"An expert in that, are you, Amalk-ney?" Mawhrin-Skel inquired.

"I bow to your superior talents in that field," Chamlis snapped back.

Gurgeh smiled. Chamlis Amalk-ney was an old — and ancient — friend; the drone had been constructed over four thousand years ago (it claimed it had forgotten the exact date, and nobody had ever been impolite enough to search out the truth). Gurgeh had known the drone all his life; it had been a friend of the family for centuries.

Mawhrin-Skel was a more recent acquaintance. The irascible, ill-mannered little machine had arrived on Chiark Orbital only a couple of hundred days earlier; another untypical character attracted there by the world's exaggerated reputation for eccentricity.

Mawhrin-Skel had been designed as a Special Circumstances drone for the Culture's Contact section; effectively a military machine with a variety of sophisticated, hardened sensory and weapons systems which would have been quite unnecessary and useless on the majority of drones. As with all sentient Culture constructs, its precise character had not been fully mapped out before its construction, but allowed to develop as the drone's mind was put together. The Culture regarded this unpredictable factor in its production of conscious machines as the price to be paid for individuality, but the result was that not every drone so brought into being was entirely suitable for the tasks it had initially been designed for.

Mawhrin-Skel was one such rogue drone. Its personality — it had been decided — wasn't right for Contact, not even for Special Circumstances. It was unstable, belligerent and insensitive. (And those were only the grounds it had chosen to tell people it had failed on.) It had been given the choice of radical personality alteration, in which it would have had little or no say in its own eventual character, or a life outside Contact, with its personality intact but its weapons and its more complex communications and sensory systems removed to bring it down to something nearer the level of a standard drone.