land.

So

who was it.

Not the entity it thought it was, that was the answer, and it was a disconcerting one. Because it knew that the self it was

now could never

think of all the things its old self would have thought of. It felt unworthy. It felt fallible and limited

and… dull.

But think positively. Patterns, images, the telling analogy… make the ill work to good. Just think….

If it was not itself, then it

would

be not itself.

As it was now to what it had been before, so the remote drone was to it now (nice connection).

The remote drone would be more than just its eyes and ears on the surface, in or near the Changers’ base, keeping look-out;

more than just

its assistant in the doubtless frantic preparations to equip and secrete which would ensue if the drone did

raise the alarm; more. And less.

Look on the happy side, think of the good things.

Hadn’t it been

clever.

Yes, it had.

Its escape from the spare-parts warship had been, though it thought it itself, quite breathtakingly masterful and brilliant.

Its courageous use

of warp so deep into a gravity well would have been foolhardy in the extreme in anything else but the dire

circumstances it had found itself in,

but was anyway superbly skilled…. And its stunning cross-realm transfer, from hyper-

to real space, was not simply even more brilliant and even

braver than anything else it had done, it was almost certainly

a first; there was nothing anywhere in its vast store of information to indicate that

anybody had

ever

done that before. It was proud.

But after all that, here it was, trapped; an intellectual cripple, a philosophical shadow of its former self.

Now all it could do was wait, hoping that whoever came to find it would be friendly. The Culture must know; the Mind was certain

its signal

had worked and that it would be picked up somewhere. But the Idirans knew as well. It didn’t think they would just

try to storm in, because they

knew as well as it did that antagonizing the Dra’Azon was a bad idea. But what if the Idirans

found a way in and the Culture couldn’t. What if the

whole region of space around the Sullen Gulf was now Idiran held. The

Mind knew there was only one thing it could do if it fell into Idiran hands,

but not only did it not want to destruct for

purely personal reasons, it didn’t want to destruct anywhere near Schar’s World anyway, for the same

reason that the Idirans

wouldn’t come charging in. But if it

was

captured in the planet, that might be the last time it would have a chance to

destroy itself. By the time it was taken off

the planet the Idirans might have found a way of stopping it from destructing.

Perhaps it had made a mistake in escaping at all. Perhaps it should have just destructed along with the rest of the ship and

saved all this

complication and worry. But it had seemed like an almost heavensent opportunity to escape—finding itself so

close to a Planet of the Dead

when it had been attacked. It wanted to live anyway, but it would have been… wasteful to throw

away such a great chance even if it had been

perfectly sanguine about its own survival or destruction.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. It was here and it just had to wait. Wait and think. Consider all the options

(few) and

possibilities (many). Rack those memories as best it could for anything that might be relevant, that might help.

For example (and the one really

interesting bit

would

be a bad one), it had discovered that the Idirans had probably employed one of the Changers who had actually served with

the caretaker staff on Schar’s World. Of course perhaps the man was dead, or busy on something else, or too far away, or the

information had

been incorrect in the first place and the intelligence-gathering section of the Culture had got it wrong….

But if not, then that man would be the

one obvious person to send after something hiding in the Command System tunnels.

It was part of the Mind’s very construction—at every level—to believe that there was no such thing as bad knowledge except

in very relative

terms, but it really did wish that it hadn’t had that bit of information in its memory banks; it would just

as soon not have known anything about this

man, this Changer who knew Schar’s World and probably worked for the Idirans. (Perversely,

it found itself wishing it knew this man’s

name.

)

But with any luck he would be irrelevant, or the Culture would get here first. Or the Dra’Azon being would recognize a fellow

Mind in trouble

and help, or… anything.

In darkness the Mind waited.

… Hundreds of those planets were empty; the hundred million room towers were there; the little rooms, the cabinets and the

trays and the cards

and the spaces for the numbers and letters were there; but nothing was written, nothing held, on any of

the cards…. (Sometimes the Mind liked

to imagine traveling down the narrow spaces between the cabinets, one of its remote

drones floating between the banked files of memory in

the thin corridors, from room to room, for floor after floor, kilometer

after kilometer, over buried continents of rooms, filled-in oceans of rooms,

leveled ranges, felled forests, covered deserts

of rooms.)… These whole systems of dark planets, those trillions of square kilometers of blank

paper, represented the Mind’s

future; the spaces it would fill in its life to come.

If it had one.