Suddenly she was surrounded waist deep in stars. The drone, the far-distant stars beneath her feet and their reflections had all disappeared. “This is the Ruprine Cluster, in Arm One-one Near-tip,” the ship’s voice said all around her.
Arm One-one Near-tip was a little under three hundred light years distant from the region of space where the Orbital Dinyol-hei lay circling around the sun Etchilbieth. In galactic terms, this was practically next door.
“These stars,” the ship said as a few dozen of the suns shown turned from their natural colours to green, “represent the extent of a small civilisation called the Sichultian Enablement, a Level Four/Five society originating here.” One of the green stars blazed brightly, then reduced in brilliance. “The Quyn system; home of the planet Sichult where the pan-human Sichultians evolved.” A pair of pan-humans were shown, standing just outside the ball of stars surrounding Yime. Curious physical proportions, Yime thought. Two sexes; each a little odd-looking to her eyes, just as she would have been to theirs, she supposed. Their skin colours changed as she looked at them, from dark to pale then back to dark, with yellow, red and olive tones exhibited en route. The two naked beings were replaced by one clothed one. He appeared tall, powerfully built and had long white hair.
“This is a man called Joiler Veppers,” the ship told her. “He is the richest individual in the entire civilisation, and by some margin. He is also the most powerful individual in the entire civilisation — though unofficially, through his wealth and connections rather than due to formal political position.”
The image of the stellar cluster with its artificially green stars and the tall, white-haired man both vanished to be replaced by the earlier image of the stars constituting the Sichultian Enablement, with the Quyn system’s sun still shown as the brightest.
“Ms. Nsokyi,” the ship said, “are you aware of the current, long-running confliction over the future of the Afterlives known as Hells?”
“Yes,” Yime said.
Confliction was the technically correct term for a formal conflict within a virtual reality — i.e. one where the outcome mattered beyond the confines of the virtual battle environment itself — but mostly people just called this one the War in Heaven. It had been running now for nearly three decades and had yet to produce a result. She’d heard reports recently that it was finally coming close to a conclusion, but then there had been similar reports almost every hundred days since it had started so she had taken no more notice than anybody else. Most people had long since lost interest.
“Good,” the ship said. “Mr. Veppers controls the largest part of the Enablement’s productive capacity and — through one of his interests in particular — has access to this.” A star near the outer limit of the Enablement’s volume blazed too, attracting attention. The view zoomed in vertiginously until it showed a single-ringed gas giant planet. Between its broad, dun-coloured polar regions, the planet displayed seven horizontal bands coloured various shades of yellow, red and brown.
“This,” the ship said, as the entirety of the single equatorial ring surrounding the planet flashed green once, “is the artificial planetary nebula of the Tsungarial Disk, around the planet Razhir, in the Tsung system. The Disk comprises over three hundred million separate habitats and — mostly — manufacturies, usually called fabricaria. The Disk was abandoned two million years ago by the then Subliming Meyeurne and has been a Galactic Protectorate since shortly after their disappearance. The Protectorate status was agreed to be necessary due to a chaotic, dangerously uncontrolled war both over and enabled by the very considerable ship-and-weapon-system-manufacturing capacity left behind, at least irresponsibly, possibly mischievously and arguably maliciously by the Meyeurne. The civilisations involved were the Hreptazyle and the Yelve.”
The ship didn’t bother to display any images of the Meyeurne, Hreptazyle or Yelve. Certainly Yime had never heard of any of them, which meant they were either long gone or just irrelevant.
“Shortly following the Idiran War,” the Bodhisattva said, “the Culture became the latest in a long line of trusted Level Eights to be given Protectorate custody of the Disk. However, as part of what were in effect war reparations after the Chel debacle, six hundred years ago, we ceded overarching control of the Disk to the Nauptre Reliquaria and their junior partners the GFCF.”
Yime most certainly had heard of the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF. Like the Culture, the Reliquaria was a Level Eight civilisation; technologically the societies were equals. Originally a species of giant, furred, gliding marsupials, for the last couple of millennia they had expressed themselves almost exclusively as their machines: GSV-sized constructor ships, smaller though still substantial space vessels, lesser independent space-faring units and a multifarious variety of metre-scale individuals roughly equivalent to drones, though with no standard model; each design was unique or close to it. Their presence then extended down through the centimetre and millimetre scales to collectivised nanobots.
The furry marsupials still existed, but they’d retreated to their home planets and habitats to lives of cheerfully selfish indolence, leaving their machines to represent them in the galactic community. Generally reckoned to be well on the slippery (if confusingly, by convention, upward) slope to Subliming, the Reliquaria’s relations with the Culture were formal — perhaps even frosty — rather than friendly, largely due to the Nauptrians’ robust attitude to punishment in their artificial Afterlife.
Basically, they were very much for it.
Unlike the Culture, which — despite being firmly of a mind with the anti-Hell side of the confliction — had thought it politic to take no active part in the virtual war, the Nauptrians had made themselves an enthusiastic part of the pro-Hell war effort.
The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy was a Level Seven civilisation. Pan-human, smaller and more delicate than the average but generally reckoned to be quite beautiful, with large heads and large eyes, they had a strange relationship with the Culture, professing to love it — they had even chosen their name partly in honour of the Culture — but often seeming to want to criticise it and even work against it, as though they so much wanted to be of help they needed the Culture reduced to a level of neediness that would make such aid something it would genuinely be grateful for.
The mention of Chel was randomly appropriate, Yime thought. Before that particular stain on the Culture’s reputation people had seemed reticent to talk about the whole issue of Afterlives. After it, for a while at least, they’d appeared to talk of little else.
“The components of the Tsungarial Disk have mostly been mothballed for all this time,” the ship continued, “left as a kind of monument or mausoleum. Over the last few decades, however, as the Sichultia have expanded their sphere of influence out to and around it, they have been granted limited, low-level control over the Disk and allowed, in the shape of Veppers’ Veprine Corporation, to use a handful of the orbital manufacturies to construct trading and exploratory ships, all of this supervised by the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF.
“Veppers and the Sichultia have long sought greater operational control over the Disk and its manufacturing capacity to aid their commercial, military and civilisational expansion. They are now on the verge of achieving their goal due to the changing attitudes, not to say connivance, of the GFCF and the Reliquaria. This is because the GFCF covets at least some of that capacity as well — their medium-term aim is to step up a civilisational level, and control of the reactivated Disk’s productive capacity would go some way to securing it — while the Nauptre Reliquaria are pro-Hell, in the short term wanting the pro/anti-Hell confliction ended — and with what they see as the right result — as well as, in the long term, and assuming they do not Sublime in the meantime, by their own admission planning to combine all Afterlives with their own and others Sublimed. That nobody else thinks this is even possible does not seem to trouble them and is anyway beside the point.”