Surface Detail

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Nsokyi?”

“This girl, being revented. She’s our excuse for getting involved in all this.”

“Her revention is one reason to get involved. I’m not sure that characterising it as an ‘excuse’ is entirely helpful.” The ship’s voice sounded frosty. “Also, this entire confliction is specifically about the fate of the dead. It is entirely within the remit of Quietus.”

“But isn’t this more of an SC thing?” Yime suggested. “In fact, hasn’t this got Special Circumstances written all over it?”

She waited for a reply, but one did not appear to be immediately forthcoming. She went on. “This does sound like it involves tangling with equiv-tech galactic Players with the intention of stopping a proper ships-and-everything full-scale shooting war. I’m not sure how much more hardcore SC than that a situation can get.”

“That’s an interesting observation.”

“Is SC involved in this?”

“Not that we know of.”

“Who would ‘we’ be within this context?”

“Let me re-phrase that last reply: Not that I know of.”

This was mildly illuminating. Quietus had a deliberately flat organisational structure; in theory perfectly so at ship level, all the Minds concerned having equal knowledge and an equal say. In practice there was a degree of legislative/executive, strategic/ tactical distinction, some Minds and ships doing the planning while others subsequently undertook the execution.

“Shouldn’t we tell SC?” she asked.

“I’m sure that is being considered. My immediate task is to brief and transport you. Yours, Ms. Nsokyi, is to attend to this briefing and, assuming you are agreeable, take part in this mission.”

“I see.” Yime nodded. That was her told. “What’s the other complication?”

The projection of the brown, red and yellow gas giant with its artificial ring system returned, replacing the image of the Sichultian female.

“Approximately two hundred and eight thousand years ago a proportion of the dormant fabricaria in the Tsungarial Disk suffered a smatter infection in the shape of the remains of a hege-monising swarm outbreak which took refuge there. The hegswarm was duly dealt with in the usual manner and annihilated by the cooperative of civilisations then responsible for overseeing that volume of space. The smatter infection was assumed to have been expunged from the Disk components at the same time. However, isolated recurrences of it have taken place over random intervals ever since. Due to its earlier success in dealing rapidly and effectively with these sporadic flare-ups, a small, specialist Culture presence was allowed to remain even after the Culture lost the mandate for the Disk’s protection.”

Yime nodded. “Ah. Pest Control.”

“The specialist Culture contingent in the Tsungarial Disk is indeed part of the Restoria section.”

Restoria was the part of Contact charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks, when – by accident or design – a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy’s matter into nothing but copies of themselves. It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy and arguably hegswarms were just that; another legitimate – if rather over-enthusiastic – galactic life-form type.

Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion. Equally, then, those same sophisticated civilisations could be seen as the galaxy’s way of retaining a sort of balance between raw and refined, between wilderness and complexity, as well as ensuring that there was both always room for new intelligent life to evolve and that there was something wild, unexplored and interesting for it to gaze upon when it did. The Restoria section was the Culture’s current specialist contribution to this age-old struggle. As often known as Pest Control as by its official title, it was made up of experts in the management, amelioration and – if necessary – obliteration of hegswarms.

Quietus and Restoria worked together closely on occasion and both felt that they did so with mutual respect and on equal terms.

Restoria’s approach to its task and hence general demeanour was less punctilious than Quietus’, but then the ships, systems and humans in Pest Control generally spent their working lives rushing from hegswarm eruption to hegswarm eruption rather than communing with the honoured dead, so a buccaneering rather than considered and respectful bearing was only to be expected.