"You call it enjoyment to lose your house, your titles, your estates; your children maybe; to be expected to walk out on to the balcony with a gun and blow your brains out? That's enjoyment? We're well free of that. You want something you can't have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can't provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive." Gurgeh remained silent, lit by the fire and the soft glow from the room's concealed lighting. "You called yourself «Morat» when you completed your name, but perhaps you aren't the perfect game-player after all; perhaps you should have called yourself «Shequi»; gambler."

"You know," Gurgeh said slowly, his voice hardly louder than the crackling logs in the fire, "I'm actually slightly afraid of playing this young kid." He glanced at the drone. "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."

"You are a throwback," Chamlis told him. "The game's the thing. That's the conventional wisdom, isn't it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with."

Gurgeh nodded slowly. "So they say. So everybody else believes."

"But not you?"

"I…" The man seemed to have difficulty finding the right word. "I… exult when I win. It's better than love, it's better than sex or any glanding; it's the only instant when I feel…" — he shook his head, his mouth tightened "… real," he said. "Me. The rest of the time… I feel a bit like that little ex-Special Circumstances drone, Mawhrin-Skel; as though I've had some sort of… birthright taken away from me."