This was a remarkable land. There were no true horses and few plains. There were more people here than in all of populous China. Machines did almost everything—even thinking and copulating. Men could still do these things, but the machines did them better. A machine could spawn a human baby if properly primed; this was called "hydroponic insemination" or something similar. Appalling—but so it had been for generations. And the stars in the sky were no longer specks of light on the dome of the night, but bright suns—and near many of these suns were other worlds like this one.

People were numbered. Machines provided their food. A man was limited not by the strength of his arm and the accuracy of his bow, but by the amount of intangible wealth he possessed, reckoned in points. Naturally this made for extreme laziness. The Chinese were soft, while the hard-riding Uigurs were hard—or had been, before civilization had softened them and made them vulnerable to the Kirghiz. But among these Galactics the edge of war no longer necessarily gave the hard men the advantage; the machine weapons and magic were far too strong. So there was no natural halt to the process of decay—some year the machines themselves, like the Kirghiz, would rebel and take over. Alp well understood the process!

Meanwhile, there was the Game. The competitive nature of the minority of Galactics was sublimated there. The conditions of times past were duplicated—crudely—and history was re-enacted—approximately. A man's fortune and reputation in the galaxy was determined largely by his performance in this Game, and the most ambitious men participated. Even women! In the Game was all the action and lust and intrigue that the mundane galaxy lacked.

It took only a minute's thought to show Alp that he would be far more at home in the Game than in the "real" galaxy, for that mundane scheme was as foreign as hell to him, literally, while the Game—