The Player of Games (9 page)

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 civilianised 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 near by 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 greying 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 grey. 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 backwards. 1I 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, fish-tanks 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 soft, 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 realised 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 co-ordinates, though they're only accurate to-' 'Never mind the co-ordinates!' 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-travelled 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. He tried to tell himself it was still no proof, that Mawhrin-Skel might still have been lying, but even as he thought that, he saw something ominous in the fact the warship had not replied direct. It had used its GSV, an even more reliable source of information, to confirm its whereabouts. 'Want the rest of the LOU's message?' Hub said, 'Or are you going to bite my head off again?' Gurgeh was puzzled. 'What rest of the message?' he said. The underground car swung round, slowed further. He could see Ikroh's transit gallery, hanging under the Plate surface like an upside-down building. 'Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,' Hub said. 'You been communicating with this ship behind my back, Gurgeh? The message is: "Nice to hear from you again."'
Three days passed. He couldn't settle to anything. He tried to read papers, old books, the material of his own he'd been working on - but on every occasion he found himself reading and re-reading the same piece or page or screen, time and time again, trying hard to take it in but finding his thoughts constantly veering away from the words and diagrams and illustrations in front of him, refusing to absorb anything, going back time and time again to the same treadmill, the same looping, tail-swallowing, eternally pointless round of questioning and regret. Why had he done it? What way out was there? He tried glanding soothing drugs, but it took so much to have any effect he just felt groggy. He used
Sharp Blue
and
Edge
and
Focal
to force himself to concentrate, but it gave him a jarring feeling at the back of his skull somewhere, and exhausted him. It wasn't worth it. His brain wanted to worry and fret and there was no point in trying to frustrate it. He refused all calls. He called Chamlis a couple of times, but never found anything to say. All Chamlis could tell him was that the two Contact ships it knew had both been in touch; each said it had passed on Chamlis's message to a few other Minds. Both had been surprised Gurgeh had been contacted so quickly. Both would pass on Gurgeh's request to be told more; neither knew anything else about what was going on. He heard nothing from Mawhrin-Skel. He asked Hub to find the machine, just to let him know where it was, but Hub couldn't, which obviously annoyed the Orbital Mind a lot. He had it send the drone team down again and they swept the house once more. Hub left one of the machines there in the house, to monitor continuously for surveillance. Gurgeh spent a lot of time walking in the forests and mountains around Ikroh, walking and hiking and scrambling twenty or thirty kilometres each day just for the natural soporific of being dead, animal-tired at night. On the fourth day, he was almost starting to feel that if he didn't do anything, didn't talk to anybody or communicate or write, and didn't stir from the house, nothing would happen. Maybe Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared for ever. Perhaps Contact had come to take it away, or said it could come back to the fold. Maybe it had gone totally crazy and flown off into space; maybe it had taken seriously the old joke about Styglian enumerators, and had gone off to count all the grains of sand on a beach.
It was a fine day. He sat in the broad lower branches of a sunbread tree in the garden at Ikroh, looking out through the canopy of leaves to where a small herd of feyl had emerged from the forest to crop the wineberry bushes at the bottom of the lower lawn. The pale, shy animals, stick-thin and camouflage-skinned, pulled nervously at the low shrubs, their triangular heads jigging and bobbing, jaws working. Gurgeh looked back to the house, just visible through the gently moving leaves of the tree. He saw a tiny drone, small and grey-white, near one of the windows of the house. He froze. It might not be Mawhrin-Skel, he told himself. It was too far away to be certain. It might be Loash and-all-the-rest. Whatever it was, it was a good forty metres away, and he must be almost invisible sitting here in the tree. He couldn't be traced; he'd left his terminal back at the house, something he had taken to doing increasingly often recently, even though it was a dangerous, irresponsible thing to do, to be apart from the Hub's information network, effectively cut off from the rest of the Culture. He held his breath, sat dead still. The little machine seemed to hesitate in mid-air, then point in his direction. It came floating straight towards him. It wasn't Mawhrin-Skel or Loash the verbose; it wasn't even the same type. It was a little larger and fatter and it had no aura at all. It stopped just below the tree and said in a pleasant voice, 'Mr Gurgeh?' He jumped out of the tree. The herd of feyl started and disappeared, leaping into the forest in a confusion of green shapes. 'Yes?' he said. 'Good afternoon. My name's Worthil; I'm from Contact. Pleased to meet you.' 'Hello.' 'What a lovely place. Did you have the house built?' 'Yes,' Gurgeh said. Irrelevant small-talk; a nano-second interrogation of Hub's memories would have told the machine exactly when Ikroh was built, and by whom. 'Quite beautiful. I couldn't help noticing the roofs all slope at more or less the same mean angle as the surrounding mountain slopes. Your idea?' 'A private aesthetic theory,' Gurgeh admitted, a little more impressed; he'd never mentioned that to anybody. The fieldless machine made a show of looking around. 'Hmm. Yes, a fine house and an impressive setting. But now: may I come to the reason for my visit?' Gurgeh sat down cross-legged by the tree. 'Please do.' The drone lowered itself to keep level with his face. 'First of all, let me apologise if we put you off earlier. I think the drone who visited you previously may have taken its instructions a little too literally, though, to give it its due, time is rather limited…. Anyway; I'm here to tell you all you want to know. We have, as you probably suspected, found something we think might interest you. However…' The drone turned away from the man, to look at the house and its garden again. 'I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to leave your beautiful home.' 'So it does involve travelling?' 'Yes. For some time.' 'How long?' Gurgeh asked. The drone seemed to hesitate. 'May I tell you what it is we've found, first?' 'All right.' 'It must be in confidence, I'm afraid,' the drone said apologetically. 'What I've come to tell you has to remain restricted for the time being. You'll understand why once I've explained. Can you give me your word you won't let this go any further?' 'What would happen if I say No?' 'I leave. That's all.' Gurgeh shrugged, brushed a little bark from the hem of the gathered-up robe he was wearing. 'All right. In secret, then.' Worthil floated upwards a little, turning its front briefly towards Ikroh. 'It'll take a little time to explain. Might we retire to your house?' 'Of course.' Gurgeh rose to his feet.