The news-team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. "You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh," Hamin told him.
Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.
He sat looking out over the forest of cinderbuds. The trees were sixty metres high or more. At their peak rate, the drone had told him, they grew at nearly a quarter-metre per day, sucking such vast quantities of water and matter from the ground that the soil dropped all around them, subsiding far enough to reveal the uppermost levels of their roots, which would burn in the Incandescence and take the full Great Year to regrow.
It was dusk, the short time in a short day when the rapidly spinning planet left the bright yellow dwarf dropping beyond the horizon. Gurgeh breathed deeply. There was no smell of burning. The air seemed quite clear, and a couple of planets in the Echronedal system shone in the sky. Nevertheless, Gurgeh knew there was sufficient dust in the atmosphere to forever block out most of the stars in the sky and leave the huge wheel that was the main galaxy blurred and indistinct; not remotely as breathtaking as it was when viewed from beyond the planet's hazed covering of gas.
He sat in a tiny garden near the top of the fortress, so that he could see over the summits of most of the cinderbuds. He was level with the fruit-bearing heads of the tallest trees. The fruit pods, each about the size of a curled-up child, were full of what was basically ethyl-alcohol. When the Incandescence arrived some would drop and some would stay hanging there; all would burn.
A shiver ran through Gurgeh when he thought about it. Approximately seventy days to go, they said. Anybody sitting where he was now when the fire-front arrived would be roasted alive, water-sprays or not. Radiated heat alone would cook you. The garden he was sitting in would go; the wooden bench he was sitting on would be taken inside, behind the thick stone and the metal and fireglass shutters. Gardens in the deeper courtyards would survive, though they would have to be dug out from some of the wind-blown ash. The people would be safe, in the drenched castle, or the deep shelters… unless they had been very foolish, and were caught outside. It had happened, he'd been told.
He saw Flere-Imsaho flying over the trees towards him. The machine had been given permission to fly off by itself, as long as it told the authorities where it was going and agreed to be fitted with a position monitor. Obviously there wasn't anything on Echronedal the Empire considered especially militarily sensitive. The drone hadn't been too happy with the conditions, but reckoned it would go mad cooped up in the castle, so had agreed. This had been its first expedition.
"Jernau Gurgeh."
"Hello, drone. Bird-watching?"
"Flying fish. Thought I'd start with the oceans."
"Going to take a look at the fire?"
"Not yet. I hear you're playing Lo Tenyos Krowo next."
"In four days. They say he's very good."
"He is. He's also one of the people who know all about the Culture."
Gurgeh glared at the machine. "What?"
"There are never fewer than eight people in the Empire who know where the Culture comes from, roughly what size it is, and our level of technological development."
"Really," Gurgeh said through his teeth.
"For the last two hundred years the Emperor, the chief of Naval Intelligence and the six star marshals have been appraised of the power and extent of the Culture. They don't want anybody else to know; their choice, not ours. They're frightened; it's understandable."
"Drone," Gurgeh said loudly, "has it occurred to you I might be getting a little sick of being treated like a child all the time? Why the hell couldn't you just tell me that?"
"Jernau, we only wanted to make things easier for you. Why complicate things by telling you that a few people did know when there was no real likelihood of your ever coming into any but the most fleeting contact with any of them? Frankly, you'd never have been told at all if you hadn't got to the stage of playing against one of these people; no need for you to know. We're just trying to help you, really. I thought I'd tell you in case Krowo said something during the course of the game which puzzled you and upset your concentration."
"Well I wish you cared as much about my temper as you do about my concentration," Gurgeh said, getting up and going to lean on the parapet at the end of the garden.
"I'm very sorry," the drone said, without a trace of contrition.
Gurgeb waved one band. "Never mind. I take it Krowo's in Naval Intelligence then, not the Office of Cultural Exchange?"
"Correct. Officially his post does not exist. But everybody in court knows the highest placed player who's the least bit devious is offered the job."
"I thought Cultural Exchange was a funny place for somebody that good."
"Well, Krowo's had the intelligence job for three Great Years, and some people reckon he could have been Emperor if he'd really wanted, but he prefers to stay where he is. He'll be a difficult opponent."
"So everybody keeps telling me," Gurgeh said, then frowned and looked towards the fading light on the horizon. "What's that?" he said. "Did you hear that?"
It came again; a long, haunting, plaintive cry from far away, almost drowned by the quiet rustling of the cinderbud canopy. The faint sound rose in a still quiet but chilling crescendo; a scream that died away slowly. Gurgeh shivered for the second time that evening.
"What is that?" he whispered.
The drone sidled closer. "What? Those calls?" it said.
"Yes!" Gurgeh said, listening to the faint sound as it came and went on the soft, warm wind, wavering out of the darkness over the rustling heads of the giant cinderbuds.
"Animals," Flere-Imsaho said, dimly silhouetted against the last fractions of light in the western sky. "Big carnivores called troshae, mostly. Six-legged. You saw some from the Emperor's personal menagerie on the night of the ball. Remember?"
Gurgeh nodded, still listening, fascinated, to the cries of the distant beasts. "How do they escape the Incandescence?"
"Troshae run ahead, almost up to the fire-line, during the previous Great Month. The ones you're listening to couldn't run fast enough to escape even if they started now. They've been trapped and penned so they can be hunted for sport. That's why they're howling like that; they know the fire's coming and they want to get away."
Gurgeh said nothing, head turned to catch the faint sound of the doomed animals.
Flere-Imsaho waited for a minute or so, but the man did not move, or ask anything else. The machine backed off, to return to Gurgeh's rooms. Just before it went through the door into the casue, it looked back at the man standing clutching the stone parapet at the far end of the little garden. He was crouched a little, head forward, motionless. It was quite dark now, and ordinary human eyes could not have picked out the quiet figure.
The drone hesitated, then disappeared into the fortress.
Gurgeh hadn't thought Azad was the sort of game you could have an off-day in, certainly not an off-twenty-days. Discovering that it was came as a great disappointment.
He'd studied many of Lo Tenyos Krowo's past games and had looked forward to playing the Intelligence chief. The apex's style was exciting, far more flamboyant — if occasionally more erratic — than that of any of the other top-flight players. It ought to have been a challenging, enjoyable match, but it wasn't. It was hateful, embarrassing, ignominious. Gurgeh annihilated Krowo. The burly, at first rather jovial and unconcerned-seeming apex made some awful, simple errors, and some that resulted from genuinely inspired, even brilliant play, but which in the end were just as disastrous. Sometimes, Gurgeh knew, you came up against somebody who, just by the way they played, caused you a lot more problems than they ought to, and sometimes, too, you found a game in which everything went badly, no matter how hard you tried, and regardless of your most piercing insights and incisive moves. The chief of Naval Intelligence seemed to have both problems at once. Gurgeh's game-style might have been designed to cause Krowo problems, and the apex's luck was almost non-existent.