Excession

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘Where?’ Confused.

  ‘Where are you going to stop, or where will I be taken? Is it another ship, or a habitat, or an O or a planet, a rock? What?’

  ‘I . . .’ The avatar frowned again. ‘The ship does not know yet,’ it said. ‘Things are being worked out.’

  Dajeil looked at Amorphia for a while, her hands absently stroking the bulge of her belly under her robe. ‘What is happening, Amorphia?’ she asked, keeping her voice soft. ‘Why is all this taking place?’

  ‘I can’t . . . there is no need . . . no need for you to know,’ the avatar said hesitantly. It looked exasperated, and shook its head as though angry, gaze flicking up and around the room, as though seeking something.

  Finally it looked back at her. ‘I might be able to tell you more, later, if you will agree to stay on board until . . . until a time comes when I can only evacuate you by another vessel.’

  She smiled. ‘That sounds like no great hardship. Does that mean I can stay here longer?’

  ‘Not here; the tower and everything else will have gone; it will mean living inside. Inside the GSV.’

  Dajeil shrugged. ‘All right. I suppose I can suffer that. When will that have to happen?’

  ‘In a day or two,’ Amorphia said. Then the avatar looked concerned, and sat forward on the seat. ‘There . . . it’s possible

  ... it’s possible there . . . might be a slightly increased risk to you, staying aboard until then. The ship will do all it can to minimise that, of course, but the possibility exists. And it might be . . .’ Amorphia’s head shook suddenly. ‘I - the ship, would like you to remain on board, if possible, until then. It might be . . . important. Good.’ The avatar looked as though it had startled itself. Dajeil suddenly recalled having held a tiny baby when it had farted loudly; the look of utter, blinking surprise on its face was not dissimilar to that on Amorphia’s face now. Dajeil choked back an urge to laugh, and it disappeared anyway when, as though prompted by the thought, her child kicked within her. She clamped a hand to her belly. ‘Yes,’ Amorphia said, nodding vigorously. ‘It would be good if you stayed on board. . . . Good might come of it altogether.’ It sat staring at her, panting as though from exertion.

  ‘Then I had better stay, hadn’t I?’ Dajeil said, again keeping her voice steady and calm.

  ‘Yes,’ said the avatar. ‘Yes; I’d appreciate that. Thank you.’ It stood up suddenly from the seat, as though released by a spring within. Dajeil was startled; she almost jumped. ‘I must go now,’ Amorphia said.

  Dajeil swung her legs out and stood too, more slowly. ‘Very well,’ she said as the avatar made its way to the staircase set onto the wall of the tower. ‘I hope you’ll tell me more later.’

  ‘Of course,’ the avatar mumbled, then it turned and bowed quickly and was gone, bootsteps clattering down the stairs.

  The door slammed some moments later.

  Dajeil Gelian climbed the steps to the parapet of the tower. A breeze caught her robe’s hood and spilled her heavy, still-wet hair out and down. The sun-line had set, throwing highlights of gold and ruby light across the sky and turning the starboard horizon into a fuzzy violet border. The wind stiffened. It felt cold.

  Amorphia was not walking back this evening; after the creature had hurried up the narrow path through the tower’s walled garden and out of the land-gate, it just rose up into the air, without any obvious AG pack or flying suit, and then accelerated through the air in a dark, thin blur, curving through the air to disappear a few seconds later over the edge of the cliff beyond.

  Dajeil looked up. There were tears in her eyes, which annoyed her. She sniffed them back angrily and wiped her cheeks. A few blinks, and the view of the sky was steady and unobscured again.

  It had indeed already begun.

  A flight of the dirigible creatures were dropping down from the red-speckled clouds above her, heading for the cliffs. Looking closely, she could see the accompanying drones that were their herders. Doubtless the same scene was being repeated at this moment both beneath the grey surface of the sea on the far side of the tower as well as above, in the region of furious heat and crushing pressure that was the gas-giant environment.

  The dirigible creatures hesitated in the skies above; in front of them, a whole area of the cliff, perhaps a kilometre across and half that in height, simply folded in on itself in four parcel-neat sections and disappeared backwards into four huge, long glowing halls. The reassured dirigible creatures were shepherded towards one of the opened bays. Elsewhere, other parts of the cliffs were performing similar tricks; lights sparkled in the spaces revealed. The entire swathe of grey-brown scree - easily twenty kilometres across and a hundred metres in both depth and height - was folding and tipping in eight gigantic Vs and channelling several billion tonnes of real-enough rock into eight presumably reinforced ship bays, doubtless to undergo whatever transformational process was in store for the sea and the gas-giant atmosphere.

  A titanic, bone-resounding tremor shook the ground and rumbled over the tower while huge clouds of dust leapt billowing into the chilly air as the rock disappeared. Dajeil shook her head - her wet hair flapping on the sodden shoulders of her robe - then walked towards the doorway which led to the rest of the tower, intending to retreat there before the clouds of stone dust arrived.

  The black bird Gravious made to settle on her shoulder; she shooed it off and it landed flapping uproariously on the edge of the opened trap door.

  ‘My tree!’ it screamed, hopping from leg to leg. ‘My tree! They’ve - I - my - it’s gone!’

  ‘Too bad,’ she said. The sound of another great tumble of falling rock split the skies. ‘Stay wherever it puts me,’ she told the bird. ‘If it’ll let you. Now get out of my way.’

  ‘But my food for the winter! It’s gone!’

  ‘Winter has gone, you stupid bird,’ she told it. The black bird stopped moving and just perched there, head thrown forward and to one side, right eye staring at her, as though trying to catch some more meaningful echo of what she had just told it. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be accommodated.’ She waved it off its perch and it flapped noisily away.

  A last earthquake of sound rolled under and over the tower. The woman Dajeil Gelian looked round at the twilight-lit rolling grey dust clouds to see the light from opened bays beyond shine through, as the pretence at natural form was dispensed with and the overall shape of the craft’s fabric began to reveal itself.

  The Culture General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service. No longer just her gallant protector and a grossly over-specified mobile game reserve . . . It seemed that the great ship had finally found something to become involved with which was more in keeping with the extent of its powers. She wished it well, though with trepidation.

  The sea like stone, she thought. She turned and stepped down into the warmth of the tower, patting the bulge that was her sleeping, undreaming child. A stern winter indeed; harder than any of us had anticipated.

  VI

  Leffid Ispanteli was trying desperately to remember the name of the lass he was with. Geltry? Usper? Stemli?

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, ffffuck! Gods, yes! More, more; now, yes! There! There! Yes! That’s oohhh . . . !’

  Soli? Getrin? Ayscoe?

  ‘Oh, fuck! There! More! Harder! Right . . . right . . . now! . . .Aah!’

  Selas? Serayer? (Grief; how ungallant of him!)

  ‘Oh, sweet providence! Oh FUCK!’

  No wonder he couldn’t think of her name; the girl was kicking up such a racket he was surprised he could think at all. Still, a chap shouldn’t grumble, he supposed; always nice to be appreciated. Even if it was the yacht that was doing most of the work.

  The diminutive hire yacht continued to shudder and buck beneath them, spiralling and curving through space a few hundred kilometres away from the huge stepped world that was Tier.

  Leffid had used these little yachts for this sort of thing before; if you fed a nicely jagged course into their computers t
hey’d do most of the bumping and grinding for you while leaving just enough apparent gravity to brace oneself without leaving one feeling terribly heavy. Programming in the odd power-off interval gave moments of delicious free-fall, and drew the small craft further away from the great world, so that gradually the view beyond the viewing ports increased in majesty as more and more of the conical habitat was revealed, turning slowly and glittering in the light of the system’s sun. Altogether a wonderful way of having sex, really, providing one found a suitable and willing partner.

  ‘Aw! Aw! Aaawww! Force! Push, push, push; yes!’

  She held his thrusting hips, smoothed his feathered scalp and used her other hand turned out to stroke his lower belly. Her huge dark eyes glittered, myriad tiny lights sparkling somewhere inside them in pulsing vortexes of colour and intensity that varied charmingly with the intensity of her pleasure.

  ‘Come on! Yes! Come on up; further! Further! Aaarrrhh.’

  Dammit all; what was her name?

  Geldri? Shokas? Esiel?

  Grief; what if it wasn’t even a Culture name? He’d been certain it was but now he was starting to think maybe it wasn’t after all. That made it even more difficult. More excusable, maybe, too, but certainly more difficult too.

  They’d met at the Homomdan Ambassador’s party to celebrate the start of the six-hundred and forty-fifth Festival of Tier. He’d resolved to have his neural lace removed for the month of the Festival, deciding that as this year’s theme was Primitivism he ought to give up some aspect of his amendments. The neural lace had been his choice because although there was no physical alteration and he looked just the same to everybody else, he’d reckoned he’d feel more different.

  Which he did. It was oddly liberating to have to ask things or people for information and not know precisely what the time was and where he was located in the habitat. But it also meant that he was forced to rely on his own memory for things like people’s names. And how imperfect was the unassisted human memory (he’d forgotten)!

  He’d even thought of having his wings removed too, at least partly to show that he was taking part in the spirit of the Festival, but in the end he’d stuck with them. Probably just as well; this girl had made a big thing about the wings; headed straight for him, masked, body glittering. She was nearly as tall as he was, perfectly proportioned, and she had four arms! A drink in each hand, too. His kind of female, he’d decided instantly, even as she was looking admiringly at his folded, snow-white wings. She wore some sort of gelsuit; basically deep blue but covered with a pattern like gold wire wrapped all over it and dotted with little diamonds of contrasting, subtly glowing red. Her whiskered mask was porcelain-bone studded with rubies and finished with iridescent badra feathers. Stunning perfume.

  She handed him a glass and took off her mask to reveal eyes the size of opened mouths; eyes softly, blackly featureless in the lustrous lights of the vibrantly decorated dome until he’d looked carefully and seen the tiny hints of lights within their curved surfaces. The gelfield suit covered her everywhere except those heavily altered eyes and a small hole at the back of her head where a plait of long, shiningly auburn hair spilled out. Wrapped in gold wire, it ended at the small of her back and was tethered to the suit there.

  She’d said her first name; the gelsuit’s lips had parted to show white teeth and a pink tongue.

  ‘Leffid,’ he’d replied, bowing deeply but watching her face as best he could while he did so. She’d looked up at his wings as they’d risen up and towards her over the plain black robe he’d worn. He’d seen her take a deep breath. The lights in her eyes had sparkled brightly.

  Ah-ha! he’d thought.

  The Homomdan ambassador had turned the riotously decorated, stadium-sized bowl that was her residential quarters into an old-fashioned fun-fair for the party. They had wandered through the acts, tents and rides, he and she, talking small talk, passing comment on other people they passed, celebrating the refreshing absence of drones at the party, discussing the merits of whirligigs, shubblebubs, helter-skelters, ice-flumes, quittletraps, slicicles, boing-braces, airblows, tramplescups and bodyflaggers, and bemoaning the sheer pointlessness of inter-species funny-face competitions.

  She was on an improving tour from her home Orbital, cruising and learning with a party of friends on a semi-Eccentric ship that would be here as long as the Festival lasted. One of her aunts had some Contact contacts and had swung an invitation to the ambassador’s celebration; her friends were so jealous. He guessed she was still in her teens, though she moved with the easy grace of somebody older and her conversation was more intelligent and even shrewder than he’d have expected. He was used to being able to almost switch off talking to most teenagers but he was having to race after her meanings and allusions at time. Were teenagers getting even smarter? Maybe he was just getting old! No matter; she obviously liked the wings. She asked to stroke them.

  He told her he was a resident of Tier, Culture or ex-Culture depending how you wanted to look at it; it wasn’t something he bothered about, though he supposed if forced he felt more loyalty to Tier, where he’d lived for twenty years, than to the Culture, where he’d lived for the rest of his life. In the AhForgetIt Tendency, that was, not the Culture proper, which the Tendency regarded as being far too serious and not nearly as dedicated to hedonistic pursuits as it ought to be. He’d first come here as part of a Tendency cultural mission, but stayed when the rest returned back to their home Orbital. (He’d thought about saying, Well, actually I was in the Tendency’s equivalent of Special Circumstances, kind of a spy, really, and I know lots of secret codes and stuff . . . but that probably wasn’t the sort of line that would work with a sophisticated girl like this.)

  Oh, much older than her; quite middle-aged, at one hundred and forty. Well, that was kind of her to say so. Yes, the wings worked, in anything less than 50% standard gravity. Had them since he was thirty. He lived on an air level here with 30% gravity. Huge web-trees up there. Some people lived in their hollowed-out fruit husks, though he preferred a sort of wispy house-thing made from sheets of chaltressor silk stretched over hi-pressure thinbooms. Oh yes, she’d be very welcome to see it.

  Had she seen much of Tier? Arrived yesterday? Such good timing for the Festival! He’d love to be her guide. Why not now? Why not. They could hire a yacht. First though they would go and make their apologies to the Ambassador. Of course; he and she were old pals. Something to tell that aunt of hers. And they’d call by the cruise ship; bring the others? Oh, just a little camera drone? Well why not? Yes, Tier’s rules could be tiresome at times, couldn’t they?

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yeeehhhsss . . .’

  That was him; she’d given one final, ear-splitting shriek and then gone limp, with just a huge grin on her gelsuited face (she’d kept it on, another aperture had obligingly opened). Time to bring this bout to a climax . . .

  The yacht had served him before; it heard what he said and took that as a signal to cut engines and go into free-fall. He loved technology.

  The neural lace would have handled his orgasm sequence better, controlling the flow of secretions from his drug glands so that they more precisely matched and enhanced the extended human-basic physiological process taking place, but it was still pretty damn good all the same; his didn’t last quite as long as hers obviously had, but he’d put it at over a minute, easily.

  He floated, still joined to her, watching the smile on her face and the tiny, dim lights in the huge dark eyes. Her fabulous chest heaved now and again; her four arms waved round with a graceful, under-sea motion. After a while, one of her hands went to the nape of her neck. She took the gelsuit’s head off and let it float free.

  The deep dark eyes stayed; the rest of her face was brown flushed with red, and quite beautiful. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

  With the gelsuit’s head removed, a little sweat beaded on her forehead and top lip. He gently fanned her face with his wings, bringing them sweeping softly from behind his shoulders and then ba
ck. The huge eyes regarded him for a while, then she put her head back, stretching and sighing. A couple of pink cushions floated past, bumping into her floating arms and ricocheting slowly away.

  The yacht’s hire-limit warning chimed; it wasn’t allowed to stray too far from Tier. He’d already told it to cruise back in when it hit the limit; it duly fired its engines and they were pressed back into the slickly warm surfaces of the couches and cushions in a delicious tangle of limbs for a while. The girl wriggled with a succulent slowness, eyes quite dark now.

  He looked over to one side and saw the little camera drone she’d brought, sitting on the ledge under one of the diamond view ports, its one beady eye still fastened on the two of them. He winked at it.

  Something moved outside, in the darkness, amongst the slow wheeling turn of stars. He watched it for a while. The yacht murmured, engine firing quietly; some apparent gravity stuck him and the girl to the ceiling for a second or two, then weightlessness returned. The girl made a couple of small noises that might have indicated she was asleep, and seemed to relax inside, letting go of him. He pulled her closer with his arms while his wings beat once, twice, bringing them both closer to the view port.

  Outside, close, by, a ship was passing by, heading inbound on its final approach for Tier. They must have been almost directly in its path; the yacht’s engine-burn had been avoidance action. Leffid looked down at the sleeping girl, wondering if he ought to wake her so that she could watch; there was something magical about seeing this great craft going sliding silently by, its dark, spectacularly embellished hull slicing space just a hundred metres away.

  He had an idea, and grinned to himself and stretched out his hand to take the little camera drone - currently getting a fine view of the lass’s backside and his balls - and turn it round, point it out the view port at the passing ship, so that she would have a surprise when she watched her recording, but then something else caught his attention, and his hand never did touch the camera drone.

  Instead he stared out of the port, his eyes fastened on a section of the vessel’s hull.