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Jernau Morat Gurgeh is one of the best game players in The Culture, a space-faring society of advanced "genofixed" humans and artificially intelligent machines - he is such a gamer that he has taken the name "Morat", meaning game-player or player of games. But he's a little bit bored with his life-- nothing is that challenging or engaging anymore-- and his old family friend, the drone Chamlis Amalk-ney, offers to ask Contact to see if there might be something interesting he could do. When they do come up with an offer, it involves considerable travel, and Gurgeh is rather a home-body, preferring not to leave his home orbital, so he turns them down. However, not long after, he is manipulated by the rogue drone Mawhrin-Skel (who was intended for the Special Circumstances branch of Contact but then deemed unfit), and he is black-mailed and maneuvered into accepting the offered task that Contact had suggested, which involves traveling to a remote civilization where their society is obsessed with and run by a complicated strategy game called Azad.

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A young girl in a lonely part of Montana buries her younger brother, who had been the last living member of her family, says the prayer her mother said over the other family graves, and then sets out on horseback by herself fleeing from the rough young men her brother had been hanging out with-- in particular their leader, the man she suspects killed her brother, and who wants to claim her for himself. On her second day of travel, she sees another man on horseback pursuing her, and she flees him as well because her mother had told her all men are the same, dangerous drunks. While she sleeps, the man catches up to her-- but he is in fact a city boy who had come out West with some friends to get away from his troubles (the society girl he was in love with wouldn't have him), and he had gotten separated from his party and lost in the wilderness. She has some food and the survival skills to get them through to civilization, and when he hears her story of the man she is running from, he naturally wants to help and protect her. They travel together for a while, once even drawn to a Christian Endeavor meeting by the music, which keeps them hidden from the ruffians who go by while they are inside, and the girl is encouraged by words from scripture of the religion she had scarcely known anything of. They make it safely to a city big enough to have a train station and the young man, George, learns via telegram that his mother is seriously ill, so he sells his horse and returns-- he encourages his young friend, who he has come to admire, to come with him, but she refuses because she believes he is promised to another, and a kind woman at a farm where they stayed overnight had told her it wasn't proper to travel alone with a man. They go their separate ways, and he only knows her first name-- Elizabeth.

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