“It’s all very well for you, but I’m being kept in a monitoring chamber all day! A monitoring chamber; I ask you! These meatbrains are trying to probe me! Beautiful weather outside and a major migratory season just starting, but I’m locked up with a shower of heinous sentientophiles trying to violate me!”
“Sorry, drone, but what can I do? You know they’re just looking for an excuse to throw me out. If you want, I’ll make a request you’re allowed to stay here in the module instead, but I doubt they’ll let you.”
“I don’t have to do this you know, Jernau Gurgeh; I can do what I like. If I wanted to I could just refuse to go. I’m not yours — or theirs — to be ordered around.”
“I know that but they don’t. Of course you can do as you please… whatever you see fit.”
Gurgeh turned away from the drone and back to the module-screen, where he was studying some classic ten games. Flere-Imsaho was grey with frustration. The normal green-yellow aura it displayed when out of its disguise had been growing increasingly pale over the past few days. Gurgeh almost felt sorry for it.
“Well…” Flere-Imsaho whined — and Gurgeh got the impression that had it had a real mouth it would have spluttered, too — “it’s just not good enough!” And with that rather lame remark, the drone whirled out of the lounge.
Gurgeh wondered just how badly the drone felt about being imprisoned all day. It had occurred to him recently that the machine might even have been instructed to stop him from getting too far in the games. If so, then refusing to be detained would be an acceptable way of doing it; Contact could justifiably claim that asking the drone to give up its freedom was an unreasonable request, and one it had every right to turn down. Gurgeh shrugged to himself; there was nothing he could do about it.
He switched to another old game.
Ten days later it was over, and Gurgeh was through to the fourth round; he had only one more opponent to beat and then he would be going to Echronedal for the final matches, not as an observer or guest, but as a contestant.
He’d built up the lead he’d hoped for in the lesser games, and in the main boards had not even tried to mount any great offensives. He’d waited for the others to come to him, and they had, but he was counting on them not being so willing to cooperate with each other as the players in the first match. These were important people; they had their own careers to think about, and however loyal they might be to the Empire, they had to look after their own interests as well. Only the priest had relatively little to lose, and so might be prepared to sacrifice himself for the imperial good and whatever not game-keyed post the Church could find for him.
In the game outside the game, Gurgeh thought the Games Bureau had made a mistake in pitching him against the first ten people to qualify. It appeared to make sense because it gave him no respite, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need any, and the tactic meant that his opponents were from different branches of the imperial tree, and thus harder to tempt with departmental inducements, as well as being less likely to know each other’s game-styles.
He’d also discovered something called inter-service rivalry — he’d found records of some old games that didn’t seem to make sense until the ship described this odd phenomenon — and made special efforts to get the Admiralty men and the colonel at each other’s throats. They’d needed little prompting.
It was a workmanlike match; uninspiring but functional, and he simply played better than any of the others. His winning margin wasn’t great, but it was a win. One of the Fleet vice-admirals came second. Tounse, the priest, finished last.
Again, the Bureau’s supposedly random scheduling gave him as little time as possible between matches, but Gurgeh was secretly pleased at this; it meant he could keep the same high pitch of concentration going from day to day, and it gave him no time to worry or stop too long to think. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, a part of him was sitting back as stunned and amazed as anybody else was at how well he was doing. If that part ever came forward, ever took centre-stage and was allowed to say, “Now wait a minute here…” he suspected his nerve would fail, the spell would break, and the walk that was a fall would become a plunge into defeat. As the adage said; falling never killed anybody; it was when you stopped…
Anyway, he was awash with a bitter-sweet flood of new and enhanced emotions; the terror of risk and possible defeat, the sheer exultation of the gamble that paid off and the campaign which triumphed; the horror of suddenly seeing a weakness in his position which could lose him the game; the surge of relief when nobody else noticed and there was time to plug the gap; the pulse of furious, gloating glee when he saw such a weakness in another’s game; and the sheer unbridled joy of victory.
And outside, the additional satisfaction of knowing that he was doing so much better than anybody had expected. All their predictions — the Culture’s, the Empire’s, the ship’s, the drone’s — had been wrong; apparently strong fortifications which had fallen to him. Even his own expectations had been exceeded, and if he worried at all, he worried that some subconscious mechanism would now let him relax a little, having proved so much, come so far, defeated so many. He didn’t want that; he wanted to keep going; he was enjoying all this. He wanted to find the measure of himself through this infinitely exploitable, indefinitely demanding game, and he didn’t want some weak, frightened part of himself to let him down. He didn’t want the Empire to use some unfair way of getting rid of him, either. But even that was only half a worry. Let them try to kill him; he had a reckless feeling of invincibility now. Just don’t let them try to disqualify him on some technicality. That would hurt.
But there was another way they might try to stop him. He knew that in the single game they would be likely to use the physical option. It was how they’d think; this Culture man would not accept the bet, he’d be too frightened. Even if he did accept, and fought on, the terror of knowing what might happen to him would paralyse him, devour and defeat him from inside.
He talked it over with the ship. The Limiting Factor had consulted with the Little Rascal — tens of millennia distant, in the greater Cloud — and felt able to guarantee his survival. The old warship would stay outside the Empire but power up to a maximum velocity, minimum radius holding circle as soon as the game started. If Gurgeh was forced to bet against a physical option, and lost, the ship would drive in at full speed for Eä. It was certain it could evade any imperial craft on the way, get to Eä within a few hours and use its heavy duty displacer to snap Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho off the place without even slowing down.
“What’s this?” Gurgeh looked dubiously at the tiny spherical pellet Flere-Imsaho had produced.
“Beacon and one-off communicator,” the drone told him. It dropped the tiny pellet into his hand, where it rolled around. “You put it under your tongue; it’ll implant; you’ll never know it’s there. The ship homes in on that as it comes in, if it can’t find you any other way. When you feel a series of sharp pains under your tongue — four stabs in two seconds — you’ve got two seconds to assume a foetal position before everything within a three-quarter metre radius of that pellet gets slung aboard the ship; so get your head between knees and don’t swing your arms about.”
Gurgeh looked at the pellet. It was about two millimetres across. “Are you serious, drone?”