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 undiscovered 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 plight 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.
Equally, there was a possibility that the ship's Mind had lost control but not integrity; perhaps — like a small garrison quitting the undefendable curtain wall of a great fortress to take refuge in an all-but-invulnerable central keep — the Mind had been forced to dissociate itself from all its subsystems and given up command to the invader, but succeeded in retaining its own personality in a Mind core as invulnerable to infiltration as the electronic core within the drone's mind (where what was left of its twin now seethed) was proof against escape.
Elencher Minds had been in such dire situations before and survived; certainly such a core could be destroyed (they could not have their power turned off, as the drone's core could; Mind cores had their own internal energy sources) but even the most brutal aggressor would far rather lay siege to that keep-core in the knowledge that the information contained within must surely fall to it eventually, than just destroy it.
There was always hope, the drone told itself; it must not give up hope. According to the specifications it had, the Displacer which had catapulted it out of the ill-fated ship had a range — with something the volume of Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 — of nearly a light second. Surely that was far enough to put it beyond range of detection? Certainly the Peace Makes Plenty's sensors wouldn't have had a hope of spotting something so small so far away; it just had to hope that neither could the artifact.
Excession; that was what the Culture called such things. It had become a pejorative term and so the Elench didn't use it normally, except sometimes informally, amongst themselves. Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering.
So, now it knew what had happened to it and what the core 2/2 contained, the question was; what was to be done?
It had to get word to outside; that was the task it had been entrusted with by the ship, that was what its whole life-mission had become the instant the ship came under such intensive attack.
But how? Its tiny warp unit had been destroyed, its bom-com unit likewise, its HS laser too. It had nothing that worked at translight speeds, no way of unsticking itself or even a signal from the glutinous slowness that trapped anything unable to step outside the skein of space-time. The drone felt as if it was some quick, graceful flying insect, knocked down to a stagnant pond and trapped there by surface tension, all grace abandoned in its bedraggled, doomed struggle with a strange, cloyingly foreign medium.
It considered again the sub-core where its self-repair mechanisms waited. But not its own repair systems; those of its turncoat twin. It was beyond belief that those too had not been subverted by the invader. Worse than useless; a temptation. Because there was a vanishingly small chance that in all the excitement they had not been taken over.
Temptation… But no; it couldn't risk it. It would be folly.
It would have to make its own self-repair units. It was possible, but it would take forever; a month. For a human a month was not that long; for a drone — even one thinking at the shamefully slow speed of light on the skein — it was like a sequence of life sentences. A month was not a long time to wait; drones were very good at waiting and had a whole suite of techniques to pass the time pleasantly or just side-step it, but it was an abominably long time to have to concentrate on anything, to have to work at a single task.
Even at the end of that month, it would just be the start. At the very least there would be a lot of fine tuning to be done; the self-repair mechanisms wou
ld need direction, amendment, tinkering with; some would doubtless dismantle where they were supposed to build, others would duplicate what they were meant to scour. It would be like releasing millions of potential cancer cells into an already damaged animal body and trying to keep track of each one. It could quite easily kill itself by mistake, or accidentally breach the containment around the core of its corrupted twin or the original self-repair mechanisms. Even if all went well, the whole process could take years.
Despair!
It set the initial routines under way all the same — what else could it do? — and thought on.
It had a few million particles of anti-matter stored, it had some maniple-field capability left (somewhere between finger- and arm-strength, but down-scalable to the point of being able to work at the micrometer scale, and capable of slicing molecular bonds; it would need both capabilities when it came to building the prototype self-repairer constructs), it possessed two hundred. and forty one-millimetre-long nanomissiles, also AM tipped, it could still put up a small mirror field about it, and it had its laser, which was not far off maximum potential. Plus it still had the thimbleful of mush that had been the final-resort back-up biochemical brain… Which might no longer be able to support thought, but could still inspire it…
Well, it was one way to use the nasty gooey mess. Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 started to fashion a shielded reaction chamber and began working out both how best to bring the anti-matter and the cellular gunge together to provide itself with the most reaction mass and maximum thrust and how to direct the resulting exhaust plume so as to minimise the chances of attracting attention.
Accelerating into the stars using a wasted brain; it had its amusing side, it supposed. It set those routines in motion too and — with the equivalent of a long sigh and the taking off of a jacket and the rolling up of sleeves — returned its attention to the self-repairer-building problem.
Excession c-5 Page 10
