Surface Detail

Nine

To build on such a scale would have been spectacular enough, she thought. That this thing was not unique, that it was not that special, that it was one of a “class” was moderately astounding. That it was some way from being one of the largest class was completely astounding. That it could move — bewilderingly, unreally quickly in a realm hidden at right angles to everything she had ever known or experienced — was beyond belief.

She sat with her legs dangling over the edge of a thousand-metre cliff and watched the various craft at play. Fliers of too many shapes and types to be sure they were not each unique — the smallest carrying only one man, woman or child — buzzed and fussed above, below, before and on each side. Larger craft floated with a stately grace, their appearance varied, motley and near chaotic with masts, pennants, exposed decks and bulbously glittering excrescences but their general structure approaching a sort of bloated uniformity the greater in size they were; they drifted on the unhurried breezes the vast craft’s internal meteorology created. True ships, spacecraft, generally more sober in form if not in decoration, moved with still greater deliberation, often accompanied by small squat-looking tug-craft that looked hewn from solid.

The canyon in front of her was fifteen kilometres long, its laser-straight edges softened by the multi-coloured mass of climbing, hanging and floating foliage draped spilling like gaudy ice-falls from the tops of the two great strakes on either side.

The sheer walls were diced with a breathtaking complexity of variously sized, mostly brightly lit apertures from or into a few of which, on occasion, the various air and spacecraft issued or disappeared, the whole staggering, intricate network of docks and hangars graphed onto each colossal escarpment representing a mere detail on the surface of this truly gigantic vessel.

The floor of the great canyon was near table-flat grassland, strung all about with meandering streams making their way to a hazy plain, kilometres ahead. Above, beyond filmy layers of pale cloud, a single bright, yellow-white line provided light and warmth, looping day-slow across the sky in place of a sun. It disappeared into the misty distance of the view in front of her. It was almost noon by the ship’s own time and so the sunline stood near directly overhead.

At her back, behind a low wall, in the parkland that covered the vessel’s topmost surface, people passed, tumbling waters could be heard and tall, distant trees stood on gentle rolling hills. Dotted amongst the trees, long vertical bands of pale, almost transparent vegetation rose into the air, each soaring to two or three times the height of the tallest trees and surmounted by a dark ovoid the size of the crowns of the trees beneath. Dozens of these strange shapes swayed to and fro in the breeze, oscillating together like some vast seaweed forest.

Lededje and Sensia were sitting on the natural-looking cliff edge of dark red rock, their backs to the low wall of undressed stone. Looking straight down, Lededje could just about make out the filaments of a sort of gauzy net five or six metres down that would catch you if you fell. It didn’t really look up to the job, she thought, but she’d been prepared to trust Sensia when she’d suggested sitting here.

Ten metres to her right, a stream launched out into the air from a spur of rock. Its separating, whitening spray fell only fifty metres or so before it was unceremoniously gathered up by half of a giant inverted cone of what looked like glass and funnelled into a transparent pipe that plunged straight down towards the valley floor. It was almost a relief to see that, like so many other seemingly exotic, extraordinary and fabulous things, at least part of the GSV’s functional glamour ended up expressing itself as plumbing.

This was the Culture General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amongst Folly, the ship whose avatoid Sensia she had addressed when she’d first woken up within its near infinite substrate of thinking material.

Another version of Sensia — small, thin, spry, bronze-skinned and barely clothed — sat by her side. This personification of the ship was properly called an avatar. She had brought Lededje here to give her an idea of the size of the ship that she represented, that she in some sense was. Shortly they would board one of the small aircraft gliding, buzzing and blattering about them, presumably so that any tiny remaining fragment of Lededje that was not dumb-founded beyond imagining at the mind-boggling scale of the ship she was on — a labyrinth within, a jungled three-dimensional maze without — could join all the other parts of her that already most profoundly were.

Lededje dragged her gaze away from the sight and stared down at her own hand and arm.

So, well, here she was, “revented” as they called it, her soul, the very essence of her being, rehoused — as of only an hour or so ago — in a new body. And a fresh new body, she was relieved to know, not one that had belonged to anybody else (she had originally imagined that such bodies were the result of people guilty of terrible crimes being punished by having their personalities removed from the brains such bodies housed, leaving them free to host another’s mind).

She inspected the tiny, almost transparent hairs on her forearm and the pores on the golden-brown skin beneath. This was a human-basic body, roughly though very convincingly amended to look like that of a Sichultian. Looking closely at individual hairs and pores, she suspected that her eyesight was better than it had been originally. There was a level of detail visible that made her head swim. She supposed that it was always possible she had been lied to and she was still within a Virtual Reality, where such zooming-in was almost easier to do than it was to limit.

She flicked her gaze out again, to the kilometres of dazzling view in front of her. Of course, even this might exist within a simulated environment. Modelling such a vast ship within even the most detailed image of reality must be easier than actually building one, and certainly any people capable of constructing such a vessel could command the relatively trivial computational resources necessary to create an utterly convincing simulation of what she could see and hear and feel and smell before her now.

It could always all be unreal — how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.

Waking in this real body had been similar to waking up within the fake body imagined in the great ship’s substrate. She had experienced a slow, pleasant coming-to, the warm fuzziness of what had felt like deep, satisfying sleep changing slowly to the clarity and sharpness of a wakefulness informed by the knowledge that something had profoundly changed.

Embodied, she’d thought. Embodiment was all, Sensia had told her, ironically while they were talking in the Virtual. An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.

She had opened her eyes and found herself in a bed of what looked like snowflakes, felt like feathers and behaved like particularly obedient and well-disposed insects. White as snow but nearly as warm as her skin, the material had seemed unconstrained by any enveloping cover, and yet the apparently free-floating individual elements had refused to get in her eyes, up her nose or to leave the confines of the bed and the few centimetres around both it and her pyjama-clad body.

Beyond the bed had been a modest, sparsely furnished room three or four metres to a side with one window-wall looking out onto a brightly lit balcony where she could see Sensia sitting in one of two chairs. The avatar had gazed out at the view for a few more moments before turning to her and smiling.

“Welcome to the land of the living!” she’d said, waving one hand. “Get dressed; we’ll have some lunch and then we’ll go exploring.”

So now here they sat, with Lededje trying to take in what she was seeing.

She looked back at her arm again. She had chosen pale purple blouson pants, cuffed tight at the ankle, and a filmy but opaque long-sleeved top of the same colour, sleeves rolled back to the elbows. She looked pretty good, all-in-all, she thought. The average Culture human, from what she could gather having seen a few hundred of them now in passing — and disregarding the outlandish outliers, as it were — was hardly taller than a well-fed Sichultian, but ill-proportioned: legs too short, back too long, and emaciated-looking; bellies and behinds uncomfortably flat, shoulders and upper back looking almost broken. She supposed to them she looked hump-backed, pot-bellied and big-bottomed, but no matter; to her she looked exactly, almost perfectly right. And a beauty, which was what she had always been and had always been destined to be, with or without the cell-level markings that had invested her body, down to the bone and beyond.

She had no more false modesty, she realised, than Sensia, than the ship itself.

Lededje looked up from her arm. “I think I’d like some form of tat,” she told Sensia.

“Tattooing?” the avatar said. “Easily done. Though we can definitely do better than just permanently marking your skin, unless that’s what you specifically want.”

“What, for example?”

“Take a look.” Sensia waved one arm and in front of them, and, hanging over the thousand-metre drop, a series of images appeared of Culture humans displaying tattoos even more fabulous than her own had been, at least at skin level. Here were tattoos that genuinely shone rather than just glowed a little, or could reflect; tattoos that moved, that lased, that could loop out to create real or hologramatic structures beyond the surface of the skin itself, tattoos that were not just works of art but ongoing performances. “Have a think,” Sensia said.

Lededje nodded. “Thank you. I shall.” She looked out at the view again. Behind them, on the path on the far side of the low wall, a small group of people passed. They were talking the Culture’s own language, Marain, which Lededje too could now speak and understand, though not without a certain deliberation; Sichultian Formal was still what came naturally to her and was what she and Sensia were speaking now. “You know that I need to get back to Sichult,” she said.

“Business to conclude,” Sensia said, nodding.

“When would I be able to leave?”

“How about tomorrow?”

She looked at the avatar’s brazen skin. It looked false, as though she was made of metal, not genuine flesh and bone. Lededje supposed that was the idea. Her own skin was not so different in tone — from a distance she and Sensia might have looked quite similar in colour — but from close up hers would appear natural, both to a Sichultian and even, she was sure, this motley assortment of strange-looking people.

“That would be possible?”

“Well, you could make a start. You’re some distance away. It’ll take a while.”

“How long?”

Sensia shrugged. “Depends on a lot of things. Many tens of days, I’d guess. Less than a hundred though, I’d hope.” She made a gesture with her hands Lededje guessed was meant to signal regret or apology. “Can’t take you myself; way off my course schedule. In fact, at the moment, we’re heading sort of tangentially away from the Enablement space.”

“Oh.” Lededje hadn’t realised this. “Then the sooner I get started the better.”

“I’ll put the word out to the ships, see who’s interested,” Sensia said. “However. There is a condition.”

“A condition?” She wondered if there was, after all, some form of payment expected.

“Let me be honest with you, Lededje,” Sensia said, with a quick smile.

“Please,” she said.

“We — I — strongly suspect that you may be returning to Sichult with murder in your heart.”

Lededje said nothing for as long as it took for her to realise that the longer she left it to respond, the more like agreement that silence seemed. “Why do you think that?” she asked, trying to imitate Sensia’s level, friendly, matter-of-fact tone.

“Oh, come now, Lededje,” the avatar chided. “I’ve done a little research. The man murdered you.” She waved one hand casually. “Perhaps not in cold blood, but certainly when you were completely helpless. This is a man who has had complete control over you since before you were born, who forced your family into servitude and had you marked for ever as a chattel, engraved like a high-denomination bank-note made out specifically to him. You were his slave; you tried to run, he hunted you like an animal, caught you and, when you resisted, he killed you. Now you are free of him, and free of the marks that identified you as his but with a free pass back to where he — probably imagining that you are entirely dead — still is, quite unsuspecting.” Sensia turned to Lededje at this point, swivelling not just her head but her shoulders and upper body, so that the younger woman could not pretend not to have noticed. Lededje turned too, less gracefully, as Sensia — still smiling — lowered and slowed her voice ever so slightly and said, “My child, you would not be human, pan-human, Sichultian or anything else if you didn’t positively ache for revenge.”

Lededje heard all this, but did not immediately react. There is more, she wanted to say. There is more; it is not just about revenge… but she couldn’t say that. She looked away, kept staring at the view. “What would the condition be, then?” she asked.

Sensia shrugged. “We have these things called slap-drones.”

“Oh yes?” She had vaguely heard of drones; they were the Culture’s equivalent of robots, though they looked more like items of luggage than anything else. Some of the tinier things floating in the great hazy view in front of them were probably drones. She already didn’t like the idea of a variety with the word “slap” in its title.

“They’re things that stop people doing something they probably ought not to do,” Sensia told her. “They… just accompany you.” She shrugged. “Sort of an escort. If it thinks you’re about to do something objectionable, like hit somebody or try to kill them or something, it’ll stop you.”

“Stop… how?”

Sensia laughed. “Well, just shout at you at first, probably. But if you persist, it’ll physically get in the way; deflect a blow or push aside a gun barrel or whatever. Ultimately, though, they’re entirely entitled to zap you; drop you unconscious if need be. No pain or damage, of course, but—”

“Who decides on this? What court?” Lededje asked. She felt suddenly hot, and was acutely aware that on her new, paler skin, a flush might show as a visible blush.

“The court of me, Lededje,” Sensia said quietly, with a small smile Lededje glanced at then looked away from.

“Really? On whose authority?”

She could hear the smile in the avatar’s voice. “On the authority of me being part of the Culture and my judgement on such matters being accepted by other parts, specifically other Minds, of the Culture. Immediately, because I can. Ultimately—”

“So, even in the Culture, might is right,” Lededje said bitterly. She started rolling her sleeves down, feeling suddenly chilled.

“Intellectual might, I suppose,” Sensia said gently. “As I was about to say, though, ultimately my right to impose a slap-drone on you comes down to the principle that it is what any set of morally responsible conscious entities, machine or human, would choose to do were they in possession of the same set of facts as I am. However, part of my moral responsibility to you is to point out that you are free to publicise your case. There are specialist news services who’d certainly be interested and — you being relatively exotic and from somewhere we have few dealings with — even the general news services might be interested too. Then there are specialist legal, procedural, jurisdictional, behavioural, diplomatic…” She shrugged again. “And probably even philosophical interest groups who’d love to hear about something like this. You’d definitely find somebody who’d argue your case.”

“And who’d I be appealing to? You?”

“The court of informed public opinion,” Sensia said. “This is the Culture, kid. That’s the court of last resort. If I was convinced I’d made a mistake, or even if I thought I was right but everybody else appeared to think otherwise, I guess I’d reluctantly have to abandon the slap-drone thing. Being a ship Mind I’d take more notice of what other ship Minds thought, then other Minds in general, then AIs, humans, drones and others, though of course as this would be a dispute ultimately about a human’s rights I’d have to give more than usual weight to the human vote. It sounds a little complicated but there are all sorts of well-known precedents and much-used, highly respected processes involved.”

Sensia dipped forward and looked round at Lededje, trying to get her to look at her, though Lededje refused. “Look, Lededje, I don’t mean to make it sound off-putting at all; the whole process would seem incredibly quick and informal to somebody with your background and understanding of the way courts and legal systems work and you wouldn’t have to stay aboard me to see it through; you could start back for home and see how things turn out while you’re en route. I say it would seem informal, but it’d be extremely thorough, and, frankly, much less likely to produce an unjust result than a similar case going through the courts you have back home. If you’d like to do this, please feel free. At any time. It’s your right. Personally I don’t think you’d have a hope in hell of getting off the slap-drone thing, but one never entirely knows with such matters and continually having seemingly obvious judgements challenged is pretty much how the system works.”

Lededje thought about this. “How… secret has me being brought back to life been until now?”

“Right now, it’s just between you and me, given that I can’t find the Me, I’m Counting, the ship that we’re assuming put the neural lace into your head in the first place.”

Only after she’d done it did Lededje realise she’d put one hand to the back of her head as soon as Sensia had mentioned a lace. Her fingertips moved through the soft, short fair hair covering her scalp, tracing the contours of her own skull.

She’d been offered another neural lace, before she’d been woken up in this new body. She’d said no, and was still unsure why she’d made that choice. Anyway, one could be… installed later, even if the process required time to come to fully functioning fruition. That was what had happened with the last one, after all.

“What might have happened to the ship?” she asked. She had a sudden recollection of Himerance, sitting in the seat in her bedroom, dimly lit, talking quietly to her, ten years earlier.

“Happened to it?” Sensia sounded surprised. “Oh, it’ll be off on a retreat, probably. Or wandering aimlessly, tramping the galaxy, or doggedly pursuing some weird obsession all of its own; either way all it needs is to stop telling people where it is and it disappears off the screens. Ships do that, especially old ships.” She snorted. “Especially old ships that saw active service in the Idiran war. They’re very prone to going Eccentric.”

“So ships don’t get slap-droned?” She tried to sound sarcastic.

“Oh, but they do, if they’re especially strange, or of a certain… capital substance; a major ship.” Sensia leaned in close and said, “Ship like me went Eccentric once, or seemed to. Can you imagine?” she said, pretending horror as she nodded out at the view. “Something this size? Went totally off the rails in a crisis and shook off the ship detailed to be its slap-drone.”

“And how did that end?”

Sensia shrugged. “Not too badly. Could have been a bit better, could have been an awful lot worse.”

Lededje thought a little more. “Then I think I’ll just have to accept your judgement.” She turned and smiled smoothly at the avatar. “I don’t accept that it’s necessary, but I’ll… acquiesce.” Sensia wore an expression of regret, and a small frown. “Though you should know,” Lededje said, fighting to keep her voice under control, “that there is no possibility of the man who killed me being brought to justice for what he did to me, let alone suffering any punishment for it. He is a very charming, very powerful but completely evil man. He is utterly selfish and self-centred, and due to his position he can and does get away with anything — anything at all. He deserves to die. It would absolutely be the correct moral thing to do to kill Joiler Veppers, my personal grievance against him set entirely aside. If I am going back to my home with murder in my heart, as you put it, then you are making exactly the wrong moral choice in deciding to protect him.”

“I understand how you feel, Lededje,” the avatar said.

“I doubt it.”

“Well, I certainly understand the force of what you’re saying; please accept that at least. It’s just not my place to pass judgement at such a remove on somebody I have no conceivable moral jurisdiction over.”

“The Culture never interferes in other societies?” Lededje said, trying to sound scornful. It was one of the few things she could recall having heard about the Culture back in Sichult: its people were hopelessly effeminate, or unnaturally aggressive females (the story changed according to exactly which aspect of the Culture’s alleged demeanour the Sichultian press and establishment wanted to portray as shocking, depraved or despicable), it didn’t use money and it was ruled by its giant robot ships that interfered in other civilisations. Despite herself, she could feel tears welling up behind her eyes.

“Good grief, yes, we’re interfering all the time,” the avatar admitted. “But it’s all carefully thought out, long-term managed and there’s always got to be some strategic goal that’ll benefit the people being interfered with.” Sensia looked away for a moment. “Well, usually. That’s not to say things don’t go awry on occasion.” She looked back at Lededje. “But that’s all the more reason to take care. Especially when this is a person of such importance, with such a degree of fame, notoriety or whatever, and with control over so much of your civilisation’s productive—”

“So his position, his money protects him even here?” Lededje protested, trying hard not to cry now.

“I’m sorry,” Sensia said. “That’s the reality of the situation. We don’t make your rules. As an alien being he has as much right as anybody else has not to have me collude in any plot against his life; as a focus of power within your society, anything that happens to him matters more than it does to almost anybody else. It would be irresponsible not to take that into account even if I did share your desire to kill him.”

“What chance would I have anyway,” Lededje said, sniffing and looking away. “I’m no assassin. I could happily kill him but I’ve no particular skill in such matters. My only advantage is I know something of his estates and houses and the people who surround him.” She raised her hand, studied its back and front. “And I don’t look like I used to look, so I might have a chance of getting close to him.”

“I imagine he’s well protected,” Sensia said. She paused for a moment. “Yes, I see that he is. Your news services seem most taken with these cloned people, the Zei.”

Lededje thought to say something to the effect that Jasken was the real bodyguard, Veppers’ true last line of defence, but then thought the better of it. Best not be seen to be thinking in such terms. She sniffed some more, wiping her nose on her hand.

“You don’t have to go back, Lededje,” Sensia said gently. “You could stay here, make a new life in the Culture.”

Lededje used the heels of her hands to dry round her eyes. “You know, for almost as long as I can remember that was the one thing I wanted?” she said. She glanced at Sensia, who looked puzzled. “All those years, all those times I tried to run away, the one thing nobody ever asked me was where I might be running to.” She smiled a small, thin smile at the avatar, who looked surprised now. “If they had asked,” Lededje told her, “I might even have told them: I was running away to the Culture, because I’d heard they’d escaped the tyranny of money and individual power, and that all people were equal here, men and women alike, with no riches or poverty to put one person above or beneath another.”

“But now you’re here?” Sensia offered, sounding sad.

“But now I’m here I find Joiler Veppers is still deferred to because he is a rich and powerful man.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “And I find I need to return because that is my home, like it or not, and I must make my peace with it somehow.” She looked sharply at Sensia. “Then I might come back. Would I be allowed to come back?”

“You’d be allowed.”

Lededje nodded once and looked away.

They were both silent for a few moments. Then Sensia said, “Slap-drones can be quite useful companions, anyway; willing and obedient servants — bodyguards, too — so long as you don’t try to kill or injure somebody. I’ll choose you a good one.”

“I’m sure we’ll get on just fine,” Lededje said.

She wondered how easy it would be to lose a slap-drone. Or to kill it, too.

Yime Nsokyi stood in the main room of her apartment, her stance upright, her booted feet together, her head slightly back, her hands clasped behind her back. She was dressed formally in long dark grey boots, grey trousers, a light blouse and a plain grey jacket with a stiff, high collar. She had a pen terminal in the breast pocket of the jacket and a back-up terminal in the shape of an earbud attached to the lobe of her left ear. Her hair was very neatly combed.

“Ms. Nsokyi, hello.”

“Good day.”

“You look very… poised. Wouldn’t you rather sit?”

“I prefer to stand.”

“Okay.” The avatar of the GCU Bodhisattva, OAQS had appeared, Displaced apparently, in front of her a moment earlier, its coming heralded half an hour before by the call she’d received. She had had time to dress and compose herself. The avatar took the form of an old-looking drone, nearly a metre long, half that across and a quarter-metre in height. It floated at eye level. “I shall take it we may dispense with any pleasantries,” it said.

“That would be my choice,” Yime agreed.

“I see. In that case, are you ready to…?”

Yime flexed her knees, picked up a small soft bag at her feet and stood again. “Fully,” she said.

“Okay then.”

The avatar and the human female disappeared inside two silver ellipsoids which had hardly appeared before they shrank to two points and vanished, not quite fast enough to create two tiny claps of thunder, but sufficiently quickly to cause a draught that ruffled the leaves of nearby plants.

Prin awoke from the long and terrible real nightmare of his time in Hell and found Chay, his true love, gazing over at him as he lay, blinking, on the clinic bed. He was on his side, looking at her; she was on her other side on a bed a metre away, facing him. Her eyes blinked slowly.

It had taken a while for him to register where he was, who this person looking over at him was, even who he himself was. At first all he knew was that he was somewhere vaguely medical, that he felt something very sweet and special for the female lying opposite, and that he had done something important and terrifying.

Hell. He had been in Hell. They had been in Hell; he and Chay. They had gone in there to prove that it was real, not a myth, and that it was a vile, perverted version of an afterlife, a place of unredeemed cruelty, impossible to defend in any civilised society.

They had sought to witness this and then to bring the evidence back and do what they could to make it public; get it disseminated as widely as possible, defying the state, the government, the political-commercial establishment and all the various vested interests which wanted their Hell — all the hells — to continue.

Now, here they were, back in the Real, the two of them.

He couldn’t quite speak yet. He was lying on this bed, in what certainly looked like the clinic they had left from, with Chay on the bed opposite his. They had transferred their personalities into electronic or photonic form or whatever it was — he had never been interested in the technical details — and they had set out together for Hell.

He could hear faint beeping noises, and see various pieces of medical equipment and communications gear stationed around their two beds.

“Prin! You’re back!” a voice said. He recognised the voice, or at least knew that he ought to know who the speaker was. A male came into view.

He did recognise him. Irkun. He was called Irkun and he was the medic-cum-comms-wizard who had been overseeing the transfer of their personalities, their beings, from their own bodies, through the communications network to wherever the state-run link to Hell was, and then on to the Hell itself. And back, of course. That was the point; they had to come back, and so they’d been sent with lengths of code attached that would let them come back. In the Hell these had been disguised as necklaces of barbed wire. They gave the wearer one brief spell to impersonate one of the more powerful and privileged demons within the Hell, and one chance to get back out of the virtual world back to the Real.

He remembered the blue glowing gate and the mill and the valley side with the X-shaped devices bearing the rotting corpses.

Blue glowing gate, and his desperate leap, holding her…

Tumbling in the air, somersaulting so that he went through first, her in his limbs immediately afterwards, if possible.

“You made it!” Irkun said, clapping both trunks together. He was dressed like a medic; white waistcoat, tail bunned and pinned, hooves in little white bootees. “You’re back! You made it! And Chay, is she…?”

Irkun turned to look at Chay. She was still staring straight ahead. Prin had thought she was gazing at him, but of course, she wasn’t. She blinked slowly, again, exactly as she had a little earlier.

“… right behind you?” Irkun asked, voice trailing away a little as he looked at the medical units and comms gear gathered around her bed. He pulled out a tablet remote and started tapping at it, trunk-fingers dancing over the icons, letters and numbers. “Is she…?” he said, falling silent. He stopped tapping at the remote and looked, stricken, at Prin.

Irkun, Chay, the bed she was lying on and the whole small clinic room — on a houseboat in a lagoon off a shallow sea — all started to waver and dissolve as tears began to fill Prin’s eyes.

There were three others besides Prin and Irkun. They had kept the core team as small as they possibly could to avoid the pro-Hell people finding out.

They lay on couches on a deck looking out over the lagoon towards the distant dunes and the sea. Birds flew across the reflection of a livid sunset, dark shapes against the long rips and tearings of the cloud-streaked sky. There were no other boats or houseboats visible. The one they were on looked innocent enough, though it concealed some very hi-tech gear and a buried optic cable linking them to a satellite array in the nearest small town, kilometres distant. Prin had been awake for about half a day now. They needed to decide what to do next, especially about Chay.

“If we leave her under we can re-integrate her fine, whenever she comes back,” Biath said. He was their mind-state expert.

“Even with a broken mind?” Prin asked.

“Certainly,” Biath said, as though this was some sort of accomplishment.

“So we take a perfectly healthy sleeping mind and plonk a broken one into it and it’s the broken one that wins, that emerges?” Yolerre said. She was their main programmer, the whiz that had come up with the barbed-wire code to let them escape from the Hell.

Biath shrugged. “The newer writes over the older,” he told her. “That’s just normal.”

“But if we wake her—?” Prin began.

“If we wake her she’ll be just as she was before the two of you went under,” Sulte said. He was their mission controller, their main ex-government source and another comms expert. “But the longer she’s awake and living any sort of normal life, the harder it gets to re-integrate her two personalities: the unconscious one here that doesn’t include her experiences in the Hell and the virtually conscious one — wherever it is — that does.” He looked at Biath, who nodded to this.

“Which, given that the latter will probably leave her out of her mind,” Irkun said, “may be for the best.”

“She could be treated,” Irkun said. “There are techniques.”

“These techniques ever been tried on somebody carrying all the nightmares of Hell in their head?” Yolerre asked.

Irkun just shook his head and made a sucking noise.

“How long before any re-integration becomes impossible?” Prin asked.

“At worst, problematic within hours,” Biath said. “Few days probably. Week at the most. Over-write would be brutal, could leave her… catatonic at best. Only humane course would be trying to prise the Hell memories in piecemeal.” He shook his head. “Very likely her continuance personality would just reject the memories completely. Nightmares would need watching.”

“You really don’t think she’s likely to pop out soon?” Irkun asked Prin. Irkun had his tablet remote propped up in front of him, monitoring Chay’s condition in the clinic room just a few metres away.

Prin shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any chance,” he said. “She’d forgotten what the emergency code was, what it was for, how you operated it; like I keep saying, she even denied that there was any Real. And those bastard demons would have been on her in seconds after I barged through. If she didn’t follow me in a few heartbeats, she isn’t following me for… months.” He started crying again. The others saw, huddled closer, made soothing noises, and those closest reached out to touch him with their trunks.

He looked round them all. “I think we have to wake her,” he told them.

“What happens if we do get her back?” Yolerre asked.

“She can be given some sort of existence in a virtual world,” Sulte said. “Fact is it’ll be easier to treat her there, yes?” he said glancing at Biath, who nodded.

“Do we need to take a vote?” Irkun asked.

“I think it’s Prin’s call,” Sulte said. The others nodded, made noises of assent.

“You’ll have her back, Prin,” Yolerre said, reaching out to stroke him gently with one trunk.

Prin looked away. “No, I won’t,” he said.

When they did wake her, the following morning, he had already left.

He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to abandon the one he loved and who was still in Hell by accepting the love of the one who had never been there, no matter how whole, perfect and un-traumatised she might be.

No doubt this Chay, this one who had never seen Hell, would feel injured by his actions, and not understand how he could be so cruel to her, but then he had seen what real hurt and real cruelty was, and the person that he was now could never pretend that what had happened to the two of them in Hell had somehow not taken place, and changed who he was for ever.

The room where Lededje had woken, to see Sensia sitting outside on the balcony, was hers for as long as she stayed on the ship. After their tour in a small, very quiet aircraft — the GSV was appropriately mind-boggling from every external angle and internal corridor — Sensia had dropped Lededje off nearby, where one of the kilometres-long internal corridors abutted one of the little stepped valleys of accommodation units, given her a long, silvery and elaborate ring — a thing called a terminal that let her talk to the ship — then left her to find her own way back to the room and otherwise sort herself out. Sensia said she’d be a call away, happy to be a guide, companion or whatever. In the meantime, she imagined Lededje might want to rest, or just have some time to herself.

The ring fitted itself to Lededje’s longest finger and gave spoken directions back to her room. One wall of the room acted as a screen and allowed apparently unrestricted access to the ship’s equivalent of the Sichultian datasphere. She sat, started asking questions.

“Welcome aboard,” said the avatar drone of the Bodhisattva. “May I take your bag?”

Yime nodded. Instead of the avatar taking it from her, the bag simply disappeared from her hand, leaving the skin on her fingers with a tingling feeling. She wobbled on her feet and almost staggered as the bag’s weight was suddenly removed from that side of her body, leaving her unbalanced. “You’ll find it in your cabin,” the avatar said.

“Thank you.” Yime looked down. She was standing on nothing. It felt like a very hard nothing, but — just looking — there didn’t seem to be anything beneath her feet except stars arranged in familiar-looking wispy sprays and whorls. Stars to the sides, too. Above her, a vast dark presence; a ceiling of polished black reflecting the stars shining beneath her feet. Looking straight up, she saw a ghost-pale version of herself, looking straight back down.

Beneath, she recognised the patterns of the stars as those visible from her home Orbital of Dinyol-hei. Though given that she had just left her apartment in the later afternoon, these were not the stars she’d have expected to see if they’d simply moved straight down from her apartment to the part of the Orbital beneath where she lived. The ship was obviously some distance further away. She felt pleased with herself to have worked this out so quickly.

“Do you need time to freshen up, adjust, orientate yourself or otherwise—?” the drone began.

“No,” Yime said. She stood as she had before, though with feet spread a little. “May we begin?”

“Yes. Your full attention, please,” the Bodhisattva said.

Your full attention. Yime felt mildly insulted. Still, this was Quietus. It was known for its air of formal austerity and a degree of implicit asceticism. If you didn’t like the discipline involved in most things Quietudinal you shouldn’t have signed up in the first place.

There was a spiteful rumour, seemingly incapable of being entirely laid to rest, that the more recently manifested specialist divisions of the Culture’s Contact section were only there to provide substitute employment niches for those desperate but unable to make the cut and get into Special Circumstances itself.

Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but nevertheless potentially deeply powerful Elders and the still more detached-from-reality Sublimed, where any vestige or trace of such exotic entities remained.

Special Circumstances was, in effect, the Contact section’s espionage wing.

There had always been specialist sub-divisions within the organisational behemoth that was Contact. Special Circumstances was only the most obvious and, uniquely, it had been formally separate almost since its inception; largely because it sometimes did the sort of things the people who were proud to be part of Contact would have been horrified to have been remotely associated with.

As time had passed though, especially over the last half-thousand years or so, Contact itself had seen fit to introduce various reorganisations and rationalisations which had resulted in the creation of three other specialist divisions, of which the Quietudinal Service was one.

The Quietudinal Service — Quietus, as it was usually called — dealt with the dead. The dead outnumbered the living in the greater galaxy by some distance, if you added up all those individuals existing in the various Afterlives the many different civilisations had created over the millennia. Happily — mercifully — the dead generally tended to keep themselves to themselves and caused relatively little trouble compared to those for whom the Real was still the place to exist within and try to exploit. However, the sheer scale of their numbers ensured that important issues involving the deceased still arose now and again; the dead Quietus dealt with might be technically departed, but they were, sometimes, far from quiet.

A lot of the time such matters were effectively about legality, even about definitions; in a lot of societies the principal difference between a live virtual person — possibly just passing through, as it were, between bodies, back in the Real — and a dead virtual person was that the latter had no right to property or any other kind of ownership outside of their own simulated realm. Perhaps not unnaturally, there were those amongst the dead who found such a distinction unfair. This sort of thing could lead to trouble, but Quietus was skilled in dealing with the results.

Relatively small in terms of ships and personnel, Quietus could nevertheless call on whole catalogued suites of dead but preserved experts and expert systems — not all of which were even pan-human in origin — to help them deal with such matters, bringing them back from their fun-filled retirement or out of suspended animation, where they had left instructions that they were ready to be revived if they could be of use when circumstances required.

Slanged as “Probate” by some of those in SC, Quietus had links with Special Circumstances, but regarded itself as a more specialised service than its much older and larger sibling utility. Most of the humans within Quietus regarded any links with SC as deplorable in essence and only very occasionally necessary, if ever. Some just plain looked down on Special Circumstances. Theirs, they felt, was a higher, more refined calling and their demeanour, behaviour, appearance and even dress reflected this.

Quietus ships added the letters OAQS — for On Active Quietudinal Service — to their names while they were so employed, and usually took on a monochrome outer guise, either pure shining white in appearance or glossily black. They even moved quietly, adjusting the configuration of their engine fields to produce the minimum amount of disturbance both on the sub-universal energy grid and the 3D skein of real space. Normal Culture ships either went for maximum efficiency or the always popular let’s-see-what-we-can-squeeze-out-of-these-babies approach.

Similarly, the human and other biological operatives of Quietus were expected to be sober, serious people while they were on duty, and to dress appropriately.

It was to this division of Contact that Yime belonged.

Your full attention, indeed. Oh well. Rather than reply, Yime just nodded.

Suddenly she was surrounded waist deep in stars. The drone, the far-distant stars beneath her feet and their reflections had all disappeared. “This is the Ruprine Cluster, in Arm One-one Near-tip,” the ship’s voice said all around her.

Arm One-one Near-tip was a little under three hundred light years distant from the region of space where the Orbital Dinyol-hei lay circling around the sun Etchilbieth. In galactic terms, this was practically next door.

“These stars,” the ship said as a few dozen of the suns shown turned from their natural colours to green, “represent the extent of a small civilisation called the Sichultian Enablement, a Level Four/Five society originating here.” One of the green stars blazed brightly, then reduced in brilliance. “The Quyn system; home of the planet Sichult where the pan-human Sichultians evolved.” A pair of pan-humans were shown, standing just outside the ball of stars surrounding Yime. Curious physical proportions, Yime thought. Two sexes; each a little odd-looking to her eyes, just as she would have been to theirs, she supposed. Their skin colours changed as she looked at them, from dark to pale then back to dark, with yellow, red and olive tones exhibited en route. The two naked beings were replaced by one clothed one. He appeared tall, powerfully built and had long white hair.

“This is a man called Joiler Veppers,” the ship told her. “He is the richest individual in the entire civilisation, and by some margin. He is also the most powerful individual in the entire civilisation — though unofficially, through his wealth and connections rather than due to formal political position.”

The image of the stellar cluster with its artificially green stars and the tall, white-haired man both vanished to be replaced by the earlier image of the stars constituting the Sichultian Enablement, with the Quyn system’s sun still shown as the brightest.

“Ms. Nsokyi,” the ship said, “are you aware of the current, long-running confliction over the future of the Afterlives known as Hells?”

“Yes,” Yime said.

Confliction was the technically correct term for a formal conflict within a virtual reality — i.e. one where the outcome mattered beyond the confines of the virtual battle environment itself — but mostly people just called this one the War in Heaven. It had been running now for nearly three decades and had yet to produce a result. She’d heard reports recently that it was finally coming close to a conclusion, but then there had been similar reports almost every hundred days since it had started so she had taken no more notice than anybody else. Most people had long since lost interest.

“Good,” the ship said. “Mr. Veppers controls the largest part of the Enablement’s productive capacity and — through one of his interests in particular — has access to this.” A star near the outer limit of the Enablement’s volume blazed too, attracting attention. The view zoomed in vertiginously until it showed a single-ringed gas giant planet. Between its broad, dun-coloured polar regions, the planet displayed seven horizontal bands coloured various shades of yellow, red and brown.

“This,” the ship said, as the entirety of the single equatorial ring surrounding the planet flashed green once, “is the artificial planetary nebula of the Tsungarial Disk, around the planet Razhir, in the Tsung system. The Disk comprises over three hundred million separate habitats and — mostly — manufacturies, usually called fabricaria. The Disk was abandoned two million years ago by the then Subliming Meyeurne and has been a Galactic Protectorate since shortly after their disappearance. The Protectorate status was agreed to be necessary due to a chaotic, dangerously uncontrolled war both over and enabled by the very considerable ship-and-weapon-system-manufacturing capacity left behind, at least irresponsibly, possibly mischievously and arguably maliciously by the Meyeurne. The civilisations involved were the Hreptazyle and the Yelve.”

The ship didn’t bother to display any images of the Meyeurne, Hreptazyle or Yelve. Certainly Yime had never heard of any of them, which meant they were either long gone or just irrelevant.

“Shortly following the Idiran War,” the Bodhisattva said, “the Culture became the latest in a long line of trusted Level Eights to be given Protectorate custody of the Disk. However, as part of what were in effect war reparations after the Chel debacle, six hundred years ago, we ceded overarching control of the Disk to the Nauptre Reliquaria and their junior partners the GFCF.”

Yime most certainly had heard of the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF. Like the Culture, the Reliquaria was a Level Eight civilisation; technologically the societies were equals. Originally a species of giant, furred, gliding marsupials, for the last couple of millennia they had expressed themselves almost exclusively as their machines: GSV-sized constructor ships, smaller though still substantial space vessels, lesser independent space-faring units and a multifarious variety of metre-scale individuals roughly equivalent to drones, though with no standard model; each design was unique or close to it. Their presence then extended down through the centimetre and millimetre scales to collectivised nanobots.

The furry marsupials still existed, but they’d retreated to their home planets and habitats to lives of cheerfully selfish indolence, leaving their machines to represent them in the galactic community. Generally reckoned to be well on the slippery (if confusingly, by convention, upward) slope to Subliming, the Reliquaria’s relations with the Culture were formal — perhaps even frosty — rather than friendly, largely due to the Nauptrians’ robust attitude to punishment in their artificial Afterlife.

Basically, they were very much for it.

Unlike the Culture, which — despite being firmly of a mind with the anti-Hell side of the confliction — had thought it politic to take no active part in the virtual war, the Nauptrians had made themselves an enthusiastic part of the pro-Hell war effort.

The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy was a Level Seven civilisation. Pan-human, smaller and more delicate than the average but generally reckoned to be quite beautiful, with large heads and large eyes, they had a strange relationship with the Culture, professing to love it — they had even chosen their name partly in honour of the Culture — but often seeming to want to criticise it and even work against it, as though they so much wanted to be of help they needed the Culture reduced to a level of neediness that would make such aid something it would genuinely be grateful for.

The mention of Chel was randomly appropriate, Yime thought. Before that particular stain on the Culture’s reputation people had seemed reticent to talk about the whole issue of Afterlives. After it, for a while at least, they’d appeared to talk of little else.

“The components of the Tsungarial Disk have mostly been mothballed for all this time,” the ship continued, “left as a kind of monument or mausoleum. Over the last few decades, however, as the Sichultia have expanded their sphere of influence out to and around it, they have been granted limited, low-level control over the Disk and allowed, in the shape of Veppers’ Veprine Corporation, to use a handful of the orbital manufacturies to construct trading and exploratory ships, all of this supervised by the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF.

“Veppers and the Sichultia have long sought greater operational control over the Disk and its manufacturing capacity to aid their commercial, military and civilisational expansion. They are now on the verge of achieving their goal due to the changing attitudes, not to say connivance, of the GFCF and the Reliquaria. This is because the GFCF covets at least some of that capacity as well — their medium-term aim is to step up a civilisational level, and control of the reactivated Disk’s productive capacity would go some way to securing it — while the Nauptre Reliquaria are pro-Hell, in the short term wanting the pro/anti-Hell confliction ended — and with what they see as the right result — as well as, in the long term, and assuming they do not Sublime in the meantime, by their own admission planning to combine all Afterlives with their own and others Sublimed. That nobody else thinks this is even possible does not seem to trouble them and is anyway beside the point.”

“Why does the Reliquaria being pro-Hell have anything to do with control of the Disk?” Yime asked.

“Because the Disk’s productive or possibly computational capacity may come into play in an outbreak from the confliction into the Real.”

“An outbreak?” Yime felt genuinely shocked. Conflictions — virtual wars — were there specifically to stop people warring in the Real.

“The pro/anti-Hell confliction may be about to end,” the ship said, “in victory for the pro-Hell side.”

That was a blow for the Culture, Yime thought. Even though it had seemingly stood aside from the war, there had never been any doubt which side it believed in.

It was all just bad timing, in a way. At the point when the war began, the Culture had been in one of its cyclic eras of trying not to be seen to be throwing its weight around. Too many others of the In-Play Level Eights had objected to the Culture being involved with the War in Heaven for it to be able to do so without looking arrogant, even belligerent.

The assumption had somehow always been that the pro-Hell forces were going to be fighting a losing battle anyway and their defeat was probably inevitable no matter who did or didn’t join in. Seemingly, the more the In-Play and the Elders thought about it, the more obvious it became that the whole idea of Afterlives dedicated to extended torture was indeed barbaric, unnecessary and outdated, and the course of the confliction over the continued existence of the Hells was expected to follow this slow but decisive shift in opinion. At the time, the prospect of the Culture getting involved seemed likely to most people to make the conflict less fair, its outcome effectively fixed before it even began.

For a virtual war to work, people had to accept the outcome; the losing side in particular had to abide by the result rather than cry foul, revoke the solemn pledges they had made in the War Conduct Agreement drawn up before the conflict began, and continue as things had been before. The consensus had been that the Culture taking part would give the pro-Hell side the excuse to do just that, if and when they lost.

“The anti-Hell side,” the ship continued, “was the first to attempt to hack the other’s conflict-direction processing substrates. The opposing side retaliated. The anti-Hell side has additionally attempted direct hacking attacks on some of the Hells themselves, seeking either to release the inmates or to destroy the virtual environments completely.

“The various hacking attacks by both sides have almost all failed, those that succeeded did little damage and the vast majority of those by both sides were detected by those targeted, leading to multiple judging and arbitration disputes, all of which are currently being kept sub judice; successfully so far though probably not for much longer. Extensive legal and diplomatic disputes are anticipated and almost certainly being prepared for.

“There are certain so-far unsubstantiated reports that some of the secret substrates within which several major Hells are running are located not where one might expect to find them — essentially, within the volumes of influence of their parent civilisations — but instead within the Tsungarial Disk or elsewhere within the Sichultian Enablement. The worry is that an outbreak of the confliction into the Real may involve the Tsungarial Disk, especially the until-now dormant majority of the fabricaria and the hidden substrates that may also lie there. If this is truly the case then the potential for a substantial war in the Real would seem high.

“Thus the Sichultian Enablement suddenly and unexpectedly finds itself in a position of power well beyond that which its developmental level would lead one to expect. It is poised to contribute significantly, possibly decisively, to a situation of extreme importance, the outcome of which might lead directly to a significant conflict in the Real involving several high-level Players. Given that Mr. Veppers is so powerful within the Sichultian Enablement, what he thinks and does therefore becomes of profound importance.”

Yime thought about this. “Why would we — why would Quietus be involved?”

“There is a complication,” the ship told her.

“I thought there might be.”

“In fact, there are two.”

“That I did not anticipate,” Yime admitted.

“The first concerns this person.” A figure appeared.

“Hmm,” Yime said, after a moment. The figure was of a pan-human: a Sichultian, Yime would have guessed from the rather odd bodily proportions. This one was female, bald or shaven-headed and dressed in a short sleeveless tunic which displayed extensive and intricate multi-coloured abstract markings on her night-black skin. She was smiling. Looking closely, Yime could see further markings on the female’s teeth and the whites of her eyes. The two naked figures she’d been shown earlier hadn’t had anything like that. Those, though, had been generalised, textbook figures. The person shown here, like the image of Veppers, was an individual. “Sichultian?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“The markings aren’t natural.”

“Correct.”

“Are they… real?”

“They were real and permanent. They continued within her body. She was an Intagliate, one of a subset of humans within the Sichultian Enablement who are tattooed throughout their physical being. The practice began as an art form though later also became a form of punishment, especially for matters regarding private civil debt.”

Yime nodded. What a bizarre thing to do, she thought.

“Her name is Lededje Y’breq,” the ship told her.

“She was an Intagliate,” but “Her name is…” Yime noticed. Ship Minds didn’t make mistakes like that. She suspected she already knew where this was going.

“Ms. Y’breq died between five and ten days ago in Ubruater, the capital city of the Sichultian Enablement’s originating planet, Sichult,” the ship told her. “She may have been murdered. If so then the murderer may have been Joiler Veppers, or somebody controlled by him, somebody in his employ. The Sichultia do not possess, or, as far as we know, have even limited access to mindstate transcription or ‘soulkeeper’ technology, however there is an unconfirmed report that Ms. Y’breq’s personality was somehow retrieved from her when she died and that she was revented aboard the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.”

“Oh. It was nearby?”

“It was nowhere near nearby; it was over three thousand light years distant from the nearest part of the Sichultian Enablement at the time, and no ships or other entities representing or associated with the vessel were closer than approximately nine hundred years away at the time either. Nor had the ship or any of its known associates ever had any recorded dealings with the Sichultian Enablement.”

“How mysterious.”

“There is a possible link, however, between these seemingly unrelated components.”

“Ah-hah.”

“We’ll come to that shortly. The salient point to be made here is that it is believed that Ms. Y’breq may be on her way back to the Sichultian Enablement, revented within a quite different body — probably still Sichultian in form, though, for all we know, male — and bearing the intention of doing some violence, likely fatal, to Mr. Veppers, in revenge for her earlier murder.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Stop her? Help her?”

“As things stand, simply finding her and keeping in touch would be sufficient achievement. You would then await further orders.”

“So she’s our excuse,” Yime suggested.

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Nsokyi?”

“This girl, being revented. She’s our excuse for getting involved in all this.”

“Her revention is one reason to get involved. I’m not sure that characterising it as an ‘excuse’ is entirely helpful.” The ship’s voice sounded frosty. “Also, this entire confliction is specifically about the fate of the dead. It is entirely within the remit of Quietus.”

“But isn’t this more of an SC thing?” Yime suggested. “In fact, hasn’t this got Special Circumstances written all over it?”

She waited for a reply, but one did not appear to be immediately forthcoming. She went on. “This does sound like it involves tangling with equiv-tech galactic Players with the intention of stopping a proper ships-and-everything full-scale shooting war. I’m not sure how much more hardcore SC than that a situation can get.”

“That’s an interesting observation.”

“Is SC involved in this?”

“Not that we know of.”

“Who would ‘we’ be within this context?”

“Let me re-phrase that last reply: Not that I know of.”

This was mildly illuminating. Quietus had a deliberately flat organisational structure; in theory perfectly so at ship level, all the Minds concerned having equal knowledge and an equal say. In practice there was a degree of legislative/executive, strategic/tactical distinction, some Minds and ships doing the planning while others subsequently undertook the execution.

“Shouldn’t we tell SC?” she asked.

“I’m sure that is being considered. My immediate task is to brief and transport you. Yours, Ms. Nsokyi, is to attend to this briefing and, assuming you are agreeable, take part in this mission.”

“I see.” Yime nodded. That was her told. “What’s the other complication?”

The projection of the brown, red and yellow gas giant with its artificial ring system returned, replacing the image of the Sichultian female.

“Approximately two hundred and eight thousand years ago a proportion of the dormant fabricaria in the Tsungarial Disk suffered a smatter infection in the shape of the remains of a hegemonising swarm outbreak which took refuge there. The hegswarm was duly dealt with in the usual manner and annihilated by the cooperative of civilisations then responsible for overseeing that volume of space. The smatter infection was assumed to have been expunged from the Disk components at the same time. However, isolated recurrences of it have taken place over random intervals ever since. Due to its earlier success in dealing rapidly and effectively with these sporadic flare-ups, a small, specialist Culture presence was allowed to remain even after the Culture lost the mandate for the Disk’s protection.”

Yime nodded. “Ah. Pest Control.”

“The specialist Culture contingent in the Tsungarial Disk is indeed part of the Restoria section.”

Restoria was the part of Contact charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks, when — by accident or design — a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy’s matter into nothing but copies of themselves. It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy and arguably hegswarms were just that; another legitimate — if rather over-enthusiastic — galactic life-form type.

Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion. Equally, then, those same sophisticated civilisations could be seen as the galaxy’s way of retaining a sort of balance between raw and refined, between wilderness and complexity, as well as ensuring that there was both always room for new intelligent life to evolve and that there was something wild, unexplored and interesting for it to gaze upon when it did. The Restoria section was the Culture’s current specialist contribution to this age-old struggle. As often known as Pest Control as by its official title, it was made up of experts in the management, amelioration and — if necessary — obliteration of hegswarms.

Quietus and Restoria worked together closely on occasion and both felt that they did so with mutual respect and on equal terms.

Restoria’s approach to its task and hence general demeanour was less punctilious than Quietus’, but then the ships, systems and humans in Pest Control generally spent their working lives rushing from hegswarm eruption to hegswarm eruption rather than communing with the honoured dead, so a buccaneering rather than considered and respectful bearing was only to be expected.

“The Restoria mission at the Tsungarial Disk has been kept informed regarding the potential for the fabricaria to come into play should the confliction spill over into the Real and has requested any help that might be available so long as it draws no extra external attention to the mission or the Disk. We are happy to provide and are lucky to have had assets, including but not limited to myself, and you, close by, given that the situation may become one of extreme urgency very quickly. Whether Restoria has also made such a request to Special Circumstances is not known to us.

“It is worth noting that the smatter infestation within the Disk has been in abatement for the last few decades and will, it is hoped, not enter into the equation.”

Smatter was the name given to the bitty remains of a hegswarm after it had been stamped out as any coherent threat. Usually it didn’t last significantly longer than the outbreak itself and just got mopped up. If some bits did persist then, while you could never afford to ignore the stuff, you didn’t really need to fear it. On the other hand, some of it getting into a mothballed system of a few hundred million ancient mothballed manufacturies did sound like awfully bad luck, Yime thought. Actually, it sounded like the kind of thing that woke Restoria people up at night, sweating and screaming.

The image of the gas giant planet and its glittering, artificial disk rotated slowly and silently in front of Yime.

“What was the possible link between the ‘components’ you mentioned earlier?” she asked.

“It is a potential link between the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly and the Sichultian Enablement in the shape of this vessel.”

The ringed gas giant disappeared to be replaced by the slim but chunky image of a Hooligan-class Limited Offensive Unit. It looked like a long, quite substantial bolt with various smoothed-off washers, nuts and longer collars screwed onto it.

“This is the Me, I’m Counting, an ex-LOU now of the Culture Ulterior,” the ship told her. “It was constructed by the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly shortly before the Idiran war and is thought to remain in sporadic contact with it. It is a self-declared Peripatetic Eccentric: a wanderer, a tramp vessel. It was last heard of with any formal degree of certitude some eight years ago when it declared it might go into a retreat. It is thought to have been present in the Sichultian Enablement two years earlier and so may constitute the mentioned link between it and the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly. There are indications that it accumulates images of strange and exotic creatures or devices and it may have chosen to collect such an image of Lededje Y’breq.”

“That would be a very comprehensive image.”

“It would.”

“And one which would be ten years younger than the female when she died. She wouldn’t know she’d been murdered, if she was.”

“She might simply have been told.”

Yime nodded. “I suppose she might.”

“We think we know, to a degree,” the ship said, a note of caution in its voice, “where the Me, I’m Counting is.”

“Do we?”

“It may well be with the GSV Total Internal Reflection.”

“And where is it?”

“That is not known. It is one of the Forgotten.”

“The what?”

“Ah.”