The plain fact was that he didn’t like talking to people, he didn’t like mixing with them and he didn’t even like thinking about them individually. The best he could manage was when he was well away from people; then he could feel a not unpleasant craving for their company as a whole, a craving that quite vanished - to be replaced by stomach-churning dread - the instant it looked like being satisfied.
Gestra Ishmethit was a freak; despite being born to the most ordinary and healthy of mothers (and an equally ordinary father), in the most ordinary of families on the most ordinary of Orbitals and having the most ordinary of upbringings, an accident of birth, or some all-but-impossible conjunction of disposition and upbringing, had left him the sort of person the Culture’s carefully meddled-with genes virtually never threw up; a genuine misfit, something even rarer in the Culture than a baby born physically deformed.
But whereas it was perfectly simple to replace or regrow a stunted limb or a misshapen face, it was a different matter when the oddness lay inside, a fact Gestra had always accepted with an equanimity he sometimes suspected people regarded as even more freakish than his original almost pathological shyness. Why didn’t he just have the condition treated? his relations and few acquaintances asked. Why didn’t he ask to remain as much himself as possible, yet with this strange aberrancy removed, expunged? It might not be easy, but it would be painless; probably it could be done in his sleep; he’d remember nothing about it and when he woke up he could live a normal life.
He came to the attention of AIs, drones, humans and Minds that took an interest in that sort of thing; soon they were queuing up to treat him; he was a challenge! He became so frightened by their - by turns - kind, cheery, cajoling, brusque or just plain plaintive entreaties to talk to him, counsel him, explain the merits of their various treatments and courses to him that he stopped answering his terminal and practically became a hermit in a summer house in his family’s estate, unable to explain that despite it all - indeed, exactly because of all his previous attempts to integrate with the rest of society and what he had learned about himself through them - he wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.
In the end it had taken the intervention of the Hub Mind of his home Orbital to come up with a solution. A drone from Contact had come to speak to him one day.
He’d always found it easier talking to drones rather than humans, and this drone had been somehow particularly business-like but unconcernedly charming as well, and after probably the longest conversation with anybody Gestra had ever had, it had offered him a variety of posts where he could be alone. He had chosen the position where he could be most alone and most lonely, where he could happily yearn for the human contact he knew was the one thing he was incapable of appreciating.
It was, in the end, a sinecure; it had been explained from the beginning that he would not really have anything to do on Pittance; he would simply be there; a symbolic human presence amongst the mass of quiescent weapons, a witness to the Mind’s silent sentinelship over the sleeping machines. Gestra Ishmethit had been perfectly happy with that lack of responsibility, too, and had now been resident on Pittance for one and a half centuries, had not once left to go anywhere else, had not received a single visitor in all that time and had never felt anything less than content. Some days, he even felt happy.
The ships were arranged in lines and rows sixty-four at a time in the series of huge dark spaces. Those great halls were kept cold and in vacuum, but Gestra had discovered that if he found some rubbish from his quarters and kept it warm in a gelfield sack, and then set it down on the chill floor of one of the hangars and blew oxygen over it from a pressurised tank, it could be made to burn. Quite a satisfactory little fire could be got going, flaring white and yellow in the breath of gas and producing a quickly dispersing cloud of smoke and soot. He had found that by adjusting the flow of oxygen and directing it through a nozzle he had designed and made himself, he could produce a fierce blaze, a dull red glow or any state of conflagration in between.
He knew the Mind didn’t like him doing this, but it amused him, and it was almost the only thing he did which annoyed it. Besides, the Mind had grudgingly admitted both that the amount of heat produced was too small ever to leak through the eighty kilometres of iron to show up on the surface of Pittance and that ultimately the waste products of the combustion would be recovered and recycled, so Gestra felt free to indulge himself with a clear conscience, every few months or so.
Today’s fire was composed of some old wall hangings he’d grown tired of, some vegetable scraps from past meals, and tiny bits and pieces of wood. The wooden scraps were produced by his hobby, which was constructing one-in-one-twenty-eighth scale models of ancient sailing ships.
He had drained the swimming pool in his quarters and turned it into a miniature forestry plantation and farm using some of the biomass the Mind and he had been provided with; tiny trees grew there which he cut down and sliced into little planks and turned on lathes to produce all the masts, spars, decks and other wooden parts the sea ships required. Other bonsai plants in the forest provided long fibres which he teased and twisted and coiled into thread- and string-thin ropes to make halyards and sheets. Different plants let him create still thinner fibres which he wove into sails on infinitesimal looms he had also constructed himself. The iron and steel parts were made from material scraped from the iron walls of Pittance itself. He smelted the metal in a miniature furnace to rid it of the last traces of impurities and either flattened it in a tiny hand-turned rolling mill, cast it using wax and talc-like fines, or turned it on microscopic lathes. Another furnace fused sand - taken from the beach which had been part of the swimming pool - to make wafer-thin sheets of glass for portholes and skylights. Yet more of the life-support system’s biomass was used to produce pitch and oils, which caulked the hull and greased the little winches, derricks and other pieces of machinery. His most precious commodity was brass, which he had to pare from an antique telescope his mother had given him (with some ironic comment he had long chosen to forget) when he’d announced his decision to leave for Pittance. (His mother was herself Stored now; one of his great grand-nieces had sent him a letter.)
It had taken him ten years to make the tiny machines to make the ships, and then making each ship occupied another twenty years of his time. He had constructed six vessels so far, each slightly larger and better made than the one before. He had almost completed a seventh, with just the sails to finish and sew; the scraps of wood he was burning were the last of its off-cuts and compacted sawdust.
The little fire burned well enough. He let it blaze and looked around. His breath sounded loud in his suit as he lifted his head to gaze around the dark space. The sixty-four ships stored in this hall were Gangster Class Rapid Offensive Units; slim segmented cylinders over two hundred metres tall and fifty in diameter. The tiny glow from the fire was lost to normal sight amongst the spire-like heights of the ships; he had to press the control surfaces on the forearm of the ancient space suit to intensify the image displayed on the visor-screen in front of him.
The ships looked like they’d been tattooed. Their hulls were covered in a bewildering swirl of patterns upon patterns upon patterns, a fractal welter of colours, designs and textures that saturated their every square millimetre. He had seen this a hundred times before but it never failed to fascinate and amaze him.
On a few occasions he had floated up to some of the ships and touched their skins, and even through the thickness of the gloves on the millennium-old suit he had felt the roughened surface, whorled and raised and encrusted beneath. He had looked closely, then more closely still, using the suit’s lights and the magnification on the visor-screen to peer into the gaudy display in front of him, and found himself becoming lost within concentric layers of complexity and design. Finally the suit was using electrons to scan the surface and imposing false
colours on the surfaces displayed and still the complexity went on, down and down to the atomic level. He had pulled back out through the layers and levels of motifs, figures, mandalas and fronds, his head buzzing with the extravagant, numbing complexity of it all.
Gestra Ishmethit remembered seeing screen-shots of warships; they had been whatever colour they wanted to be - usually perfectly black or perfectly reflecting when they were not hidden by a hologram of the view straight through them - but he could not recall ever having seen such odd designs upon them. He had consulted the Mind’s archives. Sure enough, the ships had been ordinary, plain-hulled craft when they had flown here. He asked the Mind why the ships had become decorated so, writing to it on the display of his terminal as he always did when he wanted to communicate: Why ships tattooed look?
The Mind had replied: Think of it as a form of armour, Gestra.
And that was all he could get out of it.
He decided he would have to be content to remain puzzled.
The little fire sent quivering veins of dim light into the hollow shadows around the enigmatic towers of the dazzlingly patterned ships. The only sound was his breathing. He felt wonderfully alone here; even the Mind couldn’t communicate with him here as long as he kept the suit’s communicator turned off. Here was perfect; here was total and complete loneliness, here was peace, and quiet, and a fire in the vacuum. He lowered his gaze again, towards the embers.
Something glinted near the floor of the hall, a couple of kilometres away.
His heart seemed to freeze. The thing glinted again. Whatever it was, it was coming closer.
He turned the suit communicator on with a shaking hand.
Before his quivering fingers could tap in a question to the Mind, the display on his visor-screen, lit up: Gestra, we are to be visited. Please return to your quarters.
He stared at the text, his eyes wide, his heart thudding in his chest, his mind reeling. The glowing letters stayed where they were, they added up to the same thing; they would not go away. He inspected each one in turn, looking for mistakes, desperately trying to make some different kind of sense from them, but they kept repeating the same sentence, they kept meaning the same thing.
Visited, he thought. Visited? Visited? Visited?
He felt terror for the first time in one and a half centuries.
The drone which had glinted in the shadows, which the Mind had sent to summon him because his suit communicator had been turned off, had to carry the man back to his quarters, he was shaking so much. It had picked up the oxygen cylinder too, turning it off.
Behind it, the fire went on glowing faintly for a few seconds in the darkness, then even that baleful glimmer succumbed to the empty coldness, and it winked out.
5
Kiss The Blade
I
The Explorer Ship Break Even of the Stargazer Clan’s Fifth fleet, part of the Zetetic Elench, looped slowly around the outer limit of the comet cloud of the star system Tremesia I/II, scanning beams briefly touching on as many of the dark, frozen bodies as it could, searching for its lost sister vessel.
The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them. However, many of them had orbits well outside the ecliptic and that helped to make the search every bit as difficult as it would have been with a greater number of comet nuclei but in a more planar cloud. Even so, it was impossible to check all of them; ten thousand ships would have been required to thoroughly check every single sensor trace in the comet cloud to make sure that one of them was not a stricken ship, and the best the Break Even could do was briefly fasten its gaze on the most likely looking candidates.
Just doing that bare minimum would take a full day for this system alone, and it had another nine stars allocated to it as prime possibilities, plus another eighty less likely solar systems. The other six vessels of the Fifth fleet had similar schedules, similar allocations of stellar systems to attempt to search.
Elencher ships sent routine location and status reports back to a responsible and reliable habitat, facility or course-scheduled craft every sixteen standard days. The Peace Makes Plenty had signalled safely back to the Elench embassy on Tier along with the other seven ships of the fleet sixty-four days after they’d all left the habitat.
Day eighty had come, and only seven had reported in. The others immediately stopped heading any further away if that was the course they’d been set on; four days later, still with no word, and with no sign of anybody else having heard anything, the seven remaining ships of the Fifth fleet set their courses to converge on the last known position of the missing ship and accelerated to their maximum speed. The first of them had arrived in the general volume where the Peace Makes Plenty ought to be five days later; the last one appeared another twelve days after that.
They had to assume that the ship they were looking for had not travelled at that sort of speed since it had last signalled, they had to assume that it had been cruising, even loitering amongst the systems it had been investigating, they had to assume that it was somewhere within a stellar system, small nebula or gas cloud in the first place, and they had to assume that it was not deliberately trying to hide from them, or that somebody else was not deliberately trying to hide it from them.
The stars themselves were relatively easy to check; microscopic as it might be compared to the average sun, a half-million tonne ship containing a few tonnes of anti-matter and a variety of highly exotic materials falling into a star left a tiny but distinct and unmistakable flash behind it, and usually a mark on the stellar surface that lasted for days at least; one loop round the star could tell you if that kind of disaster had befallen a missing craft. Small solid planets were easy too, unless a ship was deliberately hiding or being hidden, which of course was perfectly possible in such situations and considerably more likely than a ship suffering some natural disaster or terminal technical fault. Large gaseous planets presented a bigger challenge. Asteroid belts, where they existed, could pose real problems, and comet clouds were a nightmare.
In the vast majority of solar systems the spaces between the inner system and the comet cloud were easy to search for big, obvious things and pointless to search for small things or anything trying to hide. Interstellar space was the same, but much worse; unless something was trying to signal you from out there, you could more or less forget about finding anything smaller than a planet.
The Break Even and its crew, like the rest of the fleet, the Clan and the Elench, had no illusions about the likelihood of success their search offered. They were doing it because you had to do something, because there was always just a chance, no matter how remote, that their sister ship was somewhere findable and obvious - orbiting a planet, sitting in a 1/6 Stabile round a big planet’s orbit - and you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you took the cold statistical view that there was next to zero hope of finding the ship intact, and then later discovered it had been there all along, savable at the time but later lost because nobody could be bothered to hope - and act - against the odds. Still, the statistics did not make optimistic reading, indicating that the whole task was as close to being impossible as made little difference, and there was a morbid, depressing quality about such searches, almost as though they were more a kind of vigil for the dead, part of a funeral ceremony, than a practical attempt to look for the missing.
The days went by; the ships, aware that whatever had befallen the Peace Makes Plenty might as easily happen to them, signalled their locations to each other every few hours.
Sixteen days after the first ship had started searching and hundreds of investigated star systems later, the quest began to be wound down. Over the next few days, five of the ships returned to the other parts of the Upper Leaf Spiral they had been exploring while two remained behind in the volume the Peace Makes Plenty ought still to be in, somewhere, carrying out more thorough explorations of the star systems as part of their normal mission profile, but always hoping that their missing sister sh
ip might turn up, or at the very least that they might uncover some fragment of evidence, some hint of what had happened to their missing sibling.
The fact that the ship had disappeared would not be reported outside the fleet for another sixteen days; the Stargazer clan would pass the sad news on to the rest of the Elench eight days subsequently, and the outside galaxy would be informed, if it cared, another month after that. The Elench looked after their own, and kept themselves to themselves, as well.
The Break Even powered away from the last stellar system it had investigated, leaving the red giant astern with a kind of dismal relief. It was not one of the two craft who’d stay to continue the scaled-down search; it was heading back to the volume where it had been before the Peace Makes Plenty had gone missing. It kept all its sensors sweeping on full scan as it moved away from the giant sun, through the orbits of two small, cold planets and, further out, the dark, gelid bodies of the comet nuclei. Its course took it directly towards the next nearest star; on the way it swept interstellar space with its sensors too, still hoping, still half dreading . . . but nothing turned up. Esperi’s single, dim-red globe fell away astern, like an ember cooling to ash in the freezing night.
A few hours later the ship was out of the volume altogether, heading out-down-spinward back to its allotted crop of distant, anonymous stars.
II
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