Never a civilisation to take too many risks, however, and priding itself on the assiduity of its bet-hedging, the Culture had not disposed of all the remaining craft; a few thousand — representing less than a per cent of the original total — were kept in reserve, fully armed save for their usual complement of Displacer-dispatched explosive warheads (a relatively minor weapon system anyway), which they and other craft would manufacture in the event of mobilisation. Most of the mothballed ships were retained within a scattering of Culture Orbitals, chosen so that if there ever was an emergency which the craft would be required to deal with, no part of the greater galaxy would be more than a month or so's flight away.
Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture's stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and the comings and goings of cruise ships and visiting GSVs, but in places as far out of the way as it was possible to find amongst the cavernously cold and empty spaces of the great lens; quiet, secret, hidden places; places off the beaten track, places possibly nobody else even knew existed.
Pittance had been chosen as one of those places.
The General Systems Vehicle Uninvited Guest and a fleet of accompanying warcraft had been dispatched to rendezvous with the cold, dark, wandering mass. It was found exactly where it had been predicted it ought to be, and work began. Firstly, a series of enormous halls had been hollowed out of its interior, then a precisely weighed and shaped piece of the matter mined from one of those giant hangars had been aimed with millimetric accuracy and fired at Pittance by the GSV, leaving a small new crater on the surface of the world, exactly as though it had been struck by another, smaller, piece of interstellar debris.
This was done because Pittance wasn't spinning quite quickly enough or heading in exactly the right direction for the Culture's purposes; the exquisitely engineered collision made both alterations at once. So Pittance spun a little quicker to provide a more powerful hint of artificial gravity inside and its course was altered just a fraction to deflect it from a star system it would otherwise have drifted through in five and a half thousand years or so.
A number of giant Displacer units were set within the fabric of Pittance and the warships were safely Displaced, one at a time, into the giant spaces the GSV had created. Lastly, a frightening variety and number of sensory and weapon systems had been emplaced, camouflaged on the surface of Pittance and buried deep underneath it, while a cloud of tiny, dark, almost invisible but apocalyptically powerful devices were placed in orbit about the slowly tumbling mass, also to watch for unwelcome guests, and — if necessary — welcome them with destruction.
Its work finished, the Uninvited Guest had departed, taking with it most of the iron mined from Pittance's interior. It left behind a world that — save for that plausible-looking extra crater — seemed untouched; even its overall mass was almost exactly as it had been before, again, minus a little to allow for the collision it had suffered, the debris of which was allowed to drift as the laws of gravity dictated, most of it sailing like lazy shrapnel spinning into space but a little of it — captured by the tiny world's weak gravitational field — drifting along with it, and so incidentally providing perfect cover for the cloud of black-body sentry devices.
Watching over Pittance from near its centre was its own quiet Mind, carefully designed to enjoy the quiet life and to take a subdued, passive pride in the feeling of containing, and jealously guarding, an almost incalculable amount of stored, latent, preferably never-to-be-used power.
The rarefied, specialist Minds in the warships themselves had been consulted like the rest on their fate those five hundred years ago; those in Storage at Pittance had been of the persuasion that preferred to sleep until they might be needed, and been prepared to accept that their sleep might be very long indeed, before quite probably ending in battle and death. What they had all agreed they would prefer would be to be woken only as a prelude to joining the Culture's ultimate Sublimation, if and when that became the society's choice. Until then they would be content to slumber in their dark halls, the war gods of past wrath implicitly guarding the peace of the present and the security of the future.
Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening.
Pittance was a very safe place, then, and Gestra Ishmethit liked safe places. It was a very lonely place, and Gestra Ishmethit had always craved loneliness. It was at once a very important place and a place that almost nobody knew or cared about or indeed probably ever would, and that also suited Gestra Ishmethit quite perfectly, because he was a strange creature, and accepted that he was.
Tall, adolescently gawky and awkward despite his two hundred years, Gestra felt he had been an outsider all his life. He'd tried physical alteration (he'd been quite handsome, for a while), he'd tried being female (she'd been quite pretty, she'd been told), he'd tried moving away from where he'd been brought up (he'd moved half the galaxy away to an Orbital quite different but every bit as pleasant as his home) and he'd tried a life lived adream (he'd been a merman prince in a water-filled space ship fighting an evil machine-hive mind, and according to the scenario was supposed to woo the warrior princess of another clan) but in all the things he'd tried he had never felt anything else than awkward: being handsome was worse than being gangly and bumbling because his body felt like a lie he was wearing; being a woman was the same, and somehow embarrassing, as well, as though it was somebody else's body he had kidnapped from inside; moving away just left him terrified of having to explain to people why he'd wanted to leave home in the first place, and living in a dream scenario all day and night just felt wrong; he had a horror of immersing himself in that virtual world as completely as his merman did in his watery realm and thus losing hold of what he felt was a tenuous grip on reality at the best of times, and so he'd lived the scenario with the nagging sensation that he was just a pet fish in somebody else's fish tank, swimming in circles through the prettified ruins of sunken castles. In the end, to his mortification, the princess had defected to the machine hive-mind.
The plain fact was that he didn't like talking to people, he didn't like mixing with them and he didn't even like thinking about them individually. The best he could manage was when he was well away from people; then he could feel a not unpleasant craving for their company as a whole, a craving that quite vanished — to be replaced by stomach-churning dread — the instant it looked like being satisfied.
Gestra Ishmethit was a freak; despite being born to the most ordinary and healthy of mothers (and an equally ordinary father), in the most ordinary of families on the most ordinary of Orbitals and having the most ordinary of upbringings, an accident of birth, or some all-but-impossible conjunction of disposition and upbringing, had left him the sort of person the Culture's carefully meddled-with genes virtually never threw up; a genuine misfit, something even rarer in the Culture than a baby born physically deformed.
But whereas it was perfectly simple to replace or regrow a stunted limb or a misshapen face, it was a different matter when the oddness lay inside, a fact Gestra had always accepted with an equanimity he sometimes suspected people regarded as even more freakish than his original almost pathological shyness. Why didn't he just have the condition treated? his relations and few acquaintances asked. Why didn't he ask to remain as much himself as possible, yet with this strange aberrancy removed, expunged? It might not be easy, but it would be painless; probably it could be done in his sleep; he'd remember nothing about it and when he woke up he could live a normal life.