So far all they'd done was exchange a few pleasantries and talk a little about old times; partly, of course, so that Genar-Hofoen could satisfy himself that this apparition had genuinely been sent by his uncle and SC had paid him the enormous compliment of sending not one but two personality-states to him in order to argue him round to doing whatever it was they wanted from him (that the hologram might be a brilliantly researched forgery created by SC would be even more of a compliment… but that way lay paranoia).

"I take it you had a good evening," Tishlin's simulation said.

"Enormous fun."

Tishlin looked puzzled. Genar-Hofoen watched the expression form on his uncle's face and wondered how comprehensive was the duplication of his uncle's personality now encoded — living, if you wanted to look at it that way — in the module's AI core. Did whatever was in there — sent here enciphered with the specific task of persuading him to cooperate with Special Circumstances — actually feel? Or did it just appear to?

Shit, I must be feeling bad, Genar-Hofoen thought. I haven't bothered about that sort of shit since university.

"How can you have enormous fun with… aliens?" the hologram asked, eyebrows gathering.

"Attitude," Genar-Hofoen said cryptically, slicing off more steak.

"But you can't drink with them, eat with them, can't really touch them, or want the same things…" Tishlin said, still frowning.

Genar-Hofoen shrugged. "It's a kind of translation," he said. "You get used to it." He munched away for a moment while his uncle's program — or whatever it was — digested this. He pointed his knife at the image. 'That's something I'd want, in the unlikely event I agree to do whatever it is they want me to do."

"What?" Tishlin said, leaning back, arms crossed.

"I want to become an Affronter."

Tishlin's eyebrows elevated. "You want what, boy?" he said.

"Well, some of the time," Genar-Hofoen said, half turning his head to the drone behind him; the machine came quickly forward and refilled his glass with the infusion. "I mean, all I want is an Affronter body, one that I can just sort of zap into and… well, just be an Affronter. You know; socialise. I don't see what the problem is, really. In fact I keep telling them it'll be a great thing for Culture-Affront relations. I'd really be able to relate to these guys; I could really be one of them. Hell; isn't that what this ambassador shit is supposed to be all about?" He belched. "I'm sure it could be done. The module says it could but it shouldn't and says it's asked elsewhere and I know all the standard objections, but I think it'd be a great idea. I'm damn sure I'd enjoy it, I mean I could always sort of zap back into my own body anytime… this is really shocking you, isn't it, Uncle?"

The image shook its head. "You always were the oddest child, Byr. I suppose I should have known what to expect from you. Anybody who'd go out there to live with the Affront in the first place has to be slightly strange."

Genar-Hofoen held his arms out wide. "But I'm just doing what you did!" he protested.

"I only wanted to meet weird aliens, Byr; I didn't want to become one of them."

"Heck, and I thought you'd be proud of me."

"Proud but worried. Byr, are you seriously suggesting that becoming an Affronter would be part of your price for doing what SC asks?"

"Certainly," Genar-Hofoen said, and squinted up at the hammer-beamed ceiling. "I vaguely recall asking for a ship as well last night and the Death And Gravity saying yes…" he shook his head and laughed. "Must have imagined it." He finished the last of the steak.

"They've told me what they're prepared to offer, Byr," Tishlin said. "You didn't imagine it."

Genar-Hofoen looked up. "Really?" he asked.

"Really," Tishlin said.

Genar-Hofoen nodded slowly. "And how did they persuade you to act as go-between, Uncle?" he asked.

"They only had to ask, Byr. I may not be in Contact any more but I'm happy to help out when I can, when they have a problem."

"This isn't Contact, Uncle, this is Special Circumstances," Byr said quietly. "They tend to play by slightly different rules."

Tishlin looked serious; the image sounded defensive. "I know that, boy. I asked around some of my contacts before I agreed to do this; everything checks out, everything seems to be… reliable. I suggest you do the same, obviously, but from what I can see, what I've been told is the truth."

Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. "Okay. So what have they told you, Uncle?" he asked, draining the last of the infusion. He frowned, wiped his lips and inspected the napkin. He looked at the sediment in the bottom of the glass, then glared at the servant drone. It wobbled in the drone equivalent of a shrug and took the glass from his hand.

Tishlin's representation sat forward, putting its arms on the table. "Let me tell you a story, Byr."

"By all means," Genar-Hofoen said, picking something from his lips and wiping it on the napkin. The serving drone started to remove the rest of the breakfast things.

"Long ago and far away — two and a half thousand years ago," Tishlin said, "in a wispy tendril of suns outside the Galactic plane, nearest to Asatiel Cluster, but not really near to that or anywhere else — the Problem Child, an early General Contact Unit, Troubadour Class, chanced upon the ember of a very old star. The GCU started to investigate. And it found not one but two unusual things."

Genar-Hofoen drew his gown about him and settled back in his seat, a small smile on his lips. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Some of Genar-Hofoen's earliest memories were of the long, sunlit kitchen of the house at Ois, back on Seddun Orbital; his mother, the other adults of the house and his various cousins would all be milling around, chattering and laughing while he sat on his uncle's knee, being told tales. Some of them were ordinary children's stories — which he'd heard before, often, but which always sounded better when Uncle Tish told them — and some of them his uncle's own stories, from when he'd been in Contact, travelling the galaxy in a succession of ships, exploring strange new worlds and meeting all sorts of odd folk and finding any number of weird and wonderful things amongst the stars.

"Firstly," the hologram image said, "the dead sun gave every sign of being absurdly ancient. The techniques used to date it indicated it was getting on for a trillion years old."

"What?" Genar-Hofoen snorted.

Uncle Tishlin spread his hands. "The ship couldn't believe it either. To come up with this unlikely figure, it used…" the apparition glanced away to one side, the way Tishlin always had when he was thinking, and Genar-Hofoen found himself smiling, "… isotopic analysis and flux-pitting assay."

"Technical terms," Genar-Hofoen said, nodding. He and the hologram both smiled.

"Technical terms," the image of Tishlin agreed. "But no matter what it was they used or how they did their sums, it always came out that the dead star was at least fifty times older than the universe."

"I never heard that one before," Genar-Hofoen said, shaking his head and looking thoughtful.

"Me neither," Tishlin agreed. "Though as it turns out it was released publicly, just not until long after it had all happened. One reason there was no big fuss at the time was that the ship was so embarrassed about what it was coming up with it never filed a full report, just kept the results to itself, in its own mind."

"Did they have proper Minds back then?"

Tishlin's image shrugged. "Mind with a small «m»; AI core, we'd probably call it these days. But it was certainly sentient and the point is that the information remained in the ship's head, as it were."

Where, of course, it would remain the ship's. Practically the only form of private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory. Any publicly filed report or analysis was theoretically available to anybody, but your own thoughts, your own recollections — whether you were a human, a drone or a ship Mind — were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad manners even to think about trying to read somebody else's — or something else's — mind.