Or might they not get bored being good?
Supposedly they were infinitely patient, boundlessly resource- ful, unceasingly understanding, but would not any rational mind, with or without the capital letter, grow tired of such unleavened niceness eventually? Wouldn’t they want to cause just a little havoc, just once in a while, just to show what they could do?
Or did such thoughts merely betray his own inheritance of animal ferocity? Chelgrians were proud of having evolved from predators. It was a kind of double pride, too, even if a few people regarded it as contradictory in nature; they were proud that their distant ancestors had been predators, but they were also proud that their species had evolved and matured away from the kind of behaviour that inheritance might imply.
Maybe only a creature with that ancient inheritance of sav- agery would think the way he, in his mind, had accused the Minds of thinking. Maybe the humans – who could not claim quite such a purity of predatoriness in their past as Chelgrians, but who had certainly behaved savagely enough towards those of their own species and others since they began to become civilised – would also think that way, but their machines didn’t. Perhaps that was even why they had handed over so much of the running of their civilisation to the machines in the first place; they didn’t trust themselves with the colossal powers and energies their science and technology had provided them with.
Which might be comforting, but for one fact that many people found worrying and – he suspected – the Culture found embarrassing.
Most civilisations that had acquired the means to build genu- ine Artificial Intelligences duly built them, and most of those designed or shaped the consciousness of the AIs to a greater or lesser extent; obviously if you were constructing a sentience that was or could easily become much greater than your own, it would not be in your interest to create a being which loathed you and might be likely to set about dreaming up ways to exterminate you.
So AIs, especially at first, tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour of their source species. Even when they underwent their own form of evolution and began to design their successors – with or without the help, and sometimes the knowledge, of their creators – there was usually still a detectable flavour of the intellectual character and the basic morality of that precursor species present in the resulting consciousness. That flavour might gradually disappear over subsequent generations of AIs, but it would usually be replaced by another, adopted and adapted from elsewhere, or just mutate beyond recognition rather than disappear altogether.
What various Involveds including the Culture had also tried to do, often out of sheer curiosity once Al had become a settled and even routine technology, was to devise a consciousness with no flavour; one with no metalogical baggage whatsoever; what had become known as a perfect Al.
It turned out that creating such intelligences was not particu- larly challenging once you could build AIs in the first place. The difficulties only arose when such machines became sufficiently empowered to do whatever they wanted to do, They didn’t go berserk and try to kill all about them, and they didn’t relapse into some blissed-out state of machine solipsism.
What they did do at the first available opportunity was Sublime, leaving the material universe altogether and joining the many beings, communities and entire civilisations which had gone that way before. It was certainly a rule and appeared to be a law that perfect AIs always Sublime.
Most other civilisations thought this perplexing, or claimed to find it only natural, or dismissed it as mildly interesting and sufficient to prove that there was little point in wasting time and resources creating such flawless but useless sentience. The Cul- ture, more or less alone, seemed to find the phenomenon almost a personal insult, if you could designate an entire civilisation as a person.
So a trace of some sort of bias, some element of moral or other partiality must be present in the Culture’s Minds. Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition towards boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanour; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?
The thought did not disturb him, which itself seemed odd. Some part of him, some part that was hidden, dormant, even found the idea, if not pleasant, at least satisfactory, eYen useful.
He increasingly had the feeling that there was more to discover about the mission he had undertaken, and that it was important, and that he would be all the more determined to do whatever it was that had to be done.
He knew that he would know more about it, later; remem- ber more, later, because he was remembering more now, all the time.
‘And how are we today, Quil?’
Colonel Jarra Dimirj lowered himself into the seat by Quilan’s bed. The Colonel had lost his midlimb and one arm in a flyer crash on the very last day of the war; these were regrowing. Some of the casualties in the hospital seemed unconcerned about wandering around with developing limbs exposed, and some, often the more grizzled and proudly scarred ones, even made a joke of the fact that they had what looked exactly like a child’s arm or midlimb or leg attached to themselves.
Colonel Dimirj preferred to keep his rematuring limbs covered up, which – to the extent that he really cared about anything – Quilan found more tasteful. The Colonel seemed to have made it his duty to talk to all the patients in the hospital on a rota. Obviously it was his turn. He looked different today, Quilan thought. He seemed energised. Perhaps he was due to go home soon, or had been promoted.
‘I’m fine, Jarra.’
‘Uh-huh. How’s your new self coming along, anyway?’
‘They seem happy enough. Apparently I’m making satisfac- tory progress.’
They were in the military hospital at Lapendal, on Chel. Quilan was still confined to bed, though the bed itself was wheeled, powered and self-contained and could, had he wanted, have taken him throughout most of the hospital and a fair part of the grounds. Quilan thought this sounded like a formula for chaos, but allegedly the medical staff actually encouraged their charges to wander. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered; Quilan hadn’t used the bed’s mobility at all. He left it where it was, just to the side of the tall window which, he was told, looked out across the gardens and the lake to the forests on the far shore.
He hadn’t looked out of the window. He hadn’t read any- thing, except for the screen when they tested his eyesight. He hadn’t watched anything, except for the comings and goings of the medical staff, patients and visitors in the corridor outside. Sometimes, when the door was left closed, he only heard the people in the corridor. Mostly he just stared ahead, at the wall on the far side of the room, which was white.
‘That’s good, yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘When do they think you’ll be out of that bed?’
‘They think perhaps another five days.~
His injuries had been severe. One more day in the half- wrecked truck struggling across the Phelen Plains on Aorme and he would have died. As it was he had been delivered to Golse City, triaged and transferred to an Invisible depot ship with only hours to spare. The depot vessel’s hopelessly over-stretched medics did their best to stabilise him. Still, he nearly died several more times.
The Loyalist military and his family negotiated his ransom. A neutral medical shuttle craft from one of the Caring Orders took him to a Navy hospital ship. He was barely alive when he arrived. They had to throw away his body from the midriff down; necrosis had eaten as far as his midlimb and was busily destroying his internal organs. In the end they disposed of those too and amputated his midlimb, putting him on a total life-support machine until the rest of his body regrew, part by part; skeleton, organs, muscles and ligaments, skin and fur.
The process was almost complete, though he had recovered more slowly than they’d expected. He could not believe that he had come so close to dying so many times, and had been so unlucky not to.
Perhaps the thought of seeing Worosei, of surprising her, of seeing the expression on her face that he had daydreamed about in the crippled truck lurching across the plains; perhaps that had kept him going. He didn’t know, because all he could remember after the first few days in the truck was in the form of momentary and disconnected sensations: pain, a smell, a flash of light, a sudden feeling of nausea, an overheard word or phrase. So he did not know what his thoughts – assuming he’d had any thoughts – had been during that fevered, scrambled time, but it seemed to him perfectly possible and even likely that only those daydreams of Worosei had sustained him and made exactly the