"Oh, shut up, machine."
As it turned out, they needn't have returned to the module; there was nothing more to take or pack. He stood in the small lounge, fiddling with the Orbital bracelet on his wrist and realising he was looking forward to the coming games on Echronedal more than he had any of the others. The pressure would be off; he wouldn't have to face the opprobrium of the press and the Empire's ghastly general public, he could cooperate with the Empire to produce a convincing piece of fake news, and the likelihood of more physical option bets had thereby been reduced almost to zero. He was going to enjoy himself…
Flere-Imsaho was glad to see the man was getting over the effects of seeing behind the screen the Empire showed its guests; he was much as he'd been before, and the days at Hamin's estate seemed to have relaxed him. It could see a small change in him though; something it could not quite pin down, but which it knew was there.
They didn't see Shohobohaum Za again. He'd left on a tour "upcountry', wherever that was. He sent his regards, and a message in Marain to the effect that if Gurgeh could lay his mitts on some fresh grif…
Before they left, Gurgeh asked the module about the girl he'd met at the grand ball, months earlier. He couldn't remember her name, but if the module could provide a list of the females who'd survived the first round, he was sure he'd recognise hers… the module got confused, but Flere-Imsaho told them both to forget it.
No women had made it to the second round.
Pequil came with them to the shuttleport. His arm was fully healed. Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho bade farewell to the module; it climbed into the sky for a rendezvous with the distant Limiting Factor. They said goodbye to Pequil too — he took Gurgeh's hand in both of his — and then the man and the drone boarded the shuttle.
Gurgeh watched Groasnachek as it fell away beneath them. The city tilted as he was thrown back into his seat; the whole view swung and juddered as the shuttlecraft powered into the hazy skies.
Gradually all the patterns and the shapes came out, revealed for a while before the increasing distance, the city's own vapours, dust and grime, and the altering angle of their climb took it all away.
For all the jumble, it looked momentarily peaceful and ordered in its parts. The distance made its individual, local confusions and dislocations disappear, and from a certain height, where little ever dallied, and almost everything just passed through, it looked exactly like a great, mindless, spreading organism.
3. Machina Ex Machina
So far so average. Our game-player's lucked out again. I guess you can see he's a changed man, though. These humans!
I'm going to be consistent, however. I haven't told you who I am so far, and I'm not going to tell you now, either. Maybe later.
Maybe.
Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that's not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that's all it can be. I get so frustrated with people who can't see this!
Even a human should be able to understand it's obvious.
The result is what matters, not how it's achieved (unless, of course, the process of achieving is itself a series of results). What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? (Let's not even think about a Mind mind.) Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfils the same task.
Just matter, switching energy of one sort or another.
Switches. Memory. The random element that is chance and that is called choice: common denominators, all.
I say again; you is what you done. Dynamic (mis)behaviourism, that's my creed.
Gurgeh? His switches are working funny. He's thinking differently, acting uncharacteristically. He is a different person. He's seen the worst that meatgrinder of a city could provide, and he just took it personally, and took his revenge.
Now he's spaceborne again, head crammed full of Azad rules, his brain adapted and adapting to the swirling, switching patterns of that seductive, encompassing, feral set of rules and possibilities, and being carted through space towards the Empire's most creakily symbolic shrine: Echronedal; the place of the standing wave of flame; the Fire Planet.
But will our hero prevail? Can he possibly prevail? And what would constitute winning, anyway?
How much has the man still got to learn? What will he make of such knowledge? More to the point, what will it make of him?
Wait and see. It'll work itself out, in time.
Take it from there, maestro…
Echronedal was twenty light years from Eä. Halfway there the Imperial Fleet left the region of dust that lay between Eä's system and the direction of the main galaxy, and so that vast armed spiral was spread over half the sky like a million jewels caught in a whirlpool.
Gurgeh was impatient to get to the Fire Planet. The journey seemed to take for ever, and the liner he was making it on was hopelessly cramped. He spent most of the time in his cabin. The bureaucrats, imperial officials and other game-players on the ship regarded him with undisguised dislike, and apart from a couple of shuttle trips over to the battlecruiser Invincible — the imperial flag ship — for receptions, Gurgeh didn't socialise.
The crossing was made without incident, and after twelve days they arrived over Echronedal, a planet orbiting a yellow dwarf in a fairly ordinary system and itself a human-habitable world with only one peculiarity.
It was not unusual to find distinct equatorial bulges on once fast-spinning planets, and Echronedal's was comparatively slight, though sufficient to produce a single unbroken continental ribbon of land lying roughly between the planet's tropics, the rest of the globe lying beneath two great oceans, ice-capped at the poles. What was unique, in the experience of the Culture as well as the Empire, was to discover a wave of fire forever moving round the planet on the continental landmass.
Taking about half a standard year to complete its circumnavigation, the fire swept over the land, its fringes brushing the shores of the two oceans, its wave-front a near-straight line, its flames consuming the growth of the plants which had flourished in the ashes of the previous blaze. The whole land-based ecosystem had evolved around this never-ending conflagration; some plants could only sprout from beneath the still-warm cinders, their seeds jolted into development by the passing heat; other plants blossomed just before the fire arrived, bursting into rapid growth just before the flames found them, and using the fire-front's thermals to transport their seeds into the upper atmosphere, to fall back again, somewhere, on to the ash. The land-animals of Echronedal fell into three categories; some kept constantly on the move, maintaining the same steady walking pace as the fire, some swam round its oceanic boundaries, while other species burrowed into the ground, hid in caves, or survived through a variety of mechanisms in lakes or rivers.
Birds circled the world like a jetstream of feathers.
The blaze remained little more than a large, continuous bush-fire for eleven revolutions. On the twelfth, it changed.
The cinderbud was a tall, skinny plant which grew quickly once its seeds had germinated; it developed an armoured base and shot up to a height of ten metres or more in the two hundred days it had before the flames came round again. When the fire did arrive, the cinderbud didn't burn; it closed its leafy head until the blaze had passed, then kept on growing in the ashes. After eleven of those Great Months, eleven baptisms in the flames, the cinderbuds were great trees, anything up to seventy metres in height. Their own chemistry then produced first the Oxygen Season, and then the Incandescence.