The Player of Games

'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.

Gurgeh sat in the main screen-room of Ikroh. The windows were blanked out and the wall holoscreen was on; the Contact drone was controlling the room systems. It put the lights out. The screen went blank, then showed the main galaxy, in 2-D, from a considerable distance. The two Clouds were nearest Gurgeh's point of view, the