“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 idealized, 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, toward 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 realized 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 anymore 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 gray 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 demoralizing 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 meters high or more. At their peak rate, the drone had told him, they grew at nearly a quarter-meter 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 w
as 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 toward 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 toward 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 nonexistent.
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 behavior, 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 dreamed 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.