The Player of Games

of a ship himself.

By about the ninetieth day he felt he was just starting to develop a feel for the biotechs; he could play a limited game against the ship on all the minor boards and one of the major boards, and, when he went to sleep, he spent the whole three hours each night dreaming about people and his life, reliving his childhood and his adolescence and his years since then in a strange mixture of memory and fantasy and unrealised desire. He always meant to write to — or record something for — Chamlis or Yay or any of the other people back at Chiark who'd sent messages, but the time never seemed quite right, and the longer he delayed the harder the task became. Gradually people stopped sending to him, which made Gurgeh feel guilty and relieved at once.

One hundred and one days after leaving Chiark, and well over two thousand light years from the Orbital, the Limiting Factor made its rendezvous with the River class Superlifter Kiss My Ass. The tandemed craft, now enclosed within one ellipsoid field, began to increase their speed to match that of the GSV. This was going to take a few hours, apparently, so Gurgeh went to bed as normal.

The Limiting Factor woke him half-way into his sleep. It switched his cabin screen on.

'What's happening?' Gurgeh said sleepily, just starting to worry. The screen which made up one wall of the cabin was in-holoed, so that it acted like a window. Before he had switched it off and gone to sleep, it had shown the rear end of the Superlifter against the starfield. Now it showed a landscape; a slowly moving panorama of lakes and hills, streams and forests, all seen from directly overhead.

An aircraft flew slowly over the view like a lazy insect.

'I thought you might like to see this,' the ship said.

'Where's that?' Gurgeh asked, rubbing his eyes. He didn't understand. He'd thought the whole idea of meeting the Superlifter was so that the GSV which they were due to meet soon didn't have to slow down; the Superlifter was supposed to haul them along even faster so they could catch up with the giant craft. Instead, they must have stopped, over an orbital or a planet, or something even bigger.

'We have now rendezvoused with the GSV Little Rascal,' the ship told him.

'Have we? Where is it?' Gurgeh said, swinging his feet out of bed.

'You're looking at its topside rear park.'

The view, which must have been magnified earlier, retreated, and Gurgeh realised that he was looking down at a huge craft over which the Limiting Factor was moving slowly. The park seemed to be roughly square; he couldn't guess how many kilometres to a side. In the hazy distance forward there was the hint of immense, regular canyons; ribs on that vast surface stepping down to further levels. The whole sweep of air and ground and water was lit from directly above, and he realised that he couldn't even see the Limiting Factor's shadow. He asked a few questions, still staring at the screen.

Although it was only four kilometres in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometres, and the craft's overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometres. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.

In the five hundred days it took the Little Rascal to cross from the main galaxy to the region of the Clouds, Gurgeh gradually learned the game of Azad, and even found sufficient spare time to meet and casually befriend a few people.

These were Contact people. Half of them formed the crew of the GSV itself, there not so much to run the craft — anyone of its triumvirate of Minds was quite capable of doing that — as to manage their own human society on board. And to witness; to study the never-ending torrent of data delivered on new discoveries by distant Contact units and other GSVs; to learn, and be the Culture's human representatives amongst the systems of stars and the systems of sentient societies Contact was there to discover, investigate and — occasionally — change.

The other half was composed of the crews of smaller craft; some were there for recreation and refit stops, others were hitching a ride just as Gurgeh and the Limiting Factor were, some left en route to survey more of the clusters and clumps of stars which existed between the galaxy and the Clouds, while other people were waiting for their vessels to be built, the ships and smaller Systems Vehicles they would one day crew existing only as another number on a list of craft to be built on board at some point in the future.

The Little Rascal was what Contact termed a throughput GSV; it acted as a kind of marshalling point for humans and material, picking people up and assembling them into crews for the units, LSVs, MSVs and smaller classes of GSVs which it constructed. Other types of large GSVs were accommodation biased, and effectively self-sufficient in human crews for their offspring craft.

Gurgeh spent some days in the park on top of the vessel, walking through it or flying over it in one of the real-winged, propeller-driven aircraft which were the fashion on the GSVat the time. He even became a proficient enough flyer to enter himself in a race, during which several thousand of the flimsy planes flew figures-of-eight over the top of the Vehicle, through one of the cavernous accessways that ran the length of the craft, out the other end and underneath.

The Limiting Factor, housed in one of the Mainbays just off a Way, encouraged him in this, saying it provided Gurgeh with much needed relaxation. Gurgeh accepted none of the offers to play people at games, but did take up a trickle from the flood of invitations to parties, events and other gatherings; he spent some days and nights off the Limiting Factor, and the old warship was in turn host to a select number of young female guests.

Most of the time, though, Gurgeh spent alone inside the ship, poring over tables of figures and the records of past games, rubbing the biotechs in his hands, and striding over the three great boards, gaze flickering over the lay of land and pieces, his mind racing, searching for patterns and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses. He spent twenty days or so taking a crash course in Eachic, the imperial language. He had originally envisaged speaking Marain as usual and using an interpreter, but he suspected there were subtle links between the language and the game, and for that reason alone learned the tongue. The ship told him later it would have been desirable anyway; the Culture was trying to keep even the intricacies of its language secret from the Empire of Azad.

Not long after he'd arrived, he'd been sent a drone, a machine even smaller than Mawhrin-Skel. It was circular in plan and composed of separate revolving sections; rotating rings around a stationary core. It said it was a library drone with diplomatic training and it was called Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ep-handra Lorgin Estral. Gurgeh said hello and made sure his terminal was switched on. As soon as the machine had gone again he sent a message to Chamlis Amalk-ney, along with a recording of his meeting with the tiny drone. Chamlis signalled back later that the device appeared to be what it claimed; one of a fairly new model of library drone. Not the old-timer they might have expected, but probably harmless enough. Chamlis had never heard of an offensive version of that type.

The old drone closed with some Gevant gossip. Yay Meristinoux was talking about leaving Chiark to pursue her landscaping career elsewhere. She'd developed an interest in things called volcanoes; had Gurgeh heard of those? Hafflis was changing sex again. Professor Boruelal sent her regards but no more messages until he wrote back. Mawhrin-Skel still thankfully absent. Hub was piqued it appeared to have lost the ghastly machine; technically the wretch was still within the Orbital Mind's jurisdiction and it would have to account for it somehow at the next inventory and census.

For a few days after that first meeting with Flere-Imsaho, Gurgeh wondered what it was that he found disturbing about the tiny library drone. Flere-Imsaho was almost pathetically small — it could have hidden inside a pair of cupped hands — but there was something about it which made Gurgeh feel oddly uncomfortable in its presence.

He worked it out, or rather he woke up knowing, one morning, after a nightmare in which he'd been trapped inside a metal sphere and rolled around in some bizarre and cruel game… Flere-Imsaho, with its spinning outer sections and its disc-like white casing, looked rather like a hidden-piece wafer from a Possession game.

Gurgeh lounged in an envelopingly comfortable chair set underneath some lushly canopied trees and watched people skating in the rink below. He was dressed only in a waistcoat and shorts, but there was a leakfield between the observation area and the icerink itself, keeping the air around Gurgeh warm. He divided his time between his terminal screen, from which he was memorising some probability equations, and the rink, where a few people he