Surface Detail(78)

“Broadcasting.”

“It’s a wasteful and inefficient way to communicate, but the advantage of a broadcast in this context is precisely that it goes everywhere and nobody can tell who might be listening.”

“How many of these ‘Forgotten’ are there?”

“Good question. To most people they appear simply as ships that have gone into an especially uncommunicative retreat, an impression the ships concerned do nothing to contradict, of course. At any time anything up to one per cent of the Culture ship fleet might be on a retreat, and perhaps point three or point four per cent of those have been silent since quitting what one might call the main sequence of normal ship behaviour. I hesitate to call it discipline. It’s not a much-studied field, so even the quality of the relatively few guesstimates is hard to evaluate. There might be as few as eight or twelve of these ships, or possibly as many as three or four hundred.”

“And what’s the point of all this?”

“They’re back-up,” the Bodhisattva said. “If, through some bizarre and frankly unfeasibly widespread and complete calamity, the Culture somehow ceased to be, then any one of these ships could re-seed the galaxy – or a different one, perhaps – with something that would be recognisably the Culture. This does beg the question what would be the point if it had been so comprehensively expunged in the first place, but I suppose you could argue some lesson might have been learned that might make version two more resilient somehow.”

“I thought the entire Contact fleet was supposed to represent our ‘back-up’,” Yime said. In its relationships with other civilisations, especially with those that were encountering it for the first time, much tended to be made of the fact – or at least the assertion – that each and every GSV represented the Culture in its entirety, that each one held all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated and could build any object or device that the Culture was capable of making, while the sheer scale of a General Systems Vehicle meant they each contained so many humans and drones they were more or less guaranteed to hold a reasonably representative sample of both even without trying to.

The Culture was deliberately and self-consciously very widely distributed throughout the galaxy, with no centre, no nexus, no home planet. Its distribution might make it easy to attack, but it also made it hard to eradicate altogether, at least in theory. Having hundreds of thousands of vessels individually quite capable of rebuilding the entire Culture from scratch was generally held to be safeguard enough against civilisational oblivion, or so Yime had been led to believe. Obviously others thought differently.

“The Contact fleet is what one might call a second line of defence,” the ship told her.

“What’s the first?”

“All the Orbitals.” the ship said reasonably. “And other habs; Rocks and planets included.”

“And these Forgotten are the last ditch.”

“Probably. So one might imagine. As far as I know.”

That, in ship-speak, Yime thought, probably meant No. Though she knew better than to try to coax a less ambiguous answer out of a Mind.

“So they just sit there. Wherever ‘there’ might be.”

“Oort clouds, interstellar space, within or even beyond the outer halo of the greater galaxy itself; who knows? However, yes, that is the general idea.”

“And indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely until now, at least,” the Bodhisattva said.

“Waiting for a catastrophe that’ll probably never happen but which if it did would indicate either the existence of a force so powerful it could probably discover these ships regardless and snuff them out too, or an existential flaw in the Culture so deep it would certainly be present in these ‘Forgotten’ as well, especially given their … representativeness.”

“Put like that, the entire strategy does sound a little forlorn,” the ship said, sounding almost apologetic. “But there we are. Because you never know, I suppose. I think a part of the whole idea is that it provides a degree of comfort for those who might otherwise worry about such matters.”

“But most people don’t know about these ships in the first place,” Yime pointed out. “How can you be comforted by something you don’t know about?”

“Ah,” the Bodhisattva said. “That’s the beauty of it: only people who do worry are likely to seek out such knowledge, and so are suitably reassured. They also tend to appreciate the need not to make the knowledge too well known, and indeed take additional pleasure in helping to keep it from becoming so. Everybody else just gets happily on with their lives, never fretting in the first place.”