He took the underground to Celleck, the village where Chamlis Amalk-ney lived by itself, in an old-fashioned and odd approximation of human domesticity, surrounded by wall paintings, antique furniture, inlaid walls, fish-tanks and insect vivaria.
“I’ll find out all I can, Gurgeh,” Chamlis sighed, floating beside him, looking out to the square. “But I can’t guarantee that I can do it without whoever was behind your last visit from Contact finding out about it. They may think you’re interested.”
“Maybe I am,” Gurgeh said. “Maybe I do want to talk to them again, I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ve sent the message to my friends, but—”
He had a sudden, paranoid idea. He turned to Chamlis urgently. “These friends of yours are ships.”
“Yes,” Chamlis said. “Both of them.”
“What are they called?”
“The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read The Instructions.”
“They’re not warships?”
“With names like that? They’re GCUs; what else?”
“Good,” Gurgeh said, relaxing a little, looking out to the square again. “Good. That’s all right.” He took a deep breath.
“Gurgeh, can’t you — please — tell me what’s wrong?” Chamlis’s voice was soft, even sad. “You know it’ll go no further. Let me help. It hurts me to see you like this. If there’s anything I can—”
“Nothing,” Gurgeh said, looking at the machine again. He shook his head. “There’s nothing, nothing else you can do. I’ll let you know if there is.” He started across the room. Chamlis watched him. “I have to go now. I’ll see you again, Chamlis.”
He went down to the underground. He sat in the car, staring at the floor. On about the fourth request, he realised the car was talking to him, asking where he wanted to go. He told it.
He was staring at one of the wall-screens, watching the steady stars, when the terminal beeped.
“Gurgeh? Makil Stra-bey, yet again one more time once more.”
“What?” he snapped, annoyed at the Mind’s glib chumminess.
“That ship just replied with the information you asked for.”
He frowned. “What ship? What information?”
“The Gunboat Diplomat, our game-player. Its location.”
His heart pounded and his throat seemed to close up. “Yes,” he said, struggling to get the word out. “And?”
“Well, it didn’t reply direct; it sent via its home GSV Youthful Indiscretion and got it to confirm its location.”
“Yes, well? Where is it?”
“In the Altabien-North cluster. Sent co-ordinates, though they’re only accurate to—”
“Never mind the co-ordinates!” Gurgeh shouted. “Where is that cluster? How far away is it from here?”
“Hey; calm down. It’s about two and a half millennia away.”
He sat back, closing his eyes. The car started to slow down.
Two thousand five hundred light years. It was, as the urbanely well-travelled people on a GSV would say, a long walk. But close enough — by quite a long way — for a warship to minutely target an effector, throw a sensing field a light-second in diameter across the sky, and pick up the weak but indisputable flicker of coherent HS light coming from a machine small enough to fit into a pocket.
He tried to tell himself it was still no proof, that Mawhrin-Skel might still have been lying, but even as he thought that, he saw something ominous in the fact the warship had not replied direct. It had used its GSV, an even more reliable source of information, to confirm its whereabouts.
“Want the rest of the LOU’s message?” Hub said, “Or are you going to bite my head off again?”
Gurgeh was puzzled. “What rest of the message?” he said. The underground car swung round, slowed further. He could see Ikroh’s transit gallery, hanging under the Plate surface like an upside-down building.
“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” Hub said. “You been communicating with this ship behind my back, Gurgeh? The message is: ‘Nice to hear from you again.’ ”
Three days passed. He couldn’t settle to anything. He tried to read — papers, old books, the material of his own he’d been working on — but on every occasion he found himself reading and re-reading the same piece or page or screen, time and time again, trying hard to take it in but finding his thoughts constantly veering away from the words and diagrams and illustrations in front of him, refusing to absorb anything, going back time and time again to the same treadmill, the same looping, tail-swallowing, eternally pointless round of questioning and regret. Why had he done it? What way out was there?
He tried glanding soothing drugs, but it took so much to have any effect he just felt groggy. He used Sharp Blue and Edge and Focal to force himself to concentrate, but it gave him a jarring feeling at the back of his skull somewhere, and exhausted him. It wasn’t worth it. His brain wanted to worry and fret and there was no point in trying to frustrate it.
He refused all calls. He called Chamlis a couple of times, but never found anything to say. All Chamlis could tell him was that the two Contact ships it knew had both been in touch; each said it had passed on Chamlis’s message to a few other Minds. Both had been surprised Gurgeh had been contacted so quickly. Both would pass on Gurgeh’s request to be told more; neither knew anything else about what was going on.
He heard nothing from Mawhrin-Skel. He asked Hub to find the machine, just to let him know where it was, but Hub couldn’t, which obviously annoyed the Orbital Mind a lot. He had it send the drone team down again and they swept the house once more. Hub left one of the machines there in the house, to monitor continuously for surveillance.
Gurgeh spent a lot of time walking in the forests and mountains around Ikroh, walking and hiking and scrambling twenty or thirty kilometres each day just for the natural soporific of being dead, animal-tired at night.
On the fourth day, he was almost starting to feel that if he didn’t do anything, didn’t talk to anybody or communicate or write, and didn’t stir from the house, nothing would happen. Maybe Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared for ever. Perhaps Contact had come to take it away, or said it could come back to the fold. Maybe it had gone totally crazy and flown off into space; maybe it had taken seriously the old joke about Styglian enumerators, and had gone off to count all the grains of sand on a beach.
It was a fine day. He sat in the broad lower branches of a sunbread tree in the garden at Ikroh, looking out through the canopy of leaves to where a small herd of feyl had emerged from the forest to crop the wineberry bushes at the bottom of the lower lawn. The pale, shy animals, stick-thin and camouflage-skinned, pulled nervously at the low shrubs, their triangular heads jigging and bobbing, jaws working. Gurgeh looked back to the house, just visible through the gently moving leaves of the tree.
He saw a tiny drone, small and grey-white, near one of the windows of the house. He froze. It might not be Mawhrin-Skel, he told himself. It was too far away to be certain. It might be Loash and-all-the-rest. Whatever it was, it was a good forty metres away, and he must be almost invisible sitting here in the tree. He couldn’t be traced; he’d left his terminal back at the house, something he had taken to doing increasingly often recently, even though it was a dangerous, irresponsible thing to do, to be apart from the Hub’s information network, effectively cut off from the rest of the Culture.
He held his breath, sat dead still.
The little machine seemed to hesitate in mid-air, then point in his direction. It came floating straight towards him.