And lifeless! The whole system! Even the few Deadly-Slow species – the glacially paced plodders of the galactic community whose constitution and chemistries might have suited the cold and quiet of the local environment – appeared to have given both the star and its planets a miss; no Baskers, no sign of Seedsail or Darclouds or any of the other relevant species that were the cosmic equivalent of sub-silt feeders. A lonely, misfit sun, then; never quite one thing or the other, and remote from its peers.

The Mistake Not … registered a twinge of affinity with the dead star, and investigated that response as well, turning over in its mind the bizarre concept of a conscious entity such as itself feeling some sort of metaphorical connection with something as classically boring, as easily described and as billion-year venerable as a failed sun.

The ship was aware that, however splendid, intellectually refined and marvellous it might be (and it was very much of the opinion that it was all of those things, and more), it would likely still only ever measure its age in thousands of years, and for all the star’s monotonous lifelessness and sterility, it would still be here when it, the ship Mistake Not …, had gone.

Still: life was life, consciousness was consciousness, and mere classical matter, inanimate – no matter how long-lasting – was just ineffably boring and in a sense pointless compared to almost any sort of life, let along something that was fully aware of its own existence, never mind something as gloriously hyper-sentient and thoroughly, vitally connected to the universe as a ship Mind.

And besides, when it had ceased to be as a Culture vessel, the ship was confident that its being would continue to exist in some form, somewhere, either – at the very least – as part of some long-slumbering transcorporated group-mind, or – ultimate of ultimates, as far as was known – within the Sublime.

Which kind of brought it back to where it had come in: here.

The approaching Liseiden fleet manifested as a collection of forty slightly embarrassingly untidy warp-wakes, some distance off.

The Liseiden were fluidics: metre-scale eel-like creatures originally evolved beneath the ice of a wandering extra-stellar planet. They were at the five going-on six stage of development according to the pretty much universally accepted table of Recognised Civilisationary Levels. This meant they were Low Level Involved, and – like many at that level – Strivationist; energetically seeking to better themselves and shift their civilisation further along its own Main Sequence of technological and societal development.

They were a lively, creative and uninhibited species, according to most analyses, and just the tolerable side of the assertive/aggressive line, though not above bending the odd rule or stepping over the occasional decency boundary if they thought they could profit civilisationally. So not, in that regard at least, that different from almost every other Involved species.