Better than nothing, though. Better still to have problems than to let death eradicate them all…

There was, however, another less immediately relevant, but more intrinsically worrying, problem it had discovered, and it was implied in the question: who was it?

Its higher functions had had to close down when it had transferred from four- to three-dimensional space. The Mind's information was held in binary form, in spirals composed of protons and neutrons; and neutrons — outside a nucleus, and also outside hyperspace — decayed (into protons, ha-ha; not too long after entering the Command System, the vast majority of its memory would have consisted of the stunningly illuminating message: "0000000… "). So it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive functions, wrapping them in fields which prevented both decay and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry, in real space, and using real-space light to think with (how humiliating).

In fact, it could still access all that stored memory (though the process was complicated, and so slow), so all was not lost there… But as for thinking, as for being itself — another matter entirely. It wasn't its real self. It was a crude, abstracted copy of itself, the mere ground plan for the full labyrinthine complexity of its true personality. It was the truest possible copy its limited scale was theoretically capable of providing, and it was still sentient; conscious by even the most rigorous of standards. Yet an index was not the text, a street plan was not the city, a map not the land.

So who was it?

Not the entity it thought it was, that was the answer, and it was a disconcerting one. Because it knew that the self it was now could never think of all the things its old self would have thought of. It felt unworthy. It felt fallible and limited and… dull.

But think positively. Patterns, images, the telling analogy … make the ill work to good. Just think…

If it was not itself, then it would be not itself.

As it was now to what it had been before, so the remote drone was to it now (nice connection).

The remote drone would be more than just its eyes and ears on the surface, in or near the Changers" base, keeping look-out; more than just its assistant in the doubtless frantic preparations to equip and secrete which would ensue if the drone did raise the alarm; more. And less.

Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.

Its escape from the spare-parts warship had been, though it thought it itself, quite breathtakingly masterful and brilliant. Its courageous use of warp so deep into a gravity well would have been foolhardy in the extreme in anything else but the dire circumstances it had found itself in, but was anyway superbly skilled… And its stunning cross-realm transfer, from hyper- to real space, was not simply even more brilliant and even braver than anything else it had done, it was almost certainly a first; there was nothing anywhere in its vast store of information to indicate that anybody had ever done that before. It was proud.

But after all that, here it was, trapped; an intellectual cripple, a philosophical shadow of its former self.

Now all it could do was wait, hoping that whoever came to find it would be friendly. The Culture must know; the Mind was certain its signal had worked and that it would be picked up somewhere. But the Idirans knew as well. It didn't think they would just try to storm in, because they knew as well as it did that antagonising the Dra'Azon was a bad idea. But what if the Idirans found a way in and the Culture couldn't? What if the whole region of space around the Sullen Gulf was now Idiran held? The Mind knew there was only one thing it could do if it fell into Idiran hands, but not only did it not want to destruct for purely personal reasons, it didn't want to destruct anywhere near Schar's World anyway, for the same reason that the Idirans wouldn't come charging in. But if it was captured in the planet, that might be the last time it would have a chance to destroy itself. By the time it was taken off the planet the Idirans might have found a way of stopping it from destructing.

Perhaps it had made a mistake in escaping at all. Perhaps it should have just destructed along with the rest of the ship and saved all this complication and worry. But it had seemed like an almost heaven-sent opportunity to escape — finding itself so close to a Planet of the Dead when it had been attacked. It wanted to live anyway, but it would have been… wasteful to throwaway such a great chance even if it had been perfectly sanguine about its own survival or destruction.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. It was here and it just had to wait. Wait and think. Consider all the options (few) and possibilities (many). Rack those memories as best it could for anything that might be relevant, that might help. For example (and the one really interesting bit would be a bad one), it had discovered that the Idirans had probably employed one of the Changers who had actually served with the caretaker staff on Schar's World. Of course perhaps the man was dead, or busy on something else, or too far away, or the information had been incorrect in the first place and the intelligence-gathering section of the Culture had got it wrong… But if not, then that man would be the one obvious person to send after something hiding in the Command System tunnels.

It was part of the Mind's very construction — at every level — to believe that there was no such thing as bad knowledge except in very relative terms, but it really did wish that it hadn't had that bit of information in its memory banks; it would just as soon not have known anything about this man, this Changer who knew Schar's World and probably worked for the Idirans. (Perversely, it found itself wishing it knew this man's name.)

But with any luck he would be irrelevant, or the Culture would get here first. Or the Dra'Azon being would recognise a fellow Mind in trouble and help, or… anything.

In darkness the Mind waited.

…Hundreds of those planets were empty; the hundred million room towers were there; the little rooms, the cabinets and the trays and the cards and the spaces for the numbers and letters were there; but nothing was written, nothing held, on any of the cards… (Sometimes the Mind liked to imagine travelling down the narrow spaces between the cabinets, one of its remote drones floating between the banked files of memory in the thin corridors, from room to room, for floor after floor, kilometre after kilometre, over buried continents of rooms, filled-in oceans of rooms, levelled ranges, felled forests, covered deserts of rooms.)… These whole systems of dark planets, those trillions of square kilometres of blank paper, represented the Mind's future; the spaces it would fill in its life to come.

If it had one.