The general volume was one of the less well-visited and relatively uninhabited regions of the galaxy. Nearest major civilisation point; the Sagraeth system, forty light years away, with a stage-three lizardoid civilisation first contacted by the Culture a decade ago. Nothing special there. Voluminal influences/interests rated Creheesil 15 %, Affront 10 %, Culture 5 % (the normal claimed minimum, the Culture's influence/interest equivalent of background radiation), and a smattering of investigations and flybys by twenty other civilisations making up a nominal 2 %; otherwise not a place anybody was really interested in; a two-thirds forgotten, disregarded region of space. Never before directly investigated by the Elench, though there had been the usual deep-space remote scans from afar, showing nothing special. No clues there.
Date; n4.28.803, by the chronology the Elench still shared with the Culture. The drone's service log abstract recorded that it had been built as part of a matched pair by the Peace Makes Plenty in n4.13, shortly after the ship's own construction had been completed. Most recent entry; "28.725.500: ship leaving Tier habitat for a standard sweep-search of the outer reaches of the Upper Leaf-Swirl. The detailed service log was missing. The last flagged event the drone could find in its library dated from "28.802; a daily current affairs archive update. So had that been just yesterday, or could something have happened to its clock?
It scrutinised its damage reports and searched its memories. The damage profile equated to that caused by plasma fire, and — from the lack of obvious patterning — either an enormous plasma event very far away or plasma fire — possibly fusion-sourced — much closer but buffered in some way. A nearby plasma implosure was the most obvious example. Not something it could do itself. The ship could, though.
Its X-ray laser had been fired recently and its field-shields projectors had soaked up some leak-through damage. Consistent with what would have happened if something just like itself had attacked it. Hmm. One of a matched pair.
It thought. It searched. It could find no further mention of its twin.
It looked about itself, gauging its drift, and searching.
It was drifting at about two-eighty klicks a second, almost directly away from the Esperi system. In front of it — it focused all its damaged sensory capacity to peer ahead — nothing; it didn't appear to be aimed at anything.
Two-eighty klicks a second; that was somewhere just underneath the theoretical limit beyond which something of its mass would start to produce a relativistic trace on the surface of space-time, if one had perfect instrumentation. Now, was that a coincidence, or not? If not, it might have been slung out of the ship for some reason; Displaced, perhaps. It concentrated its senses backwards. No obvious point of origin, and nothing coming after it, either. Hint of something though.
The drone refocused, cursing its hopelessly degraded senses. Behind it, it found… gas, plasma, carbon. It widened the cone of its focus.
What it had discovered was an inflating shell of debris, drifting after it at a tenth of its speed. It ran a rewind of the debris shell's expansion; it originated at a point forty klicks behind the position where it had first woken up, eighteen fifty-three milliseconds ago.
Which implied it had been drifting totally unconscious for nearly half a second. Scary.
It scanned the distant shell of expanding particles. They'd been hot. Messy. That was wreckage. Battle wreckage, even. The carbon and the ions could originally have been part of itself, or part of the ship, or even part of a human. A few molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. No oxygen.
But all of it doing just 10 % of its own velocity. Odd, that. As though it had somehow been prioritised out of a sudden appearance of matter. Again, as though it had been Displaced, perhaps.
The drone flicked part of its attention back inside, to the sealed cores in its mind substrate with their warning notices. Can't put this off any longer, I suppose, it thought.
It interrogated the two cores. PAST, the first was labelled. The other one was simply called 2/2.
Uh-huh, it thought.
It opened the first core and found its memories.
II
Genar-Hofoen floated within the shower, buffeted from all sides by the streams of water. The fans sucking the water back out of the AG shower chamber sounded awfully loud this morning. Part of his brain told him he was running short of oxygen; he'd either have to leave the shower or grope for the air hose which was probably in the last place he'd feel for it. It was either that or open his eyes. It all seemed too much bother. He was quite comfortable where he was.
He waited to see what would give first.
It was his brain's indifference to the fact he was suffocating. Suddenly he was wide awake and flailing around like some drowning basic-human, desperate for breath but afraid to breathe in the constellation of water globules he was floating within. His eyes were wide open. He saw the air hose and grabbed it. He breathed in. Shit it was bright. His eyes dimmed the view. That was better.
He felt he'd showered enough. He mumbled, "Off, off," into the air hose mask a few times, but the water kept on coming. Then he remembered that the module wasn't talking to him right now because he'd told the suit to accept no more communications last night. Obviously such irresponsibility had to be punished by the module being childish. He sighed.
Luckily the shower had an Off button. The water jets cut off. Gravity was fed gently back into the chamber and he floated slowly down with the settling blobs of water. A reverser field clicked on and he looked at himself in it while the last of the water drained away, sucking in his belly and sticking out his chin while he turned his face to the best angle and smoothed down a few upstart locks of his blond curls.
"Well, I may feel like shit but I still look great," he announced to nobody in particular. For once, probably even the module wasn't listening.
"Sorry to force the pace," the representation of his uncle Tishlin said.
"'s all right," he said through a mouthful of feyl steak. He washed it down with some warmed-over infusion the module had always assured him was beneficial when you hadn't had enough sleep. It tasted disgusting enough to be either genuinely good for you, or just one of the module's little jokes.
"Sleep okay?" his uncle's image asked. He was, apparently, sitting across the table from Genar-Hofoen in the module's dining room, a pleasantly airy space filled with porcelain and flowers and boasting a seemingly real-time view on three sides of a sunlit mountain valley, which in reality was half a galaxy away. A small serving drone hovered near the wall behind the man.
"Good two hours," Genar-Hofoen said. He supposed he could have stayed awake the night before when he'd first discovered his uncle's hologram waiting for him; he could have glanded something to keep him bright and awake and receptive and got all this over with then, but he'd known he'd end up paying for it eventually and besides, he wanted to show them that just because they'd gone to the trouble of persuading his favourite uncle to record a semantic-signal-mind-abstract-state or whatever the hell the module had called it, he still wasn't going to jump just because they said so. The only concession he'd made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going at the moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully good and satisfying sex, and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.
So he'd gone to bed and had a pretty good if maybe still not quite long enough sleep and Uncle Tishlin's message had just had to sit twiddling its abstract semantics in the module's AI core, waiting till he got up.
So far all they'd done was exchange a few pleasantries and talk a little about old times; partly, of course, so that Genar-Hofoen could satisfy himself that this apparition had genuinely been sent by his uncle and SC had paid him the enormous compliment of sending not one but two personality-states to him in order to argue him round to doing whatever it was they wanted from him (that the hologram might be a brilliantly researched forgery created by SC would be even more of a compliment�
�� but that way lay paranoia).
"I take it you had a good evening," Tishlin's simulation said.
"Enormous fun."
Tishlin looked puzzled. Genar-Hofoen watched the expression form on his uncle's face and wondered how comprehensive was the duplication of his uncle's personality now encoded — living, if you wanted to look at it that way — in the module's AI core. Did whatever was in there — sent here enciphered with the specific task of persuading him to cooperate with Special Circumstances — actually feel? Or did it just appear to?
Shit, I must be feeling bad, Genar-Hofoen thought. I haven't bothered about that sort of shit since university.
"How can you have enormous fun with… aliens?" the hologram asked, eyebrows gathering.
"Attitude," Genar-Hofoen said cryptically, slicing off more steak.
"But you can't drink with them, eat with them, can't really touch them, or want the same things…" Tishlin said, still frowning.
Genar-Hofoen shrugged. "It's a kind of translation," he said. "You get used to it." He munched away for a moment while his uncle's program — or whatever it was — digested this. He pointed his knife at the image. 'That's something I'd want, in the unlikely event I agree to do whatever it is they want me to do."
"What?" Tishlin said, leaning back, arms crossed.
"I want to become an Affronter."
Tishlin's eyebrows elevated. "You want what, boy?" he said.
"Well, some of the time," Genar-Hofoen said, half turning his head to the drone behind him; the machine came quickly forward and refilled his glass with the infusion. "I mean, all I want is an Affronter body, one that I can just sort of zap into and… well, just be an Affronter. You know; socialise. I don't see what the problem is, really. In fact I keep telling them it'll be a great thing for Culture-Affront relations. I'd really be able to relate to these guys; I could really be one of them. Hell; isn't that what this ambassador shit is supposed to be all about?" He belched. "I'm sure it could be done. The module says it could but it shouldn't and says it's asked elsewhere and I know all the standard objections, but I think it'd be a great idea. I'm damn sure I'd enjoy it, I mean I could always sort of zap back into my own body anytime… this is really shocking you, isn't it, Uncle?"
The image shook its head. "You always were the oddest child, Byr. I suppose I should have known what to expect from you. Anybody who'd go out there to live with the Affront in the first place has to be slightly strange."
Genar-Hofoen held his arms out wide. "But I'm just doing what you did!" he protested.
"I only wanted to meet weird aliens, Byr; I didn't want to become one of them."
"Heck, and I thought you'd be proud of me."
"Proud but worried. Byr, are you seriously suggesting that becoming an Affronter would be part of your price for doing what SC asks?"
"Certainly," Genar-Hofoen said, and squinted up at the hammer-beamed ceiling. "I vaguely recall asking for a ship as well last night and the Death And Gravity saying yes…" he shook his head and laughed. "Must have imagined it." He finished the last of the steak.
"They've told me what they're prepared to offer, Byr," Tishlin said. "You didn't imagine it."
Genar-Hofoen looked up. "Really?" he asked.
"Really," Tishlin said.
Genar-Hofoen nodded slowly. "And how did they persuade you to act as go-between, Uncle?" he asked.
"They only had to ask, Byr. I may not be in Contact any more but I'm happy to help out when I can, when they have a problem."
"This isn't Contact, Uncle, this is Special Circumstances," Byr said quietly. "They tend to play by slightly different rules."
Tishlin looked serious; the image sounded defensive. "I know that, boy. I asked around some of my contacts before I agreed to do this; everything checks out, everything seems to be… reliable. I suggest you do the same, obviously, but from what I can see, what I've been told is the truth."
Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. "Okay. So what have they told you, Uncle?" he asked, draining the last of the infusion. He frowned, wiped his lips and inspected the napkin. He looked at the sediment in the bottom of the glass, then glared at the servant drone. It wobbled in the drone equivalent of a shrug and took the glass from his hand.
Tishlin's representation sat forward, putting its arms on the table. "Let me tell you a story, Byr."
"By all means," Genar-Hofoen said, picking something from his lips and wiping it on the napkin. The serving drone started to remove the rest of the breakfast things.
"Long ago and far away — two and a half thousand years ago," Tishlin said, "in a wispy tendril of suns outside the Galactic plane, nearest to Asatiel Cluster, but not really near to that or anywhere else — the Problem Child, an early General Contact Unit, Troubadour Class, chanced upon the ember of a very old star. The GCU started to investigate. And it found not one but two unusual things."
Genar-Hofoen drew his gown about him and settled back in his seat, a small smile on his lips. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Some of Genar-Hofoen's earliest memories were of the long, sunlit kitchen of the house at Ois, back on Seddun Orbital; his mother, the other adults of the house and his various cousins would all be milling around, chattering and laughing while he sat on his uncle's knee, being told tales. Some of them were ordinary children's stories — which he'd heard before, often, but which always sounded better when Uncle Tish told them — and some of them his uncle's own stories, from when he'd been in Contact, travelling the galaxy in a succession of ships, exploring strange new worlds and meeting all sorts of odd folk and finding any number of weird and wonderful things amongst the stars.
"Firstly," the hologram image said, "the dead sun gave every sign of being absurdly ancient. The techniques used to date it indicated it was getting on for a trillion years old."
"What?" Genar-Hofoen snorted.
Uncle Tishlin spread his hands. "The ship couldn't believe it either. To come up with this unlikely figure, it used…" the apparition glanced away to one side, the way Tishlin always had when he was thinking, and Genar-Hofoen found himself smiling, "… isotopic analysis and flux-pitting assay."
"Technical terms," Genar-Hofoen said, nodding. He and the hologram both smiled.
"Technical terms," the image of Tishlin agreed. "But no matter what it was they used or how they did their sums, it always came out that the dead star was at least fifty times older than the universe."
"I never heard that one before," Genar-Hofoen said, shaking his head and looking thoughtful.
"Me neither," Tishlin agreed. "Though as it turns out it was released publicly, just not until long after it had all happened. One reason there was no big fuss at the time was that the ship was so embarrassed about what it was coming up with it never filed a full report, just kept the results to itself, in its own mind."
"Did they have proper Minds back then?"
Tishlin's image shrugged. "Mind with a small «m»; AI core, we'd probably call it these days. But it was certainly sentient and the point is that the information remained in the ship's head, as it were."
Where, of course, it would remain the ship's. Practically the only form of private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory. Any publicly filed report or analysis was theoretically available to anybody, but your own thoughts, your own recollections — whether you were a human, a drone or a ship Mind — were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad manners even to think about trying to read somebody else's — or something else's — mind.
Personally, Genar-Hofoen had always thought it was a reasonable enough rule, although along with a lot of people over the years he'd long suspected that one of the main reasons for its existence was that it suited the purposes of the Culture's Minds in general, and those in Special Circumstances in particular.
Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to themselves and hatch little schemes and plots to their hearts" content. The trouble was that while in humans this sor
t of behaviour tended to manifest itself in practical jokes, petty jealousies, silly misunderstandings and instances of tragically unrequited love, with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to try to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already did know about (with the almost unspeakable implication that one day they might do just that not with a culture but with the Culture… always assuming they hadn't done so already, of course).
"What about the people on board the Culture ship?" Genar-Hofoen asked.
"They knew as well, of course, but they kept quiet, too. Apart from anything else, they had two weirdnesses on their hands; they assumed they had to be linked in some way but they couldn't work out how, so they decided to wait and see before they told everybody else." Tishlin shrugged. "Understandable, I suppose; it was all so outlandish I suppose anybody would think twice about shouting it to the rooftops. You couldn't get away with such reticence these days, but this was then; the guidelines were looser."
"What was the other unusual thing they found?"
"An artifact," Tishlin said, sitting back in the seat. "A perfect black-body sphere fifty klicks across, in orbit around the unfeasibly ancient star. The ship was completely unable to penetrate the artifact with its sensors, or with anything else for that matter, and the thing itself showed no signs of life. Shortly thereafter the Problem Child developed an engine fault — something almost unheard of, even back then — and had to leave the star and the artifact. Naturally, it left a load of satellites and sensor platforms behind it to monitor the artifact; all it had arrived with, in fact, plus a load more it had made while it was there.
"However, when a follow-up expedition arrived three years later — remember, this all happened on the galactic outskirts, and speeds were much lower then — it found nothing; no star, no artifact, and none of the sensors and remote packages the Problem Child had left behind; the outgoing signals apparently coming from the sentry units stopped just before the follow-up expedition arrived within monitoring range. Ripples in the gravity field near by implied the star and presumably everything else had vanished utterly the moment the Problem Child had been safely out of sensor range."
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