Gurgeh stared at the intersection where his well-defended Heart piece sat, then again at the coordinates he'd dialled at random on to the wafer, two hours earlier. They were the same, there was no doubt. If he" d looked a move earlier, he could have moved the Heart out of danger, but he hadn't. He'd lost both pieces; and with the Heart lost, the game was lost; he'd lost.

"Oh, bad luck," Mr preltram said, clearing his throat.

Gurgeh nodded. "I believe it's customary, at such moments of disaster, for the defeated player to be given the Heart as a keepsake," he said, fingering the lost piece.

"Um… so I understand," Mr Dreltram said, obviously at once embarrassed on Gurgeh's behalf, and delighted at his good fortune. Gurgeh nodded. He put the Heart down, lifted the ceramic wafer which had betrayed him. "I'd rather have this, I think." He held it up to Mr Dreltram, who nodded.

"Well, of course. I mean, why not; I certainly wouldn't object."

The train rolled quietly into a tunnel, slowing for a station set in the caverns inside the mountain.

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games — those which can be played in any sense «perfectly», such as grid, Prallian scope, "nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions — can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine sentience societies.