just watching, admiring.
The LOU was a modern ship with an old Mind, part of an experiment of sorts to see how that would work. The theory was that pairing a capable new vessel with a wise old Mind would somehow present the best of both worlds, especially for one of the Culture’s relatively few warships, which would be fully expected to sit/drift/race around all its anticipated life doing nothing whatsoever, or at least nothing whatsoever to do with what it had been designed for. The trouble with this idea, as the
Still, as one of the ship Minds that had been involved at the sharp end of the Idiran war a thousand years earlier and not gone into a profound retreat, a group-mind or the wilder shores of Eccentricity, the Mind within the
Taking its mildly eccentric habits and interests with it into its new home, the
It wasn’t a hermit — Culture warships were strongly counselled not even to think of becoming true hermits — it kept up, in a general sort of way, with what was happening in the galaxy, and there were always a few respected and responsible ships who knew how to contact it if they really needed to, but it had few acquaintances and fewer friends, none of whom expected any real degree of chattiness from it and who were quite used to hearing nothing from it for hundreds of days at a time.
So it was surprised when a message pinged in, from, apparently, somebody being so informal that even many of the usual signal protocols could be cheerfully dispensed with.
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Cac, chumlet, how are you?
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The sender was, according to a minimal ration of the usual embedded personal codings and eccentricities of glyph-expression, its old friend the MSV
It sent back along the same signal route:
PD?
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The same.
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Even without the normal protocols, it was possible to work out the other craft’s rough position through the beam direction and reply delay, even after only a couple of signals. It looked like the
Unless the other ship was introducing a deliberate delay into its replies, of course, in which case it could be almost on top of it. The
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I am in every respect excellent, as you might expect, it replied. Shall I assume the same of you?
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Do. Still obsessed with them sparkly bits then?
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The
The signals it was responding to had originally arrived via a beam spread wide enough to encompass the whole of the solar system it was within, with the implication that the
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My interest in stars — their formation, development and death, ability to harbour and promote life, affect, empower and destroy all around them and so on — remains. Though obviously I struggle to couch it as poetically as you.
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Are you with our friends the field-liners?
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The
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No. Holidaying, as of recently; magnetosphere-surfing for the most part. I intend to resume my studies of the inhabitants at a later date.
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Not talking to you, then?
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Of course they’re talking to me. We have a highly complex and mutually beneficial dialogue, when necessary. The question I might ask is why are
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Your oldest friend can’t say hello without occasioning such suspicion?
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Who’s suspicious? It’s been so long, and you’ve been so quiet. I thought perhaps you’d expired without telling me.
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If I’ve been quiet, it’s because I take my cue from you. But yes, it’s been a while. I’ve been busy. Well, indolent. The effect is the same. I’ve managed to whittle my population down to a framework crew of the like-minded, so all is harmonious.
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So, what brings you to this neck of the scrub?
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Technically, the serendipity of a tour — for pleasure; like yourself I have discovered a rich seam of auto-indulgence in myself — during which I had made swinging by your own current location, however out of the way, something of a priority, for reasons which are beginning to escape me.
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I shall endeavour to be more scintillating.
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However, there is something which has come to my attention which might interest you.
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And what would that be?
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A matter of potential thorniness. It involves the Tiny-wee Tucked-away. The vastness beyond vast.