“No,” Gurgeh sighed, looking down.
“Oh, it’s all so wonderful in the Culture, isn’t it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing’s exploited, but there’s still luck and heartache and joy, there’s still chance and advantage and disadvantage.”
The drone hung above the drop and the waking plain. Gurgeh watched the Orbital dawn come up, swinging from the edge of the world. “Take hold of your luck, Gurgeh. Accept what I’m offering you. Just this once let’s both make our own chances. You already know you’re one of the best in the Culture; I’m not trying to flatter you; you know that. But this win would seal that fame forever.”
“If it’s possible…” Gurgeh said, then went silent. His jaw clenched. The drone sensed him trying to control himself the way he had done on the steps up to Hafflis’s house, seven hours ago.
“If it isn’t, at least have the courage to know,” Mawhrin-Skel said, voice pitched at an extremity of pleading.
The man raised his eyes to the clear blue-pinks of dawn. The ruffled, misty plain looked like a vast and tousled bed. “You’re crazy, drone. You could never do it.”
“I know what I can do, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said. It pulled away again, sat in the air, regarding him.
He thought of that morning, sitting on the train; the rush of that delicious fear. Like an omen, now.
Luck; simple chance.
He knew the drone was right. He knew it was wrong, but he knew it was right, too. It all depended on him.
He leaned against the balustrade. Something in his pocket dug into his chest. He felt in, pulled out the hidden-piece wafer he’d taken as a memento after the disastrous Possession game. He turned the wafer over in his hands a few times. He looked at the drone, and suddenly felt very old and very childlike at the same time.
“If,” he said slowly, “anything goes wrong, if you’re found out—I’m dead. I’ll kill myself. Brain death; complete and utter. No remains.”
“Nothing is going to go wrong. For me, it is the simplest thing in the world to find out what’s inside those shells.”
“What if you are discovered, though? What if there is an SC drone around here somewhere, or the Hub is watching?”
The drone said nothing for a moment. “They’d have noticed by now. It is already done.”
Gurgeh opened his mouth to speak, but the drone quickly floated closer, calmly continuing. “For my own sake, Gurgeh… for my own peace of mind. I wanted to know, too. I came back long ago; I’ve been watching for the past five hours, quite fascinated. I couldn’t resist finding out if it was possible.… To be honest, I still don’t know; the game is beyond me, just over-complicated for the way my poor target-tracking mind is configured… but I had to try to find out. I had to. So, you see; the risk is run, Gurgeh; the deed is done. I can tell you what you need to know.… And I ask nothing in return; that’s up to you. Maybe you can do something for me some day, but no obligation; believe me, please believe me. No obligation at all. I’m doing this because I want to see you—somebody; anybody—do it.”
Gurgeh looked at the drone. His mouth was dry. He could hear somebody shouting in the distance. The terminal button on his jacket shoulder beeped. He drew breath to speak to it, but then heard his own voice say, “Yes?”
“Ready to resume, Jernau?” Chamlis said from the button.
And he heard his own voice say, “I’m on my way.”
He stared at the drone as the terminal beeped off.
Mawhrin-Skel floated closer. “As I said, Jernau Gurgeh; I can fool these adding machines, no problem at all. Quickly now. Do you want to know or not? The Full Web; yes or no?”
Gurgeh glanced round in the direction of Hafflis’s apartments. He turned back, leaned out over the drop, toward the drone.
“All right,” he said, whispering, “just the five prime points and the four verticals nearest topside center. No more.”
* * *
Mawhrin-Skel told him.
It was almost enough. The girl struggled brilliantly to the very end, and deprived him on the final move.
The Full Web fell apart, and he won by thirty-one points, two short of the Culture’s existing record.
One of Estray Hafflis’s house drones was dimly confused to discover, while cleaning up under the great stone table much later that morning, a crushed and shattered ceramic wafer with warped and twisted numbered dials set into its crazed and distorted surface.
It wasn’t part of the house Possession set.
The machine’s non-sentient, mechanistic, entirely predictable brain thought about it for a while, then finally decided to junk the mysterious remnant along with the rest of the debris.
When he woke up that afternoon, it was with the memory of defeat. It was some time before he recalled that he had in fact won the Stricken match. Victory had never been so bitter.
He breakfasted alone on the terrace, watching a fleet of sailboats cut down the narrow fjord, bright sails in a fresh breeze. His right hand hurt a little as he held his bowl and cup; he’d come close to drawing blood when he’d crushed the Possession wafer at the end of the Stricken match.
He dressed in a long coat, trous and short kilt, and went on a long walk, down to the shore of the fjord and then along it, toward the sea coast and the windswept dunes where Hassease lay, the house he’d been born in, where a few of his extended family still lived. He tramped along the coast path toward the house, through the blasted, twisted shapes of wind-misshapen trees. The grass made sighing noises around him, and seabirds cried. The breeze was cold and freshening under ragged clouds. Out to sea, beyond Hassease village, where the weather was coming from, he could see tall veils of rain under a dark front of storm-clouds. He drew his coat tighter about him and hurried toward the distant silhouette of the sprawling, ramshackle house, thinking he should have taken an underground car. The wind whipped up sand from the distant beach and threw it inland; he blinked, eyes watering.
“Gurgeh.”
The voice was quite loud; louder than the sound of sighing grass and wind-troubled tree branches. He shielded his eyes, looked to one side. “Gurgeh,” the voice said again. He peered into the shade of a stunted, slanting tree.
“Mawhrin-Skel? Is that you?”
“The same,” the small drone said, floating forward over the path.
Gurgeh looked out to sea. He started down the path to the house again, but the drone did not follow him. “Well,” he told it, looking back from a few paces away, “I must keep going. I’ll get wet if I—”
“No,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “Don’t go. I have to talk to you. This is important.”
“Then tell me as I walk,” he said, suddenly annoyed. He strode away. The drone flashed round in front of him, at face level, so that he had to stop or he’d have bumped into it.
“It’s about the game; Stricken; last night and this morning.”
“I believe I already said thank you,” he told the machine. He looked beyond it. The leading edge of the squall was hitting the far end of the village harbor beyond Hassease. The dark clouds were almost above him, casting a great shadow.
“And I believe I said you might be able to help me one day.”
“Oh,” Gurgeh said, with an expression more sneer than smile. “And what am I supposed to be able to do for you?”
“Help me,” Mawhrin-Skel said quietly, voice almost lost in the noise of the wind. “Help me to get back into Contact.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Gurgeh said, and put out one hand to swipe the machine out of his path. He forced his way past it.
The next thing he knew he’d been shoved down into the grass at the path-side, as though shoulder-charged by someone invisible. He stared up in amazement at the tiny machine floating above him, while his hands felt the damp ground under him and the grass hissed on each side.
“You little—” he said, trying to stand up. He was shoved back down again, and sat there incredulous, simply unbelieving
. No machine had ever used force on him. It was unheard of. He tried to rise again, a shout of anger and frustration forming in his throat.
He went limp. The shout died in his mouth.
He felt himself flop back into the grass.
He lay there, looking up into the dark clouds overhead. He could move his eyes. Nothing else.
He remembered the missile shoot and the immobility the suit had imposed on him when it had been hit once too often. This was worse.
This was paralysis. He could do nothing.
He worried about his breathing stopping, his heart stopping, his tongue blocking his throat, his bowels relaxing.
Mawhrin-Skel floated into his field of view. “Listen to me, Jernau Gurgeh.” Some cold drops of rain started to patter into the grass and onto his face. “Listen to me.… You shall help me. I have our entire conversation, your every word and gesture from this morning, recorded. If you don’t help me, I’ll release that recording. Everyone will know you cheated in the game against Olz Hap.” The machine paused. “Do you understand, Jernau Gurgeh? Have I made myself clear? Do you realize what I am saying? There is a name—an old name—for what I am doing, in case you haven’t already guessed. It is called blackmail.”
The machine was mad. Anybody could make up anything they wanted; sound, moving pictures, smell, touch… there were machines that did just that. You could order them from a store and effectively paint whatever pictures—still or moving—you wanted, and with sufficient time and patience you could make it look as realistic as the real thing, recorded with an ordinary camera. You could simply make up any film sequence you wanted.
Some people used such machines just for fun or revenge, making up stories where appalling or just funny things happened to their enemies or their friends. Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible; in a society like the Culture, where next to nothing was forbidden, and both money and individual power had virtually ceased to exist, it was doubly irrelevant.
The machine really must be mad. Gurgeh wondered if it intended to kill him. He turned the idea over in his mind, trying to believe it could happen.
“I know what’s going through your mind, Gurgeh,” the drone went on. “You’re thinking that I can’t prove it; I could have made it up; nobody will believe me. Well, wrong. I had a real-time link with a friend of mine; an SC Mind sympathetic to my cause, who’s always known I would have made a perfectly good operative and has worked on my appeal. What passed between us this morning is recorded in perfect detail in a Mind of unimpeachable moral credentials, and at a level of perceived fidelity unapproachable with the sort of facilities generally available.
“What I have on you could not have been falsified, Gurgeh. If you don’t believe me, ask your friend Amalk-ney. It’ll confirm all I say. It may be stupid, and ignorant too, but it ought to know where to find out the truth.”
Rain struck Gurgeh’s helpless, relaxed face. His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.
The drone’s small body splashed and dripped above him as the drops grew larger and fell harder. “You’re wondering what I want from you?” the drone said. He tried to move his eyes to say “no,” just to annoy it, but it didn’t seem to notice. “Help,” it said. “I need your help; I need you to speak for me. I need you to go to Contact and add your voice to those demanding my return to active duty.” The machine darted down toward his face; he felt his coat collar pulled. His head and upper torso were lifted with a jerk from the damp ground until he stared helplessly at the gray-blue casing of the small machine. Pocketsize, he thought, wishing he could blink, and glad of the rain because he could not. Pocket-size; it would fit into one of the big pockets in this coat.
He wanted to laugh.
“Don’t you understand what they’ve done to me, man?” the machine said, shaking him. “I’ve been castrated, spayed, paralyzed! How you feel now; helpless, knowing the limbs are there but unable to make them work! Like that, but knowing that they aren’t there! Can you understand that? Can you? Did you know that in our history people used to lose whole limbs, forever? Do you remember your social history, little Jernau Gurgeh? Eh?” It shook him. He felt and heard his teeth rattle. “Do you remember seeing cripples, from before arms and legs just grew back? Back then, humans lost limbs—blown off or cut off or amputated—but still thought they had them, still thought they could feel them; ‘ghost limbs’ they called them. Those unreal arms and legs could itch and they could ache but they could not be used; can you imagine? Can you imagine that, Culture man with your genofixed regrowth and your over-designed heart and your doctored glands and clot-filtered brain and flawless teeth and perfect immune system? Can you?”
It let him fall back to the ground. His jaw jerked and he felt his teeth nip the end of his tongue. A salt taste filled his mouth. Now he really would drown, he thought; in his own blood. He waited for real fear. The rain filled his eyes but he could not cry.
“Well, imagine that, times eight, times more; imagine what I feel, all set up to be the good soldier fighting for all that we hold dear, to seek out and smite the barbarians around us! Gone, Jernau Gurgeh; razed; gone. My sensory systems, my weapons, my very memory-capacity; all reduced, laid waste: crippled. I peek into shells in a Stricken game, I push you down with an eight-strength field and hold you there with an excuse for an electro-magnetic effector… but this is nothing, Jernau Gurgeh; nothing. An echo; a shadow… nothing…”
It floated higher, away from him.
It gave him back the use of his body. He struggled off the damp ground, and felt his tongue with one hand; the blood had stopped flowing, closed off. He sat up, a little groggy, feeling the back of his head where it had hit the ground. It was not sore. He looked at the small, dripping body of the machine, floating over the path.
“I have nothing to lose, Gurgeh,” it said. “Help me or I’ll destroy your reputation. Don’t think I wouldn’t. Whether it would mean almost nothing to you—which I doubt—I’d do it just for the fun of causing you even the smallest amount of embarrassment. And if it means everything, and you really would kill yourself—which I also very much doubt—then I would still. I’ve never killed a human before. It’s possible I might have been given the chance, somewhere, some time, if I’d been allowed to join SC… but I’d settle for causing a suicide.”
He held up one hand to it. His coat felt heavy. The trous were soaked. “I believe you,” he said. “All right. But what can I do?”
“I’ve told you,” the drone said, over the noise of the wind howling in the trees and the rain beating against the swaying stalks of grass. “Speak for me. You have more influence than you realize. Use it.”
“But I don’t, I—”
“I’ve seen your mail, Gurgeh,” the drone said tiredly. “Don’t you know what a guest-invitation from a GSV means? It’s the closest Contact ever comes to offering a post directly. Didn’t anybody ever teach you anything besides games? Contact wants you. Officially Contact never head-hunts; you have to apply, then once you’re in it’s the other way round; to join SC you have to wait to be invited. But they want you, all right.… Gods, man, can’t you take a hint?”
“Even if you’re right, what am I supposed to do, just go to Contact and say ‘Take this drone back’? Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t even know how to start going about it.” He didn’t want to say anything about the visit from the Contact drone the other evening.
He didn’t have to.
“Haven’t they already been in touch with you?” Mawhrin-Skel asked. “The night before last?”
Gurgeh got shakily to his feet. He brushed some sandy earth from his coat. The rain gusted on the wind. The village on the coast and the sprawling house of his childhood were almost invisible under the dark sheets of driving rain.
“Yes, I’ve been watching you, Jernau Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “I know Contact are interested in you. I have no idea just
what it is Contact might want from you, but I suggest that you find out. Even if you don’t want to play, you’d better make a damn good plea on my behalf; I’ll be watching, so I’ll know whether you do or not.… I’ll prove it to you. Watch.”
A screen unfolded from the front of the drone’s body like a strange flat flower, expanding to a square a quarter-meter or so to a side. It lit up in the rainy gloom to show Mawhrin-Skel itself, suddenly glowing a blinding, flashing white, above the stone table at Hafflis’s house. The scene was shot from above, probably near one of the stone ribs over the terrace. Gurgeh watched again as the line of coals glowed bright, and the lanterns and flowers fell. He heard Chamlis say, “Oh dear. Do you think I said something to upset it?” He saw himself smile as he sat down by the Stricken game-set.
The scene faded. It was replaced by another dim scene viewed from above; a bed; his bed, in the principal chamber at Ikroh. He recognized the small, ringed hands of Ren Myglan kneading his back from beneath. There was sound, too:
“… ah, Ren, my baby, my child, my love…”
“… Jernau…”
“You piece of shit,” he told the drone.
The scene faded and the sound cut off. The screen collapsed, sucked back inside the body of the drone.
“Just so, and don’t you forget it, Jernau Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel said. “Those bits were quite fakeable; but you and I know they were real, don’t we? Like I said; I’m watching you.”
He sucked on the blood in his mouth, spat. “You can’t do this. Nobody’s allowed to behave like this. You won’t get—”
“—away with it? Well, maybe not. But the thing is, if I don’t get away with it, I don’t care. I’m no worse off. I’m still going to try.” It paused, physically shook itself free of water, then produced a spherical field about itself, clearing the moisture from its casing, leaving it spotless and clean, and sheltering it from the rain.