Avoid self-destruction, recognise — and renounce — money for the impoverishing ration system it really was, become a bunch of interfering, do-gooding busybodies, resist the siren call of selfish self-promotion that was Subliming and free your conscious machines to do what they did best — essentially, running everything — and there you were; millennia of smug self-regard stretched before you, no matter what species you had started out from.
So. It was thought, by those Minds that especially concerned themselves with such matters, that the Morthanveld were on the cusp of going Culture; of undergoing a kind of societal phase-change, altering subtly but significantly into a water-worlder equivalent of the Culture. All that would need to happen for this to be effected, it was reckoned, would be the Morthanveld giving up the last vestiges of monetary exchange within their society, adopting a more comprehensive, self-consciously benign and galaxy-wide foreign policy and — probably most crucially — granting their AIs complete self-expressive freedom and full citizenship rights.
The Culture wanted to encourage this, obviously, but could not be seen to interfere or to be trying to influence matters. This was the main reason for not upsetting the people who would be Djan Seriy’s hosts for the latter part of her journey back to Sursamen; this was why she was being stripped of almost all her SC enhancements and even some of the amendments she had chosen for herself before Special Circumstances had invited her aboard in the first place.
“Probably a bluff anyway,” she told Turminder Xuss grumpily, looking out over the surface of cragged, chevronned ice below. The skies were clear and the balcony on which she stood and over which the drone silently hovered provided a calm, pleasantly warm environment; however, a furious torrent of air was howling all around the platform as the planet’s jetstream swept above the high mountains. Force fields beyond the balcony’s perimeter prevented the invisible storm from buffeting and freezing them, though such was the power of the screaming rush of air that a faint echo of its voice could be heard even through the field; a distant, thrumming wail, like some animal trapped and shrieking on the ice far below.
When they had first taken up station here during the previous night the air had been perfectly still and you could hear the cracks and creaks and booms of the glacier as it ground against the torn shoulders of the mountains that formed its banks and scoured its way across the great gouged bed of fractured rock beneath.
“A bluff?” Turminder Xuss sounded unconvinced.
“Yes,” Anaplian said. “Could it not be that the Morthanveld merely pretend to be on the brink of becoming like the Culture in order to keep the Culture from interfering in their business?”
“Hmm,” the drone said. “That wouldn’t work for long.”
“Even so.”
“And you’d wonder why the idea that the Morthanveld were poised in this manner was allowed to become so prevalent in the first place.”
Anaplian realised they had got rather rapidly to the point that all such conversations regarding the strategic intentions of the Culture tended to arrive at sooner or later, where it became clear that the issue boiled down to the question What Are The Minds Really Up To? This was always a good question, and it was usually only churls and determinedly diehard cynics who even bothered to point out that it rarely, if ever, arrived paired up with an equally good answer.
The normal, almost ingrained response of people at this point was to metaphorically throw their hands in the air and exclaim that if that was what it really all boiled down to then there was no point in even attempting to pursue the issue further, because as soon as the motivations, analyses and stratagems of Minds became the defining factor in a matter, all bets were most profoundly off, for the simple reason that any and all efforts to second-guess such infinitely subtle and hideously devious devices were self-evidently futile.
Anaplian was not so sure about this. It was her suspicion that it suited the purposes of the Minds rather too neatly that people believed this so unquestioningly. Such a reaction represented not so much the honest appraisal of further enquiry as being pointless as an unthinking rejection of the need to enquire at all.
“Perhaps the Minds are jealous,” Anaplian said. “They don’t want the Morthanveld to steal even the echo of their thunder by becoming like them. They patronise the waterworlders in order to antagonise them, make them do the opposite of what is supposedly anticipated, so that they become less like the Culture. Because that is what the Minds really desire.”
“That makes as much sense as anything I’ve heard so far on the matter,” Turminder Xuss said, politely.
She was not being allowed to take the drone with her on her return to Sursamen. SC agent + combat drone was a combination that was well known far beyond the Culture. Although perilously close to a cliché, it remained a partnership you could, allegedly, still frighten children and bad people with.
Anaplian felt a faint tingle somewhere inside her head and experienced a sort of buzzing sensation throughout her body. She tried clicking into her skein sense, that let her monitor significant gravity waves in her vicinity and alerted her to any warp activity nearby, but the system was off-line, flagged indefinitely inoperable though not as a result of hostile action (nevertheless, she could feel at least one part of her SC-amended neural lace protesting, some automatic system forever watching for damage by stealth reacting to what it would register as the impairment of her abilities and the degradation of her inherent survivability with pre-programmed outrage).
The platform’s own drone-standard AI was, with her permission, moving slowly through her suite of enhancements and gradually turning off those it was thought the Morthanveld might object to. Click. There went the electromagnetic effector ability. She tried interfering with the field unit buried in the ceiling overhead, which was keeping the air on the balcony insulated from the thin and well-below-freezing airstream coursing around the platform. No connection. She could still sense EM activity but she couldn’t affect it any more. She had lived most of her life without such abilities and to date had used very few of them in anger, but she experienced their going with a distinct sense of loss and even dismay.
She looked down at her fingernails. They appeared normal at the moment, but she’d already thought the signal that would make them detach and fall off by the following morning. There would be no pain or blood and new nails would grow back during the next few days, but they wouldn’t be Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons, they wouldn’t be lasers.
Oh well, she thought, inspecting them, even ordinary, unamended nails could still scratch.
Click. There, she couldn’t radio now either. No transmissions possible. Trapped inside her own head. She tried to communicate via her lace, calling up Leeb Scoperin, one of her colleagues here and her most recent lover. Nothing directly; she would have to go through the platform’s systems, just like ordinary Culture people. She had rather hoped to see Leeb before she left, but he just hadn’t been able to get away from whatever it was he was doing at such short notice.
Turminder Xuss’ own systems must have registered something happening. “That you?” it asked.