Matter (Culture, #8)

by Iain M. Banks

“But this thing must be ancient, ma’am, mustn’t it?” Holse protested. “It’s been under there for an eternity; everybody knows the Iln vanished millions of years ago. Whatever this thing is it can’t be that dangerous, not to more modern powers like the Optimae, the Culture and so on. Can it?” “It doesn’t work that way,” Anaplian said. “Would that it did.” She fell silent as they tore upwards into the air, spreading out. Hippinse cleared his throat and said, “The type of progress you guys are used to doesn’t scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime – god-like retirement, if you will – and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who’ve achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s inferior. With workable tech from this thing’s time the stats show it’s about sixty-forty it will be less capable than what we have now, but that’s a big minority.”