The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

No, not quite the end. There’s still me. I know I’ve been naughty, not revealing my identity, but then, maybe you’ve guessed; and who am I to deprive you of the satisfaction of working it out for yourself? Who am I, indeed? Yes, I was there, all the time. Well, more or less all the time. I watched, I listened, I thought and sensed and waited, and did as I was told (or asked, to maintain the proprieties). I was there all right, in person or in the shape of one of my representatives, my little spies. To be honest, I don’t know whether I’d have liked old Gurgeh to have found out the truth or not; still undecided on that one, I must confess. I—we—left it to chance, in the end. For example; just supposing Chiark Hub had told our hero the exact shape of the cavity in the husk that had been Mawhrin-Skel, or Gurgeh had somehow opened that lifeless casing and seen for himself… would he have thought that little, disk-shaped hole a mere coincidence? Or would he have started to suspect? We’ll never know; if you’re reading this he’s long dead; had his appointment with the displacement drone and been zapped to the very livid heart of the system, corpse blasted to plasma in the vast erupting core of Chiark’s sun, his sundered atoms rising and falling in the raging fluid thermals of the mighty star, each pulverized particle migrating over the millennia to that planet-swallowing surface of blinding, storm-swept fire, to boil off there, and so add their own little parcels of meaningless ill...