"Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape."
Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine for a few seconds, then said slowly, nodding, "Well… that is barbaric."
"Actually it's a later development in the game, and seen as a rather liberal concession by the ruling class, as in theory it allows a poor person to keep up in the bidding with a rich person. Before the introduction of the physical licence option, the latter could always outbid the former."
"Oh." Gurgeh could see the logic, just not the morality.
"Azad is not the sort of place it's easy to think about coldly, Jemau Gurgeh. They have done things the average Culture person would find… unspeakable. A programme of eugenic manipulation has lowered the average male and female intelligence; selective birth-control sterilisation, area starvation, mass deportation and racially-based taxation systems produced the equivalent of genocide, with the result that almost everybody on the home planet is the same colour and build. Their treatment of alien captives, their societies and works is equally—"
"Look, is all this serious?" Gurgeh got up from the seat and walked into the field of the hologram, gazing down at the fabulously complicated game-floor, which appeared to be under his feet but was in fact, he knew, a terrible gulf of space away. "Are you telling me the truth? Does this empire really exist?"
"Very much so, Jemau Gurgeh. If you want to confirm all I've said, I can arrange for special access rights to be granted to you, direct from the GSV s and other Minds who've taken charge of this. You can have all you want on the empire of Azad, from the first sniff of contact to the latest real-time news reports. It's all true."
"And when did you first get that sniff of contact?" Gurgeh said, turning to the drone. "How long have you been sitting on this?"
The drone hesitated. "Not long," it said eventually. "Seventy-three years."
"You people certainly don't rush into things, do you?"
"Only when we've no choice," the drone agreed.
"And how does the empire feel about us?" Gurgeh asked. "Let me guess; you haven't told them all about the Culture."
"Very good, Jemau Gurgeh," the drone said, with what was almost a laugh in its voice. "No, we haven't told them everything. That's something the drone we'd be sending with you would have to keep you straight on; right from the start we've misled the empire about our distribution, numbers, resources, technological level and ultimate intentions… though of course only the relative paucity of advanced societies in the relevant region of the Lesser Cloud has made this possible. The Azadians do not, for example, know that the Culture is based in the main galaxy; they believe we come from the Greater Cloud, and that our numbers are only about twice theirs. They have little inkling of the level of genofixing in Culture humans, or of the sophistication of our machine intelligences; they've never heard of a ship Mind, or seen a GSV.
"They've been trying to find out about us ever since first contact, of course, but without any success. They probably think we have a home planet or something; they themselves are still very much planet-oriented, using planet-forming techniques to create usable ecospheres, or more usually just taking over already occupied globes; ecologically and morally, they're catastrophically bad. The reason they're trying to find out about us is they want to invade us; they want to conquer the Culture. The problem is that, as with all playground-bully mentalities, they're quite profoundly frightened; xenophobic and paranoid at once. We daren't let them know the extent and power of the Culture yet, in case the whole empire self-destructs… such things have happened before, though of course that was long before Contact itself was formed. Our technique's better these days. Still tempting, all the same," the drone said, as though thinking aloud, not talking to him.
"They do," Gurgeh said, "sound fairly…" — he'd been going to say "barbaric', but that didn't seem strong enough — "… animalistic."
"Hmm," the drone said. "Be careful, now; that is how they term the species they subjugate; animals. Of course they are animals, just as you are, just as I am a machine. But they are fully conscious, and they have a society at least as complicated as our own; more so, in some ways. It is pure chance that we've met them when their civilisation looks primitive to us; one less ice age on Eä and it could conceivably have been the other way round."
Gurgeh nodded thoughtfully, and watched the silent aliens move across the game-floor, in the reproduced light of a distant, alien sun.
"But," Worthil added brightly, "it didn't happen that way, so not to worry. Now then," it said, and suddenly they were back in the room at Ikroh, the holoscreen off and the windows clear; Gurgeh blinked in the sudden wash of daylight. "I'm sure you realise there's still a vast amount left to tell you, but you have our proposal now, in its barest outline. I'm not asking you to say «Yes» unequivocally at this stage, but is there any point in my going on, or have you already decided that you definitely don't want to go?"
Gurgeh rubbed his beard, looking out of the window towards the forest above Ikroh. It was too much to take in. If it really was genuine, then Azad was the single most significant game he'd ever encountered in his life… possibly more significant than all the rest put together.
As an ultimate challenge, it excited and appalled him in equal measure; he felt instinctively, almost sexually drawn to it, even now, knowing so little… but he wasn't sure he possessed the self-discipline to study that intensely for two years solid, or that he was capable of holding a mental model of a game so bewilderingly complex in his head. He kept coming back to the fact that the Azadians themselves managed it, but, as the machine said, they were submerged in the game from birth; perhaps it could only be mastered by somebody who'd had their cognitive processes shaped by the game itself…
But five years! All that time; not just away from here, but at least half, probably more, of that stretch spent with no time for keeping abreast of developments in other games, no time to read papers or write them, no time for anything except this one, absurd, obsessive game. He would change; he would be a different person at the end of it; he could not help but change, take on something of the game itself; that would be inevitable. And would he ever catch up again, once he came back? He would be forgotten; he would be away so long the rest of the game-playing Culture would just disregard him; he'd be a historical figure. And when he came back, would he be allowed to talk about it? Or would Contact's seven-decade-long embargo continue? But if he went, he might be able to buy Mawhrin-Skel off. He could make its price his price. Let it back in to SC. Or — it occurred to him there and then — have them silence it, somehow.
A flock of birds flew across the sky, white scraps against the dark greens of the mountain forest; they landed on the garden outside the window, strutting back and forth and pecking at the ground. He turned to the drone again, crossed his arms. "When would you need to know?" he said. He still hadn't decided. He had to stall, find out all he could first.
"It would have to be within the next three or four days. The GSV Little Rascal is heading out in this direction from the middle-galaxy at the moment, and will be leaving for the Clouds within the next hundred days. If you were to miss it, your journey would last a lot longer; your own ship will have to sustain maximum velocity right up to the rendezvous point, even as things stand."
"My own ship?" Gurgeh said.
"You'll need your own craft, firstly to get you to the Little Rascal in time, and then again at the other end, to travel from the GSV's closest approach to the Lesser Cloud into the empire itself."