Its thoughts turned to that woman; Dajeil Gelian, who in one sense had been the cause, the seed for all of this, and the one person it had wanted to find, the one soul - asleep or awake - it had been determined to offer sanctuary to when it had first renounced the Culture’s normality. Now that sanctuary was compromised, and she too would have to be offloaded with all the rest of its waifs and strays and teeming undead. A promise being fulfilled leading to a promise to her being broken, as though she had not experienced enough of that in her life. Still, it would make amends, and for that reason there were a lot of other promises being made and - so far, it would seem - kept. That would have to do.

Movement on the motionless tableau; Amorphia turned its attention there and saw the black bird Gravious flapping away across the field. More movement. Amorphia walked towards it, around and over the poised, charging cavalry and the fallen soldiers, between a pair of convincing-looking hanging fountains of earth where two cannon balls were slamming into the ground and over a small, blood-swollen stream to another part of the battlefield, where a team of three revival drones were floating above a revivee.

This was unusual; people normally wanted to be woken back in their home and in the presence of friends, but over the last couple of decades - as the tableaux had become more impressive - more people had wished to be brought back to life here, in the midst of them.

Amorphia squatted down by the woman, who had been lying posed as a dying soldier, her tunic punctured by bullet holes and stained red. She lay on her back, blinking in the sunlight, attended by machines. The head of the Storage suit had been slipped off and lay like a rubbery mask on the grass beside her; her face looked pale and just a little blotchy; she was an old woman, but her depilated head gave her a curious, baby-like quality of nakedness.

‘Hello?’ Amorphia said, taking one of the woman’s hands in hers and gently detaching that part of the suit too, pulling the hand-covering off inside-out, like a tight glove.

‘Whoa,’ the woman said, swallowing, her eyes watering.

Sikleyr-Najasa Croepise Ince Stahal da Mapin, Stored thirty-one years ago at the age of three-hundred and eighty-six. Revival criterion: on the acclamation of the next Line Messiah-elect on the planet Ischeis. She had been a scholar of the planet’s major religion and had wanted to be present at the Elevation of its next Saviour, an event which had not been anticipated for another two hundred years or so.

Her mouth twisted, and she coughed. ‘How--?’ she began, then coughed again.

‘Just thirty-one standard years,’ Amorphia told her.

The woman’s eyes widened, then she smiled. ‘That was quick,’ she said.