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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
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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
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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
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The artifact appeared to be either almost completely massless, or - perhaps -
some sort of projection; it seemed to make no impres-sion on the skein, the
fabric of space-time which any accumulation of matter effectively dents with
its mass, like a boulder lying on a trampoline. The artifact/projection gave
the impression that it was floating on the skein, making no impression on it
whatsoever. This was unusual; this was certainly worth investigating. Even
more intriguingly, there was also a possible anomaly in the lower energy grid,
which underlay the fabric of real space. There was a region directly
underneath the three-dimensional form of the artifact that, intermittently,
seemed to lack the otherwise universally chaotic nature of the Grid; there was
a vaguest-of-vague hint of order there, almost as if the artifact was casting
some sort of bizarre - indeed, impossible - shadow. Even more curious.
The
Peace Makes Plenty hove to, sitting in front of the artifact - in as much as
it could be said to have a front - and trying both to analyse it and
communicate with it.
Nothing; the black-body sphere appeared to be massless and inviolable, almost
as though it was a blister on the skein itself, as though the signals the ship
was sending towards it could never connect with a thing there because all they
did was slide flickering over that blister almost as though it wasn't there
and pass on undisturbed into space beyond; as though, trying to pick up.a
stone that appeared to be resting on the surface of a trampoline, one
discovered that the trampoline surface itself was bulged up to cover the
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stone.
The ship decided to attempt to contact the artifact in a more direct manner;
it would send a drone-probe underneath the object in hyperspace, below the
surface of space-time; effectively making a tear, a rent in the fabric of the
skein - the sort of opening it would normally create to fashion a way into HS
through which it could travel. The drone-probe would attempt, as it were, to
surface inside the artifact; if there was nothing there but a projection, it
would find out; if there was something there, it would presumably either be
prevented from entering it, or accepted within. The ship readied its
emissary.
The situation was so unusual the
Peace Makes Plenty even considered breaking with
Elench precedent by informing Tier habitat or one of its peers what was going
on;
the nearest other Stargazer craft was a month's travel away, but might be able
to help if the
Peace Makes Plenty got itself into trouble. In the end, however, it stuck
with tradition and kept quiet. There was a kind of stealthy pragmatism in
this; an encounter of the sort the ship was embarking upon might only be
successful if the
Elencher craft could fairly claim to be acting on its own, without having made
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suspicious contactee, look like a request for reinforcements.
Plus, there was simple pride involved; an Elencher ship would not be an
Elencher ship if it started acting like part of a committee; why, it might as
well then be a
Culture ship!
The drone-probe was dispatched with the
Peace Makes Plenty keeping in close contact. The instant the probe passed
within the horizon of the artifact, it-
The records the drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 had access to ended there.
Something, obviously, had happened.
The next thing it personally knew, the
Peace Makes Plenty had been under attack. The assault had been almost
unbelievably swift and ferocious; the drone-
probe must have been taken over almost instantaneously, the ship's subsystems
surrendered milliseconds later and the integrity of the ship's Mind shattered
within -
at a guess - less than a second after the drone-probe had infringed the space
beneath the artifact.
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