The world was almost as long down its axis as it was wide and was conventionally arranged – by the relaxed, abundantly provisioned standards of a post-scarcity humanoid civilisation – with parkland, forests, lakes and aesthetically pleasing built-up areas and isolated grand architectural statements spread across its nearly three million square kilometres of interior surface.

The Gzilt had never entirely turned their backs on the ideas of both private ownership and money, though the latter had been demoted to being of mostly ceremonial value and both had been detached from what most people regarded as being the most important measure of a person’s worth; there had been enough of everything to go around everybody in the Gzilt civilisation for many millennia, and while a degree of self-interest and acquisitiveness was taken as being only natural, outright self-obsession and full-on greed were regarded as signs of weakness of character, if not a symptom of actual psychological damage.

The Bokri microrbital was joint-owned by a group of Secular Collectionary orders: institutionalised obsessive, only para-religious organisations, each devoted to one or other aspect of preservation.

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The Incast were a philosophical order dedicated to storing as much of the disputed, superseded or just plain long-proved-wrong knowledge that the Gzilt civilisation and species had built up over the millennia, and any artefacts associated therewith.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.