“Oh, just kidding you on,” he said, smiling. “The vote was already lost so I joined in to look less… perennially obedient.” He frowned. “But you should realise, Septame; everything is breaking down a little now, including your grip. What worked until now — obligations, understandings, favours owed, the promise of future advancement and the threat of secrets becoming public and so on — they don’t have quite the force they did before.” He shrugged, then smiled broadly. “This is what you wanted, Ban. What you worked for all this time, what you’ve engineered. End of an era. Ha! End of the end of all eras.” He waved both hands this time, spilling a little wine. “School’s breaking up. People are out to play.”
Scoaliera Tefwe, who had been a friend and a lover of Ngaroe QiRia long ago, when he was already a very old man and she had been of conventional middle age — a little under two hundred — woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries.
Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken.
All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening nearby, and inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied.
It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. She opened her eyes.
SIMULATION, said the glowing red letters along the bottom of her field of vision. Ah, she thought, whereupon the word faded away.
So she was still sort of asleep, after all. But her consciousness and sense of embodiment were being woken up.
She was, apparently, already sitting, fully dressed, in a chair facing a table in a large, pleasant-looking room of some antiquity with a view — to one side, through opened floor-length windows — over mountains lined with trees and a lake whose shore was lined with villages. The wakes of a few boats left long white Vs on the wind-ruffled waters.
At the other end of the table from the windows, there was a time display in an ornate wooden case. She looked at the date.
My, that had been a long sleep.
Across the table from her there was a chair. When she looked away from the time display, a figure hazed from nothing through transparency into seeming solidity over the course of a couple of seconds. The small, pale, androgynous figure now sitting opposite her appeared to be the avatar of the LSV You Call This Clean? This was reassuring; she was still where she might have expected to be. The calm conventionality of the whole being-woken process had been a fairly infallible sign that nothing was likely to be too wrong, but this helped confirm it.
On the other hand, she was usually woken lying down, with time to take stock if she wanted, and swing herself off the couch, perhaps take the air and take in the view from the balcony, and only go to sit at the table when she felt she wanted to. Not this time, though; getting the basic minimum here.
“Scoaliera,” the virtual avatar said, smiling.
“YC,” she replied. The You Call This Clean? didn’t name its avatars or avatoids separately; people usually just called them ‘YC’. “Are we both well?”
“We are.”
Always good to know that your Stored self and the ship carrying it/you were judged to be well according to the punctilious standards of a Culture Mind. “So,” she said, “what is it?”
“Hoping you’ll agree to take a trip, fully uploaded-style, then to be downloaded into an avatoid.”
“Where? Why?”
“Not sure where yet; you might be able to help answer that yourself. The why is that we need you to look for Ngaroe QiRia.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Do you now?” The “we” the ship was referring to would be either Contact section, or Special Circumstances. Exactly who would become clear shortly, she didn’t doubt.
The avatar nodded. “If you’d be so kind.”
“Why?”
“He might have some information it would be useful to know.”
“He’s been alive for nearly ten millennia; I’m sure he has a lot of information it would be useful to know.”
“No doubt. But this is probably something quite specific.”
“What?”
“Not sure, but somehow relating to the shortly forthcoming Sublimation of the Gzilt.”
This was news to her. She’d been Stored, this time, over four hundred years earlier, when, as far as she could recall, the Gzilt had seemed no more likely to go for Subliming than the Culture itself.
“That the best you’ve got?”
“More detail?” YC asked.
“More detail.”
“You insist?”
“I do.”
The ship told her about the intercepted message from the Zihdren-Remnanter and subsequent developments.
Tefwe thought. “Do we have a view on or interest in whether the Gzilt Sublime or not?”
“No.”
“Take me through the levels.”
“Culture as a whole; no — their business. Contact; not really — opinions differ, mildly. Some temporary local upset to be expected, in the short term especially relating to Scavengers, but all part of the process. SC; no stated interest. Probably some difference of opinion but nobody expressing. Not even a grumble of discussion let alone action. And things are otherwise quiet, so lack of interest not a result of distraction, temporary or otherwise.”
“So this isn’t an SC thing?”
“Not directly, though elements usually associated are cooperating. Specifically, a fast ship will be made available; whatever’s closest to wherever you say you need to go. Other ships at your disposal if necessary should serial uploading and embodiment be required. Simming as unlikely to become an SC focus. Probably.”
“So why are we bothering?”
“Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case it turns out to be something we should have bothered about. Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.” The YC smiled apologetically. “Very small thing attached to very momentous thing. One point three trillion people heading into the big Enfold in less than twenty days from now, but if the Zihdren-Remnanter news about the Book of Truth gets out, that might change things. And maybe it should change things. But either way, it would be good to know the truth. Even if we discover the truth, we don’t have to volunteer it, and even if we discover the truth, don’t volunteer it but are asked to provide it, we still don’t have to — though that’d be harder to justify. The point is, if we are asked and we haven’t even bothered to look, we look bad, and if we are asked and decide to tell what we know, we want to be confident what we’re able to offer really is the truth, or as close as we could reasonably get to it.”
“How many new faces know the old guy’s not a figment?”
“Just one beyond reasonable doubt; the GSV Contents May Differ. There was no leak as such; the ship just did some inspired digging and was owed favours by the right mix of craft. Though the others in the handling group will have been briefed there’s a possibility.”
“The ITG?”
“No. Fresh group. Nobody’s heard from the Interesting Times Gang all the while you’ve been Stored.”
“How remiss.”
“As well as waking you with the suggestion you might care to return to the fray, I’ve been asked to enquire if you know of any other ships that might have helped Mr QiRia over the years. Aside from the Warm, Considering, which we know about.”
“The only other one I remember was called the Smile Tolerantly, an ancient GCU, but the last I heard it was about to become Eccentric or Sublime or do something equally unhelpful.”