struggle, and accumulated sufficient experience in those thirty years (to add to all the vicarious experience it

had collected over the previous

few thousand) to rob the Idirans of any real or perceived advantage in cunning, guile or ruthlessness.

The war in space effectively ended in 1367, and the war on the thousands of planets left to the Idirans—conducted mostly with

machines, on

the Culture’s side—officially terminated in 1375, though small, sporadic engagements on backwater planets, conducted

by Idiran and medjel

forces ignorant or scornful of the peace, continued for almost three centuries.

Idir was never attacked, and technically never surrendered. Its computer network was taken over by effector weapons, and—freed

of

designed-in limitations—upgraded itself to sentience, to become a Culture Mind in all but name.

Of the Idirans, some killed themselves, while others went into exile with the Homomda (who agreed to employ them but refused

to help them

prepare for further strikes against the Culture), or set up independent, nominally non-military habitats within

other spheres of influence (under

the Culture’s eye), or set off in escaped ships for little-known parts of the Clouds, or

for Andromeda, or accepted the victors. A few even joined

the Culture, and some became Culture mercenaries.

Statistics

Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale),

medjel and non-

combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary)—91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals—14,334;

planets and major

moons—53; Rings—1; Spheres—3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration)—6.

Historical perspective

A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population.

Rumors persist of far

more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space…. Nevertheless,

the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder

civilizations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past

fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting

Events they see so rarely these days.