Whatever version you chose to believe, it was no secret that the Culture proper had chosen to dedicate another, smaller, GSV to the task of following the Sleeper Service wherever it went, presumably to keep an eye on it.
Following its renaming, and paying no apparent heed to the craft now tailing it, the Sleeper Service’s next step was to evacuate everybody else remaining aboard. Most of the ships had already gone, and the rest were asked to leave. Then the drones, aliens and all the human personnel and their pets were deposited on the first Orbital it came to. The only people left aboard were those in Storage.
After that the ship went in search of others (and one other in particular), and let it be known throughout the Culture, through its information network, that it was willing to travel anywhere to pick up those who might wish to join it, so long as they were in Storage and happy to be set amongst one of its tableaux.
People were reluctant at first; this was definitely the sort of behaviour that earned a ship the title Eccentric, and Eccentric ships had been known to do odd, even dangerous things. Still, the Culture had its share of brave souls, and a few took up the craft’s strange invitation, without apparent ill effect. When the first few people who had been Stored aboard the GSV were safely returned on the realisation of their revival criteria, again without seeming to have suffered for the strangeness of their temporary lodgings, the slow trickle of adventurous individuals began to turn into a steady stream of slightly perverse or just romantic ones; as the reputation of the Sleeper Service spread, and it released holograms of its more and more ambitious tableaux (important historical incidents, then small battles and details from greater conflicts), so more and more people thought it rather amusing to be Stored within this eccentric Eccentric, where they might be said to be forming part of a work of art even while they slept, rather than just plonked in a boring box somewhere underneath their local Plate.
And so taking a ride aboard the Sleeper Service as a kind of vicariously wandering soul became nothing less than fashionable, and the ship slowly filled with undead people in Storage suits whom it posed into larger and larger scenes, until eventually it was able to tackle whole battlefields and lay them out in the sixteen square kilometres of territory it possessed in each of its General Bays.
Amorphia completed its sweeping gaze across the bright, silent stillness of the vast killing ground. As an avatar it possessed no real thoughts of its own, but the Mind that was the Sleeper Service liked to run the creature off a small sub-routine that was only a little more intelligent than the average human being — while both retaining the option of stepping in, full force, if it needed to and making the avatar behave in a confused, distracted state that the ship believed somehow reflected, on the nearly infinitely smaller human scale, its own philosophical perplexities.
So it was that the semi-human sub-routine looked out across that great tableau, and felt a kind of sadness that it might all have to be dismantled. There was an extra, perhaps deeper melancholy at the thought that it would no longer be able to play host to the living things aboard; the creatures of the sea and the air and the gas-giant atmosphere, and the woman.
Its thoughts turned to that woman; Dajeil Gelian, who in one sense had been the cause, the seed for all of this, and the one person it had wanted to find, the one soul — asleep or awake — it had been determined to offer sanctuary to when it had first renounced the Culture’s normality. Now that sanctuary was compromised, and she too would have to be offloaded with all the rest of its waifs and strays and teeming undead. A promise being fulfilled leading to a promise to her being broken, as though she had not experienced enough of that in her life. Still, it would make amends, and for that reason there were a lot of other promises being made and — so far, it would seem — kept. That would have to do.
Movement on the motionless tableau; Amorphia turned its attention there and saw the black bird Gravious flapping away across the field. More movement. Amorphia walked towards it, around and over the poised, charging cavalry and the fallen soldiers, between a pair of convincing-looking hanging fountains of earth where two cannon balls were slamming into the ground and over a small, blood-swollen stream to another part of the battlefield, where a team of three revival drones were floating above a revivee.
This was unusual; people normally wanted to be woken back in their home and in the presence of friends, but over the last couple of decades — as the tableaux had become more impressive — more people had wished to be brought back to life here, in the midst of them.
Amorphia squatted down by the woman, who had been lying posed as a dying soldier, her tunic punctured by bullet holes and stained red. She lay on her back, blinking in the sunlight, attended by machines. The head of the Storage suit had been slipped off and lay like a rubbery mask on the grass beside her; her face looked pale and just a little blotchy; she was an old woman, but her depilated head gave her a curious, baby-like quality of nakedness.
“Hello?” Amorphia said, taking one of the woman’s hands in hers and gently detaching that part of the suit too, pulling the hand-covering off inside-out, like a tight glove.
“Whoa,” the woman said, swallowing, her eyes watering.
Sikleyr-Najasa Croepise Ince Stahal da Mapin, Stored thirty-one years ago at the age of three-hundred and eighty-six. Revival criterion: on the acclamation of the next Line Messiah-elect on the planet Ischeis. She had been a scholar of the planet’s major religion and had wanted to be present at the Elevation of its next Saviour, an event which had not been anticipated for another two hundred years or so.
Her mouth twisted, and she coughed. “How—?” she began, then coughed again.
“Just thirty-one standard years,” Amorphia told her.
The woman’s eyes widened, then she smiled. “That was quick,” she said.
She recovered rapidly for one of her age; in a few minutes she was able to be helped to her feet and — taking Amorphia’s arm, and trailed by the three drones — they walked across the battlefield towards the nearest edge of the tableau.
They stood on the small hill, Hill 4, that Amorphia had stood on a little earlier. Amorphia was distantly, naggingly aware of the gap the woman’s revival had left in the scene. Normally she would have been replaced within the day with another Storee, posed in the same position, but there were none left; the gap she had left would remain unless the ship plundered another tableau to repair the hole in this one. The woman gazed around her for some time, then shook her head.
Amorphia guessed what she was thinking. “It is a terrible sight,” it said. “But it was the last great land battle on Xlephier Prime. To have one’s final significant battle at such an early technological stage is actually a great achievement for a humanoid species.”
The woman turned to Amorphia. “I know,” she said. “I was just thinking how impressive all this was. You must be proud.”
II
The Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, had been investigating a little-explored part of the Upper Leaf Swirl on a standard random search pattern. It had left Tier habitat on n4.28.725.500 along with the seven other Stargazer vessels; they had scattered like seeds into the depths of the Swirl, bidding each other farewell and knowing they might never see each other again.