He took every tenth day off, again at the ship's suggestion; he explored the vessel more fully, though there was little enough to see. Gurgeh was used to civilian craft, which could be compared in density and design to ordinary, human-habitable buildings, with comparatively thin walls enclosing large volumes of space, but the warship was more like a single solid chunk of rock or metal; like an asteroid, with only a few small hollowed-out tubes and tiny caves fit for humans to wander about in. He walked along or clambered through or floated up and down what corridors and passageways it did have though, and stood in one of the three nose blisters for a while, gazing at the congealed-looking clutter of still-unremoved machinery and equipment.
The primary effector, surrounded by its associated shield-disruptors, scanners, trackers, illuminators, displacers and secondary weaponry systems, bulked large in the dim light, and looked like some gigantic cone-lensed eyeball encrusted with gnarled metallic growths. The whole, massy assemblage was easily twenty metres in diameter, but the ship told him — he thought with some pride — that when it was all connected up, it could spin and stop the whole installation so fast that to a human it would appear only to flicker momentarily; blink, and you'd miss it.
He inspected the empty hangar in one of the waist blisters; it would eventually house a Contact module which was being converted on the GSV they were on their way to meet. That module would be Gurgeh's home when he arrived on Eä. He'd seen holos of how the interior would look; it was passably spacious, if hardly up to the standards of Ikroh.
He learned more about the Empire itself, its history and politics, philosophy and religion — its beliefs and mores — and its mixtures of sub species and sexes.
It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental — startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated — fabulously rich and grindingly poor (but also — undeniably — unequivocally fascinating).
And it was true that — as he'd been told — there was one constant in all the numbing variety of Azadian life; the game of Azad permeated every level of society — like a single steady theme nearly buried in a cacophony of noise — and Gurgeh started to see what the drone Worthil had meant when it said Contact suspected it was the game that held the Empire together. Nothing else seemed to.
He swam in the pool most days. The effector housing had been converted to include a holo projector — and the Limiting Factor started out by showing a blue sky and white clouds on the inside surface of the twenty-five metre broad blister — but he grew tired of looking at that and told the ship to produce the view he would see if they were travelling in real space; the adjusted equivalent view as the ship called it.
So he swam beneath the unreal blackness of space and the hard little lightmotes of the slowly moving stars, pulling himself through and diving beneath the gently underlit surface of the warm water like a soft, inverted image of a ship himself.
By about the ninetieth day he felt he was just starting to develop a feel for the biotechs; he could play a limited game against the ship on all the minor boards and one of the major boards, and, when he went to sleep, he spent the whole three hours each night dreaming about people and his life, reliving his childhood and his adolescence and his years since then in a strange mixture of memory and fantasy and unrealised desire. He always meant to write to — or record something for — Chamlis or Yay or any of the other people back at Chiark who'd sent messages, but the time never seemed quite right, and the longer he delayed the harder the task became. Gradually people stopped sending to him, which made Gurgeh feel guilty and relieved at once.
One hundred and one days after leaving Chiark, and well over two thousand light years from the Orbital, the Limiting Factor made its rendezvous with the River class Superlifter Kiss My Ass. The tandemed craft, now enclosed within one ellipsoid field, began to increase their speed to match that of the GSV. This was going to take a few hours, apparently, so Gurgeh went to bed as normal.
The Limiting Factor woke him half-way into his sleep. It switched his cabin screen on.
"What's happening?" Gurgeh said sleepily, just starting to worry. The screen which made up one wall of the cabin was in-holoed, so that it acted like a window. Before he had switched it off and gone to sleep, it had shown the rear end of the Superlifter against the starfield. Now it showed a landscape; a slowly moving panorama of lakes and hills, streams and forests, all seen from directly overhead.
An aircraft flew slowly over the view like a lazy insect.
"I thought you might like to see this," the ship said.
"Where's that?" Gurgeh asked, rubbing his eyes. He didn't understand. He'd thought the whole idea of meeting the Superlifter was so that the GSV which they were due to meet soon didn't have to slow down; the Superlifter was supposed to haul them along even faster so they could catch up with the giant craft. Instead, they must have stopped, over an orbital or a planet, or something even bigger.
"We have now rendezvoused with the GSV Little Rascal," the ship told him.
"Have we? Where is it?" Gurgeh said, swinging his feet out of bed.
"You're looking at its topside rear park."
The view, which must have been magnified earlier, retreated, and Gurgeh realised that he was looking down at a huge craft over which the Limiting Factor was moving slowly. The park seemed to be roughly square; he couldn't guess how many kilometres to a side. In the hazy distance forward there was the hint of immense, regular canyons; ribs on that vast surface stepping down to further levels. The whole sweep of air and ground and water was lit from directly above, and he realised that he couldn't even see the Limiting Factor's shadow. He asked a few questions, still staring at the screen.
Although it was only four kilometres in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometres, and the craft's overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometres. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.
In the five hundred days it took the Little Rascal to cross from the main galaxy to the region of the Clouds, Gurgeh gradually learned the game of Azad, and even found sufficient spare time to meet and casually befriend a few people.
These were Contact people. Half of them formed the crew of the GSV itself, there not so much to run the craft — anyone of its triumvirate of Minds was quite capable of doing that — as to manage their own human society on board. And to witness; to study the never-ending torrent of data delivered on new discoveries by distant Contact units and other GSVs; to learn, and be the Culture's human representatives amongst the systems of stars and the systems of sentient societies Contact was there to discover, investigate and — occasionally — change.
The other half was composed of the crews of smaller craft; some were there for recreation and refit stops, others were hitching a ride just as Gurgeh and the Limiting Factor were, some left en route to survey more of the clusters and clumps of stars which existed between the galaxy and the Clouds, while other people were waiting for their vessels to be built, the ships and smaller Systems Vehicles they would one day crew existing only as another number on a list of craft to be built on board at some point in the future.