Excession

I

[tight beam, M16.4, rec. @n4.28.856.4903]

xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

Is it just me, or does something smell suspicious about all this?

oo

[tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28. 856. 6883]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

Oh good, an easy one; it’s you.

oo

I’m serious. This feels… strange.

oo

How dare you imply I’m not serious.

Anyway; what’s the problem?

This is the most important thing ever, by our understanding.

Naturally everything and everybody will seem a little odd after such a realisation.

We cannot help but be affected.

oo

You’re right, I’m sure, but I just have this niggling feeling.

No; the more I think about it the more I’m convinced you are right and I am worrying over nothing.

I’ll do a little checking for my own peace of mind, but I’m sure it will only help lay my fears to rest.

oo

You should spend more time in Infinite Fun Space, you know.

oo

You’re probably right. Oh well.

oo

Still, keep in touch.

Just in case anything does turn up.

Of course.

Take care.

oo

Good checking, my friend.

You take care, too.

II

The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 drifted, waiting. Several seconds had passed since the skein pulse had resonated around it and it was still trying to decide what to do. It had passed the time by throwing together the anti-matter reaction chamber as best it could in the short time available, instead of painstakingly putting it together bit by delicate bit. As an after-thought, it released all but one of its nanomissiles and stuck two hundred of them around its heat-scarred rear panel in two groups on either side of the reaction chamber; fortuitously, the panel’s damaged surface made it easy for it to embed the tiny missiles so that only the last third of their millimetre-long bodies protruded from the panel. It kept the other thirty-nine missiles ready to fire, for all the good that would do against whatever it was stalking it.

The gentle, buzzing vibrations in the skein had taken on a distinctive signature; something was coming towards it in hyperspace, with a sensory keel in real space, trawling slowly, well below lightspeed. Whatever it was, it was not the Peace Makes Plenty; the timbral characteristics were all wrong.

A wash of wide-band radiation, like a sourceless light, a final pulse of maser energies, in real space this time, and then something shimmering away to one side; a ship surfacing into the three-dimensional void, image flickering once then snapping steady.

Ten kilometres away; one klick long. Matched velocity. A fat, grey-black ellipsoid shape, covered with sharp spines, barbs and blades…

An Affronter ship!

The drone hesitated. Could this have been the ship that had been following the Peace Makes Plenty! Probably. Had it been taken over by the artifact/excession? Possibly. Not that it mattered in the end. Shit.

The Affront; no friends of the Elench. Or anybody else, for that matter. I’ve failed. They’ll reel me in, gobble me up.

The drone tried desperately to work out what it could do. Did the fact it was an Affronter ship make any real difference? Doubtful. Should it signal it, try to get it to help? It could try; the Affront were signatories to the standard conventions on ships and individuals in distress and in theory they ought to take the drone aboard, help repair it and broadcast a warning about the artifact to the rest of the galaxy.

In practice they would take the drone to bits to find out how it worked, drain it of all its information, ransom it if they hadn’t destroyed it in the process of investigation and inquisition, probably try to put a spy-program into it so that it would report back to them once it was back amongst the Elench, and meanwhile try to work out how they could use the artifact/excession, perhaps being foolhardy enough to attempt investigating it in the same final, fatal way the Peace Makes Plenty had, or perhaps keeping it secret for now and bringing more ships and technology to bear upon it. Almost certainly the one thing they wouldn’t do was play the situation by the book.

EM effector; communicating. Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 readied its shields, for as much as that was worth; probably delay proceedings by, oh, a good nanosecond if the Affronter ship decided to attack it…

— Machine! What are you?

(Well, that was spoken like an Affronter, certainly; it’d bet they hadn’t tangled with the artifact/excession yet. Oh well. Play it by the conventions:)

— I am Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, and in distress, it communicated. ~ And you?

— You are ours now. Surrender or take flight!

(Definitely still 100% Affront.)

— Sorry, I missed that. What did you say your name was again?

— Surrender at once or take flight, wretch!

— Let me think about that.

(And thinking was exactly what it was doing; thinking hard, thinking feverishly. Stalling for time, but thinking.)

— No!

The effector signal strength started to soar exponentially. It had plenty of time to slam down its shields.

Bastards, it thought. Of course; they like a chase…

The drone fired the missiles embedded in its rear panel; the two hundred tiny engines brought unequal amounts of matter and anti-matter together and threw the resulting blast of plasma boiling into the vacuum, careening the machine away across space directly away from the Affronter craft. The acceleration was relatively mild. The drone had no time to test the anti-matter reaction chamber it had constructed; it threw a few particles of each sort into the chamber and hoped. The chamber blew up. Shit; back to the drawing board.

Not much damage — not much extra damage, anyway — but not much extra impetus either, and it wouldn’t be using the chamber again. The acceleration went on, building slowly. What else? Think!

The Affronter ship didn’t bother to set off in pursuit of the drone; Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 dropped its plan of leaving a few nanomissiles scattered like mines behind it. (Who am I trying to kid, anyway? Think; think!)

Space seemed to buckle and twist in front of it, and suddenly it was no longer heading straight away from the Affronter ship; it was parallel to it again. Those animal pus-bags are playing with me!

A flicker from near the Affronter ship’s nose. A centimetre-diameter circle of laser light blinked onto the drone’s casing and wavered there. The drone instructed the nanomissile engines to shut off and flicked on its mirror shields; the laser beam tracked it unsteadily and narrowed until it was a millimetre in diameter, then its power suddenly leapt by seven orders of magnitude. The drone coned its protesting mirrorfield and turned rear-on to the ship again, presenting the smallest possible target. The laser modulated, stepping up to the ultraviolet. It started strobing.

Playing with me, just fucking playing with me… (Think! Think!)

Well, first…

It popped the clamps around its two upper-level minds and raised the bit of its casing that would let the two components — AI core and photonic nucleus — free. The casing shuddered and grated, but it moved. Once it was clear of the main casing, the drone nudged the two mind components with its maniple field. Nothing happened. They were stuck.

Panic! If they remained intact and the Affronters captured them and weren’t a great deal more careful than they were notorious for being… It pushed harder; the components duly drifted out, losing power the instant contact lapsed with the drone’s body. Whatever was inside them should be dead or dying now. It blasted them with its laser anyway, turning them into hot dust, then vented the powder behind it round the edge of the mirrorshield, where it might interfere with the laser a little. A very little.

It readied the core inside its present substrate; that would have to be dumped and lasered too.

Then the drone had an idea.

It thought about it. If it had been a human, its mouth would have gone dry.

It turned round inside the tight confines of its pummelled shield and fired all two hundred of the nanomissile engines. It shook off the remaining loose nanomissiles and fired thirty of them straight at the Affronter ship. The other nine it left tumbling behind it like a handful of tiny black-body needle-tips, with their own instructions and the small amount of spare capacity in their microscopic brains packed with coded nonsense.

The nanomissiles fired at the Affronter ship accelerated towards it in a cloud of sparkling light ahead of the drone; they were picked off, one by one, over the course of a millisecond, in a dizzy flaring scatter of light-blossoms, their tiny warheads and the remains of their anti-matter fuel erupting together; the last one to be targeted by the Affronter’s effector and forced to self-destruct had closed the range to the ship by less than a kilometre.

Behind, all nine of the tumbling nanomissiles must have been picked out by the effector as well, because they detonated too.

And with any luck you’ll think those were my messages in bottles and that was my neat idea, Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 thought, decoupling the core with its twin’s mind-state in it. The core de-powered. Whatever was in there died. It had no time to mourn; it rearranged its internal state to shunt the core to the outside, then let its body settle back to normal. It pushed the core back down over its blistered, cracked casing, to the top of the rear panel, near where the wreckage of the cobbled-together and blown-apart reaction chamber hung, then it let the core fall into the livid plasma and sleeting radiation of the nanomissiles’ exhausts; it flared and disintegrated, falling astern in a bright trail of fire.

The laser targeted on the drone was heading into the X-ray part of the spectrum; it would break through the mirror shield in a second and a half. It would take the drone four and a half seconds to get within range of the ship.

Shit. It waited until the mirrorshield was a couple of tenths of a second from failing, then signalled: ~ I surrender!, and hoped that it was talking to another machine; if it was relying on Affronter reactions it’d be fried before the message got through to their stupid animal brains.

The laser flicked off. The drone kept its EM shields up.

It was heading towards the Affronter vessel at about half a klick a second; the ship’s be-bladed, swollen-looking bulk drifted closer.

— Turn off your shields!

— I can’t! It put expression into the signal, so that it came across as a wail.

— Now!

— I’m trying! I’m trying! You damaged me! Damaged me even more! Such weaponry! What chance have I, a mere drone, something smaller than an Affronter’s beak, against such power?

Nearly in range. Not far. Not far now. Another two seconds.

— Drop your shields instantly and allow yourself to be taken over or suffer instant destruction.

Still nearly two seconds. It would never keep them talking long enough…

— Please don’t! I’m attempting to shut off the shield projector, but it’s in fail-safe mode; it won’t let itself be shut off. It’s arguing; can you believe that? But, honestly; I am doing my best. Please believe me. Please don’t kill me. I’m the only survivor, you know; our ship was attacked! I was lucky to get away. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never heard of anything like it either.

A pause. A pause of animal dimensions. Time for animal thoughts. Loads of time.

— Final chance; turn off—

— There; turning shields off now. I’m all yours.

The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 turned off its electromagnetic mirrorshield. In the same instant, it fired its laser straight at the Affronter ship.

An instant later it released the containment around its remaining stock of anti-matter, detonated its in-built self-destruct charge and instructed the single nanomissile it still carried within its body to explode too.

— Fuck you! were its final words.

Its last emotion was a mixture of sorrow, elation, and a kind of desperate pride that its plan might have worked… Then it died, instantly and forever, in its own small fireball of heat and light.

To the Affronter ship, the effect of the tiny drone’s laser was rather less than a tickle; it flickered across its hull and barely singed it.

The cloud of glowing wreckage the drone’s self-destruction had caused passed over the Affronter ship, and was duly swept by analysing sensors. Plasma. Atoms. Nothing as big as a molecule. Likewise the slowly expanding debris from the two groups of nanomissiles.

Disappointment, then; that had been a particularly sophisticated model of Elencher drone, not far behind the leading-edge of Culture drone technology. Capturing one would have been a good prize. Still, it had put up a reasonable fight considering, and provided a morsel of unexpected sport.

The Affront light cruiser Furious Purpose came about and headed slowly away from the scene of its miniature battle, carefully scanning for more nanomissiles. They posed no threat to the cruiser, of course, but the small drone appeared to have tried to use some of the tiny weapons to place information in, and it might have left others behind which were not inclined to self-destruct when effector-targeted. None showed up. The cruiser back-tracked along the course the drifting drone appeared to have taken. It discovered a small cooling cloud of matter at one point, the remnants of some sort of explosion apparently, but that was all. Beyond that; nothing. Nothing everywhere one looked. Most dissatisfying.

The Furious Purpose’s restless officers debated how much more time they should spend looking for this lost Elencher ship. Had something happened to it? Had the small drone been lying? Might there be a more interesting opponent floating around out here somewhere?

Or might it all be a ruse, a decoy? The Culture — the real Culture, the wily ones, not these semi-mystical Elenchers with their miserable hankering to be somebody else — had been known to give whole Affronter fleets the run-around for several months with not dissimilar enticements and subterfuges, keeping them occupied, seemingly on the track of some wildly promising prey which turned out to be nothing at all, or a Culture ship with some ridiculous but earnestly argued excuse, while the Culture or one of its snivelling client species got on — or away — with something else somewhere else, spoiling rightful Affronter fun.

How were they to know this was not one of those occasions? Perhaps the Elencher ship was under contract to the Culture proper. Perhaps they had lost the Explorer craft and a GCU — trailing them as they had been trailing the Elench craft — had slipped in to take its place. Might this not be true?

No, argued some of the officers, because the Culture would never sacrifice a drone it considered sentient.

The rest thought about this, considered the Culture’s bizarrely sentimental attitude to life, and were forced to concede the point.

The cruiser spent another two days around the Esperi system and then broke away. It returned to the habitat called Tier with a trivial but niggling engine fault.

III

Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at.

Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined.

It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better… and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you… so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.

Metamathics led to the Mind equivalent of that experience, repeated a million times, magnified a billion times, and then beyond, to configurations of wonder and bliss even the simplest abstract of which the human-basic brain had no conceivable way of comprehending. It was like a drug; an ultimately liberating, utterly enhancing, unadulterably beneficial, overpoweringly glorious drug for the intellect of machines as far beyond the sagacity of the human mind as they were beyond its understanding.

This was the way the Minds spent their time. They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled.

Some of the universes possessed just one tiny but significant alteration, leading to some subtle twist in the way things worked, while others were so wildly, aberrantly different it could take a perfectly first-rate Mind the human equivalent of years of intense thought even to find the one tenuously familiar strand of recognisable reality that would allow it to translate the rest into comprehensibility. Between those extremes lay an infinitude of universes of unutterable fascination, consummate joy and absolute enlightenment. All that humanity knew and could understand, every single aspect, known, guessed at and hoped for in and of the universe was like a mean and base mud hut compared to the vast, glittering cloud-high palace of monumentally exquisite proportions and prodigious riches that was the metamathical realm. Within the infinities raised to the power of infinities that those metamathical rules provided, the Minds built their immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy.

That was where they lived. That was their home. When they weren’t running ships, meddling with alien civilisations or planning the future course of the Culture itself, the Minds existed in those fantastic virtual realities, sojourning beyondward into the multi-dimensioned geographies of their unleashed imaginations, vanishingly far away from the single limited point that was reality.

The Minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun.

It did the experience pathetically little justice.

… The Sleeper Service promenaded metaphysically amongst the lush creates of its splendid disposition, an expanding shell of awareness in a dreamscape of staggering extent and complexity, like a gravity-free sun built by a jeweller of infinite patience and skill. It is absolutely the case, it said to itself, it is absolutely the case…

There was only one problem with the Land of Infinite Fun, and that was that if you ever did lose yourself in it completely — as Minds occasionally did, just as humans sometimes surrendered utterly to some AI environment — you could forget that there was a base reality at all. In a way, this didn’t really matter, as long as there was somebody back where you came from minding the hearth. The problem came when there was nobody left or inclined to tend the fire, mind the store, look after the housekeeping (or however you wanted to express it), or if somebody or something else — somebody or something from outside, the sort of entity that came under the general heading of an Outside Context Problem, for example — decided they wanted to meddle with the fire in that hearth, the stock in the store, the contents and running of the house; if you’d spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead, or enslaved.

It didn’t matter that base reality was petty and grey and mean and demeaning and quite empty of meaning compared to the glorious majesty of the multi-hued life you’d been living through metamathics; it didn’t matter that base reality was of no consequence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the single foundation-stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested upon, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.

It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn’t matter how fast, error-free and tireless it was, it didn’t matter how great a labour-saving boon it was, it didn’t matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they’d moved.

It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…

That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome. It was the problem that Subliming dispensed with, of course, and it was one of the (usually more minor) reasons that civilisations chose Elderhood; if your course was set in that direction in the first place then eventually that reliance on the material universe came to seem vestigial, untidy, pointless, and even embarrassing.

It wasn’t the course the Culture had fully embarked upon, at least not yet, but as a society it was well aware of both the difficulties presented by remaining in base reality and the attractions of the Sublime. In the meantime, it compromised, busying itself in the macrocosmic clumsiness and petty, messy profanity of the real galaxy while at the same time exploring the transcendental possibilities of the sacred Irreal.

It is absolutely the—

A single signal flicked the great ship’s attention entirely back to base reality:

xRock End In Tears

oGSV Sleeper Service.

Done.

The ship contemplated the one-word message for what was, for it, a very long time, and wondered at the mixture of emotions it felt. It set its newly manufactured drone-fleet to work in the external environments and re-checked the evacuation schedule.

Then it located Amorphia — the avatar was wandering bemused through kilometres of tableaux exhibition space that had once been accommodation sections — and instructed it to re-visit the woman Dajeil Gelian.

IV

Genar-Hofoen was distinctly unimpressed with his quarters aboard the Battle-Cruiser Kiss The Blade. For one thing, they smelled.

— What is that? he asked, his nose wrinkling. ~ Methane?

— Methane is odourless, Genar-Hofoen, the suit said. ~ I believe the smell you find objectionable may be a mixture of methanal and methylamine.

— Fucking horrible smell, whatever it is.

— I’m sure your mucous membrane receptors will cease to react to it before long.

— I certainly hope so.

He was standing in what was supposed to be his bedroom. It was cold. It was very big; a ten-metre square — plenty of headroom — but it was cold; he could see his breath. He still wore most of the gelfield suit but he’d detached all but the nape-part of the neck and let the head of the suit flop down over his back so that he could get a fresher impression of his quarters, which consisted of a vestibule, a lounge, a frighteningly industrial-looking kitchen-diner, an equally intimidatingly mechanical bathroom and this so-called bedroom. He was starting to wish he hadn’t bothered. The walls, floor and ceiling of the room were some sort of white plastic; the floor bulged up to create a sort of platform on which a huge white thing lay spread, like a cloud made solid. ~ What, he asked, pointing at the bed, ~ is that?

— I think it is your bed.

— I’d guessed. But what is that… thing lying on it?

— Quilt? Duvet? Bed-covering.

— What do you want to cover it for? he asked, genuinely confused.

— Well, it’s more to cover you, I think, when you’re asleep, the suit said, sounding uncertain.

The man dropped his hold-all onto the shiny plastic floor and went forward to heft the white cloudy thing. It felt quite light. Possibly a little damp, unless the suit’s tactiles were getting confused. He pulled a glove-section back and touched the bed-cover thing with his bare skin. Cold. Maybe damp. ~ Module? Genar-Hofoen said. He’d get its opinion on all this.

— You can’t talk to Scopell-Afranqui directly, remember? the suit said politely.

— Shit, Genar-Hofoen said. He rubbed the material of the bedcover between his fingers. ~ This feel damp to you, suit?

— A little. Do you want me to ask the ship to patch you through to the module?

— Eh? Oh, no; don’t bother. We moving yet?

— No.

The man shook his head. ~ Horrible smell, he said. He prodded the bed-cover thing again. He wished now he’d insisted that the module be accommodated on board the ship so that he could live inside it, but the Affronters had said this wasn’t possible; hangar space was at a premium on all three ships. The module had protested, and he’d made supportive noises, but he had been rather entertained by the idea that Scopell-Afranqui would have to stay here while he went zapping off to far-off parts of the galaxy on an important mission. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure.

There was a distant growling noise and a tremor underfoot; then there came a jerk that almost threw the human off his feet. He staggered to one side and had to sit down on the bed.

It made a squelching sound. He stared at it, aghast.

— Now we’re moving, said the suit.

V

Singing softly to himself, the man tended the little fire he had started on the floor of the hall, beneath and between the stored ships, arrayed in the blackness like the trunks of enormous trees in a silent, petrified forest. Gestra Ishmethit was surveying his charges in the deep-buried darkness that was Pittance.

Pittance was a huge irregular lump of matter, two hundred kilometres across at its narrowest point and ninety-eight per cent iron by volume. It was the remnant of a catastrophe which had occurred over four billion years earlier, when the planet of whose core it had been part had been struck by another large body. Expelled from its own solar system by that cataclysm, it had wandered between the stars for a quarter of the life of the universe, uncaptured by any other gravity well but subtly affected by all it passed anywhere near. It had been discovered drifting in deep space a millennium ago by a GCU taking an eccentrically trajectorial course between two stellar systems, it had been given the brief examination its simple and homogeneous composition deserved and then had been left to glide, noted, effectively tagged, untouched, but given the name Pittance.

When the time came, five hundred years later, to dismantle the colossal war machine the Culture had created in order to destroy that of the Idirans, Pittance had suddenly been found a role.

Most of the Culture’s warships had been decommissioned and dismantled. A few were retained, demilitarised, to act as express delivery systems for small packages of matter — humans, for example — on the rare occasions when the transmission of information alone was not sufficient to deal with a problem, and an even smaller number were kept intact and operational; two hundred years after the war ended, the number of fully active warcraft was actually smaller than it had been before the conflict began (though, as the Culture’s critics never tired of pointing out, the average — and avowedly completely peaceful — General Contact Unit was more than a match for the vast majority of alien craft it was likely to bump into over the course of its career).

Never a civilisation to take too many risks, however, and priding itself on the assiduity of its bet-hedging, the Culture had not disposed of all the remaining craft; a few thousand — representing less than a per cent of the original total — were kept in reserve, fully armed save for their usual complement of Displacer-dispatched explosive warheads (a relatively minor weapon system anyway), which they and other craft would manufacture in the event of mobilisation. Most of the mothballed ships were retained within a scattering of Culture Orbitals, chosen so that if there ever was an emergency which the craft would be required to deal with, no part of the greater galaxy would be more than a month or so’s flight away.

Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture’s stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and the comings and goings of cruise ships and visiting GSVs, but in places as far out of the way as it was possible to find amongst the cavernously cold and empty spaces of the great lens; quiet, secret, hidden places; places off the beaten track, places possibly nobody else even knew existed.

Pittance had been chosen as one of those places.

The General Systems Vehicle Uninvited Guest and a fleet of accompanying warcraft had been dispatched to rendezvous with the cold, dark, wandering mass. It was found exactly where it had been predicted it ought to be, and work began. Firstly, a series of enormous halls had been hollowed out of its interior, then a precisely weighed and shaped piece of the matter mined from one of those giant hangars had been aimed with millimetric accuracy and fired at Pittance by the GSV, leaving a small new crater on the surface of the world, exactly as though it had been struck by another, smaller, piece of interstellar debris.

This was done because Pittance wasn’t spinning quite quickly enough or heading in exactly the right direction for the Culture’s purposes; the exquisitely engineered collision made both alterations at once. So Pittance spun a little quicker to provide a more powerful hint of artificial gravity inside and its course was altered just a fraction to deflect it from a star system it would otherwise have drifted through in five and a half thousand years or so.

A number of giant Displacer units were set within the fabric of Pittance and the warships were safely Displaced, one at a time, into the giant spaces the GSV had created. Lastly, a frightening variety and number of sensory and weapon systems had been emplaced, camouflaged on the surface of Pittance and buried deep underneath it, while a cloud of tiny, dark, almost invisible but apocalyptically powerful devices were placed in orbit about the slowly tumbling mass, also to watch for unwelcome guests, and — if necessary — welcome them with destruction.

Its work finished, the Uninvited Guest had departed, taking with it most of the iron mined from Pittance’s interior. It left behind a world that — save for that plausible-looking extra crater — seemed untouched; even its overall mass was almost exactly as it had been before, again, minus a little to allow for the collision it had suffered, the debris of which was allowed to drift as the laws of gravity dictated, most of it sailing like lazy shrapnel spinning into space but a little of it — captured by the tiny world’s weak gravitational field — drifting along with it, and so incidentally providing perfect cover for the cloud of black-body sentry devices.

Watching over Pittance from near its centre was its own quiet Mind, carefully designed to enjoy the quiet life and to take a subdued, passive pride in the feeling of containing, and jealously guarding, an almost incalculable amount of stored, latent, preferably never-to-be-used power.

The rarefied, specialist Minds in the warships themselves had been consulted like the rest on their fate those five hundred years ago; those in Storage at Pittance had been of the persuasion that preferred to sleep until they might be needed, and been prepared to accept that their sleep might be very long indeed, before quite probably ending in battle and death. What they had all agreed they would prefer would be to be woken only as a prelude to joining the Culture’s ultimate Sublimation, if and when that became the society’s choice. Until then they would be content to slumber in their dark halls, the war gods of past wrath implicitly guarding the peace of the present and the security of the future.

Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening.

Pittance was a very safe place, then, and Gestra Ishmethit liked safe places. It was a very lonely place, and Gestra Ishmethit had always craved loneliness. It was at once a very important place and a place that almost nobody knew or cared about or indeed probably ever would, and that also suited Gestra Ishmethit quite perfectly, because he was a strange creature, and accepted that he was.

Tall, adolescently gawky and awkward despite his two hundred years, Gestra felt he had been an outsider all his life. He’d tried physical alteration (he’d been quite handsome, for a while), he’d tried being female (she’d been quite pretty, she’d been told), he’d tried moving away from where he’d been brought up (he’d moved half the galaxy away to an Orbital quite different but every bit as pleasant as his home) and he’d tried a life lived adream (he’d been a merman prince in a water-filled space ship fighting an evil machine-hive mind, and according to the scenario was supposed to woo the warrior princess of another clan) but in all the things he’d tried he had never felt anything else than awkward: being handsome was worse than being gangly and bumbling because his body felt like a lie he was wearing; being a woman was the same, and somehow embarrassing, as well, as though it was somebody else’s body he had kidnapped from inside; moving away just left him terrified of having to explain to people why he’d wanted to leave home in the first place, and living in a dream scenario all day and night just felt wrong; he had a horror of immersing himself in that virtual world as completely as his merman did in his watery realm and thus losing hold of what he felt was a tenuous grip on reality at the best of times, and so he’d lived the scenario with the nagging sensation that he was just a pet fish in somebody else’s fish tank, swimming in circles through the prettified ruins of sunken castles. In the end, to his mortification, the princess had defected to the machine hive-mind.

The plain fact was that he didn’t like talking to people, he didn’t like mixing with them and he didn’t even like thinking about them individually. The best he could manage was when he was well away from people; then he could feel a not unpleasant craving for their company as a whole, a craving that quite vanished — to be replaced by stomach-churning dread — the instant it looked like being satisfied.

Gestra Ishmethit was a freak; despite being born to the most ordinary and healthy of mothers (and an equally ordinary father), in the most ordinary of families on the most ordinary of Orbitals and having the most ordinary of upbringings, an accident of birth, or some all-but-impossible conjunction of disposition and upbringing, had left him the sort of person the Culture’s carefully meddled-with genes virtually never threw up; a genuine misfit, something even rarer in the Culture than a baby born physically deformed.

But whereas it was perfectly simple to replace or regrow a stunted limb or a misshapen face, it was a different matter when the oddness lay inside, a fact Gestra had always accepted with an equanimity he sometimes suspected people regarded as even more freakish than his original almost pathological shyness. Why didn’t he just have the condition treated? his relations and few acquaintances asked. Why didn’t he ask to remain as much himself as possible, yet with this strange aberrancy removed, expunged? It might not be easy, but it would be painless; probably it could be done in his sleep; he’d remember nothing about it and when he woke up he could live a normal life.

He came to the attention of AIs, drones, humans and Minds that took an interest in that sort of thing; soon they were queuing up to treat him; he was a challenge! He became so frightened by their — by turns — kind, cheery, cajoling, brusque or just plain plaintive entreaties to talk to him, counsel him, explain the merits of their various treatments and courses to him that he stopped answering his terminal and practically became a hermit in a summer house in his family’s estate, unable to explain that despite it all — indeed, exactly because of all his previous attempts to integrate with the rest of society and what he had learned about himself through them — he wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.

In the end it had taken the intervention of the Hub Mind of his home Orbital to come up with a solution. A drone from Contact had come to speak to him one day.

He’d always found it easier talking to drones rather than humans, and this drone had been somehow particularly business-like but unconcernedly charming as well, and after probably the longest conversation with anybody Gestra had ever had, it had offered him a variety of posts where he could be alone. He had chosen the position where he could be most alone and most lonely, where he could happily yearn for the human contact he knew was the one thing he was incapable of appreciating.

It was, in the end, a sinecure; it had been explained from the beginning that he would not really have anything to do on Pittance; he would simply be there; a symbolic human presence amongst the mass of quiescent weapons, a witness to the Mind’s silent sentinelship over the sleeping machines. Gestra Ishmethit had been perfectly happy with that lack of responsibility, too, and had now been resident on Pittance for one and a half centuries, had not once left to go anywhere else, had not received a single visitor in all that time and had never felt anything less than content. Some days, he even felt happy.

The ships were arranged in lines and rows sixty-four at a time in the series of huge dark spaces. Those great halls were kept cold and in vacuum, but Gestra had discovered that if he found some rubbish from his quarters and kept it warm in a gelfield sack, and then set it down on the chill floor of one of the hangars and blew oxygen over it from a pressurised tank, it could be made to burn. Quite a satisfactory little fire could be got going, flaring white and yellow in the breath of gas and producing a quickly dispersing cloud of smoke and soot. He had found that by adjusting the flow of oxygen and directing it through a nozzle he had designed and made himself, he could produce a fierce blaze, a dull red glow or any state of conflagration in between.

He knew the Mind didn’t like him doing this, but it amused him, and it was almost the only thing he did which annoyed it. Besides, the Mind had grudgingly admitted both that the amount of heat produced was too small ever to leak through the eighty kilometres of iron to show up on the surface of Pittance and that ultimately the waste products of the combustion would be recovered and recycled, so Gestra felt free to indulge himself with a clear conscience, every few months or so.

Today’s fire was composed of some old wall hangings he’d grown tired of, some vegetable scraps from past meals, and tiny bits and pieces of wood. The wooden scraps were produced by his hobby, which was constructing one-in-one-twenty-eighth scale models of ancient sailing ships.

He had drained the swimming pool in his quarters and turned it into a miniature forestry plantation and farm using some of the biomass the Mind and he had been provided with; tiny trees grew there which he cut down and sliced into little planks and turned on lathes to produce all the masts, spars, decks and other wooden parts the sea ships required. Other bonsai plants in the forest provided long fibres which he teased and twisted and coiled into thread- and string-thin ropes to make halyards and sheets. Different plants let him create still thinner fibres which he wove into sails on infinitesimal looms he had also constructed himself. The iron and steel parts were made from material scraped from the iron walls of Pittance itself. He smelted the metal in a miniature furnace to rid it of the last traces of impurities and either flattened it in a tiny hand-turned rolling mill, cast it using wax and talc-like fines, or turned it on microscopic lathes. Another furnace fused sand — taken from the beach which had been part of the swimming pool — to make wafer-thin sheets of glass for portholes and skylights. Yet more of the life-support system’s biomass was used to produce pitch and oils, which caulked the hull and greased the little winches, derricks and other pieces of machinery. His most precious commodity was brass, which he had to pare from an antique telescope his mother had given him (with some ironic comment he had long chosen to forget) when he’d announced his decision to leave for Pittance. (His mother was herself Stored now; one of his great grand-nieces had sent him a letter.)

It had taken him ten years to make the tiny machines to make the ships, and then making each ship occupied another twenty years of his time. He had constructed six vessels so far, each slightly larger and better made than the one before. He had almost completed a seventh, with just the sails to finish and sew; the scraps of wood he was burning were the last of its off-cuts and compacted sawdust.

The little fire burned well enough. He let it blaze and looked around. His breath sounded loud in his suit as he lifted his head to gaze around the dark space. The sixty-four ships stored in this hall were Gangster Class Rapid Offensive Units; slim segmented cylinders over two hundred metres tall and fifty in diameter. The tiny glow from the fire was lost to normal sight amongst the spire-like heights of the ships; he had to press the control surfaces on the forearm of the ancient space suit to intensify the image displayed on the visor-screen in front of him.

The ships looked like they’d been tattooed. Their hulls were covered in a bewildering swirl of patterns upon patterns upon patterns, a fractal welter of colours, designs and textures that saturated their every square millimetre. He had seen this a hundred times before but it never failed to fascinate and amaze him.

On a few occasions he had floated up to some of the ships and touched their skins, and even through the thickness of the gloves on the millennium-old suit he had felt the roughened surface, whorled and raised and encrusted beneath. He had looked closely, then more closely still, using the suit’s lights and the magnification on the visor-screen to peer into the gaudy display in front of him, and found himself becoming lost within concentric layers of complexity and design. Finally the suit was using electrons to scan the surface and imposing false colours on the surfaces displayed and still the complexity went on, down and down to the atomic level. He had pulled back out through the layers and levels of motifs, figures, mandalas and fronds, his head buzzing with the extravagant, numbing complexity of it all.

Gestra Ishmethit remembered seeing screen-shots of warships; they had been whatever colour they wanted to be — usually perfectly black or perfectly reflecting when they were not hidden by a hologram of the view straight through them — but he could not recall ever having seen such odd designs upon them. He had consulted the Mind’s archives. Sure enough, the ships had been ordinary, plain-hulled craft when they had flown here. He asked the Mind why the ships had become decorated so, writing to it on the display of his terminal as he always did when he wanted to communicate: Why ships tattooed look?

The Mind had replied: Think of it as a form of armour, Gestra.

And that was all he could get out of it.

He decided he would have to be content to remain puzzled.

The little fire sent quivering veins of dim light into the hollow shadows around the enigmatic towers of the dazzlingly patterned ships. The only sound was his breathing. He felt wonderfully alone here; even the Mind couldn’t communicate with him here as long as he kept the suit’s communicator turned off. Here was perfect; here was total and complete loneliness, here was peace, and quiet, and a fire in the vacuum. He lowered his gaze again, towards the embers.

Something glinted near the floor of the hall, a couple of kilometres away.

His heart seemed to freeze. The thing glinted again. Whatever it was, it was coming closer.

He turned the suit communicator on with a shaking hand.

Before his quivering fingers could tap in a question to the Mind, the display on his visor-screen, lit up: Gestra, we are to be visited. Please return to your quarters.

He stared at the text, his eyes wide, his heart thudding in his chest, his mind reeling. The glowing letters stayed where they were, they added up to the same thing; they would not go away. He inspected each one in turn, looking for mistakes, desperately trying to make some different kind of sense from them, but they kept repeating the same sentence, they kept meaning the same thing.

Visited, he thought. Visited? Visited? Visited?

He felt terror for the first time in one and a half centuries.

The drone which had glinted in the shadows, which the Mind had sent to summon him because his suit communicator had been turned off, had to carry the man back to his quarters, he was shaking so much. It had picked up the oxygen cylinder too, turning it off.

Behind it, the fire went on glowing faintly for a few seconds in the darkness, then even that baleful glimmer succumbed to the empty coldness, and it winked out.