The creature looked up immediately. "Then we'll start tagging all the fauna now," it said. "That'll make it quicker to round them up when the time comes. It'll take a few more days after that before we can start the transformation process. From that point…" It shrugged. It was the most human gesture she had ever seen the avatar make. "… there may be twenty or thirty days before… before some sort of resolution is reached. Again, it's hard to say."

Dajeil folded her arms across the bulge of her forty-year-old, self-perpetuated pregnancy. She nodded slowly. "Well, thanks for telling me all this." She smiled insincerely, and suddenly she could not hold in the emotions any longer and looked through tears and black, down-tumbled curls at the long-limbed creature arranged upon her couch and said, "So, don't you have things you must be doing?"

From the top of the rain-blown tower, the woman watched the avatar as it retraced its steps along the narrow path through the sparsely treed water meadow to the foot of the two-kilometre cliff, which was skirted by a rough slope of scree. The thin, dark figure — filling half her field of view and grainy with magnification — negotiated a last great boulder at the base of the cliff, then disappeared. Dajeil let muscles in her eyes relax; meanwhile a set of near-instinctive routines in her brain shut down again. The view returned to normal.

Dajeil raised her gaze to the overcast. A flight of the box-kite creatures was poised in the air just under the cloud surface directly above the tower, dark rectangular shapes hanging still against the greyness as though standing sentinel over her.

She tried to imagine what they felt, what they knew. There were ways of tapping directly into their minds, ways that were virtually never used with humans and whose use even with animals was generally frowned upon in proportion to the creature's intelligence, but they did exist and the ship would let her use them if she asked. There were ways, too, for the ship to simulate all but perfectly what such creatures must be experiencing, and she had used those techniques often enough for a human equivalent of that imitative process to have transferred itself to her mind, and it was that process she invoked now, though to no avail, as it transpired; she was too agitated, too distracted by the things Amorphia had told her to be able to concentrate.

Instead, she tried to imagine the ship as a whole in that same, trained mind's eye, remembering the occasions when she had viewed the vessel from its remote machines or gone flying around it, attempting to imagine the changes it was already preparing itself for. She supposed they would be unglimpsable from the sort of distance that would let you see the whole craft.

She looked around, taking in the great cliff, the clouds and the sea, the darkness of sky. Her gaze swept round the waves, the sea-marsh, and the water meadows beneath the scree and the cliff. She rubbed her belly without thinking, as she had done for nearly forty years, and pondered on the marginality of things, and how quickly change could come, even to something that had seemed set to continue as it was in perpetuity.

But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.

She became suddenly very aware of her place here, her position. She saw herself and the tower, both within and outside the ship; outside its main hull — distinct, discrete, straight-sided and measured exactly in kilometres — but within the huge envelope of water, air and gas it encompassed within the manifold layers of its fields (she imagined the force fields sometimes as like the hooped slips, underskirts, skirts, flounces and lace of some ancient formal gown). A slab of power and substance floating in a giant spoonful of sea, most of its vast bulk exposed to the air and clouds that formed its middle layer and around which the sun-line curved each day, and all domed with the long, field-contained pressure vessel of ferocious heat, colossal pressure and crushing gravity that simulated the conditions of a gas-giant planet. A room, a cave, a hollow husk a hundred kilometres long, hurrying through space, with the ship as its vast, flattened kernel. A kernel — an enclosed world inside this world — within which she had not set foot for thirty-nine of these forty unchanging years, having no desire ever again to see that infinite catacomb of the silent undead.

All to change, Dajeil Gelian thought; all to change, and the sea and the sky to become as stone, or steel…

The black bird Gravious settled by her hand on the stone parapet of the tower.

"What's going on?" it croaked. "There's something going on. I can tell. What is it, then? What's it all about?"

"Oh, ask the ship," she told it.

"Already asked it. All it'll say is there's changes coming, like as not." The bird shook its head once, as if trying to dislodge something distasteful from its beak. "Don't like changes," it said. It swivelled its head, fixing its beady gaze upon the woman. "What sort of changes, then, eh? What we got to expect? What we got to look forward to, eh? It tell you?"

She shook her head. "No," she said, not looking at the bird. "No, not really."

"Huh." The bird continued to look at her for a moment, then pivoted its head back to look out across the salt marsh. It ruffled its feathers and rose up on its thin black legs. "Well," it said, "Winter's coming. Can't delay. Best prepare." The bird dropped into the air. "Fat lot of use…" she heard it mutter. It opened its wings and flew away on an involute course.

Dajeil Gelian looked up to the clouds again, and the sky beyond. All to change, and the sea and the sky to become as stone, or steel… She shook her head again, and wondered what extremity of circumstance could possibly have so galvanised the great craft that had been her home, her refuge for so long.

Whatever; after four decades in its state of self-imposed internal exile, navigating its own wayward course within its sought-out wilderness as part of the civilisation's Ulterior and functioning most famously as a repository for quiescent souls and very large animals, it sounded like the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service was again starting to think and behave a little more like a ship which belonged to the Culture.

1. Outside Context Problem

I

(GCU Grey Area signal sequence file #n428857/119)

.

[swept-to-tightbeam, M16.4, [email protected]]

xGSV Honest Mistake

oGCU Grey Area

Take a look at this:

oo

(Signal sequence #n428855/1446, relay:)

oo

1) [skein broadcast, Mclear, received @ n4.28.855.0065+]:

*!c11505*

oo

2) [swept beam Ml, received @ n4.28.855.0066-]:

SDA.

C2314992+52

xFATC @ n4.28.855.

oo

3) [swept beam, M2, relay, received@ n4.28.855.0079-]:

xGCU Fate Amenable To Change.

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& as requested:

Significant developmental anomaly.

C4629984+523

(@n28.855.0065.43392).

oo

4) [tight beam, M16, relay, received @ n4.28.855.0085]:

xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& only as required:

Developmental anomaly provisionally rated EqT, potentially jeopardising, found here C9259969+5331.

My Status: L5 secure, moving to L6^.

Instigating all other Extreme precautions.

oo

5) [broadcast Mclear, received @ n4.28. 855.01.]:

*xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& *broadcast*:

Ref. 3 previous compacs & precursor broadcast.

Panic over.