The Player of Games

'Jernau Gurgeh.'

'Hello, drone. Bird-watching?'

'Flying fish. Thought I'd start with the oceans.'

'Going to take a look at the fire?'

'Not yet. I hear you're playing Lo Tenyos Krowo next.'

'In four days. They say he's very good.'

'He is. He's also one of the people who know all about the Culture.'

Gurgeh glared at the machine. 'What?'

'There are never fewer than eight people in the Empire who know where the Culture comes from, roughly what size it is, and our level of technological development.'

'Really,' Gurgeh said through his teeth.

'For the last two hundred years the Emperor, the chief of Naval Intelligence and the six star marshals have been appraised of the power and extent of the Culture. They don't want anybody else to know; their choice, not ours. They're frightened; it's understandable.'

'Drone,' Gurgeh said loudly, 'has it occurred to you I might be getting a little sick of being treated like a child all the time? Why the hell couldn't you just tell me that?'

'Jernau, we only wanted to make things easier for you. Why complicate things by telling you that a few people did know when there was no real likelihood of your ever coming into any but the most fleeting contact with any of them? Frankly, you'd never have been told at all if you hadn't got to the stage of playing against one of these people; no need for you to know. We're just trying to help you, really. I thought I'd tell you in case Krowo said something during the course of the game which puzzled you and upset your concentration.'

'Well I wish you cared as much about my temper as you do about my concentration,' Gurgeh said, getting up and going to lean on the parapet at the end of the garden.

'I'm very sorry,' the drone said, without a trace of contrition.

Gurgeb waved one band. 'Never mind. I take it Krowo's in Naval Intelligence then, not the Office of Cultural Exchange?'

'Correct. Officially his post does not exist. But everybody in court knows the highest placed player who's the least bit devious is offered the job.'

'I thought Cultural Exchange was a funny place for somebody that good.'

'Well, Krowo's had the intelligence job for three Great Years, and some people reckon he could have been Emperor if he'd really wanted, but he prefers to stay where he is. He'll be a difficult opponent.'

'So everybody keeps telling me,' Gurgeh said, then frowned and looked towards the fading light on the horizon. 'What's that?' he said. 'Did you hear that?'

It came again; a long, haunting, plaintive cry from far away, almost drowned by the quiet rustling of the cinderbud canopy. The faint sound rose in a still quiet but chilling crescendo; a scream that died away slowly. Gurgeh shivered for the second time that evening.

'What is that?' he whispered.

The drone sidled closer. 'What? Those calls?' it said.

'Yes!' Gurgeh said, listening to the faint sound as it came and went on the soft, warm wind, wavering out of the darkness over the rustling heads of the giant cinderbuds.

'Animals,' Flere-Imsaho said, dimly silhouetted against the last fractions of light in the western sky. 'Big carnivores called troshae, mostly. Six-legged. You saw some from the Emperor's personal menagerie on the night of the ball. Remember?'

Gurgeh nodded, still listening, fascinated, to the cries of the distant beasts. 'How do they escape the Incandescence?'

'Troshae run ahead, almost up to the fire-line, during the previous Great Month. The ones you're listening to couldn't run fast enough to escape even if they started now. They've been trapped and penned so they can be hunted for sport. That's why they're howling like that; they know the fire's coming and they want to get away.'

Gurgeh said nothing, head turned to catch the faint sound of the doomed animals.

Flere-Imsaho waited for a minute or so, but the man did not move, or ask anything else. The machine backed off, to return to Gurgeh's rooms. Just before it went through the door into the casue, it looked back at the man standing clutching the stone parapet at the far end of the little garden. He was crouched a little, head forward, motionless. It was quite dark now, and ordinary human eyes could not have picked out the quiet figure.

The drone hesitated, then disappeared into the fortress.

Gurgeh hadn't thought Azad was the sort of game you could have an off-day in, certainly not an off-twenty- days. Discovering that it was came as a great disappointment.

He'd studied many of Lo Tenyos Krowo's past games and had looked forward to playing the Intelligence chief. The apex's style was exciting, far more flamboyant — if occasionally more erratic — than that of any of the other top-flight players. It ought to have been a challenging, enjoyable match, but it wasn't. It was hateful, embarrassing, ignominious. Gurgeh annihilated Krowo. The burly, at first rather jovial and unconcerned-seeming apex made some awful, simple errors, and some that resulted from genuinely inspired, even brilliant play, but which in the end were just as disastrous. Sometimes, Gurgeh knew, you came up against somebody who, just by the way they played, caused you a lot more problems than they ought to, and sometimes, too, you found a game in which everything went badly, no matter how hard you tried, and regardless of your most piercing insights and incisive moves. The chief of Naval Intelligence seemed to have both problems at once. Gurgeh's game-style might have been designed to cause Krowo problems, and the apex's luck was almost non-existent.

Gurgeh felt real sympathy for Krowo, who was obviously more upset at the manner than the fact of the defeat. They were both glad when it was over.

Flere-Imsaho watched the man play during the closing stages of the match. It read each move as they appeared on the screen, and what it saw was something less like a game and more like an operation. Gurgeh the game-player, the morat, was taking his opponent apart. The apex was playing badly, true, but Gurgeh was off-handedly brilliant anyway. There was a callousness in his play that was new, too; something the drone had been half expecting but was still surprised to see so soon and so completely. It read the signs the man 's body and face held; annoyance, pity, anger, sorrow… and it read the play too, and saw nothing remotely similar. All it read was the ordered fury of a player working the boards and the pieces, the cards and the rules, like the familiar controls of some omnipotent machine.

Another change, it thought. The man had altered, slipped deeper into the game and the society. It had been warned this might happen. One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eachic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behaviour, but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.

Marain was a synthetic language, designed to be phonetically and philosophically as expressive as the pan- human speech apparatus and the pan-human brain would allow. Flere-Imsaho suspected it was over-rated, but smarter minds than it had dreamt Marain up, and ten millennia later even the most rarefied and superior Minds still thought highly of the language, so it supposed it had to defer to their superior understanding. One of the Minds who'd briefed it had even compared Marain to Azad. That really was fanciful, but Flere-Imsaho had taken the point behind the hyperbole.

Eachic was an ordinary, evolved language, with rooted assumptions which substituted sentimentality for compassion and aggression for cooperation. A comparatively innocent and sensitive soul like Gurgeh was bound to pick up some of its underlying ethical framework if he spoke it all the time.

So now the man played like one of those carnivores he'd been listening to, stalking across the board, setting up traps and diversions and killing grounds; pouncing, pursuing, bringing down, consuming, absorbing… Flere- Imsaho shifted inside its disguise as though uncomfortable, then switched the screen off.

The day after Gurgeh's game with Krowo ended, he received a long letter from Chamlis Amalk-ney. He sat in