Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
The gun-metal bulk of the drone called Jase appeared at the far end of the terrace, out of the lodge itself. Fal smiled when she saw it and sat down on a stone bench jutting out from the low wall which separated terrace from view. They were high up, but it was a hot and windless day; she wiped a little sweat from her forehead as the old drone floated along the terrace towards her, the slanting lines of sunlight passing over its body in a steady rhythm. The drone settled on the stones beside the bench, its broad, flat top about level with the crown of the girl’s head.
‘Isn’t it a lovely day, Jase?’ Fal said, looking back at the distant mountains again.
‘It is,’ Jase said. The drone had an unusually deep and full-toned voice, and made the most of it. For a thousand years or more Culture drones had had aura fields which coloured according to their mood – their equivalent of facial expression and body language – but Jase was old, made long before aura fields were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them. It preferred either to rely on its voice to express what it felt, or to remain inscrutable.
‘Damn.’ Fal shook her head, looking at the far-away snow. ‘I wish I was climbing.’ She made a clicking noise with her mouth and looked down at her right leg, which stuck straight out in front of her. She had broken the leg eight days before, while climbing in the mountains on the other side of the plain. Now it was splinted up with a fine tracery of field-strands, concealed beneath fashionably tight trousers.
Jase ought, she thought, to have taken this as an excuse to lecture her again on the advisability of only climbing with a floater harness, or with a rescue drone near by, or at the very least on not climbing alone, but the old machine said nothing. She looked at it, her tanned face shining in the light. ‘So, Jase, what have you got for me? Business?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Fal settled herself as comfortably as she could on the stone bench and crossed her arms. Jase stretched out a short force field from its casing to support the awkward-looking outstretched leg, though it knew that the splint’s own fields were taking all the strain.
‘Spit it out,’ Fal said.
‘You may recall an item from the daily synopsis eighteen days ago about one of our spacecraft which was cobbled together by a factory vessel in the volume of space Inside from the Sullen Gulf; the factory craft had to destruct, and later so did the ship it made.’
‘I remember,’ said Fal, who forgot little about anything, and nothing at all from a daily synopsis. ‘It was a mongrel because the factory was trying to get a GSV Mind out of the way.’
‘Well,’ Jase said, its voice a little weary, ‘we have a problem with that.’
Fal smiled.
The Culture, there could be no doubt, relied profoundly on its machines for both its strategy and tactics in the war it was now engaged in. Indeed, a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level than did any single human or group of humans within the society. The Minds that the Culture’s factory craft, safe Orbitals and larger GSVs were now producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy. They were so intelligent that no human was capable of understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life).
From those mental colossi, down through the more ordinary but still sentient machines and the smart but ultimately mechanistic and predictable computers, right down to the smallest circuit in a micromissile hardly more intelligent than a fly, the Culture had placed its bets – long before the Idiran war had been envisaged – on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
A hostile reading of such a situation might lead to the idea that the discovery by the Culture’s Minds that some humans were actually capable of matching and occasionally beating their record for accurately assessing a given set of facts would lead to machine indignation and blown circuits, but this was not the case. It fascinated those Minds that such a puny and chaotic collection of mental faculties could by some sleight of neuron produce an answer to a problem which was as good as theirs. There was an explanation, of course, and it perhaps had something to do with patterns of cause and effect which even the almost god-like power of the Minds had difficulty trying to fathom; it also had quite a lot to do with sheer weight of numbers.
There were in excess of eighteen trillion people in the Culture, just about every one of them well nourished, extensively educated and mentally alert, and only thirty or forty of them had this unusual ability to forecast and assess on a par with a well-informed Mind (of which there were already many hundreds of thousands). It was not impossible that this was pure luck; toss eighteen trillion coins in the air for a while and a few of them are going to keep landing the same side up for a long, long time.
Fal ’Ngeestra was a Culture Referer, one of those thirty, maybe forty, out of the eighteen trillion who could give you an intuitive idea of what was going to happen, or tell you why she thought that something which had already happened had happened the way it did, and almost certainly turn out right every time. She was being handed problems and ideas constantly, being both used and assessed herself. Nothing she said or did went unrecorded; nothing she experienced went unnoticed. She did insist, however, that when she was climbing, alone or with friends, she must be left to her own devices and not watched by the Culture’s. She would take a pocket terminal with her to record everything, but she would not have a real-time link with any part of the Mind network on the Plate she lived on.
Because of that insistence she had lain in the snow with a shattered leg for a day and a night before a search party had discovered her.
The drone Jase started to give her the details of the flight of the nameless ship from its mother-craft, of its interception and self-destruction. Fal had turned her head, though, and was only half listening. Her eyes and mind were on the distant, snowy slopes, where she hoped she would be climbing again in a few days’ time, once these stupid bones in her leg had thoroughly healed.
The mountains were beautiful. There were other mountains on the up slope side of the lodge terrace, reaching into the clear blue sky, but they were tame stuff indeed compared to those sharp, rearing peaks across the plain. She knew that was why they had put her in this lodge; they hoped she would climb those nearer mountains rather than take the trouble to hop into a flyer and head over the plain. It was a silly idea, though; they had to let her see the mountains, or she wouldn’t be herself, and as long as she could see them she just had to climb them. Idiots.
On a planet, she thought, You wouldn’t be able to see them so well. You wouldn’t be able to see the lower foothills, the way the mountains rise from the plain just so.
The lodge, the terrace, the mountains and the plain were on an Orbital. Humans had built this place, or at least built the machines that built the machines that . . . Well, you could go on and on. The Plate of the Orbital was almost perfectly flat; in fact, vertically it was slightly concave, but as the internal diameter of the completed Orbital – properly formed only once all the individual Plates had been joined up and the last dividing wall was removed – would measure over three million kilometres, the curvature was a great deal less than on the convex surface of any human-habitable globe. So from Fal’s raised vantage point she could see right to the base of the distant mountains.
Fal thought it must be very strange to live on a planet and have to look over a curve; so that, for example, you would see the top
She was suddenly aware that she was thinking about planets because of something Jase had just said. She turned round and looked earnestly at the dark grey machine, playing back her short-term memory to recall exactly what it had just said.
‘This Mind went underneath the planet in hyperspace?’ she said. ‘Then warped inside?’
‘That was what it said it was trying to do when it sent the coded message in its destruct pattern. As the planet is still there it must have succeeded. Had it failed, at least half a per cent of its mass would have reacted with the planet’s own material as though it was antimatter.’
‘I see.’ Fal scratched at one cheek with a finger. ‘I thought that wasn’t supposed to be possible?’ Her voice contained the question. She looked at Jase.
‘What?’ it said.
‘Doing . . .’ She scowled at not being immediately understood and waved one hand impatiently. ‘. . . Doing what it did. Going under something so big in hyperspace and then bouncing over. I was told even we couldn’t do that.’
‘So was the Mind in question, but it was desperate. The General War Council itself decided that we should try to duplicate the feat, using a similar Mind and a spare planet.’
‘What happened?’ Fal asked, grinning at the idea of a ‘spare’ planet.
‘No Mind would even consider the idea; far too dangerous. Even the eligible ones on the War Council demurred.’
Fal laughed, gazing up at the red and white flowers curled round the trelliswork overhead. Jase, which deep down was a hopeless romantic, thought her laughter sounded like the tinkling of mountain streams, and always recorded her laughs for itself, even when they were snorts or guffaws, even when she was being rude and it was a dirty laugh. Jase knew a machine, even a sentient one, could not die of shame, but it also knew that it would do just that if Fal ever guessed any of this. Fal stopped laughing. She said:
‘What does this thing actually look like? I mean you never see them by themselves, they’re always in something . . . a ship or whatever. And how did it – what did it use to warp with?’
‘Externally,’ Jase said in its usual, calm, measured tones, ‘it is an ellipsoid. Fields up, it looks like a very small ship. It’s about ten metres long and two and a half in diameter. Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper; those are what make it so heavy because they’re so dense. It weighs nearly fifteen thousand tonnes. It is fitted with its own power, of course, and several field generators, any of which could be pressed into service as emergency motors, and indeed are designed with this in mind. Only the outer envelope is constantly in real space, the rest – all the thinking parts, anyway – stay in hyperspace.
‘Assuming, as we must, that the Mind did what it said it was going to do, there is only one possible way it could have accomplished the task, given that it does not have a warp motor or Displacer.’ Jase paused as Fal sat forward, her elbows on her knees, her hands clenched under her chin. It saw her shifting her weight on her backside and a tiny grimace appear fleetingly on her face. Jase decided she was getting uncomfortable on the hard stone bench, and ordered one of the lodge drones to bring some cushions. ‘The Mind does have an internal warping unit, but it is supposed to be used only to expand microscopic volumes of the memory so that there is more space around the sections of information – in the form of third-level elementary particle-spirals – which it wants to change. The normal volume limit on that warping unit is less than a cubic millimetre; somehow the ship Mind jury-rigged it so that it would encompass its entire body and let it appear within the planet’s surface. A clear air space would be the logical place to go for, and the tunnels of the Command System seem an obvious choice; that is where it said it would head for.’
‘Right,’ Fal said, nodding. ‘OK. Now, what are – oh . . .’
A small drone carrying two large cushions appeared at her side. ‘Hmm, thanks,’ Fal said, levering herself up with one hand and placing one cushion beneath her, the other at her back. The small drone floated off to the lodge again. Fal settled herself. ‘Did you ask for these, Jase?’ she asked.
‘Not me,’ Jase lied, secretly pleased. ‘What were you going to ask?’
‘These tunnels,’ Fal said, leaning forward more comfortably this time. ‘This Command System. What is it?’
‘Briefly, it consists of a winding, paired loop of twenty-two-metre diameter tunnels buried five kilometres deep. The whole system is several hundred kilometres in length. The trains were designed to be the wartime mobile command centres of a state which once existed on the planet, when it was at the intermediate-sophisticated stage-three phase. State-of-the-art weaponry at the time was the fusion bomb, delivered by transplanetary guided rocket. The Command System was designed to—’
‘Yes.’ Fal waved her hand quickly. ‘Protect, keep mobile so they couldn’t be blown up. Right?’
‘Yes.’
‘What sort of rock cover did they have?’
‘Granite,’ Jase said.
‘Batholithic?’
‘Just a second,’ Jase said, consulting elsewhere. ‘Yes. Correct: a batholith.’
‘A batholith?’ Fal said, eyebrows raised. ‘Just one?’
‘Just one.’
‘This is a slightly low-G world? Thick crust?’
‘Both.’
‘Uh-huh. So the Mind’s inside these . . .’ She looked along the terrace, not really seeing anything, but in her mind’s eye looking down kilometres of dark tunnels (and thinking there might be some pretty impressive mountains above them: all that granite; low-G; good climbing territory). She looked at the machine again. ‘So what happened? It’s a Planet of the Dead; did the natives eventually do it to themselves?’
‘With biological weapons, not nukes, to the last humanoid, eleven thousand years ago.’
‘Hmm.’ Fal nodded. Now it was obvious why the Dra’Azon had made Schar’s World one of their Planets of the Dead. If you were a pure-energy superspecies long retired from the normal, matter-based life of the galaxy, and your conceit was to cordon off and preserve the odd planet or two you thought might serve as a fitting monument to death and futility, Schar’s World with its short and sordid history sounded like the sort of place you’d put pretty near the top of your list.
Something occurred to her. ‘How come the tunnels haven’t sealed up again over all that time? Five klicks’ worth of pressure . . .’
‘We don’t know,’ Jase sighed. ‘The Dra’Azon have not been very forthcoming with information. It is possible the System’s engineers devised a technique for withstanding the pressure over such a period. This is unlikely, admittedly, but then they were ingenious.’
‘Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible,’ Fal said, and made a little snorting noise.
Jase felt pleasure at the girl’s words (if not the snort), but at the same time detected in them a tinge of that mixture of contempt and patronising smugness the Culture found it so difficult not to exhibit when surveying the mistakes of less advanced societies, even though the source civilisations of its own mongrel past had been no less fallible. Still, the underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
‘So,’ Fal said, looking down as she tapped her one good heel on the grey stones, ‘the Mind’s in the tunnels; the Dra’Azon’s on the outside. What’s the Quiet Barrier limit?’
‘The usual half-distance to the nearest other star: three hundred and ten standard light-days in the case of Schar’s World at the moment.’
‘—And . . . ?’ She held out her hand to Jase and raised her head and her eyebrows. Flower shadows moved on her neck as the gentlest of breezes started and ruffled the blossoms on the trellis
‘Well,’ Jase said, ‘the reason the Mind was allowed in at all was because—’
‘In distress. Right. Go on.’
Jase, who had stopped being annoyed by Fal’s interruptions the first time she had brought it a mountain flower, went on, ‘There is a small base on Schar’s World, as there is on almost all the Planets of the Dead. As usual it is staffed from a small, nominally neutral, non-dynamic society of some galactic maturity—’
‘The Changer,’ Fal broke in, quite slowly, as though guessing the answer to a puzzle which had been troubling her for hours and ought to have been simple. She looked through the flower-strewn trellis, to a blue sky where a few small white clouds were moving slowly. She looked back to the machine. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? That Changer guy who . . . and that Special Circumstancer – Balveda – and the place where you have to be senile to rule. They’re Changers on Schar’s World and this bloke—’ She broke off and frowned. ‘But I thought he was dead.’
‘Now we’re not so sure. The last message from the GCU Nervous Energy seemed to indicate he might have escaped.’
‘What happened to the GCU?’
‘We don’t know. Contact was lost while it was trying to capture rather than destroy the Idiran ship. Both are presumed lost.’
‘Capture it, eh?’ Fal said tartly. ‘Another show-off Mind. But that’s it, isn’t it? The Idirans might be able to use this guy – what’s his name? Do we know?’
‘Bora Horza Gobuchul.’
‘Whereas we don’t have any Changers.’
‘We do, but the one we have is on the other side of the galaxy on an urgent job not connected with the war; it would take half a year to get her there. Besides, she has never been to Schar’s World; the tricky part about this problem is that Bora Horza Gobuchul has.’
‘Ho-ho,’ Fal said.
‘In addition, we have unconfirmed information that the same Idiran fleet which knocked out the fleeing ship also tried unsuccessfully to follow the Mind to Schar’s World with a small landing force. Thus the Dra’Azon concerned is going to be suspicious. It might let Bora Horza Gobuchul through, as he has served before with the caretaker staff on the planet, but even he is not certain to gain entry. Anybody else is very doubtful indeed.’