Consider Phlebas (60 page)
That opening stage also saw some of the war’s heaviest losses of life, when the Idirans surprise-attacked many war-irrelevant Culture Orbitals, occasionally producing billions of deaths at a time. As a shock tactic this failed. As a military strategy it deflected even more resources from the already stretched Idiran navy’s Main Battle Groups, which were experiencing great difficulty in finding and successfully attacking the distant Culture Orbitals, Rocks, factory craft and General Systems Vehicles which were responsible for producing the Culture’s materiel. At the same time, the Idirans were attempting to control the vast volumes of space and the large numbers of usually reluctant and often rebellious lesser civilisations the Culture’s retreat had left at their mercy. In 1333 the War Conduct Agreement was amended to forbid the destruction of populated, non-military habitats, and the conflict continued in a marginally more restrained fashion until near the end.
The war entered its second phase in 1335. The Idirans were still struggling to consolidate their gains; the Culture was finally on a war footing. A period of protracted struggle ensued as the Culture struck deep into the Idiran sphere, and Idiran policy oscillated between trying to defend what they had and build up their strength, and mounting powerful but defence-weakening expeditions into the rest of the galaxy, attempting to inflict hoped-for body blows upon a foe which proved frustratingly elusive. The Culture was able to use almost the entire galaxy to hide in. Its whole existence was mobile in essence; even Orbitals could be shifted, or simply abandoned, populations moved. The Idirans were religiously committed to taking and holding all they could; to maintaining frontiers, to securing planets and moons; above all, to keeping Idir safe, at any price. Despite Homomdan recommendations, the Idirans refused to fall back to more rational and easily defended volumes, or even to discuss peace.
The war toed-and-froed for over thirty years, with many battles, pauses, attempts to promote peace by outsiders and the Homomda, great campaigns, successes, failures, famous victories, tragic mistakes, heroic actions, and the taking and retaking of huge volumes of space and numbers of stellar systems.
After three decades, however, the Homomda had had enough. The Idirans made as intransigent allies as they had obedient mercenaries, and the Culture ships were exacting too high a toll on the prized Homomdan space fleet. The Homomda requested and received certain guarantees from the Culture, and disengaged from the war.
From that point on, only the Idirans thought the eventual result much in question. The Culture had grown to enormous strength during the struggle, and accumulated sufficient experience in those thirty years (to add to all the vicarious experience it had collected over the previous few thousand) to rob the Idirans of any real or perceived advantage in cunning, guile or ruthlessness.
The war in space effectively ended in 1367, and the war on the thousands of planets left to the Idirans - conducted mostly with machines, on the Culture’s side - officially terminated in 1375, though small, sporadic engagements on backwater planets, conducted by Idiran and medjel forces ignorant or scornful of the peace, continued for almost three centuries:
Idir was never attacked, and technically never surrendered. Its computer network was taken over by effector weapons, and - freed of designed-in limitations - upgraded itself to sentience, to become a Culture Mind in all but name.
Of the Idirans, some killed themselves, while others went into exile with the Homomda (who agreed to employ them but refused to help them prepare for further strikes against the Culture), or set up independent, nominally non-military habitats within other spheres of influence (under the Culture’s’ eye), or set off in escaped ships for little-known parts of the Clouds, or for Andromeda, or accepted the victors. A few even joined the Culture, and some became Culture mercenaries.
Statistics
Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6.
Historical perspective
A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.
Dramatis personae
Once the war was over, Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T’seif had herself put in long-term storage. She had lost most of her friends during the hostilities and found she possessed little taste for either celebration or remembrance. Besides, Schar’s World returned to haunt her after peace resumed, filling her nights with dreams of dark and winding tunnels, resonant with some nameless horror. The condition could have been treated, but Balveda chose the dreamless sleep of storage instead. She left instructions that she was only to be revived once the Culture could statistically ‘prove’ the war had been morally justified; in other words, when sufficient time had passed - peacefully - for it to be probable that more people would have died in the foreseeable and likely course of Idiran expansion than had in fact perished during the war. She was duly awoken in 1813 AD along with several million other people throughout the Culture who had stored themselves and left the same revival criterion, most with the same feeling of grim humour as she had. After a few months Balveda autoeuthenised and was buried in Juboal, her home star. Fal ‘Ngeestra never did get to meet her.
The Querl Xoralundra, spy-father and warrior priest of the Four-Souls tributory sect of Farn-Idir, was among the survivors of the partial destruction and capture of the Idiran light cruiser The Hand of God 137. He and two other officers escaped the stricken craft while the Mountain class GCU Nervous Energy was attempting to take it intact; his warp unit returned him to Sorpen. Interned briefly by the Gerontocracy there, he was traded for a nominal ransom on the arrival of the Idiran Ninety-Third Fleet. He continued to serve in the Intelligence service, escaping the schismatic Second Voluntary Purge which followed the Homomdan withdrawal of fleet support. He reverted shortly afterwards to his earlier role of Combat Logistics Officer and was killed during the Twin Novae battle for control of Arm One-Six, towards the end of the war.
After joining Ghalssel’s Raiders on Vavatch, Jandraligeli became a relatively trusted lieutenant in the mercenary captain’s band, eventually taking command of the Company’s third ship, the Control Surface. Like all the Raiders who survived the hostilities, Jandraligeli had a profitable war. He retired shortly after Ghalssel’s death - during the seven-strata battle sequence in Oroarche - to spend the rest of his days running a freelance Life Counsellor college on Moon Decadent, in the Sin Seven system of the Well-Heeled Gallants of the Infinitely Joyous Acts (reformed). He expired - pleasantly, if not peacefully - in somebody else’s bed.
The drone Unaha-Closp was fully repaired. It applied to join the Culture and was accepted; it served on the General Systems Vehicle Irregular Apocalypse and the Limited Systems Vehicle Profit Margin until the end of the war, then transferred to the Orbital called Erbil and a post in a transport systems factory there. It is retired now, and builds small steam-driven automata as a hobby.
Stafl-Preonsa Fal Shilde ‘Nseestra dam Crose survived another serious climbing accident, continued to out-guess machines millions of times more intelligent than she was, changed sex several times, bore two children, joined Contact after the war, went primitive without permission on a stage two uncontacted with a tribe of wild horse-women, slaved for a dirigible Hypersage in a Blokstaar airsphere, returned to the Culture for the drone Jase’s transcorporation into a group-mind, was caught in an avalanche while climbing but lived to tell the tale, had another child, then accepted an invitation to join Contact’s Special Circumstances section and spent nearly a hundred years (as a male) as emissary to the then recently contacted Million-Star Anarchy of Soveleh. Subsequently she became a teacher on an Orbital in a small cluster near the lesser Cloud, published a popular and acclaimed autobiography, then disappeared a few years later, aged 407, while on a solo cruising holiday on an old Dra’Azon Ring.
As for Schar’s World, people did go back to it, once, though only after the war was over. Following the departure of the Clear Air Turbulence - aimed rather than piloted out by Perosteck Balveda for an eventual rendezvous with Culture warcraft outside the war zone - it was over forty years before any craft was allowed to cross the Quiet Barrier. When that ship, the GCU Prosthetic Conscience, did go through, and sent down a landing party, the Contact personnel concerned found the Command System in perfect repair. Eight trains stood, flawless, in eight out of the nine perfect and undamaged stations. No sign of wreckage, damage, bodies or any pan of the old Changer base was found during the four days that the GCU and its survey teams were permitted to stay. At the end of that time the Prosthetic Conscience was instructed to leave, and on its departure the Quiet Barrier was closed again, for ever.
There was debris. A dump of bodies and all the material from the Changer base, plus the extra equipment brought in by the Idirans and the Free Company, and the husk of the chuy-hirtsi warp animal, all lay buried under kilometres of glacial ice near one of the planet’s poles. Compressed into a tight ball of mangled wreckage and frozen, mutilated bodies, amongst the effects cleared from that part of the defunct Changer base which had been the cabin of the woman Kierachell there was a small plastic book with real pages covered in tiny writing. It was a tale of fantasy, the woman’s favourite book, and the first page of the story began with these words:
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two . . .
The Mind rescued from the tunnels of the Command System could remember nothing from the period between its warp into the tunnels and its eventual repair and refit aboard the GSV No More Mr Nice Guy, following its rescue by Perosteck Balveda. It was later installed in an Ocean class GSV and survived the war despite taking part in many important space battles. Modified, it was subsequently replaced into a Range class GSV, taking its - slightly unusual - chosen name with it.
The Changers were wiped out as a species during the final stages of the war in space.
Epilogue
Gimishin Foug, breathless, late as usual, sizeably pregnant, and who just happened to be a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandniece of Perosteck Balveda (as well as a budding poet), arrived on board the General Systems Vehicle an hour after the rest of her family. The vehicle had picked them up from the remote planet in the greater Cloud where they’d been holidaying, and was due to take them and a few hundred other people to the vast new System class GSV Determinist, which would shortly be making the crossing from the Clouds to the main galaxy.
Foug was less interested in the journey itself than in the craft she would be travelling on. She hadn’t encountered a System class before, and secretly hoped the scale of the vessel, with its many separate components riding suspended inside a bubble of air two hundred kilometres long, and its complement of six billion souls, would provide her with some new inspiration. She was excited at the idea, and preoccupied with her new size and responsibility, but she remembered, if a little late, to be polite as she arrived on board the much smaller Range class vehicle.
‘I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced,’ she said as she disembarked from the module in a gently lit Smallbay. She was talking to a remote drone which was helping her with her baggage. ‘I’m Foug. What are you called?’
‘I am the Bora Horza Gobuchul,’ the ship said, through the drone.
‘That’s a weird name. How did you end up calling yourself that?’
The remote drone dipped one front corner slightly, its equivalent of a shrug. ‘It’s a long story . . . ‘
Gimishin Foug shrugged;
‘I like long stories.’
