— 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 d
ark 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.
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