Flere-Imsaho buzzed a little louder, but only momentarily.
There was silence. Gurgeh drank from his glass.
Olos and Hamin exchanged looks. “Jernau Gurgeh,” Olos said at last, rolling his glass round in his hands. “Let’s be frank. You’re an embarrassment to us. You’ve done very much better than we expected; we did not think we could be so easily fooled, but somehow you did it. I congratulate you on whatever ruse it was you used, whether it centered on your drug-glands, your machine there, or simply many more years playing Azad than you admitted to. You have bettered us, and we’re impressed. I am only sorry that innocent people, such as those bystanders who were shot instead of you, and Lo Prinest Bermoiya, had to be hurt. As you have no doubt guessed, we would like you to go no further in the game. Now, the Imperial Office has nothing to do with the Games Bureau, so there is little we can do directly. We do have a suggestion though.”
“What’s that?” Gurgeh sipped his drink.
“As I’ve been saying”—Hamin pointed the stem of the pipe at Gurgeh—“we have many laws. We therefore have many crimes. Some of these are of a sexual nature, yes?” Gurgeh looked down at his drink. “I need hardly point out,” Hamin continued, “that the physiology of our race makes us… unusual, one might almost say gifted, in that respect. Also, in our society, it is possible to control people. It is possible to make somebody, or even several people, do things they might not want to do. We can offer you, here, the sort of experience which by your own admission would be impossible on your own world.” The old apex leaned closer, dropping his voice. “Can you imagine what it might be like to have several females, and males—even apices, if you like—who will do your every bidding?” Hamin knocked his pipe out on the table leg; the ash drifted over the humming bulk of Flere-Imsaho. The rector of Candsev College smiled in a conspiratorial way and sat back, re-packing his pipe from a small pouch.
Olos leaned forward. “This whole island is yours for as long as you want it, Jernau Gurgeh. You may have as many people of whatever sexual mix as you like, for as long as you desire.”
“But I pull out of the game.”
“You retire, yes,” Olos said.
Hamin nodded. “There are precedents.”
“The whole island?” Gurgeh made a show of looking around the gently lit roof-garden. A troupe of dancers appeared; the lithe, skimpily dressed men, women and apices made their way up some steps to a small stage raised behind the musicians.
“Everything,” Olos said. “The island, house, servants, dancers; everything and everyone.”
Gurgeh nodded but didn’t say anything.
Hamin relit his pipe. “Even the band,” he said, coughing. He waved at the musicians. “What do you think of their instruments, Mr. Gurgeh? Do they not sound sweet?”
“Very pleasant.” Gurgeh drank a little, watching the dancers arrange themselves onstage.
“Even there, though,” Hamin said, “you are missing something. You see, we gain a great deal of pleasure from knowing at what cost this music is bought. You see the stringed instrument; the one on the left with the eight strings?”
Gurgeh nodded. Hamin said, “I can tell you that each of those steel strings has strangled a man. You see that white pipe at the back, played by the male?”
“The pipe shaped like a bone?”
Hamin laughed. “A female’s femur, removed without anesthetic.”
“Naturally,” Gurgeh said, and took a few sweet-tasting nuts from a bowl on the table. “Do they come in matched pairs, or are there a lot of one-legged lady music critics?”
Hamin smiled. “You see?” he said to Olos. “He does appreciate.” The old apex gestured back at the band, behind whom the dancers were now arranged, ready to start their performance. “The drums are made from human skin; you can see why each set is called a family. The horizontal percussion instrument is constructed from finger bones, and… well, there are other instruments, but can you understand now why that music sounds so… precious to those of us who know what has gone into the making of it?”
“Oh, yes,” Gurgeh said. The dancers began. Fluid, practiced, they impressed almost immediately. Some must have worn AG units, floating through the air like huge, diaphanously slow birds.
“Good,” Hamin nodded. “You see, Gurgeh, one can be on either side in the Empire. One can be the player, or one can be… played upon.” Hamin smiled at what was a play on words in Eächic, and to some extent in Marain too.
Gurgeh watched the dancers for a moment. Without looking away from them, he said, “I’ll play, rector; on Echronedal.” He tapped one ring on the rim of his glass, in time to the music.
Hamin sighed. “Well, I have to tell you, Jernau Gurgeh, that we are worried.” He pulled on the pipe again, studied the glowing bowl. “Worried about the effect your getting any further in the game would have on the morale of our people. So many of them are just simple folk; it is our duty to shield them from the harsh realities, sometimes. And what harsher reality can there be than the realization that most of one’s kin are gullible, cruel and foolish? They would not understand that a stranger, an alien, can come here and do so well at the holy game. We here—those of us in the court and the colleges—might not be so concerned, but we have to keep the ordinary, decent… I would even go as far as to say innocent people in mind, Mr. Gurgeh, and what we have to do in that respect, what we sometimes have to take responsibility for, does not always make us happy. But we know our duty, and we will do it; for them, and for our Emperor.”
Hamin leaned forward again. “We don’t intend to kill you, Mr. Gurgeh, though I’m told there are factions in the court who’d like nothing better, and—they say—people in the security services easily capable of doing so. No; nothing so gross. But…” The old apex sucked on the thin pipe, producing a gentle papping noise. Gurgeh waited.
Hamin pointed the stem at him again. “I have to tell you, Gurgeh, that no matter how you do in the first game on Echronedal, it will be announced that you have been defeated. We have unequivocal control of the communications- and news-services on the Fire Planet, and as far as the press and the public will be concerned, you will be knocked out in the first round there. We will do whatever has to be done to make it appear that that is exactly what has in fact happened. You are free to tell people I’ve told you this, and free to claim whatever you want after the event; you will be ridiculed, though, and what I have described will happen anyway. The truth has already been decided.”
Olos’s turn: “So, you see, Gurgeh; you may go to Echronedal, but to certain defeat; absolutely certain defeat. Go as a high-class tourist if you want, or stay here and enjoy yourself as our guest; but there is no longer any point in playing.”
“Hmm,” Gurgeh said. The dancers were slowly losing their clothes as they stripped each other. Some of them, still dancing, were at the same time contriving to stroke and touch each other in an exaggeratedly sexual way. Gurgeh nodded. “I’ll think about it.” Then he smiled at the two apices. “I’d like to see your Fire Planet, all the same.” He drank from the cool glass, and watched the slow build-up of erotic choreography behind the musicians. “Other than that, though… I can’t imagine I’ll be trying too terribly hard.”
Hamin was studying his pipe. Olos looked very serious.
Gurgeh held out his hands in a gesture of resigned helplessness. “What more can I say?”
“Would you be prepared to… cooperate, though?” Olos said.
Gurgeh looked inquisitive. Olos reached slowly over and tapped the rim of Gurgeh’s glass. “Something that would… ring true,” he said softly.
Gurgeh watched the two apices exchange glances. He waited for them to make their play.
“Documentary evidence,” Hamin said after a moment, talking to his pipe. “Film of you looking worried over a bad board-position. Maybe even an interview. We could arrange these things without your cooperation, naturally, but it would be easier, less fraught for all concerned, with your aid.” The old apex sucked
on his pipe. Olos drank, glancing at the romantic antics of the dance troupe.
Gurgeh looked surprised. “You mean, lie? Participate in the construction of your false reality?”
“Our real reality, Gurgeh,” Olos said quietly. “The official version; the one that will have documentary evidence to support it… the one that will be believed.”
Gurgeh grinned broadly. “I’d be delighted to help. Of course; I shall regard it as a challenge to produce a definitively abject interview for popular consumption. I’ll even help you work out positions so awful even I can’t get out of them.” He raised his glass to them. “After all; it’s the game that matters, is it not?”
Hamin snorted, his shoulders shook. He sucked on the pipe again and through a veil of smoke said, “No true game-player could say more.” He patted Gurgeh on the shoulder. “Mr. Gurgeh, even if you choose not to avail yourself of the facilities my house has to offer, I hope you’ll stay with us for a while. I should enjoy talking with you. Will you stay?”
“Why not?” Gurgeh said, and he and Hamin raised their glasses to each other; Olos sat back, laughing silently. Together the three turned to watch the dancers, who had now formed a copulatorily complicated pattern of bodies in a carnal jigsaw, still keeping, Gurgeh was impressed to note, to the beat of the music.
He stayed at the house for the next fifteen days. He talked, guardedly, with the old rector during that time. He still felt they didn’t really know each other when he left, but perhaps they knew a little more of each other’s societies.
Hamin obviously found it hard to believe the Culture really did do without money. “But what if I do want something unreasonable?”
“What?”
“My own planet?” Hamin wheezed with laughter.
“How can you own a planet?” Gurgeh shook his head.
“But supposing I wanted one?”
“I suppose if you found an unoccupied one you could land without anybody becoming annoyed… perhaps that would work. But how would you stop other people landing there too?”
“Could I not buy a fleet of warships?”
“All our ships are sentient. You could certainly try telling a ship what to do… but I don’t think you’d get very far.”
“Your ships think they’re sentient!” Hamin chuckled.
“A common delusion shared by some of our human citizens.”
Hamin found the Culture’s sexual mores even more fascinating. He was at once delighted and outraged that the Culture regarded homosexuality, incest, sex-changing, hermaphrodicy and sexual characteristic alteration as just something else people did, like going on a cruise or changing their hairstyle.
Hamin thought this must take all the fun out of things. Didn’t the Culture forbid anything?
Gurgeh attempted to explain there were no written laws, but almost no crime anyway. There was the occasional crime of passion (as Hamin chose to call it), but little else. It was difficult to get away with anything anyway, when everybody had a terminal, but there were very few motives left, too.
“But if someone kills somebody else?”
Gurgeh shrugged. “They’re slap-droned.”
“Ah! This sounds more like it. What does this drone do?”
“Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.”
“Is that all?”
“What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.”
“Ah; but in your Culture, can’t you gatecrash?”
“I suppose so,” Gurgeh conceded. “But nobody’d talk to you.”
As for what Hamin told Gurgeh about the Empire, it only made him appreciate what Shohobohaum Za had said; that it was a gem, however vicious and indiscriminate its cutting edges might be. It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called “human nature”—the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural—when they were surrounded and subsumed by the self-created monster that was the Empire of Azad, and which displayed such a fierce instinct (Gurgeh could think of no other word) for self-preservation.
The Empire wanted to survive; it was like an animal, a massive, powerful body that would only let certain cells or viruses survive within it and as a matter of course killed off any and all others, automatically and unthinkingly. Hamin himself used this analogy when he compared revolutionaries to cancer. Gurgeh tried to say that single cells were single cells, while a conscious collection of hundreds of billions of them—or a conscious device made from arrays of pico-circuitry, for that matter—was simply incomparable… but Hamin refused to listen. It was Gurgeh, not he, who’d missed the point.
The rest of the time Gurgeh spent walking in the forest, or swimming in the warm, slack sea. The slow rhythm of Hamin’s house was built around meals, and Gurgeh learned to take great care in dressing for these, eating them, talking to the guests—old and new, as people came and went—and relaxing afterward, bloated and spacy, continuing to talk, and watching the deliberate entertainment of—usually—erotic dances, and the involuntary cabaret of changing sexual alliances among the guests, dancers, servants and house staff. Gurgeh was enticed many times, but never tempted. He found the Azadian females more and more attractive all the time, and not just physically… but used his genofixed glands in a negative, even contrary way, to stay carnally sober in the midst of the subtly exhibited orgy around him.
A pleasant enough few days. The rings did not jab him, and nobody shot at him. He and Flere-Imsaho got back safely to the module on the roof of the Grand Hotel a couple of days before the Imperial Fleet was due to depart for Echronedal. Gurgeh and the drone would have preferred to take the module, which was perfectly capable of making the crossing by itself, but Contact had forbidden that—the effect on the Admiralty of discovering that something no larger than a lifeboat could outstrip their battlecruisers was not something to be contemplated—and the Empire had refused permission for the alien machine to be conveyed inside an imperial craft. So Gurgeh would have to make the journey with the Fleet like everybody else.
“You think you’ve got problems,” Flere-Imsaho said bitterly. “They’ll be watching us all the time; on the liner during the crossing and then once we’re in the castle. That means I’ve got to stay inside this ridiculous disguise all day and all night until the games are over. Why couldn’t you have lost in the first round like you were supposed to? We could have told them where to insert their Fire Planet and been back on a GSV by now.”
“Oh, shut up, machine.”
As it turned out, they needn’t have returned to the module; there was nothing more to take or pack. He stood in the small lounge, fiddling with the Orbital bracelet on his wrist and realizing he was looking forward to the coming games on Echronedal more than he had any of the others. The pressure would be off; he wouldn’t have to face the opprobrium of the press and the Empire’s ghastly general public, he could cooperate with the Empire to produce a convincing piece of fake news, and the likelihood of more physical option bets had thereby been reduced almost to zero. He was going to enjoy himself…
Flere-Imsaho was glad to see the man was getting over the effects of seeing behind the screen the Empire showed its guests; he was much as he’d been before, and the days at Hamin’s estate seemed to have relaxed him. It could see a small change in him though; something it could not quite pin down, but which it knew was there.
They didn’t see Shohobohaum Za again. He’d left on a tour “up-country,” wherever that was. He sent his regards, and a message in Marain to the effect that if Gurgeh could lay his mitts on some fresh grif…
Before they left, Gurgeh asked the module about the girl he’d met at the grand ball, months earlier. He couldn’t remember her name, but if the module could provide a list of the females who’d survived the first round, he was sure he’d recognize hers… the module got confused, but Flere-Imsaho told them both to forget it.
No women had made it to the second round.
r /> Pequil came with them to the shuttleport. His arm was fully healed. Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho bade farewell to the module; it climbed into the sky for a rendezvous with the distant Limiting Factor. They said goodbye to Pequil too—he took Gurgeh’s hand in both of his—and then the man and the drone boarded the shuttle.
Gurgeh watched Groasnachek as it fell away beneath them. The city tilted as he was thrown back into his seat; the whole view swung and juddered as the shuttlecraft powered into the hazy skies.
Gradually all the patterns and the shapes came out, revealed for a while before the increasing distance, the city’s own vapors, dust and grime, and the altering angle of their climb took it all away.
For all the jumble, it looked momentarily peaceful and ordered in its parts. The distance made its individual, local confusions and dislocations disappear, and from a certain height, where little ever dallied, and almost everything just passed through, it looked exactly like a great, mindless, spreading organism.
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 fulfills the same task.