In the game outside the game, Gurgeh thought the Games Bureau had made a mistake in pitching him against the first ten people to qualify. It appeared to make sense because it gave him no respite, but, as it turned out, he didn't need any, and the tactic meant that his opponents were from different branches of the imperial tree, and thus harder to tempt with departmental inducements, as well as being less likely to know each other's game-styles.
He'd also discovered something called inter-service rivalry — he'd found records of some old games that didn't seem to make sense until the ship described this odd phenomenon — and made special efforts to get the Admiralty men and the colonel at each other's throats. They'd needed little prompting.
It was a workmanlike match; uninspiring but functional, and he simply played better than any of the others. His winning margin wasn't great, but it was a win. One of the Fleet vice-admirals came second. Tounse, the priest, finished last.
Again, the Bureau's supposedly random scheduling gave him as little time as possible between matches, but Gurgeh was secretly pleased at this; it meant he could keep the same high pitch of concentration going from day to day, and it gave him no time to worry or stop too long to think. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, a part of him was sitting back as stunned and amazed as anybody else was at how well he was doing. If that part ever came forward, ever took centre-stage and was allowed to say, "Now wait a minute here…" he suspected his nerve would fail, the spell would break, and the walk that was a fall would become a plunge into defeat. As the adage said; falling never killed anybody; it was when you stopped…
Anyway, he was awash with a bitter-sweet flood of new and enhanced emotions; the terror of risk and possible defeat, the sheer exultation of the gamble that paid off and the campaign which triumphed; the horror of suddenly seeing a weakness in his position which could lose him the game; the surge of relief when nobody else noticed and there was time to plug the gap; the pulse of furious, gloating glee when he saw such a weakness in another's game; and the sheer unbridled joy of victory.
And outside, the additional satisfaction of knowing that he was doing so much better than anybody had expected. All their predictions — the Culture's, the Empire's, the ship's, the drone's — had been wrong; apparently strong fortifications which had fallen to him. Even his own expectations had been exceeded, and if he worried at all, he worried that some subconscious mechanism would now let him relax a little, having proved so much, come so far, defeated so many. He didn't want that; he wanted to keep going; he was enjoying all this. He wanted to find the measure of himself through this infinitely exploitable, indefinitely demanding game, and he didn't want some weak, frightened part of himself to let him down. He didn't want the Empire to use some unfair way of getting rid of him, either. But even that was only half a worry. Let them try to kill him; he had a reckless feeling of invincibility now. Just don't let them try to disqualify him on some technicality. That would hurt.
But there was another way they might try to stop him. He knew that in the single game they would be likely to use the physical option. It was how they'd think; this Culture man would not accept the bet, he'd be too frightened. Even if he did accept, and fought on, the terror of knowing what might happen to him would paralyse him, devour and defeat him from inside.
He talked it over with the ship. The Limiting Factor had consulted with the Little Rascal- tens of millennia distant, in the greater Cloud and felt able to guarantee his survival. The old warship would stay outside the Empire but power up to a maximum velocity, minimum radius holding circle as soon as the game started. If Gurgeh was forced to bet against a physical option, and lost, the ship would drive in at full speed for Eä. It was certain it could evade any imperial craft on the way, get to Eä within a few hours and use its heavy duty displacer to snap Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho off the place without even slowing down.
"What's this?" Gurgeh looked dubiously at the tiny spherical pellet Flere-Imsaho had produced.
"Beacon and one-off communicator," the drone told him. It dropped the tiny pellet into his hand, where it rolled around. "You put it under your tongue; it'll implant; you'll never know it's there. The ship homes in on that as it comes in, if it can't find you any other way. When you feel a series of sharp pains under your tongue — four stabs in two seconds — you've got two seconds to assume a foetal position before everything within a three-quarter metre radius of that pellet gets slung aboard the ship; so get your head between knees and don't swing your arms about."
Gurgeh looked at the pellet. It was about two millimetres across. "Are you serious, drone?"
"Profoundly. That ship'll probably be on sprint boost; it could be dragging past here at anything up to one-twenty kilolights. At that speed even its heavy duty displacer will only be within range for about a fifth of a millisecond, so we're going to need all the help we can get. This is a very dubious situation you're putting me and yourself in, Gurgeh. I want you to know I'm not very happy about it."
"Don't worry, drone; I'll make sure they don't include you in the physical bet."
"No; I mean the possibility of being displaced. It's risky. I wasn't told about this. Displacement fields in hyperspace are singularities, subject to the Uncertainty Principle—"
"Yeah; you might end up getting zapped into another dimension or something—"
"Or smeared over the wrong bit of this one, more to the point."
"And how often does that happen?"
"Well, about once in eighty-three million displacements, but that's not—"
"So it still compares pretty favourably with the risk you take getting into one of this gang's groundcars, or even an aircraft. Be a rascal, Flere-Imsaho; risk it."
"That's all very well for you to say, but even if—"
Gurgeh let the machine witter on.
He'd risk it. The ship, if it did have to come in, would take a few hours to make the journey, but death-bets were never carried out until the next dawn, and Gurgeh was perfectly capable of switching off the pain of any tortures involved. The Limiting Factor had full medical facilities; it would be able to patch him up, if the worst happened.
He popped the pellet under his tongue; there was a sensation of numbness for a second, then it was gone, as though dissolved. He could just feel it with his finger, under the floor of his mouth.
He woke on the morning of the first day's play with an almost sexual thrill of anticipation.
Another venue; this time it was a conference-centre near the shuttle-port he'd first arrived at. There he faced Lo Prinest Bermoiya, a judge in the Supreme Court of Eä, and one of the most impressive apices Gurgeh had yet seen. He was tall, silver-haired, and he moved with a grace Gurgeh found oddly, even disturbingly familiar, without at first being able to explain why. Then he realised the elderly judge walked like somebody from the Culture; there was a slow ease about the apex's movements which lately Gurgeh had stopped taking for granted and so, for the first time in a way, seen.
Bermoiya sat very still between moves in the lesser games, staring at the board continually and only ever moving to shift a piece. His card-playing was equally studied and deliberate, and Gurgeh found himself reacting in the opposite manner, becoming nervous and fidgety. He fought back against this with body-drugs, deliberately calming himself, and over the seven full days the lesser games lasted gradually got to grips with the steady, considered pace of the apex's style. The judge finished a little ahead after the games were totalled up. There had been no mention of bets of any sort.