"Well, not right now," Gurgeh said. He touched the float-hatch controls, rising through the floor into the light. The remote-drone drifted up above him. "I want to settle in first," he told it. "I need more theoretical work before I start playing."
"Very well." The drone started to drift away. It stopped. "The ship wishes to advise you that its normal operating mode includes full internal monitoring, removing the need for your terminal. Is this satisfactory, or would you prefer the internal observation systems to be switched off, and to use your terminal to contact the ship?"
"The terminal," Gurgeh said, immediately.
"Internal monitoring has been reduced to emergency-only status."
"Thanks," Gurgeh said.
"You're welcome," the drone said, floating off.
Gurgeh watched it disappear into the corridor, then turned back to look at the vast board, shaking his head once more.
Over the next thirty days, Gurgeh didn't touch a single Azad piece; the whole time was spent learning the theory of the game, studying its history where it was useful for a better understanding of the play, memorising the moves each piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual morale-strength, their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their specific skill harmonics as related to different areas of the boards; he pored over tables and grids setting out the qualities inherent in the suits, numbers, levels and sets of the associated cards and puzzled over the place in the greater play the lesser boards occupied, and how the elemental imagery in the later stages fitted in with the more mechanistic workings of the pieces, boards and die-matching in the earlier rounds, while at the same time trying to find some way of linking in his mind the tactics and strategy of the game as it was usually played, both in its single-game mode one person against another — and in the multiple-game versions, when up to ten contestants might compete in the same match, with all the potential for alliances, intrigue, concerted action, pacts and treachery that such a game-form made possible.
Gurgeh found the days slipping by almost unnoticed. He would sleep only two or three hours each night, and the rest of the time he was in front of the screen, or sometimes standing in the middle of one of the game-boards as the ship talked to him, drew holo diagrams in the air, and moved pieces about. He was glanding the whole time, his bloodstream full of secreted drugs, his brain pickled in their genofixed chemistry as his much-worked maingland — five times the human-basic size it had been in his primitive ancestors — pumped, or instructed other glands to pump, the coded chemicals into his body.
Chamlis sent a couple of messages. Gossip about the Plate, mostly. Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared; Hafflis was talking about changing back to a woman so he could have another child; Hub and the Plate landscapers had set a date for the opening of Tepharne, the latest, farside, Plate to be constructed, which had still been undergoing its weathering when Gurgeh had left. It would be opened to people in a couple of years. Chamlis suspected Yay would not be pleased she hadn't been consulted before the announcement was made. Chamlis wished Gurgeh well, and asked him how he was.
Yay's communication was barely more than a moving-picture postcard. She lay sprawled in a G-web, before a vast screen or a huge observation port showing a blue and red gas-giant planet, and told him she was enjoying her cruise with Shuro and a couple of his friends. She didn't seem entirely sober. She wagged one finger at him, telling him he was bad for leaving so soon and for so long, without waiting until she got back… then she seemed to see somebody outside the terminal's field of view, and closed, saying she'd be in touch later.
Gurgeh told the Limiting Factor to acknowledge the communications, but did not reply directly. The calls left him feeling a little alone but he threw himself back into the game each time, and everything else was washed from his mind but that.
He talked to the ship. It was more approachable than its remote-drone had been; as Worthil had said, it was likeable, but not in any way brilliant, except at Azad. In fact it occurred to Gurgeh that the old warship was getting more out of the game than he was; it had learned it perfectly, and seemed to enjoy teaching him as well as simply glorying in the game itself as a complex and beautiful system. The ship admitted it had never fired its effectors in anger, and that perhaps it was finding something in Azad that it had missed in real fighting.
The Limiting Factor was «Murderer» class General Offensive Unit number 50017, and as such was one of the last built, constructed seven hundred and sixteen years earlier in the closing stages of the Idiran war, when the conflict in space was almost over. In theory the craft had seen active service, but at no point had it ever been in any danger.
After thirty days, Gurgeh started to handle the pieces.
A proportion of Azad game-pieces were biotechs: sculpted artefacts of genetically engineered cells which changed character from the moment they were first unwrapped and placed on the board; part vegetable, part animal, they indicated their values and abilities by colour, shape and size. The Limiting Factor claimed the pieces it had produced were indistinguishable from the real things, though Gurgeh thought this was probably a little optimistic.
It was only when he started to try to gauge the pieces, to feel and smell what they were and what they might become — weaker or more powerful, faster or slower, shorter or longer lived — that he realised just how hard the whole game was going to be.
He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, coloured vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things. He rubbed them until his hands stained, he sniffed them and stared at them, but once they were on the board they did quite unexpected things; changing to become cannon-fodder when he'd thought they were battleships, altering from the equivalent of philosophical premises stationed well back in his own territories to become observation pieces best suited for the high ground or a front line.
After four days he was in despair, and seriously thinking of demanding to be returned to Chiark, admitting everything to Contact and just hoping they would take pity on him and either keep Mawhrin-Skel on, or keep it silenced. Anything rather than go on with this demoralising, appallingly frustrating charade.
The Limiting Factor suggested he forgot about the biotechs for the moment and concentrated on the subsidiary games, which, if he won them, would give him a degree of choice over the extent to which biotechs had to be used in the following stages. Gurgeh did as the ship suggested, and got on reasonably well, but he still felt depressed and pessimistic, and sometimes he would find that the Limiting Factor had been talking to him for some minutes while he had been thinking about some quite different aspect of the game, and he had to ask the ship to repeat itself.
The days went by, and now and again the ship would suggest Gurgeh handled a biotech, and would advise him which secretions to build up beforehand. It even suggested he take some of the more important pieces into bed with him, so that he would lie asleep, hands clutched or arms cradled round a biotech, as though it was a tiny baby. He always felt rather foolish when he woke up, and he was glad there was nobody there to see him in the morning (but then he wondered if that was true; his experience with Mawhrin-Skel might have made him over-sensitive, but he doubted he would ever be certain again that he wasn't being watched. Perhaps the Limiting Factor was spying on him, perhaps Contact was observing him, evaluating him… but — he decided — he no longer cared if they were or not).