at Chamlis. So did Yay. 'Oh, yes,' Gurgeh said, smiling. He shrugged. 'Why not? See what our betters can come up with. What have I got to lose?' He laughed.
'I love to see you happy,' Yay said, kissing him lightly. She stepped into the elevator; Chamlis followed her. Yay winked at Gurgeh as the door closed. 'My regards to Ren,' she grinned.
Gurgeh stared at the closed door for a moment, then shook his head, smiling to himself. He went back to the lounge, where a couple of the house remote-drones were tidying up; everything seemed back in place, as it should be. He went over to the game-board set between the dark couches, and adjusted one of the Deploy pieces so that it sat in the centre of its starting hexagon, then looked at the couch where Yay had sat after she'd come back from her run. There was a fading patch of dampness there, dark on dark. He put his hand out hesitantly, touched it, sniffed his fingers, then laughed at himself. He took an umbrella and went out to inspect the damage done to the lawn by the aircraft, before returning to the house, where a light in the squat main tower told that Ren was waiting for him.
The elevator dropped two hundred metres through the mountain, then through the bedrock underneath; it slowed to cycle through a rotate-lock and gently lowered itself through the metre of ultradense base material to stop underneath the Orbital Plate in a transit gallery, where a couple of underground cars waited and the outside screens showed sunlight blazing up on to the Plate base. Yay and Chamlis got into a car, told it where they wanted to go, and sat down as it unlocked itself, turned and accelerated away.
'Contact?' Yay said to Chamlis. The floor of the small car hid the sun, and beyond the sidescreens stars shone sharply. The car whizzed by some of the arrays of the vital but generally indecipherably obscure equipment that hung beneath every Plate. 'Did I hear the name of the great benign bogy being mentioned?'
'I suggested Gurgeh might contact Contact,' Chamlis said. It floated to a screen. The screen detached itself, still showing the view outside, and floated up the car wall until the decimetre of space its thickness had occupied in the skin of the vehicle was revealed. Where the screen had pretended to be a window was now a real window; a slab of transparent crystal with hard vacuum and the rest of the universe on the other side. Chamlis looked out at the stars. 'It occurred to me they might have some ideas; something to occupy him. .
'I thought you were wary of Contact?'
'I am, generally, but I know a few of the Minds; I still have some connections… I'd trust them to help, I think.'
'I don't know,' Yay said. 'We're all taking this awful seriously; he'll come out of it. He's got friends. Nothing too terrible's going to happen to him as long as his pals are around.'
'Hmm,' the drone said. The car stopped at one of the elevator tubes serving the village where Charnlis Amalk-ney lived. 'Will we see you in Tronze?' the drone asked.
'No, I've a site conference that evening,' Yay said. 'And then there's a young fellow I saw at the shoot the other day… I've arranged to bump into him that night.' She grinned.
'I see,' Chamlis said. 'Lapsing into predatory mode, eh? Well, enjoy your bumping.'
'I'll try,' Yay laughed. She and the drone bade each other goodnight, then Charnlis went through the car's lock — its ancient, minutely battered casing suddenly bright in the blast of sunlight from underneath — and went straight up the elevator tube, without waiting for a lift. Yay smiled and shook her head at such geriatric precocity, as the car pulled away again.
Ren slept on, half covered by a sheet. Her black hair spilled across the top of the bed. Gurgeh sat at his occasional desk near the balcony windows, looking out at the night. The rain had passed, the clouds thinned and separated, and now the light of the stars and the four Plates on the far, balancing side of the Chiark Orbital — three million kilometres away and with their inner faces in daylight — cast a silvery sheen on the passing clouds and made the dark fjord waters glitter.
He turned on the deskpad, pressed its calibrated margin a few times until he found the relevant publications, then read for a while; papers on game-theory by other respected players, reviews of some of their games, analyses of new games and promising players.
He opened the windows later and stepped out on to the circular balcony, shivering a little as the cool night air touched his nakedness. He'd taken his pocket terminal with him, and braved the cold for a while, talking to the dark trees and the silent fjord, dictating a new paper on old games.
When he went back in, Ren Myglan was still asleep, but breathing quickly and erratically. Intrigued, he went over to her and crouched down by the side of the bed, looking intently at her face as it twitched and contorted in her sleep. Her breath laboured in her throat and down her delicate nose, and her nostrils flared.
Gurgeh squatted like that for some minutes, with an odd expression on his face, somewhere between a sneer and a sad smile, wondering — with a sense of vague frustration, even regret — what sort of nightmares the young woman must be having, to make her quiver and pant and whimper so.
The next two days passed relatively uneventfully. He spent most of the time reading papers by other players and theorists, and finished a paper of his own which he'd started the night Ren Myglan stayed. Ren had left during breakfast the next morning, after an argument; he liked to work during breakfast, she'd wanted to talk. He'd suspected she was just tetchy after not sleeping well.
He caught up on some correspondence. Mostly it was in the form of requests; to visit other worlds, take part in great tournaments, write papers, comment on new games, become a teacher/lecturer/ professor in various educational establishments, be a guest on any one of several GSVs, take on such-and-such a child prodigy… it was a long list.
He turned them all down. It gave him a rather pleasant feeling. There was a communication from a GCU which claimed to have discovered a world on which there was a game based on the precise topography of individual snowflakes; a game which, for that reason, was never played on the same board twice. Gurgeh had never heard of such a game, and could find no mention of it in the usually up-to-date files Contact collated for people like him. He suspected the game was a fake — GCUs were notoriously mischievous — but sent a considered and germain (if also rather ironic) reply, because the joke, if it was a joke, appealed to him.
He watched a gliding competition over the mountains and cliffs on the far side of the fjord.
He turned on the house holoscreen and watched a recently made entertainment he'd heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had expected to despise its preposterousness, but found it quite amusing. He sketched out a glacier game, based on what sort of minerals could be gouged from rocks, what mountains destroyed, rivers dammed, landscapes created and bays blocked if — as in the entertainment — glaciers could liquefy and re-freeze parts of themselves at will. The game was diverting enough, but contained nothing original; he abandoned it after an hour or so.
He spent much of the next day swimming in Ikroh's basement pool; when doing the backstroke, he dictated as well, his pocket terminal tracking up and down the pool with him, just overhead.
In the late afternoon a woman and her young daughter came riding through the forest and stopped off at Ikroh. Neither of them showed any sign of having heard of him; they just happened to be passing. He invited them to stay for a drink, and made them a late lunch; they tethered their tall, panting mounts in the shade at the side of the house, where the drones gave them water. He advised the woman on the most scenic route to take when she and her daughter resumed their journey, and gave the child a piece from a highly ornamented Bataos set she'd admired.
He took dinner on the terrace, the terminal screen open and showing the pages of an ancient barbarian treatise on games. The book — a millennium old when the civilisation had been Contacted, two thousand years earlier — was limited in its appreciation, of course, but Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society's games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul. Besides, barbarian societies had always intrigued him, even before their games had.
The book was interesting. He rested his eyes watching the sun going down, then went back to it as the darkness deepened. The house drones brought him drinks, a heavier jacket, a light snack, as he requested them. He told the house to refuse all incoming calls.
The terrace lights gradually brightened. Chiark's farside shone whitely overhead, coating everything in silver; stars twinkled in a cloudless sky. Gurgeh read on.
The terminal beeped. He looked severely at the camera eye set in one corner of the screen. 'House,' he said,
