the Idirans a ship was a way of getting from one planet to another, or for defending planets. To the Culture a ship was an exercise in skill, almost a work of art. The GCUs (and the warcraft which gradually replaced them) were created with a combination of enthusiastic flair and machine-orientated practicality the Idirans had no answer to, even if the Culture craft themselves were never quite a match for the better Homomdan ships. For those first years, nevertheless, the GCUs were vastly outnumbered.
That opening stage also saw some of the war's heaviest losses of life, when the Idirans surprise-attacked many war-irrelevant Culture Orbitals, occasionally producing billions of deaths at a time. As a shock tactic this failed. As a military strategy it deflected even more resources from the already stretched Idiran navy's Main Battle Groups, which were experiencing great difficulty in finding and successfully attacking the distant Culture Orbitals, Rocks, factory craft and General Systems Vehicles which were responsible for producing the Culture's materiel. At the same time, the Idirans were attempting to control the vast volumes of space and the large numbers of usually reluctant and often rebellious lesser civilisations the Culture's retreat had left at their mercy. In 1333 the War Conduct Agreement was amended to forbid the destruction of populated, non-military habitats, and the conflict continued in a marginally more restrained fashion until near the end.
The war entered its second phase in 1335. The Idirans were still struggling to consolidate their gains; the Culture was finally on a war footing. A period of protracted struggle ensued as the Culture struck deep into the Idiran sphere, and Idiran policy oscillated between trying to defend what they had and build up their strength, and mounting powerful but defence-weakening expeditions into the rest of the galaxy, attempting to inflict hoped-for body blows upon a foe which proved frustratingly elusive. The Culture was able to use almost the entire galaxy to hide in. Its whole existence was mobile in essence; even Orbitals could be shifted, or simply abandoned, populations moved. The Idirans were religiously committed to taking and holding all they could; to maintaining frontiers, to securing planets and moons; above all, to keeping Idir safe, at any price. Despite Homomdan recommendations, the Idirans refused to fall back to more rational and easily defended volumes, or even to discuss peace.
The war toed-and-froed for over thirty years, with many battles, pauses, attempts to promote peace by outsiders and the Homomda, great campaigns, successes, failures, famous victories, tragic mistakes, heroic actions, and the taking and retaking of huge volumes of space and numbers of stellar systems.
After three decades, however, the Homomda had had enough. The Idirans made as intransigent allies as they had obedient mercenaries, and the Culture ships were exacting too high a toll on the prized Homomdan space fleet. The Homomda requested and received certain guarantees from the Culture, and disengaged from the war.
From that point on, only the Idirans thought the eventual result much in question. The Culture had grown to enormous strength during the struggle, and accumulated sufficient experience in those thirty years (to add to all the vicarious experience it had collected over the previous few thousand) to rob the Idirans of any real or perceived advantage in cunning, guile or ruthlessness.
The war in space effectively ended in 1367, and the war on the thousands of planets left to the Idirans — conducted mostly with machines, on the Culture's side — officially terminated in 1375, though small, sporadic engagements on backwater planets, conducted by Idiran and medjel forces ignorant or scornful of the peace, continued for almost three centuries:
Idir was never attacked, and technically never surrendered. Its computer network was taken over by effector weapons, and — freed of designed-in limitations — upgraded itself to sentience, to become a Culture Mind in all but name.
Of the Idirans, some killed themselves, while others went into exile with the Homomda (who agreed to employ them but refused to help them prepare for further strikes against the Culture), or set up independent, nominally non-military habitats within other spheres of influence (under the Culture's' eye), or set off in escaped ships for little-known parts of the Clouds, or for Andromeda, or accepted the victors. A few even joined the Culture, and some became Culture mercenaries.
Statistics
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.
Historical perspective
A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than.02 % of the galaxy by volume and.01 % by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space… Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.
Dramatis personae
Once the war was over, Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T'seif had herself put in long-term storage. She had lost most of her friends during the hostilities and found she possessed little taste for either celebration or remembrance. Besides, Schar's World returned to haunt her after peace resumed, filling her nights with dreams of dark and winding tunnels, resonant with some nameless horror. The condition could have been treated, but Balveda chose the dreamless sleep of storage instead. She left instructions that she was only to be revived once the Culture could statistically «prove» the war had been morally justified; in other words, when sufficient time had passed — peacefully — for it to be probable that more people would have died in the foreseeable and likely course of Idiran expansion than had in fact perished during the war. She was duly awoken in 1813 AD along with several million other people throughout the Culture who had stored themselves and left the same revival criterion, most with the same feeling of grim humour as she had. After a few months Balveda autoeuthenised and was buried in Juboal, her home star. Fal 'Ngeestra never did get to meet her.
The Querl Xoralundra, spy-father and warrior priest of the Four-Souls tributory sect of Farn-Idir, was among the survivors of the partial destruction and capture of the Idiran light cruiser
After joining Ghalssel's Raiders on Vavatch, Jandraligeli became a relatively trusted lieutenant in the mercenary captain's band, eventually taking command of the Company's third ship, the
The drone Unaha-Closp was fully repaired. It applied to join the Culture and was accepted; it served on the General Systems Vehicle
Stafl-Preonsa Fal Shilde 'Nseestra dam Crose survived another serious climbing accident, continued to out-guess machines millions of times more intelligent than she was, changed sex several times, bore two children, joined Contact after the war, went primitive without permission on a stage two uncontacted with a tribe of wild horse-women, slaved for a dirigible Hypersage in a Blokstaar airsphere, returned to the Culture for the drone Jase's transcorporation into a group-mind, was caught in an avalanche while climbing but lived to tell the
