He looked around the room. Early morning sunlight flooded the landscape outside Ikroh and lanced through the lounge, streaming in from the fjord-side windows, across the room and out through the windows opening on to the uphill lawns. Birds filled the cool, still air with song.
There was nothing else to take, nothing more to pack. He'd sent the house drones down with a chest of clothes the night before, but now wondered why he'd bothered; he wouldn't need many changes on the warship, and when they got to the GSV he could order anything he wanted. He'd packed a few personal ornaments, and had the house copy his stock of still and moving pictures to the Limiting Factor's memory. The last thing he'd done was burn the letter he'd written to leave with Boruelal, and stir the ashes in the fireplace until they were fine as dust. Nothing more remained.
"Ready?" Worthil said.
"Yes," he said. His head was clear and no longer sore, but he felt tired, and knew he'd sleep well that night. "Is it here yet?"
"On its way."
They were waiting for Mawhrin-Skel. It had been told its appeal had been re-opened; as a favour to Gurgeh, it was likely to be given a role in Special Circumstances. It had acknowledged, but not appeared. It would meet them when Gurgeh left.
Gurgeh sat down to wait.
A few minutes before he was due to leave, the tiny drone appeared, floating down the chimney to hover over the empty fire grate.
"Mawhrin-Skel," Worthil said. "Just in time."
"I believe I'm being recalled to duty," the smaller drone said.
"You are indeed," Worthil said heartily.
"Good. I'm sure my friend, the LOU Gunboat Diplomat, will follow my future career with great interest."
"Of course," Worthil said. "I would hope it would."
Mawhrin-Skel's fields glowed orange-red. It floated over to Gurgeh, its grey body shining brightly, fields all but extinguished in the bright sunshine. "Thank you," it said to him. "I wish you a good journey, and much luck."
Gurgeh sat on the couch and looked at the tiny machine. He thought of several things to say, but said none of them. Instead, he stood up, straightened his jacket, looked at Worthil and said, "I think I'm ready to go now."
Mawhrin-Skel watched him leave the room, but did not try to follow.
He boarded the Limiting Factor.
Worthil showed him the three great game-boards, set in three of the effector bulges round the vessel's waist, pointed out the module hangar housed in the fourth blister and the swimming pool which the dockyard had installed in the fifth because they couldn't think of anything else at such short notice and they didn't like to leave the blister just empty. The three effectors in the nose had been left in but disconnected, to be removed once the Limiting Factor docked with the Little Rascal. Worthil guided him round the living quarters, which seemed perfectly acceptable.
Surprisingly quickly, it was time to leave, and Gurgeh said goodbye to the Contact drone. He sat in the accommodation section, watching the small drone float down the corridor to the warship's lock, and then told the screen in front of him to switch to exterior view. The temporary corridor joining the ship to Ikroh's transit gallery retracted, and the long tube of the ship's innard-hull slotted back into place from outside.
Then, with no notice or noise at all, the view of the Plate base withdrew, shrinking. As the ship pulled away, the Plate merged into the other three on that side of the Orbital, to become part of a single thick line, and then that line dwindled rapidly to a point, and the star of Chiark's system flashed brilliantly from behind it, before the star too quickly dulled and shrank, and Gurgeh realised he was on his way to the Empire of Azad.
2. Imperium
Still with me?
Little textual note for you here (bear with me).
Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I'd better explain that bit of the translation.
Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it's brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.
So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he'd think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!
How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?
…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates — or apices — with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.
(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)
Anyway, enough of that.
Let's see now: we've finally got old Gurgeh off Gevant Plate, Chiark Orbital, and we have him fizzing away at quite a clip in a stripped down military ship heading for a rendezvous with the Cloudbound General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal.
Points To Ponder:
Does Gurgeh really understand what he's done, and what might happen to him? Has it even begun to occur to him that he might have been tricked? And does he really know what he's let himself in for?
Of course not!
That's part of the fun!
Gurgeh had been on cruises many times in his life and — on that longest one, thirty years earlier — travelled some thousands of light years from Chiark, but within a few hours of his departure aboard the Limiting Factor he was feeling the gap of light years the still accelerating ship was putting between him and his home with an immediacy he had not anticipated. He spent some time watching the screen, where Chiark's star shone yellow-white and gradually diminishing, but nevertheless he felt further away from it than even the screen showed.
He had never felt the falseness of such representations before, but sitting there, in the old accommodation social area, looking at the rectangle of screen on the wall, he couldn't help feeling like an actor, or a component in the ship's circuitry: like part of, and therefore as false as, the pretend-view of Real Space hung in front of him.
Maybe it was the silence. He had expected noise, for some reason. The Limiting Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing acceleration; the craft's velocity was hurtling towards its maximum with a rapidity which, when displayed in numbers on the wall-screen, numbed Gurgeh's brain. He didn't even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as hyperspace? At least he had heard of that, even if he didn't know much about it… whatever; for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.