's swept away rather a lot of mature cinderbuds, but I dare say the fire'll cope. There was no attempt to kill Nicosar the other night; that was just a ruse to get the whole castle and the game under the control of guards who'd do anything the Emperor told them.' 'Why, though?' Gurgeh said tiredly, kicking at a blister of board metal.
'Why
did Nicosar order them to do all that?' 'He told them it was the only way to defeat the Culture and save him. They didn't know he was doomed too; they thought he had some way of saving himself. Maybe they'd have done it regardless, even knowing that. They were very highly trained. Anyway; they obeyed their orders.' The machine made a chuckling noise. 'Most of them, anyway. A few left the shelter they were supposed to blow up intact, and got some people into it with them. So you're not unique; there are some other survivors. Mostly servants; Nicosar made sure an the important people were in here. The ship's drones are with the survivors. We're keeping them locked up until you're safely away. They'll have enough rations to last until they're rescued.' 'Go on.' 'You sure you can handle an this stuff right now?' 'Just tell me
why
,' Gurgeh said, sighing. 'You've been used, Jernau Gurgeh,' the drone said matter-of-factly. 'The truth is, you
were
playing for the Culture, and Nicosar
was
playing for the Empire. I personally told the Emperor the night before the start of the last match that you really were our champion; if you won, we were coming in; we'd smash the Empire and impose our own order. If he won, we'd keep out for as long as he was Emperor and for the next ten Great Years anyway. 'That's why Nicosar did all he did. He wasn't just a sore loser; he'd lost his Empire. He had nothing else to live for, so why not go in a blaze of glory?' 'Was all that true?' Gurgeh asked. 'Would we really have taken over?' 'Gurgeh,' Flere-Imsaho said, 'I have no idea. Not in my brief; no need to know. It doesn't matter; he
believed
it was true.' 'Slightly unfair pressure,' Gurgeh said, smiling without any humour at the machine. 'Telling somebody they're playing for such high stakes, just the night before the game.' 'Gamespersonship.' 'So why didn't he tell me what we were playing for?' 'Guess.' 'The bet would have been off and we came in all guns blazing anyway.' 'Correct' Gurgeh shook his head, brushed a little soot off one jacket sleeve, smudging it. 'You really thought I'd win?' he asked the drone. 'Against Nicosar? You thought that, even before I got here?' 'Before you left Chiark, Gurgeh. As soon as you showed any interest in leaving. SC's been looking for somebody like you for quite a while. The Empire's been ripe to fall for decades; it needed a big push, but it could always go. Coming in "all guns blazing" as you put it is almost never the right approach; Azad - the game itself - had to be discredited. It was what had held the Empire together all these years the linchpin; but that made it the most vulnerable point, too.' The drone made a show of looking around, at the mangled debris of the hall. 'Everything worked out a little more dramatically than we'd expected, I must admit, but it looks like all the analyses of your abilities and Nicosar's weaknesses were just about right. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are
very
smart machines.' 'They knew I'd win?' Gurgeh asked disconsolately, chin in hand. 'You can't
know
something like that, Gurgeh. But they must have thought you stood a good chance. I had some of it explained to me in my briefing… they thought you were just about the best game-player in the Culture, and if you got interested and involved then there wasn't much any Azad player could do to stop you, no matter how long they'd spent playing the game. You've spent all your life learning games; there can't be a rule, move, concept or idea in Azad you haven't encountered ten times before in other games; it just brought them all together. These guys never stood a chance. All you needed was somebody to keep an eye on you and give you the occasional nudge in the right direction at the appropriate times.' The drone dipped briefly; a little bow. 'Yours truly!' 'All my life,' Gurgeh said quietly, looking past the drone to the dull, dead landscape outside the tall windows. 'Sixty years… and how long has the Culture known about the Empire?' 'About - ah! You're thinking we shaped you somehow. Not so. If we did that sort of thing we wouldn't need outsider "mercenaries" like Shohobohaum Za to do the
really
dirty work.' 'Za?' Gurgeh said. 'Not his real name; not Culture-born at all. Yes, he's what you'd call a "mercenary". Just as well, too, or the secret police would have shot you outside that tent. Remember timid little me nipping out the way? I'd just shot one of your assailants with my CREW; on high X-ray so it wouldn't register on the cameras. Za broke the neck of another one; he'd heard there might be some trouble. He'll probably be leading a guerrilla army on Eä in a couple of days from now, I imagine.' The drone gave a little wobble in the air. 'Let's see… what else can I tell you? Oh yes; the
Limiting Factor
isn't as innocent as it looks, either. While we were on the
Little Rascal
we did take out the old effectors, but only so we could put in new ones. Just two, in two of the three nose blisters. We put the empty one on clear and holos of empty blisters in the other two.' 'But I was
in
all three!' Gurgeh protested. 'No, you were in the same one three times. The ship just rotated the corridors housing, fiddled with the AG and had a couple of drones change things round a bit while you were going from one to the other, or rather down one corridor up another and back to the same blister. All for nothing, mind you, but if we
had
needed some heavy weaponry it would have been there. It's forward planning that makes one feel safe, don't you think?' 'Oh, yes,' Gurgeh said, sighing. He got to his feet and went back out on to the balcony, where the black soot-snow fell steadily and quietly. 'Talking about the
Limiting Factor
,' Flere-Imsaho said cheerily, 'the old reprobate is overhead now. Module's on its way. We'll have you aboard in a minute or two; you can have a nice wash and change out of those dirty clothes. Are you ready to leave?' Gurgeh looked down at his feet, scuffed some of the soot and ash across the flagstones. 'What is there to pack?' 'Not a lot, indeed. I was too busy keeping you from baking to go in search of your belongings. Anyway, the only thing you seem to be fond of is that tatty old jacket. Did you get that bracelet thing? I left it on your chest when I went exploring.' 'Yes, thanks,' Gurgeh said, gazing out at the flat black desolation stretching to the dark horizon. He looked up; the module burst through the deep brown overcast, trailing strands of vapour. 'Thanks,' Gurgeh said again, as the module swooped, dropping almost to ground level then racing across the scorched desert towards the castle, drawing a plume of ash and soot off the ground in its wake as it slowed and started to turn and the noise of its supersonic plummet cracked round the forlorn fortress like too-late thunder. 'Thanks for everything.'
The craft swung its rear towards the castle, floating up until it was level with the edge of the balcony parapet. Its rear door opened, made a flat ramp. The man walked across the balcony, stepped up on to the parapet, and into the cool interior of the machine. The drone followed and the door closed. The module blasted suddenly away, sucking a great swirling fountain of ash and soot after it as it climbed, flashing through the dark clouds above the castle like some solid lightning bolt, while its thunder broke across the plain and the castle and the low hills behind. Ash settled again; the soot continued its soft and gentle fall. The module returned a few minutes later, to pick up the ship's drones and the remains of the alien effector equipment, then left the castle for the last time, and rose again to its waiting ship.
A little while later, the small band of dazed survivors - released by the two ship's drones, and mostly servants, soldiers, concubines and clerks - stumbled into the day-time night and the soot-like-snow, to take stock of their temporary exile in the once great fortress, and claim their vanished land.
4. The Passed Pawn
Lazy-matching, dull-siding, the ship went slowly through one end of a tensor field three million kilometres long, over a wall of monocrystal, then started to float down through the gradually thickening atmosphere of the Plate. From five hundred kilometres up, the two slabs of land and sea, the one beyond them of raw rock under deep cloud, and the one beyond that of still forming land, showed clear in the night air. Beyond its crystal wall, the farthest Plate was very new; dark and void to normal sight, the ship could see on it the illuminating radars of the landscaping machines as they moved their cargoes of rock in from space. Even as the vessel watched, a huge asteroid was detonated in the darkness, producing a slow fountain of red-glowing molten rock which fell slowly to the new surface, or was caught and held, moulded in the vacuum before it was allowed to settle. The Plate beside it was dark too, and near the bottom of its squared off funnel a blanket of clouds covered it completely as its rawness was weathered. The other two Plates were much older, and twinkled with lights. Chiark was at aphelion; Gevant and Osmolon were white on black; islands of snow on dark seas. The old warship slowly submerged itself in the atmosphere, floating down the blade-flat slope of the Plate wall to where the real air began, then set out over the ocean for the land. A seaship, a liner on that ocean and bright with lights, blasted its horns and set off fireworks as the
Limiting Factor
went over, a kilometre up. The ship saluted too, using its effectors to produce artificial auroras; roaring, shifting folds of light in the clear, still air above it. Then the two ships sailed on into the night. It had been an uneventful journey back. The man Gurgeh had wanted to be stored at once, saying he didn't want to be awake during the journey back; he wanted sleep, rest, a period of oblivion. The ship had insisted he think it over first, even though it had the equipment ready. After ten days it had relented and the man, who'd become increasingly morose during that time, went thankfully into a dreamless, low metabolism sleep. He hadn't played a single game of any description during those ten days, hardly said a word, couldn't even bother to get dressed, and spent most of his time just sitting staring at walls. The drone had agreed that putting him to sleep for the journey was probably the kindest thing they could do. They'd crossed the Lesser Cloud and met with the Range class GSV
So Much For Subtlety
, which was heading back for the main galaxy. The inward journey had taken longer than the outward, but there'd been no hurry. The ship had left the GSV near the higher reaches of a galactic limb and cut down and across, past stars, dustfields and nebulae, where the hydrogen migrated and the suns formed and in the ship's domain of unreal space the Holes were pillars of energy, from fabric to Grid. It had woken the man up slowly, two days out from his home. He still sat and stared at the walls; he didn't play any games, catch up on any news, or even deal with his mail. At his request, it hadn't signalled ahead to any of his friends, just sent one permission-to-approach burst to Chiark Hub. It dropped a few hundred metres and followed the line of the fjord, slipping silently between the snow-covered mountains, its sleek hull reflecting a little blue-grey light as it floated over the dark, still water. A few people on yachts or in nearby houses saw the big craft as it cruised quietly by, and watched it manoeuvre its bulk delicately between bank and bank, water and patchy cloud.
Ikroh was dark and unlit, caught in the star-shadow of the three hundred and fifty metre length of silent craft above it. Gurgeh took a last look round the cabin he'd been sleeping in - fitfully - for the last couple of ship nights, then walked slowly down the corridor to the module blister. Flere-Imsaho followed him with one small bag, wishing the man would change out of that horrible jacket. It saw him into the module and came down with him. The lawn in front of the dark house was pure white and untouched. The module lowered to within a centimetre of it, then opened its rear door. Gurgeh stepped out and down. The air was fragrant and sharp; a tangible clarity. His feet made cramping, creaking noises in the snow. He turned back to the lit interior of the module. Flere-Imsaho gave him his bag. He looked at the small machine. 'Goodbye,' he said. 'Goodbye,' Jernau Gurgeh. I don't expect we shall ever meet again.' 'I suppose not.' He stepped back as the door started to swing closed and the craft began to rise very slowly, then he took a couple of quick steps backwards until he could just see the drone over the rising lip of the door, and shouted, 'One thing; when Nicosar fired that gun, and the ray came off the mirror-field and hit him; was that coincidence, or did you aim it?' He thought it wasn't going to answer him, but just before the door closed and the wedge of light thrown over it disappeared with the rising craft, he heard the drone say: 'I am not going to tell you.' He stood and watched the module float back to the waiting ship. It was taken inside, the blister closed, and the
Limiting Factor
went black, its hull a perfect shadow, darker than the night. A pattern of lights came on along its length, spelling 'Farewell' in Marain. Then it started to move, rising noiselessly upwards. Gurgeh watched it until the still-shown lights were just a set of moving stars, and fast receding in a sky of ghostly clouds, then he looked down at the faintly blue-grey snow. When he looked up again, the ship had gone. He stood for a while, as though waiting. After a time he turned and tramped across the white lawn to the house. He went in through the windows. The house was warm, and he shivered suddenly in his cool clothes for a second, then suddenly the lights went on. 'Boo!' Yay Meristinoux leapt out from behind a couch by the fire. Chamlis Amalk-ney appeared from the kitchen with a tray. 'Hello, Jernau. I hope you don't mind…' Gurgeh's pale, pinched face broke into a smile. He put his bag down and looked at them both: Yay, fresh-faced and grinning, leaping over the couch; and Chamlis, fields orange-red, setting the tray down on the table before the banked fire. Yay thudded into him, arms round him, hugging him, laughing. She drew back. 'Gurgeh!' 'Yay, hello,' he said, dropping his bag and hugging her. 'How
are
you?' she asked, squeezing him. 'Are you all right? We annoyed Hub until it told us you were definitely coming, but you've been asleep all this time, haven't you? You didn't even read my letters.' Gurgeh looked away. 'No. I've got them, but I haven't…' he shook his head, looked down. 'I'm sorry.' 'Never mind.' Yay patted his shoulder. She kept one arm round him and took him to the couch. He sat, looking at them both. Chamlis broke up the damp sawdust banking on the fire, releasing the flames beneath. Yay spread her arms, showing off short skirt and waistcoat. 'Changed, haven't I?' Gurgeh nodded. Yay looked as well and handsome as ever, and androgynous. 'Just changing back,' she said. 'Another few months and I'll be back where I started. Ah, Gurgeh, you should have seen me as a man; I was dashing!' 'He was unbearable,' Chamlis said, pouring some mulled wine from a pot-bellied jug. Yay threw herself on to the couch beside Gurgeh, hugging him again and making a growling noise in her throat. Chamlis handed them gently steaming goblets of wine. Gurgeh drank gratefully. 'I didn't expect to see you,' he told Yay. 'I thought you'd gone away.' 'I went away.' Yay nodded, gulping her wine. 'I came back. Last summer. Chiark's getting another Plate-pair; I put in some plans… and now I'm team coordinator for farside.' 'Congratulations. Floating islands?' Yay looked blank for a second, then laughed into her goblet. 'No floating islands, Gurgeh.' 'Plenty of volcanoes, though,' Chamlis said sniffily, sucking a thread of wine from a thimble-sized container. 'Perhaps one little one,' Yay nodded. Her hair was longer than he remembered; blue-black. Still as curly. She punched him gently on the shoulder. 'It's good to see you again, Gurgeh.' He squeezed her hand, looked at Chamlis. 'Good to be back,' he said, then fell silent, staring at the burning logs in the fireplace. 'We're all glad you're back, Gurgeh,' Chamlis said after a while. 'But if you don't mind my saying so, you don't look too good. We heard you were in storage for the last couple of years, but there's something else…. What happened out there? We've heard all sorts of reports. Do you want to talk about it?' Gurgeh hesitated, gazing at the leaping flames consuming the jumbled logs in the fire. He put his glass down and started to explain.
He told them all that happened, from the first few days aboard the
Limiting Factor
to the last few days, again on the ship, as it powered out of the disintegrating Empire of Azad. Chamlis was quiet, and its fields changed slowly through many colours. Yay grew slowly more concerned-looking; she shook her head frequently, gasped several times, and looked ill twice. In between, she kept the fire stocked with logs.
Gurgeh sipped his lukewarm wine. 'So… I slept, all the way back, until two days out. And now it all seems… I don't know; deep-frozen. Not fresh, but… not decayed yet. Not gone.' He swilled the wine around in his goblet. His shoulders shook with a half-hearted laugh. 'Oh well.' He drained his glass. Chamlis lifted the jug from the ashes at the front of the fire and refilled Gurgeh's goblet with the hot wine. 'Jernau, I can't tell you how sorry I am; this was all my fault. If I hadn't-' 'No,' Gurgeh said. 'Not your fault. I got myself into it. You did warn me. Don't ever say that; don't ever think it was anybody's responsibility but mine.' He got up suddenly and walked to the fjord-side windows, looking down the slope of snow-covered lawn to the trees and the black water, and over it to the mountains and the scattered lights of the houses on the far shore. 'You know,' he said, as though talking to his own reflection in the glass, 'I asked the ship yesterday exactly what they did do about the Empire in the end; how they went in to sort it out. It said they didn't even bother. Fell apart all on its own.' He thought of Hamin and Monenine and Inclate and At-sen and Bermoiya and Za and Olos and Krowo and the girl whose name he'd forgotten… He shook his head at his image in the glass. 'Anyway; it's over.' He turned back to Yay and Chamlis and the warm room. 'What's the gossip here?' So they told him about Hafflis's twins, both talking now, and Boruelal leaving to go GSV-ing for a few years, and Olz Hap - breaker of not a few young hearts - being more or less acclaimed/embarrassed/forced into Boruelal's old post, and Yay fathering a child a year back - he'd get to meet mother and child next year probably, when they came for an extended visit - and one of Shuro's pals being killed in a combat game two years back, and Ren Myglan becoming a man, and Chamlis still hard at work on the reference text for its pet planet, and Tronze Festival the year before last ending in disaster and chaos after some fireworks blew up in the lake and swamped half the cliffside terraces; two people dead, brains splattered over lumps of stonework; hundreds injured. Last year's hadn't been half so exciting. Gurgeh was listening to all this as he wandered round the room, reacquainting himself with it. Nothing much seemed to have changed. 'What a lot I've miss-' he began, then noticed the little wooden plaque on the wall, and the object mounted on it. He reached out, touched it, took it down from the wall. 'Ah,' Chamlis said, making what was almost a coughing noise. 'I hope you don't mind…. I mean I hope you don't think that's too… irreverent, or tasteless. I just thought…' Gurgeh smiled sadly, touching the lifeless surfaces of the body that had once been Mawhrin-Skel. He turned back to Yay and Chamlis, walking over to the old drone. 'Not at all, but I don't want it. Do you?' 'Yes, please.' Gurgeh presented the heavy little trophy to Chamlis, who went red with pleasure. 'You vindictive old horror,' Yay snorted. 'This means a great deal to me,' Chamlis said primly, holding the plaque close to its casing. Gurgeh put his glass back on the tray. A log collapsed in the fire, showering sparks up. Gurgeh crouched and poked at the remaining logs. He yawned. Yay and the drone exchanged looks, then Yay reached out and tapped Gurgeh with one foot. 'Come on, Jernau; you're tired; Chamlis has to head back home and make sure its new fishes haven't eaten each other. Is it all right if I stay here?' Gurgeh looked, surprised, at her smiling face, and nodded.
When Chamlis left, Yay put her head on Gurgeh's shoulder and said she'd missed him a lot, and five years was a long time, and he looked a lot more cuddleable than when he'd gone away, and… if he wanted… if he wasn't too tired… She used her mouth, and on her forming body Gurgeh traced slow movements, rediscovering sensations he'd almost forgotten; stroking her gold-dark skin, caressing the odd, almost comic unbuddings of her now concaving genitals, making her laugh, laughing with her, and - in the long moment of climax - with her then too, still one their every tactile cell surging to a single pulse, as though alight.
Still he didn't sleep, and in the night got up out of the tousled bed. He went to the windows and opened them. The cold night air spilled in. He shivered, pulled on the trous, jacket and shoes. Yay moved and made a small noise. He closed the windows and went back to the bed, crouching down in the darkness beside her. He pulled the covers over her exposed back and shoulder, and moved his hand very gently through her curls. She snored once and stirred, then breathed quietly on. He crossed to the windows and went quickly outside, closing them silently behind him. He stood on the snow-covered balcony, gazing at the dark trees descending in uneven rows to the glittering black fjord. The mountains on the far side shone faintly, and above them in the crisp night dim areas of light moved on the darkness, occluding star-fields and the farside Plates. The clouds drifted slowly, and down at lkroh there was no wind. Gurgeh looked up and saw, amongst the clouds, the Clouds, their ancient light hardly wavering in the cold, calm air. He watched his breath go out before him, like a damp smoke between him and those distant stars, and shoved his chilled hands into the jacket pockets for warmth. One touched something softer than the snow, and he brought it out; a little dust. He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.
… No, not quite the end. There's still me. I know I've been naughty, not revealing my identity, but then, maybe you've guessed; and who am I to deprive you of the satisfaction of working it out for yourself? Who am I, indeed? Yes, I was there, all the time. Well, more or less all the time. I watched, I listened, I thought and sensed and waited, and did as I was told (or asked, to maintain the proprieties). I was there all right, in person or in the shape of one of my representatives, my little spies. To be honest; I don't know whether I'd have liked old Gurgeh to have found out the truth or not; still undecided on that one, I must confess. I - we - left it to chance, in the end. For example; just supposing Chiark Hub had told our hero the exact shape of the cavity in the husk that had been Mawhrin-Skel, or Gurgeh had somehow opened that lifeless casing and seen for himself… would he have thought that little, disk-shaped hole a mere coincidence? Or would he have started to suspect? We'll never know; if you're reading this he's long dead; had his appointment with the displacement drone and been zapped to the very livid heart of the system, corpse blasted to plasma in the vast erupting core of Chiark's sun, his sundered atoms rising and falling in the raging fluid thermals of the mighty star, each pulverised particle migrating over the millennia to that planet-swallowing surface of blinding, storm-swept fire, to boil off there, and so add their own little parcels of meaningless illumination to the encompassing night… Ah well, getting a bit flowery there. Still; an old drone should be allowed such indulgences, now and again, don't you think? Let me recapitulate. This is a true story. I was there. When I wasn't, and when I didn't know exactly what was going on - inside Gurgeh's mind, for example - I admit that I have not hesitated to make it up. But it's still a true story. Would I lie to you? As ever,