One order collected ancient farming implements, another chemical rockets and antique space craft, while another had specialised in household dust; its sheds and warehouses were packed with billions and billions of vials and other containers collected from worlds and habitats throughout the Gzilt realm over thousands of years and filled with nothing more than the sort of stuff that collected in the corners of rooms and cabins and which had been picked, swept, sucked or electro-staticked up by volunteers or enthusiasts to be sent to the Little Siblings of the Detritus, on Bokri.

This had seemed idiotic, even perverse to many people, right from the start, but had turned out to be surprisingly if modestly useful, providing the raw material for many an undergraduate paper on, for example, changing patterns of casual domestic ambient surface debris through the ages.

The Incast were a philosophical order dedicated to storing as much of the disputed, superseded or just plain long-proved-wrong knowledge that the Gzilt civilisation and species had built up over the millennia, and any artefacts associated therewith. Housed in multiply backed-up and distributed memory storage facilities across Bokri and various other microrbitals throughout the Ospin system and beyond were entire libraries of ancient conspiracy theories, crackpot physics hypotheses, unutterably antique speculations on anatomy, chemistry and astronomy, and – as a sort of sideline – devices holding the mind-states of untold numbers of individuals and group-minds – mostly Gzilt but from other species as well.

Some were static back-ups for the dynamic originals, held and running elsewhere, some were being retained under the instructions of the people whose personalities and memories they held encoded, to be re-energised and their inhabitants woken at some specific date or when something especially noteworthy occurred to the Gzilt – the Subliming naturally representing pretty much the ultimate example of that criterion – and some had effectively been lost or abandoned.

In the Culture, stuff like this would be collected by Minds with an interest in just such societal flotsam and jetsam and stored in the specially adapted bays and hangars of GSVs, or in the subsidiary structures of Orbital Hubs. In the Gzilt, the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin were the place; they acted as the sump, the filtered, partitioned bilges of the civilisation.

The main Incast Facility within Bokri lay in the centre of a broad, circular lake; it was a spherical building a kilometre across looking like a sort of reversed image of an iceberg, with barely a tenth of its bulk seemingly lying beneath the surface of the lake. It was mostly white, wore its multi-storey nature on its surface with obvious horizontal divisions but possessed relatively few piercings, windows or balconies.

It was generally reached by an evacuated travel-tube system set on a long, elegantly thin bridge extending from the shore of the lake, a kilometre away. The Mistake Not … reckoned they didn’t really have the time to indulge in such niceties, so deposited Cossont, the android Eglyle Parinherm and its own avatar Berdle near the centre of the building, Displacing them neatly into an empty elevator car and using a small collection of similarly dropped-off comms and effector gear to start interfacing/interfering with the facility’s own administrational data complexes.