“Can’t you understand what they’ve done to me, man? Better I had never been brought into being than forced to wander the Culture forever, knowing what I’ve lost. They call it compassion to draw my talons and remove my eyes and cast me adrift in a paradise made for others; I call it torture. It’s obscene, Gurgeh, it’s barbaric, diabolic; recognize that old word? I see you do. Well, try to imagine how I might feel, and what I might do.… Think about it, Gurgeh. Think about what you can do for me, and what I can do to you.”
The machine drew away from him again, retreating through the pouring rain. The cold drops splashed on top of its invisible globe of fields, and little rivulets of water ran round the transparent surface of that sphere to dribble underneath, falling in a steady stream into the grass. “I’ll be in touch. Goodbye, Gurgeh,” Mawhrin-Skel said.
The drone flicked away, tearing over the grass and into the sky in a gray cone of slipstream. Gurgeh lost sight of it within seconds.
He stood for a while, brushing sand and bits of grass from his sodden clothes, then turned to walk back in the direction he’d come from, through the falling rain and the beating wind.
He looked back, once, to gaze again upon the house where he’d grown up, but the squall, billowing round the low summits of the rolling dunes, had all but obscured the rambling chaotic structure.
“But Gurgeh, what is the problem?”
“I can’t tell you!” He walked up to the rear wall of the main room of Chamlis’s apartment, turned and paced back again, before going to stand by the window. He looked out over the square.
People walked, or sat at tables under the awnings and arch-ways of the pale, green-stone galleries which lined the village’s main square. Fountains played, birds flew from tree to tree, and on the tiled roof of the square’s central bandstand/stage/ holoscreen housing, a jet black tzile, almost the size of a full-grown human, lay sprawled, one leg hanging over the edge of the tiles. Its trunk, tail and ears all twitched as it dreamed; its rings and bracelets and earrings glinted in the sunlight. Even as Gurgeh watched, the creature’s thin trunk articulated lazily, stretching back over its head to scratch indolently at the back of its neck, near its terminal collar. Then the black proboscis fell back as though exhausted, to swing to and fro for a few seconds. Laughter drifted up through the warm air from some nearby tables. A red-colored dirigible floated over distant hills, like a vast blob of blood in the blue sky.
He turned back into the room again. Something about the square, the whole village, disgusted and angered him. Yay was right; it was all too safe and twee and ordinary. They might as well be on a planet. He walked over to where Chamlis floated, near the long fishtank. Chamlis’s aura was tinged with gray frustration. The old drone gave an exasperated shudder and picked up a little container of fish-food; the tank lid lifted and Chamlis sprinkled some of the food grains onto the top of the water; the glittering mirrorfish moved silkily up to the surface, mouths working rhythmically.
“Gurgeh,” Chamlis said reasonably, “how can I help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong?”
“Just tell me; is there any way you can find out more about what Contact wanted to talk about? Can I get in touch with them again? Without everybody else knowing? Or…” He shook his head, put his hands to his head. “No; I suppose people will know, but it doesn’t matter…” He stopped at the wall, stood looking at the warm sandstone blocks between the paintings. The apartments had been built in an old-fashioned style; the pointing between the sandstone blocks was dark, inlaid with little white pearls. He gazed at the richly beaded lines and tried to think, tried to know what it was he could ask and what there was he could do.
“I can get in touch with the two ships I know,” Chamlis said. “The ones I contacted originally, I can ask them; they might know what Contact was going to suggest.” Chamlis watched the silvery fish silently feeding. “I’ll do that now, if you like.”
“Please. Yes,” he said, and turned away from the manufactured sandstone and the cultivated pearls. His shoes clacked across the patterned tiles of the room. The sunlit square again. The tzile, still sleeping. He could see its jaws moving, and wondered what alien words the creature was mouthing in its sleep.
“It’ll be a few hours before I hear anything,” Chamlis said. The fishtank lid closed; the drone put the fish-food container into a drawer in a tiny, delicate table near the tank. “Both ships are fairly distant.” Chamlis tapped the side of the tank with a silvered field; the mirrorfish floated over to investigate. “But why?” the drone said, looking at him. “What’s changed? What sort of trouble are you… can you be in? Gurgeh; please tell me. I want to help.”
The machine floated closer to the tall human, who was standing staring down to the square, his hands clasped and unconsciously kneading each other. The old drone had never seen the man so distressed.
“Nothing,” Gurgeh said hopelessly, shaking his head, not looking at the drone. “Nothing’s changed. There’s no trouble. I just need to know a few things.”
He had gone straight back to Ikroh the day before. He’d stood in the main room, where the house had lit the fire a couple of hours earlier after hearing the weather forecast, and he’d taken off the wet, dirty clothes and thrown them all onto the fire. He’d had a hot bath and a steam bath, sweating and panting and trying to feel clean. The plunge bath had been so cold there had been a thin covering of ice on it; he’d dived in, half expecting his heart to stop with the shock.
He’d sat in the main room, watching the logs burn. He’d tried to pull himself together, and once he’d felt capable of thinking clearly he’d raised Chiark Hub.
“Gurgeh; Makil Stra-bey again, at your service. How’s tricks? Not another visitation from Contact, surely?”
“No. But I have a feeling they left something behind when they were here; something to watch me.”
“What… you mean a bug or a microsystem or something?”
“Yes,” he said, sitting back in the broad couch. He wore a simple robe. His skin felt scrubbed and shiny clean after his bathe. Somehow, the friendly, understanding voice of Hub made him feel better; it would be all right, he’d work something out. He was probably frightened over nothing; Mawhrin-Skel was just a demented, insane machine with delusions of power and grandeur. It wouldn’t be able to prove anything, and nobody would believe it if it simply made unsubstantiated claims.
“What makes you think you’re being bugged?”
“I can’t tell you,” Gurgeh said. “Sorry. But I have seen some evidence. Can you send something—drones or whatever—to Ikroh, to sweep the place? Would you be able to find something if they did leave anything?”
“If it’s ordinary tech stuff, yes. But it depends on the soph level. A warship can passive-bug using its electro-magnetic effector; they can watch you under a hundred klicks of rock-cover from the next stellar system and tell you what your last meal was. Hyper-space tech; there are defenses against it, but no way of detecting it’s going on.”
“Nothing that complicated; just a bug or a camera or something.”
“Should be possible. We’ll displace a drone team to you in a minute or so. Want us to harden this comm channel? Can’t make it totally eavesdrop-proof, but we can make it difficult.”
“Please.”
“No problem. Detach the terminal speaker pip and shove it in your ear. We’ll soundfield the outside.”
Gurgeh did just that. He felt better already. The Hub seemed to know what it was doing. “Thanks, Hub,” he said. “I appreciate all this.”
“Hey, no thanks required, Gurgeh. That’s what we’re here for. Besides; this is fun!”
Gurgeh smiled. There was a distant thump somewhere above the house as the Hub’s drone team arrived.
The drones swept the house for sensory equipment and secured the buildings and grounds; they polarized the windows and drew the drapes; they put some sort of special mat under the couch he sat on; they even installed a kind of filter or valve inside the chimney of the
fire.
Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.
He set to work. He used his terminal to probe the Hub’s information banks. They contained as a matter of course almost every even moderately important or significant or useful piece of information the Culture had ever accumulated; a near infinite ocean of fact and sensation and theory and artwork which the Culture’s information net was adding to at a torrential rate every second of the day.
You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot. The Culture had theoretical total freedom of information; the catch was that consciousness was private, and information held in a Mind—as opposed to an unconscious system, like the Hub’s memory-banks—was regarded as part of the Mind’s being, and so as sacrosanct as the contents of a human brain; a Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.
And so, while Hub protected his privacy, Gurgeh found out, without having to ask Chamlis, that what Mawhrin-Skel had said might be true; there were indeed levels of event-recording which could not be easily faked, and which drones of above-average specification were potentially capable of using. Such recordings, especially if they had been witnessed by a Mind in a real-time link, would be accepted as genuine. His mood of renewed optimism started to sink away from him again.
Also, there was an SC Mind, that of the Limited Offensive Unit Gunboat Diplomat, which had supported Mawhrin-Skel’s appeal against the decision which had removed the drone from Special Circumstances.
The feeling of dazed sickness started to fill him again.
He wasn’t able to find out when Mawhrin-Skel and the LOU had last been in touch; that, again, counted as private information. Privacy; that brought a bitter laugh to his mouth, thinking of the privacy he’d had over the last few days and nights.
But he did discover that a drone like Mawhrin-Skel, even in civilianized form, was capable of sustaining a one-way real-time link with such a ship over millennia distances, so long as the ship was watching out for the signal and knew where to look. He could not find out there and then where the Gunboat Diplomat was in the galaxy—SC ships routinely kept their locations secret—but put in a request that the ship release its position to him.
From what he could tell from the information he’d discovered, Mawhrin-Skel’s claim that the Mind had recorded their conversation would not hold up if the ship was more than about twenty millennia away; if it turned out, say, that the craft was on the other side of the galaxy, then the drone had definitely lied, and he would be safe.
He hoped the vessel was on the other side of the galaxy; he hoped it was a hundred thousand light-years away or more, or it had gone crazy and run into a black hole or decided to head for another galaxy, or stumbled across a hostile alien ship powerful enough to blow it out of the skies… anything, so long as it wasn’t nearby and able to make that real-time link.
Otherwise, everything Mawhrin-Skel had said checked out. It could be done. He could be blackmailed. He sat in the couch, while the fire burned down and the Hub drones floated through the house humming and clicking to themselves, and he stared into the graying ashes, wishing that it was all unreal, wishing it hadn’t happened, cursing himself for letting the little drone talk him into cheating.
Why? he asked himself. Why did I do it? How could I have been so stupid? It had seemed a glamorous, enticingly dangerous thing at the time; a little crazy, but then, was he not different from other people? Was he not the great game-player and so allowed his eccentricities, granted the freedom to make his own rules? He hadn’t wanted self-glorification, not really. And he had already won the game; he just wanted somebody in the Culture to have completed a Full Web; hadn’t he? It wasn’t like him to cheat; he had never done it before; he would never do it again… how could Mawhrin-Skel do this to him? Why had he done it? Why couldn’t it just not have happened? Why didn’t they have time-travel, why couldn’t he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn’t able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision…
He clenched his fists, trying to break the terminal he held in his right hand, but it wouldn’t break. His hand hurt again.
He tried to think calmly. What if the worst did happen? The Culture was generally rather disdainful of individual fame, and therefore equally uninterested in scandal—there was, anyway, little that was scandalous—but Gurgeh had no doubt that if Mawhrin-Skel did release the recordings it claimed to have made, they would be propagated; people would know.
There were plenty of news and current affairs indices and networks in the multiplicity of communications which linked every Culture habitat, be it ship, rock, Orbital or planet. Somebody somewhere would be only too pleased to broadcast Mawhrin-Skel’s recordings. Gurgeh knew of a couple of recently established games indices whose editors, writers and correspondents regarded him and most of the other well-known players and authorities as some sort of constricting, over-privileged hierarchy; they thought too much attention was paid to too few players, and sought to discredit what they called the old guard (which included him, much to his amusement). They would love what Mawhrin-Skel had on him. He could deny it all, once it was out, and some people would doubtless believe him despite the hardness of the evidence, but the other top players, and the responsible, well-established and authoritative indices, would know the truth of it, and that was what he would not be able to bear.
He would still be able to play, and he would still be allowed to publish, to register his papers as open for dissemination, and probably many of them would be taken up; not quite so often as before, perhaps, but he would not be frozen out completely. It would be worse than that; he would be treated with compassion, understanding, tolerance. But he would never be forgiven.
Could he come to terms with that, ever? Could he weather the storm of abuse and knowing looks, the gloating sympathy of his rivals? Would it all die down enough eventually, would a few years pass and it be sufficiently forgotten? He thought not. Not for him. It would always be there. He could not face down Mawhrin-Skel with that; publish and be damned. The drone had been right; it would destroy his reputation, destroy him.
He watched the logs in the wide grate glow duller red and then go soft and gray. He told Hub he was finished; it quietly returned the house to normal and left him alone with his thoughts.
He woke the next morning, and it was still the same universe; it had not been a nightmare and time had not gone backward. It had all still happened.
He took the underground to Celleck, the village where Chamlis Amalk-ney lived by itself, in an old-fashioned and odd approximation of human domesticity, surrounded by wall paintings, antique furniture, inlaid walls, fishtanks and insect vivaria.
* * *
“I’ll find out all I can, Gurgeh,” Chamlis sighed, floating beside him, looking out to the square. “But I can’t guarantee that I can do it without whoever was behind your last visit from Contact finding out about it. They may think you’re interested.”
“Maybe I am,” Gurgeh said. “Maybe I do want to talk to them again, I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ve sent the message to my friends, but—”
He had a sudden, paranoid idea. He turned to Chamlis urgently. “These friends of yours are ships.”
“Yes,” Chamlis said. “Both of them.”
“What are they called?”
“The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read the Instructions.”
“They’re not warships?”
“With names like that? They’re GCUs; what else?”
“Good,” Gurgeh said, relaxing a little, looking out to the square again. “Good. That’s all right.” He took a deep breath.
“Gurgeh, can’t you—please—tell me what’s wrong?” Chamlis’s voice was so
ft, even sad. “You know it’ll go no further. Let me help. It hurts me to see you like this. If there’s anything I can—”
“Nothing,” Gurgeh said, looking at the machine again. He shook his head. “There’s nothing, nothing else you can do. I’ll let you know if there is.” He started across the room. Chamlis watched him. “I have to go now. I’ll see you again, Chamlis.”
He went down to the underground. He sat in the car, staring at the floor. On about the fourth request, he realized the car was talking to him, asking where he wanted to go. He told it.
He was staring at one of the wall-screens, watching the steady stars, when the terminal beeped.
“Gurgeh? Makil Stra-bey, yet again one more time once more.”
“What?” he snapped, annoyed at the Mind’s glib chumminess.
“That ship just replied with the information you asked for.”
He frowned. “What ship? What information?”
“The Gunboat Diplomat, our game-player. Its location.”
His heart pounded and his throat seemed to close up. “Yes,” he said, struggling to get the word out. “And?”
“Well, it didn’t reply direct; it sent via its home GSV Youthful Indiscretion and got it to confirm its location.”
“Yes, well? Where is it?”
“In the Altabien-North cluster. Sent coordinates, though they’re only accurate to—”
“Never mind the coordinates!” Gurgeh shouted. “Where is that cluster? How far away is it from here?”
“Hey; calm down. It’s about two and a half millennia away.”
He sat back, closing his eyes. The car started to slow down.
Two thousand five hundred light-years. It was, as the urbanely well-traveled people on a GSV would say, a long walk. But close enough—by quite a long way—for a warship to minutely target an effector, throw a sensing field a light-second in diameter across the sky, and pick up the weak but indisputable flicker of coherent HS light coming from a machine small enough to fit into a pocket.