Yet here was that same place, still disputed. Not all the subsequent battles throughout and amongst the somersaulting cascade of rocky debris and the orbiting industrial wasteland of deserted infrastructure wheeling round the system’s planets had produced a decisive victory for either side.
He looked at it, remembering, wondering what other troopers like his old self still laboured, fought and died there.
“We need a decision,” the group leader for this watch said. “Pursue, hold, abandon?” Her disembodied head looked round all the others at once, fixing her gaze on each simultaneously, because in the sim, of course, you could do this.
He voted abandon, though he was not convinced. Abandon was the decision, by just the one vote. He felt a sort of despairing elation, and wondered if that contradictory mix was also something only possible in a sim. It had been so long since he’d been properly alive, he was no longer sure.
It didn’t matter; they would abandon the battle for the simulated asteroids and the simulated orbiting facilities in this particular simulated system in this particular simulated version of this particular simulated era in this particular simulated galaxy.
He felt that he should feel bad about this, but did not.
What was one more betrayal amongst so many?
Nine
To build on such a scale would have been spectacular enough, she thought. That this thing was not unique, that it was not that special, that it was one of a “class” was moderately astounding. That it was some way from being one of the largest class was completely astounding. That it could move – bewilderingly, un -really quickly in a realm hidden at right angles to everything she had ever known or experienced – was beyond belief.
She sat with her legs dangling over the edge of a thousand-metre cliff and watched the various craft at play. Fliers of too many shapes and types to be sure they were not each unique – the smallest carrying only one man, woman or child – buzzed and fussed above, below, before and on each side. Larger craft floated with a stately grace, their appearance varied, motley and near chaotic with masts, pennants, exposed decks and bulbously glittering excrescences but their general structure approaching a sort of bloated uniformity the greater in size they were; they drifted on the unhurried breezes the vast craft’s internal meteorology created. True ships, spacecraft, generally more sober in form if not in decoration, moved with still greater deliberation, often accompanied by small squat-looking tug-craft that looked hewn from solid.
The canyon in front of her was fifteen kilometres long, its laser-straight edges softened by the multi-coloured mass of climbing, hanging and floating foliage draped spilling like gaudy ice-falls from the tops of the two great strakes on either side.
The sheer walls were diced with a breathtaking complexity of variously sized, mostly brightly lit apertures from or into a few of which, on occasion, the various air and spacecraft issued or disappeared, the whole staggering, intricate network of docks and hangars graphed onto each colossal escarpment representing a mere detail on the surface of this truly gigantic vessel.
The floor of the great canyon was near table-flat grassland, strung all about with meandering streams making their way to a hazy plain, kilometres ahead. Above, beyond filmy layers of pale cloud, a single bright, yellow-white line provided light and warmth, looping day-slow across the sky in place of a sun. It disappeared into the misty distance of the view in front of her. It was almost noon by the ship’s own time and so the sunline stood near directly overhead.
At her back, behind a low wall, in the parkland that covered the vessel’s topmost surface, people passed, tumbling waters could be heard and tall, distant trees stood on gentle rolling hills. Dotted amongst the trees, long vertical bands of pale, almost transparent vegetation rose into the air, each soaring to two or three times the height of the tallest trees and surmounted by a dark ovoid the size of the crowns of the trees beneath. Dozens of these strange shapes swayed to and fro in the breeze, oscillating together like some vast seaweed forest.
Lededje and Sensia were sitting on the natural-looking cliff edge of dark red rock, their backs to the low wall of undressed stone. Looking straight down, Lededje could just about make out the filaments of a sort of gauzy net five or six metres down that would catch you if you fell. It didn’t really look up to the job, she thought, but she’d been prepared to trust Sensia when she’d suggested sitting here.
Ten metres to her right, a stream launched out into the air from a spur of rock. Its separating, whitening spray fell only fifty metres or so before it was unceremoniously gathered up by half of a giant inverted cone of what looked like glass and funnelled into a transparent pipe that plunged straight down towards the valley floor. It was almost a relief to see that, like so many other seemingly exotic, extraordinary and fabulous things, at least part of the GSV’s functional glamour ended up expressing itself as plumbing.
This was the Culture General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amongst Folly, the ship whose avatoid Sensia she had addressed when she’d first woken up within its near infinite substrate of thinking material.
Another version of Sensia – small, thin, spry, bronze-skinned and barely clothed – sat by her side. This personification of the ship was properly called an avatar. She had brought Lededje here to give her an idea of the size of the ship that she represented, that she in some sense was. Shortly they would board one of the small aircraft gliding, buzzing and blattering about them, presumably so that any tiny remaining fragment of Lededje that was not dumb-founded beyond imagining at the mind-boggling scale of the ship she was on – a labyrinth within, a jungled three-dimensional maze without – could join all the other parts of her that already most profoundly were.
Lededje dragged her gaze away from the sight and stared down at her own hand and arm.
So, well, here she was, “revented” as they called it, her soul, the very essence of her being, rehoused – as of only an hour or so ago – in a new body. And a fresh new body, she was relieved to know, not one that had belonged to anybody else (she had originally imagined that such bodies were the result of people guilty of terrible crimes being punished by having their personalities removed from the brains such bodies housed, leaving them free to host another’s mind).
She inspected the tiny, almost transparent hairs on her forearm and the pores on the golden-brown skin beneath. This was a human-basic body, roughly though very convincingly amended to look like that of a Sichultian. Looking closely at individual hairs and pores, she suspected that her eyesight was better than it had been originally. There was a level of detail visible that made her head swim. She supposed that it was always possible she had been lied to and she was still within a Virtual Reality, where such zooming-in was almost easier to do than it was to limit.
She flicked her gaze out again, to the kilometres of dazzling view in front of her. Of course, even this might exist within a simulated environment. Modelling such a vast ship within even the most detailed image of reality must be easier than actually building one, and certainly any people capable of constructing such a vessel could command the relatively trivial computational resources necessary to create an utterly convincing simulation of what she could see and hear and feel and smell before her now.
It could always all be unreal – how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.
Waking in this real body had been similar to waking up within the fake body imagined in the great ship’s substrate. She had experienced a slow, pleasant coming-to, the warm fuzziness of what had felt like deep, satisfying sleep changing slowly to the clarity and sharpness of a wakefulness informed by the knowledge that something had profoundly changed.
Embodied, she’d thought. Embodiment was all, Sensia had told her, ironically while they were talking in the Virtual.
An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.
She had opened her eyes and found herself in a bed of what looked like snowflakes, felt like feathers and behaved like particularly obedient and well-disposed insects. White as snow but nearly as warm as her skin, the material had seemed unconstrained by any enveloping cover, and yet the apparently free-floating individual elements had refused to get in her eyes, up her nose or to leave the confines of the bed and the few centimetres around both it and her pyjama-clad body.
Beyond the bed had been a modest, sparsely furnished room three or four metres to a side with one window-wall looking out onto a brightly lit balcony where she could see Sensia sitting in one of two chairs. The avatar had gazed out at the view for a few more moments before turning to her and smiling.
“Welcome to the land of the living!” she’d said, waving one hand. “Get dressed; we’ll have some lunch and then we’ll go exploring.”
So now here they sat, with Lededje trying to take in what she was seeing.
She looked back at her arm again. She had chosen pale purple blouson pants, cuffed tight at the ankle, and a filmy but opaque long-sleeved top of the same colour, sleeves rolled back to the elbows. She looked pretty good, all-in-all, she thought. The average Culture human, from what she could gather having seen a few hundred of them now in passing – and disregarding the outlandish outliers, as it were – was hardly taller than a well-fed Sichultian, but ill-proportioned: legs too short, back too long, and emaciated-looking; bellies and behinds uncomfortably flat, shoulders and upper back looking almost broken. She supposed to them she looked hump-backed, pot-bellied and big-bottomed, but no matter; to her she looked exactly, almost perfectly right. And a beauty, which was what she had always been and had always been destined to be, with or without the cell-level markings that had invested her body, down to the bone and beyond.
She had no more false modesty, she realised, than Sensia, than the ship itself.
Lededje looked up from her arm. “I think I’d like some form of tat,” she told Sensia.
“Tattooing?” the avatar said. “Easily done. Though we can definitely do better than just permanently marking your skin, unless that’s what you specifically want.”
“What, for example?”
“Take a look.” Sensia waved one arm and in front of them, and, hanging over the thousand-metre drop, a series of images appeared of Culture humans displaying tattoos even more fabulous than her own had been, at least at skin level. Here were tattoos that genuinely shone rather than just glowed a little, or could reflect; tattoos that moved, that lased, that could loop out to create real or hologramatic structures beyond the surface of the skin itself, tattoos that were not just works of art but ongoing performances. “Have a think,” Sensia said.
Lededje nodded. “Thank you. I shall.” She looked out at the view again. Behind them, on the path on the far side of the low wall, a small group of people passed. They were talking the Culture’s own language, Marain, which Lededje too could now speak and understand, though not without a certain deliberation; Sichultian Formal was still what came naturally to her and was what she and Sensia were speaking now. “You know that I need to get back to Sichult,” she said.
“Business to conclude,” Sensia said, nodding.
“When would I be able to leave?”
“How about tomorrow?”
She looked at the avatar’s brazen skin. It looked false, as though she was made of metal, not genuine flesh and bone. Lededje supposed that was the idea. Her own skin was not so different in tone – from a distance she and Sensia might have looked quite similar in colour – but from close up hers would appear natural, both to a Sichultian and even, she was sure, this motley assortment of strange-looking people.
“That would be possible?”
“Well, you could make a start. You’re some distance away. It’ll take a while.”
“How long?”
Sensia shrugged. “Depends on a lot of things. Many tens of days, I’d guess. Less than a hundred though, I’d hope.” She made a gesture with her hands Lededje guessed was meant to signal regret or apology. “Can’t take you myself; way off my course schedule. In fact, at the moment, we’re heading sort of tangentially away from the Enablement space.”
“Oh.” Lededje hadn’t realised this. “Then the sooner I get started the better.”
“I’ll put the word out to the ships, see who’s interested,” Sensia said. “However. There is a condition.”
“A condition?” She wondered if there was, after all, some form of payment expected.
“Let me be honest with you, Lededje,” Sensia said, with a quick smile.
“Please,” she said.
“We – I – strongly suspect that you may be returning to Sichult with murder in your heart.”
Lededje said nothing for as long as it took for her to realise that the longer she left it to respond, the more like agreement that silence seemed. “Why do you think that?” she asked, trying to imitate Sensia’s level, friendly, matter-of-fact tone.
“Oh, come now, Lededje,” the avatar chided. “I’ve done a little research. The man murdered you.” She waved one hand casually. “Perhaps not in cold blood, but certainly when you were completely helpless. This is a man who has had complete control over you since before you were born, who forced your family into servitude and had you marked for ever as a chattel, engraved like a high-denomination bank-note made out specifically to him. You were his slave; you tried to run, he hunted you like an animal, caught you and, when you resisted, he killed you. Now you are free of him, and free of the marks that identified you as his but with a free pass back to where he – probably imagining that you are entirely dead – still is, quite unsuspecting.” Sensia turned to Lededje at this point, swivelling not just her head but her shoulders and upper body, so that the younger woman could not pretend not to have noticed. Lededje turned too, less gracefully, as Sensia – still smiling – lowered and slowed her voice ever so slightly and said, “My child, you would not be human, pan-human, Sichultian or anything else if you didn’t positively ache for revenge.”
Lededje heard all this, but did not immediately react. There is more, she wanted to say. There is more; it is not just about revenge … but she couldn’t say that. She looked away, kept staring at the view. “What would the condition be, then?” she asked.
Sensia shrugged. “We have these things called slap-drones.”
“Oh yes?” She had vaguely heard of drones; they were the Culture’s equivalent of robots, though they looked more like items of luggage than anything else. Some of the tinier things floating in the great hazy view in front of them were probably drones. She already didn’t like the idea of a variety with the word “slap” in its title.
“They’re things that stop people doing something they probably ought not to do,” Sensia told her. “They … just accompany you.” She shrugged. “Sort of an escort. If it thinks you’re about to do something objectionable, like hit somebody or try to kill them or something, it’ll stop you.”
“Stop … how?”
Sensia laughed. “Well, just shout at you at first, probably. But if you persist, it’ll physically get in the way; deflect a blow or push aside a gun barrel or whatever. Ultimately, though, they’re entirely entitled to zap you; drop you unconscious if need be. No pain or damage, of course, but—”
“Who decides on this? What court?” Lededje asked. She felt suddenly hot, and was acutely aware that on her new, paler skin, a flush might show as a visible blush.
“The court of me, Lededje,” Sensia said quietly, with a small smile Lededje glanced at then looked away from.
“Really? On whose authority?”
She could hear the smile in the avatar’s voice. “On the authority of me being part of the Cul
ture and my judgement on such matters being accepted by other parts, specifically other Minds, of the Culture. Immediately, because I can. Ultimately—”
“So, even in the Culture, might is right,” Lededje said bitterly. She started rolling her sleeves down, feeling suddenly chilled.
“Intellectual might, I suppose,” Sensia said gently. “As I was about to say, though, ultimately my right to impose a slap-drone on you comes down to the principle that it is what any set of morally responsible conscious entities, machine or human, would choose to do were they in possession of the same set of facts as I am. However, part of my moral responsibility to you is to point out that you are free to publicise your case. There are specialist news services who’d certainly be interested and – you being relatively exotic and from somewhere we have few dealings with – even the general news services might be interested too. Then there are specialist legal, procedural, jurisdictional, behavioural, diplomatic …” She shrugged again. “And probably even philosophical interest groups who’d love to hear about something like this. You’d definitely find somebody who’d argue your case.”
“And who’d I be appealing to? You?”
“The court of informed public opinion,” Sensia said. “This is the Culture, kid. That’s the court of last resort. If I was convinced I’d made a mistake, or even if I thought I was right but everybody else appeared to think otherwise, I guess I’d reluctantly have to abandon the slap-drone thing. Being a ship Mind I’d take more notice of what other ship Minds thought, then other Minds in general, then AIs, humans, drones and others, though of course as this would be a dispute ultimately about a human’s rights I’d have to give more than usual weight to the human vote. It sounds a little complicated but there are all sorts of well-known precedents and much-used, highly respected processes involved.”
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