Gurgeh thought the idea of sharing a world with volcanoes made floating islands look like not such a bad idea after all.
"Have you seen this!" Flere-Imsaho yelped one day, floating quickly up to him in the pool's airstream cabinet, where Gurgeh was drying off. Behind the little machine, attached to it by a thin strand of field still coloured yellow-green (but speckled with angry white), there floated a large, rather old-fashioned and complicated-looking drone.
Gurgeh squinted at it. "What about it?"
"I've got to wear the damn thing!" Flere-Imsaho wailed. The field strand joining it to the other drone flicked, and the old-looking drone's casing hinged open. The old body-shell appeared to be completely empty, but as Gurgeh — puzzled — looked closer, he saw that in the centre of the casing there was a little mesh cradle, just the right size to hold Flere-Imsaho.
"Oh," Gurgeh said, and turned away, rubbing the water from his armpits, and grinning.
"They didn't tell me this when they offered me the job!" Flere-Imsaho protested, slamming the body-shell shut again. "They say it's because the Empire isn't supposed to know how small us drones are! Why couldn't they just have got a big drone then? Why saddle me with this … this …"
"Fancy dress?" Gurgeh suggested, rubbing a hand through his hair and stepping out of the airstream.
"Fancy?" the library drone screamed. "Fancy? Dowdy's what it is; rags! Worse than that, I'm supposed to make a «humming» noise and produce lots of static electricity, just to convince these barbarian dingbats we can't build drones properly!" The small machine's voice rose to a screech. "A «humming» noise! I ask you!"
"Perhaps you could ask for a transfer," Gurgeh said calmly, slipping into his robe.
"Oh yes," Flere-Imsaho said bitterly, with a trace of what might almost have been sarcasm, "and get all the shit jobs from now on because I haven't been cooperative." It lashed a field out and thumped the antique casing. "I'm stuck with this heap of junk."
"Drone," Gurgeh said, "I can't tell you how sorry I am."
The Limiting Factor nosed its way out of the Mainbay. Two Lifters nudged the craft round until it faced down the twenty kilometre length of corridor. The ship and its little tugs eased their way forward, exiting from the body of the GSV at its nose. Other ships and craft and pieces of equipment moved inside the shell of air surrounding the Little Rascal; GCUs and Superlifters, planes and hot-air balloons, vacuum dirigibles and gliders, people floating in modules or cars or harnesses.
Some watched the old warship go. The Lifter tugs dropped away.
The ship went up, passing level upon level of bay doors, blank hull, hanging gardens, and whole jumbled arrays of opened accommodation sections, where people walked or danced or sat eating or just gazing out, watching the fuss of airborne activity, or played sports and games. Some waved. Gurgeh watched on the lounge screen, and even recognised a few people he'd known, flying past in an aircraft, shouting goodbye.
Officially, he was going on a solo cruising holiday before travelling to the Pardethillisian Games. He had already dropped hints he might forgo the tournament. Some of the theoretical and news journals had been interested enough in his sudden departure from Chiark — and the equally abrupt cessation of his publications — to have representatives on the Little Rascal interview him. In a strategy he'd already agreed with Contact, he'd given the impression he was growing bored with games in general, and that the journey — and his entry in the great tournament — were attempts to restore his flagging interest.
People seemed to have fallen for this.
The ship cleared the top of the GSV, rising beside the cloud-speckled topside park. It rose on into the thinner air above, met with the Superlifter Prime Mover, and together they gradually dropped back and to the side of the GSV's inner atmospheric envelope. They went slowly through the many layers of fields; the bumpfield, the insulating, the sensory, the signalling and receptor, the energy and traction, the hullfield, the outer sensory and, finally, the horizon, until they were free in hyperspace once more. After a few hours of deceleration to speeds the Limiting Factor's engines could cope with, the disarmed warship was on its own, and the Prime Mover was powering away again, chasing its GSV.
"… so you'd be well advised to stay celibate; they'll find it difficult enough taking a male seriously even if you do look bizarre to them, but if you tried to form any sexual relationships they'd almost certainly take it as a gross insult."
"Any more good news, drone?"
"Don't say anything about sexual alterations either. They do know about drug-glands, even if they don't know about their precise effects, but they don't know about most of the major physical improvements. I mean, you can mention blister-free callousing and that sort of thing, that isn't important; but even the gross re-plumbing involved in your own genital design would cause something of a furore if they found out about it."
"Really," Gurgeh said. He was sitting in the Limiting Factor's main lounge. Flere-Imsaho and the ship were giving him a briefing on what he could and couldn't say and do in the Empire. They were a few days" travel from the frontier.
"Yes; they'd be jealous," the tiny drone said in its high, slightly grating voice. "And probably quite disgusted too."
"Especially jealous though," the ship said through its remote-drone, making a sighing noise.
"Well, yes," Flere-Imsaho said, "but definitely disg—"
"The thing to remember, Gurgeh," the ship interrupted quickly, "is that their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. In the same way, everyone you meet will be conscious of both their position in society and their relationship to others around them.
"It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of «marriage» to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favours by—"
"Oh, ship, come on!" He laughed. He had done his own research into the Empire, reading its own histories and watching its explanatory recordings. The ship's view of the Empire's customs and institutions sounded biased and unfair and terribly Culture-prim. Flere-Imsaho and the ship remote made a show of looking at each other, then the small library drone flushed grey yellow with resignation, and said in its high voice, "All right, let's go back to the beginning…"
The Limiting Factor lay in space above Eä, the beautiful blue-white planet Gurgeh had seen for the first time almost two years earlier in the screen-room at Ikroh. On either side of the ship lay an imperial battlecruiser, each twice the length of the Culture craft.
The two warships had met the smaller vessel at the limits of the star clump Eä's system lay in, and the Limiting Factor, already on a slow warp drive rather than its normal hyperspace propulsion — something else the Empire was being kept in the dark about — had stopped. Its eight effector blisters were transparent, showing the three game-boards, module hangar and pool in the waist housings, and the empty spaces in the three long nose emplacements, the weaponry having been removed on the Little Rascal. Nevertheless, the Azadians sent a small craft over to the ship with three officers in it. Two stayed with Gurgeh while the third checked each of the blisters in turn, then took a general look round the entire ship.