The Explorers Club
Iain M. Banks' 'Culture' Fan Fiction
A Plate class GSV at 20 kilometres long, even with 10 million inhabitants, isn’t really lacking in interior space. Over the centuries as modifications are made, fads and architectural fashions come and go and a population ever eager for new experiences demands change, gaps and spaces get left behind, areas fall into disuse. Not that a culture starship would ever be so crude as to discard things, or have “waste” products - there would, eventually be a time when these spaces and the materials within them would be re-used; but that time might be a considerable distance in the future. So they lie, not forgotten exactly but, let us say, presently unneeded. And, while the interior is primarily for the use of the inhabitants, of necessity there will be much need of service spaces, access corridors and infrastructural bits and pieces whose purpose may only be known to the minds controlling the vessel- never intended for use or occupation they may still be entered. After all, nothing is ever really “off-limits” in the Culture, other than the self imposed respect of individual privacy. Areas downright hazardous to health, might not be so with suitable protective clothing or other precautions and providing there is no active (or passive) interference with ship board operations these spaces too might be accessed.
It is these “liminal” spaces, on the threshold between past and future use, between living space and operational necessity that the “Liminal Spaces Explorers Club” exists aboard this, any many similar craft. Their purpose, to discover, investigate and perhaps even care for these unloved areas.
Now, this being a Club, its members choose to impose on themselves a set of rules.
First and foremost, to be included in the catalog of liminal spaces it must be discovered by actual, physical, exploration. Whilst it is true that the inhabitants assume (or at the very least, hope) that the minds who operate the vessel have deep in their mysterious and almost limitless data banks a complete, accurate and up to date understanding of every minute aspect of the vessel it is not acceptable within the club just to ask the minds where “unused” spaces are. For a start, it is too easy, and furthermore you can’t really trust these minds, devious to a fault as they are. They might choose to give incorrect information, or for example, reveal the existence of a old broom closet without mentioning the magnificent darkened cathedral like space beside it - either for their own amusement, or to pass on to the many gossip sources that infest Culture ships.
Likewise, inhabitants tend to assume that the minds would not let them wander into a space that is flooded with hard radiation every tend minutes; and that, should one get into unexpected difficulty (say, falling from a vast height within that darkened cathedral space) then a simple call into one’s terminal would have a drone, or possibly a trampoline depending on the mind’s mood, displaced below them. So the general assumption is that such exploration isn’t really dangerous, but there is always that tiny element of doubt about whether that is really the case, that frisson of excitement that behind the next door is a hostile alien life form successfully hiding from the mind’s senses that makes being an active member of the Liminal Spaces Explorers Club that little bit more exciting, and lifts its members, at least in their own eyes, above the general hoi-polloi.
It is to maintain this general air of mystique that the second rule exists - that the “Catalog of Liminal Spaces” - for there is such a thing, should indeed be a physical “thing” and hence maintained on paper (or species equivalent) and kept solely for members use in the club premises. Again, whilst it is generally assumed that nothing can truly be hidden from a determined (and deeply unethical) mind; that the deeply ingrained respect of personal privacy means that the club would like to think that they hold secrets unbeknownst to all others, reinforcing that air of being just a little bit special.
Over the last decades, on this particular vessel, there has been a tendency to not merely discover and explore such spaces but to “improve” them in some respect. A very simple example exists in the upper reaches of the starboard forward outrigger. The outriggers are a now, rather dated but once popular way to combine vast open spaces with city like densities. Create an area of parkland, forest, sports fields, lakes and whatever, perhaps 1km x 4km, with another kilometre of airspace. Enclose it with walls, perhaps leaving the ends open but make the walls hollow, say, 200m of interior space within the walls. Fill this space with 20 levels (thus levels are 50 meters apart), link levels by splitting the floor at each end, one part rising up gently to link to up to the higher level and the other falling down to the lower. Build road and tramways along the shallow double helix you have created and line the roadways with whatever buildings you require, usually up to no more than 5 or 6 stories. Intersperse with smaller parks, add vertical funiculars at each end if desired, project skies on to the “ceiling” of each floor and you 4 square kilometres of open space and up to 150 kilometres of pleasant city streets. Those buildings which back onto the open air above the parkland can have windows, balconies, or indeed small parks hanging out into the air space, although these tend to reduce significantly in number at the higher levels as the sky projection looks strange from sideways on.
Now if you go to the very top level of the starboard outrigger, and down one of the narrow gaps between the buildings on the parkland side you will find a little used alleyway. At various points access hatches appear in the outer wall, behind which is a series of gantry and walkways giving access to the weather production system embedded in the “ceiling”, above the projection screen. This consists of piping, header tanks, refrigeration equipment and vortex generators capable of producing a variety of (albeit mild) weather effects, including a dusting of light snow.
There is however one particular hatchway, now marked with a subtle, but obvious if you know what you looking for, symbol. In addition to gantry access above the “sky” this hatch has a metal stairway that leads down to a small platform just below the sky. The cloud projection looks very strange from this angle so don’t look that way. Instead look down, through those thousand meters of clear air (or mist, rain, or snow depending on the weather settings) down to the parkland below. No-one knows you are here, you have complete privacy and a god-like (insert deity of your choosing) view over your fellow inhabitants.
Why was the platform built? We assume that the ship’s minds know - but remember that simply asking them for the answer is both beneath us and a breach of another club rule. We can speculate - there is evidence of mounting points, perhaps for a winch or catapult, a section of handrail looks like it can be folded away, so maybe it was some sort of jumping off point? Who knows?
But the point is that you know of its existence, because you are a member of the club, and those that have been here before you have prepared the way. Incongruously, the platform has been equipped with a round table, through which a jaunty coloured parasol rustles in the breeze and there are four chairs just fitting around the remaining space, their backs almost touching the handrails. Wonder how long those have been in place? All that mist and drizzle can’t have been good for them can it…?
Nevertheless, it is a regular event for a quartet of club members to make the trek to the uppermost floor (using the long and winding tram, not the shortcut funicular), carrying foodstuffs, beverages and appropriate utensils about their persons and consuming them on the windy platform. A new member, somewhat naive in the ways of the club once asked why they could not ask the assistance of a suitable accommodating drone to fly the comestibles, or indeed the whole party, up to the platform and save all the trouble. It was gently pointed out by the longer established members that this really wasn’t in the spirit of things at all, and murmured amongst themselves whether he who had raised the question was really a suitable candidate for the club at all, and to ask pointedly who had recommended them? Once the picnic is underway it is assumed that someone (I.e. a ship mind) would prevent any serious harm befalling anyone unlucky enough to be directly under the path of, say, a falling wine bottle (discussion question - would it reach terminal velocity before hitting the ground?) but are revellers are expected to be cautious and considerate and prevent such an occurrence in the first place. Of course throwing the naive questioner over the edge would have been perfectly reasonable…
Our intrepid club members thus knowingly place themselves at risk - perhaps they will trip and fall? Perhaps the platform itself, never intended for such weights collapses? Perhaps a malfunctioning vortex generators blows them all off? (Do these things ever malfunction?) And just at that very moment all the ship minds are engaged on some vital task crucial to the safety of the ship, and not a single drone or flight capable inhabitant notices their plight and they fall to their doom. Even so, they accept this risk, all while realising that in the grand scheme of things, aboard a closely surveilled star ship they probably have a much greater risk of injury from a jealous lover with a kitchen knife, and that such an event would get them a better write up in the gossip columns anyway. Whatever, those are the risks, and only the members of the Liminal Spaces Explorer Club dare to take them.
Or take a different example, not too far away, at least in linear distance from our first. The current craze for the sport of team freestyle bodyballing requires an 8 sided court. Somewhat unimaginatively, the designers of the main spectator arena simply provided eight tall stands around the court, enclosing the whole in cladding adorned with the various team and league logos. The space for this venue was found adjacent to the third starboard side main bay, with the back of the rear stand on the outside wall of the main bay. Rather than leave an awkward triangular space that lead nowhere, the cladding had been placed such that it met the main bay wall neatly, at a right angle. Little noticed to all but a sharp eyed LSEC member was a hatchway giving access to the empty, triangular space should any maintenance be required, even though such a thing was highly unlikely given the build quality of Culture machinery and the fact that the space didn’t contain any machinery, just the supporting structure for the arena seating.
An occasional member of the club, let us call him Alannarion suffered a broken heart over a failed love affair, the pain of which he thought he might never get over. A counselling drone (perhaps in jest, you never know with AIs) suggested he take up a hobby and randomly selected glass blowing from Association of Therapists Approved List of Activities to Mend a Broken Heart (yes, there is such a thing in the Culture, in a society of hundreds of billions of highly educated and connected individuals you can find a list of pretty much anything).
Alannarion obtained the necessary equipment and set to work. As it turned out he didn’t really have much aptitude for glass blowing, barely getting beyond the basic tear drop shape, but producing a considerable quantity of them. And it wasn’t mending his broken heart either. What he realised he actually needed was a grand but futile romantic gesture. Recognising that this would put him danger of somewhat becoming a laughing stock he resolved to carry out the grand gesture in secret, revealing it to the world only if it seemed like a good idea at the time.
He had visited the hidden space behind the bodyball court with a friend from the club and was pretty sure he could find it again without alerting any other club member to his actions. He did indeed find the hatchway and set his plan in motion. First he obtained some climbing ropes, karabiners and so forth, and a considerable length of wire. For almost a year he went each night (for he didn’t want to seen) to the hatchway carrying in his backpack half a dozen or so carefully wrapped glass tear drops. He would shimmy up his network of ropes, remembering a safety line at all times (he didn’t want his gesture to be that romantic) and proceeded to carefully hang almost two thousand glass tear drops in strings on wires from the arena supports. He then spent considerable time working on fixing tiny lights to each tear drop and programming them in sequence to appear as an endlessly falling shower of tears.
While he worked he planned out scenarios for revealing his creation to his lost love. Considered viewing angles, time of day, ruses for getting her to the this liminal space, how she would react. How he would react even (would he fall back in to her arms, or simply spurn her affections now he had grown so much?) Eventually he was ready.
Sadly, his beloved had met someone else and they had left the vessel some months previously, taking passage on another GSV heading anti-spin ward into the Lowenbern star cluster to visit a popular stellar nursery and then seeing where their fate would take them next. Alannarion had been rather too wrapped up in his project to notice.
Well, if she could flounce off like that then so could he! He would show her. His true grand gesture (even more futile, truth be told) would be seek passage too, but in the opposite direction, spin ward, and not in the luxury of a GSV, but slumming it in a miserable little GCU. Obviously he’d have to join Contact first but that proved to be surprisingly straightforward as they were impressed with his romantic ideas and were sure they could find a use for him. Who knew, perhaps he would cross paths with his beloved on the far side of the galaxy, him a highly respected hero with a string of contact successes behind him.
Alannarion never told anyone about his project, not even updating the hand-written records in the LSEC clubroom. It wasn’t until some years later that a rather dull but persistent completist club member was trying to visit every location in the Catalog opened the hatch to the space behind the stand and found, still falling, the endless rain of tear drops.
Ironically, as is often the case with faddish sports, freestyle bodyballing fell out of favour and a few years afterwards the arena itself was left unused, joining the Catalog as item JQ/40/615.
(Membership of the Liminal Spaces Explorers Club is by invitation only but a small exhibition of club activities can be viewed on application (in PERSON only) at the club room, 2015, Jefissa Buildings, 3rd Street, College District, Forward Upper 40).