The Player of Games

2. Imperium

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases-not-words?

…Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates — or apices — with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

Let’s see now: we’ve finally got old Gurgeh off Gevant Plate, Chiark Orbital, and we have him fizzing away at quite a clip in a stripped down military ship heading for a rendezvous with the Cloudbound General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal.

Points To Ponder:

Does Gurgeh really understand what he’s done, and what might happen to him? Has it even begun to occur to him that he might have been tricked? And does he really know what he’s let himself in for?

Of course not!

That’s part of the fun!

Gurgeh had been on cruises many times in his life and — on that longest one, thirty years earlier — travelled some thousands of light years from Chiark, but within a few hours of his departure aboard the Limiting Factor he was feeling the gap of light years the still accelerating ship was putting between him and his home with an immediacy he had not anticipated. He spent some time watching the screen, where Chiark’s star shone yellow-white and gradually diminishing, but nevertheless he felt further away from it than even the screen showed.

He had never felt the falseness of such representations before, but sitting there, in the old accommodation social area, looking at the rectangle of screen on the wall, he couldn’t help feeling like an actor, or a component in the ship’s circuitry: like part of, and therefore as false as, the pretend-view of Real Space hung in front of him.

Maybe it was the silence. He had expected noise, for some reason. The Limiting Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing acceleration; the craft’s velocity was hurtling towards its maximum with a rapidity which, when displayed in numbers on the wall-screen, numbed Gurgeh’s brain. He didn’t even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as hyperspace? At least he had heard of that, even if he didn’t know much about it… whatever; for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.

The ship didn’t seem to want to start any conversations, either, which normally wouldn’t have bothered Gurgeh, but now did. He left his cabin and went for a walk, going down the narrow, hundred metre-long corridor which led to the waist of the craft. In the bare corridor, hardly a metre wide, and so low he could touch the ceiling without having to stretch, he thought he could hear a very faint hum, coming from all around him. At the end of that passage he turned down another, apparently sloping at an angle of at least thirty degrees, but seemingly level as soon as he stepped (with a moment of dizziness) into it. That corridor ended at an effector blister, where one of the great game-boards had been set up.

The board stretched out in front of him, a swirl of geometric shapes and varying colours; a landscape spreading out over five hundred square metres, with the low pyramid-ranges of stacked, three-dimensional territory increasing even that total. He walked over to the edge of the huge board wondering if he had, after all, taken on too much.

He looked around the old effector blister. The board took up a little more than half the floor space, lying on top of the light foam metal planking the dockyard had installed. Half the volume of the space was beneath Gurgeh’s feet; the cross-section of the effector housing was circular, and the planking and board described a diameter across it, more or less flush with the hull of the ship beyond the blister. The housing roof curved, gunmetal dull, arcing twelve metres overhead. Gurgeh dropped under the planking on a float-hatch into the dimly lit bowl under the foam metal floor. The echoing space was even more empty than that above; save for a few hatches and shallow holes on the surface of the bowl, the removal of the mass of weaponry had been accomplished without leaving a trace. Gurgeh remembered Mawhrin-Skel, and wondered how the Limiting Factor felt about having its talons drawn.

“Jernau Gurgeh.” He turned as his name was pronounced and saw a cube of skeletal components floating near him.

“Yes?”

“We have now reached our Terminal Aggregation Point and are sustaining a velocity of approximately eight point five kilolights in ultraspace one positive.”

“Really?” Gurgeh said. He looked at the half-metre cube and wondered which bits were its eyes.

“Yes,” the remote-drone said. “We are due to rendezvous with the GSV Little Rascal in approximately one hundred and two days from now. We are currently receiving instructions from the Little Rascal on how to play Azad, and the ship has instructed me to tell you it will shortly be able to commence playing. When do you wish to start?”

“Well, not right now,” Gurgeh said. He touched the float-hatch controls, rising through the floor into the light. The remote-drone drifted up above him. “I want to settle in first,” he told it. “I need more theoretical work before I start playing.”

“Very well.” The drone started to drift away. It stopped. “The ship wishes to advise you that its normal operating mode includes full internal monitoring, removing the need for your terminal. Is this satisfactory, or would you prefer the internal observation systems to be switched off, and to use your terminal to contact the ship?”

“The terminal,” Gurgeh said, immediately.

“Internal monitoring has been reduced to emergency-only status.”

“Thanks,” Gurgeh said.

“You’re welcome,” the drone said, floating off.

Gurgeh watched it disappear into the corridor, then turned back to look at the vast board, shaking his head once more.

Over the next thirty days, Gurgeh didn’t touch a single Azad piece; the whole time was spent learning the theory of the game, studying its history where it was useful for a better understanding of the play, memorising the moves each piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual morale-strength, their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their specific skill harmonics as related to different areas of the boards; he pored over tables and grids setting out the qualities inherent in the suits, numbers, levels and sets of the associated cards and puzzled over the place in the greater play the lesser boards occupied, and how the elemental imagery in the later stages fitted in with the more mechanistic workings of the pieces, boards and die-matching in the earlier rounds, while at the same time trying to find some way of linking in his mind the tactics and strategy of the game as it was usually played, both in its single-game mode one — person against another — and in the multiple-game versions, when up to ten contestants might compete in the same match, with all the potential for alliances, intrigue, concerted action, pacts and treachery that such a game-form made possible.

Gurgeh found the days slipping by almost unnoticed. He would sleep only two or three hours each night, and the rest of the time he was in front of the screen, or sometimes standing in the middle of one of the game-boards as the ship talked to him, drew holo diagrams in the air, and moved pieces about. He was glanding the whole time, his bloodstream full of secreted drugs, his brain pickled in their genofixed chemistry as his much-worked maingland — five times the human-basic size it had been in his primitive ancestors — pumped, or instructed other glands to pump, the coded chemicals into his body.

Chamlis sent a couple of messages. Gossip about the Plate, mostly. Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared; Hafflis was talking about changing back to a woman so he could have another child; Hub and the Plate landscapers had set a date for the opening of Tepharne, the latest, farside, Plate to be constructed, which had still been undergoing its weathering when Gurgeh had left. It would be opened to people in a couple of years. Chamlis suspected Yay would not be pleased she hadn’t been consulted before the announcement was made. Chamlis wished Gurgeh well, and asked him how he was.

Yay’s communication was barely more than a moving-picture postcard. She lay sprawled in a G-web, before a vast screen or a huge observation port showing a blue and red gas-giant planet, and told him she was enjoying her cruise with Shuro and a couple of his friends. She didn’t seem entirely sober. She wagged one finger at him, telling him he was bad for leaving so soon and for so long, without waiting until she got back… then she seemed to see somebody outside the terminal’s field of view, and closed, saying she’d be in touch later.

Gurgeh told the Limiting Factor to acknowledge the communications, but did not reply directly. The calls left him feeling a little alone but he threw himself back into the game each time, and everything else was washed from his mind but that.

He talked to the ship. It was more approachable than its remote-drone had been; as Worthil had said, it was likeable, but not in any way brilliant, except at Azad. In fact it occurred to Gurgeh that the old warship was getting more out of the game than he was; it had learned it perfectly, and seemed to enjoy teaching him as well as simply glorying in the game itself as a complex and beautiful system. The ship admitted it had never fired its effectors in anger, and that perhaps it was finding something in Azad that it had missed in real fighting.

The Limiting Factor was “Murderer” class General Offensive Unit number 50017, and as such was one of the last built, constructed seven hundred and sixteen years earlier in the closing stages of the Idiran war, when the conflict in space was almost over. In theory the craft had seen active service, but at no point had it ever been in any danger.

After thirty days, Gurgeh started to handle the pieces.

A proportion of Azad game-pieces were biotechs: sculpted artefacts of genetically engineered cells which changed character from the moment they were first unwrapped and placed on the board; part vegetable, part animal, they indicated their values and abilities by colour, shape and size. The Limiting Factor claimed the pieces it had produced were indistinguishable from the real things, though Gurgeh thought this was probably a little optimistic.

It was only when he started to try to gauge the pieces, to feel and smell what they were and what they might become — weaker or more powerful, faster or slower, shorter or longer lived — that he realised just how hard the whole game was going to be.

He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, coloured vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things. He rubbed them until his hands stained, he sniffed them and stared at them, but once they were on the board they did quite unexpected things; changing to become cannon-fodder when he’d thought they were battleships, altering from the equivalent of philosophical premises stationed well back in his own territories to become observation pieces best suited for the high ground or a front line.

After four days he was in despair, and seriously thinking of demanding to be returned to Chiark, admitting everything to Contact and just hoping they would take pity on him and either keep Mawhrin-Skel on, or keep it silenced. Anything rather than go on with this demoralising, appallingly frustrating charade.

The Limiting Factor suggested he forgot about the biotechs for the moment and concentrated on the subsidiary games, which, if he won them, would give him a degree of choice over the extent to which biotechs had to be used in the following stages. Gurgeh did as the ship suggested, and got on reasonably well, but he still felt depressed and pessimistic, and sometimes he would find that the Limiting Factor had been talking to him for some minutes while he had been thinking about some quite different aspect of the game, and he had to ask the ship to repeat itself.

The days went by, and now and again the ship would suggest Gurgeh handled a biotech, and would advise him which secretions to build up beforehand. It even suggested he take some of the more important pieces into bed with him, so that he would lie asleep, hands clutched or arms cradled round a biotech, as though it was a tiny baby. He always felt rather foolish when he woke up, and he was glad there was nobody there to see him in the morning (but then he wondered if that was true; his experience with Mawhrin-Skel might have made him over-sensitive, but he doubted he would ever be certain again that he wasn’t being watched. Perhaps the Limiting Factor was spying on him, perhaps Contact was observing him, evaluating him… but — he decided — he no longer cared if they were or not).

He took every tenth day off, again at the ship’s suggestion; he explored the vessel more fully, though there was little enough to see. Gurgeh was used to civilian craft, which could be compared in density and design to ordinary, human-habitable buildings, with comparatively thin walls enclosing large volumes of space, but the warship was more like a single solid chunk of rock or metal; like an asteroid, with only a few small hollowed-out tubes and tiny caves fit for humans to wander about in. He walked along or clambered through or floated up and down what corridors and passageways it did have though, and stood in one of the three nose blisters for a while, gazing at the congealed-looking clutter of still-unremoved machinery and equipment.

The primary effector, surrounded by its associated shield-disruptors, scanners, trackers, illuminators, displacers and secondary weaponry systems, bulked large in the dim light, and looked like some gigantic cone-lensed eyeball encrusted with gnarled metallic growths. The whole, massy assemblage was easily twenty metres in diameter, but the ship told him — he thought with some pride — that when it was all connected up, it could spin and stop the whole installation so fast that to a human it would appear only to flicker momentarily; blink, and you’d miss it.

He inspected the empty hangar in one of the waist blisters; it would eventually house a Contact module which was being converted on the GSV they were on their way to meet. That module would be Gurgeh’s home when he arrived on Eä. He’d seen holos of how the interior would look; it was passably spacious, if hardly up to the standards of Ikroh.

He learned more about the Empire itself, its history and politics, philosophy and religion — its beliefs and mores — and its mixtures of sub species and sexes.

It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental — startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated — fabulously rich and grindingly poor (but also — undeniably — unequivocally fascinating).

And it was true that — as he’d been told — there was one constant in all the numbing variety of Azadian life; the game of Azad permeated every level of society — like a single steady theme nearly buried in a cacophony of noise — and Gurgeh started to see what the drone Worthil had meant when it said Contact suspected it was the game that held the Empire together. Nothing else seemed to.

He swam in the pool most days. The effector housing had been converted to include a holo projector — and the Limiting Factor started out by showing a blue sky and white clouds on the inside surface of the twenty-five metre broad blister — but he grew tired of looking at that and told the ship to produce the view he would see if they were travelling in real space; the adjusted equivalent view as the ship called it.

So he swam beneath the unreal blackness of space and the hard little lightmotes of the slowly moving stars, pulling himself through and diving beneath the gently underlit surface of the warm water like a soft, inverted image of a ship himself.

By about the ninetieth day he felt he was just starting to develop a feel for the biotechs; he could play a limited game against the ship on all the minor boards and one of the major boards, and, when he went to sleep, he spent the whole three hours each night dreaming about people and his life, reliving his childhood and his adolescence and his years since then in a strange mixture of memory and fantasy and unrealised desire. He always meant to write to — or record something for — Chamlis or Yay or any of the other people back at Chiark who’d sent messages, but the time never seemed quite right, and the longer he delayed the harder the task became. Gradually people stopped sending to him, which made Gurgeh feel guilty and relieved at once.

One hundred and one days after leaving Chiark, and well over two thousand light years from the Orbital, the Limiting Factor made its rendezvous with the River class Superlifter Kiss My Ass. The tandemed craft, now enclosed within one ellipsoid field, began to increase their speed to match that of the GSV. This was going to take a few hours, apparently, so Gurgeh went to bed as normal.

The Limiting Factor woke him half-way into his sleep. It switched his cabin screen on.

“What’s happening?” Gurgeh said sleepily, just starting to worry. The screen which made up one wall of the cabin was in-holoed, so that it acted like a window. Before he had switched it off and gone to sleep, it had shown the rear end of the Superlifter against the starfield. Now it showed a landscape; a slowly moving panorama of lakes and hills, streams and forests, all seen from directly overhead.

An aircraft flew slowly over the view like a lazy insect.

“I thought you might like to see this,” the ship said.

“Where’s that?” Gurgeh asked, rubbing his eyes. He didn’t understand. He’d thought the whole idea of meeting the Superlifter was so that the GSV which they were due to meet soon didn’t have to slow down; the Superlifter was supposed to haul them along even faster so they could catch up with the giant craft. Instead, they must have stopped, over an orbital or a planet, or something even bigger.

“We have now rendezvoused with the GSV Little Rascal,” the ship told him.

“Have we? Where is it?” Gurgeh said, swinging his feet out of bed.

“You’re looking at its topside rear park.”

The view, which must have been magnified earlier, retreated, and Gurgeh realised that he was looking down at a huge craft over which the Limiting Factor was moving slowly. The park seemed to be roughly square; he couldn’t guess how many kilometres to a side. In the hazy distance forward there was the hint of immense, regular canyons; ribs on that vast surface stepping down to further levels. The whole sweep of air and ground and water was lit from directly above, and he realised that he couldn’t even see the Limiting Factor’s shadow. He asked a few questions, still staring at the screen.

Although it was only four kilometres in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometres, and the craft’s overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometres. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.

In the five hundred days it took the Little Rascal to cross from the main galaxy to the region of the Clouds, Gurgeh gradually learned the game of Azad, and even found sufficient spare time to meet and casually befriend a few people.

These were Contact people. Half of them formed the crew of the GSV itself, there not so much to run the craft — anyone of its triumvirate of Minds was quite capable of doing that — as to manage their own human society on board. And to witness; to study the never-ending torrent of data delivered on new discoveries by distant Contact units and other GSVs; to learn, and be the Culture’s human representatives amongst the systems of stars and the systems of sentient societies Contact was there to discover, investigate and — occasionally — change.

The other half was composed of the crews of smaller craft; some were there for recreation and refit stops, others were hitching a ride just as Gurgeh and the Limiting Factor were, some left en route to survey more of the clusters and clumps of stars which existed between the galaxy and the Clouds, while other people were waiting for their vessels to be built, the ships and smaller Systems Vehicles they would one day crew existing only as another number on a list of craft to be built on board at some point in the future.

The Little Rascal was what Contact termed a throughput GSV; it acted as a kind of marshalling point for humans and material, picking people up and assembling them into crews for the units, LSVs, MSVs and smaller classes of GSVs which it constructed. Other types of large GSVs were accommodation biased, and effectively self-sufficient in human crews for their offspring craft.

Gurgeh spent some days in the park on top of the vessel, walking through it or flying over it in one of the real-winged, propeller-driven aircraft which were the fashion on the GSV at the time. He even became a proficient enough flyer to enter himself in a race, during which several thousand of the flimsy planes flew figures-of-eight over the top of the Vehicle, through one of the cavernous accessways that ran the length of the craft, out the other end and underneath.

The Limiting Factor, housed in one of the Mainbays just off a Way, encouraged him in this, saying it provided Gurgeh with much needed relaxation. Gurgeh accepted none of the offers to play people at games, but did take up a trickle from the flood of invitations to parties, events and other gatherings; he spent some days and nights off the Limiting Factor, and the old warship was in turn host to a select number of young female guests.

Most of the time, though, Gurgeh spent alone inside the ship, poring over tables of figures and the records of past games, rubbing the biotechs in his hands, and striding over the three great boards, gaze flickering over the lay of land and pieces, his mind racing, searching for patterns and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses. He spent twenty days or so taking a crash course in Eächic, the imperial language. He had originally envisaged speaking Marain as usual and using an interpreter, but he suspected there were subtle links between the language and the game, and for that reason alone learned the tongue. The ship told him later it would have been desirable anyway; the Culture was trying to keep even the intricacies of its language secret from the Empire of Azad.

Not long after he’d arrived, he’d been sent a drone, a machine even smaller than Mawhrin-Skel. It was circular in plan and composed of separate revolving sections; rotating rings around a stationary core. It said it was a library drone with diplomatic training and it was called Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ep-handra Lorgin Estral. Gurgeh said hello and made sure his terminal was switched on. As soon as the machine had gone again he sent a message to Chamlis Amalk-ney, along with a recording of his meeting with the tiny drone. Chamlis signalled back later that the device appeared to be what it claimed; one of a fairly new model of library drone. Not the old-timer they might have expected, but probably harmless enough. Chamlis had never heard of an offensive version of that type.

The old drone closed with some Gevant gossip. Yay Meristinoux was talking about leaving Chiark to pursue her landscaping career elsewhere. She’d developed an interest in things called volcanoes; had Gurgeh heard of those? Hafflis was changing sex again. Professor Boruelal sent her regards but no more messages until he wrote back. Mawhrin-Skel still thankfully absent. Hub was piqued it appeared to have lost the ghastly machine; technically the wretch was still within the Orbital Mind’s jurisdiction and it would have to account for it somehow at the next inventory and census.

For a few days after that first meeting with Flere-Imsaho, Gurgeh wondered what it was that he found disturbing about the tiny library drone. Flere-Imsaho was almost pathetically small — it could have hidden inside a pair of cupped hands — but there was something about it which made Gurgeh feel oddly uncomfortable in its presence.

He worked it out, or rather he woke up knowing, one morning, after a nightmare in which he’d been trapped inside a metal sphere and rolled around in some bizarre and cruel game… Flere-Imsaho, with its spinning outer sections and its disc-like white casing, looked rather like a hidden-piece wafer from a Possession game.

Gurgeh lounged in an envelopingly comfortable chair set underneath some lushly canopied trees and watched people skating in the rink below. He was dressed only in a waistcoat and shorts, but there was a leakfield between the observation area and the icerink itself, keeping the air around Gurgeh warm. He divided his time between his terminal screen, from which he was memorising some probability equations, and the rink, where a few people he knew were sweeping about the sculpted pastel surfaces.

“Good day, Jernau Gurgeh,” said the drone Flere-Imsaho in its squeaky little voice, settling delicately on the plump arm of the chair. As usual, its aura field was yellow-green; mellow approachability.

“Hello,” Gurgeh said, glancing at it briefly. “And what have you been up to?” He touched the terminal screen to inspect another set of tables and equations.

“Oh, well, actually I’ve been studying some of the species of birds which live here within the interior of the vessel. I do find birds interesting, don’t you?”

“Hmm.” Gurgeh nodded vaguely, watching the tables change. “What I haven’t been able to work out,” he said, “is when you go for a walk in the topside park you find droppings, as you’d expect to, but inside here everything’s spotless. Does the GSV have drones to clean up after the birds, or what? I know I could just ask it, but I wanted to work it out for myself. There must be some answer.”

“Oh that’s easy,” the little machine said. “You just use birds and trees with a symbiotic relationship; the birds soil only in the bolls of certain trees, otherwise the fruit they depend on doesn’t grow.”

Gurgeh looked down at the drone. “I see,” he said coldly. “Well, I was growing tired of the problem anyway.” He turned back to the equations, adjusting the floating terminal so that its screen hid Flere-Imsaho from his sight. The drone stayed silent, went a confused medley of contrite purple and do-not-disturb silver, and flew away.

Flere-Imsaho kept itself to itself most of the time, only calling on Gurgeh once a day or so, and not staying on board the Limiting Factor. Gurgeh was glad of that; the young machine — it said it was only thirteen — could be trying at times. The ship reassured Gurgeh that the little drone would be up to the task of preventing social gaffes and keeping him informed on the finer linguistic points by the time they arrived at the Empire, and — it told Gurgeh later — reassured Flere-Imsaho that the man didn’t really despise it.

There was more news from Gevant. Gurgeh had actually written back to a few people, or recorded messages for them, now that he felt he was finally coming to grips with Azad and could spare the time. He and Chamlis corresponded every fifty days or so, though Gurgeh found he had little to say, and most of the news came from the other direction. Hafflis was fully changed; broody but not pregnant. Chamlis was compiling a definitive history of some primitive planet it had once visited. Professor Boruelal was taking a half-year sabbatical, living in a mountain retreat on Osmolon Plate, terminal-less. Olz Hap the wunderkind had come out of her shell; she was already lecturing on games at the university and had become a brilliant regular on the best party circuits. She had spent some days staying at Ikroh, just to be better able to relate to Gurgeh; she’d gone on record as claiming he was the best player in the Culture. Hap’s analysis of the famous Stricken game at Hafflis’s that night was the best-received first work anybody could remember.

Yay sent to say she was fed up with Chiark; she was off, away; she’d had offers from other Plate building collectives and she was going to take up at least one of them, just to show what she could do. She spent most of the communication explaining her theories on artificial volcanoes for Plates, describing in gesticulatory detail how you could lens sunlight to focus it on the undersurface of the Plate, melting the rock on the other side, or just use generators to provide the heat. She enclosed some film of eruptions on planets, with explanations of the effects and notes on how they could be improved.

Gurgeh thought the idea of sharing a world with volcanoes made floating islands look like not such a bad idea after all.

“Have you seen this!” Flere-Imsaho yelped one day, floating quickly up to him in the pool’s airstream cabinet, where Gurgeh was drying off. Behind the little machine, attached to it by a thin strand of field still coloured yellow-green (but speckled with angry white), there floated a large, rather old-fashioned and complicated-looking drone.

Gurgeh squinted at it. “What about it?”

“I’ve got to wear the damn thing!” Flere-Imsaho wailed. The field strand joining it to the other drone flicked, and the old-looking drone’s casing hinged open. The old body-shell appeared to be completely empty, but as Gurgeh — puzzled — looked closer, he saw that in the centre of the casing there was a little mesh cradle, just the right size to hold Flere-Imsaho.

“Oh,” Gurgeh said, and turned away, rubbing the water from his armpits, and grinning.

“They didn’t tell me this when they offered me the job!” Flere-Imsaho protested, slamming the body-shell shut again. “They say it’s because the Empire isn’t supposed to know how small us drones are! Why couldn’t they just have got a big drone then? Why saddle me with this… this…”

“Fancy dress?” Gurgeh suggested, rubbing a hand through his hair and stepping out of the airstream.

“Fancy?” the library drone screamed. “Fancy? Dowdy’s what it is; rags! Worse than that, I’m supposed to make a ‘humming’ noise and produce lots of static electricity, just to convince these barbarian dingbats we can’t build drones properly!” The small machine’s voice rose to a screech. “A ‘humming’ noise! I ask you!”

“Perhaps you could ask for a transfer,” Gurgeh said calmly, slipping into his robe.

“Oh yes,” Flere-Imsaho said bitterly, with a trace of what might almost have been sarcasm, “and get all the shit jobs from now on because I haven’t been cooperative.” It lashed a field out and thumped the antique casing. “I’m stuck with this heap of junk.”

“Drone,” Gurgeh said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

The Limiting Factor nosed its way out of the Mainbay. Two Lifters nudged the craft round until it faced down the twenty kilometre length of corridor. The ship and its little tugs eased their way forward, exiting from the body of the GSV at its nose. Other ships and craft and pieces of equipment moved inside the shell of air surrounding the Little Rascal; GCUs and Superlifters, planes and hot-air balloons, vacuum dirigibles and gliders, people floating in modules or cars or harnesses.

Some watched the old warship go. The Lifter tugs dropped away.

The ship went up, passing level upon level of bay doors, blank hull, hanging gardens, and whole jumbled arrays of opened accommodation sections, where people walked or danced or sat eating or just gazing out, watching the fuss of airborne activity, or played sports and games. Some waved. Gurgeh watched on the lounge screen, and even recognised a few people he’d known, flying past in an aircraft, shouting goodbye.

Officially, he was going on a solo cruising holiday before travelling to the Pardethillisian Games. He had already dropped hints he might forgo the tournament. Some of the theoretical and news journals had been interested enough in his sudden departure from Chiark — and the equally abrupt cessation of his publications — to have representatives on the Little Rascal interview him. In a strategy he’d already agreed with Contact, he’d given the impression he was growing bored with games in general, and that the journey — and his entry in the great tournament — were attempts to restore his flagging interest.

People seemed to have fallen for this.

The ship cleared the top of the GSV, rising beside the cloud-speckled topside park. It rose on into the thinner air above, met with the Superlifter Prime Mover, and together they gradually dropped back and to the side of the GSV’s inner atmospheric envelope. They went slowly through the many layers of fields; the bumpfield, the insulating, the sensory, the signalling and receptor, the energy and traction, the hullfield, the outer sensory and, finally, the horizon, until they were free in hyperspace once more. After a few hours of deceleration to speeds the Limiting Factor’s engines could cope with, the disarmed warship was on its own, and the Prime Mover was powering away again, chasing its GSV.

“… so you’d be well advised to stay celibate; they’ll find it difficult enough taking a male seriously even if you do look bizarre to them, but if you tried to form any sexual relationships they’d almost certainly take it as a gross insult.”

“Any more good news, drone?”

“Don’t say anything about sexual alterations either. They do know about drug-glands, even if they don’t know about their precise effects, but they don’t know about most of the major physical improvements. I mean, you can mention blister-free callousing and that sort of thing, that isn’t important; but even the gross re-plumbing involved in your own genital design would cause something of a furore if they found out about it.”

“Really,” Gurgeh said. He was sitting in the Limiting Factor’s main lounge. Flere-Imsaho and the ship were giving him a briefing on what he could and couldn’t say and do in the Empire. They were a few days’ travel from the frontier.

“Yes; they’d be jealous,” the tiny drone said in its high, slightly grating voice. “And probably quite disgusted too.”

“Especially jealous though,” the ship said through its remote-drone, making a sighing noise.

“Well, yes,” Flere-Imsaho said, “but definitely disg—”

“The thing to remember, Gurgeh,” the ship interrupted quickly, “is that their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. In the same way, everyone you meet will be conscious of both their position in society and their relationship to others around them.

“It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one’s labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of ‘marriage’ to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favours by—”

“Oh, ship, come on!” He laughed. He had done his own research into the Empire, reading its own histories and watching its explanatory recordings. The ship’s view of the Empire’s customs and institutions sounded biased and unfair and terribly Culture-prim. Flere-Imsaho and the ship remote made a show of looking at each other, then the small library drone flushed grey yellow with resignation, and said in its high voice, “All right, let’s go back to the beginning…”

The Limiting Factor lay in space above Eä, the beautiful blue-white planet Gurgeh had seen for the first time almost two years earlier in the screen-room at Ikroh. On either side of the ship lay an imperial battlecruiser, each twice the length of the Culture craft.

The two warships had met the smaller vessel at the limits of the star clump Eä’s system lay in, and the Limiting Factor, already on a slow warp drive rather than its normal hyperspace propulsion — something else the Empire was being kept in the dark about — had stopped. Its eight effector blisters were transparent, showing the three game-boards, module hangar and pool in the waist housings, and the empty spaces in the three long nose emplacements, the weaponry having been removed on the Little Rascal. Nevertheless, the Azadians sent a small craft over to the ship with three officers in it. Two stayed with Gurgeh while the third checked each of the blisters in turn, then took a general look round the entire ship.

Those or other officers stayed on board for the five days it took to get to Eä itself. They were much as Gurgeh had expected, with flat, broad faces and the shaven, almost white skin. They were smaller than he was, he realised when they stood in front of him, but somehow their uniforms made them look much larger. These were the first real uniforms Gurgeh had ever seen, and he felt a strange, dizzying sensation when he saw them; a sense of displacement and foreignness as well as an odd mixture of dread and awe.

Knowing what he did, he wasn’t surprised at the way they acted towards him. They seemed to try to ignore him, rarely speaking to him, and never looking him in the eyes when they did; he had never felt quite so dismissed in life.

The officers did appear to be interested in the ship, but not in either Flere-Imsaho — which was keeping well out of their way anyway — or in the ship’s remote-drone. Flere-Imsaho had, only minutes before the officers arrived on board, finally and with extreme and voluble reluctance, enclosed itself in the fake carapace of the old drone casing. It had fumed quietly for a few minutes while Gurgeh told it how attractive and valuably antique the ancient, aura-less casing looked, then it had floated quickly off when the officers came aboard.

So much, thought Gurgeh, for its helping with awkward linguistic points and the intricacies of etiquette.

The ship’s remote-drone was no better. It followed Gurgeh round, but it was playing dumb, and made a show of bumping into things now and again. Twice Gurgeh had turned round and almost fallen over the slow and clumsy cube. He was very tempted to kick it.

It was left to Gurgeh to try to explain that there was no bridge or flight-deck or control-room that he knew of in the ship, but he got the impression the Azadian officers didn’t believe him.

When they arrived over Eä, the officers contacted their battlecruiser and talked too fast for Gurgeh to understand, but the Limiting Factor broke in and started speaking too; there was a heated discussion. Gurgeh looked round for Flere-Imsaho to translate, but it had disappeared again. He listened to the jabbering exchange for some minutes with increasing frustration; he decided to let them argue it out and turned to go and sit down. He stumbled over the remote-drone, which was floating near the floor just behind him; he fell into rather than sat on the couch. The officers looked round at him briefly, and he felt himself blush. The remote-drone drifted hesitantly away before he could aim a foot at it.

So much, he thought, for Flere-Imsaho; so much for Contact’s supposedly flawless planning and stupendous cunning. Their juvenile representative didn’t even bother to hang around and do its job properly; it preferred to hide, nursing its pathetic self-esteem. Gurgeh knew enough about the way the Empire worked to realise that it wouldn’t let such things happen; its people knew what duties and orders meant, and they took their responsibilities seriously, or, if they didn’t, they suffered for it.

They did as they were told; they had discipline.

Eventually, after the three officers had talked amongst themselves for a while, and then to their ship again, they left him and went to inspect the module hangar. When they’d gone, Gurgeh used his terminal to ask the ship what they’d been arguing about.

“They wanted to bring some more personnel and equipment over,” the Limiting Factor told him. “I told them they couldn’t. Nothing to worry about. You’d better get your stuff together and go to the module hangar; I’ll be heading out of imperial space within the hour.”

Gurgeh turned to head towards his cabin. “Wouldn’t it be terrible,” he said, “if you forgot to tell Flere-Imsaho you were going, and I had to visit Eä all by myself.” He was only half joking.

“It would be unthinkable,” the ship said.

Gurgeh passed the remote-drone in the corridor, spinning slowly in mid-air and bobbing erratically up and down. “And is this really necessary?” he asked it.

“Just doing what I’m told,” the drone replied testily.

“Just overdoing it,” Gurgeh muttered, and went to pack his things.

As he packed, a small parcel fell out of a cloak he hadn’t worn since he’d left Ikroh; it bounced on the soft floor of the cabin. He picked it up and opened the ribbon-tied packet, wondering who it might be from; anyone of several ladies on the Little Rascal, he imagined.

It was a thin bracelet, a model of a very broad, fully completed Orbital, its inner surface half light and half dark. Bringing it up to his eyes, he could see tiny, barely discernible pinpricks of light on the night-time half; the daylight side showed bright blue sea and scraps of land under minute cloud systems. The whole interior scene shone with its own light, powered by some source inside the narrow band.

Gurgeh slipped it over his hand; it glowed against his wrist. A strange present for somebody on a GSV to give, he thought.

Then he saw the note in the package, picked it out and read, “Just to remind you, when you’re on that planet. Chamlis.”

He frowned at the name, then — distantly at first, but with a growing and annoying sense of shame — remembered the night before he’d left Gevant, two years earlier.

Of course.

Chamlis had given him a present.

He’d forgotten.

“What’s that?” Gurgeh said. He sat in the front section of the converted module the Limiting Factor had picked up from the GSV. He and Flere-Imsaho had boarded the little craft and said their au revoirs to the old warship, which was to stand off the Empire, waiting to be recalled. The hangar blister had rotated and the module, escorted by a couple of frigates, had fallen towards the planet while the Limiting Factor made a show of moving very slowly and hesitantly away from the gravity well with the two battlecruisers.

“What’s what?” Flere-Imsaho said, floating beside him, disguise discarded and lying on the floor.

“That,” Gurgeh said, pointing at the screen, which displayed the view looking straight down. The module was flying overland towards Groasnachek, Eä’s capital city; the Empire didn’t like vessels entering the atmosphere directly above its cities, so they’d come in over the ocean.

“Oh,” Flere-Imsaho said. “That. That’s the Labyrinth Prison.”

“A prison?” Gurgeh said. The complex of walls and long, geometrically contorted buildings slid away beneath them as the outskirts of the sprawling capital invaded the screen.

“Yes. The idea is that people who’ve broken laws are put into the labyrinth, the precise place being determined by the nature of the offence. As well as being a physical maze, it is constructed to be what one might call a moral and behaviouristic labyrinth as well (its external appearance offers no clues to the internal lay-out, by the way; that’s just for show); the prisoner must make correct responses, act in certain approved ways, or he will get no further, and may even be put further back. In theory a perfectly good person can walk free of the labyrinth in a matter of days, while a totally bad person will never get out. To prevent overcrowding, there’s a time-limit which, if exceeded, results in the prisoner being transferred for life to a penal colony.”

The prison had disappeared from beneath them by the time the drone finished; the city swamped the screen instead, its swirling patterns of streets, buildings and domes like another sort of maze.

“Sounds ingenious,” Gurgeh said. “Does it work?”

“So they’d have us believe. In fact it’s used as an excuse for not giving people a proper trial, and anyway the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.”

The module and the two frigates touched down at a huge shuttleport on the banks of a broad, muddy, much bridged river, still some distance from the centre of the city but surrounded by medium-rise buildings and low geodesic domes. Gurgeh walked out of the craft with Flere-Imsaho — in its fake antique guise, humming loudly and crackling with static — at his side; he found himself standing on a huge square of synthetic grass which had been unrolled up to the rear of the module. Standing on the grass were perhaps forty or fifty Azadians in various styles of uniform and clothing. Gurgeh, who’d been trying hard to work out how to recognise the various sexes, reckoned they were mostly of the intermediate or apex sex, with only a smattering of males and females; beyond them stood several lines of identically uniformed males, carrying weapons. Behind them, another group played rather strident and brash-sounding music.

“The guys with the guns are just the honour guard,” Flere-Imsaho said through its disguise. “Don’t be alarmed.”

“I’m not,” Gurgeh said. He knew this was how things were done in the Empire; formally, with official welcoming parties composed of imperial bureaucrats, security guards, officials from the games organisations, associated wives and concubines, and people representing news-agencies. One of the apices strode forward towards him.

“This one is addressed as ‘sir’ in Eächic,” Flere-Imsaho whispered.

“What?” Gurgeh said. He could hardly hear the machine’s voice over the humming noise it was making. It was buzzing and crackling loud enough to all but drown the sound of the ceremonial band, and the static the drone was producing made Gurgeh’s hair stick out on one side.

“I said, he’s called sir, in Eächic,” Flere-Imsaho hissed over the hum. “Don’t touch him, but when he holds up one hand, you hold up two and say your bit. Remember; don’t touch him.”

The apex stopped just in front of Gurgeh, held up one hand and said, “Welcome to Groasnachek, Eä, in the Empire of Azad, Murat Gurgee.”

Gurgeh controlled a grimace, held up both hands (to show they were empty of weapons, the old books explained) and said, “I am honoured to set foot upon the holy ground of Eä,” in careful Eächic. (“Great start,” muttered the drone.)

The rest of the welcoming passed in something of a daze. Gurgeh’s head swam; he sweated under the heat of the bright binary overhead while he was outside (he was expected to inspect the honour guard, he knew, though quite what he was supposed to be looking for had never been explained), and the alien smells of the shuttleport buildings once they passed inside to the reception made him feel more strongly than he’d expected that he really was somewhere quite foreign. He was introduced to lots of people, again mostly apices, and sensed they were delighted to be addressed in what was apparently quite passable Eächic. Flere-Imsaho told him to do and say certain things, and he heard himself mouth the correct words and felt himself perform the acceptable gestures, but his overall impression was of chaotic movement and noisy, unlistening people — rather smelly people, too, though he was sure they thought the same of him. He also had an odd feeling that they were laughing at him, somewhere behind their faces.

Apart from the obvious physical differences, the Azadians all seemed very compact and hard and determined compared to Culture people; more energetic and even — if he was going to be critical — neurotic. The apices were, anyway. From the little he saw of the males, they seemed somehow duller, less fraught and more stolid as well as being physically bulkier, while the females appeared to be quieter — somehow deeper — and more delicate-looking.

He wondered how he looked to them. He was aware he stared a little, at the oddly alien architecture and confusing interiors, as well as at the people… but on the other hand he found a lot of people — mostly apices, again — staring at him. On a couple of occasions Flere-Imsaho had to repeat what it said to him, before he realised it was talking to him. Its monotonous hum and crackling static, never far away from him that afternoon, seemed only to add to the air of dazed, dreamlike unreality.

They served food and drink in his honour; Culture and Azadian biology was close enough for a few foods and several drinks to be mutually digestible, including alcohol. He drank all they gave him, but bypassed it. They sat in a long, low shuttleport building, simply styled outside but ostentatiously furnished inside, around a long table loaded with food and drink. Uniformed males served them; he remembered not to speak to them. He found that most of the people he spoke to either talked too fast or painstakingly slowly, but struggled through several conversations nevertheless. Many people asked why he had come alone, and after several misunderstandings he stopped trying to explain he was accompanied by the drone and simply said he liked travelling by himself.

Some asked him how good he was at Azad. He replied truthfully he had no idea; the ship had never told him. He said he hoped he would be able to play well enough not to make his hosts regret they had invited him to take part. A few seemed impressed by this, but, Gurgeh thought, only in the way that adults are impressed by a respectful child.

One apex, sitting on his right and dressed in a tight, uncomfortable-looking uniform similar to those worn by the three officers who’d boarded the Limiting Factor, kept asking him about his journey, and the ship he’d made it on. Gurgeh stuck to the agreed story. The apex continually refilled Gurgeh’s ornate crystal goblet with wine; Gurgeh was obliged to drink on each occasion a toast was proposed. Bypassing the liquor to avoid getting drunk meant he had to go to the toilet rather often (for a drink of water, as much as to urinate). He knew this was a subject of some delicacy with the Azadians, but he seemed to be using the correct form of words each time; nobody looked shocked, and Flere-Imsaho seemed calm.

Eventually, the apex on Gurgeh’s left, whose name was Lo Pequil Monenine senior, and who was a liaison official with the Alien Affairs Bureau, asked Gurgeh if he was ready to leave for his hotel. Gurgeh said he thought that he was supposed to be staying on board the module. Pequil began to talk rather fast, and seemed surprised when Flere-Imsaho cut in, talking equally quickly. The resulting conversation went a little too rapidly for Gurgeh to follow perfectly, but the drone eventually explained that a compromise had been reached; Gurgeh would stay in the module, but the module would be parked on the roof of the hotel. Guards and security would be provided for his protection, and the catering services of the hotel, which was one of the very best, would be at his disposal.

Gurgeh thought this all sounded reasonable. He invited Pequil to come along in the module to the hotel, and the apex accepted gladly.

“Before you ask our friend what we’re passing over now,” Flere-Imsaho said, hovering and buzzing at Gurgeh’s elbow, “that’s called a shantytown, and it’s where the city draws its surplus unskilled labour from.”

Gurgeh frowned at the bulkily disguised drone. Lo Pequil was standing beside Gurgeh on the rear ramp of the module, which had opened to make a sort of balcony. The city unrolled beneath them. “I thought we weren’t to use Marain in front of these people,” Gurgeh said to the machine.

“Oh, we’re safe enough here; this guy’s bugged, but the module can neutralise that.”

Gurgeh pointed at the shantytown. “What’s that?” he asked Pequil.

“That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers.”

“Driven off the land,” Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, “by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganisation of the agricultural production apparatus.”

Gurgeh wondered if the drone’s last phrase meant ‘farms’, but he turned to Pequil and said, “I see.”

“What does your machine say?” Pequil inquired.

“It was quoting some… poetry,” Gurgeh told the apex. “About a great and beautiful city.”

“Ah.” Pequil nodded; a series of upward jerks of the head. “Your people like poetry, do they?”

Gurgeh paused, then said, “Well, some do and some don’t, you know?”

Pequil nodded wisely.

The wind above the city drifted in over the restraining field around the balcony, and brought with it a vague smell of burning. Gurgeh leant on the haze of field and looked down at the huge city slipping by underneath. Pequil seemed reluctant to come too near the edge of the balcony.

“Oh; I have some good news for you,” Pequil said, with a smile (rolling both lips back).

“What’s that?”

“My office,” Pequil said, seriously and slowly, “has succeeded in obtaining permission for you to follow the progress of the Main Series games all the way to Echronedal.”

“Ah; where the last few games are played.”

“Why yes. It is the culmination of the full six-year Grand Cycle, on the Fire Planet itself. I assure you, you are most privileged to be allowed to attend. Guest players are rarely granted such an honour.”

“I see. I am indeed honoured. I offer my sincere thanks to you and your office. When I return to my home I shall tell my people that the Azadians are a most generous folk. You have made me feel very welcome. Thank you. I am in your debt.”

Pequil seemed satisfied with this. He nodded, smiled. Gurgeh nodded too, though he thought the better of attempting the smile.

“Well?”

“Well what, Jernau Gurgeh?” Flere-Imsaho said, its yellow-green fields extending from its tiny casing like the wings of some exotic insect. It laid a ceremonial robe on Gurgeh’s bed. They were in the module, which now rested on the roof-garden of Groasnachek’s Grand Hotel.

“How did I do?”

“You did very well. You didn’t call the minister ‘Sir’ when I told you to, and you were a bit vague at times, but on the whole you did all right. You haven’t caused any catastrophic diplomatic incidents or grievously insulted anybody… I’d say that’s not too bad for the first day. Would you turn round and face the reverser? I want to make sure this thing fits properly.”

Gurgeh turned round and held out his arms as the drone smoothed the robe against his back. He looked at himself in the reverser field.

“It’s too long and it doesn’t suit me,” he said.

“You’re right, but it’s what you have to wear for the grand ball in the palace tonight. It’ll do. I might take the hem up. The module tells me it’s bugged, incidentally, so watch what you say once you’re outside the module’s fields.”

“Bugged?” Gurgeh looked at the image of the drone in the reverser.

“Position monitor and mike. Don’t worry; they do this to everybody. Stand still. Yes, I think that hem needs to come up. Turn round.”

Gurgeh turned round. “You like ordering me around, don’t you, machine?” he said to the tiny drone.

“Don’t be silly. Right. Try it on.”

Gurgeh put the robe on, looked at his image in the reverser. “What’s this blank patch on the shoulder for?”

“That’s where your insignia would go, if you had one.”

Gurgeh fingered the bare area on the heavily embroidered robe. “Couldn’t we have made one up? It looks a bit bare.”

“I suppose we could,” Flere-Imsaho said, tugging at the robe to adjust it. “You have to be careful doing that sort of thing though. Our Azadian friends are always rather nonplussed by our lack of a flag or a symbol, and the Culture rep here — you’ll meet him tonight if he remembers to turn up — thought it was a pity there was no Culture anthem for bands to play when our people come here, so he whistled them the first song that came into his head, and they’ve been playing that at receptions and ceremonies for the last eight years.”

“I thought I recognised one of the tunes they played,” Gurgeh admitted.

The drone pushed his arms up and made some more adjustments. “Yes, but the first song that came into the guy’s head was ‘Lick Me Out’; have you heard the lyrics?”

“Ah.” Gurgeh grinned. “That song. Yes, that could be awkward.”

“Damn right. If they find out they’ll probably declare war. Usual Contact snafu.”

Gurgeh laughed. “And I used to think Contact was so organised and efficient.” He shook his head.

“Nice to know something works,” the drone muttered.

“Well, you’ve kept this whole Empire secret seven decades; that’s worked too.”

“More luck than skill,” Flere-Imsaho said. It floated round in front of him, inspecting the robe. “Do you really want an insignia? We could rustle some up if it’d make you feel happier.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Right. We’ll use your full name when they announce you at the ball tonight; sounds reasonably impressive. They can’t grasp we don’t have any real ranks, either, so you may find they use ‘Morat’ as a kind of title.” The little drone dipped to fix a stray gold-thread near the hem. “It’s all to the good in the end; they’re a bit blind to the Culture, just because they can’t comprehend it in their own hierarchical terms. Can’t take us seriously.”

“What a surprise.”

“Hmm. I’ve got a feeling it’s all part of a plan; even this delinquent rep — ambassador, sorry — is part of it. You too, I think.”

“You think?” Gurgeh said.

“They’ve built you up, Gurgeh,” the drone told him, rising to head height and brushing his hair back a little. Gurgeh in turn brushed the meddlesome field away from his brow. “Contact’s told the Empire you’re one hot-shot game-player; they’ve said they reckon you can get to colonel/bishop/junior ministerial level.”

“What?” Gurgeh said, looking horrified. “That’s not what they told me!”

“Or me,” the drone said. “I only found out myself looking at a news roundup an hour ago. They’re setting you up, man; they want to keep the Empire happy and they’re using you to do it. First they get them good and worried telling them you can beat some of their finest players, then, when — as is probably going to happen — you get knocked out in the first round, they thereby reassure the Empire the Culture’s just a joke; we get things wrong, we’re easily humiliated.”

Gurgeh looked levelly at the drone, eyes narrowed. “First round, you think, do you?” he said calmly.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” The little drone wavered back a little in the air, looking embarrassed. “Are you offended? I was just assuming… well, I’ve watched you play… I mean…” The machine’s voice trailed off.

Gurgeh removed the heavy robe and dropped it on to the floor. “I think I’ll take a bath,” he told the drone. The machine hesitated, then picked up the robe and quickly left the cabin. Gurgeh sat on the bed and rubbed his beard.

In fact, the drone hadn’t offended him. He had his own secrets. He was sure he could do better in the game than Contact expected. For the last hundred days on the Limiting Factor he knew he hadn’t been extending himself; while he hadn’t been trying to lose or make any deliberate mistakes, he also hadn’t been concentrating as much as he intended to in the coming games.

He wasn’t sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them, a little game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods.

The Great Palace of Groasnachek lay by the broad and murky river which had given the city its name. That night there was a grand ball for the more important people who would be playing the game of Azad over the next half-year.

They were taken there in a groundcar, along broad, tree-lined boulevards lit by tall floodlights. Gurgeh sat in the back of the vehicle with Pequil, who’d been in the car when it arrived at the hotel. A uniformed male drove the car, apparently in sole control of the machine. Gurgeh tried not to think about crashes. Flere-Imsaho sat on the floor in its bulky disguise, humming quietly and attracting small fibres from the limousine’s furry floor covering.

The palace wasn’t as immense as Gurgeh had expected, though still impressive enough; it was ornately decorated and brightly illuminated, and from each of its many spires and towers, long, richly decorated banners waved sinuously, slow brilliant waves of heraldry against the orange-black sky.

In the awning-covered courtyard where the car stopped there was a huge array of gilded scaffolding on which burned twelve thousand candles of various sizes and colours; one for every person entered in the games. The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who were sufficiently content with their present position — and who had earned the security of tenure which meant they could not be displaced, no matter how well their underlings might do in the games — not to want to compete.

The mentors and administrators of the Azad colleges — the game’s teaching institutions — formed the remainder of the gathering, and were similarly exempt from the need to take part in the tournament.

The night was too warm for Gurgeh’s taste; a thick heat filled with the city-smell, and stagnant. The robe was heavy and surprisingly uncomfortable; Gurgeh wondered how soon he could politely leave the ball. They entered the palace through a huge doorway flanked by massive opened gates of polished, jewel-studded metal. The vestibules and halls they passed through glittered with sumptuous decorations standing on tables or hanging from walls and ceilings.

The people were as fabulous as their surroundings. The females, of whom there seemed to be a great number, were ablaze with jewellery and extravagantly ornamented dresses. Gurgeh guessed that, measuring from the bottom of their bell-shaped gowns, the women must have been as broad as they were tall. They rustled as they went by, and smelled strongly of heavy, obtrusive perfumes. Many of the people he passed glanced or looked or actually stopped and stared at Gurgeh and the floating, humming, crackling Flere-Imsaho.

Every few metres along the walls, and on both sides of every doorway, gaudily-uniformed males stood stock still, their trousered legs slightly apart, gloved hands clasped behind their rod-straight backs, their gaze fixed firmly on the high, painted ceilings.

“What are they standing there for?” Gurgeh whispered to the drone in Eächic, low enough so that Pequil couldn’t hear.

“Show,” the machine said.

Gurgeh thought about this. “Show?”

“Yes; to show that the Emperor is rich and important enough to have hundreds of flunkeys standing around doing nothing.”

“Doesn’t everybody know that already?”

The drone didn’t answer for a moment. Then it sighed. “You haven’t really cracked the psychology of wealth and power yet, have you, Jernau Gurgeh?”

Gurgeh walked on, smiling on the side of his face Flere-Imsaho couldn’t see.

The apices they passed were all dressed in the same heavy robes Gurgeh was wearing; ornate without being ostentatious. What struck Gurgeh most strongly, though, was that the whole place and everybody in it seemed to be stuck in another age. He could see nothing in the palace or worn by the people that could not have been produced at least a thousand years earlier; he had watched recordings of ancient imperial ceremonies when he’d done his own research into the society, and thought he had a reasonable grasp of ancient dress and forms. It struck him as strange that despite the Empire’s obvious, if limited, technological sophistication, its formal side remained so entrenched in the past. Ancient customs, fashions and architectural forms were all common in the Culture too, but they were used freely, even haphazardly, as only parts of a whole range of styles, not adhered to rigidly and consistently to the exclusion of all else.

“Just wait here; you’ll be announced,” the drone said, tugging at Gurgeh’s sleeve so that he stopped beside the smiling Lo Pequil at a doorway leading down a huge flight of broad steps into the main ballroom. Pequil handed a card to a uniformed apex standing at the top of the steps, whose amplified voice rang round the vast hall.

“The honourable Lo Pequil Monenine, AAB, Level Two Main, Empire Medal, Order of Merit and bar… with Chark Gavant-sha Gernow Morat Gurgee Dam Hazeze.”

They walked down the grand staircase. The scene below them was an order of magnitude brighter and more impressive than any social event Gurgeh had ever witnessed. The Culture simply didn’t do things on such a scale. The ballroom looked like a vast and glittering pool into which somebody had thrown a thousand fabulous flowers, and then stirred.

“That announcer murdered my name,” Gurgeh said to the drone. He glanced at Pequil. “But why does our friend look so unhappy?”

“I think because the ‘senior’ in his name was missed out,” Flere-Imsaho said.

“Is that important?”

“Gurgeh, in this society everything is important,” the drone said, then added glumly, “At least you both got announced.”

“Hello there!” a voice shouted out as they got to the bottom of the stairs. A tall, male-looking person pushed between a couple of Azadians to get beside Gurgeh. He wore garish, flowing robes. He had a beard, bunned brown hair, bright staring green eyes, and he looked as though he might come from the Culture. He stuck one long-fingered, many-ringed hand out, took Gurgeh’s hand and clasped it. “Shohobohaum Za; pleased to meet you. I used to know your name too until that delinquent at the top of the stairs got his tongue round it. Gurgeh, isn’t it? Oh, Pequil; you here too, eh?” He pushed a glass into Pequil’s hands. “Here; you drink this muck, don’t you? Hi drone. Hey; Gurgeh,” he put his arm round Gurgeh’s shoulders, “you want a proper drink, yeah?”

“Jernow Morat Gurgee,” Pequil began, looking awkward, “Let me introduce…”

But Shohobohaum Za was already steering Gurgeh away through the crowds at the bottom of the staircase. “How’s things anyway, Pequil?” he shouted over his shoulder at the dazed-looking apex. “Okay? Yeah? Good. Talk to you later. Just taking this other exile for a little drink!”

A pale-looking Pequil waved back weakly. Flere-Imsaho hesitated, then stayed with the Azadian.

Shohobohaum Za turned back to Gurgeh, removed his arm from the other man’s shoulders and, in a less strident voice, said, “Boring bladder, old Pequil. Hope you didn’t mind being dragged away.”

“I’ll cope with the remorse,” Gurgeh said, looking the other Culture man up and down. “I take it you’re the… ambassador?”

“The same,” Za said, and belched. “This way,” he nodded, guiding Gurgeh through the crowds. “I spotted some grif bottles behind one of the drink tables and I want to dock with a couple before the Emp and his cronies snaffle the lot.” They passed a low stage where a band played loudly. “Crazy place, isn’t it?” Za shouted at Gurgeh as they headed for the rear of the hall.

Gurgeh wondered exactly what the other man was referring to.

“Here we is,” Za said, coming to a stop by a long line of tables. Behind the tables, liveried males served drinks and food to the guests. Above them, on a huge arched wall, a dark tapestry sewn with diamonds and gold-thread depicted an ancient space battle.

Za gave a whistle and leant over to whisper to the tall, stern-looking male who approached. Gurgeh saw a piece of paper being exchanged, then Za slapped his hand over Gurgeh’s wrist and breezed away from the tables, hauling Gurgeh over to a large circular couch set round the bottom of a fluted pillar of marble inlaid with precious metals.

“Wait till you taste this stuff,” Za said, leaning towards Gurgeh and winking. Shohobohaum Za was a little lighter in colour than Gurgeh, but still much darker than the average Azadian. It was notoriously difficult to judge the age of Culture people, but Gurgeh guessed the man was a decade or so younger than he. “You do drink?” Za said, looking suddenly alarmed.

“I’ve been bypassing the stuff,” Gurgeh told him.

Za shook his head emphatically. “Don’t do that with grif,” he said, patting Gurgeh’s hand. “Would be tragic. Ought to be a treasonable offence, in fact. Gland Crystal Fugue State instead. Brilliant combination; blows your neurons out your ass. Grif is stunning stuff. Comes from Echronedal you know; shipped over for the games. Only make it during the Oxygen Season; stuff we’re getting should be two Great Years old. Costs a fortune. Opened more legs than a cosmetic laser. Anyway.” Za sat back, clasping his hands and looking seriously at Gurgeh. “What do you think of the Empire? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it? I mean, vicious but sexy, right?” He jumped forward as a male servant carrying a tray with a couple of small, stoppered jugs came up to them. “Ah-ha!” He took the tray with its jugs in exchange for another scrap of paper. He unstoppered both jugs and handed one to Gurgeh. He raised his jug to his lips, closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He muttered something under his breath that sounded like a chant. Finally he drank, keeping his eyes tightly closed.

When he opened his eyes, Gurgeh was sitting with one elbow on his knee, his chin in his hand, looking quizzically at him. “Did they recruit you like this?” he asked. “Or is it an effect the Empire has?”

Za laughed throatily, gazing up to the ceiling where a vast painting showed ancient seaships fighting some millennia-old engagement. “Both!” Za said, still chuckling. He nodded at Gurgeh’s jug, an amused but — so it seemed to Gurgeh — more intelligent look on his face now; a look which made Gurgeh revise his estimation of the other man’s age upward by several decades. “You going to drink that stuff?” Za said. “I just spent an unskilled worker’s yearly wage getting it for you.”

Gurgeh looked into the other man’s bright green eyes for a moment, then raised the jug to his lips. “To the unskilled workers, Mr Za,” he said, and drank.

Za laughed uproariously again, head back. “I think we’re going to get along just fine, game-player Gurgeh.”

The grif was sweet, scented, subtle and smoky. Za drained his own jug, holding the thin spout over his opened mouth to savour the last few drops. He looked at Gurgeh and smacked his lips. “Slips down like liquid silk,” he said. He put the jug on the floor. “So; you’re going to play the great game, eh, Jernau Gurgeh?”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Gurgeh sipped a little more of the heady liquor.

“Let me give you some advice,” Za said, briefly touching his arm. “Don’t bet on anything. And watch the women — or men, or both, or whatever you’re into. You could get into some very nasty situations if you aren’t careful. Even if you mean to stay celibate you might find some of them — women especially — just can’t wait to see what’s between your legs. And they take that sort of stuff ridiculously seriously. You want any body-games; tell me. I’ve got contacts; I can set it up nice and discreet. Utter discretion and complete secrecy totally guaranteed; ask anybody.” He laughed, then touched Gurgeh’s arm again and looked serious. “I’m serious,” he said. “I can fix you up.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Gurgeh said, drinking. “Thanks for the warning.”

“My pleasure; no problem. I’ve been here eight… nine years now; envoy before me only lasted twenty days; got chucked out for consorting with a minister’s wife.” Za shook his head and chuckled. “I mean, I like her style, but shit; a minister! Crazy bitch was lucky she was only thrown out; if she’d been one of their own they’d have been up her orifices with acid leeches before the prison gate had shut. Makes me cross my legs just thinking about it.”

Before Gurgeh could reply, or Za could continue, there was a terrific crashing noise from the top of the great staircase, like the sound of thousands of breaking bottles. It echoed through the ballroom. “Damn, the Emperor,” Za said, standing. He nodded at Gurgeh’s jug. “Drink up, man!”

Gurgeh stood up slowly; he pushed the jug into Za’s hands. “You have it. I think you appreciate it more.” Za restoppered the jug and shoved it into a fold in his robe.

There was a lot of activity at the top of the stairs. People in the ballroom were milling about too, apparently forming a sort of human corridor which led from the bottom of the staircase to a large, glittering seat set on a low dais covered with gold-cloth.

“Better get you into your place,” Za said; he went to grab Gurgeh’s wrist again, but Gurgeh raised his hand suddenly, smoothing his beard; Za missed.

Gurgeh nodded forward. “After you,” he said. Za winked and strode off. They came up behind the group of people in front of the throne.

“Here’s your boy, Pequil,” Za announced to the worried-looking apex, then went to stand further away. Gurgeh found himself standing beside Pequil, with Flere-Imsaho floating behind him at waist level, humming assiduously.

“Mr Gurgee, we were starting to worry about you,” Pequil whispered, glancing nervously up at the staircase.

“Were you?” Gurgeh said. “How comforting.” Pequil didn’t look very pleased. Gurgeh wondered if the apex had been addressed wrongly again.

“I have good news, Gurgee,” Pequil whispered. He looked up at Gurgeh, who tried hard to look inquisitive. “I have succeeded in obtaining for you a personal introduction to Their Royal Highness The Emperor-Regent Nicosar!”

“I am greatly honoured.” Gurgeh smiled.

“Indeed! Indeed! A most singular and exceptional honour!” Pequil gulped.

“So don’t fuck up,” Flere-Imsaho muttered from behind. Gurgeh looked at the machine.

The crashing noise sounded again, and suddenly, sweeping down the staircase, quickly filling its breadth, a great gaudy wave of people flowed down towards the floor. Gurgeh assumed the one in the lead carrying a long staff was the Emperor — or Emperor-Regent as Pequil had called him — but at the bottom of the stairs that apex stood aside and shouted, “Their Imperial Highness of the College of Candsev, Prince of Space, Defender of the Faith, Duke of Groasnachek, Master of the Fires of Echronedal, the Emperor-Regent Nicosar the first!”

The Emperor was dressed all in black; a medium-sized, serious-looking apex, quite unornamented. He was surrounded by fabulously dressed Azadians of all sexes, including comparatively conservatively uniformed male and apex guards toting big swords and small guns; preceding the Emperor was a variety of large animals, four- and six-legged, variously coloured, collared and muzzled, and held on the end of emerald- and ruby-chained leads by fat, almost naked males whose oiled skins glowed like frosted gold in the ballroom lights.

The Emperor stopped and talked to some people (who knelt when he approached), further down the line on the far side, then he crossed with his entourage to the side Gurgeh was on.

The ballroom was almost totally silent. Gurgeh could hear the throaty breathing of several of the tamed carnivores. Pequil was sweating. A pulse beat quickly in the hollow of his cheek.

Nicosar came closer. Gurgeh thought the Emperor looked, if anything, a little less impressively hard and determined than the average Azadian. He was slightly stooped, and even when he was talking to somebody only a couple of metres away, Gurgeh could hear only the guest’s side of the conversation. Nicosar looked a little younger than Gurgeh had expected.

Despite having been advised about his personal introduction by Pequil, Gurgeh nevertheless felt mildly surprised when the blackclothed apex stopped in front of him.

“Kneel,” Flere-Imsaho hissed.

Gurgeh knelt on one knee. The silence seemed to deepen. “Oh shit,” the humming machine muttered. Pequil moaned.

The Emperor looked down at Gurgeh, then gave a small smile. “Sir one-knee; you must be our foreign guest. We wish you a good game.”

Gurgeh realised what he’d done wrong, and went down on the other knee too, but the Emperor gave a small wave with one ringed hand and said, “No, no; we admire originality. You shall greet us on one knee in future.”

“Thank you, Your Highness,” Gurgeh said, with a small bow. The Emperor nodded, and turned to walk further up the line.

Pequil gave a quivering sigh.

The Emperor reached the throne on the dais, and music started; people suddenly started talking, and the twin lines of people broke up; everybody chattered and gesticulated at once. Pequil looked as though he was about to collapse. He seemed to be speechless.

Flere-Imsaho floated up to Gurgeh. “Please,” it said, “don’t ever do something like that again.” Gurgeh ignored the machine.

“At least you could talk, eh?” Pequil said suddenly, taking a glass from a tray with a shaking hand. “At least he could talk, eh, machine?” He was talking almost too fast for Gurgeh to follow. He sank the drink. “Most people freeze. I think I might have. Many people do. What does one knee matter, eh? What does that matter?” Pequil looked round for the male with the drinks tray, then gazed at the throne, where the Emperor was sitting talking to some of his retinue. “What a majestic presence!” Pequil said.

“Why’s he ‘Emperor-Regent’?” Gurgeh asked the sweating apex.

“Their Royal Highness had to take up the Royal Chain after the Emperor Molsce sadly died two years ago. As second-best player during the last games, Our Worship Nicosar was elevated to the throne. But I have no doubt they will remain there!”

Gurgeh, who’d read about Molsce dying but hadn’t realised Nicosar wasn’t regarded as a full Emperor in his own right, nodded and, looking at the extravagantly accoutred people and beasts surrounding the imperial dais, wondered what additional splendours Nicosar could possibly merit if he did win the games.

“I’d offer to dance with you but they don’t approve of men dancing together,” Shohobohaum Za said, coming up to where Gurgeh stood by a pillar. Za took a plate of paper-wrapped sweetmeats from a small table and held it out to Gurgeh, who shook his head. Za popped a couple of the little pastries into his mouth while Gurgeh watched the elaborate, patterned dances surge in eddies of flesh and coloured cloth across the ballroom floor. Flere-Imsaho floated near by. There were some bits of paper sticking to its static-charged casing.

“Don’t worry,” Gurgeh told Za. “I shan’t feel insulted.”

“Good. Enjoying yourself?” Za leant against the pillar. “Thought you looked a bit lonely standing here. Where’s Pequil?”

“He’s talking to some imperial officials, trying to arrange a private audience.”

“Ho, he’ll be lucky,” snorted Za. “What d’you think of our wonderful Emperor, anyway?”

“He seems… very imperious,” Gurgeh said, and made a frowning gesture at the robes he was wearing, and tapped one ear.

Za looked amused, then mystified, then he laughed. “Oh; the microphone!” He shook his head, unwrapped another couple of pastries and ate them. “Don’t worry about that. Just say what you want. You won’t be assassinated or anything. They don’t mind. Diplomatic protocol. We pretend the robes aren’t bugged, and they pretend they haven’t heard anything. It’s a little game we play.”

“If you say so,” Gurgeh said, looking over at the imperial dais.

“Not much to look at at the moment, young Nicosar,” Za said, following Gurgeh’s gaze. “He gets his full regalia after the game; theoretically in mourning for Molsce at the moment. Black’s their colour for mourning; something to do with space, I think.” He looked at the Emperor for a while. “Odd set-up, don’t you think? All that power belonging to one person.”

“Seems a rather… potentially unstable way to run a society,” Gurgeh agreed.

“Hmm. Of course, it’s all relative, isn’t it? Really, you know, that old guy the Emp’s talking to at the moment probably has more real power than Nicosar himself.”

“Really?” Gurgeh looked at Za.

“Yes; that’s Hamin, rector of Candsev College. Nicosar’s mentor.”

“You don’t mean he tells the Emperor what to do?”

“Not officially, but” — Za belched — “Nicosar was brought up in the college; spent sixty years, child and apex, learning the game from Hamin. Hamin raised him, groomed him, taught him all he knew, about the game and everything else. So when old Molsce gets his one way ticket to the land of nod — not before time — and Nicosar takes over, who’s the first person he’s going to turn to for advice?”

“I see,” Gurgeh nodded. He was starting to regret not having studied more on Azad the political system rather than just Azad the game. “I thought the colleges just taught people how to play.”

“That’s all they do in theory, but in fact they’re more like surrogate noble families. Where the Empire gains over the usual bloodline set-up is they use the game to recruit the cleverest, most ruthless and manipulative apices from the whole population to run the show, rather than have to marry new blood into some stagnant aristocracy and hope for the best when the genes shake out. Actually quite a neat system; the game solves a lot. I can see it lasting; Contact seems to think it’s all going to fall apart at the seams one day, but I doubt it myself. This lot could outlast us. They are impressive, don’t you think? Come on; you have to admit you’re impressed, aren’t you?”

“Unspeakably,” Gurgeh said. “But I’d like to see more before I come to any final judgement.”

“You’ll end up impressed; you’ll appreciate its savage beauty. No; I’m serious. You will. You’ll probably end up wanting to stay. Oh, and don’t pay any attention to that dingbat drone they’ve sent to nursemaid you. They’re all the same those machines; want everything to be like the Culture; peace and love and all that same bland crap. They haven’t got the” — Za belched — “the sensuality to appreciate the” — he belched again — “Empire. Believe me. Ignore the machine.”

Gurgeh was wondering what to say to that when a brightly dressed group of apices and females came up to surround him and Shohobohaum Za. An apex stepped out of the smiling, shining group, and, with a bow Gurgeh thought looked exaggerated, said to Za, “Would our esteemed envoy amuse our wives with his eyes?”

“I’d be delighted!” Za said. He handed the sweetmeat tray to Gurgeh, and while the women giggled and the apices smirked at each other, he went close to the females and flicked the nictitating membranes in his eyes up and down. “There!” He laughed, dancing back. One of the apices thanked him, then the group of people walked away, talking and laughing.

“They’re like big kids,” Za told Gurgeh, then patted him on the shoulder and wandered off, a vacant look in his eyes.

Flere-Imsaho floated over, making a noise like rustling paper. “I heard what that asshole said about ignoring machines,” it said.

“Hmm?” Gurgeh said.

“I said — oh, it doesn’t matter. Not feeling left out because you can’t dance, are you?”

“No. I don’t enjoy dancing.”

“Just as well. It would be socially demeaning for anybody here even to touch you.”

“What a way with words you have, machine,” Gurgeh said. He put the plate of savouries in front of the drone and then let go and walked off. Flere-Imsaho yelped, and just managed to grab the falling plate before all the paper-wrapped pastries fell off.

Gurgeh wandered around for a while, feeling a little angry and more than a little uncomfortable. He was consumed with the idea that he was surrounded by people who were in some way failed, as though they were all the unpassed components from some high-quality system which would have been polluted by their inclusion. Not only did those around him strike him as foolish and boorish, but he felt also that he was not much different himself. Everybody he met seemed to feel he’d come here just to make a fool of himself.

Contact sent him out here with a geriatric warship hardly worthy of the name, gave him a vain, hopelessly gauche young drone, forgot to tell him things which they ought to have known would make a considerable difference to the way the game was played — the college system, which the Limiting Factor had glossed over, was a good example — and put him at least partly in the charge of a drunken, loudmouthed fool childishly infatuated with a few imperialist tricks and a resourcefully inhumane social system.

During the journey here, the whole adventure had seemed so romantic; a great and brave commitment, a noble thing to do. That sense of the epic had left him now. All he felt at this moment was that he, like Shohobohaum Za or Flere-Imsaho, was just another social misfit and this whole, spectacularly seedy Empire had been thrown to him like a scrap. Somewhere, he was sure, Minds were loafing in hyperspace within the field-fabric of some great ship, laughing.

He looked about the ballroom. Reedy music sounded, the paired apices and luxuriously dressed females moved about the shining marquetry floor in pre-set arrangements, their looks of pride and humility equally distasteful, while the servant males moved carefully around like machines, making sure each glass was kept full, each plate covered. He hardly thought it mattered what their social system was; it simply looked so crassly, rigidly over-organised.

“Ah, Gurgee,” Pequil said. He came through the space between a large potted plant and a marble pillar, holding a young-looking female by one elbow. “There you are. Gurgee; please meet Trinev Dutleysdaughter.” The apex smiled from the girl to the man, and guided her forward. She bowed slowly. “Trinev is a game-player too,” Pequil told Gurgeh. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“I’m honoured to meet you, young lady,” Gurgeh said to the girl, bowing a little too. She stood still in front of him, her gaze directed at the floor. Her dress was less ornate than most of those he’d seen, and the woman inside it looked less glamorous.

“Well, I’ll leave you two odd-ones-out to talk, shall I?” Pequil said, taking a step back, hands clasped. “Miss Dutleysdaughter’s father is over by the rear bandstand, Gurgee; if you wouldn’t mind returning the young lady when you’ve finished talking…?”

Gurgeh watched Pequil go, then smiled at the top of the young woman’s head. He cleared his throat. The girl remained silent. Gurgeh said, “I, ah… I’d thought that only intermediates — apices — played Azad.”

The girl looked up as far as his chest. “No, sir. There are some capable female players, of minor rank, of course.” She had a soft, tired-sounding voice. She still did not raise her face to him, so he had to address the crown of her head, where he could see the white scalp through the black, tied hair.

“Ah,” he said. “I thought it might have been… forbidden. I’m glad it isn’t. Do males play too?”

“They do, sir. Nobody is forbidden to play. That is embodied in the Constitution. It is simply made — it is only that it is more difficult for either—” The woman broke off and brought her head up with a sudden, startling look. “—for either of the lesser sexes to learn, because all the great colleges must take only apex scholars.” She looked back down again. “Of course, this is to prevent the distraction of those who study.”

Gurgeh wasn’t sure what to say. “I see,” was all he could come up with at first. “Do you… hope to do well in the games?”

“If I can do well — if I can reach the second game in the main series — then I hope to be able to join the civil service, and travel.”

“Well, I hope you succeed.”

“Thank you. Unfortunately, it is not very likely. The first game, as you know, is played by groups of ten, and to be the only woman playing nine apices is to be regarded as a nuisance. One is usually put out of the game first, to clear the field.”

“Hmm. I was warned something similar might happen to me,” Gurgeh said, smiling at the woman’s head and wishing she would look up at him again.

“Oh no.” The woman did look up then, and Gurgeh found the directness of her flat-faced gaze oddly disconcerting. “They won’t do that to you; it wouldn’t be polite. They don’t know how weak or strong you are. They…” She looked down again. “They know that I am, so it is no disrespect to remove me from the board so that they may get on with the game.”

Gurgeh looked round the huge, noisy, crowded ballroom, where the people talked and danced and the music sounded loud. “Is there nothing you can do?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it be possible to arrange that ten women play each other in the first round?”

She was still looking down, but something about the curve of her cheek told him she might have been smiling. “Indeed, sir. But I believe there has never been an occasion in the great-game series when two lesser-sexes have played in the same group. The draw has never worked out that way, in all these years.”

“Ah,” Gurgeh said. “And single games, one-against-one?”

“They do not count unless one has gone through the earlier rounds. When I do practise single games, I am told… that I’m very lucky. I suppose I must be. But then, I know I am, for my father has chosen me a fine master and husband, and even if I do not succeed in the game, I shall marry well. What more can a woman ask for, sir?”

Gurgeh didn’t know what to say. There was a strange tingling feeling at the back of his neck. He cleared his throat a couple of times. In the end all he could find to say was, “I hope you do win. I really hope you do.”

The woman looked briefly up at him, then down again. She shook her head.

After a while, Gurgeh suggested that he take her back to her father, and she assented. She said one more thing.

They were walking down the great hall, threading their way through the clumps of people to where her father waited, and at one point they passed between a great carved pillar and a wall of battle-murals. During the instant they were quite hidden from the rest of the room, the woman reached out one hand and touched him on the top of his wrist; with the other hand she pressed a finger over a particular point on the shoulder of his robe, and with that one finger pressing, and the others lightly brushing his arm, in the same moment whispered, “You win. You win!”

Then they were with her father, and after repeating how welcome he felt, Gurgeh left the family group. The woman didn’t look at him again. He had had no time to reply to her.

“Are you all right, Jernau Gurgeh?” Flere-Imsaho said, finding the man leaning against a wall and seemingly just staring into space, as though he was one of the liveried male servants.

Gurgeh looked at the drone. He put his finger to the point on the robe’s shoulder the girl had pressed. “Is this where the bug is on this thing?”

“Yes,” the machine said. “That’s right. Did Shohobohaum Za tell you that?”

“Hmm, thought so,” Gurgeh said. He pushed himself away from the wall. “Would it be polite to leave now?”

“Now?” The drone started back a little, humming loudly. “Well, I suppose so… are you sure you’re all right?”

“Never felt better. Let’s go.” Gurgeh walked away.

“You seem agitated. Are you really alright? Aren’t you enjoying yourself? What did Za give you to drink? Are you nervous about the game? Has Za said something? Is it because nobody’ll touch you?”

Gurgeh walked through the people, ignoring the humming, crackling drone at his shoulder.

As they left the great ballroom, he realised that apart from remembering that she was called somebody’s-daughter, he had forgotten the woman’s name.

Gurgeh was due to play his first game of Azad two days after the ball. He spent the time working out a few set-piece manoeuvres with the Limiting Factor. He could have used the module’s brain, but the old warship had a more interesting game-style. The fact that the Limiting Factor was several decades away by real space light meant there was a significant delay involved — the ship itself always replied instantly to a move — but the effect was still of playing an extraordinarily quick and gifted player.

Gurgeh didn’t take up any more invitations to formal functions; he’d told Pequil his digestive system was taking time to adjust to the Empire’s rich food, and that appeared to be an acceptable excuse. He even refused the chance to go on a sight-seeing trip of the capital.

He saw nobody during those days except Flere-Imsaho, which spent most of its time, in its disguise, sitting on the hotel parapet, humming quietly and watching birds, which it attracted with crumbs scattered on the roof-garden lawn.

Now and again, Gurgeh would walk out on to the grassed roof and stand looking out over the city.

The streets and the sky were both full of traffic. Groasnachek was like a great, flattened, spiky animal, awash with lights at night and hazy with its own heaped breath during the day. It spoke with a great, garbled choir of voices; an encompassing background roar of engines and machines that never ceased, and the sporadic tearing sounds of passing aircraft. The continual wails, whoops, warbles and screams of sirens and alarms were strewn across the fabric of the city like shrapnel holes.

Architecturally, Gurgeh thought, the place was a hopeless mix of styles, and far too big. Some buildings soared, some sprawled, but each seemed to have been designed without any regard to any other, and the whole effect — which might have been interestingly varied — was in fact gruesome. He kept thinking of the Little Rascal, holding ten times as many people as the city in a smaller area, and far more elegantly, even though most of the craft’s volume was taken up with ship-building space, engines, and other equipment.

Groasnachek had all the planning of a bird-dropping, Gurgeh thought, and the city was its own maze.

When the day came for the game to start he woke feeling elated, as though he’d just won a game, rather than being about to embark on the first real, serious match of his life. He ate very little for breakfast, and dressed slowly in the ceremonial garments the game required; rather ridiculous gathered-up clothes, with soft slippers and hose beneath a bulky jacket with rolled, gartered sleeves. At least, as a novice, Gurgeh’s robes were relatively unornamented, and restrained in colour.

Pequil arrived to take him to the game in an official groundcar. The apex chattered during the journey, enthusing about some recent conquest the Empire had made in a distant region of space; a glorious victory.

The car sped along the broad streets, heading for the outskirts of the city where the public hall Gurgeh would play in had been converted into a game-room.

All over the city that morning, people were going to their first game of the new series; from the most optimistic young player lucky enough to win a place in the games in a state lottery, right up to Nicosar himself, those twelve thousand people faced that day knowing that their lives might change utterly and for ever, for better or worse, starting from right now.

The whole city was alive with the game-fever which infected it every six years; Groasnachek was packed with the players, their retinues, advisors, college mentors, relations and friends, the Empire’s press and news-services, and visiting delegations from colonies and oominions there to watch the future course of imperial history being decided.

Despite his earlier euphoria, Gurgeh discovered that his hands were shaking by the time they arrived at the hall, and as he was led into the place with its high white walls and its echoing wooden floor, an unpleasant sensation of churning seemed to emanate from his belly. It felt quite different from the normal feeling of being keyed-up which he experienced before most games; this was something else; keener, and more thrilling and unsettling than anything he’d known before.

All that lightened this mood of tension was discovering that Flere-Imsaho had been refused permission to remain in the game-hall when the match was in progress; it would have to stay outside. Its display of clicking, humming, crackling crudity had not been sufficient to convince the imperial authorities that it was incapable of somehow assisting Gurgeh during the game. It was shown to a small pavilion in the grounds of the hall, to wait there with the imperial guards on security duty.

It complained, loudly.

Gurgeh was introduced to the other nine people in his game. In theory, they had all been chosen at random. They greeted him cordially enough, though one of them, a junior imperial priest, nodded rather than spoke to him.

They played the lesser game of strategy-cards first. Gurgeh started very cautiously, surrendering cards and points to discover what the others held. When it finally became obvious, he began playing properly, hoping he would not be made to look too silly in the rush, but over the next few turns he realised the others were still unsure exactly who held what, and he was the only one playing the game as though it was in its final stages.

Thinking that perhaps he’d missed something, he played a couple of more exploratory cards, and only then did the priest start to play for the end. Gurgeh resumed, and when the game finished before midday he held more points than anybody else.

“So far so good, eh, drone?” he said to Flere-Imsaho. He was sitting at the table where the players, game-officials and some of the more important spectators were at lunch.

“If you say so,” the machine said grumpily. “I don’t get to see much, stuck in the out-house with the jolly soldier boys.”

“Well, take it from me; it’s looking all right.”

“Early days yet, Jernau Gurgeh. You won’t catch them that easily again.”

“I knew I could rely on your support.”

In the afternoon they played on a couple of the smaller boards in a series of single games to decide order of precedence. Gurgeh knew he was good at both these games, and easily beat the others. Only the priest seemed upset by this. There was another break, for dinner, during which Pequil arrived unofficially, on his way home from the office. He expressed his pleased surprise at how well Gurgeh was doing, and even patted him on the arm before he left.

The early-evening session was a formality; all that happened was that they were told by the game-officials — amateurs from a local club, with one imperial official in charge — the exact configuration and order of play for the following day, on the Board of Origin. As had now become obvious, Gurgeh was going to start with a considerable advantage.

Sitting in the back of the car with only Flere-Imsaho for company, and feeling quite pleased with himself, Gurgeh watched the city go by in the violet light of dusk.

“Not too bad, I suppose,” the drone said, humming only a little as it lay on the seat by Gurgeh. “I’d contact the ship tonight if I were you, to discuss what you’re going to do tomorrow.”

“Would you really?”

“Yes. You’re going to need all the help you can get. They’ll gang up on you tomorrow; bound to. This is where you lose out, of course; if any of them were in this situation they’d be getting in touch with one or more of the less well-placed players and doing a deal with them to go for—”

“Yes, but as you never seem to tire of telling me, they would all demean themselves doing anything of the sort with me. On the other hand though, with your encouragement and the Limiting Factor’s help, how can I lose?”

The drone was silent.

Gurgeh got in touch with the ship that night. Flere-Imsaho had declared itself bored; it had discarded its casing, gone black-body, and floated off unseen into the night to visit a city park where there were some nocturnal birds.

Gurgeh talked over his plans with the Limiting Factor, but the time delay of almost a minute made the conversation with the distant warship a slow business. The ship had some good suggestions, though. Gurgeh was certain that at this level at least he must be getting far better advice from the ship than any of his immediate opponents were receiving from their advisors, aides and mentors. Probably only the top hundred or so players, those directly sponsored and supported by the leading colleges, would have access to such informed help. This thought cheered him further, and he went to bed happy.

Three days later, just as play was closing after the early-evening session, Gurgeh looked at the Board of Origin and realised he was going to be put out of the game.

Everything had gone well at first. He’d been pleased with his handling of the pieces, and sure he’d had a more subtle appreciation of the game’s strategic balance. With his superiority in position and forces resulting from his successes during the early stages, he’d been confident he was going to win, and so stay in the Main Series to play in the second round, of single games.

Then, on the third morning, he realised he had been overconfident, and his concentration had lapsed. What had looked like a series of unconnected moves by most of the other players suddenly became a coordinated mass attack, with the priest at its head. He’d panicked and they’d trounced him. Now he was a dead man.

The priest came up to Gurgeh when the session’s play was over and Gurgeh was still sitting in his high stoolseat, looking down at the shambles on the board and wondering what had gone wrong. The apex asked the man if he was willing to concede; it was the conventional course when somebody was so far behind in pieces and territory, and there was less shame attached to an honourable admission of defeat than to a stubborn refusal to face reality which only dragged the game out longer for one’s opponents. Gurgeh looked at the priest, then at Flere-Imsaho, who’d been allowed into the hall once the play had ended. The machine wobbled a little in front of him, humming mightily and fairly buzzing with static.

“What do you think, drone?” he said tiredly.

“I think the sooner you get out of those ridiculous clothes, the better,” the machine said. The priest, whose own robes were a more gaudy version of Gurgeh’s, glanced angrily at the humming machine, but said nothing.

Gurgeh looked at the board again, then at the priest. He took a long, sighing breath and opened his mouth, but before he could speak Flere-Imsaho said, “So I think you should go back to the hotel and get changed and relax and give yourself an opportunity to think.”

Gurgeh nodded his head slowly, rubbing his beard and looking at the mess of tangled fortunes on the Board of Origin. He told the priest he’d see him tomorrow.

“There’s nothing I can do; they’ve won,” he told the drone once they were back in the module.

“If you say so. Why not ask the ship?”

Gurgeh contacted the Limiting Factor to give it the bad news. It commiserated, and, rather than come up with any helpful ideas, told him exactly where he’d gone wrong, going into considerable detail. Gurgeh thanked it with little good grace, and went to bed dispirited, wishing he’d resigned when the priest had asked him.

Flere-Imsaho had gone off exploring the city again. Gurgeh lay in the darkness, the module quiet around him.

He wondered what they’d really sent him here for. What did Contact actually expect him to do? Had he been sent to be humiliated, and so reassure the Empire the Culture was unlikely to be any threat to it? It seemed as likely as anything else. He could imagine Chiark Hub rattling off figures about the colossal amount of energy expended in sending him all this way… and even the Culture, even Contact, would think twice about doing all it had just to provide one citizen with a glorified adventure holiday. The Culture didn’t use money as such, but it also didn’t want to be too conspicuously extravagant with matter and energy, either (so inelegant to be wasteful). But to keep the Empire satisfied that the Culture was just a joke, no threat… how much was that worth?

He turned over in the bed, switched on the floatfield, adjusted its resistance, tried to sleep, turned this way and that, adjusted the field again but still could not get comfortable, and so, eventually, turned it off.

He saw the slight glow from the bracelet Chamlis had given him, shining by the bedside. He picked the thin band up, turning it over in his hands. The tiny Orbital was bright in the darkness, lighting up his fingers and the covers on the bed. He gazed at its daylight surface and the microscopic whorls of weather systems over blue sea and duncoloured land. He really ought to write to Chamlis, say thank you.

It was only then he realised quite how clever the little piece of jewellery was. He’d assumed it was just an illuminated still picture, but it wasn’t; he could remember how it had looked when he’d first seen it, and now the scene was different; the island continents on the daylight side were mostly different shapes to those he remembered, though he recognised a couple of them, near the dawn terminator. The bracelet was a moving representation of an Orbital; possibly even a crude clock.

He smiled in the darkness, turned away.

They all expected him to lose. Only he knew — or had known — he was a better player than they thought. But now he’d thrown away the chance of proving he was right and they were wrong.

“Fool, fool,” he whispered to himself in the darkness.

He couldn’t sleep. He got up, switched on the module-screen and told the machine to display his game. The Board of Origin appeared, thru-holoed in front of him. He sat there and stared at it, then he told the module to contact the ship.

It was a slow, dreamlike conversation, during which he gazed as though transfixed at the bright game-board seemingly stretching away from him, while waiting for his words to reach the distant warship, and then for its reply to come back.

“Jernau Gurgeh?”

“I want to know something, ship. Is there any way out of this?” Stupid question. He could see the answer. His position was an inchoate mess; the only certain thing about it was that it was hopeless.

“Out of your present situation in the game?”

He sighed. What a waste of time. “Yes. Can you see a way?”

The frozen holo on the screen in front of him, his displayed position, was like some trapped moment of falling; the instant when the foot slips, the fingers lose their last strength, and the fatal, accelerating descent begins. He thought of satellites, forever falling, and the controlled stumble that bipeds call walking.

“You are more points behind than anybody who has ever come back to win in any Main Series game. You have already been defeated, they believe.”

Gurgeh waited for more. Silence. “Answer the question,” he told the ship. “You didn’t answer the question. Answer me.”

What was the ship playing at? Mess, mess, a total mess. His position was a swirling, amorphous, nebulous, almost barbaric welter of pieces and areas, battered and crumbling and falling away. Why was he even bothering to ask? Didn’t he trust his own judgement? Did he need a Mind to tell him? Would only that make it real?

“Yes, of course there is a way,” the ship said. “Many ways, in fact, though they are all unlikely, near impossible. But it can be done. There isn’t nearly enough time to—”

“Goodnight, ship,” he said, as the signal continued.

“— explain any of them in detail, but I think I can give you a general idea what to do, though of course just because it has to be such a synoptic appraisal, such a—”

“Sorry, ship; goodnight.” Gurgeh turned the channel off. It clicked once. After a little while the closing chime announced the ship had signed off too. Gurgeh looked at the holo image of the board again, then closed his eyes.

By morning he still had no idea what he was going to do. He hadn’t slept at all that night, just sat in front of the screen, staring at its displayed panorama of the game until the view was seemingly etched into his brain, and his eyes hurt with the strain. Later he’d eaten lightly and watched some of the broadcast entertainments the Empire fed the population with. It was a suitably mindless diversion.

Pequil arrived, smiling, and said how well Gurgeh had done to stay in contention at all, and how, personally, Pequil was sure that Gurgeh would do well in the second-series games for those knocked out of the Main Series, if he wished to take part. Of course, they were mostly of interest to those seeking promotion in their careers, and led no further, but Gurgeh might do better against other… ah, unfortunates. Anyway; he was still going to Echronedal to see the end of the games, and that was a great privilege, wasn’t it?

Gurgeh hardly spoke, just nodded now and again. They rode out to the hall, while Pequil went on and on about the great victory Nicosar had achieved in his first game the previous day; the Emperor-Regent was already on to the second board, the Board of Form.

The priest again asked Gurgeh to resign, and again Gurgeh said he wished to play. They all sat down around the great spread of board, and either dictated their moves to the club players, or made them themselves. Gurgeh sat for a long time before placing his first piece that morning; he rubbed the biotech between his hands for minutes, looking down, wide-eyed, at the board for so long the others thought he’d forgotten it was his turn, and asked the Adjudicator to remind him.

Gurgeh placed the piece. It was as though he saw two boards; one here in front of him and one engraved into his mind from the night before. The other players made their moves, gradually forcing Gurgeh back into one small area of the board, with only a couple of free pieces outside it, hunted and fleeing.

When it came, as he’d known it would without wanting to admit to himself that he did know, the… he could only think of it as a revelation… made him want to laugh. In fact he did rock back in his seat, head nodding. The priest looked at him expectantly, as though waiting for the stupid human to finally give up, but Gurgeh smiled over at the apex, selected the strongest cards from his dwindling supply, deposited them with the Adjudicator, and made his next move.

All he was banking on, it turned out, was the rest being too concerned with winning the game quickly. It was obvious that some sort of deal had been arranged which would let the priest win, and Gurgeh guessed that the others wouldn’t be playing at their best when they were competing for somebody else; it would not be their victory. They would not own it. Certainly, they didn’t have to play well; sheer weight of numbers could compensate for indifferent play.

But the moves could become a language, and Gurgeh thought he could speak that language now, well enough (tellingly) to lie in it… so he made his moves, and at one moment, with one move, seemed to be suggesting that he had given up… then with his next move he appeared to indicate he was determined to take one of several players down with him… or two of them… or a different one… the lies went on. There was no single message, but rather a succession of contradictory signals, pulling the syntax of the game to and fro and to and fro until the common understanding the other players had reached began to fatigue and tear and split.

In the midst of this, Gurgeh made some at first sight inconsequential, purposeless moves which — seemingly suddenly, apparently without any warning — threatened first a few, then several, then most of the troop-pieces of one player, but at the cost of making Gurgeh’s own forces more vulnerable. While that player panicked, the priest did what Gurgeh was relying on him doing, rushing into the attack. Over the next few moves, Gurgeh asked for the cards he’d deposited with the game official to be revealed. They acted rather like mines in a Possession game. The priest’s forces were variously destroyed, demoralised, random-move blinded, hopelessly weakened or turned over to Gurgeh or — in only a few cases — to some of the other players. The priest was left with almost nothing, forces scattering over the board like dead leaves.

In the confusion, Gurgeh watched the others, devoid of their leader, squabble over the scraps of power. One got into serious trouble; Gurgeh attacked, annihilated most of his forces and captured the rest, and then kept on attacking without even waiting to regroup.

He realised later he’d still been behind in points at that time, but the sheer momentum of his own resurrection from oblivion carried him on, spreading an unreasoning, hysterical, almost superstitiously intense panic amongst the others.

From that point on he made no more errors; his progress across the board became a combination of rout and triumphal procession. Perfectly adequate players were made to look like idiots as Gurgeh’s forces rampaged across their territories, consuming ground and material as though nothing could be easier or more natural.

Gurgeh finished the game on the Board of Origin before the evening session. He’d saved himself; he wasn’t just through to the next board, he was in the lead. The priest, who’d sat looking at the game-surface with an expression Gurgeh thought he’d have recognised as “stunned” even without his lessons in Azadian facial language, walked out of the hall without the customary end-of-game pleasantries, while the other players either said very little or were embarrassingly effusive about his performance.

A crowd of people clustered round Gurgeh; the club members, some press people and other players, some observing guests. Gurgeh felt oddly untouched by the surrounding, chattering apices. Crowding up to him, but still trying not to touch him, somehow their very numbers lent an air of unreality to the scene. Gurgeh was buried in questions, but he couldn’t answer any of them. He could hardly make them out as individual inquiries anyway; the apices all talked too fast. Flere-Imsaho floated in above the heads of the crowd, but despite trying to shout people down to gain their attention, all it succeeded in attracting was their hair, with its static. Gurgeh saw one apex try to push the machine out of his way, and receive an obviously unexpected and painful electric shock.

Pequil shoved his way through the crowd and bustled up to Gurgeh, but instead of coming to rescue the man, he told him he’d brought another twenty reporters with him. He touched Gurgeh without seeming to think about it, turning him to face some cameras. More questions followed, but Gurgeh ignored them. He had to ask Pequil several times if he could leave before the apex had a path cleared to the door and the waiting car.

“Mr Gurgee; let me add my congratulations.” Pequil said in the car. “I heard while I was in the office and came straight away. A famous victory.”

“Thank you,” Gurgeh said, slowly calming himself. He sat in the car’s plushly upholstered seat, looking out at the sunlit city. The car was air-conditioned, unlike the game-hall, but it was only now Gurgeh found himself sweating. He shivered.

“Me too,” Flere-Imsaho said. “You raised your game just in time.”

“Thank you, drone.”

“You were lucky as hell, too, mind you.”

“I trust you’ll let me arrange a proper press-conference, Mr Gurgee,” Pequil said eagerly. “I’m sure you’re going to be quite famous after this, no matter what happens during the rest of the match. Heavens, you’ll be sharing leaders with the Emperor himself tonight!”

“No thanks,” Gurgeh said. “Don’t arrange anything.” He couldn’t think that he’d have anything useful to tell people. What was there to say? He’d won the game; he’d every chance of taking the match itself.

He was anyway a little uncomfortable at the thought of his image and voice being broadcast all over the Empire, and his story, undoubtedly sensationalised, being told and retold and distorted by these people.

“Oh but you must!” Pequil protested. “Everybody will want to see you! You don’t seem to realise what you’ve done; even if you lose the match you’ve established a new record! Nobody has ever come back from being so far behind! It was quite brilliant!”

“All the same,” Gurgeh said, suddenly feeling very tired, “I don’t want to be distracted. I have to concentrate. I have to rest.”

“Well,” Pequil said, looking crestfallen, “I see your point, but I warn you; you’re making a mistake. People will want to hear what you’ve got to say, and our press always gives the people what they want, no matter what the difficulties. They’ll just make it up. You’d be better off saying something yourself.”

Gurgeh shook his head, looked out at the traffic on the boulevard. “If people want to lie about me that’s a matter for their consciences. At least I don’t have to talk to them. I really could not care less what they say.”

Pequil looked at Gurgeh with an expression of astonishment, but said nothing. Flere-Imsaho made a chuckling noise over its constant hum.

Gurgeh talked it over with the ship. The Limiting Factor said that the game could probably have been won more elegantly, but what Gurgeh had done did represent one end of the spectrum of unlikely possibilities it had been going to sketch out the previous night. It congratulated him. He had played better than it had thought possible. It also asked him why he hadn’t listened after it had told him it could see a way out.

“All I wanted to know was that there was a way out.”

(Again the delay, the weight of time while his beamed words lanced beneath the matter-dimpled surface that was real space.)

“But I could have helped you,” said the ship. “I thought it was a bad sign when you refused my aid. I began to think you had given up in your mind, if not on the board.”

“I didn’t want help, ship.” He played with the Orbital bracelet, wondering absently if it portrayed any particular world, and if so, which. “I wanted hope.”

“I see,” the ship said, eventually.

“I wouldn’t accept it,” the drone said.

“You wouldn’t accept what?” Gurgeh asked, looking up from a holo-displayed board.

“Za’s invitation.” The tiny machine floated closer; it had discarded its bulky disguise now they were back inside the module.

Gurgeh looked coldly at it. “I didn’t notice it was addressed to you too.” Shohobohaum Za had sent a message congratulating Gurgeh and inviting him out for an evening’s entertainment.

“Well, it wasn’t; but I’m supposed to monitor everything—”

“Are you really?” Gurgeh turned back to the holospread before him. “Well you can stay here and monitor whatever you like while I go out on the town with Shohobohaum Za tonight.”

“You’ll regret it,” the drone told him. “You’ve been very sensible, staying in and not getting involved, but you’ll suffer for it if you do start gallivanting.”

“ ‘Gallivanting’?” Gurgeh stared at the drone, realising only then how difficult it was to look something up and down when it was just a few centimetres high. “What are you, drone; my mother?”

“I’m just trying to be sensible about this,” the machine said, voice rising. “You’re in a strange society, you’re not the most worldly-wise of people, and Za certainly isn’t my idea of—”

“You opinionated box of junk!” Gurgeh said loudly, rising and switching off the holoscreen.

The drone jumped in mid-air; it backed off hastily. “Now, now, Jernau Gurgeh…”

“Don’t you ‘Now, now’ me, you patronising adding machine. If I want to take an evening off, I will. And quite frankly the thought of some human company for a change is looking more attractive all the time.” He jabbed a finger at the machine. “Don’t read any more of my mail, and don’t bother about escorting Za and me this evening.” He walked quickly past it, heading for his cabin. “Now, I’m going to take a shower; why don’t you go watch some birds?”

The man left the module’s lounge. The little drone hovered steadily in mid-air for a while. “Oops,” it said to itself, eventually, then, with a shrug-like wobble, swooped away, fields vaguely rosy.

“Have some of this,” Za said. The car swept along the city streets beneath the erubescent skies of dusk.

Gurgeh took the flask and drank.

“Not quite grif,” Za told him, “but it does the job.” He took the flask back while Gurgeh coughed a little. “Did you let that grif get to you at the ball?”

“No,” Gurgeh admitted. “I bypassed it; wanted a clear head.”

“Aw heck,” Za said, looking downcast. “You mean I could have had more?” He shrugged, brightened, tapped Gurgeh on the elbow. “Hey; I never said; congratulations. On winning the game.”

“Thanks.”

“That showed them. Wow, did you give them a shock.” Za shook his head in admiration; his long brown hair swung across his loose tunic top like heavy smoke. “I had you filed as a prime-time loser, J-G, but you’re some kind of showman.” He winked one bright green eye at Gurgeh, and grinned.

Gurgeh looked uncertainly at Za’s beaming face for a moment, then burst out laughing. He took the flask from Za’s hand and put it to his lips.

“To the showmen,” he said, and drank.

“Amen to that, my maestro.”

The Hole had been on the outskirts of the city once, but now it was just another part of one more urban district. The Hole was a set of vast artificial caverns burrowed out of the chalk centuries ago to store natural gas in; the gas had long since run out, the city ran on other forms of energy, and the set of huge, linked caves had been colonised, first by Groasnachek’s poor, then (by a slow process of osmosis and displacement, as though — gas or human — nothing ever really changed) by its criminals and outlaws, and finally, though not completely, by its effectively ghettoised aliens and their supporting cast of locals.

Gurgeh and Za’s car drove into what had once been a massive above-ground gas-storage cylinder; it had become the housing for a pair of spiralling ramps taking cars and other vehicles down into and up out of the Hole. In the centre of the still mostly empty, ringingly echoing cylinder, a cluster of variously sized lifts slid up and down inside ramshackle frameworks of girders, tubing and beams.

The outer and inner surfaces of the ancient gasometer sparkled slatily under rainbow lights and the flickeringly unreal, grotesquely oversize images of advertising holos. People milled about the surface level of the cavernous tower, and the air was full of shouting, screaming, haggling voices and the sound of labouring engines. Gurgeh watched the crowds and the stalls and stands slide by as the car dipped and started its long descent. A strange, half-sweet, half-acrid smell seeped through the car’s conditioning, like a sweaty breath from the place.

They quit the car in a long, low, crowded tunnel where the air was heavy with fumes and shouts. The gallery was choked with multifariously shaped and sized vehicles which rumbled and hissed and edged about amongst the swarmingly varied people like massive, clumsy animals wading in an insect sea. Za took Gurgeh by the hand as their car trundled towards the ascending ramp. They went bustling through the buffeting crowds of Azadians and other humanoids towards a dimily-glowing tunnel mouth.

“What d’you think so far?” Za shouted back to Gurgeh.

“Crowded, isn’t it?”

“You should see it on a holiday!”

Gurgeh looked round at the people. He felt ghostlike, invisible. Until now he’d been the centre of attention; a freak, stared and gawped and peered at, and kept entirely at arm’s length. Now suddenly nobody gave a damn, hardly sparing him a second glance. They bumped into him, jostled him, shoved past him, brushed against him, all quite careless.

And so varied, even in this sickly, sea-green tunnel light. So many different types of people mixed in with the Azadians he was becoming used to seeing; a few aliens that looked vaguely familiar from his memory of pan-human types, but mostly quite wildly different; he lost count of the variations in limbs, height, bulk, physiognomy and sensory apparatus he was confronted with during that short walk.

They went down the warm tunnel and into a huge, brightly lit cavern, at least eighty metres tall and half as broad again; lengthwise, its cream-coloured walls stretched away in both directions for half a kilometre or more, ending in great side-lit arches leading to further galleries. Its flat floor was chock-a-block with shack-like buildings and tents, partitions and covered walkways, stalls and kiosks and small squares with dribbling fountains and gaily striped awnings. Lamps danced from wires strung on thin poles, and overhead brighter lights burned, high in the vaulted roof; a colour between ivory and pewter. Structures of stepped buildings and wall- or roof-hung gantries lined the sides of the gallery, and whole areas of grimy grey wall were punctured by the irregular holes of windows, balconies, terraces and doors. Lifts and pulleys creaked and rattled, taking people to higher levels, or lowering them to the bustling floor.

“This way,” Za said. They wove their way through the narrow streets of the gallery surface until they came to the far wall, climbed some broad but rickety wooden steps, and approached a heavy wooden door guarded by a metal portcullis and a pair of lumberingly large figures; one Azadian male and another whose species Gurgeh couldn’t identify. Za waved and, without either guard appearing to do anything, the portcullis rose, the door swung ponderously open, and he and Za left the echoing cave behind for the relative quietness of a dim, wood-lined, heavily carpeted tunnel.

The cavern light closed off behind them; a hazy, cerise glow came through an arched ceiling of wafer-thin plaster. The polished wooden walls looked thick, were char-dark, and felt warm. Muffled music came from ahead.

Another door; a desk set into an alcove where two apices eyed them both sullenly, then consented to smile at Za, who passed over a small hide pouch to them. The door opened. He and Gurgeh went through to the light and music and noise beyond.

It was a jumble of a space; impossible to decide whether it was one confusingly subdivided, chaotically split-levelled hall, or a profusion of smaller rooms and galleries all knocked into one. The place was packed, and loud with high-pitched atonal music. It could have been on fire, judging from the thick haze of smoke filling it, but the fumes smelled sweet, almost perfumed.

Za guided Gurgeh through crowds to a wooden cupola raised a metre off a small covered walkway and looking out from the rear on to a sort of staggered stage beneath. The stage was surrounded by similar circular boxes as well as various stepped areas of seats and benches, all of which were crowded, mostly with Azadians.

On the small, roughly circular stage below, some dwarfish alien — only vaguely pan-human — was wrestling, or perhaps copulating, with an Azadian female in a quivering tub full of gently steaming red mud, all seemingly held in a low-G field. The spectators shouted and clapped and threw drinks.

“Oh good,” Za said, sitting down. “The fun’s started.”

“Are they fucking or fighting?” Gurgeh said, leaning over the rail and peering down at the struggling, heaving bodies of the alien and the female.

Za shrugged. “Does it matter?”

A waitress, an Azadian female wearing only a little cloth around her waist, took Za’s drink order. The woman’s puff-balled hair appeared to be on fire, surrounded by a flickering hologram of yellow-blue flames.

Gurgeh turned away from the stage. The audience behind him yelled appreciatively as the woman threw the alien off and jumped on top of him, throwing him under the steaming mud. “You come here often?” he asked Za.

The tall male laughed loudly. “No.” The great green eyes flashed. “But I leave quite a lot.”

“This where you relax?”

Za shook his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right. That’s what the Hole’s for; fun. Fun and games. Cools down a bit during the day, but it can get pretty wild, too. The drink festivals are usually the worst. Shouldn’t be any trouble tonight though. Fairly quiet.”

The crowd shrieked; the woman was holding the dwarfish alien’s face under the mud; it struggled desperately.

Gurgeh turned round to watch. The alien’s movements weakened slowly as the naked, mud-slicked woman forced its head into the bubbling red liquid. Gurgeh glanced at Za. “So they were fighting.”

Za shrugged again. “We may never know.” He looked down too, as the woman forced the now limp alien’s body further into the ochre mud.

“Has she killed it?” Gurgeh asked. He had to raise his voice as the crowd screamed, stamping feet and beating fists on tables.

“Na,” Shohobohaum Za said, shaking his head. “The little guy’s a Uhnyrchal.” Za nodded down, as the woman used one hand to keep the alien’s head submerged, and raised the other in triumph in the air, glaring bright-eyed at the baying audience. “See that little black thing sticking up?”

Gurgeh looked. There was a little black bulb poking up through the surface of the red mud. “Yes.”

“That’s his dick.”

Gurgeh looked suspiciously at the other man. “How exactly is that going to help him?”

“The Uhnyrchal can breathe through their dicks,” Za said. “That guy’s fine; he’ll be fighting in another club tomorrow night; maybe even later this evening.”

Za watched the waitress place their drinks on the table. He leant forward to whisper something to her; she nodded and walked off. “Try glanding Expand with this stuff,” Za suggested. Gurgeh nodded. They both drank.

“Wonder why the Culture’s never genofixed that,” Za said, staring into his glass.

“What?”

“Being able to breathe through your dick.”

Gurgeh thought. “Sneezing at certain moments could be messy.”

Za laughed. “There might be compensations.”

The audience behind them went “Oooo”. Za and Gurgeh turned round to see the victorious woman pulling her opponent’s body up out of the mud by its penis; the alien being’s head and feet were still under the glutinous, slowly slopping liquid. “Ouch,” Za muttered, drinking.

Somebody in the crowd tossed the woman a dagger; she caught it, stooped, and sliced off the alien genitals. She brandished the dripping flesh aloft while the crowd went wild with delight and the alien sank slowly beneath the cloying red liquid, the woman’s foot on its chest. The mud gradually turned black where the blood oozed, and a few bubbles surfaced.

Za sat back, looking mystified. “Must have been some sub-species I haven’t heard of.”

The low-G mud-tub was trundled away, the woman still shaking her trophy at the baying crowd.

Shohobohaum Za rose to greet a party of four dramatically beautiful and stunningly dressed Azadian females who were approaching the cupola. Gurgeh had glanded the body-drug Za had suggested, and was just beginning to feel the effects of both that and the liquor.

The women looked, he thought, quite the equals of any he’d seen the night of the welcoming ball, and much more friendly.

The acts went on; sex acts, mostly. Acts which, outside the Hole, Gurgeh was told by Za and two of the Azadian females (Inclate and At-sen, sitting on either side of him), would mean death for both participants; death by radiation or death by chemicals.

Gurgeh didn’t pay too much attention. This was his night out and the staged obscenities were the least important part of it. He was away from the game; that was what mattered. Living by another set of rules. He knew why Za had had the women come to the table, and it amused him. He felt no particular desire for the two exquisite creatures he sat between — certainly nothing uncontrollable — but they made good company. Za was no fool, and the two charming females — Gurgeh knew they would have been males, or even apices had Za discovered Gurgeh’s preferences lay in that direction — were both intelligent and witty.

They knew a little about the Culture, had heard rumours about the sexual alterations Culture people possessed, and made discreetly roguish jokes about Gurgeh’s proclivities and abilities compared to their own, and to both the other Azadian genders. They were flattering, enticing and friendly; they drank from small glasses, they sipped smoke from tiny, slender pipes — Gurgeh had tried a pipe too, but only coughed, much to everyone’s amusement — and they both had long, sinuously curling blue-black hair, silkily membraned with near-invisibly fine platinum nets and beaded with minute, glinting AG studs, which made their hair move in slow motion and gave each graceful movement of their delicately structured heads a dizzyingly unreal quality.

Inclate’s slim dress was the ever-shifting colour of oil on water, speckled with jewels which twinkled like stars; At-sen’s was a videodress, glowing fuzzy red with its own concealed power. A choker round her neck acted as a small television monitor, displaying a hazy, distorted image of the view around her — Gurgeh to one side, the stage behind, one of Za’s ladies on the other side, the other directly across the table. Gurgeh showed her the Orbital bracelet, but she was not especially impressed.

Za, on the other side of the table, was playing small games of forfeit with his two giggling ladies, handling tiny, almost transparent slice jewel-cards and laughing a lot. One of the ladies noted the forfeits down in a little notebook, with much giggling and feigned embarrassment.

“But Jernow!” At-sen said, from Gurgeh’s left. “You must have a scar-portrait! So that we may remember you when you have gone back to the Culture and its decadent, many-orificed ladies!” Inclate, on his right, giggled.

“Certainly not,” Gurgeh said, mock-serious. “It sounds quite barbaric.”

“Oh yes, yes, it is!” At-sen and Inclate laughed into their glasses. At-sen pulled herself together, put her hand on his wrist. “Wouldn’t you like to think there was some poor person walking around on Eä with your face on their skin?”

“Yes, but on which bit?” Gurgeh asked.

They thought this hilariously funny.

Za stood; one of his ladies packed the tiny slivers of the game-cards away in a little chain purse. “Gurgeh,” Za said, knocking back the last of his drink. “We’re off for a more private chat; you three too?” Za grinned wickedly at Inclate and At-sen, producing gales of laughter and small shrieks. At-sen dipped her fingers in her drink and flicked some liquor at Za, who dodged.

“Yes, come, Jernow,” Inclate said, taking hold of Gurgeh’s arm with both hands. “Let’s all go; the air is so stuffy here, and the noise so loud.”

Gurgeh smiled, shook his head. “No; I’d only disappoint you.”

“Oh no! No!” Slim fingers tugged at his sleeves, curled round his arms.

The politely mocking argument went on for some minutes, while Za stood, grinning, ladies draped on either side, looking on, and Inclate and At-sen tried their hardest either to physically lift Gurgeh to his feet, or, by pouting protestations, persuade him to move.

All failed. Za shrugged — his ladies imitated the alien gesture, before dissolving into laughter — and said, “Okay; just stay there, all right, game-player?”

Za looked at Inclate and At-sen, who were temporarily subdued and petulant. “You two look after him, right?” Za told them. “Don’t let him talk to any strangers.”

At-sen sniffed imperiously. “Your friend declines all; strange or familiar.”

Inclate snorted despite herself. “Or both in one,” she blurted. Whereupon she and At-sen started laughing again and reaching behind Gurgeh to slap and pinch each other’s shoulders.

Za shook his head. “Jernau; try and control those two as well as you control yourself.”

Gurgeh ducked a few flicked drops of drink while the females squealed on either side of him. “I’ll try,” he told Za.

“Well,” Za said, “I’ll try not to be too long. Sure you won’t join in? Could be quite an experience.”

“I’m sure. But I’m fine here.”

“Okay. Don’t wander. See you soon.” Za grinned at the giggling girls on either side of him, and then they turned together, walked away. “Ish!” Za shouted back over his shoulder. “Soon-ish, game-player!”

Gurgeh waved goodbye. Inclate and At-sen quietened fractionally and set about telling him what a naughty boy he was for not being more naughty. Gurgeh ordered more drinks and pipes to keep them quiet. They showed him how to play the game of elements, chanting, “Blade cuts cloth, cloth wraps stone, stone dams water, water quenches fire, fire melts blade…” like serious schoolgirls, and showing him the appropriate hand-shapes, so that he could learn.

It was a truncated, two-dimensional version of the elemental die-matching from the Board of Becoming, minus Air and Life. Gurgeh found it amusing that even in the Hole he could not escape the influence of Azad. He played the simple game because the ladies wanted to, and he took care not to win too many hands… something, he realised, he had never done before in his life.

Still puzzling over this anomaly, he went to the toilets, of which there were four different types. He used the Aliens, but took some time to find the right piece of equipment. He was still chortling over this when he came out, to find Inclate standing outside the sphincter-like doorway. She looked worried; the oil-film dress rippled dully.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“At-sen,” she said, kneading her little hands together. “Her ex-master came; took her away. He wants to have her again or it will be a tenth-year since they are one, and she will be free.” She looked up at Gurgeh, small face contorted, distressed. The blue-black hair washed round her face like a slow and fluid shadow. “I know Sho-Za said you must not move, but will you? This is not your concern, but she’s my friend…”

“What can I do?” Gurgeh said.

“Come; we two may distract him. I think I know where he’s taken her. I shall not endanger you, Jernow.” She took his hand.

They half walked, half ran down twisting wooden corridors, past many rooms and doors. He was lost in a maze of sensation; a welter of sounds (music, laughter, screams), sights (servants, erotic pictures, glimpsed galleries of packed, swaying bodies) and smells (food, perfume, alien sweats).

Suddenly, Inclate stopped. They were in a deep, bowled room like a theatre, where a naked human male stood on stage, turning slowly, this way and that, in front of a giant screen showing a close-up of his skin. Deep, booming music played. Inclate stood looking round the packed auditorium, still holding Gurgeh’s hand.

Gurgeh glanced at the man on stage. The lights were bright, sunlight spectraed. The slightly plump, pale-skinned male had several enormous, multi-coloured bruises — like huge prints — on his body. Those on his back and chest were largest, and showed Azadian faces. The mixture of blacks, blues, purples, greens, yellows and reds combined to form portraits of uncanny accuracy and subtlety, which the flexings of the man’s muscles seemed to make live, exactly as though those faces took on new expressions with each moment. Gurgeh looked, and felt his breath draw in.

“There!” Inclate shouted over the pulsing music, and tugged at his hand. They set off through the crowding people, towards where At-sen stood, near the front of the stage. She was being held by an apex who was pointing at the man on the stage and shouting at her, shaking her. At-sen’s head was down, her shoulders quivered as if she was crying. The video-dress was turned off; it hung on her, grey and drab and lifeless. The apex hit At-sen across the head (the slow black hair twisted languidly), and shouted at her again. She fell to her knees; the beaded hair followed her as if she was sinking slowly under water. Nobody around the couple took any notice. Inclate strode towards them, pulling Gurgeh after her.

The apex saw them coming, tried to drag At-sen away. Inclate started to shout at the apex; she held up Gurgeh’s hand as they pushed people aside, drew closer. The apex looked suddenly fearful; he stumbled away, dragging At-sen with him to an exit beneath the raised stage. Inclate started forward, but her way was blocked by a cluster of large Azadian males, standing staring open-mouthed at the man on the stage. Inclate beat at their backs with her fists. Gurgeh watched At-sen disappear, dragged through the door beneath the stage. He pulled Inclate to one side and used his greater mass and strength to force a way between two of the protesting males; he and the girl ran to the swinging door.

The corridor curved sharply. They followed the sounds of screams, down some narrow stairs, over a step where the broken monitor-collar lay, snapped and dead, down to a quiet corridor where the light was jade and there were many doors. At-sen was lying on the floor, the apex above her, screaming at her. He saw Gurgeh and Inclate, shook his fist at them. Inclate screamed incoherently at him.

Gurgeh started forward; the apex took a gun from a pocket.

Gurgeh stopped. Inclate went quiet. At-sen whimpered on the floor. The apex started talking, far too fast for Gurgeh to follow; he pointed at the woman on the floor, then gestured at the ceiling. He began to cry, and the gun shook in his hand (and part of Gurgeh, sitting back calmly analysing, thought, Am I frightened? Is this fear yet? I’m looking death in the face, staring at it through that little black hole, the little twisted tunnel in this alien’s hand (like another element the hand can show), and I’m waiting to feel fear…

…and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m still waiting. Does this mean that I shan’t die now, or that I shall?

Life or death in a finger’s twitch, a single nerve-pulse, just one perhaps not fully willed decision by some jealous irrelevant one-credit sick-head, a hundred millennia from home…).

The apex backed away, gesturing imploringly, pathetically to At-sen, and at Gurgeh and Inclate. He came forward and kicked At-sen, once, in the back, with no great force, making her cry out, then turned and ran, shouting incoherently and throwing the gun down to the floor. Gurgeh ran after him, vaulting over At-sen. The apex disappeared down a dark spiral staircase at the far end of the curved passage. Gurgeh started to follow, then stopped. The sound of clattering footsteps died away. He went back to the jade-lit corridor.

A door was open; soft citrine light spilled out.

There was a short hall, a bathroom off, then the room. It was small, and mirrored everywhere; even the soft floor rippled with unsteady reflections the colour of honey. He walked in, at the centre of a vanishing army of reflected Gurgehs.

At-sen sat on a translucent bed, forlorn in her wrecked grey dress, head down and sobbing while Inclate, kneeling by her, arm round the crying woman’s shoulders, whispered gently. Their images proliferated about the shining walls of the room. He hesitated, glanced back at the door. At-sen looked up at him, tears streaming.

“Oh, Jernow!” She held out one shaking hand. He squatted by the bedside, his arm round her as she quivered, while both women cried.

He stroked At-sen’s back.

She put her head on his shoulder, and her lips were warm and strange on his neck; Inclate left the bed, padded to the door and closed it, then joined the man and the woman, dropping the oil-film dress to the mirror-floor in a glistening pool of iridescence.

Shohobohaum Za arrived a minute later, kicking the door in, walking smartly into the middle of the mirrored room (so that an infinitude of Zas repeated and repeated their way across that cheating space), and glared round, ignoring the three people on the bed.

Inclate and At-sen froze, hands at Gurgeh’s clothing-ties and buttons. Gurgeh was momentarily shocked, then tried to assume an urbane expression. Za looked at the wall behind Gurgeh, who followed his gaze; he found himself looking at his own reflection; face dark, hair mussed, clothes half undone. Za leapt across the bed, kicking into the image.

The wall shattered in a chorus of screams; the mirror-glass cascaded to reveal a dark and shallow room behind, and a small machine on a tripod, pointing into the mirror-room. Inclate and At-sen sprang off the bed and raced out; Inclate grabbed her dress on the way.

Za took the tiny camera off its tripod and looked at it. “Record only, thank goodness; no transmitter.” He stuffed the machine into a pocket, then turned and grinned at Gurgeh. “Put it back in the holster, game-player. We got to run!”

They ran. Down the jade passage towards the same spiral steps At-sen’s abductor had taken. Za stooped as he ran, scooping up the gun the apex had dropped and Gurgeh had forgotten about. It was inspected, tried and discarded within a couple of seconds. They got to the spiral steps and leapt up them.

Another corridor, darkly russet. Music boomed above. Za skidded to a stop as two large apices ran towards them. “Oops,” Za said, doing an about-turn. He shoved Gurgeh back to the stairs and they ran up again, coming out in a dark space full of the beating, pulsing music; light blazed to one side. Footsteps hammered up the stairs. Za turned and kicked down into the stairwell with one foot, producing an explosive yelp and a sudden clatter.

A thin blue beam freckled the darkness, lancing from the stairwell and bursting yellow flame and orange sparks somewhere overhead. Za dodged away. “Fucking artillery indeed.” He nodded past Gurgeh towards the light. “Exit stage centre, maestro.”

They ran out on to the stage, flooded with sunlight brilliance. A bulky male in the centre of the stage turned resentfully as they thundered out from the wings; the audience yelled abuse. Then the expression on the near-naked bruise artiste’s face switched from vexation to stunned surprise.

Gurgeh almost fell; he did stop, dead still.

… to gaze, again, at his own face.

It was printed, twice life-size, in a bloody rainbow of contusions, on the torso of the dumbstruck performer. Gurgeh stared, expression mirroring the amazement on the tubby artiste’s face.

“No time for art now, Jernau.” Za pulled him away, dragged him to the front of the stage and threw him off. He dived after him.

They landed on top of a group of protesting Azadian males, tumbling them to the ground. Za hauled Gurgeh to his feet, then nearly fell again as a blow struck the back of his head. He turned and lashed out with one foot, fending off another punch with one arm. Gurgeh felt himself twirled round; he found himself facing a large, angry male with blood on his face. The man drew his arm back, made a fist of his hand (so that Gurgeh thought; stone! from the game of elements).

The man seemed to move very slowly.

Gurgeh had time to think what to do.

He brought his knee up into the male’s groin and heel-palmed his face. He shook the falling man’s grip free, ducked a blow from another male, and saw Za elbow yet another Azadian in the face.

Then they were sprinting away again. Za roared and waved his hands as he ran for an exit. Gurgeh fought a strange urge to laugh at this, but the tactic seemed to work; people parted for them like water round the bows of a boat.

They sat in a small, open-ceilinged bar, deep in the maze-like clutter of the main gallery, under a solid sky of chalky pearl. Shohobohaum Za was dismantling the camera he’d discovered behind the false mirror, teasing its delicate components apart with a humming, toothpick-size instrument. Gurgeh dabbed at a graze on his cheek, incurred when Za had thrown him from the stage.

“Na, my fault, game-player. I should have known. Inclate’s brother’s in Security, and At-sen’s got an expensive habit. Nice kids, but a bad combination, and not exactly what I asked for. Damn lucky for your ass one of my sweeties dropped a slice-jewel-card and wouldn’t play anything else without it. Ah well; half a fuck’s better than none at all.”

He prised another piece out of the camera body; there was a crackle and a little flash. Za poked dubiously at the smoking casing.

“How did you know where to find us?” Gurgeh asked. He felt like a fool, but less embarrassed than he’d have expected.

“Knowledge, guesswork and luck, game-player. There are places in that club you go when you want to roll somebody, other places where you can question them, or kill them, or hook them on something… or take their picture. I was just hoping it was lights-action time and not something worse.” He shook his head, peered at the camera. “I should have known though. Ought to have guessed. Getting too damn trusting.”

Gurgeh shrugged, sipped at his hot liquor and studied the guttering candle on the counter in front of them. “I was the one who was suckered. But who?” He looked at Za. “Why?”

“The state, Gurgeh,” Za said, prodding at the camera again. “Because they want to have something on you, just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“Just in case you keep surprising them and winning games. It’s insurance. You heard of that? No? Never mind. It’s like gambling in reverse.” Za held the camera with one hand, straining at part of it with the thin instrument. A hatch popped open. Za looked happy, and extracted a coin-sized disk from the guts of the machine. He held it up to the light, where it glinted nacreously. “Your holiday snaps,” Za told Gurgeh.

He adjusted something at the end of the toothpick, so that the little disk stuck to the instrument’s point as though glued there, then held the tiny polychromatic coin over the candle flame until it sizzled and smoked and hissed, and finally fell in dull flakes on to the wax. “Sorry you couldn’t have that as a souvenir,” Za said.

Gurgeh shook his head. “Something I’d rather forget.”

“Ah, never mind. I’ll get those two bitches though,” Za grinned. “They owe me one for free. Several, in fact.” Za looked happy at the thought.

“Is that all?” Gurgeh asked.

“Hey; they were just playing their parts. No malice involved. Worth a spanking at most.” Za waggled his eyebrows lasciviously.

Gurgeh sighed.

When they went back to the transit gallery to order their car, Za waved at some bulky, severely casual males and apices waiting in the lime-lit tunnel, and tossed one of them what was left of the camera. The apex caught it, and turned away along with the others.

The car arrived minutes later.

“And what time do you call this? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? You’ve got a game to play tomorrow, you know. Just look at the state of your clothes! And where did you pick up that graze? What have you—”

“Machine.” Gurgeh yawned, throwing his jacket down on to a seat in the lounge. “Go fuck yourself.”

The following morning, Flere-Imsaho wasn’t talking to him. It joined him in the module lounge just as the call came through that Pequil had arrived with the car, but when Gurgeh said hello, it ignored him, and travelled down in the hotel elevator studiously humming and crackling even louder than usual. It was similarly uncommunicative in the car. Gurgeh decided he could live with this.

“Gurgee, you have hurt yourself.” Pequil looked with concern at the graze over Gurgeh’s cheek.

“Yes,” Gurgeh smiled, stroking his beard. “I cut myself shaving.”

It was attrition time on the Board of Form.

Gurgeh was up against the other nine players from the start, until it became too obvious that was what was happening. He’d used the advantage accrued on the previous board to set up a small, dense and almost impregnable enclave; he just sat in there for two days, letting the others beat up against it. Done properly, this would have broken him, but his opponents were trying not to look too concerted in their actions, so attacked a few at a time. They were anyway each fearful of weakening themselves over-much in case they were pounced upon by the others.

By the end of those two days, a couple of the news-agencies were saying it was unfair and discourteous to the stranger to gang up on him.

Flere-Imsaho — over its huff by then and talking to him again — reckoned this reaction might be genuine and unprompted, but was more likely to be the result of imperial pressure. Certainly it thought the Church — which had doubtless been instructing the priest as well as financing the deals he’d been making with the other players — had been leant on by the Imperial Office. Whatever, on the third day the massed attacks against Gurgeh fell away and the game resumed a more normal course.

The game-hall was crowded with people. There were many more paying spectators, numerous invited guests had changed venue to come and see the alien play, and the press-agencies had sent extra reporters and cameras. The club players, under the stewardship of the Adjudicator, succeeded in keeping the crowd quiet, so Gurgeh didn’t find the extra people caused any great distraction during the game. It was difficult to move around the hall during the breaks though; people were constantly accosting him, asking him questions, or just wanting to look at him.

Pequil was there most of the time, but seemed more taken up with going in front of the cameras himself than shielding Gurgeh from all the people wanting to talk to him. At least he helped to divert the attentions of the news-people and let Gurgeh concentrate on the game.

Over the next couple of days, Gurgeh noticed a subtle change in the way the priest was playing, and, to a lesser degree, in the game-style of another two players.

Gurgeh had taken three players right out of the game; another three had been taken by the priest, without much of a fight. The remaining two apices had established their own small enclaves on the board and were taking comparatively little part in the wider game. Gurgeh was playing well, if not at quite the pitch he had when he’d won on the Board of Origin. He ought to be defeating the priest and the other two fairly easily. He was, indeed, gradually prevailing, but very slowly. The priest was playing better than he had before, especially at the beginning of each session, which made Gurgeh think that the apex was getting some high-grade help during the breaks. The same applied to the other two players, though they were presumably being less extensively briefed.

When the end came, though, on the fifth day of the game, it was sudden, and the priest’s play simply collapsed. The other two players resigned. More adulation followed, and the news-agencies began to run editorials worrying that somebody from Outside could do so well. Some of the more sensational releases even carried stories that the alien from the Culture was using some sort of supernatural sense or illegal technical device. They’d found out Flere-Imsaho’s name and mentioned it as the possible source of Gurgeh’s illicit skill.

“They’re calling me a computer ,” the drone wailed.

“And they’re calling me a cheat,” Gurgeh said, thoughtfully. “Life is cruel, as they keep saying here.”

“Here they are correct.”

The last game, on the Board of Becoming, the one Gurgeh felt most at home on, was a romp. The priest had filed a special objective plan with the Adjudicator before the game commenced, something he was entitled to do as the player with the second largest number of points. He was effectively playing for second place; although he would be out of the Main Series, he would have a chance to re-enter it if he won his next two games in the second series.

Gurgeh suspected this was a ruse, and played very cautiously at first, waiting for either the mass attack or some cunning individual set-piece. But the others seemed to be playing almost aimlessly, and even the priest seemed to be making the sort of slightly mechanical moves he’d been making in the first game. When Gurgeh made a few light, exploratory attacks, he found little opposition. He divided his forces in half and went on a full-scale raid into the territory of the priest, just for the sheer hell of it. The priest panicked and hardly made one good move after that; by the end of the session he was in danger of being wiped out.

After the break Gurgeh was attacked by all the others, while the priest struggled, pinned against one edge of the board. Gurgeh took the hint. He gave the priest room to manoeuvre and let him attack two of the weaker players to regain his position on the board. The game finished with Gurgeh established over most of the board and the others either eradicated or confined to small, strategically irrelevant areas. Gurgeh had no particular interest in fighting the game out to the bitter end, and anyway guessed that if he tried to do so the others would form a united opposition, no matter how obvious it was they were working together; Gurgeh was being offered victory, but he would suffer if he tried to be greedy, or vindictive. The status quo was agreed; the game ended. The priest came second on points, just. Pequil congratulated him again, outside the hall. He’d reached the second round of the Main Series; he was one of only twelve hundred First Winners and twice that number of Qualifiers. He would now play against one person in the second round. Again, the apex begged Gurgeh to give a news-conference, and again Gurgeh refused.

“But you must! What are you trying to do? If you don’t say something soon you’ll turn them against you; this enigmatic stuff won’t do for ever you know. You’re the underdog at the moment; don’t lose that!”

“Pequil,” Gurgeh said, fully aware he was insulting the apex by addressing him so, “I have no intention of speaking to anybody about my game, and what they choose to say or think about me is irrelevant. I am here to play the game and nothing else.”

“You are our guest,” Pequil said coldly.

“And you are my hosts.” Gurgeh turned and walked away from the official, and the ride back in the car was completed in silence, save for Flere-Imsaho’s humming, which occasionally sounded to Gurgeh as if it barely concealed a chuckling laugh.

“Now the trouble starts.”

“Why do you say that, ship?” It was night. The rear doors of the module lay open. Gurgeh could hear the distant buzz of the police hoverplane stationed over the hotel to keep news-agency craft away; the smell of the city, warm and spicy and smoky, drifted in too. Gurgeh was studying a set-piece problem in a single game, and taking notes. This seemed to be the best way of talking to the Limiting Factor with the time-delay; talk, then switch off and consider the problem while the HS light flashed to and fro; then, when the reply came, switch back to speech mode; it was almost like having a real conversation.

“Because now you have to show your moral cards. It’s the single game, so you have to define your first principles, register your philosophical premises. Therefore you’ll have to give them some of the things you believe in. I believe this could prove troublesome.”

“Ship,” Gurgeh said, writing some notes on a scratch tablet as he studied the holo in front of him, “I’m not sure I have any beliefs.”

“I think you do, Jernau Gurgeh, and the Imperial Game Bureau will want to know what they are, for the record; I’m afraid you’ll have to think of something.”

“Why should I? What does it matter? I can’t win any posts or ranks, I’m not going to gain any power out of this, so what difference does it make what I believe in? I know they need to find out what people in power think, but I just want to play the game.”

“Yes, but they will need to know for their statistics. Your views may not matter a jot in terms of the elective properties of the game, but they do need to keep a record of what sort of player wins what sort of match… besides which, they will be interested in what sort of extremist politics you give credence to.”

Gurgeh looked at the screen camera. “Extremist politics? What are you talking about?”

“Jernau Gurgeh,” the machine said, making a sighing noise, “a guilty system recognises no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you amongst its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximise that effect, and some try to minimise it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.”

Gurgeh thought about this. “Can I lie?”

“I shall take it you mean, would you be advised to register false premises, rather than, are you capable of telling untruths.” (Gurgeh shook his head.) “This would probably be the wisest course. Though you may find it difficult to come up with something acceptable to them which you didn’t find morally repugnant yourself.”

Gurgeh looked back to the holo display. “Oh, you’d be surprised,” he muttered. “Anyway, if I’m lying about it, how can I find it repugnant?”

“An interesting point; if one assumes that one is not morally opposed to lying in the first place, especially when it is largely or significantly what we term self-interested rather than disinterested or compassionate lying, then—”

Gurgeh stopped listening and studied the holo. He really must look up some of his opponent’s previous games, once he knew who it would be.

He heard the ship stop talking. “Tell you what, ship,” he said. “Why don’t you think about it? You seem more engrossed in the whole idea than I do, and I’m busy enough anyway, so why don’t you work out a compromise between truth and expediency we’ll all be happy with, hmm? I’ll agree to whatever you suggest, probably.”

“Very well, Jernau Gurgeh. I’ll be happy to do that.”

Gurgeh bade the ship goodnight. He completed his study of the single-game problem, then switched the screen off. He stood and stretched, yawning. He strolled out of the module, into the orange-brown darkness of the hotel roof-garden. He almost bumped into a large, uniformed male.

The guard saluted — a gesture Gurgeh never did know how to reply to — and handed him a piece of paper. Gurgeh took it and thanked him; the guard went back to his station at the top of the roof-stairs.

Gurgeh walked back into the module, trying to read the note.

“Flere-Imsaho?” he called, uncertain whether the little machine was still around or not. It came floating through from another part of the module in its undisguised, quiet form, carrying a large, richly illustrated book on the avian fauna of Eä.

“Yes?”

“What does this say?” Gurgeh flourished the note.

The drone floated up to the piece of paper. “Minus the imperial embroidery, it says they’d like you to go to the palace tomorrow so they can add their congratulations. What it means is, they want to take a look at you.”

“I suppose I have to go?”

“I would say so.”

“Does it mention you?”

“No, but I’ll come along anyway; they can only throw me out. What were you talking to the ship about?”

“It’s going to register my Premises for me. It was also giving me a lecture on sociological conditioning.”

“It means well,” said the drone. “It just doesn’t want to leave such a delicate task to someone like you.”

“Just going out, were you, drone?” Gurgeh said, switching on the screen again and sitting down to watch it. He brought up the game-player’s channel on the imperial waveband and flicked through to the draw for the single games in the second round. Still no decision; the draw was still being decided; expected any minute.

“Well,” Flere-Imsaho said, “There is a very interesting species of nocturnal fish-hunter that inhabits an estuary just a hundred kilometres from here, and I was thinking—”

“Don’t let me keep you,” Gurgeh said, just as the draw started to come through on the imperial game-channel; the screen started to fill with numbers and names.

“Right. I’ll say goodnight, then.” The drone floated away.

Gurgeh waved without looking round. “Goodnight,” he said. He didn’t hear whether the drone replied or not.

He found his place in the draw; his name appeared on the screen beside that of Lo Wescekibold Ram, governing director of the Imperial Monopolies Board. He was ranked as Level Five Main, which meant he was one of the sixty best game-players in the Empire.

The following day was Pequil’s day off. An imperial aircraft was sent for Gurgeh and landed beside the module. Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho — which had been rather late returning from its estuarial expedition — were taken out over the city to the palace. They landed on the roof of an impressive set of office buildings overlooking one of the small parks set within the palace grounds, and were led down wide, richly carpeted stairs to a high-ceilinged office where a male servant asked Gurgeh if he wanted anything to eat or drink. Gurgeh said no, and he and the drone were left alone.

Flere-Imsaho drifted over to the tall windows. Gurgeh looked at some portrait paintings hanging on the walls. After a short while, a youngish apex entered the room. He was tall, dressed in a relatively unfussy and businesslike version of the uniform of the Imperial Bureaucracy.

“Mr Gurgeh; good day. I’m Lo Shav Olos.”

“Hello,” Gurgeh said. They exchanged polite nods, then the apex walked quickly to a large desk in front of the windows and set a bulky sheaf of papers down on it before sitting down.

Lo Shav Olos looked round at Flere-Imsaho, buzzing and hissing away near by. “And this must be your little machine.”

“Its name is Flere-Imsaho. It helps me with your language.”

“Of course.” The apex gestured to an ornate seat on the other side of his desk. “Please; sit down.”

Gurgeh sat, and Flere-Imsaho came to float near him. The male servant returned with a crystal goblet and placed it on the desk near Olos, who drank before saying, “Not that you must need much help, Mr Gurgeh.” The young apex smiled. “Your Eächic is very good.”

“Thank you.”

“Let me add my personal congratulations to those of the Imperial Office, Mr Gurgeh. You have done far better than many of us expected you to do. I understand you were learning the game only for about a third of one of our Great Years.”

“Yes, but I found Azad so interesting I did little else during that time. And it does share concepts with other games I’ve studied in the past.”

“Nevertheless, you’ve beaten people who’ve been learning the game all their lives. The priest Lin Goforiev Tounse was expected to do well in these games.”

“So I saw,” Gurgeh smiled. “Perhaps I was lucky.”

The apex gave a little laugh, and sat back in his chair. “Perhaps you were, Mr Gurgeh. I’m sorry to see your luck didn’t extend to cover the draw for the next round. Lo Wescekibold Ram is a formidable player, and many expect him to better his previous performance.”

“I hope I can give him a good game.”

“So do we all.” The apex drank from his goblet again, then got up and went to the windows behind him, looking out over the park. He scratched at the thick glass, as though there was a speck on it. “While not, strictly speaking, my province, I confess I’d be interested if you could tell me a little about your plans for the registration of Premises.” He turned and looked at Gurgeh.

“I haven’t decided quite how to express them yet,” Gurgeh said. “I’ll register them tomorrow, probably.”

The apex nodded thoughtfully. He pulled at one sleeve of the imperial uniform. “I wonder if I might advise you to be… somewhat circumspect, Mr Gurgeh?” (Gurgeh asked the drone to translate ‘circumspect’. Olos waited, then continued.) “Of course you must register with the Bureau, but as you know, your participation in these games is in a purely honorary capacity, and so exactly what you say in your Premises has only… statistical value, shall we say?”

Gurgeh asked the drone to translate ‘capacity’.

“Garbleness, game-playeroid,” Flere-Imsaho muttered darkly in Marain. “Twiddly-dee; you that word capacity beforely usedish Eächic in. Placey-wacey’s buggy-wuggied. Stoppy-toppy deez guys spladdiblledey-dey-da more cluettes on da lingo offering, righty?”

Gurgeh suppressed a smile. Olos went on. “As a rule, contestants must be prepared to defend their views with arguments, should the Bureau find it necessary to challenge any of them, but I hope you will understand that this will hardly be likely to happen to you. The Imperial Bureau is not blind to the fact that the… values of your society may be quite different from our own. We have no wish to embarrass you by forcing you to reveal things the press and the majority of our citizens might find… offensive.” He smiled. “Personally, off the record, I would imagine that you could be quite… oh, one might almost say ‘vague’… and nobody would be especially bothered.”

“‘Especially’?” Gurgeh said innocently to the humming, crackling drone at his side.

“More gibberish biltrivnik ner plin ferds, you’re quontstipilish trying nomonomo wertsishi my zozlik zibbidik dik fucking patience, Gurgeh.”

Gurgeh coughed loudly. “Excuse me,” he said to Olos. “Yes. I see. I’ll bear that in mind when I draw up my Premises.”

“I’m glad, Mr Gurgeh,” Olos said, coming back to his chair and sitting again. “What I’ve said is my personal view, of course, and I have no links with the Imperial Bureau; this office is quite independent of that body. Nevertheless, one of the great strengths of the Empire is its cohesion, its… unity, and I doubt that I could be very wide of the mark in judging what the attitude of another imperial department might be.” Lo Shav Olos smiled indulgently. “We really do all pull together.”

“I understand,” Gurgeh said.

“I’m sure you do. Tell me; are you looking forward to your trip to Echronedal?”

“Very much so, especially as the honour is extended so rarely to guest players.”

“Indeed.” Olos looked amused. “Few guests are ever allowed on to the Fire Planet. It is a holy place, as well as being itself a symbol of the everlasting nature of the Empire and the Game.”

“My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,” Gurgeh purred, with the hint of a bow. Flere-Imsaho made a spluttering noise.

Olos smiled broadly. “I feel quite certain that having established yourself as being so proficient — indeed gifted — at our game, you will prove yourself to be more than worthy of your place in the game-castle on Echronedal. Now,” the apex said, glancing at his desk-screen, “I see it is time for me to attend yet another doubtless insufferably tedious meeting of the Trade Council. I’d far prefer to continue our own exchange, Mr Gurgeh, but unhappily it must be curtailed in the interests of the efficiently regulated exchange of goods between our many worlds.”

“I fully understand,” Gurgeh said, standing at the same time as the apex.

“I’m pleased to have met you, Mr Gurgeh,” Olos smiled.

“And I you.”

“Let me wish you luck in your game against Lo Wescekibold Ram,” the apex said as he walked to the door with Gurgeh. “I’m afraid you will need it. I’m sure it will be an interesting game.”

“I hope so,” Gurgeh said. They left the room. Olos offered his hand; Gurgeh clasped it, allowing himself to look a little surprised.

“Good day, Mr Gurgeh.”

“Goodbye.”

Then Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho were escorted back to the aircraft on the roof while Lo Shav Olos strode off down another corridor to his meeting.

“You asshole, Gurgeh!” the drone said in Marain as soon as they were back in the module. “First you ask me two words you already know, and then you use both of them and the—”

Gurgeh was shaking his head by this time, and interrupted. “You really don’t understand very much about game-playing, do you, drone?”

“I know when people are playing the fool.”

“Better than playing a household pet, machine.”

The machine made a noise like an indrawn breath, then seemed to hesitate and said, “Well, anyway… at least you don’t have to worry about your Premises now.” It gave a rather forced-sounding chuckle. “They’re as frightened of you telling the truth as you are!”

Gurgeh’s game against Lo Wescekibold Ram attracted great attention. The press, fascinated by this odd alien who refused to speak to them, sent their most acerbic reporters, and the camera operators best able to catch any fleeting facial expression which would make the subject look ugly, stupid or cruel (and preferably all three at once). Gurgeh’s off-world physiognomy was regarded as a challenge by some camera people, and as a large fish in a small barrel by others.

Numerous paying game-fans had traded tickets for other games so they could watch this one, and the guests’ gallery could have been filled many times over, even though the venue had been changed from the original hall Gurgeh had played in before to a large marquee erected in a park only a couple of kilometres from both the Grand Hotel and the Imperial Palace. The marquee held three times as many people as the old hall, and was still crowded.

Pequil had arrived as usual in the Alien Affairs Bureau car in the morning, and taken Gurgeh to the park. The apex no longer tried to put himself in front of the cameras, but busily hurried them out of the way to clear a path for Gurgeh.

Gurgeh was introduced to Lo Wescekibold Ram. He was a short, bulky apex with a more rugged face than Gurgeh had expected and a military bearing.

Ram played quick, incisive lesser games, and they finished two on the first day, ending about even. Gurgeh only realised how hard he’d been concentrating that evening when he fell asleep watching the screen. He slept for almost six hours.

The next day they played another two of the lesser games, but the play extended, by agreement, into the evening session; Gurgeh felt the apex was testing him, trying to wear him out, or at least see what the limits of his endurance were; they would be playing all six of the lesser games before the three main boards, and Gurgeh already knew he was under much more strain playing Ram alone than he’d been competing against nine others.

After a great struggle, almost to midnight, Gurgeh finished fractionally ahead. He slept seven hours and woke up just in time to get ready for the next day’s play. He forced himself awake, glanding the Culture’s favourite breakfast drug, Snap, and was a little disappointed to see Ram looked just as fresh and energetic as he felt.

That game became another war of attrition, dragging through the afternoon, and Ram didn’t suggest playing into the evening. Gurgeh spent a couple of hours discussing the game with the ship during the evening, then, to wash it from his mind, watched the Empire’s broadcast channels for a while.

There were adventure programmes and quizzes and comedies, news-stations and documentaries. He looked for reports on his own game. He was mentioned, but the day’s rather dull play didn’t merit much space. He could see that the agencies were becoming less and less well-disposed to him, and he wondered if they now regretted standing up for him when he’d been ganged up on during the first match.

Over the next five days the news-stations became even less happy with “Alien Gurgey” (Eächic was phonetically less subtle than Marain, so his name was always going to be spelled incorrectly). He finished the lesser games about level with Ram, then beat him on the Board of Origin after being well down at one stage, and lost on the Board of Form only by the most slender of margins.

The news-agencies at once decided that Gurgeh was a menace to the Empire and the common good, and began a campaign to have him thrown off Eä. They claimed he was in telepathic touch with the Limiting Factor, or with the robot called Flere-Imsaho, that he used all manner of disgusting drugs which were kept in the vice den and drug emporium he lived in on the roof of the Grand Hotel, then — as though just discovering the fact — that he could make the drugs inside his own body (which was true) using glands ripped out of little children in appalling and fatal operations (which was not). The effect of these drugs seemed to be to turn him into either a super-computer or an alien sex-maniac (even both, in some reports).

One agency discovered Gurgeh’s Premises, which the ship had drawn up and registered with the Games Bureau. These were held to be typically shifty and mealy-mouthed Culture double-talk; a recipe for anarchy and revolution. The agencies adopted hushed and reverent tones as they appealed loyally to the Emperor to “do something” about the Culture, and blamed the Admiralty for having known about this gang of slimy perverts for decades without, apparently, showing them who was boss, or just crushing them completely (one daring agency even went so far as to claim the Admiralty wasn’t totally certain where the Culture’s home planet was). They offered up prayers that Lo Wescekibold Ram would wipe the Alien Gurgey off the Board of Becoming as decisively as the Navy would one day dispose of the corrupt and socialistic Culture. They urged Ram to use the physical option if he had to; that would show what the namby-pamby Alien was made of (perhaps literally!).

“Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.

“Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him.

Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.

After four days of the game on the Board of Becoming, Gurgeh was poised to win. He saw Ram talking worriedly with some of his advisors afterwards, and half expected the apex to offer his resignation then, after the afternoon session. But Ram decided to fight on; they agreed to forgo the evening session and resume the next morning.

The big tent ruffled slightly in a warm breeze as Flere-Imsaho joined Gurgeh at the exit. Pequil supervised the way being cleared through the crowds outside to where the car was waiting. The crowd was composed mostly of people who just wanted to see the alien, though there were a few demonstrating noisily against Gurgeh, and an even smaller number who were cheering him. Ram and his advisors left the tent first.

“I think I see Shohobohaum Za in the crowd,” the drone said as they waited at the exit. Ram’s entourage was still cluttering the far end of the ribbon of path held clear by the two lines of policemen.

Gurgeh glanced at the machine, then down the line of arm-linked police. He was still tensed from the game, bloodstream suffused with multifarious chemicals. As happened every now and again, everything he saw around him seemed to be part of the game; the way people stood like pieces, grouped according to who could take or affect whom; the way the pattern on the marquee was like a simple grid-area on the board, and the poles like planted power-sources waiting to replenish some exhausted minor piece and supporting a crux-point in the game; the way the people and police stood like the suddenly closed jaws of some nightmarish pincer-movement… all was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.

“Za?” Gurgeh said. He looked in the direction the drone’s field was pointing, but couldn’t see the man.

The last of Ram’s group cleared the pavement where the official cars waited. Pequil gestured for Gurgeh to proceed. They walked between the lines of uniformed males. Cameras pointed, questions were shouted. Some ragged chanting began and Gurgeh saw a banner waving over the heads of the crowd; “GO HOME ALIEN”.

“Seems I’m not too popular,” he said.

“You aren’t,” Flere-Imsaho told him.

In two steps (Gurgeh realised in a distant, game-sense way even as he was speaking and the drone was replying), he was going to be adjacent to… it took one more step to analyse the problem… something bad, something jarring and discordant… there was something… different; wrong about the three-group he was about to pass on his left; like unplaced ghost-pieces hiding in forest territory… He had no idea exactly what was wrong with the group, but he knew immediately — as the protagonising structures of the game-sense claimed precedence in his thoughts — that he wasn’t going to risk putting a piece in there.

… Another half-step…

… to realise that the piece he didn’t want to risk was himself.

He saw the three-group start to move and split up. He turned and ducked automatically; it was the obvious replying move of a threatened piece with too much momentum to stop or bound back from such an attacking force.

There were several loud bangs. The three-group of people burst towards him through the arms of two policemen, like a composite piece suddenly fragmenting. He converted his ducking motion into a dive and roll which he realised with some delight was the almost perfect physical equivalent to a trip-piece tying up a light-attacker. He felt a pair of legs thud into his side, not hard, then there was a weight on top of him and more loud noises. Something else fell on top of his legs.

It was like waking up.

He’d been attacked. There had been flashes, explosions, people launching themselves at him.

He struggled under the warm, animal weight on top of him, the one he’d tripped up. People were shouting; police moved quickly. He saw Pequil lying on the ground. Za was there too, standing looking rather confused. Somebody was screaming. No sign of Flere-Imsaho. Something warm was seeping into the hose he wore on his legs.

He struggled out from under the body lying on top of him, suddenly revolted by the thought that the person — apex or male, he couldn’t tell — might be dead. Shohobohaum Za and a policeman helped him up. There was a lot of shouting still; people were moving or being moved back, clearing a space around whatever had happened; bodies lay on the ground, some covered in bright red-orange blood. Gurgeh got dizzily to his feet.

“All right, game-player?” Za asked, grinning.

“Yes, I think so,” Gurgeh nodded. There was blood on his legs, but it was the wrong colour to be his.

Flere-Imsaho descended from the sky. “Jernau Gurgeh! Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Gurgeh looked around. “What happened?” he asked Shohobohaum Za. “Did you see what happened?” The police had drawn their guns and were clustered around the area; the people were moving away, the press-cameras were being forced back by shouting police. Five policemen were pinning somebody down on the grass. Two apices in civilian clothes lay on the path; the one Gurgeh had tripped was covered in blood. A policeman stood over each body; another two were tending to Pequil.

“Those three attacked you,” Za said, eyes flicking around as he nodded at the two bodies and the figure under the pile of police. Gurgeh could hear somebody sobbing loudly, in what was left of the crowd. Reporters were still shouting questions.

Za guided Gurgeh over to where Pequil lay, while Flere-Imsaho fussed and hummed overhead. Pequil lay on his back, eyes open, blinking, while a policeman cut away the blood-soaked sleeve of his uniform jacket. “Old Pequil here got in the way of a bullet,” Za said. “You all right, Pequil?” he shouted jovially.

Pequil smiled weakly and nodded.

“Meanwhile,” Za said, putting his arm round Gurgeh’s shoulders and looking round all the time, gaze darting everywhere, “your brave and resourceful drone here exceeded the speed of sound to get about twenty metres out of the way, upwards.”

“I was merely gaining height the better to ascertain wh—”

“You dropped,” Za told Gurgeh, still without looking at him, “and rolled; I thought they’d got you, actually. I managed to knock one of these bods on the head and I think the police burnt the other one.” Za’s gaze settled momentarily on the knot of people beyond the cordon of police, where the sobbing was coming from. “Somebody in the crowd got hit too; the bullets meant for you.”

Gurgeh looked down at one of the dead apices; his head lay at right-angles to his body, across his shoulder; it would have looked wrong on almost any humanoid. “Yeah, that’s the one I hit,” Za said, glancing briefly at the apex. “Bit too hard I think.”

“I repeat,” Flere-Imsaho said, moving round in front of Gurgeh and Za, “I was merely gaining height in order to—”

“Yes, we’re glad you’re safe, drone,” Za said, waving the buzzing bulk of the machine away like a large and cumbersome insect and guiding Gurgeh forward to where an apex in police uniform was gesturing towards the cars. Whooping noises sounded in the sky and the surrounding streets.

“Ah, here’s the boys,” Za said, as a wailing noise dopplered its way over the park, and a large orange-red airvan rushed out of the sky to land in a storm of dust on the grass near by; the marquee fabric flapped and banged and rippled in the blast of air. More heavily armed police jumped out of the van.

There was some confusion about whether they ought to go to the cars or not; finally they were taken back into the marquee and statements were taken from them and some other witnesses; two cameras were confiscated from protesting news-people.

Outside, the two dead bodies and the wounded attacker were loaded on to the airvan. An air-ambulance arrived for Pequil, who was lightly wounded in the arm.

As Gurgeh, Za and the drone finally left the marquee to be taken back to the hotel in a police aircraft, a groundcar-ambulance was pulling in through the park gates to pick up the two males and a female also injured in the attack.

“Nice little module,” Shohobohaum Za said, throwing himself into a formseat. Gurgeh sat down too. The noise of the departing policecraft echoed through the interior. Flere-Imsaho went quiet as soon as they got in and disappeared through to another part of the module.

Gurgeh ordered a drink from the module and asked Za if he would like anything. “Module,” Za said, sprawling out over the seat and looking thoughtful, “I’d like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Eflyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with roasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawlic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof.”

“Male or female warp-wing?” the module said.

“In this place?” Za laughed. “Hell; both.”

“It will take some minutes.”

“That is perfectly all right.” Za rubbed his hands together and then looked at Gurgeh. “So, you survived; well done.”

Gurgeh looked uncertain for an instant, then said, “Yes. Thanks.”

“Think comparatively little of it.” Za flapped one hand. “Quite enjoyed myself, actually. Just sorry I killed the guy.”

“I wish I could take such a magnanimous view,” Gurgeh said. “He was trying to kill me. And with bullets.” Gurgeh found the idea of being hit by a bullet particularly horrible.

“Well,” Za shrugged, “I’m not sure it makes much difference whether you’re killed by a projectile or a CREW; you’re just as dead. Anyway, I still feel sorry for those guys. Poor bastards were probably just doing their jobs.”

“Their jobs?” Gurgeh said, mystified.

Za yawned and nodded, stretching out in the folds of the accommodating formseat. “Yeah; they’ll be imperial secret police or Bureau Nine or something like that.” He yawned again. “Oh, the story’ll be they’re disaffected civilians… though they might try to hang it on the revs… but that’d be a bit unlikely…” Za grinned, shrugged. “Na; they might try it anyway; just for a laugh.”

Gurgeh thought. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t understand. You said these people were police. How—”

“Secret police, Jernau.”

“… But how can you have a secret policeman? I thought one of the points of having a uniform for the police was so that they could be easily identified and act as a deterrent.”

“Good grief,” Za said, covering his face with his hands. He put them down and gazed at Gurgeh. He took a deep breath. “Right… well; the secret police are people who go about listening to what people say when they aren’t being deterred by the sight of a uniform. Then if the person hasn’t actually said anything illegal, but has said something they think is dangerous to the security of the Empire, they kidnap them and interrogate them and — as a rule — kill them. Sometimes they send them to a penal colony but usually they incinerate them or throw them down an old mineshaft; the atmosphere here’s rich with revolutionary fervour, Jernau Gurgeh, and there are some rich seams of loose tongues beneath the city streets. They do other things as well, these secret police. What happened to you today was one of those other things.”

Za sat back and made an expansive, shrugging gesture. “Or, on the other hand, I suppose it isn’t impossible they really were revs, or disaffected citizens. Except that they moved all wrong… But that’s what secret police do, take it from me. Ah!”

A tray approached bearing a large bowl in a holder; vapour rose dramatically from the frothing, multi-coloured surface of the liquid. Za took the bowl.

“To the Empire!” he shouted, and drained it in one go. He slammed the bowl back on to the tray. “Haaa!” he exclaimed, sniffing and coughing and wiping his eyes with the sleeves of his tunic. He blinked at Gurgeh.

“Sorry if I’m being slow,” Gurgeh said, “but if these people were imperial police, mustn’t they have been acting on orders? What’s going on? Does the Empire want me dead because I’m winning the game against Ram?”

“Hmm,” Za said, coughing a little. “You’re learning, Jernau Gurgeh. Shit, I thought a game-player would have a bit more… natural deviousness about him… you’re a babe amongst the carnivores out here… anyway, yes, somebody in a position of power wants you dead.”

“Think they’ll try it again?”

Za shook his head. “Too obvious; they’d have to be pretty desperate to try something like that again… in the short term at least. I think they’ll wait and see what happens in your next ten game, then if they can’t ditch you in that they’ll get your next single opponent to use the physical option on you and hope you’ll scare off. If you get that far.”

“Am I really such a threat to them?”

“Hey, Gurgeh; they realise now they’ve made a mistake. You didn’t see the ’casts before you got here. They were saying you were the best player in the whole Culture and you were some sort of decadent slob, a hedonist who’d never worked a day in your life, that you were arrogant and totally convinced you were going to win the game, that you had all sorts of new glands sewn into your body, that you’d fucked your mother, men… animals for all I know, that you were half computer… then the Bureau saw some of your games you’d been playing on the way here, and announced—”

“What?” Gurgeh said, sitting forward. “What do you mean they’d seen some of the games I’d been playing?”

“They asked me for some recent games you’d played; I got in touch with the Limiting Factor — isn’t that thing a bore? — and had it send me the moves in a couple of your recent games against it. The Bureau said on the strength of those they were more than happy to let you play using your drug-glands and everything else… I’m sorry; I’d assumed the ship asked your permission first. Didn’t it?”

“No,” Gurgeh said.

“Well, anyway, they said you could play without restrictions. I don’t think they really wanted to — purity of the game, you know? — &&&but the orders must have been handed down. The Empire wanted to prove that even with your unfair advantages you still weren’t capable of staying in the Main Series. Your first couple of days’ play against that priest and his squad dies must have had them rubbing their little hands with glee, but then that out-of-the-hat stunt-win dropped their chins in their soup. Having you drawn against Ram in the single game probably seemed like a really good wheeze too, but now you’re about to kick his latrine boards out from under him and they’ve panicked. Za hiccuped. “Hence the bungled splat-job today.”

“So the draw against Ram wasn’t really random, either?”

“God’s balls, Gurgeh,” Za laughed. “No, man! Holy shit! Are you really this naïve?” He sat shaking his head and looking at the floor and hiccupping every now and again.

Gurgeh stood up and went to the opened module doors. He looked out at the city, shimmering in the late evening haze. Long tower shadows lay on it like widely spaced hairs on some near-bald pelt. Aircraft glinted sunset-red above it.

Gurgeh didn’t think he’d ever felt so angry and frustrated in his life. Another uncomfortable feeling to add to those he’d been experiencing lately, feelings he’d put down to the game, and to really playing seriously for the first time.

Everybody seemed to be treating him like a child. They happily decided what he need and need not be told, they kept things back from him that he ought to have been told, and when they did tell him they acted as if he should have known all the time.

He looked back at Za, but the man was sitting rubbing his belly and looking distracted. He belched loudly, then smiled happily and shouted, “Hey, module! Put up channel ten!.. yeah, on the screen; yo.” He got up and trotted forward to stand right in front of the screen, and stood there, arms folded, whistling tunelessly and grinning vacantly at the moving pictures. Gurgeh watched from the side.

The news showed film of imperial troopers landing on a distant planet. Towns and cities burned, refugee lines snaked, bodies were shown. There were interviews with the tearful families of slain troopers. The just invaded locals — hairy quadrupeds with prehensile lips — were shown lying down tied up in the mud, or on their knees before a portrait of Nicosar. One was shorn, so the people back home could see what they looked like under all that fur. Their lips had become prized trophies.

The following story was about Nicosar demolishing his opponent in the single game. The Emperor was shown walking from one part of the board to another, signing some documents in an office, then from a distance, standing on the board again while a commentator enthused over the way he’d played.

The attack on Gurgeh was next. He was amazed when he saw the incident on film. It was over in an instant; a sudden leap, him falling, the drone disappearing upwards, some flashes, Za springing forward out of the crowd, confusion and movement, then his face in close-up, a shot of Pequil on the ground, and another of the dead attackers. He was described as being dazed but unharmed, thanks to the prompt action of the police. Pequil was not seriously wounded; he was interviewed in hospital, explaining how he felt. The attackers were described as extremists.

“That means they might decide to call them revs later on,” Za said.

He told the screen to turn off, then turned to Gurgeh. “Didn’t you think I was quick there, though?” he said, grinning widely and throwing his arms wide. “Did you see the way I moved? It was beautiful!” He laughed and spun round, then half walked, half danced to the foamseat again, and fell into it. “Shit, I was only there to see what sort of loonies they had out protesting against you, but wow am I glad I went! What speed! Fucking animal grace, maestro!”

Gurgeh agreed Za had moved very quickly.

“Let’s see it again, module!” Za shouted. The module-screen obliged, and Shohobohaum Za laughed and giggled as he watched the few seconds of action. He replayed it a few more times, in slow motion, clapping his hands, then called for another drink. The frothing bowl came quicker this time, the module’s synthesisers having wisely kept the previous coding. Gurgeh sat down again, seeing that Za wasn’t thinking of leaving just yet. Gurgeh ordered some snacks; Za snorted in derision when offered food, and crunched the roasted weirdberries that came with his foaming cocktail.

They watched imperial broadcasts while Za slurped slowly at his drink. Outside, one sun went down and the city lights sparkled in the half-light. Flere-Imsaho appeared without its disguise — Za took no notice of it — and announced it was on its way out, making yet another foray into the avian population of the planet.

“Don’t think that thing fucks birds, d’you?” Za said after it had disappeared.

“No,” Gurgeh said, drinking his light wine.

Za snorted. “Hey; you want to come out again some time? That visit to the Hole was a real hoot. I really enjoyed it in a weird sort of way. How about it? Except let’s go totally wild this time; show these constipated bonebrains what Culture guys are like when they really put their minds to it.”

“I don’t think so,” Gurgeh said. “Not after that last time.”

“You mean you didn’t enjoy it?” Za said, astonished.

“Not that much.”

“But we had a great time! We got drunk, we got stoned, we got — well, one of us got laid, and you nearly did — we had a fight, which we won, dammit, and then we ran away… holy shit; what more do you want?”

“Not more, less. Anyway; I have other games to play.”

“You’re crazy; that was… a wonderful night out. Wonderful.” He rested his head on the seat-back and breathed deeply.

“Za,” Gurgeh said, sitting forward, chin in hand, elbow on knee, “why do you drink so much? You don’t need to; you’ve got all the usual glands. Why?”

“Why?” Za said, his head coming upright again; he looked round as though startled to see where he was for a moment. “Why?” he repeated. He hiccuped. “You ask me ‘Why?’ ?” he said.

Gurgeh nodded.

Za scratched under one armpit, shook his head and looked apologetic. “What was the question again?”

“Why do you drink so much?” Gurgeh smiled tolerantly.

“Why not?” Za’s arms flapped once. “I mean, have you never done something just… just because? I mean… It’s um… empathy. This is what the locals do, y’know. This is their way out; this is how they escape their place in the glorious imperial machine… and a fucking grand position it is to appreciate its finer points from too… it all makes sense, y’know Gurgeh; I worked it out.” Za nodded wisely, tapped the side of his head very slowly with one limp finger. “Worked it out,” he repeated. “Think about it; the Culture’s all its…” The same finger made a twirling motion in the air. “… built in glands; hundreds of secretions and thousands of effects, any combination you like and all for free… but the Empire, ah ha!” The finger pointed upwards. “In the Empire you got to pay; escape is a commodity like anything else. And it’s this stuff; drink. Lowers the reaction time, makes the tears come easier…” Za put two swaying fingers to his cheeks. “… makes the fists come easier…” Now his hands were clenched, and he pretended to box; jabbing. “… and…” He shrugged. “… it eventually kills you.” He looked more or less at Gurgeh. “See?” He spread his arms wide again and then let them fall back limply on the seat. “Besides,” he said, in a suddenly weary voice. “I don’t have all the usual glands.”

Gurgeh looked up in surprise. “You don’t?”

“Nup. Too dangerous. The Empire would disappear me and do the most thorough PM you ever seen. Want to find out what a Culturnik’s like inside, see?” Za closed his eyes. “Had to have almost everything taken out, and then… when I got here, let the Empire do all sorts of tests and take all sorts of samples… let them find out what they wanted without causing a diplomatic incident, disappearing an ambassador…”

“I see. I’m sorry.” Gurgeh didn’t know what else to say. He honestly hadn’t realised. “So all those drugs you were advising me to gland…”

“Guesswork, and memory,” Za said, eyes still shut. “Just trying to be friendly.”

Gurgeh felt embarrassed, almost ashamed.

Za’s head went back and he started to snore.

Then suddenly his eyes opened and he jumped up. “Well, must be toddling,” he said, making what looked like a supreme effort to pull himself together. He stood swaying in front of Gurgeh. “D’you think you could call me an air cab?”

Gurgeh did that. A few minutes later, after receiving clearance from Gurgeh via the guards on the roof, the machine arrived and took Shohobohaum Za away, singing.

Gurgeh sat for a little while as the evening wore on and the second sun set, then he finally dictated a letter to Chamlis Amalk-ney, thanking the old drone for the Orbital bracelet, which he still wore. He copied most of the letter to Yay, too, and told them both what had happened to him since he’d arrived. He didn’t bother to disguise the game he was playing or the Empire itself, and wondered how much of this truth would actually get through to his friends. Then he studied some problems on the screen and talked over the next day’s play with the ship.

He picked up Shohobohaum Za’s discarded bowl at one point, discovering there were still a few mouthfuls of drink left inside. He sniffed it, then shook his head, and told a tray to tidy the debris up.

Gurgeh finished Lo Wescekibold Ram off the next day with that the press described as ‘contempt’. Pequil was there, looking little the worse for wear save for a sling bandage on his arm. He said he was glad Gurgeh had escaped injury. Gurgeh told him how sorry he was Pequil had been hurt.

They went to and returned from the game-tent in an aircraft; the Imperial Office had decided Gurgeh was at too much risk travelling on the ground.

When he got back to the module again, Gurgeh discovered he was to have no interval between that game and the next; the Games Bureau had couriered a letter to say his next ten game would start the following morning.

“I’d have preferred a break,” Gurgeh confessed to the drone. He was having a float-shower, hanging in the middle of the AG chamber while the water sprayed from various directions and was sucked away through tiny holes all over the semi-spherical interior. Membrane plugs prevented the water from going into his nose, but speaking was still a little spluttery.

“No doubt you would,” Flere-Imsaho said in its squeaky voice. “But they’re trying to wear you out. And of course it means you’ll be playing against some of the best players, the ones who’ve also managed to finish their games quickly.”

“That had occurred to me,” Gurgeh said. He could only just see the drone through the spray and steam. He wondered what would happen if somehow the machine hadn’t been made quite perfectly and some water got into it. He turned lazily head over heels in the shifting currents of air and water.

“You could always appeal to the Bureau. I think it’s obvious you’re being discriminated against.”

“So do I. So do they. So what?”

“It might do some good to make an appeal.”

“You make it then.”

“Don’t be stupid; you know they ignore me.”

Gurgeh started humming to himself, eyes closed.

One of his opponents in the ten game was the same priest he’d beaten in the first one, Lin Goforiev Tounse; he’d won through his second-string games to rejoin the Main Series. Gurgeh looked at the priest when the apex entered the hall of the entertainment complex where they’d be playing, and smiled. It was an Azadian facial gesture he’d found himself practising occasionally, unconsciously, rather like a baby attempts to imitate the expressions on the faces of the adults around it. Suddenly it seemed like the right time to use it. He would never get it quite right, he knew — his face simply wasn’t built quite the same as an Azadian’s — but he could imitate the signal well enough for it to be unambiguous.

Translated or not, though, Gurgeh knew it was a smile that said, “Remember me? I’ve beaten you once and I’m looking forward to doing it again”; a smile of self-satisfaction, of victory, of superiority. The priest tried to smile back with the same signal, but it was unconvincing, and soon turned to a scowl. He looked away.

Gurgeh’s spirits soared. Elation filled him, burning bright inside. He had to force himself to calm down.

The other eight players had all, like Gurgeh, won their matches. Three were Admiralty or Navy men, one was an Army colonel, one a judge and the other three were bureaucrats. All were very good players.

At this third stage in the Main Series the contestants played a mini-tournament of one-against-one lesser games, and Gurgeh thought this would provide his best chance of surviving the match; on the main boards he was likely to face some sort of concerted action, but in the single games he had a chance of building up enough of an advantage to weather such storms.

He found himself taking great pleasure in beating Tounse, the priest. The apex swept his arm across the board after Gurgeh’s winning move, and stood up and started shouting and waving his fist at him, raving about drugs and heathens. Once, Gurgeh was aware, such a reaction would have brought him out in a cold sweat, or at the very least left him dreadfully embarrassed. But now he found himself just sitting back and smiling coldly.

Still, as the priest ranted at him, he thought the apex might be about to hit him, and his heart did beat a little faster… but Tounse stopped in mid-flow, looked round the hushed, shocked people in the room, seemed to realise where he was, and fled.

Gurgeh let out a breath, relaxed his face. The imperial Adjudicator came over and apologised on the priest’s behalf.

Flere-Imsaho was still popularly thought to be providing some sort of in-game aid to Gurgeh. The Bureau said that, to allay uninformed suspicions of this sort, they would like the machine to be held in the offices of an imperial computer company on the other side of the city during each session. The drone had protested noisily, but Gurgeh readily agreed.

He was still attracting large crowds to his games. A few came to glare and hiss, until they were escorted off the premises by game officials, but mostly they just wanted to see the play. The entertainment complex had facilities for diagrammatic representations of the main boards so that people outside the main hall could follow the proceedings, and some of Gurgeh’s sessions were even shown in live broadcasts, when they didn’t clash with the Emperor’s.

After the priest, Gurgeh played two of the bureaucrats and the colonel, winning all his games, though by a slender margin against the Army man. These games took a total of five days to play, and Gurgeh concentrated hard for all that time. He’d expected to feel worn-out at the end; he did feel slightly drained, but the primary sensation was one of jubilation. He’d done well enough to have at least a chance of beating the nine people the Empire had set against him, and far from appreciating the rest, he found he was actually impatient for the others to finish their minor games so that the contest on the main boards could begin.

“It’s all very well for you, but I’m being kept in a monitoring chamber all day! A monitoring chamber; I ask you! These meatbrains are trying to probe me! Beautiful weather outside and a major migratory season just starting, but I’m locked up with a shower of heinous sentientophiles trying to violate me!”

“Sorry, drone, but what can I do? You know they’re just looking for an excuse to throw me out. If you want, I’ll make a request you’re allowed to stay here in the module instead, but I doubt they’ll let you.”

“I don’t have to do this you know, Jernau Gurgeh; I can do what I like. If I wanted to I could just refuse to go. I’m not yours — or theirs — to be ordered around.”

“I know that but they don’t. Of course you can do as you please… whatever you see fit.”

Gurgeh turned away from the drone and back to the module-screen, where he was studying some classic ten games. Flere-Imsaho was grey with frustration. The normal green-yellow aura it displayed when out of its disguise had been growing increasingly pale over the past few days. Gurgeh almost felt sorry for it.

“Well…” Flere-Imsaho whined — and Gurgeh got the impression that had it had a real mouth it would have spluttered, too — “it’s just not good enough!” And with that rather lame remark, the drone whirled out of the lounge.

Gurgeh wondered just how badly the drone felt about being imprisoned all day. It had occurred to him recently that the machine might even have been instructed to stop him from getting too far in the games. If so, then refusing to be detained would be an acceptable way of doing it; Contact could justifiably claim that asking the drone to give up its freedom was an unreasonable request, and one it had every right to turn down. Gurgeh shrugged to himself; there was nothing he could do about it.

He switched to another old game.

Ten days later it was over, and Gurgeh was through to the fourth round; he had only one more opponent to beat and then he would be going to Echronedal for the final matches, not as an observer or guest, but as a contestant.

He’d built up the lead he’d hoped for in the lesser games, and in the main boards had not even tried to mount any great offensives. He’d waited for the others to come to him, and they had, but he was counting on them not being so willing to cooperate with each other as the players in the first match. These were important people; they had their own careers to think about, and however loyal they might be to the Empire, they had to look after their own interests as well. Only the priest had relatively little to lose, and so might be prepared to sacrifice himself for the imperial good and whatever not game-keyed post the Church could find for him.

In the game outside the game, Gurgeh thought the Games Bureau had made a mistake in pitching him against the first ten people to qualify. It appeared to make sense because it gave him no respite, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need any, and the tactic meant that his opponents were from different branches of the imperial tree, and thus harder to tempt with departmental inducements, as well as being less likely to know each other’s game-styles.

He’d also discovered something called inter-service rivalry — he’d found records of some old games that didn’t seem to make sense until the ship described this odd phenomenon — and made special efforts to get the Admiralty men and the colonel at each other’s throats. They’d needed little prompting.

It was a workmanlike match; uninspiring but functional, and he simply played better than any of the others. His winning margin wasn’t great, but it was a win. One of the Fleet vice-admirals came second. Tounse, the priest, finished last.

Again, the Bureau’s supposedly random scheduling gave him as little time as possible between matches, but Gurgeh was secretly pleased at this; it meant he could keep the same high pitch of concentration going from day to day, and it gave him no time to worry or stop too long to think. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, a part of him was sitting back as stunned and amazed as anybody else was at how well he was doing. If that part ever came forward, ever took centre-stage and was allowed to say, “Now wait a minute here…” he suspected his nerve would fail, the spell would break, and the walk that was a fall would become a plunge into defeat. As the adage said; falling never killed anybody; it was when you stopped…

Anyway, he was awash with a bitter-sweet flood of new and enhanced emotions; the terror of risk and possible defeat, the sheer exultation of the gamble that paid off and the campaign which triumphed; the horror of suddenly seeing a weakness in his position which could lose him the game; the surge of relief when nobody else noticed and there was time to plug the gap; the pulse of furious, gloating glee when he saw such a weakness in another’s game; and the sheer unbridled joy of victory.

And outside, the additional satisfaction of knowing that he was doing so much better than anybody had expected. All their predictions — the Culture’s, the Empire’s, the ship’s, the drone’s — had been wrong; apparently strong fortifications which had fallen to him. Even his own expectations had been exceeded, and if he worried at all, he worried that some subconscious mechanism would now let him relax a little, having proved so much, come so far, defeated so many. He didn’t want that; he wanted to keep going; he was enjoying all this. He wanted to find the measure of himself through this infinitely exploitable, indefinitely demanding game, and he didn’t want some weak, frightened part of himself to let him down. He didn’t want the Empire to use some unfair way of getting rid of him, either. But even that was only half a worry. Let them try to kill him; he had a reckless feeling of invincibility now. Just don’t let them try to disqualify him on some technicality. That would hurt.

But there was another way they might try to stop him. He knew that in the single game they would be likely to use the physical option. It was how they’d think; this Culture man would not accept the bet, he’d be too frightened. Even if he did accept, and fought on, the terror of knowing what might happen to him would paralyse him, devour and defeat him from inside.

He talked it over with the ship. The Limiting Factor had consulted with the Little Rascal — tens of millennia distant, in the greater Cloud — and felt able to guarantee his survival. The old warship would stay outside the Empire but power up to a maximum velocity, minimum radius holding circle as soon as the game started. If Gurgeh was forced to bet against a physical option, and lost, the ship would drive in at full speed for Eä. It was certain it could evade any imperial craft on the way, get to Eä within a few hours and use its heavy duty displacer to snap Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho off the place without even slowing down.

“What’s this?” Gurgeh looked dubiously at the tiny spherical pellet Flere-Imsaho had produced.

“Beacon and one-off communicator,” the drone told him. It dropped the tiny pellet into his hand, where it rolled around. “You put it under your tongue; it’ll implant; you’ll never know it’s there. The ship homes in on that as it comes in, if it can’t find you any other way. When you feel a series of sharp pains under your tongue — four stabs in two seconds — you’ve got two seconds to assume a foetal position before everything within a three-quarter metre radius of that pellet gets slung aboard the ship; so get your head between knees and don’t swing your arms about.”

Gurgeh looked at the pellet. It was about two millimetres across. “Are you serious, drone?”

“Profoundly. That ship’ll probably be on sprint boost; it could be dragging past here at anything up to one-twenty kilolights. At that speed even its heavy duty displacer will only be within range for about a fifth of a millisecond, so we’re going to need all the help we can get. This is a very dubious situation you’re putting me and yourself in, Gurgeh. I want you to know I’m not very happy about it.”

“Don’t worry, drone; I’ll make sure they don’t include you in the physical bet.”

“No; I mean the possibility of being displaced. It’s risky. I wasn’t told about this. Displacement fields in hyperspace are singularities, subject to the Uncertainty Principle—”

“Yeah; you might end up getting zapped into another dimension or something—”

“Or smeared over the wrong bit of this one, more to the point.”

“And how often does that happen?”

“Well, about once in eighty-three million displacements, but that’s not—”

“So it still compares pretty favourably with the risk you take getting into one of this gang’s groundcars, or even an aircraft. Be a rascal, Flere-Imsaho; risk it.”

“That’s all very well for you to say, but even if—”

Gurgeh let the machine witter on.

He’d risk it. The ship, if it did have to come in, would take a few hours to make the journey, but death-bets were never carried out until the next dawn, and Gurgeh was perfectly capable of switching off the pain of any tortures involved. The Limiting Factor had full medical facilities; it would be able to patch him up, if the worst happened.

He popped the pellet under his tongue; there was a sensation of numbness for a second, then it was gone, as though dissolved. He could just feel it with his finger, under the floor of his mouth.

He woke on the morning of the first day’s play with an almost sexual thrill of anticipation.

Another venue; this time it was a conference-centre near the shuttle-port he’d first arrived at. There he faced Lo Prinest Bermoiya, a judge in the Supreme Court of Eä, and one of the most impressive apices Gurgeh had yet seen. He was tall, silver-haired, and he moved with a grace Gurgeh found oddly, even disturbingly familiar, without at first being able to explain why. Then he realised the elderly judge walked like somebody from the Culture; there was a slow ease about the apex’s movements which lately Gurgeh had stopped taking for granted and so, for the first time in a way, seen.

Bermoiya sat very still between moves in the lesser games, staring at the board continually and only ever moving to shift a piece. His card-playing was equally studied and deliberate, and Gurgeh found himself reacting in the opposite manner, becoming nervous and fidgety. He fought back against this with body-drugs, deliberately calming himself, and over the seven full days the lesser games lasted gradually got to grips with the steady, considered pace of the apex’s style. The judge finished a little ahead after the games were totalled up. There had been no mention of bets of any sort.

They started play on the Board of Origin, and at first Gurgeh thought the Empire was going to be content to rely on Bermoiya’s obvious skill at Azad… but then, an hour into the game, the silver-haired apex raised his hand for the Adjudicator to approach. Together they came to Gurgeh, standing at one corner of the board. Bermoiya bowed. “Jernow Gurgey,” he said; the voice was deep, and Gurgeh seemed to hear a whole tome of authority within each bass syllable. “I must request that we engage in a wager of the body. Are you willing to consider this?”

Gurgeh looked into the large, calm eyes. He felt his own gaze falter; he looked down. He was reminded momentarily of the girl at the ball. He looked back up… to the same steady pressure from that wise and learned face.

This was someone used to sentencing his fellow creatures to execution, disfigurement, pain and prison; an apex who dealt in torture and mutilation and the power to command their use and even that of death itself to preserve the Empire and its values.

And I could just say “No”, Gurgeh thought. I’ve done enough. Nobody would blame me. Why not? Why not accept they’re better at this than I am? Why put yourself through the worry and the torment? Psychological torment at least, physical perhaps. You’ve proved all you had to, all you wanted, more than they expected.

Give in. Don’t be a fool. You’re not the heroic sort. Apply a bit of game-sense: you’ve won all you ever needed to. Back out now and show them what you think of their stupid “physical option”, their squalid, bullying threats … show them how little it really means.

But he wasn’t going to. He looked levelly into the apex’s eyes and he knew he was going to keep playing. He suspected he was going slightly mad, but he wasn’t going to give this up. He would take this fabulous, maniacal game by the scruff of the neck, jump up on to it and hold on.

And see how far it would take him before it threw him off, or turned and consumed him.

“I’m willing,” he said, eyes wide.

“I believe you are a male.”

“Yes,” Gurgeh said. His palms started to sweat.

“My bet is castration. Removal of the male member and testes against apicial gelding, on this one game on the Board of Origin. Do you accept?”

“I—” Gurgeh swallowed, but his mouth stayed dry. It was absurd; he was in no real danger. The Limiting Factor would rescue him; or he could just go through with it; he would feel no pain, and genitalia were some of the faster regrowing parts of the body… but still the room seemed to warp and distort in front of him, and he had a sudden, sickening vision of cloying red liquid, slowly staining black, bubbling… “Yes!” he blurted, forcing it out. “Yes,” he said to the Adjudicator.

The two apices bowed and retreated.

“You could call the ship now if you want,” Flere-Imsaho said. Gurgeh stared at the screen. In fact he was going to call the Limiting Factor, but only to discuss his present rather poor position in the game, not to scream for rescue. He ignored the drone.

It was night, and the day had gone badly for him. Bermoiya had played brilliantly and the news-services were full of the game. It was being hailed as a classic, and once again Gurgeh — with Bermoiya — was sharing news-leaders with Nicosar, who was still trampling all over the opposition, good though it was acknowledged to be.

Pequil, his arm still pinned up, approached Gurgeh in a subdued, almost reverent way after the evening session and told him there was a special watch being kept on the module which would last until the game was over. Pequil was sure Gurgeh was an honourable person, but those engaging in physical bets were always discreetly watched, and in Gurgeh’s case this was being done by a high-atmosphere AG cruiser, one of a squadron which constantly patrolled the not-quite-space above Groasnachek. The module would not be allowed to move from its position on the hotel roof-garden.

Gurgeh wondered how Bermoiya was feeling now. He had noticed that the apex had said “must” when he stated his intention of using the physical option. Gurgeh had come to respect the apex’s style of play, and, therefore, Bermoiya himself. He doubted the judge had any great desire to use the option, but the situation had grown serious for the Empire; it had assumed he’d be beaten by now, and based its strategy of exaggerating the threat he posed to them on that assumption. This supposedly winning play was turning into a small disaster. Rumours were that heads had already rolled in the Imperial Office over the affair. Bermoiya would have been given his orders; Gurgeh had to be stopped.

Gurgeh had checked on the fate the apex would suffer in the now unlikely event it was he and not Gurgeh who lost. Apicial gelding meant the full and permanent removal of the reversible apex vagina and ovaries. Thinking about that, considering what would be done to the steady, stately judge if he lost, Gurgeh realised he hadn’t properly thought through the implications of the physical option. Even if he did win, how could he let another being be mutilated? If Bermoiya lost, it would be the end of him; career, family, everything. The Empire did not allow the regeneration or replacement of any wager lost body parts; the judge’s loss would be permanent and possibly fatal; suicide was not unknown in such cases. Perhaps it would be best if Gurgeh did lose.

The trouble was he didn’t want to. He didn’t feel any personal animosity towards Bermoiya, but he desperately wanted to win this game, and the next one, and the one after that. He hadn’t realised how seductive Azad was when played in its home environment. While it was technically the same game he’d played on the Limiting Factor, the whole feeling he had about it, playing it where it was meant to be played, was utterly different; now he realised… now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game; Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance…

Flere-Imsaho stayed in the module that evening. Gurgeh contacted the ship and discussed his forlorn position in the game; the ship could, as usual, see some unlikely ways out, but they were ways he’d already seen for himself. Recognising they were there was one thing though; following them through on the board itself in the midst of play was another matter. So the ship was no great help there.

Gurgeh gave up analysing the game and asked the Limiting Factor what he could do about ameliorating the bet he had with Bermoiya if — unlikely though it was — he won, and it was the judge who had to face the surgeon. The answer was nothing. The bet was on and that was it. Neither of them could do anything; they had to play to a finish. If they both refused to play then they would both suffer the bet-penalties.

“Jernau Gurgeh,” the ship said, sounding hesitant. “I need to know what you would like me to do, if things go badly tomorrow.”

Gurgeh looked down. He’d been waiting for this. “You mean, do I want you to come in and snatch me off here, or go through with it and be picked up later, with my tail but not much else between my legs, and wait for everything to regrow? But of course having kept the Culture sweet with the Empire in the process.” He didn’t try to disguise the sarcasm in his voice.

“More or less,” the ship said, after the delay. “The problem is, while it would cause less of a fuss if you did go through with it, I’ll have to displace or destroy your genitals anyway, if they are removed; the Empire would have access to rather too much information about us, if they did a full analysis.”

Gurgeh almost laughed. “You’re saying my balls are some sort of state secret?”

“Effectively. So we’re going to annoy the Empire anyway, even if you do let them operate on you.”

Gurgeh was still thinking, even after the delayed signal arrived. He curled his tongue in his mouth, feeling the tiny lump under the soft tissue. “Ah, fuck it,” he said, eventually. “Watch the game; if I’ve definitely lost, I’ll try and hold out for as long as possible; somewhere, anywhere. When I’m obviously doing that, come in; zap us off here and make my apologies to Contact. If I just cave in… let it happen. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.”

“Very well,” the ship said, while Gurgeh sat stroking his beard, thinking that, if nothing else, he’d been given the choice. But if they hadn’t been going to remove the evidence and possibly cause a diplomatic incident anyway, would Contact have been so accommodating? It didn’t matter. But he knew in his heart, after that conversation, he’d lost the will to win.

The ship had more news. It had just received a signal from Chamlis Amalk-ney, promising a longer message soon, but for the mean time just letting him know that Olz Hap had finally done it; she’d achieved a Full Web. A Culture player had — at last — produced the ultimate Stricken result. The young lady was the toast of Chiark and the Culture game-players. Chamlis had already congratulated her on Gurgeh’s behalf, but expected he’d want to send her a signal of his own. It wished him well.

Gurgeh switched the screen off and sat back. He sat and stared at the blank space for a while, unsure what to know, or think, or remember, or even be. A sad smile touched one side of his face, for a while.

Flere-Imsaho floated over to his shoulder.

“Jernau Gurgeh. Are you tired?”

He turned to it eventually. “What? Yes; a little.” He stood up, stretched. “Doubt I’ll sleep much, though.”

“I thought that might be the case. I wondered if you would like to come with me.”

“What, to look at birds? I don’t think so, drone. Thanks anyway.”

“I wasn’t thinking of our feathered friends, actually. I have not always gone to watch them when I’ve gone out at nights. Sometimes I went to different parts of the city; to look for whatever species of birds might be there, at first, but later because… well; because.”

Gurgeh frowned. “Why do you want me to come with you?”

“Because we might be leaving here rather quickly tomorrow, and it occurred to me that you’ve seen very little of the city.”

Gurgeh waved one hand. “Za showed me quite enough of that.”

“I doubt he showed you what I’m thinking of. There are many different things to see.”

“I’m not interested in seeing the sights, drone.”

“The sights I’m thinking of will interest you.”

“Would they now?”

“I believe so. I think I know you well enough to tell. Please come, Jernau Gurgeh. You’ll be glad, I swear. Please come. You did say you wouldn’t sleep, didn’t you? Well then, what do you have to lose?” The drone’s fields were their normal green-yellow colour, quiet and controlled. Its voice was low, serious.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “What are you up to, drone?”

“Please, please come with me, Gurgeh.” The drone floated off towards the nose of the module. Gurgeh stood, watching it. It stopped by the door from the lounge. “Please, Jernau Gurgeh. I swear you won’t regret this.”

Gurgeh shrugged. “Yeah, yeah, all right.” He shook his head. “Let’s go out to play,” he muttered to himself.

He followed the drone as it moved towards the module nose. There was a compartment there with a couple of AG bikes, a few floater harnesses and some other pieces of equipment.

“Put on a harness, please. I won’t be a moment.” The drone left Gurgeh to fasten the AG harness on over his shorts and shirt. It reappeared shortly afterwards holding a long, black, hooded cloak. “Now put this on, please.”

Gurgeh put the cloak on over the harness. Flere-Imsaho shoved the hood up over his head and tied it so that Gurgeh’s face was hidden from the sides and in deep shadow from the front. The harness didn’t show beneath the thick material. The lights in the compartment dimmed and went out, and Gurgeh heard something move overhead. He looked up to see a square of dim stars directly above him.

“I’ll control your harness, if that’s all right with you,” the drone whispered. Gurgeh nodded.

He was lifted quickly into the darkness. He did not dip again as he’d expected, but kept going up into the fragrant warmth of the city night. The cloak fluttered quietly around him; the city was a swirl of lights, a seemingly never-ending plain of scattered radiance. The drone was a small, still shadow by his shoulder.

They set out over the city. They overflew roads and rivers and great buildings and domes, ribbons and clumps and towers of light, areas of vapour drifting over darkness and fire, rearing towers where reflections burned and lights soared, quivering stretches of dark water and broad dark parks of grass and trees. Finally they started to drop.

They landed in an area where there were relatively few lights, dropping between two darkened, windowless buildings. His feet touched down in the dirt of an alley.

“Excuse me,” the drone said, and nudged its way into the hood until it was floating up-ended by Gurgeh’s left ear. “Walk down here,” it whispered. Gurgeh walked down the alley. He tripped over something soft, and knew before he turned it was a body. He looked closer at the bundle of rags, which moved a little. The person was curled up under tattered blankets, head on a filthy sack. He couldn’t tell what sex it was; the rags offered no clue.

“Ssh,” the drone said as he opened his mouth to speak. “That is just one of the loafers Pequil was talking about; somebody shifted off the land. He’s been drinking; that’s part of the smell. The rest is him.” It was only then that Gurgeh caught the stench rising from the still sleeping male. He almost gagged.

“Leave him,” Flere-Imsaho said.

They left the alley. Gurgeh had to step over another two sleeping people. The street they found themselves on was dim and stank of something Gurgeh suspected was supposed to be food. A few people were walking about. “Stoop a little,” the drone said. “You’ll pass for a Minan disciple dressed like this, but don’t let the hood fall, and don’t stand upright.”

Gurgeh did as he was told.

As he walked up the street, under the dim, grainy, flickering light of sporadic, monochrome streetlamps, he passed what looked like another drunk, lying against a wall. There was blood between the apex’s legs, and a dark, dried stream of it leading from his head. Gurgeh stopped.

“Don’t bother,” came the little voice. “He’s dying. Probably been in a fight. The police don’t come here too often. And nobody’s likely to call for medical aid; he’s obviously been robbed, so they’d have to pay for the treatment themselves.”

Gurgeh looked round, but there was nobody else near by. The apex’s eyelids fluttered briefly, as though he was trying to open them. The fluttering stopped.

“There,” Flere-Imsaho said quietly.

Gurgeh continued up the street. Screams came from high up in a grimy housing block on the far side of the street. “Just some apex beating up his woman. You know for millennia females were thought to have no effect on the heredity of the children they bore? They’ve known for five hundred years that they do; a viral DNA analogue which alters the genes a woman’s impregnated with. Nevertheless, under the law females are simply possessions. The penalty for murdering a woman is a year’s hard labour, for an apex. A female who kills an apex is tortured to death over a period of days. Death by Chemicals. Said to be one of the worst. Keep walking.”

They came to an intersection with a busier street. A male stood on the corner, shouting in a dialect Gurgeh didn’t understand. “He’s selling tickets for an execution,” the drone said. Gurgeh raised his eyebrows, turned his head fractionally. “I’m serious,” Flere-Imsaho said. Gurgeh shook his head all the same.

Filling the middle of the street was a crowd of people. The traffic — only about half of it powered, the rest human-driven — was forced to mount the pavements. Gurgeh went to the back of the crowd, thinking that with his greater height he would be able to see what was happening, but he found people making way for him anyway, drawing him closer to the centre of the crowd.

Several young apices were attacking an old male lying on the ground. The apices wore some sort of strange uniform, though somehow Gurgeh knew it was not an official uniform. They kicked the old male with a sort of poised savagery, as though the attack was some kind of competitive ballet of pain, and they were being evaluated on artistic impression as well as the raw torment and physical injury inflicted.

“In case you think this is staged in any way,” Flere-Imsaho whispered, “it isn’t. These people aren’t paying anything to watch this, either. This is simply an old guy getting beaten up, probably just for the sake of it, and these people would rather watch than do anything to stop it.”

As the drone spoke, Gurgeh realised he was at the front of the crowd. Two of the young apices looked up at him.

In a detached way, Gurgeh wondered what would happen now. The two apices shouted at him, then they turned and pointed him out to the others. There were six of them. They all stood — ignoring the whimpering male on the ground behind them — and looked steadily at Gurgeh. One of them, the tallest, undid something in the tight, metallically decorated trousers he wore and hooked out the half-flaccid vagina in its turned-out position, and, with a wide smile, first held it out to Gurgeh, then turned round waving it at the others in the crowd.

Nothing more. The young, identically clad apices grinned at the people for a while, then just walked away; each stepped, as though accidentally, on the head of the crumpled old male on the ground. The crowd started to drift off. The old man lay on the roadway, covered in blood. A sliver of grey bone poked through the arm of the tattered coat he wore, and there were teeth scattered on the road surface near his head. One leg lay oddly, the foot turned outwards, slack looking.

He moaned. Gurgeh started forward and began to stoop.

“Do not touch him!”

The drone’s voice stopped Gurgeh like a brick wall. “If any of these people see your hands or face, you’re dead. You’re the wrong colour, Gurgeh. Listen; a few hundred dark-skinned babies are still born each year, as the genes work themselves out. They’re supposed to be strangled and their bodies presented to the Eugenics Council for a bounty, but a few people risk death and bring them up, blanching their skins as they grow older. If anybody thought you were one, especially in a disciple’s cloak, they’d skin you alive.”

Gurgeh backed off, kept his head down, and stumbled off down the road.

The drone pointed out prostitutes — mostly females — who sold their sexual favours to apices for a few minutes, or hours, or for the night. In some parts of the city, the drone said as they travelled the dark streets, there were apices who had lost limbs and could not afford grafted arms and legs amputated from criminals; these apices hired their bodies to males.

Gurgeh saw many cripples. They sat on street corners, selling trinkets, playing music on scratchy, squeaky instruments, or just begging. Some were blind, some had no arms, some had no legs. Gurgeh looked at the damaged people and felt dizzy; the gritty surface of the street beneath him seemed to tip and heave. For a moment it was as though the city, the planet, the whole Empire swirled around him in a frantic spinning tangle of nightmare shapes; a constellation of suffering and anguish, an infernal dance of agony and mutilation. They passed garish shops full of brightly coloured rubbish, state-run drug and alcohol stores, stalls selling religious statues, books, artefacts and ceremonial paraphernalia, kiosks vending tickets for executions, amputations, tortures and staged rapes — mostly lost Azad body-bets — and hawkers selling lottery tickets, brothel introductions and unlicensed drugs. A groundvan passed full of police; the nightly patrol. A few of the hawkers scuttled into alleyways and a couple of kiosks slammed suddenly shut as the van drove by, but opened again immediately afterwards.

In a tiny park, they found an apex with two bedraggled males and a sick-looking female on long leads. He was making them attempt tricks, which they kept getting wrong; a crowd stood round laughing at their antics. The drone told him the trio were almost certainly mad, and had nobody to pay for their stay in mental hospital, so they’d been de-citizenised and sold to the apex. They watched the pathetic, bedraggled creatures trying to climb lamp-posts or form a pyramid for a while, then Gurgeh turned away. The drone told him one in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. The figure was higher for males than for apices, and higher for females than either. The same applied to the rates of suicide, which was illegal.

Flere-Imsaho directed him to a hospital. It was typical, the drone said. Like the whole area, it was about average for the greater city. The hospital was run by a charity, and many of the people working there were unpaid. The drone told him everybody would assume he was a disciple there to see one of his flock, but anyway the staff were too busy to stop and quiz everybody they saw in the place. Gurgeh walked through the hospital in a daze.

There were people with limbs missing, as he’d seen in the streets, and there were people turned odd colours or covered with scabs and sores. Some were stick-thin; grey skin stretched over bone. Others lay gasping for breath, or retching noisily behind thin screens, moaning or mumbling or screaming. He saw people still covered in blood waiting to be attended to, people doubled-up coughing blood into little bowls, and others strapped into metal cots, beating their heads on the sides, saliva frothing over their lips.

Everywhere there were people; on bed after bed and cot after cot and mattress after mattress, and everywhere, too, there were the enveloping odours of corrupting flesh, harsh disinfectant and bodily wastes.

It was an average-bad night, the drone informed him. The hospital was a little more crowded than usual because several ships of the Empire’s war-wounded had come back recently from famous victories. Also, it was the night when people got paid and didn’t have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes, the incidence of unemployment, per capita income as a ratio of total population in given areas, birth-tax and death-tax and the penalties for abortion and illegitimate birth; it talked about laws governing types of sexual congress, about charitable payments and religious organisations running soup kitchens and night shelters and first-aid clinics; about numbers and figures and statistics and ratios all the time, and Gurgeh didn’t think he picked up a word of it. He just wandered round the building for what seemed like hours, then he saw a door and left.

He was standing in a small garden, dark and dusty and deserted, at the back of the hospital, hemmed in on all sides. Yellow light from grimy windows spilled on to the grey grass and cracked paving-stones. The drone said it still had things it wanted to show him. It wanted him to see a place where down-and-outs slept; it thought it could get him into a prison as a visitor—

“I want to go back; now!” he shouted, throwing back the hood.

“All right!” the drone said, tugging the hood back up. They lifted off, going straight up for a long time before they started to head for the hotel and the module. The drone said nothing. Gurgeh was silent too, watching the great galaxy of lights that was the city as it passed beneath his feet.

They got back to the module. The roof-door opened for them as they fell, and the lights came on after it closed again. Gurgeh stood for a while as the drone took the cloak from him and unclipped the AG harness. Slipping down off his shoulders, the removal of the harness left him with an odd sensation of nakedness.

“I’ve one more thing I’d like to show you,” the drone said. It moved down the corridor to the module lounge. Gurgeh followed it.

Flere-Imsaho floated in the centre of the room. The screen was on, showing an apex and a male copulating. Background music surged; the setting was plush with cushions and thick drapes. “This is an Imperial Select channel,” the drone said. “Level One, mildly scrambled.” The scene switched, then switched again, each time showing a slightly different mix of sexual activity, from solo masturbation through to groups involving all three Azadian sexes.

“This sort of thing is restricted,” the drone said. “Visitors aren’t supposed to see it. The unscrambling apparatus is available for a price on the general market, however. Now we’ll see some Level Two channels. These are restricted to the Empire’s bureaucratic, military, religious and commercial upper echelons.”

The screen went briefly hazy with a swirl of random colours, then cleared to show some more Azadians, mostly naked or very scantily clad. Again, the emphasis was on sexuality, but there was another, new element in what was happening; many of the people wore very strange and uncomfortable-looking clothes, and some were being tied up and beaten, or put into various absurd positions in which they were sexually used. Females dressed in uniforms ordered males and apices around. Gurgeh recognised some of the uniforms as those worn by Imperial Navy officers; others looked like exaggerations of more ordinary uniforms. Some of the apices were dressed in male clothes, some in female dress. Apices were made to eat their own or somebody else’s excreta, or drink their urine. The wastes of other pan-human species seemed to be particularly prized for this practice. Mouths and anuses, animals and aliens were penetrated by males and apices; aliens and animals were persuaded to mount the various sexes, and objects — some everyday, some apparently specially made — were used as phallic substitutes. In every scene, there was an element of… Gurgeh supposed it was dominance.

He’d been only mildly surprised that the Empire wanted to hide the material shown on the first level; a people so concerned with rank and protocol and clothed dignity might well want to restrict such things, harmless though they might be. The second level was different; he thought it gave the game away a little, and he could understand them being embarrassed about it. It was clear that the delight being taken in Level Two was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense. Level One had been about sex; this was about something the Empire obviously thought more of but could not disentangle from that act.

“Now Level Three,” the drone said.

Gurgeh watched the screen.

Flere-Imsaho watched Gurgeh.

The man’s eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused photons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited for the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long-stilled moon.

The screams echoed through the lounge, over its foamseats and couches and low tables; the screams of apices, men, women, children. Sometimes they were silenced quickly, but usually not. Each instrument, and each part of the tortured people, made its own noise; blood, knives, bones, lasers, flesh, ripsaws, chemicals, leeches, fleshworms, vibraguns, even phalluses, fingers and claws; each made or produced their own distinctive sounds, counterpoints to the theme of screams. The final scene the man watched featured a psychotic male criminal previously injected with massive doses of sex hormones and hallucinogens, a knife, and a woman described as an enemy of the state, who was pregnant, and just before term.

The eyes closed. His hands went to his ears. He looked down. “Enough,” he muttered.

Flere-Imsaho switched the screen off. The man rocked backwards on his heels, as though there had indeed been some attraction, some artificial gravity from the screen, and now that it had ceased, he almost over-balanced in reaction.

“That one is live, Jernau Gurgeh. It is taking place now. It is still happening, deep in some cellar under a prison or a police barracks.”

Gurgeh looked up at the blank screen, eyes still wide and staring, but dry. He gazed, rocked backwards and forwards, and breathed deeply. There was sweat on his brow, and he shivered.

“Level Three is for the ruling elite only. Their strategic military signals are given the same encrypting status. I think you can see why.

“This is no special night, Gurgeh, no festival of sado-erotica. These things go out every evening… There is more, but you’ve seen a representative cross-section.”

Gurgeh nodded. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with some difficulty, took a few more deep breaths, rubbed his beard. He opened his mouth to speak, but the drone spoke first.

“One other thing. Something else they kept from you. I didn’t know this myself until last night, when the ship mentioned it. Ever since you played Ram your opponents have been on various drugs as well. Cortex-keyed amphetamines at least, but they have far more sophisticated drugs which they use too. They have to inject, or ingest them; they don’t have genofixed glands to manufacture drugs in their own bodies, but they certainly use them; most of the people you’ve been playing have had far more ‘artificial’ chemicals and compounds in their bloodstream than you’ve had.”

The drone made a sighing noise. The man was still staring at the dead screen. “That’s it,” the drone said. “I’m sorry if what I’ve shown you has upset you, Jernau Gurgeh, but I didn’t want you to leave here thinking the Empire was just a few venerable game-players, some impressive architecture and a few glorified night-clubs. What you’ve seen tonight is also what it’s about. And there’s plenty in between that I can’t show you; all the frustrations that affect the poor and the relatively well-off alike, caused simply because they live in a society where one is not free to do as one chooses. There’s the journalist who can’t write what he knows is the truth, the doctor who can’t treat somebody in pain because they’re the wrong sex… a million things every day, things that aren’t as melodramatic and gross as what I’ve shown you, but which are still part of it, still some of the effects.

“The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I’d say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises the ‘sanctity’ of the body… but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having.” Flere-Imsaho paused, then floated towards Gurgeh, came very close to him. “Ah, but I’m preaching again, aren’t I? The excesses of youth. I’ve kept you up late. Maybe you’re ready for some sleep now; it’s been a long night, hasn’t it? I’ll leave you.” It turned and floated away. It stopped near the door again. “Good night,” it said.

Gurgeh cleared his throat. “Good night,” he said, looking away from the dark screen at last. The drone dipped and disappeared.

Gurgeh sat down on a formseat. He stared at his feet for a while, then got up and walked outside the module, into the roof-garden. The dawn was just coming up. The city looked washed-out somehow, and cold. The many lights burned weakly, brilliance sapped by the calm blue vastness of the sky. A guard at the stairwell entrance coughed and stamped his feet, though Gurgeh could not see him.

He went back into the module and lay down on his bed. He lay in the darkness without closing his eyes, then closed his eyes and turned over, trying to sleep. He could not, and neither could he bring himself to secrete something that would make him sleep.

At last he got up and went back to the lounge where the screen was. He had the module access the game-channels, and sat there looking at his own game with Bermoiya for a long time, without moving or speaking, and without a single molecule of glanded drug in his bloodstream.

A prison ambulance stood outside the conference-centre. Gurgeh got out of the aircraft and walked straight into the game-hall. Pequil had to run to keep up with the man. The apex didn’t understand the alien; he hadn’t wanted to talk during the journey from the hotel to the conference-centre, whereas usually people in such a situation couldn’t stop talking… and somehow he didn’t seem to be frightened at all, though Pequil couldn’t see how that could be. If he hadn’t known the awkward, rather innocent alien better, he’d have thought it was anger he could read on that discoloured, hairy, pointed face.

Lo Prinest Bermoiya sat in a stoolseat just off the Board of Origin. Gurgeh stood on the board itself. He rubbed his beard with one long finger, then moved a couple of pieces. Bermoiya made his own moves, then when the action spread — as the alien tried desperately to wriggle out of his predicament — the judge had some amateur players make most of his moves for him. The alien remained on the board, making his own moves, scurrying to and fro like a giant, dark insect. Bermoiya couldn’t see what the alien was playing at; his play seemed to be without purpose, and he made some moves which were either stupid mistakes or pointless sacrifices. Bermoiya mopped up some of the alien’s tattered forces. After a while, he thought perhaps the male did have a plan, of sorts, but if so it must be a very obscure one. Perhaps there was some kind of odd, face-saving point the male was trying to make, while he still was a male.

Who knew what strange precepts governed an alien’s behaviour at such a moment? The moves went on; inchoate, unreadable. They broke for lunch. They resumed.

Bermoiya didn’t return to the stoolseat after the break; he stood at the side of the board, trying to work out what slippery, ungraspable plan the alien might have. It was like playing a ghost, now; it was as though they were competing on separate boards. He couldn’t seem to get to grips with the male at all; his pieces kept slipping away from him, moving as though the man had anticipated his next move before he’d even thought of it.

What had happened to the alien? He’d played quite differently yesterday. Was he really receiving help from outside? Bermoiya felt himself start to sweat. There was no need for it; he was still well ahead, still poised for victory, but suddenly he began to sweat. He told himself it was nothing to worry about; a side-effect of some of the concentration boosters he’d taken over lunch.

Bermoiya made some moves which ought to settle what was going on; expose the alien’s real plan, if he had one. No result. Bermoiya tried some more exploratory gestures, committing a little more to the attempt. Gurgeh attacked immediately.

Bermoiya had spent a hundred years learning and playing Azad, and he’d sat in courts of every level for half that time. He’d seen many violent outbursts by just-sentenced criminals, and watched — and even taken part in — games containing moves of great suddenness and ferocity. Nevertheless, the alien’s next few moves contrived to be on a level more barbarous and wild than anything Bermoiya had witnessed, in either context. Without the experience of the courts, he felt he might have physically reeled.

Those few moves were like a series of kicks in the belly; they contained all the berserk energy the very best young players spasmodically exhibited; but marshalled, synchronised, sequenced and unleashed with a style and a savage grace no untamed beginner could have hoped to command. With the first move Bermoiya saw what the alien’s plan might be. With the next move he saw how good the plan was; with the next that the play might go on into the following day before the alien could finally be vanquished; with the next that he, Bermoiya, wasn’t in quite as unassailable a position as he’d thought… and with the following two that he still had a lot of work to do, and then that perhaps the play wouldn’t last until tomorrow after all.

Bermoiya made his own moves again, trying every ploy and stratagem he’d learned in a century of game-playing; the disguised observation piece, the feint-within-the-feint using attack-pieces and card-stock; the premature use of the Board of Becoming element pieces, making a swamp on the territories by the conjunction of Earth and Water… but nothing worked.

He stood, just before the break, at the end of the afternoon session, and he looked at the alien. The hall was silent. The alien male stood in the middle of the board, staring impassively at some minor piece, rubbing at the hair on his face. He looked calm, unperturbed.

Bermoiya surveyed his own position. Everything was in a mess; there was nothing he could do now. Beyond redemption. It was like some badly prepared, fundamentally flawed case, or some piece of equipment, three-quarters destroyed; there was no saving it; better to throw it out and start again.

But there was no starting again. He was going to be taken out of here and taken to hospital and spayed; he was going to lose that which made him what he was, and he would never be allowed to have it back; gone for ever. For ever.

Bermoiya couldn’t hear the people in the hall. He couldn’t see them, either, or see the board beneath his feet. All he could see was the alien male, standing tall and insect-like with his sharp-featured face and his angular body and stroking his furred face with one long, dark finger, the two-part nails at its tip showing the lighter skin beneath.

How could he look so unconcerned? Bermoiya fought the urge to scream; a great breath surged out of him. He thought how easy this had all looked this morning; how fine it had felt that not only would he be going to the Fire Planet for the final games, but also that he would be doing the Imperial Office a great favour at the same time. Now he thought that perhaps they had always known this might happen and they wanted him humiliated and brought down (for some reason he could not know, because he had always been loyal and conscientious. A mistake; it had to be a mistake…).

But why now? he thought, why now?

Why this time of all times, why this way, for this bet? Why had they wanted him to do this thing and make this wager when he had within him the seed of a child? Why?

The alien rubbed his furry face, pursed his strange lips as he looked down at some point on the board. Bermoiya began to stumble towards the male, oblivious of the obstacles in his way, trampling the biotechs and the other pieces under his feet and crashing over the raised pyramids of higher ground.

The male looked round at him, as though seeing him for the first time. Bermoiya felt himself stop. He gazed into the alien eyes.

And saw nothing. No pity, no compassion, no spirit of kindness or sorrow. He looked into those eyes, and at first he thought of the look criminals had sometimes, when they’d been sentenced to a quick death. It was a look of indifference; not despair, not hatred, but something flatter and more terrifying than either; a look of resignation, of all-hope-gone; a flag hoisted by a soul that no longer cared.

Yet although, in that instant of recognition, the doomed convict was the first image Bermoiya clutched at, he knew immediately it was not the fit one. He did not know what the fit one was. Perhaps it was unknowable.

Then he knew. And suddenly, for the first time in his life, he understood what it was for the condemned to look into his eyes.

He fell. To his knees at first, thudding down on to the board, cracking raised areas, then forward, on to his face, eyes level with the board, seeing it from the ground at last. He closed his eyes.

The Adjudicator and his helpers came over to him and gently lifted him; paramedics strapped him to the stretcher, sobbing quietly, and carried him outside to the prison ambulance.

Pequil stood amazed. He had never thought he would see an imperial judge break down like that. And in front of the alien! He had to run after the dark man; he was striding back out of the hall as quickly and quietly as he’d arrived: ignoring the hisses and shouts from the public galleries around him. They were in the aircar before even the press could catch up, speeding away from the game-hall.

Gurgeh, Pequil realised, had not said a single word the whole time they’d been in the hall.

Flere-Imsaho watched the man. It had expected more of a reaction, but he did nothing except sit at the screen, watching replays of all the games he’d played since he’d arrived. He wouldn’t talk.

He would be going to Echronedal now, along with a hundred and nineteen other fourth-round single-game winners. As was usual after a bet of such severity had been honoured, the family of the now mutilated Bermoiya had resigned for him. Without moving a piece on either of the two remaining great boards, Gurgeh had won the match and his place on the Fire Planet.

Some twenty days remained between the end of Gurgeh’s game against Bermoiya and the date when the imperial court’s fleet departed for the twelve-day journey to Echronedal. Gurgeh had been invited to spend part of that time at an estate owned by Hamin, the rector of the ruling College of Candsev, and mentor to the Emperor. Flere-Imsaho had advised against it, but Gurgeh had accepted. They would leave tomorrow for the estate, a few hundred kilometres distant on an island in an inland sea.

Gurgeh was taking what the drone believed was an unhealthy, even perverse interest in what the news- and press-agencies were saying about him. The man seemed actually to relish the calumnies and invective poured upon him following his win over Bermoiya. Sometimes he smiled when he read or heard what they said about him, especially when the news-readers — in shocked, reverent tones — related what the alien Gurgey had caused to be done to Lo Prinest Bermoiya; a gentle, lenient judge with five wives and two husbands, though no children.

Gurgeh had also started to watch the channels which showed the imperial troops crushing the savages and infidels it was civilising in distant parts of the Empire. He had the module unscramble the higher-level military broadcasts which the services put out, it seemed, in a spirit of competition with the court’s more highly encrypted entertainment channels.

The military broadcasts showed scenes of alien executions and tortures. Some showed the buildings and art-works of the recalcitrant or rebellious species being blown up or burned; things only very rarely shown on the standard news-channels if for no other reason than that all aliens were depicted as a matter of course as being uncivilised monsters, docile simpletons or greedy and treacherous subhumans, all categories incapable of producing high art and genuine civilisation. Sometimes, where physically possible, Azadian males — though never apices — were shown raping the savages.

It upset Flere-Imsaho that Gurgeh should enjoy watching such things, especially as it had been instrumental in introducing him to the scrambled broadcasts in the first place, but at least he didn’t appear to find the sights sexually stimulating. He didn’t dwell on them the way the drone knew Azadians tended to; he looked, registered, then flicked away again.

He still spent the majority of his time staring at the games shown on the screen. But the coded signals, and his own bad press, kept drawing him back, time and again, like a drug.

“But I don’t like rings.”

“It isn’t a question of what you like, Jernau Gurgeh. When you go to Hamin’s estate you’ll be outside this module. I might not always be close by, and anyway I’m not a specialist in toxicology. You’ll be eating their food and drinking their drink and they have some very clever chemists and exobiologists. But if you wear one of these on each hand — index finger preferably — you should be safe from poisoning; if you feel a single jab it means a non-lethal drug, such as a hallucinogen. Three jabs means somebody’s out to waste you.”

“What do two jabs mean?”

“I don’t know! A malfunction, probably; now will you put them on?”

“They really don’t suit me.”

“Would a shroud?”

“They feel funny.”

“Never mind, if they work.”

“How about a magic amulet to ward off bullets?”

“Are you serious? I mean, if you are there is a passive-sensor impact-shield jewellery set on board, but they’d probably use CREWs—”

Gurgeh waved one (ringed) hand. “Oh, never mind.” He sat down again, turning on a military-execution channel.

The drone found it difficult to talk to the man; he wouldn’t listen. It attempted to explain that despite all the horrors he had seen in the city and on the screen there was still nothing the Culture could do that wouldn’t do more harm than good. It tried to tell him that the Contact section, the whole Culture in fact, was like him, dressed in his cloak and standing unable to help the man lying injured in the street, that they had to stick to their disguise and wait until the moment was right… but either its arguments weren’t getting through to him, or that wasn’t what the man was thinking about, because he made no response, and wouldn’t enter into a discussion about it.

Flere-Imsaho didn’t go out much during the days between the end of the game with Bermoiya and the journey to Hamin’s estate. Instead it stayed in, with the man, worrying.

“Mr Gurgeh; I am pleased to meet you.” The old apex put out his hand. Gurgeh grasped it. “I hope you had a pleasant flight here, yes?”

“We did, thank you,” Gurgeh said. They stood on the roof of a low building set in luxuriant green vegetation and looking out over the calm waters of the inland sea. The house was almost submerged in the burgeoning greenery; only the roof was fully clear of the swaying treetops. Near by were paddocks full of riding animals, and from the various levels of the house long sweeping gantries, elegant and slim, soared out through the crowding trunks above the shady forest floor, giving access to the golden beaches and the pavilions and summer-houses of the estate. In the sky, huge sunlit clouds piled sparkling over the distant mainland.

“You say ‘we,’,” Hamin said, as they walked across the roof and liveried males took Gurgeh’s baggage from the aircraft.

“The drone Flere-Imsaho and I,” Gurgeh said, nodding to the bulky, buzzing machine at his shoulder.

“Ah yes,” the old apex laughed, bald head reflecting the binary light. “The machine some people thought let you play so well.” They descended to a long balcony set with many tables, where Hamin introduced Gurgeh — and the drone — to various people, mostly apices plus a few elegant females. There was only one person Gurgeh already knew; the smiling Lo Shav Olos put down a drink and rose from his table, taking Gurgeh’s hand.

“Mr Gurgeh; how good to see you again. Your luck held out and your skill increased. A formidable achievement. Congratulations, once again.” The apex’s gaze flicked momentarily to Gurgeh’s ringed fingers.

“Thank you. It was at a price I’d have willingly forgone.”

“Indeed. You never cease to surprise us, Mr Gurgeh.”

“I’m sure I shall, eventually.”

“You are too modest.” Olos smiled and sat down.

Gurgeh declined the offer to visit his rooms and freshen up; he felt perfectly fresh already. He sat at a table with Hamin, some other directors of Candsev College, and a few court officials. Chilled wines and spiced snacks were served. Flere-Imsaho settled, relatively quietly, on the floor by Gurgeh’s feet. Gurgeh’s new rings appeared to be happy there was nothing more damaging than alcohol in the fare being served.

The conversation mostly avoided Gurgeh’s last game. Everyone pronounced his name correctly. The college directors asked him about his unique game-style; Gurgeh answered as best he could. The court officials inquired politely about his home world, and he told them some nonsense about living on a planet. They asked him about Flere-Imsaho, and Gurgeh expected the machine to answer, but it didn’t, so he told them the truth; the machine was a person by the Culture’s definition. It could do as it liked and it did not belong to him.

One tall and strikingly beautiful female, a companion of Lo Shav Olos who’d come over to join their table, asked the drone if its master played logically or not.

Flere-Imsaho replied — with a trace of weariness Gurgeh suspected only he could detect — that Gurgeh was not its master, and that it supposed he thought more logically than it did when he was playing games, but that anyway it knew very little about Azad.

They all found this most amusing.

Hamin stood then and suggested that his stomach, with over two and a half centuries of experience behind it, could tell it was approaching time for dinner better than any servant’s clock. People laughed, and gradually began to depart the long balcony. Hamin escorted Gurgeh to his room personally and told him a servant would let him know when the meal was to be served.

“I wish I knew why they invited you here,” Flere-Imsaho said, quickly unpacking Gurgeh’s few cases while the man looked out of the window at the still trees and the calm sea.

“Perhaps they want to recruit me for the Empire. What do you think, drone? Would I make a good general?”

“Don’t be facetious, Jernau Gurgeh.” The drone switched to Marain. “And not to forget, random domran, here bugged are we, nonsense wonsense.”

Gurgeh looked concerned and said in Eächic, “Heavens, drone; are you developing a speech impediment?”

“Gurgeh…” the drone hissed, setting out some clothes the Empire deemed suitable to be worn when eating.

Gurgeh turned away, smiling. “Maybe they just want to kill me.”

“I wonder if they want any help.”

Gurgeh laughed and came over to the bed where the drone had laid out the formal clothing. “It’ll be all right.”

“So you say. But we haven’t even got the protection of the module here, let alone anything else. But… let’s not worry about it.”

Gurgeh picked up a couple of the robe-pieces and tried them against his body, holding them under his chin and looking down. “I’m not worried anyway,” he said.

The drone shouted at him in exasperation. “Oh Jernau Gurgeh! How many times do I have to tell you? You cannot wear red and green together like that!”

“You like music, Mr Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.

Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.”

Hamin sat back, apparently satisfied with this answer. They had climbed to the broad roof-garden after dinner, which had been a long, complicated and very filling affair during which naked females had danced in the centre of the room and — if Gurgeh’s rings were to be believed — nobody had tried to interfere with his food. It was dusk now, and the party was outside in the warm evening air, listening to the wailing music produced by a group of apex musicians. Slender gantries led from the garden into the tall, graceful trees.

Gurgeh sat at a small table with Hamin and Olos. Flere-Imsaho sat near his feet. Lamps shone in the trees around them; the roof-garden was its own island of light in the night, surrounded by the cries of birds and animals, calling out as though in answer to the music.

“I wonder, Mr Gurgeh,” Hamin said, sipping his drink and lighting a long, small-bowled pipe. “Did you find any of our dancing girls attractive?” He pulled on the long-stemmed pipe, then, with the smoke wreathing around his bald head, went on, “I only ask because one of them — she with the silver streak in her hair, remember? — did express rather an interest in you. I’m sorry… I hope I’m not shocking you, Mr Gurgeh, am I?”

“Not in the least.”

“Well, I just wanted to say you’re amongst friends here, yes? You’ve more than proved yourself in the game, and this is a very private place, outside the gaze of the press and the common people, who of course have to depend on certain hard and fast rules… whereas we do not, not here. You catch my drift? You may relax in confidence.”

“I’m most grateful. I shall certainly try to relax; but I was told before I came here that I would be found ugly, even disfigured, by your people. Your kindness overwhelms me, but I would prefer not to inflict myself on somebody who might not be available through choice alone.”

“Too modest, again, Jernau Gurgeh,” Olos smiled.

Hamin nodded, puffing on his pipe. “You know, Mr Gurgeh, I have heard that in your ‘Culture’ you have no laws. I am sure this is an exaggeration, but there must be a grain of truth in the assertion, and I would guess you must find the number and strictness of our laws… to be a great difference between your society and ours.

“Here we have many rules, and try to live according to the laws of God, Game and Empire. But one of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr Gurgeh.” Hamin waved the pipe-stem round the tables of people. “Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are — ha!” — Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe “no more than robots!”

Flere-Imsaho buzzed a little louder, but only momentarily.

There was silence. Gurgeh drank from his glass.

Olos and Hamin exchanged looks. “Jernau Gurgeh,” Olos said at last, rolling his glass round in his hands. “Let’s be frank. You’re an embarrassment to us. You’ve done very much better than we expected; we did not think we could be so easily fooled, but somehow you did it. I congratulate you on whatever ruse it was you used, whether it centred on your drug-glands, your machine there, or simply many more years playing Azad than you admitted to. You have bettered us, and we’re impressed. I am only sorry that innocent people, such as those bystanders who were shot instead of you, and Lo Prinest Bermoiya, had to be hurt. As you have no doubt guessed, we would like you to go no further in the game. Now, the Imperial Office has nothing to do with the Games Bureau, so there is little we can do directly. We do have a suggestion though.”

“What’s that?” Gurgeh sipped his drink.

“As I’ve been saying” — Hamin pointed the stem of the pipe at Gurgeh — “we have many laws. We therefore have many crimes. Some of these are of a sexual nature, yes?” Gurgeh looked down at his drink. “I need hardly point out,” Hamin continued, “that the physiology of our race makes us… unusual, one might almost say gifted, in that respect. Also, in our society, it is possible to control people. It is possible to make somebody, or even several people, do things they might not want to do. We can offer you, here, the sort of experience which by your own admission would be impossible on your own world.” The old apex leant closer, dropping his voice. “Can you imagine what it might be like to have several females, and males — even apices, if you like — who will do your every bidding?” Hamin knocked his pipe out on the table leg; the ash drifted over the humming bulk of Flere-Imsaho. The rector of Candsev College smiled in a conspiratorial way and sat back, re-packing his pipe from a small pouch.

Olos leant forward. “This whole island is yours for as long as you want it, Jernau Gurgeh. You may have as many people of whatever sexual mix as you like, for as long as you desire.”

“But I pull out of the game.”

“You retire, yes,” Olos said.

Hamin nodded. “There are precedents.”

“The whole island?” Gurgeh made a show of looking around the gently lit roof-garden. A troupe of dancers appeared; the lithe, skimpily-dressed men, women and apices made their way up some steps to a small stage raised behind the musicians.

“Everything.” Olos said. “The island, house, servants, dancers; everything and everyone.”

Gurgeh nodded but didn’t say anything.

Hamin relit his pipe. “Even the band,” he said, coughing. He waved at the musicians. “What do you think of their instruments, Mr Gurgeh? Do they not sound sweet?”

“Very pleasant.” Gurgeh drank a little, watching the dancers arrange themselves on stage.

“Even there, though,” Hamin said, “you are missing something. You see, we gain a great deal of pleasure from knowing at what cost this music is bought. You see the stringed instrument; the one on the left with the eight strings?”

Gurgeh nodded. Hamin said, “I can tell you that each of those steel strings has strangled a man. You see that white pipe at the back, played by the male?”

“The pipe shaped like a bone?”

Hamin laughed. “A female’s femur, removed without anaesthetic.”

“Naturally,” Gurgeh said, and took a few sweet-tasting nuts from a bowl on the table. “Do they come in matched pairs, or are there a lot of one-legged lady music critics?”

Hamin smiled. “You see?” he said to Olos. “He does appreciate.” The old apex gestured back at the band, behind whom the dancers were now arranged, ready to start their performance. “The drums are made from human skin; you can see why each set is called a family. The horizontal percussion instrument is constructed from finger bones, and… well, there are other instruments, but can you understand now why that music sounds so… precious to those of us who know what has gone into the making of it?”

“Oh, yes,” Gurgeh said. The dancers began. Fluid, practised, they impressed almost immediately. Some must have worn AG units, floating through the air like huge, diaphanously slow birds.

“Good,” Hamin nodded. “You see, Gurgeh, one can be on either side in the Empire. One can be the player, or one can be… played upon.” Hamin smiled at what was a play on words in Eächic, and to some extent in Marain too.

Gurgeh watched the dancers for a moment. Without looking away from them, he said, “I’ll play, rector; on Echronedal.” He tapped one ring on the rim of his glass, in time to the music.

Hamin sighed. “Well, I have to tell you, Jernau Gurgeh, that we are worried.” He pulled on the pipe again, studied the glowing bowl. “Worried about the effect your getting any further in the game would have on the morale of our people. So many of them are just simple folk; it is our duty to shield them from the harsh realities, sometimes. And what harsher reality can there be than the realisation that most of one’s kin are gullible, cruel and foolish? They would not understand that a stranger, an alien, can come here and do so well at the holy game. We here — those of us in the court and the colleges — might not be so concerned, but we have to keep the ordinary, decent… I would even go as far as to say innocent people in mind, Mr Gurgeh, and what we have to do in that respect, what we sometimes have to take responsibility for, does not always make us happy. But we know our duty, and we will do it; for them, and for our Emperor.”

Hamin leant forward again. “We don’t intend to kill you, Mr Gurgeh, though I’m told there are factions in the court who’d like nothing better, and — they say — people in the security services easily capable of doing so. No; nothing so gross. But…” The old apex sucked on the thin pipe, producing a gentle papping noise. Gurgeh waited.

Hamin pointed the stem at him again. “I have to tell you, Gurgeh, that no matter how you do in the first game on Echronedal, it will be announced that you have been defeated. We have unequivocal control of the communications — and news-services on the Fire Planet, and as far as the press and the public will be concerned, you will be knocked out in the first round there. We will do whatever has to be done to make it appear that that is exactly what has in fact happened. You are free to tell people I’ve told you this, and free to claim whatever you want after the event; you will be ridiculed, though, and what I have described will happen anyway. The truth has already been decided.”

Olos’s turn: “So, you see, Gurgeh; you may go to Echronedal, but to certain defeat; absolutely certain defeat. Go as a high-class tourist if you want, or stay here and enjoy yourself as our guest; but there is no longer any point in playing.”

“Hmm,” Gurgeh said. The dancers were slowly losing their clothes as they stripped each other. Some of them, still dancing, were at the same time contriving to stroke and touch each other in an exaggeratedly sexual way. Gurgeh nodded. “I’ll think about it.” Then he smiled at the two apices. “I’d like to see your Fire Planet, all the same.”

He drank from the cool glass, and watched the slow build-up of erotic choreography behind the musicians. “Other than that, though… I can’t imagine I’ll be trying too terribly hard.”

Hamin was studying his pipe. Olos looked very serious.

Gurgeh held out his hands in a gesture of resigned helplessness. “What more can I say?”

“Would you be prepared to… cooperate, though?” Olos said.

Gurgeh looked inquisitive. Olos reached slowly over and tapped the rim of Gurgeh’s glass. “Something that would… ring true,” he said softly.

Gurgeh watched the two apices exchange glances. He waited for them to make their play.

“Documentary evidence,” Hamin said after a moment, talking to his pipe. “Film of you looking worried over a bad board-position. Maybe even an interview. We could arrange these things without your cooperation, naturally, but it would be easier, less fraught for all concerned, with your aid.” The old apex sucked on his pipe. Olos drank, glancing at the romantic antics of the dance troupe.

Gurgeh looked surprised. “You mean, lie? Participate in the construction of your false reality?”

“Our real reality, Gurgeh,” Olos said quietly. “The official version; the one that will have documentary evidence to support it… the one that will be believed.”

Gurgeh grinned broadly. “I’d be delighted to help. Of course; I shall regard it as a challenge to produce a definitively abject interview for popular consumption. I’ll even help you work out positions so awful even I can’t get out of them.” He raised his glass to them. “After all; it’s the game that matters, is it not?”

Hamin snorted, his shoulders shook. He sucked on the pipe again and through a veil of smoke said, “No true game-player could say more.” He patted Gurgeh on the shoulder. “Mr Gurgeh, even if you choose not to avail yourself of the facilities my house has to offer, I hope you’ll stay with us for a while. I should enjoy talking with you. Will you stay?”

“Why not?” Gurgeh said, and he and Hamin raised their glasses to each other; Olos sat back, laughing silently. Together the three turned to watch the dancers, who had now formed a copulatorily complicated pattern of bodies in a carnal jigsaw, still keeping, Gurgeh was impressed to note, to the beat of the music.

He stayed at the house for the next fifteen days. He talked, guardedly, with the old rector during that time. He still felt they didn’t really know each other when he left, but perhaps they knew a little more of each other’s societies.

Hamin obviously found it hard to believe the Culture really did do without money. “But what if I do want something unreasonable?”

“What?”

“My own planet?” Hamin wheezed with laughter.

“How can you own a planet?” Gurgeh shook his head.

“But supposing I wanted one?”

“I suppose if you found an unoccupied one you could land without anybody becoming annoyed… perhaps that would work. But how would you stop other people landing there too?”

“Could I not buy a fleet of warships?”

“All our ships are sentient. You could certainly try telling a ship what to do… but I don’t think you’d get very far.”

“Your ships think they’re sentient!” Hamin chuckled.

“A common delusion shared by some of our human citizens.”

Hamin found the Culture’s sexual mores even more fascinating. He was at once delighted and outraged that the Culture regarded homosexuality, incest, sex-changing, hermaphrodicy and sexual characteristic alteration as just something else people did, like going on a cruise or changing their hair-style.

Hamin thought this must take all the fun out of things. Didn’t the Culture forbid anything?

Gurgeh attempted to explain there were no written laws, but almost no crime anyway. There was the occasional crime of passion (as Hamin chose to call it), but little else. It was difficult to get away with anything anyway, when everybody had a terminal, but there were very few motives left, too.

“But if someone kills somebody else?”

Gurgeh shrugged. “They’re slap-droned.”

“Ah! This sounds more like it. What does this drone do?”

“Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.”

“Is that all?”

“What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.”

“Ah; but in your Culture, can’t you gatecrash?”

“I suppose so,” Gurgeh conceded. “But nobody’d talk to you.”

As for what Hamin told Gurgeh about the Empire, it only made him appreciate what Shohobohaum Za had said; that it was a gem, however vicious and indiscriminate its cutting edges might be. It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called “human nature” — the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural — when they were surrounded and subsumed by the self-created monster that was the Empire of Azad, and which displayed such a fierce instinct (Gurgeh could think of no other word) for self-preservation.

The Empire wanted to survive; it was like an animal, a massive, powerful body that would only let certain cells or viruses survive within it and as a matter of course killed off any and all others, automatically and unthinkingly. Hamin himself used this analogy when he compared revolutionaries to cancer. Gurgeh tried to say that single cells were single cells, while a conscious collection of hundreds of billions of them — or a conscious device made from arrays of picocircuitry, for that matter — was simply incomparable… but Hamin refused to listen. It was Gurgeh, not he, who’d missed the point.

The rest of the time Gurgeh spent walking in the forest, or swimming in the warm, slack sea. The slow rhythm of Hamin’s house was built around meals, and Gurgeh learned to take great care in dressing for these, eating them, talking to the guests — old and new, as people came and went — and relaxing afterwards, bloated and spacy, continuing to talk, and watching the deliberate entertainment of — usually — erotic dances, and the involuntary cabaret of changing sexual alliances amongst the guests, dancers, servants and house staff. Gurgeh was enticed many times, but never tempted. He found the Azadian females more and more attractive all the time, and not just physically… but used his genofixed glands in a negative, even contrary way, to stay carnally sober in the midst of the subtly exhibited orgy around him.

A pleasant enough few days. The rings did not jab him, and nobody shot at him. He and Flere-Imsaho got back safely to the module on the roof of the Grand Hotel a couple of days before the Imperial Fleet was due to depart for Echronedal. Gurgeh and the drone would have preferred to take the module, which was perfectly capable of making the crossing by itself, but Contact had forbidden that — the effect on the Admiralty of discovering that something no larger than a lifeboat could outstrip their battlecruisers was not something to be contemplated — and the Empire had refused permission for the alien machine to be conveyed inside an imperial craft. So Gurgeh would have to make the journey with the Fleet like everybody else.

“You think you’ve got problems,” Flere-Imsaho said bitterly. “They’ll be watching us all the time; on the liner during the crossing and then once we’re in the castle. That means I’ve got to stay inside this ridiculous disguise all day and all night until the games are over. Why couldn’t you have lost in the first round like you were supposed to? We could have told them where to insert their Fire Planet and been back on a GSV by now.”

“Oh, shut up, machine.”

As it turned out, they needn’t have returned to the module; there was nothing more to take or pack. He stood in the small lounge, fiddling with the Orbital bracelet on his wrist and realising he was looking forward to the coming games on Echronedal more than he had any of the others. The pressure would be off; he wouldn’t have to face the opprobrium of the press and the Empire’s ghastly general public, he could cooperate with the Empire to produce a convincing piece of fake news, and the likelihood of more physical option bets had thereby been reduced almost to zero. He was going to enjoy himself…

Flere-Imsaho was glad to see the man was getting over the effects of seeing behind the screen the Empire showed its guests; he was much as he’d been before, and the days at Hamin’s estate seemed to have relaxed him. It could see a small change in him though; something it could not quite pin down, but which it knew was there.

They didn’t see Shohobohaum Za again. He’d left on a tour “upcountry”, wherever that was. He sent his regards, and a message in Marain to the effect that if Gurgeh could lay his mitts on some fresh grif…

Before they left, Gurgeh asked the module about the girl he’d met at the grand ball, months earlier. He couldn’t remember her name, but if the module could provide a list of the females who’d survived the first round, he was sure he’d recognise hers… the module got confused, but Flere-Imsaho told them both to forget it.

No women had made it to the second round.

Pequil came with them to the shuttleport. His arm was fully healed. Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho bade farewell to the module; it climbed into the sky for a rendezvous with the distant Limiting Factor. They said goodbye to Pequil too — he took Gurgeh’s hand in both of his — and then the man and the drone boarded the shuttle.

Gurgeh watched Groasnachek as it fell away beneath them. The city tilted as he was thrown back into his seat; the whole view swung and juddered as the shuttlecraft powered into the hazy skies.

Gradually all the patterns and the shapes came out, revealed for a while before the increasing distance, the city’s own vapours, dust and grime, and the altering angle of their climb took it all away.

For all the jumble, it looked momentarily peaceful and ordered in its parts. The distance made its individual, local confusions and dislocations disappear, and from a certain height, where little ever dallied, and almost everything just passed through, it looked exactly like a great, mindless, spreading organism.