He breakfasted alone on the terrace, watching a fleet of sailboats cut down the narrow fjord, bright sails in a fresh breeze. His right hand hurt a little as he held his bowl and cup; he'd come close to drawing blood when he'd crushed the Possession wafer at the end of the Stricken game.
He dressed in a long coat, trous and short kilt, and went on a long walk, down to the shore of the fjord and then along it, towards the sea coast and the windswept dunes where Hassease lay, the house he'd been born in, where a few of his extended family still lived. He tramped along the coast path towards the house, through the blasted, twisted shapes of wind-misshapen trees. The grass made sighing noises around him, and seabirds cried. The breeze was cold and freshening under ragged clouds. Out to sea, beyond Hassease village, where the weather was coming from, he could see tall veils of rain under a dark front of storm-clouds. He drew his coat tighter about him and hurried towards the distant silhouette of the sprawling, ramshackle house, thinking he should have taken an underground car. The wind whipped up sand from the distant beach and threw it inland; he blinked, eyes watering.
"Gurgeh."
The voice was quite loud; louder than the sound of sighing grass and wind-troubled tree branches. He shielded his eyes, looked to one side. "Gurgeh," the voice said again. He peered into the shade of a stunted, slanting tree.
"Mawhrin-Skel? Is that you?"
"The same," the small drone said, floating forward over the path.
Gurgeh looked out to sea. He started down the path to the house again, but the drone did not follow him. "Well," he told it, looking back from a few paces away, "I must keep going. I'll get wet if I—"
"No," Mawhrin-Skel said. "Don't go. I have to talk to you. This is important."
"Then tell me as I walk," he said, suddenly annoyed. He strode away. The drone flashed round in front of him, at face level, so that he had to stop or he'd have bumped into it.
"It's about the game; Stricken; last night and this morning."
"I believe I already said thank you," he told the machine. He looked beyond it. The leading edge of the squall was hitting the far end of the village harbour beyond Hassease. The dark clouds were almost above him, casting a great shadow.
"And I believe I said you might be able to help me one day."
"Oh," Gurgeh said, with an expression more sneer than smile. "And what am I supposed to be able to do for you?"
"Help me," Mawhrin-Skel said quietly, voice almost lost in the noise of the wind. "Help me to get back into Contact."
"Don't be absurd," Gurgeh said, and put out one hand to swipe the machine out of his path. He forced his way past it.
The next thing he knew he'd been shoved down into the grass at the path-side, as though shoulder-charged by someone invisible. He stared up in amazement at the tiny machine floating above him, while his hands felt the damp ground under him and the grass hissed on each side.
"You little—" he said, trying to stand up. He was shoved back down again, and sat there incredulous, simply unbelieving. No machine had ever used force on him. It was unheard of. He tried to rise again, a shout of anger and frustration forming in his throat.
He went limp. The shout died in his mouth.
He felt himself flop back into the grass.
He lay there, looking up into the dark clouds overhead. He could move his eyes. Nothing else.
He remembered the missile shoot and the immobility the suit had imposed on him when it had been hit once too often. This was worse.
This was paralysis. He could do nothing.
He worried about his breathing stopping, his heart stopping, his tongue blocking his throat, his bowels relaxing.
Mawhrin-Skel floated into his field of view. "Listen to me, Jernau Gurgeh." Some cold drops of rain started to patter into the grass and on to his face. "Listen to me…. You shall help me. I have our entire conversation, your every word and gesture from this morning, recorded. If you don't help me, I'll release that recording. Everyone will know you cheated in the game against Olz Hap." The machine paused. "Do you understand, Jernau Gurgeh? Have I made myself clear? Do you realise what I am saying? There is a name — an old name — for what I am doing, in case you haven't already guessed. It is called blackmail."
The machine was mad. Anybody could make up anything they wanted; sound, moving pictures, smell, touch… there were machines that did just that. You could order them from a store and effectively paint whatever pictures — still or moving — you wanted, and with sufficient time and patience you could make it look as realistic as the real thing, recorded with an ordinary camera. You could simply make up any film sequence you wanted.
Some people used such machines just for fun or revenge, making up stories where appalling or just funny things happened to their enemies or their friends. Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible; in a society like the Culture, where next to nothing was forbidden, and both money and individual power had virtually ceased to exist, it was doubly irrelevant.
The machine really must be mad. Gurgeh wondered if it intended to kill him. He turned the idea over in his mind, trying to believe it could happen.
"I know what's going through your mind, Gurgeh," the drone went on. "You're thinking that I can't prove it; I could have made it up; nobody will believe me. Well, wrong. I had a real-time link with a friend of mine; an SC Mind sympathetic to my cause, who's always known I would have made a perfectly good operative and has worked on my appeal. What passed between us this morning is recorded in perfect detail in a Mind of unimpeachable moral credentials, and at a level of perceived fidelity unapproachable with the sort of facilities generally available.
"What I have on you could not have been falsified, Gurgeh. If you don't believe me, ask your friend Amalk-ney. It'll confirm all I say. It may be stupid, and ignorant too, but it ought to know where to find out the truth."
Rain struck Gurgeh's helpless, relaxed face. His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.
The drone's small body splashed and dripped above him as the drops grew larger and fell harder. "You're wondering what I want from you?" the drone said. He tried to move his eyes to say "no', just to annoy it, but it didn't seem to notice. "Help," it said. "I need your help; I need you to speak for me. I need you to go to Contact and add your voice to those demanding my return to active duty." The machine darted down towards his face; he felt his coat collar pulled. His head and upper torso were lifted with a jerk from the damp ground until he stared helplessly at the grey-blue casing of the small machine. Pocket-size, he thought, wishing he could blink, and glad of the rain because he could not. Pocket-size; it would fit into one of the big pockets in this coat.
He wanted to laugh.
"Don't you understand what they've done to me, man?" the machine said, shaking him. "I've been castrated, spayed, paralysed! How you feel now; helpless, knowing the limbs are there but unable to make them work! Like that, but knowing that they aren't there! Can you understand that? Can you? Did you know that in our history people used to lose whole limbs, for ever? Do you remember your social history, little Jernau Gurgeh? Eh?" It shook him. He felt and heard his teeth rattle. "Do you remember seeing cripples, from before arms and legs just grew back? Back then, humans lost limbs — blown off or cut off or amputated — but still thought they had them, still thought they could feel them; "ghost limbs" they called them. Those unreal arms and legs could itch and they could ache but they could not be used; can you imagine? Can you imagine that, Culture man with your genofixed regrowth and your over-designed heart and your doctored glands and clot-filtered brain and flawless teeth and perfect immune system? Can you?"