“The Forgotten,” the Bodhisattva told Yime Nsokyi. “Also known as Oubliettionaries.”
There were times, Yime might occasionally be forced to admit, when a neural lace would indeed be useful. If she had one she could be quizzing it now, asking it for mentions, references, definitions. What the hell was an Oubliettionary? Of course, the ship would know she was making such inquiries — she was on the ship now, not the Orbital, so any lace or terminal business would be conducted through the Bodhisattva’s Mind or its sub-systems — but at least with a lace you could have the relevant knowledge just dumped into your head rather than have to listen to it one word at a time.
“I see,” Yime said. She folded her arms. “I’m listening.”
“They’re ships of a certain… predisposition, shall we say, normally a GSV, usually with a few other ships and a small number of active drones aboard and often containing no humans at all,” the Bodhisattva told her. “They resign from the day-to-day informational commerce of the Culture, stop registering their position, take themselves off into the middle of nowhere and then they just sit there, doing nothing. Except listen, indefinitely.”
“Listen?”
“They listen to one or more — probably all, I’d imagine — of the handful of widely scattered broadcast stations which send out a continual update on the general state of matters in the greater galactic community in general and the Culture in particular.”
“News stations.”
“For want of a better word.”
“Broadcasting.”
“It’s a wasteful and inefficient way to communicate, but the advantage of a broadcast in this context is precisely that it goes everywhere and nobody can tell who might be listening.”
“How many of these ‘Forgotten’ are there?”
“Good question. To most people they appear simply as ships that have gone into an especially uncommunicative retreat, an impression the ships concerned do nothing to contradict, of course. At any time anything up to one per cent of the Culture ship fleet might be on a retreat, and perhaps point three or point four per cent of those have been silent since quitting what one might call the main sequence of normal ship behaviour. I hesitate to call it discipline. It’s not a much-studied field, so even the quality of the relatively few guesstimates is hard to evaluate. There might be as few as eight or twelve of these ships, or possibly as many as three or four hundred.”
“And what’s the point of all this?”
“They’re back-up,” the Bodhisattva said. “If, through some bizarre and frankly unfeasibly widespread and complete calamity, the Culture somehow ceased to be, then any one of these ships could re-seed the galaxy — or a different one, perhaps — with something that would be recognisably the Culture. This does beg the question what would be the point if it had been so comprehensively expunged in the first place, but I suppose you could argue some lesson might have been learned that might make version two more resilient somehow.”
“I thought the entire Contact fleet was supposed to represent our ‘back-up’,” Yime said. In its relationships with other civilisations, especially with those that were encountering it for the first time, much tended to be made of the fact — or at least the assertion — that each and every GSV represented the Culture in its entirety, that each one held all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated and could build any object or device that the Culture was capable of making, while the sheer scale of a General Systems Vehicle meant they each contained so many humans and drones they were more or less guaranteed to hold a reasonably representative sample of both even without trying to.
The Culture was deliberately and self-consciously very widely distributed throughout the galaxy, with no centre, no nexus, no home planet. Its distribution might make it easy to attack, but it also made it hard to eradicate altogether, at least in theory. Having hundreds of thousands of vessels individually quite capable of rebuilding the entire Culture from scratch was generally held to be safeguard enough against civilisational oblivion, or so Yime had been led to believe. Obviously others thought differently.
“The Contact fleet is what one might call a second line of defence,” the ship told her.
“What’s the first?”
“All the Orbitals.” the ship said reasonably. “And other habs; Rocks and planets included.”
“And these Forgotten are the last ditch.”
“Probably. So one might imagine. As far as I know.”
That, in ship-speak, Yime thought, probably meant No. Though she knew better than to try to coax a less ambiguous answer out of a Mind.
“So they just sit there. Wherever ‘there’ might be.”
“Oort clouds, interstellar space, within or even beyond the outer halo of the greater galaxy itself; who knows? However, yes, that is the general idea.”
“And indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely until now, at least,” the Bodhisattva said.
“Waiting for a catastrophe that’ll probably never happen but which if it did would indicate either the existence of a force so powerful it could probably discover these ships regardless and snuff them out too, or an existential flaw in the Culture so deep it would certainly be present in these ‘Forgotten’ as well, especially given their… representativeness.”
“Put like that, the entire strategy does sound a little forlorn,” the ship said, sounding almost apologetic. “But there we are. Because you never know, I suppose. I think a part of the whole idea is that it provides a degree of comfort for those who might otherwise worry about such matters.”
“But most people don’t know about these ships in the first place,” Yime pointed out. “How can you be comforted by something you don’t know about?”
“Ah,” the Bodhisattva said. “That’s the beauty of it: only people who do worry are likely to seek out such knowledge, and so are suitably reassured. They also tend to appreciate the need not to make the knowledge too well known, and indeed take additional pleasure in helping to keep it from becoming so. Everybody else just gets happily on with their lives, never fretting in the first place.”
Yime shook her head, frustrated. “They can’t be completely secret,” she protested. “They must be mentioned somewhere.”
The Culture was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, especially big ones. It was one of the very few areas where most of the Culture’s civilisational peers and even many much less advanced societies thoroughly eclipsed it, though, being the Culture, this was regarded as being the legitimate source of a certain perverse pride. That didn’t stop it — the “it” in such contexts usually meaning Contact, or (even more likely) SC — from trying to keep secrets, every now and again, but it never worked for very long.
Though sometimes, of course, not very long was still long enough.
“Well, naturally,” the Bodhisattva said. “Let’s just say the information is there, but little notice is taken. And by the very nature of the whole… program — if one can even dignify it with a name implying such a degree of organisation — confirmation is almost impossible to find.”
“So this isn’t what you might call official?” Yime asked.
The ship made a sighing noise. “There is no Contact department or committee that I know of which devotes itself to such matters.”
Yime pursed her lips. She knew when a ship was basically saying, Let’s leave it at that, shall we?