[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

the fire.
Buckled, annealed girders and holes in the floor and walls marked where the observation galleries had
been. The screening gear which had fallen from the ceiling of the hall lay half-melted and congealed in the
centre of the Azad board, like some blistered travesty of a mountain.
He turned to look at the window, where Nicosar had stood, and walked over the creaking surface of
the ruined board. He crouched down, grunting as his knees sent stabs of pain through him. He put his
hand out to where an eddy in the firestorm had collected a little conical pile of dust in the angle of an
internal buttress, right at the edge of the game-board, near where a fused, L-shaped lump of blackened
metal might have been the remains of a gun.
The grey-white ash was soft and warm, and mixed in with it he found a small, C-shaped piece of
metal. The half-melted ring still contained the setting for a jewel, like a tiny rough crater on its rim, but the
stone was gone. He looked at the ring for a while, blowing the ash off it and turning it over and over in
his hands. After a while he put the ring back into the pile of dust. He hesitated, then he took the Orbital
bracelet out of his jacket pocket and added it to the shallow grey cone, pulled the two poison-warning
rings off his fingers, and put them there too. He scooped a handful of the warm ash into one palm, gazing
at it thoughtfully.
'Jernau Gurgeh, good morning.'
He turned and rose, quickly stuffing his hand into his jacket pocket as though ashamed of
something. The little white body of Flere-Imsaho floated in through the window, very tiny and clean and
exact in that shattered, melted place. A tiny grey thing, the size of a baby's finger, floated up to the drone
from the ground near Gurgeh's feet. A hatch opened in Flere-Imsaho's immaculate body; the
micromissile entered the drone. A section of the machine's body revolved, then was still.
'Hello,' Gurgeh said, walking over to it. He looked round the ruined hall, then back at the drone. 'I
hope you're going to tell me what happened.'
'Sit down, Gurgeh. I'll tell you.'
He sat on a block of stone fallen from above the windows. He looked dubiously upwards at where it
must have fallen from. 'Don't worry,' Flere-Imsaho said. 'You're safe. I've checked the roof.'
Gurgeh rested his hands on his knees. 'So?' he said.
'First things first,' Flere-Imsaho said. 'Allow me to introduce myself properly; my name is Sprant
Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti, and I am not a library drone.'
Gurgeh nodded. He recognised some of the nomenclature Chiark Hub had been so impressed with,
long ago. He didn't say anything.
'If I had been a library drone, you'd be dead. Even if you'd escaped Nicosar, you'd have been
incinerated a few minutes later.'
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
'I appreciate that,' Gurgeh said. 'Thank you.' His voice sounded flat, wrung out, and not especially
grateful. 'I thought they'd got you; killed you.'
'Damn nearly did,' the drone said. 'That firework display was for real. Nicosar must have got his hands
on some equiv-tech effector gear; which means - or meant - the Empire has had some sort of contact
with another advanced civilisation. I've scanned what's left of the equipment; could be Homomda
stuff. Anyway, the ship'll load it for further analysis.'
'Where is the ship? I thought we'd be on it, not still down here.'
'It came barrelling through half an hour after the fire hit. Could have snapped us both off, but I reckoned
we were safer staying where we were; I had no trouble insulating you from the fire, and keeping you
under with my effector was easy enough too. The ship popped us a couple of spare drones and kept on
going, braking and turning. It's on its way back now; should be overhead in five minutes. We can go
safely back up in the module. Like I said; displacement can be risky.' Gurgeh gave a sort of half-laugh
through his nose. He looked around the dim hall again. 'I'm still waiting,' he told the machine.
'The imperial guards went crazy, on Nicosar's orders. They blew up the aqueduct, cisterns and shelters,
and killed everybody they could find. They tried to take over theInvincible from the Navy, too. In the
resulting on-board firefight, the ship crashed; came down somewhere in the northern ocean. Biggish
splash;tsaunami 's swept away rather a lot of mature cinderbuds, but I dare say the fire'll cope. There
was no attempt to kill Nicosar the other night; that was just a ruse to get the whole castle and the game
under the control of guards who'd do anything the Emperor told them.'
'Why, though?' Gurgeh said tiredly, kicking at a blister of board metal.'Why did Nicosar order them to
do all that?'
'He told them it was the only way to defeat the Culture and save him. They didn't know he was doomed
too; they thought he had some way of saving himself. Maybe they'd have done it regardless, even
knowing that. They were very highly trained. Anyway; they obeyed their orders.' The machine made a
chuckling noise. 'Most of them, anyway. A few left the shelter they were supposed to blow up intact,
and got some people into it with them. So you're not unique; there are some other survivors. Mostly
servants; Nicosar made sure an the important people were in here. The ship's drones are with the
survivors. We're keeping them locked up until you're safely away. They'll have enough rations to last
until they're rescued.'
'Go on.'
'You sure you can handle an this stuff right now?'
'Just tell mewhy ,' Gurgeh said, sighing.
'You've been used, Jernau Gurgeh,' the drone said matter-of-factly. 'The truth is, youwere playing for
the Culture, and Nicosarwas playing for the Empire. I personally told the Emperor the night before the
start of the last match that you really were our champion; if you won, we were coming in; we'd smash the
Empire and impose our own order. If he won, we'd keep out for as long as he was Emperor and for the
next ten Great Years anyway.
'That's why Nicosar did all he did. He wasn't just a sore loser; he'd lost his Empire. He had nothing else
to live for, so why not go in a blaze of glory?'
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
'Was all that true?' Gurgeh asked. 'Would we really have taken over?'
'Gurgeh,' Flere-Imsaho said, 'I have no idea. Not in my brief; no need to know. It doesn't matter; he
believed it was true.'
'Slightly unfair pressure,' Gurgeh said, smiling without any humour at the machine. 'Telling somebody
they're playing for such high stakes, just the night before the game.'
'Gamespersonship.'
'So why didn't he tell me what we were playing for?'
'Guess.'
'The bet would have been off and we came in all guns blazing anyway.'
'Correct'
Gurgeh shook his head, brushed a little soot off one jacket sleeve, smudging it. 'You really thought I'd
win?' he asked the drone. 'Against Nicosar? You thought that, even before I got here?'
'Before you left Chiark, Gurgeh. As soon as you showed any interest in leaving. SC's been looking for
somebody like you for quite a while. The Empire's been ripe to fall for decades; it needed a big push,
but it could always go. Coming in all guns blazing as you put it is almost never the right approach; Azad -
the game itself - had to be discredited. It was what had held the Empire together all these years the
linchpin; but that made it the most vulnerable point, too.' The drone made a show of looking around, at
the mangled debris of the hall. 'Everything worked out a little more dramatically than we'd expected, I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]