’t say,” he said.

“Shall I try again?”

“Think it’ll do any good?”

“No.”

“Then don’t.”

“Gurgeh. This disturbs me. What is going on?”

“I wish,” Gurgeh said, “I knew.” He looked up at the stars again. The little drone’s ghostly vapour-trail had almost disappeared. “Get me Chamlis Amalk-ney, will you?”

“On line… Jernau?”

“What, Hub?”

“Be careful.”

“Oh. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“You must have annoyed it,” Chamlis said through the terminal.

“Very likely,” Gurgeh said. “But what do you think?”

“They were sizing you up for something.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. But you just refused the deal.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, and think yourself lucky you did, too.”

“What do you mean? This was your idea.”

“Look, you’re out of it. It’s over. But obviously my request went further and quicker than I thought it would. We triggered something. But you’ve put them off. They aren’t interested any more.”

“Hmm. I suppose you’re right.”

“Gurgeh; I’m sorry.”

“Never mind,” Gurgeh told the old machine. He looked up at the stars. “Hub?”

“Hey; we’re interested. If it had been purely personal we wouldn’t have listened to a word, we swear, and besides, it’d be notified on your daily communication statement we were listening.”

“Never mind all that.” Gurgeh smiled, oddly relieved the Orbital’s Mind had been eavesdropping. “Just tell me how far away that ROU is.”

“On the word ‘is’, it was a minute and forty-nine seconds away; a light month distant, already clear of the system, and well out of our jurisdiction, we’re very glad to say. Hightailing it in a direction a little up-spin of Galactic Core. Looks like it’s heading for the GSV Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence, unless one of them’s trying to fool somebody.”

“Thank you, Hub. Goodnight.”

“To you too. And you’re on your own this time, we promise.”

“Thank you, Hub. Chamlis?”

“You might just have missed the chance of a lifetime, Gurgeh… but it was more likely a narrow escape. I’m sorry for suggesting Contact. They came too fast and too hard to be casual.”

“Don’t worry so much, Chamlis,” he told the drone. He looked back at the stars again, and sat back, swinging his foot up on to the table. “I handled it. We managed. Will I see you at Tronze tomorrow?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Good luck — I mean against this wonderchild, at Stricken — if I don’t see you tomorrow.”

He grinned ruefully into the darkness. “Thanks. Goodnight, Chamlis.”

“Goodnight, Gurgeh.”

The train emerged from the tunnel into bright sunlight. It banked round the remainder of the curve, then set out across the slender bridge. Gurgeh looked over the handrail and saw the lush green pastures and brightly winding river half a kilometre below on the valley floor. Shadows of mountains lay across the narrow meadows; shadows of clouds freckled the tree-covered hills themselves. The wind of the train’s slipstream ruffled his hair as he drank in the sweet, scented mountain air and waited for his opponent to return. Birds circled in the distance over the valley, almost level with the bridge. Their cries sounded through the still air, just audible over the windrush sound of the train’s passing.

Normally he’d have waited until he was due in Tronze that evening and go there underground, but that morning he’d felt like getting away from Ikroh. He’d put on boots, a pair of conservatively styled pants and a short open jacket, then taken to the hill paths, hiking over the mountain and down the other side.

He’d sat by the side of the old railway line, glanding a mild buzz and amusing himself by chucking little bits of lodestone into the track’s magnetic field and watching them bounce out again. He’d thought about Yay’s floating islands.

He’d also thought about the mysterious visitation from the Contact drone, on the previous evening, but somehow that just would not come clear; it was as though it had been a dream. He had checked the house communication and systems statement: as far as the house was concerned, there had been no visit; but his conversation with Chiark Hub was logged, timed and witnessed by other subsections of the Hub, and by the Hub Entire for a short while. So it had happened all right.

He’d flagged down the antique train when it appeared, and even as he’d climbed on had been recognised by a middle-aged man called Dreltram, also making his way to Tronze. Mr Dreltram would treasure a defeat at the hands of the great Jernau Gurgeh more than victory over anybody else; would he play? Gurgeh was well used to such flattery — it usually masked an unrealistic but slightly feral ambition — but had suggested they play Possession. It shared enough rule-concepts with Stricken to make it a decent limbering-up exercise. They’d found a Possession set in one of the bars and taken it out on to the roof-deck, sitting behind a windbreak so that the cards wouldn’t blow away. They ought to have enough time to complete the game; the train would take most of the day to get to Tronze, a journey an underground car could accomplish in ten minutes.

The train left the bridge and entered a deep, narrow ravine, its slipstream producing an eerie, echoing noise off the natched rocks on either side. Gurgeh looked at the game-board. He was playing straight, without the help of any glanded substances; his opponent was using a potent mixture suggested by Gurgeh himself. In addition, Gurgeh had given Mr Dreltram a seven-piece lead at the start, which was the maximum allowed. The fellow wasn’t a bad player, and had come near to overwhelming Gurgeh at the start, when his advantage in pieces had the greatest effect, but Gurgeh had defended well and the man’s chance had probably gone, though there was still the possibility he might have a few mines left in awkward places.

Thinking of such unpleasant surprises, Gurgeh realised he hadn’t looked at where his own hidden piece was. This had been another, unofficial, way of making the game more even. Possession is played on a forty-square grid; the two players’ pieces are distributed in one major group and two minor groups each. Up to three pieces can be hidden on different initially unoccupied intersections. Their locations are dialled — and locked — into three circular cards; thin ceramic wafers which are turned over only when the player wishes to bring those pieces into play. Mr Dreltram had already revealed all three of his hidden pieces (one had happened to be on the intersection Gurgeh had, sportingly, sown all nine of his mines on, which really was bad luck).

Gurgeh had spun the dials on his single hidden-piece wafer and put it face down on the table without looking at it; he had no more idea where that piece was than Mr Dreltram. It might turn out to be in an illegal position, which could well lose him the game, or (less likely) it might turn up in a strategically useful place deep inside his opponent’s territory. Gurgeh liked playing this way, if it wasn’t a serious game; as well as giving his opponent a probably needed extra advantage, it made the game as a whole more interesting and less predictable; added an extra spice to the proceedings.

He supposed he ought to find out where the piece was; the eighty-move point was fast approaching when the piece had to be revealed anyway.

He couldn’t see his hidden-piece wafer. He looked over the card and wafer-strewn table. Mr Dreltram was not the most tidy of players; his cards and wafers and unused or removed pieces were scattered over most of the table, including the part supposed to be Gurgeh’s. A gust of wind when they’d entered a tunnel an hour earlier had almost blown some of the lighter cards away, and they’d weighed them down with goblets and lead-glass paperweights; these added to the impression of confusion, as did Mr Dreltram’s quaint, if rather affected, custom of noting down all the moves by hand on a scratch tablet (he claimed the built-in memory on a board had broken down on him once, and lost him all record of one of the best games he’d ever played). Gurgeh started lifting bits and pieces up, humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer.

He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr Dreltram behind him, looking oddly awkward. Gurgeh frowned as Mr Dreltram, just returned from the bathroom, his eyes wide with the mixture of drugs he was glanding, and followed by a tray bearing drinks, sat down again, staring at Gurgeh’s hands.

It was only then, as the tray set the glasses on the table, that Gurgeh realised the cards he happened to be holding, which he had lifted up to look for his hidden-piece wafer, were Mr Dreltram’s remaining mine-cards. Gurgeh looked at them — they were still face down; he hadn’t seen where the mines were — and understood what Mr Dreltram must be thinking.

He put the cards back where he’d found them. “I’m very sorry,” he laughed, “I was looking for my hidden piece.”

He saw it, even as he spoke the words. The circular wafer was lying, uncovered, almost right in front of him on the table. “Ah,” he said, and only then felt the blood rise to his face. “Here it is. Hmm. Couldn’t see it for looking at it.”

He laughed again, and as he did so felt a strange, clutching sensation coursing through him, seeming to squeeze his guts in something between terror and ecstasy. He had never experienced anything like it. The closest any sensation had ever come, he thought (suddenly, clearly), had been when he was still a boy and he’d experienced his first orgasm, at the hands of a girl a few years older than him. Crude, purely human-basic, like a single instrument picking out a simple theme a note at a time (compared to the drug-gland-boosted symphonies sex would later become), that first time had nevertheless been one of his most memorable experiences; not just because it was then novel, but because it seemed to open up a whole new fascinating world, an entirely different type of sensation and being. It had been the same when he’d played his first competition game, as a child, representing Chiark against another Orbital’s junior team, and it would be the same again when his drug-glands matured, a few years after puberty.

Mr Dreltram laughed too, and wiped his face with a handkerchief.

Gurgeh played furiously for the next few moves, and had to be reminded by his opponent when the eighty-move deadline came up. Gurgeh turned over his hidden piece without having checked it first, risking it occupying the same square as one of his revealed pieces. The hidden piece, on a sixteen-hundred-to-one chance, turned up in the same position as the Heart; the piece the whole game was about; the piece one’s opponent was trying to take possession of.

Gurgeh stared at the intersection where his well-defended Heart piece sat, then again at the coordinates he’d dialled at random on to the wafer, two hours earlier. They were the same, there was no doubt. If he’d looked a move earlier, he could have moved the Heart out of danger, but he hadn’t. He’d lost both pieces; and with the Heart lost, the game was lost; he’d lost.

“Oh, bad luck,” Mr Dreltram said, clearing his throat.

Gurgeh nodded. “I believe it’s customary, at such moments of disaster, for the defeated player to be given the Heart as a keepsake,” he said, fingering the lost piece.

“Um… so I understand,” Mr Dreltram said, obviously at once embarrassed on Gurgeh’s behalf, and delighted at his good fortune.

Gurgeh nodded. He put the Heart down, lifted the ceramic wafer which had betrayed him. “I’d rather have this, I think.” He held it up to Mr Dreltram, who nodded.

“Well, of course. I mean, why not; I certainly wouldn’t object.”

The train rolled quietly into a tunnel, slowing for a station set in the caverns inside the mountain.

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games — those which can be played in any sense ‘perfectly’, such as grid, Prallian scope, ’nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions — can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine sentience societies.

“The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it’s just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They’re just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you’ll keep fit at the same time.”

Gurgeh gave an ironic bow to the young man who’d approached him with an idea for a game. The fellow looked nonplussed. He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak. Gurgeh was waiting for this; as he had on the last five or six occasions when the young man had tried to say something, Gurgeh interrupted him before he’d even started.

“I’m quite serious, you know; there is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain. The same lessons can be learned, the same skills acquired, at the only levels that really matter.” He paused again. He could see the drone Mawhrin-Skel floating towards him over the heads of the people thronging the broad plaza.

The main concert was over. The mountain summits around Tronze echoed to the sounds of various smaller bands as people gravitated towards the specific musical forms they preferred; some formal, some improvised, some for dancing, some for experiencing under a specific drug-trance. It was a warm, cloudy night; a little farside light shone a milky halo directly overhead on the high overcast. Tronze, the largest town on both the Plate and the Orbital, had been built on the edge of the Gevant Plate’s great central massif, at the point where the kilometre-high Lake Tronze flowed over the lip of the plateau and tumbled its waters towards the plain below, where they fell as a permanent downpour into the rain forest.

Tronze was the home of fewer than a hundred thousand people, but to Gurgeh it still felt too crowded, despite its spacious houses and squares, its sweeping galleries and plazas and terraces, its thousands of houseboats and its elegant, bridge-linked towers. Tronze, for all the fact that Chiark was a fairly recent Orbital, only a thousand or so years old, was already almost as big as any Orbital community ever grew; the Culture’s real cities were its great ships, the General Systems Vehicles. Orbitals were its rustic hinterland, where people liked to spread themselves out with plenty of elbow room. In terms of scale, when compared to one of the larger GSVs containing billions of people, Tronze was barely a village.

Gurgeh usually attended the Tronze Sixty-fourth Day concert. And he was usually buttonholed by enthusiasts. Normally Gurgeh was civil, if occasionally abrupt. Tonight, after the fiasco on the train, and that strange, exciting, shaming pulse of emotion he’d experienced as a result of being thought to cheat, not to mention the slight nervousness he felt because he’d heard the girl off the GSV Cargo Cult was indeed here in Tronze this evening and looking forward to meeting him, he was in no mood to suffer fools gladly.

Not that the unlucky young male was necessarily a complete idiot; all he’d done was sketch out what had been, after all, not a bad idea for a game; but Gurgeh had fallen on him like an avalanche. The conversation — if you could call it that — had become a game.

The object was to keep talking; not to talk continuously, which any idiot could do, but to pause only when the young man was not signalling — through bodily or facial language, or actually starting to speak — that he wanted to cut in. Instead, Gurgeh would stop unexpectedly in the middle of a point, or after having just said something mildly insulting, but while still giving the impression he was going to keep talking. Also, Gurgeh was quoting almost verbatim from one of his own more famous papers on game-theory; an added insult, as the young man probably knew the text as well as he did.

“To imply,” Gurgeh continued, as the young man’s mouth started to open again, “that one can remove the element of luck, chance, happenstance in life by—”

“Jernau Gurgeh, not interrupting anything, am I?” Mawhrin-Skel said.

“Nothing of note,” Gurgeh said, turning to face the small machine. “How are you, Mawhrin-Skel? Been up to any fresh mischief?”

“Nothing of note,” the tiny drone echoed, as the young man Gurgeh had been talking to sidled off. Gurgeh sat in a creeper-covered pergola positioned close to one edge of the plaza, near the observation platforms which reached out over the broad curtain of the falls, where spray rose from the rapids lying between the lip of the lake and the vertical drop to the forest a kilometre below. The roaring falls provided a background wash of white noise.

“I’ve found your young adversary,” the small drone announced. It extended one softly glowing blue field and plucked a nightflower from a growing vine.

“Hmm?” Gurgeh said. “Oh, the young, ah… Stricken player?”

“That’s right,” Mawhrin-Skel said evenly, “the young, ah… Stricken player.” It folded some of the nightflower’s petals back, straining them on the plucked stem.

“I heard she was here,” Gurgeh said.

“She’s at Hafflis’s table. Shall we go and meet her?”

“Why not?” Gurgeh stood; the machine floated away.

“Nervous?” Mawhrin-Skel asked as they headed through the crowds towards one of the raised terraces level with the lake, where Hafflis’s apartments were.

“Nervous?” Gurgeh said. “Of a child?”

Mawhrin-Skel floated silently for a moment or two as Gurgeh climbed some steps — Gurgeh nodded and said hello to a few people — then the machine came close to him and said quietly, as it slowly stripped the petals from the dying blossom, “Want me to tell you your heart rate, skin receptivity level, pheromone signature, neuron function-state…?” Its voice trailed off as Gurgeh came to a halt, half-way up the flight of broad steps.

He turned to face the drone, looking through half-hooded eyes at the tiny machine. Music drifted over the lake, and the air was full of the nightflowers’ musky scent. The lighting set into the stone balustrades lit the game-player’s face from underneath. People flooding down the steps from the terrace above, laughing and joking, parted round the man like waters round a rock, and — Mawhrin-Skel noticed — went oddly quiet as they did so. After a few seconds, as Gurgeh stood there, silent, breathing evenly, the little drone made a shuckling noise.

“Not bad,” it said. “Not bad at all. I can’t tell just yet what you’re glanding, but that’s a very impressive degree of control. Everything parameter-centred, near as damn. Except your neuron function-state; that’s even less like normal than usual, but then your average civilian drone probably couldn’t spot that. Well done.”

“Don’t let me detain you, Mawhrin-Skel,” Gurgeh said coldly. “I’m sure you can find something else to amuse you besides watching me play a game.” He continued up the broad steps.

“Nothing currently on this Orbital is capable of detaining me, dear Mr Gurgeh,” the drone said matter-of-factly, tearing the last of the petals from the nightflower. It dropped the husk in the water channel which ran along the top of the balustrade.

“Gurgeh, good to see you. Come; sit down.”

Estray Hafflis’s party of thirty or so people sat round a huge, rectangular stone table set on a balcony jutting out over the falls and covered by stone arches strung with nightflower vines and softly shining paper lanterns; there were music-players at one end, sitting on the edge of the great slab with drums and strings and air instruments; they were laughing and playing mostly for themselves, each trying to play too fast for the others to follow.

Set into the centre of the table was a long narrow pit full of glowing coals; a kind of miniaturised bucket-line trundled above the fire, carrying little meat and vegetable pieces from one end of the table to the other; they were skewered on to the line at one end by one of Hafflis’s children, and removed at the other end, wrapped in edible paper and thrown with a fair degree of accuracy to anybody who wanted them, by Hafflis’s youngest, who was only six. Hafflis was unusual in having had seven children; normally people bore one and fathered one. The Culture frowned on such profligacy, but Hafflis just liked being pregnant. He was in a male stage at the moment, however, having changed a few years earlier.

He and Gurgeh exchanged pleasantries, then Hafflis showed the game-player to a seat beside Professor Boruelal, who was grinning happily and swaying in her seat. She wore a long black and white robe, and when she saw Gurgeh kissed him noisily on the lips. She attempted to kiss Mawhrin-Skel too, but it flicked away.

She laughed, and speared a half-done piece of meat from the line over the centre of the table with a long fork. “Gurgeh! Meet the lovely Olz Hap! Olz; Jernau Gurgeh. Come on; shake hands!”

Gurgeh sat down, taking the small, pale hand of the frightened-looking girl on Boruelal’s right. She was wearing something dark and shapeless, and was in her early teens, at most. He smiled with a slight frown, glancing at the professor, trying to share the joke of her inebria with the young blonde girl, but Olz Hap was looking at his hand, not his face. She let her hand be touched but then withdrew it almost immediately. She sat on her hands and stared at her plate.

Boruelal breathed deeply, seeming to gather herself together. She took a drink from a tall glass in front of her.

“Well,” she said, looking at Gurgeh as though he’d only just appeared. “How are you, Jernau?”

“Well enough.” He watched Mawhrin-Skel manoeuvre itself beside Olz Hap, floating over the table beside her plate, fields all formal blue and green friendliness.

“Good evening,” he heard the drone say in its most avuncular voice. The girl brought her head up to look at the machine, and Gurgeh listened to their conversation at the same time as he and Boruelal talked.

“Hello.”

“Well enough to play a game of Stricken?”

“Mawhrin-Skel’s the name. Olz Hap, am I right?”

“I think so, Professor. Are you well enough to invigilate?”

“Yes. How do you do.”

“Fuck me, no; drunk as a desert spring. Have to get somebody else. Suppose I could come down in time but… naa…”

“Oh, ah, shake fields with me, eh? That’s very sweet of you; so few people bother. How nice to meet you. We’ve all heard so much.”

“How about the young lady herself?”

“Oh. Oh dear.”

“What?”

“What’s wrong? Have I said something wrong?”

“Is she ready to play?”

“No, it’s just—”

“Play what?”

“Ah; you’re shy. You needn’t be. Nobody’ll force you to play. Least of all Gurgeh, believe me.”

“The game, Boruelal.”

“Well, I—”

“What, do you mean now?”

“I wouldn’t worry, if I were you. Really.”

“Now; or any time.”

“Well I don’t know. Let’s ask her! Hey, kid…”

“Bor—” Gurgeh began, but the professor had already turned to the girl.

“Olz; want to play this game, then?”

The young girl looked straight at Gurgeh. Her eyes were bright in the glare of the line of fire running down the centre of the table. “If Mr Gurgeh would like to, yes.”

Mawhrin-Skel’s fields glowed red with pleasure, momentarily brighter than the coals. “Oh good,” it said. “A fight.”

Hafflis had loaned his own ancient Stricken set out; it took a few minutes for a supply drone to bring one from a town store. They set it up at one end of the balcony, by the edge overlooking the roaring white falls. Professor Boruelal fumbled with her terminal and put in a request for some adjudicating drones to oversee the match; Stricken was susceptible to high-tech cheating, and a serious game required that steps be taken to ensure nothing underhand went on. A drone visiting from Chiark Hub volunteered, as did a Manufactury drone from the shipyard under the massif. One of the university’s own machines would represent Olz Hap.

Gurgeh turned to Mawhrin-Skel, to ask it to be his representative, but it said, “Jernau Gurgeh; I thought you might like Chamlis Amalk-ney to represent you.”

“Is Chamlis here?”

“Arrived a while ago. Been avoiding me. I’ll ask it.”

Gurgeh’s button terminal beeped. “Yes?” he said.

Chamlis’s voice spoke from the button. “The fly-dropping just asked me to represent you in a Stricken adjudication. Do you want me to?”

“Yes, I’d like you to,” Gurgeh said, watching Mawhrin-Skel’s fields flicker white with anger in front of him.

“I’ll be there in twenty seconds,” Chamlis said, closing the channel.

“Twenty-one point two,” Mawhrin-Skel said acidly, exactly twenty-one point two seconds later, as Chamlis appeared over the edge of the balcony, its casing dark against the cataract beyond. Chamlis turned its sensing band to the smaller machine.

“Thank you,” Chamlis said warmly. “I had a bet on with myself that I’d have you counting the seconds to my arrival.”

Mawhrin-Skel’s fields blazed brightly, painfully white, lighting up the entire balcony for a second; people stopped talking and turned; the music hesitated. The tiny drone seemed almost literally to shake with dumb rage.

“Fuck you!” it screeched at last, and seemed to disappear, leaving only an after-image of sun-bright blindness behind it in the night. The coals blazed bright, a wind whipped at clothes and hair, several of the paper lanterns bucked and shook and fell from the arches overhead; leaves and nightflowers drifted down from the two arches immediately over where Mawhrin-Skel had been floating.

Chamlis Amalk-ney, red with happiness, tipped to look up into the dark sky, where a small hole appeared briefly in the cloud cover. “Oh dear,” it said. “Do you think I said something to upset it?”

Gurgeh smiled and sat down at the game-set. “Did you plan that, Chamlis?”

Amalk-ney bowed in mid-air to the other drones, and to Boruelal. “Not exactly.” It turned to face Olz Hap, sitting on the far side of the game-web from Gurgeh. “Ah… by way of contrast: a fair human.”

The girl blushed, looked down. Boruelal made the introductions.

Stricken is played in a three-dimensional web stretched inside a metre cube. The traditional materials are taken from a certain animal on the planet of origin; cured tendon for the web, tusk ivory for the frame. The set Gurgeh and Olz Hap used was synthetic. They each put up their hinged screens, took the bags of hollow globes and coloured beads (nutshells and stones in the original) and selected the beads they wanted, locking them in the globes. The adjudicating drones ensured there was no possibility of anyone seeing which beads went into which shells. Then the man and the girl each took a handful of the little spheres and placed them in various places inside the web. The game had begun.

She was good. Gurgeh was impressed. Olz Hap was impetuous but canny, brave but not stupid. She was also very lucky. But there was luck and luck. Sometimes you could sniff it out, recognise things were going well and would probably continue to go well, and play to that. If things did keep going right, you profited extravagantly. If the luck didn’t persist, well, you just played the percentages.

The girl had that sort of luck, that night. She made the right guesses about Gurgeh’s pieces, capturing several strong beads in weak disguises; she anticipated moves he’d sealed in the Foretell shells; and she ignored the tempting traps and feints he set up.

Somehow he struggled on, coming up with desperate, improvised defences against each attack, but it was all too seat-of-the-pants, too extemporary and tactical. He wasn’t being allowed the time to develop his pieces or plan a strategy. He was responding, following, replying.

He preferred to have the initiative.

It was some time before he realised just how audacious the girl was being. She was going for a Full Web; the simultaneous capture of every remaining point in the game-space. She wasn’t just trying to win, she was trying to pull off a coup which only a handful of the game’s greatest players had ever accomplished, and which nobody in the Culture — to Gurgeh’s knowledge — had yet achieved. Gurgeh could hardly believe it, but it was what she was doing. She was sapping pieces but not obliterating them, then falling back; she was striking out through his own avenues of weakness, then holding there. She was inviting him to come back, of course, giving him a better chance of winning, and indeed of achieving the same momentous result, though with far less hope of doing so. But the self-confidence of it! The experience and even arrogance such a course implied!

He looked at the slight, calm-faced girl through the web of thin wires and little suspended spheres, and could not help but admire her ambition, her vaulting ability and self-belief. She was playing for the grand gesture, and to the gallery, not settling for a reasonable win, despite the fact that the reasonable win would be over a famous, respected game-player. And Boruelal had thought she might feel intimidated by him! Well, good for her.

Gurgeh sat forward, rubbing his beard, oblivious of the people now packing the balcony, silently watching the game.

He struggled back into it somehow. Partly luck, partly more skill than even he thought he possessed. The game was still poised for a Full Web victory, and she was still the most likely to achieve it, but at least his position looked less hopeless. Somebody brought him a glass of water and something to eat. He vaguely recalled being grateful.

The game went on. People came and went around him. The web held all his fortune; the little spheres, holding their secret treasures and threats, became like discrete parcels of life and death, single points of probability which could be guessed at but never known until they were challenged, opened, looked at. All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.

He no longer knew what body-made drugs washed through him, nor could he guess what the girl was using. He had lost all sense of self and time.

The game drifted for a few moves, as they both lost concentration, then came alive again. He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed.

He looked at that model, twisted it.

The game changed.

He saw a way to win. The Full Web remained a possibility. His, now. It all depended. Another twist. Yes; he would win. Almost certainly. But that was no longer enough. The Full Web beckoned, tantalisingly, seductively, entrancingly…

“Gurgeh?” Boruelal shook him. He looked up. There was a hint of dawn over the mountains. Boruelal’s face looked grey and sober. “Gurgeh; a break. It’s been six hours. Do you agree? A break, yes?”

He looked through the web at the pale, waxen face of the young girl. He gazed round in a sort of daze. Most of the people had gone. The paper lanterns had disappeared, too; he fell vaguely sorry to have missed the little ritual of throwing the glowing lamps over the terrace edge and watching them drift down to the forest.

Boruelal shook him once more. “Gurgeh?”

“Yes; a break. Yes, of course,” he croaked. He got up, stiff and sore, muscles protesting and joints creaking.

Chamlis had to stay with the game-set, to ensure the adjudication. Grey dawn spread across the sky. Somebody gave him some hot soup, which he sipped while he ate a few crackers and wandered through the quiet arcades for a while, where a few people slept or still sat and talked, or danced to quiet, recorded music. He leant on the balustrade above the kilometre drop, sipping and munching, dazed and vacant from the game, still playing and replaying it somewhere inside his head.

The lights of the towns and villages on the mist-strewn plain below, beyond the semi-circle of dark rain forest, looked pale and uncertain. Distant mountain tops shone pink and naked.

“Jernau Gurgeh?” a soft voice said.

He looked over the plain. The drone Mawhrin-Skel floated a metre from his face. “Mawhrin-Skel,” he said quietly.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“How goes the game?”

“Fine, thank you. I think I’ll win now… pretty sure in fact. But there’s just a chance I might win…” He felt himself smiling. “… famously.”

“Really?” Mawhrin-Skel continued to float there, over the drop in front of him. It kept its voice soft, though there was nobody near by. Its fields were off. Its surface was an odd, mottled mixture of grey tones.

“Yes,” Gurgeh said, and briefly explained about a Full Web victory.

The drone seemed to understand. “So, you have won, but you could win the Full Web, which no one in the Culture has ever done save for exhibition purposes, to prove its possibility.”

“That’s right!” He nodded, looked over the light speckled plain. “That’s right.” He finished the crackers, brushed his hands slowly free of crumbs. He left the soup bowl balanced on the balustrade.

“Does it really,” Mawhrin-Skel said thoughtfully, “matter who first wins a Full Web?”

“Hmm?” Gurgeh said.

Mawhrin-Skel drifted closer. “Does it really matter who first wins one? Somebody will, but does it count for much who does? It would appear to be a very unlikely eventuality in any given game… has it really much to do with skill?”

“Not beyond a certain point,” Gurgeh admitted. “It requires a lucky genius.”

“But that could be you.”

“Maybe.” Gurgeh smiled across the gulf of chill morning air. He drew his jacket closer about him. “It depends entirely on the disposition of certain coloured beads in certain metal spheres.” He laughed. “A victory that would echo round the game-playing galaxy, and it depends on where a child placed…” his voice trailed off. He looked at the tiny drone again, frowning. “Sorry; getting a bit melodramatic.” He shrugged, leant on the stone edge. “It would be… pleasant to win, but it’s unlikely, I’m afraid. Somebody else will do it, some time.”

“But it might as well be you,” Mawhrin-Skel hissed, floating still closer.

Gurgeh had to draw away to focus on the device. “Well—”

“Why leave it to chance, Jernau Gurgeh?” Mawhrin-Skel said, pulling back a little. “Why abandon it to mere, stupid luck?”

“What are you talking about?” Gurgeh said slowly, eyes narrowing. The drug-trance was dissipating, the spell breaking. He felt keen, keyed-up; nervous and excited at once.

“I can tell you which beads are in which globes,” Mawhrin-Skel said.

Gurgeh laughed gently. “Nonsense.”

The drone floated closer. “I can. They didn’t tear everything out of me when they turned me away from SC. I have more senses than cretins like Amalk-ney have even heard of.” It closed in. “Let me use them; let me tell you what is where in your bead-game. Let me help you to the Full Web.”

Gurgeh stood back from the balustrade, shaking his head. “You can’t. The other drones—”

“— are weak simpletons, Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel insisted. “I have the measure of them, believe me. Trust me. Another SC machine, definitely not; a Contact drone, probably not… but this gang of obsoletes? I could find out where every bead that girl has placed is. Every single one!”

“You wouldn’t need them all,” Gurgeh said, looking troubled, waving his hand.

“Well then! Better yet! Let me do it! Just to prove to you! To myself!”

“You’re talking about cheating, Mawhrin-Skel,” Gurgeh said, looking round the plaza. There was nobody near by. The paper lanterns and the stone ribs they hung from were invisible from where he stood.

“You’re going to win; what difference does it make?”

“It’s still cheating.”

“You said yourself it’s all luck. You’ve won—”

“Not definitely.”

“Almost certainly; a thousand to one you don’t.”

“Probably longer odds than that,” Gurgeh conceded.

“So the game is over. The girl can’t lose any more than she has already. Let her be part of a game that will go down in history. Give her that!”

“It,” Gurgeh said, slapping his hand on the stonework, “is,” another slap, “still,” slap, “cheating!”

“Keep your voice down,” Mawhrin-Skel murmured. It backed away a little. It spoke so low he had to lean out over the drop to hear it. “It’s luck. All is luck when skill’s played out. It was luck left me with a face that didn’t fit in Contact, it’s luck that’s made you a great game-player, it’s luck that’s put you here tonight. Neither of us were fully planned, Jernau Gurgeh; your genes determined you and your mother’s genofixing made certain you would not be a cripple or mentally subnormal. The rest is chance. I was brought into being with the freedom to be myself; if what that general plan and that particular luck produced is something a majority — a majority, mark you; not all — of one SC admissions board decides is not what they just happen to want, is it my fault? Is it?”

“No,” Gurgeh sighed, looking down.

“Oh, it’s all so wonderful in the Culture, isn’t it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing’s exploited, but there’s still luck and heartache and joy, there’s still chance and advantage and disadvantage.”

The drone hung above the drop and the waking plain. Gurgeh watched the Orbital dawn come up, swinging from the edge of the world. “Take hold of your luck, Gurgeh. Accept what I’m offering you. Just this once let’s both make our own chances. You already know you’re one of the best in the Culture; I’m not trying to flatter you; you know that. But this win would seal that fame for ever.”

“If it’s possible…” Gurgeh said, then went silent. His jaw clenched. The drone sensed him trying to control himself the way he had done on the steps up to Hafflis’s house, seven hours ago.

“If it isn’t, at least have the courage to know,” Mawhrin-Skel said, voice pitched at an extremity of pleading.

The man raised his eyes to the clear blue-pinks of dawn. The ruffled, misty plain looked like a vast and tousled bed. “You’re crazy, drone. You could never do it.”

“I know what I can do, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said. It pulled away again, sat in the air, regarding him.

He thought of that morning, sitting on the train; the rush of that delicious fear. Like an omen, now.

Luck; simple chance.

He knew the drone was right. He knew it was wrong; but he knew it was right, too. It all depended on him.

He leant against the balustrade. Something in his pocket dug into his chest. He felt in, pulled out the hidden-piece wafer he’d taken as a memento after the disastrous Possession game. He turned the wafer over in his hands a few times. He looked at the drone, and suddenly felt very old and very child-like at the same time.

“If,” he said slowly, “anything goes wrong, if you’re found out — I’m dead. I’ll kill myself. Brain death; complete and utter. No remains.”

“Nothing is going to go wrong. For me, it is the simplest thing in the world to find out what’s inside those shells.”

“What if you are discovered, though? What if there is an SC drone around here somewhere, or the Hub is watching?”

The drone said nothing for a moment. “They’d have noticed by now. It is already done.”

Gurgeh opened his mouth to speak, but the drone quickly floated closer, calmly continuing. “For my own sake, Gurgeh… for my own peace of mind. I wanted to know, too. I came back long ago; I’ve been watching for the past five hours, quite fascinated. I couldn’t resist finding out if it was possible… To be honest, I still don’t know; the game is beyond me, just over-complicated for the way my poor target tracking mind is configured… but I had to try to find out. I had to. So, you see; the risk is run, Gurgeh; the deed is done. I can tell you what you need to know… And I ask nothing in return; that’s up to you. Maybe you can do something for me some day, but no obligation; believe me, please believe me. No obligation at all. I’m doing this because I want to see you — somebody; anybody — do it.”

Gurgeh looked at the drone. His mouth was dry. He could hear somebody shouting in the distance. The terminal button on his jacket shoulder beeped. He drew breath to speak to it, but then heard his own voice say, “Yes?”

“Ready to resume, Jernau?” Chamlis said from the button.

And he heard his own voice say, “I’m on my way.”

He stared at the drone as the terminal beeped off.

Mawhrin-Skel floated closer. “As I said, Jernau Gurgeh; I can fool these adding machines, no problem at all. Quickly now. Do you want to know or not? The Full Web; yes or no?”

Gurgeh glanced round in the direction of Hafflis’s apartments. He turned back, leant out over the drop, towards the drone.

“All right,” he said, whispering, “just the five prime points and the four verticals nearest topside centre. No more.”

Mawhrin-Skel told him.

It was almost enough. The girl struggled brilliantly to the very end, and deprived him on the final move.

The Full Web fell apart, and he won by thirty-one points, two short of the Culture’s existing record.

One of Estray Hafflis’s house drones was dimly confused to discover, while cleaning up under the great stone table much later that morning, a crushed and shattered ceramic wafer with warped and twisted numbered dials set into its crazed and distorted surface.

It wasn’t part of the house Possession set.

The machine’s non-sentient, mechanistic, entirely predictable brain thought about it for a while, then finally decided to junk the mysterious remnant along with the rest of the debris.

When he woke up that afternoon, it was with the memory of defeat. It was some time before he recalled that he had in fact won the Stricken game. Victory had never been so bitter.

He breakfasted alone on the terrace, watching a fleet of sailboats cut down the narrow fjord, bright sails in a fresh breeze. His right hand hurt a little as he held his bowl and cup; he’d come close to drawing blood when he’d crushed the Possession wafer at the end of the Stricken game.

He dressed in a long coat, trous and short kilt, and went on a long walk, down to the shore of the fjord and then along it, towards the sea coast and the windswept dunes where Hassease lay, the house he’d been born in, where a few of his extended family still lived. He tramped along the coast path towards the house, through the blasted, twisted shapes of wind-misshapen trees. The grass made sighing noises around him, and seabirds cried. The breeze was cold and freshening under ragged clouds. Out to sea, beyond Hassease village, where the weather was coming from, he could see tall veils of rain under a dark front of storm-clouds. He drew his coat tighter about him and hurried towards the distant silhouette of the sprawling, ramshackle house, thinking he should have taken an underground car. The wind whipped up sand from the distant beach and threw it inland; he blinked, eyes watering.

“Gurgeh.”

The voice was quite loud; louder than the sound of sighing grass and wind-troubled tree branches. He shielded his eyes, looked to one side. “Gurgeh,” the voice said again. He peered into the shade of a stunted, slanting tree.

“Mawhrin-Skel? Is that you?”

“The same,” the small drone said, floating forward over the path.

Gurgeh looked out to sea. He started down the path to the house again, but the drone did not follow him. “Well,” he told it, looking back from a few paces away, “I must keep going. I’ll get wet if I—”

“No,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “Don’t go. I have to talk to you. This is important.”

“Then tell me as I walk,” he said, suddenly annoyed. He strode away. The drone flashed round in front of him, at face level, so that he had to stop or he’d have bumped into it.

“It’s about the game; Stricken; last night and this morning.”

“I believe I already said thank you,” he told the machine. He looked beyond it. The leading edge of the squall was hitting the far end of the village harbour beyond Hassease. The dark clouds were almost above him, casting a great shadow.

“And I believe I said you might be able to help me one day.”

“Oh,” Gurgeh said, with an expression more sneer than smile. “And what am I supposed to be able to do for you?”

“Help me,” Mawhrin-Skel said quietly, voice almost lost in the noise of the wind. “Help me to get back into Contact.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Gurgeh said, and put out one hand to swipe the machine out of his path. He forced his way past it.

The next thing he knew he’d been shoved down into the grass at the path-side, as though shoulder-charged by someone invisible. He stared up in amazement at the tiny machine floating above him, while his hands felt the damp ground under him and the grass hissed on each side.

“You little—” he said, trying to stand up. He was shoved back down again, and sat there incredulous, simply unbelieving. No machine had ever used force on him. It was unheard of. He tried to rise again, a shout of anger and frustration forming in his throat.

He went limp. The shout died in his mouth.

He felt himself flop back into the grass.

He lay there, looking up into the dark clouds overhead. He could move his eyes. Nothing else.

He remembered the missile shoot and the immobility the suit had imposed on him when it had been hit once too often. This was worse.

This was paralysis. He could do nothing.

He worried about his breathing stopping, his heart stopping, his tongue blocking his throat, his bowels relaxing.

Mawhrin-Skel floated into his field of view. “Listen to me, Jernau Gurgeh.” Some cold drops of rain started to patter into the grass and on to his face. “Listen to me… You shall help me. I have our entire conversation, your every word and gesture from this morning, recorded. If you don’t help me, I’ll release that recording. Everyone will know you cheated in the game against Olz Hap.” The machine paused. “Do you understand, Jernau Gurgeh? Have I made myself clear? Do you realise what I am saying? There is a name — an old name — for what I am doing, in case you haven’t already guessed. It is called blackmail.”

The machine was mad. Anybody could make up anything they wanted; sound, moving pictures, smell, touch… there were machines that did just that. You could order them from a store and effectively paint whatever pictures — still or moving — you wanted, and with sufficient time and patience you could make it look as realistic as the real thing, recorded with an ordinary camera. You could simply make up any film sequence you wanted.

Some people used such machines just for fun or revenge, making up stories where appalling or just funny things happened to their enemies or their friends. Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible; in a society like the Culture, where next to nothing was forbidden, and both money and individual power had virtually ceased to exist, it was doubly irrelevant.

The machine really must be mad. Gurgeh wondered if it intended to kill him. He turned the idea over in his mind, trying to believe it could happen.

“I know what’s going through your mind, Gurgeh,” the drone went on. “You’re thinking that I can’t prove it; I could have made it up; nobody will believe me. Well, wrong. I had a real-time link with a friend of mine; an SC Mind sympathetic to my cause, who’s always known I would have made a perfectly good operative and has worked on my appeal. What passed between us this morning is recorded in perfect detail in a Mind of unimpeachable moral credentials, and at a level of perceived fidelity unapproachable with the sort of facilities generally available.

“What I have on you could not have been falsified, Gurgeh. If you don’t believe me, ask your friend Amalk-ney. It’ll confirm all I say. It may be stupid, and ignorant too, but it ought to know where to find out the truth.”

Rain struck Gurgeh’s helpless, relaxed face. His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.

The drone’s small body splashed and dripped above him as the drops grew larger and fell harder. “You’re wondering what I want from you?” the drone said. He tried to move his eyes to say ‘no’, just to annoy it, but it didn’t seem to notice. “Help,” it said. “I need your help; I need you to speak for me. I need you to go to Contact and add your voice to those demanding my return to active duty.” The machine darted down towards his face; he felt his coat collar pulled. His head and upper torso were lifted with a jerk from the damp ground until he stared helplessly at the grey-blue casing of the small machine. Pocket-size, he thought, wishing he could blink, and glad of the rain because he could not. Pocket-size; it would fit into one of the big pockets in this coat.

He wanted to laugh.

“Don’t you understand what they’ve done to me, man?” the machine said, shaking him. “I’ve been castrated, spayed, paralysed! How you feel now; helpless, knowing the limbs are there but unable to make them work! Like that, but knowing that they aren’t there! Can you understand that? Can you? Did you know that in our history people used to lose whole limbs, for ever? Do you remember your social history, little Jernau Gurgeh? Eh?” It shook him. He felt and heard his teeth rattle. “Do you remember seeing cripples, from before arms and legs just grew back? Back then, humans lost limbs — blown off or cut off or amputated — but still thought they had them, still thought they could feel them; ‘ghost limbs’ they called them. Those unreal arms and legs could itch and they could ache but they could not be used; can you imagine? Can you imagine that, Culture man with your genofixed regrowth and your over-designed heart and your doctored glands and clot-filtered brain and flawless teeth and perfect immune system? Can you?”

It let him fall back to the ground. His jaw jerked and he felt his teeth nip the end of his tongue. A salt taste filled his mouth. Now he really would drown, he thought; in his own blood. He waited for real fear. The rain filled his eyes but he could not cry.

“Well, imagine that, times eight, times more; imagine what I feel, all set up to be the good soldier fighting for all that we hold dear, to seek out and smite the barbarians around us! Gone, Jernau Gurgeh; razed; gone. My sensory systems, my weapons, my very memory-capacity; all reduced, laid waste: crippled. I peek into shells in a Stricken game, I push you down with an eight-strength field and hold you there with an excuse for an electro-magnetic effector… but this is nothing, Jernau Gurgeh; nothing. An echo; a shadow… nothing…”

It floated higher, away from him.

It gave him back the use of his body. He struggled off the damp ground, and felt his tongue with one hand; the blood had stopped flowing, closed off. He sat up, a little groggy, feeling the back of his head where it had hit the ground. It was not sore. He looked at the small, dripping body of the machine, floating over the path.

“I have nothing to lose, Gurgeh,” it said. “Help me or I’ll destroy your reputation. Don’t think I wouldn’t. Whether it would mean almost nothing to you — which I doubt — I’d do it just for the fun of causing you even the smallest amount of embarrassment. And if it means everything, and you really would kill yourself — which I also very much doubt — then I would still. I’ve never killed a human before. It’s possible I might have been given the chance, somewhere, some time, if I’d been allowed to join SC… but I’d settle for causing a suicide.”

He held up one hand to it. His coat felt heavy. The trous were soaked. “I believe you,” he said. “All right. But what can I do?”

“I’ve told you,” the drone said, over the noise of the wind howling in the trees and the rain beating against the swaying stalks of grass. “Speak for me. You have more influence than you realise. Use it.”

“But I don’t, I—”

“I’ve seen your mail, Gurgeh,” the drone said tiredly. “Don’t you know what a guest-invitation from a GSV means? It’s the closest Contact ever comes to offering a post directly. Didn’t anybody ever teach you anything besides games? Contact wants you. Officially Contact never head-hunts; you have to apply, then once you’re in it’s the other way round; to join SC you have to wait to be invited. But they want you, all right… Gods, man, can’t you take a hint?”

“Even if you’re right, what am I supposed to do, just go to Contact and say ‘Take this drone back’? Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t even know how to start going about it.” He didn’t want to say anything about the visit from the Contact drone the other evening.

He didn’t have to.

“Haven’t they already been in touch with you?” Mawhrin-Skel asked. “The night before last?”

Gurgeh got shakily to his feet. He brushed some sandy earth from his coat. The rain gusted on the wind. The village on the coast and the sprawling house of his childhood were almost invisible under the dark sheets of driving rain.

“Yes, I’ve been watching you, Jernau Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “I know Contact are interested in you. I have no idea just what it is Contact might want from you, but I suggest that you find out. Even if you don’t want to play, you’d better make a damn good plea on my behalf; I’ll be watching, so I’ll know whether you do or not… I’ll prove it to you. Watch.”

A screen unfolded from the front of the drone’s body like a strange flat flower, expanding to a square a quarter-metre or so to a side. It lit up in the rainy gloom to show Mawhrin-Skel itself, suddenly glowing a blinding, flashing white, above the stone table at Hafflis’s house. The scene was shot from above, probably near one of the stone ribs over the terrace. Gurgeh watched again as the line of coals glowed bright, and the lanterns and flowers fell. He heard Chamlis say, “Oh dear. Do you think I said something to upset it?” He saw himself smile as he sat down by the Stricken game-set.

The scene faded. It was replaced by another dim scene viewed from above; a bed; his bed, in the principal chamber at Ikroh. He recognised the small, ringed hands of Ren Myglan kneading his back from beneath. There was sound, too:

“… ah, Ren, my baby, my child, my love…”

“…Jernau…”

“You piece of shit,” he told the drone.

The scene faded and the sound cut off. The screen collapsed, sucked back inside the body of the drone.

“Just so, and don’t you forget it, Jernau Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “Those bits were quite fakeable; but you and I know they were real, don’t we? Like I said; I’m watching you.”

He sucked on the blood in his mouth, spat. “You can’t do this. Nobody’s allowed to behave like this. You won’t get—”

“— away with it? Well, maybe not. But the thing is, if I don’t get away with it, I don’t care. I’m no worse off. I’m still going to try.” It paused, physically shook itself free of water, then produced a spherical field about itself, clearing the moisture from its casing, leaving it spotless and clean, and sheltering it from the rain.

“Can’t you understand what they’ve done to me, man? Better I had never been brought into being than forced to wander the Culture for ever, knowing what I’ve lost. They call it compassion to draw my talons and remove my eyes and cast me adrift in a paradise made for others; I call it torture. It’s obscene, Gurgeh, it’s barbaric, diabolic; recognise that old word? I see you do. Well, try to imagine how I might feel, and what I might do… Think about it, Gurgeh. Think about what you can do for me, and what I can do to you.”

The machine drew away from him again, retreating through the pouring rain. The cold drops splashed on top of its invisible globe of fields, and little rivulets of water ran round the transparent surface of that sphere to dribble underneath, falling in a steady stream into the grass. “I’ll be in touch. Goodbye, Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel said.

The drone flicked away, tearing over the grass and into the sky in a grey cone of slipstream. Gurgeh lost sight of it within seconds.

He stood for a while, brushing sand and bits of grass from his sodden clothes, then turned to walk back in the direction he’d come from, through the falling rain and the beating wind.

He looked back, once, to gaze again upon the house where he’d grown up, but the squall, billowing round the low summits of the rolling dunes, had all but obscured the rambling chaotic structure.

“But Gurgeh, what is the problem?”

“I can’t tell you!” He walked up to the rear wall of the main room of Chamlis’s apartment, turned and paced back again, before going to stand by the window. He looked out over the square.

People walked, or sat at tables under the awnings and archways of the pale, green-stone galleries which lined the village’s main square. Fountains played, birds flew from tree to tree, and on the tiled roof of the square’s central bandstand/stage/holoscreen housing, a jet black tzile, almost the size of a full-grown human, lay sprawled, one leg hanging over the edge of the tiles. Its trunk, tail and ears all twitched as it dreamed; its rings and bracelets and earrings glinted in the sunlight. Even as Gurgeh watched, the creature’s thin trunk articulated lazily, stretching back over its head to scratch indolently at the back of its neck, near its terminal collar. Then the black proboscis fell back as though exhausted, to swing to and fro for a few seconds. Laughter drifted up through the warm air from some nearby tables. A red-coloured dirigible floated over distant hills, like a vast blob of blood in the blue sky.

He turned back into the room again. Something about the square, the whole village, disgusted and angered him. Yay was right; it was all too safe and twee and ordinary. They might as well be on a planet. He walked over to where Chamlis floated, near the long fish-tank. Chamlis’s aura was tinged with grey frustration. The old drone gave an exasperated shudder and picked up a little container of fish-food; the tank lid lifted and Chamlis sprinkled some of the food grains on to the top of the water; the glittering mirrorfish moved silkily up to the surface, mouths working rhythmically.

“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said reasonably, “how can I help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong?”

“Just tell me; is there any way you can find out more about what Contact wanted to talk about? Can I get in touch with them again? Without everybody else knowing? Or…” He shook his head, put his hands to his head. “No; I suppose people will know, but it doesn’t matter…” He stopped at the wall, stood looking at the warm sandstone blocks between the paintings. The apartments had been built in an old-fashioned style; the pointing between the sandstone blocks was dark, inlaid with little white pearls. He gazed at the richly beaded lines and tried to think, tried to know what it was he could ask and what there was he could do.

“I can get in touch with the two ships I know,” Chamlis said. “The ones I contacted originally, I can ask them; they might know what Contact was going to suggest.” Chamlis watched the silvery fish silently feeding. “I’ll do that now, if you like.”

“Please. Yes,” he said, and turned away from the manufactured sandstone and the cultivated pearls. His shoes clacked across the patterned tiles of the room. The sunlit square again. The tzile, still sleeping. He could see its jaws moving, and wondered what alien words the creature was mouthing in its sleep.

“It’ll be a few hours before I hear anything,” Chamlis said. The fish-tank lid closed; the drone put the fish-food container into a drawer in a tiny, delicate table near the tank. “Both ships are fairly distant.” Chamlis tapped the side of the tank with a silvered field; the mirrorfish floated over to investigate. “But why?” the drone said, looking at him. “What’s changed? What sort of trouble are you… can you be in? Gurgeh; please tell me. I want to help.”

The machine floated closer to the tall human, who was standing staring down to the square, his hands clasped and unconsciously kneading each other. The old drone had never seen the man so distressed.

“Nothing,” Gurgeh said hopelessly, shaking his head, not looking at the drone. “Nothing’s changed. There’s no trouble. I just need to know a few things.”

He had gone straight back to Ikroh the day before. He’d stood in the main room, where the house had lit the fire a couple of hours earlier after hearing the weather forecast, and he’d taken off the wet, dirty clothes and thrown them all on to the fire. He’d had a hot bath and a steam bath, sweating and panting and trying to feel clean. The plunge bath had been so cold there had been a thin covering of ice on it; he’d dived in, half expecting his heart to stop with the shock. He’d sat in the main room, watching the logs burn. He’d tried to pull himself together, and once he’d felt capable of thinking clearly he’d raised Chiark Hub.

“Gurgeh; Makil Stra-bey again, at your service. How’s tricks? Not another visitation from Contact, surely?”

“No. But I have a feeling they left something behind when they were here; something to watch me.”

“What… you mean a bug or a microsystem or something?”

“Yes,” he said, sitting back in the broad couch. He wore a simple robe. His skin felt scrubbed and shiny clean after his bathe. Somehow, the friendly, understanding voice of Hub made him feel better; it would be all right, he’d work something out. He was probably frightened over nothing; Mawhrin-Skel was just a demented, insane machine with delusions of power and grandeur. It wouldn’t be able to prove anything, and nobody would believe it if it simply made unsubstantiated claims.

“What makes you think you’re being bugged?”

“I can’t tell you,” Gurgeh said. “Sorry. But I have seen some evidence. Can you send something — drones or whatever — to Ikroh, to sweep the place? Would you be able to find something if they did leave anything?”

“If it’s ordinary tech stuff, yes. But it depends on the soph level. A warship can passive-bug using its electro-magnetic effector; they can watch you under a hundred klicks of rock-cover from the next stellar system and tell you what your last meal was. Hyper-space tech; there are defences against it, but no way of detecting it’s going on.”

“Nothing that complicated; just a bug or a camera or something.”

“Should be possible. We’ll displace a drone team to you in a minute or so. Want us to harden this comm channel? Can’t make it totally eavesdrop-proof, but we can make it difficult.”

“Please.”

“No problem. Detach the terminal speaker pip and shove it in your ear. We’ll soundfield the outside.”

Gurgeh did just that. He felt better already. The Hub seemed to know what it was doing. “Thanks, Hub,” he said. “I appreciate all this.”

“Hey, no thanks required, Gurgeh. That’s what we’re here for. Besides; this is fun!”

Gurgeh smiled. There was a distant thump somewhere above the house as the Hub’s drone team arrived.

The drones swept the house for sensory equipment and secured the buildings and grounds; they polarised the windows and drew the drapes; they put some sort of special mat under the couch he sat on; they even installed a kind of filter or valve inside the chimney of the fire.

Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.

He set to work. He used his terminal to probe the Hub’s information banks. They contained as a matter of course almost every even moderately important or significant or useful piece of information the Culture had ever accumulated; a near infinite ocean of fact and sensation and theory and artwork which the Culture’s information net was adding to at a torrential rate every second of the day.

You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot. The Culture had theoretical total freedom of information; the catch was that consciousness was private, and information held in a Mind — as opposed to an unconscious system, like the Hub’s memory-banks — was regarded as part of the Mind’s being, and so as sacrosanct as the contents of a human brain; a Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.

And so, while Hub protected his privacy, Gurgeh found out, without having to ask Chamlis, that what Mawhrin-Skel had said might be true; there were indeed levels of event-recording which could not be easily faked, and which drones of above-average specification were potentially capable of using. Such recordings, especially if they had been witnessed by a Mind in a real-time link, would be accepted as genuine. His mood of renewed optimism started to sink away from him again.

Also, there was an SC Mind, that of the Limited Offensive Unit Gunboat Diplomat, which had supported Mawhrin-Skel’s appeal against the decision which had removed the drone from Special Circumstances.

The feeling of dazed sickness started to fill him again.

He wasn’t able to find out when Mawhrin-Skel and the LOU had last been in touch; that, again, counted as private information. Privacy; that brought a bitter laugh to his mouth, thinking of the privacy he’d had over the last few days and nights.

But he did discover that a drone like Mawhrin-Skel, even in civilianised form, was capable of sustaining a one-way real-time link with such a ship over millennia distances, so long as the ship was watching out for the signal and knew where to look. He could not find out there and then where the Gunboat Diplomat was in the galaxy — SC ships routinely kept their locations secret — but put in a request that the ship release its position to him.

From what he could tell from the information he’d discovered, Mawhrin-Skel’s claim that the Mind had recorded their conversation would not hold up if the ship was more than about twenty millennia away; if it turned out, say, that the craft was on the other side of the galaxy, then the drone had definitely lied, and he would be safe.

He hoped the vessel was on the other side of the galaxy; he hoped it was a hundred thousand light years away or more, or it had gone crazy and run into a black hole or decided to head for another galaxy, or stumbled across a hostile alien ship powerful enough to blow it out of the skies… anything, so long as it wasn’t near by and able to make that real-time link.

Otherwise, everything Mawhrin-Skel had said checked out. It could be done. He could be blackmailed. He sat in the couch, while the fire burned down and the Hub drones floated through the house humming and clicking to themselves, and he stared into the greying ashes, wishing that it was all unreal, wishing it hadn’t happened, cursing himself for letting the little drone talk him into cheating. Why? he asked himself. Why did I do it? How could I have been so stupid? It had seemed a glamorous, enticingly dangerous thing at the time; a little crazy, but then, was he not different from other people? Was he not the great game-player and so allowed his eccentricities, granted the freedom to make his own rules? He hadn’t wanted self-glorification, not really. And he had already won the game; he just wanted somebody in the Culture to have completed a Full Web; hadn’t he? It wasn’t like him to cheat; he had never done it before; he would never do it again… how could Mawhrin-Skel do this to him? Why had he done it? Why couldn’t it just not have happened? Why didn’t they have time-travel, why couldn’t he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light years off, but he wasn’t able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision…

He clenched his fists, trying to break the terminal he held in his right hand, but it wouldn’t break. His hand hurt again.

He tried to think calmly. What if the worst did happen? The Culture was generally rather disdainful of individual fame, and therefore equally uninterested in scandal — there was, anyway, little that was scandalous — but Gurgeh had no doubt that if Mawhrin-Skel did release the recordings it claimed to have made, they would be propagated; people would know.

There were plenty of news and current affairs indices and networks in the multiplicity of communications which linked every Culture habitat, be it ship, rock, Orbital or planet. Somebody somewhere would be only too pleased to broadcast Mawhrin-Skel’s recordings. Gurgeh knew of a couple of recently established games indices whose editors, writers and correspondents regarded him and most of the other well-known players and authorities as some sort of constricting, over-privileged hierarchy; they thought too much attention was paid to too few players, and sought to discredit what they called the old guard (which included him, much to his amusement). They would love what Mawhrin-Skel had on him. He could deny it all, once it was out, and some people would doubtless believe him despite the hardness of the evidence, but the other top players, and the responsible, well-established and authoritative indices, would know the truth of it, and that was what he would not be able to bear.

He would still be able to play, and he would still be allowed to publish, to register his papers as open for dissemination, and probably many of them would be taken up; not quite so often as before, perhaps, but he would not be frozen out completely. It would be worse than that; he would be treated with compassion, understanding, tolerance. But he would never be forgiven.

Could he come to terms with that, ever? Could he weather the storm of abuse and knowing looks, the gloating sympathy of his rivals? Would it all die down enough eventually, would a few years pass and it be sufficiently forgotten? He thought not. Not for him. It would always be there. He could not face down Mawhrin-Skel with that; publish and be damned. The drone had been right; it would destroy his reputation, destroy him.

He watched the logs in the wide grate glow duller red and then go soft and grey. He told Hub he was finished; it quietly returned the house to normal and left him alone with his thoughts.

He woke the next morning, and it was still the same universe; it had not been a nightmare and time had not gone backwards. It had all still happened.

He took the underground to Celleck, the village where Chamlis Amalk-ney lived by itself, in an old-fashioned and odd approximation of human domesticity, surrounded by wall paintings, antique furniture, inlaid walls, fish-tanks and insect vivaria.

“I’ll find out all I can, Gurgeh,” Chamlis sighed, floating beside him, looking out to the square. “But I can’t guarantee that I can do it without whoever was behind your last visit from Contact finding out about it. They may think you’re interested.”

“Maybe I am,” Gurgeh said. “Maybe I do want to talk to them again, I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ve sent the message to my friends, but—”

He had a sudden, paranoid idea. He turned to Chamlis urgently. “These friends of yours are ships.”

“Yes,” Chamlis said. “Both of them.”

“What are they called?”

“The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read The Instructions.”

“They’re not warships?”

“With names like that? They’re GCUs; what else?”

“Good,” Gurgeh said, relaxing a little, looking out to the square again. “Good. That’s all right.” He took a deep breath.

“Gurgeh, can’t you — please — tell me what’s wrong?” Chamlis’s voice was soft, even sad. “You know it’ll go no further. Let me help. It hurts me to see you like this. If there’s anything I can—”

“Nothing,” Gurgeh said, looking at the machine again. He shook his head. “There’s nothing, nothing else you can do. I’ll let you know if there is.” He started across the room. Chamlis watched him. “I have to go now. I’ll see you again, Chamlis.”

He went down to the underground. He sat in the car, staring at the floor. On about the fourth request, he realised the car was talking to him, asking where he wanted to go. He told it.

He was staring at one of the wall-screens, watching the steady stars, when the terminal beeped.

“Gurgeh? Makil Stra-bey, yet again one more time once more.”

“What?” he snapped, annoyed at the Mind’s glib chumminess.

“That ship just replied with the information you asked for.”

He frowned. “What ship? What information?”

“The Gunboat Diplomat, our game-player. Its location.”

His heart pounded and his throat seemed to close up. “Yes,” he said, struggling to get the word out. “And?”

“Well, it didn’t reply direct; it sent via its home GSV Youthful Indiscretion and got it to confirm its location.”

“Yes, well? Where is it?”

“In the Altabien-North cluster. Sent co-ordinates, though they’re only accurate to—”

“Never mind the co-ordinates!” Gurgeh shouted. “Where is that cluster? How far away is it from here?”

“Hey; calm down. It’s about two and a half millennia away.”

He sat back, closing his eyes. The car started to slow down.

Two thousand five hundred light years. It was, as the urbanely well-travelled people on a GSV would say, a long walk. But close enough — by quite a long way — for a warship to minutely target an effector, throw a sensing field a light-second in diameter across the sky, and pick up the weak but indisputable flicker of coherent HS light coming from a machine small enough to fit into a pocket.

He tried to tell himself it was still no proof, that Mawhrin-Skel might still have been lying, but even as he thought that, he saw something ominous in the fact the warship had not replied direct. It had used its GSV, an even more reliable source of information, to confirm its whereabouts.

“Want the rest of the LOU’s message?” Hub said, “Or are you going to bite my head off again?”

Gurgeh was puzzled. “What rest of the message?” he said. The underground car swung round, slowed further. He could see Ikroh’s transit gallery, hanging under the Plate surface like an upside-down building.

“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” Hub said. “You been communicating with this ship behind my back, Gurgeh? The message is: ‘Nice to hear from you again.’ ”

Three days passed. He couldn’t settle to anything. He tried to read — papers, old books, the material of his own he’d been working on — but on every occasion he found himself reading and re-reading the same piece or page or screen, time and time again, trying hard to take it in but finding his thoughts constantly veering away from the words and diagrams and illustrations in front of him, refusing to absorb anything, going back time and time again to the same treadmill, the same looping, tail-swallowing, eternally pointless round of questioning and regret. Why had he done it? What way out was there?

He tried glanding soothing drugs, but it took so much to have any effect he just felt groggy. He used Sharp Blue and Edge and Focal to force himself to concentrate, but it gave him a jarring feeling at the back of his skull somewhere, and exhausted him. It wasn’t worth it. His brain wanted to worry and fret and there was no point in trying to frustrate it.

He refused all calls. He called Chamlis a couple of times, but never found anything to say. All Chamlis could tell him was that the two Contact ships it knew had both been in touch; each said it had passed on Chamlis’s message to a few other Minds. Both had been surprised Gurgeh had been contacted so quickly. Both would pass on Gurgeh’s request to be told more; neither knew anything else about what was going on.

He heard nothing from Mawhrin-Skel. He asked Hub to find the machine, just to let him know where it was, but Hub couldn’t, which obviously annoyed the Orbital Mind a lot. He had it send the drone team down again and they swept the house once more. Hub left one of the machines there in the house, to monitor continuously for surveillance.

Gurgeh spent a lot of time walking in the forests and mountains around Ikroh, walking and hiking and scrambling twenty or thirty kilometres each day just for the natural soporific of being dead, animal-tired at night.

On the fourth day, he was almost starting to feel that if he didn’t do anything, didn’t talk to anybody or communicate or write, and didn’t stir from the house, nothing would happen. Maybe Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared for ever. Perhaps Contact had come to take it away, or said it could come back to the fold. Maybe it had gone totally crazy and flown off into space; maybe it had taken seriously the old joke about Styglian enumerators, and had gone off to count all the grains of sand on a beach.

It was a fine day. He sat in the broad lower branches of a sunbread tree in the garden at Ikroh, looking out through the canopy of leaves to where a small herd of feyl had emerged from the forest to crop the wineberry bushes at the bottom of the lower lawn. The pale, shy animals, stick-thin and camouflage-skinned, pulled nervously at the low shrubs, their triangular heads jigging and bobbing, jaws working. Gurgeh looked back to the house, just visible through the gently moving leaves of the tree.

He saw a tiny drone, small and grey-white, near one of the windows of the house. He froze. It might not be Mawhrin-Skel, he told himself. It was too far away to be certain. It might be Loash and-all-the-rest. Whatever it was, it was a good forty metres away, and he must be almost invisible sitting here in the tree. He couldn’t be traced; he’d left his terminal back at the house, something he had taken to doing increasingly often recently, even though it was a dangerous, irresponsible thing to do, to be apart from the Hub’s information network, effectively cut off from the rest of the Culture.

He held his breath, sat dead still.

The little machine seemed to hesitate in mid-air, then point in his direction. It came floating straight towards him.

It wasn’t Mawhrin-Skel or Loash the verbose; it wasn’t even the same type. It was a little larger and fatter and it had no aura at all. It stopped just below the tree and said in a pleasant voice, “Mr Gurgeh?”

He jumped out of the tree. The herd of feyl started and disappeared, leaping into the forest in a confusion of green shapes. “Yes?” he said.

“Good afternoon. My name’s Worthil; I’m from Contact. Pleased to meet you.”

“Hello.”

“What a lovely place. Did you have the house built?”

“Yes,” Gurgeh said. Irrelevant small-talk; a nano-second interrogation of Hub’s memories would have told the machine exactly when Ikroh was built, and by whom.

“Quite beautiful. I couldn’t help noticing the roofs all slope at more or less the same mean angle as the surrounding mountain slopes. Your idea?”

“A private aesthetic theory,” Gurgeh admitted, a little more impressed; he’d never mentioned that to anybody. The fieldless machine made a show of looking around.

“Hmm. Yes, a fine house and an impressive setting. But now: may I come to the reason for my visit?”

Gurgeh sat down cross-legged by the tree. “Please do.”

The drone lowered itself to keep level with his face. “First of all, let me apologise if we put you off earlier. I think the drone who visited you previously may have taken its instructions a little too literally, though, to give it its due, time is rather limited… Anyway; I’m here to tell you all you want to know. We have, as you probably suspected, found something we think might interest you. However…” The drone turned away from the man, to look at the house and its garden again. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to leave your beautiful home.”

“So it does involve travelling?”

“Yes. For some time.”

“How long?” Gurgeh asked.

The drone seemed to hesitate. “May I tell you what it is we’ve found, first?”

“All right.”

“It must be in confidence, I’m afraid,” the drone said apologetically. “What I’ve come to tell you has to remain restricted for the time being. You’ll understand why once I’ve explained. Can you give me your word you won’t let this go any further?”

“What would happen if I say No?”

“I leave. That’s all.”

Gurgeh shrugged, brushed a little bark from the hem of the gathered-up robe he was wearing. “All right. In secret, then.”

Worthil floated upwards a little, turning its front briefly towards Ikroh. “It’ll take a little time to explain. Might we retire to your house?”

“Of course.” Gurgeh rose to his feet.

Gurgeh sat in the main screen-room of Ikroh. The windows were blanked out and the wall holoscreen was on; the Contact drone was controlling the room systems. It put the lights out. The screen went blank, then showed the main galaxy, in 2-D, from a considerable distance. The two Clouds were nearest Gurgeh’s point of view, the larger Cloud a semi-spiral with a long tail leading away from the galaxy, and the smaller Cloud vaguely Y-shaped.

“The Greater and Lesser Clouds,” the drone Worthil said. “Each about one hundred thousand light years away from where we are now. No doubt you’ve admired them from Ikroh in the past; they’re quite visible, though you’re on the under-edge of the main galaxy relative to them, and so looking at them through it. We’ve found what you might consider a rather interesting game… here.” A green dot appeared near the centre of the smaller Cloud.

Gurgeh looked at the drone. “Isn’t that,” he said, “rather far away? I take it you’re suggesting I go there.”

“It is a long way away, and we do suggest just that. The journey will take nearly two years on the fastest ships, due to the nature of the energy grid; it’s more tenuous out there, between the star-clumps. Inside the galaxy such a journey would take less than a year.”

“But that means I’d be away four years,” Gurgeh said, staring at the screen. His mouth had gone dry.

“More like five,” the drone said matter-of-factly.

“That’s… a long time.”

“It is, and I’ll certainly understand if you decline our invitation. Though we do think you’ll find the game itself interesting. First of all, however, I have to explain a little about the setting, which is what makes the game unique.” The green dot expanded, became a rough circle. The screen went suddenly out-holo, filling the room with stars. The rough green circle of suns became an even rougher sphere. Gurgeh experienced the momentary swimming sensation he sometimes felt when surrounded by space or its impression.

“These stars,” Worthil said — the green-coloured stars, at least a couple of thousand suns, flashed once — “are under the control of what one can only describe as an empire. Now…” The drone turned to look at him. The little machine lay in space like some impossibly large ship, stars in front of it as well as behind it. “It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet, let alone cracks the lightspeed problem, which of course one has to do, to rule effectively over any worthwhile volume.

“Every now and again, however, Contact disturbs some particular ball of rock and discovers something nasty underneath. On every occasion, there is a specific and singular reason, some special circumstance which allows the general rule to go by the board. In the case of the conglomerate you see before you — apart from the obvious factors, such as the fact that we didn’t get out there until fairly recently, and the lack of any other powerful influence in the Lesser Cloud — that special circumstance is a game.”

It took a while to sink in. Gurgeh looked at the machine. “A game?” he said to it.

“That game is called ‘Azad’ by the natives. It is important enough for the empire itself to take its name from the game. You are looking at the Empire of Azad.”

Gurgeh did just that. The drone went on. “The dominant species is humanoid, but, very unusually — and certain analyses claim that this too has been a factor in the survival of the empire as a social system — it is composed of three sexes.” Three figures appeared in the centre of Gurgeh’s field of vision, as though standing in the middle of the ragged sphere of stars. They were rather shorter than Gurgeh if the scale was right. Each of them looked odd in different ways, but they shared what looked to Gurgeh to be rather short legs and slightly bloated, flat and very pale faces. “The one on the left,” Worthil said, “is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the fertilised egg in the third sex, on the right, which has a womb. The one in the middle is the dominant sex.”

Gurgeh had to think about this. “The what?” he said.

“The dominant sex,” Worthil repeated. “Empires are synonymous with centralised — if occasionally schismatised — hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through — usually — a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser — as a rule nominally independent — power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance. The intermediate — or apex — sex you see standing in the middle there controls the society and the empire. Generally, the males are used as soldiers and the females as possessions. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea?”

“Well.” Gurgeh shook his head. “I don’t understand how it works, but if you say it does… all right.” He rubbed his beard. “I take it this means these people can’t change sex.”

“Correct. Genetechnologically, it’s been within their grasp for hundreds of years, but it’s forbidden. Illegal, if you remember what that means.” Gurgeh nodded. The machine went on. “It looks perverse and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting — corruption and favouritism, mostly — endemic to the system.”

“Okay,” Gurgeh said. “I’ll have a lot of questions to ask later, but go on. What about this game?”

“Indeed. Here is one of the boards.”

“… You’re joking,” Gurgeh said eventually. He sat forward, gazing at the holo still picture spread before him.

The starfield and the three humanoids had vanished, and Gurgeh and the drone called Worthil were, seemingly, at one end of a huge room many times larger than the one they in fact occupied. Before them stretched a floor covered with a stunningly complicated and seemingly chaotically abstract and irregular mosaic pattern, which in places rose up like hills and dipped into valleys. Looking closer, it could be seen that the hills were not solid, but rather stacked, tapering levels of the same bewildering meta-pattern, creating linked, multi-layered pyramids over the fantastic landscape, which, on still closer inspection, had what looked like bizarrely sculpted game-pieces standing on its riotously coloured surface. The whole construction must have measured at least twenty metres to a side.

“That,” Gurgeh asked, “is a board?” He swallowed. He had never seen, never heard about, never had the least hint of a game as complicated as this one must surely be, if those were individual pieces and areas.

“One of them.”

“How many are there?” It couldn’t be real. It had to be a joke. They were making fun of him. No human brain could possibly cope with a game on such a scale. It was impossible. It had to be.

“Three. All that size, plus numerous minor ones, played with cards as well. Let me give you some of the background to the game.

“First, the name; ‘Azad’ means ‘machine’, or perhaps ‘system’, in the wide sense which would include any functioning entity, such as an animal or a flower, as well as something like myself, or a waterwheel. The game has been developed over several thousand years, reaching its present form about eight hundred years ago, around the same time as the institutionalisation of the species’ still extant religion. Since then the game has altered little. It dates in its finalised form, then, from about the time of the hegemonisation of the empire’s home planet, Eä, and the first, relativistic exploration of nearby space.”

Now the view was of a planet, hanging huge in the room in front of Gurgeh; blue-white and brilliant and slowly, slowly, revolving against a background of dark space. “Eä,” the drone said. “Now; the game is used as an absolutely integral part of the power-system of the empire. Put in the crudest possible terms, whoever wins the game becomes emperor.”

Gurgeh looked round slowly at the drone, which looked back. “I kid you not,” it said dryly.

“Are you serious?” Gurgeh said, nonetheless.

“Quite entirely,” the drone said. “Becoming emperor does constitute a rather unusual… prize,” the machine said, “and the whole truth, as you might imagine, is much more complicated than that. The game of Azad is used not so much to determine which person will rule, but which tendency within the empire’s ruling class will have the upper hand, which branch of economic theory will be followed, which creeds will be recognised within the religious apparat, and which political policies will be followed. The game is also used as an exam for both entry into and promotion within the empire’s religious, educational, civil administrational, judicial and military establishments.

“The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.”

“But…” Gurgeh looked at the drone beside him, and seemed to feel the presence of the planet before them as an almost physical force, something he felt drawn to, pulled towards, “is that true?”

The planet disappeared and they were back looking at the vast game-board again. The holo was in motion now, though silently, and he could see the alien people moving around, shifting pieces and standing around the edges of the board.

“It doesn’t have to be totally true,” the drone said, “but cause and effect are not perfectly polarised here; the set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so. It becomes true; it is willed into actuality. Anyway; they can’t be too far wrong, or the empire would not exist at all. It is by definition a volatile and unstable system; Azad — the game — would appear to be the force that holds it together.”

“Wait a moment now,” Gurgeh said, looking at the machine. “We both know Contact’s got a reputation for being devious; you wouldn’t be expecting me to go out there and become emperor or anything, would you?”

For the first time, the drone showed an aura, flashing briefly red. There was a laugh in its voice, too. “I wouldn’t expect you’d get very far trying that. No; the empire falls under the general definition of a ‘state’, and the one thing states always try to do is to ensure their own existence in perpetuity. The idea of anybody from outside coming in and trying to take the empire over would fill them with horror. If you decide you want to go, and if you are able to learn the game sufficiently well during the voyage, then there might be a chance, we think, going on your past performance as a game-player, of you qualifying as a clerk in the civil service, or as an army lieutenant. Don’t forget; these people are surrounded by this game from birth. They have anti-agatic drugs, and the best players are about twice your own age. Even they, of course, are still learning.

“The point is not what you would be able to achieve in terms of the semi-barbarous social conditions the game is set up to support, but whether you can master the theory and practice of the game at all. Opinions in Contact differ over whether it is possible for even a game-player of your stature to compete successfully, just on general game-playing principles and a crash-course in the rules and practice.”

Gurgeh watched the silent, alien figures move across the artificial landscape of the huge board. He couldn’t do this. Five years? That was insane. He might as well let Mawhrin-Skel broadcast his shame; in five years he might have made a new life, leaving Chiark, finding something else to interest him besides games, changing his appearance… maybe changing his name; he had never heard of anybody doing that, but it must be possible.

Certainly, the game of Azad, if it really existed, was quite fascinating. But why had he heard nothing of it until now? How could Contact keep something like this secret; and why? He rubbed his beard, still watching the silent aliens as they stalked the broad board, stopping to move pieces or have others move them for them.

They were alien, but they were people; humanoid. They had mastered this bizarre, outrageous game. “They’re not super-intelligent, are they?” he asked the drone.

“Hardly, retaining such a social system at this stage of technological development, game or no game. On average, the intermediate or apex sex is probably a little less bright than the average Culture human.”

Gurgeh was mystified. “That implies there’s a difference between the sexes.”

“There is now,” Worthil said.

Gurgeh didn’t quite see what that meant, but the drone went on before he could ask any further questions. “In fact, we are reasonably hopeful that you will be able to play an above-average game of Azad if you study for the two years your outward journey would take. It would require continued and comprehensive use of memory and learning-enhancing secretions, of course, and I might point out that possession of drug-glands alone would disqualify you from actually gaining any post within the empire through your game performance, even if you weren’t an alien anyway. There is a strict ban on any ‘unnatural’ influence being used during the game; all the gamerooms are electronically shielded to prevent the use of a computer link, and drug tests are carried out after every match. Your own body chemistry, as well as your alien nature and the fact that to them you are a heathen, means that you would — if you did decide to go — only be taking part in an honorary capacity.”

“Drone… Worthil…” Gurgeh said, turning to face it. “I don’t think I’ll be going all that way, not so far, for so long… but I’d love to know more about this game; I want to discuss it, analyse it along with other—”

“Not possible,” the drone said. “I’m allowed to tell you all that I am telling you, but none of this can go any further. You have given your word, Jernau Gurgeh.”

“And if I break it?”

“Everybody would think you’d made it up; there’s nothing on accessible record to show any different.”

“Why is it all so secret, anyway? What are you frightened of?”

“The truth is, we don’t know what to do, Jernau Gurgeh. This is a larger problem than Contact usually has to deal with; as a rule it’s possible to go by the book; we’ve built up enough experience with every sort of barbarian society to know what does and does not work with each type; we monitor, we use controls, we cross-evaluate and Mind-model and generally take every possible precaution to make sure we’re doing the right thing… but something like Azad is unique; there are no templates, no reliable precedents. We have to play it by ear, and that’s something of a responsibility, dealing with an entire stellar empire. Which is why Special Circumstances has become involved; we’re used to dealing with tricky situations. And frankly, with this one, we’re sitting on it. If we let everybody know about Azad we may be pressured into making a decision just by the weight of public opinion… which may not sound like a bad thing, but might prove disastrous.”

“For whom?” Gurgeh said sceptically.

“The people of the empire, and the Culture. We might be forced into a high-profile intervention against the empire; it would hardly be war as such because we’re way ahead of them technologically, but we’d have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time. The people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and the Culture would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists.”

“You seem very sure there would be a wave of popular opinion.”

“Let me explain something to you, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said. “The game of Azad is a gambling game, frequently even at the highest levels. The form these wagers take is occasionally macabre. I very much doubt that you’d be involved on the sort of levels you’d be playing at if you did agree to take part, but it is quite usual for them to wager prestige, honours, possessions, slaves, favours, land and even physical licence on the outcome of games.”

Gurgeh waited, but eventually sighed and said, “All right… what’s ‘physical licence’?”

“The players wager tortures and mutilations against each other.”

“You mean, if you lose a game… you have… these things done to you?”

“Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape.”

Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine for a few seconds, then said slowly, nodding, “Well… that is barbaric.”

“Actually it’s a later development in the game, and seen as a rather liberal concession by the ruling class, as in theory it allows a poor person to keep up in the bidding with a rich person. Before the introduction of the physical licence option, the latter could always outbid the former.”

“Oh.” Gurgeh could see the logic, just not the morality.

“Azad is not the sort of place it’s easy to think about coldly, Jernau Gurgeh. They have done things the average Culture person would find… unspeakable. A programme of eugenic manipulation has lowered the average male and female intelligence; selective birth-control sterilisation, area starvation, mass deportation and racially-based taxation systems produced the equivalent of genocide, with the result that almost everybody on the home planet is the same colour and build. Their treatment of alien captives, their societies and works is equally—”

“Look, is all this serious?” Gurgeh got up from the seat and walked into the field of the hologram, gazing down at the fabulously complicated game-floor, which appeared to be under his feet but was in fact, he knew, a terrible gulf of space away. “Are you telling me the truth? Does this empire really exist?”

“Very much so, Jernau Gurgeh. If you want to confirm all I’ve said, I can arrange for special access rights to be granted to you, direct from the GSVs and other Minds who’ve taken charge of this. You can have all you want on the empire of Azad, from the first sniff of contact to the latest real-time news reports. It’s all true.”

“And when did you first get that sniff of contact?” Gurgeh said, turning to the drone. “How long have you been sitting on this?”

The drone hesitated. “Not long,” it said eventually. “Seventy-three years.”

“You people certainly don’t rush into things, do you?”

“Only when we’ve no choice,” the drone agreed.

“And how does the empire feel about us?” Gurgeh asked. “Let me guess; you haven’t told them all about the Culture.”

“Very good, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said, with what was almost a laugh in its voice. “No, we haven’t told them everything. That’s something the drone we’d be sending with you would have to keep you straight on; right from the start we’ve misled the empire about our distribution, numbers, resources, technological level and ultimate intentions… though of course only the relative paucity of advanced societies in the relevant region of the Lesser Cloud has made this possible. The Azadians do not, for example, know that the Culture is based in the main galaxy; they believe we come from the Greater Cloud, and that our numbers are only about twice theirs. They have little inkling of the level of genofixing in Culture humans, or of the sophistication of our machine intelligences; they’ve never heard of a ship Mind, or seen a GSV.

“They’ve been trying to find out about us ever since first contact, of course, but without any success. They probably think we have a home planet or something; they themselves are still very much planet-oriented, using planet-forming techniques to create usable ecospheres, or more usually just taking over already occupied globes; ecologically and morally, they’re catastrophically bad. The reason they’re trying to find out about us is they want to invade us; they want to conquer the Culture. The problem is that, as with all playground-bully mentalities, they’re quite profoundly frightened; xenophobic and paranoid at once. We daren’t let them know the extent and power of the Culture yet, in case the whole empire self-destructs… such things have happened before, though of course that was long before Contact itself was formed. Our technique’s better these days. Still tempting, all the same,” the drone said, as though thinking aloud, not talking to him.

“They do,” Gurgeh said, “sound fairly…” — he’d been going to say ‘barbaric’, but that didn’t seem strong enough — “… animalistic.”

“Hmm,” the drone said. “Be careful, now; that is how they term the species they subjugate; animals. Of course they are animals, just as you are, just as I am a machine. But they are fully conscious, and they have a society at least as complicated as our own; more so, in some ways. It is pure chance that we’ve met them when their civilisation looks primitive to us; one less ice age on Eä and it could conceivably have been the other way round.”

Gurgeh nodded thoughtfully, and watched the silent aliens move across the game-floor, in the reproduced light of a distant, alien sun.

“But,” Worthil added brightly, “it didn’t happen that way, so not to worry. Now then,” it said, and suddenly they were back in the room at Ikroh, the holoscreen off and the windows clear; Gurgeh blinked in the sudden wash of daylight. “I’m sure you realise there’s still a vast amount left to tell you, but you have our proposal now, in its barest outline. I’m not asking you to say ‘Yes’ unequivocally at this stage, but is there any point in my going on, or have you already decided that you definitely don’t want to go?”

Gurgeh rubbed his beard, looking out of the window towards the forest above Ikroh. It was too much to take in. If it really was genuine, then Azad was the single most significant game he’d ever encountered in his life… possibly more significant than all the rest put together.

As an ultimate challenge, it excited and appalled him in equal measure; he felt instinctively, almost sexually drawn to it, even now, knowing so little… but he wasn’t sure he possessed the self-discipline to study that intensely for two years solid, or that he was capable of holding a mental model of a game so bewilderingly complex in his head. He kept coming back to the fact that the Azadians themselves managed it, but, as the machine said, they were submerged in the game from birth; perhaps it could only be mastered by somebody who’d had their cognitive processes shaped by the game itself…

But five years! All that time; not just away from here, but at least half, probably more, of that stretch spent with no time for keeping abreast of developments in other games, no time to read papers or write them, no time for anything except this one, absurd, obsessive game. He would change; he would be a different person at the end of it; he could not help but change, take on something of the game itself; that would be inevitable. And would he ever catch up again, once he came back? He would be forgotten; he would be away so long the rest of the game-playing Culture would just disregard him; he’d be a historical figure. And when he came back, would he be allowed to talk about it? Or would Contact’s seven-decade-long embargo continue? But if he went, he might be able to buy Mawhrin-Skel off. He could make its price his price. Let it back in to SC. Or — it occurred to him there and then — have them silence it, somehow.

A flock of birds flew across the sky, white scraps against the dark greens of the mountain forest; they landed on the garden outside the window, strutting back and forth and pecking at the ground. He turned to the drone again, crossed his arms. “When would you need to know?” he said. He still hadn’t decided. He had to stall, find out all he could first.

“It would have to be within the next three or four days. The GSV Little Rascal is heading out in this direction from the middle-galaxy at the moment, and will be leaving for the Clouds within the next hundred days. If you were to miss it, your journey would last a lot longer; your own ship will have to sustain maximum velocity right up to the rendezvous point, even as things stand.”

“My own ship?” Gurgeh said.

“You’ll need your own craft, firstly to get you to the Little Rascal in time, and then again at the other end, to travel from the GSV’s closest approach to the Lesser Cloud into the empire itself.”

He watched the snow-white birds peck on the lawn for a while. He wondered whether he ought to mention Mawhrin-Skel now. Part of him wanted to, just to get it over with, just in case they would say Yes immediately and he could stop worrying about the machine’s threat (and start worrying about that insanely complicated game). But he knew he mustn’t. Wisdom is patience, as the saying said. Keep that back; if he was going to go (though of course he wouldn’t, couldn’t, it was madness even to think of going), then make them think he had nothing he wanted in return; let it all be arranged and then make his condition clear… if Mawhrin-Skel waited that long before getting pushy.

“All right,” he said to the Contact drone. “I’m not saying I will go, but I will think about it. Tell me more about Azad.”

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.

There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal’s camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner’s head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.

A terminal was safety.

So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks.

He sat, a couple of days after the drone Worthil’s visit, on a small stone bench near the tree-line a few kilometres from Ikroh. He was breathing hard from the climb up the path. It was a bright, sunny day and the earth smelled sweet. He used the terminal to take a few photographs of the view from the little clearing. There was a rusting piece of ironware beside the bench; a present from an old lover he’d almost forgotten about. He took a few photographs of that, too. Then the terminal beeped.

“House here, Gurgeh. You said to give you the choice on Yay’s calls. She says this is moderately urgent.”

He hadn’t been accepting calls from Yay. She’d tried to get in touch several times over the last few days. He shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said, leaving the terminal to float in mid-air in front of him.

The screen unrolled to reveal Yay’s smiling face. “Ah, the recluse. How are you, Gurgeh?”

“I’m all right.”

Yay peered forward at her own screen. “What is that you’re sitting beside?”

Gurgeh looked at the piece of ironware by the side of the bench. “That’s a cannon,” he told her.

“That’s what I thought.”

“It was a present from a lady friend,” Gurgeh explained. “She was very keen on forging and casting. She graduated from pokers and fire grates to cannons. She thought I might find it amusing to fire large metal spheres at the fjord.”

“I see.”

“You need a fast-burning powder to make it work, though, and I never did get round to acquiring any.”

“Just as well; the thing would probably have exploded and blown your brains out.”

“That did occur to me as well.”

“Good for you.” Yay’s smile widened. “Hey, guess what?”

“What?”

“I’m going on a cruise; I persuaded Shuro he needs his horizons broadened. You remember Shuro; at the shoot?”

“Oh. Yes, I remember. When do you go?”

“I’ve gone. We just undocked from Tronze port; the clipper Screw Loose. This is the last chance I had to call you real-time. The delay’ll mean letters in future.”

“Ah.” He wished he hadn’t accepted this call, too, now. “How long are you going for?”

“A month or two.” Yay’s bright, smiling face crinkled. “We’ll see. Shuro might get tired of me before then. Kid’s mostly into other men, but I’m trying to persuade him otherwise. Sorry I couldn’t say goodbye before I left, but it’s not for long; I’ll s—”

The terminal screen went blank. The screen snapped back into the casing as it fell to the ground and lay, silent and dead, on the tree-needled ground of the clearing. Gurgeh stared at the terminal. He leant forward and picked it up. Some needles and bits of grass had been caught in the screen as it rolled back into the casing. He pulled them out. The machine was lifeless; the little tell-tale light on the base was off.

“Well, Jernau Gurgeh?” Mawhrin-Skel said, floating in from the side of the clearing.

He clutched the terminal with both hands. He stood up, staring at the drone as it sidled through the air, bright in the sunlight. He made himself relax, putting the terminal in a jacket pocket and sitting down, legs crossed on the bench. “Well what, Mawhrin-Skel?”

“A decision.” The machine floated level with his face. Its fields were formal blue. “Will you speak for me?”

“What if I do and nothing happens?”

“You’ll just have to try harder. They’ll listen, if you’re persuasive enough.”

“But if you’re wrong, and they don’t?”

“Then I’d have to think about whether to release your little entertainment or not; it would be fun, certainly… but I might save it, in case you could be useful to me in some other way; one never knows.”

“No, indeed.”

“I saw you had a visitor the other day.”

“I thought you might have noticed.”

“Looked like a Contact drone.”

“It was.”

“I’d like to pretend I knew what it said to you, but once you went into the house, I had to stop eavesdropping. Something about travelling, I believe I heard you say?”

“A cruise, of sorts.”

“Is that all?”

“No.”

“Hmm. My guess was they might want you to join Contact, become a Referer, one of their planners; something like that. Not so?”

Gurgeh shook his head. The drone wobbled from side to side in the air, a gesture Gurgeh was not sure he understood. “I see. And have you mentioned me yet?”

“No.”

“I think you ought to, don’t you?”

“I don’t know whether I’m going to do what they ask. I haven’t decided yet.”

“Why not? What are they asking you to do? Can it compare to the shame—”

“I’ll do what I want to do,” he told it, standing up. “I might as well, after all, drone, mightn’t I? Even if I can persuade Contact to take you back, you and your friend Gunboat Diplomat would still have the recording; what’s to prevent you doing all this again?”

“Ah, so you know its name. I wondered what you and Chiark Hub were up to. Well, Gurgeh; just ask yourself this: what else could I possibly want from you? This is all I want; to be allowed to be what I was meant to be. When I am restored to that state, I’ll have all I could possibly desire. There would be nothing else you could possibly have any control over. I want to fight, Gurgeh; that’s what I was designed for; to use skill and cunning and force to win battles for our dear, beloved Culture. I’m not interested in controlling others, or in making the strategic decisions; that sort of power doesn’t interest me. The only destiny I want to control is my own.”

“Fine words,” Gurgeh said.

He took the dead terminal out of his pocket, turned it over in his hands. Mawhrin-Skel plucked the terminal out of his hands from a couple of metres away, held it underneath its casing, and folded it neatly in half. It bent it again, into quarters; the pen-shaped machine snapped and broke. Mawhrin-Skel crumpled the remains into a little jagged ball.

“I’m getting impatient, Jernau Gurgeh. Time goes slower the faster you think, and I think very fast indeed. Let’s say another four days, shall we? You have one hundred and twenty-eight hours before I tell Gunboat to make you even more famous than you are already.” It tossed the wrecked terminal back to him; he caught it.

The little drone drifted off towards the edge of the clearing. “I’ll be waiting for your call,” it said. “Better get a new terminal, though. And do be careful on the walk back to Ikroh; dangerous to be out in the wilds with no way of summoning help.”

“Five years?” Chamlis said thoughtfully. “Well, it’s some game, I agree, but won’t you lose touch over that sort of period? Have you thought this through properly, Gurgeh? Don’t let them rush you into anything you might regret later.”

They were in the lowest cellar in Ikroh. Gurgeh had taken Chamlis down there to tell it about Azad. He’d sworn the old drone to secrecy first. They’d left Hub’s resident anti-surveillance drone guarding the cellar entrance and Chamlis had done its best to check there was nobody and nothing listening in, as well as producing a reasonable impression of a quietfield around them. They talked against a background of pipes and service ducts rumbling and hissing around them in the darkness; the naked walls’ rock sweated, darkly glistening.

Gurgeh shook his head. There was nowhere to sit down in the cellar, and its roof was just a little too low for him to stand fully upright. So he stood, head bowed. “I think I’m going to do it,” he said, not looking at Chamlis. “I can always come back, if it’s too difficult, if I change my mind.”

“Too difficult?” Chamlis echoed, surprised. “That’s not like you. I agree it’s a tough game, but—”

“Anyway, I can come back,” he said.

Chamlis was silent for a moment. “Yes. Yes, of course you can.”

He still didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. He had tried to think it through, to apply the same sort of cold, logical analysis to his own plight that he would normally bring to bear in a tricky situation in a game, but he just didn’t seem to be able to do so; it was as though that ability could look calmly only on distant, abstract problems, and was incapable of focusing on anything so intricately enmeshed with his own emotional state.

He wanted to go to get away from Mawhrin-Skel, but — he had to admit to himself — he was attracted by Azad. Not just the game. That was still slightly unreal, too complicated to be taken seriously yet. The empire itself interested him.

And yet of course he wanted to stay. He had enjoyed his life, until that night in Tronze. He had never been totally satisfied, but then, who was? Looking back, the life he’d led seemed idyllic. He might lose the occasional game, feel that another game-player was unjustifiably lauded over himself, lust after Yay Meristinoux and feel piqued she preferred others, but these were small, small hurts indeed, compared both with what Mawhrin-Skel held on him, and with the five years’ exile which now faced him.

“No,” he said, nodding at the floor, “I think I will go.”

“All right… but this just doesn’t seem like you, Gurgeh. You’ve always been so… measured. In control.”

“You make me sound like a machine,” Gurgeh said tiredly.

“No, but more… predictable than this; more comprehensible.”

He shrugged, looked at the rough rock floor. “Chamlis,” he said, “I’m only human.”

“That, my dear old friend, has never been an excuse.”

He sat in the underground car. He’d been to the university to see Professor Boruelal; he’d taken with him a sealed, hand-written letter for her to keep, to be opened only if he died, explaining all that had happened, apologising to Olz Hap, trying to make clear how he’d felt, what had made him do such a terrible, stupid thing… but in the end he hadn’t handed the letter over. He’d been terrified at the thought of Boruelal opening it, accidentally perhaps, and reading it while he was still alive.

The underground car raced across the base of the Plate, heading for Ikroh again. He used his new terminal to call the drone named Worthil. It had left after their last meeting to go exploring in one of the system’s gas-giant planets, but on receiving his call had itself displaced by Chiark Hub to the base underside. It came in through the speeding car’s lock. “Jernau Gurgeh,” it said, condensation frosting on its casing, its presence entering the car’s warm interior like a cold draught, “you’ve reached a decision?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go.”

“Good!” the drone said. It placed a small container about half its own size down on one of the padded car seats. “Gas-giant flora,” it explained.

“I hope I didn’t unduly curtail your expedition.”

“Not at all. Let me offer you my congratulations; I think you’ve made a wise, even brave choice. It did cross my mind that Contact was only offering you this opportunity to make you more content with your present life. If that’s what the big Minds were expecting, I’m glad to see you confounding them. Well done.”

“Thank you.” Gurgeh attempted a smile.

“Your ship will be prepared immediately. It should be on its way within the day.”

“What kind of ship is it?”

“An old ‘Murderer’ class GOU left over from the Idiran war; been in deep storage about six decades from here for the last seven hundred years. Called the Limiting Factor. It’s still in battle-trim at the moment, but they’ll strip out the weaponry and emplace a set of game-boards and a module hanger. I understand the Mind isn’t anything special; these warship forms can’t afford to be sparkling wits or brilliant artists, but I believe it’s a likeable enough device. It’ll be your opponent during the journey. If you want, you’re free to take somebody else along with you, but we’ll send a drone with you anyway. There’s a human envoy at Groasnachek, the capital of Eä, and he’ll be your guide as well… were you thinking of taking a companion?”

“No,” Gurgeh said. In fact he had thought of asking Chamlis, but knew the old drone felt it had already had enough excitement — and boredom — in its life. He didn’t want to put the machine in the position of having to say no. If it actually wanted to go, he was sure it wouldn’t be afraid to ask.

“Probably wise. What about personal possessions? It could be awkward if you want to take anything larger than a small module, say, or livestock larger than human size.”

Gurgeh shook his head. “Nothing remotely that large. A few cases of clothes… perhaps one or two ornaments… nothing more. What sort of drone were you thinking of sending?”

“Basically a diplomat-cum-translator and general gofer; probably an old-timer with some experience of the empire. It’ll have to have a comprehensive knowledge of all the empire’s social mannerisms and forms of address and so on; you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to make gaffes in a society like that. The drone will keep you clear as far as etiquette goes. It’ll have a library too, of course, and probably a limited degree of offensive capability.”

“I don’t want a gun-drone, Worthil,” Gurgeh said.

“It is advisable, for your own protection. You’ll be under the protection of the imperial authorities, of course, but they aren’t infallible. Physical attack isn’t unknown during a game, and there are groups within the society which might want to harm you. I ought to point out the Limiting Factor won’t be able to stay near by once it’s dropped you on Eä; the empire’s military have insisted they will not allow a warship to be stationed over their home planet. The only reason they’re letting it approach Eä at all is because we’re removing all the armament. Once the ship has departed, that drone will be the only totally reliable protection you have.”

“It won’t make me invulnerable, though, will it?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll take my chances with the empire. Give me a mild-mannered drone; positively nothing armed, nothing… target-oriented.”

“I really do strongly advise—”

“Drone,” Gurgeh said, “to play this game properly I’ll need to feel as much as possible like one of the locals, with the same vulnerability and worries. I don’t want your device bodyguarding me. There won’t be any point in my going if I know I don’t have to take the game as seriously as everybody else.”

The drone said nothing for some time. “Well, if you’re sure,” it said eventually, sounding unhappy.

“I am.”

“Very well. If you insist.” The drone made a sighing sound. “I think that settles everything. The ship ought to be here in a—”

“There is a condition,” Gurgeh said.

“A… condition?” the drone said. Its fields became briefly visible, a glittering mixture of blue and brown and grey.

“There is a drone here, called Mawhrin-Skel,” Gurgeh said.

“Yes,” Worthil said carefully. “I was briefed that that device lives here now. What about it?”

“It was exiled from Special Circumstances; thrown out. We’ve become… friends since it came here. I promised if I ever had any influence with Contact, I’d do what I could to help it. I’m afraid I can only play Azad on condition that the drone’s returned to SC.”

Worthil said nothing for a moment. “That was rather a foolish promise to have made, Mr Gurgeh.”

“I admit I didn’t ever think I would be in a position to have to fulfil it. But I am, so I have to make that a condition.”

“You don’t want to take this machine with you, do you?” Worthil sounded puzzled.

“No!” he said. “I just promised I’d try to get it back into service.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I’m not really in a position to make that sort of deal, Jernau Gurgeh. That machine was civilianised because it was dangerous and refused to undergo reconstruction therapy; its case is not something that I can decide on. It’s a matter for the admissions board concerned.”

“All the same; I have to insist.”

Worthil made a sighing noise, lifted the spherical container it had placed on the seat and seemed to study its blank surface. “I’ll do what I can,” it said, a trace of annoyance in its tone, “but I can’t promise anything. Admissions and appeal boards hate being leant on; they go terribly moralistic.”

“I need my obligation to Mawhrin-Skel discharged somehow,” Gurgeh said quietly. “I can’t leave here with it able to claim I didn’t try to help it.”

The Contact drone seemed not to hear. Then it said, “Hmm. Well, we’ll see what we can do.”

The underground car flew across the base of the world, silent and swift.

“To Gurgeh; a great game-player, a great man!” Hafflis stood on the parapet at one end of the terrace, the kilometre drop behind him, a bottle in one hand, a fuming drug-bowl in the other. The stone table was crowded with people who’d come to wish Gurgeh goodbye. It had been announced that he was leaving tomorrow morning, to journey to the Clouds on the GSV Little Rascal, to be one of the Culture’s representatives at the Pardethillisian Games, the great ludic convocation held every twenty-two years or so by the Meritocracy Pardethillisi, in the Lesser Cloud.

Gurgeh had, indeed, been invited to this tournament, as he had been invited to the Games before that, just as he was to several thousand competitions and convocations of various sizes and complexions every year, either within the Culture or outside it. He’d refused that invitation as he refused them all, but the story now was that he’d changed his mind and would go there and play for the Culture. The next Games were to be held in three and a half years, which made the need to leave at such short notice somewhat tricky to explain, but Contact had done a little creative timetabling and some bare-faced lying and made it appear to the casual inquirer that only the Little Rascal could get Gurgeh there in time for the lengthy formal registration and qualifying period required.

“Cheers!” Hafflis put his head back and the bottle to his lips. Everybody round the great table joined in, drinking from a dozen different types of bowl, glass, goblet and tankard. Hafflis rocked further and further back on his heels as he drained the bottle; a few people shouted out warnings or threw bits of food at him; he just had time to put the bottle down and smack his wine-wet lips before he overbalanced and disappeared over the edge of the parapet.

“Oops,” came his muffled voice. Two of his younger children, sitting playing three-cups with a thoroughly mystified Styglian enumerator, went to the parapet and dragged their drunken parent back over from the safety field. He tumbled on to the terrace and staggered back to his seat, laughing.

Gurgeh sat between Professor Boruelal and one of his old flames; Vossle Chu, the woman whose hobbies had in the past included iron-foundry. She had crossed from Rombree, on Chiark’s farside from Gevant, to come and see Gurgeh off. There were at least ten of his former lovers amongst the crowd squeezed around the table. He wondered fuzzily what the significance might be that out of that ten, six had chosen to change sex and become — and remain — men over the past few years.

Gurgeh, along with everybody else, was getting drunk, as was traditional on such occasions. Hafflis had promised that they would not do to Gurgeh what they had done to a mutual friend a few years earlier; the young man had been accepted into Contact and Hafflis had held a party to celebrate. At the end of the evening they’d stripped the fellow naked and thrown him over the parapet… but the safety field had been turned off; the new Contact recruit had fallen nine hundred metres — six hundred of them with empty bowels — before three of Hafflis’s pre-positioned house drones rose calmly out of the forest beneath to catch him and take him back up.

The (Demilitarised) General Offensive Unit Limiting Factor had arrived under Ikroh that afternoon. Gurgeh had gone down to the transit gallery to inspect it. The craft was a third of a kilometre long, very sleek and simple looking; a pointed nose, three long blisters like vast aircraft cockpits leading to the nose, and another five fat blisters circling the vessel’s waist; its rear was blunt and flat. The ship had said hello, told him it was there to take him to the GSV Little Rascal, and asked him if he had any special dietary requirements.

Boruelal slapped him on the back. “We’re going to miss you, Gurgeh.”

“Likewise,” Gurgeh said, swaying, and felt quite emotional. He wondered when it would be time to throw the paper lanterns over the parapet to float down to the rainforest. They’d turned the lights on behind the waterfall, all the way down the cliff, and an inflatible dirigible, seemingly crewed largely by game-fans, had anchored above the plain level with Tronze, promising a firework display later. Gurgeh had been quite touched by such shows of respect and affection.

“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said. He turned, still holding his glass, to look at the old machine. It put a small package into his hand. “A present,” it said. Gurgeh looked at the small parcel; paper tied up with ribbon. “Just an old tradition,” Chamlis explained. “You open it when you’re under way.”

“Thank you,” Gurgeh said, nodding slowly. He put the present into his jacket, then did something he rarely did with drones, and hugged the old machine, putting his arms round its aura fields. “Thank you, very very much.”

The night darkened; a brief shower almost extinguished the coals in the centre of the table, but Hafflis got supply drones to bring crates of spirits and they all had fun squirting the drink on to the coals to keep them alight in pools of blue flame which burned down half the paper lanterns and scorched the nightflower vines and made many holes in clothes and singed the Styglian enumerator’s pelt. Lightning flashed in the mountains above the lake, the falls glowed, backlit and fabulous, and the dirigible’s fireworks drew applause and answering fireworks and cloud-lasers from all over Tronze. Gurgeh was dumped naked into the lake, but hauled out spluttering by Hafflis’s children. He woke up in Boruelal’s bed, at the university, a little after dawn. He sneaked away early.

He looked around the room. Early morning sunlight flooded the landscape outside Ikroh and lanced through the lounge, streaming in from the fjord-side windows, across the room and out through the windows opening on to the uphill lawns. Birds filled the cool, still air with song.

There was nothing else to take, nothing more to pack. He’d sent the house drones down with a chest of clothes the night before, but now wondered why he’d bothered; he wouldn’t need many changes on the warship, and when they got to the GSV he could order anything he wanted. He’d packed a few personal ornaments, and had the house copy his stock of still and moving pictures to the Limiting Factor’s memory. The last thing he’d done was burn the letter he’d written to leave with Boruelal, and stir the ashes in the fireplace until they were fine as dust. Nothing more remained.

“Ready?” Worthil said.

“Yes,” he said. His head was clear and no longer sore, but he felt tired, and knew he’d sleep well that night. “Is it here yet?”

“On its way.”

They were waiting for Mawhrin-Skel. It had been told its appeal had been re-opened; as a favour to Gurgeh, it was likely to be given a role in Special Circumstances. It had acknowledged, but not appeared. It would meet them when Gurgeh left.

Gurgeh sat down to wait.

A few minutes before he was due to leave, the tiny drone appeared, floating down the chimney to hover over the empty fire grate.

“Mawhrin-Skel,” Worthil said. “Just in time.”

“I believe I’m being recalled to duty,” the smaller drone said.

“You are indeed,” Worthil said heartily.

“Good. I’m sure my friend, the LOU Gunboat Diplomat, will follow my future career with great interest.”

“Of course,” Worthil said. “I would hope it would.”

Mawhrin-Skel’s fields glowed orange-red. It floated over to Gurgeh, its grey body shining brightly, fields all but extinguished in the bright sunshine. “Thank you,” it said to him. “I wish you a good journey, and much luck.”

Gurgeh sat on the couch and looked at the tiny machine. He thought of several things to say, but said none of them. Instead, he stood up, straightened his jacket, looked at Worthil and said, “I think I’m ready to go now.”

Mawhrin-Skel watched him leave the room, but did not try to follow.

He boarded the Limiting Factor.

Worthil showed him the three great game-boards, set in three of the effector bulges round the vessel’s waist, pointed out the module hangar housed in the fourth blister and the swimming pool which the dockyard had installed in the fifth because they couldn’t think of anything else at such short notice and they didn’t like to leave the blister just empty. The three effectors in the nose had been left in but disconnected, to be removed once the Limiting Factor docked with the Little Rascal. Worthil guided him round the living quarters, which seemed perfectly acceptable.

Surprisingly quickly, it was time to leave, and Gurgeh said goodbye to the Contact drone. He sat in the accommodation section, watching the small drone float down the corridor to the warship’s lock, and then told the screen in front of him to switch to exterior view. The temporary corridor joining the ship to Ikroh’s transit gallery retracted, and the long tube of the ship’s innard-hull slotted back into place from outside.

Then, with no notice or noise at all, the view of the Plate base withdrew, shrinking. As the ship pulled away, the Plate merged into the other three on that side of the Orbital, to become part of a single thick line, and then that line dwindled rapidly to a point, and the star of Chiark’s system flashed brilliantly from behind it, before the star too quickly dulled and shrank, and Gurgeh realised he was on his way to the Empire of Azad.