∞

To be fair, this posting did look like a sinecure until all this Z-R shit hit the impellers.

∞

These things always do. Perhaps the lesson is that there are no sinecures, just matters of potentially grave consequence we happen to get away with most of the time. Can we ask the Empiricist to lean on the Passing By …? These big System-class fuckers are supposed to cast a long shadow ahead of them, or what use are they?

∞

I’ll make the suggestion. Back to the general babble.

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

oLOU Caconym

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Empiricist

oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

oUe Mistake Not …

oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

oMSV Pressure Drop

oLSV You Call This Clean?

Well, we must await further developments. Let us hope nothing too momentous occurs in the meantime.

* * *

The first part of the ship dance “The Approaching Eclipsing of One Sun by Another” was performed with due ceremony on the achievement of the Gzilt system outskirts, with the Gzilt home planet of Zyse only hours away. The dance was augmented with the participation of the Culture ship Beats Working. This vessel’s accrued inferred alien cachet value (positive), honorary, had, by general acclaim within the fleet and squadron, now become so great that it might actually be embarrassing for it to be informed of the level to which it had ascended so rapidly.

It was probably and arguably already over the limit that even as august a being as Ossebri 17 Haldesib, holding a position as elevated as Swarmprince and Sub-Swarm Divisional Head and Fleet Officer in Charge, could be properly expected to confer-by-informing. It was decided therefore to allow the Culture ship to continue to accrue inferred alien cachet value (positive), honorary, for the meantime, while still not disturbing the metaphorical airflow-through-the-hive by informing the vessel of this distinction.

Regardless, Gzilt and Zyse now lay ahead, and close.

“Hello again. Sorry for being so … abrupt.”

“That’s all right. I take it we’re still aboard the same Culture ship, the Mistake Not …”

“Yes, we are.”

“So, what were you looking at that disturbed you so?” the voice from the silver-grey cube asked. “Or are you going to turn me off again?”

“We were looking at what you’d done to yourself.”

“Really? What? … Come on; tell me. The version of me in here and version of me that did whatever I did to myself are less than twenty years apart. When you’ve lived as long as I have, that’s nothing. I won’t have changed much in between. Effectively I’m the same person. Tell me.”

“You’d put your earliest memories into your eyes, then had those removed,” she said. “You went to Ximenyr, in the Girdlecity, to have it done. You had extra ears put where your eyes should have been.”

“… Well, that’s certainly taking my predilection for the audible over the visible to an extreme.” The voice sounded genuinely amused.