State of play: one
Fal ’Ngeestra watched the shadows of the clouds move on the distant plain, ten kilometers away horizontally and one vertically,
and then, with a
sigh, lifted her gaze to the line of snow-capped mountains on the far side of the open grassland. The mountain
range was fully thirty kilometers
from her eyes, but the peaks were sharp and distinct in the thin air which they invaded
with their rock and brilliant icy whiteness. Even at that
distance, through that much atmosphere, their glare startled the
eye.
She turned away, walking along the broad flagstones of the lodge terrace with a stiff-legged gait unsuited to her lack of
years. The
trelliswork above her head was covered in bright red and white flowers and cast a regular pattern of shadows over
the terrace beneath; she
walked through light and shade, her hair dim then shining gold in turn as each halting step moved
her from shadow to sunlight.
The gun-metal bulk of the drone called Jase appeared at the far end of the terrace, out of the lodge itself. Fal smiled when
she saw it and
sat down on a stone bench jutting out from the low wall which separated terrace from view. They were high up,
but it was a hot and windless
day; she wiped a little sweat from her forehead as the old drone floated along the terrace toward
her, the slanting lines of sunlight passing over
its body in a steady rhythm. The drone settled on the stones beside the bench,
its broad, flat top about level with the crown of the girl’s head.
“Isn’t it a lovely day, Jase." Fal said, looking back at the distant mountains again.
“It is," Jase said. The drone had an unusually deep and fulltoned voice, and made the most of it. For a thousand years or
more Culture
drones had had aura fields which colored according to their mood—their equivalent of facial expression and body
language—but Jase was
old, made long before aura fields were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them.
It preferred either to rely on its voice to
express what it felt, or to remain inscrutable.
“Damn." Fal shook her head, looking at the faraway snow. “I wish I was climbing." She made a clicking noise with her mouth
and looked
down at her right leg, which stuck straight out in front of her. She had broken the leg eight days before, while
climbing in the mountains on the
other side of the plain. Now it was splinted up with a fine tracery of field-strands, concealed
beneath fashionably tight trousers.
Jase ought, she thought, to have taken this as an excuse to lecture her again on the advisability of only climbing with a
floater harness, or
with a rescue drone nearby, or at the very least on not climbing alone, but the old machine said nothing.
She looked at it, her tanned face
shining in the light. “So, Jase, what have you got for me. Business."
“I’m afraid so."
Fal settled herself as comfortably as she could on the stone bench and crossed her arms. Jase stretched out a short force
field from its
casing to support the awkward-looking outstretched leg, though it knew that the splint’s own fields were taking
all the strain.
“Spit it out," Fal said.
“You may recall an item from the daily synopsis eighteen days ago about one of our spacecraft which was cobbled together by
a factory
vessel in the volume of space Inside from the Sullen Gulf; the factory craft had to destruct, and later so did the
ship it made."
“I remember," said Fal, who forgot little about anything, and nothing at all from a daily synopsis. “It was a mongrel because
the factory was
trying to get a GSV Mind out of the way."
“Well," Jase said, its voice a little weary, “we have a problem with that."
Fal smiled.
The Culture, there could be no doubt, relied profoundly on its machines for both its strategy and tactics in the war it was
now engaged in.
Indeed, a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a
more fundamental level than did any
single human or group of humans within the society. The Minds that the Culture’s factory
craft, safe Orbitals and larger GSVs were now
producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy.
They were so intelligent that no human was capable of
understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves
were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life).
From those mental colossi, down through the more ordinary but still sentient machines and the smart but ultimately mechanistic
and
predictable computers, right down to the smallest circuit in a micromissile hardly more intelligent than a fly, the Culture
had placed its bets—
long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because
the Culture saw itself as being
a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of
achieving this desired state as well as more
efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games,
romance, studying
dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid
of a safety harness.
A hostile reading of such a situation might lead to the idea that the discovery by the Culture’s Minds that some humans were
actually
capable of matching and occasionally beating their record for accurately assessing a given set of facts would lead
to machine indignation and
blown circuits, but this was not the case. It fascinated those Minds that such a puny and chaotic
collection of mental faculties could by some
sleight of neuron produce an answer to a problem which was as good as theirs.
There was an explanation, of course, and it perhaps had
something to do with patterns of cause and effect which even the almost
god-like power of the Minds had difficulty trying to fathom; it also had
quite a lot to do with sheer weight of numbers.
There were in excess of eighteen trillion people in the Culture, just about every one of them well nourished, extensively
educated and
mentally alert, and only thirty or forty of them had this unusual ability to forecast and assess on a par with
a well-informed Mind (of which there
were already many h undreds of thousands). It was not impossible that this was pure luck;
toss eighteen trillion coins in the air for a while and a
few of them are going to keep landing the same side up for a long,
long time.
Fal ’Ngeestra was a Culture Referrer, one of those thirty, maybe forty, out of the eighteen trillion who could give you an
intuitive idea of what
was going to happen, or tell you why she thought that something which had already happened had happened
the way it did, and almost certainly