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the avatar behave in a confused, distracted state that the ship believed
somehow reflected, on
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Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug 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
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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.
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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 inves-tigating 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.
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One month in, and the ship had turned up nothing special; just a few bits of
uncharted interstellar debris, duly logged, and that was all. There was a
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hint - a probably false-signal resonation in the skein of space-time behind
them - that there might be a craft following them, but then it was not unusual
for other civilisations to follow ships of the Zetetic Elench.
The Elench had once been part of the Culture proper; they had split off
fifteen hundred years ago, the few habitats and the many Rocks, ships, drones
and humans concerned preferring to take a slightly different line from the
mainstream
Culture. The Culture aimed to stay roughly as it was and change at least a
proportion of those lesser civilisations it discovered, while acting as an
honest broker between the Involved - the more developed societies who made up
the current players in the great galactic civilisational game.
The Elench wanted to alter themselves, not others; they sought out the
undiscovered not to change it but to be changed by it. The Elencher ideal was
that somebody from a more stable society - the Culture itself was the perfect
example -
could meet the same Elencher - Rock, ship, drone or human - on successive
occasions and never encounter the same entity twice. They would have changed
between meetings just because in the interim they had encountered some other
civilisation and incorporated some different technology into their bodies or
information into their minds. It was a search for the sort of pan-relevant
truth that the Culture's monosophical approach was unlikely ever to throw up;
it was a vocation, a mission, a calling.
The results of this attitude were as various as might be imagined; entire
Elencher fleets had either never come back from expeditions, and remained
lost, or had eventually been found, the vessels and their crews completely, if
willingly, subsumed by another civilisation.
At its most extreme, in the old days, some craft had been discovered turned
entirely into Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects; selfishly
auto-replicating organisms determined to turn every piece of matter they found
into copies of themselves. There were techniques - beyond simple outright
destruction, which was always an option - for dealing with this sort of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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