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made the most of it. For a thousand years or more Culture drones had had aura
fields which coloured according to their mood - their equivalent of facial
expression and body language - but Jase was old, made long before aura fields
were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them. It
preferred either to rely on its voice to express what it felt, or to remain
inscrutable.
'Damn.' Fal shook her head, looking at the far-away snow. 'I wish I was
climbing.' She made a clicking noise with her mouth and looked down at her
right leg, which stuck straight out in front of her. She had broken the leg
eight days before, while climbing in the mountains on the other side of the
plain. Now it was splinted up with a fine tracery of field-strands, concealed
beneath fashionably tight trousers.
Jase ought, she thought, to have taken this as an excuse to lecture her again
on the advisability of only climbing with a floater harness, or with a rescue
drone near by, or at the very least on not climbing alone, but the old machine
said nothing. She looked at it, her tanned face shining in the light. 'So,
Jase, what have you got for me? Business?'
'I'm afraid so.'
Fal settled herself as comfortably as she could on the stone bench and crossed
her arms. Jase stretched out a short force field from its casing to support
the awkward-looking outstretched leg, though it knew that the splint's own
fields were taking all the strain.
'Spit it out,' Fal said.
'You may recall an item from the daily synopsis eighteen days ago about one of
our spacecraft which was cobbled together by a factory vessel in the volume of
space Inside from the Sullen Gulf;
the factory craft had to destruct, and later so did the ship it made.'
'I remember,' said Fal, who forgot little about anything, and nothing at all
from a daily synopsis. 'It was a mongrel because the factory was trying to get
a GSV Mind out of the way.'
'Well,' Jase said, its voice a little weary, 'we have a problem with that.'
Fal smiled.
The Culture, there could be no doubt, relied profoundly on its machines for
both its strategy and tactics in the war it was now engaged in. Indeed, a case
could be made for holding that the
Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level
than did any single human or group of humans within the society. The Minds
that the Culture's factory craft, safe
Orbitals and larger GSVs were now producing were some of the most
sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy. They were so intelligent
that no human was capable of understanding just how smart they were (and the
machines themselves were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of
life).
From those mental colossi, down through the more ordinary but still sentient
machines and the smart but ultimately mechanistic and predictable computers,
right down to the smallest circuit in a micromissile hardly more intelligent
than a fly, the Culture had placed its bets - long before the Idiran war had
been envisaged - on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because
the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and
machines, even sentient
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were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at
using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things
that really mattered in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead
languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high
mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
A hostile reading of such a situation might lead to the idea that the
discovery by the
Culture's Minds that some humans were actually capable of matching and
occasionally beating their record for accurately assessing a given set of
facts would lead to machine indignation and blown circuits, but this was not
the case. It fascinated those Minds that such a puny and chaotic collection of
mental faculties could by some sleight of neuron produce an answer to a
problem which was as good as theirs. There was an explanation, of course, and
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