Nevertheless, whole civilisations had been making the one-way trip there for all that time, there was good proof that even the first to do so were still in some meaningful sense there, however much they might have changed, and – compared to the relative chaos, uncertainty and existential short-termism of the Real – that represented a fairly good option by most peoples’ reckoning.

So, a beguiling proposition and a field ripe for studying, too, if one was so inclined. The Mind in the Caconym, which had taken the ship’s name, had been so inclined, once. No longer. The whole enterprise had been exquisitely frustrating, and its friend the Pressure Drop knew this.

∞

I understand. I could, of course, just shut up, withdraw and say no more about it.

∞

No, my interest is piqued, as I’m sure you anticipated. What is it?

∞

Annoyingly – amazingly – the Caconym knew that as far as authorities on the Sublime went, it was one of the few assets the Culture – or anybody else – possessed. It kept hoping that some other brave, ambitious or just plain self-deluded souls would take up the Sublime-exploring baton and enquire further, look closer, delve deeper and make some breakthrough it had been unable to make, so taking the responsibility away from it, and it had tried to encourage informal associations of other Minds with similar interests to pursue such behaviour, but all such hopes had been dashed; almost nobody else was interested. It had even dared anticipate that the Contact section would form a specialist department to handle such matters and tackle the problem properly, but – despite having dropped a few heavy hints on the subject over the years – this too seemed as far away as ever.

The Gzilt, the Pressure Drop sent.

∞

Mm-hmm. Been talking about the Big Cheerie-O for some. They’re actually off, too; set a date and everything. See, I do listen to some news. Hmm. That’s quite close, now. Not having second thoughts are they?

∞

Not yet. But there’s been … a development.

∞

The Gzilt were a sort of cousin species/civilisation to the Culture. Nearly founders, though not quite, they had been influential in the setting up and design of the Culture almost ten thousand years earlier, when a disparate group of humanoid species at roughly the same stage of technological and societal development had been thinking about banding together.

Amiable enough, if somewhat martially uptight due to an unusual social set-up that basically meant everybody was presumed to be in a single society-wide militia – hence everybody had a military rank, from birth – they had made significant contributions to the establishment and ethos of the Culture while it was all still at the being-talked-about phase but then, almost at the last moment, and to pretty much everyone’s surprise, in a way including their own, they had decided not to join the new confederation.