The Player of Games

thing, recorded with an ordinary camera. You could simply make up any film sequence you wanted.

Some people used such machines just for fun or revenge, making up stories where appalling or just funny things happened to their enemies or their friends. Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible; in a society like the Culture, where next to nothing was forbidden, and both money and individual power had virtually ceased to exist, it was doubly irrelevant.

The machine really must be mad. Gurgeh wondered if it intended to kill him. He turned the idea over in his mind, trying to believe it could happen.

'I know what's going through your mind, Gurgeh,' the drone went on. 'You're thinking that I can't prove it; I could have made it up; nobody will believe me. Well, wrong. I had a real-time link with a friend of mine; an SC Mind sympathetic to my cause, who's always known I would have made a perfectly good operative and has worked on my appeal. What passed between us this morning is recorded in perfect detail in a Mind of unimpeachable moral credentials, and at a level of perceived fidelity unapproachable with the sort of facilities generally available.

'What I have on you could not have been falsified, Gurgeh. If you don't believe me, ask your friend Amalk-ney. It'll confirm all I say. It may be stupid, and ignorant too, but it ought to know where to find out the truth.'

Rain struck Gurgeh's helpless, relaxed face. His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.

The drone's small body splashed and dripped above him as the drops grew larger and fell harder. 'You're wondering what I want from you?' the drone said. He tried to move his eyes to say 'no', just to annoy it, but it didn't seem to notice. 'Help,' it said. 'I need your help; I need you to speak for me. I need you to go to Contact and add your voice to those demanding my return to active duty.' The machine darted down towards his face; he felt his coat collar pulled. His head and upper torso were lifted with a jerk from the damp ground until he stared helplessly at the grey-blue casing of the small machine. Pocket-size, he thought, wishing he could blink, and glad of the rain because he could not. Pocket-size; it would fit into one of the big pockets in this coat.

He wanted to laugh.

'Don't you understand what they've done to me, man?' the machine said, shaking him. 'I've been castrated, spayed, paralysed! How you feel now; helpless, knowing the limbs are there but unable to make them work! Like that, but knowing that they aren't there! Can you understand that? Can you? Did you know that in our history people used to lose whole limbs, for ever? Do you remember your social history, little Jernau Gurgeh? Eh?' It shook him. He felt and heard his teeth rattle. 'Do you remember seeing cripples, from before arms and legs just grew back? Back then, humans lost limbs — blown off or cut off or amputated — but still thought they had them, still thought they could feel them; 'ghost limbs' they called them. Those unreal arms and legs could itch and they could ache but they could not be used; can you imagine? Can you imagine that, Culture man with your genofixed regrowth and your over-designed heart and your doctored glands and clot-filtered brain and flawless teeth and perfect immune system? Can you?'

It let him fall back to the ground. His jaw jerked and he felt his teeth nip the end of his tongue. A salt taste filled his mouth. Now he really would drown, he thought; in his own blood. He waited for real fear. The rain filled his eyes but he could not cry.

'Well, imagine that, times eight, times more; imagine what I feel, all set up to be the good soldier fighting for all that we hold dear, to seek out and smite the barbarians around us! Gone, Jernau Gurgeh; razed; gone. My sensory systems, my weapons, my very memory-capacity; all reduced, laid waste: crippled. I peek into shells in a Stricken game, I push you down with an eight-strength field and hold you there with an excuse for an electro- magnetic effector… but this is nothing, Jernau Gurgeh; nothing. An echo; a shadow… nothing…'

It floated higher, away from him.

It gave him back the use of his body. He struggled off the damp ground, and felt his tongue with one hand; the blood had stopped flowing, closed off. He sat up, a little groggy, feeling the back of his head where it had hit the ground. It was not sore. He looked at the small, dripping body of the machine, floating over the path.

'I have nothing to lose, Gurgeh,' it said. 'Help me or I'll destroy your reputation. Don't think I wouldn't. Whether it would mean almost nothing to you — which I doubt — I'd do it just for the fun of causing you even the smallest amount of embarrassment. And if it means everything, and you really would kill yourself — which I also very much doubt — then I would still. I've never killed a human before. It's possible I might have been given the chance, somewhere, some time, if I'd been allowed to join SC… but I'd settle for causing a suicide.'

He held up one hand to it. His coat felt heavy. The trous were soaked. 'I believe you,' he said. 'All right. But what can I do?'

'I've told you,' the drone said, over the noise of the wind howling in the trees and the rain beating against the swaying stalks of grass. 'Speak for me. You have more influence than you realise. Use it.'

'But I don't, I—'

'I've seen your mail, Gurgeh,' the drone said tiredly. 'Don't you know what a guest-invitation from a GSV means? It's the closest Contact ever comes to offering a post directly. Didn't anybody ever teach you anything besides games? Contact wants you. Officially Contact never head-hunts; you have to apply, then once you're in it's the other way round; to join SC you have to wait to be invited. But they want you, all right…. Gods, man, can't you take a hint?'

'Even if you're right, what am I supposed to do, just go to Contact and say 'Take this drone back'? Don't be stupid. I wouldn't even know how to start going about it.' He didn't want to say anything about the visit from the Contact drone the other evening.

He didn't have to.

'Haven't they already been in touch with you?' Mawhrin-Skel asked. 'The night before last?'

Gurgeh got shakily to his feet. He brushed some sandy earth from his coat. The rain gusted on the wind. The village on the coast and the sprawling house of his childhood were almost invisible under the dark sheets of driving rain.

'Yes, I've been watching you, Jernau Gurgeh,' Mawhrin-Skel said. 'I know Contact are interested in you. I have no idea just what it is Contact might want from you, but I suggest that you find out. Even if you don't want to play, you'd better make a damn good plea on my behalf; I'll be watching, so I'll know whether you do or not…. I'll prove it to you. Watch.'

A screen unfolded from the front of the drone's body like a strange flat flower, expanding to a square a quarter-metre or so to a side. It lit up in the rainy gloom to show Mawhrin-Skel itself, suddenly glowing a blinding, flashing white, above the stone table at Hafflis's house. The scene was shot from above, probably near one of the stone ribs over the terrace. Gurgeh watched again as the line of coals glowed bright, and the lanterns and flowers fell. He heard Chamlis say, 'Oh dear. Do you think I said something to upset it?' He saw himself smile as he sat down by the Stricken game-set.

The scene faded. It was replaced by another dim scene viewed from above; a bed; his bed, in the principal chamber at Ikroh. He recognised the small, ringed hands of Ren Myglan kneading his back from beneath. There was sound, too:

'…. ah, Ren, my baby, my child, my love…'

'….Jernau…'

'You piece of shit,' he told the drone.

The scene faded and the sound cut off. The screen collapsed, sucked back inside the body of the drone.

'Just so, and don't you forget it, Jernau Gurgeh,' Mawhrin-Skel said. 'Those bits were quite fakeable; but you and I know they were real, don't we? Like I said; I'm watching you.'

He sucked on the blood in his mouth, spat. 'You can't do this. Nobody's allowed to behave like this. You won't get—'

'— away with it? Well, maybe not. But the thing is, if I don't get away with it, I don't care. I'm no worse off. I'm still going to try.' It paused, physically shook itself free of water, then produced a spherical field about itself, clearing the moisture from its casing, leaving it spotless and clean, and sheltering it from the rain.

'Can't you understand what they've done to me, man? Better I had never been brought into being than forced to wander the Culture for ever, knowing what I've lost. They call it compassion to draw my talons and remove my eyes and cast me adrift in a paradise made for others; I call it torture. It's obscene, Gurgeh, it's barbaric, diabolic; recognise that old word? I see you do. Well, try to imagine how I might feel, and what I might do…. Think about it, Gurgeh. Think about what you can do for me, and what I can do to you.'