If not, quite simply, it would be the death of all of them.

She looked again at Horza.

The face of the man on the stretcher was white as the snow, and as blank. The features were there: eyes, nose, brows, mouth; but they seemed somehow unlinked and disconnected, giving a look of anonymity to a face lacking all character, animation and depth. It was as though all the people, all the characterisations, all the parts the man had played in his life had leaked out of him in his coma and taken their own little share of his real self with them, leaving him empty, wiped clean.

The drone supporting the floating stretcher babbled briefly in a tongue Balveda couldn't recognise, its voice echoing down the tunnel; then it fell silent. The Mind floated, still and dull silver, its patchy, mirror-rainbow surface reflecting her, the dim light outside and the man and the drone from its ellipsoid shape.

She got to her feet and with one hand pushed the stretcher out over the moonlit snow towards the ship, her legs sinking into the whiteness up to her thighs. A steel-blue shadow of the struggling woman was thrown to one side in the silence, away from the moon and towards the dark and distant mountains, where a curtain of storm clouds hung like a deeper night. Behind the woman, her tracks led back, deep and scuffed, to the tunnels" mouth. She cried quietly with the effort of it all and the numbing pain of her wounds.

A couple of times on her way, she raised her head to the dark form of the ship, a mixture of hope and fear on her face as she waited for the blast and splash of warning laser light which would tell her that the craft's autoguard did not accept her; that the drone and Horza's suit were both too damaged to be recognisable to the ship; that it was over, and she was doomed to die here, a hundred metres from safety and escape — but held from it by a set of faithful, automatic, unconscious circuits…

… The lift swung down when she applied the ring from Horza's hand to the elevator controls. She put the drone and the man into the hold. The drone murmured; the man was quiet and motionless as a fallen statue.

She had intended to switch off the ship's autoguard and go back immediately for the Mind, but the man's icy stillness frightened her. She went for the emergency medical kit and turned up the heating in the hold, but when she got back to the stretcher, the cold, blank-faced Changer was dead.

Appendices: the Idiran-Culture war

(The following three pages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text 2110 AD, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa Listach Ja'andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack.)

Reasons: the Culture

It was, the Culture knew from the start, a religious war in the fullest sense. The Culture went to war to safeguard its own peace of mind: no more. But that peace was the Culture's most precious quality, perhaps its only true and treasured possession.

In practice as well as theory the Culture was beyond considerations of wealth or empire. The very concept of money — regarded by the Culture as a crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing — was irrelevant within the society itself, where the capacity of its means of production ubiquitously and comprehensively exceeded every reasonable (and in some cases, perhaps, unreasonable) demand its not unimaginative citizens could make. These demands were satisfied, with one exception, from within the Culture itself. Living space was provided in abundance, chiefly on matter-cheap Orbitals; raw material existed in virtually inexhaustible quantities both between the stars and within stellar systems; and energy was, if anything, even more generally available, through fusion, annihilation, the Grid itself, or from stars (taken either indirectly, as radiation absorbed in space, or directly, tapped at the stellar core). Thus the Culture had no need to colonise, exploit or enslave.

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. The Culture's sole justification for the relatively unworried, hedonistic life its population enjoyed was its good works; the secular evangelism of the Contact Section, not simply finding, cataloguing, investigating and analysing other, less advanced civilisations but — where the circumstances appeared to Contact to justify so doing — actually interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical processes of those other cultures.

With a sort of apologetic smugness, Contact — and therefore the Culture — could prove statistically that such careful and benign use of "the technology of compassion" (to use a phrase in vogue at the time) did work, in the sense that the techniques it had developed to influence a civilisation's progress did significantly improve the quality of life of its members, without harming that society as a whole by its very contact with a more advanced culture.

Faced with a religiously inspired society determined to extend its influence over every technologically inferior civilisation in its path regardless of either the initial toll of conquest or the subsequent attrition of occupation, Contact could either disengage and admit defeat — so giving the lie not simply to its own reason for existence but to the only justificatory action which allowed the pampered, self-consciously fortunate people of the Culture to enjoy their lives with a clear conscience — or it could fight. Having prepared and steeled itself (and popular opinion) through decades of the former, it resorted eventually, inevitably, like virtually any organism whose existence is threatened, to the latter.

For all the Culture's profoundly materialist and utilitarian outlook, the fact that Idir had no designs on any physical pan of the Culture itself was irrelevant. Indirectly, but definitely and mortally, the Culture was threatened… not with conquest, or loss of life, craft, resource or territory, but with something more important: the loss of its purpose and that clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the surrender of its soul.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, the Culture, not the Idirans, had to fight, and in that necessity of desperation eventually gathered a strength which — even if any real doubt had been entertained as to the eventual result — could brook no compromise.

Reasons: the Idirans

The Idirans were already at war, conquering the species they regarded as inferior and subjugating them in a primarily religious empire which was only incidentally a commercial one as well. It was clear to them from the start that their jihad to "calm, integrate and instruct" these other species and bring them under the direct eye of their God had to continue and expand, or be meaningless. A halt or moratorium, while possibly making at least as much sense as continued expansion in military, commercial and administrative terms, would negate such militant hegemonisation as a religious concept. Zeal outranked and outshone pragmatism; as with the Culture, it was the principle which mattered.

The war, long before it was finally declared, was regarded by the Idiran high command as a continuation of the permanent hostilities demanded by theological and disciplinary colonisation, involving a quantitative and qualitative escalation of armed conflict of only a limited degree to cope with the relatively equivalent technological expertise of the Culture.