The Player of Games

abilities and Nicosar's weaknesses were just about right. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines.'

'They knew I'd win?' Gurgeh asked disconsolately, chin in hand.

'You can't know something like that, Gurgeh. But they must have thought you stood a good chance. I had some of it explained to me in my briefing… they thought you were just about the best game-player in the Culture, and if you got interested and involved then there wasn't much any Azad player could do to stop you, no matter how long they'd spent playing the game. You've spent all your life learning games; there can't be a rule, move, concept or idea in Azad you haven't encountered ten times before in other games; it just brought them all together. These guys never stood a chance. All you needed was somebody to keep an eye on you and give you the occasional nudge in the right direction at the appropriate times.' The drone dipped briefly; a little bow. 'Yours truly!'

'All my life,' Gurgeh said quietly, looking past the drone to the dull, dead landscape outside the tall windows. 'Sixty years… and how long has the Culture known about the Empire?'

'About — ah! You're thinking we shaped you somehow. Not so. If we did that sort of thing we wouldn't need outsider «mercenaries» like Shohobohaum Za to do the really dirty work.'

'Za?' Gurgeh said.

'Not his real name; not Culture-born at all. Yes, he's what you'd call a «mercenary». Just as well, too, or the secret police would have shot you outside that tent. Remember timid little me nipping out the way? I'd just shot one of your assailants with my CREW; on high X-ray so it wouldn't register on the cameras. Za broke the neck of another one; he'd heard there might be some trouble. He'll probably be leading a guerrilla army on Ea in a couple of days from now, I imagine.'

The drone gave a little wobble in the air. 'Let's see… what else can I tell you? Oh yes; the Limiting Factor isn't as innocent as it looks, either. While we were on the Little Rascal we did take out the old effectors, but only so we could put in new ones. Just two, in two of the three nose blisters. We put the empty one on clear and holos of empty blisters in the other two.'

'But I was in all three!' Gurgeh protested.

'No, you were in the same one three times. The ship just rotated the corridors housing, fiddled with the AG and had a couple of drones change things round a bit while you were going from one to the other, or rather down one corridor up another and back to the same blister. All for nothing, mind you, but if we had needed some heavy weaponry it would have been there. It's forward planning that makes one feel safe, don't you think?'

'Oh, yes,' Gurgeh said, sighing. He got to his feet and went back out on to the balcony, where the black soot-snow fell steadily and quietly.

'Talking about the Limiting Factor,' Flere-Imsaho said cheerily, 'the old reprobate is overhead now. Module's on its way. We'll have you aboard in a minute or two; you can have a nice wash and change out of those dirty clothes. Are you ready to leave?'

Gurgeh looked down at his feet, scuffed some of the soot and ash across the flagstones. 'What is there to pack?'

'Not a lot, indeed. I was too busy keeping you from baking to go in search of your belongings. Anyway, the only thing you seem to be fond of is that tatty old jacket. Did you get that bracelet thing? I left it on your chest when I went exploring.'

'Yes, thanks,' Gurgeh said, gazing out at the flat black desolation stretching to the dark horizon. He looked up; the module burst through the deep brown overcast, trailing strands of vapour. 'Thanks,' Gurgeh said again, as the module swooped, dropping almost to ground level then racing across the scorched desert towards the castle, drawing a plume of ash and soot off the ground in its wake as it slowed and started to turn and the noise of its supersonic plummet cracked round the forlorn fortress like too-late thunder. 'Thanks for everything.'

The craft swung its rear towards the castle, floating up until it was level with the edge of the balcony parapet. Its rear door opened, made a flat ramp. The man walked across the balcony, stepped up on to the parapet, and into the cool interior of the machine.

The drone followed and the door closed.

The module blasted suddenly away, sucking a great swirling fountain of ash and soot after it as it climbed, flashing through the dark clouds above the castle like some solid lightning bolt, while its thunder broke across the plain and the castle and the low hills behind. Ash settled again; the soot continued its soft and gentle fall.

The module returned a few minutes later, to pick up the ship's drones and the remains of the alien effector equipment, then left the castle for the last time, and rose again to its waiting ship.

A little while later, the small band of dazed survivors — released by the two ship's drones, and mostly servants, soldiers, concubines and clerks — stumbled into the day-time night and the soot-like-snow, to take stock of their temporary exile in the once great fortress, and claim their vanished land.

4. The Passed Pawn

Lazy-matching, dull-siding, the ship went slowly through one end of a tensor field three million kilometres long, over a wall of monocrystal, then started to float down through the gradually thickening atmosphere of the Plate. From five hundred kilometres up, the two slabs of land and sea, the one beyond them of raw rock under deep cloud, and the one beyond that of still forming land, showed clear in the night air.

Beyond its crystal wall, the farthest Plate was very new; dark and void to normal sight, the ship could see on it the illuminating radars of the landscaping machines as they moved their cargoes of rock in from space. Even as the vessel watched, a huge asteroid was detonated in the darkness, producing a slow fountain of red-glowing molten rock which fell slowly to the new surface, or was caught and held, moulded in the vacuum before it was allowed to settle.

The Plate beside it was dark too, and near the bottom of its squared off funnel a blanket of clouds covered it completely as its rawness was weathered.

The other two Plates were much older, and twinkled with lights. Chiark was at aphelion; Gevant and Osmolon were white on black; islands of snow on dark seas. The old warship slowly submerged itself in the atmosphere, floating down the blade-flat slope of the Plate wall to where the real air began, then set out over the ocean for the land.

A seaship, a liner on that ocean and bright with lights, blasted its horns and set off fireworks as the Limiting Factor went over, a kilometre up. The ship saluted too, using its effectors to produce artificial auroras; roaring, shifting folds of light in the clear, still air above it. Then the two ships sailed on into the night.

It had been an uneventful journey back. The man Gurgeh had wanted to be stored at once, saying he didn't want to be awake during the journey back; he wanted sleep, rest, a period of oblivion. The ship had insisted he think it over first, even though it had the equipment ready. After ten days it had relented and the man, who'd become increasingly morose during that time, went thankfully into a dreamless, low metabolism sleep.

He hadn't played a single game of any description during those ten days, hardly said a word, couldn't even bother to get dressed, and spent most of his time just sitting staring at walls. The drone had agreed that putting him to sleep for the journey was probably the kindest thing they could do.

They'd crossed the Lesser Cloud and met with the Range class GSV So Much For Subtlety, which was heading back for the main galaxy. The inward journey had taken longer than the outward, but there'd been no hurry. The ship had left the GSV near the higher reaches of a galactic limb and cut down and across, past stars, dustfields and nebulae, where the hydrogen migrated and the suns formed and in the ship's domain of unreal space the Holes were pillars of energy, from fabric to Grid.

It had woken the man up slowly, two days out from his home.