He watched the snow-white birds peck on the lawn for a while. He wondered whether he ought to mention Mawhrin-Skel now. Part of him wanted to, just to get it over with, just in case they would say Yes immediately and he could stop worrying about the machine's threat (and start worrying about that insanely complicated game). But he knew he mustn't. Wisdom is patience, as the saying said. Keep that back; if he was going to go (though of course he wouldn't, couldn't, it was madness even to think of going), then make them think he had nothing he wanted in return; let it all be arranged and then make his condition clear… if Mawhrin-Skel waited that long before getting pushy.
"All right," he said to the Contact drone. "I'm not saying I will go, but I will think about it. Tell me more about Azad."
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.
There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.
A terminal was safety.
So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks.
He sat, a couple of days after the drone Worthil's visit, on a small stone bench near the tree-line a few kilometres from Ikroh. He was breathing hard from the climb up the path. It was a bright, sunny day and the earth smelled sweet. He used the terminal to take a few photographs of the view from the little clearing. There was a rusting piece of ironware beside the bench; a present from an old lover he'd almost forgotten about. He took a few photographs of that, too. Then the terminal beeped.
"House here, Gurgeh. You said to give you the choice on Yay's calls. She says this is moderately urgent."
He hadn't been accepting calls from Yay. She'd tried to get in touch several times over the last few days. He shrugged. "Go ahead," he said, leaving the terminal to float in mid-air in front of him.
The screen unrolled to reveal Yay's smiling face. "Ah, the recluse. How are you, Gurgeh?"
"I'm all right."
Yay peered forward at her own screen. "What is that you're sitting beside?"
Gurgeh looked at the piece of ironware by the side of the bench. "That's a cannon," he told her.
"That's what I thought."
"It was a present from a lady friend," Gurgeh explained. "She was very keen on forging and casting. She graduated from pokers and fire grates to cannons. She thought I might find it amusing to fire large metal spheres at the fjord."
"I see."
"You need a fast-burning powder to make it work, though, and I never did get round to acquiring any."
"Just as well; the thing would probably have exploded and blown your brains out."
"That did occur to me as well."
"Good for you." Yay's smile widened. "Hey, guess what?"
"What?"
"I'm going on a cruise; I persuaded Shuro he needs his horizons broadened. You remember Shuro; at the shoot?"
"Oh. Yes, I remember. When do you go?"
"I've gone. We just undocked from Tronze port; the clipper Screw Loose. This is the last chance I had to call you real-time. The delay'll mean letters in future."
"Ah." He wished he hadn't accepted this call, too, now. "How long are you going for?"
"A month or two." Yay's bright, smiling face crinkled. "We'll see. Shuro might get tired of me before then. Kid's mostly into other men, but I'm trying to persuade him otherwise. Sorry I couldn't say goodbye before I left, but it's not for long; I'll s—"
The terminal screen went blank. The screen snapped back into the casing as it fell to the ground and lay, silent and dead, on the tree-needled ground of the clearing. Gurgeh stared at the terminal. He leant forward and picked it up. Some needles and bits of grass had been caught in the screen as it rolled back into the casing. He pulled them out. The machine was lifeless; the little tell-tale light on the base was off.
"Well. Jernau Gurgeh?" Mawhrin-Skel said, floating in from the side of the clearing.
He clutched the terminal with both hands. He stood up, staring at the drone as it sidled through the air, bright in the sunlight. He made himself relax, putting the terminal in a jacket pocket and sitting down, legs crossed on the bench. "Well what, Mawhrin-Skel?
"A decision." The machine floated level with his face. Its fields were formal blue. "Will you speak for me?"
"What if I do and nothing happens?
"You'll just have to try harder. They'll listen, if you're persuasive enough."
"But if you're wrong, and they don't?"
"Then I'd have to think about whether to release your little entertainment or not; it would be fun, certainly… but I might save it, in case you could be useful to me in some other way; one never knows."
"No, indeed."
"I saw you had a visitor the other day."
"I thought you might have noticed."
"Looked like a Contact drone."
"It was."
"I'd like to pretend I knew what it said to you, but once you went into the house, I had to stop eavesdropping. Something about travelling, I believe I heard you say?"
"A cruise, of sorts."
"Is that all?
"No."
"Hmm. My guess was they might want you to join Contact, become a Referer, one of their planners; something like that. Not so?"
Gurgeh shook his head. The drone wobbled from side to side in the air, a gesture Gurgeh was not sure he understood. "I see. And have you mentioned me yet?"
"No."
"I think you ought to don't you?"
"I don't know whether I'm going to do what they ask. I haven't decided yet."
"Why not? What are they asking you to do? Can it compare to the shame—"
"I'll do what I want to do," he told it, standing up. "I might as well, after all, drone, mightn't I? Even if l can persuade Contact to take you back, you and your friend Gunboat Diplomat would still have the recording; what's to prevent you doing all this again?"
"Ah, so you know its name. I wondered what you and Chiark Hub were up to. Well, Gurgeh; just ask yourself this: what else could I possibly want from you? This is all I want; to be allowed to be what I was meant to be. When I am restored to that state, I'll have all I could possibly desire. There would be nothing else you could possibly have any control over. I want to fight, Gurgeh; that's what I was designed for; to use skill and cunning and force to win battles for our dear, beloved Culture. I'm not interested in controlling others, or in making the strategic decisions; that sort of power doesn't interest me. The only destiny I want to control is my own."
"Fine words," Gurgeh said.
He took the dead terminal out of his pocket, turned it over in his hands. Mawhrin-Skel plucked the terminal out of his hands from a couple of metres away, held it underneath its casing, and folded it neatly in half. It bent it again, into quarters; the pen-shaped machine snapped and broke. Mawhrin-Skel crumpled the remains into a little jagged ball.