Surface Detail

“And what’s the point of all this?”

“They’re back-up,” the Bodhisattva said. “If, through some bizarre and frankly unfeasibly widespread and complete calamity, the Culture somehow ceased to be, then any one of these ships could re-seed the galaxy — or a different one, perhaps — with something that would be recognisably the Culture. This does beg the question what would be the point if it had been so comprehensively expunged in the first place, but I suppose you could argue some lesson might have been learned that might make version two more resilient somehow.”

“I thought the entire Contact fleet was supposed to represent our ‘back-up’,” Yime said. In its relationships with other civilisations, especially with those that were encountering it for the first time, much tended to be made of the fact — or at least the assertion — that each and every GSV represented the Culture in its entirety, that each one held all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated and could build any object or device that the Culture was capable of making, while the sheer scale of a General Systems Vehicle meant they each contained so many humans and drones they were more or less guaranteed to hold a reasonably representative sample of both even without trying to.

The Culture was deliberately and self-consciously very widely distributed throughout the galaxy, with no centre, no nexus, no home planet. Its distribution might make it easy to attack, but it also made it hard to eradicate altogether, at least in theory. Having hundreds of thousands of vessels individually quite capable of rebuilding the entire Culture from scratch was generally held to be safeguard enough against civilisational oblivion, or so Yime had been led to believe. Obviously others thought differently.

“The Contact fleet is what one might call a second line of defence,” the ship told her.

“What’s the first?”

“All the Orbitals.” the ship said reasonably. “And other habs; Rocks and planets included.”

“And these Forgotten are the last ditch.”

“Probably. So one might imagine. As far as I know.”

That, in ship-speak, Yime thought, probably meant No. Though she knew better than to try to coax a less ambiguous answer out of a Mind.

“So they just sit there. Wherever ‘there’ might be.”

“Oort clouds, interstellar space, within or even beyond the outer halo of the greater galaxy itself; who knows? However, yes, that is the general idea.”

“And indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely until now, at least,” the Bodhisattva said.

“Waiting for a catastrophe that’ll probably never happen but which if it did would indicate either the existence of a force so powerful it could probably discover these ships regardless and snuff them out too, or an existential flaw in the Culture so deep it would certainly be present in these ‘Forgotten’ as well, especially given their… representativeness.”

“Put like that, the entire strategy does sound a little forlorn,” the ship said, sounding almost apologetic. “But there we are. Because you never know, I suppose. I think a part of the whole idea is that it provides a degree of comfort for those who might otherwise worry about such matters.”

“But most people don’t know about these ships in the first place,” Yime pointed out. “How can you be comforted by something you don’t know about?”

“Ah,” the Bodhisattva said. “That’s the beauty of it: only people who do worry are likely to seek out such knowledge, and so are suitably reassured. They also tend to appreciate the need not to make the knowledge too well known, and indeed take additional pleasure in helping to keep it from becoming so. Everybody else just gets happily on with their lives, never fretting in the first place.”

Yime shook her head, frustrated. “They can’t be completely secret,” she protested. “They must be mentioned somewhere.”

The Culture was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, especially big ones. It was one of the very few areas where most of the Culture’s civilisational peers and even many much less advanced societies thoroughly eclipsed it, though, being the Culture, this was regarded as being the legitimate source of a certain perverse pride. That didn’t stop it — the “it” in such contexts usually meaning Contact, or (even more likely) SC — from trying to keep secrets, every now and again, but it never worked for very long.

Though sometimes, of course, not very long was still long enough.

“Well, naturally,” the Bodhisattva said. “Let’s just say the information is there, but little notice is taken. And by the very nature of the whole… program — if one can even dignify it with a name implying such a degree of organisation — confirmation is almost impossible to find.”

“So this isn’t what you might call official?” Yime asked.

The ship made a sighing noise. “There is no Contact department or committee that I know of which devotes itself to such matters.”

Yime pursed her lips. She knew when a ship was basically saying, Let’s leave it at that, shall we?

Well, one more thing to have to take account of.

“So,” she said, “the Me, I’m Counting may be aboard the GSV Total Internal Reflection, which is on retreat and is probably one of these Forgotten.”

“Indeed.”

“And the Me, I’m Counting holds an image of Ms. Y’breq.”

“Probably the image of Ms. Y’breq,” the Bodhisattva said. “We have intelligence, from another individual the ship took an image of subsequently, that it was happy to guarantee any image it took remained unique, for its own collection only, never to be shared or even backed up. It would appear that it has stuck to this.”

“So you think… what? That Y’breq will attempt to recover her image, even though it’s ten years old?”

“It has been judged to be a distinct possibility.”

“And Quietus knows where the Me, I’m Counting and the Total Internal Reflection are?”

“We believe we have a rough idea. More to the point, we have occasional contact with a representative of the Total Internal Reflection.”

“We do, do we?”

“The Total Internal Reflection is relatively unusual amongst the Forgotten — we think — in that it plays host to a small population of humans and drones who seek a more than usually severe form of seclusion than the average retreat offers. Such commitments are usually quite long term in nature — decades, on average — however, there is a continual if fluctuating churn in both populations, so people need to be ferried to and from the GSV. There are three semi-regular rendezvous points and a fairly reliable rendezvous programme. The next scheduled meeting is in eighteen days at a location in the Semsarine Wisp. Ms. Y’breq should be able to get there in time, and so should you and I, Ms. Nsokyi.”

“Does she know about this rendezvous?”

“We believe so.”

“Is she heading in that direction?”

“Again, we believe so.”

“Hmm.” Yime frowned.

“That is the generality of the situation, Ms. Nsokyi. A more comprehensive briefing awaits, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“May I take it that you are agreeable to taking part in this mission?”

“Yes,” Yime said. “Are we under way yet?”

The image of the old Hooligan-class warship vanished to be replaced with the sight of stars again, some of them reflected in the polished-looking black body of the ship hanging above and others gleaming through the hardness beneath her feet that looked like nothing at all. The stars were moving, now.

“Yes, we are,” the Bodhisattva said.

Lededje was introduced to the avatar of the Special Circumstances ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints in a war bar where the only lighting apart from the screens and holos came from broad curtains of amphoteric lead falling down the walls from slots in the dark ceiling.