Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

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  Pray tell.

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  Well… Let me ask you a question. What do you understand results by our communicating with our mutual friend?

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  Why, that we are allowed to share in its inimitable objectivity. What else?

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  That is the general volume of my concern. I'll say no more.

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  What? Don't be ridiculous. Elaborate.

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  No. You know what you said to our unwitting fellow in suspicion about not advertising lines of inquiry which might end in embarrassment…

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  Unfair! After all I've shared with you!

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  Yes, including the exciting opportunity to get involved with this in the first place. Thanks a lot.

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  Cast that up to me again would you? I've said I'm sorry. Wish I'd never said anything now.

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  Yes, but if the Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival finds out who passed on the information which led to the Fate Amenable To Change's search in the first place…

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  I know, I know. Look; I'm doing all I can. I have requested a sympathetic ship to divert itself to Pittance, just in case. That's where my prognostications indicate a site for possible future mischief.

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  Death! If it comes to that…

  III

  The twittering batball bounced off the centre of the high-scoring wall and flew straight towards Genar-Hofoen. The creature's tiny, clipped wings paddled frantically at the atmosphere as it tried to right itself and flee. One of its stumpy wings was ragged, perhaps even broken. It started to curve away as it approached the human. He took a good back-swing with his bat and slammed it into the little creature, sending it yelping and spinning away. He'd intended it to head for the high-scoring wall, but the stroke had been slightly off-target, resulting in the spin he'd given the thing and its course towards the corner between the high-scoring wall and the right-side forfeit baffle. Shit, he thought; the batball thrashed at the atmosphere and curved further towards the forfeit baffle.

  Fivetide darted forward and with a flip of the bat strapped to one of his front limbs — and a resounding, "Ha!" — snapped the batball into the centre of the high-scoring wall again; it thudded against the roundel and ricocheted off at an angle Genar-Hofoen knew he wasn't going to be able to intercept. He lunged at it anyway, but the creature sailed slackly past, half a metre away from his outstretched bat. He fell to the floor and rolled, feeling the gelfield suit tensing and squeezing him as it absorbed the shock. He picked himself up to a sitting position and looked around. He was breathing hard and his heart was hammering; playing this sort of game against another human would have been no joke in Affronter gravity. Playing it against an Affronter, even one with half his tentacles sportingly tied round its back, was even harder work.

  "Hopeless!" Fivetide roared, crossing towards where the batball lay motionless near the back of the court. As he passed the human he flicked a tentacle under Genar-Hofoen's chin and levered him up. The gesture was almost certainly meant to be helpful, but it would have broken the average unprotected human neck. Genar-Hofoen merely found himself propelled off the floor like a rock out of a catapult and sent sailing towards the ceiling of the court, arms flailing.

  — Idiot! the suit said, as Genar-Hofoen reached the top of his trajectory. He assumed the suit was talking about Fivetide.

  A tentacle wrapped itself round his waist like a whip. "Oops!" Fivetide said, and lowered him safely to the floor with surprising gentleness. "Sorry about that, Genar-Hofoen," he yelled. "You know what they say; "It's a wise lad knows his own strength when he's having fun," eh!" He patted the human relatively gently on the head, then continued over to the motionless body of the batball. He prodded it with the bat.

  "Don't breed them like they used to," he said, then made a noise Genar-Hofoen had learned to interpret as a sigh.

  — Tentacled scumbag fuckwit, said the suit.

  — Suit, really! he thought, amused.

  — Well…

  The suit was not in the best of moods. He and it were spending a lot more time together; the suit didn't trust the containment around Genar-Hofoen's quarters in the ship and had insisted that the human keep it on, even when he was asleep. Genar-Hofoen had grumbled, but not over-much; there were too many funny smells in his quarters for him to have complete faith in the Affront's attempt at a human life-support system. The most the gelfield suit would let him do at night was peel aside its head section so that he could sleep with his face exposed; that way, even if his environment collapsed suddenly and totally, the suit would be able to protect him.

  Fivetide flicked the batball up with the end of his bat and flicked it over the transparent wall of the court, into the spectators" seats. Then he banged on the wall, waking the snoozing form of the gelding on the far side.

  "Wake up, you dozy pellet!" Fivetide bellowed. "Another batball, dolt!"

  The neutered Affronter adolescent jumped to its tentacle tips, its eye stalks waving around wildly, then it reached into a small cage by its side with one limb while another tentacle opened the door in the court wall. It picked one batball out of the dozen or so tied up in the cage and handed the squirming creature to the adult Affronter, who accepted it then jerked forward and hissed at the adolescent, making it flinch. It closed the door quickly.

  "Ha!" Fivetide shouted, putting the trussed, wriggling batball to his forebeak and tearing the cord that had held it immobile. "Another game, Genar-Hofoen?" Fivetide spat the short length of cord away and patted the batball up and down in one of his limbs while the little animal flexed its abbreviated wings.

  "Why not?" Genar-Hofoen said coolly. He was exhausted, but he wasn't going to let Fivetide know.

  "Nine-nil to me, I believe," the Affronter said, holding the batball up to his eyes. "I know," he said. "Let's make it more interesting." He put the struggling batball into the tip of his forebeak, his eye stalks bent forward and down to look at what he was doing. There was a delicate movement around Fivetide's beak-fronds and a tiny screech, accompanied by a faint pop.

  Fivetide withdrew the creature from his beak and inspected it, apparently satisfied. "There," he said. "Always good for a change, playing with a blinded one." He threw the writhing, mewling creature to Genar-Hofoen. "Your serve, I believe."

  The Culture had a problem with the Affront. The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, for that matter, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront's problem with the Culture was simply that the older civilisation stopped it doing all the things it wanted to do. The Culture's problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn't scratch; the Culture's problem with the Affront was that the Affront existed at all and the Culture couldn't in all conscience do anything about it.

  The problem stemmed from an accident of galactic topography and a combination of bad luck and bad timing.

  The fuzzily specified region which had given rise to the various species that had eventually made up the Culture had been on the far side of the galaxy from the Affront home planet, and contacts between the Culture and the Affront had been unusually sparse for a long time for a variety of frankly banal reasons. By the time the Culture came to know the Affront better — shortly after the long distraction of the Idiran war — the Affront were a rapidly developing and swiftly maturing species, and short of another war there was no practical way of quickly changing either their nature or behaviour.

  Some Culture Minds had argued at the time that a quick war against the Affront was exactly the right course of action, but even as they'd started setting out their case they'd known it was already lost; for all that the Culture was just then at a peak of military power it had never expected to attain at the start of that long and terrible conflict, just so there was a corresponding determination at all levels that — the task of stopping the Idirans" relentless expansion having been accomplished — the Cultu
re would neither need nor seek to achieve such a martial zenith again. Even while the Minds concerned had been contending that a single abrupt and crushing blow would benefit all concerned — including the Affront, not just ultimately, but soon — the Culture's warships were being stood down, deactivated, componented, stored and demilitarised by the tens of thousands, while its trillions of citizens were congratulating themselves on a job well done and returning with the relish of the truly peace-loving to the uninhibited enjoyment of all the recreational wonders the resolutely hedonism-focused society of the Culture had to offer.

  There had probably never been a less propitious time for arguing that more fighting was a good idea, and the argument duly foundered, though the problem remained.

  Part of the problem was that the Affront had the disturbing habit of treating every other species they encountered with either total suspicion or amused contempt, depending almost entirely on whether that civilisation was ahead of or behind them in technological development. There had been one developed species — the Padressahl — in that same volume of the galaxy which had been sufficiently like the Affront in terms of evolutionary background and physical appearance to be treated almost as friends by the Affront and which yet had a moral outlook similar enough to the Culture's to consider it worth the effort of chaperoning the Affront with the other local species, and, to their eternal credit, the Padressahl had been doggedly endeavouring to nudge the Affront into something remotely resembling decent behaviour for more centuries than they cared to remember or admit.

  It was the Padressahl who had given the Affront their name; originally the Affront had called themselves after their home world, Issorile. Calling them the Affront — following an episode involving a Padressahl trade mission to Issorile which the recipients had treated more as a food parcel — had been most decidedly intended as an insult, but the Issorilians, as they then were, thought that «Affront» sounded much better and had steadfastly refused to drop their new name even after they had formed their loose patron/protégé alliance with the Padressahl.

  However, a century or so after the end of the Idiran War, the Padressahl had had what the Culture regarded as the gross bad manners to suddenly sublime off into Advanced Elderhood at just the wrong time, leaving their less mature charges joyfully off the leash and both snapping at the heels of the local members of the Culture's great long straggling civilisational caravan wending its way towards progress (whether they went wittingly or not), and positively savaging several of the even less well-developed neighbouring species which for their own good nobody else had yet thought fit to contact.

  Suggestions by a few of the more cynical Culture Minds that the Padressahl decision to hit the hyperspace button and go for full don't-give-a-damn-anymore god-head had been caused partially if not principally by their frustration and revulsion at the incorrigible ghastliness of Affront nature had never been either fully accepted or convincingly refuted.

  Whatever; in the end, with a deal of arm and tentacle twisting, some deftly managed suitable-technology donation (through what the Affront Intelligence Regiment still gleefully but naively thought was some really neat high-tech theft on their part), the occasional instance of knocking heads together (or whatever anatomical feature was considered appropriate) and a hefty amount of naked bribery (woefully inelegant to the refined intellect of the average Culture Mind — their tastes generally ran to far more rarefied forms of chicanery — but undeniably effective) the Affront had — kicking and screaming at times, admittedly — finally been more or less persuaded to join the great commonality of the galactic meta-civilisation; they had agreed to abide by its rules almost all the time and had grudgingly accepted that other beings beside themselves might have rights, or at least tolerably excusable desires (such as those concerning life, liberty, self-determination and so on), which occasionally might even override the self-evidently perfectly natural, demonstrably just and indeed arguably even sacred Affronter prerogative to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they damn well pleased, preferably while having a bit of fun with the locals at the same time.

  All that, however, represented only a partial solution to the least vexing part of the problem. If the Affront had been simply one more expansionist species of callously immature but technologically localised adventurers with bad contact manners, the problem they represented to the Culture would have subsided to the sort of level that would have gone more or less unnoticed; they would have become just another part of the general clutter of inventively obdurate species struggling to express themselves in the vast emptiness that was the galaxy.

  The problem was rooted deeper, however; it went back further, it was more intrinsic. The problem was that the Affront had spent uncounted millennia long before they'd even got off their own fog-bound moon-planet tinkering with and carefully altering the flora and, especially, the fauna of that environment. They had discovered at a relatively early point in their development how to change the genetic make-up of both their own inheritance — which almost by definition needed little further amendment, given their manifest superiority — and that of the creatures with whom they shared their home world.

  Those creatures had all, accordingly, been amended as the Affront saw fit, for their own amusement and delight. The result was what one Culture Mind had described as a kind of self-perpetuating, never-ending holocaust of pain and fear.

  Affronter society rested on a huge base of ruthlessly exploited juvenile geldings and a sub-class of oppressed females who unless born to the highest families — and not always even then — could count themselves lucky if they were only raped by the males from their own tribe. It was generally regarded as significant — within the Culture if nowhere else — that one of the few aspects of their own genetic inheritance with which the Affront had deemed it desirable to meddle had been in the matter of making the act of sex a somewhat less pleasurable and considerably more painful act for their females than their basic genetic legacy required; the better, it was claimed, to further the considered good of the species rather than the impetuously selfish pleasure of the individual.

  When an Affronter went hunting for the artificially fattened treehurdlers, limbcroppers, paralice or skinstrippers that were their favoured prey, it was in a soar-chariot pushed by the animals called swiftwings which lived in a state of perpetual dread, their nervous systems and pheromone receptors painstakingly tuned to react with ever increasing levels of dread and the urge to escape as their masters became more and more excited and so exuded more of the relevant odours.

  The hunted animals themselves were artificially terrified as well, just by the very appearance of the Affronters, and so driven to ever more desperate manoeuvres in their frantic urge to escape.

  When an Affronters" skin was cleaned it was by the small animals called xysters, whose diligence had been vastly improved by giving them such a frenetic hunger for an Affronter's dead skin cells that unless they were overcome by exhaustion they were prone to bloating themselves literally to the point of bursting.

  Even the Affront's standard domesticated food animals had long since been declared as tasting much more interesting when they betrayed the signs of having been severely stressed, and so had also been altered to such a pitch of highly strung anxiety — and husbanded in conditions diligently contrived to intensify the effect — that they inevitably produced what any Affronter worth his methylacetylene would agree was the most inspiringly tasty meat this side of an event horizon.

  The examples went on; in fact, reviewing their society, it was more or less impossible to avoid manifestations of the Affronters" deliberate, even artistic use of genetic manipulation to produce through a kind of ebulliently misplaced selfishness — which to them was indistinguishable from genuine altruism — the sort of result it took most societies paroxysms of self-destructive wretchedness to generate.

  Hearty but horrible; that was the Affront. "Progress through pain!" It was an Affronter saying. Genar-Hofoen had even heard Fivetide say it. H
e couldn't recall exactly, but it had probably been followed by a bellowed, "Ho ho ho!"

  The Affront appalled the Culture; they appeared so unamendable, their attitude and their abominable morality seemed so secured against remedy. The Culture had offered to provide machines to do the kind of jobs the juvenile castrati did, but the Affront just laughed; why, they could quite easily build machines of their own, but where was the honour in being served by a mere machine?

  Similarly, the Culture's attempts to persuade the Affront that there were other ways to control fertility and familial inheritance besides those which relied on the virtual imprisonment, genetic mutilation and organised violation of their females, or to consume vat-grown meat — better, if anything, than the real thing — or to offer non-sentient versions of their hunting animals all met with equally derisive if brusquely good-humoured dismissals.

  Still, Genar-Hofoen liked them, and had come even to admire them for their vivacity and enthusiasm; he had never really subscribed to the standard Culture belief that any form of suffering was intrinsically bad, he accepted that a degree of exploitation was inevitable in a developing culture, and leant towards the school of thought which held that evolution, or at least evolutionary pressures, ought to continue within and around a civilised species, rather than — as the Culture had done — choosing to replace evolution with a kind of democratically agreed physiological stasis-plus-option-list while handing over the real control of one's society to machines.

  It was not that Genar-Hofoen hated the Culture, or particularly wished it ill in its present form; he was deeply satisfied that he had been born into it and not some other humanoid species where you suffered, procreated and died and that was about it; he just didn't feel at home in the Culture all the time. It was a motherland he wanted to leave and yet know he could always return to if, he wanted. He wanted to experience life as an Affronter, and not just in some simulation, however accurate. Plus, he wanted to go somewhere the Culture had never been, and well, explore.