Gurgeh had spun the dials on his single hidden-piece wafer and put it face down on the table without looking at it; he had no more idea where that piece was than Mr Dreltram. It might turn out to be in an illegal position, which could well lose him the game, or (less likely) it might turn up in a strategically useful place deep inside his opponent's territory. Gurgeh liked playing this way, if it wasn't a serious game; as well as giving his opponent a probably needed extra advantage, it made the game as a whole more interesting and less predictable; added an extra spice to the proceedings.
He supposed he ought to find out where the piece was; the eighty-move point was fast approaching when the piece had to be revealed anyway.
He couldn't see his hidden-piece wafer. He looked over the card and wafer-strewn table. Mr Dreltram was not the most tidy of players; his cards and wafers and unused or removed pieces were scattered over most of the table, including the part supposed to be Gurgeh's. A gust of wind when they'd entered a tunnel an hour earlier had almost blown some of the lighter cards away, and they'd weighed them down with goblets and lead-glass paperweights; these added to the impression of confusion, as did Mr Dreltram's quaint, if rather affected, custom of noting down all the moves by hand on a scratch tablet (he claimed the built-in memory on a board had broken down on him once, and lost him all record of one of the best games he'd ever played). Gurgeh started lifting bits and pieces up, humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer.
He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr Dreltram behind him, looking oddly awkward. Gurgeh frowned as Mr Dreltram, just returned from the bathroom, his eyes wide with the mixture of drugs he was glanding, and followed by a tray bearing drinks, sat down again, staring at Gurgeh's hands.
It was only then, as the tray set the glasses on the table, that Gurgeh realised the cards he happened to be holding, which he had lifted up to look for his hidden-piece wafer, were Mr Dreltram's remaining mine-cards. Gurgeh looked at them — they were still face down; he hadn't seen where the mines were — and understood what Mr Dreltram must be thinking.
He put the cards back where he'd found them. 'I'm very sorry,' he laughed, 'I was looking for my hidden piece.'
He saw it, even as he spoke the words. The circular wafer was lying, uncovered, almost right in front of him on the table. 'Ah,' he said, and only then felt the blood rise to his face. 'Here it is. Hmm. Couldn't see it for looking at it.'
He laughed again, and as he did so felt a strange, clutching sensation coursing through him, seeming to squeeze his guts in something between terror and ecstasy. He had never experienced anything like it. The closest any sensation had ever come, he thought (suddenly, clearly), had been when he was still a boy and he'd experienced his first orgasm, at the hands of a girl a few years older than him. Crude, purely human-basic, like a single instrument picking out a simple theme a note at a time (compared to the drug-gland-boosted symphonies sex would later become), that first time had nevertheless been one of his most memorable experiences; not just because it was then novel, but because it seemed to open up a whole new fascinating world, an entirely different type of sensation and being. It had been the same when he'd played his first competition game, as a child, representing Chiark against another Orbital's junior team, and it would be the same again when his drug-glands matured, a few years after puberty.
Mr Dreltram laughed too, and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
Gurgeh played furiously for the next few moves, and had to be reminded by his opponent when the eighty- move deadline came up. Gurgeh turned over his hidden piece without having checked it first, risking it occupying the same square as one of his revealed pieces. The hidden piece, on a sixteen-hundred-to-one chance, turned up in the same position as the Heart; the piece the whole game was about; the piece one's opponent was trying to take possession of.
Gurgeh stared at the intersection where his well-defended Heart piece sat, then again at the coordinates he'd dialled at random on to the wafer, two hours earlier. They were the same, there was no doubt. If he' d looked a move earlier, he could have moved the Heart out of danger, but he hadn't. He'd lost both pieces; and with the Heart lost, the game was lost; he'd lost.
'Oh, bad luck,' Mr preltram said, clearing his throat.
Gurgeh nodded. 'I believe it's customary, at such moments of disaster, for the defeated player to be given the Heart as a keepsake,' he said, fingering the lost piece.
'Um… so I understand,' Mr Dreltram said, obviously at once embarrassed on Gurgeh's behalf, and delighted at his good fortune. Gurgeh nodded. He put the Heart down, lifted the ceramic wafer which had betrayed him. 'I'd rather have this, I think.' He held it up to Mr Dreltram, who nodded.
'Well, of course. I mean, why not; I certainly wouldn't object.'
The train rolled quietly into a tunnel, slowing for a station set in the caverns inside the mountain.
'All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games — those which can be played in any sense «perfectly», such as grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions — can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine sentience societies.
'The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.'
Gurgeh gave an ironic bow to the young man who'd approached him with an idea for a game. The fellow looked nonplussed. He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak. Gurgeh was waiting for this; as he had on the last five or six occasions when the young man had tried to say something, Gurgeh interrupted him before he'd even started. 'I'm quite serious, you know; there is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain. The same lessons can be learned, the same skills acquired, at the only levels that really matter.' He paused again. He could see the drone Mawhrin-Skel floating towards him over the heads of the people thronging the broad plaza.
The main concert was over. The mountain summits around Tronze echoed to the sounds of various smaller bands as people gravitated towards the specific musical forms they preferred; some formal, some improvised, some for dancing, some for experiencing under a specific drug-trance. It was a warm, cloudy night; a little farside light shone a milky halo directly overhead on the high overcast. Tronze, the largest town on both the Plate and the Orbital, had been built on the edge of the Gevant Plate's great central massif, at the point where the kilometre-high Lake Tronze flowed over the lip of the plateau and tumbled its waters towards the plain below, where they fell as a permanent downpour into the rain forest.
Tronze was the home of fewer than a hundred thousand people, but to Gurgeh it still felt too crowded, despite its spacious houses and squares, its sweeping galleries and plazas and terraces, its thousands of houseboats and its elegant, bridge-linked towers. Tronze, for all the fact that Chiark was a fairly recent Orbital, only a thousand or so years old, was already almost as big as any Orbital community ever grew; the Culture's real cities were its great ships, the General Systems Vehicles. Orbitals were its rustic hinterland, where people liked to spread themselves out with plenty of elbow room. In terms of scale, when compared to one of the larger GSVs containing billions of people, Tronze was barely a village.
Gurgeh usually attended the Tronze Sixty-fourth Day concert. And he was usually buttonholed by enthusiasts. Normally Gurgeh was civil, if occasionally abrupt. Tonight, after the fiasco on the train, and that strange, exciting,
