The night darkened; a brief shower almost extinguished the coals in the center of the table, but Hafflis got supply drones to bring crates of spirits and they all had fun squirting the drink onto the coals to keep them alight in pools of blue flame which burned down half the paper lanterns and scorched the night-flower vines and made many holes in clothes and singed the Styglian enumerator’s pelt. Lightning flashed in the mountains above the lake, the falls glowed, backlit and fabulous, and the dirigible’s fireworks drew applause and answering fireworks and cloud-lasers from all over Tronze. Gurgeh was dumped naked into the lake, but hauled out spluttering by Hafflis’s children.
He woke up in Boruelal’s bed, at the university, a little after dawn. He sneaked away early.
He looked around the room. Early morning sunlight flooded the landscape outside Ikroh and lanced through the lounge, streaming in from the fjord-side windows, across the room and out through the windows opening onto the uphill lawns. Birds filled the cool, still air with song.
There was nothing else to take, nothing more to pack. He’d sent the house drones down with a chest of clothes the night before, but now wondered why he’d bothered; he wouldn’t need many changes on the warship, and when they got to the GSV he could order anything he wanted. He’d packed a few personal ornaments, and had the house copy his stock of still and moving pictures to the Limiting Factor’s memory. The last thing he’d done was burn the letter he’d written to leave with Boruelal, and stir the ashes in the fireplace until they were fine as dust. Nothing more remained.
“Ready?” Worthil said.
“Yes,” he said. His head was clear and no longer sore, but he felt tired, and knew he’d sleep well that night. “Is it here yet?”
“On its way.”
They were waiting for Mawhrin-Skel. It had been told its appeal had been re-opened; as a favor to Gurgeh, it was likely to be given a role in Special Circumstances. It had acknowledged, but not appeared. It would meet them when Gurgeh left.
Gurgeh sat down to wait.
A few minutes before he was due to leave, the tiny drone appeared, floating down the chimney to hover over the empty fire grate.
“Mawhrin-Skel,” Worthil said. “Just in time.”
“I believe I’m being recalled to duty,” the smaller drone said.
“You are indeed,” Worthil said heartily.
“Good. I’m sure my friend the LOU Gunboat Diplomat will follow my future career with great interest.”
“Of course,” Worthil said. “I would hope it would.”
Mawhrin-Skel’s fields glowed orange-red. It floated over to Gurgeh, its gray body shining brightly, fields all but extinguished in the bright sunshine. “Thank you,” it said to him. “I wish you a good journey, and much luck.”
Gurgeh sat on the couch and looked at the tiny machine. He thought of several things to say, but said none of them. Instead, he stood up, straightened his jacket, looked at Worthil and said, “I think I’m ready to go now.”
Mawhrin-Skel watched him leave the room, but did not try to follow.
He boarded the Limiting Factor.
Worthil showed him the three great game-boards, set in three of the effector bulges round the vessel’s waist, pointed out the module hangar housed in the fourth blister and the swimming pool which the dockyard had installed in the fifth because they couldn’t think of anything else at such short notice and they didn’t like to leave the blister just empty. The three effectors in the nose had been left in but disconnected, to be removed once the Limiting Factor docked with the Little Rascal. Worthil guided him round the living quarters, which seemed perfectly acceptable.
Surprisingly quickly, it was time to leave, and Gurgeh said goodbye to the Contact drone. He sat in the accommodation section, watching the small drone float down the corridor to the warship’s lock, and then told the screen in front of him to switch to exterior view. The temporary corridor joining the ship to Ikroh’s transit gallery retracted, and the long tube of the ship’s innard-hull slotted back into place from outside.
Then, with no notice or noise at all, the view of the Plate base withdrew, shrinking. As the ship pulled away, the Plate merged into the other three on that side of the Orbital, to become part of a single thick line, and then that line dwindled rapidly to a point, and the star of Chiark’s system flashed brilliantly from behind it, before the star too quickly dulled and shrank, and Gurgeh realized he was on his way to the Empire of Azad.
2
Imperium
Still with me?
Little textual note for you here (bear with me).
Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.
Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.
So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!
How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases-not-words?
…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates—or apices—with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilization (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.
(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)
Anyway, enough of that.
Let’s see now: we’ve finally got old Gurgeh off Gevant Plate, Chiark Orbital, and we have him fizzing away at quite a clip in a stripped-down military ship heading for a rendezvous with the Cloudbound General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal.
Points to Ponder:
Does Gurgeh really understand what he’s done, and what might happen to him? Has it even begun to occur to him that he might have been tricked? And does he really know what he’s let himself in for?
Of course not!
That’s part of the fun!
Gurgeh had been on cruises many times in his life and—on that longest one, thirty years earlier—traveled some thousands of light-years from Chiark, but within a few hours of his departure aboard the Limiting Factor he was feeling the gap of light-years the still accelerating ship was putting between him and his home with an immediacy he had not anticipated. He spent some time watching the screen, where Chiark’s star shone yellow-white and gradually diminishing, but nevertheless he felt further away from it than even the screen showed.
He had never felt the falseness of such representations before, but sitting there, in the old accommodation social area, looking at the rectangle of screen on the wall, he couldn’t help feeling like an actor, or a component in the ship’s circuitry: like part of, and therefore as false as, the pretend-view of Real Space hung in front of him.
Maybe it was the silence. He had expected noise, for some reason. The Limiting Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing acceleration; the craft’s velocity was hurtl
ing toward its maximum with a rapidity which, when displayed in numbers on the wall-screen, numbed Gurgeh’s brain. He didn’t even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as hyperspace? At least he had heard of that, even if he didn’t know much about it… whatever; for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.
The ship didn’t seem to want to start any conversations, either, which normally wouldn’t have bothered Gurgeh, but now did. He left his cabin and went for a walk, going down the narrow, hundred-meter-long corridor which led to the waist of the craft. In the bare corridor, hardly a meter wide, and so low he could touch the ceiling without having to stretch, he thought he could hear a very faint hum, coming from all around him. At the end of that passage he turned down another, apparently sloping at an angle of at least thirty degrees, but seemingly level as soon as he stepped (with a moment of dizziness) into it. That corridor ended at an effector blister, where one of the great game-boards had been set up.
The board stretched out in front of him, a swirl of geometric shapes and varying colors; a landscape spreading out over five hundred square meters, with the low pyramid-ranges of stacked, three-dimensional territory increasing even that total. He walked over to the edge of the huge board wondering if he had, after all, taken on too much.
He looked around the old effector blister. The board took up a little more than half the floor space, lying on top of the light foammetal planking the dockyard had installed. Half the volume of the space was beneath Gurgeh’s feet; the cross-section of the effector housing was circular, and the planking and board described a diameter across it, more or less flush with the hull of the ship beyond the blister. The housing roof curved, gunmetal dull, arcing twelve meters overhead.
Gurgeh dropped under the planking on a float-hatch into the dimly lit bowl under the foammetal floor. The echoing space was even more empty than that above; save for a few hatches and shallow holes on the surface of the bowl, the removal of the mass of weaponry had been accomplished without leaving a trace. Gurgeh remembered Mawhrin-Skel, and wondered how the Limiting Factor felt about having its talons drawn.
“Jernau Gurgeh.” He turned as his name was pronounced and saw a cube of skeletal components floating near him.
“Yes?”
“We have now reached our Terminal Aggregation Point and are sustaining a velocity of approximately eight point five kilo-lights in ultraspace one positive.”
“Really?” Gurgeh said. He looked at the half-meter cube and wondered which bits were its eyes.
“Yes,” the remote-drone said. “We are due to rendezvous with the GSV Little Rascal in approximately one hundred and two days from now. We are currently receiving instructions from the Little Rascal on how to play Azad, and the ship has instructed me to tell you it will shortly be able to commence playing. When do you wish to start?”
“Well, not right now,” Gurgeh said. He touched the float-hatch controls, rising through the floor into the light. The remote-drone drifted up above him. “I want to settle in first,” he told it. “I need more theoretical work before I start playing.”
“Very well.” The drone started to drift away. It stopped. “The ship wishes to advise you that its normal operating mode includes full internal monitoring, removing the need for your terminal. Is this satisfactory, or would you prefer the internal observation systems to be switched off, and to use your terminal to contact the ship?”
“The terminal,” Gurgeh said, immediately.
“Internal monitoring has been reduced to emergency-only status.”
“Thanks,” Gurgeh said.
“You’re welcome,” the drone said, floating off.
Gurgeh watched it disappear into the corridor, then turned back to look at the vast board, shaking his head once more.
Over the next thirty days, Gurgeh didn’t touch a single Azad piece; the whole time was spent learning the theory of the game, studying its history where it was useful for a better understanding of the play, memorizing the moves each piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual morale-strength, their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their specific skill harmonics as related to different areas of the boards; he pored over tables and grids setting out the qualities inherent in the suits, numbers, levels and sets of the associated cards and puzzled over the place in the greater play the lesser boards occupied, and how the elemental imagery in the later stages fitted in with the more mechanistic workings of the pieces, boards and die-matching in the earlier rounds, while at the same time trying to find some way of linking in his mind the tactics and strategy of the game as it was usually played, both in its single-game mode—one person against another—and in the multiple-game versions, when up to ten contestants might compete in the same match, with all the potential for alliances, intrigue, concerted action, pacts and treachery that such a game-form made possible.
Gurgeh found the days slipping by almost unnoticed. He would sleep only two or three hours each night, and the rest of the time he was in front of the screen, or sometimes standing in the middle of one of the game-boards as the ship talked to him, drew holo diagrams in the air, and moved pieces about. He was glanding the whole time, his bloodstream full of secreted drugs, his brain pickled in their genofixed chemistry as his much-worked maingland—five times the human-basic size it had been in his primitive ancestors—pumped, or instructed other glands to pump, the coded chemicals into his body.
Chamlis sent a couple of messages. Gossip about the Plate, mostly. Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared; Hafflis was talking about changing back to a woman so he could have another child; Hub and the Plate landscapers had set a date for the opening of Tepharne, the latest, farside, Plate to be constructed, which had still been undergoing its weathering when Gurgeh had left. It would be opened to people in a couple of years. Chamlis suspected Yay would not be pleased she hadn’t been consulted before the announcement was made. Chamlis wished Gurgeh well, and asked him how he was.
Yay’s communication was barely more than a moving-picture postcard. She lay sprawled in a G-web, before a vast screen or a huge observation port showing a blue and red gas-giant planet, and told him she was enjoying her cruise with Shuro and a couple of his friends. She didn’t seem entirely sober. She wagged one finger at him, telling him he was bad for leaving so soon and for so long, without waiting until she got back… then she seemed to see somebody outside the terminal’s field of view, and closed, saying she’d be in touch later.
Gurgeh told the Limiting Factor to acknowledge the communications, but did not reply directly. The calls left him feeling a little alone but he threw himself back into the game each time, and everything else was washed from his mind but that.
He talked to the ship. It was more approachable than its remote-drone had been; as Worthil had said, it was likeable, but not in any way brilliant, except at Azad. In fact it occurred to Gurgeh that the old warship was getting more out of the game than he was; it had learned it perfectly, and seemed to enjoy teaching him as well as simply glorying in the game itself as a complex and beautiful system. The ship admitted it had never fired its effectors in anger, and that perhaps it was finding something in Azad that it had missed in real fighting.
The Limiting Factor was “Murderer” class General Offensive Unit number 50017, and as such was one of the last built, constructed seven hundred and sixteen years earlier in the closing stages of the Idiran war, when the conflict in space was almost over. In theory the craft had seen active service, but at no point had it ever been in any danger.
After thirty days, Gurgeh started to handle the pieces.
A proportion of Azad game-pieces were biotechs: sculpted artifacts of genetically engineered cells which changed character from the moment they were first unwrapped and placed on t
he board; part vegetable, part animal, they indicated their values and abilities by color, shape and size. The Limiting Factor claimed the pieces it had produced were indistinguishable from the real things, though Gurgeh thought this was probably a little optimistic.
It was only when he started to try to gauge the pieces, to feel and smell what they were and what they might become—weaker or more powerful, faster or slower, shorter or longer lived—that he realized just how hard the whole game was going to be.
He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, colored vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things. He rubbed them until his hands stained, he sniffed them and stared at them, but once they were on the board they did quite unexpected things; changing to become cannon-fodder when he’d thought they were battleships, altering from the equivalent of philosophical premises stationed well back in his own territories to become observation pieces best suited for the high ground or a front line.
After four days he was in despair, and seriously thinking of demanding to be returned to Chiark, admitting everything to Contact and just hoping they would take pity on him and either keep Mawhrin-Skel on, or keep it silenced. Anything rather than go on with this demoralizing, appallingly frustrating charade.
The Limiting Factor suggested he forgot about the biotechs for the moment and concentrated on the subsidiary games, which, if he won them, would give him a degree of choice over the extent to which biotechs had to be used in the following stages. Gurgeh did as the ship suggested, and got on reasonably well, but he still felt depressed and pessimistic, and sometimes he would find that the Limiting Factor had been talking to him for some minutes while he had been thinking about some quite different aspect of the game, and he had to ask the ship to repeat itself.
The days went by, and now and again the ship would suggest Gurgeh handled a biotech, and would advise him which secretions to build up beforehand. It even suggested he take some of the more important pieces into bed with him, so that he would lie asleep, hands clutched or arms cradled round a biotech, as though it was a tiny baby. He always felt rather foolish when he woke up, and he was glad there was nobody there to see him in the morning (but then he wondered if that was true; his experience with Mawhrin-Skel might have made him over-sensitive, but he doubted he would ever be certain again that he wasn’t being watched. Perhaps the Limiting Factor was spying on him, perhaps Contact was observing him, evaluating him… but—he decided—he no longer cared if they were or not).