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, “are you going deaf?”
“Please forgive the over-ride,” a rather officious and unapologetic voice Gurgeh did not recognise said from the screen. “Am I talking to Chiark-Gevantsa Jernau Morat Gurgeh dam Hassease?”
Gurgeh stared dubiously at the screen eye. He hadn’t heard his full name pronounced for years. “Yes.”
“My name is Loash Armasco-Iap Wu-Handrahen Xato Koum.”
Gurgeh raised one eyebrow. “Well, that should be easy enough to remember.”
“Might I interrupt you, sir?”
“You already have. What do you want?”
“To talk with you. Despite my over-ride, this does not constitute an emergency, but I can only talk to you directly this evening. I am here representing the Contact Section, at the request of Dastaveb Chamlis Amalk-ney Ep-Handra Thedreiskre Ostlehoorp. May I approach you?”
“Providing you can stay off the full names, yes,” Gurgeh said.
“I shall be there directly.”
Gurgeh snapped the screen shut. He tapped the pen-like terminal on the edge of the wooden table and looked out over the dark fjord, watching the dim lights of the few houses on the far shore.
He heard a roaring noise in the sky, and looked up to see a farside-lit vapour-trail overhead, steeply angled and pointing to the slope uphill from Ikroh. There was a muffled bang over the forest above the house, and a noise like a sudden gust of wind, then, zooming round the side of the house, came a small drone, its fields bright blue and striped yellow.
It drifted over towards Gurgeh. The machine was about the same size as Mawhrin-Skel; it could, Gurgeh thought, have sat comfortably in the rectangular sandwich plate on the table. Its gunmetal casing looked a little more complicated and knobbly than Mawhrin-Skel’s.
“Good evening,” Gurgeh said as the small machine cleared the terrace wall.
It settled down on the table, by the sandwich plate. “Good evening, Morat Gurgeh.”
“Contact, eh?” Gurgeh said, putting his terminal into a pocket in his robe. “That was quick. I was only talking to Chamlis the night before last.”
“I happened to be in the volume,” the machine explained in its clipped voice, “in transit — between the GCU Flexible Demeanour and the GSV Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence, aboard the (D)ROU Zealot. As the nearest Contact operative, I was the obvious choice to visit you. However, as I say, I can only stay for a short time.”
“Oh, what a pity,” Gurgeh said.
“Yes; you have such a charming Orbital here. Perhaps some other time.”
“Well, I hope it hasn’t been a wasted journey for you, Loash… I wasn’t really expecting an audience with a Contact operative. My friend Chamlis just thought Contact might… I don’t know; have something interesting which wasn’t in general circulation. I expected nothing at all, or just information. Might I ask just what you’re doing here?” He leant forward, putting both elbows on the table, leaning over the small machine. There was one sandwich left on the plate just in front of the drone. Gurgeh took it and ate, munching and looking at the machine.
“Certainly. I am here to ascertain just how open to suggestions you are. Contact might be able to find you something which would interest you.”
“A game?”
“I have been given to understand it is connected with a game.”
“That does not mean you have to play one with me,” Gurgeh said, brushing his hands free of crumbs over the plate. A few crumbs flew towards the drone, as he’d hoped they might, but it fielded each one, flicking them neatly to the centre of the plate in front of it.