Following its renaming, and paying no apparent heed to the craft now tailing it, the Sleeper Service’s next step was to evacuate everybody else remaining aboard. Most of the ships had already gone, and the rest were asked to leave. Then the drones, aliens and all the human personnel and their pets were deposited on the first Orbital it came to. The only people left aboard were those in Storage.
After that the ship went in search of others (and one other in particular), and let it be known throughout the Culture, through its information network, that it was willing to travel anywhere to pick up those who might wish to join it, so long as they were in Storage and happy to be set amongst one of its tableaux.
People were reluctant at first; this was definitely the sort of behaviour that earned a ship the title Eccentric, and Eccentric ships had been known to do odd, even dangerous things. Still, the Culture had its share of brave souls, and a few took up the craft’s strange invitation, without apparent ill effect. When the first few people who had been Stored aboard the GSV were safely returned on the realisation of their revival criteria, again without seeming to have suffered for the strangeness of their temporary lodgings, the slow trickle of adventurous individuals began to turn into a steady stream of slightly perverse or just romantic ones; as the reputation of the Sleeper Service spread, and it released holograms of its more and more ambitious tableaux (important historical incidents, then small battles and details from greater conflicts), so more and more people thought it rather amusing to be Stored within this eccentric Eccentric, where they might be said to be forming part of a work of art even while they slept, rather than just plonked in a boring box somewhere underneath their local Plate.
And so taking a ride aboard the Sleeper Service as a kind of vicariously wandering soul became nothing less than fashionable, and the ship slowly filled with undead people in Storage suits whom it posed into larger and larger scenes, until eventually it was able to tackle whole battlefields and lay them out in the sixteen square kilometres of territory it possessed in each of its General Bays.
Amorphia completed its sweeping gaze across the bright, silent stillness of the vast killing ground. As an avatar it possessed no real thoughts of its own, but the Mind that was the Sleeper Service liked to run the creature off a small sub-routine that was only a little more intelligent than the average human being - while both retaining the option of stepping in, full force, if it needed to and making the avatar behave in a confused, distracted state that the ship believed somehow reflected, on the nearly infinitely smaller human scale, its own philosophical perplexities.
So it was that the semi-human sub-routine looked out across that great tableau, and felt a kind of sadness that it might all have to be dismantled. There was an extra, perhaps deeper melancholy at the thought that it would no longer be able to play host to the living things aboard; the creatures of the sea and the air and the gas-giant atmosphere, and the woman.
Its thoughts turned to that woman; Dajeil Gelian, who in one sense had been the cause, the seed for all of this, and the one person it had wanted to find, the one soul - asleep or awake - it had been determined to offer sanctuary to when it had first renounced the Culture’s normality. Now that sanctuary was compromised, and she too would have to be offloaded with all the rest of its waifs and strays and teeming undead. A promise being fulfilled leading to a promise to her being broken, as though she had not experienced enough of that in her life. Still, it would make amends, and for that reason there were a lot of other promises being made and - so far, it would seem - kept. That would have to do.
Movement on the motionless tableau; Amorphia turned its attention there and saw the black bird Gravious flapping away across the field. More movement. Amorphia walked towards it, around and over the poised, charging cavalry and the fallen soldiers, between a pair of convincing-looking hanging fountains of earth where two cannon balls were slamming into the ground and over a small, blood-swollen stream to another part of the battlefield, where a team of three revival drones were floating above a revivee.
This was unusual; people normally wanted to be woken back in their home and in the presence of friends, but over the last couple of decades - as the tableaux had become more impressive - more people had wished to be brought back to life here, in the midst of them.
Amorphia squatted down by the woman, who had been lying posed as a dying soldier, her tunic punctured by bullet holes and stained red. She lay on her back, blinking in the sunlight, attended by machines. The head of the Storage suit had been slipped off and lay like a rubbery mask on the grass beside her; her face looked pale and just a little blotchy; she was an old woman, but her depilated head gave her a curious, baby-like quality of nakedness.
‘Hello?’ Amorphia said, taking one of the woman’s hands in hers and gently detaching that part of the suit too, pulling the hand-covering off inside-out, like a tight glove.
‘Whoa,’ the woman said, swallowing, her eyes watering.
Sikleyr-Najasa Croepise Ince Stahal da Mapin, Stored thirty-one years ago at the age of three-hundred and eighty-six. Revival criterion: on the acclamation of the next Line Messiah-elect on the planet Ischeis. She had been a scholar of the planet’s major religion and had wanted to be present at the Elevation of its next Saviour, an event which had not been anticipated for another two hundred years or so.
Her mouth twisted, and she coughed. ‘How--?’ she began, then coughed again.
‘Just thirty-one standard years,’ Amorphia told her.
The woman’s eyes widened, then she smiled. ‘That was quick,’ she said.
She recovered rapidly for one of her age; in a few minutes she was able to be helped to her feet and - taking Amorphia’s arm, and trailed by the three drones - they walked across the battlefield towards the nearest edge of the tableau.
They stood on the small hill, Hill 4, that Amorphia had stood on a little earlier. Amorphia was distantly, naggingly aware of the gap the woman’s revival had left in the scene. Normally she would have been replaced within the day with another Storee, posed in the same position, but there were none left; the gap she had left would remain unless the ship plundered another tableau to repair the hole in this one. The woman gazed around her for some time, then shook her head.
Amorphia guessed what she was thinking. ‘It is a terrible sight,’ it said. ‘But it was the last great land battle on Xlephier Prime. To have one’s final significant battle at such an early technological stage is actually a great achievement for a humanoid species.’
The woman turned to Amorphia. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking how impressive all this was. You must be proud.’
II
The Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, had been investigating a little-explored part of the Upper Leaf Swirl on a standard random search pattern. It had left Tier habitat on n4.28.725.500 along with the seven other Stargazer vessels; they had scattered like seeds into the depths of the Swirl, bidding each other farewell and knowing they might never see each other again.
One month in, and the ship had turned up nothing special; just a few bits of uncharted interstellar debris, duly logged, and that was all. There was a hint - a probably false-signal resonation in the skein of space-time behind them - that there might be a craft following them, but then it was not unusual for other civilisations to follow ships of the Zetetic Elench.
The Elench had once been part of the Culture proper; they had split off fifteen hundred years ago, the few habitats and the many Rocks, ships, drones and humans concerned preferring to take a slightly different line from the mainstream Culture. The Culture aimed to stay roughly as it was and change at least a proportion of those lesser civilisations it discovered, while acting as an honest broker between the Involved - the more developed societies who made up the current players in the great galactic civilisational game.
The Elench wanted to alter themselves, not others; they sought out the undiscove
red not to change it but to be changed by it. The Elencher ideal was that somebody from a more stable society - the Culture itself was the perfect example - could meet the same Elencher - Rock, ship, drone or human - on successive occasions and never encounter the same entity twice. They would have changed between meetings just because in the interim they had encountered some other civilisation and incorporated some different technology into their bodies or information into their minds. It was a search for the sort of pan-relevant truth that the Culture’s monosophical approach was unlikely ever to throw up; it was a vocation, a mission, a calling.
The results of this attitude were as various as might be imagined; entire Elencher fleets had either never come back from expeditions, and remained lost, or had eventually been found, the vessels and their crews completely, if willingly, subsumed by another civilisation.
At its most extreme, in the old days, some craft had been discovered turned entirely into Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects; selfishly auto-replicating organisms determined to turn every piece of matter they found into copies of themselves. There were techniques - beyond simple outright destruction, which was always an option - for dealing with this sort of eventuality which normally resulted in the Objects concerned becoming Evangelical Hegemonising Swarm Objects rather than Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects, but if the Objects concerned had been particularly single-minded, it still meant that people had died to contribute to its greedily ungracious self-regard.
These days, the Elench very rarely ran into anything like that sort of trouble, but they did still change all the time. In a way, the Elench, even more than the Culture, was an attitude rather than an easily definable grouping of ships or people. Because parts of Elench were constantly being subsumed and assimilated, or just disappearing, while at the same time other individuals and small groups were joining it (both from the Culture and from other societies, human and otherwise), there was anyway a turn-over of personnel and secondary ideas that made it one of the most rapidly evolving in-play civilisations. Somehow, though, despite it all, and perhaps because it was more an attitude, a meme, than anything else, the Elench had developed an ability that it had arguably inherited from its parent civilisation; the ability to remain roughly the same in the midst of constant change.
It also had a knack of turning up intriguing things - ancient artifacts, new civilisations, the mysterious remnants of Sublimed species, unguessably old depositories of antique knowledge - not all of which were of ultimate interest to the Elench itself, but many of which might excite the curiosity, further the purposes and benefit the informational or monetary funds of others, especially if they could get to them before anybody else. Such opportunities arose but rarely, but they had occurred sufficiently often in the past for certain societies of an opportunistic bent to consider it worth the expense or the bother of dedicating a ship to follow an Elencher craft, for a while at least, and so the Peace Makes Plenty had not been unduly alarmed by the discovery that it might be being tailed.
Two months in. And still nothing exciting; just gas clouds, dust clouds, brown dwarfs and a couple of lifeless star systems. All well enough charted from afar and displaying no sign of ever having been touched by anything intelligent.
Even the hint of the following ship had disappeared; if it ever had been real, the vessel concerned had probably decided the Peace Makes Plenty was not going to strike lucky this trip. Nevertheless, everything the Elencher ship came within range of was scanned; passive sensors filtered the natural spectrum for signs of meaning, beams and pulses were sent out into the vacuum and across the skein of space-time, searching and probing, while the ship consumed whatever echoes came back, analysing, considering, evaluating . . .
Seventy-eight days after leaving Tier, approaching a red giant star named Esperi from a direction which according to its records nobody had ever taken before, the Peace Makes Plenty had discovered an artifact, fourteen light months distant from the sun itself.
The artifact was a little over fifty kilometres in diameter. It was black-body; an ambient anomaly, indistinguishable from a distance from any given volume of almost empty interstellar space. The Peace Makes Plenty only noticed it at all because it occluded part of a distant galaxy and the Elencher ship, knowing that bits of galaxies did not just wink off and back on again of their own accord, had turned to investigate.
The artifact appeared to be either almost completely massless, or - perhaps - some sort of projection; it seemed to make no impression on the skein, the fabric of space-time which any accumulation of matter effectively dents with its mass, like a boulder lying on a trampoline. The artifact/projection gave the impression that it was floating on the skein, making no impression on it whatsoever. This was unusual; this was certainly worth investigating. Even more intriguingly, there was also a possible anomaly in the lower energy grid, which underlay the fabric of real space. There was a region directly underneath the three-dimensional form of the artifact that, intermittently, seemed to lack the otherwise universally chaotic nature of the Grid; there was a vaguest-of-vague hint of order there, almost as if the artifact was casting some sort of bizarre - indeed, impossible - shadow. Even more curious.
The Peace Makes Plenty hove to, sitting in front of the artifact - in as much as it could be said to have a front - and trying both to analyse it and communicate with it.
Nothing; the black-body sphere appeared to be massless and inviolable, almost as though it was a blister on the skein itself, as though the signals the ship was sending towards it could never connect with a thing there because all they did was slide flickering over that blister almost as though it wasn’t there and pass on undisturbed into space beyond; as though, trying to pick up a stone that appeared to be resting on the surface of a trampoline, one discovered that the trampoline surface itself was bulged up to cover the stone.
The ship decided to attempt to contact the artifact in a more direct manner; it would send a drone-probe underneath the object in hyperspace, below the surface of space-time; effectively making a tear, a rent in the fabric of the skein - the sort of opening it would normally create to fashion a way into HS through which it could travel. The drone-probe would attempt, as it were, to surface inside the artifact; if there was nothing there but a projection, it would find out; if there was something there, it would presumably either be prevented from entering it, or accepted within. The ship readied its emissary.
The situation was so unusual the Peace Makes Plenty even considered breaking with Elench precedent by informing Tier habitat or one of its peers what was going on; the nearest other Stargazer craft was a month’s travel away, but might be able to help if the Peace Makes Plenty got itself into trouble. In the end, however, it stuck with tradition and kept quiet. There was a kind of stealthy pragmatism in this; an encounter of the sort the ship was embarking upon might only be successful if the Elencher craft could fairly claim to be acting on its own, without having made what might, to a suspicious contactee, look like a request for reinforcements.
Plus, there was simple pride involved; an Elencher ship would not be an Elencher ship if it started acting like part of a committee; why, it might as well then be a Culture ship!
The drone-probe was dispatched with the Peace Makes Plenty keeping in close contact. The instant the probe passed within the horizon of the artifact, it--
The records the drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 had access to ended there.
Something, obviously, had happened.
The next thing it personally knew, the Peace Makes Plenty had been under attack. The assault had been almost unbelievably swift and ferocious; the drone-probe must have been taken over almost instantaneously, the ship’s subsystems surrendered milliseconds later and the integrity of the ship’s Mind shattered within - at a guess - less than a second after the drone-probe had infringed the space beneath the artifact.
A few more seconds later and Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 itself had been involved in a last desperate attempt to get word of the ship’s plig
ht to the outside galaxy while the vessel’s usurped systems did their damnedest to prevent it; by destroying it if necessary. The long-agreed, carefully worked-out ruse using itself and its twin and the preprogrammed independent Displacer unit had worked, though only just, and even so, with considerable damage to the drone that had been Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 and was now Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, with a kind of twisted remnant of Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 lodged within it.
The drone had carried out the equivalent of pressing an ear to the wall of the core with its twin’s mind in it, carefully accessing a meaning-free abstract of the activity inside the closed-off core to find out what was happening in there. It was like listening to a furious argument going on in an adjoining room; a chilling, frightening sound; the sort of bawling match that made you expect the sound of screams and things breaking, any moment.
Its original self had probably died in the process of escape; instead of its own body it now inhabited that of its twin, whose violated, defected mind-state now raged helplessly within the core labelled 2/2.
The drone, still tumbling through interstellar space at two hundred and eighty kilometres a second, felt a kind of revulsion at the very idea of having a treacherous, perverted version of its twin locked inside its own mind. Its first reaction was to expunge it; it thought about just dumping the core into the vacuum and wasting it with its laser, the one weapon which still seemed to be working at close to normal capacity; or it could just shut off power to the core, letting whatever was in it die for want of energy.
And yet it mustn’t; like the two higher mind components, the ravaged version of its twin’s mind-state might contain clues to the nature of the artifact’s own mind-type. It, the AI core and the photonic nucleus all had to be kept as evidence; retained, perhaps, as samples from which a kind of antidote to the artifact’s poisonous infectivity might be drawn. There was even a chance that something of its twin’s true personality might be retained in the rapacious mind-state the two upper minds and the core contained.