Geste reached out and picked the waiting goblet off the floater. “You know what's been going on?” he asked. He tasted the drink, grimaced, then put it back on the floater.

The floater sank back into the floor and another, pale blue this time, emerged, but remained coupled by a thin strand of material. The messenger weasel nuzzled against Geste's hand, its fur testing the chemical composition of his sweat and relaying the information to the household machines to help them design a better beverage, which would be fed up to the waiting floater.

Geste paid no attention to that. He was too worried to pet the weasel, and let his hand hang limply against it.

“You mean old Thaddeus doing his best to blow away the High Castle, with Brenner and a bunch of other folks in it?” Gamesmaster said. “Sure, I know. I keep in touch. I've been getting all the dope from your floater, and from Mother, and from a dozen other places."

Geste squinted critically up at the ceiling and remarked, “You talk too much, you know that? You might want to consider reprogramming yourself a little, toning that down."

“I'll keep it in mind, boss, but I still want to know why you brought that noble savage here. Why did you come home at all, for that matter?"

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Geste replied. “I promised that I'd set him up with Sunlight, didn't I? I can't take him back to his village until I come through on that; I've got a reputation to live up to, and besides, it should be pretty funny, watching the two of them together. You know what Sunlight is like, her whole ethereal, too-good-for-mortal-flesh routine, and here this poor kid wants to haul her into bed-she probably hasn't been laid by a human being in centuries, let alone some yokel who can't have any more romantic technique than one of those damned rabbits that are all over this planet.” He snorted, and picked up his new drink.

“You're getting off the subject, boss."

He sipped at the goblet and nodded. “Yeah, I am; sorry. Anyway, I really did want to see what happened when I got the two of them face to face. I was looking forward to it. And I was looking forward to seeing Sheila again; it's been… what, half a year, almost?"

“Maybe a third."

“Still too long. In any case, I was looking forward to a little light-hearted fun, and a few interesting days, and instead I found myself in the middle of what might turn into a full-blown war. You know Thaddeus’ history; he's started wars before. He may be out to rebuild his father's stupid little empire again. That threw me off-stride; I haven't thought in terms of wars or empires or interstellar politics for centuries now. All I could think was that if I took Bredon home, he'd say I had welshed, and if I dropped him anywhere else I might be too busy to ever come back for him."

“If Thaddeus is out to conquer this corner of the galaxy, and you try to stop him, you could wind up too dead to come back and pick the kid up."

“I know-I thought of that, too. So I could take him home, or I could keep him with me, or I could bring him here. Keeping him with me on that little airskiff wouldn't work; he'd just get in the way. So here he is. And I want you, and all the rest of Arcade, to look after him, and see that he has what he needs, until I get back. Do whatever he tells you so long as it won't hurt anything. If I do get killed, you see that he gets home safely."

“You got it, boss. No problem."

“Good. Now, what can we do about Thaddeus?"

The intelligence had no quick answer for that. After a moment it hummed quietly to indicate its befuddlement.

“Fat lot of help you are,” Geste muttered.

“Sorry, boss, but I'm a housekeeper, not a general. This is way the hell outside my programming. I don't know the first thing about stopping a war."

“You should-it's not that different from a game, and you know plenty about games."

The intelligence hesitated, then asked, “You think I should treat this like a war game?"

“Of course-why do you think they're called war games in the first place?"

“Well, yeah, I know that, but I never knew whether they were accurate simulations or not. If it's like that, the first thing we need is military intelligence, if you'll forgive the phrase. We need to scout out exactly what the situation is. Boss, you're the best-equipped person on the planet for that; you've got more spy gadgets than all the rest put together."

“That's true, I guess,” Geste admitted, leaning back. “I never planned on using them for anything but fun, but I've got them, don't I? Start sending them out there, then. First priority is tapping into Thaddeus’ own systems, finding out what he's done already, and what he plans to do. Put as many snoopers, crackers, and tapping devices onto that as you can-either silicon-based or organic or just transmitted software, whatever you can get in there. You'll need a lot, because he's always refused to centralize anything. For the real-world stuff, I want records of all movements in and out of Fortress Holding-record heat-signatures, or emissions, or whatever other features can be used to distinguish them, and try and identify the individual machines. Anything that seems slow and stupid enough, put a spyscope or a homing bug on it-follow it and see what it does. And can we do anything about bent-space measurement?"

“Sure, boss, we've got lots of bent-space stuff. You told me to see about tunneling into The Meadows a couple of years back, and most of that place is in bent space, so I've been working on bent-space navigation for that-I never got into The Meadows with it, but I can find my way around in overspace or underspace or whatever other variant of polyspace you care to name, and I can spot every crimp in the planet's gravity well."

“I told you to do that?"

“You sure did; want a playback?"

“No, I believe you. I just forgot.” Geste shook his head in pleased bemusement at his own accidental foresight.

“All in all,” Gamesmaster said, “I think we're all right on reconnaisance, boss, but we haven't got much of anything for defense or attack."

“We can sabotage any system we can read, can't we?"

“Well, probably-it's not quite that easy. A lot of them will be tamper-protected, and we may lose the snooper every time. And Thaddeus is bound to have a lot of redundancy in his systems, as well as a lot of systems; he's fought wars before."

“That's true,” Geste said thoughtfully. “I guess he has. He and Shadowdark."

“Oh, some of the others have, too."

“I suppose they must have.” It occurred to Geste that he knew surprisingly little about some of his comrades. He dismissed that as unimportant, and returned to the subject at hand. “We must be able to mount some sort of an attack. I want you to devote whatever capacity you can spare easily to adapting equipment for use as weaponry, or maybe just building weapons from scratch. We may need an arsenal."

“You got it, boss. You want anything special?"

“No, I don't know any more about what he's got than you do."

“Okay, I got it; I'll do a mixed bag, whatever I think of. You let me know if you come up with any brilliant ideas for me to work on. Anything else?"

“On defense-Thaddeus can't get into a bent-space shelter, can he?"

“Not if you close it off before he can send anything through. But, boss, you wouldn't like being stuck in a closed-off bubble. Once you close it off from normal space, you don't just have a bend any more, you've got a pocket universe. Breaking back out into normal space could be tricky. I wouldn't want to try it. And so long as you have a connection to normal space, Thaddeus can attack you through it, one way or another."

“What if we got off-planet? Just packed up and left?"

The intelligence hesitated. “Well, boss,” it said at last, “you could try that. You could pack up and go back to Mother and take off for Terra or anywhere else you fancy. But that wouldn't stop Thaddeus. He got off Alpha Imperium centuries after the collapse of the local civilization, remember; he used salvaged materials and slave labor and built himself a starship in a mud-hut technology. He could do the same here. And meanwhile, if you just took off, you'd have to leave behind a lot of stuff. All the mortals, for example. And me. I wouldn't like that. I mean, I know that you won't hang around Denner's Wreck forever, but I always figured that when you left you'd see that I came along, or else you'd leave me a secure situation here. If you run off now, you can't take me along-there isn't room on Mother, and you couldn't make the modifications quickly enough to get away before Thaddeus shot you down. And if you left me behind, I figure Thaddeus would get to me sooner or later."