Those or other officers stayed on board for the five days it took to get to Eä itself. They were much as Gurgeh had expected, with flat, broad faces and the shaven, almost white skin. They were smaller than he was, he realised when they stood in front of him, but somehow their uniforms made them look much larger. These were the first real uniforms Gurgeh had ever seen, and he felt a strange, dizzying sensation when he saw them; a sense of displacement and foreignness as well as an odd mixture of dread and awe.
Knowing what he did, he wasn't surprised at the way they acted towards him. They seemed to try to ignore him, rarely speaking to him, and never looking him in the eyes when they did; he had never felt quite so dismissed in life.
The officers did appear to be interested in the ship, but not in either Flere-Imsaho — which was keeping well out of their way anyway — or in the ship's remote-drone. Flere-Imsaho had, only minutes before the officers arrived on board, finally and with extreme and voluble reluctance, enclosed itself in the fake carapace of the old drone casing. It had fumed quietly for a few minutes while Gurgeh told it how attractive and valuably antique the ancient, aura-less casing looked, then it had floated quickly off when the officers came aboard.
So much, thought Gurgeh, for its helping with awkward linguistic points and the intricacies of etiquette.
The ship's remote-drone was no better. It followed Gurgeh round, but it was playing dumb, and made a show of bumping into things now and again. Twice Gurgeh had turned round and almost fallen over the slow and clumsy cube. He was very tempted to kick it.
It was left to Gurgeh to try to explain that there was no bridge or flight-deck or control-room that he knew of in the ship, but he got the impression the Azadian officers didn't believe him.
When they arrived over Eä, the officers contacted their battlecruiser and talked too fast for Gurgeh to understand, but the Limiting Factor broke in and started speaking too; there was a heated discussion. Gurgeh looked round for Flere-Imsaho to translate, but it had disappeared again. He listened to the jabbering exchange for some minutes with increasing frustration; he decided to let them argue it out and turned to go and sit down. He stumbled over the remote-drone, which was floating near the floor just behind him; he fell into rather than sat on the couch. The officers looked round at him briefly, and he felt himself blush. The remote-drone drifted hesitantly away before he could aim a foot at it.
So much, he thought, for Flere-Imsaho; so much for Contact's supposedly flawless planning and stupendous cunning. Their juvenile representative didn't even bother to hang around and do its job properly; it preferred to hide, nursing its pathetic self-esteem. Gurgeh knew enough about the way the Empire worked to realise that it wouldn't let such things happen; its people knew what duties and orders meant, and they took their responsibilities seriously, or, if they didn't, they suffered for it.
They did as they were told; they had discipline.
Eventually, after the three officers had talked amongst themselves for a while, and then to their ship again, they left him and went to inspect the module hangar. When they'd gone, Gurgeh used his terminal to ask the ship what they'd been arguing about.
"They wanted to bring some more personnel and equipment over," the Limiting Factor told him. "I told them they couldn't. Nothing to worry about. You'd better get your stuff together and go to the module hangar; I'll be heading out of imperial space within the hour."
Gurgeh turned to head towards his cabin. "Wouldn't it be terrible," he said, "if you forgot to tell Flere-Imsaho you were going, and I had to visit Eä all by myself." He was only half joking.
"It would be unthinkable," the ship said.
Gurgeh passed the remote-drone in the corridor, spinning slowly in mid-air and bobbing erratically up and down. "And is this really necessary?" he asked it.
"Just doing what I'm told," the drone replied testily.
"Just overdoing it," Gurgeh muttered, and went to pack his things.
As he packed, a small parcel fell out of a cloak he hadn't worn since he'd left Ikroh; it bounced on the soft floor of the cabin. He picked it up and opened the ribbon-tied packet, wondering who it might be from; anyone of several ladies on the Little Rascal, he imagined.
It was a thin bracelet, a model of a very broad, fully completed Orbital, its inner surface half light and half dark. Bringing it up to his eyes, he could see tiny, barely discernible pinpricks of light on the night-time half; the daylight side showed bright blue sea and scraps of land under minute cloud systems. The whole interior scene shone with its own light, powered by some source inside the narrow band.
Gurgeh slipped it over his hand; it glowed against his wrist. A strange present for somebody on a GSV to give, he thought.
Then he saw the note in the package, picked it out and read, "Just to remind you, when you're on that planet. Chamlis."
He frowned at the name, then — distantly at first, but with a growing and annoying sense of shame — remembered the night before he'd left Gevant, two years earlier.
Of course.
Chamlis had given him a present.
He'd forgotten.
"What's that?" Gurgeh said. He sat in the front section of the converted module the Limiting Factor had picked up from the GSV. He and Flere-Imsaho had boarded the little craft and said their au revoirs to the old warship, which was to stand off the Empire, waiting to be recalled. The hangar blister had rotated and the module, escorted by a couple of frigates, had fallen towards the planet while the Limiting Factor made a show of moving very slowly and hesitantly away from the gravity well with the two battlecruisers.
"What's what?" Flere-Imsaho said, floating beside him, disguise discarded and lying on the floor.
"That," Gurgeh said, pointing at the screen, which displayed the view looking straight down. The module was flying overland towards Groasnachek, Eä's capital city; the Empire didn't like vessels entering the atmosphere directly above its cities, so they'd come in over the ocean.
"Oh," Flere-Imsaho said. "That. That's the Labyrinth Prison."
"A prison?" Gurgeh said. The complex of walls and long, geometrically contorted buildings slid away beneath them as the outskirts of the sprawling capital invaded the screen.
"Yes. The idea is that people who've broken laws are put into the labyrinth, the precise place being determined by the nature of the offence. As well as being a physical maze, it is constructed to be what one might call a moral and behaviouristic labyrinth as well (its external appearance offers no clues to the internal lay-out, by the way; that's just for show); the prisoner must make correct responses, act in certain approved ways, or he will get no further, and may even be put further back. In theory a perfectly good person can walk free of the labyrinth in a matter of days, while a totally bad person will never get out. To prevent overcrowding, there's a time-limit which, if exceeded, results in the prisoner being transferred for life to a penal colony."
The prison had disappeared from beneath them by the time the drone finished; the city swamped the screen instead, its swirling patterns of streets, buildings and domes like another sort of maze.
"Sounds ingenious," Gurgeh said. "Does it work?"
"So they'd have us believe. In fact it's used as an excuse for not giving people a proper trial, and anyway the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works."
The module and the two frigates touched down at a huge shuttleport on the banks of a broad, muddy, much bridged river, still some distance from the centre of the city but surrounded by medium-rise buildings and low geodesic domes. Gurgeh walked out of the craft with Flere-Imsaho — in its fake antique guise, humming loudly and crackling with static — at his side; he found himself standing on a huge square of synthetic grass which had been unrolled up to the rear of the module. Standing on the grass were perhaps forty or fifty Azadians in various styles of uniform and clothing. Gurgeh, who'd been trying hard to work out how to recognise the various sexes, reckoned they were mostly of the intermediate or apex sex, with only a smattering of males and females; beyond them stood several lines of identically uniformed males, carrying weapons. Behind them, another group played rather strident and brash-sounding music.