Jevan was already shaking his head. “I’m afraid not, Septame.”

“You might persuade the president not to sign the order,” Solbli suggested, with a thin smile.

Banstegeyn didn’t even pretend to smile. The president was duty-bound to sign everything put in front of him or her, up to and including an order for his or her own execution, in theory. Not that that principle had been tested for eleven millennia.

Even then, even at death, a politician could just come back; being backed-up at the start of your term was part of the deal, and if you were killed during your time in office you got re-embodied. Wonderful disincentive for assassination; Banstegeyn had always appreciated it. There was some delay in between – forty days, was it? Or thirty? – to allow time for a clone of the deceased to be grown and implanted with their most recent back-up, and people got shuffled around to take your place in the meantime, but then you just resumed your post … or you could take part in a subsequent election if you’d been in the last year of your term; now he thought about it there was some sort of …

Then he had to look away from Jevan and Solbli, because he’d just had an idea, and the audacity of it, the sheer dagger-like simplicity and directness of it, had all but taken his breath away.

He yawned, spreading his arms, giving himself a chance to shiver, to tremble, without it looking suspicious, and said, smiling, “Well, there we are; some you lose.” He looked at his time-to, shrugged. “In fifteen days it won’t matter a damn anyway.”

Jevan and Solbli looked relieved, and a little surprised.

The representative of the Culture ship of the Scree class, the Beats Working, was warmly welcomed into the principal shared gallery space of the squadron and fleet flagship Interstitial/Exploratory Vessel Melancholia Enshrines All Triumph by Ossebri 17 Haldesib, Swarmprince and Sub-Swarm Divisional Head. Gifts were exchanged, and, although the Culture representative, one Jonsker Ap-Candrechenat, was unable to ingest a welcoming libation in the fullest sense, it nevertheless absorbed a portion into its chemical analysis unit and graciously accepted the remainder on board itself to be returned to the ship the Beats Working later, where it would be treated with all due respect.

Great respect had already been shown, it had been decided after consultation with the appropriate experts, expert systems and reference library resources aboard the Melancholia Enshrines All Triumph, in the act of sending a mechanical but fully sentient device to represent the Culture ship Beats Working, as the machine was able to exist within the Melancholia Enshrines All Triumph nakedly, without any sort of exo-suit. This would not have been possible had one of the tiny number of humans aboard the Culture vessel been allocated to represent it.