Or might it all be a ruse, a decoy? The Culture – the real Culture, the wily ones, not these semi-mystical Elenchers with their miserable hankering to be somebody else – had been known to give whole Affronter fleets the run-around for several months with not dissimilar enticements and subterfuges, keeping them occupied, seemingly on the track of some wildly promising prey which turned out to be nothing at all, or a Culture ship with some ridiculous but earnestly argued excuse, while the Culture or one of its snivelling client species got on – or away – with something else somewhere else, spoiling rightful Affronter fun.
How were they to know this was not one of those occasions? Perhaps the Elencher ship was under contract to the Culture proper. Perhaps they had lost the Explorer craft and a GCU – trailing them as they had been trailing the Elench craft – had slipped in to take its place. Might this not be true?
No, argued some of the officers, because the Culture would never sacrifice a drone it considered sentient.
The rest thought about this, considered the Culture’s bizarrely sentimental attitude to life, and were forced to concede the point.
The cruiser spent another two days around the Esperi system and then broke away. It returned to the habitat called Tier with a trivial but niggling engine fault.
III
Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at.
Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined.
It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better… and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you… so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first Chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.
Metamathics led to the Mind equivalent of that experience, repeated a million times, magnified a billion times, and then beyond, to configurations of wonder and bliss even the simplest abstract of which the human-basic brain had no conceivable way of comprehending. It was like a drug; an ultimately liberating, utterly enhancing, unadulterably beneficial, overpoweringly glorious drug for the intellect of machines as far beyond the sagacity of the human mind as they were beyond its understanding.
This was the way the Minds spent their time. They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled.
Some of the universes possessed just one tiny but significant alteration, leading to some subtle twist in the way things worked, while others were so wildly, aberrantly different it could take a perfectly first-rate Mind the human equivalent of years of intense thought even to find the one tenuously familiar strand of recognisable reality that would allow it to translate the rest into comprehensibility. Between those extremes lay an infinitude of universes of unutterable fascination, consummate joy and absolute enlightenment. All that humanity knew and could understand, every single aspect, known, guessed at and hoped for in and of the universe was like a mean and base mud hut compared to the vast, glittering cloud-high palace of monumentally exquisite proportions and prodigious riches that was the metamathical realm. Within the infinities raised to the power of infinities that those metamathical rules provided, the Minds built their immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy.
That was where they lived. That was their home. When they weren’t running ships, meddling with alien civilisations or planning the future course of the Culture itself, the Minds existed in those fantastic virtual realities, sojourning beyondward into the multi-dimensioned geographies of their unleashed imaginations, vanishingly far away from the single limited point that was reality.
The Minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun.
It did the experience pathetically little justice.
… The Sleeper Service promenaded metaphysically amongst the lush creates of its splendid disposition, an expanding shell of awareness in a dreamscape of staggering extent and complexity, like a gravity-free sun built by a jeweller of infinite patience and skill. It is absolutely the case, it said to itself, it is absolutely the case…
There was only one problem with the Land of Infinite Fun, and that was that if you ever did lose yourself in it completely – as Minds occasionally did, just as humans sometimes surrendered utterly to some AI environment – you could forget that there was a base reality at all. In a way, this didn’t really matter, as long as there was somebody back where you came from minding the hearth. The problem came when there was nobody left or inclined to tend the fire, mind the store, look after the housekeeping (or however you wanted to express it), or if somebody or something else – somebody or something from outside, the sort of entity that came under the general heading of an Outside Context Problem, for example – decided they wanted to meddle with the fire in that hearth, the stock in the store, the contents and running of the house; if you’d spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead, or enslaved.
It didn’t matter that base reality was petty and grey and mean and demeaning and quite empty of meaning compared to the glorious majesty of the multi-hued life you’d been living through metamathics; it didn’t matter that base reality was of no consequence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the single foundation-stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested upon, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.
It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn’t matter how fast, error-free and tireless it was, it didn’t matter how great a labour-saving boon it was, it didn’t matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they’d moved.
It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome. It was the problem that Subliming dispensed with, of course, and it was one of the (usually more minor) reasons that civilisations chose Elderhood; if your course was set in that direction in the first place then eventually that reliance on the material universe came to seem vestigial, untidy, pointless, and even embarrassing.
It wasn’t the course the Culture had fully embarked upon, at least not yet, but as a society it was well aware of both the difficulties presented by remaining in base reality and the attractions of the Sublime. In the meantime, it compromised, busying itself in the macrocosmic clumsiness and petty, messy profanity of the real galaxy while at the same time exploring the transcendental possibilities of the sacred Irreal.
It is absolutely the-
A single signal flicked the great ship’s attention entirely back to base reality:
xRock End In Tears
oGSV Sleeper Service.
Done.
The ship contemplated the one-word message for what was, for it, a very long time, and wondered at the mixture of emotions it felt. It set its newly manufactured drone-fleet to work in the external environments and re-checked the evacuation schedule.