"Then I'll take my chances with the empire. Give me a mild-mannered drone; positively nothing armed, nothing… target-oriented."
"I really do strongly advise—"
"Drone," Gurgeh said, "to play this game properly I'll need to feel as much as possible like one of the locals, with the same vulnerability and worries. I don't want your device bodyguarding me. There won't be any point in my going if I know I don't have to take the game as seriously as everybody else."
The drone said nothing for some time. "Well, if you're sure," it said eventually, sounding unhappy.
"I am."
"Very well. If you insist." The drone made a sighing sound. "I think that settles everything. The ship ought to be here in a—"
"There is a condition," Gurgeh said.
"A… condition?" the drone said. Its fields became briefly visible, a glittering mixture of blue and brown and grey.
"There is a drone here, called Mawhrin-Skel," Gurgeh said.
"Yes," Worthil said carefully. "I was briefed that that device lives here now. What about it?"
"It was exiled from Special Circumstances; thrown out. We've become… friends since it came here. I promised if I ever had any influence with Contact, I'd do what I could to help it. I'm afraid I can only play Azad on condition that the drone's returned to SC."
Worthil said nothing for a moment. "That was rather a foolish promise to have made, Mr Gurgeh."
"I admit I didn't ever think I would be in a position to have to fulfil it. But I am, so I have to make that a condition."
"You don't want to take this machine with you, do you?" Worthil sounded puzzled.
"No!" he said. "I just promised I'd try to get it back into service."
"Uh-huh. Well, I'm not really in a position to make that sort of deal, Jernau Gurgeh. That machine was civilianised because it was dangerous and refused to undergo reconstruction therapy; its case is not something that I can decide on. It's a matter for the admissions board concerned."
"All the same; I have to insist."
Worthil made a sighing noise, lifted the spherical container it had placed on the seat and seemed to study its blank surface. "I'll do what I can," it said, a trace of annoyance in its tone, "but I can't promise anything. Admissions and appeal boards hate being leant on; they go terribly moralistic."
"I need my obligation to Mawhrin-Skel discharged somehow," Gurgeh said quietly. "I can't leave here with it able to claim I didn't try to help it."
The Contact drone seemed not to hear. Then it said, "Hmm. Well, we'll see what we can do."
The underground car flew across the base of the world, silent and swift.
"To Gurgeh; a great game-player, a great man!" Hafflis stood on the parapet at one end of the terrace, the kilometre drop behind him, a bottle in one hand, a fuming drug-bowl in the other. The stone table was crowded with people who'd come to wish Gurgeh goodbye. It had been announced that he was leaving tomorrow morning, to journey to the Clouds on the GSV Little Rascal, to be one of the Culture's representatives at the Pardethillisian Games, the great ludic convocation held every twenty-two years or so by the Meritocracy Pardethillisi, in the Lesser Cloud.
Gurgeh had, indeed, been invited to this tournament, as he had been invited to the Games before that, just as he was to several thousand competitions and convocations of various sizes and complexions every year, either within the Culture or outside it. He'd refused that invitation as he refused them all, but the story now was that he'd changed his mind and would go there and play for the Culture. The next Games were to be held in three and a half years, which made the need to leave at such short notice somewhat tricky to explain, but Contact had done a little creative timetabling and some bare-faced lying and made it appear to the casual inquirer that only the Little Rascal could get Gurgeh there in time for the lengthy formal registration and qualifying period required.
"Cheers!" Hafilis put his head back and the bottle to his lips. Everybody round the great table joined in, drinking from a dozen different types of bowl, glass, goblet and tankard. Hafflis rocked further and further back on his heels as he drained the bottle; a few people shouted out warnings or threw bits of food at him; he just had time to put the bottle down and smack his wine-wet lips before he overbalanced and disappeared over the edge of the parapet.
"Oops," came his muffled voice. Two of his younger children, sitting playing three-cups with a thoroughly mystified Styglian enumerator, went to the parapet and dragged their drunken parent back over from the safety field. He tumbled on to the terrace and staggered back to his seat, laughing.
Gurgeh sat between Professor Boruelal and one of his old flames; Vossle Chu, the woman whose hobbies had in the past included iron-foundry. She had crossed from Rombree, on Chiark's farside from Gevant, to come and see Gurgeh off. There were at least ten of his former lovers amongst the crowd squeezed around the table. He wondered fuzzily what the significance might be that out of that ten, six had chosen to change sex and become — and remain — men over the past few years.
Gurgeh, along with everybody else, was getting drunk, as was traditional on such occasions. Hafflis had promised that they would not do to Gurgeh what they had done to a mutual friend a few years earlier; the young man had been accepted into Contact and Hafflis had held a party to celebrate. At the end of the evening they'd stripped the fellow naked and thrown him over the parapet… but the safety field had been turned off; the new Contact recruit had fallen nine hundred metres — six hundred of them with empty bowels — before three of Hafflis's pre-positioned house drones rose calmly out of the forest beneath to catch him and take him back up.
The (Demilitarised) General Offensive Unit Limiting Factor had arrived under Ikroh that afternoon. Gurgeh had gone down to the transit gallery to inspect it. The craft was a third of a kilometre long, very sleek and simple looking; a pointed nose, three long blisters like vast aircraft cockpits leading to the nose, and another five fat blisters circling the vessel's waist; its rear was blunt and flat. The ship had said hello, told him it was there to take him to the GSV Little Rascal, and asked him if he had any special dietary requirements.
Boruelal slapped him on the back. "We're going to miss you, Gurgeh."
"Likewise," Gurgeh said, swaying, and felt quite emotional. He wondered when it would be time to throw the paper lanterns over the parapet to float down to the rainforest. They'd turned the lights on behind the waterfall, all the way down the cliff, and an inflatible dirigible, seemingly crewed largely by game-fans, had anchored above the plain level with Tronze, promising a firework display later. Gurgeh had been quite touched by such shows of respect and affection.
"Gurgeh," Chamlis said. He turned, still holding his glass, to look at the old machine. It put a small package into his hand. "A present," it said. Gurgeh looked at the small parcel; paper tied up with ribbon. "Just an old tradition," Chamlis explained. "You open it when you're under way."
"Thank you," Gurgeh said, nodding slowly. He put the present into his jacket, then did something he rarely did with drones, and hugged the old machine, putting his arms round its aura fields. "Thank you, very very much."
The night darkened; a brief shower almost extinguished the coals in the centre of the table, but Hafflis got supply drones to bring crates of spirits and they all had fun squirting the drink on to the coals to keep them alight in pools of blue flame which burned down half the paper lanterns and scorched the nightflower vines and made many holes in clothes and singed the Styglian enumerator's pelt. Lightning flashed in the mountains above the lake, the falls glowed, backlit and fabulous, and the dirigible's fireworks drew applause and answering fireworks and cloud-lasers from all over Tronze. Gurgeh was dumped naked into the lake, but hauled out spluttering by Hafflis's children. He woke up in Boruelal's bed, at the university, a little after dawn. He sneaked away early.