Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

  xLSV Serious Callers Only

  oEccentric Shoot Them Later

  (signal file attached) What did I tell you? I don't know about this. Looks suspicious to me.

  oo

  Hmm. And I don't know, either. I hate to say it, but it sounds genuine. Of course, if I prove to be wrong you will never confront me with this, ever, all right?

  oo

  If, after all this is over, we are both still in a position for me to confer and you to benefit from such leniency, I shall be infinitely glad to extend such forbearance.

  oo

  Well, it could have been expressed more graciously, but I accept this moral blank cheque with all the deference it merits.

  oo

  I'm going to call the Sleeper Service. It won't take any notice of me but I'm going to call the mealworm anyway.

  IV

  Genar-Hofoen didn't take his pen terminal with him when he went out that evening, and the first place he visited in Night City was a Tier-Sintricate/Ishlorsinami Tech. store.

  The woman was small for an Ishy, thought Genar-Hofoen. Still, she towered over him. She wore the usual long black robes and she smelled… musty. They sat on plain, narrow seats in a bubble of blackness. The woman was bent over a tiny fold-away screen balanced on her knees. She nodded and craned her body over towards him. Her hand extended, close to his left ear. A sequence of shining, telescoping rods extended from her fingers. She closed her eyes. In the dimness, Genar-Hofoen could see tiny lights flickering on the inside of her eyelids.

  Her hand touched his ear, tickling slightly. He felt his face twitch. "Don't move," she said.

  He tried to stay still. The woman withdrew her hand. She opened her eyes and peered at the point where the tips of three of the delicate rods met. She nodded and said, "Hmm."

  Genar-Hofoen bent forward and looked too. He couldn't see anything. The woman closed her eyes again; her lid screens glowed again.

  "Very sophisticated," she said. "Could have missed it."

  Genar-Hofoen looked at his right palm. "Sure there's nothing on this hand?" he asked, recalling Verlioef Schung's firm handshake.

  "As sure as I can be," the woman said, withdrawing a small transparent container from her robe and dropping whatever she had taken out of his ear into it. He still couldn't see anything there.

  "And the suit?" he asked, fingering one lapel of his jacket.

  "Clean," the woman said.

  "So that's it?" he asked.

  "That is all," she told him. The black bubble disappeared and they were sitting in a small room whose walls were lined with shelves overflowing with impenetrably technical-looking gear.

  "Well, thanks."

  "That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents."

  "Oh, call it a round thousand."

  He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you'd have no excuse for not having fun.

  Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take its cue from each year's Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The theme that year had been the Sea; Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves" surfaces had been balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave's looming, overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street beneath. At either end of the Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect — through oceanically inauthentic tunnels — with other highways.

  The theme this year was the Primitive and the City had chosen to interpret this as a gigantic early electronic circuit board; the network of silvery streets formed an almost perfectly flat cityscape studded with enormous resistors, dense-looking, centipedally legged flat-topped chips, spindly diodes and huge semi-transparent valves with complicated internal structures, each standing on groups of shining metal legs embedded in the network of the printed circuit. Those were the bits that Genar-Hofoen sort of half recognised from his History of Technical Stuff course or whatever it had been called when he'd been a student; there were lots of other jagged, knobbly, smooth, brightly coloured, matt black, shiny, vaned, crinkled bits he didn't know the purpose or the name of.

  Street Six this year was a fifteen-metre wide stream of quickly flowing mercury covered with etched diamond sheeting; every now and again large coherent blobs of sparkling blue-gold went speeding along the mercury stream underfoot. Apparently these were symbolised electrons or something. The original idea had been to incorporate the mercury channels into the City transport system, but this had proved impractical and so they were there just for effect; the City tube system ran deep underground as usual. Genar-Hofoen had jumped on and off a few of the underground cars on his way to the City and on and off a couple more once he'd arrived, hoping to give the slip to anybody following. Having done this and had the tracer in his ear removed, he was happy he'd done the best he could to ensure that his evening's fun would take place unobserved by SC, though he wasn't particularly bothered if they were still watching him; it was more the principle of the thing. No point getting obsessive about it.

  Street Six itself was packed with people, walking, talking, staggering, strolling, rolling along within bubblespheres, riding on exotically accoutred animals, riding in small carriages drawn by ysner-mistretl pairs and floating along under small vacuum balloons or in force field harnesses. Above, in the eternal night sky beneath the City's vast dome, this part of the evening's entertainment was being provided by a city-wide hologram of an ancient bomber raid.

  The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or six piston engines each, many of them picked out by searchlights. Spasms of light leaving black-on-black clouds and blossoming spheres of dimming red sparks were supposed to be anti-aircraft fire, while in amongst the bombers smaller single and twin-engined aircraft whizzed; the two sorts of aircraft were shooting at each other, the large planes from turrets and the smaller ones from their wings and noses. Gently curving lines of white, yellow and red tracer moved slowly across the sky and every now and again an aircraft seemed to catch fire and start to fall out of the sky; occasionally one would explode in mid air. All the time, the dark shapes of bombs could be glimpsed, falling to explode with bright flashes and vivid gouts of flame on parts of the City seemingly always just a little way off. Genar-Hofoen thought it all looked a little contrived, and he doubted there'd ever been such a concentrated air battle, or one in which the ground fire kept up while interceptor planes did their intercepting, but as a show it was undeniably impressive.

  Explosions, gunfire and sirens sounded above the chatter of people filling the street and was sporadically submerged by the music spilling from the hundreds of bars and multifarious entertainment venues lining the Street. The air was full of half-strange, half-familiar, entirely enticing smells and wild pheremonic effects understandably banned everywhere else on Tier.

  Genar-Hofoen strolled down the middle of the Street, a large glass of Tier 9050 in one hand, a cloud cane in the other and a small puff-creant nestling on one shoulder of his immaculately presented ownskin jacket. The 9050 was a cocktail which notoriously involved about three hundred separate processes to make, many of them involving unlikely and even unpleasant combinations-of plants, animals and substances. The end result was an acceptable if strong-tasting drink composed largely of alcohol, no more, but you didn't really drink it for the internal effect, you drank it to show yo
u could afford to; they put it in a special crystal field-goblet so you could show that you could. The name was meant to imply that after sinking a few you were ninety per cent certain to get laid and fifty per cent assured of ending up in legal trouble (or it may have been the other way round — Genar-Hofoen could never remember).

  The cloud cane was a walking stick burning compressed pellets of a mildly and brief-acting psychotropic mixture; taking a suck on its pierced top cap was like sliding two distorting lenses in front of your eyes, sticking your head underwater and shoving a chemical factory up your nose while standing in a shifting gravity field.

  The puff-creant was a small symbiont, half animal half vegetable, which you paid to squat on your shoulder and cough up your nose every time you turned your face towards it. The cough contained spores that could do any one of about thirty different and interesting things to your perceptions and moods.

  Genar-Hofoen was particularly pleased with his new suit. It was made of his own skin, genetically altered in various subtle ways, specially vat-grown and carefully tailored to his exact specifications. He'd donated a few skin cells to — and left the order and payment with — a gene-tailor here on Tier two and a half years earlier when he was on his way to God'shole habitat. It had been a whim after a drinking session (as had an animated obscene tattoo he'd removed a month later). He hadn't really expected to pick the suit up for a while. Fortunately long-term fashions hadn't changed too much in the interim. The suit and its accompanying cloak looked terrific. He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!

  Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning "scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, suggesting, offering, providing entrance, stimulating appetites, prompting desires; suggesting, propositioning, pandering.

  RHYPAROGRAPHY! KELOIDAL ANAMNESIS! IVRESSE!

  Genar-Hofoen walked through it all, soaking it all in, refusing all the offers and suggestions, politely turning down the overtures and come-ons, the recommendations and invitations.

  ZUFULOS! ORPHARIONS! RASTRAE! NAUMACHIA HOURLY!

  For now, he was content just to be here, walking, promenading, watching and being watched, sizing up and — with any luck — being sized up. It was evening — real evening — in this level of Tier, the time when Night City started to become busy; everywhere was open, nowhere was full, everybody wanted your custom, but nobody was really settling on a venue yet; just cruising, grazing, petting. Genar-Hofoen was happy to be part of that general drift; he loved this, he gloried in it. This was where he felt most himself. For now, there was simply no better place to be, and he believed in entering into the experience with all due and respectful intensity; these were his sort of people, here was where his sort of thing happened and this was his sort of place.

  PILIOUS OMADHAUNS INVITE RASURE! LAGOPHTHALMISCITY GUARANTEED WHEN YOU SEE THE JEISTIECORS AND LORICAS OF OUR MARTICHORASTIC MINIKINS!

  He saw her outside a Sublimer sekos set under the rotundly swollen bulk of a building shaped like a giant resistor. The entrance to the cult's sacred place was a brightly shining loop, like a thick but tiny rainbow layered in different shades of white. Young Sublimers stood outside the enclosure, clad in glowing white robes. The Sublimers — each tall and thin — glowed, too; their skin glowed gently, pallid to the point of unhealthy-looking bloodlessness. Their eyes shone, soft light spilling from the wide, open whites, while the same half-silvery light was projected from their teeth when they smiled. They smiled all the time, even when they were talking. The woman was standing looking at the pair of enthusiastically gesticulating Sublimers with an expression of amused disdain.

  She was tall, tawny-skinned. Her face was broad, her nose thin and almost parallel with the planes of her cheeks; her arms were crossed, her body tilted back from the two young people, her weight taken on one black-booted heel as she looked down that long nose at the shining Sublimers. Her eyes and her hair looked as dark as the featureless shadowrobe which hid the rest of her frame.

  He stopped in the middle of the street and watched her arguing with the two Sublimers for a few moments. Her gestures and the way she held her body were different but the face was very similar to the way he remembered her looking, forty years ago; just a little older, perhaps. He had always wondered how much she'd changed.

  But it couldn't be her. Tishlin had said she was still on board the Sleeper. They'd have mentioned if she'd left, wouldn't they?

  He let a group of squatly chortling Bystlians pass him, then sauntered a little way back up the street, studying the architecture of the giant valve bulging over it from the opposite pavement and sniffing from his cloud cane in a vague, bored manner while watching a line of dark bombs flit out of the darkness above to fall and detonate somewhere beyond the line of barrel-like resistors that formed the other side of the street; bright yellow-orange explosions lit up the sky and debris rose slowly and fell. Further up the avenue, some sort of commotion surrounded a large animal.

  He turned and looked back down the crowded street. At that moment a giant blue-gold shape slid under his feet, rushing silently along within the mercury stream beneath the diamond plate. The girl arguing with the Sublimers turned, glancing at the street as the blob went gliding past. As she looked back to the two young glowing people she caught sight of him watching her. Her gaze settled on him for a moment and the flicker of an expression — a glimmer of recognition? — passed briefly over her face before she started talking to the Sublimers again. He hadn't had time to look away even if he'd wanted to.

  He was wondering whether he ought to go over to her now, wait and see if she stepped back into the thoroughfare and maybe approach her then, or just walk away, when a tall girl in a glowing gown stepped up to him and said, "May I help you, sir? You seem taken with our place of exaltation. Do you have any questions you'd like to ask? Is there anything I can do to enlighten you?"

  He turned to the Sublimer. She was almost as tall as he; her face was pretty but somehow vacuous, though he knew that might have been prejudice on his part.

  Sublimers had turned what was a normal but generally optional part of a species" choice of fate into a religion. Sublimers believed that everybody ought to Sublime, that every human, every animal, every machine and Mind ought to head straight for ultimate transcendence, leaving the mundane life behind and setting as direct a course as possible for nirvana.

  People who joined the cult spent a year trying to persuade others of this before they Sublimed themselves, joining one of the sect's group-minds to contemplate irreality. The few drones, other AIs and Minds that became persuaded of the merit of this course of action through the arguments of the Sublimers tended to do what any other machine did on such occasions and disappear in the direction of the nearest Sublimed Entity, though one or two stuck around in a pre-Sublimed state long enough to help the cause. In general, though, the cult was regarded as rather a pointless one. Subliming was seen as something that usually happened to entire societies, and more as a practical lifestyle alteration than a religious commitment; more like moving house than entering a sacred order.

  "Well, I don't know," Genar-Hofoen said, sounding wary. "What exactly do you people believe in again?"

  The Sublimer looked up the street behind him. "Oh, we believe in the power of the Sublime," she said. "Let me tell you more." She glanced up the avenue again. "Oh; perhaps we ought to get off the street, don't you think?" She held out her hand and took a step back towards the pavement.

  Genar-Hofoen looked back, to where things were getting noisy. The giant animal he'd noticed earlier — a sexipedal pondrosaur — was advancing slowly down the avenue in the midst of a retinue and a crowd of spectators. The shaggy, brown-furred animal was six metres tall, splendidly l
iveried with long, gaudy banners and ribbons and commanded by a garishly uniformed mahout brandishing a fiery mace. The beast was surmounted by a glitteringly black and silver cupola whose bulbously filigreed windows gave no hint of who or what might be inside; similarly ornamented bowls covered the great animal's eyes. It was attended by five loping kliestrithrals, each black tusked creature pawing at the street surface and snorting and held on a tight lead by a burly hire guard. A knot of people held the procession up; the pondrosaur paused and put its long head back to let out a surprisingly soft, subdued roar, then it adjusted its eye-cups with its two leg-thick fore-limbs and bobbed its head to either side. The gaggle of promenaders began to disperse and the great beast and its escorts moved forward again.

  "Hmm, yes," Genar-Hofoen said. "Perhaps we'd better move out the way." He finished the 9050 and looked round for a place to deposit the empty container.

  "Please; allow me." The Sublimer girl took the field-goblet from him as though it was some sort of holy object. Genar-Hofoen followed her onto the sidewalk; she put an arm through his and they proceeded slowly towards the entrance to the sekos, where the woman was still standing talking to the other two Sublimers with her look of ironic curiosity.

  "Have you heard of Sublimers before?" the girl on his arm asked.

  "Oh, yes," he said, watching the other woman's face as they approached. They stopped on the pavement outside the Sublimer building, entering a hushfield in which the only sound was gently tinkling music and a background of waves on a beach. "You believe everybody should just sort of disappear up their own arses, don't you?" he asked with every appearance of innocence. He was only a few metres from the woman in the shadowrobe, though the compartmented hushfield meant he couldn't hear what she was saying. Her face was much like he remembered it; the eyes and mouth were the same. She had never worn her hair up like that, but even its shade of black-blue was the same.