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don't see what the problem is, really. In fact I keep telling them it'll be a
great thing for Culture-Affront relations. I'd really be able to relate to
these guys; I could really be one of them. Hell; isn't that what this
ambassador shit is supposed to be all about?' He belched. 'I'm sure it could
be done. The module says it could but it shouldn't and says it's asked
elsewhere and I know all the standard objections, but I think it'd be a great
idea. I'm damn sure
I'd enjoy it, I mean I could always sort of zap back into my own body anytime&
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this is really shocking you, isn't it, Uncle?'
The image shook its head. 'You always were the oddest child, Byr. I suppose I
should have known what to expect from you. Anybody who'd go out there to live
with the Affront in the first place has to be slightly strange.'
Genar-Hofoen held his arms out wide. 'But I'm just doing what you did!' he
protested.
'I only wanted to meet weird aliens, Byr; I didn't want to become one of
them.'
'Heck, and I thought you'd be proud of me.'
'Proud but worried. Byr, are you seriously suggesting that becoming an
Affronter would be part of your price for doing what SC asks?'
'Certainly,' Genar-Hofoen said, and squinted up at the hammer-beamed ceiling.
'I
vaguely recall asking for a ship as well last night and the
Death And Gravity saying yes& ' he shook his head and laughed. 'Must have
imagined it.' He finished the last of the steak.
'They've told me what they're prepared to offer, Byr,' Tishlin said. 'You
didn't imagine it.'
Genar-Hofoen looked up. 'Really?' he asked.
'Really,' Tishlin said.
Genar-Hofoen nodded slowly. 'And how did they persuade you to act as go-
between, Uncle?' he asked.
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'They only had to ask, Byr. I may not be in Contact any more but I'm happy to
help out when I can, when they have a problem.'
'This isn't Contact, Uncle, this is Special Circumstances,' Byr said quietly.
'They tend to play by slightly different rules.'
Tishlin looked serious; the image sounded defensive. 'I know that, boy. I
asked around some of my contacts before I agreed to do this; everything checks
out, everything seems to be& reliable. I suggest you do the same, obviously,
but from what I can see, what I've been told is the truth.'
Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. 'Okay. So what have they told you,
Uncle?'
he asked, draining the last of the infusion. He frowned, wiped his lips and
inspected the napkin. He looked at the sediment in the bottom of the glass,
then glared at the servant drone. It wobbled in the drone equivalent of a
shrug and took the glass from his hand.
Tishlin's representation sat forward, putting its arms on the table. 'Let me
tell you a story, Byr.'
'By all means,' Genar-Hofoen said, picking something from his lips and wiping
it on the napkin. The serving drone started to remove the rest of the
breakfast things.
'Long ago and far away - two and a half thousand years ago,' Tishlin said, 'in
a wispy tendril of suns outside the Galactic plane, nearest to Asatiel
Cluster, but not really near to that or anywhere else - the
Problem Child
, an early General Contact
Unit, Troubadour Class, chanced upon the ember of a very old star. The GCU
started to investigate. And it found not one but two unusual things.'
Genar-Hofoen drew his gown about him and settled back in his seat, a small
smile on his lips. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Some of
Genar-Hofoen's earliest memories were of the long, sunlit kitchen of the house
at Ois, back on
Seddun Orbital; his mother, the other adults of the house and his various
cousins would all be milling around, chattering and laughing while he sat on
his uncle's knee, being told tales. Some of them were ordinary children's
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stories - which he'd heard before, often, but which always sounded better when
Uncle Tish told them -
and some of them his uncle's own stories, from when he'd been in Contact,
travelling the galaxy in a succession of ships, exploring strange new worlds
and meeting all sorts of odd folk and finding any number of weird and
wonderful things amongst the stars.
'Firstly,' the hologram image said, 'the dead sun gave every sign of being
absurdly ancient. The techniques used to date it indicated it was getting on
for a trillion file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Excession.html
(58 of 406) [5/21/03 1:43:10 AM]
Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug years old.'
'What?' Genar-Hofoen snorted.
Uncle Tishlin spread his hands. 'The ship couldn't believe it either. To come
up with this unlikely figure, it used& ' the apparition glanced away to one
side, the way
Tishlin always had when he was thinking, and Genar-Hofoen found himself
smiling, '& isotopic analysis and flux-pitting assay.'
'Technical terms,' Genar-Hofoen said, nodding. He and the hologram both
smiled.
'Technical terms,' the image of Tishlin agreed. 'But no matter what it was
they used or how they did their sums, it always came out that the dead star
was at least fifty times older than the universe.'
'I never heard that one before,' Genar-Hofoen said, shaking his head and
looking thoughtful.
'Me neither,' Tishlin agreed. 'Though as it turns out it was released
publicly, just not until long after it had all happened. One reason there was
no big fuss at the time was that the ship was so embarrassed about what it was
coming up with it never filed a full report, just kept the results to itself,
in its own mind.'
'Did they have proper Minds back then?'
Tishlin's image shrugged. 'Mind with a small "m"; AI core, we'd probably call
it these days. But it was certainly sentient and the point is that the
information remained in the ship's head, as it were.'
Where, of course, it would remain the ship's. Practically the only form of
private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory. Any publicly
filed report or analysis was theoretically available to anybody, but your own
thoughts, your own recol-lections - whether you were a human, a drone or a
ship Mind - were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad
manners even to think about trying to read somebody else's - or something
else's - mind.
Personally, Genar-Hofoen had always thought it was a reason-able enough rule,
although along with a lot of people over the years he'd long suspected that
one of the main reasons for its existence was that it suited the purposes of
the Culture's
Minds in general, and those in Special Circumstances in particular.
Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to
themselves file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Excession.html (59
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Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug and hatch little
schemes and plots to their hearts' content. The trouble was that while in
humans this sort of behaviour tended to manifest itself in practical jokes,
petty jealousies, silly misunderstandings and instances of tragically
unrequited love, with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell
everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon
themselves to try to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already
did know about (with the almost unspeakable implication that one day they
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might do just that not with a culture but with the
Culture& always assuming they hadn't done so already, of course).
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