Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

  If it ought to.

  Ought it? It checked its signal log, as if it might have missed an incoming message.

  Still nothing from those who had sent it here. The Interesting Times Gang seemed to have been observing comm silence for days. Just the usual daily plea from the LSV Serious Callers Only; the equivalent of an unopened letter and just the latest in a series.

  The Sleeper watched events on the Jaundiced Outlook, even as it prepared itself for the coming encounter near Esperi, like a military commander drawing up war plans and issuing hundreds of preparatory orders who cannot keep his or her attention from flicking to a microscopic drama being played out amongst a group of insects clinging to the wall above the table. The ship felt foolish, voyeuristic, and yet fascinated.

  Its thoughts were interrupted by the Grey Area, sending from its Mainbay in the nose of the GSV.

  — I'll be on my way then, if you don't need me any more.

  — I'd rather you stuck around, the Sleeper Service replied.

  — Not when you're heading for that thing, and the Affronters.

  — You might be surprised.

  — I'm sure. However, I want to leave.

  — Farewell, then, the GSV sent, opening the bay door.

  — I suppose this means another Displace.

  — If you don't mind.

  — And if I do?

  — There is an alternative, but I'd rather not use it.

  — Well, if there is one, I want to use it!

  — The Jaundiced Outlook declined, and it had humans aboard.

  — Bugger the humans, and bugger the Jaundiced Outlook, too. What's the alternative? Have you got superlifters capable of this sort of speed?

  — No.

  — What then…?

  — Just get to the rear of my field envelope.

  — Whatever you say.

  The GCU quit its berth, easing out into the confined space between the GSVs hull and the craft's innermost field layer. It took a few minutes for it to manoeuvre itself down the side of the giant ship and round the corner to the flat rear of the craft. When it got there it found three other ships waiting for it.

  — Who the hell are they? the GCU asked the larger ship. ~ In fact, what the hell are they?

  It was something of a rhetorical question. The three craft were unambiguously warships; slightly longer and fatter than the Grey Area itself but tapering at either end to points surmounted with large spheres. Spheres which could logically only contain weaponry. Quite a lot of weaponry, judging by the size of the globes.

  — My own design. Their names are T3OUs 4, 118 and 736.

  — Oh, witty.

  — You won't find them terribly good company; AI cores only, semi-slaved to me. But they can operate together as a super lifter to get you down to manageable speeds.

  The GCU was silent for a moment. It moved in to take up position in the centre of the triangle the three ships had formed. ~ T3OUs? it asked. Type Three Offensive Units, by any chance?

  — Correct.

  — Many more like these hidden away?

  — Enough.

  — You have been busy all these years.

  — Yes I have. I trust I can rely on your absolute discretion, for the next few hours at any rate.

  — You certainly have that.

  — Good. Farewell. Thank you for your help.

  — Glad to be of the small amount of service I was. Best of luck. I suppose I'll find out soon enough how things pan out.

  — I imagine so.

  III

  The avatar returned the main focus of its attention to the three humans on the Jaundiced Outlook. The two old lovers had moved from small talk to a post mortem on their relationship, still without coming up with anything particularly interesting.

  "… We wanted different things," Dajeil said to Genar-Hofoen. "That's usually enough."

  "I wanted what you wanted, for a long time," the man said, swirling some wine round in a crystal goblet.

  "The funny thing was," Dajeil said, "we were all right while it was just the two of us, remember?"

  The man smiled sadly. "I remember."

  "You two sure you want me here?" asked Ulver.

  Dajeil looked at her. "If you feel embarrassed…" she said.

  "No; I just thought…" Ulver's voice trailed off. They were both looking at her. She frowned. "Okay; now I feel embarrassed."

  "What about you two?" Dajeil asked evenly, looking from Ulver to Genar-Hofoen.

  They exchanged looks. Each shrugged at the same time, then laughed, then looked guiltily at her. If they had rehearsed it it could hardly have been more synchronised. Dajeil felt a pang of jealousy, then forced herself to smile, as graciously as she could. Somehow the act helped produce the emotion.

  IV

  Something was wrong.

  The avatar's principal attention snapped back to its home ship. The Grey Area and the three warships were free of the GSV's envelope now, dropping back in their own web of fields and decelerating to velocities the GCU's engine could accommodate. Ahead lay the Excession; the Sleeper Service had just carried out its first close track-scan look at it. But the Excession had changed; it had re-established its links with the energy grids and then it had grown; then it had erupted.

  It wasn't the sort of enlargement the Fate Amenable To Change had witnessed and seemingly been transported by; that had been something based on the skein or on some novel formulation of fields. This was something incarnated in the ultimate fire of the energy grid itself, spilling across the whole sweep of Infraspace and Ultraspace and invading the skein as well, creating an immense spherical wave-front of grid-fire boiling across three-dimensional space.

  It was expanding, quickly. Impossibly quickly; sky-fillingly, explosively quickly; almost too quickly to measure, certainly too quickly for its true shape and form to be gauged. So quickly that there could only be minutes before the Sleeper Service ran into it and far too quickly for the GSV to brake or turn and avoid the conflagration.

  Suddenly the avatar was on its own; the Sleeper briefly severed all connection with it while it concentrated on dispersing its own war fleet all about it.

  Some of the ships were Displaced from deep inside its interior, snapping out of existence from within the thousands of evacuated bays where they had been quietly manufactured over the decades and reappearing in hyperspace, powered up and already heading outwards. Others — the vast majority — were revealed as the giant ship peeled back some of the outer layers of its field structures to reveal the craft it had hidden there over the past few weeks, loosing entire fleets of smaller ships like seeds disseminating from a colossal pod.

  When the avatar was reconnected to the GSV, most of the ships had been distributed, scattered to the hypervolume in a series of explosive flurries; bombardments of ships, layers and blossoms of vessels like a whole deployed hierarchy of cluster munitions, every warhead a warcraft. A cloud of vessels; a wall of ships rushing towards the blooming hypersphere of the Excession.

  V

  The Grey Area watched it all happen, carried in its cradle of fields by the three silent warships. Part of it wanted to whoop and cry hurrah, seeing this detonation of materiel, sufficient to smash a war machine ten times — a hundred times — the size of the approaching Affronter fleet; ah the things you could do if you had the time and patience and no treaties to adhere to or agreements to uphold!

  Another part of it watched with horror as the Excession swelled, obliterating the view ahead, rampaging out like an explosion still greater than that of ships the Sleeper Service had just produced. It was like the energy grid itself had been turned inside out, as though the most massive black hole in the universe had suddenly turned white and bloated into some big-bang eruption of fury between the universes; a forest-levelling storm capable of devouring the Sleeper Service and all its ships as though it were a tree and they mere leaves.

  The Grey Area was fascinated and appalled. It had never thought to experience anyth
ing like this. It had grown up within a universe almost totally free from threat; providing you didn't try to do anything utterly stupid like plunge into a black or a white hole, there was simply no natural force that could threaten a ship of its power and sophistication; even a supernova held little threat, handled properly. This was different. Nothing like this had been seen in the galaxy since the worst days of the Idiran war five hundred years earlier, and even then not remotely on such a scale. This was terrifying. To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast. This was a fireball of energies from beyond the remit of reality; a monstrous wall of flame to devastate anything in its path.

  Grief, this could swallow me too, thought the Grey Area. Meat shit. Same went for the Jaundiced Outlook for that matter…

  It might be making-peace-with-oneself time.

  VI

  The Sleeper Service was having roughly similar thoughts. The combination of its own inward velocity and the out-rushing wall of the Excession's annihilating boundary implied they would meet in one hundred and forty seconds. The Excession's ferocious expansion had begun immediately after the Sleeper Service had swept its active sensors across the thing. It had all started happening then. As though it was reacting.

  The Sleeper Service looked up its signal-sequence log, searching for messages from the craft nearer to the Excession. The Fate Amenable To Change and the MSV Not Invented Here were the closest craft. They had reported nothing. They were both now unreachable, either swallowed up within the event-horizon of the Excession's expanding boundary or — if it was reaching out specifically towards the Sleeper Service, stretching out a single limb rather than expanding omnidirectionally — obscured from the GSV's view by the sheer extent of that limb's leading edge.

  The Sleeper signalled the GSVs What Is The Answer And Why? and Use Psychology both directly and via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook, asking them what they could see. Trying to contact them directly was probably pointless; the Excession's boundary was moving so fast it looked like it was going to eclipse any returning signal, but there was a decent chance the indirect route might provide a useful reply before it encountered that event-horizon.

  It had to assume the expansion was not equidirectional. It still had its second front, the Affront's war fleet, even if that was vastly less threatening than what it was faced with now. The Sleeper instructed its own warcraft to flee, to do all they could to escape the oncoming blast-front of the Excession's inflation. If the distension was localised, some at least might escape; they had anyway been launched towards the Affronter fleet, not straight at the Excession. The Sleeper wondered with a fleeting sourness whether the bloating Excession — or whatever was controlling it — was capable of appreciating this distinction. Whatever, it was done; the warcraft were on their own for the moment.

  Think. What had the Excession done up until now? What could it possibly be doing? What was it for? Why did it do what it did?

  The GSV spent two entire seconds thinking.

  (Back on the Jaundiced Outlook, that was long enough for the avatar Amorphia to interrupt Dajeil and say, "Excuse me. I beg your pardon, Dajeil. Ah, there's been a development with the Excession… )

  Then the Sleeper swung its engine fields about, flourishing them into an entirely new configuration and instituting a crash-stop.

  The giant ship poured every available unit of power it possessed into an emergency braking manoeuvre which threw up vast livid waves of disturbance in the energy grid; soaring tsunami of piled-up energies that rose and rose within the hyperspatial realm until they too threatened to tear into the skein itself and unleash those energies not witnessed in the galaxy for a half a thousand years. An instant before the wave fronts ripped into the fabric of real space the ship switched from one level of hyperspace to the other, ploughing its traction fields into the Ultraspace energy grid and producing another vast tumbling swell of fricative power.

  The ship flickered between the two expanses of hyperspace, distributing the colossal forces at its command amidst each domain, hauling its velocity down at a rate barely allowed for in its design parameters while equally strained steering units edged their own performance envelopes in the attempt to turn the giant craft, angling it slowly ever further away from the centre.

  For a moment, there was little enough to do. They were not sufficient to escape, but at least such actions made the point that it was trying to. All that could be done was being done. The Sleeper Service contemplated its life.

  Have I done good, or bad? it thought. Well, or ill? The damnable thing was that you just didn't know, until your life was over; well over. There was a necessary delay between drawing a line under one's existence and being able to objectively evaluate its effects and therefore one's own moral worth. It wasn't a problem a ship was usually confronted with; faced with, yes; that implied a degree of volition and ships went into retreats or became Eccentric all the time, declaring that they'd done their bit for whatever cause they had believed in or been part of. It was always possible to withdraw, to take stock and look back and try to fit one's existence into an ethical framework greater than that necessarily imposed by the immediacy of events surrounding a busy existence. But even then, how long did one have to make that evaluation? Not long. Probably not long enough. Usually one grew tired of the whole process or moved on to some other level of awareness before sufficient time had passed for that objective evaluation to come about.

  If a ship lived for a few hundred or even a thousand years before becoming something quite different — an Eccentric, a Sublimed, whatever — and its civilisation, the thing of which it had been a part when it had been involved, then lived for a few thousand years, how long did it take before you really knew the full moral context of your actions?

  Perhaps, an impossibly long time. Perhaps, indeed, that was the real attraction of Subliming. Real Subliming; the sort of strategic, civilisation-wide transcendence that genuinely did seem to draw a line under a society's works, deeds and thoughts (in what it pleased people to call the real universe, at any rate). Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or meta-philosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just… accounting.

  What a rather saddening thought, thought the Sleeper Service. All we're looking for when we Sublime is our score…

  It was getting near time, the ship thought sadly, to send off its mind-state, to parcel up its mortal thoughts and emotions and post them off, away from this — by the look of it — soon-to-be-overwhelmed physicality called the Sleeper Service (once called, a long time ago, the Quietly Confident) and consign it to the remembrance of its peers.

  It would probably never live again in reality. Assuming there was what it knew as reality to come back to at all of course (for it was starting to think; What if the Excession's expansion was equidirectional, and never stopped; what if it was a sort of new big-bang, what if it was destined to take in the whole galaxy, the whole of this universe?). But, even so, even if there was a reality and a Culture to come back to, there was no guarantee it would ever be resurrected. If anything, the likelihood was the other way; it was almost certainly guaranteed not to be regarded as a fit entity for rebirth in another physical matrix. Warships were; that guarantee of serial immortality was the seal upon their bravery (and had occasionally been the impetus for their foolhardiness); they knew they were coming back…

  But it had been an Eccentric, and there were only a few other Minds who knew that it had been true and faithful to the greater aims and purposes of the Culture all the time rather than what everybody else no doubt thought it was; a self-indulgent fool determined to waste the huge resources it had been quite deliberately blessed with. Probably, come to think of it, those Minds who did know the extent of its secret purpose would be the last to rally to any call to resurrect it; their
own part in the plan — call it conspiracy if you wished — to conceal its true purpose was probably not something they wished to broadcast. Better for them, they would think, that the Sleeper Service died, or at least that it existed only in a controllable simulationary state in another Mind matrix.

  The giant ship watched the Excession, still billowing out towards it. For all its prodigious power, the Sleeper now felt as helpless as the driver of an ancient covered wagon, caught on a road beneath a volcano, watching the incandescent cloud of a nueé ardente tearing down the mountainside towards it.

  The replies from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook ought to be coming in soon, if they came at all.

  It signalled the avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook to consign the humans" mind-states to the AI cores, if the ship would agree (there would be a fine test of loyalty!). Let them work out their stories there if they could. The transition would anyway prepare the humans for the transmission of their mind-states if and when the Excession's destructive boundary caught up with the Jaundiced Outlook; that was the only succour they could be offered.

  What else?

  It sifted through the things it still had left to do.

  Little of real import, it reckoned. There were thousands of studies on its own behaviour it had always meant to glance at; a million messages it had never looked into, a billion life-stories it had never seen through to the end, a trillion thoughts it had never followed up…

  The ship kicked through the debris of its life, watching the towering wall of the Excession come ever closer.

  It scanned the articles, features, studies, biographies and stories which had been written about itself and which it had collected. There were hardly any screen works and those which did exist needn't have; nobody had ever succeeded in smuggling a camera aboard it. It supposed it ought to feel proud of that but it didn't. The lack of any real visual interest hadn't put people off; they'd found the ship and the articulation of its eccentricity quite entirely fascinating. A few commentators had even come close to the reality of the situation, putting forward the idea that the Sleeper Service was part of Special Circumstances and somehow Up To Something… but any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.