The Zoologist was one of a relatively small group of Superlifters to have survived the war. Then, even before the great conflict had ended — but long after the Culture had produced fantastically more powerful warships by the multitude — it had done something relatively unusuaclass="underline" it had Sublimed, all by itself.
A little later it had done something for which the term “unusual” was woefully inadequate: it had come back again.
It was practically the definition of a Mind that the word — properly capitalised — meant a conscious entity able to go into the Sublime, not evaporate, and even — maybe, sometimes, very occasionally, in fact so seldom that it would be quite close to most people’s statistical definition of “never” — be able to return, in some sense still viable and identifiably the same personality as that which had made the transition from Real to Sublime in the first place.
If the Zoologist’s reasons for wanting to Sublime had — aside from the obvious, of wanting to experience the sheer ineffable wonderfulness of it all — been opaque, its reasons for coming back to the Real were simply baffling. The Mind itself had no explanation whatsoever, and seemed bemused by the question.
Come back it had though, and — seemingly having no desire to remain in its own resurfaced vessel or even substrate — it had canvassed various of its earlier comrades amongst the Contact fleet (those that had survived; the severe attrition of the early years of the Idiran war came into effect here) to see if any of them would house its soul for posterity, or at least until it got bored and changed its mind again, or whatever.
Meanwhile, Contact’s finest and most expert Minds in all things to do with the Sublime had tried debriefing the returned Mind. They had initially been ecstatic at having one of their own who had been there and made the return trip (lots of Minds had promised to do so over the millennia, though none ever did; the Zoologist had made no such undertaking, but had returned). This had, however, proven farcical.
The ship’s memories were abstracted, beyond vague; effectively useless. The Mind itself was basically a mess; self-restructured (presumably) along lines it was impossible to see the logic behind. Identifiably the same, it was expressed in the most bizarre and obfuscatory tangle of needlessly complicated and self-referential analytical/meditative and sagational/ratiocinative processal architecture it had been the misfortune of all concerned ever to contemplate.
Special Circumstances — Contact’s scruple-free wing and the bit that was as close to military intelligence and espionage matters as the Culture even reluctantly admitted to possessing — had been more than happy to take receipt of the old ship’s physical form, desperate to see if its time in the Sublime had altered it in any way, or if its re-creation back out of the Sublime — if that was the way it worked — had left tell-tale signs giving some or indeed any clue to how the Sublime worked (either way the answer was, it hadn’t).
They ended up no wiser even regarding the seemingly non-get-roundable requirement that you could not go disembodied into the Sublime. You had to make the transition substrate and alclass="underline" brains and whole bodies, computational matrices and whole ships — or the equivalent — seemed to be required, as well as the personalities and memories such physical ware encoded.
In any event, finally free of all this unwelcome and troubling attention, the Mind that had been housed in the Zoologist had taken up residence inside the substrate of the Caconym, and retired to a life of time-passing hobbies and quiet contemplation.
Quiet and extremely slow contemplation; the Zoologist had insisted on an allocation of computational resources within the Caconym’s substrate so modest and restricted that its full consciousness could only be expressed with a lot of calculational fancy footwork and some very intense looping. It had been offered as much power as it might have needed, sufficient to let it interact with its host in full Mind real time, but had declined. What all this meant was that for the Caconym to talk to the Zoologist, or interact with it in any other meaningful way, it had to slow itself down to the sort of speed a non-augmented human would have been able to keep up with. This, apparently, signified some sort of philosophical authenticity to the Zoologist, and sheer laziness to the Caconym.
Back in the Real, the principal consciousness of the Caconym was watching the skies and stars around it whip past as it raced the Pressure Drop to Gzilt space, while simultaneously performing prodigious feats of potential pattern- and relevance-spotting as sub-systems reported back after performing multi-dimensional searches of every database known to intelligent life, all to look for any additional information that might be brought to bear on the issue under consideration. At the same time, it was running simulation after simulation to try to build up a reliable prediction matrix regarding how things might turn out.
In that context, the Mind was happily thinking at close to maximum speed, barely below serious, full-on combat velocities and cycle times, thoroughly and satisfyingly involved with and wrapped up within a problem that, for all its thorniness, possessed the incomparable virtue of being important and real, not imagined; here on the other hand, it was reduced to a conversation that would take subjective months between each question and response.
The Caconym sometimes envisaged its substrate architecture as a giant castle; a castle the size of an enormous city, the size of a whole world of castles all aggregated together and piled one on top of another until you had a sort of fractal fortress that looked suitably and stonily castle-like from afar, with walls, towers and battlements and so on but which, as you got closer, resolved into something much bigger than it had appeared, as it became clear that each — for example — tower was made up of a conglomeration of much smaller towers, stacked and serried and piled one upon another to resemble a vastly larger one.
What remained of the Zoologist’s soul had taken up residence in one of these tiny towers; one that perched on top of a colossal meta-tower, forming what, from a distance, looked like a thick spire.
In some states of mind, the Caconym would take the time to walk through its own substrate image, coalescing its sense of self into a human-resembling avatoid and strolling through this virtualised castle-scape from the vastly complicated main gate until, via ramps and walkways, halls and stairways, it got to its destination. Other times it flew straight there in the form of a giant bird, flapping slowly over the roofs, parapets and embrasures, bastions, courtyards and keeps until it found the location it was looking for.
This time it imagined itself as a single vast storm cell of dark, lightning-flecked cloud poised circling ponderously over the entirety of the vast castle like some malevolent galaxy of slow-revolving mist, then, from the lowering funnel of a developing tornado mouth, suddenly consolidated itself into a single raptor, the skies clearing instantly as the bird folded in its wings and stooped, cannonball-quick, to the spire-tower, spreading its wings to brake its headlong plunge an instant before it would have dashed itself against the stones of the tower’s parapet.
The ship re-imagined itself as a human avatoid as it touched down onto the flagstones of the tower’s machicolated battlements. It raised a hand to knock on a stout wooden door, but it opened by itself.
Inside, where the virtual environment belonged to and was envisaged by the Zoologist, the tower opened out into a substantial but not preposterously big single-storey circular space which resembled a cross between the study of a wizard specialising in highly exotic stuffed fauna and the laboratory of a mad scientist with a weakness for bubbling vials and giant items of electrical equipment with conspicuous insulation issues. The whole was lit by hazy sunlight coming through tall, skinny windows. Beyond the portion swept by the door the floor was a mess; the Caconym had to wade through ankle and then knee-deep litter to make any progress into the room.