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connections& I'd trust them to help, I think.'
'I don't know,' Yay said. 'We're all taking this awful seriously; he'll come
out of it. He's got friends. Nothing too terrible's going to happen to him
as long as his pals are around.'
'Hmm,' the drone said. The car stopped at one of the elevator tubes serving
the village where Charnlis Amalk-ney lived. 'Will we see you in Tronze?' the
drone asked.
'No, I've a site conference that evening,' Yay said. 'And then there's a
young fellow
I saw at the shoot the other day& I've arranged to bump into him that night.'
She grinned.
'I see,' Chamlis said. 'Lapsing into predatory mode, eh? Well, enjoy your
bumping.'
'I'll try,' Yay laughed. She and the drone bade each other goodnight, then
Charnlis went through the car's lock - its ancient, minutely battered casing
suddenly bright in the blast of sunlight from underneath - and went straight
up the elevator tube, without waiting for a lift. Yay smiled and shook her
head at such geriatric precocity, as the car pulled away again.
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Ren slept on, half covered by a sheet. Her black hair spilled across the top
of the bed. Gurgeh sat at his occasional desk near the balcony windows,
looking out at the night. The rain had passed, the clouds thinned and
separated, and now the
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Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games (1988) v1.0 : Scanned by HugHug light of
the stars and the four Plates on the far, balancing side of the Chiark Orbital
-
three million kilometres away and with their inner faces in daylight - cast a
silvery sheen on the passing clouds and made the dark fjord waters glitter.
He turned on the deskpad, pressed its calibrated margin a few times until he
found the relevant publications, then read for a while; papers on game-theory
by other respected players, reviews of some of their games, analyses of new
games and promising players.
He opened the windows later and stepped out on to the circular balcony,
shivering a little as the cool night air touched his nakedness. He'd taken
his pocket terminal with him, and braved the cold for a while, talking to the
dark trees and the silent fjord, dictating a new paper on old games.
When he went back in, Ren Myglan was still asleep, but breathing quickly and
erratically. Intrigued, he went over to her and crouched down by the side of
the bed, looking intently at her face as it twitched and contorted in her
sleep. Her breath laboured in her throat and down her delicate nose, and her
nostrils flared.
Gurgeh squatted like that for some minutes, with an odd expression on his
face, somewhere between a sneer and a sad smile, wondering - with a sense of
vague frustration, even regret - what sort of nightmares the young woman must
be having, to make her quiver and pant and whimper so.
The next two days passed relatively uneventfully. He spent most of the time
reading papers by other players and theorists, and finished a paper of his own
which he'd started the night Ren Myglan stayed. Ren had left during breakfast
the next morning, after an argument; he liked to work during breakfast, she'd
wanted to talk. He'd suspected she was just tetchy after not sleeping well.
He caught up on some correspondence. Mostly it was in the form of requests;
to visit other worlds, take part in great tournaments, write papers, comment
on new games, become a teacher/lecturer/ professor in various educational
establishments, be a guest on any one of several GSVs, take on such-and-such a
child prodigy& it was a long list.
He turned them all down. It gave him a rather pleasant feeling. There was a
communication from a GCU which claimed to have discovered a world on which
there was a game based on the precise topography of individual snowflakes; a
game which, for that reason, was never played on the same board twice. Gurgeh
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Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games (1988) v1.0 : Scanned by HugHug had never
heard of such a game, and could find no mention of it in the usually up-
to-date files Contact collated for people like him. He suspected the game was
a fake - GCUs were notoriously mischievous - but sent a considered and germain
(if also rather ironic) reply, because the joke, if it was a joke, appealed to
him.
He watched a gliding competition over the mountains and cliffs on the far side
of the fjord.
He turned on the house holoscreen and watched a recently made entertainment
he'd heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent
inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had
expected to despise its preposterousness, but found it quite amusing. He
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sketched out a glacier game, based on what sort of minerals could be gouged
from rocks, what mountains destroyed, rivers dammed, landscapes created and
bays blocked if - as in the entertainment - glaciers could liquefy and
re-freeze parts of themselves at will. The game was diverting enough, but
contained nothing original; he abandoned it after an hour or so.
He spent much of the next day swimming in Ikroh's basement pool; when doing
the backstroke, he dictated as well, his pocket terminal tracking up and down
the pool with him, just overhead.
In the late afternoon a woman and her young daughter came riding through the
forest and stopped off at Ikroh. Neither of them showed any sign of having
heard of him; they just happened to be passing. He invited them to stay for a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]