Some watched the old warship go. The Lifter tugs dropped away.
The ship went up, passing level upon level of bay doors, blank hull, hanging gardens, and whole jumbled arrays of opened accommodation sections, where people walked or danced or sat eating or just gazing out, watching the fuss of airborne activity, or played sports and games. Some waved. Gurgeh watched on the lounge screen, and even recognized a few people he’d known, flying past in an aircraft, shouting goodbye.
Officially, he was going on a solo cruising holiday before traveling to the Pardethillisian Games. He had already dropped hints he might forgo the tournament. Some of the theoretical and news journals had been interested enough in his sudden departure from Chiark—and the equally abrupt cessation of his publications—to have representatives on the Little Rascal interview him. In a strategy he’d already agreed with Contact, he’d given the impression he was growing bored with games in general, and that the journey—and his entry in the great tournament—were attempts to restore his flagging interest.
People seemed to have fallen for this.
The ship cleared the top of the GSV, rising beside the cloud-speckled topside park. It rose on into the thinner air above, met with the Superlifter Prime Mover, and together they gradually dropped back and to the side of the GSV’s inner atmospheric envelope. They went slowly through the many layers of fields; the bumpfield, the insulating, the sensory, the signaling and receptor, the energy and traction, the hullfield, the outer sensory and, finally, the horizon, until they were free in hyper-space once more. After a few hours of deceleration to speeds the Limiting Factor’s engines could cope with, the disarmed warship was on its own, and the Prime Mover was powering away again, chasing its GSV.
“… so you’d be well advised to stay celibate; they’ll find it difficult enough taking a male seriously even if you do look bizarre to them, but if you tried to form any sexual relationships they’d almost certainly take it as a gross insult.”
“Any more good news, drone?”
“Don’t say anything about sexual alterations either. They do know about drug-glands, even if they don’t know about their precise effects, but they don’t know about most of the major physical improvements. I mean, you can mention blister-free callousing and that sort of thing, that isn’t important; but even the gross re-plumbing involved in your own genital design would cause something of a furor if they found out about it.”
“Really,” Gurgeh said. He was sitting in the Limiting Factor’s main lounge. Flere-Imsaho and the ship were giving him a briefing on what he could and couldn’t say and do in the Empire. They were a few days’ travel from the frontier.
“Yes; they’d be jealous,” the tiny drone said in its high, slightly grating voice. “And probably quite disgusted too.”
“Especially jealous though,” the ship said through its remote-drone, making a sighing noise.
“Well, yes,” Flere-Imsaho said, “but definitely disg—”
“The thing to remember, Gurgeh,” the ship interrupted quickly, “is that their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. In the same way, everyone you meet will be conscious of both their position in society and their relationship to others around them.
“It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one’s labor or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of ‘marriage’ to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favors by—”
“Oh, ship, come on!” He laughed. He had done his own research into the Empire, reading its own histories and watching its explanatory recordings. The ship’s view of the Empire’s customs and institutions sounded biased and unfair and terribly Culture-prim.
Flere-Imsaho and the ship remote made a show of looking at each other, then the small library drone flushed gray yellow with resignation, and said in its high voice, “All right, let’s go back to the beginning…”
* * *
The Limiting Factor lay in space above Eä, the beautiful blue-white planet Gurgeh had seen for the first time almost two years earlier in the screen-room at Ikroh. On either side of the ship lay an imperial battlecruiser, each twice the length of the Culture craft.
The two warships had met the smaller vessel at the limits of the star clump Eä’s system lay in, and the Limiting Factor, already on a slow warp drive rather than its normal hyperspace propulsion—something else the Empire was being kept in the dark about—had stopped. Its eight effector blisters were transparent, showing the three game-boards, module hangar and pool in the waist housings, and the empty spaces in the three long nose emplacements, the weaponry having been removed on the Little Rascal. Nevertheless, the Azadians sent a smallcraft over to the ship with three officers in it. Two stayed with Gurgeh while the third checked each of the blisters in turn, then took a general look round the entire ship.
Those or other officers stayed on board for the five days it took to get to Eä itself. They were much as Gurgeh had expected, with flat, broad faces and the shaven, almost white skin. They were smaller than he was, he realized when they stood in front of him, but somehow their uniforms made them look much larger. These were the first real uniforms Gurgeh had ever seen, and he felt a strange, dizzying sensation when he saw them; a sense of displacement and foreignness as well as an odd mixture of dread and awe.
Knowing what he did, he wasn’t surprised at the way they acted toward him. They seemed to try to ignore him, rarely speaking to him, and never looking him in the eyes when they did; he had never felt quite so dismissed in life.
The officers did appear to be interested in the ship, but not in either Flere-Imsaho—which was keeping well out of their way anyway—or in the ship’s remote-drone. Flere-Imsaho had, only minutes before the officers arrived on board, finally and with extreme and voluble reluctance, enclosed itself in the fake carapace of the old drone casing. It had fumed quietly for a few minutes while Gurgeh told it how attractive and valuably antique the ancient, aura-less casing looked, then it had floated quickly off when the officers came aboard.
So much, thought Gurgeh, for its helping with awkward linguistic points and the intricacies of etiquette.
The ship’s remote-drone was no better. It followed Gurgeh round, but it was playing dumb, and made a show of bumping into things now and again. Twice Gurgeh had turned round and almost fallen over the slow and clumsy cube. He was very tempted to kick it.
It was left to Gurgeh to try to explain that there was no bridge or flight-deck or control-room that he knew of in the ship, but he got the impression the Azadian officers didn’t believe him.
When they arrived over Eä, the officers contacted their battle-cruiser and talked too fast for Gurgeh to understand, but the Limiting Factor broke in and started speaking too; there was a heated discussion. Gurgeh looked round for Flere-Imsaho to translate, but it had disappeared again. He listened to the jabbering exchange for some minutes with increasing frustration; he decided to let them argue it out and turned to go and sit down. He stumbled over the remote-drone, which was floating near the floor just behind him; he fell into rather than sat on the couch. The officers looked round at him briefly, and he felt himself blush. The remote-drone drifted hesitantly away before he could aim a foot at it.
So much, he thought, for Flere-Imsaho; so much for Contact’s supposedly flawless planning and stupendous cunning. Their juvenile representative didn’t even bother to hang around and do its job properly
; it preferred to hide, nursing its pathetic self-esteem.
Gurgeh knew enough about the way the Empire worked to realize that it wouldn’t let such things happen; its people knew what duties and orders meant, and they took their responsibilities seriously, or, if they didn’t, they suffered for it.
They did as they were told; they had discipline.
Eventually, after the three officers had talked among themselves for a while, and then to their ship again, they left him and went to inspect the module hangar. When they’d gone, Gurgeh used his terminal to ask the ship what they’d been arguing about.
“They wanted to bring some more personnel and equipment over,” the Limiting Factor told him. “I told them they couldn’t. Nothing to worry about. You’d better get your stuff together and go to the module hangar; I’ll be heading out of imperial space within the hour.”
Gurgeh turned to head toward his cabin. “Wouldn’t it be terrible,” he said, “if you forgot to tell Flere-Imsaho you were going, and I had to visit Eä all by myself.” He was only half joking.
“It would be unthinkable,” the ship said.
Gurgeh passed the remote-drone in the corridor, spinning slowly in midair and bobbing erratically up and down. “And is this really necessary?” he asked it.
“Just doing what I’m told,” the drone replied testily.
“Just overdoing it,” Gurgeh muttered, and went to pack his things.
As he packed, a small parcel fell out of a cloak he hadn’t worn since he’d left Ikroh; it bounced on the soft floor of the cabin. He picked it up and opened the ribbon-tied packet, wondering who it might be from; any one of several ladies on the Little Rascal, he imagined.
It was a thin bracelet, a model of a very broad, fully completed Orbital, its inner surface half light and half dark. Bringing it up to his eyes, he could see tiny, barely discernible pinpricks of light on the nighttime half; the daylight side showed bright blue sea and scraps of land under minute cloud systems. The whole interior scene shone with its own light, powered by some source inside the narrow band.
Gurgeh slipped it over his hand; it glowed against his wrist. A strange present for somebody on a GSV to give, he thought.
Then he saw the note in the package, picked it out and read, “Just to remind you, when you’re on that planet. Chamlis.”
He frowned at the name, then—distantly at first, but with a growing and annoying sense of shame—remembered the night before he’d left Gevant, two years earlier.
Of course.
Chamlis had given him a present.
He’d forgotten.
“What’s that?” Gurgeh said. He sat in the front section of the converted module the Limiting Factor had picked up from the GSV. He and Flere-Imsaho had boarded the little craft and said their au revoirs to the old warship, which was to stand off the Empire, waiting to be recalled. The hangar blister had rotated and the module, escorted by a couple of frigates, had fallen toward the planet while the Limiting Factor made a show of moving very slowly and hesitantly away from the gravity well with the two battlecruisers.
“What’s what?” Flere-Imsaho said, floating beside him, disguise discarded and lying on the floor.
“That,” Gurgeh said, pointing at the screen, which displayed the view looking straight down. The module was flying overland toward Groasnachek, Eä’s capital city; the Empire didn’t like vessels entering the atmosphere directly above its cities, so they’d come in over the ocean.
“Oh,” Flere-Imsaho said. “That. That’s the Labyrinth Prison.”
“A prison?” Gurgeh said. The complex of walls and long, geometrically contorted buildings slid away beneath them as the outskirts of the sprawling capital invaded the screen.
“Yes. The idea is that people who’ve broken laws are put into the labyrinth, the precise place being determined by the nature of the offense. As well as being a physical maze, it is constructed to be what one might call a moral and behavioristic labyrinth as well (its external appearance offers no clues to the internal lay-out, by the way; that’s just for show); the prisoner must make correct responses, act in certain approved ways, or he will get no further, and may even be put further back. In theory a perfectly good person can walk free of the labyrinth in a matter of days, while a totally bad person will never get out. To prevent overcrowding, there’s a time-limit which, if exceeded, results in the prisoner being transferred for life to a penal colony.”
The prison had disappeared from beneath them by the time the drone finished; the city swamped the screen instead, its swirling patterns of streets, buildings and domes like another sort of maze.
“Sounds ingenious,” Gurgeh said. “Does it work?”
“So they’d have us believe. In fact it’s used as an excuse for not giving people a proper trial, and anyway the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.”
* * *
The module and the two frigates touched down at a huge shuttleport on the banks of a broad, muddy, much bridged river, still some distance from the center of the city but surrounded by medium-rise buildings and low geodesic domes. Gurgeh walked out of the craft with Flere-Imsaho—in its fake antique guise, humming loudly and crackling with static—at his side; he found himself standing on a huge square of synthetic grass which had been unrolled up to the rear of the module. Standing on the grass were perhaps forty or fifty Azadians in various styles of uniform and clothing. Gurgeh, who’d been trying hard to work out how to recognize the various sexes, reckoned they were mostly of the intermediate or apex sex, with only a smattering of males and females; beyond them stood several lines of identically uniformed males, carrying weapons. Behind them, another group played rather strident and brash-sounding music.
“The guys with the guns are just the honor guard,” Flere-Imsaho said through its disguise. “Don’t be alarmed.”
“I’m not,” Gurgeh said. He knew this was how things were done in the Empire; formally, with official welcoming parties composed of imperial bureaucrats, security guards, officials from the games organizations, associated wives and concubines, and people representing news-agencies. One of the apices strode forward toward him.
“This one is addressed as ‘sir’ in Eächic,” Flere-Imsaho whispered.
“What?” Gurgeh said. He could hardly hear the machine’s voice over the humming noise it was making. It was buzzing and crackling loud enough to all but drown the sound of the ceremonial band, and the static the drone was producing made Gurgeh’s hair stick out on one side.
“I said, he’s called sir, in Eächic,” Flere-Imsaho hissed over the hum. “Don’t touch him, but when he holds up one hand, you hold up two and say your bit. Remember; don’t touch him.”
The apex stopped just in front of Gurgeh, held up one hand and said, “Welcome to Groasnachek, Eä, in the Empire of Azad, Murat Gurgee.”
Gurgeh controlled a grimace, held up both hands (to show they were empty of weapons, the old books explained) and said, “I am honored to set foot upon the holy ground of Eä,” in careful Eächic. (“Great start,” muttered the drone.)
The rest of the welcoming passed in something of a daze. Gurgeh’s head swam; he sweated under the heat of the bright binary overhead while he was outside (he was expected to inspect the honor guard, he knew, though quite what he was supposed to be looking for had never been explained), and the alien smells of the shuttleport buildings once they passed inside to the reception made him feel more strongly than he’d expected that he really was somewhere quite foreign. He was introduced to lots of people, again mostly apices, and sensed they were delighted to be addressed in what was apparently quite passable Eächic. Flere-Imsaho told him to do and say certain things, and he heard himself mouth the correct words and felt himself perform the acceptable gestures, but his overall impression was of chaotic movement and noisy, unlistening people—rather smelly people, too, though he was sure they thought the same of him. He also had an odd feeling that they were laughing at hi
m, somewhere behind their faces.
Apart from the obvious physical differences, the Azadians all seemed very compact and hard and determined compared to Culture people; more energetic and even—if he was going to be critical—neurotic. The apices were, anyway. From the little he saw of the males, they seemed somehow duller, less fraught and more stolid as well as being physically bulkier, while the females appeared to be quieter—somehow deeper—and more delicate-looking.
He wondered how he looked to them. He was aware he stared a little, at the oddly alien architecture and confusing interiors, as well as at the people… but on the other hand he found a lot of people—mostly apices, again—staring at him. On a couple of occasions Flere-Imsaho had to repeat what it said to him, before he realized it was talking to him. Its monotonous hum and crackling static, never far away from him that afternoon, seemed only to add to the air of dazed, dreamlike unreality.
They served food and drink in his honor; Culture and Azadian biology was close enough for a few foods and several drinks to be mutually digestible, including alcohol. He drank all they gave him, but bypassed it. They sat in a long, low shuttleport building, simply styled outside but ostentatiously furnished inside, around a long table loaded with food and drink. Uniformed males served them; he remembered not to speak to them. He found that most of the people he spoke to either talked too fast or painstakingly slowly, but struggled through several conversations nevertheless. Many people asked why he had come alone, and after several misunderstandings he stopped trying to explain he was accompanied by the drone and simply said he liked traveling by himself.
Some asked him how good he was at Azad. He replied truthfully he had no idea; the ship had never told him. He said he hoped he would be able to play well enough not to make his hosts regret they had invited him to take part. A few seemed impressed by this, but, Gurgeh thought, only in the way that adults are impressed by a respectful child.
The Player of Games Page 14