It was practically the definition of a Mind that the word – properly capitalised – meant a conscious entity able to go into the Sublime, not evaporate, and even – maybe, sometimes, very occasionally, in fact so seldom that it would be quite close to most people’s statistical definition of “never” – be able to return, in some sense still viable and identifiably the same personality as that which had made the transition from Real to Sublime in the first place.

If the Zoologist’s reasons for wanting to Sublime had – aside from the obvious, of wanting to experience the sheer ineffable wonderfulness of it all – been opaque, its reasons for coming back to the Real were simply baffling. The Mind itself had no explanation whatsoever, and seemed bemused by the question.

Come back it had though, and – seemingly having no desire to remain in its own resurfaced vessel or even substrate – it had canvassed various of its earlier comrades amongst the Contact fleet (those that had survived; the severe attrition of the early years of the Idiran war came into effect here) to see if any of them would house its soul for posterity, or at least until it got bored and changed its mind again, or whatever.

Meanwhile, Contact’s finest and most expert Minds in all things to do with the Sublime had tried debriefing the returned Mind. They had initially been ecstatic at having one of their own who had been there and made the return trip (lots of Minds had promised to do so over the millennia, though none ever did; the Zoologist had made no such undertaking, but had returned). This had, however, proven farcical.

The ship’s memories were abstracted, beyond vague; effectively useless. The Mind itself was basically a mess; self-restructured (presumably) along lines it was impossible to see the logic behind. Identifiably the same, it was expressed in the most bizarre and obfuscatory tangle of needlessly complicated and self-referential analytical/meditative and sagational/ratiocinative processal architecture it had been the misfortune of all concerned ever to contemplate.

Special Circumstances – Contact’s scruple-free wing and the bit that was as close to military intelligence and espionage matters as the Culture even reluctantly admitted to possessing – had been more than happy to take receipt of the old ship’s physical form, desperate to see if its time in the Sublime had altered it in any way, or if its re-creation back out of the Sublime – if that was the way it worked – had left tell-tale signs giving some or indeed any clue to how the Sublime worked (either way the answer was, it hadn’t).

They ended up no wiser even regarding the seemingly non-get-roundable requirement that you could not go disembodied into the Sublime. You had to make the transition substrate and all: brains and whole bodies, computational matrices and whole ships – or the equivalent – seemed to be required, as well as the personalities and memories such physical ware encoded.