Banks, Iain Culture 07 Look to Windward

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In a sense it was the most radically reductivist position made real; an
acknowledgement that mind arose from matter, and could be fundamentally
and absolutely defined in material terms, and as such it did not suit everyone.
Some societies had reached the horizon of such knowledge and been on the
brink of the control it implied, only to turn away, unwilling to lose the
benefits of the beliefs such a development threatened.
Other peoples had accepted the exchange and suffered from it, losing
themselves in ways that seemed sensible, even worthy at the time but which
finally led to their effective extinction.
Most societies subscribed to the technologies involved and changed to deal
with the consequences. In places like the Culture the consequences were that
people could take back-ups of themselves if they were about to do something
dangerous, they could create mind-state versions of themselves which could
be used to deliver messages or undertake a multiplicity of experiences in a
variety of places and in an assortment of physical or virtual forms, they could
entirely transfer their original personality into a different body or device, and
they could merge with other individuals - balancing retained individuality
against consensual wholeness - in devices designed for such metaphysical
intimacy.
Amongst the Chelgrian people the course of history had diverged from the
norm. The device which was emplaced in them, the Soulkeeper, was rarely
used to revive an individual. Instead it was used to ensure that the soul, the
personality of the dying person, would be available to be accepted into
heaven.
The majority of Chelgrians had long believed, like the majority of many
intelligent species, in a place where the dead went after death. There had been
a variety of different religions, faiths and cults on the planet, but the belief
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system that came to dominate Chel and was exported out to the stars when
the species achieved space travel - even if by then it was taken as having a
symbolic rather than a literal truth - was one which still spoke of a mythical
afterlife, where the good would be rewarded by an eternity of noble joy and
the evil would be condemned - no matter what their caste had been in the
mortal world - to servitude forever.
According to the carefully kept and minutely analysed records of the galaxy's
more nit-picking elder civilisations, the Chelgrians had persisted in their
religiosity for a significant time after the advent of scientific methodology,
and - in continuing to cleave to the caste system - were unusual in retaining
such a manifestly discriminatory social order so long into post-contact
history. None of this, though, prepared any of the observing societies for what
happened not long after the Chelgrians became able to transcribe their
personalities into media other than their own individual brains.
Subliming was an accepted if still somewhat mysterious part of galactic life; it
meant leaving the normal matter-based life of the universe behind and
ascending to a higher state of existence based on pure energy. In theory any
individual - biological or machine - could Sublime, given the right technology,
but the pattern was for whole swathes of a society and species to disappear at
the same time, and often the entirety of a civilisation went in one go (only the
Culture was known to worry that such - to it - unlikely absoluteness implied a
degree of coercion).
There were generally a host of warning signs that a society was about to
Sublime - a degree of society-wide ennui, the revival of long-quiescent
religions and other irrational beliefs, an interest in the mythology and
methodology of Subliming itself - and it almost always happened to fairly
well-established and long-lived civilisations.
To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then
eventually Sublime was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main
Sequence for civilisations, though there was an equally honourable and
venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own
business (mostly) and generally sitting about feeling pleasantly invulnerable [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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