“A decision.” The machine floated level with his face. Its fields were formal blue. “Will you speak for me?”
“What if I do and nothing happens?”
“You’ll just have to try harder. They’ll listen, if you’re persuasive enough.”
“But if you’re wrong, and they don’t?”
“Then I’d have to think about whether to release your little entertainment or not; it would be fun, certainly… but I might save it, in case you could be useful to me in some other way; one never knows.”
“No, indeed.”
“I saw you had a visitor, the other day.”
“I thought you might have noticed.”
“Looked like a Contact drone.”
“It was.”
“I’d like to pretend I knew what it said to you, but once you went into the house, I had to stop eavesdropping. Something about traveling, I believe I heard you say?”
“A cruise, of sorts.”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
“Hmm. My guess was they might want you to join Contact, become a Referrer, one of their planners; something like that. Not so?”
Gurgeh shook his head. The drone wobbled from side to side in the air, a gesture Gurgeh was not sure he understood. “I see. And have you mentioned me yet?”
“No.”
“I think you ought to, don’t you?”
“I don’t know whether I’m going to do what they ask. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Why not? What are they asking you to do? Can it compare to the shame—”
“I’ll do what I want to do,” he told it, standing up. “I might as well, after all, drone, mightn’t I? Even if I can persuade Contact to take you back, you and your friend Gunboat Diplomat would still have the recording; what’s to prevent you doing all this again?”
“Ah, so you know its name. I wondered what you and Chiark Hub were up to. Well, Gurgeh; just ask yourself this: what else could I possibly want from you? This is all I want; to be allowed to be what I was meant to be. When I am restored to that state, I’ll have all I could possibly desire. There would be nothing else you could possibly have any control over. I want to fight, Gurgeh; that’s what I was designed for; to use skill and cunning and force to win battles for our dear, beloved Culture. I’m not interested in controlling others, or in making the strategic decisions; that sort of power doesn’t interest me. The only destiny I want to control is my own.”
“Fine words,” Gurgeh said.
He took the dead terminal out of his pocket, turned it over in his hands. Mawhrin-Skel plucked the terminal out of his hands from a couple of meters away, held it underneath its casing, and folded it neatly in half. It bent it again, into quarters; the pen-shaped machine snapped and broke. Mawhrin-Skel crumpled the remains into a little jagged ball.
“I’m getting impatient, Jernau Gurgeh. Time goes slower the faster you think, and I think very fast indeed. Let’s say another four days, shall we? You have one hundred and twenty-eight hours before I tell Gunboat to make you even more famous than you are already.” It tossed the wrecked terminal back to him; he caught it.
The little drone drifted off toward the edge of the clearing. “I’ll be waiting for your call,” it said. “Better get a new terminal, though. And do be careful on the walk back to Ikroh; dangerous to be out in the wilds with no way of summoning help.”
“Five years?” Chamlis said thoughtfully. “Well, it’s some game, I agree, but won’t you lose touch over that sort of period? Have you thought this through properly, Gurgeh? Don’t let them rush you into anything you might regret later.”
They were in the lowest cellar in Ikroh. Gurgeh had taken Chamlis down there to tell it about Azad. He’d sworn the old drone to secrecy first. They’d left Hub’s resident anti-surveillance drone guarding the cellar entrance and Chamlis had done its best to check there was nobody and nothing listening in, as well as producing a reasonable impression of a quietfield around them. They talked against a background of pipes and service ducts rumbling and hissing around them in the darkness; the naked walls’ rock sweated, darkly glistening.
Gurgeh shook his head. There was nowhere to sit down in the cellar, and its roof was just a little too low for him to stand fully upright. So he stood, head bowed. “I think I’m going to do it,” he said, not looking at Chamlis. “I can always come back, if it’s too difficult, if I change my mind.”
“Too difficult?” Chamlis echoed, surprised. “That’s not like you. I agree it’s a tough game, but—”
“Anyway, I can come back,” he said.
Chamlis was silent for a moment. “Yes. Yes, of course you can.”
He still didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. He had tried to think it through, to apply the same sort of cold, logical analysis to his own plight that he would normally bring to bear in a tricky situation in a game, but he just didn’t seem to be able to do so; it was as though that ability could look calmly only on distant, abstract problems, and was incapable of focusing on anything so intricately enmeshed with his own emotional state.
He wanted to go to get away from Mawhrin-Skel, but—he had to admit to himself—he was attracted by Azad. Not just the game. That was still slightly unreal, too complicated to be taken seriously yet. The empire itself interested him.
And yet of course he wanted to stay. He had enjoyed his life, until that night in Tronze. He had never been totally satisfied, but then, who was? Looking back, the life he’d led seemed idyllic. He might lose the occasional game, feel that another game-player was unjustifiably lauded over himself, lust after Yay Meristinoux and feel piqued she preferred others, but these were small, small hurts indeed, compared both with what Mawhrin-Skel held on him, and with the five years’ exile which now faced him.
“No,” he said, nodding at the floor, “I think I will go.”
“All right… but this just doesn’t seem like you, Gurgeh. You’ve always been so… measured. In control.”
“You make me sound like a machine,” Gurgeh said tiredly.
“No, but more… predictable than this; more comprehensible.”
He shrugged, looked at the rough rock floor. “Chamlis,” he said, “I’m only human.”
“That, my dear old friend, has never been an excuse.”
He sat in the underground car. He’d been to the university to see Professor Boruelal; he’d taken with him a sealed, handwritten letter for her to keep, to be opened only if he died, explaining all that had happened, apologizing to Olz Hap, trying to make clear how he’d felt, what had made him do such a terrible, stupid thing… but in the end he hadn’t handed the letter over. He’d been terrified at the thought of Boruelal opening it, accidentally perhaps, and reading it while he was still alive.
The underground car raced across the base of the Plate, heading for Ikroh again. He used his new terminal to call the drone named Worthil. It had left after their last meeting to go exploring in one of the system’s gas-giant planets, but on receiving his call had itself displaced by Chiark Hub to the base underside. It came in through the speeding car’s lock. “Jernau Gurgeh,” it said, condensation frosting on its casing, its presence entering the car’s warm interior like a cold draft, “you’ve reached a decision?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go.”
“Good!” the drone said. It placed a small container about half its own size down on one of the padded car seats. “Gas-giant flora,” it explained.
“I hope I didn’t unduly curtail your expedition.”
“Not at all. Let me offer you my congratulations; I think you’ve made a wise, even brave choice. It did cross my mind that Contact was only offering you this opportunity to make you more content with your present life. If that’s what the big Minds were expecting, I’m glad to see you confounding them. Well done.”
“Thank you.” Gurgeh attempted a smile.
“Your ship will be prepared immediately. It should be on its way within the day.”
“What kind of ship is it?”
“An old ‘Murderer’ class GOU left over from the Idiran war; been in deep storage about six decades from here for the last seven hundred years. Called the Limiting Factor. It’s still in battle-trim at the moment, but they’ll strip out the weaponry and emplace a set of game-boards and a module hangar. I understand the Mind isn’t anything special; these warship forms can’t afford to be sparkling wits or brilliant artists, but I believe it’s a likeable enough device. It’ll be your opponent during the journey. If you want, you’re free to take somebody else along with you, but we’ll send a drone with you anyway. There’s a human envoy at Groasnachek, the capital of Eä, and he’ll be your guide as well… were you thinking of taking a companion?”
“No,” Gurgeh said. In fact he had thought of asking Chamlis, but knew the old drone felt it had already had enough excitement—and boredom—in its life. He didn’t want to put the machine in the position of having to say no. If it actually wanted to go, he was sure it wouldn’t be afraid to ask.
“Probably wise. What about personal possessions? It could be awkward if you want to take anything larger than a small module, say, or livestock larger than human size.”
Gurgeh shook his head. “Nothing remotely that large. A few cases of clothes… perhaps one or two ornaments… nothing more. What sort of drone were you thinking of sending?”
“Basically a diplomat-cum-translator and general gofer; probably an old-timer with some experience of the empire. It’ll have to have a comprehensive knowledge of all the empire’s social mannerisms and forms of address and so on; you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to make gaffes in a society like that. The drone will keep you clear as far as etiquette goes. It’ll have a library too, of course, and probably a limited degree of offensive capability.”
“I don’t want a gun-drone, Worthil,” Gurgeh said.
“It is advisable, for your own protection. You’ll be under the protection of the imperial authorities, of course, but they aren’t infallible. Physical attack isn’t unknown during a game, and there are groups within the society which might want to harm you. I ought to point out the Limiting Factor won’t be able to stay nearby once it’s dropped you on Eä; the empire’s military have insisted they will not allow a warship to be stationed over their home planet. The only reason they’re letting it approach Eä at all is because we’re removing all the armament. Once the ship has departed, that drone will be the only totally reliable protection you have.”
“It won’t make me invulnerable, though, will it?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll take my chances with the empire. Give me a mild-mannered drone; positively nothing armed, nothing… target-oriented.”
“I really do strongly advise—”
“Drone,” Gurgeh said, “to play this game properly I’ll need to feel as much as possible like one of the locals, with the same vulnerability and worries. I don’t want your device bodyguarding me. There won’t be any point in my going if I know I don’t have to take the game as seriously as everybody else.”
The drone said nothing for some time. “Well, if you’re sure,” it said eventually, sounding unhappy.
“I am.”
“Very well. If you insist.” The drone made a sighing sound. “I think that settles everything. The ship ought to be here in a—”
“There is a condition,” Gurgeh said.
“A… condition?” the drone said. Its fields became briefly visible, a glittering mixture of blue and brown and gray.
“There is a drone here, called Mawhrin-Skel,” Gurgeh said.
“Yes,” Worthil said carefully. “I was briefed that that device lives here now. What about it?”
“It was exiled from Special Circumstances; thrown out. We’ve become… friends since it came here. I promised if I ever had any influence with Contact, I’d do what I could to help it. I’m afraid I can only play Azad on condition that the drone’s returned to SC.”
Worthil said nothing for a moment. “That was rather a foolish promise to have made, Mr. Gurgeh.”
“I admit I didn’t ever think I would be in a position to have to fulfill it. But I am, so I have to make that a condition.”
“You don’t want to take this machine with you, do you?” Worthil sounded puzzled.
“No!” he said. “I just promised I’d try to get it back into service.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I’m not really in a position to make that sort of deal, Jernau Gurgeh. That machine was civilianized because it was dangerous and refused to undergo reconstruction therapy; its case is not something that I can decide on. It’s a matter for the admissions board concerned.”
“All the same; I have to insist.”
Worthil made a sighing noise, lifted the spherical container it had placed on the seat and seemed to study its blank surface. “I’ll do what I can,” it said, a trace of annoyance in its tone, “but I can’t promise anything. Admissions and appeal boards hate being leaned on; they go terribly moralistic.”
“I need my obligation to Mawhrin-Skel discharged somehow,” Gurgeh said quietly. “I can’t leave here with it able to claim I didn’t try to help it.”
The Contact drone seemed not to hear. Then it said, “Hmm. Well, we’ll see what we can do.”
The underground car flew across the base of the world, silent and swift.
“To Gurgeh; a great game-player, a great man!” Hafflis stood on the parapet at one end of the terrace, the kilometer drop behind him, a bottle in one hand, a fuming drug-bowl in the other. The stone table was crowded with people who’d come to wish Gurgeh goodbye. It had been announced that he was leaving tomorrow morning, to journey to the Clouds on the GSV Little Rascal, to be one of the Culture’s representatives at the Pardethillisian Games, the great ludic convocation held every twenty-two years or so by the Meritocracy Pardethillisi, in the Lesser Cloud.
Gurgeh had, indeed, been invited to this tournament, as he had been invited to the Games before that, just as he was to several thousand competitions and convocations of various sizes and complexions every year, either within the Culture or outside it. He’d refused that invitation as he refused them all, but the story now was that he’d changed his mind and would go there and play for the Culture. The next Games were to be held in three and a half years, which made the need to leave at such short notice somewhat tricky to explain, but Contact had done a little creative timetabling and some bare-faced lying and made it appear to the casual inquirer that only the Little Rascal could get Gurgeh there in time for the lengthy formal registration and qualifying period required.
“Cheers!” Hafflis put his head back and the bottle to his lips. Everybody round the great table joined in, drinking from a dozen different types of bowl, glass, goblet and tankard. Hafflis rocked further and further back on his heels as he drained the bottle; a few people shouted out warnings or threw bits of food at him; he just had time to put the bottle down and smack his wine-wet lips before he overbalanced and disappeared over the edge of the parapet.
“Oops,” came his muffled voice. Two of his younger children, sitting playing three-cups with a thoroughly mystified Styglian enumerator, went to the parapet and dragged their drunken parent back over from the safety field. He tumbled onto the terrace and staggered back to his seat, laughing.
Gurgeh sat between Professor Boruelal and one of his old flames; Vossle Chu, the woman whose hobbies had in the past included iron-foundry. She had crossed from Rombree, on Chiark’s farside from Gevant, to come and see Gurgeh off. There were at least ten of his former lovers among the crowd squeezed around the table. He wondered fuzzily what the significance might be that out of that ten, six had chosen to change sex and become—and remain—men over the past few years.
Gurgeh, along with everybody else, was getting drunk, as was traditional on such occasions. Hafflis had promised that they would not do to Gurgeh what they had done to a mutual friend a few years earlier; the young man had been accepted into Contact an
d Hafflis had held a party to celebrate. At the end of the evening they’d stripped the fellow naked and thrown him over the parapet… but the safety field had been turned off; the new Contact recruit had fallen nine hundred meters—six hundred of them with empty bowels—before three of Hafflis’s pre-positioned house drones rose calmly out of the forest beneath to catch him and take him back up.
The (Demilitarized) General Offensive Unit Limiting Factor had arrived under Ikroh that afternoon. Gurgeh had gone down to the transit gallery to inspect it. The craft was a third of a kilometer long, very sleek and simple looking; a pointed nose, three long blisters like vast aircraft cockpits leading to the nose, and another five fat blisters circling the vessel’s waist; its rear was blunt and flat. The ship had said hello, told him it was there to take him to the GSV Little Rascal, and asked him if he had any special dietary requirements.
Boruelal slapped him on the back. “We’re going to miss you, Gurgeh.”
“Likewise,” Gurgeh said, swaying, and felt quite emotional. He wondered when it would be time to throw the paper lanterns over the parapet to float down to the rain forest. They’d turned the lights on behind the waterfall, all the way down the cliff, and an itinerant dirigible, seemingly crewed largely by game-fans, had anchored above the plain level with Tronze, promising a firework display later. Gurgeh had been quite touched by such shows of respect and affection.
“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said. He turned, still holding his glass, to look at the old machine. It put a small package into his hand. “A present,” it said. Gurgeh looked at the small parcel; paper tied up with ribbon. “Just an old tradition,” Chamlis explained. “You open it when you’re under way.”
“Thank you,” Gurgeh said, nodding slowly. He put the present into his jacket, then did something he rarely did with drones, and hugged the old machine, putting his arms round its aura fields. “Thank you, very very much.”