Genar-Hofoen had heard about the Grey Area all right. It was starting to make sense now. If there was one vessel that might be capable of plundering - and, more importantly, that might be willing to plunder - a Stored soul from under the nose of the Sleeper, the Grey Area was probably it. Assuming what he’d heard about the ship was true, it had spent the last decade perfecting its techniques of teasing dreams and memories out of a variety of animal species, while the Sleeper Service had by all accounts been technologically stagnant for the last forty years, its time taken up with the indulgence of its own scarcely less eccentric pastime.

The image of Uncle Tishlin bore a distant expression for a moment, then said, ‘Apparently that’s part of the beauty of it; just because the Sleeper Service is another oddball doesn’t mean that it’s any more likely than any other GSV to have the Grey Area aboard; the GCU will have to lie off, and that’ll make this Mimage-stealing trick easier. If the Grey Area was actually inside the GSV at the time it probably couldn’t carry it off undetected.’

Genar-Hofoen was looking thoughtful again. ‘This artifact thing,’ he said. ‘Could almost be a what-do-you-call it, couldn’t it? An Outside Context Paradox.’

‘Problem,’ Tishlin said. ‘Outside Context Problem.’

‘Hmm. Yes. One of those. Almost.’

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass . . . when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

That was an Outside Context Problem; so was the suitably up-teched version that happened to whole planetary civilisations when somebody like the Affront chanced upon them first rather than, say, the Culture.