“Never mind all that.” Gurgeh smiled, oddly relieved the Orbital’s Mind had been eavesdropping. “Just tell me how far away that ROU is.”
“On the word ‘is,’ it was a minute and forty-nine seconds away; a light month distant, already clear of the system, and well out of our jurisdiction, we’re very glad to say. Hightailing it in a direction a little up-spin of Galactic Core. Looks like it’s heading for the GSV Unfortunate Conflict of Evidence, unless one of them’s trying to fool somebody.”
“Thank you, Hub. Good night.”
“To you too. And you’re on your own this time, we promise.”
“Thank you, Hub. Chamlis?”
“You might just have missed the chance of a lifetime, Gurgeh… but it was more likely a narrow escape. I’m sorry for suggesting Contact. They came too fast and too hard to be casual.”
“Don’t worry so much, Chamlis,” he told the drone. He looked back at the stars again, and sat back, swinging his foot up onto the table. “I handled it. We managed. Will I see you at Tronze tomorrow?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Good luck—I mean against this wonderchild, at Stricken—if I don’t see you tomorrow.”
He grinned ruefully into the darkness. “Thanks. Good night, Chamlis.”
“Good night, Gurgeh.”
The train emerged from the tunnel into bright sunlight. It banked round the remainder of the curve, then set out across the slender bridge. Gurgeh looked over the handrail and saw the lush green pastures and brightly winding river half a kilometer below on the valley floor. Shadows of mountains lay across the narrow meadows; shadows of clouds freckled the tree-covered hills themselves. The wind of the train’s slipstream ruffled his hair as he drank in the sweet, scented mountain air and waited for his opponent to return. Birds circled in the distance over the valley, almost level with the bridge. Their cries sounded through the still air, just audible over the windrush sound of the train’s passing.
Normally he’d have waited until he was due in Tronze that evening and go there underground, but that morning he’d felt like getting away from Ikroh. He’d put on boots, a pair of conservatively styled pants and a short open jacket, then taken to the hill paths, hiking over the mountain and down the other side.
He’d sat by the side of the old railway line, glanding a mild buzz and amusing himself by chucking little bits of lodestone into the track’s magnetic field and watching them bounce out again. He’d thought about Yay’s floating islands.
He’d also thought about the mysterious visitation from the Contact drone, on the previous evening, but somehow that just would not come clear; it was as though it had been a dream. He had checked the house communication and systems statement: as far as the house was concerned, there had been no visit; but his conversation with Chiark Hub was logged, timed and witnessed by other subsections of the Hub, and by the Hub Entire for a short while. So it had happened all right.
He’d flagged down the antique train when it appeared, and even as he’d climbed on had been recognized by a middle-aged man called Dreltram, also making his way to Tronze. Mr. Dreltram would treasure a defeat at the hands of the great Jernau Gurgeh more than victory over anybody else; would he play? Gurgeh was well used to such flattery—it usually masked an unrealistic but slightly feral ambition—but had suggested they play Possession. It shared enough rule-concepts with Stricken to make it a decent limbering-up exercise.
They’d found a Possession set in one of the bars and taken it out onto the roof-deck, sitting behind a windbreak so that the cards wouldn’t blow away. They ought to have enough time to complete the game; the train would take most of the day to get to Tronze, a journey an underground car could accomplish in ten minutes.
The train left the bridge and entered a deep, narrow ravine, its slipstream producing an eerie, echoing noise off the naked rocks on either side. Gurgeh looked at the game-board. He was playing straight, without the help of any glanded substances; his opponent was using a potent mixture suggested by Gurgeh himself. In addition, Gurgeh had given Mr. Dreltram a seven-piece lead at the start, which was the maximum allowed. The fellow wasn’t a bad player, and had come near to overwhelming Gurgeh at the start, when his advantage in pieces had the greatest effect, but Gurgeh had defended well and the man’s chance had probably gone, though there was still the possibility he might have a few mines left in awkward places.
Thinking of such unpleasant surprises, Gurgeh realized he hadn’t looked at where his own hidden piece was. This had been another, unofficial, way of making the game more even. Possession is played on a forty-square grid; the two players’ pieces are distributed in one major group and two minor groups each. Up to three pieces can be hidden on different initially unoccupied intersections. Their locations are dialed—and locked—into three circular cards; thin ceramic wafers which are turned over only when the player wishes to bring those pieces into play. Mr. Dreltram had already revealed all three of his hidden pieces (one had happened to be on the intersection Gurgeh had, sportingly, sown all nine of his mines on, which really was bad luck).
Gurgeh had spun the dials on his single hidden-piece wafer and put it face down on the table without looking at it; he had no more idea where that piece was than Mr. Dreltram. It might turn out to be in an illegal position, which could well lose him the game, or (less likely) it might turn up in a strategically useful place deep inside his opponent’s territory. Gurgeh liked playing this way, if it wasn’t a serious game; as well as giving his opponent a probably needed extra advantage, it made the match as a whole more interesting and less predictable; added an extra spice to the proceedings.
He supposed he ought to find out where the piece was; the eighty-move point was fast approaching when the piece had to be revealed anyway.
He couldn’t see his hidden-piece wafer. He looked over the card and wafer-strewn table. Mr. Dreltram was not the most tidy of players; his cards and wafers and unused or removed pieces were scattered over most of the table, including the part supposed to be Gurgeh’s. A gust of wind when they’d entered a tunnel an hour earlier had almost blown some of the lighter cards away, and they’d weighed them down with goblets and lead-glass paperweights; these added to the impression of confusion, as did Mr. Dreltram’s quaint, if rather affected, custom of noting down all the moves by hand on a scratch tablet (he claimed the built-in memory on a board had broken down on him once, and lost him all record of one of the best games he’d ever played). Gurgeh started lifting bits and pieces up, humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer.
He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr. Dreltram behind him, looking oddly awkward. Gurgeh frowned as Mr. Dreltram, just returned from the bathroom, his eyes wide with the mixture of drugs he was glanding, and followed by a tray bearing drinks, sat down again, staring at Gurgeh’s hands.
It was only then, as the tray set the glasses on the table, that Gurgeh realized the cards he happened to be holding, which he had lifted up to look for his hidden-piece wafer, were Mr. Dreltram’s remaining mine-cards. Gurgeh looked at them—they were still face down; he hadn’t seen where the mines were—and understood what Mr. Dreltram must be thinking.
He put the cards back where he’d found them. “I’m very sorry,” he laughed, “I was looking for my hidden piece.”
He saw it, even as he spoke the words. The circular wafer was lying, uncovered, almost right in front of him on the table. “Ah,” he said, and only then felt the blood rise to his face. “Here it is. Hmm. Couldn’t see it for looking at it.”
He laughed again, and as he did so felt a strange, clutching sensation coursing through him, seeming to squeeze his guts in something between terror and ecstasy. He had never experienced anything like it. The closest any sensation had ever come, he thought (suddenly, clearly), had been when he was still a boy and he’d experienced his first orgasm, at the hands of a girl a few years older than him. Crude,
purely human-basic, like a single instrument picking out a simple theme a note at a time (compared to the drug-gland-boosted symphonies sex would later become), that first time had nevertheless been one of his most memorable experiences; not just because it was then novel, but because it seemed to open up a whole new fascinating world, an entirely different type of sensation and being. It had been the same when he’d played his first competition game, as a child, representing Chiark against another Orbital’s junior team, and it would be the same again when his drug-glands matured, a few years after puberty.
Mr. Dreltram laughed too, and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
Gurgeh played furiously for the next few moves, and had to be reminded by his opponent when the eighty-move deadline came up. Gurgeh turned over his hidden piece without having checked it first, risking it occupying the same square as one of his revealed pieces.
The hidden piece, on a sixteen-hundred-to-one chance, turned up in the same position as the Heart; the piece the whole game was about; the piece one’s opponent was trying to take possession of.
Gurgeh stared at the intersection where his well-defended Heart piece sat, then again at the coordinates he’d dialed at random onto the wafer, two hours earlier. They were the same, there was no doubt. If he’d looked a move earlier, he could have moved the Heart out of danger, but he hadn’t. He’d lost both pieces; and with the Heart lost, the game was lost; he’d lost.
“Oh, bad luck,” Mr. Dreltram said, clearing his throat.
Gurgeh nodded. “I believe it’s customary, at such moments of disaster, for the defeated player to be given the Heart as a keepsake,” he said, fingering the lost piece.
“Um… so I understand,” Mr. Dreltram said, obviously at once embarrassed on Gurgeh’s behalf, and delighted at his good fortune.
Gurgeh nodded. He put the Heart down, lifted the ceramic wafer which had betrayed him. “I’d rather have this, I think.” He held it up to Mr. Dreltram, who nodded.
“Well, of course. I mean, why not; I certainly wouldn’t object.”
The train rolled quietly into a tunnel, slowing for a station set in the caverns inside the mountain.
* * *
“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games—those which can be played in any sense ‘perfectly,’ such as grid, Prallian scope, ’nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions—can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.
“The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it’s just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They’re just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you’ll keep fit at the same time.”
Gurgeh gave an ironic bow to the young man who’d approached him with an idea for a game. The fellow looked nonplussed. He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak. Gurgeh was waiting for this; as he had on the last five or six occasions when the young man had tried to say something, Gurgeh interrupted him before he’d even started.
“I’m quite serious, you know; there is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain. The same lessons can be learned, the same skills acquired, at the only levels that really matter.” He paused again. He could see the drone Mawhrin-Skel floating toward him over the heads of the people thronging the broad plaza.
The main concert was over. The mountain summits around Tronze echoed to the sounds of various smaller bands as people gravitated toward the specific musical forms they preferred; some formal, some improvised, some for dancing, some for experiencing under a specific drug-trance. It was a warm, cloudy night; a little farside light shone a milky halo directly overhead on the high overcast. Tronze, the largest town on both the Plate and the Orbital, had been built on the edge of the Gevant Plate’s great central massif, at the point where the kilometer-high Lake Tronze flowed over the lip of the plateau and tumbled its waters toward the plain below, where they fell as a permanent downpour into the rain forest.
Tronze was the home of fewer than a hundred thousand people, but to Gurgeh it still felt too crowded, despite its spacious houses and squares, its sweeping galleries and plazas and terraces, its thousands of houseboats and its elegant, bridge-linked towers. Tronze, for all the fact that Chiark was a fairly recent Orbital, only a thousand or so years old, was already almost as big as any Orbital community ever grew; the Culture’s real cities were its great ships, the General Systems Vehicles. Orbitals were its rustic hinterland, where people liked to spread themselves out with plenty of elbow room. In terms of scale, when compared to one of the larger GSVs containing billions of people, Tronze was barely a village.
Gurgeh usually attended the Tronze Sixty-fourth Day concert. And he was usually buttonholed by enthusiasts. Normally Gurgeh was civil, if occasionally abrupt. Tonight, after the fiasco on the train, and that strange, exciting, shaming pulse of emotion he’d experienced as a result of being thought to cheat, not to mention the slight nervousness he felt because he’d heard the girl off the GSV Cargo Cult was indeed here in Tronze this evening and looking forward to meeting him, he was in no mood to suffer fools gladly.
Not that the unlucky young male was necessarily a complete idiot; all he’d done was sketch out what had been, after all, not a bad idea for a game; but Gurgeh had fallen on him like an avalanche. The conversation—if you could call it that—had become a game.
The object was to keep talking; not to talk continuously, which any idiot could do, but to pause only when the young man was not signaling—through bodily or facial language, or actually starting to speak—that he wanted to cut in. Instead, Gurgeh would stop unexpectedly in the middle of a point, or after having just said something mildly insulting, but while still giving the impression he was going to keep talking. Also, Gurgeh was quoting almost verbatim from one of his own more famous papers on game-theory; an added insult, as the young man probably knew the text as well as he did.
“To imply,” Gurgeh continued, as the young man’s mouth started to open again, “that one can remove the element of luck, chance, happenstance in life by—”
“Jernau Gurgeh, not interrupting anything, am I?” Mawhrin-Skel said.
“Nothing of note,” Gurgeh said, turning to face the small machine. “How are you, Mawhrin-Skel? Been up to any fresh mischief?”
“Nothing of note,” the tiny drone echoed, as the young man Gurgeh had been talking to sidled off. Gurgeh sat in a creeper-covered pergola positioned close to one edge of the plaza, near the observation platforms which reached out over the broad curtain of the falls, where spray rose from the rapids lying between the lip of the lake and the vertical drop to the forest a kilometer below. The roaring falls provided a background wash of white noise.
“I’ve found your young adversary,” the small drone announced. It extended one softly glowing blue field and plucked a night-flower from a growing vine.
/> “Hmm?” Gurgeh said. “Oh, the young, ah… Stricken player?”
“That’s right,” Mawhrin-Skel said evenly, “the young, ah… Stricken player.” It folded some of the nightflower’s petals back, straining them on the plucked stem.
“I heard she was here,” Gurgeh said.
“She’s at Hafflis’s table. Shall we go and meet her?”
“Why not?” Gurgeh stood; the machine floated away.
“Nervous?” Mawhrin-Skel asked as they headed through the crowds toward one of the raised terraces level with the lake, where Hafflis’s apartments were.
“Nervous?” Gurgeh said. “Of a child?”
Mawhrin-Skel floated silently for a moment or two as Gurgeh climbed some steps—Gurgeh nodded and said hello to a few people—then the machine came close to him and said quietly, as it slowly stripped the petals from the dying blossom, “Want me to tell you your heart rate, skin receptivity level, pheromone signature, neuron function-state…?” Its voice trailed off as Gurgeh came to a halt, halfway up the flight of broad steps.
He turned to face the drone, looking through half-hooded eyes at the tiny machine. Music drifted over the lake, and the air was full of the nightflowers’ musky scent. The lighting set into the stone balustrades lit the game-player’s face from underneath. People flooding down the steps from the terrace above, laughing and joking, parted round the man like waters round a rock, and—Mawhrin-Skel noticed—went oddly quiet as they did so. After a few seconds, as Gurgeh stood there, silent, breathing evenly, the little drone made a chuckling noise.
“Not bad,” it said. “Not bad at all. I can’t tell just yet what you’re glanding, but that’s a very impressive degree of control. Everything parameter-centered, near as damn. Except your neuron function-state; that’s even less like normal than usual, but then your average civilian drone probably couldn’t spot that. Well done.”