"Hub."

"Ziller. Good evening. Are you enjoying yourself?"

"No. How about you?"

"Of course."

"Of course? Can real happiness be so... foregone as that? How depressing."

"Ziller, I am a Hub Mind. I have an entire- and if I may say so- quite fabulous Orbital to look after, not to mention having fifty billion people to tend to."

"Certainly I wasn't going to mention them."

"Right now I'm observing a fading supernova in a galaxy two and a half billion years away. Closer to home, a thousand years off, I'm watching a dying planet orbiting inside the atmosphere of a red giant sun as it spirals slowly down toward the core. I can also watch the results of the planet's destruction on the sun, a thousand years later, via hyperspace.

"In-system, I'm tracking millions of comets and asteroids, and directing the orbits of tens of thousands of them, some to use as raw material for Plate landscaping, some just to keep them out of the way. Next year I'm going to let a big comet come right through the Orbital, between the Rim and the Hub. That should be pretty spectacular. Several hundred thousand smaller bodies are speeding toward us right now, earmarked to provide an over-the-top light show for the first night of your new orchestral work at the end of the Twin Novae period."

"It was that-"

"At the same time, of course, I'm in simultaneous communication with hundreds of other Minds; thousands, over the course of any given day; ship Minds of every type, some approaching, some just having left, some old friends, some sharing interests and fascinations very similar to my own, plus other Orbitals and university Sages, amongst others. I have eleven Roving Personality Constructs, each one flitting over time from place to place in the greater galaxy, rooming with other Minds in the processor substrates of GSV's and smaller vessels, other Orbitals, Eccentric and Ulterior craft and with Minds of various other types; what they will be like, and how these once identical siblings might change me when they return and we consider remerging, I can only imagine and look forward to."

"It all sounds-"

"While I am at the moment hosting no other Minds, I look forward to that, as well.

"Fascinating. Now-"

"Additionally, sub-systems like manufactury process-overseeing complexes keep a constant and fascinating dialogue. Within the hour, for example, in a shipyard in a cavern under the Buzuhn Bulkhead Range, a new Mind will be born, to be emplaced within a GCV before the year is out."

"No, no; keep going."

"Meanwhile, via one of my planetary remotes I'm watching a pair of cyclonic systems collide on Naratradjan Prime and composing a glyph sequence on the effects of ultra-violent atmospheric phenomena on otherwise habitable ecospheres. Here on Masaq' I'm watching a series of avalanches in the Pilthunguon Mountains on Hildri, a tornado whirling across the Shaban Savannah on Akron, a sworl-island calving in the Picha Sea, a forest fire in Molten, a seiche bore funnelling up Gardens River, a firework display above Junzra City, a wooden house frame being hoisted into place in a village in Furl, a quartet of lovers on a hilltop in-"

"You've made your-"

"-Ocutti. Then there are drones and other autonomous sentients, able to communicate directly and at speed, plus the implanted humans and other biologicals also able to converse immediately. Plus of course I have millions of avatars like this one, the majority of them talking with and listening to people right now."

"... Have you finished?"

"Yes. But even if all the other stuff seems just a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!"

"Think of all that bullshit, all the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandizement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness."

"That is the chaff, Ziller. I ignore that. I can respond politely and where necessary felicitously to the most intense bore forever without flagging and it costs me nothing. It's like ignoring all the boring bits in space between the neat stuff like planets and stars and ships. And even that's not completely boring anyway."

"I cannot tell you how glad I am that you live such a full life, Hub."

"Thank you."

"And all this makes you suitable to command a world of fifty billion souls?"

"Perfectly," the avatar said smoothly. "I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing left to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply.

"It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it, it was us and we were it.

"And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish." The avatar smiled silkily as it leaned closer to him, as though imparting a confidence. "Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.

We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying."

... "I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail," the avatar continued. "I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human- or a Chelgrian- might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with the process of dying in pain." The avatar's eyes seemed to shine. It came forward, closer to his face by the breadth of a hand.

"Whereas I," it whispered, "have billions." It smiled, and something in its expression made Ziller clench his teeth. "I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who't killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killling them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I never need wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless, and hateful thing to have to do.

"And, as you might imagine, I consider that I have an obligation to discharge. I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence at Masaq' Hub for as long as I'm needed until I'm no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this faint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six."