Beneath, she recognised the patterns of the stars as those visible from her home Orbital of Dinyol-hei. Though given that she had just left her apartment in the later afternoon, these were not the stars she’d have expected to see if they’d simply moved straight down from her apartment to the part of the Orbital beneath where she lived. The ship was obviously some distance further away. She felt pleased with herself to have worked this out so quickly.
“Do you need time to freshen up, adjust, orientate yourself or otherwise—?” the drone began.
“No,” Yime said. She stood as she had before, though with feet spread a little. “May we begin?”
“Yes. Your full attention, please,” the Bodhisattva said.
Your full attention. Yime felt mildly insulted. Still, this was Quietus. It was known for its air of formal austerity and a degree of implicit asceticism. If you didn’t like the discipline involved in most things Quietudinal you shouldn’t have signed up in the first place.
There was a spiteful rumour, seemingly incapable of being entirely laid to rest, that the more recently manifested specialist divisions of the Culture’s Contact section were only there to provide substitute employment niches for those desperate but unable to make the cut and get into Special Circumstances itself.
Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but nevertheless potentially deeply powerful Elders and the still more detached-from-reality Sublimed, where any vestige or trace of such exotic entities remained.
Special Circumstances was, in effect, the Contact section’s espionage wing.
There had always been specialist sub-divisions within the organisational behemoth that was Contact. Special Circumstances was only the most obvious and, uniquely, it had been formally separate almost since its inception; largely because it sometimes did the sort of things the people who were proud to be part of Contact would have been horrified to have been remotely associated with.
As time had passed though, especially over the last half-thousand years or so, Contact itself had seen fit to introduce various re -organisations and rationalisations which had resulted in the creation of three other specialist divisions, of which the Quietudinal Service was one.
The Quietudinal Service – Quietus, as it was usually called – dealt with the dead. The dead outnumbered the living in the greater galaxy by some distance, if you added up all those individuals existing in the various Afterlives the many different civilisations had created over the millennia. Happily – mercifully – the dead generally tended to keep themselves to themselves and caused relatively little trouble compared to those for whom the Real was still the place to exist within and try to exploit. However, the sheer scale of their numbers ensured that important issues involving the deceased still arose now and again; the dead Quietus dealt with might be technically departed, but they were, sometimes, far from quiet.
A lot of the time such matters were effectively about legality, even about definitions; in a lot of societies the principal difference between a live virtual person – possibly just passing through, as it were, between bodies, back in the Real – and a dead virtual person was that the latter had no right to property or any other kind of ownership outside of their own simulated realm. Perhaps not unnaturally, there were those amongst the dead who found such a distinction unfair. This sort of thing could lead to trouble, but Quietus was skilled in dealing with the results.
Relatively small in terms of ships and personnel, Quietus could nevertheless call on whole catalogued suites of dead but preserved experts and expert systems – not all of which were even pan-human in origin – to help them deal with such matters, bringing them back from their fun-filled retirement or out of suspended animation, where they had left instructions that they were ready to be revived if they could be of use when circumstances required.
Slanged as “Probate” by some of those in SC, Quietus had links with Special Circumstances, but regarded itself as a more specialised service than its much older and larger sibling utility. Most of the humans within Quietus regarded any links with SC as deplorable in essence and only very occasionally necessary, if ever. Some just plain looked down on Special Circumstances. Theirs, they felt, was a higher, more refined calling and their demeanour, behaviour, appearance and even dress reflected this.