“And it all happened, and we all heard the big, bad terrible secret, but obviously it wasn’t that big or bad or terrible, because nobody vetoed the Gzilt joining this new cobbled-together civ – we were calling ourselves mongrels even back then, feeling very edgy and radical. And so the Gzilt were cleared to become part of the Culture … even though in the end they didn’t actually take up the offer and go through with it.

“So. All well and good, you might think. That’s what we all thought.

“… Except one member of the negotiating party, a certain Representative Ngaroe QiRia, from the Buhdren Federality – that would be me – later remembered what it was that he’d heard, what he’d been expected to forget, what he thought, like everybody else, he had forgotten.

“Thing is, I’d always been interested in long-term living, even way back then, and particularly in holding on to memories that might otherwise get forgotten, over-written or whatever. So I’d had some experimental cranial, biochemical brain-chemistry-mangling stuff done, not all of it entirely legal or even medically advisable, but most of it didn’t seem to have worked anyway, frankly, so it never really occurred to me it might interfere with this hear-and-forget thing they’d hit us with during the negotiations.

“Turned out I remembered all this stuff I’d been meant to forget due to a fix even I didn’t know I had: something the clinicians had added as some sort of experimental after-thought and then either forgot to tell me about – ha! – or decided it might be better to keep quiet about.

“Anyway, the effects have been ongoing, and have stayed and developed, though they’ve long since been smoothed over and ever-so-carefully incorporated into all the other treatments and amendments and augmentations I’ve had since.

“At first I wouldn’t Sublime or even be Stored or undergo any sort of transitional state because I was afraid this secret would come out, because I don’t think I understood that though it was a … I don’t know; a faith-shaking secret … that’s just in theory. In practice, people don’t believe for good reasons anyway, they just believe and that’s it, like we don’t love for good reasons, we just love because we need to love.

“Later, even knowing this, and knowing that the Gzilt knowing would make little real difference because they would just ignore the knowledge or find another way of not thinking about it, I still just kept on living, not Subliming with any group and not trans-corporating into a group-mind or into a Mind or anything else because it had become a habit, this going on and going on. It had become so much of what made me who I had become, there seemed no point in trying to change it.

“So I became the man who lived for ever, more or less, because I’d once held a secret I didn’t care about any more.