Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

  I intend to pursue the perpetrators of this unnecessary war for as long as it takes until they are brought to justice, and I am aware both that I will no longer be able to do so without them knowing that I am doing so, and that there is no better circumstance to arrange for the jeopardisation of a fellow Mind than in time of war, when blanket secrecies are imposed, warcraft of every sort are loosed, mistakes can be claimed to have been made, deals done, mercenaries hired and old scores settled.

  I do not believe I am being melodramatic in this. I will be under terminal threat and so will anybody else who determines to adopt the same course as I. The conspirators have played exceedingly dirty until this point and I cannot imagine they will do other than continue to do so now that their filthy scheme is on the very brink of success.

  What do you say? Will you join in this perilous mission?

  oo

  How I wish that I could persuade myself, never mind you, that you are being melodramatic.

  You risk more than I. My Eccentricity might save me. We have gone this far together. Count me in.

  Oh, meat, they never said this would happen when they invited me onto the Group and into the Gang…

  Hmm. I had forgotten how unpleasant the emotion of fear is. This is hateful! You're right. Let's get these bastards. How dare they disturb my peace of mind so just to teach some tentacled bunch of backwoods barbarians a lesson!

  V

  The battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade caught the cruise ship Just Passing Through on the outskirts of the Ekro system. The Culture craft — ten-kilometres of sleek beauty host to two hundred thousand holidaying travellers of umpteen different species-types — hove to as soon as the battle-cruiser came within range but the Affronter vessel put a shot across its bows anyway, just on general principles. The more determinedly assiduous revellers hadn't believed the announcement about the war anyway, and thought the missile warhead's detonation which lit up the skies ahead of the ship was just some particularly big but otherwise unimpressive firework.

  It had been close. Another hour's warning and the Culture ship's hurried reconfiguring and matter-scavenging engine-rebuild would have ensured its escape. But it wasn't to be.

  The two ships joined. In the reception vestibule, a small party of people met a trio of suited Affronters as they emerged from the airlocks in a swirl of cool mists.

  "You are the ship's representative?"

  "Yes," the squat figure at the front of the humans said. "And you?"

  "I am Colonel Alien-Befriender (first class) Fivetide Humidyear VII of the Winterhunter tribe and the battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade. This ship is claimed as prize in the name of the Affront Republic according to the normal rules of war. If you obey all our instructions promptly, there is every possibility that no harm will come to you, your passengers or crew. In case you have any illusions concerning your status, you are now our hostages. Any questions?"

  "None that I either can't guess the answer to or imagine you'd answer truthfully," the avatar said. "Your jurisdiction is accepted under force of arms alone. Your actions while this situation persists will be recorded. Nothing less than the total destruction of this vessel atom by atom will wipe out that record, and when in due course-"

  "Yes, yes. I'll contact my lawyers now. Now take me to your best suite fitted out for Affront physiology."

  The girl was indignant with a kind of ferocity probably only somebody from the Peace faction could muster in such a situation. "But we're the Peace faction," she protested for the fifth or sixth time. "We're… we're like the true Culture, the way it used to be…"

  "Ah," Leffid said, grimacing as somebody pushed behind him and forced his chest into the front of the bar. He glanced round, scowling, and ruffled his wings back into shape. The Starboard lounge of the Xoanon was crowded — the ship was crowded — and he could see his wings were going to end up in a terrible shape by the time this was over. Mind you, there were compensations; somebody pushed into the bar and squeezed the Peace faction girl closer to him, so that her bare arm touched him and he could feel the warmth of her hip against his. She smelled wonderful. "Now that could be your problem," he said, trying to sound sympathetic. "Calling yourselves the true Culture, you see? To the Tier Sintricates, and even to the Affront, that could sound, well confusing."

  "But everybody knows we won't have anything to do with war. It's just so unfair? She flicked her short black hair and stared into the drug bowl she held. It was fuming too. 'Fucking war!" She sounded close to tears.

  Leffid judged the time right to put his arm round her. She didn't seem to mind. He thought the better of hinting that in his own small way he might have helped start the war. Sort of thing some people might be impressed with, but not all.

  Besides, he'd given his word, and the Tendency had been rewarded for its tip-off to the Mainland with this very ship, currently engaged in the highly humanitarian task of helping to evacuate Tier habitat of all Temporarily Undesirable Aliens, not to mention earning the Tendency some much-needed cordiality credit with a whole raft of other Involveds and strands of the Culture. The girl sighed deeply and held the drug bowl to her face, letting some of the heavy grey smoke tip towards her exceedingly pretty little nose. She glanced round at him with a small brave smile, her gaze rising over his shoulder.

  "Like your wings," she said.

  He smiled. "Why, thank you…" (Damn!) "… ah, my dear."

  The professor blinked. Yes, it really was an Affronter floating at the far end of the room, near the windows. Suit like a small, tubby spacecraft, all gleaming knobbly bits, articulated limbs and glistening prisms. The gauzy white curtains blew in around it, letting bright, high-angled sunlight flow in waves across the carpet. Oh dear, was that her underwear draped over a hassock in the Affronter's shadow?

  "I beg your pardon?" she said. She wasn't sure she'd heard right.

  "Phoese Cloathel-Beldrunsa Khoriem lei Poere da'Merire, you have been deemed the senior human representative on the Orbital named Cloathel. You are hereby informed that this Orbital is claimed in the name of the Affront Republic. All Culture personnel are now Affront citizens (third class). All orders from superiors will be obeyed. Any resistance will be treated as treason."

  The professor rubbed her eyes.

  "Cloudsheen, is that you?" she asked the Affronter. The destroyer Wingclipper had arrived the day before with a cultural exchange group the university had been expecting for some weeks. Cloudsheen was the ship's captain; they'd had a good talk about pan-species semantics at the party just the night before. Intelligent, surprisingly sensitive creature; not remotely as aggressive as she'd expected. This looked like him, but different. She had a disquieting feeling the extra bits on his suit were weapons.

  'Captain Cloudsheen, if you please, professor," the Affronter said, floating closer. It was directly above her skirt, lying crumpled on the floor. Heavens, she had been messy last night.

  "Are you serious?" she asked. She had a strong urge to fart but she held it in; she was oddly concerned that the Affronter would think she was being insulting.

  "I am perfectly serious, professor. The Affront and the Culture are now at war."

  "Oh," she said. She glanced over at her terminal brooch, lying on an extension of the bed's headboard. Well, the Newsflash light was winking, right enough; practically strobing in fact; must be urgent indeed. She thought. "Shouldn't you be addressing this to the Hub?"

  "It refuses to communicate," the Affronter officer said. "We have surrounded it. You have been deemed most senior Culture — ex-Culture, I should say — representative in its place. This is not a joke, professor, I'm sorry to say. The Orbital has been mined with AM warheads. If it proves necessary, your world will be destroyed. The full cooperation of yourself and everybody else on the Orbital will help ensure this does not happen."

  "Well, I don't accept this honour, Cloudsheen. I-"

  The Affronter had turned and was floating back towards the windows again. It swivelled in the air as it retreated. "Y
ou don't have to," it said. "As I said, you have been deemed."

  "Well then," she said, "I deem you to be acting without any authority I care to recognise and-"

  The Affronter darted through the air towards her and stopped directly above the bed, making her flinch despite herself. She smelled… something cold and toxic. "Professor," Cloudsheen said. "This is not an academic debate or some common room word-game. You are prisoners and hostages and all your lives are forfeit. The sooner you understand the realities of the situation, the better. I know as well as you that you are in no way in charge of the Orbital, but certain formalities have to be observed, regardless of their practical irrelevance. I consider that duty has now been discharged and frankly that's all that matters, because I have the AM warheads; and you don't." It drew quickly away, sucking a cool breeze behind it. It stopped just before the windows again. "Lastly," it said, "I am sorry to have disturbed you. I thank you personally and on behalf of my crew for the reception party. It was most enjoyable."

  He left. The curtains soughed in and out, slowly golden.

  Her heart, she was surprised to discover, was pounding.

  The Attitude Adjuster woke them one by one, telling each the same story; Excessionary threat near Esperi, Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Some of the vessels were immediately suspicious, or at least puzzled. The confirmatory messages from other craft — the No Fixed Abode, the Different Tan and the Not Invented Here — convinced them in every case.

  Part of the Attitude Adjuster felt sick. It knew it was doing the right thing, in the end, but at a simple, surface level it felt disgust at the deception it was having to foist upon its fellow ships. It tried to tell itself that it would all end with little or no blood spilled and few or no Mind-deaths, but it knew that there was no guarantee. It had spent years thinking all this through, shortly after the proposition had been put to it seventy years earlier, and had known then, accepted then that it might come to this, but it had always hoped it would not. Now the moment was at hand it was starting to wonder if it had made a mistake, but knew it was too late to turn back now. Better to believe that it had been right then and now it was merely being short-sighted and squeamish.

  It could not be wrong. It was not wrong. It had had an open mind and it had become convinced of the rightness of the course which was being suggested and in which it would play such an important part. It had done as it had been asked to do; it had watched the Affront, studied them, immersed itself in their history, culture and beliefs. And in all that time it had achieved a kind of sympathy for them, an empathy, even, and at the start perhaps a degree of admiration for them, but it had also built up a cold and terrible hatred of their ways.

  In the end, it thought it understood them because it was just a little like them.

  It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that — by some criteria — a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

  The Attitude Adjuster thought it could see into the souls of the Affronters. They were not the happy-go-lucky life-and-soul-of-the-party grand fellows with a few bad habits they were commonly thought to be; they were not thoughtlessly cruel in the course of seeking to indulge other more benign and even admirable pleasures; they were not merely terrible rascals.

  They gloried, first and foremost, in their cruelty. Their cruelty was the point. They were not thoughtless. They knew they hurt their own kind and others and they revelled in it; it was their purpose. The rest — the robust joviality, the blokish vivacity — was part happy accident, part cunningly exaggerated ploy, the equivalent of an angelic-looking child discovering that a glowing smile will melt the severest adult heart and excuse almost any act, however dreadful.

  It had agreed to the plan now coming to fruition with a heavy soul. People would die, Minds be destroyed because of what it was doing. The ghastly danger was gigadeathcrime. Mass destruction. Utter horror. The Attitude Adjuster had lied, it had deceived, it had acted — by what it knew would be the consensual opinion of all but a few of its peers — with massive dishonour. It was all too well aware its name might live for millennia hence as that of a traitor, as an abhorrence, an abomination.

  Still, it would do what it had become convinced had to be done, because to do otherwise would be to wish an even worse self-hatred upon itself, the ultimate abomination of disgust at oneself.

  Perhaps, it told itself as it brought another slumbering warcraft to wakefulness, the Excession would make everything all right. The half-thought was already ironic, but it continued with it anyway. Yes; maybe the Excession was the solution. Maybe it really was worth all that was being risked in its name, and capable of bringing placid resolution. That would be sweet; the excuse takes over, the casus belli brings peace… Like fuck, it thought. The ship sneered at itself, examining the idiotic thought and then discarding it with probably less contempt than it deserved.

  It was, anyway, too late to reconsider now. Too much had been done already. The Pittance Mind was already dead, choosing self-destruction rather than compromise; the human who had been the only other conscious sentience in the rock had been killed, and the de-stored ships would speed, utterly deceived, to what could well prove to be their doom; the future alone knew who or what else they would take with them. The war had begun and all the Attitude Adjuster could do was play out the part it had agreed to play.

  Another warship Mind surfaced to wakefulness.

  … Excessionary threat near Esperi, the Attitude Adjuster told the newly woken ship; Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Confirmatory messages from the GSV No Fixed Abode, the GCU Different Tan and the MSV Not Invented Here attached…

  The module Scopell-Afranqui left the urgencies of the instant behind for a moment and retreated into a kind of simulation of its plight.

  The craft had a romantic, even sentimental streak which Genar-Hofoen had rarely glimpsed in all the two years they had spent together on God'shole habitat (and which, indeed, it had deliberately kept hidden for fear of his ridicule), and it saw itself now as being like the castellan of some small fortified embassy in a teeming barbarian city, far from the civilised lands that were his home; a wise, thoughtful man, technically a warrior, but more of a thinker, one who saw much more of the realities behind the embassy's mission than those in his charge, and who had devoutly hoped that his warrior skills would never be called upon. Well, that time had come; the native soldiers were hammering at the compound's gates right now and it was only a matter of time before the embassy compound fell. There was treasure in the embassy and the barbarians would not rest until they had it.

  The castellan left the parapet where he had looked out upon the besieging forces and retreated to his private chamber. His few troops were already putting up the best defence they could; nothing he could do or say would do other than hinder them now. His few spies had been dispatched some time ago through secret passageways into the city, to do what damage they cou
ld once the embassy itself was destroyed, as it surely must be. There was nothing else which awaited his attention. Save this one decision.

  He had already opened the safe and taken out the sealed orders; the paper was in his hand. He read it again. So it was to be destruction. He had guessed as much, but it was still a shock somehow.

  It should not have come to this, but it had. He had known the risks, they had been pointed out at the beginning, when he had taken up this position, but he had not really imagined for a moment that he would really be faced with either utter dishonour and the vicarious treachery of forced collaboration, or death at his own hand.

  There was, of course, no real choice. Call it his upbringing. He looked ruefully around the small private chamber that held the memories of home, his library, his clothes and keepsakes. This was him. This was who he was. The same beliefs and principles that had led him here to this lonely outpost required that there was no choice over surrender or death. But there was still one choice to make, and it was a bitter one to be given.

  He could destroy the embassy — and himself with it, of course — completely, so that all that would be left to the barbarians would be its stones. Or he could take the entire city with him. It was not just a city; in one sense it was not even principally a city; it was a vast arsenal, a crowded barracks and a busy naval port; altogether an important component of the barbarians" war effort. Its destruction would benefit the side that the castellan was loyal to, the cause that he absolutely believed in; arguably it would save lives in the long run. Yet the city had its civilians too; the out-numbering innocents that were the women and children and the subjugated underclasses, not to mention the blameless others from neutral lands who just happened to find themselves caught up in the war through no fault of their own. Had he a right to snuff them out too by destroying the city?