The Sublime Doesn't Do Exit Interviews

A civilization can be lied to for ten thousand years and it will not matter, provided the lie is discovered in the same week the civilization stops existing. That is the actual plot engine of this book, more than the chase, more than the fugitive lieutenant commander and her four-armed instrument. The Gzilt's holy book predicted electromagnetism, radioactivity, the cosmic microwave background — genuinely, verifiably, centuries ahead of the instruments that would confirm it — and it turns out to have been seeded by a since-Sublimed alien species running what amounts to a very long con, or a very long kindness, nobody can quite agree which. The reveal lands six days before the entire species disappears into the Sublime forever. Septame Banstegeyn has a president assassinated and blames the wrong aliens rather than let the truth surface on schedule. And the novel's quiet joke is that none of this urgency was necessary. The Culture already knew. Several ancient individuals already knew. The information was sitting around uncollected for millennia, waiting for a moment when it would cost something to say out loud, and