Similarly, the Culture’s attempts to persuade the Affront that there were other ways to control fertility and familial inheritance besides those which relied on the virtual imprisonment, genetic mutilation and organised violation of their females, or to consume vat-grown meat – better, if anything, than the real thing – or to offer non-sentient versions of their hunting animals all met with equally derisive if brusquely good-humoured dismissals.
Still, Genar-Hofoen liked them, and had come even to admire them for their vivacity and enthusiasm; he had never really subscribed to the standard Culture belief that any form of suffering was intrinsically bad, he accepted that a degree of exploitation was inevitable in a developing culture, and leant towards the school of thought which held that evolution, or at least evolutionary pressures, ought to continue within and around a civilised species, rather than – as the Culture had done – choosing to replace evolution with a kind of democratically agreed physiological stasis-plus-option-list while handing over the real control of one’s society to machines.
It was not that Genar-Hofoen hated the Culture, or particularly wished it ill in its present form; he was deeply satisfied that he had been born into it and not some other humanoid species where you suffered, procreated and died and that was about it; he just didn’t feel at home in the Culture all the time. It was a motherland he wanted to leave and yet know he could always return to if, he wanted. He wanted to experience life as an Affronter, and not just in some simulation, however accurate. Plus, he wanted to go somewhere the Culture had never been, and well, explore.
Neither ambition seemed to him all that much to ask, but he’d been thwarted in both desires until now. He’d thought he’d detected movement on the Affronter side of things before this Sleeper business had come up, but now, if all concerned were to be believed, he could more or less have whatever he wanted, no strings attached.
He found this suspicious in itself. Special Circumstances was not notorious for its desire to issue blank cheques to anyone. He wondered if he was being paranoid, or had just been living with the Affront for too long (none of his predecessors had lasted longer than a hundred days and he’d been here nearly two years already).
Either way, he was being cautious; he had asked around. He still had some replies to receive – they should be waiting for him when he arrived at Tier – but so far everything seemed to tally. He had also asked to speak to a representation of the Desert Class MSV Not Invented Here, the ship acting as incident coordinator for all this – again, this ought to happen on Tier – and he’d looked up the craft’s own history in the module’s archives and transferred the results to the suit’s own AI.
The Desert Class had been the first type of General Systems Vehicle the Culture had constructed, providing the original template for the Very Large Fast Self-Sufficient Ship concept. At three-and-a-bit klicks in length it was tiny by today’s standards – ships twice its length and eight times its volume were routinely constructed inside GSVs the size of the Sleeper Service and the whole class had been demoted to Medium Systems Vehicle status – but it certainly had the distinction of age; the Not Invented Here had been around for nearly two millennia and boasted a long and interesting career, coming as close as the Culture’s distributed and democratic military command structure had allowed to being in advisory control of several fleets in the course of the Idiran War. It was now in that equivalent of serenely glorious senescence that affected some ancient Minds; no longer producing many smaller ships, taking relatively little to do with Contact’s normal business, and keeping itself relatively sparsely populated.
It remained, nevertheless, a full Culture ship; it hadn’t taken a sabbatical, gone into a retreat or become an Eccentric, nor had it joined the Culture Ulterior – the fairly recently fashionable name for the bits of the Culture that had split away and weren’t really fully paid-up members any more. All the same, and despite the fact that the archive entry on the old ship was huge (as well as all the naked factual stuff, it contained one hundred and three different full-length biographies of the craft which it would have taken him a couple of years to read), Genar-Hofoen couldn’t help feeling that there was a slight air of mystery about the old ship.
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
Also included in the archive entries were some fairly wild claims by a few of the smaller, more eccentric news and analyses journals and reviews – some of them one-person outfits – to the effect that the MSV was a member of some shadowy cabal, that it was part of a conspiracy of mostly very old craft which stepped in to take control of situations which might threaten the Culture’s cozy proto-imperialist meta-hegemony; situations which proved beyond all doubt that the so-called normal democratic process of general policy-making was a complete and utter ultra-statist sham and the humans – and indeed their cousins and fellow dupes in this Mind-controlled plot, the drones – had even less power than they thought they had in the Culture… There was quite a lot of stuff like that. Genar-Hofoen read it until his head felt as if it was spinning, then he stopped; there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
Whatever; doubtless the old MSV was not itself in total command of the situation he was allowing himself to be dragged into, but just the tip of the iceberg, representing a collection, if not a cabal, of other interested and experienced Minds who’d all be having a say in the immediate reaction to the discovery of this artifact near Esperi.
As well as his request for a talk with a personality-state of the Not Invented Here, Genar-Hofoen had sent messages to ships, drones and people he knew with SC connections, asking them if what he’d been told was all true. A few of the nearer ones had got replies to him before he’d left God’shole habitat, each confirming that what they had been told of what he was asking about – which admittedly varied according to how much whatever collection of Minds the Not Invented Here was representing had chosen to tell the individuals concerned. The information he’d received looked genuine and the deal he’d been offered sounded good. At any rate, by the time he’d got to Tier and received all his replies he reckoned so many other people and Minds not irretrievably complicit with SC would have heard about what he’d been offered it would become impossible for SC to wriggle out of its deal with him without losing an unthinkable amount of face.
He still suspected there was a lot more to this than he was being told, and he had no doubt he was and would continue to be both manipulated and used, but providing the price they were paying him was right, that didn’t bother him, and at least the job itself sounded simple enough.
He’d taken the precaution of checking up on the story his uncle had told him about the disappearing trillion-year-old sun and the orbiting artifact. Sure enough, there it was; a semi-mythological story set way back in the archives, one of any number of weird-sounding tales with frustratingly little evidence to back them up. Certainly nobody seemed able to explain what had happened in this case. And of course there was nobody around to ask anymore. Except for the lady he was travelling to talk to.
The captain of the good ship Problem Child had indeed been a woman; Zreyn Tramow. Honorary Contact Fleet Captain Gart-Kepilesa Zreyn Enhoff Tramow Afayaf dam Niskat-west, to give her her official title and Full Name. The archives held her picture. She’d looked proud and capable; a pale, narrow face, with close-set eyes, centimetre-short blonde hair and thin lips, but smiling, and with what appeared to him at least to be an intelligent brightness to those eyes. He liked the look of her.
He’d wondered what it would be like to have been Stored for two-and-a-bit millennia and then be woken up with no body to return to and a man you’d never seen before talking to you. And trying to steal your soul.
He’d stared at the photograph for a while, trying to see behind those clear blue mocking eyes.
They played another two games of batball; Fivetide won those as well. Genar-Hofoen was quivering with fatigue by the end. Then it was time to freshen up and head for the officers’ mess, where there was a full-dress uniform celebration dinner that evening because it was Commander Kindrummer VI’s birthday. The carousing went on long into the night; Fivetide taught the human some obscene songs, Genar-Hofoen responded in kind, two Atmosphere Force Wing Captains had an only semi-serious duel with grater muffs – much blood, no limbs lost, honour satisfied – and Genar-Hofoen did a tightrope walk over the commander’s table pit while the scratchounds howled beneath. The suit swore it hadn’t contributed to the feat, though he was sure it had steadied him a couple of times. However, he didn’t say anything.