"I'm all right."

Yay peered forward at her own screen. "What is that you're sitting beside?"

Gurgeh looked at the piece of ironware by the side of the bench. "That's a cannon," he told her.

"That's what I thought."

"It was a present from a lady friend," Gurgeh explained. "She was very keen on forging and casting. She graduated from pokers and fire grates to cannons. She thought I might find it amusing to fire large metal spheres at the fjord."

"I see."

"You need a fast-burning powder to make it work, though, and I never did get round to acquiring any."

"Just as well; the thing would probably have exploded and blown your brains out."

"That did occur to me as well."

"Good for you." Yay's smile widened. "Hey, guess what?"

"What?"

"I'm going on a cruise; I persuaded Shuro he needs his horizons broadened. You remember Shuro; at the shoot?"

"Oh. Yes, I remember. When do you go?"

"I've gone. We just undocked from Tronze port; the clipper Screw Loose. This is the last chance I had to call you real-time. The delay'll mean letters in future."

"Ah." He wished he hadn't accepted this call, too, now. "How long are you going for?"

"A month or two." Yay's bright, smiling face crinkled. "We'll see. Shuro might get tired of me before then. Kid's mostly into other men, but I'm trying to persuade him otherwise. Sorry I couldn't say goodbye before I left, but it's not for long; I'll s—"

The terminal screen went blank. The screen snapped back into the casing as it fell to the ground and lay, silent and dead, on the tree-needled ground of the clearing. Gurgeh stared at the terminal. He leant forward and picked it up. Some needles and bits of grass had been caught in the screen as it rolled back into the casing. He pulled them out. The machine was lifeless; the little tell-tale light on the base was off.

"Well. Jernau Gurgeh?" Mawhrin-Skel said, floating in from the side of the clearing.

He clutched the terminal with both hands. He stood up, staring at the drone as it sidled through the air, bright in the sunlight. He made himself relax, putting the terminal in a jacket pocket and sitting down, legs crossed on the bench. "Well what, Mawhrin-Skel?

"A decision." The machine floated level with his face. Its fields were formal blue. "Will you speak for me?"

"What if I do and nothing happens?

"You'll just have to try harder. They'll listen, if you're persuasive enough."

"But if you're wrong, and they don't?"

"Then I'd have to think about whether to release your little entertainment or not; it would be fun, certainly… but I might save it, in case you could be useful to me in some other way; one never knows."

"No, indeed."

"I saw you had a visitor the other day."

"I thought you might have noticed."

"Looked like a Contact drone."

"It was."

"I'd like to pretend I knew what it said to you, but once you went into the house, I had to stop eavesdropping. Something about travelling, I believe I heard you say?"

"A cruise, of sorts."

"Is that all?

"No."

"Hmm. My guess was they might want you to join Contact, become a Referer, one of their planners; something like that. Not so?"

Gurgeh shook his head. The drone wobbled from side to side in the air, a gesture Gurgeh was not sure he understood. "I see. And have you mentioned me yet?"

"No."

"I think you ought to don't you?"

"I don't know whether I'm going to do what they ask. I haven't decided yet."

"Why not? What are they asking you to do? Can it compare to the shame—"

"I'll do what I want to do," he told it, standing up. "I might as well, after all, drone, mightn't I? Even if l can persuade Contact to take you back, you and your friend Gunboat Diplomat would still have the recording; what's to prevent you doing all this again?"

"Ah, so you know its name. I wondered what you and Chiark Hub were up to. Well, Gurgeh; just ask yourself this: what else could I possibly want from you? This is all I want; to be allowed to be what I was meant to be. When I am restored to that state, I'll have all I could possibly desire. There would be nothing else you could possibly have any control over. I want to fight, Gurgeh; that's what I was designed for; to use skill and cunning and force to win battles for our dear, beloved Culture. I'm not interested in controlling others, or in making the strategic decisions; that sort of power doesn't interest me. The only destiny I want to control is my own."

"Fine words," Gurgeh said.

He took the dead terminal out of his pocket, turned it over in his hands. Mawhrin-Skel plucked the terminal out of his hands from a couple of metres away, held it underneath its casing, and folded it neatly in half. It bent it again, into quarters; the pen-shaped machine snapped and broke. Mawhrin-Skel crumpled the remains into a little jagged ball.

"I'm getting impatient, Jernau Gurgeh. Time goes slower the faster you think, and I think very fast indeed. Let's say another four days, shall we? You have one hundred and twenty-eight hours before I tell Gunboat to make you even more famous than you are already." It tossed the wrecked terminal back to him; he caught it.

The little drone drifted off towards the edge of the clearing. "I'll be waiting for your call," it said. "Better get a new terminal, though. And do be careful on the walk back to Ikroh; dangerous to be out in the wilds with no way of summoning help."

"Five years?" Chamlis said thoughtfully. "Well, it's some game, I agree, but won't you lose touch over that sort of period? Have you thought this through properly, Gurgeh? Don't let them rush you into anything you might regret later."

They were in the lowest cellar in Ikroh. Gurgeh had taken Chamlis down there to tell it about Azad. He'd sworn the old drone to secrecy first. They'd left Hub's resident anti-surveillance drone guarding the cellar entrance and Chamlis had done its best to check there was nobody and nothing listening in, as well as producing a reasonable impression of a quietfield around them. They talked against a background of pipes and service ducts rumbling and hissing around them in the darkness; the naked walls" rock sweated, darkly glistening.

Gurgeh shook his head. There was nowhere to sit down in the cellar, and its roof was just a little too low for him to stand fully upright. So he stood, head bowed. "I think I'm going to do it," he said, not looking at Chamlis. "I can always come back, if it's too difficult, if I change my mind."

"Too difficult?" Chamlis echoed, surprised. "That's not like you. I agree it's a tough game, but—"

"Anyway, I can come back," he said.

Chamlis was silent for a moment. "Yes. Yes, of course you can."

He still didn't know if he was doing the right thing. He had tried to think it through, to apply the same son of cold, logical analysis to his own plight that he would normally bring to bear in a tricky situation in a game, but he just didn't seem to be able to do so; it was as though that ability could look calmly only on distant, abstract problems, and was incapable of focusing on anything so intricately enmeshed with his own emotional state.

He wanted to go to get away from Mawhrin-Skel, but — he had to admit to himself — he was attracted by Azad. Not just the game. That was still slightly unreal, too complicated to be taken seriously yet. The empire itself interested him.

And yet of course he wanted to stay. He had enjoyed his life, until that night in Tronze. He had never been totally satisfied, but then, who was? Looking back, the life he'd led seemed idyllic. He might lose the occasional game, feel that another game-player was unjustifiably lauded over himself, lust after Yay Meristinoux and feel piqued she preferred others, but these were small, small hurts indeed, compared both with what Mawhrin-Skel held on him, and with the five years" exile which now faced him.