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But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.
A kernel - an enclosed world inside this world - within which she had not set foot for thirty-nine of these forty unchanging years, having no desire ever again to see that infinite catacomb of the silent undead.
Dajeil Gelian looked up to the clouds again, and the sky beyond. All to change, and the sea and the sky to become as stone, or steel . .
Whatever; after four decades in its state of self-imposed internal exile, navigating its own wayward course within its sought-out wilderness as part of the civilisation’s Ulterior and functioning most famously as a repository for quiescent souls and very large animals, it sounded like the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service was again starting to think and behave a little more like a ship which belonged to the Culture.
Full Internal Report to follow immediately in High Embarrassment Factor code. BSTS. H&H. BTB.
Remain calm, the machine told itself. Look at the overview; place this and yourself in context. You are prepared, you are hardened, you are proof. You will do all that you can to survive as you are or at the very least to prevail. There is a plan to be put into effect here. Play your part with skill, courage and honour and no ill will be thought of you by those who survive and succeed.
What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.
an Affronter with an impressive array of scars and more stumps than limbs was considered either an admirably dedicated sportsman or a brave but stupid and probably dangerous incompetent, depending entirely on the individual’s reputation.
Unhappily, the processing power required for this sort of technical gee-whizzery meant that according to Culture convention the suit had to be sentient. Genar-Hofoen had insisted on a model with the intelligence fixed at the lower limit of the acceptable intellectual range, but it still meant that the suit literally had a mind of its own (even if it was ‘node-distributed’, - one of those technical terms Genar-Hofoen took some pride in having no idea concerning the meaning of).
The result was a device which was almost as much a metaphorical pain to live with as it was in a literal sense a pleasure to live within; it looked after you perfectly but it couldn’t help constantly reminding you of the fact. Typical Culture, thought Genar-Hofoen.
contests between groups of captured aliens had been a particular and reasonably regular highlight, despite the fact that mounting such fights was often hideously expensive and fraught with technical complications due to the different chemistries and pressures involved. (Not to mention frequently presenting a very real danger to the observing dinner guests; who could forget the ghastly explosion at the Deepscars’ table five back in ’334, when every single guest had met a messy but honourable end due to the explosion of a highly pressurised bait-pit domed to simulate the atmosphere of a
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Genar-Hofoen shook his head slightly, grinning to himself. In all his life he had never been anywhere as unequivocally alien as here, inside a giant torus of cold, compressed gas orbiting a black hole - itself in orbit around a brown dwarf body light years from the nearest star - its exterior studded with ships - most of them the jaggedly bulbous shapes of Affront craft - and full, in the main, of happy, space-faring Affronters and their collection of associated victim-species. Still, he had never felt so thoroughly at home.
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.
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 sort 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
The Grey Area. The ship that did what the other ships both deplored and despised; actually looked into the minds of other people,
A pariah craft; the one the other Minds called Meatfucker because of its revolting hobby (though not, as it were, to its face). A ship that still wanted to be part of the Culture proper and nominally still was, but which was shunned by almost all its peers; a virtual outcast amongst the great inclusionary meta-fleet that was Contact.
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass . . . when suddenly this bristling lump of iron
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The Culture’s ultimate OCP was popularly supposed to be likely to take the shape of a galaxy-consuming Hegemonising Swarm, an angered Elder civilisation or a sudden, indeed instant visit by neighbours from Andromeda once the expedition finally got there.
probably they thought hangovers were just annoying, rather than character-forming and so had, shortsightedly, dispensed with them.
Excession notice @c18519938.52314.
The fact that Xlephier Prime was one of the twenty or so planets that could fairly claim to have been one of the home worlds of the Culture - not that it really admitted to having such things - made the task easier.
Every Culture habitat - whether it was an Orbital or other large structure, a ship, a Rock, or a planet - possessed Storage facilities. Storage was where some people went when they had reached a certain age, or if they had just grown tired of living. It was one of the choices that Culture humans faced towards the end of their artificially extended three-and-a-half to four centuries of life.
They could opt for rejuvenation and/or complete immortality, they could become part of a group mind, they could simply die when the time came, they could transfer out of the Culture altogether, bravely accepting one of the open but essentially inscrutable invitations left by certain Elder civilisations, or they could go into Storage, with whatever revival criterion they desired.
That was a decision the Culture had been putting off for many millennia; in theory it could have sublimed anything up to eight thousand years ago, but - while individuals and small groups of people and Minds did sublime all the time, and other parts of the society had hived off and split away, to make their own decisions on the matter - the bulk of the Culture had chosen not to, determining instead to surf a line across the ever-breaking wave of galactic life continuation.
Partly it was a kind of curiosity that no doubt seemed childish to any sublimed species; a feeling that there was still more to discover in base reality, even if its laws and rules were all perfectly known (and besides, what of other galaxies, what of other universes? Did the Elders have access to these but none of them had ever seen fit to communicate the truth to the unsublimed? Or did all such considerations simply cease to matter, post-sublimation?).
Partly it was an expression of the Culture’s extrovertly concerned morality; the sublimed Elders, become as gods to all intents and purposes, seemed to be derelict in the duties which the more naive and less devel...
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The implication was that the very ideas, the actual concepts of good, of fairness and of justice just ceased to matter once one had gone for sublimation, no matter how creditable, progressive and unselfish one’s behaviour had been as a species pre-sublimation.
the Culture thought this was itself wrong, and so decided to attempt to accomplish what the gods, it seemed, could not be bothered with; discovering, judging and encouraging - or discouraging - the behaviour of those to whom its own powers were scarcely less than those of a deity.
The Sleeper Service - which was not called that then - had simply been the first ship fully to take advantage of this development. When it Stored people it usually did so in small tableaux after the manner of famous paintings, at first, or humorous poses; the Storage suits allowed their occupants to be posed in any way that would have been natural for a human, and it was a simple matter to add a pigmentation layer to the surface which did such a good job of impersonating skin that a human would have to look very closely indeed to spot the difference.
The only people left aboard were those in Storage. After that the ship went in search of others (and one other in particular), and let it be known throughout the Culture, through its information network, that it was willing to travel anywhere to pick up those who might wish to join it, so long as they were in Storage and happy to be set amongst one of its tableaux.
as the reputation of the Sleeper Service spread, and it released holograms of its more and more ambitious tableaux (important historical incidents, then small battles and details from greater conflicts), so more and more people thought it rather amusing to be Stored within this eccentric Eccentric, where they might be said to be forming part of a work of art even while they slept, rather than just plonked in a boring box somewhere underneath their local Plate.
And so taking a ride aboard the Sleeper Service as a kind of vicariously wandering soul became nothing less than fashionable, and the ship slowly filled with undead people in Storage suits whom it posed into larger and larger scenes, until eventually it was able to tackle whole battlefields and lay them out in the sixteen square kilometres of territory it possessed in each of its General Bays.
The Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, had been investigating a little-explored part of the Upper Leaf Swirl on a standard random search pattern.
The Elench had once been part of the Culture proper; they had split off fifteen hundred years ago, the few habitats and the many Rocks, ships, drones and humans concerned preferring to take a slightly different line from the mainstream Culture.
The Culture aimed to stay roughly as it was and change at least a proportion of those lesser civilisations it discovered, while acting as an honest broker between the Involved - the more developed societies who made up the current players in the great galactic civilisational game.
In a way, the Elench, even more than the Culture, was an attitude rather than an easily definable grouping of ships or people.
Somehow, though, despite it all, and perhaps because it was more an attitude, a meme, than anything else, the Elench had developed an ability that it had arguably inherited from its parent civilisation; the ability to remain roughly the same in the midst of constant change.
it stuck with tradition and kept quiet. There was a kind of stealthy pragmatism in this; an encounter of the sort the ship was embarking upon might only be successful if the Elencher craft could fairly claim to be acting on its own, without having made what might, to a suspicious contactee, look like a request for reinforcements. Plus, there was simple pride involved; an Elencher ship would not be an Elencher ship if it started acting like part of a committee; why, it might as well then be a Culture ship!
Excession; that was what the Culture called such things.
Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering.
For a human a month was not that long; for a drone - even one thinking at the shamefully slow speed of light on the skein - it was like a sequence of life sentences. A month was not a long time to wait; drones were very good at waiting and had a whole suite of techniques to pass the time pleasantly or just side-step it, but it was an abominably long time to have to concentrate on anything, to have to work at a single task.
About half the docks were occupied, some with Affronter ships, some with craft from a handful of other species. Dwarfing all the others were three huge dark craft, each of which looked vaguely as though it had been modelled by taking a free-fall aerial bomb from one age and welding onto it a profusion of broad swords, scimitars and daggers from an even earlier time and then magnifying the result until each was a couple of kilometres in length.
Ulver Seich, barely twenty-two, famed scholastic overachiever since the age of three, voted Most Luscious Student by her last five University years and breaker of more hearts on Phage Rock than anybody since her legendary great-great-great grandmother, had been summarily dragged away from her graduation ball by the drone Churt Lyne.
Phage Rock - by now recognised as one of a distinct category of Culture artifacts which were neither ships nor worlds but something in between - had grown, accruing new bits of systemic or interstellar debris about it as its needs required and its population increased, securing the chunks of metal, rock, ice and compacted dust to its still gnarled outer surface in a slow process of acquisition, consumption and evolution,
‘What’s “nonary” mean?’ ‘Based on nine. Ordinary Marain; the stuff you learned in kindergarten, for goodness’ sake; the three-by-three dot grid.’
‘Real forever, as far as we understand it. You could choose the size and therefore age of the universe you wanted to remain within, and/or visit as many as you wanted. You could, for example, head on up through older universes and attempt to access technologies perhaps beyond even this one. But just as interesting is the point that because you wouldn’t be tied to one universe, one time stream, you need be involved in no heat death when the time came in your original universe; or no evaporation, or no big crunch, depending.
‘It’s like being on an escalator. At the moment, confined to this universe, we’re stuck to this stair, this level; the possibility this artifact appears to offer is that of being able to step from one stair to another, so that before your stair on the escalator comes to the end of its travel - heat-death, big crunch, whatever - you just step off one level down to another. You could, in effect, live for ever . . . well, unless it’s discovered that cosmic fireball engines themselves have a life-cycle; as I understand it the metamath on that implies but does not guarantee perpetuity.’
if you surround something like this with a mega-fleet and it isn’t quite omnipotent, just staggeringly powerful and fully invasive, you’re basically giving it an immense, ready-made war-fleet to play with, if it is hostile. Just a thought.
Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined. It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better ... and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you . . . so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh
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