He heard nothing from Mawhrin-Skel. He asked Hub to find the machine, just to let him know where it was, but Hub couldn't, which obviously annoyed the Orbital Mind a lot. He had it send the drone team down again and they swept the house once more. Hub left one of the machines there in the house, to monitor continuously for surveillance.

Gurgeh spent a lot of time walking in the forests and mountains around Ikroh, walking and hiking and scrambling twenty or thirty kilometres each day just for the natural soporific of being dead, animal-tired at night.

On the fourth day, he was almost starting to feel that if he didn't do anything, didn't talk to anybody or communicate or write, and didn't stir from the house, nothing would happen. Maybe Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared for ever. Perhaps Contact had come to take it away, or said it could come back to the fold. Maybe it had gone totally crazy and flown off into space; maybe it had taken seriously the old joke about Styglian enumerators, and had gone off to count all the grains of sand on a beach.

It was a fine day. He sat in the broad lower branches of a sunbread tree in the garden at Ikroh, looking out through the canopy of leaves to where a small herd of feyl had emerged from the forest to crop the wineberry bushes at the bottom of the lower lawn. The pale, shy animals, stick-thin and camouflage-skinned, pulled nervously at the low shrubs, their triangular heads jigging and bobbing, jaws working. Gurgeh looked back to the house, just visible through the gently moving leaves of the tree.

He saw a tiny drone, small and grey-white, near one of the windows of the house. He froze. It might not be Mawhrin-Skel, he told himself. It was too far away to be certain. It might be Loash and-all-the-rest. Whatever it was, it was a good forty metres away, and he must be almost invisible sitting here in the tree. He couldn't be traced; he'd left his terminal back at the house, something he had taken to doing increasingly often recently, even though it was a dangerous, irresponsible thing to do, to be apart from the Hub's information network, effectively cut off from the rest of the Culture.

He held his breath, sat dead still.

The little machine seemed to hesitate in mid-air, then point in his direction. It came floating straight towards him.

It wasn't Mawhrin-Skel or Loash the verbose; it wasn't even the same type. It was a little larger and fatter and it had no aura at all. It stopped just below the tree and said in a pleasant voice, "Mr Gurgeh?"

He jumped out of the tree. The herd of feyl started and disappeared, leaping into the forest in a confusion of green shapes. "Yes?" he said.

"Good afternoon. My name's Worthil; I'm from Contact. Pleased to meet you."

"Hello."

"What a lovely place. Did you have the house built?"

"Yes," Gurgeh said. Irrelevant small-talk; a nano-second interrogation of Hub's memories would have told the machine exactly when Ikroh was built, and by whom.

"Quite beautiful. I couldn't help noticing the roofs all slope at more or less the same mean angle as the surrounding mountain slopes. Your idea?"

"A private aesthetic theory," Gurgeh admitted, a little more impressed; he'd never mentioned that to anybody. The fieldless machine made a show of looking around.

"Hmm. Yes, a fine house and an impressive setting. But now: may I come to the reason for my visit?"

Gurgeh sat down cross-legged by the tree. "Please do."

The drone lowered itself to keep level with his face. "First of all, let me apologise if we put you off earlier. I think the drone who visited you previously may have taken its instructions a little too literally, though, to give it its due, time is rather limited…. Anyway; I'm here to tell you all you want to know. We have, as you probably suspected, found something we think might interest you. However…" The drone turned away from the man, to look at the house and its garden again. "I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to leave your beautiful home."

"So it does involve travelling?"

"Yes. For some time."

"How long?" Gurgeh asked.

The drone seemed to hesitate. "May I tell you what it is we've found, first?"

"All right."

"It must be in confidence, I'm afraid," the drone said apologetically. "What I've come to tell you has to remain restricted for the time being. You'll understand why once I've explained. Can you give me your word you won't let this go any further?"

"What would happen if I say No?"

"I leave. That's all."

Gurgeh shrugged, brushed a little bark from the hem of the gathered-up robe he was wearing. "All right. In secret, then."

Worthil floated upwards a little, turning its front briefly towards Ikroh. "It'll take a little time to explain. Might we retire to your house?"

"Of course." Gurgeh rose to his feet.

Gurgeh sat in the main screen-room of Ikroh. The windows were blanked out and the wall holoscreen was on; the Contact drone was controlling the room systems. It put the lights out. The screen went blank, then showed the main galaxy, in 2-D, from a considerable distance. The two Clouds were nearest Gurgeh's point of view, the larger Cloud a semi-spiral with a long tail leading away from the galaxy, and the smaller Cloud vaguely Y-shaped.

"The Greater and Lesser Clouds," the drone Worthil said. "Each about one hundred thousand light years away from where we are now. No doubt you've admired them from Ikroh in the past; they're quite visible, though you're on the under-edge of the main galaxy relative to them, and so looking at them through it. We've found what you might consider a rather interesting game… here." A green dot appeared near the centre of the smaller Cloud.

Gurgeh looked at the drone. "Isn't that," he said, "rather far away? I take it you're suggesting I go there."

"It is a long way away, and we do suggest just that. The journey will take nearly two years on the fastest ships, due to the nature of the energy grid; it's more tenuous out there, between the star-clumps. Inside the galaxy such a journey would take less than a year."

"But that means I'd be away four years," Gurgeh said, staring at the screen. His mouth had gone dry.

"More like five," the drone said matter-of-factly.

"That's… a long time."

"It is, and I'll certainly understand if you decline our invitation. Though we do think you'll find the game itself interesting. First of all, however, I have to explain a little about the setting, which is what makes the game unique." The green dot expanded, became a rough circle. The screen went suddenly out-holo, filling the room with stars. The rough green circle of suns became an even rougher sphere. Gurgeh experienced the momentary swimming sensation he sometimes felt when surrounded by space or its impression.

"These stars," Worthil said — the green-coloured stars, at least a couple of thousand suns, flashed once — "are under the control of what one can only describe as an empire. Now…" The drone turned to look at him. The little machine lay in space like some impossibly large ship, stars in front of it as well as behind it. "It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet, let alone cracks the lightspeed problem, which of course one has to do, to rule effectively over any worthwhile volume.

"Every now and again, however, Contact disturbs some particular ball of rock and discovers something nasty underneath. On every occasion, there is a specific and singular reason, some special circumstance which allows the general rule to go by the board. In the case of the conglomerate you see before you — apart from the obvious factors, such as the fact that we didn't get out there until fairly recently, and the lack of any other powerful influence in the Lesser Cloud — that special circumstance is a game."