He clenched his fists, trying to break the terminal he held in his right hand, but it wouldn't break. His hand hurt again.
He tried to think calmly. What if the worst did happen? The Culture was generally rather disdainful of individual fame, and therefore equally uninterested in scandal — there was, anyway, little that was scandalous — but Gurgeh had no doubt that if Mawhrin-Skel did release the recordings it claimed to have made, they would be propagated; people would know.
There were plenty of news and current affairs indices and networks in the multiplicity of communications which linked every Culture habitat, be it ship, rock, Orbital or planet. Somebody somewhere would be only too pleased to broadcast Mawhrin-Skel's recordings. Gurgeh knew of a couple of recently established games indices whose editors, writers and correspondents regarded him and most of the other well-known players and authorities as some sort of constricting, over-privileged hierarchy; they thought too much attention was paid to too few players, and sought to discredit what they called the old guard (which included him, much to his amusement). They would love what Mawhrin-Skel had on him. He could deny it all, once it was out, and some people would doubtless believe him despite the hardness of the evidence, but the other top players, and the responsible, well-established and authoritative indices, would know the truth of it, and that was what he would not be able to bear.
He would still be able to play, and he would still be allowed to publish, to register his papers as open for dissemination, and probably many of them would be taken up; not quite so often as before, perhaps, but he would not be frozen out completely. It would be worse than that; he would be treated with compassion, understanding, tolerance. But he would never be forgiven.
Could he come to terms with that, ever? Could he weather the storm of abuse and knowing looks, the gloating sympathy of his rivals? Would it all die down enough eventually, would a few years pass and it be sufficiently forgotten? He thought not. Not for him. It would always be there. He could not face down Mawhrin-Skel with that; publish and be damned. The drone had been right; it would destroy his reputation, destroy him.
He watched the logs in the wide grate glow duller red and then go soft and grey. He told Hub he was finished; it quietly returned the house to normal and left him alone with his thoughts.
He woke the next morning, and it was still the same universe; it had not been a nightmare and time had not gone backwards. 1I had all still happened.
He took the underground to Celleck, the village where Chamlis Amalk-ney lived by itself, in an old-fashioned and odd approximation of human domesticity, surrounded by wall paintings, antique furniture, inlaid walls, fish-tanks and insect vivaria.
"I'll find out all I can, Gurgeh," Chamlis sighed, floating beside him, looking out to the square. "But I can't guarantee that I can do it without whoever was behind your last visit from Contact finding out about it. They may think you're interested."
"Maybe I am," Gurgeh said. "Maybe I do want to talk to them again, I don't know."
"Well, I've sent the message to my friends, but—"
He had a sudden, paranoid idea. He turned to Chamlis urgently. "These friends of yours are ships."
"Yes," Chamlis said. "Both of them."
"What are they called?"
"The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read The Instructions."
"They're not warships?"
"With names like that? They're GCUs; what else?"
"Good," Gurgeh said, relaxing a little, looking out to the square again. "Good. That's all right." He took a deep breath.
"Gurgeh, can't you — please — tell me what's wrong?" Chamlis's voice was soft, even sad. "You know it'll go no further. Let me help. It hurts me to see you like this. If there's anything I can—"
"Nothing," Gurgeh said, looking at the machine again. He shook his head. "There's nothing, nothing else you can do. I'll let you know if there is." He started across the room. Chamlis watched him. "I have to go now. I'll see you again, Chamlis."
He went down to the underground. He sat in the car, staring at the floor. On about the fourth request, he realised the car was talking to him, asking where he wanted to go. He told it.
He was staring at one of the wall-screens, watching the steady stars, when the terminal beeped.
"Gurgeh? Makil Stra-bey, yet again one more time once more."
"What?" he snapped, annoyed at the Mind's glib chumminess.
"That ship just replied with the information you asked for."
He frowned. "What ship? What information?"
"The Gunboat Diplomat, our game-player. Its location."
His heart pounded and his throat seemed to close up. "Yes," he said, struggling to get the word out. "And?"
"Well, it didn't reply direct; it sent via its home GSV Youthful Indiscretion and got it to confirm its location."
"Yes, well? Where is it?"
"In the Altabien-North cluster. Sent co-ordinates, though they're only accurate to—"
"Never mind the co-ordinates!" Gurgeh shouted. "Where is that cluster? How far away is it from here?"
"Hey; calm down. It's about two and a half millennia away."
He sat back, closing his eyes. The car started to slow down.
Two thousand five hundred light years. It was, as the urbanely well-travelled people on a GSV would say, a long walk. But close enough by quite a long way — for a warship to minutely target an effector, throw a sensing field a light-second in diameter across the sky, and pick up the weak but indisputable flicker of coherent HS light coming from a machine small enough to fit into a pocket.
He tried to tell himself it was still no proof, that Mawhrin-Skel might still have been lying, but even as he thought that, he saw something ominous in the fact the warship had not replied direct. It had used its GSV, an even more reliable source of information, to confirm its whereabouts.
"Want the rest of the LOU's message?" Hub said, "Or are you going to bite my head off again?"
Gurgeh was puzzled. "What rest of the message?" he said. The underground car swung round, slowed further. He could see Ikroh's transit gallery, hanging under the Plate surface like an upside-down building.
"Mysteriouser and mysteriouser," Hub said. "You been communicating with this ship behind my back, Gurgeh? The message is: "Nice to hear from you again.""
Three days passed. He couldn't settle to anything. He tried to read papers, old books, the material of his own he'd been working on — but on every occasion he found himself reading and re-reading the same piece or page or screen, time and time again, trying hard to take it in but finding his thoughts constantly veering away from the words and diagrams and illustrations in front of him, refusing to absorb anything, going back time and time again to the same treadmill, the same looping, tail-swallowing, eternally pointless round of questioning and regret. Why had he done it? What way out was there?
He tried glanding soothing drugs, but it took so much to have any effect he just felt groggy. He used Sharp Blue and Edge and Focal to force himself to concentrate, but it gave him a jarring feeling at the back of his skull somewhere, and exhausted him. It wasn't worth it. His brain wanted to worry and fret and there was no point in trying to frustrate it.
He refused all calls. He called Chamlis a couple of times, but never found anything to say. All Chamlis could tell him was that the two Contact ships it knew had both been in touch; each said it had passed on Chamlis's message to a few other Minds. Both had been surprised Gurgeh had been contacted so quickly. Both would pass on Gurgeh's request to be told more; neither knew anything else about what was going on.