The Player of Games (29 page)

Limiting Factor
. They said goodbye to Pequil too - he took Gurgeh's hand in both of his - and then the man and the drone boarded the shuttle. Gurgeh watched Groasnachek as it fell away beneath them. The city tilted as he was thrown back into his seat; the whole view swung and juddered as the shuttlecraft powered into the hazy skies. Gradually all the patterns and the shapes came out, revealed for a while before the increasing distance, the city's own vapours, dust and grime, and the altering angle of their climb took it all away. For all the jumble, it looked momentarily peaceful and ordered in its parts. The distance made its individual, local confusions and dislocations disappear, and from a certain height, where little ever dallied, and almost everything just passed through, it looked exactly like a great, mindless, spreading organism.

3. Machina Ex Machina
So far so average. Our game-player's lucked out again. I guess you can see he's a changed man, though. These humans! I'm going to be consistent, however. I haven't told you who I am so far, and I'm not going to tell you now, either. Maybe later. Maybe. Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that's not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that's all it can be. I get so frustrated with people who can't see this! Even a human should be able to understand it's obvious. The result is what matters, not how it's achieved (unless, of course, the process of achieving is itself a series of results). What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? (Let's not even think about a Mind mind.) Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfils the same task. Just matter, switching energy of one sort or another. Switches. Memory. The random element that is chance and that is called choice: common denominators, all. I say again; you is what you done. Dynamic (mis)behaviourism, that's my creed. Gurgeh? His switches are working funny. He's thinking differently, acting uncharacteristically. He is a different person. He's seen the worst that meatgrinder of a city could provide, and he just took it personally, and took his revenge. Now he's spaceborne again, head crammed full of Azad rules, his brain adapted and adapting to the swirling, switching patterns of that seductive, encompassing, feral set of rules and possibilities, and being carted through space towards the Empire's most creakily symbolic shrine: Echronedal; the place of the standing wave of flame; the Fire Planet. But will our hero prevail?
Can
he possibly prevail? And what would constitute winning, anyway? How much has the man still got to learn? What will he make of such knowledge? More to the point, what will it make of him? Wait and see. It'll work itself out, in time. Take it from there, maestro…
Echronedal was twenty light years from Eä. Halfway there the Imperial Fleet left the region of dust that lay between Eä's system and the direction of the main galaxy, and so that vast armed spiral was spread over half the sky like a million jewels caught in a whirlpool. Gurgeh was impatient to get to the Fire Planet. The journey seemed to take for ever, and the liner he was making it on was hopelessly cramped. He spent most of the time in his cabin. The bureaucrats, imperial officials and other game-players on the ship regarded him with undisguised dislike, and apart from a couple of shuttle trips over to the battlecruiser
Invincible
- the imperial flag ship - for receptions, Gurgeh didn't socialise. The crossing was made without incident, and after twelve days they arrived over Echronedal, a planet orbiting a yellow dwarf in a fairly ordinary system and itself a human-habitable world with only one peculiarity. It was not unusual to find distinct equatorial bulges on once fast-spinning planets, and Echronedal's was comparatively slight, though sufficient to produce a single unbroken continental ribbon of land lying roughly between the planet's tropics, the rest of the globe lying beneath two great oceans, ice-capped at the poles. What was unique, in the experience of the Culture as well as the Empire, was to discover a wave of fire forever moving round the planet on the continental landmass. Taking about half a standard year to complete its circumnavigation, the fire swept over the land, its fringes brushing the shores of the two oceans, its wave-front a near-straight line, its flames consuming the growth of the plants which had flourished in the ashes of the previous blaze. The whole land-based ecosystem had evolved around this never-ending conflagration; some plants could only sprout from beneath the still-warm cinders, their seeds jolted into development by the passing heat; other plants blossomed just before the fire arrived, bursting into rapid growth just before the flames found them, and using the fire-front's thermals to transport their seeds into the upper atmosphere, to fall back again, somewhere, on to the ash. The land-animals of Echronedal fell into three categories; some kept constantly on the move, maintaining the same steady walking pace as the fire, some swam round its oceanic boundaries, while other species burrowed into the ground, hid in caves, or survived through a variety of mechanisms in lakes or rivers. Birds circled the world like a jetstream of feathers. The blaze remained little more than a large, continuous bush-fire for eleven revolutions. On the twelfth, it changed. The cinderbud was a tall, skinny plant which grew quickly once its seeds had germinated; it developed an armoured base and shot up to a height of ten metres or more in the two hundred days it had before the flames came round again. When the fire did arrive, the cinderbud didn't burn; it closed its leafy head until the blaze had passed, then kept on growing in the ashes. After eleven of those Great Months, eleven baptisms in the flames, the cinderbuds were great trees, anything up to seventy metres in height. Their own chemistry then produced first the Oxygen Season, and then the Incandescence. And in that sudden cycle the fire didn't walk; it sprinted. It was no longer a wide but low and even mild bush-fire; it was an inferno. Lakes disappeared, rivers dried, rocks crumbled in its baking heat; every animal that had evolved its own way of dodging or keeping pace with the fires of the Great Months had had to find another method of surviving; running fast enough to build up a sufficient lead on the Incandescence to still keep ahead of it, swimming far out into the ocean or to the few mostly small islands off the coasts, or hibernating, deep in great cave-systems or on the beds of deep rivers, lakes and fjords. Plants too switched to new survival mechanisms, rooting deeper, growing thicker seed-cases, or equipping their thermal-seeds for higher, longer flight, and the baked ground they would encounter on landing. For a Great Month thereafter the planet, its atmosphere choked with smoke, soot and ash, wavered on the edge of catastrophe as smoke clouds blocked out the sun and the temperature plummeted. Then slowly, while the diminished small fire continued on its way, the atmosphere cleared, the animals started to breed again, the plants grew once more, and the little cinderbuds started sprouting through the ashes from the old root complexes. The Empire's castles on Echronedal, extravagantly sprinklered and doused, had been built to survive whatever terrible heat and screaming winds the planet's bizarre ecology could provide, and it was in the greatest of those fortresses, Castle Klaff, that for the last three hundred standard years the final games of Azad had been played; timed to coincide, whenever possible, with the Incandescence.
The Imperial Fleet arrived above Echronedal in the middle of the Oxygen Season. The flagship remained over the planet while the escorting battleships dispersed to the outskirts of the system. The liners stayed until the
Invincible's
shuttle squadron had ferried the game-players, court officials, guests and observers down to the surface, then left for a nearby system. The shuttles dropped through the clear air of Echronedal to land at Castle Klaff. The fortress lay on a spur of rock at the foot of a range of soft, well-worn hills overlooking a broad plain. Normally it looked out over a horizon-wide sweep of low scrub punctuated by the thin towers of cinderbuds at whatever stage they'd reached, but now the cinderbuds had branched and blossomed, and their canopy of rippling leaves fluttered over the plain like some rooted yellow overcast, and the tallest trunks rose higher than the castle's curtain wall. When the Incandescence arrived it would wash around the fortress like a livid wave; all that ever saved the castle from incineration was a two-kilometre viaduct leading from a reservoir in the low hills to Klaff itself, where giant cisterns and a complicated system of sprinklers ensured the secured and shuttered fortress was drenched with water as the fire passed. If the dousing system ever broke down, there were deep shelters in the rock far underneath the castle which would house the inhabitants until the burning was over. So far, the waters had always saved the fortress, and it had remained an oasis of scorched yellow in a wilderness of fire. The Emperor - whoever had won the final game - was traditionally meant to be in Klaff when the fire passed, to rise from the fortress after the flames died, ascending through the darkness of the smoke clouds to the darkness of space and thence to his Empire. The timing hadn't always worked out perfectly, and in earlier centuries the Emperor and his court had had to sit out the fire in another castle, or even missed the Incandescence altogether. However, the Empire had this time calculated correctly, and it looked as though the Incandescence - due to start only two hundred kilometres fireward of the castle, where the cinderbuds changed abruptly from their normal size and shape to the huge trees that surrounded Klaff - would arrive more or less on time, to provide a suitable backdrop for the coronation. Gurgeh felt uncomfortable as soon as they landed. Eä had been of just a little less than what the Culture rather arbitrarily regarded as standard mass, so its gravity had felt roughly the equivalent of the force Chiark Orbital had produced by rotating and the
Limiting Factor
and the
Little Rascal
had created with AG fields. But Echronedal was half as massive again as Eä, and Gurgeh felt heavy. The castle had long since been equipped with slow-accelerating elevators, and it was unusual to see anybody other than male servants climbing upstairs, but even walking on the level was uncomfortable for the first few of the planet's short days. Gurgeh's rooms overlooked one of the castle's inner courtyards. He settled in there with Flere-Imsaho - who gave no sign of being affected by the higher gravity - and the male servant every finalist was entitled to. Gurgeh had voiced some uncertainty about having a servant at all ('Yeah,' the drone had said, 'who needs two?'), but it had been explained it was traditional, and a great honour for the male, so he'd acquiesced. There was a rather desultory party on the night of their arrival. Everybody sat around talking, tired after the long journey and drained by the fierce gravity; the conversation was mostly about swollen ankles. Gurgeh went briefly, to show his face. It was the first time he'd met Nicosar since the grand ball at the start of the games; the receptions on the
Invincible
during the journey had not been graced by the imperial presence. 'This time, get it right,' Flere-Imsaho told him as they entered the main hall of the castle; the Emperor sat on a throne, welcoming the people as they arrived. Gurgeh was about to kneel like everybody else, but Nicosar saw him, shook one ringed finger and pointed at his own knee. 'Our one-kneed friend; you have not forgotten?' Gurgeh knelt on one knee, bowing his head. Nicosar laughed thinly. Hamin, sitting on the Emperor's right, smiled. Gurgeh sat, alone, in a chair by a wall, near a large suit of antique armour. He looked unenthusiastically round the room, and ended up gazing, with a frown, at an apex standing in one corner of the hall, talking to a group of uniformed apices perched on stoolseats around him. The apex was unusual not just because he was standing but because he seemed to be encased in a set of gun-metal bones, worn outside his Navy uniform. 'Who's that?' Gurgeh asked Flere-Imsaho, humming and crackling unenthusiastically between his chair and the suit of armour by the wall. 'Who's who?' 'That apex with the… exoskeleton? Is that what you call it? Him.' 'That is Star Marshal Yomonul. In the last games he made a personal bet, with Nicosar's blessing, that he would go to prison for a Great Year if he lost. He lost, but he expected that Nicosar would use the imperial veto - which he can do, on wagers which aren't body-bets - because the Emperor wouldn't want to lose the services of one of his best commanders for six years. Nicosar did use the veto, but only to have Yomonul incarcerated in that device he's wearing, rather than shut away in a prison cell. 'The portable prison is proto-sentient; it has various independent sensors as well as conventional exoskeleton features such as a micropile and powered limbs. Its job is to leave Yomonul free to carry out his military duties, but otherwise to impose prison discipline on him. It will only let him eat a little of the simplest food, allows him no alcohol, keeps him to a strict regimen of exercise, will not allow him to take part in social activities - his presence here this evening must mark some sort of special dispensation by the Emperor - and won't let him copulate. In addition, he has to listen to sermons by a prison chaplain who visits him for two hours every ten days.' 'Poor guy. I see he has to stand, as well.' 'Well, one shouldn't try to outsmart the Emperor, I guess,' Flere-Imsaho said. 'But his sentence is almost over.' 'No time off for good behaviour?' 'The Imperial Penal Service does not deal in discounts. They do add time on if you behave badly, though.' Gurgeh shook his head, looking at the distant prisoner in his private prison. 'It's a mean old Empire, isn't it, drone?' 'Mean enough…. But if it ever tries to fuck with the Culture it'll find out what mean really is.' Gurgeh looked round in surprise at the machine. It floated, buzzing there, its bulky grey and brown casing looking hard and even sinister against the dull gleam of the empty suit of armour. 'My, we're in a combative mood this evening.' 'I am. You'd better be.' 'For the games? I'm ready.' 'Are you really going to take part in this piece of propaganda?' 'What piece of propaganda?' 'You know damn well; helping the Bureau to fake your own defeat. Pretending you've lost; giving interviews and lying.' 'Yes. Why not? It lets me play the game. They might try to stop me otherwise.' 'Kill you?' Gurgeh shrugged. 'Disqualify me.' 'Is it worth so much to keep playing?' 'No,' Gurgeh lied. 'But telling a few white lies isn't much of a price, either.' 'Huh,' the machine said. Gurgeh waited for it to say more, but it didn't. They left a little later. Gurgeh got up out of the chair and walked to the door, only remembering to turn and bow towards Nicosar after the drone prompted him.