Infrastructure, Laws & Malcontents

Planets figure little in the life of the average Culture person; there are a few handfuls of what are regarded as ‘home’ planets, and a few hundred more that were colonized (sometimes after terraforming) in the early days before the Culture proper came into being, but only a fraction of a percent of the Culture’s inhabitants live on them (many more live permanently on ships). More people live in Rocks; hollowed-out asteroids and planetoids (almost all fitted with drives, and some — after nine millennia — having been fitted with dozens of different, consecutively more advanced engines). The majority, however, live in larger artificial habitats, predominantly Orbitals.

Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to the idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here’s where I stole it from). If you know what a Ringworld is — invented by Larry Niven; a segment of a Dyson Sphere — then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink the whole thing till it’s about three million kilometers across, and place in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it to produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night cycle (roughly; the Culture’s day is actually a bit longer). An elliptical orbit provides seasons.

Of course, the materials used in the construction of something ten million kilometers in circumference spinning once every 24 hours are far beyond anything we can realistically imagine now, and it is quite possible that the physical constraints imposed by the strength of atomic bonds ensure that such structures will prove impossible to construct, but if it is possible to build on a such a scale and subject such structures to forces of these magnitudes, then I’d submit that there is an elegance in using the same rotation to produce both an acceptable day-night cycle and an apparent gravity which makes the idea intrinsically attractive.

Usually, rather than construct whole Orbitals in one operation, the Culture starts with Plates; a pair of slabs of land and water (plus full retaining walls, of course) of not less than a thousand kilometers to a side, spinning in a similar orbit, attached by tensor fields to each other, and behaving like sections of a completed Orbital; this variation provides greater flexibility when responding to population increase. Further plate-pairs can then be added until the Orbital is complete.

The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial world’s integrity through collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed with negligible effect.

Whatever the source material, Orbitals are obviously far more mass-efficient in providing living space than planets. The Culture, as is made clear in Use of Weapons, regards terraforming generally as ecologically unsound; the wilderness should be left as it is, when it is so easy to build paradise in space from so little.

An idea of how the day-night cycle appears on the surface of an Orbital can be gained by taking an ordinary belt, buckling it so that it forms a circle, and putting your eye to the outside of one of the belt’s holes; looking through the hole at a light bulb and slowly rotating the whole belt will give some idea of how a star appears to move across the sky when seen from an Orbital, though it will also leave you looking rather silly.

As indicated, the usual minimum for the width of an Orbital is about a thousand kilometers (two thousand if you count the sloped, mostly transparent retaining walls, which usually extend to five hundred kilometers or so above the plate land-sea surface). The normal ratio of land to sea is 1:3, so that on each Plate — assuming they are being constructed in the balanced pairs described above — a (very) roughly square island rests in the middle of a sea, with approximately two hundred and fifty kilometers from the shore of the land mass to the retaining walls. Orbitals, though, like everything else in the Culture, vary enormously.

One thing almost every Orbital — whether just two Plates or a completed (“closed”) Orbital — does have, is a Hub. As its name implies, the Hub sits in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all parts of the main circumferential structure (but not physically joined to it, normally). The Hub is where the Orbital’s controlling AI (often a Mind) usually exists, running, or helping to run, the Orbital’s transport, manufacturing, maintenance and subsidiary systems, acting as switchboard for trans-Orbital communications, library and general information point, traffic control for approaching, departing and close-passing ships, and generally working as the Orbital’s principle link with the rest of the Culture. During the construction phase of a Plate-pair, the Hub will normally control the process.

The design of a Plate sometimes incorporates the deep — or strategic — structure of the surface geography, so that the Plate medium itself contains the corrugations that will become mountains, valleys and lakes; more commonly, the Plate surface is left flat and the strategic structures on the inner surface — also constructed from Plate base material — are added later. Under either method, the Plate’s manufacturing and maintenance systems are located within the indentations or hollows of the strategic structure, leaving the land surface free to assume a rural appearance, once the tactical geomorphology has been designed and positioned, the Plate’s complement of water and air has been emplaced, the necessary weathering has occurred, and the relevant flora and fauna have been introduced.

The surface of the Plate base is pierced by multitudinous shafts allowing access to the factory and maintenance volumes, and to the sub-surface transport systems. (Almost invariably, these include restricted single-aperture concentrically rotating airlocks paired in sequence.)

Existing on the outer surface of the base material, an Orbital’s rapid-transport systems operate in vacuum, with the resulting advantages the lack of air-resistance confers; the relatively uncluttered nature of the Orbital’s outer surface (whether flat, allowing the systems to operate next to that surface, or corrugated, requiring sling-bridges under unoccupied mountain indentations), means that the systems can be both high-capacity and extremely flexible. Journey starting-points and destinations can be highly specific for the same reason; an isolated house or a small village will have its own access shaft, and in larger conurbations a shaft will usually be within a few minutes walk.

Surface transport on Orbitals tends to be used when the pleasure of making the journey is itself part of the reason for traveling; air travel is common enough (if still far slower than sub-surface travel), though individual Plates often have their own guide-lines concerning the amount of air travel thought appropriate. Such guide-lines are part of one’s manners, and not formalized in anything as crude as laws.

The Culture doesn’t actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behavior; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognize as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result — punishment, if you will — is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.

In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real value is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort of action we would class as a crime against property.

Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are played, though most are in Virtual Reality. Something of a status-symbol for the determined megalomaniac is having one’s own starship; this is considered wasteful by most people, and is also futile, if the purpose of having it is to escape the Culture completely and — say — set up oneself as God or Emperor on some backward planet; the person might be free to pilot their (obviously non-AI controlled) ship, and even approach a planet, but the Contact section is equally free to follow that person wherever they go and do whatever it thinks appropriate to stop him or her from doing anything injurious or unpleasant to whatever civilizations they come into — or attempt to come into — contact with. This tends to be frustrating, and Virtual Reality games — up to and including utter-involvement level, in which the player has to make a real and sustained effort to return to the real world, and can even forget that it exists entirely — are far more satisfying.

Some people, however, refuse this escape-route too, and leave the Culture altogether for a civilization that suits them better and where they can operate in a system which gives them the kind of rewards they seek. To renounce the Culture so is to lose access to its technology though, and, again, Contact supervises the entry of such people into their chosen civilization at a level which guarantees they aren’t starting with too great an advantage compared to the original inhabitants (and retains the option of interfering, if it sees fit).

A few such apparently anti-social people are even used by Contact itself, especially by the Special Circumstances section.

The way the Culture creates AIs means that a small number of them suffer from similar personality problems; such machines are given the choice of cooperative re-design, a more limited role in the Culture than they might have had otherwise, or a similarly constrained exile.