The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

“Really. Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.” He looked quickly, briefly up at the machine again, as though ashamed. “But every now and again, I do worry about losing; I think, what if there’s some kid—especially some kid, somebody younger and just naturally more talented—out there, able to take that away from me. That worries me. The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.”

He woke the next morning, and it was still the same universe; it had not been a nightmare and time had not gone backward. It had all still happened.

“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.