Excession

by Iain M. Banks

  The cloud cane was a walking stick burning compressed pellets of a mildly and brief-acting psychotropic mixture; taking a suck on its pierced top cap was like sliding two distorting lenses in front of your eyes, sticking your head underwater and shoving a chemical factory up your nose while standing in a shifting gravity field.

  The puff-creant was a small symbiont, half animal half vegetable, which you paid to squat on your shoulder and cough up your nose every time you turned your face towards it. The cough contained spores that could do any one of about thirty different and interesting things to your perceptions and moods.

  Genar-Hofoen was particularly pleased with his new suit. It was made of his own skin, genetically altered in various subtle ways, specially vat-grown and carefully tailored to his exact specifications. He’d donated a few skin cells to - and left the order and payment with - a gene-tailor here on Tier two and a half years earlier when he was on his way to God’shole habitat. It had been a whim after a drinking session (as had an animated obscene tattoo he’d removed a month later). He hadn’t really expected to pick the suit up for a while. Fortunately long-term fashions hadn’t changed too much in the interim. The suit and its accompanying cloak looked terrific. He felt great.

  SPADASSINS DIGLADIATE! ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND! GOL-IARD DUNKING!

  Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning ’scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, suggesting, offering, providing entrance, stimulating appetites, prompting desires; suggesting, propositioning, pandering.

  RHYPAROGRAPHY! KELOIDAL ANAMNESIS! IVRESSE!

  Genar-Hofoen walked through it all, soaking it all in, refusing all the offers and suggestions, politely turning down the overtures and come-ons, the recommendations and invitations.

  ZUFULOS! ORPHARIONS! RASTRAE! NAUMACHIA HOURLY!

  For now, he was content just to be here, walking, promenading, watching and being watched, sizing up and - with any luck - being sized up. It was evening - real evening - in this level of Tier, the time when Night City started to become busy; everywhere was open, nowhere was full, everybody wanted your custom, but nobody was really settling on a venue yet; just cruising, grazing, petting. Genar-Hofoen was happy to be part of that general drift; he loved this, he gloried in it. This was where he felt most himself. For now, there was simply no better place to be, and he believed in entering into the experience with all due and respectful intensity; these were his sort of people, here was where his sort of thing happened and this was his sort of place.

  PILIOUS OMADHAUNS INVITE RASURE! LAGOPHTHALMISCITY GUARANTEED WHEN YOU SEE THE JEISTIECORS AND LORICAS OF OUR MARTICHORASTIC MINIKINS!

  He saw her outside a Sublimer sekos set under the rotundly swollen bulk of a building shaped like a giant resistor. The entrance to the cult’s sacred place was a brightly shining loop, like a thick but tiny rainbow layered in different shades of white. Young Sublimers stood outside the enclosure, clad in glowing white robes. The Sublimers - each tall and thin - glowed, too; their skin glowed gently, pallid to the point of unhealthy-looking bloodlessness. Their eyes shone, soft light spilling from the wide, open whites, while the same half-silvery light was projected from their teeth when they smiled. They smiled all the time, even when they were talking. The woman was standing looking at the pair of enthusiastically gesticulating Sublimers with an expression of amused disdain.

  She was tall, tawny-skinned. Her face was broad, her nose thin and almost parallel with the planes of her cheeks; her arms were crossed, her body tilted back from the two young people, her weight taken on one black-booted heel as she looked down that long nose at the shining Sublimers. Her eyes and her hair looked as dark as the featureless shadowrobe which hid the rest of her frame.

  He stopped in the middle of the street and watched her arguing with the two Sublimers for a few moments. Her gestures and the way she held her body were different but the face was very similar to the way he remembered her looking, forty years ago; just a little older, perhaps. He had always wondered how much she’d changed.

  But it couldn’t be her. Tishlin had said she was still on board the Sleeper. They’d have mentioned if she’d left, wouldn’t they?

  He let a group of squatly chortling Bystlians pass him, then sauntered a little way back up the street, studying the architecture of the giant valve bulging over it from the opposite pavement and sniffing from his cloud cane in a vague, bored manner while watching a line of dark bombs flit out of the darkness above to fall and detonate somewhere beyond the line of barrel-like resistors that formed the other side of the street; bright yellow-orange explosions lit up the sky and debris rose slowly and fell. Further up the avenue, some sort of commotion surrounded a large animal.

  He turned and looked back down the crowded street. At that moment a giant blue-gold shape slid under his feet, rushing silently along within the mercury stream beneath the diamond plate. The girl arguing with the Sublimers turned, glancing at the street as the blob went gliding past. As she looked back to the two young glowing people she caught sight of him watching her. Her gaze settled on him for a moment and the flicker of an expression - a glimmer of recognition? - passed briefly over her face before she started talking to the Sublimers again. He hadn’t had time to look away even if he’d wanted to.

  He was wondering whether he ought to go over to her now, wait and see if she stepped back into the thoroughfare and maybe approach her then, or just walk away, when a tall girl in a glowing gown stepped up to him and said, ‘May I help you, sir? You seem taken with our place of exaltation. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Is there anything I can do to enlighten you?’

  He turned to the Sublimer. She was almost as tall as he; her face was pretty but somehow vacuous, though he knew that might have been prejudice on his part.

  Sublimers had turned what was a normal but generally optional part of a species’ choice of fate into a religion. Sublimers believed that everybody ought to Sublime, that every human, every animal, every machine and Mind ought to head straight for ultimate transcendence, leaving the mundane life behind and setting as direct a course as possible for nirvana.

  People who joined the cult spent a year trying to persuade others of this before they Sublimed themselves, joining one of the sect’s group-minds to contemplate irreality. The few drones, other AIs and Minds that became persuaded of the merit of this course of action through the arguments of the Sublimers tended to do what any other machine did on such occasions and disappear in the direction of the nearest Sublimed Entity, though one or two stuck around in a pre-Sublimed state long enough to help the cause. In general, though, the cult was regarded as rather a pointless one. Subliming was seen as something that usually happened to entire societies, and more as a practical lifestyle alteration than a religious commitment; more like moving house than entering a sacred order.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Genar-Hofoen said, sounding wary. ‘What exactly do you people believe in again?’

  The Sublimer looked up the street behind him. ‘Oh, we believe in the power of the Sublime,’ she said. ‘Let me tell you more.’ She glanced up the avenue again. ‘Oh; perhaps we ought to get off the street, don’t you think?’ She held out her hand and took a step back towards the pavement.

  Genar-Hofoen looked back, to where things were getting noisy. The giant animal he’d noticed earlier - a sexipedal pondrosaur - was advancing slowly down the avenue in the midst of a retinue and a crowd of spectators. The shaggy, brown-furred animal was six metres tall, splendidly liveried with long, gaudy banners and ribbons and commanded by a garishly uniformed mahout brandishing a fiery mace. The beast was surmounted by a glitteringly black and silver cupola whose bulbously filigreed windows gave no hint of who or what might be inside; similarly orna
mented bowls covered the great animal’s eyes. It was attended by five loping kliestrithrals, each black tusked creature pawing at the street surface and snorting and held on a tight lead by a burly hire guard. A knot of people held the procession up; the pondrosaur paused and put its long head back to let out a surprisingly soft, subdued roar, then it adjusted its eye-cups with its two leg-thick fore-limbs and bobbed its head to either side. The gaggle of promenaders began to disperse and the great beast and its escorts moved forward again.

  ‘Hmm, yes,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘Perhaps we’d better move out the way.’ He finished the 9050 and looked round for a place to deposit the empty container.

  ‘Please; allow me.’ The Sublimer girl took the field-goblet from him as though it was some sort of holy object. Genar-Hofoen followed her onto the sidewalk; she put an arm through his and they proceeded slowly towards the entrance to the sekos, where the woman was still standing talking to the other two Sublimers with her look of ironic curiosity.

  ‘Have you heard of Sublimers before?’ the girl on his arm asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, watching the other woman’s face as they approached. They stopped on the pavement outside the Sublimer building, entering a hushfield in which the only sound was gently tinkling music and a background of waves on a beach. ‘You believe everybody should just sort of disappear up their own arses, don’t you?’ he asked with every appearance of innocence. He was only a few metres from the woman in the shadowrobe, though the compartmented hushfield meant he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her face was much like he remembered it; the eyes and mouth were the same. She had never worn her hair up like that, but even its shade of black-blue was the same.

  ‘Oh, no!’ the Sublimer girl said, her expression terribly serious. ‘What we believe in takes one completely away from such bodily concerns . . .’

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see up the street, where the pondrosaur was shuffling forwards through a thick crowd of admirers. He smiled at the Sublimer girl as she talked on. He shifted a little so that he could see the other woman better.

  No, it wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t. She’d have recognised him, she’d have reacted by now. Even if she’d been trying to pretend she hadn’t seen him he’d have been able to tell; she’d never been very good at hiding her feelings from anybody, least of all from him. She glanced at him again, then quickly away. He felt a sudden, unbidden sensation of fearful pleasure, a jolt of excitement which left his skin tingling.

  ‘. . . highest expression of our quintessential urge to be greater than we . . .’ He nodded and looked at the Sublimer girl, who was still babbling away. He frowned a little and stroked his chin with his free hand, still nodding. He kept watching the other woman. Out on the street, the pondrosaur and its retinue had come to a stop almost alongside them; a Tier Sintricate was hovering level with the giant animal’s mahout, who seemed to be arguing angrily with it.

  The woman was smiling at the other two Sublimers with what appeared to be an expression of tolerant ridicule. She kept her eyes on the Sublimer fellow doing the talking at that point, but took a long, deep breath, and - just as she let it out - glanced at Genar-Hofoen again with the briefest of smiles and a flick of her eyebrows before looking back at the Sublimers and tipping her head just a little to one side.

  He wondered. Would SC really go this far to keep him under their control, or at least under their eye? How likely was it that he should find somebody who looked so much like her? He supposed there must be hundreds of people who bore a passing resemblance to Dajeil Gelian; perhaps there were even a few who had heard something about her and deliberately assumed her appearance; that happened all the time with genuinely famous people and just because he’d never heard of anybody taking on Dajeil’s looks didn’t mean nobody had ever done so. If this person was one of them, it was just possible he would have to be on his guard . . .

  ‘. . . personal ambition or the desire to better oneself or to provide opportunities for one’s children is but a pale reflection of, compared to the ultimate transcendence which true Subliming offers; for, as it is written . . .’

  Genar-Hofoen leant closer to the girl talking to him and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure,’ he said quietly. ‘Would you excuse me for just a moment?’

  He took the two steps over to the woman in the shadowrobe. She turned her head from the two Sublimers and smiled politely at him. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ He grinned as he said it, acknowledging both the well-worn nature of the line and the fact that neither he nor she was really interested in what the Sublimers had to say.

  She nodded her head politely to him. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. Her voice was higher than Dajeil’s; more girlish, and with a quite different accent. ‘Though if we had met and you hadn’t altered in some way and I’d forgotten, certainly I’d be far too ashamed to admit it.’ She smiled. He did the same. She frowned. ‘Unless . . . do you live on Tier?’

  ‘Just passing through,’ he told her. A bomber, in flames, tore past just overhead and exploded in a burst of light behind the Sublimer building. On the street, the argument around the pondrosaur seemed to be getting more heated; the animal itself was staring intently at the Sintricate and its mahout was standing up on its neck, pointing the flaming mace at the darkly spiny being to emphasise whatever points he was making.

  ‘But I’ve been this way before,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘Perhaps we bumped into each other then.’

  She nodded thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded.

  ‘Oh, you two know each other?’ said the young Sublimer man she’d been talking to. ‘Well, many people find that Subliming in the company of a loved one or just somebody they know is--’

  ‘Do you play Calascenic Crasis?’ she asked, cutting across the young Sublimer. ‘You may have seen me at a game here.’ She put her head back, looking down that long nose at him. ‘If so, I’m disappointed you left it till now to say hello.’

  ‘Ah!’ the Sublimer lad said. ‘Games; an expression of the urge to enter into worlds beyond ourselves! Another--’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of the game,’ he confessed. ‘Do you recommend it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, and sounded ironic. ‘It benefits all who play.’

  ‘Well, I’m always willing to entertain some new experience. Perhaps you could teach me.’

  ‘Ah, now; the ultimate new experience--’ began the Sublimer lad.

  Genar-Hofoen turned to him and said, ‘Oh, shut up!’ It had been an instinctive reaction, and for a moment he was worried he might have said the wrong thing, but she didn’t seem to be regarding the young Sublimer’s hurt look with any great degree of sympathy.

  She looked back to him. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You stand me my stake and I’ll teach you Crasis.’

  He smiled, wondering if that had been too easy. ‘It’s a deal,’ he said. He waved the cloud cane under his nose and took a deep breath, then bowed. ‘My name’s Byr.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ She nodded again. ‘Call me Flin,’ she said, and, taking hold of the cane, waved it under her own nose.

  ‘Shall we, Flin?’ he said, and indicated the street beyond, where the pondrosaur had sunk to its belly, its four legs doubled up underneath it and both fore-limbs folded beneath its chin, as though bored. Two Sintricates were shouting at the enraged mahout, who was shaking the flaming mace at them. The hire guards were looking nervous and patting the restless kliestrithrals.

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Remember where you met!’ the Sublimer called after them. ‘Subliming is the ultimate meeting of souls, the pinnacle of . . .’ They left the hushfield. His voice was drowned out by the thudding of projected anti-aircraft fire as they walked along the pavement.

  ‘So, where are we going?’ he asked her.

  ‘Well, you can take me for a drink and then we’ll hit a Crasis bar I know. Sound all right?’

  ‘Sounds fine. Shall we take a trap
?’ he said, pointing a little way up the street to a two-wheeled open vehicle waiting by the kerb. A ysner-mistretl pair were harnessed between the traces, the ysner craning its long neck down to peck at a feed bag in the gutter, the small, smartly uniformed mistretl on its back looking around alertly and tapping its thumbs together.

  ‘Good idea,’ she said. They walked up to the trap and climbed aboard. ‘The Collyrium Lounge,’ the woman said to the mistretl as they sat in the rear of the small vehicle. It saluted and pulled a whip out from its fancy jerkin. The ysner made a sighing noise.

  The trap shook suddenly. A great deep burst of noise came from the street behind them. They all looked round. The pondrosaur was rearing up, bellowing; its mahout nearly fell off its neck. His mace tumbled from his grasp and bounced on the street. Two of the kliestrithrals jumped up and leapt into the crowd, snarling and dragging their handlers with them. The two Sintricates who’d been arguing with the mahout rose quickly into the air out of the way; people in float harnesses took avoiding action through the confusion of searchlight beams and anti-aircraft fire. Flin and Genar-Hofoen watched people scatter in all directions as the pondrosaur leapt forward with surprising agility and started charging down the street towards them. The mahout clung desperately to the beast’s ears, screeching at it to stop. The stabilised black and silver cupola on the animal’s back seemed to float along above it until the animal’s increasing speed forced it to oscillate from side to side. At Genar-Hofoen’s side, Flin seemed frozen.