"Does it show?" he said, raising the glass to his lips.
"I have learned to recognise the signs," the professor said. She was twice Gurgeh's age, well into her second century, but still tall and handsome and striking. Her skin was pale and her hair was white, as it always had been, and cropped. "Another of my students humiliated?"
Gurgeh shrugged. He drained the glass, looked round for a tray to put it on.
"Allow me," Chamlis Amalk-ney murmured, gently taking the glass from his hand and placing it on a passing tray a good three metres away. Its yellow-tinged field brought back a full glass of the same rich wine. Gurgeh accepted it.
Boruelal wore a dark suit of soft fabric, lightened at throat and knees by delicate silver chains. Her feet were bare, which Gurgeh thought did not set off the outfit as — say — a pair of heeled boots might have done. But it was the most minor of eccentricities compared to those of some of the university staff. Gurgeh smiled, looking down at the woman's toes, tan upon the blond wooden flooring.
"You're so destructive, Gurgeh," Boruelal told him. "Why not help us instead? Become part of the facility instead of an itinerant guest lecturer?"
"I've told you, Professor; I'm too busy. I have more than enough games to play, papers to write, letters to answer, guest trips to make… and besides… I'd get bored. I bore easily, you know," Gurgeh said, and looked away.
"Jernau Gurgeh would make a very bad teacher," Chamlis Amalk-ney agreed. "If a student failed to understand something immediately, no matter how complicated and involved, Gurgeh would immediately lose all patience and quite probably pour their drink over them… if nothing worse."
"So I've heard." The professor nodded gravely.
"That was a year ago," Gurgeh said, frowning. "And Yay deserved it." He scowled at the old drone.
"Well," the professor said, looking momentarily at Chamlis, "perhaps we have found a match for you, Jernau Gurgeh. There's a young—" Then there was a crash in the distance, and the background noise in the hall increased. They each turned at the sound of people shouting.
"Oh, not another commotion," the professor said tiredly.
Already that evening, one of the younger lecturers had lost control of a pet bird, which had gone screeching and stooping through the hall, tangling in the hair of several people before the drone Mawhrin-Skel intercepted the animal in mid-air and knocked it unconscious, much to the chagrin of most of the people at the party.
"What now?" Boruelal sighed. "Excuse me." She absently left glass and savoury on Chamlis Amalk-ney's broad, flat top and moved off, excusing her way through the crowd towards the source of the upheaval.
Chamlis's aura flickered a displeased grey-white. It set the glass down noisily on the table and threw the savoury into a distant bin. "It's that dreadful machine Mawhrin-Skel," Chamlis said testily.
Gurgeh looked over the crowd to where all the noise was coming from. "Really?" he said. "What, causing all the rumpus?"
"I really don't know why you find it so appealing," the old drone said. It picked up Boruelal's glass again and poured the pale gold wine out into an outstretched field, so that the liquid lay cupped in mid-air, as though in an invisible glass.
"It amuses me," Gurgeh replied. He looked at Chamlis. "Boruelal said something about finding a match for me. Was that what you were talking about earlier?"
"Yes it was. Some new student they've found; a GSV cabin-brat with a gift for Stricken."
Gurgeh raised one eyebrow. Stricken was one of the more complex games in his repertoire. It was also one of his best. There were other human players in the Culture who could beat him — though they were all specialists at the game, not general game-players as he was — but not one of them could guarantee a win, and they were few and far between, probably only ten in the whole population.
"So, who is this talented infant?" The noise on the far side of the room had lessened.
"It's a young woman," Chamlis said, slopping the field-held liquid about and letting it dribble through thin strands of hollow, invisible force. "Just arrived here; came off the Cargo Cult; still settling in."
The General Systems Vehicle Cargo Cult had stopped off at Chiark Orbital ten days earlier, and left only two days ago. Gurgeh had played a few multiple exhibition matches on the craft (and been secretly delighted that they had been clean sweeps; he hadn't been beaten in any of the various games), but he hadn't played Stricken at all. A few of his opponents had mentioned something about a supposedly brilliant (though shy) young game-player on the Vehicle, but he or she hadn't turned up as far as Gurgeh knew, and he'd assumed the reports of this prodigy's powers were much exaggerated. Ship people tended to have a quaint pride in their craft; they liked to feel that even though they had been beaten by the great game-player, their vessel still had the measure of him, somewhere (of course, the ship itself did, but that didn't count; they meant people; humans, or 1.0 value drones).
"You are a mischievous and contrary device," Boruelal said to the drone Mawhrin-Skel, floating at her shoulder, its aura field orange with well-being, but circled with little purple motes of unconvincing contrition.
"Oh," Mawhrin-Skel said brightly, "do you really think so?"
"Talk to this appalling machine, Jernau Gurgeh," the professor said, frowning momentarily at the top of Chamlis Amalk-ney's casing, then picking up a fresh glass. (Chamlis poured the liquid it had been playing with into Boruelal's original glass and replaced it on the table.)
"What have you been doing now?" Gurgeh asked Mawhrin-Skel as it floated near his face.
"Anatomy lesson," it said, its fields collapsing to a mixture of formal blue and brown ill-humour.
"A chirlip was found on the terrace," Boruelal explained, looking accusingly at the little drone. "It was wounded. Somebody brought it in, and Mawhrin-Skel offered to treat it."
"I wasn't busy," Mawhrin-Skel interjected, reasonably.
"It killed and dissected it in front of all the people," the professor sighed. "They were most upset."
"It would have died from shock anyway," Mawhrin-Skel said. "They're fascinating creatures, chirlips. Those cute little fur-folds conceal partially cantilevered bones, and the looped digestive system is quite fascinating."
"But not when people are eating," Boruelal said, selecting another savoury from the tray. "It was still moving," she added glumly. She ate the savoury.
"Residual synaptic capacitance," explained Mawhrin-Skel.
"Or "Bad Taste" as we machines call it," Chamlis Amalk-ney said.
"An expert in that, are you, Amalk-ney?" Mawhrin-Skel inquired.
"I bow to your superior talents in that field," Chamlis snapped back.
Gurgeh smiled. Chamlis Amalk-ney was an old — and ancient — friend; the drone had been constructed over four thousand years ago (it claimed it had forgotten the exact date, and nobody had ever been impolite enough to search out the truth). Gurgeh had known the drone all his life; it had been a friend of the family for centuries.
Mawhrin-Skel was a more recent acquaintance. The irascible, ill-mannered little machine had arrived on Chiark Orbital only a couple of hundred days earlier; another untypical character attracted there by the world's exaggerated reputation for eccentricity.
Mawhrin-Skel had been designed as a Special Circumstances drone for the Culture's Contact section; effectively a military machine with a variety of sophisticated, hardened sensory and weapons systems which would have been quite unnecessary and useless on the majority of drones. As with all sentient Culture constructs, its precise character had not been fully mapped out before its construction, but allowed to develop as the drone's mind was put together. The Culture regarded this unpredictable factor in its production of conscious machines as the price to be paid for individuality, but the result was that not every drone so brought into being was entirely suitable for the tasks it had initially been designed for.