popping lights of a small firework display. The air was filled, too, with the chanting of massed voices;

a choir of scalecones stood banked on

the far side of the auditorium. The humanoids forming the choir appeared identical in

all but stature and in the tones they produced from their

puffed-out chests and long necks. They seemed to be making the ambient

racket, but as he looked around the arena Horza could make out the

faint purple edges in the air where other, more localized

sound fields held command, over smaller stages where dancers danced, singers sang,

strippers stripped, boxers boxed, or people

just stood around talking.

Banked all around, the paraphernalia of the game seethed like a vast storm. Maybe ten or even twenty thousand people, mostly

humanoid

but some utterly different, including not a few machines and drones, they sat or lay or walked or stood, watching

magicians, jugglers, fighters,

immolators, hypnotics, couplers, actors, orators and a hundred other types of entertainers

all doing their turns. Tents had been pitched on some

of the larger terraces; rows of seats and couches remained on others.

Many small stages frazzled with lights, smoke and glittering holograms

and soligrams. Horza saw a 3-D maze spread out over

several terraces, full of tubes and angles, some clear, some opaque, some moving,

some staying still. Shadows and forms moved

inside.

A slow-motion animal trapeze act arced gradually overhead. Horza recognized the beasts performing it; it would become a combat

act later

on.

Some people walked by Horza: tall humanoids in fabulous clothes, glittering like a gaudy night city seen from the air. They

chattered in

almost inaudibly high voices, and from a network of fine, golden-colored tubes branching all around their bright

red and dark purple faces, tiny

puffs of incandescent gas pulsed out, wreathing their semi-scaled necks and naked shoulders,

and trailing and dimming behind them in a fiery

orange glow. Horza watched them pass. Their cloaks, flowing out behind as

though hardly heavier than the air through which they moved,

flickered with the image of an alien face, each cloak showing

part of one huge moving image, as though a projector overhead was focused on

the capes of the moving group. The orange gas

touched Horza’s nostrils and his head swam for a second. He let his immune glands deal with

the narcotic, and continued to

look around the arena.

The eye of the storm, the still, quiet spot, was so small it could easily have been missed in even a slow and attentive scan

of the auditorium.

It was not in the center, but set at one end of the ellipsoid of level ground forming the lowest visible

level of the arena. There, under a canopy of

still dark lighting units, a round table stood, just about large enough to accommodate

at its rim the sixteen large, differently styled chairs which

each faced a wedge of color fixed to the top of the table. A

console set into the table itself faced each chair, on which straps and other

restraining devices lay opened. Behind each

of the seats lay an area of clear space on which small seats, twelve in all, were placed. A small

fence separated them from

the larger seats in front, and another fence cordoned off the set of twelve seats from a larger area behind where

people,

most of them moties, were already quietly waiting.

The game seemed to have been delayed. Horza sat down on what was either an over-designed seat or a rather unimaginative piece

of

sculpture. He was almost on the highest level of the terraces of the arena, with a good view over most of the rest. There

was nobody nearby. He

reached deep inside his heavy blouse and peeled off some artificial skin from his abdomen. He rolled

the skin into a ball and threw it into a

large pot that held a small tree, just behind where he sat; then he checked the Aoish

credit Tenths, the negotiable memory card, the pocket

terminal and the light CRE pistol which had been hidden by the paunch

of fake skin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a small, darkly dressed

man approach. The man looked at Horza with his head

tilted, from about five meters off, then came closer.

“Hey, you want to be a Life."

“No. Goodbye," Horza said. The small man sniffed and walked off, stopping further along the walkway to prod a shape lying

near the edge

of a narrow terrace. Horza looked over and saw a woman there raise her head groggily, then shake it slowly,

moving sinuous lengths of

bedraggled white hair. Her faced showed briefly in the light of an overhead spot; she was beautiful

but looked very tired. The small man spoke

to her again, but she shook her head and made a motion with one hand. The small

man walked off.

The flight in the ex-Culture shuttle had been relatively uneventful; after some confusion, Horza had succeeded in patching

through to the Orbital’s

navigation system, discovered where he was in relation to the

Olmedreca

’s last known position, and set off to find whatever was left of the

Megaship. He’d accessed a news service while gorging

himself on Culture emergency rations, and found a report on the

Olmedreca

in the

index. The pictures showed the ship, listing a little and fractionally bow-down, floating in a calm sea surrounded

by ice, the first kilometer of its

hull seemingly buried inside the huge tabular berg. Small aircraft and a few shuttles hovered

and flew about the gigantic wreck, like flies above

the carcass of a dinosaur. The commentary accompanying the visuals spoke

of a mysterious second nuclear explosion aboard the craft. It also

reported that when police craft had arrived, the Megaship

had proved to be deserted.

Hearing that, Horza had immediately altered the shuttle’s destination, swinging the craft round, to head for Evanauth.

Horza had had three Tenths of an Aoish credit. He had sold the shuttle for five Tenths. It was absurdly cheap, especially

given the imminent

destruction of the Orbital, but he had been in a hurry, and the dealer who accepted the craft was certainly

taking a risk handling the machine; it

was very obviously a Culture design, the brain had equally obviously been shot out

of it, so there could be little doubt it had been stolen. The

Culture would treat the destruction of the craft’s consciousness

as murder.

In three hours Horza had sold the shuttle, bought clothes, cards, a gun, a couple of terminals and some information. All except

the

information had been cheap.

Horza now knew that there was a craft answering the description of the

Clear Air Turbulence

on the Orbital, or rather underneath it, inside

the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle called

The Ends of Invention.

He found that hard to believe, but there was no other craft it could be.

According to the information agency, a ship fitting

the

CAT

’s description had been brought on board by one of the Evanauth Port shipbuilders

to have repairs made to its warping units;

it had arrived under tow two days previously, with only its fusion motors working. He could not,

however, find out its name

or exact location.

It sounded to Horza like the

CAT

had been used to rescue the survivors of Kraiklyn’s band; it must have come over the O wall on remote

control, using its

warp units. It had picked the Free Company up, then hopped back over again, damaging its warp motors in the process.

He had also been unable to find out who the survivors might be, but assumed Kraiklyn must be one of them; nobody else could

have

brought the

CAT

over the Edgewall. He hoped he’d find Kraiklyn at the Damage game. Either way, Horza had decided to make for the

CAT

afterward. He still intended to head for Schar’s World, and the

Clear Air Turbulence

was the most likely way of getting there. He hoped Yalson

was alive. He also hoped it was true about

The Ends of Invention

being totally demilitarized, and the volume around Vavatch being free of

Culture ships. After all this time he wouldn’t have

put it past the Culture’s Minds to have found out about the

CAT

being in the same volume of

space as

The Hand of God 137

when it came under attack, and to have made a connection or two.

He sat back in the seat—or sculpture—and relaxed, letting the internal pattern of the motie drop from his mind and body. He

had to start

thinking like Kraiklyn again; he closed his eyes.

After a few minutes he could hear things starting to happen down in the lower reaches of the arena. He brought himself to

and looked

around. The white-haired woman who had been lying on the nearby terrace had got up; she was walking, a little unsteadily,

down into the arena,

her long, heavy dress sweeping over the steps. Horza got up, too, following quickly down the stairs in

the wake of her perfume. She didn’t look

at him when he skipped past her. She was fiddling with an askew tiara.

The lights were on over the colored table where the game would be played. Some of the stages in the auditorium were starting

to close up