Consider Phlebas

off, then came closer.

'Hey, you want to be a Life?'

'No. Goodbye,' Horza said. The small man sniffed and walked off, stopping further along the walkway to prod a shape lying near the edge of a narrow terrace. Horza looked over and saw a woman there raise her head groggily, then shake it slowly, moving sinuous lengths of bedraggled white hair. Her faced showed briefly in the light of an overhead spot; she was beautiful but looked very tired. The small man spoke to her again, but she shook her head and made a motion with one hand. The small man walked off.

The flight in the ex-Culture shuttle had been relatively uneventful; after some confusion, Horza had succeeded in patching through to the Orbital's navigation system, discovered where he was in relation to the Olmedreca's last known position, and set off to find whatever was left of the Megaship. He'd accessed a news service while gorging himself on Culture emergency rations, and found a report on the Olmedreca in the index. The pictures showed the ship, listing a little and fractionally bow-down, floating in a calm sea surrounded by ice, the first kilometre of its hull seemingly buried inside the huge tabular berg. Small aircraft and a few shuttles hovered and flew about the gigantic wreck, like flies above the carcass of a dinosaur. The commentary accompanying the visuals spoke of a mysterious second nuclear explosion aboard the craft. It also reported that when police craft had arrived, the Megaship had proved to be deserted.

Hearing that, Horza had immediately altered the shuttle's destination, swinging the craft round, to head for Evanauth.

Horza had had three Tenths of an Aoish credit. He had sold the shuttle for five Tenths. It was absurdly cheap, especially given the imminent destruction of the Orbital, but he had been in a hurry, and the dealer who accepted the craft was certainly taking a risk handling the machine; it was very obviously a Culture design, the brain had equally obviously been shot out of it, so there could be little doubt it had been stolen. The Culture would treat the destruction of the craft's consciousness as murder.

In three hours Horza had sold the shuttle, bought clothes, cards, a gun, a couple of terminals and some information. All except the information had been cheap.

Horza now knew that there was a craft answering the description of the Clear Air Turbulence on the Orbital, or rather underneath it, inside the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle called The Ends of Invention. He found that hard to believe, but there was no other craft it could be. According to the information agency, a ship fitting the CAT's description had been brought on board by one of the Evanauth Port shipbuilders to have repairs made to its warping units; it had arrived under tow two days previously, with only its fusion motors working. He could not, however, find out its name or exact location.

It sounded to Horza like the CAT had been used to rescue the survivors of Kraiklyn's band; it must have come over the O wall on remote control, using its warp units. It had picked the Free Company up, then hopped back over again, damaging its warp motors in the process.

He had also been unable to find out who the survivors might be, but assumed Kraiklyn must be one of them; nobody else could have brought the CAT over the Edgewall. He hoped he'd find Kraiklyn at the Damage game. Either way, Horza had decided to make for the CAT afterwards. He still intended to head for Schar's World, and the Clear Air Turbulence was the most likely way of getting there. He hoped Yalson was alive. He also hoped it was true about The Ends of Invention being totally demilitarised, and the volume around Vavatch being free of Culture ships. After all this time he wouldn't have put it past the Culture's Minds to have found out about the CAT being in the same volume of space as The Hand of God 137 when it came under attack, and to have made a connection or two.

He sat back in the seat — or sculpture — and relaxed, letting the internal pattern of the motie drop from his mind and body. He had to start thinking like Kraiklyn again; he closed his eyes.

After a few minutes he could hear things starting to happen down in the lower reaches of the arena. He brought himself to and looked around. The white-haired woman who had been lying on the nearby terrace had got up; she was walking, a little unsteadily, down into the arena, her long, heavy dress sweeping over the steps. Horza got up, too, following quickly down the stairs in the wake of her perfume. She didn't look at him when he skipped past her. She was fiddling with an askew tiara.

The lights were on over the coloured table where the game would be played. Some of the stages in the auditorium were starting to close up or go dim. People were gradually gravitating towards the game table, to the seats and loungers and standing areas overlooking it. In the glare of the overhead lights, tall figures in black robes moved slowly, checking pieces of the game equipment. They were the adjudicators: Ishlorsinami. The species was renowned for being the most unimaginative, humourless, prissy, honest and incorruptible group in the galaxy and they always officiated at Damage games because hardly anybody else could be trusted.

Horza stopped by a food stall to stock up on food and drink; he watched the game table and the figures around it while his order was prepared. The woman with the heavy dress and long white hair passed him, still going down the steps. Her tiara was almost straight, though her long, loose gown was crumpled. She yawned as she went past. Horza paid for his food with a card, then followed the woman again, going towards the growing crowd of people and machines starting to cluster all around the outer perimeter of the game area. The woman looked suspiciously at him when he half ran, half walked down the steps past her again.

Horza bribed his way into one of the better terraces. He pulled the hood of his heavy blouse out from the thick collar, stretching it over his forehead and out a little so that his face was in shadow. He didn't want the real Kraiklyn to see him now. The terrace jutted out over lower ones, slanting down with an excellent view of the table itself and the gantries above. Most of the fenced areas around the table were visible too. Horza settled onto a soft lounger near a noisy group of extravagantly dressed tripedals who hooted a lot and kept spitting into a large pot in the centre of their group of gently rocking couches.

The Ishlorsinami seemed to have satisfied themselves that everything was working and was set up fairly. They walked down a ramp set into the surface of the arena's ellipsoid floor. Some lights went off; a quietfield slowly cut off the sounds from the rest of the auditorium.

Horza took a quick look round. A few stages and sets still showed lights, but they were going out. The slow-motion animal trapeze act was still going on, though, high up in the darkness below the stars; the huge ponderous beasts were swinging through the air, field harnesses glittering. They somersaulted and twisted, but now as they did so, passing each other in mid-air, they reached out with their clawed paws, slashing slowly and silently at each other's fur. Nobody else seemed to be watching.

Horza was surprised to see the woman he had passed twice on the stairs walk past him again and drape herself over a vacant couch which had been reserved near the front of the terrace. Somehow he hadn't thought she would be rich enough to afford this area.

Without a fanfare or announcement, the Players of the Eve of Destruction appeared, coming up the ramp in the arena floor, led by a single Ishlorsinami. Horza checked his terminal; it was exactly seven hours standard to the Orbital's destruction. Applause, cheers and, near Horza at least, loud hooting greeted the contestants, though the quietfields muffled everything. As they appeared from the shadows on the ramp, some of the Players acknowledged the crowd who had come to see them play, while other Players totally ignored them.

Horza recognised few of them. The ones he did know, or had at least heard of, were Ghalssel, Tengayet Doy-Suut, Wilgre and Neeporlax. Ghalssel of Ghalssel's Raiders — probably the most successful of the Free Companies. Horza had heard the mercenary ship arrive from about eleven kilometres away, while he was making the deal with the shuttle saleswomen. She had frozen at the time; her eyes glazed. Horza didn't like to ask whether she thought the noise was the Culture coming to destroy the Orbital a few hours early or just coming to get her for buying a hot shuttle craft.

Ghalssel was an average-looking man, stocky enough to be obviously from a high-G planet, but without the look of compressed power that most such people possessed. He was simply dressed and his head was clean shaven. Supposedly only a Damage game, where such things were banned, could force Ghalssel out of the suit he always wore. Tengayet Doy-Suut was tall, very dark and also simply dressed. The Suut was the champion Damage Player, on both game average, wins and maximum credits. He had come from a recently Contacted planet twenty years before, and had been a champion player of games of chance and bluff there, too. That was where he had had his face removed and a stainless-steel mask grafted on; only the eyes looked alive: expressionless soft jewels set in