Excession

by Iain M. Banks

  The image nodded slowly.

  ‘Shit,’ Genar-Hofoen said.

  III

  ‘But it makes my brain hurt.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Major. This is of inestimable importance.’

  ‘I only looked at the first bit there and it’s already given me a thumping case-ache.’

  ‘Still, it has to be done. Kindly read it all carefully and then I’ll explain its significance.’

  ‘Knot my stalks, this is a terrible thing to ask of a chap after a regimental dinner.’ Fivetide wondered if humans suffered so for their self-indulgence. He doubted it, no matter what they claimed; with the possibly honourable, possibly demented exception of Genar-Hofoen, they seemed a bit too stuffy and sensible willingly to submit to such self-punishment in the cause of fun. Besides, they were so insecure in their physical inheritance they had meddled with themselves in all sorts of ways; probably they thought hangovers were just annoying, rather than character-forming and so had, shortsightedly, dispensed with them.

  ‘I realise it’s early and it is the morning after the night before, Major. But please.’

  The emissary - which Fivetide had met once before, and which possessed the irritating trait of looking somewhat like a better-built version of Fivetide’s dear departed father - had just appeared in the nest house without notice or warning. If he hadn’t known the way these things worked, Fivetide would right now be thinking of ways to torture the head of nest security. Tentacles had rolled, beaks had been separated, for less.

  Lucky he’d been able to whip the bed covers round his deputy wife and both vice courtesans before the blighter had announced his/its presence by just floating into the nest.

  Fivetide clapped his forebeak together a couple of times. Tastes like I’ve had me beak up me arse, he thought. ‘Can’t you just tell me what the damn signal means now?’ he asked.

  ‘You won’t know what I’m referring to. Come now; the sooner you read it the sooner I’ll be able to tell you what it means, and the sooner I’ll be able to demonstrate how it is just possible that this information will - at the very least - enable you to remove the harness of Culture interference forever.’

  ‘Hmm. I’m sure. And what’ll it do at most?’

  The emissary of the ship let its eye stalks dip to either side, the Affronter equivalent of a smile. ‘At most, the information in this signal will lead to you being able to dominate the Culture as completely as it - if it chose to - could dominate you.’ The creature paused. ‘This signal could conceivably presage the start of a process which will deliver the entire Galaxy into your hands, and subsequently open up territories for expansion and exploitation beyond that which you cannot even begin to guess at. And I do not exaggerate. Have I your attention now, Major?’

  Fivetide snorted sceptically. ‘I suppose you have,’ he said, shaking his limbs and rubbing his eyes. He returned his gaze to the note screen, and read the signal.

  xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,

  oGSV Ethics Gradient

  & strictly as SC cleared:

  Excession notice @c18519938.52314.

  Constitutes formal All-ships Warning Level 0

  [(in temporary sequestration) - textual note added by GSV

  WisdomLikeSilence@n4.28.855.0150.650001].

  Excession.

  Confirmed precedent-breach. Type K7ˆ. True class non-estimal.

  Its status: Active. Aware. Contactiphile. Uninvasive sf. LocStatre:

  Esperi (star).

  First ComAtt (its, following shear-by contact via my primary scanner @ n4.28.855.0065.59312) @ n4.28.855.0065.59487 in M1-a16 & Galin II by tight beam, type 4A. PTA & Handshake burst as appended, x@ 0.7Y. Suspect signal gleaned from Z-E/Ialsaer ComBeam spread, 2nd Era. xContact callsigned ‘I’. No other signals registered.

  My subsequent actions: maintained course and speed, skim-declutched primary scanner to mimic 50% closer approach, began directed full passive HS scan (sync./start of signal sequence, as above), sent buffered Galin II pro-forma message-reception confirmation signal to contact location, dedicated track scanner @ 19% power and 300% beamspread to contact @ -5% primary scanner roll-off point, instigated 2exponential slow-to-stop line manoeuvre synchronised to skein-local stop-point @ 12% of track scanner range limit, ran full systems check as detailed, executed slow/4 swing-around then retraced course to previous closest approach point and stop @ standard 2ex curve. Holding there. Excession’s physical characteristics: (¡am!) sphere rad. 53.34km, mass (non-estimal by space-time fabric influence - locality ambiently planar - estimated by pan-polarity material density norms at) 1.45x813t. Black-body surface, stipple granular, fractal within .0012-1344mm range, open to (field-filtered) vacuum, anomalous field presence inferred from 821 kHz leakage. Affirm K7ˆ category by HS topology & eG links (inf. & ult.). eG link details non-estimal. DiaGlyph files attached.

  Associated anomalous materials presence: several highly dispersed detritus clouds all within 28 minutes, three consistent with staged destruction of >.1 m3 near-equiv-tech entity, another ditto approx 38 partially exhausted M-DAWS .1cal rounds, another consisting of general hi-soph level (O2-atmosphered) ship-internal combat debris. Latter drifting directly away from excession’s current position. Retracks of debris clouds’ expansion profiles indicates mutual age of 52.5 days. Combat debris cloud implicitly originating @ a point 948 milliseconds from excession’s current position. DiaGlyph files attached.

  No other presences apparent to within 30 years.

  My status: H&H, unTouched. L8 secure post system-scour (100%). ATDPSs engaged. CRTTDPSs engaged.

  Repeat:

  Excession eG (inf. & ult.) linked, confirmed.

  eGrid link details non-estimal.

  True class non-estimal.

  Awaiting.

  @ n4.28.855.0073.64523 . . .

  ... PS:

  Gulp.

  Fivetide shook his stalks. Gods, this hangover was fierce.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ve read, but I still don’t understand.’

  The emissary of the war vessel Attitude Adjuster smiled again ‘Allow me to explain.’

  3

  Uninvited Guests

  I

  The battle of Boustrago had taken place on Xlephier Prime thirteen thousand years earlier. It had been the final, decisive battle in the Archipelagic War (though it had, inappropriately, been fought near to the centre of a continent), a twenty-year conflict between that world’s first two great imperial nation states. The muzzle-loading cannon and rifle were state-of-the-art munitions at the time, though the cavalry charge was still very much regarded as both the most decisive battlefield manoeuvre and quite the finest and most stirring sight that warfare had to offer by the military high commands on each side. The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as ever, created enormous casualties on both sides.

  Amorphia wandered amongst the dead and dying of Hill 4. The battle had by this time moved on; the few defenders who’d survived and repelled the initial rush had been ordered to pull back just as the next wave of opposing troops had appeared out of the cannon smoke and fallen upon them; they had been slaughtered almost to a man and the victors had swept on to the next redoubt across the shallow valley beyond. Shattered palisades, lines of stakes and bunkers had been chewed up by the initial bombardment and later by the hooves of the cavalry. Bodies lay scattered like twisted, shredded leaves amongst the torn-up grassland and the rich brown-red soil. The blood of men and animals saturated the grass in places, making it thick and glossy, and collected in little hollows like pools of dark ink.

  The sun was high in the cloudless sky; the only cover was the wispy remnants of cannon smoke. Already a few carrion birds - no longer too concerned by the noise of the battle near by - had landed and started to investigate the corpses and the shattered bodies of the wounded.

  The soldiers wore brightly coloured, cheery-looking uniforms with lots of metal buckle-work and very tall hats. Their guns were long, simple-looking things; the
ir pikes, swords and bayonets lay glittering in the sunlight. The animals lying tangled amongst the traces of the smashed cannon trains were big, thick-set beasts, almost unadorned; the cavalry mounts were almost as gaily decorated as their riders. They all lay together, some with the collapsed shapelessness of death, some in a pool of their own internal organs, some missing limbs, some in a posture appropriate to a still vital suffering, caught in expressions appropriate to their agony, thrashing or writhing or - in the case of some of the soldiers - supporting themselves on one limb and reaching out to plead for help, or water, or a coup de grâce to end their torment.

  It was all quite still, frozen like a three-dimensional photograph, and it all lay, spread out like some military society’s model scene made real, in General Bay Three Inner of the GSV Sleeper Service.

  The ship’s avatar achieved the top of the low hill and looked out over the battle-scene beyond. It stretched for kilometres in all directions across the sunlit rolling downland; a grand confusion of posed men, dashing mounts, cavalry charges, cannons and smoke and shadows.

  Getting the smoke right had been the hardest part. The landscape was simplicity itself; a covering of artificial flora on a thin layer of sterilised soil lying on a structure of foametal. The great majority of the animals were simply very good sculptures the ship had created. The people were real, of course, though the ones who’d been disembowelled or particularly severely mutilated were generally sculptures too.

  The details of the scene were as authentic as the ship could make them; it had studied every painting, etching and sketch of the battle and read every account, military and media report of it, even taking the trouble to track down the records of the diary entries of individual soldiers, while at the same time undertaking exhaustive research into the whole historical period concerned including the uniforms, weaponry and tactics in use when the battle had taken place. For what it was worth after so much time, a drone team had visited the preserved battle site itself and conducted their own deep-scan of the ground. The fact that Xlephier Prime was one of the twenty or so planets that could fairly claim to have been one of the home worlds of the Culture - not that it really admitted to having such things - made the task easier.

  The GSV had studied the real-time recordings Contact craft and their emissaries had taken over the years of battles fought by humanoid societies with similar technology, to get a feel for the way such events really looked and felt without the possibly prejudiced and partial eyes and memories of the participants or spectators getting in the way.

  And it had, eventually, got the smoke right. It had taken a while, and eventually it had had to resort to a rather higher-tech solution than it would have preferred, but it had done it. The smoke was real, each particle held and isolated in the grip of a localised anti-gravity field produced by projectors hidden underneath the landscape. The ship was quietly proud of the smoke.

  Even the fact that the scene still wasn’t perfect - many of the soldiers looked female, and/or foreign, or indeed alien, when you looked closely at them, and even the males of the appropriate and not-too-meddled-with genetic stock were too big and too generally healthy to be right for the time - didn’t really disturb the ship. The people hadn’t been the most difficult thing to get right, but they were the most important component of the scene; they were the reason it was all here.

  It had all started eighty years ago, on a very small scale.

  Every Culture habitat - whether it was an Orbital or other large structure, a ship, a Rock, or a planet - possessed Storage facilities. Storage was where some people went when they had reached a certain age, or if they had just grown tired of living. It was one of the choices that Culture humans faced towards the end of their artificially extended three-and-a-half to four centuries of life. They could opt for rejuvenation and/or complete immortality, they could become part of a group mind, they could simply die when the time came, they could transfer out of the Culture altogether, bravely accepting one of the open but essentially inscrutable invitations left by certain Elder civilisations, or they could go into Storage, with whatever revival criterion they desired.

  Some people slept for - say - a hundred years at a time then lived a single day before returning to their undreaming, unageing slumbers, some wanted simply to be woken after a set time had passed to see what had changed while they’d been gone, some desired to come back when something especially interesting was happening (content to leave that judgement to others), and some only wanted to be brought back if and when the Culture finally became one of the Elders itself.

  That was a decision the Culture had been putting off for many millennia; in theory it could have sublimed anything up to eight thousand years ago, but - while individuals and small groups of people and Minds did sublime all the time, and other parts of the society had hived off and split away, to make their own decisions on the matter - the bulk of the Culture had chosen not to, determining instead to surf a line across the ever-breaking wave of galactic life continuation.

  Partly it was a kind of curiosity that no doubt seemed childish to any sublimed species; a feeling that there was still more to discover in base reality, even if its laws and rules were all perfectly known (and besides, what of other galaxies, what of other universes? Did the Elders have access to these but none of them had ever seen fit to communicate the truth to the unsublimed? Or did all such considerations simply cease to matter, post-sublimation?).

  Partly it was an expression of the Culture’s extrovertly concerned morality; the sublimed Elders, become as gods to all intents and purposes, seemed to be derelict in the duties which the more naive and less developed societies they left behind ascribed to such entities. With certain very limited exceptions, the Elder species subsequently took almost nothing to do with the rest of life in the galaxy whose physical trappings they invariably left behind; tyrants went unchecked, hegemonies went unchallenged, genocides went unstopped and whole nascent civilisations were snuffed out just because their planet suffered a comet-strike or happened to be too near a super-nova, even though these events occurred under the metaphorical noses of the sublimed ones.

  The implication was that the very ideas, the actual concepts of good, of fairness and of justice just ceased to matter once one had gone for sublimation, no matter how creditable, progressive and unselfish one’s behaviour had been as a species pre-sublimation. In a curiously puritanical way for society seemingly so hell-bent on the ruthless pursuit of pleasure, the Culture thought this was itself wrong, and so decided to attempt to accomplish what the gods, it seemed, could not be bothered with; discovering, judging and encouraging - or discouraging - the behaviour of those to whom its own powers were scarcely less than those of a deity. Its own Elderhood would come eventually, it had no doubt, but it would be damned if it would let that happen until it had grown tired of doing (what it hoped was) good.

  For those who wished to await that judgment day without having to live through every other day in between, Storage was the answer, as it was for others, for all those other reasons.

  The rate of technological change in the Culture, at least at the level which directly affected the humans within it, was fairly modest. For millennia the accepted and normal method of Storing a human was to place each in a coffin-like box a little over two metres long, just under one across and half a metre deep; such units were easy to make and suitably reliable. However, even such unglamorous staples of Culture existence couldn’t escape improvement and refinement for ever. Eventually, along with the development of the gelfield suit, it became possible to put people into the stasis of long-term Storage within a covering that was even more reliable than the old coffin-boxes, and yet scarcely thicker than a second skin or a layer of clothing.

  The Sleeper Service - which was not called that then - had simply been the first ship fully to take advantage of this development. When it Stored people it usually did so in small tableaux after the manner of famous paintings, at first, or humorous poses; the Storage suits allow
ed their occupants to be posed in any way that would have been natural for a human, and it was a simple matter to add a pigmentation layer to the surface which did such a good job of impersonating skin that a human would have to look very closely indeed to spot the difference. Of course, the ship had always asked the permission of the Storees in question before it used their sleeping forms in this way, and respected the wishes of the few people who preferred not to be Stored in a situation where they might be gazed upon as though they were figures in a painting, or sculptures.

  Back then, the GSV had been called the Quietly Confident, and it had been run, as ships of that class normally were, by not one but three Minds. What happened next depended on who you believed.

  The official version was that when one of the three Minds had decided it wanted to quit the Culture the other two Minds had argued with it and then made the unusual decision to leave the structure of the GSV to the single dissenting Mind, rather than, as would have been more normal, just giving it a smaller ship.

  The perhaps more plausible and certainly more interesting rumour was that there had been a good old-fashioned wing-ding battle between the Minds, two against one, and the two had lost, very much against the odds. The two losing Minds had been kicked out, taking to commandeered GCUs like officers given life boats after a mutiny. And that was why, this version went, the whole of the Quietly Confident - which promptly renamed itself the Sleeper Service, had been turned over to the single dissident Mind; it hadn’t been some gentlepeople’s agreement; it had been a revolution.

  Whatever version you chose to believe, it was no secret that the Culture proper had chosen to dedicate another, smaller, GSV to the task of following the Sleeper Service wherever it went, presumably to keep an eye on it.