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“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,”
(their word for humanoids was best translated as “biotomaton”),
Officially we’re called the KFC, Kraiklyn’s Free Company, and he’s the boss.
They were all gradually getting covered in the dark green moss, which Horza supposed might be useful as camouflage (providing, of course, that it didn’t turn out to be some horrible, previously undiscovered sentient killer-moss… He told himself to stop being silly).
Still, the underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs, or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.
The small, sharp lights on the undersurface of the cloud cover are stars; the waves on the sea are the irregularities of the Grid on which a ship traveling in hyperspace finds traction with its engine fields, while that sparkle is its source of energy. The Grid and the plain of real space are curved, rather like the ocean and the cloud would be round a planet, but less so. Black holes show as thin and twisting waterspouts from clouds to sea; supernovae as long lightning flashes in the overcast. Rocks, moons, planets, Orbitals, even Rings and Spheres, hardly show at all…
YOU MAY ENTER. THERE IS DEATH HERE. BE WARNED.
Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. “I trust,” it said, “we’re not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris.”
In the distance was the plain, rivers sparkling in the sunlight and—marking its far side—the hills where the lodge was, her home. Birds wheeled far away, in the high valleys beneath her, and sometimes light glinted from the plain, as some reflective surface moved.
This is our place and our time and our life, and we should be enjoying it. But are we? Look in from outside; ask yourself… Just what are we doing? Killing the immortal, changing to preserve, warring for peace… and so embracing utterly what we claimed to have renounced completely, for our own good reasons.
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
And there is even a genetic template for that catastrophe change from meek to fierce, in the step from breeder to warrior…. Oh, a savage and noble species, justifiably proud of themselves, and refusing to alter their genetic code, not far wrong in claiming perfection already.
We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas. Our ancestors were the lost-and-found of the galaxy, continually breeding and breeding and milling and killing, their societies and civilizations forever falling apart and reforming…. There had to be something wrong with us, something mutant in the system, something too quick and nervous and frantic for our own good or anybody else’s. We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused.
We are self-altering, we meddle with the code of life itself, re-spelling the Word which is the Way, the incantation of being. Interfering with our own inheritance, and interfering in the development of other peoples (ha! an interest we share)… And worse still, worst of all, not just producing, but embracing and giving ourselves over totally to the ultimate anathema: the Minds, the sentient machines; the very image and essence of life itself, desecrated. Idolatry incarnate.
We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state. We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect. We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.
Who are you? What are you? A weapon. A thing made to deceive and kill, by the long-dead.
“Horza,” the woman said grumpily, sitting slowly upright, flexing her shoulders and arching her neck, “twenty years at my mother’s side, more than I care to think of as a gay and dashing young blade indulging in all the pleasures the Culture has ever produced, one or two of maturity, seventeen in Contact and four in Special Circumstances have not made me pleasant to know or quick to wake in the mornings. You wouldn’t have some water to drink, would you? I’ve slept too long, I wasn’t comfortable, it’s cold and dark, I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered
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The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single suits, blowing each other up with weapons
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Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary)—91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals—14,334; planets and major moons—53; Rings—1; Spheres—3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration)—6.
The Changers were wiped out as a species during the final stages of the war in space.
