The general volume was one of the less well-visited and relatively uninhabited regions of the galaxy. Nearest major civilisation point; the Sagraeth system, forty light years away, with a stage-three lizardoid civilisation first contacted by the Culture a decade ago. Nothing special there. Voluminal influences/interests rated Creheesil 15 %, Affront 10 %, Culture 5 % (the normal claimed minimum, the Culture's influence/interest equivalent of background radiation), and a smattering of investigations and flybys by twenty other civilisations making up a nominal 2 %; otherwise not a place anybody was really interested in; a two-thirds forgotten, disregarded region of space. Never before directly investigated by the Elench, though there had been the usual deep-space remote scans from afar, showing nothing special. No clues there.

Date; n4.28.803, by the chronology the Elench still shared with the Culture. The drone's service log abstract recorded that it had been built as part of a matched pair by the Peace Makes Plenty in n4.13, shortly after the ship's own construction had been completed. Most recent entry; "28.725.500: ship leaving Tier habitat for a standard sweep-search of the outer reaches of the Upper Leaf-Swirl. The detailed service log was missing. The last flagged event the drone could find in its library dated from "28.802; a daily current affairs archive update. So had that been just yesterday, or could something have happened to its clock?

It scrutinised its damage reports and searched its memories. The damage profile equated to that caused by plasma fire, and — from the lack of obvious patterning — either an enormous plasma event very far away or plasma fire — possibly fusion-sourced — much closer but buffered in some way. A nearby plasma implosure was the most obvious example. Not something it could do itself. The ship could, though.

Its X-ray laser had been fired recently and its field-shields projectors had soaked up some leak-through damage. Consistent with what would have happened if something just like itself had attacked it. Hmm. One of a matched pair.

It thought. It searched. It could find no further mention of its twin.

It looked about itself, gauging its drift, and searching.

It was drifting at about two-eighty klicks a second, almost directly away from the Esperi system. In front of it — it focused all its damaged sensory capacity to peer ahead — nothing; it didn't appear to be aimed at anything.

Two-eighty klicks a second; that was somewhere just underneath the theoretical limit beyond which something of its mass would start to produce a relativistic trace on the surface of space-time, if one had perfect instrumentation. Now, was that a coincidence, or not? If not, it might have been slung out of the ship for some reason; Displaced, perhaps. It concentrated its senses backwards. No obvious point of origin, and nothing coming after it, either. Hint of something though.

The drone refocused, cursing its hopelessly degraded senses. Behind it, it found… gas, plasma, carbon. It widened the cone of its focus.

What it had discovered was an inflating shell of debris, drifting after it at a tenth of its speed. It ran a rewind of the debris shell's expansion; it originated at a point forty klicks behind the position where it had first woken up, eighteen fifty-three milliseconds ago.

Which implied it had been drifting totally unconscious for nearly half a second. Scary.

It scanned the distant shell of expanding particles. They'd been hot. Messy. That was wreckage. Battle wreckage, even. The carbon and the ions could originally have been part of itself, or part of the ship, or even part of a human. A few molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. No oxygen.

But all of it doing just 10 % of its own velocity. Odd, that. As though it had somehow been prioritised out of a sudden appearance of matter. Again, as though it had been Displaced, perhaps.

The drone flicked part of its attention back inside, to the sealed cores in its mind substrate with their warning notices. Can't put this off any longer, I suppose, it thought.

It interrogated the two cores. PAST, the first was labelled. The other one was simply called 2/2.

Uh-huh, it thought.

It opened the first core and found its memories.

II

Genar-Hofoen floated within the shower, buffeted from all sides by the streams of water. The fans sucking the water back out of the AG shower chamber sounded awfully loud this morning. Part of his brain told him he was running short of oxygen; he'd either have to leave the shower or grope for the air hose which was probably in the last place he'd feel for it. It was either that or open his eyes. It all seemed too much bother. He was quite comfortable where he was.

He waited to see what would give first.

It was his brain's indifference to the fact he was suffocating. Suddenly he was wide awake and flailing around like some drowning basic-human, desperate for breath but afraid to breathe in the constellation of water globules he was floating within. His eyes were wide open. He saw the air hose and grabbed it. He breathed in. Shit it was bright. His eyes dimmed the view. That was better.

He felt he'd showered enough. He mumbled, "Off, off," into the air hose mask a few times, but the water kept on coming. Then he remembered that the module wasn't talking to him right now because he'd told the suit to accept no more communications last night. Obviously such irresponsibility had to be punished by the module being childish. He sighed.

Luckily the shower had an Off button. The water jets cut off. Gravity was fed gently back into the chamber and he floated slowly down with the settling blobs of water. A reverser field clicked on and he looked at himself in it while the last of the water drained away, sucking in his belly and sticking out his chin while he turned his face to the best angle and smoothed down a few upstart locks of his blond curls.

"Well, I may feel like shit but I still look great," he announced to nobody in particular. For once, probably even the module wasn't listening.

"Sorry to force the pace," the representation of his uncle Tishlin said.

"'s all right," he said through a mouthful of feyl steak. He washed it down with some warmed-over infusion the module had always assured him was beneficial when you hadn't had enough sleep. It tasted disgusting enough to be either genuinely good for you, or just one of the module's little jokes.

"Sleep okay?" his uncle's image asked. He was, apparently, sitting across the table from Genar-Hofoen in the module's dining room, a pleasantly airy space filled with porcelain and flowers and boasting a seemingly real-time view on three sides of a sunlit mountain valley, which in reality was half a galaxy away. A small serving drone hovered near the wall behind the man.

"Good two hours," Genar-Hofoen said. He supposed he could have stayed awake the night before when he'd first discovered his uncle's hologram waiting for him; he could have glanded something to keep him bright and awake and receptive and got all this over with then, but he'd known he'd end up paying for it eventually and besides, he wanted to show them that just because they'd gone to the trouble of persuading his favourite uncle to record a semantic-signal-mind-abstract-state or whatever the hell the module had called it, he still wasn't going to jump just because they said so. The only concession he'd made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going at the moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully good and satisfying sex, and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.

So he'd gone to bed and had a pretty good if maybe still not quite long enough sleep and Uncle Tishlin's message had just had to sit twiddling its abstract semantics in the module's AI core, waiting till he got up.