General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. They were more than just very big spaceships; they were habitats,
universities,
factories, museums, dockyards, libraries, even mobile exhibition centers. They represented the Culture—they
were the Culture. Almost anything
that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be done on a GSV. They could make anything
the Culture was capable of making, contained
all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated, carried or could construct
specialized equipment of every imaginable type for every
conceivable eventuality, and continually manufactured smaller ships:
General Contact Units usually, warcraft now. Their complements were
measured in millions at least. They crewed their offspring
ships out of the gradual increase in their own population. Self-contained, self-
sufficient, productive and, in peacetime at
least, continually exchanging information, they were the Culture’s ambassadors, its most visible
citizens and its technological
and intellectual big guns. There was no need to travel from the galactic backwoods to some distant Culture home-
planet to
be amazed and impressed by the stunning scale and awesome power of the Culture; a GSV could bring the whole lot right up to
your
front door….
Horza followed the brightly dressed crowds through the bustling reception area. There were a few people in uniform, but they
weren’t
stopping anybody. Horza felt in a daze, as though he was only a passenger in his own body, and the drunken puppeteer
he had felt in the
control of earlier was now sobered up a little and guiding him through the crowds of people toward the
doors of another elevator. He tried to
clear his head by shaking it, but it hurt when he did that. His hearing was coming
back very slowly.
He looked at his hands, then sloughed the imprinter-skin from his palms, rubbing it on each of the lapels of the daysuit until
it rolled off and
fell to the floor of the corridor.
When they got off the second elevator they were in the starship. The people dispersed through broad, pastel-shaded corridors
with high
ceilings. Horza looked one way then another, as the elevator capsule swished back up toward the reception sphere.
A small drone floated
toward him. It was the size and shape of a standard suit backpack, and Horza eyed it warily, uncertain
whether it was a Culture device or not.
“Excuse me, are you all right." the machine said. Its voice was robust but not unfriendly. Horza could just hear it.
“I’m lost," Horza said, too loudly. “Lost," he repeated, more quietly, so that he could hardly hear himself. He was aware
that he was swaying
a little as he stood there, and he could feel water trickling into his boots and dripping off the sodden
cloak onto the soft, absorbent surface
under his feet.
“Where do you want to go." the drone asked.
“To a ship called…" Horza closed his eyes in weary desperation. He didn’t dare give the real name. “…
The Beggar’s Bluff.
"
The drone was silent for a second, then said, “I’m afraid there is no such craft aboard. Perhaps it is in the port area by
itself, not on the
Ends.
"
“It’s an old Hronish assault ship," Horza said tiredly, looking for somewhere to sit down. He spotted some seats set into
the wall a few
meters away and made his way over there. The drone followed him, lowering itself as he sat so that it was still
at his eye level. “About a hundred
meters long," the Changer went on, no longer caring if he was giving some sort of game
away. “It was being repaired by some port
shipbuilders; had some damage to its warping units."
“Ah. I
think
I have the one you want. It’s more or less straight down from here. I have no record of its name, but it sounds like the
one you
want. Can you manage to get there yourself, or shall I take you."
“I don’t know if I can manage," Horza said truthfully.
“Wait a moment." The drone stayed floating silently in front of Horza for a moment or two; then it said, “Follow me, then.
There is a traveltube
just over here and down a deck." The machine backed off and indicated the direction they should head
in by extending a hazy field from its
casing. Horza got up and followed it.
They went down a small open AG lift shaft, then crossed a large open area where some of the wheeled and skirted vehicles used
on the
Orbital had been stored; just a few examples, the drone explained, for posterity. The
Ends
already had a Megaship aboard, stored in one of its
two General bays, thirteen kilometers below, in the bottom of the craft.
Horza didn’t know whether to believe the drone or not.
On the far side of the hangar they came to another corridor, and there they entered a cylinder, about three meters in diameter
and six long,
which rolled its door closed, flicked to one side and was instantly sucked into a dark tunnel. Soft lights lit
the interior. The drone explained that
the windows were blanked out because, unless you were used to it, a capsule’s journey
through a GSV could be unsettling, due both to its
speed and to the suddenness of the changes of direction, which the eye
saw but the body didn’t feel. Horza sat down heavily in one of the
folding seats in the middle of the capsule, but only for
a few seconds.
“Here we are. Smallbay 27492, in case you need it again. Innerlevel S-10-right. Goodbye." The capsule door rolled down. Horza
nodded to
the drone and stepped out into a corridor with straight, transparent walls. The capsule door closed, and the machine
vanished. He had a brief
impression of it flickering past him, but it happened so fast he could have been wrong. Anyway, his
vision was still blurred.
He looked to his right. Through the walls of the corridor he looked into clear air. Kilometers of it. There was some sort
of roof high above,
with just a suggestion of wispy clouds. A few tiny craft moved. Level with him, far enough away for the
view to be both hazy and vast, were
hangars: level after level after level of them. Bays, docks, hangars—call them what you
wanted; they filled Horza’s sight for square kilometers,
making him dizzy with the sheer scale of it all. His brain did a
sort of double take, and he blinked and shook himself, but the view did not go
away. Craft moved, lights went on or off, a
layer of cloud far below made the view further down still more hazy, and something whizzed by the
corridor Horza stood in:
a ship, fully three hundred meters long. The ship passed along the level he was on, swooped, and far far away did a left
turn,
banking gracefully in the air to disappear into another bright and vast corridor which seemed to pass by at right angles to
the one Horza
stood staring at. In the other direction, the one that the ship had appeared from, was a wall, seemingly blank.
Horza looked closer and rubbed
his eyes; he saw that the wall had an orderly speckle of lights in a grid across it: thousands
and thousands of windows and lights and balconies.
Smaller craft flitted about its face, and the dots of traveltube capsules
flashed across and up and down.
Horza couldn’t take much more. He looked to his left and saw a smooth ramp leading down underneath the tube the capsule traveled
in. He
stumbled down it, into the welcomingly small space of a two-hundred-meter-long Smallbay.
Horza wanted to cry. The old ship sat on three short legs, square in the center of the bay, a few bits and pieces of equipment
scattered around
it. There was nobody else in the bay that Horza could see, just machinery. The
CAT
looked old and battered, but intact and whole. It appeared
that repairs were either finished or not yet started. The main
hold lift was down, resting on the smooth white deck of the bay. Horza went over to
it and saw a light ladder leading up into
the brightness of the hold itself. A small insect landed briefly on his wrist. He flapped a hand at it as it
flew off. How
very
untidy
of the Culture, he thought absently, to allow an insect on board one of their sparkling vessels. Still, officially at least,
the
Ends
was no longer the Culture’s. Wearily he climbed the ladder, hampered by the damp cloak and accompanied by the squelching
noises
coming from his boots.
The hold smelled familiar, though it looked oddly spacious with no shuttle in it. There was nobody about. He went up the stairs
from the hold
to the accommodation section. He walked along the corridor toward the mess, wondering who was alive, who was
dead, what changes had
been made, if any. It had only been three days, but he felt as though he had been away for years. He
was almost at Yalson’s cabin when the
door was quickly pulled open.
Yalson’s fair-haired head came out, an expression of surprise, even joy, starting to form on it. “Haw—" she said, then stopped,
frowned at