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anticipated. He spent some time watching the screen, where
Chiark's star shone yellow-white and gradually diminishing, but nevertheless
he felt further away from it than even the screen showed.
He had never felt the falseness of such representations before, but sitting
there, in the old accommodation social area, looking at the rectangle of
screen on the wall, he couldn't help feeling like an actor, or a component in
the ship's circuitry: like part of, and therefore as false as, the
pretend-view of Real Space hung in front of him.
Maybe it was the silence. He had expected noise, for some reason. The
Limiting
Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing
acceleration; the craft's velocity was hurtling towards its maximum with a
rapidity which, when displayed in numbers on the wall-screen, numbed Gurgeh's
brain. He didn't even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as
hyperspace? At least he had heard of that, even if he didn't know much about
it& whatever; for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly
silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient
warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up,
and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made
half of dreams.
The ship didn't seem to want to start any conversations, either, which
normally wouldn't have bothered Gurgeh, but now did. He left his cabin and
went for a walk, going down the narrow, hundred metre-long corridor which led
to the waist of the craft. In the bare corridor, hardly a metre wide, and so
low he could touch the ceiling without having to stretch, he thought he could
hear a very faint hum, coming from all around him. At the end of that passage
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he turned down another, apparently sloping at an angle of at least thirty
degrees, but seemingly level as soon as he stepped (with a moment of
dizziness) into it. That corridor ended at an effector blister, where one of
the great game-boards had been set up.
The board stretched out in front of him, a swirl of geometric shapes and
varying colours; a landscape spreading out over five hundred square metres,
with the low pyramid-ranges of stacked, three-dimensional territory increasing
even that total. He walked over to the edge of the huge board wondering if he
had, after all, taken on too much.
He looked around the old effector blister. The board took up a little more
than half the floor space, lying on top of the light foam metal planking the
dockyard had installed. Half the volume of the space was beneath Gurgeh's
feet; the cross-
section of the effector housing was circular, and the planking and board
described a
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Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games (1988) v1.0 : Scanned by HugHug diameter
across it, more or less flush with the hull of the ship beyond the blister.
The housing roof curved, gunmetal dull, arcing twelve metres overhead. Gurgeh
dropped under the planking on a float-hatch into the dimly lit bowl under the
foam metal floor. The echoing space was even more empty than that above; save
for a few hatches and shallow holes on the surface of the bowl, the removal of
the mass of weaponry had been accomplished without leaving a trace. Gurgeh
remembered Mawhrin-Skel, and wondered how the
Limiting Factor
felt about having its talons drawn:
'Jernau Gurgeh.' He turned as his name was pronounced and saw a cube of
skeletal components floating near him.
'Yes?'
'We have now reached our Terminal Aggregation Point and are sustaining a
velocity of approximately eight point five kilolights in ultraspace one
positive.'
'Really?' Gurgeh said. He looked at the half-metre cube and wondered which
bits were its eyes.
'Yes,' the remote-drone said. 'We are due to rendezvous with the GSV
Little Rascal
in approximately one hundred and two days from now. We are currently
receiving instructions from the
Little Rascal on how to play Azad, and the ship has instructed me to tell you
it will shortly be able to commence playing. When do you wish to start?'
'Well, not right now,' Gurgeh said. He touched the float-hatch controls,
rising through the floor into the light. The remote-drone drifted up above
him. 'I want to settle in first,' he told it. 'I need more theoretical work
before I start playing.'
'Very well.' The drone started to drift away. It stopped. 'The ship wishes
to advise you that its normal operating mode includes full internal
monitoring, removing the need for your terminal. Is this satisfactory, or
would you prefer the internal observation systems to be switched off, and to
use your terminal to contact the ship?'
'The terminal,' Gurgeh said, immediately.
'Internal monitoring has been reduced to emergency-only status.'
'Thanks,' Gurgeh said.
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'You're welcome,' the drone said, floating off.
Gurgeh watched it disappear into the corridor, then turned back to look at the
vast board, shaking his head once more.
Over the next thirty days, Gurgeh didn't touch a single Azad piece; the whole
time was spent learning the theory of the game, studying its history where it
was useful for a better understanding of the play, memorising the moves each
piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual
morale-strength, their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their
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