“What won’t they listen to?”
“Ideas!” Yay shouted at the ceiling. “Something different, something not so goddamn conservative for a change. Just because I’m young they won’t pay attention.”
“I thought they were pleased with your work,” Chamlis said. Gurgeh was sitting back in his couch, swirling the drink in his glass round and just watching Yay.
“Oh, they like me to do all the easy stuff,” Yay said, sounding suddenly tired. “Stick up a range or two, carve out a couple of lakes… but I’m talking about the overall plan; real radical stuff. All we’re doing is building just another next-door Plate. Could be one of a million anywhere in the galaxy. What’s the point of that?”
“So people can live on it?” Chamlis suggested, fields rosy.
“People can live anywhere!” Yay said, levering herself up from the couch to look at the drone with her bright green eyes. “There’s no shortage of Plates; I’m talking about art!”
“What did you have in mind?” Gurgeh asked.
“How about,” Yay said, “magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn’t that sound more exciting?”
“More exciting than what?” Gurgeh asked.
“More exciting than this!” Meristinoux leapt up and went over to the window. She tapped the ancient pane. “Look at that; you might as well be on a planet. Seas and hills and rain. Wouldn’t you rather live on a floating island, sailing through the air over the water?”
“What if the islands collide?” Chamlis asked.
“What if they do?” Yay turned to look at the man and the machine. It was getting still darker outside, and the room lights were slowly brightening. She shrugged. “Anyway; you could make it so they didn’t… but don’t you think it’s a wonderful idea? Why should one old woman and a machine be able to stop me?”
“Well,” Chamlis said, “I know the Preashipleyl machine, and if it thought your idea was good it wouldn’t just ignore it; it’s had a lot of experience, and—”
“Yeah,” Yay said, “too much experience.”
“That isn’t possible, young lady,” the drone said.
Yay Meristinoux took a deep breath, and seemed about to argue, but just spread her arms wide and rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. “We’ll see,” she said.
The afternoon, which had been steadily darkening until then, was suddenly lit up on the far side of the fjord by a bright splash of sunlight filtering through the clouds and the easing rain. The room slowly filled with a watery glow, and the house lights dimmed again. Wind moved the tops of the dripping trees. “Ah,” Yay said, stretching her back and flexing her arms. “Not to worry.” She inspected the landscape outside critically. “Hell; I’m going for a run,” she announced. She headed for the door in the corner of the room, pulling off first one boot, then the other, throwing the waistcoat over a chair, and unbuttoning her blouse. “You’ll see.” She wagged a finger at Gurgeh and Chamlis. “Floating islands; their time has come.”
Chamlis said nothing. Gurgeh looked skeptical. Yay left.
Chamlis went to the window. It watched the girl—down to a pair of shorts now—run out along the path leading down from the house, between the lawns and the forest. She waved once, without looking back, and disappeared into the woods. Chamlis flickered its fields in response, even though Yay couldn’t see.
“She’s handsome,” it said.
Gurgeh sat back in the couch. “She makes me feel old.”
“Oh, don’t you start feeling sorry for yourself,” Chamlis said, floating back from the window.
Gurgeh looked at the hearth stones. “Everything seems… gray at the moment, Chamlis. Sometimes I start to think I’m repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing’s worth playing for anyway.”
“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said matter-of-factly, and did something it rarely did, actually settling physically into the couch, letting it take its weight. “Settle up; are we talking about games, or life?”
Gurgeh put his dark-curled head back and laughed.
“Games,” Chamlis went on, “have been your life. If they’re starting to pall, I’d understand you might not be so happy with anything else.”
“Maybe I’m just disillusioned with games,” Gurgeh said, turning a carved game-piece over in his hands. “I used to think that context didn’t matter; a good game was a good game and there was a purity about manipulating rules that translated perfectly from society to society… but now I wonder. Take this; Deploy.” He nodded at the board in front of him. “This is foreign. Some backwater planet discovered just a few decades ago. They play this there and they bet on it; they make it important. But what do we have to bet with? What would be the point of my wagering Ikroh, say?”
“Yay wouldn’t take the bet, certainly,” Chamlis said, amused. “She thinks it rains too much.”
“But you see? If somebody wanted a house like this they’d already have had one built; if they wanted anything in the house”—Gurgeh gestured round the room—“they’d have ordered it; they’d have it. With no money, no possessions, a large part of the enjoyment the people who invented this game experienced when they played it just… disappears.”
“You call it enjoyment to lose your house, your titles, your estates; your children maybe; to be expected to walk out onto the balcony with a gun and blow your brains out? That’s enjoyment? We’re well free of that. You want something you can’t have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can’t provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive.” Gurgeh remained silent, lit by the fire and the soft glow from the room’s concealed lighting. “You called yourself ‘Morat’ when you completed your name, but perhaps you aren’t the perfect game-player after all; perhaps you should have called yourself ‘Shequi’; gambler.”
“You know,” Gurgeh said slowly, his voice hardly louder than the crackling logs in the fire, “I’m actually slightly afraid of playing this young kid.” He glanced at the drone. “Really. Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.” He looked quickly, briefly up at the machine again, as though ashamed. “But every now and again, I do worry about losing; I think, what if there’s some kid—especially some kid, somebody younger and just naturally more talented—out there, able to take that away from me. That worries me. The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.”
“You are a throwback,” Chamlis told him. “The game’s the thing. That’s the conventional wisdom, isn’t it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with.”
Gurgeh nodded slowly. “So they say. So everybody else believes.”
“But not you?”
“I…” The man seemed to have difficulty finding the right word. “I… exult when I win. It’s better than love, it’s better than sex or any glanding; it’s the only instant when I feel…”—he shook his head, his mouth tightened—“… real,” he said. “Me. The rest of the time… I feel a bit like that little ex–Special Circumstances drone, Mawhrin-Skel; as though I’ve had some sort of… birthright taken away from me.”
“Ah, is that the affinity you feel?” Chamlis said coldly, aura to match. “I wondered what you saw in that appalling machine.”
“Bitterness,” Gurgeh said, sitting back again. “That’s what I see in it. It has novelty value, at least.” He got up and went to the fire, prodding at the logs with the wrought-iron poker and placing another piece of wood on, handling the log awkwardly with heavy tongs.
“This is not a heroic age,” he told the drone, staring at the fire. “The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is s
o comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.”
“Contact uses individuals,” Chamlis pointed out. “It puts people into younger societies who have a dramatic and decisive effect on the fates of entire meta-civilizations. They’re usually ‘mercenaries,’ not Culture, but they’re human, they’re people.”
“They’re selected and used. Like game-pieces. They don’t count.” Gurgeh sounded impatient. He left the tall fireplace, returned to the couch. “Besides, I’m not one of them.”
“So have yourself stored until a more heroic age does arrive.”
“Huh,” Gurgeh said, sitting again. “If it ever does. It would seem too much like cheating, anyway.”
The drone Chamlis Amalk-ney listened to the rain and the fire. “Well,” it said slowly, “if it’s novelty value you want, Contact—never mind SC—are the people to go to.”
“I have no intention of applying to join Contact,” Gurgeh said. “Being cooped up in a GCU with a bunch of gung-ho do-gooders searching for barbarians to teach is not my idea of either enjoyment or fulfillment.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that Contact had the best Minds, the most information. They might be able to come up with some ideas. Any time I’ve ever been involved with them they’ve got things done. It’s a last resort, mind you.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re tricky. Devious. They’re gamblers, too; and used to winning.”
“Hmm,” Gurgeh said, and stroked his dark beard. “I wouldn’t know how to go about it,” he said.
“Nonsense,” Chamlis said. “Anyway; I have my own connections there; I’d—”
A door slammed. “Holy shit it’s cold out there!” Yay burst into the room, shaking herself. Her arms were clenched across her chest and her thin shorts were stuck to her thighs; her whole body was quivering. Gurgeh got up from the couch.
“Come here to the fire,” Chamlis told the girl. Yay stood shivering in front of the window, dripping water. “Don’t just stand there,” Chamlis told Gurgeh. “Fetch a towel.”
Gurgeh looked critically at the machine, then left the room.
By the time he came back, Chamlis had persuaded Yay to kneel in front of the fire; a bowed field over the nape of her neck held her head down to the heat, while another field brushed her hair. Little drops of water fell from her drenched curls to the hearth, hissing on the hot flagstones.
Chamlis took the towel from Gurgeh’s hands, and the man watched as the machine moved the towel over the young woman’s body. He looked away at one point, shaking his head, and sat down on the couch again, sighing.
“Your feet are filthy,” he told the girl.
“Ah, it was a good run though,” Yay laughed from beneath the towel.
With much blowing and whistling and “brr-brrs,” Yay was dried. She kept the towel wrapped round her and sat, legs drawn up, on the couch. “I’m famished,” she announced suddenly. “Mind if I make myself something to—?”
“Let me,” Gurgeh said. He went through the corner door, reappearing briefly to drape Yay’s hide trous over the same chair she’d left the waistcoat on.
“What were you talking about?” Yay asked Chamlis.
“Gurgeh’s disaffection.”
“Do any good?”
“I don’t know,” the drone admitted.
Yay retrieved her clothes and dressed quickly. She sat in front of the fire for a while, watching it as the day’s light faded and the room lights came up.
Gurgeh brought a tray in loaded with sweetmeats and drinks.
* * *
Once Yay and Gurgeh had eaten, the three of them played a complicated card-game of the type Gurgeh liked best; one that involved bluff and just a little luck. They were in the middle of the game when friends of Yay’s and Gurgeh’s arrived, their aircraft touching down on a house lawn Gurgeh would rather they hadn’t used. They came in bright and noisy and laughing; Chamlis retreated to a corner by the window.
Gurgeh played the good host, keeping his guests supplied with refreshments. He brought a fresh glass to Yay where she stood, listening with a group of others, to a couple of people arguing about education.
“Are you leaving with this lot, Yay?” Gurgeh leaned back against the tapestried wall behind, dropping his voice a little so that Yay had to turn away from the discussion, to face him.
“Maybe,” she said slowly. Her face glowed in the light of the fire. “You’re going to ask me to stay again, aren’t you?” She swirled her drink around in her glass, watching it.
“Oh,” Gurgeh said, shaking his head and looking up at the ceiling, “I doubt it. I get bored going through the same old moves and responses.”
Yay smiled. “You never know,” she said. “One day I might change my mind. You shouldn’t let it bother you, Gurgeh. It’s almost an honor.”
“You mean to be such an exception?”
“Mmm.” She drank.
“I don’t understand you,” he told her.
“Because I turn you down?”
“Because you don’t turn anybody else down.”
“Not so consistently.” Yay nodded, frowning at her drink.
“So; why not?” There. He’d finally said it.
Yay pursed her lips. “Because,” she said, looking up at him, “it matters to you.”
“Ah,” he nodded, looking down, rubbing his beard. “I should have feigned indifference.” He looked straight at her. “Really, Yay.”
“I feel you want to… take me,” Yay said, “like a piece, like an area. To be had; to be… possessed.” Suddenly she looked very puzzled. “There’s something very… I don’t know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You’ve never changed sex, have you?” He shook his head. “Or slept with a man?” Another shake. “I thought so,” Yay said. “You’re strange, Gurgeh.” She drained her glass.
“Because I don’t find men attractive?”
“Yes; you’re a man!” She laughed.
“Should I be attracted to myself, then?”
Yay studied him for a while, a small smile flickering on her face. Then she laughed and looked down. “Well, not physically, anyway.” She grinned at him and handed him her empty glass. Gurgeh refilled it; she returned back to the others.
Gurgeh left Yay arguing about the place of geology in Culture education policy, and went to talk to Ren Myglan, a young woman he’d been hoping would call in that evening.
One of the people had brought a pet; a proto-sentient Styglian enumerator which padded round the room, counting under its slightly fishy breath. The slim, three-limbed animal, blond-haired and waist-high, with no discernible head but lots of meaningful bulges, started counting people; there were twenty-three in the room. Then it began counting articles of furniture, after which it concentrated on legs. It wandered up to Gurgeh and Ren Myglan. Gurgeh looked down at the animal peering at his feet and making vague, swaying, pawing motions at his slippers. He tapped it with his toe. “Say six,” the enumerator muttered, wandering off. Gurgeh went on talking to the woman.
After a few minutes, standing near her, talking, occasionally moving a little closer, he was whispering into her ear, and once or twice he reached round behind her, to run his fingers down her spine through the silky dress she wore.
“I said I’d go on with the others,” she told him quietly, looking down, biting her lip, and putting her hand behind her, holding his where it rubbed at the small of her back.
“Some boring band, some singer, performing for everybody?” he chided gently, taking his hand away, smiling. “You deserve more individual attention, Ren.”
She laughed quietly, nudging him.
Eventually she left the room, and didn’t return. Gurgeh strolled over to where Yay was gesticulating wildly and extolling the virtues of life on floating magnetic islands, then saw Chamlis in the corner, studiously ignoring the three-legged pet, which was staring up at the machine and trying to scratch one of its bulges without falling o
ver. He shooed the beast away and talked to Chamlis for a while.
Finally the crowd of people left, clutching bottles and a few raided trays of sweetmeats. The aircraft hissed into the night.
Gurgeh, Yay and Chamlis finished their card-game; Gurgeh won.
“Well, I have to go,” Yay said, standing and stretching. “Chamlis?”
“Also. I’ll come with you; we can share a car.”
Gurgeh saw them to the house elevator. Yay buttoned her cloak. Chamlis turned to Gurgeh. “Want me to say anything to Contact?”
Gurgeh, who’d been absently looking up the stairs leading to the main house, looked puzzledly at Chamlis. So did Yay. “Oh, yes,” Gurgeh said, smiling. He shrugged. “Why not? See what our betters can come up with. What have I got to lose?” He laughed.
“I love to see you happy,” Yay said, kissing him lightly. She stepped into the elevator; Chamlis followed her. Yay winked at Gurgeh as the door closed. “My regards to Ren,” she grinned.
Gurgeh stared at the closed door for a moment, then shook his head, smiling to himself. He went back to the lounge, where a couple of the house remote-drones were tidying up; everything seemed back in place, as it should be. He went over to the game-board set between the dark couches, and adjusted one of the Deploy pieces so that it sat in the center of its starting hexagon, then looked at the couch where Yay had sat after she’d come back from her run. There was a fading patch of dampness there, dark on dark. He put his hand out hesitantly, touched it, sniffed his fingers, then laughed at himself. He took an umbrella and went out to inspect the damage done to the lawn by the aircraft, before returning to the house, where a light in the squat main tower told that Ren was waiting for him.
The elevator dropped two hundred meters through the mountain, then through the bedrock underneath; it slowed to cycle through a rotate-lock and gently lowered itself through the meter of ultra-dense base material to stop underneath the Orbital Plate in a transit gallery, where a couple of underground cars waited and the outside screens showed sunlight blazing up onto the Plate base. Yay and Chamlis got into a car, told it where they wanted to go, and sat down as it unlocked itself, turned and accelerated away.