The Player of Games c-2

by Iain M. Banks

  The Little Rascal was what Contact termed a throughput GSV; it acted as a kind of marshalling point for humans and material, picking people up and assembling them into crews for the units, LSVs, MSVs and smaller classes of GSVs which it constructed. Other types of large GSVs were accommodation biased, and effectively self-sufficient in human crews for their offspring craft.

  Gurgeh spent some days in the park on top of the vessel, walking through it or flying over it in one of the real-winged, propeller-driven aircraft which were the fashion on the GSVat the time. He even became a proficient enough flyer to enter himself in a race, during which several thousand of the flimsy planes flew figures-of-eight over the top of the Vehicle, through one of the cavernous accessways that ran the length of the craft, out the other end and underneath.

  The Limiting Factor, housed in one of the Mainbays just off a Way, encouraged him in this, saying it provided Gurgeh with much needed relaxation. Gurgeh accepted none of the offers to play people at games, but did take up a trickle from the flood of invitations to parties, events and other gatherings; he spent some days and nights off the Limiting Factor, and the old warship was in turn host to a select number of young female guests.

  Most of the time, though, Gurgeh spent alone inside the ship, poring over tables of figures and the records of past games, rubbing the biotechs in his hands, and striding over the three great boards, gaze flickering over the lay of land and pieces, his mind racing, searching for patterns and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses. He spent twenty days or so taking a crash course in Eächic, the imperial language. He had originally envisaged speaking Marain as usual and using an interpreter, but he suspected there were subtle links between the language and the game, and for that reason alone learned the tongue. The ship told him later it would have been desirable anyway; the Culture was trying to keep even the intricacies of its language secret from the Empire of Azad.

  Not long after he'd arrived, he'd been sent a drone, a machine even smaller than Mawhrin-Skel. It was circular in plan and composed of separate revolving sections; rotating rings around a stationary core. It said it was a library drone with diplomatic training and it was called Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ep-handra Lorgin Estral. Gurgeh said hello and made sure his terminal was switched on. As soon as the machine had gone again he sent a message to Chamlis Amalk-ney, along with a recording of his meeting with the tiny drone. Chamlis signalled back later that the device appeared to be what it claimed; one of a fairly new model of library drone. Not the old-timer they might have expected, but probably harmless enough. Chamlis had never heard of an offensive version of that type.

  The old drone closed with some Gevant gossip. Yay Meristinoux was talking about leaving Chiark to pursue her landscaping career elsewhere. She'd developed an interest in things called volcanoes; had Gurgeh heard of those? Hafflis was changing sex again. Professor Boruelal sent her regards but no more messages until he wrote back. Mawhrin-Skel still thankfully absent. Hub was piqued it appeared to have lost the ghastly machine; technically the wretch was still within the Orbital Mind's jurisdiction and it would have to account for it somehow at the next inventory and census.

  For a few days after that first meeting with Flere-Imsaho, Gurgeh wondered what it was that he found disturbing about the tiny library drone. Flere-Imsaho was almost pathetically small — it could have hidden inside a pair of cupped hands — but there was something about it which made Gurgeh feel oddly uncomfortable in its presence.

  He worked it out, or rather he woke up knowing, one morning, after a nightmare in which he'd been trapped inside a metal sphere and rolled around in some bizarre and cruel game… Flere-Imsaho, with its spinning outer sections and its disc-like white casing, looked rather like a hidden-piece wafer from a Possession game.

  Gurgeh lounged in an envelopingly comfortable chair set underneath some lushly canopied trees and watched people skating in the rink below. He was dressed only in a waistcoat and shorts, but there was a leakfield between the observation area and the icerink itself, keeping the air around Gurgeh warm. He divided his time between his terminal screen, from which he was memorising some probability equations, and the rink, where a few people he knew were sweeping about the sculpted pastel surfaces.

  "Good day, Jernau Gurgeh," said the drone Flere-Imsaho in its squeaky little voice, settling delicately on the plump arm of the chair. As usual, its aura field was yellow-green; mellow approachability.

  "Hello," Gurgeh said, glancing at it briefly. "And what have you been up to?" He touched the terminal screen to inspect another set of tables and equations.

  "Oh, well, actually I've been studying some of the species of birds which live here within the interior of the vessel. I do find birds interesting, don't you?"

  "Hmm." Gurgeh nodded vaguely, watching the tables change. "What I haven't been able to work out," he said, "is when you go for a walk in the topside park you find droppings, as you'd expect to, but inside here everything's spotless. Does the GSV have drones to clean up after the birds, or what? I know I could just ask it, but I wanted to work it out for myself. There must be some answer."

  "Oh that's easy," the little machine said. "You just use birds and trees with a symbiotic relationship; the birds soil only in the bolls of certain trees, otherwise the fruit they depend on doesn't grow."

  Gurgeh looked down at the drone. "I see," he said coldly. "Well, I was growing tired of the problem anyway." He turned back to the equations, adjusting the floating terminal so that its screen hid Flere-Imsaho from his sight. The drone stayed silent, went a confused medley of contrite purple and do-not-disturb silver, and flew away.

  Flere-Imsaho kept itself to itself most of the time, only calling on Gurgeh once a day or so, and not staying on board the Limiting Factor. Gurgeh was glad of that; the young machine — it said it was only thirteen — could be trying at times. The ship reassured Gurgeh that the little drone would be up to the task of preventing social gaffes and keeping him informed on the finer linguistic points by the time they arrived at the Empire, and — it told Gurgeh later — reassured Flere-Imsaho that the man didn't really despise it.

  There was more news from Gevant. Gurgeh had actually written back to a few people, or recorded messages for them, now that he felt he was finally coming to grips with Azad and could spare the time. He and Chamlis corresponded every fifty days or so, though Gurgeh found he had little to say, and most of the news came from the other direction. Hafflis was fully changed; broody but not pregnant. Chamlis was compiling a definitive history of some primitive planet it had once visited. Professor Boruelal was taking a half-year sabbatical, living in a mountain retreat on Osmolon Plate, terminal-less. Olz Hap the wunderkind had come out of her shell; she was already lecturing on games at the university and had become a brilliant regular on the best party circuits. She had spent some days staying at lkroh, just to be better able to relate to Gurgeh; she'd gone on record as claiming he was the best player in the Culture. Hap's analysis of the famous Stricken game at Hafflis's that night was the best-received first work anybody could remember.

  Yay sent to say she was fed up with Chiark; she was off, away; she'd had offers from other Plate building collectives and she was going to take up at least one of them, just to show what she could do. She spent most of the communication explaining her theories on artificial volcanoes for Plates, describing in gesticulatory detail how you could lens sunlight to focus it on the undersurface of the Plate, melting the rock on the other side, or just use generators to provide the heat. She enclosed some film of eruptions on planets, with explanations of the effects and notes on how they could be improved.

  Gurgeh thought the idea of sharing a world with volcanoes made floating islands look like not such a bad idea after all.

  "Have you seen this!" Flere-Imsaho yelped one day, floating quickly up to him in the pool's airstream cabinet, where Gurgeh was drying off. Behind the little machine, attached to it by a thin strand of field still coloured yellow-green (but speckled with angry white
), there floated a large, rather old-fashioned and complicated-looking drone.

  Gurgeh squinted at it. "What about it?"

  "I've got to wear the damn thing!" Flere-Imsaho wailed. The field strand joining it to the other drone flicked, and the old-looking drone's casing hinged open. The old body-shell appeared to be completely empty, but as Gurgeh — puzzled — looked closer, he saw that in the centre of the casing there was a little mesh cradle, just the right size to hold Flere-Imsaho.

  "Oh," Gurgeh said, and turned away, rubbing the water from his armpits, and grinning.

  "They didn't tell me this when they offered me the job!" Flere-Imsaho protested, slamming the body-shell shut again. "They say it's because the Empire isn't supposed to know how small us drones are! Why couldn't they just have got a big drone then? Why saddle me with this … this …"

  "Fancy dress?" Gurgeh suggested, rubbing a hand through his hair and stepping out of the airstream.

  "Fancy?" the library drone screamed. "Fancy? Dowdy's what it is; rags! Worse than that, I'm supposed to make a «humming» noise and produce lots of static electricity, just to convince these barbarian dingbats we can't build drones properly!" The small machine's voice rose to a screech. "A «humming» noise! I ask you!"

  "Perhaps you could ask for a transfer," Gurgeh said calmly, slipping into his robe.

  "Oh yes," Flere-Imsaho said bitterly, with a trace of what might almost have been sarcasm, "and get all the shit jobs from now on because I haven't been cooperative." It lashed a field out and thumped the antique casing. "I'm stuck with this heap of junk."

  "Drone," Gurgeh said, "I can't tell you how sorry I am."

  The Limiting Factor nosed its way out of the Mainbay. Two Lifters nudged the craft round until it faced down the twenty kilometre length of corridor. The ship and its little tugs eased their way forward, exiting from the body of the GSV at its nose. Other ships and craft and pieces of equipment moved inside the shell of air surrounding the Little Rascal; GCUs and Superlifters, planes and hot-air balloons, vacuum dirigibles and gliders, people floating in modules or cars or harnesses.

  Some watched the old warship go. The Lifter tugs dropped away.

  The ship went up, passing level upon level of bay doors, blank hull, hanging gardens, and whole jumbled arrays of opened accommodation sections, where people walked or danced or sat eating or just gazing out, watching the fuss of airborne activity, or played sports and games. Some waved. Gurgeh watched on the lounge screen, and even recognised a few people he'd known, flying past in an aircraft, shouting goodbye.

  Officially, he was going on a solo cruising holiday before travelling to the Pardethillisian Games. He had already dropped hints he might forgo the tournament. Some of the theoretical and news journals had been interested enough in his sudden departure from Chiark — and the equally abrupt cessation of his publications — to have representatives on the Little Rascal interview him. In a strategy he'd already agreed with Contact, he'd given the impression he was growing bored with games in general, and that the journey — and his entry in the great tournament — were attempts to restore his flagging interest.

  People seemed to have fallen for this.

  The ship cleared the top of the GSV, rising beside the cloud-speckled topside park. It rose on into the thinner air above, met with the Superlifter Prime Mover, and together they gradually dropped back and to the side of the GSV's inner atmospheric envelope. They went slowly through the many layers of fields; the bumpfield, the insulating, the sensory, the signalling and receptor, the energy and traction, the hullfield, the outer sensory and, finally, the horizon, until they were free in hyperspace once more. After a few hours of deceleration to speeds the Limiting Factor's engines could cope with, the disarmed warship was on its own, and the Prime Mover was powering away again, chasing its GSV.

  "… so you'd be well advised to stay celibate; they'll find it difficult enough taking a male seriously even if you do look bizarre to them, but if you tried to form any sexual relationships they'd almost certainly take it as a gross insult."

  "Any more good news, drone?"

  "Don't say anything about sexual alterations either. They do know about drug-glands, even if they don't know about their precise effects, but they don't know about most of the major physical improvements. I mean, you can mention blister-free callousing and that sort of thing, that isn't important; but even the gross re-plumbing involved in your own genital design would cause something of a furore if they found out about it."

  "Really," Gurgeh said. He was sitting in the Limiting Factor's main lounge. Flere-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 Eä, 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 Eä'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 Eä 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 Eä, 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.