The Player of Games

Imsaho and the ship were giving him a briefing on what he could and couldn't say and do in the Empire. They were a few days' travel from the frontier.

'Yes; they'd be jealous,' the tiny drone said in its high, slightly grating voice. 'And probably quite disgusted too.'

'Especially jealous though,' the ship said through its remote-drone, making a sighing noise.

'Well, yes,' Flere-Imsaho said, 'but definitely disg—'

'The thing to remember, Gurgeh,' the ship interrupted quickly, 'is that their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. In the same way, everyone you meet will be conscious of both their position in society and their relationship to others around them.

'It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of «marriage» to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favours by—'

'Oh, ship, come on!' He laughed. He had done his own research into the Empire, reading its own histories and watching its explanatory recordings. The ship's view of the Empire's customs and institutions sounded biased and unfair and terribly Culture-prim. Flere-Imsaho and the ship remote made a show of looking at each other, then the small library drone flushed grey yellow with resignation, and said in its high voice, 'All right, let's go back to the beginning…'

The Limiting Factor lay in space above Ea, the beautiful blue-white planet Gurgeh had seen for the first time almost two years earlier in the screen-room at Ikroh. On either side of the ship lay an imperial battlecruiser, each twice the length of the Culture craft.

The two warships had met the smaller vessel at the limits of the star clump Ea's system lay in, and the Limiting Factor, already on a slow warp drive rather than its normal hyperspace propulsion — something else the Empire was being kept in the dark about — had stopped. Its eight effector blisters were transparent, showing the three game-boards, module hangar and pool in the waist housings, and the empty spaces in the three long nose emplacements, the weaponry having been removed on the Little Rascal. Nevertheless, the Azadians sent a small craft over to the ship with three officers in it. Two stayed with Gurgeh while the third checked each of the blisters in turn, then took a general look round the entire ship.

Those or other officers stayed on board for the five days it took to get to Ea itself. They were much as Gurgeh had expected, with flat, broad faces and the shaven, almost white skin. They were smaller than he was, he realised when they stood in front of him, but somehow their uniforms made them look much larger. These were the first real uniforms Gurgeh had ever seen, and he felt a strange, dizzying sensation when he saw them; a sense of displacement and foreignness as well as an odd mixture of dread and awe.

Knowing what he did, he wasn't surprised at the way they acted towards him. They seemed to try to ignore him, rarely speaking to him, and never looking him in the eyes when they did; he had never felt quite so dismissed in life.

The officers did appear to be interested in the ship, but not in either Flere-Imsaho — which was keeping well out of their way anyway — or in the ship's remote-drone. Flere-Imsaho had, only minutes before the officers arrived on board, finally and with extreme and voluble reluctance, enclosed itself in the fake carapace of the old drone casing. It had fumed quietly for a few minutes while Gurgeh told it how attractive and valuably antique the ancient, aura-less casing looked, then it had floated quickly off when the officers came aboard.

So much, thought Gurgeh, for its helping with awkward linguistic points and the intricacies of etiquette.

The ship's remote-drone was no better. It followed Gurgeh round, but it was playing dumb, and made a show of bumping into things now and again. Twice Gurgeh had turned round and almost fallen over the slow and clumsy cube. He was very tempted to kick it.

It was left to Gurgeh to try to explain that there was no bridge or flight-deck or control-room that he knew of in the ship, but he got the impression the Azadian officers didn't believe him.

When they arrived over Ea, the officers contacted their battlecruiser and talked too fast for Gurgeh to understand, but the Limiting Factor broke in and started speaking too; there was a heated discussion. Gurgeh looked round for Flere-Imsaho to translate, but it had disappeared again. He listened to the jabbering exchange for some minutes with increasing frustration; he decided to let them argue it out and turned to go and sit down. He stumbled over the remote-drone, which was floating near the floor just behind him; he fell into rather than sat on the couch. The officers looked round at him briefly, and he felt himself blush. The remote- drone drifted hesitantly away before he could aim a foot at it.

So much, he thought, for Flere-Imsaho; so much for Contact's supposedly flawless planning and stupendous cunning. Their juvenile representative didn't even bother to hang around and do its job properly; it preferred to hide, nursing its pathetic self-esteem. Gurgeh knew enough about the way the Empire worked to realise that it wouldn't let such things happen; its people knew what duties and orders meant, and they took their responsibilities seriously, or, if they didn't, they suffered for it.

They did as they were told; they had discipline.

Eventually, after the three officers had talked amongst themselves for a while, and then to their ship again, they left him and went to inspect the module hangar. When they'd gone, Gurgeh used his terminal to ask the ship what they'd been arguing about.

'They wanted to bring some more personnel and equipment over,' the Limiting Factor told him. 'I told them they couldn't. Nothing to worry about. You'd better get your stuff together and go to the module hangar; I'll be heading out of imperial space within the hour.'

Gurgeh turned to head towards his cabin. 'Wouldn't it be terrible,' he said, 'if you forgot to tell Flere-Imsaho you were going, and I had to visit Ea all by myself.' He was only half joking.

'It would be unthinkable,' the ship said.

Gurgeh passed the remote-drone in the corridor, spinning slowly in mid-air and bobbing erratically up and down. 'And is this really necessary?' he asked it.

'Just doing what I'm told,' the drone replied testily.

'Just overdoing it,' Gurgeh muttered, and went to pack his things.

As he packed, a small parcel fell out of a cloak he hadn't worn since he'd left Ikroh; it bounced on the soft floor of the cabin. He picked it up and opened the ribbon-tied packet, wondering who it might be from; anyone of several ladies on the Little Rascal, he imagined.

It was a thin bracelet, a model of a very broad, fully completed Orbital, its inner surface half light and half dark. Bringing it up to his eyes, he could see tiny, barely discernible pinpricks of light on the night-time half; the daylight side showed bright blue sea and scraps of land under minute cloud systems. The whole interior scene shone with its own light, powered by some source inside the narrow band.

Gurgeh slipped it over his hand; it glowed against his wrist. A strange present for somebody on a GSV to give, he thought.

Then he saw the note in the package, picked it out and read, 'Just to remind you, when you're on that planet. Chamlis.'

He frowned at the name, then — distantly at first, but with a growing and annoying sense of shame — remembered the night before he'd left Gevant, two years earlier.

Of course.

Chamlis had given him a present.

He'd forgotten.

'What's that?' Gurgeh said. He sat in the front section of the converted module the Limiting