Gurgeh watched the silent, alien figures move across the artificial landscape of the huge board. He couldn’t do this. Five years? That was insane. He might as well let Mawhrin-Skel broadcast his shame; in five years he might have made a new life, leaving Chiark, finding something else to interest him besides games, changing his appearance… maybe changing his name; he had never heard of anybody doing that, but it must be possible.
Certainly, the game of Azad, if it really existed, was quite fascinating. But why had he heard nothing of it until now? How could Contact keep something like this secret; and why? He rubbed his beard, still watching the silent aliens as they stalked the broad board, stopping to move pieces or have others move them for them.
They were alien, but they were people; humanoid. They had mastered this bizarre, outrageous game. “They’re not super-intelligent, are they?” he asked the drone.
“Hardly, retaining such a social system at this stage of technological development, game or no game. On average, the intermediate or apex sex is probably a little less bright than the average Culture human.”
Gurgeh was mystified. “That implies there’s a difference between the sexes.”
“There is now,” Worthil said.
Gurgeh didn’t quite see what that meant, but the drone went on before he could ask any further questions. “In fact, we are reasonably hopeful that you will be able to play an above- average game of Azad if you study for the two years your outward journey would take. It would require continued and comprehensive use of memory and learning-enhancing secretions, of course, and I might point out that possession of drug-glands alone would disqualify you from actually gaining any post within the empire through your game performance, even if you weren’t an alien anyway. There is a strict ban on any ‘unnatural’ influence being used during the game; all the game-rooms are electronically shielded to prevent the use of a computer link, and drug tests are carried out after every game. Your own body chemistry, as well as your alien nature and the fact that to them you are a heathen, means that you would—if you did decide to go—only be taking part in an honorary capacity.”
“Drone… Worthil…” Gurgeh said, turning to face it. “I don’t think I’ll be going all that way, not so far, for so long… but I’d love to know more about this game; I want to discuss it, analyze it along with other—”
“Not possible,” the drone said. “I’m allowed to tell you all that I am telling you, but none of this can go any further. You have given your word, Jernau Gurgeh.”
“And if I break it?”
“Everybody would think you’d made it up; there’s nothing on accessible record to show any different.”
“Why is it all so secret, anyway? What are you frightened of?”
“The truth is, we don’t know what to do, Jernau Gurgeh. This is a larger problem than Contact usually has to deal with; as a rule it’s possible to go by the book; we’ve built up enough experience with every sort of barbarian society to know what does and does not work with each type; we monitor, we use controls, we cross-evaluate and Mind-model and generally take every possible precaution to make sure we’re doing the right thing… but something like Azad is unique; there are no templates, no reliable precedents. We have to play it by ear, and that’s something of a responsibility, dealing with an entire stellar empire. Which is why Special Circumstances has become involved; we’re used to dealing with tricky situations. And frankly, with this one, we’re sitting on it. If we let everybody know about Azad we may be pressured into making a decision just by the weight of public opinion… which may not sound like a bad thing, but might prove disastrous.”
“For whom?” Gurgeh said skeptically.
“The people of the empire, and the Culture. We might be forced into a high-profile intervention against the empire; it would hardly be war as such because we’re way ahead of them technologically, but we’d have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time. The people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and the Culture would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists.”
“You seem very sure there would be a wave of popular opinion.”
“Let me explain something to you, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said. “The game of Azad is a gambling game, frequently even at the highest levels. The form these wagers take is occasionally macabre. I very much doubt that you’d be involved on the sort of levels you’d be playing at if you did agree to take part, but it is quite usual for them to wager prestige, honors, possessions, slaves, favors, land and even physical license on the outcome of games.”
Gurgeh waited, but eventually sighed and said, “All right… what’s ‘physical license’?”
“The players wager tortures and mutilations against each other.”
“You mean, if you lose a game… you have… these things done to you?”
“Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape.”
Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine for a few seconds, then said slowly, nodding, “Well… that is barbaric.”
“Actually it’s a later development in the game, and seen as a rather liberal concession by the ruling class, as in theory it allows a poor person to keep up in the bidding with a rich person. Before the introduction of the physical license option, the latter could always outbid the former.”
“Oh.” Gurgeh could see the logic, just not the morality.
“Azad is not the sort of place it’s easy to think about coldly, Jernau Gurgeh. They have done things the average Culture person would find… unspeakable. A program of eugenic manipulation has lowered the average male and female intelligence; selective birth-control sterilization, area starvation, mass deportation and racially based taxation systems produced the equivalent of genocide, with the result that almost everybody on the home planet is the same color and build. Their treatment of alien captives, their societies and works is equally—”
“Look, is all this serious?” Gurgeh got up from the seat and walked into the field of the hologram, gazing down at the fabulously complicated game-floor, which appeared to be under his feet but was in fact, he knew, a terrible gulf of space away. “Are you telling me the truth? Does this empire really exist?”
“Very much so, Jernau Gurgeh. If you want to confirm all I’ve said, I can arrange for special access rights to be granted to you, direct from the GSVs and other Minds who’ve taken charge of this. You can have all you want on the empire of Azad, from the first sniff of contact to the latest real-time news reports. It’s all true.”
“And when did you first get that sniff of contact?” Gurgeh said, turning to the drone. “How long have you been sitting on this?”
The drone hesitated. “Not long,” it said eventually. “Seventy-three years.”
“You people certainly don’t rush into things, do you?”
“Only when we’ve no choice,” the drone agreed.
“And how does the empire feel about us?” Gurgeh asked. “Let me guess; you haven’t told them all about the Culture.”
“Very good, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said, with what was almost a laugh in its voice. “No, we haven’t told them everything. That’s something the drone we’d be sending with you would have to keep you straight on; right from the start we’ve misled the empire about our distribution, numbers, resources, technological level and ultimate intentions… though of course only the relative paucity of advanced societies in the relevant region of the Lesser Cloud has made this possible. The Azadians do not, for example, know that the Culture is based in the main galaxy; they believe we come from the Greater Cloud, and that our numbers are only about twice theirs. They have little inkling of the level of genofixing in Culture humans, or of the
sophistication of our machine intelligences; they’ve never heard of a ship Mind, or seen a GSV.
“They’ve been trying to find out about us ever since first contact, of course, but without any success. They probably think we have a home planet or something; they themselves are still very much planet-oriented, using planeforming techniques to create usable ecospheres, or more usually just taking over already occupied globes; ecologically and morally, they’re catastrophically bad. The reason they’re trying to find out about us is they want to invade us; they want to conquer the Culture. The problem is that, as with all playground-bully mentalities, they’re quite profoundly frightened; xenophobic and paranoid at once. We daren’t let them know the extent and power of the Culture yet, in case the whole empire self-destructs… such things have happened before, though of course that was long before Contact itself was formed. Our technique’s better these days. Still tempting, all the same,” the drone said, as though thinking aloud, not talking to him.
“They do,” Gurgeh said, “sound fairly…”—he’d been going to say “barbaric,” but that didn’t seem strong enough—“… animalistic.”
“Hmm,” the drone said. “Be careful, now; that is how they term the species they subjugate; animals. Of course they are animals, just as you are, just as I am a machine. But they are fully conscious, and they have a society at least as complicated as our own; more so, in some ways. It is pure chance that we’ve met them when their civilization looks primitive to us; one less ice age on Eä and it could conceivably have been the other way round.”
Gurgeh nodded thoughtfully, and watched the silent aliens move across the game-floor, in the reproduced light of a distant, alien sun.
“But,” Worthil added brightly, “it didn’t happen that way, so not to worry. Now then,” it said, and suddenly they were back in the room at Ikroh, the holoscreen off and the windows clear; Gurgeh blinked in the sudden wash of daylight. “I’m sure you realize there’s still a vast amount left to tell you, but you have our proposal now, in its barest outline. I’m not asking you to say ‘Yes’ unequivocally at this stage, but is there any point in my going on, or have you already decided that you definitely don’t want to go?”
Gurgeh rubbed his beard, looking out of the window toward the forest above Ikroh. It was too much to take in. If it really was genuine, then Azad was the single most significant game he’d ever encountered in his life… possibly more significant than all the rest put together. As an ultimate challenge, it excited and appalled him in equal measure; he felt instinctively, almost sexually drawn to it, even now, knowing so little… but he wasn’t sure he possessed the self-discipline to study that intensely for two years solid, or that he was capable of holding a mental model of a game so bewilderingly complex in his head. He kept coming back to the fact that the Azadians themselves managed it, but, as the machine said, they were submerged in the game from birth; perhaps it could only be mastered by somebody who’d had their cognitive processes shaped by the game itself…
But five years! All that time; not just away from here, but at least half, probably more, of that stretch spent with no time for keeping abreast of developments in other games, no time to read papers or write them, no time for anything except this one, absurd, obsessive game. He would change; he would be a different person at the end of it; he could not help but change, take on something of the game itself; that would be inevitable. And would he ever catch up again, once he came back? He would be forgotten; he would be away so long the rest of the game-playing Culture would just disregard him; he’d be a historical figure. And when he came back, would he be allowed to talk about it? Or would Contact’s seven-decade-long embargo continue?
But if he went, he might be able to buy Mawhrin-Skel off. He could make its price his price. Let it back in to SC. Or—it occurred to him there and then—have them silence it, somehow.
A flock of birds flew across the sky, white scraps against the dark greens of the mountain forest; they landed on the garden outside the window, strutting back and forth and pecking at the ground. He turned to the drone again, crossed his arms. “When would you need to know?” he said. He still hadn’t decided. He had to stall, find out all he could first.
“It would have to be within the next three or four days. The GSV Little Rascal is heading out in this direction from the middle-galaxy at the moment, and will be leaving for the Clouds within the next hundred days. If you were to miss it, your journey would last a lot longer; your own ship will have to sustain maximum velocity right up to the rendezvous point, even as things stand.”
“My own ship?” Gurgeh said.
“You’ll need your own craft, firstly to get you to the Little Rascal in time, and then again at the other end, to travel from the GSV’s closest approach to the Lesser Cloud into the empire itself.”
He watched the snow-white birds peck on the lawn for a while. He wondered whether he ought to mention Mawhrin-Skel now. Part of him wanted to, just to get it over with, just in case they would say Yes immediately and he could stop worrying about the machine’s threat (and start worrying about that insanely complicated game). But he knew he mustn’t. Wisdom is patience, as the saying said. Keep that back; if he was going to go (though of course he wouldn’t, couldn’t, it was madness even to think of going), then make them think he had nothing he wanted in return; let it all be arranged and then make his condition clear… if Mawhrin-Skel waited that long before getting pushy.
“All right,” he said to the Contact drone. “I’m not saying I will go, but I will think about it. Tell me more about Azad.”
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.
There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal’s camera, realize what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in midair; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner’s head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.
A terminal was safety.
So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks.
He sat, a couple of days after the drone Worthil’s visit, on a small stone bench near the tree-line a few kilometers from Ikroh. He was breathing hard from the climb up the path. It was a bright, sunny day and the earth smelled sweet. He used the terminal to take a few photographs of the view from the little clearing. There was a rusting piece of ironware beside the bench; a present from an old lover he’d almost forgotten about. He took a few photographs of that, too. Then the terminal beeped.
“House here, Gurgeh. You said to give you the choice on Yay’s calls. She says this is moderately urgent.”
He hadn’t been accepting calls from Yay. She’d tried to get in touch several times over the last few days. He shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said, leaving the terminal to float in midair in front of him.
The screen unrolled to reveal Yay’s smiling face. “Ah, the recluse. How are you, Gurgeh?”
“I’m all right.”
Yay peered forward at her own screen. “What is that you’re sitting beside?”
Gurgeh looked at the piece of ironware by the side of the bench. “That’s a cannon,” he told her.
“That’s what I thought.”
“It was a present from a lady friend,” Gurgeh explained. “She was very keen on forging and casting. She graduated fro
m pokers and fire grates to cannons. She thought I might find it amusing to fire large metal spheres at the fjord.”
“I see.”
“You need a fast-burning powder to make it work, though, and I never did get round to acquiring any.”
“Just as well; the thing would probably have exploded and blown your brains out.”
“That did occur to me as well.”
“Good for you.” Yay’s smile widened. “Hey, guess what?”
“What?”
“I’m going on a cruise; I persuaded Shuro he needs his horizons broadened. You remember Shuro; at the shoot?”
“Oh. Yes, I remember. When do you go?”
“I’ve gone. We just undocked from Tronze port; the clipper Screw Loose. This is the last chance I had to call you real-time. The delay’ll mean letters in future.”
“Ah.” He wished he hadn’t accepted this call, too, now. “How long are you going for?”
“A month or two.” Yay’s bright, smiling face crinkled. “We’ll see. Shuro might get tired of me before then. Kid’s mostly into other men, but I’m trying to persuade him otherwise. Sorry I couldn’t say goodbye before I left, but it’s not for long; I’ll s—”
The terminal screen went blank. The screen snapped back into the casing as it fell to the ground and lay, silent and dead, on the tree-needled ground of the clearing. Gurgeh stared at the terminal. He leaned forward and picked it up. Some needles and bits of grass had been caught in the screen as it rolled back into the casing. He pulled them out. The machine was lifeless; the little tell-tale light on the base was off.
“Well, Jernau Gurgeh?” Mawhrin-Skel said, floating in from the side of the clearing.
He clutched the terminal with both hands. He stood up, staring at the drone as it sidled through the air, bright in the sunlight. He made himself relax, putting the terminal in a jacket pocket and sitting down, legs crossed, on the bench. “Well what, Mawhrin-Skel?”
The Player of Games Page 10