Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

  It was one of the bodies the drag line had flicked off as it tore up the slope, another corpse they had hacked and loosened and pulled like a rotten tooth from the new face of the glacier that morning, a dead witness that it was their duty to discover and remove with all dispatch and secrecy to the charnel wagons in the valley below to be turned from an accusatory body to innocent smoke and ash. What had hit him and shattered his leg was one of the bodies which had been dumped in the glacier half a generation ago, when the enemies of the Race had been expunged from the newly conquered territories.

  The scream forced its way out of his lungs like something desperate to be born to the freezing air, like something aching to join the screams he could hear spread around him near the lip of the inclined plane.

  The commandant's breath was gone; he stared into the rock-hard face of the body that had hit him and he sobbed for breath to scream again. It was a child's face; a girl's.

  The snow burned his face. His breath would not come back. His leg was a burning brand of pain lighting up his whole body.

  But not his eyes. The view began to dim.

  Why is this happening to me? Why won't it stop? Why can't I stop it? Why can't I wake up? What makes me re-live these terrible memories?

  Then the pain and the cold went away, seemed to be taken away, and another kind of coldness came upon him, and he found himself… thinking. Thinking about all that had happened. Reviewing, judging

  … In the desert we burned them immediately. None of this sloppiness. Was it some attempt at poetry, to bury them in the glacier? Interred where they were so far up the ice sheet, their bodies would stay in the ice for centuries. Buried too deep for anyone to find without the killing effort we had to put into it. Did our leaders begin to believe their own propaganda, that their rule would last a hundred lifetimes, and so started to think that far ahead? Could they see the melt-lakes below the glacier's ragged, dirty skirt, all those centuries from now, covered with the floating bodies released from the ice's grip? Did it start to worry them what people would think of them then? Having conquered all the present with such ruthlessness, did they embark on a campaign to defeat the future too, make it love them as we all pretend to?

  … In the desert we burned them immediately. They came out in the long trains through the burning heat and the choking dust and the ones that hadn't died in the black trucks we offered copious water; no will could resist the thirst those baking days spent amongst death had built up in them.

  They drank the poisoned water and died within hours. We incinerated the plundered bodies in solar furnaces, our offering to the insatiable sky gods of Race and Purity. And there seemed to be something pure about the way they were disposed of, as though their deaths gave them a nobility they could never have achieved in their mean, degraded lives. Their ashes fell like a lighter dust on the powderous emptiness of the desert, to be blown away together in the first storm.

  The last furnace loads were the camp workers — gassed in their dormitories, mostly — and all the paperwork: every letter, every order, every requisition pad, stores sheet, file, note and memo. We were all searched, even I. Those the special police found hiding diaries were shot on the spot. Most of our effects went up in smoke, too. What we were allowed to keep had been searched so thoroughly we joked they had managed to remove each grain of sand from our uniforms, something the laundry had never been able to do.

  We were split up and moved to different posts throughout the conquered territories. Reunions were not encouraged.

  I thought of writing down what had happened — not to confess but to explain.

  And we suffered, too. Not just in the physical conditions, though those were bad enough, but in our minds, in our consciences. There may have been a few brutes, a few monsters who gloried in it all (perhaps we kept a few murderers off the streets of our cities for all that time), but most of us went through intermittent agonies, wondering in moments of crisis if what we were doing was really right, even though in our hearts we knew it was.

  So many of us had nightmares. The things we saw each day, the scenes we witnessed, the pain and terror; these things could not help but affect us.

  Those we disposed of; their torment lasted a few days, maybe a month or two, then it was over as quickly and efficiently as we could make the process.

  Our suffering has gone on for a generation.

  I am proud of what I did. I wish it had not fallen to me to do what bad to be done, but I am glad that I did it to the best of my capabilities, and I would do it again.

  That was why I wanted to write down what had happened; to witness our belief and our dedication and our suffering.

  I never did.

  I am proud of that too.

  He awoke and there was something inside his head.

  He was back in reality, back in the present, back in the bedroom of his house in the retirement complex, near the sea; he could see the sunlight hitting the tiles of the balcony outside the room. His twinned hearts thumped, the scales had risen on his back, prickling him. His leg ached, echoing with the pain of that ancient injury on the glacier.

  The dream had been the most vivid yet, and the longest, finally taking him to the ice-fall in the western face and the accident with the drag line (deep buried, that had been, in his memory, submerged beneath all the dread white weight of his remembered pain). As well as that, whatever he had experienced had gone beyond the normal course, the usual environment of dreams, propelled there by the reliving of the accident and the image of fighting for breath while he stared transfixed into the face of the dead girl.

  He had found himself thinking, explaining, even justifying what he had done in his army career, in the most definitive part of his life.

  And now he could feel something inside his head.

  Whatever it was inside his head got him to close his eyes.

  — At last, it said. It was a deep, deliberately authoritative voice, its pronunciation almost too perfect.

  At last? he thought. (What was this?)

  — I have the truth.

  What truth? (Who was this?)

  — Of what you did. Your people.

  What?

  — The evidence was everywhere; across the desert, caked in loam, lodged in plants, sunk to the bottom of lakes, and there in the cultural record too; the sudden vanishings of art works, changes in architecture and agriculture. There were a few hidden records — books, photographs, sound recordings, indices, which contradicted the re-written histories — but they still didn't directly explain why so many people, so many peoples seemed to vanish so suddenly, without any sign of assimilation.

  What are you talking about? (What was this in his head?)

  — You would not believe what I am, commandant, but what I am talking about is a thing called genocide, and the proof thereof.

  We did what had to be done!

  — Thank you, we've just been through all that. Your self-justifications have been noted.

  I believed in what I did!

  — I know. You had the residual decency to question it occasionally, but in the end you did indeed believe in what you were doing. That is not an excuse, but it is a point.

  Who are you? What gives you the right to crawl inside my brains?

  — My name would be something like Grey Area in your language. What gives me the right to crawl inside your brains, as you put it, is the same thing that gave you the right to do what you did to those you murdered; power. Superior power. Vastly superior power, in my case. However, I have been called away and I have to leave you now, but I shall return in a few months and I'll be continuing my investigations then. There are still enough of you left to construct a more… triangulated case.

  What? he thought, trying to open his eyes.

  — Commandant, there is nothing worse I can wish upon you than to be what you already are, but you might care to reflect upon this while I'm gone:

  Instantly, he was back in the dream.

  He fell through the
bed, the single ice-white sheet tore beneath him and tumbled him into a bottomless tank of blood; he fell down through it to light, and the desert, and the rail line through the sands; he fell into one of the trains, into one of the trucks and was there with his broken leg amongst the stinking dead and the moaning living, jammed in between the excrement-covered bodies with the weeping sores and the buzz of the flies and the white-hot rage of the thirst inside him.

  He died in the cattle truck, after an infinity of agony. There was time for the briefest of glimpses of his room in the retirement complex. Even in his still-shocked, pain-maddened state he had the time and the presence of mind to think that while it felt as though a day at least must have passed while he had been submerged in the torture-dream nevertheless everything in the bedroom looked just as it had earlier. Then he was dragged under again.

  He awoke entombed inside the glacier, dying of cold. He had been shot in the head but it had only paralysed him. Another endless agony.

  He had a second impression of the retirement home; still the sunlight was at the same angle. He had not imagined it was possible to feel so much pain, not in such a time, not in a life-time, not in a hundred lifetimes. He found there was just time to flex his body and move a finger's width across the bed before the dream resumed.

  Then he was in the hold of a ship, crammed in with thousands of other people in the darkness, surrounded again by stink and filth and screams and pain. He was already half dead two days later when the sea valves opened and those still left alive began to drown.

  The cleaner found the old retired commandant twisted into a ball a little way short of the apartment's door the next morning. His hearts had given out.

  The expression on his face was such that the retirement-home warden almost fainted and had to sit down quickly, but the doctor declared the end had probably been quick.

  V

  [tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28.858.8893]

  xGCU Grey Area

  oGSV Honest Mistake

  There. I am on my way.

  oo

  xGSV Honest Mistake

  oGCU Grey Area

  Not before time.

  oo

  There was work to be done.

  oo

  More animal brains to be delved into?

  oo

  History to be unearthed. Truth to be discovered.

  oo

  I would have thought that one of the last places one would have expected to find on any itinerary concerning the search for truth would be inside the minds of mere animals.

  oo

  When the mere animals concerned have orchestrated one of the most successful and total expungings of both a significant part of their own species and every physical record regarding that act of genocide, one has remarkably little choice.

  oo

  I'm sure no one would deny your application does you credit.

  oo

  Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker.

  oo

  Absolutely.

  Well, let me wish you all the best with whatever it is our friends might require of you.

  oo

  Thank you.

  My aim is to please…

  oo

  (End signal file.)

  VI

  He left a trail of weaponry and the liquefied remains of gambling chips. The two heavy micro rifles clattered to the absorber mat just outside the airlock door and the cloak fell just beyond them. The guns glinted in the soft light reflecting off gleaming wooden panels. The mercury gambling chips in his jacket pocket, exposed to the human-ambient heat of the module's interior, promptly melted. He felt the change happen, and stopped, mystified, to stare into his pockets. He shrugged, then turned his pockets inside out and let the mercury splash onto the mat. He yawned and walked on. Funny the module hadn't greeted him.

  The pistols bounced on the carpeted floor of the hall and lay beading with frost. He left the short jacket hanging on a piece of sculpture in the hall. He yawned again. It was not far off the time of habitat dawn. Very much time for bed. He rolled down the tops of the knee-boots and kicked them both down the corridor leading to the swimming pool.

  He was pulling down his trousers as he entered the module's main social area, shuffling forward bent over and holding on to the wall as he cursed the garments and tried to kick them off without falling over.

  There was somebody there. He stopped and stared.

  It looked very much like his favourite uncle was sitting in one of the lounge's best seats.

  Genar-Hofoen stood upright and swayed, staring through numerous blinks.

  "Uncle Tishlin?" he said, squinting at the apparition. He leant on an antique cabinet and finally hauled his trousers off.

  The figure — tall, white-maned and with a light smile playing on its craggily severe face — stood up and adjusted its long formal jacket. "Just a pretend version, Byr," the voice rumbled. The hologram put its head back and fixed him with a measuring, questioning look. "They really do want you to do this thing for them, boy."

  Genar-Hofoen scratched his head and muttered something to the suit. It began to peel off around him.

  "Will you tell me what the hell it actually is, Uncle?" he asked, stepping out of the gelfield and taking a deep breath of module air, more to annoy the suit than because the air tasted better. The suit gathered itself up into a head-sized ball and floated wordlessly away to clean itself.

  The hologram of his uncle breathed out slowly and crossed its arms in a way Genar-Hofoen remembered from his early childhood.

  "Put simply, Byr," the image said, "they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman."

  Genar-Hofoen stood there, quite naked, still swaying, still blinking.

  "Oh," he said, after a while.

  2. Not Invented Here

  Hup!.. and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem… Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That's funny. View's a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that's a bad sign. Don't feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here… Clock running way slow, like it's down amongst the electronics crap… Run full system check.

  … Oh, good grief!

  The drone drifted through the darkness of interstellar space. It really was alone. Profoundly, even frighteningly alone. It picked through the debris that had been its power, sensory and weapon systems, appalled at the wasteland it was discovering within itself. The drone felt weird. It knew who it was — it was Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, a type D4 military drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Flench — but its real-time memories only began from the instant it had woken up here, a zillion klicks from anywhere, slap bang in the middle of nothing with the shit kicked out of it. What a mess! Who had done this? What had happened to it? Where were its memories? Where was its mind-state?

  Actually it suspected it knew. It was functioning on the middle level of its five stepped mind-modes; the electronic.

  Below lay an atomechanical complex and beneath that a biochemical brain. In theory the routes to both lay open; in practice both were compromised. The atomechanical mind wasn't responding correctly to the system-state signals it was receiving, and the biochemical brain was simply a mush; either the drone had been doing some hard manoeuvring recently or it had been clobbered by something. It felt like dumping the whole biochemical unit into space now but it knew the cellular soup its final back-up mind-substrate had turned into might come in handy for something.

  Above, where it ought to be right now, there were a couple of enormously wide conduits leading to the photonic nucleus and beyond that the true AI core. Both completely blocked off, and metaphorically plastered with warning signals. The equivalent of a single lit tell-tale adjacent to the photonic pipe indicated there was activity of some sort in there. The AI core was either dead, empty or just not saying.

  The drone ran another systems-control check. It seemed to be in charg
e of the whole outfit, what was left of it. It wondered if the sensor and weaponry systems degradation was real. Perhaps it was an illusion; perhaps those units were in fact in perfect working order and under the control of one or both of the higher mind components. It dug deeper into the units" programming. No, it didn't look possible.

  Unless the whole situation was a simulation. That was possible. A test: what would you do if you suddenly found yourself drifting alone in interstellar space, almost every system severely damaged, reduced to a level-three mind-state with no sign of help anywhere and no recollection how you got here or what happened to you? It sounded like a particularly nasty simulation problem; a nearly-worst-case scenario dreamt up by a Drone Training and Selection Board.

  Well, there was no way of telling, and it had to act as though it was all real.

  It kept looking around inside its own mind-state. Ah ha.

  There were a couple of closed sub-cores intact within its electronic mind, sealed and labelled as potentially — though not probably — dangerous. There was a similar warning attached to the self-repair control-routine matrices. The drone let those be for the moment. It would check out everything else that it could before it started opening packages with what might prove to be nasty surprises inside.

  Where the hell was it? It scanned the stars. A matrix of figures flashed into its consciousness. Definitely the middle of nowhere. The general volume was called the Upper Leaf-Swirl by most people; forty-five kilolights from galactic centre. The nearest star — fourteen standard light months away — was called Esperi, an old red giant which had long since swallowed up its complement of inner planets and whose insubstantial orb of gases now glowed dully upon a couple of distant, icy worlds and a distant cloud of comet nuclei. No life anywhere; just another boring, barren system like a hundred million others.