"I can get in touch with the two ships I know," Chamlis said. "The ones I contacted originally, I can ask them; they might know what Contact was going to suggest." Chamlis watched the silvery fish silently feeding. "I'll do that now, if you like."
"Please. Yes," he said, and turned away from the manufactured sandstone and the cultivated pearls. His shoes clacked across the patterned tiles of the room. The sunlit square again. The tzile, still sleeping. He could see its jaws moving, and wondered what alien words the creature was mouthing in its sleep.
"It'll be a few hours before I hear anything," Chamlis said. The fish-tank lid closed; the drone put the fish-food container into a drawer in a tiny, delicate table near the tank. "Both ships are fairly distant." Chamlis tapped the side of the tank with a silvered field; the mirrorfish floated over to investigate. "But why?" the drone said, looking at him. "What's changed? What sort of trouble are you… can you be in? Gurgeh; please tell me. I want to help."
The machine floated closer to the tall human, who was standing staring down to the square, his hands clasped and unconsciously kneading each other. The old drone had never seen the man so distressed.
"Nothing," Gurgeh said hopelessly, shaking his head, not looking at the drone. "Nothing's changed. There's no trouble. I just need to know a few things."
He had gone straight back to Ikroh the day before. He'd stood in the main room, where the house had lit the fire a couple of hours earlier after hearing the weather forecast, and he'd taken off the wet, dirty clothes and thrown them all on to the fire. He'd had a hot bath and a steam bath, sweating and panting and trying to feel clean. The plunge bath had been so cold there had been a thin covering of ice on it; he'd dived in, half expecting his heart to stop with the shock. He'd sat in the main room, watching the logs burn. He'd tried to pull himself together, and once he'd felt capable of thinking clearly he'd raised Chiark Hub.
"Gurgeh; Makil Stra-bey again, at your service. How's tricks? Not another visitation from Contact, surely?"
"No. But I have a feeling they left something behind when they were here; something to watch me."
"What… you mean a bug or a microsystem or something?"
"Yes," he said, sitting back in the broad couch. He wore a simple robe. His skin felt scrubbed and shiny clean after his bathe. Somehow, the friendly, understanding voice of Hub made him feel better; it would be all right, he'd work something out. He was probably frightened over nothing; Mawhrin-Skel was just a demented, insane machine with delusions of power and grandeur; It wouldn't be able to prove anything, and nobody would believe it if it simply made unsubstantiated claims.
"What makes you think you're being bugged?"
"I can't tell you," Gurgeh said. "Sorry. But I have seen some evidence. Can you send something — drones or whatever — to Ikroh, to sweep the place? Would you be able to find something if they did leave anything?"
"If it's ordinary tech stuff, yes. But it depends on the soph level. A warship can passive-bug using its electro-magnetic effector; they can watch you under a hundred klicks of rock-cover from the next stellar system and tell you what your last meal was. Hyper-space tech; there are defences against it, but no way of detecting it's going on."
"Nothing that complicated; just a bug or a camera or something."
"Should be possible. We'll displace a drone team to you in a minute or so. Want us to harden this comm channel? Can't make it totally eavesdrop-proof, but we can make it difficult."
"Please."
"No problem. Detach the terminal speaker pip and shove it in your ear. We'll soundfield the outside."
Gurgeh did just that. He felt better already. The Hub seemed to know what it was doing. "Thanks, Hub," he said. "I appreciate all this."
"Hey, no thanks required, Gurgeh. That's what we're here for. Besides; this is fun!"
Gurgeh smiled. There was a distant thump somewhere above the house as the Hub's drone team arrived.
The drones swept the house for sensory equipment and secured the buildings and grounds; they polarised the windows and drew the drapes; they put some sort of special mat under the couch he sat on; they even installed a kind of filter or valve inside the chimney of the fire.
Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.
He set to work. He used his terminal to probe the Hub's information banks. They contained as a matter of course almost every even moderately important or significant or useful piece of information the Culture had ever accumulated; a near infinite ocean of fact and sensation and theory and artwork which the Culture's information net was adding to at a torrential rate every second of the day.
You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn't, you could still find out a lot. The Culture had theoretical total freedom of information; the catch was that consciousness was private, and information held in a Mind — as opposed to an unconscious system, like the Hub's memory-banks — was regarded as part of the Mind's being, and so as sacrosanct as the contents of a human brain; a Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.
And so, while Hub protected his privacy, Gurgeh found out, without having to ask Chamlis, that what Mawhrin-Skel had said might be true; there were indeed levels of event-recording which could not be easily faked, and which drones of above-average specification were potentially capable of using. Such recordings, especially if they had been witnessed by a Mind in a real-time link, would be accepted as genuine. His mood of renewed optimism started to sink away from him again.
Also, there was an SC Mind, that of the Limited Offensive Unit Gunboat Diplomat, which had supported Mawhrin-Skel's appeal against the decision which had removed the drone from Special Circumstances.
The feeling of dazed sickness started to fill him again.
He wasn't able to find out when Mawhrin-Skel and the LOU had last been in touch; that, again, counted as private information. Privacy; that brought a bitter laugh to his mouth, thinking of the privacy he'd had over the last few days and nights.
But he did discover that a drone like Mawhrin-Skel, even in civilianised form, was capable of sustaining a one-way real-time link with such a ship over millennia distances, so long as the ship was watching out for the signal and knew where to look. He could not find out there and then where the Gunboat Diplomat was in the galaxy — SC ships routinely kept their locations secret — but put in a request that the ship release its position to him.
From what he could tell from the information he'd discovered, Mawhrin-Skel's claim that the Mind had recorded their conversation would not hold up if the ship was more than about twenty millennia away; if it turned out, say, that the craft was on the other side of the galaxy, then the drone had definitely lied, and he would be safe.
He hoped the vessel was on the other side of the galaxy; he hoped it was a hundred thousand light years away or more, or it had gone crazy and run into a black hole or decided to head for another galaxy, or stumbled across a hostile alien ship powerful enough to blow it out of the skies… anything, so long as it wasn't near by and able to make that real-time link.
Otherwise, everything Mawhrin-Skel had said checked out. It could be done. He could be blackmailed. He sat in the couch, while the fire burned down and the Hub drones floated through the house humming and clicking to themselves, and he stared into the greying ashes, wishing that it was all unreal, wishing it hadn't happened, cursing himself for letting the little drone talk him into cheating. Why? he asked himself. Why did I do it? How could I have been so stupid? It had seemed a glamorous, enticingly dangerous thing at the time; a little crazy, but then, was he not different from other people? Was he not the great game-player and so allowed his eccentricities, granted the freedom to make his own rules? He hadn't wanted self-glorification, not really. And he had already won the game; he just wanted somebody in the Culture to have completed a Full Web; hadn't he? It wasn't like him to cheat; he had never done it before; he would never do it again… how could Mawhrin-Skel do this to him? Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision…