State of play: one
Fal ’Ngeestra watched the shadows of the clouds move on the distant plain, ten kilometres away horizontally and one vertically, and then, with a sigh, lifted her gaze to the line of snow-capped mountains on the far side of the open grassland. The mountain range was fully thirty kilometres from her eyes, but the peaks were sharp and distinct in the thin air which they invaded with their rock and brilliant icy whiteness. Even at that distance, through that much atmosphere, their glare startled the eye.
She turned away, walking along the broad flagstones of the lodge terrace with a stiff-legged gait unsuited to her lack of years. The trelliswork above her head was covered in bright red and white flowers and cast a regular pattern of shadows over the terrace beneath; she walked through light and shade, her hair dim then shining gold in turn as each halting step moved her from shadow to sunlight.
The gun-metal bulk of the drone called Jase appeared at the far end of the terrace, out of the lodge itself. Fal smiled when she saw it and sat down on a stone bench jutting out from the low wall which separated terrace from view. They were high up, but it was a hot and windless day; she wiped a little sweat from her forehead as the old drone floated along the terrace towards her, the slanting lines of sunlight passing over its body in a steady rhythm. The drone settled on the stones beside the bench, its broad, flat top about level with the crown of the girl’s head.
“Isn’t it a lovely day, Jase?” Fal said, looking back at the distant mountains again.
“It is,” Jase said. The drone had an unusually deep and full-toned voice, and made the most of it. For a thousand years or more Culture drones had had aura fields which coloured according to their mood — their equivalent of facial expression and body language — but Jase was old, made long before aura fields were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them. It preferred either to rely on its voice to express what it felt, or to remain inscrutable.
“Damn.” Fal shook her head, looking at the far-away snow. “I wish I was climbing.” She made a clicking noise with her mouth and looked down at her right leg, which stuck straight out in front of her. She had broken the leg eight days before, while climbing in the mountains on the other side of the plain. Now it was splinted up with a fine tracery of field-strands, concealed beneath fashionably tight trousers.
Jase ought, she thought, to have taken this as an excuse to lecture her again on the advisability of only climbing with a floater harness, or with a rescue drone near by, or at the very least on not climbing alone, but the old machine said nothing. She looked at it, her tanned face shining in the light. “So, Jase, what have you got for me? Business?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Fal settled herself as comfortably as she could on the stone bench and crossed her arms. Jase stretched out a short force field from its casing to support the awkward-looking outstretched leg, though it knew that the splint’s own fields were taking all the strain.
“Spit it out,” Fal said.
“You may recall an item from the daily synopsis eighteen days ago about one of our spacecraft which was cobbled together by a factory vessel in the volume of space Inside from the Sullen Gulf; the factory craft had to destruct, and later so did the ship it made.”
“I remember,” said Fal, who forgot little about anything, and nothing at all from a daily synopsis. “It was a mongrel because the factory was trying to get a GSV Mind out of the way.”
“Well,” Jase said, its voice a little weary, “we have a problem with that.”
Fal smiled.
The Culture, there could be no doubt, relied profoundly on its machines for both its strategy and tactics in the war it was now engaged in. Indeed, a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level than did any single human or group of humans within the society. The Minds that the Culture’s factory craft, safe Orbitals and larger GSVs were now producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy. They were so intelligent that no human was capable of understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life).
From those mental colossi, down through the more ordinary but still sentient machines and the smart but ultimately mechanistic and predictable computers, right down to the smallest circuit in a micromissile hardly more intelligent than a fly, the Culture had placed its bets — long before the Idiran war had been envisaged — on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
A hostile reading of such a situation might lead to the idea that the discovery by the Culture’s Minds that some humans were actually capable of matching and occasionally beating their record for accurately assessing a given set of facts would lead to machine indignation and blown circuits, but this was not the case. It fascinated those Minds that such a puny and chaotic collection of mental faculties could by some sleight of neuron produce an answer to a problem which was as good as theirs. There was an explanation, of course, and it perhaps had something to do with patterns of cause and effect which even the almost god-like power of the Minds had difficulty trying to fathom; it also had quite a lot to do with sheer weight of numbers.
There were in excess of eighteen trillion people in the Culture, just about every one of them well nourished, extensively educated and mentally alert, and only thirty or forty of them had this unusual ability to forecast and assess on a par with a well-informed Mind (of which there were already many hundreds of thousands). It was not impossible that this was pure luck; toss eighteen trillion coins in the air for a while and a few of them are going to keep landing the same side up for a long, long time.
Fal ’Ngeestra was a Culture Referer, one of those thirty, maybe forty, out of the eighteen trillion who could give you an intuitive idea of what was going to happen, or tell you why she thought that something which had already happened had happened the way it did, and almost certainly turn out right every time. She was being handed problems and ideas constantly, being both used and assessed herself. Nothing she said or did went unrecorded; nothing she experienced went unnoticed. She did insist, however, that when she was climbing, alone or with friends, she must be left to her own devices and not watched by the Culture’s. She would take a pocket terminal with her to record everything, but she would not have a real-time link with any part of the Mind network on the Plate she lived on.
Because of that insistence she had lain in the snow with a shattered leg for a day and a night before a search party had discovered her.
The drone Jase started to give her the details of the flight of the nameless ship from its mother-craft, of its interception and self-destruction. Fal had turned her head, though, and was only half listening. Her eyes and mind were on the distant, snowy slopes, where she hoped she would be climbing again in a few days’ time, once these stupid bones in her leg had thoroughly healed.