Abstract thought/pattern recognition(PoG), awakeness, sleep, reaction time(E), emotional states, painkillers, sensory boosters(SD),




Increase memory recall


She stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the night's exertions.
And, like somebody holding something precious, and it slipping from their fingers, but them
having the speed and the skill to catch it again before it hit the floor, she was able -
somewhere inside herself - to dip down and retrieve the vanishing memory as it slipped back
into the clutter and noise of her mind, and glanding recall she held it, savoured it, reexperienced
it, until she felt herself shiver again in the sunlight, and came close to making
a little moaning noise.


Use of Weapons






Abstract thought booster, 300 different compounds

Sharp Blue was a game-player’s secretion, a product of standard genofixed Culture glands sitting in
Gurgeh’s lower skull, beneath the ancient, animal-evolved lower reaches of his brain. The panoply of
internally manufactured drugs the vast majority of Culture individuals were capable of choosing
from comprised up to three hundred different compounds of varying degrees of popularity and
sophistication; Sharp Blue was one of the least used because it brought no direct pleasure and
required considerable concentration to produce. But it was good for games. What seemed
complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable
became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier; not a sensory enhancer or a sexual stimulant
or a physiological booster

Player of Games


Coffee equivolent

He forced himself awake, glanding the
Culture’s favorite breakfast drug, Snap, and was a little disappointed to see Ram looked just as fresh
and energetic as he felt.

Player of Games



Getting attacked while on Sharp Blue and probably some other boosters


Gurgeh glanced at the machine, then down the line of arm-linked police. He was still tensed from
the game, bloodstream suffused with multifarious chemicals. As happened every now and again,
everything he saw around him seemed to be part of the game; the way people stood like pieces,
grouped according to who could take or affect whom; the way the pattern on the marquee was like a
simple grid-area on the board, and the poles like planted power-sources waiting to replenish some
exhausted minor piece and supporting a crux-point in the game; the way the people and police stood
like the suddenly closed jaws of some nightmarish pincer-movement . . . all was the game, everything
was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its
structure imposed upon the mind.
“Za?” Gurgeh said. He looked in the direction the drone’s field was pointing, but couldn’t see the
man.
The last of Ram’s group cleared the pavement where the official cars waited. Pequil gestured for
Gurgeh to proceed. They walked between the lines of uniformed males. Cameras pointed, questions
were shouted. Some ragged chanting began and Gurgeh saw a banner waving over the heads of the
crowd; “GO HOME ALIEN.”
“Seems I’m not too popular,” he said.
“You aren’t,” Flere-Imsaho told him.
In two steps (Gurgeh realized in a distant, game-sense way even as he was speaking and the drone
was replying), he was going to be adjacent to . . . it took one more step to analyze the problem . . .
something bad, something jarring and discordant . . . there was something . . . different; wrong about
the three-group he was about to pass on his left; like unplaced ghost-pieces hiding in forest territory. .
. . He had no idea exactly what was wrong with the group, but he knew immediately—as the
protagonizing structures of the game-sense claimed precedence in his thoughts—that he wasn’t going
to risk putting a piece in there.
. . . Another half-step . . .
. . . to realize that the piece he didn’t want to risk was himself.
He saw the three-group start to move and split up. He turned and ducked automatically; it was the
obvious replying move of a threatened piece with too much momentum to stop or bound back from
such an attacking force.
There were several loud bangs. The three-group of people burst toward him through the arms of
two policemen, like a composite piece suddenly fragmenting. He converted his ducking motion into a
dive and roll which he realized with some delight was the almost perfect physical equivalent to a trippiece
tying up a light-attacker. He felt a pair of legs thud into his side, not hard, then there was a
weight on top of him and more loud noises. Something else fell on top of his legs.
It was like waking up.
He’d been attacked. There had been flashes, explosions, people launching themselves at him.
He struggled under the warm, animal weight on top of him, the one he’d tripped up. People were
shouting; police moved quickly. He saw Pequil lying on the ground. Za was there too, standing
looking rather confused. Somebody was screaming. No sign of Flere-Imsaho. Something warm was
seeping into the hose he wore on his legs.
He struggled out from under the body lying on top of him, suddenly revolted by the thought that the
person—apex or male, he couldn’t tell—might be dead. Shohobohaum Za and a policeman helped
him up. There was a lot of shouting still; people were moving or being moved back, clearing a space
around whatever had happened; bodies lay on the ground, some covered in bright red-orange blood.
Gurgeh got dizzily to his feet.


Player of Games








Quicken reaction time boosting.



~ All right, but why do I have to gland quicken?
~ Because it’s a long message, of course . . . in fact it’s an interactive message; an entire semanticcontext
signal-set with attached mind-state abstract capable of replying to your questions, and if you
listened to the whole thing in real time you’d still be sitting there with a vacant expression on your
face by the time your jovial hosts got to the hunt-the-waiter course. And I did say it was urgent. GenarHofoen,
are you paying attention here?
~ I’m paying fucking attention. But come on; can’t you just tell me what the message is? Précis it.
~ The message is for you, not me, Genar-Hofoen. I haven’t looked at it; it’ll be stream-deciphered as
I transmit it.
~ Okay, okay, I’m glanded up; shoot.
~ I still say it’s a bad idea . . . muttered the gelfield suit.
~ Shut UP! the module said. ~ Sorry, Genar-Hofoen. Here is the text of the message:
~ from GSV Death And Gravity to Seddun-Braijsa Byr Fruel Genar-Hofoen dam Ois, message
begins, the module said in its Official voice. Then another voice took over:
~ Genar-Hofoen, I won’t pretend I’m happy to be communicating with you again; however, I have
been asked to do so by certain of those whose opinions and judgement I respect and admire and hence
deem the situation to be such that I would be derelict in my duties if I did not oblige to the utmost of
my abilities.
Genar-Hofoen performed the mental equivalent of sighing and putting his chin in his hands while -
thanks to the quicken now coursing through his central nervous system - everything around him
seemed to happen in slow motion. The General Systems Vehicle Death and Gravity had been a longwinded
old bore when he’d known it and it sounded like nothing had happened in the interim to alter
its conversational style. Even its voice still sounded the same; pompous and monotonous at the same
time.
~ Accordingly, and with due recognition of your habitually contrary, argumentative and wilfully
perverse nature I am communicating with you by sending this message in the form of an interactive
signal. I see you are currently one of our ambassadors to that childishly cruel band of upstart ruffians
known as the Affront; I have the unhappy feeling that while this may have been envisaged as a kind of
subtle punishment for you, you will in fact have adapted with some relish to the environment if not the
task, which I assume you will dispatch with your usual mixture of off-handed carelessness and casual
self-interest--
If this signal is interactive, interrupted Genar-Hofoen, can I ask you to get to the fucking point?
He watched the two scratchounds tense together in slo-mo on either side of the pit.
~ The point is that your hosts will have to be asked to deprive themselves of your company for a
while.
~ What? Why? Genar-Hofoen thought, immediately suspicious. ~ The decision has been made - and
I hasten to establish that I had no part in this - that your services are required elsewhere.
~ Where? For how long?
~ I can’t tell you where exactly, or for how long.
~ Make a stab at it.
~ I cannot and will not.
~ Module, end this message.
~ Are you sure? asked Scopell-Afranqui.
~ Wait!, said the voice of the GSV. ~ Will it satisfy you if I say that we may need about eighty days
of your time?
~ No it won’t. I’m quite happy here. I’ve been bounced into all sorts of Special Circumstances shit
in the past on the strength of a Hey-come-and-do-one-little-job-for-us come-on line. (This was not in
fact perfectly true; Genar-Hofoen had only ever acted for SC once before, but he’d known - or at least
heard of - plenty of people who’d got more than they’d expected when they’d worked for what was in
effect the Contact section’s espionage and dirty tricks department.)
~ I did not--
~ Plus I’ve got a job to do here, Genar-Hofoen interrupted. ~ I’ve got another audience with the
Grand Council in a month to tell them to be nicer to their neighbours or we’re going to think about
slapping their paddles. I want details of this exciting new opportunity or you can shove it.
~ I did not say that I am speaking on behalf of Special Circumstances.
~ Are you denying that you are?
~ Not as such, but--
~ So stop fucking around. Who the hell else is going to start hauling a gifted and highly effective
ambassador off--?
~ Genar-Hofoen, we are wasting time here.
~ We?, Genar-Hofoen thought, watching the two scratchounds launch themselves at each other
slowly. ~ Never mind. Go on.
~ The task required of you is, apparently, a delicate one, which is why I personally regard you as
being utterly unsuited to it, and as such it would be foolish to entrust the full details either to myself,
to your module, your suit or indeed to you until all these details are required.
~ There you are; that’s exactly what you can shove; all that SC need-to-know crap. I don’t care how
fucking delicate the task is, I’m not even going to consider it until I know what’s involved.
The scratchounds were in mid-pounce now, both of them twisting as they leapt. Shit, thought
Genar-Hofoen; this might be one of those scratchound bouts where the whole thing was decided on
the initial lunge, depending entirely on which beast got its teeth into the neck of the other first.
~ What is required, said the message, with a fair approximation of the way the Death And Gravity
had always sounded when it was exasperated, is eighty days of your time, ninety-nine to ninety-nine
point nine-plus per cent of which you will spend doing nothing more onerous or demanding than being
carried from point A to point B; the first part of your journey will be spent travelling, in considerable
comfort, I imagine, aboard the Affronter ship which we will ask (or rather pay, probably) them to put
at your disposal, the second part will be spent in guaranteed comfort aboard a Culture GCU and will
be followed by a short visit aboard another Culture vessel whereupon the task we would ask of you will
actually be accomplished - and when I say a short visit, I mean that it may be possible for you to carry
out what is required of you within an hour, and that certainly the assignment should take no longer
than a day. Then you will make the return journey to take up wherever you left off with our dear
friends and allies the Affront. I take it all that doesn’t sound too much like hard work, does it?
The scratchounds were meeting in the air a metre above the centre of the bait-pit, their jaws aimed
as best they could at each other’s throats. It was still a little hard to tell, but Genar-Hofoen didn’t think
it was looking too good for Fivetide’s animal.
~ Yeah yeah yeah, well I’ve heard all this sort of thing before, D and G. What’s in it for me? Why
the hell should I--? Oh, fuck . . .
~ What? said the Death And Gravity’s message.
But Genar-Hofoen’s attention was elsewhere.
The two scratchounds met and locked, falling to the floor of the bait-pit in a tangle of slowly
thrashing limbs. The blue-collared animal had its jaws clamped around the throat of the red-collared
one. Most of the Affronters were starting to cheer. Fivetide and his supporters were screaming.
Shit.
~ Suit? Genar-Hofoen thought.
~ What is it? said the gelfield. ~ I thought you were talking to--?
~ Never mind that now. See that blue scratchound?
~ Can’t take my or your eyes off the damn thing.
~ Effectorise the fucker; get it off the other one.
~ I can’t do that! That would be cheating!
~ Fivetide’s arse is hanging way out the merry-go-round on this, suit. Do it now or take personal
responsibility for a major diplomatic incident. Up to you.
~ What? But--!
~ Effectorise it now, suit. Come on; I know that last upgrade let you sneak it under their monitors.
Oh! Look at that. Ow! Can’t you just feel those prosthetics round your neck? Fivetide must be kissing
his diplomatic career goodbye right now; probably already working out a way to challenge me to a
duel. After that, doesn’t really matter if I kill him or he kills me; probably come to war between--
~ All right! All right! There!
There was a buzzing sensation on top of Genar-Hofoen’s right shoulder. The red scratchound
jerked, the blue one doubled up around its midriff and loosened its grip. The red-collared beast
wriggled out from underneath the other and, twisting, turned on the other beast and immediately
reversed the situation, fastening its prosthetic jaws around the throat of the blue-collared animal. At
Genar-Hofoen’s side, still in slow motion, Fivetide was starting to rise into the air.
~ Right, D and G, what were you saying?
~ What was the delay? What were you doing?
~ Never mind. Like you said, time’s a wasting. Get on with it.
~ I assume it is reward you seek. What do you want?
~ Golly, let me think. Can I have my own ship?
~ I understand that to be negotiable.
~ I’ll bet.
~ You may have whatever you want. There. Will that do?
~ Oh, of course.
~ Genar-Hofoen, please. I beg you; say you will do this thing.
~ D and G, you’re begging me? Genar-Hofoen asked with a laugh in his thought, as the blue-
collared scratchound writhed hopelessly in the other beast’s jaws and Fivetide started to turn to him.
~ Yes, I am! Now will you agree? Time is of the essence!
From the corner of one eye, Genar-Hofoen watched one of Fivetide’s limbs begin to flip towards
him. He readied his slow-reacting body for the blow.
~ I’ll think about it.
~ But--!
~ Quit that signal, suit. Tell the module not to wait up. Now, suit - command instruction: take
yourself off-line until I call on you.
Genar-Hofoen halted the effects of the quicken. He smiled and sighed a happy sigh as Fivetide’s
celebratory blow landed with a teeth-rattling thud on his back and the Culture lost a thousand suckers.
Could be a fun evening.

Excession





Alter pain so that it is not incapacitating and mearly a indicator of damage.


Not the agony a basic human
would have experienced, but a deep, shocking, awful awareness of damage a civilised creature could
appreciate without the disabling suffering of crude pain. Byr took a moment to understand.


Excession






Alertness


glandular release of gain. Doing this for three days solid would leave him needing lots of sleep, but
there would be a week on the Grey Area/Meatfucker; plenty of time to recover. The buzz of gain
coursed through him, clearing his head and ridding his body of the effects of fatigue. Gradually a
feeling of rested, ready peacefulness washed over and through him.


Excession