Excession

by Iain M. Banks

  Genar-Hofoen drew his gown about him and settled back in his seat, a small smile on his lips. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Some of Genar-Hofoen’s earliest memories were of the long, sunlit kitchen of the house at Ois, back on Seddun Orbital; his mother, the other adults of the house and his various cousins would all be milling around, chattering and laughing while he sat on his uncle’s knee, being told tales. Some of them were ordinary children’s stories - which he’d heard before, often, but which always sounded better when Uncle Tish told them - and some of them his uncle’s own stories, from when he’d been in Contact, travelling the galaxy in a succession of ships, exploring strange new worlds and meeting all sorts of odd folk and finding any number of weird and wonderful things amongst the stars.

  ‘Firstly,’ the hologram image said, ‘the dead sun gave every sign of being absurdly ancient. The techniques used to date it indicated it was getting on for a trillion years old.’

  ‘What?’ Genar-Hofoen snorted.

  Uncle Tishlin spread his hands. ‘The ship couldn’t believe it either. To come up with this unlikely figure, it used . . .’ the apparition glanced away to one side, the way Tishlin always had when he was thinking, and Genar-Hofoen found himself smiling, ‘. . . isotopic analysis and flux-pitting assay.’

  ‘Technical terms,’ Genar-Hofoen said, nodding. He and the hologram both smiled.

  ‘Technical terms,’ the image of Tishlin agreed. ‘But no matter what it was they used or how they did their sums, it always came out that the dead star was at least fifty times older than the universe.’

  ‘I never heard that one before,’ Genar-Hofoen said, shaking his head and looking thoughtful.

  ‘Me neither,’ Tishlin agreed. ‘Though as it turns out it was released publicly, just not until long after it had all happened. One reason there was no big fuss at the time was that the ship was so embarrassed about what it was coming up with it never filed a full report, just kept the results to itself, in its own mind.’

  ‘Did they have proper Minds back then?’

  Tishlin’s image shrugged. ‘Mind with a small “m”; AI core, we’d probably call it these days. But it was certainly sentient and the point is that the information remained in the ship’s head, as it were.’

  Where, of course, it would remain the ship’s. Practically the only form of private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory. Any publicly filed report or analysis was theoretically available to anybody, but your own thoughts, your own recollections - whether you were a human, a drone or a ship Mind - were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad manners even to think about trying to read somebody else’s - or something else’s - mind.

  Personally, Genar-Hofoen had always thought it was a reasonable enough rule, although along with a lot of people over the years he’d long suspected that one of the main reasons for its existence was that it suited the purposes of the Culture’s Minds in general, and those in Special Circumstances in particular.

  Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to themselves and hatch little schemes and plots to their hearts’ content. The trouble was that while in humans this sort of behaviour tended to manifest itself in practical jokes, petty jealousies, silly misunderstandings and instances of tragically unrequited love, with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to try to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already did know about (with the almost unspeakable implication that one day they might do just that not with a culture but with the Culture . . . always assuming they hadn’t done so already, of course).

  ‘What about the people on board the Culture ship?’ Genar-Hofoen asked.

  ‘They knew as well, of course, but they kept quiet, too. Apart from anything else, they had two weirdnesses on their hands; they assumed they had to be linked in some way but they couldn’t work out how, so they decided to wait and see before they told everybody else.’ Tishlin shrugged. ‘Understandable, I suppose; it was all so outlandish I suppose anybody would think twice about shouting it to the rooftops. You couldn’t get away with such reticence these days, but this was then; the guidelines were looser.’

  ‘What was the other unusual thing they found?’

  ‘An artifact,’ Tishlin said, sitting back in the seat. ‘A perfect black-body sphere fifty klicks across, in orbit around the unfeasibly ancient star. The ship was completely unable to penetrate the artifact with its sensors, or with anything else for that matter, and the thing itself showed no signs of life. Shortly thereafter the Problem Child developed an engine fault - something almost unheard of, even back then - and had to leave the star and the artifact. Naturally, it left a load of satellites and sensor platforms behind it to monitor the artifact; all it had arrived with, in fact, plus a load more it had made while it was there.

  ‘However, when a follow-up expedition arrived three years later - remember, this all happened on the galactic outskirts, and speeds were much lower then - it found nothing; no star, no artifact, and none of the sensors and remote packages the Problem Child had left behind; the outgoing signals apparently coming from the sentry units stopped just before the follow-up expedition arrived within monitoring range. Ripples in the gravity field near by implied the star and presumably everything else had vanished utterly the moment the Problem Child had been safely out of sensor range.’

  ‘Just vanished?’

  ‘Just vanished. Disappeared without trace,’ Tishlin confirmed. ‘Most damnable thing, too; nobody’s ever just lost a sun before, even if it was a dead one.

  ‘In the meantime, the General Systems Vehicle which the Problem Child had rendezvoused with for repairs had reported that the GCU had effectively been attacked; its engine problem wasn’t the result of chance or some manufacturing flaw, it was the result of offensive action.

  ‘Apart from that, and the still unexplained disappearance of an entire star, everything was normal for nearly two decades.’ Tishlin’s hand flapped once on the table. ‘Oh, there were various investigations and boards of inquiry and committees and so on, but the best they could come up with was that the whole thing had been some sort of hi-tech projection, maybe produced by some previously unknown Elder civilisation with a quirky sense of humour, or, even less likely, that the sun and all the rest had popped into Hyperspace and just sped off - though they should have been able to observe that, and hadn’t - but basically the whole thing remained a mystery, and after everybody had chewed it over and over till there was nothing but spit left, it just kind of died a natural death.

  ‘Then, over the following seven decades, the Problem Child decided it didn’t want to be part of Contact any more. It left Contact, then it left the Culture proper and joined the Ulterior - again, very unusual for its class - and meanwhile every single human who’d been on board at the time exercised what are apparently termed Unusual Life Choices.’ Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language. The image made a throat-clearing noise and went on: ‘Roughly half of the humans opted for immortality, the other half autoeuthenised. The few remaining humans underwent subtle but exhaustive investigation, though nothing unusual was ever discovered.

  ‘Then there were the ship’s drones; they all joined the same Group Mind - again in the Ulterior - and have been incommunicado ever since. Apparently that was even more unusual. Within a century, almost all of those humans who’d opted for immortality were also dead, due to further “semi-contradictory” Unusual Life Choices. Then the Ulterior, and Special Circumstances - who’d taken an interest by this time, not surprisingly - lost touch with the Problem Child entirely. It just seemed to disappear, too.’ The apparition shrugged. ‘That was fifteen hundred years ago, Byr. To this day nobody has seen or heard of the ship. Subsequent investigations of the remains of a few of the humans concerned, using improved technology,
has thrown up possible discrepancies in the nanostructure of the subjects’ brains, but no further investigation has been deemed possible. The story was made public eventually, nearly a century and a half after it all happened; there was even a bit of a media fuss about it at the time, but by then it was a portrait with nobody in it: the ship, the drones, the people; they’d all gone. There was nobody to talk to, nobody to interview, nothing to do profiles of. Everybody was off-stage. And of course the principal celebrities - the star and the artifact - were the most off-stage of all.’

  ‘Well,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘All very--’

  ‘Hold on,’ Tishlin said, holding up one finger. ‘There is one loose end. A single traceable survivor from the Problem Child who turned up five centuries ago; somebody it might be possible to talk to, despite the fact they’ve spent the last twenty-four millennia trying to avoid talking.’

  ‘Human?’

  ‘Human,’ Tishlin confirmed, nodding. ‘The woman who was the vessel’s formal captain.’

  ‘They still had that sort of thing back then?’ Genar-Hofoen said. He smiled. How quaint, he thought.

  ‘It was pretty nominal, even back then,’ Tishlin conceded. ‘More captain of the crew than of the boat. Anyway; she’s still around in a sort of abbreviated form.’ Tishlin’s image paused, watching Genar-Hofoen closely. ‘She’s in Storage aboard the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service.’

  The representation paused, to let Genar-Hofoen react to the name of the ship. He didn’t, not on the outside anyway.

  ‘Just her personality is in there, unfortunately,’ Tishlin continued. ‘Her Stored body was destroyed in an Idiran attack on the Orbital concerned half a millennium ago. I suppose for our purposes that counts as a lucky break; she’d managed to cover her tracks so well - probably with the help of some sympathetic Mind - that if the attack hadn’t occurred she’d have remained incognito to this day. It was only when the records were scrutinised carefully after her body’s destruction that it was realised who she really was. But the point is that Special Circumstances thinks she might know something about the artifact. In fact, they’re sure she does, though it’s almost equally certain that she doesn’t know what she knows.’

  Genar-Hofoen was silent for a while, playing with the cord of his dressing gown. The Sleeper Service. He hadn’t heard that name for a while, hadn’t had to think about that old machine for a long time. He’d dreamt about it a few times, had had a nightmare or two about it even, but he’d tried to forget about those, tried to shove those echoes of memories to some distant corner of his mind and been pretty successful at it too, because it felt very strange to be turning over that name in his mind now.

  ‘So why’s this all suddenly become important after two and a half millennia?’ he asked the hologram.

  ‘Because something with similar characteristics to that artifact has turned up near a star called Esperi, in the Upper Leaf-Swirl, and SC needs all the help it can get to deal with it. There’s no trillion-year-old sun-cinder this time, but an apparently identical artifact is just sitting there.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Go aboard the Sleeper Service and talk to this woman’s Mimage - that’s the Mind-stored construct of her personality apparently . . .’ The image looked puzzled. ‘. . . New one on me

  ... Anyway, you’re supposed to try to persuade her to be reborn; talk her into a rebirth so she can be quizzed. The Sleeper Service won’t just release her, and it certainly won’t cooperate with SC, but if she asks to be reborn, it’ll let her.’

  ‘But why--?’ Genar-Hofoen started to ask.

  ‘There’s more,’ Tishlin said, holding up one hand. ‘Even if she won’t play, even if she refuses to come back, you’re to be equipped with a method of retrieving her through the link you’ll forge when you talk to the Mimage, without the GSV knowing. Don’t ask me how that’s supposed to be accomplished, but I think it’s got something to do with the ship they’re going to give you to get you to the Sleeper Service, after the Affronter ship they’re going to hire for you has rendezvoused with it at Tier.’

  Genar-Hofoen did his best to look sceptical. ‘Is that possible?’ he asked. ‘Retrieving her like that, I mean. Against the wishes of the Sleeper.’

  ‘Apparently,’ Tishlin said, shrugging. ‘SC thinks they’ve got a way of doing it. But you see what I mean when I said they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman . . .’

  Genar-Hofoen thought for a moment. ‘Do you know what ship this might be? The one to get me to the Sleeper?’

  ‘They haven’t--’ began the image, then paused and looked amused. ‘They just told me; it’s a GCU called the Grey Area.’ The image smiled. ‘Ah; I see you’ve heard of it, too.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it,’ the man said.

  The Grey Area. The ship that did what the other ships both deplored and despised; actually looked into the minds of other people, using its Electro Magnetic Effectors - in a sense the very, very distant descendants of electronic countermeasures equipment from your average stage three civilisation, and the most sophisticated, powerful but also precisely controllable weaponry the average Culture ship possessed - to burrow into the grisly cellular substrate of an animal consciousness and try to make sense of what it found there for its own - usually vengeful - purposes. A pariah craft; the one the other Minds called Meatfucker because of its revolting hobby (though not, as it were, to its face). A ship that still wanted to be part of the Culture proper and nominally still was, but which was shunned by almost all its peers; a virtual outcast amongst the great inclusionary meta-fleet that was Contact.

  Genar-Hofoen had heard about the Grey Area all right. It was starting to make sense now. If there was one vessel that might be capable of plundering - and, more importantly, that might be willing to plunder - a Stored soul from under the nose of the Sleeper, the Grey Area was probably it. Assuming what he’d heard about the ship was true, it had spent the last decade perfecting its techniques of teasing dreams and memories out of a variety of animal species, while the Sleeper Service had by all accounts been technologically stagnant for the last forty years, its time taken up with the indulgence of its own scarcely less eccentric pastime.

  The image of Uncle Tishlin bore a distant expression for a moment, then said, ‘Apparently that’s part of the beauty of it; just because the Sleeper Service is another oddball doesn’t mean that it’s any more likely than any other GSV to have the Grey Area aboard; the GCU will have to lie off, and that’ll make this Mimage-stealing trick easier. If the Grey Area was actually inside the GSV at the time it probably couldn’t carry it off undetected.’

  Genar-Hofoen was looking thoughtful again. ‘This artifact thing,’ he said. ‘Could almost be a what-do-you-call it, couldn’t it? An Outside Context Paradox.’

  ‘Problem,’ Tishlin said. ‘Outside Context Problem.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes. One of those. Almost.’

  An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass . . . when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

  That was an Outside Context Problem; so was the suitably up-teched version that happ
ened to whole planetary civilisations when somebody like the Affront chanced upon them first rather than, say, the Culture.

  The Culture had had lots of minor OCPs, problems that could have proved to be terminal if they’d been handled badly, but so far it had survived them all. The Culture’s ultimate OCP was popularly supposed to be likely to take the shape of a galaxy-consuming Hegemonising Swarm, an angered Elder civilisation or a sudden, indeed instant visit by neighbours from Andromeda once the expedition finally got there.

  In a sense, the Culture lived with genuine OCPs all around it all the time, in the shape of those Sublimed Elder civilisations, but so far it didn’t appear to have been significantly checked or controlled by any of them. However, waiting for the first real OCP was the intellectual depressant of choice for those people and Minds in the Culture determined to find the threat of catastrophe even in utopia.

  ‘Almost. Maybe,’ agreed the apparition. ‘Perhaps it’s a little less likely to be so with your help.’

  Genar-Hofoen nodded, staring at the surface of the table. ‘So who’s in charge of this?’ he asked, grinning. ‘There’s usually a Mind which acts as incident controller or whatever they call it in something like this.’

  ‘The Incident Coordinator is a GSV called the Not Invented Here,’ Tish told him. ‘It wants you to know you can ask whatever you want of it.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Genar-Hofoen couldn’t recall having heard of the ship. ‘And why me, particularly?’ he asked. He suspected he already had the answer to that one.

  ‘The Sleeper Service has been behaving even more oddly than usual,’ Tishlin said, looking suitably pained. ‘It’s altered its course schedule, it’s no longer accepting people for Storage, and it’s almost completely stopped communicating. But it says it will allow you on board.’

  ‘For a brow-beating, no doubt,’ Genar-Hofoen said, glancing to one side and watching a cloud pass over the meadows of the valley shown on the dining room’s projector walls. ‘Probably wants to give me a lecture.’ He sighed, still looking round the room. He fastened his gaze on Tishlin’s simulation again. ‘She still there?’ he asked.