The android nodded. “Oh, yes. And heat. Assuming the simulation continues, it will be interesting to see whether the last of the available air escapes first, or freezes.”

“This is horrible,” Pyan said again.

Cossont kept on patting the creature. “There there,” she said, for want of anything better.

Eight

(S -20)

The ship knew it would have to do it sooner or later. Might as well get it over with.

Within the computational substrates that provided the environment for the Caconym’s Mind there were plenty of bits it had never used, didn’t presently use and probably never would use. Physically fairly compact – in three dimensions fitting inside a fat ellipsoid only fifteen metres or so in length – the effective capacity of the Mind’s substrates was suitably vast. The comparisons usually involved how many normal drone or human mind-states could be losslessly encoded within the same volume, or how far back in time you would have to go before you got to the point where in any given society every single bit of computing power they would have possessed back then, summed, would be less than equal to the power contained within a single Mind.

The Caconym didn’t really care. All that mattered was that – due to innate Culture over-engineering, its own consecutive incarnations as earlier ships and a sort of long-term laziness about pursuing the most efficient use of its much-augmented and added-to substrates – it had significant spare carrying capacity, and had agreed to house the mind-state – the soul, albeit reduced – of another Mind inside it.

The Mind concerned was – well, had been – that of a Culture ship called the Zoologist, an ancient Boulder-class Superlifter. A glorified tug, basically.

Superlifters had always tended towards eccentricity. It had never been the most difficult example of ship- or Mind-psychology to put this down to being a result of their rather boring and repetitive job, their usually uncrewed nature and the fact that, as well as being tugs, they had been designed as emergency, stop-gap warships, back before the Idiran war, when the Culture hadn’t really had any proper warships, or at least none that it was going to admit to having.

The Zoologist was one of a relatively small group of Superlifters to have survived the war. Then, even before the great conflict had ended – but long after the Culture had produced fantastically more powerful warships by the multitude – it had done something relatively unusual: it had Sublimed, all by itself.

A little later it had done something for which the term “unusual” was woefully inadequate: it had come back again.