“Cheap trick,” Mawhrin-Skel said, for all to hear. “The kid was easy meat. You’re losing your touch.” Its field flashed bright red, and it bounced through the air, over people’s heads and away.
Gurgeh shook his head, then strode off.
The little drone annoyed and amused him in almost equal parts. It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people. No doubt it had swept off to annoy somebody else now. Gurgeh nodded to a few people as he moved through the crowd. He saw the drone Chamlis Amalk-ney by a long, low table, talking to one of the less insufferable professors. Gurgeh went over to them, taking a drink from a waiting-tray as it floated past.
“Ah, my friend…” Chamlis Amalk-ney said. The elderly drone was a meter and a half tall and over half a meter wide and deep, its plain casing matte with the accumulated wear of millennia. It turned its sensing band toward him. “The professor and I were just talking about you.”
Professor Boruelal’s severe expression translated into an ironic smile. “Fresh from another victory, Jernau Gurgeh?”
“Does it show?” he said, raising the glass to his lips.
“I have learned to recognize the signs,” the professor said. She was twice Gurgeh’s age, well into her second century, but still tall and handsome and striking. Her skin was pale and her hair was white, as it always had been, and cropped. “Another of my students humiliated?”
Gurgeh shrugged. He drained the glass, looked round for a tray to put it on.
“Allow me,” Chamlis Amalk-ney murmured, gently taking the glass from his hand and placing it on a passing tray a good three meters away. Its yellow-tinged field brought back a full glass of the same rich wine. Gurgeh accepted it.
Boruelal wore a dark suit of soft fabric, lightened at throat and knees by delicate silver chains. Her feet were bare, which Gurgeh thought did not set off the outfit as—say—a pair of heeled boots might have done. But it was the most minor of eccentricities compared to those of some of the university staff. Gurgeh smiled, looking down at the woman’s toes, tan upon the blond wooden flooring.
“You’re so destructive, Gurgeh,” Boruelal told him. “Why not help us instead? Become part of the faculty instead of an itinerant guest lecturer?”
“I’ve told you, Professor; I’m too busy. I have more than enough games to play, papers to write, letters to answer, guest trips to make… and besides… I’d get bored. I bore easily, you know,” Gurgeh said, and looked away.
“Jernau Gurgeh would make a very bad teacher,” Chamlis Amalk-ney agreed. “If a student failed to understand something immediately, no matter how complicated and involved, Gurgeh would immediately lose all patience and quite probably pour their drink over them… if nothing worse.”
“So I’ve heard.” The professor nodded gravely.
“That was a year ago,” Gurgeh said, frowning. “And Yay deserved it.” He scowled at the old drone.
“Well,” the professor said, looking momentarily at Chamlis, “perhaps we have found a match for you, Jernau Gurgeh. There’s a young—” Then there was a crash in the distance, and the background noise in the hall increased. They each turned at the sound of people shouting.
“Oh, not another commotion,” the professor said tiredly.
Already that evening, one of the younger lecturers had lost control of a pet bird, which had gone screeching and swooping through the hall, tangling in the hair of several people before the drone Mawhrin-Skel intercepted the animal in midair and knocked it unconscious, much to the chagrin of most of the people at the party.
“What now?” Boruelal sighed. “Excuse me.” She absently left glass and savory on Chamlis Amalk-ney’s broad, flat top and moved off, excusing her way through the crowd toward the source of the upheaval.
Chamlis’s aura flickered a displeased gray-white. It set the glass down noisily on the table and threw the savory into a distant bin. “It’s that dreadful machine Mawhrin-Skel,” Chamlis said testily.
Gurgeh looked over the crowd to where all the noise was coming from. “Really?” he said. “What, causing all the rumpus?”
“I really don’t know why you find it so appealing,” the old drone said. It picked up Boruelal’s glass again and poured the pale gold wine out into an outstretched field, so that the liquid lay cupped in midair, as though in an invisible glass.
“It amuses me,” Gurgeh replied. He looked at Chamlis. “Boruelal said something about finding a match for me. Was that what you were talking about earlier?”
“Yes it was. Some new student they’ve found; a GSV cabin-brat with a gift for Stricken.”
Gurgeh raised one eyebrow. Stricken was one of the more complex games in his repertoire. It was also one of his best. There were other human players in the Culture who could beat him—though they were all specialists at the game, not general game-players as he was—but not one of them could guarantee a win, and they were few and far between, probably only ten in the whole population.
“So, who is this talented infant?” The noise on the far side of the room had lessened.
“It’s a young woman,” Chamlis said, slopping the field-held liquid about and letting it dribble through thin strands of hollow, invisible force. “Just arrived here; came off the Cargo Cult; still settling in.”
The General Systems Vehicle Cargo Cult had stopped off at Chiark Orbital ten days earlier, and left only two days ago. Gurgeh had played a few multiple exhibition matches on the craft (and been secretly delighted that they had been clean sweeps; he hadn’t been beaten in any of the various games), but he hadn’t played Stricken at all. A few of his opponents had mentioned something about a supposedly brilliant (though shy) young game-player on the Vehicle, but he or she hadn’t turned up as far as Gurgeh knew, and he’d assumed the reports of this prodigy’s powers were much exaggerated. Ship people tended to have a quaint pride in their craft; they liked to feel that even though they had been beaten by the great game-player, their vessel still had the measure of him, somewhere (of course, the ship itself did, but that didn’t count; they meant people; humans, or 1.0 value drones).
“You are a mischievous and contrary device,” Boruelal said to the drone Mawhrin-Skel, floating at her shoulder, its aura field orange with well-being, but circled with little purple motes of unconvincing contrition.
“Oh,” Mawhrin-Skel said brightly, “do you really think so?”
“Talk to this appalling machine, Jernau Gurgeh,” the professor said, frowning momentarily at the top of Chamlis Amalkney’s casing, then picking up a fresh glass. (Chamlis poured the liquid it had been playing with into Boruelal’s original glass and replaced it on the table.)
“What have you been doing now?” Gurgeh asked Mawhrin-Skel as it floated near his face.
“Anatomy lesson,” it said, its fields collapsing to a mixture of formal blue and brown ill-humor.
“A chirlip was found on the terrace,” Boruelal explained, looking accusingly at the little drone. “It was wounded. Somebody brought it in, and Mawhrin-Skel offered to treat it.”
“I wasn’t busy,” Mawhrin-Skel interjected, reasonably.
“It killed and dissected it in front of all the people,” the professor sighed. “They were most upset.”
“It would have died from shock anyway,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “They’re fascinating creatures, chirlips. Those cute little fur-folds conceal partially cantilevered bones, and the looped digestive system is quite fascinating.”
“But not when people are eating,” Boruelal said, selecting another savory from the tray. “It was still moving,” she added glumly. She ate the savory.
“Residual synaptic capacitance,” explained Mawhrin-Skel.
“Or ‘Bad Taste’ as we machines call it,” Chamlis Amalk-ney said.
“An expert in that, are you, Amalk-ney?” Mawhrin-Skel inquired.
“I bow to your superior talents in that field,” Chamlis snapped back.
Gurgeh smiled.
Chamlis Amalk-ney was an old—and ancient—friend; the drone had been constructed over four thousand years ago (it claimed it had forgotten the exact date, and nobody had ever been impolite enough to search out the truth). Gurgeh had known the drone all his life; it had been a friend of the family for centuries.
Mawhrin-Skel was a more recent acquaintance. The irascible, ill-mannered little machine had arrived on Chiark Orbital only a couple of hundred days earlier; another untypical character attracted there by the world’s exaggerated reputation for eccentricity.
Mawhrin-Skel had been designed as a Special Circumstances drone for the Culture’s Contact section; effectively a military machine with a variety of sophisticated, hardened sensory and weapons systems which would have been quite unnecessary and useless on the majority of drones. As with all sentient Culture constructs, its precise character had not been fully mapped out before its construction, but allowed to develop as the drone’s mind was put together. The Culture regarded this unpredictable factor in its production of conscious machines as the price to be paid for individuality, but the result was that not every drone so brought into being was entirely suitable for the tasks it had initially been designed for.
Mawhrin-Skel was one such rogue drone. Its personality—it had been decided—wasn’t right for Contact, not even for Special Circumstances. It was unstable, belligerent and insensitive. (And those were only the grounds it had chosen to tell people it had failed on.) It had been given the choice of radical personality alteration, in which it would have had little or no say in its own eventual character, or a life outside Contact, with its personality intact but its weapons and its more complex communications and sensory systems removed to bring it down to something nearer the level of a standard drone.
It had, bitterly, chosen the latter. And it had made its way to Chiark Orbital, where it hoped it might fit in.
“Meatbrain,” Mawhrin-Skel told Chamlis Amalk-ney, and zoomed off toward the line of open windows. The older drone’s aura field flashed white with anger and a bright, rippling spot of rainbow light revealed that it was using its tight-beam transceiver to communicate with the departing machine. Mawhrin-Skel stopped in midair; turned. Gurgeh held his breath, wondering what Chamlis could have said, and what the smaller drone might say in reply, knowing that it wouldn’t bother to keep its remarks secret, as Chamlis had.
“What I resent,” it said slowly, from a couple of meters away, “is not what I have lost, but what I have gained, in coming—even remotely—to resemble fatigued, path-polished geriatrics like you, who haven’t even got the human decency to die when they’re obsolete. You’re a waste of matter, Amalk-ney.”
Mawhrin-Skel became a mirrored sphere, and in that ostentatiously uncommunicable mode swept out of the hall into the darkness.
“Cretinous whelp,” Chamlis said, fields frosty blue.
Boruelal shrugged. “I feel sorry for it.”
“I don’t,” Gurgeh said. “I think it has a wonderful time.” He turned to the professor. “When do I get to meet your young Stricken genius? Not hiding her away to train her, are you?”
“No, we’re just giving her time to adjust.” Boruelal picked at her teeth with the pointed end of the savory stick. “From what I can gather the girl had rather a sheltered upbringing. Sounds like she hardly left the GSV; she must feel odd being here. Also, she isn’t here to do game-theory, Jernau Gurgeh, I’d better point that out. She’s going to study philosophy.”
Gurgeh looked suitably surprised.
“A sheltered upbringing?” Chamlis Amalk-ney said. “On a GSV?” Its gunmetal aura indicated puzzlement.
“She’s shy.”
“She’d have to be.”
“I must meet her,” said Gurgeh.
“You will,” Boruelal said. “Soon, maybe; she said she might come with me to Tronze for the next concert. Hafflis runs a game there, doesn’t he?”
“Usually,” Gurgeh agreed.
“Maybe she’ll play you there. But don’t be surprised if you just intimidate her.”
“I shall be the epitome of gentle good grace,” Gurgeh assured her.
Boruelal nodded thoughtfully. She gazed out over the party and looked distracted for a second as a large cheer sounded from the center of the hall.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I think I detect a nascent commotion.” She moved away. Chamlis Amalk-ney shifted aside, to avoid being used as a table again; the professor took her glass with her.
“Did you meet Yay this morning?” Chamlis asked Gurgeh.
He nodded. “She had me dressed up in a suit, toting a gun and shooting at toy missiles which ‘explosively dismantled’ themselves.”
“You didn’t enjoy it.”
“Not at all. I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle.”
“Well, such diversions aren’t for everybody. She was just trying to be helpful. You’d said you were feeling restless, looking for something new.”
“Well, that wasn’t it,” Gurgeh said, and felt suddenly, inexplicably, saddened.
He and Chamlis watched as people began to move past them, heading toward the long line of windows which opened onto the terrace. There was a dull, buzzing sensation inside the man’s head; he had entirely forgotten that coming down from Sharp Blue required a degree of internal monitoring if you were to avoid an uncomfortable hangover. He watched the people pass with a slight feeling of nausea.
“Must be time for the fireworks,” Chamlis said.
“Yes… let’s get some fresh air, shall we?”
“Just what I need,” Chamlis said, aura dully red.
Gurgeh put his glass down, and together he and the old drone joined the flow of people spilling from the bright, tapestry-hung hall onto the floodlit terrace facing the dark lake.
Rain hit the windows with a noise like the crackling of the logs on the fire. The view from the house at Ikroh, down the steep wooded slope to the fjord and across it to the mountains on the other side, was warped and distorted by the water running down the glass, and sometimes low clouds flowed round the turrets and cupolas of Gurgeh’s home, like wet smoke.
Yay Meristinoux took a large wrought-iron poker from the hearth and, putting one booted foot up on the elaborately carved stone of the fire surround and one pale brown hand on the rope-like edge of the massive mantelpiece, stabbed at one of the spitting logs lying burning in the grate. Sparks flew up the tall chimney to meet the falling rain.
Chamlis Amalk-ney was floating near the window, watching the dull gray clouds.
The wooden door set into one corner of the room swung open and Gurgeh appeared, bearing a tray with hot drinks. He wore a loose, light robe over dark, baggy trous; slippers made small slapping noises on his feet as he crossed the room. He put the tray down, looked at Yay. “Thought of a move yet?”
Yay crossed over to look morosely at the game-board, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “I think you’ve won.”
“Look,” Gurgeh said, adjusting a few of the pieces. His hands moved quickly, like a magician’s, over the board, though Yay followed every move. She nodded.
“Yes, I see. But”—she tapped a hex Gurgeh had repositioned one of her pieces on, so giving her a potentially winning formation—“only if I’d double-secured that blocking piece two moves earlier.” She sat down on the couch, taking her drink with her. Raising her glass to the quietly smiling man on the opposite couch, she said, “Cheers. To the victor.”
“You almost won,” Gurgeh told her. “Forty-four moves; you’re getting very good.”
“Relatively,” Yay said, drinking. “Only relatively.” She lay back on the deep couch while Gurgeh put the pieces back to their starting positions and Chamlis Amalk-ney drifted over to float not-quite-between them. “You know,” Yay said, looking at the ornate ceiling, “I always like the way this house smells, Gurgeh.” She turned to look at the drone. “Don’t you, Chamlis?”
The machine??
?s aura field dipped briefly to one side; a drone shrug. “Yes. Probably because the wood our host is burning is bonise; it was developed millennia ago by the old Waverian civilization specifically for its fragrance when ignited.”
“Yes, well, it’s a nice smell,” Yay said, getting up and going back to the windows. She shook her head. “Sure as shit rains a lot here though, Gurgeh.”
“It’s the mountains,” the man explained.
Yay glanced round, one eyebrow arched. “You don’t say?”
Gurgeh smiled and smoothed one hand over his neatly trimmed beard. “How is the landscaping going, Yay?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She shook her head at the continuing downpour. “What weather.” She tossed her drink back. “No wonder you live by yourself, Gurgeh.”
“Oh, that isn’t the rain, Yay,” Gurgeh said. “That’s me. Nobody can stand to live with me for long.”
“He means,” Chamlis said, “that he couldn’t stand to live for long with anybody.”
“I’d believe either,” Yay said, coming back to the couch again. She sat cross-legged on it and played with one of the pieces on the game-board. “What did you think of the match, Chamlis?”
“You have reached the likely limits of your technical ability, but your flair continues to develop. I doubt you’ll ever beat Gurgeh, though.”
“Hey,” Yay said, pretending injured pride. “I’m just a junior; I’ll improve.” She tapped one set of fingernails against the other, and made a tutting noise with her mouth. “Like I’m told I will at landscaping.”
“You having problems?” Chamlis said.
Yay looked as though she hadn’t heard for a moment, then sighed, lay back on the couch. “Yeah… that asshole Elrstrid and that prissy fucking Preashipleyl machine. They’re so… unadventurous. They just won’t listen.”