The Player of Games

'I thought they were pleased with your work,' Chamlis said. Gurgeh was sitting back in his couch, swilling the drink in his glass round and just watching Yay.

'Oh they like me to do all the easy stuff,' Yay said, sounding suddenly tired. 'Stick up a range or two, carve out a couple of lakes… but I'm talking about the overall plan; real radical stuff. All we're doing is building just another next-door Plate. Could be one of a million anywhere in the galaxy. What's the point of that?'

'So people can live on it?' Chamlis suggested, fields rosy.

'People can live anywhere!' Yay said, levering herself up from the couch to look at the drone with her bright green eyes. 'There's no shortage of Plates; I'm talking about art!'

'What did you have in mind?' Gurgeh asked.

'How about,' Yay said, 'magnetic fields under the base material and magnetised islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn't that sound more exciting?'

'More exciting than what?' Gurgeh asked.

'More exciting than this!' Meristinoux leapt up and went over to the window. She tapped the ancient pane. 'Look at that; you might as well be on a planet. Seas and hills and rain. Wouldn't you rather live on a floating island, sailing through the air over the water?'

'What if the islands collide?' Chamlis asked.

'What if they do?' Yay turned to look at the man and the machine. It was getting still darker outside, and the room lights were slowly brightening. She shrugged. 'Anyway; you could make it so they didn't… but don't you think it's a wonderful idea? Why should one old woman and a machine be able to stop me?'

'Well,' Chamlis said, 'I know the Preashipleyl machine, and if it thought your idea was good it wouldn't just ignore it; it's had a lot of experience, and—'

'Yeah,' Yay said, 'too much experience.'

'That isn't possible, young lady,' the drone said.

Yay Meristinoux took a deep breath, and seemed about to argue, but just spread her arms wide and rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. 'We'll see,' she said.

The afternoon, which had been steadily darkening until then, was suddenly lit up on the far side of the fjord by a bright splash of sunlight filtering through the clouds and the easing rain. The room slowly filled with a watery glow, and the house lights dimmed again. Wind moved the tops of the dripping trees. 'Ah,' Yay said, stretching her back and flexing her arms. 'Not to worry.' She inspected the landscape outside critically. 'Hell; I'm going for a run,' she announced. She headed for the door in the corner of the room, pulling off first one boot, then the other, throwing the waistcoat over a chair, and unbuttoning her blouse. 'You'll see.' She wagged a finger at Gurgeh and Chamlis. 'Floating islands; their time has come.'

Chamlis said nothing. Gurgeh looked sceptical. Yay left.

Chamlis went to the window. It watched the girl — down to a pair of shorts now — run out along the path leading down from the house, between the lawns and the forest. She waved once, without looking back, and disappeared into the woods. Chamlis flickered its fields in response, even though Yay couldn't see.

'She's handsome,' it said.

Gurgeh sat back in the couch. 'She makes me feel old.'

'Oh, don't you start feeling sorry for yourself,' Chamlis said, floating back from the window.

Gurgeh looked at the hearth stones. 'Everything seems… grey at the moment, Chamlis. Sometimes I start to think I'm repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing's worth playing for anyway.'

'Gurgeh,' Chamlis said matter-of-factly, and did something it rarely did, actually settling physically into the couch, letting it take its weight. 'Settle up; are we talking about games, or life?'

Gurgeh put his dark-curled head back and laughed.

'Games,' Chamlis went on, 'have been your life. If they're starting to pall, I'd understand you might not be so happy with anything else.'

'Maybe I'm just disillusioned with games,' Gurgeh said, turning a carved game-piece over in his hands. 'I used to think that context didn't matter; a good game was a good game and there was a purity about manipulating rules that translated perfectly from society to society… but now I wonder. Take this; Deploy.' He nodded at the board in front of him. 'This is foreign. Some backwater planet discovered just a few decades ago. They play this there and they bet on it; they make it important. But what do we have to bet with? What would be the point of my wagering Ikroh, say?'

'Yay wouldn't take the bet, certainly,' Chamlis said, amused. 'She thinks it rains too much.'

'But you see? If somebody wanted a house like this they'd already have had one built; if they wanted anything in the house' — Gurgeh gestured round the room- 'they'd have ordered it; they'd have it. With no money, no possessions, a large part of the enjoyment the people who invented this game experienced when they played it just disappears.'

'You call it enjoyment to lose your house, your titles, your estates; your children maybe; to be expected to walk out on to the balcony with a gun and blow your brains out? That's enjoyment? We're well free of that. You want something you can't have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can't provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive.' Gurgeh remained silent, lit by the fire and the soft glow from the room's concealed lighting. 'You called yourself «Morat» when you completed your name, but perhaps you aren't the perfect game-player after all; perhaps you should have called yourself «Shequi»; gambler.'

'You know,' Gurgeh said slowly, his voice hardly louder than the crackling logs in the fire, 'I'm actually slightly afraid of playing this young kid.' He glanced at the drone. 'Really. Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I'm me; I'm one of the best.' He looked quickly, briefly up at the machine again, as though ashamed. 'But every now and again, I do worry about losing; I think, what if there's some kid — especially some kid, somebody younger and just naturally more talented — out there, able to take that away from me. That worries me. The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.'

'You are a throwback,' Chamlis told him. 'The game's the thing. That's the conventional wisdom, isn't it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with.'

Gurgeh nodded slowly. 'So they say. So everybody else believes.'

'But not you?'

'I…' The man seemed to have difficulty finding the right word. 'I… exult when I win. It's better than love, it's better than sex or any glanding; it's the only instant when I feel…' — he shook his head, his mouth tightened '… real,' he said. 'Me. The rest of the time… I feel a bit like that little ex-Special Circumstances drone, Mawhrin-Skel; as though I've had some sort of… birthright taken away from me.'

'Ah, is that the affinity you feel?' Chamlis said coldly, aura to match. 'I wondered what you saw in that appalling machine.'

'Bitterness,' Gurgeh said, sitting back again. 'That's what I see in it. It has novelty value, at least.' He got up and went to the fire, prodding at the logs with the wrought-iron poker and placing another piece of wood on, handling the log awkwardly with heavy tongs.

'This is not a heroic age,' he told the drone, staring at the fire. 'The individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect any more.'

'Contact uses individuals,' Chamlis pointed out. 'It puts people into younger societies who have a dramatic and decisive effect on the fates of entire meta-civilisations. They're usually «mercenaries», not Culture, but they're human, they're people.'

'They're selected and used. Like game-pieces. They don't count.' Gurgeh sounded impatient. He left the tall fireplace, returned to the couch. 'Besides, I'm not one of them.'

'So have yourself stored until a more heroic age does arrive.'

'Huh,' Gurgeh said, sitting again. 'If it ever does. It would seem too much like cheating, anyway.'

The drone Chamlis Amalk-ney listened to the rain and the fire. 'Well,' it said slowly, 'if it's novelty value you want, Contact — never mind SC — are the people to go to.'