Alternatively, every now and again a species would attempt to take by force of arms what those involved in Dweller Studies attempted to wrest from the Dwellers by polite but dogged inquiry. Force, it had been discovered — independently, amazingly often — did not really work with Dwellers. They felt no pain, held their own continued survival (and that of others, given the slightest provocation) to be of relatively little consequence and seemed to embody, apparently at the cellular level, the belief that all that really mattered, ever, was a value unique to themselves which they defined as a particular kind of kudos, one of whose guiding principles appeared to be that if any outside influence attempted to mess with them they had to resist it to the last breath in the bodies of all concerned, regardless.
Dwellers were almost everywhere and had been there practically for ever. They had learned a few things about making war over that time, and while their war machines were believed to be as customarily unreliable — and eccentrically designed, built and maintained — as every other piece of technology they deigned to involve themselves with, that didn’t mean they weren’t deadly; usually for all concerned, and within a disconcertingly large volume.
Other species had prevailed against Dwellers on occasion. Entire planetary populations of them had been wiped out and whole gas-giants dismantled to provide the raw material for one of those monstrous megastructure projects that Quick species in particular seemed so keen on building, apparently just because they could. But the long-term results were, to date, inevitably unhappy.
Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and — when it suited them — single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when — or even geological ages after when — you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection travelling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of “What the fu—?” before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.
Retaliation, where it was still possible, and on the few occasions it had been tried, led without fail towards a horribly messy war of attrition, whereupon the realisation of the sheer scale of the Dweller civilisation (if one could even call it that) and its past — and therefore probably future — longevity more often than not had a sobering effect on whatever species had been unwise enough to set themselves against the Dwellers in the first place.
Attempting to hold your local Dweller population hostage in the hope of influencing another one — or a group of others — was an almost laughably lame and even counter-productive strategy. Dwellers of any given gas-giant thought little enough of their own collective safety; giving them an excuse to show how little solidarity they felt with any other group of their own kind only led to events of particular and spectacular grisliness, for all that the genetic and cultural variation between Dweller populations was much less than that displayed by any other galaxy-wide grouping.
The long, long-arrived-at consensus, particularly amongst those still nursing civilisational bruises from earlier encounters with what was arguably one of the galaxy’s most successful species, or those with the images of what had happened to others still fresh in their data banks, was that, on balance, it was best just to leave the Dwellers alone.
Left to themselves the Dwellers disturbed nobody except occasionally themselves and those who thought too deeply about what they really represented. Their history, after all, like that of the galaxy as a whole, was one of almost but not quite uninterrupted peace and tranquillity: billions and billions of years of thankfully nothing much happening at all. In over ten billion years of civilisation there had been only three major Chaoses and the number of genuine galaxy-spanning wars didn’t even make it into double figures. In base eight!
That was a record that the Dwellers seemed to feel everybody concerned ought to feel mildly proud of. Especially themselves.
“Welcome all! Chief Seer, good to see you! Seer Taak, Seer Yurnvic. Young friends. And this must be Colonel Hatherence. Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.” Duelbe, the bald, nearly spherical major-domo of the Third Fury Shared Facility, greeted them in the transit hall as the military troop carrier disengaged and turned back towards the Pyralis. A couple of the youngest Seers, who had patently never encountered the positively ball-like form of Duelbe before, stared. It was as a rule at such moments that comparisons regarding the similarity in shape of Third Fury and the major-domo of its Shared Facility came to mind. Happily, on this occasion, if they were thought they went unvoiced.
Servants took charge of luggage pallets. Hatherence shooed away retainers who offered to help her manoeuvre in the relatively confined space — the dome-like hall, like the rest of the mostly underground facility, had been rebuilt on a human scale since the departure of the last species to be granted Seer status, with little spatial concession to other, effectively larger species. Colonel Hatherence was happy to float where she could without assistance, thank you, using trim-vanes on the outside of her discus of esuit to propel her from place to place.
“Ah!” Braam Ganscerel announced loudly, bouncing along the hall’s floor in long floating strides, idly fending himself off the ceiling above with casual prods of one staff like some strangely graceful, if inverted, pole vaulter. “That’s better! One rarely appreciates gravity so much as when faced with so little of it, eh, Duelbe?”
The major-domo smiled broadly, even though Fassin knew he must have heard the old man say this a dozen times or more. The retinue of junior Seers apparently hadn’t, and gave every impression of being barely able to contain their hearty guffaws within their aching sides.
The three double discs soared above a great curved canyon of cloud sliced deep within what looked like a convex bank of blood-red snow a hundred kilometres high. Much further above, a sky of rushing yellow streamers afforded brief glimpses of a wanly cerise sky, dotted with the spike-points of stars and, occasionally, a single, visibly sky-crossing moon like a soft brown snowball. The formation of flying machines curved across towards the blood-red bank of vapour and disappeared into it.
Senses shifted. He felt himself reaching out with a slick effortlessness into mag and rad, grav-grad and radio, pulling in a composite picture of his environment thousands of kilometres in diameter and hundreds deep, placing him with pin-sharp clarity in a great reticulated accumulation of magnetic fields, radiation and gravitational gradient, all overlaid on the wide-light image still available and the jelly-like ghost-vista of sound-scape.
Still taking the lead from Paggs, leading the trio, they dived towards a sharp thermocline coming into view a dozen klicks down.
They flew out into a wide bubble of relative sight-clarity, then into a squall of water snow. They dived deeper, through a band of pressure and temperature where water rain fell, pattering hard against the skins of their whirling double discs, then on down, down into even wide-light darkness, down to the warm hydrogen slush where the discs floated like giant double-cone yo-yos, bobbing, steaming, flickering signals to each other.