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like a library, transmitted by signal laser. Suitably housed and emplaced within enabled equipment of sufficient capacity and complexity, this… entity, though it is simply a many-branched array of statements, questions and answers, with a set of rules governing the order in which they are expressed, is able to carry out what seems very like an intelligent conversation. It is as close as one is allowed to come to an artificial intelligence, post-War.’
    ‘How singular.’
    Slovius wobbled in his pool. ‘They are assuredly surpassing rare,’ he agreed. ‘One is being sent here.’
    Fassin blinked a few times. ‘Sent here?’
    ‘To Sept Bantrabal. To this house. To us.’
    ‘To us.’
    ‘From the Administrata.’
    ‘The Administrata.’ Fassin became aware that he was sounding simple-minded.
    ‘Via the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir .’
    ‘My,’ Fassin said. ‘We are… privileged.’
    ‘Not we, Fassin; you. The projection is being sent to talk to you.’
    Fassin smiled weakly. ‘To me? I see. When will--?’
    ‘It is currently being transmitted. It ought to be ready by late evening. You may wish to clear your schedule for this. Did you have much arranged?’
    ‘Ah… a supper with Jaal. I’m sure--’
    ‘I would make it an early supper, and don’t tarry.’
    ‘Well, yes. Of course,’ Fassin said. ‘Do you have any idea, sir, what I might have done to deserve such an honour?’
    Slovius was silent for a moment, then said, ‘None whatsoever.’
    Guime replaced an intercom set on its hook and left his place by the agate wall to kneel and whisper to Slovius, who nodded, then looked at Fassin. ‘Major-Domo Verpych would like to talk to you, nephew.’
    ‘Verpych?’ Fassin said, with a gulp. The household’s major-domo, Sept Bantrabal’s most senior servant, was supposed to rest dormant until the whole sept moved to its winter lodgings, over eighty days from now. It was unheard of for him to be roused out of sequence. ‘I thought he was asleep!’
    ‘Well, he’s been woken up.’
    *
    The ship had been dead for millennia. Nobody seemed to be sure quite how many, though the most plausible estimates put it at about six or seven. It was just one more foundered vessel from one or other of the great fleets which had contended the War of the New Quick (or perhaps the slightly later Machine War, or possibly the subsequent Scatter Wars, or maybe one of the brief, bitter, confused and untidy engagements implicit in the Strew), another forgotten, discarded piece from the great game of galactic power-mongering, civilisational competition, pan-species manoeuvring and general grand-scale meta-politicking.
    The hulk had lain undiscovered on the surface of ‘glantine for at least a thousand years because although ‘glantine was a minor planet by human standards - slightly smaller than Mars - it was by the same measure sparsely populated, with fewer than a billion inhabitants, most of those concentrated in the tropics, and the area where the wreck had fallen - the North Waste Land - was a rarely visited and extensive tract of nothing much. That it had taken a long time for the local surveillance systems to return to anything like the sort of complexity or sophistication they’d exhibited before the commencement of hostilities also helped the ruins avoid detection. Lastly, for all the vessel’s hulking size, some portion of its auto-camouflage systems had survived the craft’s partial destruction, the deaths of all the mortals aboard and its impact on the planet-moon’s surface, and so had kept it disguised for all that time, seemingly just another fold of barren, rocky ejecta from the impact crater left by a smaller but much faster-travelling derelict which had crashed and vaporised in a deep crater ten kilometres away right at the start of the New Quick dispute.
    The ship’s ruins had only been discovered because somebody in a flier had crashed, fatally, into one of its great curving ribs (perfectly