The object was to keep talking; not to talk continuously, which any idiot could do, but to pause only when the young man was not signalling — through bodily or facial language, or actually starting to speak — that he wanted to cut in. Instead, Gurgeh would stop unexpectedly in the middle of a point, or after having just said something mildly insulting, but while still giving the impression he was going to keep talking. Also, Gurgeh was quoting almost verbatim from one of his own more famous papers on game-theory; an added insult, as the young man probably knew the text as well as he did. "To imply," Gurgeh continued, as the young man's mouth started to open again, "that one can remove the element of luck, chance, happenstance in life by—"

"Jernau Gurgeh, not interrupting anything, am I?" Mawhrin-Skel said.

"Nothing of note," Gurgeh said, turning to face the small machine. "How are you, Mawhrin-Skel? Been up to any fresh mischief?"

"Nothing of note," the tiny drone echoed, as the young man Gurgeh had been talking to sidled off. Gurgeh sat in a creeper-covered pergola positioned close to one edge of the plaza, near the observation platforms which reached out over the broad curtain of the falls, where spray rose from the rapids lying between the lip of the lake and the vertical drop to the forest a kilometre below. The roaring falls provided a background wash of white noise.

"I've found your young adversary," the small drone announced. It extended one softly glowing blue field and plucked a nightflower from a growing vine.

"Hmm?" Gurgeh said. "Oh, the young, ah… Stricken player?"

"That's right," Mawhrin-Skel said evenly, "the young, ah… Stricken player." It folded some of the nightflower's petals back, straining them on the plucked stem.