“They’ve told me what they’re prepared to offer, Byr,” Tishlin said. “You didn’t imagine it.”
Genar-Hofoen looked up. “Really?” he asked.
“Really,” Tishlin said.
Genar-Hofoen nodded slowly. “And how did they persuade you to act as go-between, Uncle?” he asked.
“They only had to ask, Byr. I may not be in Contact any more but I’m happy to help out when I can, when they have a problem.”
“This isn’t Contact, Uncle, this is Special Circumstances,” Byr said quietly. “They tend to play by slightly different rules.”
Tishlin looked serious; the image sounded defensive. “I know that, boy. I asked around some of my contacts before I agreed to do this; everything checks out, everything seems to be… reliable. I suggest you do the same, obviously, but from what I can see, what I’ve been told is the truth.”
Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. “Okay. So what have they told you, Uncle?” he asked, draining the last of the infusion. He frowned, wiped his lips and inspected the napkin. He looked at the sediment in the bottom of the glass, then glared at the servant drone. It wobbled in the drone equivalent of a shrug and took the glass from his hand.
Tishlin’s representation sat forward, putting its arms on the table. “Let me tell you a story, Byr.”
“By all means,” Genar-Hofoen said, picking something from his lips and wiping it on the napkin. The serving drone started to remove the rest of the breakfast things.
“Long ago and far away — two and a half thousand years ago,” Tishlin said, “in a wispy tendril of suns outside the Galactic plane, nearest to Asatiel Cluster, but not really near to that or anywhere else — the Problem Child, an early General Contact Unit, Troubadour Class, chanced upon the ember of a very old star. The GCU started to investigate. And it found not one but two unusual things.”
Genar-Hofoen drew his gown about him and settled back in his seat, a small smile on his lips. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Some of Genar-Hofoen’s earliest memories were of the long, sunlit kitchen of the house at Ois, back on Seddun Orbital; his mother, the other adults of the house and his various cousins would all be milling around, chattering and laughing while he sat on his uncle’s knee, being told tales. Some of them were ordinary children’s stories — which he’d heard before, often, but which always sounded better when Uncle Tish told them — and some of them his uncle’s own stories, from when he’d been in Contact, travelling the galaxy in a succession of ships, exploring strange new worlds and meeting all sorts of odd folk and finding any number of weird and wonderful things amongst the stars.
“Firstly,” the hologram image said, “the dead sun gave every sign of being absurdly ancient. The techniques used to date it indicated it was getting on for a trillion years old.”
“What?” Genar-Hofoen snorted.
Uncle Tishlin spread his hands. “The ship couldn’t believe it either. To come up with this unlikely figure, it used…” the apparition glanced away to one side, the way Tishlin always had when he was thinking, and Genar-Hofoen found himself smiling, “… isotopic analysis and flux-pitting assay.”
“Technical terms,” Genar-Hofoen said, nodding. He and the hologram both smiled.
“Technical terms,” the image of Tishlin agreed. “But no matter what it was they used or how they did their sums, it always came out that the dead star was at least fifty times older than the universe.”
“I never heard that one before,” Genar-Hofoen said, shaking his head and looking thoughtful.
“Me neither,” Tishlin agreed. “Though as it turns out it was released publicly, just not until long after it had all happened. One reason there was no big fuss at the time was that the ship was so embarrassed about what it was coming up with it never filed a full report, just kept the results to itself, in its own mind.”
“Did they have proper Minds back then?”
Tishlin’s image shrugged. “Mind with a small ‘m’; AI core, we’d probably call it these days. But it was certainly sentient and the point is that the information remained in the ship’s head, as it were.”
Where, of course, it would remain the ship’s. Practically the only form of private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory. Any publicly filed report or analysis was theoretically available to anybody, but your own thoughts, your own recollections — whether you were a human, a drone or a ship Mind — were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad manners even to think about trying to read somebody else’s — or something else’s — mind.
Personally, Genar-Hofoen had always thought it was a reasonable enough rule, although along with a lot of people over the years he’d long suspected that one of the main reasons for its existence was that it suited the purposes of the Culture’s Minds in general, and those in Special Circumstances in particular.
Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to themselves and hatch little schemes and plots to their hearts’ content. The trouble was that while in humans this sort of behaviour tended to manifest itself in practical jokes, petty jealousies, silly misunderstandings and instances of tragically unrequited love, with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to try to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already did know about (with the almost unspeakable implication that one day they might do just that not with a culture but with the Culture… always assuming they hadn’t done so already, of course).
“What about the people on board the Culture ship?” Genar-Hofoen asked.
“They knew as well, of course, but they kept quiet, too. Apart from anything else, they had two weirdnesses on their hands; they assumed they had to be linked in some way but they couldn’t work out how, so they decided to wait and see before they told everybody else.” Tishlin shrugged. “Understandable, I suppose; it was all so outlandish I suppose anybody would think twice about shouting it to the rooftops. You couldn’t get away with such reticence these days, but this was then; the guidelines were looser.”
“What was the other unusual thing they found?”
“An artifact,” Tishlin said, sitting back in the seat. “A perfect black-body sphere fifty klicks across, in orbit around the unfeasibly ancient star. The ship was completely unable to penetrate the artifact with its sensors, or with anything else for that matter, and the thing itself showed no signs of life. Shortly thereafter the Problem Child developed an engine fault — something almost unheard of, even back then — and had to leave the star and the artifact. Naturally, it left a load of satellites and sensor platforms behind it to monitor the artifact; all it had arrived with, in fact, plus a load more it had made while it was there.
“However, when a follow-up expedition arrived three years later — remember, this all happened on the galactic outskirts, and speeds were much lower then — it found nothing; no star, no artifact, and none of the sensors and remote packages the Problem Child had left behind; the outgoing signals apparently coming from the sentry units stopped just before the follow-up expedition arrived within monitoring range. Ripples in the gravity field near by implied the star and presumably everything else had vanished utterly the moment the Problem Child had been safely out of sensor range.”
“Just vanished?”
“Just vanished. Disappeared without trace,” Tishlin confirmed. “Most damnable thing, too; nobody’s ever just lost a sun before, even if it was a dead one.