The Player of Games

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I'd better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language- as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it's brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he'd think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates — or apices — with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

Let's see now: we've finally got old Gurgeh off Gevant Plate, Chiark Orbital, and we have him fizzing away at quite a clip in a stripped down military ship heading for a rendezvous with the Cloudbound General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal.

Points To Ponder:

Does Gurgeh really understand what he's done, and what might happen to him? Has it even begun to occur to him that he might have been tricked? And does he really know what he's let himself in for?

Of course not!

That's part of the fun!

Gurgeh had been on cruises many times in his life and — on that longest one, thirty years earlier — travelled some thousands of light years from Chiark, but within a few hours of his departure aboard the Limiting Factor he was feeling the gap of light years the still accelerating ship was putting between him and his home with an immediacy he had not anticipated. He spent some time watching the screen, where Chiark's star shone yellow-white and gradually diminishing, but nevertheless he felt further away from it than even the screen showed.

He had never felt the falseness of such representations before, but sitting there, in the old accommodation social area, looking at the rectangle of screen on the wall, he couldn't help feeling like an actor, or a component in the ship's circuitry: like part of, and therefore as false as, the pretend-view of Real Space hung in front of him.

Maybe it was the silence. He had expected noise, for some reason. The Limiting Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing acceleration; the craft's velocity was hurtling towards its maximum with a rapidity which, when displayed in numbers on the wall-screen, numbed Gurgeh's brain. He didn't even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as hyperspace? At least he had heard of that, even if he didn't know much about it… whatever; for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.

The ship didn't seem to want to start any conversations, either, which normally wouldn't have bothered Gurgeh, but now did. He left his cabin and went for a walk, going down the narrow, hundred metre-long corridor which led to the waist of the craft. In the bare corridor, hardly a metre wide, and so low he could touch the ceiling without having to stretch, he thought he could hear a very faint hum, coming from all around him. At the end of that passage he turned down another, apparently sloping at an angle of at least thirty degrees, but seemingly level as soon as he stepped (with a moment of dizziness) into it. That corridor ended at an effector blister, where one of the great game-boards had been set up.

The board stretched out in front of him, a swirl of geometric shapes and varying colours; a landscape spreading out over five hundred square metres, with the low pyramid-ranges of stacked, three-dimensional territory increasing even that total. He walked over to the edge of the huge board wondering if he had, after all, taken on too much.

He looked around the old effector blister. The board took up a little more than half the floor space, lying on top of the light foam metal planking the dockyard had installed. Half the volume of the space was beneath Gurgeh's feet; the cross-section of the effector housing was circular, and the planking and board described a diameter across it, more or less flush with the hull of the ship beyond the blister. The housing roof curved, gunmetal dull, arcing twelve metres overhead. Gurgeh dropped under the planking on a float-hatch into the dimly lit bowl under the foam metal floor. The echoing space was even more empty than that above; save for a few hatches and shallow holes on the surface of the bowl, the removal of the mass of weaponry had been accomplished without leaving a trace. Gurgeh remembered Mawhrin-Skel, and wondered how the Limiting Factor felt about having its talons drawn:

'Jernau Gurgeh.' He turned as his name was pronounced and saw a cube of skeletal components floating near him.

'Yes?'

'We have now reached our Terminal Aggregation Point and are sustaining a velocity of approximately eight point five kilolights in ultraspace one positive.'

'Really?' Gurgeh said. He looked at the half-metre cube and wondered which bits were its eyes.

'Yes,' the remote-drone said. 'We are due to rendezvous with the GSV Little Rascal in approximately one hundred and two days from now. We are currently receiving instructions from the Little Rascal on how to play Azad, and the ship has instructed me to tell you it will shortly be able to commence playing. When do you wish to start?'

'Well, not right now,' Gurgeh said. He touched the float-hatch controls, rising through the floor into the light. The remote-drone drifted up above him. 'I want to settle in first,' he told it. 'I need more theoretical work before I start playing.'

'Very well.' The drone started to drift away. It stopped. 'The ship wishes to advise you that its normal operating mode includes full internal monitoring, removing the need for your terminal. Is this satisfactory, or would you prefer the internal observation systems to be switched off, and to use your terminal to contact the ship?'

'The terminal,' Gurgeh said, immediately.

'Internal monitoring has been reduced to emergency-only status.'

'Thanks,' Gurgeh said.

'You're welcome,' the drone said, floating off.

Gurgeh watched it disappear into the corridor, then turned back to look at the vast board, shaking his head once more.

Over the next thirty days, Gurgeh didn't touch a single Azad piece; the whole time was spent learning the theory of the game, studying its history where it was useful for a better understanding of the play, memorising the moves each piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual morale-strength, their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their specific skill harmonics as related to different areas of the boards; he pored over tables and grids setting out the qualities inherent in the suits, numbers, levels and sets of the