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.
“The Restoria mission at the Tsungarial Disk has been kept informed regarding the potential for the fabricaria to come into play should the confliction spill over into the Real and has requested any help that might be available so long as it draws no extra external attention to the mission or the Disk. We are happy to provide and are lucky to have had assets, including but not limited to myself, and you, close by, given that the situation may become one of extreme urgency very quickly. Whether Restoria has also made such a request to Special Circumstances is not known to us.
“It is worth noting that the smatter infestation within the Disk has been in abatement for the last few decades and will, it is hoped, not enter into the equation.”
Smatter was the name given to the bitty remains of a hegswarm after it had been stamped out as any coherent threat. Usually it didn’t last significantly longer than the outbreak itself and just got mopped up. If some bits did persist then, while you could never afford to ignore the stuff, you didn’t really need to fear it. On the other hand, some of it getting into a mothballed system of a few hundred million ancient mothballed manufacturies did sound like awfully bad luck, Yime thought. Actually, it sounded like the kind of thing that woke Restoria people up at night, sweating and screaming.
The image of the gas giant planet and its glittering, artificial disk rotated slowly and silently in front of Yime.
“What was the possible link between the ‘components’ you mentioned earlier?” she asked.
“It is a potential link between the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly and the Sichultian Enablement in the shape of this vessel.’
The ringed gas giant disappeared to be replaced by the slim but chunky image of a Hooligan-class Limited Offensive Unit. It looked like a long, quite substantial bolt with various smoothed-off washers, nuts and longer collars screwed onto it.
“This is the Me, I’m Counting, an ex-LOU now of the Culture Ulterior,” the ship told her. “It was constructed by the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly shortly before the Idiran war and is thought to remain in sporadic contact with it. It is a self-declared Peripatetic Eccentric: a wanderer, a tramp vessel. It was last heard of with any formal degree of certitude some eight years ago when it declared it might go into a retreat. It is thought to have been present in the Sichultian Enablement two years earlier and so may constitute the mentioned link between it and the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly. There are indications that it accumulates images of strange and exotic creatures or devices and it may have chosen to collect such an image of Lededje Y’breq.”
“That would be a very comprehensive image.”
“It would.”
“And one which would be ten years younger than the female when she died. She wouldn’t know she’d been murdered, if she was.”