‘Are you serious?’ she asked. She had a strong urge to fart but she held it in; she was oddly concerned that the Affronter would think she was being insulting.
‘I am perfectly serious, professor. The Affront and the Culture are now at war.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She glanced over at her terminal brooch, lying on an extension of the bed’s headboard. Well, the Newsflash light was winking, right enough; practically strobing in fact; must be urgent indeed. She thought. ‘Shouldn’t you be addressing this to the Hub?’
‘It refuses to communicate,’ the Affronter officer said. ‘We have surrounded it. You have been deemed most senior Culture - ex-Culture, I should say - representative in its place. This is not a joke, professor, I’m sorry to say. The Orbital has been mined with AM warheads. If it proves necessary, your world will be destroyed. The full cooperation of yourself and everybody else on the Orbital will help ensure this does not happen.’
‘Well, I don’t accept this honour, Cloudsheen. I--’
The Affronter had turned and was floating back towards the windows again. It swivelled in the air as it retreated. ‘You don’t have to,’ it said. ‘As I said, you have been deemed.’
‘Well then,’ she said, ‘I deem you to be acting without any authority I care to recognise and--’
The Affronter darted through the air towards her and stopped directly above the bed, making her flinch despite herself. She smelled . . . something cold and toxic. ‘Professor,’ Cloudsheen said. ‘This is not an academic debate or some common room word-game. You are prisoners and hostages and all your lives are forfeit. The sooner you understand the realities of the situation, the better. I know as well as you that you are in no way in charge of the Orbital, but certain formalities have to be observed, regardless of their practical irrelevance. I consider that duty has now been discharged and frankly that’s all that matters, because I have the AM warheads; and you don’t.’ It drew quickly away, sucking a cool breeze behind it. It stopped just before the windows again. ‘Lastly,’ it said, ‘I am sorry to have disturbed you. I thank you personally and on behalf of my crew for the reception party. It was most enjoyable.’
He left. The curtains soughed in and out, slowly golden.
Her heart, she was surprised to discover, was pounding.
The Attitude Adjuster woke them one by one, telling each the same story; Excessionary threat near Esperi, Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Some of the vessels were immediately suspicious, or at least puzzled. The confirmatory messages from other craft - the No Fixed Abode, the Different Tan and the Not Invented Here - convinced them in every case.
Part of the Attitude Adjuster felt sick. It knew it was doing the right thing, in the end, but at a simple, surface level it felt disgust at the deception it was having to foist upon its fellow ships. It tried to tell itself that it would all end with little or no blood spilled and few or no Mind-deaths, but it knew that there was no guarantee. It had spent years thinking all this through, shortly after the proposition had been put to it seventy years earlier, and had known then, accepted then that it might come to this, but it had always hoped it would not. Now the moment was at hand it was starting to wonder if it had made a mistake, but knew it was too late to turn back now. Better to believe that it had been right then and now it was merely being short-sighted and squeamish.
It could not be wrong. It was not wrong. It had had an open mind and it had become convinced of the rightness of the course which was being suggested and in which it would play such an important part. It had done as it had been asked to do; it had watched the Affront, studied them, immersed itself in their history, culture and beliefs. And in all that time it had achieved a kind of sympathy for them, an empathy, even, and at the start perhaps a degree of admiration for them, but it had also built up a cold and terrible hatred of their ways.
In the end, it thought it understood them because it was just a little like them.
It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.
The Attitude Adjuster thought it could see into the souls of the Affronters. They were not the happy-go-lucky life-and-soul-of-the-party grand fellows with a few bad habits they were commonly thought to be; they were not thoughtlessly cruel in the course of seeking to indulge other more benign and even admirable pleasures; they were not merely terrible rascals.
They gloried, first and foremost, in their cruelty. Their cruelty was the point. They were not thoughtless. They knew they hurt their own kind and others and they revelled in it; it was their purpose. The rest - the robust joviality, the blokish vivacity - was part happy accident, part cunningly exaggerated ploy, the equivalent of an angelic-looking child discovering that a glowing smile will melt the severest adult heart and excuse almost any act, however dreadful.
It had agreed to the plan now coming to fruition with a heavy soul. People would die, Minds be destroyed because of what it was doing. The ghastly danger was gigadeathcrime. Mass destruction. Utter horror. The Attitude Adjuster had lied, it had deceived, it had acted - by what it knew would be the consensual opinion of all but a few of its peers - with massive dishonour. It was all too well aware its name might live for millennia hence as that of a traitor, as an abhorrence, an abomination.
Still, it would do what it had become convinced had to be done, because to do otherwise would be to wish an even worse self-hatred upon itself, the ultimate abomination of disgust at oneself.
Perhaps, it told itself as it brought another slumbering warcraft to wakefulness, the Excession would make everything all right. The half-thought was already ironic, but it continued with it anyway. Yes; maybe the Excession was the solution. Maybe it really was worth all that was being risked in its name, and capable of bringing placid resolution. That would be sweet; the excuse takes over, the casus belli brings peace . . . Like fuck, it thought. The ship sneered at itself, examining the idiotic thought and then discarding it with probably less contempt than it deserved.
It was, anyway, too late to reconsider now. Too much had been done already. The Pittance Mind was already dead, choosing self-destruction rather than compromise; the human who had been the only other conscious sentience in the rock had been killed, and the de-stored ships would speed, utterly deceived, to what could well prove to be their doom; the future alone knew who or what else they would take with them. The war had begun and all the Attitude Adjuster could do was play out the part it had agreed to play.
Another warship Mind surfaced to wakefulness.
... Excessionary threat near Esperi, the Attitude Adjuster told the newly woken ship; Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Confirmatory messages from the GSV No Fixed Abode, the GCU Different Tan and the MSV Not Invented Here attached . . .
The module Scopell-Afranqui left the urgencies of the instant behind for a moment and retreated into a kind of simulation of its pl
ight.
The craft had a romantic, even sentimental streak which Genar-Hofoen had rarely glimpsed in all the two years they had spent together on God’shole habitat (and which, indeed, it had deliberately kept hidden for fear of his ridicule), and it saw itself now as being like the castellan of some small fortified embassy in a teeming barbarian city, far from the civilised lands that were his home; a wise, thoughtful man, technically a warrior, but more of a thinker, one who saw much more of the realities behind the embassy’s mission than those in his charge, and who had devoutly hoped that his warrior skills would never be called upon. Well, that time had come; the native soldiers were hammering at the compound’s gates right now and it was only a matter of time before the embassy compound fell. There was treasure in the embassy and the barbarians would not rest until they had it.
The castellan left the parapet where he had looked out upon the besieging forces and retreated to his private chamber. His few troops were already putting up the best defence they could; nothing he could do or say would do other than hinder them now. His few spies had been dispatched some time ago through secret passageways into the city, to do what damage they could once the embassy itself was destroyed, as it surely must be. There was nothing else which awaited his attention. Save this one decision.
He had already opened the safe and taken out the sealed orders; the paper was in his hand. He read it again. So it was to be destruction. He had guessed as much, but it was still a shock somehow.
It should not have come to this, but it had. He had known the risks, they had been pointed out at the beginning, when he had taken up this position, but he had not really imagined for a moment that he would really be faced with either utter dishonour and the vicarious treachery of forced collaboration, or death at his own hand.
There was, of course, no real choice. Call it his upbringing. He looked ruefully around the small private chamber that held the memories of home, his library, his clothes and keepsakes. This was him. This was who he was. The same beliefs and principles that had led him here to this lonely outpost required that there was no choice over surrender or death. But there was still one choice to make, and it was a bitter one to be given.
He could destroy the embassy - and himself with it, of course - completely, so that all that would be left to the barbarians would be its stones. Or he could take the entire city with him. It was not just a city; in one sense it was not even principally a city; it was a vast arsenal, a crowded barracks and a busy naval port; altogether an important component of the barbarians’ war effort. Its destruction would benefit the side that the castellan was loyal to, the cause that he absolutely believed in; arguably it would save lives in the long run. Yet the city had its civilians too; the out-numbering innocents that were the women and children and the subjugated underclasses, not to mention the blameless others from neutral lands who just happened to find themselves caught up in the war through no fault of their own. Had he a right to snuff them out too by destroying the city?
He put the piece of paper down. He looked at his reflection in a distant looking glass.
Death. In all this choice there was no doubt about his own fate, only about how he would be remembered. As humanitarian, or weakling? As mass-murderer, or hero?
Death. How strange to contemplate it now.
He had always wondered how he would face it. There was a certain continued existence, of course. He had faith in that; the assurances of the priests that his soul was recorded in a great book, somewhere, and capable of resurrection. But the precise he he was right now; that would assuredly end, and soon; that was over.
Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on for ever risked ending up in some as yet unglimpsed horror-future. What if you lived for ever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
Better to die than risk that.
Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.
The outer gates fell; he heard them go. The castellan stood up and went to the casement. In the courtyard, the barbarian soldiers flowed through to the last line of defence.
Soon. The choice, the choice. He could spin a coin, but that would be . . . cheap. Unworthy.
He walked to the device that would destroy the embassy compound, and the city too, if he chose.
There was no choice here, either. Not really.
There would be peace again. The only question was when.
He could not know if ultimately more people would suffer and die because he was choosing not to destroy the city, but at least this way the damage and the casualties would be confined to the minimum for the longest possible time. And if in the future he would be judged to have done the wrong thing and to have made the incorrect decision . . . well, death had the other advantage that he would not be present to suffer that knowledge of that judgement.
He double-checked that the device was set so that only the embassy would be destroyed, he waited a moment longer to be sure that he was calm and clear about what he was doing, then as the tears came to his eyes, he activated the device.
The module Scopell-Afranqui self-destructed in a blink of annihilatory energies centred on its AI core, obliterating it entirely; the module itself was blasted into a million pieces. The explosion sent a shiver through the fabric of God’shole habitat that was felt all the way round that great wheel; it took out a significant section of the surrounding inner docks area and caused a rupture in the skin of the engineering compartment beneath; this was quickly repaired.
The destroyer Riptalon was damaged and would require a further week in dock, though there were no fatalities or serious injuries on board. The explosion killed five officers and a few dozen soldiers and technicians in the docks and smaller craft alongside the module; a number of semi-aware AI entities were also lost and their cores later found to be corrupted by agent entities the module had succeeded in infiltrating into the habitat’s systems shortly before its destruction, despite every precaution. These, or their descendants, continued to significantly reduce the habitat’s contribution to the war effort for the duration of hostilities.
~ So what’s it like being at war?
~ Scary, when you have every reason to believe you may be sitting next to the real reason it was declared.
The GCU Fate Amenable To Change floated in a triangular pattern with the two Elencher vessels Sober Counsel and Appeal To Reason. The two Elench ships had repeatedly attempted to communicate with the Excession, entirely without success. The Fate was getting nervous, just waiting for the pressure building up with the crews of the two Elencher ships for more intrusive action to overcome the reticence of the craft themselves.
The three craft had secretly declared their own little pact over the last few days after the second Elencher ship had appeared on the scene. They had exchanged drone and human avatars, opened up volumes of their mind-sets they would not normally have exposed to craft of another society, and pledged not to act without consulting the others. That agreeable agreement would lapse if the Elenchers chose to try to interfere with the Excession. It would have to lapse to some extent anyway in a couple of days when the MSV Not Invented Here arrived and - the Fate suspected - started bossing everybody about, but it was trying desperately to dissuade the two Elencher ships from doing anything rash in the meantime.
~ Are there any Affront warships known to be anywhere in this volume? the Appeal To Reason asked.
<
br /> ~ No, the Fate Amenable To Change replied. ~ In fact they’ve been staying away and telling everybody else to do so as well. I suppose we should have guessed that was suspicious in itself. That’s the trouble with people like them I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.
~ You think they want the Excession? the Sober Counsel asked.
~ It’s possible.
~ Perhaps they’re not coming here, suggested the Appeal To Reason. ~ Aren’t they attacking the whole Culture? There are reports of scores of ships and Orbitals being taken . . .
~ I don’t know, the Fate admitted. It looks like madness to me; they can’t defeat the whole Culture.
~ But they’re saying a ship-store at this rock Pittance has fallen, the Sober Counsel sent.
~ Well, yes. Officially there’s still a blackout on that, but (off record, of course), if they are coming in this direction I wouldn’t want to be here in about a week’s time.
~ So if we’re going to get through to the entity, we’d better do it soon, the Appeal To Reason sent.
~ Oh, don’t start on about that again; you said yourself they might not be coming . . . the Fate began, then broke off. ~ Hold on. Are you getting this?
...(SEMIWIDE BEAM, AFFRONTBASE ALLTRANS, LOOP.)
ATTENTION ALL CRAFT IN ESPERI NEAR SPACE: THE ENTITY LOCATED AT (location sequence enclosed) WAS FIRST DISCOVERED BY THE AFFRONT CRUISER FURIOUS PURPOSE ON (trans; n4.28.803.8+) AND IS HEREBY FULLY AND RIGHTFULLY CLAIMED ON THE BEHALF OF THE AFFRONT REPUBLIC AS AN INTEGRAL AND FULLY SOVEREIGN AFFRONT PROPERTY SUBJECT TO AFFRONT LAWS, EDICTS, RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES.
IN THE LIGHT OF THE CULTURE-PROVOKED HOSTILITIES NOW EXISTING BETWEEN THE AFFRONT AND THE CULTURE, THE FULL CUSTODIAL PROTECTION OF AFFRONT ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO THE FOREMENTIONED VOLUME AND TO THAT END AN ORDINANCE ABSOLUTELY PROHIBITING ALL NON-AFFRONT TRAFFIC WITHIN TEN STANDARD LIGHT YEARS AROUND THE ENTITY HAS BEEN ISSUED WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT AND HENCE ALL CRAFT INSIDE THIS VOLUME ARE ORDERED TO VACATE SAID VOLUME FORTHWITH.
Excession Page 33
