I have wandered the galaxy for the last eight hundred years, seeing all I could of other civilisations and peoples. There is always more to see, of course; the galaxy renews and re-forms itself faster than one can make one’s way round it. Anyway, I am, truly, fascinated by Shellworlds and have a particular interest in Sursamen, not the smallest part of which concerns your level, the Eighth. When I heard rumours regarding your father’s death — and please accept my condolences in that regard — and the events surrounding this sad occasion, including the death of your brother Ferbin, I immediately thought to make myself available to help the Sarl, and the children of the late king in particular.
I’d assumed you’d be going back home with many of your powers removed or reduced. I know that you return with no ship or drone or other aid about you, and so I’d like to offer my own services. Not as a day-to-day servant or courier or anything like that — our Morthanveld hosts would not tolerate such a thing — but as a last resort, if you will. Certainly as a friend in case of need. Sursamen, and especially the Eighth, seems like a dangerous place these days, and a person travelling alone, no matter how able, may need all the friends they can muster.
I — that is, the ship — am currently some distance off but keeping pace with the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown, to stay in reasonable proximity to this avatoid and facilitate its speedy retrieval should I need to do so. However, it is my intention, shortly, to make my way to Sursamen directly and this avatoid, or another — for I have several — will be there. It and myself are ready to afford you such assistance as you may require.
You need not respond now; please think about this at your leisure and make your mind up in your own time. When you meet my avatoid on Sursamen you can let me know what you think then, through it. I shall completely understand if you want nothing to do with me. That is entirely your right. However, please be assured of my continuing respect and know that I am, dear lady, entirely at your service.
I shall end this signal shortly; please decide whether you wish to pretend I have in any way read your mind, just on the off-chance we are somehow being observed.
Signal ends at implied zero: four, three, two, one…
Djan Seriy stared into the eyes of the young man sitting opposite her. She was thinking, Dear shafted WorldGod, all my potential bedfellows are machines. How depressing.
Only about half a minute had passed since they’d started staring into each other’s eyes. She sat back slowly, smiling and shaking her head. “I think your trick does not work on me, sir.”
Quike smiled. “Well, it doesn’t work with everybody,” he said. He raised his goblet. It emitted a high, pleasant, ringing tone. “Perhaps I might be permitted to try again some other time?”
“Perhaps.” They clinked bell-goblets; the twin sound was surprisingly mellifluous. She had dismissed the idea of taking seriously the offer he’d just made before the glasses had stopped ringing.
She engaged him in conversation for some time after that, listening to him recount tales of various explorations and adventures during his many travels. It was not unpleasant, she did not have to pretend interest and it was amusing to try to work out in his stories which parts were probably true and had been experienced by the ship concerned directly (assuming there really was a ship involved), which parts had been lived by the avatoid while the ship had looked on and which might have been entirely made up to try to fool anybody listening that all this related to a real human, not a ship-plus-avatar-in-human-form.
In exchange, she related something of her life on Sursamen as a child and adolescent and answered most of the eagerly asked questions Quike had, though she steered clear of certain areas and tried not to give any indication of how she would eventually react to his offer.
But of course she would reject his help, the ship’s help. If the Liveware Problem was working completely alone then it was probably either hopelessly naïve or quietly insane; neither inspired confidence. If not then it presumably represented a part of SC or something even more rarefied and it was just pretending to be hopelessly naïve or quietly insane, which was even more worrying. And if Quike and the Liveware Problem were SC then why hadn’t she been briefed about them turning up before she’d left Prasadal, or at least before she’d left the last vestige of the Culture proper and been batonned onwards to the Morthanveld?
What was going on here? All she wanted to do was go back home and pay her respects to her late father and her presumed-deceased brother, reconnect with her past a bit and perhaps lay something to rest (she was not entirely sure what, but maybe that would come to her later). She doubted she’d be able to provide much help to her surviving brother, Oramen, but if she could offer some small service or other, she would. But that was kind of it. After that she’d be off; away back to the Culture — and, if they’d take her, back to SC and the job that, for all its frustrations, dilemmas and heartbreaks, she loved.
Why was a Culture ship trying to get involved in her returning to Sursamen in the first place? At most, this was still all about a pretty paltry thing; a grubby dispute regarding the succession of power within a very minor and embarrassingly violent and undemocratic tribe whose principal claim on the interest of others was that they happened to live inside a relatively rare and exotic world-type. Was she expected to do something on Sursamen? If so, what? What could she be expected to do, unbriefed, lacking any specified mission and de-fanged?
Well, she didn’t know. She strongly suspected she’d be crazy to do anything other than keep her head down, do what she’d said she was going to do and no more. She was in enough trouble already just for quitting the mission on Prasadal and heading home on compassionate leave without adding to the charge-sheet. SC training was full of stories of agents who’d gone dramatically off-piste and had taken on bizarre missions all of their own devising. They usually ended badly.
There were only a few stories leaning in the other direction, of agents who had passed up obvious opportunities to make some beneficial intervention unbriefed, without some specific mandate or instruction. The implication was, as ever, to stick to the plan, but be prepared to improvise. (Also, listen to your drone or other companion; they were expected to be more levelheaded, less emotional than you — that was one of the main reasons they were there.)
Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgement to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words.
It sometimes seemed to SC trainees, and especially to SC trainees coming to the organisation having been raised in other societies, that those people sworn just to obey orders had the easier time of it, being allowed to be single-minded in whatever purpose they pursued rather than having to do that and wrestle with its ethical implications. However, as this difference in approach was held up as one of the principal reasons that the Culture in general and SC in particular was morally superior to everybody else, it was generally regarded as a small operational price to pay for the allegedly far greater reward of being able to feel well ahead in the ethics stakes compared to one’s civilisational peers.