‘So why’s this all suddenly become important after two and a half millennia?’ he asked the hologram.
‘Because something with similar characteristics to that artifact has turned up near a star called Esperi, in the Upper Leaf-Swirl, and SC needs all the help it can get to deal with it. There’s no trillion-year-old sun-cinder this time, but an apparently identical artifact is just sitting there.’
‘And what am I supposed to do?’
‘Go aboard the Sleeper Service and talk to this woman’s Mimage – that’s the Mind-stored construct of her personality apparently…’ The image looked puzzled. ‘… New one on me… Anyway, you’re supposed to try to persuade her to be reborn; talk her into a rebirth so she can be quizzed. The Sleeper Service won’t just release her, and it certainly won’t cooperate with SC, but if she asks to be reborn, it’ll let her.’
‘But why-?’ Genar-Hofoen started to ask.
‘There’s more,’ Tishlin said, holding up one hand. ‘Even if she won’t play, even if she refuses to come back, you’re to be equipped with a method of retrieving her through the link you’ll forge when you talk to the Mimage, without the GSV knowing. Don’t ask me how that’s supposed to be accomplished, but I think it’s got something to do with the ship they’re going to give you to get you to the Sleeper Service, after the Affronter ship they’re going to hire for you has rendezvoused with it at Tier.’
Genar-Hofoen did his best to look sceptical. ‘Is that possible?’, he asked. ‘Retrieving her like that, I mean. Against the wishes of the Sleeper.’
‘Apparently,’ Tishlin said, shrugging. ‘SC thinks they’ve got a way of doing it. But you see what I mean when I said they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman…’
Genar-Hofoen thought for a moment. ‘Do you know what ship this might be? The one to get me to the Sleeper?’
‘They haven’t-‘ began the image, then paused and looked amused. ‘They just told me; it’s a GCU called the Grey Area.’ The image smiled. ‘Ah; I see you’ve heard of it, too.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it,’ the man said.
The Grey Area. The ship that did what the other ships both deplored and despised; actually looked into the minds of other people, using its Electro Magnetic Effectors – in a sense the very, very distant descendants of electronic countermeasures equipment from your average stage three civilisation, and the most sophisticated, powerful but also precisely controllable weaponry the average Culture ship possessed – to burrow into the grisly cellular substrate of an animal consciousness and try to make sense of what it found there for its own – usually vengeful – purposes. A pariah craft; the one the other Minds called Meatfucker because of its revolting hobby (though not, as it were, to its face). A ship that still wanted to be part of the Culture proper and nominally still was, but which was shunned by almost all its peers; a virtual outcast amongst the great inclusionary meta-fleet that was Contact.
Genar-Hofoen had heard about the Grey Area all right. It was starting to make sense now. If there was one vessel that might be capable of plundering – and, more importantly, that might be willing to plunder – a Stored soul from under the nose of the Sleeper, the Grey Area was probably it. Assuming what he’d heard about the ship was true, it had spent the last decade perfecting its techniques of teasing dreams and memories out of a variety of animal species, while the Sleeper Service had by all accounts been technologically stagnant for the last forty years, its time taken up with the indulgence of its own scarcely less eccentric pastime.
The image of Uncle Tishlin bore a distant expression for a moment, then said, ‘Apparently that’s part of the beauty of it; just because the Sleeper Service is another oddball doesn’t mean that it’s any more likely than any other GSV to have the Grey Area aboard; the GCU will have to lie off, and that’ll make this Mimage-stealing trick easier. If the Grey Area was actually inside the GSV at the time it probably couldn’t carry it off undetected.’
Genar-Hofoen was looking thoughtful again. ‘This artifact thing,’ he said. ‘Could almost be a what-do-you-call it, couldn’t it? An Outside Context Paradox.’
‘Problem,’ Tishlin said. ‘Outside Context Problem.’
‘Hmm. Yes. One of those. Almost.’
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
That was an Outside Context Problem; so was the suitably up-teched version that happened to whole planetary civilisations when somebody like the Affront chanced upon them first rather than, say, the Culture.
The Culture had had lots of minor OCPs, problems that could have proved to be terminal if they’d been handled badly, but so far it had survived them all. The Culture’s ultimate OCP was popularly supposed to be likely to take the shape of a galaxy-consuming Hegemonising Swarm, an angered Elder civilisation or a sudden, indeed instant visit by neighbours from Andromeda once the expedition finally got there.
In a sense, the Culture lived with genuine OCPs all around it all the time, in the shape of those Sublimed Elder civilisations, but so far it didn’t appear to have been significantly checked or controlled by any of them. However, waiting for the first real OCP was the. intellectual depressant of choice for those people and Minds in the Culture determined to find the threat of catastrophe even in Utopia.
‘Almost. Maybe,’ agreed the apparition. ‘Perhaps it’s a little less likely to be so with your help.’
Genar-Hofoen nodded, staring at the surface of the table. ‘So who’s in charge of this?’ he asked, grinning. ‘There’s usually a Mind which acts as incident controller or whatever they call it in something like this.’
‘The Incident Coordinator is a GSV called the Not Invented Here,’ Tish told him. ‘It wants you to know you can ask whatever you want of it.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Genar-Hofoen couldn’t recall having heard of the ship. ‘And why me, particularly?’ he asked. He suspected he already had the answer to that one.
‘The Sleeper Service has been behaving even more oddly than usual,’ Tishlin said, looking suitably pained. ‘It’s altered its course schedule, it’s no longer accepting people for Storage, and it’s almost completely stopped communicating. But it says it will allow you on board.’
‘For a brow-beating, no doubt,’ Genar-Hofoen said, glancing to one side and watching a cloud pass over the meadows of the valley shown on the dining room’s projector walls. ‘Probably wants to give me a lecture.’ He sighed, still looking round the room. He fastened his gaze on Tishlin’s simulation again. ‘She still there?’ he asked.
The image nodded slowly.
‘Shit,’ Genar-Hofoen said.
III
‘But it makes my brain hurt.’
‘Nevertheless, Major. This is of inestimable importance.’
‘I only looked at the first bit there and it’s already given me a thumping case-ache.’
‘Still, it has to be done. Kindly read it all carefully and then I’ll explain its significance.’
‘Knot my stalks, this is a terrible thing to ask of a chap after a regimental dinner.’ Fivetide wondered if humans suffered so for their self-indulgence. He doubted it, no matter what they claimed; with the possibly honourable, possibly demented exception of Genar-Hofoen, they seemed a bit too stuffy and sensible willingly to submit to such self-punishment in the cause of fun. Besides, they were so insecure in their physical inheritance they had meddled with themselves in all sorts of ways; probably they thought hangovers were just annoying, rather than character-forming and so had, shortsightedly, dispensed with them.
‘I realise it’s early and it is the morning after the night before, Major. But please.’
The emissary – which Fivetide had met once before, and which possessed the irritating trait of looking somewhat like a better-built version of Fivetide’s dear departed father – had just appeared in the nest house without notice or warning. If he hadn’t known the way these things worked, Fivetide would right now be thinking of ways to torture the head of nest security. Tentacles had rolled, beaks had been separated, for less.