"Hello?" Amorphia said, taking one of the woman's hands in hers and gently detaching that part of the suit too, pulling the hand-covering off inside-out, like a tight glove.

"Whoa," the woman said, swallowing, her eyes watering.

Sikleyr-Najasa Croepise Ince Stahal da Mapin, Stored thirty-one years ago at the age of three-hundred and eighty-six. Revival criterion: on the acclamation of the next Line Messiah-elect on the planet Ischeis. She had been a scholar of the planet's major religion and had wanted to be present at the Elevation of its next Saviour, an event which had not been anticipated for another two hundred years or so.

Her mouth twisted, and she coughed. "How-?" she began, then coughed again.

"Just thirty-one standard years," Amorphia told her.

The woman's eyes widened, then she smiled. "That was quick," she said.

She recovered rapidly for one of her age; in a few minutes she was able to be helped to her feet and — taking Amorphia's arm, and trailed by the three drones — they walked across the battlefield towards the nearest edge of the tableau.

They stood on the small hill, Hill 4, that Amorphia had stood on a little earlier. Amorphia was distantly, naggingly aware of the gap the woman's revival had left in the scene. Normally she would have been replaced within the day with another Storee, posed in the same position, but there were none left; the gap she had left would remain unless the ship plundered another tableau to repair the hole in this one. The woman gazed around her for some time, then shook her head.

Amorphia guessed what she was thinking. "It is a terrible sight," it said. "But it was the last great land battle on Xlephier Prime. To have one's final significant battle at such an early technological stage is actually a great achievement for a humanoid species."

The woman turned to Amorphia. "I know," she said. "I was just thinking how impressive all this was. You must be proud."

II

The Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, had been investigating a little-explored part of the Upper Leaf Swirl on a standard random search pattern. It had left Tier habitat on n4.28.725.500 along with the seven other Stargazer vessels; they had scattered like seeds into the depths of the Swirl, bidding each other farewell and knowing they might never see each other again.

One month in, and the ship had turned up nothing special; just a few bits of uncharted interstellar debris, duly logged, and that was all. There was a hint — a probably false-signal resonation in the skein of space-time behind them — that there might be a craft following them, but then it was not unusual for other civilisations to follow ships of the Zetetic Elench.

The Elench had once been part of the Culture proper; they had split off fifteen hundred years ago, the few habitats and the many Rocks, ships, drones and humans concerned preferring to take a slightly different line from the mainstream Culture. The Culture aimed to stay roughly as it was and change at least a proportion of those lesser civilisations it discovered, while acting as an honest broker between the Involved — the more developed societies who made up the current players in the great galactic civilisational game.

The Elench wanted to alter themselves, not others; they sought out the undiscovered not to change it but to be changed by it. The Elencher ideal was that somebody from a more stable society — the Culture itself was the perfect example — could meet the same Elencher — Rock, ship, drone or human — on successive occasions and never encounter the same entity twice. They would have changed between meetings just because in the interim they had encountered some other civilisation and incorporated some different technology into their bodies or information into their minds. It was a search for the sort of pan-relevant truth that the Culture's monosophical approach was unlikely ever to throw up; it was a vocation, a mission, a calling.

The results of this attitude were as various as might be imagined; entire Elencher fleets had either never come back from expeditions, and remained lost, or had eventually been found, the vessels and their crews completely, if willingly, subsumed by another civilisation.

At its most extreme, in the old days, some craft had been discovered turned entirely into Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects; selfishly auto-replicating organisms determined to turn every piece of matter they found into copies of themselves. There were techniques — beyond simple outright destruction, which was always an option — for dealing with this sort of eventuality which normally resulted in the Objects concerned becoming Evangelical Hegemonising Swarm Objects rather than Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects, but if the Objects concerned had been particularly single-minded, it still meant that people had died to contribute to its greedily ungracious self-regard.

These days, the Elench very rarely ran into anything like that sort of trouble, but they did still change all the time. In a way, the Elench, even more than the Culture, was an attitude rather than an easily definable grouping of ships or people. Because parts of Elench were constantly being subsumed and assimilated, or just disappearing, while at the same time other individuals and small groups were joining it (both from the Culture and from other societies, human and otherwise), there was anyway a turn-over of personnel and secondary ideas that made it one of the most rapidly evolving in-play civilisations. Somehow, though, despite it all, and perhaps because it was more an attitude, a meme, than anything else, the Elench had developed an ability that it had arguably inherited from its parent civilisation; the ability to remain roughly the same in the midst of constant change.

It also had a knack of turning up intriguing things — ancient artifacts, new civilisations, the mysterious remnants of Sublimed species, unguessably old depositories of antique knowledge — not all of which were of ultimate interest to the Elench itself, but many of which might excite the curiosity, further the purposes and benefit the informational or monetary funds of others, especially if they could get to them before anybody else. Such opportunities arose but rarely, but they had occurred sufficiently often in the past for certain societies of an opportunistic bent to consider it worth the expense or the bother of dedicating a ship to follow an Elencher craft, for a while at least, and so the Peace Makes Plenty had not been unduly alarmed by the discovery that it might be being tailed.

Two months in. And still nothing exciting; just gas clouds, dust clouds, brown dwarfs and a couple of lifeless star systems. All well enough charted from afar and displaying no sign of ever having been touched by anything intelligent.

Even the hint of the following ship had disappeared; if it ever had been real, the vessel concerned had probably decided the Peace Makes Plenty was not going to strike lucky this trip. Nevertheless, everything the Elencher ship came within range of was scanned; passive sensors filtered the natural spectrum for signs of meaning, beams and pulses were sent out into the vacuum and across the skein of space-time, searching and probing, while the ship consumed whatever echoes came back, analysing, considering, evaluating…

Seventy-eight days after leaving Tier, approaching a red giant star named Esperi from a direction which according to its records nobody had ever taken before, the Peace Makes Plenty had discovered an artifact, fourteen light months distant from the sun itself.

The artifact was a little over fifty kilometres in diameter. It was black-body; an ambient anomaly, indistinguishable from a distance from any given volume of almost empty interstellar space. The Peace Makes Plenty only noticed it at all because it occluded part of a distant galaxy and the Elencher ship, knowing that bits of galaxies did not just wink off and back on again of their own accord, had turned to investigate.