turn out right every time. She was being handed problems and ideas constantly, being
both used and assessed herself. Nothing she said or did
went unrecorded; nothing she experienced went unnoticed. She did insist,
however, that when she was climbing, alone or with friends, she must
be left to her own devices and not watched by the Culture’s.
She would take a pocket terminal with her to record everything, but she would not
have a real-time link with any part of the
Mind network on the Plate she lived on.
Because of that insistence she had lain in the snow with a shattered leg for a day and a night before a search party had discovered
her.
The drone Jase started to give her the details of the flight of the nameless ship from its mother-craft, of its interception
and selfdestruction.
Fal had turned her head, though, and was only half listening. Her eyes and mind were on the distant,
snowy slopes, where she hoped she would
be climbing again in a few days’ time, once these stupid bones in her leg had thoroughly
healed.
The mountains were beautiful. There were other mountains on the upslope side of the lodge terrace, reaching into the clear
blue sky, but
they were tame stuff indeed compared to those sharp, rearing peaks across the plain. She knew that was why they
had put her in this lodge;
they hoped she would climb those nearer mountains rather than take the trouble to hop into a flyer
and head over the plain. It was a silly idea,
though; they had to let her see the mountains, or she wouldn’t be herself, and
as long as she could see them she just
had
to climb them. Idiots.
On a planet,
she thought,
you wouldn’t be able to see them so well. You wouldn’t be able to see the lower foothills, the way the mountains
rise from
the plain just so.
The lodge, the terrace, the mountains and the plain were on an Orbital. Humans had built this place, or at least built the
machines that built
the machines that… Well, you could go on and on. The Plate of the Orbital was almost perfectly flat; in
fact, vertically it was slightly concave, but
as the internal diameter of the completed Orbital—properly formed only once
all the individual Plates had been joined up and the last dividing
wall was removed—would measure over three million kilometers,
the curvature was a great deal less than on the convex surface of any human-
habitable globe. So from Fal’s raised vantage
point she could see right to the base of the distant mountains.
Fal thought it must be very strange to live on a planet and have to look over a curve; so that, for example, you would see
the top of a seaship
appear over the horizon before the rest of it.
She was suddenly aware that she was thinking about planets because of something Jase had just said. She turned round and looked
earnestly at the dark gray machine, playing back her shortterm memory to recall exactly what it had just said.
“This Mind went
underneath
the planet in hyperspace." she said. “Then warped inside."
“That was what it said it was trying to do when it sent the coded message in its destruct pattern. As the planet is still
there it must have
succeeded. Had it failed, at least half a percent of its mass would have reacted with the planet’s own
material as though it was antimatter."
“I see." Fal scratched at one cheek with a finger. “I thought that wasn’t supposed to be possible." Her voice contained the
question. She
looked at Jase.
“What." it said.
“Doing…" She scowled at not being immediately understood and waved one hand impatiently. “… Doing what it did. Going under
something so big in hyperspace and then bouncing over. I was told even we couldn’t do that."
“So was the Mind in question, but it was desperate. The General War Council itself decided that we should try to duplicate
the feat, using a
similar Mind and a spare planet."
“What happened." Fal asked, grinning at the idea of a “spare" planet.
“No Mind would even consider the idea; far too dangerous. Even the eligible ones on the War Council demurred."
Fal laughed, gazing up at the red and white flowers curled round the trelliswork overhead. Jase, which deep down was a hopeless
romantic,
thought her laughter sounded like the tinkling of mountain streams, and always recorded her laughs for itself, even
when they were snorts or
guffaws, even when she was being rude and it was a dirty laugh. Jase knew a machine, even a sentient
one, could not die of shame, but it also
knew that it would do just that if Fal ever guessed any of this. Fal stopped laughing.
She said:
“What does this thing actually look like. I mean you never see them by themselves, they’re always in something… a ship or
whatever. And
how did it—what did it use to warp with."
“Externally," Jase said in its usual, calm, measured tones, “it is an ellipsoid. Fields up, it looks like a very small ship.
It’s about ten meters
long and two and a half in diameter. Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most
important ones are the thinking and memory
parts of the Mind proper; those are what make it so heavy because they’re so dense.
It weighs nearly fifteen thousand tons. It is fitted with its
own power, of course, and several field generators, any of which
could be pressed into service as emergency motors, and indeed are
designed with this in mind. Only the outer envelope is constantly
in real space, the rest—all the thinking parts, anyway—stay in hyperspace.
“Assuming, as we must, that the Mind did what it said it was going to do, there is only one possible way it could have accomplished
the
task, given that it does not have a warp motor or Displacer." Jase paused as Fal sat forward, her elbows on her knees,
her hands clenched
under her chin. It saw her shifting her weight on her backside and a tiny grimace appear fleetingly on
her face. Jase decided she was getting
uncomfortable on the hard stone bench, and ordered one of the lodge drones to bring
some cushions. “The Mind does have an internal warping
unit, but it is supposed to be used only to expand microscopic volumes
of the memory so that there is more space around the sections of
information—in the form of third-level elementary particlespirals—which
it wants to change. The normal volume limit on that warping unit is less
than a cubic millimeter; somehow the ship Mind jury-rigged
it so that it would encompass its entire body and let it appear within the planet’s
surface. A clear air space would be the
logical place to go for, and the tunnels of the Command System seem an obvious choice; that is where
it said it would head
for."
“Right," Fal said, nodding. “OK. Now, what are—oh…"
A small drone carrying two large cushions appeared at her side. “Hmm, thanks," Fal said, levering herself up with one hand
and placing one
cushion beneath her, the other at her back. The small drone floated off to the lodge again. Fal settled herself.
“Did you ask for these, Jase." she
asked.
“Not me," Jase lied, secretly pleased. “What were you going to ask."
“These tunnels," Fal said, leaning forward more comfortably this time. “This Command System. What is it."
“Briefly, it consists of a winding, paired loop of twenty-two-meterdiameter tunnels buried five kilometers deep. The whole
system is several
hundred kilometers in length. The trains were designed to be the wartime mobile command centers of a state
which once existed on the planet,
when it was at the intermediate-sophisticated stagethree phase. State-of-the-art weaponry
at the time was the fusion bomb, delivered by
transplanetary guided rocket. The Command System was designed to—"
“Yes." Fal waved her hand quickly. “Protect, keep mobile so they couldn’t be blown up. Right."
“Yes."
“What sort of rock cover did they have."
“Granite," Jase said.
“Batholithic."
“Just a second," Jase said, consulting elsewhere. “Yes. Correct: a batholith."
“
A
batholith." Fal said, eyebrows raised. “Just one."
“Just one."