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The GSV had studied the real-time recordings Contact craft and their emissaries had taken over the years of battles fought by humanoid societies with similar technology, to get a feel for the way such events really looked and felt without the possibly prejudiced and partial eyes and memories of the participants or spectators getting in the way.

And it had, eventually, got the smoke right. It had taken a while, and eventually it had had to resort to a rather higher-tech solution than it would have preferred, but it had done it. The smoke was real, each particle held and isolated in the grip of a localised anti-gravity field produced by projectors hidden underneath the landscape. The ship was quietly proud of the smoke.

Even the fact that the scene still wasn’t perfect — many of the soldiers looked female, and/or foreign, or indeed alien, when you looked closely at them, and even the males of the appropriate and not-too-meddled-with genetic stock were too big and too generally healthy to be right for the time — didn’t really disturb the ship. The people hadn’t been the most difficult thing to get right, but they were the most important component of the scene; they were the reason it was all here.

It had all started eighty years ago, on a very small scale.

Every Culture habitat — whether it was an Orbital or other large structure, a ship, a Rock, or a planet — possessed Storage facilities. Storage was where some people went when they had reached a certain age, or if they had just grown tired of living. It was one of the choices that Culture humans faced towards the end of their artificially extended three-and-a-half to four centuries of life. They could opt for rejuvenation and/or complete immortality, they could become part of a group mind, they could simply die when the time came, they could transfer out of the Culture altogether, bravely accepting one of the open but essentially inscrutable invitations left by certain Elder civilisations, or they could go into Storage, with whatever revival criterion they desired.

Some people slept for — say — a hundred years at a time then lived a single day before returning to their undreaming, unageing slumbers, some wanted simply to be woken after a set time had passed to see what had changed while they’d been gone, some desired to come back when something especially interesting was happening (content to leave that judgement to others), and some only wanted to be brought back if and when the Culture finally became one of the Elders itself.

That was a decision the Culture had been putting off for many millennia; in theory it could have sublimed anything up to ten thousand years ago, but — while individuals and small groups of people and Minds did sublime all the time, and other parts of the society had hived off and split away, to make their own decisions on the matter — the bulk of the Culture had chosen not to, determining instead to surf a line across the ever-breaking wave of galactic life continuation.

Partly it was a kind of curiosity that no doubt seemed childish to any sublimed species; a feeling that there was still more to discover in base reality, even if its laws and rules were all perfectly known (and besides, what of other galaxies, what of other universes? Did the Elders have access to these but none of them had ever seen fit to communicate the truth to the unsublimed? Or did all such considerations simply cease to matter, post-sublimation?).

Partly it was an expression of the Culture’s extrovertly concerned morality; the sublimed Elders, become as gods to all intents and purposes, seemed to be derelict in the duties which the more naive and less developed societies they left behind ascribed to such entities. With certain very limited exceptions, the Elder species subsequently took almost nothing to do with the rest of life in the galaxy whose physical trappings they invariably left behind; tyrants went unchecked, hegemonies went unchallenged, genocides went unstopped and whole nascent civilisations were snuffed out just because their planet suffered a comet-strike or happened to be too near a super-nova, even though these events occurred under the metaphorical noses of the sublimed ones.

The implication was that the very ideas, the actual concepts of good, of fairness and of justice just ceased to matter once one had gone for sublimation, no matter how creditable, progressive and unselfish one’s behaviour had been as a species pre-sublimation. In a curiously puritanical way for society seemingly so hell-bent on the ruthless pursuit of pleasure, the Culture thought this was itself wrong, and so decided to attempt to accomplish what the gods, it seemed, could not be bothered with; discovering, judging and encouraging — or discouraging — the behaviour of those to whom its own powers were scarcely less than those of a deity. Its own Elderhood would come eventually, it had no doubt, but it would be damned if it would let that happen until it had grown tired of doing (what it hoped was) good.

For those who wished to await that judgment day without having to live through every other day in between, Storage was the answer, as it was for others, for all those other reasons.

The rate of technological change in the Culture, at least at the level which directly affected the humans within it, was fairly modest. For millennia the accepted and normal method of Storing a human was to place each in a coffin-like box a little over two metres long, just under one across and half a metre deep; such units were easy to make and suitably reliable. However, even such unglamorous staples of Culture existence couldn’t escape improvement and refinement for ever. Eventually, along with the development of the gelfield suit, it became possible to put people into the stasis of long-term Storage within a covering that was even more reliable than the old coffin-boxes, and yet scarcely thicker than a second skin or a layer of clothing.

The Sleeper Service — which was not called that then — had simply been the first ship fully to take advantage of this development. When it Stored people it usually did so in small tableaux after the manner of famous paintings, at first, or humorous poses; the Storage suits allowed their occupants to be posed in any way that would have been natural for a human, and it was a simple matter to add a pigmentation layer to the surface which did such a good job of impersonating skin that a human would have to look very closely indeed to spot the difference. Of course, the ship had always asked the permission of the Storees in question before it used their sleeping forms in this way, and respected the wishes of the few people who preferred not to be Stored in a situation where they might be gazed upon as though they were figures in a painting, or sculptures.

Back then, the GSV had been called the Quietly Confident, and it had been run, as ships of that class normally were, by not one but three Minds. What happened next depended on who you believed.

The official version was that when one of the three Minds had decided it wanted to quit the Culture the other two Minds had argued with it and then made the unusual decision to leave the structure of the GSV to the single dissenting Mind, rather than, as would have been more normal, just giving it a smaller ship.

The perhaps more plausible and certainly more interesting rumour was that there had been a good old-fashioned wing-ding battle between the Minds, two against one, and the two had lost, very much against the odds. The two losing Minds had been kicked out, taking to commandeered GCUs like officers given life boats after a mutiny. And that was why, this version went, the whole of the Quietly Confident — which promptly renamed itself the Sleeper Service, had been turned over to the single dissident Mind; it hadn’t been some gentlepeople’s agreement; it had been a revolution.