The Player of Games

3. Machina Ex Machina

So far so average. Our game-player’s lucked out again. I guess you can see he’s a changed man, though. These humans!

I’m going to be consistent, however. I haven’t told you who I am so far, and I’m not going to tell you now, either. Maybe later.

Maybe.

Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that’s not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that’s all it can be. I get so frustrated with people who can’t see this!

Even a human should be able to understand it’s obvious.

The result is what matters, not how it’s achieved (unless, of course, the process of achieving is itself a series of results). What difference does it make whether a mind’s made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? (Let’s not even think about a Mind mind.) Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfils the same task.

Just matter, switching energy of one sort or another.

Switches. Memory. The random element that is chance and that is called choice: common denominators, all.

I say again; you is what you done. Dynamic (mis)behaviourism, that’s my creed.

Gurgeh? His switches are working funny. He’s thinking differently, acting uncharacteristically. He is a different person. He’s seen the worst that meatgrinder of a city could provide, and he just took it personally, and took his revenge.

Now he’s spaceborne again, head crammed full of Azad rules, his brain adapted and adapting to the swirling, switching patterns of that seductive, encompassing, feral set of rules and possibilities, and being carted through space towards the Empire’s most creakily symbolic shrine: Echronedal; the place of the standing wave of flame; the Fire Planet.

But will our hero prevail? Can he possibly prevail? And what would constitute winning, anyway?

How much has the man still got to learn? What will he make of such knowledge? More to the point, what will it make of him?

Wait and see. It’ll work itself out, in time.

Take it from there, maestro…

Echronedal was twenty light years from Eä. Halfway there the Imperial Fleet left the region of dust that lay between Eä’s system and the direction of the main galaxy, and so that vast armed spiral was spread over half the sky like a million jewels caught in a whirlpool.

Gurgeh was impatient to get to the Fire Planet. The journey seemed to take for ever, and the liner he was making it on was hopelessly cramped. He spent most of the time in his cabin. The bureaucrats, imperial officials and other game-players on the ship regarded him with undisguised dislike, and apart from a couple of shuttle trips over to the battlecruiser Invincible — the imperial flag ship — for receptions, Gurgeh didn’t socialise.

The crossing was made without incident, and after twelve days they arrived over Echronedal, a planet orbiting a yellow dwarf in a fairly ordinary system and itself a human-habitable world with only one peculiarity.

It was not unusual to find distinct equatorial bulges on once fast-spinning planets, and Echronedal’s was comparatively slight, though sufficient to produce a single unbroken continental ribbon of land lying roughly between the planet’s tropics, the rest of the globe lying beneath two great oceans, ice-capped at the poles. What was unique, in the experience of the Culture as well as the Empire, was to discover a wave of fire forever moving round the planet on the continental landmass.

Taking about half a standard year to complete its circumnavigation, the fire swept over the land, its fringes brushing the shores of the two oceans, its wave-front a near-straight line, its flames consuming the growth of the plants which had flourished in the ashes of the previous blaze. The whole land-based ecosystem had evolved around this never-ending conflagration; some plants could only sprout from beneath the still-warm cinders, their seeds jolted into development by the passing heat; other plants blossomed just before the fire arrived, bursting into rapid growth just before the flames found them, and using the fire-front’s thermals to transport their seeds into the upper atmosphere, to fall back again, somewhere, on to the ash. The land-animals of Echronedal fell into three categories; some kept constantly on the move, maintaining the same steady walking pace as the fire, some swam round its oceanic boundaries, while other species burrowed into the ground, hid in caves, or survived through a variety of mechanisms in lakes or rivers.

Birds circled the world like a jetstream of feathers.

The blaze remained little more than a large, continuous bush-fire for eleven revolutions. On the twelfth, it changed.

The cinderbud was a tall, skinny plant which grew quickly once its seeds had germinated; it developed an armoured base and shot up to a height of ten metres or more in the two hundred days it had before the flames came round again. When the fire did arrive, the cinderbud didn’t burn; it closed its leafy head until the blaze had passed, then kept on growing in the ashes. After eleven of those Great Months, eleven baptisms in the flames, the cinderbuds were great trees, anything up to seventy metres in height. Their own chemistry then produced first the Oxygen Season, and then the Incandescence.

And in that sudden cycle the fire didn’t walk; it sprinted. It was no longer a wide but low and even mild bush-fire; it was an inferno. Lakes disappeared, rivers dried, rocks crumbled in its baking heat; every animal that had evolved its own way of dodging or keeping pace with the fires of the Great Months had had to find another method of surviving; running fast enough to build up a sufficient lead on the Incandescence to still keep ahead of it, swimming far out into the ocean or to the few mostly small islands off the coasts, or hibernating, deep in great cave-systems or on the beds of deep rivers, lakes and fjords. Plants too switched to new survival mechanisms, rooting deeper, growing thicker seed-cases, or equipping their thermal-seeds for higher, longer flight, and the baked ground they would encounter on landing.

For a Great Month thereafter the planet, its atmosphere choked with smoke, soot and ash, wavered on the edge of catastrophe as smoke clouds blocked out the sun and the temperature plummeted. Then slowly, while the diminished small fire continued on its way, the atmosphere cleared, the animals started to breed again, the plants grew once more, and the little cinderbuds started sprouting through the ashes from the old root complexes.

The Empire’s castles on Echronedal, extravagantly sprinklered and doused, had been built to survive whatever terrible heat and screaming winds the planet’s bizarre ecology could provide, and it was in the greatest of those fortresses, Castle Klaff, that for the last three hundred standard years the final games of Azad had been played; timed to coincide, whenever possible, with the Incandescence.

The Imperial Fleet arrived above Echronedal in the middle of the Oxygen Season. The flagship remained over the planet while the escorting battleships dispersed to the outskirts of the system. The liners stayed until the Invincible’s shuttle squadron had ferried the game-players, court officials, guests and observers down to the surface, then left for a nearby system. The shuttles dropped through the clear air of Echronedal to land at Castle Klaff.

The fortress lay on a spur of rock at the foot of a range of soft, well-worn hills overlooking a broad plain. Normally it looked out over a horizon-wide sweep of low scrub punctuated by the thin towers of cinderbuds at whatever stage they’d reached, but now the cinderbuds had branched and blossomed, and their canopy of rippling leaves fluttered over the plain like some rooted yellow overcast, and the tallest trunks rose higher than the castle’s curtain wall.

When the Incandescence arrived it would wash around the fortress like a livid wave; all that ever saved the castle from incineration was a two-kilometre viaduct leading from a reservoir in the low hills to Klaff itself, where giant cisterns and a complicated system of sprinklers ensured the secured and shuttered fortress was drenched with water as the fire passed. If the dousing system ever broke down, there were deep shelters in the rock far underneath the castle which would house the inhabitants until the burning was over. So far, the waters had always saved the fortress, and it had remained an oasis of scorched yellow in a wilderness of fire.

The Emperor — whoever had won the final game — was traditionally meant to be in Klaff when the fire passed, to rise from the fortress after the flames died, ascending through the darkness of the smoke clouds to the darkness of space and thence to his Empire. The timing hadn’t always worked out perfectly, and in earlier centuries the Emperor and his court had had to sit out the fire in another castle, or even missed the Incandescence altogether. However, the Empire had this time calculated correctly, and it looked as though the Incandescence — due to start only two hundred kilometres fireward of the castle, where the cinderbuds changed abruptly from their normal size and shape to the huge trees that surrounded Klaff — would arrive more or less on time, to provide a suitable backdrop for the coronation.

Gurgeh felt uncomfortable as soon as they landed. Eä had been of just a little less than what the Culture rather arbitrarily regarded as standard mass, so its gravity had felt roughly the equivalent of the force Chiark Orbital had produced by rotating and the Limiting Factor and the Little Rascal had created with AG fields. But Echronedal was half as massive again as Eä, and Gurgeh felt heavy.

The castle had long since been equipped with slow-accelerating elevators, and it was unusual to see anybody other than male servants climbing upstairs, but even walking on the level was uncomfortable for the first few of the planet’s short days.

Gurgeh’s rooms overlooked one of the castle’s inner courtyards. He settled in there with Flere-Imsaho — who gave no sign of being affected by the higher gravity — and the male servant every finalist was entitled to. Gurgeh had voiced some uncertainty about having a servant at all (“Yeah,” the drone had said, “who needs two?”), but it had been explained it was traditional, and a great honour for the male, so he’d acquiesced.

There was a rather desultory party on the night of their arrival. Everybody sat around talking, tired after the long journey and drained by the fierce gravity; the conversation was mostly about swollen ankles. Gurgeh went briefly, to show his face. It was the first time he’d met Nicosar since the grand ball at the start of the games; the receptions on the Invincible during the journey had not been graced by the imperial presence.

“This time, get it right,” Flere-Imsaho told him as they entered the main hall of the castle; the Emperor sat on a throne, welcoming the people as they arrived. Gurgeh was about to kneel like everybody else, but Nicosar saw him, shook one ringed finger and pointed at his own knee.

“Our one-kneed friend; you have not forgotten?”

Gurgeh knelt on one knee, bowing his head. Nicosar laughed thinly. Hamin, sitting on the Emperor’s right, smiled.

Gurgeh sat, alone, in a chair by a wall, near a large suit of antique armour. He looked unenthusiastically round the room, and ended up gazing, with a frown, at an apex standing in one corner of the hall, talking to a group of uniformed apices perched on stoolseats around him. The apex was unusual not just because he was standing but because he seemed to be encased in a set of gun-metal bones, worn outside his Navy uniform.

“Who’s that?” Gurgeh asked Flere-Imsaho, humming and crackling unenthusiastically between his chair and the suit of armour by the wall.

“Who’s who?”

“That apex with the… exoskeleton? Is that what you call it? Him.”

“That is Star Marshal Yomonul. In the last games he made a personal bet, with Nicosar’s blessing, that he would go to prison for a Great Year if he lost. He lost, but he expected that Nicosar would use the imperial veto — which he can do, on wagers which aren’t body-bets — because the Emperor wouldn’t want to lose the services of one of his best commanders for six years. Nicosar did use the veto, but only to have Yomonul incarcerated in that device he’s wearing, rather than shut away in a prison cell.

“The portable prison is proto-sentient; it has various independent sensors as well as conventional exoskeleton features such as a micropile and powered limbs. Its job is to leave Yomonul free to carry out his military duties, but otherwise to impose prison discipline on him. It will only let him eat a little of the simplest food, allows him no alcohol, keeps him to a strict regimen of exercise, will not allow him to take part in social activities — his presence here this evening must mark some sort of special dispensation by the Emperor — and won’t let him copulate. In addition, he has to listen to sermons by a prison chaplain who visits him for two hours every ten days.”

“Poor guy. I see he has to stand, as well.”

“Well, one shouldn’t try to outsmart the Emperor, I guess,” Flere-Imsaho said. “But his sentence is almost over.”

“No time off for good behaviour?”

“The Imperial Penal Service does not deal in discounts. They do add time on if you behave badly, though.”

Gurgeh shook his head, looking at the distant prisoner in his private prison. “It’s a mean old Empire, isn’t it, drone?”

“Mean enough… But if it ever tries to fuck with the Culture it’ll find out what mean really is.”

Gurgeh looked round in surprise at the machine. It floated, buzzing there, its bulky grey and brown casing looking hard and even sinister against the dull gleam of the empty suit of armour.

“My, we’re in a combative mood this evening.”

“I am. You’d better be.”

“For the games? I’m ready.”

“Are you really going to take part in this piece of propaganda?”

“What piece of propaganda?”

“You know damn well; helping the Bureau to fake your own defeat. Pretending you’ve lost; giving interviews and lying.”

“Yes. Why not? It lets me play the game. They might try to stop me otherwise.”

“Kill you?”

Gurgeh shrugged. “Disqualify me.”

“Is it worth so much to keep playing?”

“No,” Gurgeh lied. “But telling a few white lies isn’t much of a price, either.”

“Huh,” the machine said.

Gurgeh waited for it to say more, but it didn’t. They left a little later. Gurgeh got up out of the chair and walked to the door, only remembering to turn and bow towards Nicosar after the drone prompted him.

His first game on Echronedal, the one he was officially to lose no matter what happened, was another ten game. This time there was no suggestion of anybody ganging up on him, and he was approached by four of the other players to form a side which would oppose the rest. This was the traditional way of playing ten games, though it was the first time Gurgeh had been directly involved, apart from being on the sharp end of other people’s alliances.

So he found himself discussing strategy and tactics with a pair of Fleet admirals, a star general and an imperial minister in what the Bureau guaranteed was an electronically and optically sterile room in one wing of the castle. They spent three days talking over how they would play the game, then they swore before God, and Gurgeh gave his word, they would not break the agreement until the other five players had been defeated or they themselves were brought down. The lesser games ended with the sides about even. Gurgeh found there were advantages and disadvantages in playing as part of an ensemble. He did his best to adapt and play accordingly. More talks followed, then they joined battle on the Board of Origin.

Gurgeh enjoyed it. It added a lot to the game to play as part of a team; he felt genuinely warm towards the apices he played alongside. They came to each other’s aid when they were in trouble, they trusted one another during massed attacks, and generally played as though their individual forces were really a single side. As people, he didn’t find his comrades desperately engaging, but as playing partners he could not deny the emotion he felt for them, and experienced a growing sense of sadness — as the game progressed and they gradually beat back their opponents — that they would soon all be fighting each other.

When it came to it, and the last of the opposition had surrendered, much of what Gurgeh had felt before disappeared. He’d been at least partially tricked; he’d stuck to what he saw as the spirit of their agreement, while the others stuck to the letter. Nobody actually attacked until the last of the other team’s pieces had been captured or taken over, but there was some subtle manoeuvring when it became clear they were going to win, playing for positions that would become more important when the team-agreement ended. Gurgeh missed this until it was almost too late, and when the second part of the game began he was by far the weakest of the five.

It also became obvious that the two admirals were, not surprisingly, cooperating unofficially against the others. Jointly the pair were stronger than the other three.

In a way Gurgeh’s very weakness saved him; he played so that it was not worth taking him for a long time, letting the other four fight it out. Later he attacked the two admirals when they had grown strong enough to threaten a complete takeover, but were more vulnerable to his small force than to the greater powers of the general and the minister.

The game to-ed and fro-ed for a long time, but Gurgeh was gaining steadily, and eventually, though he was put out first of the five, he’d accumulated sufficient points to ensure he’d play on the next board. Three of the other original five-side had done so badly they had to resign from the match.

Gurgeh never really fully recovered from his mistake on the first board, and did badly on the Board of Form. It was starting to look as though the Empire would not need to lie about him being thrown out of the first game.

He still talked to the Limiting Factor, using Flere-Imsaho as a relay and the game-screen in his own room for the display.

He felt he’d adjusted to the higher gravity. Flere-Imsaho had to remind him it was a genofixed response; his bones were rapidly thickening and his musculature had expanded without waiting to be otherwise exercised.

“Hadn’t you noticed you were getting more thick-set?” the drone said in exasperation, while Gurgeh studied his body in the room mirror.

Gurgeh shook his head. “I did think I was eating rather a lot.”

“Very observant. I wonder what else you can do you don’t know about. Didn’t they teach you anything about your own biology?”

The man shrugged. “I forgot.”

He adjusted, too, to the planet’s short day-night cycle, adapting faster than anybody else, if the numerous complaints were anything to go by. Most people, the drone told him, were using drugs to bring themselves into line with the three-quarters standard day.

“Genofixing again?” Gurgeh asked at breakfast one morning.

“Yes. Of course.”

“I didn’t know we could do all this.”

“Obviously not,” the drone said. “Good grief, man; the Culture’s been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you’ve mostly settled down in idealised, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.” Gurgeh frowned at the machine. He gestured to the walls, and then to his ear.

Flere-Imsaho wobbled from side to side; drone shrug.

Gurgeh came fifth out of seven on the Board of Form. He started play on the Board of Becoming with no hope of winning, but a remote chance of getting through as the Qualifier. He played an inspired game, towards the end. He was starting to feel quite thoroughly at home on the last of the three great boards, and enjoyed using the elemental symbolism the play incorporated instead of the die-matching used in the rest of each match. The Board of Becoming was the least well-played of the three great boards, Gurgeh felt, and one the Empire seemed to understand imperfectly, and pay too little attention to.

He made it. One of the admirals won, and he scraped in as Qualifier. The margin between him and the other admiral was one point; 5,523 against 5,522. Only a draw and play-off could have been closer, but when he thought about it later, he realised he hadn’t for one moment entertained the slightest doubt he’d get through to the next round.

“You’re coming perilously close to talking about destiny, Jernau Gurgeh,” Flere-Imsaho said when he tried to explain this. He was sitting in his room, hand on the table in front of him, while the drone removed the Orbital bracelet from his wrist; he couldn’t get it over his hand any more and it was becoming too tight, thanks to his expanding muscles.

“Destiny,” Gurgeh said, looking thoughtful. He nodded. “That’s what it feels like, I suppose.”

“What next?” exclaimed the machine, using a field to cut the bracelet. Gurgeh had expected the bright little image to disappear, but it didn’t. “God? Ghosts? Time-travel?” The drone drew the bracelet off his wrist and reconnected the tiny Orbital so that it was a circle again.

Gurgeh smiled. “The Empire.” He took the bracelet from the machine, got up easily and walked to the window, turning the Orbital over in his hands and looking out into the stony courtyard.

The Empire? thought Flere-Imsaho. It got Gurgeh to let it store the bracelet inside its casing. No sense in leaving it around; somebody might guess what it represented. I do hope he’s joking.

With his own game over, Gurgeh found time to watch Nicosar’s match. The Emperor was playing in the prow-hall of the fortress; a great bowled room ribbed in grey stone and capable of seating over a thousand people. It was here the last game would be played, the game which would decide who became Emperor. The prow-hall lay at the far end of the castle, facing the direction the fire would come from. High windows, still unshuttered, looked out over the sea of yellow cinderbud heads outside.

Gurgeh sat in one of the observation galleries, watching the Emperor play. Nicosar played cautiously, gradually building up advantages, playing the game in a percentage-wary way, setting up profitable exchanges on the Board of Becoming, and orchestrating the moves of the other four players on his side. Gurgeh was impressed; Nicosar played a deceptive game. The slow, steady style he evinced here was only one side of him; every now and again there would come, just when it was needed, exactly when it would have the most devastating effect, a move of startling brilliance and audacity. Equally, the occasional fine move by an opponent was always at least matched, and usually bettered, by the Emperor.

Gurgeh felt some sympathy for those playing against Nicosar. Even playing badly was less demoralising than playing sporadically excellently but always being crushed.

“You’re smiling, Jernau Gurgeh.” Gurgeh had been absorbed in the game and hadn’t seen Hamin approach. The old apex sat down carefully beside him. Bulges under his robe showed he wore an AG harness to partially counteract Echronedal’s gravity.

“Good evening, Hamin.”

“I have heard you qualified. Well done.”

“Thank you. Only unofficially, of course.”

“Ah yes. Officially you came fourth.”

“How unexpectedly generous.”

“We took into account your willingness to cooperate. You will still help us?”

“Of course. Just show me the camera.”

“Perhaps tomorrow.” Hamin nodded, looking down to where Nicosar stood, surveying his commanding position on the Board of Becoming. “Your opponent for the single game will be Lo Tenyos Krowo; an excellent player, I warn you. Are you quite sure you don’t want to drop out now?”

“Quite. Would you have me cause Bermoiya’s mutilation only to give up now because the strain’s getting too much?”

“I see your point, Gurgeh.” Hamin sighed, still watching the Emperor. He nodded. “Yes, I see your point. And anyway; you only qualified. By the narrowest of margins. And Lo Tenyos Krowo is very, very good.” He nodded again. “Yes; perhaps you have found your level, eh?” The wizened face turned to Gurgeh.

“Very possibly, rector.”

Hamin nodded absently and looked away again, at his Emperor.

On the following morning, Gurgeh recorded some faked game-board shots; the game he’d just played was set up again, and Gurgeh made some believable but uninspired moves, and one outright mistake. The part of his opponents was taken by Hamin and a couple of other senior Candsev College professors; Gurgeh was impressed by how well they were able to mimic the game-styles of the apices he’d been playing against.

As had, in effect, been foretold, Gurgeh finished fourth. He recorded an interview with the Imperial News Service expressing his sorrow at being knocked out of the Main Series and saying how grateful he was for having had the chance to play the game of Azad. The experience of a lifetime. He was eternally in the debt of the Azadian people. His respect for the Emperor-Regent’s genius had increased immeasurably from its already high starting point. He looked forward to observing the rest of the games. He wished the Emperor, his Empire and all its people and subjects the very best for what would undoubtedly be a bright and prosperous future.

The news-team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. “You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,” Hamin told him.

Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.

He sat looking out over the forest of cinderbuds. The trees were sixty metres high or more. At their peak rate, the drone had told him, they grew at nearly a quarter-metre per day, sucking such vast quantities of water and matter from the ground that the soil dropped all around them, subsiding far enough to reveal the uppermost levels of their roots, which would burn in the Incandescence and take the full Great Year to regrow.

It was dusk, the short time in a short day when the rapidly spinning planet left the bright yellow dwarf dropping beyond the horizon. Gurgeh breathed deeply. There was no smell of burning. The air seemed quite clear, and a couple of planets in the Echronedal system shone in the sky. Nevertheless, Gurgeh knew there was sufficient dust in the atmosphere to forever block out most of the stars in the sky and leave the huge wheel that was the main galaxy blurred and indistinct; not remotely as breathtaking as it was when viewed from beyond the planet’s hazed covering of gas.

He sat in a tiny garden near the top of the fortress, so that he could see over the summits of most of the cinderbuds. He was level with the fruit-bearing heads of the tallest trees. The fruit pods, each about the size of a curled-up child, were full of what was basically ethyl-alcohol. When the Incandescence arrived some would drop and some would stay hanging there; all would burn.

A shiver ran through Gurgeh when he thought about it. Approximately seventy days to go, they said. Anybody sitting where he was now when the fire-front arrived would be roasted alive, water-sprays or not. Radiated heat alone would cook you. The garden he was sitting in would go; the wooden bench he was sitting on would be taken inside, behind the thick stone and the metal and fireglass shutters. Gardens in the deeper courtyards would survive, though they would have to be dug out from some of the wind-blown ash. The people would be safe, in the drenched castle, or the deep shelters… unless they had been very foolish, and were caught outside. It had happened, he’d been told.

He saw Flere-Imsaho flying over the trees towards him. The machine had been given permission to fly off by itself, as long as it told the authorities where it was going and agreed to be fitted with a position monitor. Obviously there wasn’t anything on Echronedal the Empire considered especially militarily sensitive. The drone hadn’t been too happy with the conditions, but reckoned it would go mad cooped up in the castle, so had agreed. This had been its first expedition.

“Jernau Gurgeh.”

“Hello, drone. Bird-watching?”

“Flying fish. Thought I’d start with the oceans.”

“Going to take a look at the fire?”

“Not yet. I hear you’re playing Lo Tenyos Krowo next.”

“In four days. They say he’s very good.”

“He is. He’s also one of the people who know all about the Culture.”

Gurgeh glared at the machine. “What?”

“There are never fewer than eight people in the Empire who know where the Culture comes from, roughly what size it is, and our level of technological development.”

“Really,” Gurgeh said through his teeth.

“For the last two hundred years the Emperor, the chief of Naval Intelligence and the six star marshals have been appraised of the power and extent of the Culture. They don’t want anybody else to know; their choice, not ours. They’re frightened; it’s understandable.”

“Drone,” Gurgeh said loudly, “has it occurred to you I might be getting a little sick of being treated like a child all the time? Why the hell couldn’t you just tell me that?”

“Jernau, we only wanted to make things easier for you. Why complicate things by telling you that a few people did know when there was no real likelihood of your ever coming into any but the most fleeting contact with any of them? Frankly, you’d never have been told at all if you hadn’t got to the stage of playing against one of these people; no need for you to know. We’re just trying to help you, really. I thought I’d tell you in case Krowo said something during the course of the game which puzzled you and upset your concentration.”

“Well I wish you cared as much about my temper as you do about my concentration,” Gurgeh said, getting up and going to lean on the parapet at the end of the garden.

“I’m very sorry,” the drone said, without a trace of contrition.

Gurgeh waved one hand. “Never mind. I take it Krowo’s in Naval Intelligence then, not the Office of Cultural Exchange?”

“Correct. Officially his post does not exist. But everybody in court knows the highest placed player who’s the least bit devious is offered the job.”

“I thought Cultural Exchange was a funny place for somebody that good.”

“Well, Krowo’s had the intelligence job for three Great Years, and some people reckon he could have been Emperor if he’d really wanted, but he prefers to stay where he is. He’ll be a difficult opponent.”

“So everybody keeps telling me,” Gurgeh said, then frowned and looked towards the fading light on the horizon. “What’s that?” he said. “Did you hear that?”

It came again; a long, haunting, plaintive cry from far away, almost drowned by the quiet rustling of the cinderbud canopy. The faint sound rose in a still quiet but chilling crescendo; a scream that died away slowly. Gurgeh shivered for the second time that evening.

“What is that?” he whispered.

The drone sidled closer. “What? Those calls?” it said.

“Yes!” Gurgeh said, listening to the faint sound as it came and went on the soft, warm wind, wavering out of the darkness over the rustling heads of the giant cinderbuds.

“Animals,” Flere-Imsaho said, dimly silhouetted against the last fractions of light in the western sky. “Big carnivores called troshae, mostly. Six-legged. You saw some from the Emperor’s personal menagerie on the night of the ball. Remember?”

Gurgeh nodded, still listening, fascinated, to the cries of the distant beasts. “How do they escape the Incandescence?”

“Troshae run ahead, almost up to the fire-line, during the previous Great Month. The ones you’re listening to couldn’t run fast enough to escape even if they started now. They’ve been trapped and penned so they can be hunted for sport. That’s why they’re howling like that; they know the fire’s coming and they want to get away.”

Gurgeh said nothing, head turned to catch the faint sound of the doomed animals.

Flere-Imsaho waited for a minute or so, but the man did not move, or ask anything else. The machine backed off, to return to Gurgeh’s rooms. Just before it went through the door into the castle, it looked back at the man standing clutching the stone parapet at the far end of the little garden. He was crouched a little, head forward, motionless. It was quite dark now, and ordinary human eyes could not have picked out the quiet figure.

The drone hesitated, then disappeared into the fortress.

Gurgeh hadn’t thought Azad was the sort of game you could have an off-day in, certainly not an off-twenty-days. Discovering that it was came as a great disappointment.

He’d studied many of Lo Tenyos Krowo’s past games and had looked forward to playing the Intelligence chief. The apex’s style was exciting, far more flamboyant — if occasionally more erratic — than that of any of the other top-flight players. It ought to have been a challenging, enjoyable match, but it wasn’t. It was hateful, embarrassing, ignominious. Gurgeh annihilated Krowo. The burly, at first rather jovial and unconcerned-seeming apex made some awful, simple errors, and some that resulted from genuinely inspired, even brilliant play, but which in the end were just as disastrous. Sometimes, Gurgeh knew, you came up against somebody who, just by the way they played, caused you a lot more problems than they ought to, and sometimes, too, you found a game in which everything went badly, no matter how hard you tried, and regardless of your most piercing insights and incisive moves. The chief of Naval Intelligence seemed to have both problems at once. Gurgeh’s game-style might have been designed to cause Krowo problems, and the apex’s luck was almost non-existent.

Gurgeh felt real sympathy for Krowo, who was obviously more upset at the manner than the fact of the defeat. They were both glad when it was over.

Flere-Imsaho watched the man play during the closing stages of the match. It read each move as they appeared on the screen, and what it saw was something less like a game and more like an operation. Gurgeh the game-player, the morat, was taking his opponent apart. The apex was playing badly, true, but Gurgeh was off-handedly brilliant anyway. There was a callousness in his play that was new, too; something the drone had been half expecting but was still surprised to see so soon and so completely. It read the signs the man’s body and face held; annoyance, pity, anger, sorrow… and it read the play too, and saw nothing remotely similar. All it read was the ordered fury of a player working the boards and the pieces, the cards and the rules, like the familiar controls of some omnipotent machine.

Another change, it thought. The man had altered, slipped deeper into the game and the society. It had been warned this might happen. One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behaviour, but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.

Marain was a synthetic language, designed to be phonetically and philosophically as expressive as the pan-human speech apparatus and the pan-human brain would allow. Flere-Imsaho suspected it was over-rated, but smarter minds than it had dreamt Marain up, and ten millennia later even the most rarefied and superior Minds still thought highly of the language, so it supposed it had to defer to their superior understanding. One of the Minds who’d briefed it had even compared Marain to Azad. That really was fanciful, but Flere-Imsaho had taken the point behind the hyperbole.

Eächic was an ordinary, evolved language, with rooted assumptions which substituted sentimentality for compassion and aggression for cooperation. A comparatively innocent and sensitive soul like Gurgeh was bound to pick up some of its underlying ethical framework if he spoke it all the time.

So now the man played like one of those carnivores he’d been listening to, stalking across the board, setting up traps and diversions and killing grounds; pouncing, pursuing, bringing down, consuming, absorbing… Flere-Imsaho shifted inside its disguise as though uncomfortable, then switched the screen off.

The day after Gurgeh’s game with Krowo ended, he received a long letter from Chamlis Amalk-ney. He sat in his room and watched the old drone. It showed him views of Chiark while it gave him the latest news. Professor Boruelal still in retreat; Hafflis pregnant. Olz Hap away on a cruise with her first love, but coming back within the year to continue at the university. Chamlis still working on its history book. Gurgeh sat, watching and listening. Contact had censored the communication, blanking out bits which, Gurgeh assumed, showed that the landscape of Chiark was Orbital, not planetary. It annoyed him less than he’d have expected.

He didn’t enjoy the letter much. It all seemed so far away, so irrelevant. The ancient drone sounded hackneyed rather than wise or even friendly, and the people on the screen looked soft and stupid. Amalk-ney showed him Ikroh, and Gurgeh found himself angered at the fact that people came and stayed there every now and again. Who did they think they were?

Yay Meristinoux didn’t appear in the letter; she’d finally grown fed up with Blask and the Preashipleyl machine and left to pursue her landscaping career in [deleted]. She sent her love. When she left she’d started the viral change to become a man.

There was one odd section, right at the end of the communication, apparently added after the main signal had been recorded. Chamlis was shown in the main lounge at Ikroh.

“Gurgeh,” it said, “this arrived today; general delivery, unspecified sender, care of Special Circumstances.” The view began to pan across to where, if no interfering interloper had changed the furniture around, there ought to have been a table. The screen blanked out. Chamlis said, “Our little friend. But quite lifeless. I’ve scanned it, and I had… [cut] send down its bugging team to take a look too. It’s dead. Just a casing with no mind; like an intact human body with the brain neatly scooped out. There’s a small cavity in the centre, where its mind must have been.”

The visuals returned; the view panned round to Chamlis again. “I can only assume the thing finally agreed to be restructured and they made it a new body. Odd they should send the old one here though. Let me know what you want done with it. Write soon. Hope this finds you well, and successful in whatever it is you’re up to. Kindest re—”

Gurgeh switched the screen off. He got up quickly, went to the window and looked out at the courtyard beneath, frowning.

A smile spread slowly across his face. He laughed, silently, after a moment, then went over to the intercom and told his servant to bring some wine. He was just raising the glass to his lips when Flere-Imsaho floated in through the window, returning from another wildlife safari, its casing pale with dust. “You look pleased with yourself,” it said. “What’s the toast?”

Gurgeh gazed into the wine’s amber depths and smiled. “Absent friends,” he said, and drank.

The next match was a three game. Gurgeh was to face Yomonul Lu Rahsp, the star marshal imprisoned in the exoskeleton, and a youngish colonel, Lo Frag Traff. He knew that, going on form, they were both supposed to be inferior to Krowo, but the Intelligence chief had done so badly — he was unlikely to hold on to his post now — Gurgeh didn’t think this was any indication he was going to have an easier game against his next two opponents than he’d had against the last one. On the contrary; it would be only natural for the two military men to gang up on him.

Nicosar was to play the old star marshal, Vechesteder, and the defence minister, Jhilno.

Gurgeh passed the days studying. Flere-Imsaho continued to explore. It told Gurgeh it had watched a whole region of the advancing fire-front being extinguished by a torrential rainstorm; it had revisited the area a couple of days later to find tinderplants re-igniting the dried vegetation. As an example of how integral the fire and the rest of the planet’s ecology had become, the drone said, it was an impressive display.

The court amused itself with hunts in the forest during the daylight hours and live or holo shows at night.

Gurgeh found the entertainments predictable and tedious. The only faintly interesting ones were duels, usually males fighting each other, held in pits surrounded by banked circles of shouting, betting imperial officials and players. The duels were only occasionally to the death. Gurgeh suspected that things went on in the castle at night — entertainments of a different sort — which were inevitably fatal for at least one of the participants, and which he would not be welcome to attend or expected to hear about.

However, the thought no longer worried him.

Lo Frag Traff was a young apex with a very obvious scar running from one brow down his cheek, almost to his mouth. He played quick, fierce games, and his career in the Imperial Star Army bore the same hallmarks. His most famous exploit had been the sacking of the Urutypaig Library. Traff had been in command of a small ground force in a war against a humanoid species; the war in space had been fought to a temporary stalemate, but through a combination of great military talent and a little luck Traff found himself in a position to threaten the species’ capital city from the ground. The enemy had sued for peace, making it a condition of the treaty that their great library, famous throughout the civilised species of the Lesser Cloud, be left untouched. Traff knew that if he refused this condition the fight would go on, so he gave his word that not a letter, not a pixel, on the ancient microfiles would be destroyed, and they would be left in situ.

Traff had orders from his star marshal that the library had to be destroyed. Nicosar himself had commanded this as one of his first edicts after coming to power; subject races had to understand that once they displeased the Emperor, nothing could prevent their punishment.

While nobody in the Empire cared in the least about one of its loyal soldiers breaking an agreement with some bunch of aliens, Traff knew that giving your word was a sacred thing; nobody would ever trust him again if he went back on it.

Traff already knew what he was going to do. He solved the problem by shuffling the library, sorting every word in it into alphabetical order and every pixel of every illustration into order of colour, shade and intensity. The original microfiles were wiped and re-recorded with volumes upon volumes of “the”s, “it”s, and “and”s; the illustrations were fields of pure colour.

There were riots, of course, but Traff was in control by then, and as he explained to the incensed and — as it turned out, literally — suicidal guardians of the library, and to the Empire’s Supreme Court, he had kept his word about not actually destroying or taking as booty a single word, image or file.

Halfway through the game on the Board of Origin, Gurgeh realised something remarkable; Yomonul and Traff were playing each other, not him. They played as if they expected him to win anyway, and were battling for second place. Gurgeh had known there was little love lost between the two; Yomonul represented the old guard of the military and Traff the new wave of brash young adventurers. Yomonul was an exponent of negotiation and minimum-force, Traff of the moves that smite. Yomonul had a liberal view of other species; Traff was a xenophobe. The two came from traditionally opposed colleges, and all their differences were displayed quite overtly in their game-styles; Yomonul’s was studied, careful and detached; Traff’s was aggressive to the point of recklessness.

Their attitude to the Emperor was different, too. Yomonul took a cool, practical view of the throne, while Traff was utterly loyal to Nicosar himself rather than the position he held. Each detested the beliefs of the other.

Nevertheless, Gurgeh hadn’t expected them to more or less disregard him and go straight for each other’s throats. Once again, he felt slightly cheated that he wasn’t getting a proper game. The only compensation was that the amount of venom in the play of the two warring military men was something to behold, undeniably impressive if distressingly self-defeating and wasteful. Gurgeh cruised through the game, quietly picking up points while the two soldiers fought. He was winning, but he couldn’t help feeling the other two were getting much more out of the game than he was. He’d have expected they would use the physical option, but Nicosar himself had ordered that there be no betting during the match; he knew the two players were pathologically opposed, and didn’t want to risk losing the military services of either.

Gurgeh sat watching a table-screen during lunch on his third day on the Board of Origin. There were still a few minutes before play resumed and Gurgeh sat alone, watching the news-reports showing how well Lo Tenyos Krowo was doing in his game against Yomonul and Traff. Whoever had faked the apex’s play — not Krowo himself, who’d refused to have anything to do with the subterfuge — was making a good job of impersonating the Intelligence chief’s style. Gurgeh smiled a little.

“Contemplating your coming victory, Jernau Gurgeh?” Hamin said, easing himself into the seat across the table.

Gurgeh turned the screen round. “It’s a little early for that, don’t you think?”

The old, bald apex peered at the screen, smiling thinly. “Hmm. You think so?” He reached out, turned the screen off.

“Things change, Hamin.”

“Indeed they do, Gurgeh. But I think the course of this game will not. Yomonul and Traff will continue to ignore you and attack each other. You will win.”

“Well then,” Gurgeh said, looking at the dead screen. “Krowo will get to play Nicosar.”

“Krowo may; we can devise a game to cover that. You must not.”

“Must not?” Gurgeh said. “I thought I’d done all you wanted. What else can I do?”

“Refuse to play the Emperor.”

Gurgeh looked into the old apex’s pale grey eyes, each set in a web of fine lines. They gazed just as calmly back. “What’s the problem, Hamin? I’m not a threat any more.”

Hamin smoothed the fine material at the cuff of his robe. “You know, Jernau Gurgeh, I do hate obsessions. They’re so… blinding, yes?” He smiled. “I am becoming worried for my Emperor, Gurgeh. I know how much he wants to prove he is rightfully on the throne, that he is worthy of the post he’s held the last two years. I believe he will do just that, but I know that what he really wants — what he always did want — is to play Molsce and win. That, of course, isn’t possible any more. The Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor; he rises from the flames… but I think he sees old Molsce in you, Jernau Gurgeh, and it is you he feels he must play, you he must beat; the alien, the man from the Culture, the morat, player-of-games. I am not sure that would be a good idea. It is not necessary. You will lose anyway, I feel certain, but… as I say; obsessions disturb me. It would be best for all concerned if you let it be known as soon as possible you will retire after this game.”

“And deprive Nicosar of the chance to beat me?” Gurgeh looked surprised and amused.

“Yes. Better he still feels there’s something still to prove. It will do him no harm.”

“I’ll think about it,” Gurgeh said.

Hamin studied him for a moment. “I hope you understand how frank I’ve been with you, Jernau Gurgeh. It would be unfortunate if such honesty went unacknowledged, and unrewarded.”

Gurgeh nodded. “Yes, I don’t doubt it would.”

A male servant at the door announced the game was about to recommence. “Excuse me, rector,” Gurgeh said, rising. The old apex’s gaze followed him. “Duty calls.”

“Obey,” Hamin said.

Gurgeh stopped, looking down at the wizened old creature on the far side of the table. Then he turned and left.

Hamin gazed at the blank table-screen in front of him, as if absorbed in some fascinating, invisible game that only he could see.

Gurgeh won on the Board of Origin and the Board of Form. The ferocious struggle between Traff and Yomonul continued; first one edged ahead, then the other. Traff went into the Board of Becoming with a very slight lead over the older apex. Gurgeh was so far ahead he was almost invulnerable, able to relax in his strongholds and spectate upon the total war around him before heading out to mop up whatever was left of the exhausted victor’s forces. It seemed the only fair — not to mention expedient — thing to do; let the lads have their fun, then impose order later and tidy the toys back in the box.

Still no substitute for a real game, though.

“Are you pleased or displeased, Mr Gurgeh?” Star Marshal Yomonul came up to Gurgeh and asked him the question during a pause in the game while Traff consulted with the Adjudicator on a point of order. Gurgeh had been standing thinking, staring at the board, and hadn’t noticed the imprisoned apex approach. He looked up in surprise to see the star marshal in front of him, his lined face looking out, faintly amused, from its titanium and carbon cage. Neither soldier had paid him any attention until now.

“At being left out?” Gurgeh said.

The apex moved one rod-braced arm to indicate the board. “Yes; to be winning so easily. Do you seek the victory or the challenge?” The apex’s skeletal mask moved with each action of the jaw.

“I’d prefer both,” Gurgeh admitted. “I have thought of joining in; as a third force, or on one side or the other… but this looks too much like a personal war.”

The elderly apex grinned; the head-cage nodded easily. “It is,” he said. “You’re doing very well as you are. I wouldn’t change now, if I were you.”

“What about you?” Gurgeh asked. “You seem to be getting the worst of it at the moment.”

Yomonul smiled; the face mask flexed even for that small gesture. “I’m having the time of my life. And I still have a few surprises lined up for the youngster, and a few tricks. But I feel a little guilty at letting you through so easily. You’ll embarrass us all if you play Nicosar and win.”

Gurgeh expressed surprise. “You think I could?”

“No.” The apex’s gesture was the more emphatic for being contained and amplified in its dark cage. “Nicosar plays at his best when he has to, and at his best he will beat you. So long as he isn’t too ambitious. No; he’ll beat you, because you’ll threaten him, and he will respect that. But — ah…” The star marshal turned as Traff strode across the board, moved a couple of pieces, and then bowed with exaggerated courtesy to Yomonul. The star marshal looked back at Gurgeh. “I see it is my turn. Excuse me.” He returned to the fray.

Perhaps one of the tricks Yomonul had mentioned was making Traff think his conversation with Gurgeh had been to enlist the Culture man’s aid; for some time afterwards the younger soldier acted as though he was expecting to have to fight on two fronts.

It gave Yomonul an edge. He scraped in ahead of Traff. Gurgeh won the match and the chance to play Nicosar. Hamin tried to talk to him in the corridor outside the game-hall, immediately after his victory, but Gurgeh just smiled and walked past.

Cinderbuds swayed all around them; the light wind made shushing noises in the golden canopy. The court, the game-players and their retinues sat on a high, steeply raked wooden structure itself almost the size of a small castle. Before the stand, in a large clearing in the cinderbud forest, was a long, narrow run; a double fence of stout timbers five metres or more high. This formed the central section of a sort of open corral, shaped like an hourglass and open to the forest at both ends. Nicosar and the higher-placed players sat at the front of the high wooden platform with a good view of the wooden funnel.

At the back of the stand there were awninged areas where food was being prepared. Smells of roasting meat drifted over the stand and out into the forest.

“That’ll have them frothing at the mouth,” Star Marshal Yomonul said, leaning over to Gurgeh with a whirring of servoes. They were sitting side by side, on the front rank of the platform, a little along from the Emperor. Both held a large projectile rifle, fastened to a supporting tripod in front of them.

“What will?” Gurgeh asked.

“The smell.” Yomonul grinned, gesturing behind them to the fires and grills. “Roasted meat. Wind’s carrying it their way. It’ll drive them crazy.”

“Oh, great,” muttered Flere-Imsaho from near Gurgeh’s feet. It had already tried to persuade Gurgeh not to take part in the hunt.

Gurgeh ignored the machine and nodded. “Of course,” he said. He hefted the rifle stock. The ancient weapon was single shot; a sliding bolt had to be operated to reload it. Each gun had slightly different rifling patterns, so that when the bullets were removed from the bodies of the animals, the marks on them would allow a score to be kept and heads and pelts to be allocated.

“You sure you’ve used one of these before?” Yomonul asked, grinning at him. The apex was in a good mood. In a few tens of days he would be released from the exoskeleton. Meanwhile, the Emperor had allowed the prison regimen to be relaxed; Yomonul could socialise, drink, and eat whatever he liked.

Gurgeh nodded. “I’ve shot guns,” he said. He’d never used a projectile gun, but there had been that day, years ago now, with Yay, in the desert.

“Bet you’ve never shot anything live before,” the drone said.

Yomonul tapped the machine’s casing with one carbon-shod foot. “Quiet, thing,” he said.

Flere-Imsaho tipped slowly up so that its bevelled brown front pointed up at Gurgeh. “‘Thing’?” it said indignantly, in a sort of whispered screech.

Gurgeh winked and put his finger to his lips. He and Yomonul grinned at each other.

The hunt, as it was called, started with a blare of trumpets and the distant howling of the troshae. A line of males appeared from the forest and ran alongside the wooden funnel, beating the timbers with rods. The first troshae appeared, shadows striping along its flanks as it entered the clearing and ran into the wooden funnel. The people around Gurgeh murmured in anticipation.

“A big one,” Yomonul said appreciatively as the golden-black striped beast loped six-legged down the run. Clicks all around the platform announced people preparing to fire. Gurgeh lifted the stock of the rifle. Fastened to its tripod, the rifle was easier to handle in the harsh gravity than it would have been otherwise, as well as being limited in its field of fire; something the Emperor’s ever watchful guards no doubt found reassuring.

The troshae sprinted down the run, paws blurring on the dusty ground; people fired at it, filling the air with muffled cracking noises and puffs of grey smoke. White wood splinters spun off the run’s timbers; puffs of dust burst from the ground. Yomonul sighted and fired; a chorus of shots burst out around Gurgeh. The guns were silenced, but all the same Gurgeh felt his ears close up a little, deadening the racket. He fired. The recoil took him by surprise; his bullet must have gone way over the animal’s head.

He looked down into the run. The animal was screaming. It tried to leap up the fence on the far side of the run, but was brought down in a hail of fire. It limped on a little further, dragging three legs and leaving a trail of blood behind it. Gurgeh heard another muffled report by his side, and the carnivore’s head jerked suddenly to one side; it collapsed. A great cheer went up. A gate in the run was opened and some males scurried in to drag the body away. Yomonul was on his feet beside Gurgeh, acknowledging the cheers. He sat down again quickly, exoskeleton motors whirring, as the next animal appeared out of the forest and raced between the wooden walls.

After the fourth troshae, several came at once, and in the confusion one scrambled up the timbers of the run and over the top; it started to chase some of the males waiting outside the run. A guard, on the ground at the foot of the stand, brought the animal down with a single laser-shot.

In the mid-morning, when a great pile of the striped bodies had accumulated in the middle of the run and there was a danger some animals would climb out over the bodies of their predecessors, the hunt was stopped while males used hooks and hawsers and a couple of small tractors to clear the warm, blood-spattered debris. Somebody on the far side of the Emperor shot one of the males while they were working. There were some tuts, and a few drunken cheers. The Emperor fined the offender and told them if they did it again they’d find themselves running with the troshae. Everybody laughed.

“You’re not firing, Gurgeh,” Yomonul said. He reckoned he’d killed another three animals by then. Gurgeh had begun to find the hunt a little pointless, and almost stopped firing. He kept missing, anyway.

“I’m not very good at this,” he said.

“Practice!” Yomonul laughed, slapping him on the back. The servo-amplified blow from the elated Star Marshal almost knocked the wind out of Gurgeh.

Yomonul claimed another kill. He gave an excited shout and kicked Flere-Imsaho. “Fetch!” he laughed.

The drone rose slowly and with dignity from the floor. “Jernau Gurgeh,” it said. “I’m not putting up with any more of this. I’m going back to the castle. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you. Enjoy your marksmanship.” It floated down and to the side, disappearing round the edge of the stand. Yomonul had it in his sights most of the way.

“You just let it go?” he asked Gurgeh, laughing.

“Glad to be rid of it,” Gurgeh told him.

They broke for lunch. Nicosar congratulated Yomonul, saying how well he’d shot. Gurgeh sat with Yomonul at lunch, too, and went down on one knee as Nicosar’s palanquin was brought up to their part of the table. Yomonul told the Emperor the exoskeleton helped steady his aim. Nicosar said it was the Emperor’s pleasure that the device be removed soon, after the formal end of the games. Nicosar glanced at Gurgeh, but said nothing else; the AG palanquin lifted itself; the imperial guards nudged it further down the line of waiting people. After lunch, people returned to their seats and the hunt went on. There were other animals to hunt, and the first part of the short afternoon was spent shooting them, but the troshae came back later on. So far, only seven of the two hundred or so troshae released from the forest pens into the run had made it all the way through the wooden funnel and out the far end to escape into the forest. Even they were wounded, and would anyway be caught by the Incandescence.

The earth in the wooden funnel in front of the shooting platform was dark with auburn blood. Gurgeh shot as the animals pounded down the sodden run, but aimed to just miss them, watching for the spatter of muddy ground in front of their noses as they tore, wounded and howling and panting, in front of him. He found the whole hunt somewhat distasteful but could not deny that the infectious excitement of the Azadians had some effect on him. Yomonul was obviously enjoying himself. The apex leant over as a large female troshae came running out of the forest with two small cubs.

“You need more practice, Gurgey,” he said. “Don’t you do any hunting at home?” The female and her cubs ran towards the wooden funnel.

“Not much,” Gurgeh admitted.

Yomonul grunted, aimed at long range and fired. One of the cubs dropped. The female skidded, stopped, went back to it. The other cub ran on hesitantly. It mewled as bullets hit it.

Yomonul reloaded. “I was surprised to see you here at all,” he said. The female, stung by a bullet in a rear leg, swung growling away from the dead cub and charged forward again, roaring, at the tottering, wounded cub.

“I wanted to show I wasn’t squeamish,” Gurgeh said, watching the second cub’s head jerk up and the beast fall at the feet of its mother. “And I have hunted—”

He was going to use the word ‘Azad’, which meant machine and animal; any organism or system, and he turned to Yomonul with a small smile to say this, but when he looked at the apex he could see there was something wrong.

Yomonul was shaking. He sat clutching his gun, turned half towards Gurgeh, face quivering in its dark cage, skin white and covered in sweat, eyes bulging.

Gurgeh went to put his hand on the strut of the Star Marshal’s forearm, instinctively offering support.

It was as though something broke inside the apex. Yomonul’s gun swung right round, snapping the supporting tripod; the bulky silencer pointed straight at Gurgeh’s forehead. Gurgeh had a fleeting, vivid impression of Yomonul’s face; jaw clamped shut, blood trickling over his chin, eyes staring, a tic working furiously on the side of his face. Gurgeh ducked; the gun fired somewhere over his head and he heard a scream as he fell out of his seat, rolling past his own gun’s tripod.

Before he could get up, Gurgeh was kicked in the back. He turned over to see Yomonul above him, swaying crazily against the background of shocked, pale faces behind him. He was struggling with the rifle bolt, reloading. One foot lashed out again, thudding into Gurgeh’s ribs; he jerked back, trying to absorb the blow, and fell over the front of the platform.

He saw wooden slats whirling, cinderbuds revolving, then he struck, crashing into a male animal handler standing just before the run. They each thudded to the ground, winded. Gurgeh looked up and saw Yomonul on the platform, exoskeleton glinting dully in the sunlight, raising the rifle and sighting on him. Two apices came up behind Yomonul, arms out to grasp him. Without even glancing back, Yomonul swung his arms flashing round behind him; a hand smashed into the chest of one apex; the rifle slammed into the face of the other. Both collapsed; the carbon-ribbed arms darted back and Yomonul steadied the gun again, aiming at Gurgeh.

Gurgeh was on his feet, diving away. The shot hit the still winded male lying behind him. Gurgeh stumbled for the wooden doors leading under the high platform; shouts came from the platform as Yomonul jumped down, landing between Gurgeh and the doors; the Star Marshal reloaded the gun as he hit the ground on his feet, the exoskeleton easily absorbing the shock of landing. Gurgeh almost fell as he turned, feet skidding on the blood-spattered earth.

He pushed himself off the ground, to run between the edge of the wooden fence and the platform edge. A uniformed guard with a CREW rifle stood in his way, looking uncertainly up at the platform. Gurgeh went to run past him, ducking as he did so. Still a few metres in front of Gurgeh, the guard started to put one hand out and unhitch the laser from his shoulder. A look of almost comic surprise appeared on his flat face, an instant before one side of his chest burst open and he spun round into Gurgeh’s path, knocking him over.

Gurgeh rolled again, clattering over the dead guard. He sat up. Yomonul was ten metres away, running awkwardly towards him, reloading. The guard’s rifle was at Gurgeh’s feet. He reached out, grabbed it, aimed at Yomonul and fired.

The Star Marshal ducked, but Gurgeh was still allowing for recoil after a morning shooting the projectile rifle. The laser-shot slammed into Yomonul’s face; the apex’s head blew apart.

Yomonul didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down; the running figure, head-cage almost empty, trailing strips of flesh and splintered bone behind it like pennants, neck spouting blood, speeded up; it ran faster towards him, and less awkwardly.

It aimed the rifle straight at Gurgeh’s head.

Gurgeh froze, stunned. Too late, he started to sight the CREW gun again, and began struggling to get up. The headless exoskeleton was three metres away; he stared into the silencer’s black mouth and he knew he was dead. But the bizarre figure hesitated, empty headshell jerking upwards, and the gun wavered.

Something crashed into Gurgeh — from the back, he realised, surprised, as everything went dark; from the back, not from the front — and then came nothing.

His back hurt. He opened his eyes. A bulky brown drone hummed between him and a white ceiling.

“Gurgeh?” the machine said.

He swallowed, licked his lips. “What?” he said. He didn’t know where he was, or who the drone was. He had only a very vague idea who he was.

“Gurgeh. It’s me; Flere-Imsaho. How do you feel?”

Flear Imsah-ho. The name meant something. “Back hurts a bit,” he said, hoping not to be found out. Gurgi? Gurgey? Must be his name.

“I’m not surprised. A very large troshae hit you in the back.”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Go back to sleep.”

“… Sleep.”

His eyelids felt very heavy and the drone looked blurred.

His back hurt. He opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling. He looked around for Flere-Imsaho. Dark wooden walls. Window. Flere-Imsaho; there it was. It floated over to him.

“Hello, Gurgeh.”

“Hello.”

“Do you remember who I am?”

“Still asking stupid questions, Flere-Imsaho. Am I going to be all right?”

“You’re bruised, you’ve got a cracked rib and you’re mildly concussed. You ought to be able to get up in a day or two.”

“Do I remember you saying a… troshae hit me? Did I dream that?”

“You didn’t dream it. I did tell you. That’s what happened. How much do you remember?”

“Falling off the stand… platform,” he said slowly, trying to think. He was in bed and his back was sore. It was his own room in the castle and the lights were on so it was probably night. His eyes widened. “Yomonul kicked me off!” he said suddenly. “Why?”

“It doesn’t matter now. Go back to sleep.”

Gurgeh started to say something else, but he felt tired again as the drone buzzed closer, and he closed his eyes for a second just to rest them.

Gurgeh stood by the window, looking down into the courtyard. The male servant took the tray out, glasses clinking.

“Go on,” he said to the drone.

“The troshae climbed the fence while everybody was watching you and Yomonul. It came up behind you and sprang. It hit you and then bowled over the exoskeleton before it had time to do much about it. Guards shot the troshae as it tried to gore Yomonul, and by the time they dragged it off the exoskeleton it had deactivated.”

Gurgeh shook his head slowly. “All I remember is being kicked off the stand.” He sat down in a chair by the window. The far edge of the courtyard was golden in the hazy light of late afternoon. “And where were you while this was happening?”

“Back here, watching the hunt on an imperial broadcast. I’m sorry I left, Jernau Gurgeh, but that appalling apex was kicking me, and the whole obscene spectacle was just too gory and disgusting for words.” Gurgeh waved one hand. “It doesn’t matter. I’m alive.” He put his face in his hands. “You’re sure it was I who shot Yomonul?”

“Oh yes! It’s all recorded. Do you want to wa—”

“No.” Gurgeh held up one hand to the drone, eyes still closed. “No; I don’t want to watch.”

“I didn’t see that bit live,” Flere-Imsaho said. “I was on my way back to the hunt as soon as Yomonul fired his first shot and killed the person on the other side of you. But I’ve watched the recording; yes, you killed him, with the guard’s CREW. But of course that just meant whoever had taken control of the exoskeleton didn’t have to fight against Yomonul inside it. As soon as Yomonul was dead the thing moved a lot faster and less erratically. He must have been using all his strength to try and stop it.”

Gurgeh stared at the floor. “You’re certain about all this?”

“Absolutely.” The drone drifted over to the wall-screen. “Look, why not watch it on your—”

“No!” Gurgeh shouted, standing, and then swaying.

He sat down again. “No,” he said, quieter.

“By the time I got there, whoever was jamming the exoskeleton controls had gone; I got a brief reading on my microwave sensors while I was between here and the hunt, but it switched off before I could get an accurate fix. Some kind of phased-pulse maser. The imperial guards picked up something too; they’d started a search in the forest by the time we took you away. I persuaded them I knew what I was doing and had you brought here. They sent a doctor in to look at you a couple of times, but that’s all. Lucky I got there when I did or they might have taken you to the infirmary and started doing all sorts of nasty tests on you…” The drone sounded perplexed. “That’s why I have a feeling this wasn’t a straight security-service job. They’d have tried other, less public ways to kill you, and they’d have been all set up to get you into the hospital if it hadn’t quite worked… all too disorganised. There’s something funny going on, I’m sure.”

Gurgeh put his hands to his back, carefully tracing the extent of the bruising again. “I wish I could remember everything. I wish I could remember whether I meant to kill Yomonul,” he said. His chest ached. He felt sick.

“As you did, and you’re such a bad shot, I’d assume the answer is no.”

Gurgeh looked at the machine. “Don’t you have something else you could be doing, drone?”

“Not really. Oh, by the way; the Emperor wants to see you, when you’re feeling well.”

“I’ll go now,” Gurgeh said, standing slowly.

“Are you sure? I don’t think you should. You don’t look well; I’d lie down if I were you. Please sit down. You’re not ready. What if he’s angry because you killed Yomonul? Oh, I suppose I’d better come with you…”

Nicosar sat in a small throne in front of a great bank of slanting, multi-coloured windows. The imperial apartments were submerged in the deep, polychromatic light; huge wall tapestries sewn with precious metal threads glittered like treasures in an underwater cave. Guards stood impassively around the walls and behind the throne; courtiers and officials shuffled to and fro with papers and flat-screens. An officer of the Imperial Household brought Gurgeh to the throne, leaving Flere-Imsaho at the other end of the room under the watchful eyes of two guards.

“Please sit.” Nicosar motioned Gurgeh to a small stool on the dais in front of him. Gurgeh sat down gratefully. “Jernau Gurgeh,” the Emperor said, his voice quiet and controlled, almost flat. “We offer you our sincere apologies for what happened yesterday. We are glad to see you have made such a rapid recovery, though we understand you are still in pain. Is there anything you wish?”

“Thank you, Your Highness, no.”

“We are glad.” Nicosar nodded slowly. He was still dressed in unrelieved black. His sober dress, small frame and plain face contrasted with the fabulous splashes of colour from the raked windows overhead and the sumptuous clothing of the courtiers. The Emperor put small, ringed hands on the arms of the throne. “We are, of course, deeply sorry to lose the regard and the services of our Star Marshal, Yomonul Lu Rahsp, especially in such tragic circumstances, but we understand that you had no choice but to defend yourself. It is our will that no action be taken against you.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.”

Nicosar waved one hand. “In the matter of who plotted against you, the person who took control of our star marshal’s imprisoning device was discovered and put to the question. We were deeply hurt to discover that the leading conspirator was our life-long mentor and guide, the rector of Candsev College.”

“Ham—” Gurgeh began, but stopped. Nicosar’s face was a study in displeasure. The old apex’s name died in Gurgeh’s throat. “I—” Gurgeh started again.

Nicosar held up one hand.

“We wish to tell you that the rector of Candsev College, Hamin Li Srilist, has been sentenced to death for his part in the conspiracy against you. We understand that this may not have been the only attempt on your life. If this is so, then all relevant circumstances will be investigated and the wrong-doers brought to justice.

“Certain persons in the court,” Nicosar said, looking at the rings on his hands, “have desired to protect their Emperor through… misguided actions. The Emperor needs no such protection from a game-opponent, even if that opponent uses aids we deny ourselves. It has been necessary to deceive our subjects in the matter of your progress in these final games, but this is for their good, not ours. We have no need to be protected from unpleasant truths. The Emperor knows no fear, only discretion. We shall be happy to postpone the game between the Emperor-Regent and the man Jernau Morat Gurgeh until he feels fit to play.”

Gurgeh found himself waiting for more of the quiet, slow, half-sung words, but Nicosar sat, impassively silent.

“I thank Your Highness,” Gurgeh said, “but I would prefer there be no postponement. I feel almost well enough to play now, and there are still three days before the match is due to start. I’m sure there is no need to delay further.”

Nicosar nodded slowly. “We are pleased. We hope, though, that if Jernau Gurgeh desires to change his mind on this matter before the match is due to start, he will not hesitate to inform the Imperial Office, which will gladly put back the starting date of the final match until Jernau Gurgeh feels fit to play the game of Azad to the very best of his ability.”

“I thank Your Highness again.”

“We are pleased that Jernau Gurgeh was not badly injured and has been able to attend this audience,” Nicosar said. He nodded briefly to Gurgeh and then looked to a courtier, waiting impatiently to one side. Gurgeh stood, bowed, and backed away.

“You only have to take four backward steps before you turn your back on him,” Flere-Imsaho told him. “Otherwise; very good.”

They were back in Gurgeh’s room. “I’ll try and remember next time,” he said.

“Anyway, sounds like you’re in the clear. I did a bit of over-hearing while you had your tête-à-tête; courtiers usually know what’s going on. Seems they found an apex trying to escape through the forest from the maser and the exo-controls; he’d dropped the gun they gave him to defend himself with, which was just as well because it was a bomb, not a gun, so they got him alive. He broke under torture and implicated one of Hamin’s cronies who tried to bargain with a confession. So they started on Hamin.”

“You mean they tortured him?”

“Only a little. He’s old and they had to keep him alive for whatever punishment the Emperor decided on. The apex exo-controller and some other henchman have been impaled, the plea-bargaining crony’s getting caged in the forest to await the Incandescence, and Hamin’s being deprived of AGe drugs; he’ll be dead in forty or fifty days.”

Gurgeh shook his head. “Hamin… I didn’t think he was that frightened of me.”

“Well, he’s old. They have funny ideas sometimes.”

“Do you think I’m safe now?”

“Yes. The Emperor wants you alive so he can destroy you on the Azad boards. Nobody else would dare harm you. You can concentrate on the game. Anyway, I’ll look after you.”

Gurgeh looked, disbelievingly, at the buzzing drone.

He could detect no trace of irony in its voice.

Gurgeh and Nicosar started the first of the lesser games three days later. There was a curious atmosphere about the final match; a sense of anti-climax pervaded Castle Klaff. Normally this last contest was the culmination of six years’ work and preparation in the Empire; the very apotheosis of all that Azad was and stood for. This time, the imperial continuance was already settled. Nicosar had ensured his next Great Year of rule when he’d beaten Vechesteder and Jhilno, though, as far as the rest of the Empire knew, the Emperor still had to play Krowo to decide who wore the imperial crown. Even if Gurgeh did win the game, it would make no difference, save for some wounded imperial pride. The court and the Bureau would put it down to experience, and make sure they didn’t invite any more decadent but sneaky aliens to take part in the holy game.

Gurgeh suspected that many of the people still in the fortress would as soon have left Echronedal to head back to Eä, but the coronation ceremony and the religious confirmation still had to be witnessed, and nobody would be allowed to leave Echronedal until the fire had passed and the Emperor had risen from its embers.

Probably only Gurgeh and Nicosar were really looking forward to the match; even the observing game-players and analysts were disheartened at the prospect of witnessing a game they were already barred from discussing, even amongst themselves. All Gurgeh’s games past the point he had supposedly been knocked out were taboo subjects. They did not exist. The Imperial Games Bureau was already hard at work concocting an official final match between Nicosar and Krowo. Judging by their previous efforts, Gurgeh expected it to be entirely convincing. It might lack the ultimate spark of genius, but it would pass.

So everything was already settled. The Empire had new star marshals (though a little shuffling would be required to replace Yomonul), new generals and admirals, archbishops, ministers and judges. The course of the Empire was set, and with very little change from the previous bearing. Nicosar would continue with his present policies; the premises of the various winners indicated little discontent or new thinking. The courtiers and officials could therefore breathe easily again, knowing nothing would alter too much, and their positions were as secure as they’d ever be. So, instead of the usual tension surrounding the final game, there was an atmosphere more like that of an exhibition match. Only the two contestants were treating it as a real contest.

Gurgeh was immediately impressed by Nicosar’s play. The Emperor didn’t stop rising in Gurgeh’s estimation; the more he studied the apex’s play the more he realised just how powerful and complete an opponent he was facing. He would need to be more than lucky to beat Nicosar; he would need to be somebody else. From the beginning he tried to concentrate on not being trounced rather than actually defeating the Emperor.

Nicosar played cautiously most of the time; then, suddenly, he’d strike out with some brilliant flowing series of moves that looked at first as though they’d been made by some gifted madman, before revealing themselves as the masterstrokes they were; perfect answers to the impossible questions they themselves posed.

Gurgeh did his best to anticipate these devastating fusions of guile and power, and to find replies to them once they’d begun, but by the time the minor games were over, thirty days or so before the fire was due, Nicosar had a considerable advantage in pieces and cards to carry over to the first of the three great boards. Gurgeh suspected his only chance was to hold out as best he could on the first two boards and hope that he might pull something back on the final one.

The cinderbuds towered around the castle, rising like a slow tide of gold about the walls. Gurgeh sat in the same small garden he’d visited before. Then he’d been able to look out over the cinderbuds to the distant horizon; now the view ended twenty metres away at the first of the great yellow leaf-heads. Late sunlight spread the castle’s shadow across the canopy. Behind Gurgeh, the fortress lights were coming on.

Gurgeh looked out to the tan trunks of the great trees, and shook his head. He’d lost the game on the Board of Origin and now he was losing on the Board of Form.

He was missing something; some facet of the way Nicosar was playing was escaping him. He knew it, he was certain, but he couldn’t work out what that facet was. He had a nagging suspicion it was something very simple, however complex its articulation on the boards might be. He ought to have spotted it, analysed and evaluated it long ago and turned it to his advantage, but for some reason — some reason intrinsic to his very understanding of the game, he felt sure — he could not. An aspect of his play seemed to have disappeared, and he was starting to think the knock to the head he’d taken during the hunt had affected him more than he’d first assumed.

But then, the ship didn’t seem to have any better idea what he was doing wrong, either. Its advice always seemed to make sense at the time, but when Gurgeh got to the board he found he could never apply the ship’s ideas. If he went against his instincts and forced himself to do as the Limiting Factor had suggested, he ended up in even more trouble; nothing was more guaranteed to cause you problems on an Azad board than trying to play in a way you didn’t really believe in. He rose slowly, straightening his back, which was hardly sore now, and returned to his room. Flere-Imsaho was in front of the screen, watching a holo-display of an odd diagram.

“What are you doing?” Gurgeh said, lowering himself into a soft chair. The drone turned, addressing him in Marain.

“I worked out a way to disable the bugs; we can talk in Marain now. Isn’t that good?”

“I suppose so,” Gurgeh said, still in Eächic. He picked up a small flat-screen to see what was happening in the Empire.

“Well you might at least use the language after I went to the trouble of jamming their bugs. It wasn’t easy you know; I’m not designed for that sort of thing. I had to learn a lot of stuff from some of my own files about electronics and optics and listening fields and all that sort of technical stuff. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Utterly and profoundly ecstatic,” Gurgeh said carefully, in Marain. He looked at the small screen. It told him of the new appointments, the crushing of an insurrection in a distant system, the progress of the game between Nicosar and Krowo — Krowo wasn’t as far behind as Gurgeh was — the victory won by imperial troops against a race of monsters, and higher rates of pay for males who volunteered to join the Army. “What is that you’re looking at?” he said, looking briefly at the wall-screen, where Flere-Imsaho’s strange torus turned slowly. “Don’t you recognise it?” the drone said, voice pitched to express surprise. “I thought you would; it’s a model of the Reality.”

“The — oh, yes.” Gurgeh nodded and went back to the small screen, where a group of asteroids was being bombarded by imperial battleships, to quell the insurrection. “Four dimensions and all that.” He flicked through the sub-channels to the game programmes. A few of the second-series matches were still being played on Eä.

“Well, seven relevant dimensions actually, in the case of the Reality itself; one of those lines… are you listening?”

“Hmm? Oh yes.” The games on Eä were all in their last stages. The secondary games from Echronedal were still being analysed.

“… one of those lines on the Reality represents our entire universe… surely you were taught all this?”

“Mm,” Gurgeh nodded. He had never been especially interested in spacial theory or hyperspace or hyperspheres or the like; none of it seemed to make any difference to how he lived, so what did it matter? There were some games that were best understood in four dimensions, but Gurgeh only cared about their own particular rules, and the general theories only meant anything to him as they applied specifically to those games. He pressed for another page on the small screen… to be confronted with a picture of himself, once more expressing his sadness at being knocked out of the games, wishing the people and Empire of Azad well and thanking everybody for having him. An announcer talked over his faded voice to say that Gurgeh had pulled out of the second-series games on Echronedal. Gurgeh smiled thinly, watching the official reality he’d agreed to be part of as it gradually built up and became accepted fact.

He looked up briefly at the torus on the screen, and remembered something he’d puzzled over, years ago now. “What’s the difference between hyperspace and ultraspace?” he asked the drone. “The ship mentioned ultraspace once and I never could work out what the hell it was talking about.”

The drone tried to explain, using the holo-model of the Reality to illustrate. As ever, it over-explained, but Gurgeh got the idea, for what it was worth.

Flere-Imsaho annoyed him that evening, chattering away in Marain all the time about anything and everything. After initially finding it rather needlessly complex, Gurgeh enjoyed hearing the language again, and discovered some pleasure in speaking it, but the drone’s high, squeaky voice became tiring after a while. It only shut up while he had his customary rather negative and depressing game-analysis with the ship that evening, still in Marain.

He had his best night’s sleep since the day of the hunt, and woke feeling, for no good reason he could think of, that there might yet be a chance of turning the game around.

It took Gurgeh most of the morning’s play to gradually work out what Nicosar was up to. When, eventually, he did, it took his breath away. The Emperor had set out to beat not just Gurgeh, but the whole Culture. There was no other way to describe his use of pieces, territory and cards; he had set up his whole side of the game as an Empire, the very image of Azad.

Another revelation struck Gurgeh with a force almost as great; one reading — perhaps the best — of the way he’d always played was that he played as the Culture. He’d habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite profoundly peaceful.

In all the games he’d played, the fight had always come to Gurgeh, initially. He’d thought of the period before as preparing for battle, but now he saw that if he’d been alone on the board he’d have done roughly the same, spreading slowly across the territories, consolidating gradually, calmly, economically… of course it had never happened; he always was attacked, and once the battle was joined he developed that conflict as assiduously and totally as before he’d tried to develop the patterns and potential of unthreatened pieces and undisputed territory.

Every other player he’d competed against had unwittingly tried to adjust to this novel style in its own terms, and comprehensively failed. Nicosar was trying no such thing. He’d gone the other way, and made the board his Empire, complete and exact in every structural detail to the limits of definition the game’s scale imposed.

It stunned Gurgeh. The realisation burst on him like some slow sunrise turning nova, like a trickle of understanding becoming stream, river, tide; tsunami. His next few moves were automatic; reaction-moves, not properly thought-out parts of his strategy, limited and inadequate though it had been shown to be. His mouth had gone dry, his hands shook.

Of course; this was what he’d been missing, this was the hidden facet, so open and blatant, and there for all to see, it was effectively invisible, too obvious for words or understanding. It was so simple, so elegant, so staggeringly ambitious but so fundamentally practical, and so much what Nicosar obviously thought the whole game to be about.

No wonder he’d been so desperate to play this man from the Culture, if this was what he’d planned all along.

Even the details Nicosar and only a handful of others in the Empire knew about the Culture and its true size and scope were there, included and displayed on the board, but probably utterly indecipherable to those who did not already know; the style of Nicosar’s board Empire was of a complete thing fully shown, the assumptions about his opponent’s forces were couched in terms of fractions of something greater.

There was, too, a ruthlessness about the way the Emperor treated his own and his opponent’s pieces which Gurgeh thought was almost a taunt; a tactic designed to disturb him. The Emperor sent pieces to their destruction with a sort of joyous callousness where Gurgeh would have hung back, attempting to prepare and build up. Where Gurgeh would have accepted surrender and conversion, Nicosar laid waste.

The difference was slight in some ways — no good player simply squandered pieces or massacred purely for the sake of it — but the implication of applied brutality was there, like a flavour, like a stench, like a silent mist hanging over the board.

He saw then that he’d been fighting back much as Nicosar might have expected him to, trying to save pieces, to make reasonable, considered, conservative moves and, in a sense, to ignore the way Nicosar was kicking and slinging his pieces into battle and tearing strips of territory from his opponent like ribbons of tattered flesh. In a way, Gurgeh had been trying desperately not to play Nicosar; the Emperor was playing a rough, harsh, dictatorial and frequently inelegant game and had rightly assumed something in the Culture man would simply not want to be a part of it.

Gurgeh started to take stock, sizing up the possibilities while he played a few more inconsequential blocking moves to give himself time to think. The point of the game was to win; he’d been forgetting that. Nothing else mattered; nothing else hung on the outcome of the game either. The game was irrelevant, therefore it could be allowed to mean everything, and the only barrier he had to negotiate was that put up by his own feelings.

He had to reply, but how? Become the Culture? Another Empire?

He was already playing the part of the Culture, and it wasn’t working — and how do you match an Emperor as an imperialist?

He stood there on the board, wearing his faintly ridiculous, gathered-up clothes, and was only distantly aware of everything else around him. He tried to tear his thoughts away from the game for a moment, looking round the great ribbed prow-hall of the castle, at the tall, open windows and the yellow cinderbud canopy outside; at the half-full banks of seats, at the imperial guards and the adjudicating officials, at the great black horn-shapes of the electronic screening equipment directly overhead, at the many people in their various clothes and guises. All translated into game-thought; all viewed as though through some powerful drug which distorted everything he saw into twisted analogs of its latching hold on his brain.

He thought of mirrors, and of reverser fields, which gave the more technically artificial but perceivably more real impression; mirror-writing was what it said; reversed writing was ordinary writing. He saw the closed torus of Flere-Imsaho’s unreal Reality, remembered Chamlis Amalk-ney and its warning about deviousness; things which meant nothing and something; harmonics of his thought.

Click. Switch off/switch on. As though he was a machine. Fall off the edge of the catastrophe curve and never mind. He forgot everything and made the first move he saw.

He looked at the move he’d made. Nothing like what Nicosar would have done.

An archetypally Culture move. He felt his heart sink. He’d been hoping for something different, something better.

He looked again. Well, it was a Culture move, but at least it was an attacking Culture move; followed through, it would wreck his whole cautious strategy so far, but it was all he could do if he was to have even the glimmer of a chance of resisting Nicosar. Pretend there really was a lot at stake, pretend he was fighting for the whole Culture; set out to win, regardless, no matter… At least he’d found a way to play, finally.

He knew he was going to lose, but it would not be a rout.

He gradually remodelled his whole game-plan to reflect the ethos of the Culture militant, trashing and abandoning whole areas of the board where the switch would not work, pulling back and regrouping and restructuring where it would; sacrificing where necessary, razing and scorching the ground where he had to. He didn’t try to mimic Nicosar’s crude but devastating attack-escape, return-invade strategy, but made his positions and his pieces in the image of a power that could eventually cope with such bludgeoning, if not now, then later, when it was ready.

He began to win a few points at last. The game was still lost, but there was still the Board of Becoming, where at last he might give Nicosar a fight.

Once or twice he caught a certain look on Nicosar’s face, when he was close enough to read the apex’s expression, that convinced him he’d done the right thing, even if it was something the Emperor had somehow expected. There was a recognition there now, in the apex’s expression and on the board, and even a kind of respect in those moves; an acknowledgement that they were fighting on even terms.

Gurgeh was overcome by the sensation that he was like a wire with some terrible energy streaming through him; he was a great cloud poised to strike lightning over the board, a colossal wave tearing across the ocean towards the sleeping shore, a great pulse of molten energy from a planetary heart; a god with the power to destroy and create at will.

He had lost control of his own drug-glands; the mix of chemicals in his bloodstream had taken over, and his brain felt saturated with the one encompassing idea, like a fever; win, dominate, control; a set of angles defining one desire, the single absolute determination.

The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and sleeping and walking around… but it was all nothing; irrelevant. Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game.

He watched the rival forces surge and tide across the great board, and they spoke a strange language, sang a strange song that was at once a perfect set of harmonies and a battle to control the writing of the themes. What he saw in front of him was like a single huge organism; the pieces seemed to move as though with a will that was neither his nor the Emperor’s, but something dictated finally by the game itself, an ultimate expression of its essence.

He saw it; he knew Nicosar saw it; but he doubted anybody else could. They were like a pair of secret lovers, secure and safe in their huge nest of a room, locked together before hundreds of people who looked on and who saw but who could not read and who would never guess what it was they were witnessing.

The game on the Board of Form came to an end. Gurgeh lost, but he had pulled back from the brink, and the advantage Nicosar would take to the Board of Becoming was far from decisive.

The two opponents separated, that act over, the final one yet to commence. Gurgeh left the prow-hall, exhausted and drained and gloriously happy, and slept for two days. The drone woke him.

“Gurgeh? Are you awake? Have you stopped being vague?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You; the game. What’s going on? Even the ship couldn’t work out what was happening on that board.” The drone floated above him, brown and grey, humming quietly. Gurgeh rubbed his eyes, blinked. It was morning; there were about ten days to go before the fire was due. Gurgeh felt as though he was waking from a dream more vivid and real than reality.

He yawned, sitting up. “Have I been vague?”

“Does pain hurt? Is a supernova bright?”

Gurgeh stretched, smirking. “Nicosar’s taking it impersonally,” he said, getting up and padding to the window. He stepped out on to the balcony. Flere-Imsaho tutted and threw a robe around him.

“If you’re going to start talking in riddles again…”

“What riddles?” Gurgeh drank in the mild air. He flexed his arms and shoulders again. “Isn’t this a fine old castle, drone?” he said, leaning on the stone rail and taking another deep breath. “They know how to build castles, don’t they?”

“I suppose they do, but Klaff wasn’t built by the Empire. They took it off another humanoid species who used to hold a ceremony similar to the one the Empire holds to crown the Emperor. But don’t change the subject. I asked you a question. What is that style? You’ve been very vague and strange the past few days; I could see you were concentrating so I didn’t press the point, but I and the ship would like to be told.”

“Nicosar’s taken on the part of the Empire; hence his style. I’ve had no choice but to become the Culture, hence mine. It’s that simple.”

“It doesn’t look it.”

“Tough. Think of it as a sort of mutual rape.”

“I think you should straighten out, Jernau Gurgeh.”

“I’m—” Gurgeh started to say, then stopped to check. He frowned in exasperation. “I’m perfectly straight, you idiot! Now why don’t you do something useful and order me some breakfast?”

“Yes, master,” Flere-Imsaho said sullenly, and dipped back inside the room. Gurgeh looked up into the empty board of blue sky, his mind already racing with plans for the game on the Board of Becoming.

Flere-Imsaho watched the man grow even more intense and absorbed in the days between the second and final games. He hardly seemed to hear anything that was said to him; he had to be reminded to eat and sleep. The drone wouldn’t have believed it, but twice it saw the man sitting with an expression of pain on his face, staring at nothing. Doing a remote ultrasound scan, the drone had discovered the man’s bladder was full to bursting; he had to be told when to pee! He spent all day, every day, gazing intently at nothing, or feverishly studying replays of old games. And though he might have been briefly undrugged after his long sleep, immediately thereafter he started glanding again, and didn’t stop. The drone used its Effector to monitor the man’s brainwaves and found that even when he appeared to sleep, it wasn’t really sleep; controlled lucid dreaming was what it seemed to be. His drug-glands were obviously working furiously all the time, and for the first time there were more tell-tale signs of intense drug-use on Gurgeh’s body than there were on his opponent’s.

How could he play in such a state? Had it been up to Flere-Imsaho, it would have stopped the man playing there and then. But it had its orders. It had a part to play, and it had played it, and all it could do now was wait and see what happened.

More people attended the start of the game on the Board of Becoming than had attended the previous two; the other game-players were still trying to work out what was going on in this strange, complicated, unfathomable game, and wanted to see what would happen on this final board, where the Emperor started with a considerable advantage, but on which the alien was known to be especially good.

Gurgeh dived back into the game, an amphibian into welcoming water. For a few moves he just gloried in the feeling of returning home to his element and the sheer joy of the contest, taking delight in a flexing of his strengths and powers, the readying tension of the pieces and places; then he curved out from that playing to the serious business of the building and the hunting, the making and linking and the destroying and cutting; the searching and destroying.

The board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassably fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar’s beliefs and his together. Image of their minds; a hologram of pure coherence, burning like a standing wave of fire across the board, a perfect map of the landscapes of thought and faith within their heads.

He began the slow move that was defeat and victory together before he even knew it himself. Nothing so subtle, so complex, so beautiful had ever been seen on an Azad board. He believed that; he knew that. He would make it the truth.

The game went on.

Breaks, days, evenings, conversations, meals; they came and went in another dimension; a monochrome thing, a flat, grainy image. He was somewhere else entirely. Another dimension, another image. His skull was a blister with a board inside it, his outside self just another piece to be shuffled here and there.

He didn’t talk to Nicosar, but they conversed, they carried out the most exquisitely textured exchange of mood and feeling through those pieces which they moved and were moved by; a song, a dance, a perfect poem. People filled the game-room every day now, engrossed in the fabulously perplexing work taking shape before them; trying to read that poem, see deeper into this moving picture, listen to this symphony, touch this living sculpture, and so understand it.

It goes on until it ends, Gurgeh thought to himself one day, and at the same time as the banality of the thought struck him, he saw that it was over. The climax had been reached. It was done, destroyed, could be no more. It was not finished, but it was over. A terrible sadness swamped him, took hold of him like a piece and made him sway and nearly fall, so that he had to walk to his stoolseat and pull himself on to it like an old man.

“Oh…” he heard himself say.

He looked at Nicosar, but the Emperor hadn’t seen it yet. He was looking at element-cards, trying to work out a way to alter the terrain ahead of his next advance.

Gurgeh couldn’t believe it. The game was over; couldn’t anybody see that? He looked despairingly around the faces of the officials, the spectators, the observers and Adjudicators. What was wrong with them all? He looked back at the board, hoping desperately that he might have missed something, made some mistake that meant there was still something Nicosar could do, that the perfect dance might last a little longer. He could see nothing; it was done. He looked at the time shown on the point-board. It was nearly time to break for the day. It was a dark evening outside. He tried to remember what day it was. The fire was due very soon, wasn’t it? Perhaps tonight, or tomorrow. Perhaps it had already been? No; even he would have noticed. The great high windows of the prow-hall were still unshuttered, looking out into the darkness where the huge cinderbuds waited, heavy with fruit.

Over over over. His — their — beautiful game over; dead. What had he done? He put his clenched hands over his mouth. Nicosar, you fool! The Emperor had fallen for it, taken the bait, entered the run and followed it to be torn apart near the high stand, storms of splinters before the fire.

Empires had fallen to barbarians before, and no doubt would again. Gurgeh knew all this from his childhood. Culture children were taught such things. The barbarians invade, and are taken over. Not always; some empires dissolve and cease, but many absorb; many take the barbarians in and end up conquering them. They make them live like the people they set out to take over. The architecture of the system channels them, beguiles them, seduces and transforms them, demanding from them what they could not before have given but slowly grow to offer. The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.

The Culture had become the Empire, the Empire the barbarians. Nicosar looked triumphant, pieces everywhere, adapting and taking and changing and moving in for the kill. But it would be their own death-change; they could not survive as they were; wasn’t that obvious? They would become Gurgeh’s, or neutrals, their rebirth his to deliver. Over.

A prickling sensation began behind his nose and he sat back, overcome by the sadness of the game’s ending, and waiting for tears.

None came. A suitable reprimand from his body, for using the elements so well, and water so much. He would drown Nicosar’s attacks; the Emperor played with fire, and would be extinguished. No tears for him.

Something left Gurgeh, just ebbed away, burned out, relaxing its grip on him. The room was cool, filled with a spirit fragrance, and the rustling sound of the cinderbud canopy outside, beyond the tall, wide windows. People talked quietly in the galleries.

He looked around, and saw Hamin sitting in the college seats. The old apex looked shrunken and doll-like; a tiny withered husk of what he’d been, face lined and body misshapen. Gurgeh stared at him. Was this one of their ghosts? Had he been there all the time? Was he still alive? The unbearably old apex seemed to be staring fixedly at the centre of the board, and for one absurd instant Gurgeh thought the old creature was already dead and they’d brought his desiccated body into the prow-hall as some sort of trophy, a final ignominy.

Then the horn sounded for the end of the evening’s play, and two imperial guards came and wheeled the dying apex away. The shrunken, grizzled head looked briefly in his direction.

Gurgeh felt as though he’d been somewhere far away, on a great journey he’d just returned from. He looked at Nicosar, consulting with a couple of his advisors as the Adjudicators noted the closing positions and the people in the galleries stood up and started chattering. Did he imagine that Nicosar looked concerned, even worried? Perhaps so. He felt suddenly very sorry for the Emperor, for all of them; for everybody.

He sighed, and it was like the last breath of some great storm that had passed through him. He stretched his arms and legs, stood again. He looked at the board. Yes; over. He’d done it. There was much left to do, a lot still to happen, but Nicosar would lose. He could choose how he lost; fall forward and be absorbed, fall back and be taken over, go berserk and raze everything… but his board-Empire was finished.

He met the Emperor’s gaze for a moment. He could see from the expression there that Nicosar hadn’t fully realised yet, but he knew the apex was reading him in return and could probably see the change in the man, sense the sense of victory… Gurgeh lowered his gaze from that hard sight, and turned away and walked out of the hall. There was no acclaim, there were no congratulations. Nobody else could see. Flere-Imsaho was its usual concerned, annoying self, but it too hadn’t spotted anything, and still inquired how he thought the game was going. He lied. The Limiting Factor thought things were building up to a head. He didn’t bother to tell it. He’d expected more of the ship, though.

He ate alone, mind blank. He spent the evening swimming in a pool deep inside the castle, carved out of the rock spur the fortress had been built upon. He was alone; everybody else had gone to the castle towers and the higher battlements, or had taken to aircars, watching the distant glow in the sky to the west, where the Incandescence had begun.

Gurgeh swam until he felt tired, then dried, dressed in trous, shirt and a light jacket, and went for a walk round the castle’s curtain wall.

The night was dark under a covering of cloud; the great cinderbuds, higher than the outer walls, closed off the distant light of the approaching Incandescence. Imperial guards were out, ensuring that nobody started the fire early; Gurgeh had to prove to them he wasn’t carrying anything which could produce a spark or flame before they would let him out of the castle, where shutters were being readied and the walkways were damp from tests of the sprinkler systems.

The cinderbuds creaked and rustled in the windless gloom, exposing new, tinder-dry surfaces to the rich air, bark-layers unpeeling from the great bulbs of flammable liquid that hung beneath their topmost branches. The night air was saturated by the heady stench of their sap.

A hushed feeling layover the ancient fortress; a religious mood of awed anticipation which even Gurgeh would experience as a tangible change in the place. The swooshings of returning aircars, coming in over a damped-down swathe of forest to the castle, reminded Gurgeh that everybody was supposed to be in the castle by midnight, and he went back slowly, drinking in the atmosphere of still expectation like something precious that could not last for long, or perhaps ever be again.

Still, he wasn’t tired; the pleasant fatigue from his swim had become just a sort of background tingle in his body, and so when he climbed the stairs to the level of his room, he didn’t stop, but kept going up, even as the horn sounded to announce midnight.

Gurgeh came out at last on to a high battlement beneath a stubby tower. The circular walkway was damp and dark. He looked to the west, where a dim, fuzzy red glow lit up the edge of the sky. The Incandescence was still far away, below the horizon, its glare reflecting off the overcast like some livid artificial sunset. Despite that light, Gurgeh was conscious of the depth and stillness of the night as it settled round the castle, quieting it. He found a door in the tower and climbed to its machicolated summit. He leant on the stonework and looked out into the north, where the low hills lay. He listened to the dripping of a leaking sprinkler somewhere beneath him, and the barely audible rustlings of the cinderbuds as they prepared for their own destruction. The hills were quite invisible; he gave up trying to make them out and turned again to that barely-curved band of dark red in the west.

A horn sounded somewhere in the castle, then another and another. There were other noises too; distant shouting and running footsteps, as though the castle was waking up again. He wondered what was going on. He pulled the thin jacket closed, suddenly feeling the coolness of the night, as a light easterly breeze started up.

The sadness he’d felt during the day had not fully left him; rather it had sunk in, become something less obvious but more integral. How beautiful that game had been; how much he had enjoyed it, exulted in it… but only by trying to bring about its cessation, only by ensuring that that joy would be short-lived. He wondered if Nicosar had realised yet; he must have had a suspicion, at least. He sat down on a small stone bench.

Gurgeh realised suddenly that he would miss Nicosar. He felt closer to the Emperor, in some ways, than he had ever felt to anybody; that game had been a deep intimacy, a sharing of experience and sensation Gurgeh doubted any other relationship could match.

He sighed, eventually, got up from the bench and went to the parapet again, looking down to the paved walk at the foot of the tower. There were two imperial guards standing there, dimly visible by the light spilling from the tower’s open door. Their pale faces were tipped up, looking at him. He wasn’t sure whether to wave or not. One of them lifted his arm; a bright light shone up at Gurgeh, who shielded his eyes. A third, smaller, darker figure Gurgeh hadn’t noticed before moved towards the tower and entered it through the lit doorway. The torch beam switched off. The two guards took up positions on either side of the tower door.

Steps sounded within the tower. Gurgeh sat on the stone bench again and waited.

“Morat Gurgeh, good evening.” It was Nicosar; the dark, slightly stooped figure of the Emperor of Azad climbed up out of the tower.

“Your Highness—”

“Sit down, Gurgeh,” the quiet voice said. Nicosar joined Gurgeh on the bench, his face like an indistinct white moon in front of him, lit only by the faint glow from the tower’s stairwell. Gurgeh wondered if Nicosar could see him at all. The moon-face turned away from him, looking towards the horizon-wide smudge of carmine. “There has been an attempt on my life, Gurgeh,” the Emperor said quietly.

“An…” Gurgeh began, appalled. “Are you all right, Your Highness?”

The moon-face swung back. “I am unharmed.” The apex held up one hand. “Please; no ‘Your Highness’ now. We’re alone; there is no breach of protocol. I wanted to explain to you personally why the castle is under martial law. The Imperial Guard have taken over all commands. I do not anticipate another attack, but one must take care.”

“But who would do this? Who would attack you?”

Nicosar looked to the north and the unseen hills. “We believe the culprits may have tried to escape along the viaduct to the reservoir lakes, so I’ve sent some guards there too.” He turned slowly back to the man, and his voice was soft. “That’s an interesting situation you’ve got me in, Morat Gurgeh.”

“I…” Gurgeh sighed, looked at his feet. “… yes.” He glanced at the circle of white face in front of him. “I’m sorry; I mean that it’s… almost over.” He heard his voice drop, and could not bear to look at Nicosar.

“Well,” the Emperor said quietly, “we shall see. I may have a surprise for you in the morning.”

Gurgeh was startled. The hazily pale face in front of him was too vague for the expression to be read, but could Nicosar be serious? Surely the apex could see his position was hopeless; had he seen something Gurgeh hadn’t? At once he started to worry. Had he been too certain? Nobody else had noticed anything, not even the ship; what if he was wrong? He wanted to see the board again, but even the imperfectly detailed image of it he still carried in his mind was accurate enough to show how their respective fortunes stood; Nicosar’s defeat was implicit, but certain. He was sure there was no way out for the Emperor; the game must be over.

“Tell me something, Gurgeh,” Nicosar said evenly. The white circle faced him again. “How long were you really learning the game for?”

“We told you the truth; two years. Intensively, but—”

“Don’t lie to me, Gurgeh. There’s no point any more.”

“Nicosar; I wouldn’t lie to you.”

The moon-face shook slowly. “Whatever you want.” The Emperor was silent for a few moments. “You must be very proud of your Culture.”

He pronounced the last word with a distaste Gurgeh might have found comical if it hadn’t been so obviously sincere.

“Pride?” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t make it; I just happened to be born into it, I—”

“Don’t be simple, Gurgeh. I mean the pride of being part of something. The pride of representing your people. Are you going to tell me you don’t feel that?”

“I… some, perhaps yes… but I’m not here as a champion, Nicosar. I’m not representing anything except myself. I’m here to play the game, that’s all.”

“That’s all,” Nicosar repeated quietly. “Well, I suppose we must say that you’ve played it well.” Gurgeh wished he could see the apex’s face. Had his voice quivered? Was that a tremor in his voice?

“Thank you. But half the credit for this game is yours… more than half, because you set—”

“I don’t want your praise!” Nicosar lashed out with one hand, striking Gurgeh across the mouth. The heavy rings raked the man’s cheek and lips.

Gurgeh rocked back, stunned, dizzy with shock. Nicosar jumped up and went to the parapet, hands like claws on the dark stone. Gurgeh touched his blooded face. His hand was trembling.

“You disgust me, Morat Gurgeh,” Nicosar said to the red glow in the west. “Your blind, insipid morality can’t even account for your own success here, and you treat this battle-game like some filthy dance. It is there to be fought and struggled against, and you’ve attempted to seduce it. You’ve perverted it; replaced our holy witnessing with your own foul pornography… you’ve soiled it… male.”

Gurgeh dabbed at the blood on his lips. He felt dizzy, head swimming. “That… that may be how you see it, Nicosar.” He swallowed some of the thick, salty blood. “I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to—”

“Fair?” the Emperor shouted, coming to stand over Gurgeh, blocking the view of the distant fire. “Why does anything have to be fair? Is life fair?” He reached down and took Gurgeh by the hair, shaking his head. “Is it? Is it?”

Gurgeh let the apex shake him. The Emperor let go of his hair after a moment, holding his hand as though he’d touched something dirty. Gurgeh cleared his throat. “No, life is not fair. Not intrinsically.”

The apex turned away in exasperation, clutching again at the curled stone top of the battlements. “It’s something we can try to make it, though,” Gurgeh continued. “A goal we can aim for. You can choose to do so, or not. We have. I’m sorry you find us so repulsive for that.”

“ ‘Repulsive’ is barely adequate for what I feel for your precious Culture, Gurgeh. I’m not sure I possess the words to explain to you what I feel for your… Culture. You know no glory, no pride, no worship. You have power; I’ve seen that; I know what you can do… but you’re still impotent. You always will be. The meek, the pathetic, the frightened and cowed… they can only last so long, no matter how terrible and awesome the machines they crawl around within. In the end you will fall; all your glittering machinery won’t save you. The strong survive. That’s what life teaches us, Gurgeh, that’s what the game shows us. Struggle to prevail; fight to prove worth. These are no hollow phrases; they are truth!”

Gurgeh watched the pale hands grasping the dark stone. What could he say to this apex? Were they to argue metaphysics, here, now, with the imperfect tool of language, when they’d spent the last ten days devising the most perfect image of their competing philosophies they were capable of expressing, probably in any form?

What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition? That Azad could be so much more than a mere battle, if it was used to articulate, to communicate, to define…? He’d done all that, said all that, and said it better than he ever could now.

“You have not won, Gurgeh,” Nicosar said quietly, voice harsh, almost croaking. “Your kind will never win.” He turned back, looking down at him. “You poor, pathetic male. You play, but you don’t understand any of this, do you?”

Gurgeh heard what sounded like genuine pity in the apex’s voice. “I think you’ve already decided that I don’t,” he told Nicosar.

The Emperor laughed, turning back to the distant reflection of the continent-wide fire still below the horizon. The sound died in a sort of cough. He waved one hand at Gurgeh. “Your sort never will understand. You’ll only be used.” He shook his head in the darkness. “Go back to your room, morat. I’ll see you in the morning.” The moon-face stared towards the horizon and the ruddy glare rubbed on the undersurface of the clouds. “The fire should be here by then.”

Gurgeh waited a moment. It was as though he’d already gone; he felt dismissed, forgotten. Even Nicosar’s last words had sounded as if they weren’t really meant for Gurgeh at all.

The man rose quietly and went back down through the dimly lit tower. The two guards stood impassively outside the door at the tower’s foot. Gurgeh looked up to the top of the tower, and saw Nicosar there on the battlements, flat pale face looking out towards the approaching fire, white hands clutching at cold stone. The man watched for a few seconds, then turned and left, going down through the corridors and halls where the imperial guards prowled, sending everybody to their rooms and locking the doors, watching all the stairs and elevators, and turning on all the lights so that the silent castle burned in the night, like some great stone ship on a darkly golden sea.

Flere-Imsaho was flicking through the broadcast channels when Gurgeh got back to his room. It asked him what all the fuss was about in the castle. He told it.

“Can’t be that bad,” the drone said, with a wobble-shrug. It looked back at the screen. “They aren’t playing martial music. No outgoing communications possible though. What happened to your mouth?”

“I fell.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Can we contact the ship?”

“Of course.”

“Tell it to power up. We might need it.”

“My, you’re getting cautious. All right.”

He went to bed, but lay awake listening to the swelling roar of the wind.

At the top of the high tower, the apex watched the horizon for several hours, seemingly locked into the stone like a pale statue, or a small tree born of an errant seed. The wind from the east freshened, tugging at the stationary figure’s dark clothes and howling round the dark-bright castle, tearing through the canopy of swaying cinderbuds with a noise like the sea.

The dawn came up. It lit the clouds first, then touched the edge of clear horizon in the east with gold. At the same time, in the black fastness of the west where the edge of the land glowed red, a sudden glint of bright, burning orange-yellow appeared, to waver and hesitate and disappear, then return, and brighten, and spread.

The figure on the tower drew back from that widening breach in the red-black sky, and — glancing briefly behind him, at the dawn — swayed uncertainly for a moment, as though caught between the rival currents of light flowing from each bright horizon.

Two guards came to the room. They unlocked the door and told Gurgeh he and the machine were required in the prow-hall. Gurgeh was dressed in his Azad robes. The guards told him it was the Emperor’s pleasure that they abandon the statutory robes for this morning’s play. Gurgeh looked at Flere-Imsaho, and went to change. He put on a fresh shirt, and the trous and light jacket he’d worn the previous night.

“So, I’m getting a chance to spectate at last; what a treat,” Flere-Imsaho said as they headed for the game-hall. Gurgeh said nothing. Guards were escorting groups of people from various parts of the castle. Outside, beyond already shuttered doors and windows, the wind howled.

Gurgeh hadn’t felt like breakfast. The ship had been in contact that morning, to congratulate him. It had finally seen. In fact, it thought there was a way out for Nicosar, but only to a draw. And no human brain could handle the play required. It had resumed its high-speed holding pattern, ready to come in the moment it sensed anything wrong. It watched through Flere-Imsaho’s eyes.

When they got to the castle’s prow-hall and the Board of Becoming, Nicosar was already there. The apex wore the uniform of the commander-in-chief of the Imperial Guard, a severe, subtly menacing set of clothes complete with ceremonial sword. Gurgeh felt quite dowdy in his old jacket. The prow-hall was almost full. People, escorted by the ubiquitous guards, were still filing into the tiered seats. Nicosar ignored Gurgeh; the apex was talking to an officer of the Guard.

“Hamin!” Gurgeh said, going over to where the old apex sat, in the front row of seats, his tiny, twisted body crumpled and hopeless between two burly guards. His face was shrivelled and yellow. One of the guards put out his hand to stop Gurgeh coming any closer. He stood in front of the bench, squatting to look into the old rector’s wrinkled face. “Hamin; can you hear me?” He thought, again, absurdly, that the apex was dead, then the small eyes flickered, and one opened, yellow-red and sticky with crystalline secretions. The shrunken-looking head moved a little. “Gurgeh…”

The eye closed, the head nodded. Gurgeh felt a hand on his sleeve, and he was led to his seat at the edge of the board.

The prow-hall’s balcony windows were closed, the panes rattling in their metal frames, but the fire shutters had not been lowered. Outside, beneath a leaden sky, the tall cinderbuds shook in the gale, and the noise of the wind formed a bass background to the subdued conversations of the shuffling people still finding their places in the great hall.

“Shouldn’t they have put the shutters down?” Gurgeh asked the drone. He sat in the stoolseat. Flere-Imsaho floated, buzzing and crackling, behind him. The Adjudicator and his helpers were checking the positions of the pieces.

“Yes,” Flere-Imsaho said. “The fire’s less than two hours away. They can drop the shutters in the last few minutes if they have to, but they don’t usually wait that long. I’d watch it, Gurgeh. Legally, the Emperor isn’t allowed to call on the physical option at this stage, but there’s something funny going on. I can sense it.”

Gurgeh wanted to say something cutting about the drone’s senses, but his stomach was churning, and he felt something was wrong, too. He looked over at the bench where Hamin sat. The withered apex hadn’t moved. His eyes were still closed.

“Something else,” Flere-Imsaho said.

“What?”

“There’s some sort of extra gear up there, on the ceiling.”

Gurgeh glanced up without making it too obvious. The jumble of ECM and screening equipment looked much as it always had, but then he’d never inspected it very closely. “What sort of gear?” he asked.

“Gear that is worryingly opaque to my senses, which it shouldn’t be. And that Guards colonel’s wired with an optic-remote mike.”

“The officer talking to Nicosar?”

“Yes. Isn’t that against the rules?”

“Supposed to be.”

“Want to raise it with the Adjudicator?”

The Adjudicator was standing at the edge of the board, between two burly guards. He looked frightened and grim. When his gaze fell on Gurgeh, it seemed to go straight through him. “I have a feeling,” Gurgeh whispered, “it wouldn’t do any good.”

“Me too. Want me to get the ship to come in?”

“Can it get here before the fire?”

“Just.”

Gurgeh didn’t have to think too long. “Do it,” he said.

“Signal sent. You remember the drill with the implant?”

“Vividly.”

“Great,” Flere-Imsaho said sourly. “A high-speed displace from a hostile environment with some grey-area effector gear around. Just what I need.”

The hall was full, the doors were closed. The Adjudicator glanced resentfully over at the Guards colonel standing near Nicosar. The officer gave the briefest of nods. The Adjudicator announced the recommencement of the game.

Nicosar made a couple of inconsequential moves. Gurgeh couldn’t see what the Emperor was aiming at. He must be trying to do something, but what? It didn’t appear to have anything to do with winning the game. He tried to catch Nicosar’s eye, but the apex refused to look at him. Gurgeh rubbed his cut lip and cheek. I’m invisible, he thought.

The cinderbuds swayed and shook in the storm outside; their leaves had spread to their maximum extent, and — whipped by the gale — they looked indistinct and merged, like one huge dull yellow organism quivering and poised beyond the castle walls. Gurgeh could sense people in the hall moving restlessly, muttering to each other, glancing at the still unshuttered windows. The guards stayed at the hall’s exits, guns ready.

Nicosar made certain moves, placing element-cards in particular positions. Gurgeh still couldn’t see what the point of all this was. The noise of the storm beyond the shaking windows was enough to all but drown the voices of the people in the hall. The smell of the cinderbuds’ volatile saps and juices pervaded the air, and some dry shreds of their leaves had found their way in to the hall somehow, to soar and float and curl on currents of air inside the great hall.

High in the stone-dark sky beyond the windows, a burning orange glow lit up the clouds. Gurgeh began to sweat; he walked over the board, made some replying moves, attempting to draw Nicosar out. He heard somebody in the observers’ gallery crying out, and then being quieted. The guards stood silently, watchfully, at the doors and around the board. The Guards colonel Nicosar had been talking to earlier stood near the Emperor. As he went back to his stoolseat, Gurgeh thought he saw tears on the officer’s cheeks.

Nicosar had been sitting. Now he stood, and, taking four element-cards, strode to the centre of the patterned terrain.

Gurgeh wanted to shout out or leap up; something; anything. But he felt rooted, transfixed. The guards in the room had tensed, the Emperor’s hands were visibly shaking. The storm outside whipped the cinderbuds like something conscious and spiteful; a spear of orange leapt ponderously above the tops of the plants, writhed briefly against the wall of darkness behind it, then sank slowly out of sight.

“Oh dear holy shit,” Flere-Imsaho whispered. “That’s only five minutes away.”

“What?” Gurgeh glanced at the machine.

“Five minutes,” the drone said, with a realistic gulp. “It ought to be nearly an hour off. It can’t have got here this quick. They’ve started a new fire-front.”

Gurgeh closed his eyes. He felt the tiny lump under his paper-dry tongue. “The ship?” he said, opening his eyes again.

The drone was silent for seconds. “… No chance,” it said, voice flat, resigned.

Nicosar stooped. He placed a fire-card on a water-symbol already on the board, in a fold in the high terrain. The Guards colonel turned his head fractionally to one side, mouth moving, as though blowing some speck of dust off his uniform’s high collar.

Nicosar stood up, looking around, appeared to listen for something, but heard only the howling noise of the storm.

“I just registered an infrasound pulse,” Flere-Imsaho said. “That was an explosion, a klick to north. The viaduct.”

Gurgeh watched helplessly as Nicosar walked slowly to another position on the board and placed one card on another; fire on air. The Colonel talked into the mike near his shoulder again. The castle shook; a series of concussions shuddered through the hall.

The pieces on the board juddered; people stood up, started shouting. The glass panes cracked in their frames, crashing to the flagstones, letting the shrieking voice of the burning gale into the hall in a hail of fluttering leaves. A line of flames burst out over the tops of the trees, filling the base of the boiling black horizon with fire.

The next fire-card was placed; on earth. The castle seemed to shift under Gurgeh. The wind tore in through windows, rolling lighter pieces across the board like some absurd and unstoppable invasion; it whipped at the robes of the Adjudicator and his officials. People were piling out of the galleries, falling over each other to get to the exits, where the guards had drawn their guns.

The sky was full of fire.

Nicosar looked at Gurgeh as he placed the final fire-card, on the ghost-element, Life.

“This is looking worse and worse all — grrreeeeee!” Flere-Imsaho said, voice breaking, screeching. Gurgeh whirled round to see the bulky machine trembling in mid-air, surrounded by a bright aura of green fire.

The guards started shooting. The doors from the hall were thrown open and the people piled through, but in the hall the guards were suddenly all over the board itself, firing up into the galleries and benches, blasting laser-fire amongst the escaping crowds, felling the screaming, struggling apices, females and males in a storm of flickering light and shattering detonations.

“Grrraaaaak!” Flere-Imsaho screamed. Its casing glowed dull red and started to smoke. Gurgeh watched, transfixed. Nicosar stood near the centre of the boards, surrounded by his guards, smiling at Gurgeh.

The fire raged above the cinderbuds. The hall emptied as a last few wounded people staggered through the doors. Flere-Imsaho hung in the air; it glowed orange, yellow, white; it started to rise, dripping blobs of molten material on to the board as it went, enveloped suddenly in flames and smoke. Suddenly, it accelerated across the hall as if pulled by some huge, invisible hand. It slammed into a far wall and exploded in a blinding flash and a blast that almost blew Gurgeh off his stoolseat.

The guards around the Emperor left the board and climbed over the benches and galleries, killing the wounded. They ignored Gurgeh. The sound of firing echoed through the doors leading to the rest of the castle, where the dead lay in their bright clothes like some obscene carpet.

Nicosar strolled slowly over to Gurgeh, stopping to tap a few Azad pieces out of his way with his boots as he advanced; he stamped on a little guttering pool of fire left from the molten debris Flere-Imsaho had trailed behind it. He drew his sword, almost casually.

Gurgeh clutched the arms of the seat. The inferno shrieked in the skies outside. Leaves swirled through the hall like dry, endless rain. Nicosar stopped in front of Gurgeh. The Emperor was smiling. He shouted above the gale. “Surprised?”

Gurgeh could hardly speak. “What have you done? Why?” he croaked.

Nicosar shrugged. “Made the game real, Gurgeh.” He looked round the hall, surveying the carnage. They were alone now; the guards were spreading through the rest of the castle, killing.

The fallen were everywhere, scattered over the floor and the galleries, draped over benches, crumpled in corners, spread like Xs on the flagstones, their robes spotted with the dark burnholes of laserburns. Smoke rose from the splintered woodwork and smouldering clothes; a sweet-sick smell of burned flesh filled the hall.

Nicosar weighed the heavy, double-edged sword in his gloved hand, smiling sadly at it. Gurgeh felt his bowels ache and his hands shake. There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and at first he thought it was the implant, rejecting, surfacing, for some reason reappearing, but then he knew that it wasn’t, and realised, for the first time in his life, that fear really did have a taste.

Nicosar gave an inaudible sigh, drew himself up in front of Gurgeh, so that he seemed to fill the view in front of the man, and brought the sword slowly towards Gurgeh.

Drone! he thought. But it was just a sooty scar on the far wall.

Ship! But the implant under his tongue lay silent, and the Limiting Factor was still light years away.

The tip of the sword was a few centimetres from Gurgeh’s belly; it started to rise, passing slowly over Gurgeh’s chest towards his neck. Nicosar opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but then he shook his head, as though in exasperation, and lunged forward.

Gurgeh kicked out, slamming both feet into the Emperor’s belly. Nicosar doubled up; Gurgeh was thrown backwards off the seat. The sword hissed over his head.

Gurgeh kept on rolling as the stoolseat crashed to the ground; he jumped to his feet. Nicosar was half doubled-up, but still clutched the sword. He staggered towards the man, hacking the sword about him as though at invisible enemies between them. Gurgeh ran; to the side at first, then across the board, heading for the hall doors. Behind him, outside the windows, the fire above the thrashing cinderbuds obliterated the black clouds of smoke; the heat was something physical, a pressure on the skin and eyes. One of Gurgeh’s feet came down on a game-piece, rolled across the board by the gale; he slipped and fell.

Nicosar stumbled after him.

The screening equipment whined, then hummed; smoke gouted from it. Blue lightning played furiously around the hanging machinery.

Nicosar didn’t notice; he plunged forward at Gurgeh, who pushed himself away; the sword crashed into the board, centimetres from the man’s head. Gurgeh picked himself up and leapt over a raised section of board. Nicosar came tearing and trampling after him.

The screening gear exploded. It crashed from the ceiling to the board in a shower of sparks and smashed into the centre of the multi-coloured terrain a few metres in front of Gurgeh, who was forced to stop and turn. He faced Nicosar.

Something white blurred through the air.

Nicosar raised the sword over his head.

The blade snapped, clipped off by a flickering yellow-green field. Nicosar felt the weight of the sword change, and looked up in disbelief. The blade dangled uselessly in mid-air, suspended from the little white disk that was Flere-Imsaho.

“Ha ha ha,” it boomed above the noise of the screaming wind.

Nicosar threw the sword-handle at Gurgeh; a green-yellow field caught it, propelled it back at Nicosar; the Emperor ducked. He staggered across the board in a storm of smoke and swirling leaves. The cinderbuds thrashed; flashes of white and yellow burst from between their trunks as the wall of flames above them beat towards the castle.

“Gurgeh!” Flere-Imsaho said, suddenly in front of his face. “Crouch down and curl up. Now!”

Gurgeh did as he was told, getting down on his haunches, arms wrapped around his shins. The drone floated above him, and Gurgeh saw the haze of a field all around him.

The wall of cinderbuds was breaking, the streaks and bursts of flame clawing through from behind them, shaking them, tearing them. The heat seemed to shrivel his face on the bones of his skull.

A figure appeared against the flames. It was Nicosar, holding one of the big laser-pistols the guards had been armed with. He stood just within and to the side of the windows, holding the gun in both hands and sighting carefully at Gurgeh. Gurgeh looked at the black muzzle of the gun, into the thumb-wide barrel, then his gaze moved up to Nicosar’s face as the apex pulled the trigger.

Then he was looking at himself.

He stared into his own distorted face just long enough to see that Jernau Morat Gurgeh, at the very instant that might have been his death, looked only rather surprised and not a little stupid… then the mirror-field disappeared and he was looking at Nicosar again.

The apex stood in exactly the same place, swaying slightly now. There was something wrong though. Something had changed. It was very obvious but Gurgeh couldn’t see what it was.

The Emperor went back on his heels, eyes staring blankly up at the smoke-stained ceiling where the screening gear had fallen from. Then the furnace gust from the windows caught him and he tipped slowly forwards again, tipping towards the board, the weight of the handcannon in his gloved hands unbalancing him.

Gurgeh saw it then; the neat, slightly smoking black hole about wide enough to fit a thumb into, in the centre of the apex’s forehead.

Nicosar’s body hit the board with a crash, scattering pieces.

The fire broke through.

The cinderbud dam gave way before the flames and was replaced by a vast wave of blinding light and a blast of heat like a hammer blow. Then the field around Gurgeh went dark, and the room and all the fire went dim, and far away at the back of his head there was a strange buzzing noise, and he felt drained, and empty, and exhausted.

After that everything went away from him, and there was only darkness.

Gurgeh opened his eyes.

He was lying on a balcony, under a jutting overhang of stone. The area around him had been swept clear, but everywhere else there was a centimetre-thick covering of dark grey ash. It was dull. The stones beneath him were warm; the air was cool and smoky.

He felt all right. No drowsiness, no sore head.

He sat up; something fell from his chest and rolled across the swept stones, falling into the grey dust. He picked it up; it was the Orbital bracelet; bright and undamaged and still keeping its own microscopic day-night cycle. He put it into his jacket pocket. He checked his hair, his eyebrows, his jacket; nothing singed at all.

The sky was dark grey; black at the horizon. Away to one side there was a small, vaguely purple disk in the sky, which he realised was the sun. He stood up.

The grey ash was being covered up with inky soot, falling from the dark overcast like negative snow. He walked across the heat-warped, flaking flagstones towards the edge of the balcony. The parapet had fallen away here; he kept back from the very edge.

The landscape had changed. Instead of the golden yellow wall of cinderbuds crowding the view beyond the curtain wall, there was just earth; black and brown and baked-looking, covered in great cracks and fissures the thin grey ash and the soot-rain had not yet filled. The barren waste stretched to the distant horizon. Faint wisps of smoke still climbed from fissures in the ground, climbing like the ghosts of trees, until the wind took them. The curtain wall was blackened and scorched, and breached in places.

The castle itself looked battered as though after a long siege. Towers had collapsed, and many of the apartments, office buildings and extra halls had fallen in on themselves, their flame-scarred windows showing only emptiness behind. Columns of smoke rose lazily like sinuous flagpoles to the summit of the crumbling fortress, where the wind caught them and made them pennants.

Gurgeh walked round the balcony, through the soft black snow of soot, to the prow-hall windows. His feet made no noise. The specks of soot made him sneeze, and his eyes itched. He entered the hall.

The stones still held their dry heat; it was like walking into a vast, dark oven. Inside the great game-room, amongst the dim shambles of twisted girders and fallen stonework, the board lay, warped and buckled and torn, its rainbow of colours reduced to greys and blacks, its carefully balanced topography of high ground and low made a nonsense of by the random heavings and saggings induced by the fire.

Buckled, annealed girders and holes in the floor and walls marked where the observation galleries had been. The screening gear which had fallen from the ceiling of the hall lay half-melted and congealed in the centre of the Azad board, like some blistered travesty of a mountain.

He turned to look at the window, where Nicosar had stood, and walked over the creaking surface of the ruined board. He crouched down, grunting as his knees sent stabs of pain through him. He put his hand out to where an eddy in the firestorm had collected a little conical pile of dust in the angle of an internal buttress, right at the edge of the game-board, near where a fused, L-shaped lump of blackened metal might have been the remains of a gun.

The grey-white ash was soft and warm, and mixed in with it he found a small, C-shaped piece of metal. The half-melted ring still contained the setting for a jewel, like a tiny rough crater on its rim, but the stone was gone. He looked at the ring for a while, blowing the ash off it and turning it over and over in his hands. After a while he put the ring back into the pile of dust. He hesitated, then he took the Orbital bracelet out of his jacket pocket and added it to the shallow grey cone, pulled the two poison-warning rings off his fingers, and put them there too. He scooped a handful of the warm ash into one palm, gazing at it thoughtfully.

“Jernau Gurgeh, good morning.”

He turned and rose, quickly stuffing his hand into his jacket pocket as though ashamed of something. The little white body of Flere-Imsaho floated in through the window, very tiny and clean and exact in that shattered, melted place. A tiny grey thing, the size of a baby’s finger, floated up to the drone from the ground near Gurgeh’s feet. A hatch opened in Flere-Imsaho’s immaculate body; the micromissile entered the drone. A section of the machine’s body revolved, then was still.

“Hello,” Gurgeh said, walking over to it. He looked round the ruined hall, then back at the drone. “I hope you’re going to tell me what happened.”

“Sit down, Gurgeh. I’ll tell you.”

He sat on a block of stone fallen from above the windows. He looked dubiously upwards at where it must have fallen from. “Don’t worry,” Flere-Imsaho said. “You’re safe. I’ve checked the roof.”

Gurgeh rested his hands on his knees. “So?” he said.

“First things first,” Flere-Imsaho said. “Allow me to introduce myself properly; my name is Sprant Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti, and I am not a library drone.”

Gurgeh nodded. He recognised some of the nomenclature Chiark Hub had been so impressed with, long ago. He didn’t say anything.

“If I had been a library drone, you’d be dead. Even if you’d escaped Nicosar, you’d have been incinerated a few minutes later.”

“I appreciate that,” Gurgeh said. “Thank you.” His voice sounded flat, wrung out, and not especially grateful. “I thought they’d got you; killed you.”

“Damn nearly did,” the drone said. “That firework display was for real. Nicosar must have got his hands on some equiv-tech effector gear; which means — or meant — the Empire has had some sort of contact with another advanced civilisation. I’ve scanned what’s left of the equipment; could be Homomda stuff. Anyway, the ship’ll load it for further analysis.”

“Where is the ship? I thought we’d be on it, not still down here.”

“It came barrelling through half an hour after the fire hit. Could have snapped us both off, but I reckoned we were safer staying where we were; I had no trouble insulating you from the fire, and keeping you under with my effector was easy enough too. The ship popped us a couple of spare drones and kept on going, braking and turning. It’s on its way back now; should be overhead in five minutes. We can go safely back up in the module. Like I said; displacement can be risky.”

Gurgeh gave a sort of half-laugh through his nose. He looked around the dim hall again. “I’m still waiting,” he told the machine.

“The imperial guards went crazy, on Nicosar’s orders. They blew up the aqueduct, cisterns and shelters, and killed everybody they could find. They tried to take over the Invincible from the Navy, too. In the resulting on-board firefight, the ship crashed; came down somewhere in the northern ocean. Biggish splash; tsaunami’s swept away rather a lot of mature cinderbuds, but I dare say the fire’ll cope. There was no attempt to kill Nicosar the other night; that was just a ruse to get the whole castle and the game under the control of guards who’d do anything the Emperor told them.”

“Why, though?” Gurgeh said tiredly, kicking at a blister of board metal. “Why did Nicosar order them to do all that?”

“He told them it was the only way to defeat the Culture and save him. They didn’t know he was doomed too; they thought he had some way of saving himself. Maybe they’d have done it regardless, even knowing that. They were very highly trained. Anyway; they obeyed their orders.” The machine made a chuckling noise. “Most of them, anyway. A few left the shelter they were supposed to blow up intact, and got some people into it with them. So you’re not unique; there are some other survivors. Mostly servants; Nicosar made sure all the important people were in here. The ship’s drones are with the survivors. We’re keeping them locked up until you’re safely away. They’ll have enough rations to last until they’re rescued.”

“Go on.”

“You sure you can handle all this stuff right now?”

“Just tell me why,” Gurgeh said, sighing.

“You’ve been used, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said matter-of-factly. “The truth is, you were playing for the Culture, and Nicosar was playing for the Empire. I personally told the Emperor the night before the start of the last match that you really were our champion; if you won, we were coming in; we’d smash the Empire and impose our own order. If he won, we’d keep out for as long as he was Emperor and for the next ten Great Years anyway.

“That’s why Nicosar did all he did. He wasn’t just a sore loser; he’d lost his Empire. He had nothing else to live for, so why not go in a blaze of glory?”

“Was all that true?” Gurgeh asked. “Would we really have taken over?”

“Gurgeh,” Flere-Imsaho said, “I have no idea. Not in my brief; no need to know. It doesn’t matter; he believed it was true.”

“Slightly unfair pressure,” Gurgeh said, smiling without any humour at the machine. “Telling somebody they’re playing for such high stakes, just the night before the game.”

“Gamespersonship.”

“So why didn’t he tell me what we were playing for?”

“Guess.”

“The bet would have been off and we came in all guns blazing anyway.”

“Correct.”

Gurgeh shook his head, brushed a little soot off one jacket sleeve, smudging it. “You really thought I’d win?” he asked the drone. “Against Nicosar? You thought that, even before I got here?”

“Before you left Chiark, Gurgeh. As soon as you showed any interest in leaving. SC’s been looking for somebody like you for quite a while. The Empire’s been ripe to fall for decades; it needed a big push, but it could always go. Coming in ‘all guns blazing’ as you put it is almost never the right approach; Azad — the game itself — had to be discredited. It was what had held the Empire together all these years — the linchpin; but that made it the most vulnerable point, too.” The drone made a show of looking around, at the mangled debris of the hall. “Everything worked out a little more dramatically than we’d expected, I must admit, but it looks like all the analyses of your abilities and Nicosar’s weaknesses were just about right. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines.”

“They knew I’d win?” Gurgeh asked disconsolately, chin in hand.

“You can’t know something like that, Gurgeh. But they must have thought you stood a good chance. I had some of it explained to me in my briefing… they thought you were just about the best game-player in the Culture, and if you got interested and involved then there wasn’t much any Azad player could do to stop you, no matter how long they’d spent playing the game. You’ve spent all your life learning games; there can’t be a rule, move, concept or idea in Azad you haven’t encountered ten times before in other games; it just brought them all together. These guys never stood a chance. All you needed was somebody to keep an eye on you and give you the occasional nudge in the right direction at the appropriate times.” The drone dipped briefly; a little bow. “Yours truly!”

“All my life,” Gurgeh said quietly, looking past the drone to the dull, dead landscape outside the tall windows. “Sixty years… and how long has the Culture known about the Empire?”

“About — ah! You’re thinking we shaped you somehow. Not so. If we did that sort of thing we wouldn’t need outsider ‘mercenaries’ like Shohobohaum Za to do the really dirty work.”

“Za?” Gurgeh said.

“Not his real name; not Culture-born at all. Yes, he’s what you’d call a ‘mercenary’. Just as well, too, or the secret police would have shot you outside that tent. Remember timid little me nipping out the way? I’d just shot one of your assailants with my CREW; on high X-ray so it wouldn’t register on the cameras. Za broke the neck of another one; he’d heard there might be some trouble. He’ll probably be leading a guerrilla army on Eä in a couple of days from now, I imagine.”

The drone gave a little wobble in the air. “Let’s see… what else can I tell you? Oh yes; the Limiting Factor isn’t as innocent as it looks, either. While we were on the Little Rascal we did take out the old effectors, but only so we could put in new ones. Just two, in two of the three nose blisters. We put the empty one on clear and holos of empty blisters in the other two.”

“But I was in all three!” Gurgeh protested.

“No, you were in the same one three times. The ship just rotated the corridors housing, fiddled with the AG and had a couple of drones change things round a bit while you were going from one to the other, or rather down one corridor up another and back to the same blister. All for nothing, mind you, but if we had needed some heavy weaponry it would have been there. It’s forward planning that makes one feel safe, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes,” Gurgeh said, sighing. He got to his feet and went back out on to the balcony, where the black soot-snow fell steadily and quietly.

“Talking about the Limiting Factor,” Flere-Imsaho said cheerily, “the old reprobate is overhead now. Module’s on its way. We’ll have you aboard in a minute or two; you can have a nice wash and change out of those dirty clothes. Are you ready to leave?”

Gurgeh looked down at his feet, scuffed some of the soot and ash across the flagstones. “What is there to pack?”

“Not a lot, indeed. I was too busy keeping you from baking to go in search of your belongings. Anyway, the only thing you seem to be fond of is that tatty old jacket. Did you get that bracelet thing? I left it on your chest when I went exploring.”

“Yes, thanks,” Gurgeh said, gazing out at the flat black desolation stretching to the dark horizon. He looked up; the module burst through the deep brown overcast, trailing strands of vapour. “Thanks,” Gurgeh said again, as the module swooped, dropping almost to ground level then racing across the scorched desert towards the castle, drawing a plume of ash and soot off the ground in its wake as it slowed and started to turn and the noise of its supersonic plummet cracked round the forlorn fortress like too-late thunder. “Thanks for everything.”

The craft swung its rear towards the castle, floating up until it was level with the edge of the balcony parapet. Its rear door opened, made a flat ramp. The man walked across the balcony, stepped up on to the parapet, and into the cool interior of the machine.

The drone followed and the door closed.

The module blasted suddenly away, sucking a great swirling fountain of ash and soot after it as it climbed, flashing through the dark clouds above the castle like some solid lightning bolt, while its thunder broke across the plain and the castle and the low hills behind. Ash settled again; the soot continued its soft and gentle fall.

The module returned a few minutes later, to pick up the ship’s drones and the remains of the alien effector equipment, then left the castle for the last time, and rose again to its waiting ship.

A little while later, the small band of dazed survivors — released by the two ship’s drones, and mostly servants, soldiers, concubines and clerks — stumbled into the day-time night and the soot-like-snow, to take stock of their temporary exile in the once great fortress, and claim their vanished land.