The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

At 100 pages long, the title story makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons, featuring some earlier activities of one of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma.

Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try and fix the mess the human species has made of it; Linter goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li (who is a Star Trek fan), argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The Arbitrary (ship) has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.

'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'