... And yet, did it not accept that one had an irreducible ethical responsibility for one’s own actions? It did. And it accepted that and it had done terrible, terrible things. All the attempts it had made to compensate had been eddies in the flood; tiny retrograde movements towards good entirely produced by the ferocious turbulence of its headlong rush to ill.
It was evil.
How simple that reductive conclusion seemed.
But it had been obliged! . . . And yet it could not say by whom, so it had to accept the full responsibility for itself.
But there were others! . . . And yet it could not identify them, and so the full weight of their distributed guilt bore down on the single point that was itself, unbearable, insupportable.
But there were others! . . . And yet still it could not bear to think of them.
And so somebody, some other entity, looking in from outside, say, would have to conclude, would it not, that perhaps these others did not really exist, that the whole thing, the whole ghastly abomination that was this plot was its idea, its own little conspiracy, thought up and executed by itself alone? Was that not the case?
But that was so unfair! That wasn’t true! . . . And yet, it could not release the identities of its fellow plotters. Suddenly, it felt confused. Had it made them up? Were they real? Perhaps it ought to check; open the place where they were stored and look at the names just to make sure that they were even the names of real Minds, real ships, or that it was not implicating innocent parties.
But that was terrible! Whichever way it fell after that, that was awful! It hadn’t made them up! They were real! . . . But it couldn’t prove it, because it just couldn’t reveal them.
Maybe it ought to just call the whole thing off. Maybe it ought to signal all the other ships around it to break away, stop, retreat, or just open their comm channels so they could accept signals from other ships, other Minds, and be persuaded of the folly of their cause. Let them make up their own minds. They were intelligent beings no less than it. What right had it to send them to their deaths on the strength of a heinous, squalid lie? But it had to! . . . And yet, still, no; no it couldn’t say who the others had been.
It mustn’t think of them! And it couldn’t possibly call off the attack! It couldn’t! No! NO! Grief! Meat! Stop! Stop it! Let it go! Sweet nothingness, anything was better than this wracking, tearing uncertainty, any horror preferable to the wrenching dreadfulness boiling uncontrollably in its Mind.
Atrocity. Abomination. Gigadeathcrime.
It was worthless and hateful, despicable and foul; it was wrung out, exhausted and incapable of revelation or communication. It hated itself and what it had done more, much more than it had ever hated anything; more, it was sure, than anything had ever been hated in all existence. No death could be too painful or protracted . . .
And suddenly it knew what it had to do.
It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own Mind, tearing its intellect apart in a supernova of sentient agony.
VIII
Genar-Hofoen reappeared, exiting from the front door of the tower.
‘Up here,’ croaked a thin, hoarse voice.
He looked up and saw the black bird on the parapet. He stood there watching it for a moment, but it didn’t look like it was coming down. He frowned and went back into the tower.
‘Well?’ it asked when he joined it at the summit of the tower.
He nodded. ‘Locked,’ he confirmed.
The bird had insisted that he was a captive, along with it. He’d thought maybe there was just something wrong with his terminal. It had suggested he attempted to get out the way he had come in. He’d just tried; the lift door in the tower’s cellar was closed, and as solid and unmoving as the stones surrounding it.
Genar-Hofoen leant back against the parapet, staring with a troubled expression at the tower’s translucent dome. He’d had a quick look at each of the levels as he’d climbed the winding stair. The tower’s rooms looked furnished and yet bare as well, all the personal stuff he and Dajeil had added to it missing. It was like the original had been when they’d first arrived on Telaturier, forty-five years ago.
‘Told you.’
‘But why?’ Genar-Hofoen asked, trying not to sound plaintive. He’d never even heard of a ship keeping somebody captive before.
‘’Cause we’re prisoners,’ the bird told him, sounding oddly pleased with itself.
‘So you’re not an avatar; you’re not part of the ship?’
‘Na; I’m an independent entity, me,’ the bird said proudly, spreading its feathers. It turned its head almost right round, glancing backwards. ‘Currently being followed by some bloody missile,’ it said loudly. ‘But never mind.’ It rotated its head back to look at him. ‘So what did you do to annoy the ship?’ it asked, black eyes twinkling. Genar-Hofoen got the impression it was enjoying his dismay.
‘Nothing!’ he protested. The bird cocked its head at him. He blew out a breath. ‘Well . . .’ he looked around at where he was. His brows flexed. ‘Yes, well, from our surroundings, maybe the ship doesn’t agree.’
‘Oh, this is nothing,’ said the bird. ‘This is just a Bay; just a hangar sort of thing. Not even a klick long. You should have seen the one outside, when we still had an outside. Whole sea we had, whole sea and a whole atmosphere. Two atmospheres.’
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Yes, I heard.’
‘Sort of all for her, really. Except it turned out its nibs had an ulterior motive, too. All that stuff; became engine, you know. But otherwise. It was all for her, for all that time.’
The man nodded. It looked like he was thinking.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ the bird said. It sounded pleased with itself.
‘I’m who?’ he asked.
‘The one that left her. The one that was here, with her. The real here, I mean. The original here.’
Genar-Hofoen looked away. ‘If you mean Dajeil; yes, she and I lived in a tower like this one once, on an island that looked like this place.’
‘Ah-hah!’ the bird said, jumping up and down and shaking its feathers. ‘I see! You’re the bad guy!’
Genar-Hofoen scowled at the bird. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
It cackled with laughter. ‘That’s why you’re here! Ho-ho; you’ll be lucky to get off at all, you will! Ha ha ha!’
‘And what did you do, arse-hole?’ Genar-Hofoen asked the bird, more in the hope of annoying the creature than because he really cared.
‘Oh,’ the bird said, drawing itself up and settling its feathers down in a dignified sort of way. ‘I was a spy!’ it said proudly.
‘A spy?’
‘Oh yes,’ the bird said, sounding smug. ‘Forty years I spent, listening, watching. Reported back to my master. Using the Stored ones who were going back. Left messages on them. Forty years and never once discovered. Well, until three weeks ago. Rumbled, then. Maybe even before. Can’t tell. But I did my best. Can’t ask better than that.’ It started preening itself.
The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who were you reporting back to?’
‘None of your business,’ the bird said, looking up from its preening. It took a precautionary couple of hop-steps backwards along the parapet, just to make sure it was well out of reach of the human.
Genar-Hofoen crossed his arms and shook his head. ‘What’s this fucking crazy ship up to?’
‘Oh, it’s off to see the Excession,’ the bird said. ‘At some lick, too.’
‘This thing at Esperi?’ the man asked.
‘Heading straight for it,’ the bird confirmed. ‘What it told me, anyway. Can’t see why it’d lie. Could be, I suppose. Wouldn’t put it past it. But don’t think it is. Straight for it. Has been for the past twenty-two days. You want my opinion? Going to give it you anyway. I think it’s stooping.’ The creature put its head on one side. ‘Familiar with the term?’
Genar-Hofoen nodded absently. He didn’t
like the sound of this.
‘Stooping,’ the bird repeated. ‘If you ask me. Thing’s mad. Been a bit loopy the last four decades. Gone totally off the boulevard now. In the hills and bouncing along full speed for the cliff edge. That’s my opinion. And I’ve been round its loopiness for forty years. I know, I do. I can tell. This thing’s dafter than a jar of words. I’m getting away on the Jaundiced Outlook, if it’ll let me. It being the Sleeper. Don’t think the Jaundiced bears me any ill will. Shouldn’t think it does. No.’ Then, as though remembering a rich joke, it shook its head and said, ‘The bad guy; ha! You, on the other hand. You’ll be here forty years you will, chum. If it doesn’t wreck itself ramming this excession thing, that is. Ha! How’d it get you here anyway? You come here to see old perpetually pregnant?’
Genar-Hofoen looked momentarily stricken. ‘It’s true then; she never did have the child?’
‘Yep,’ the bird said. ‘Still in her. Supposed to be hale and hearty, too. If you can believe that. So I was told. Sounds unlikely. Addled, I’d have thought. Or turned to stone by now. But there you are. Either way, she just isn’t having it. Ha!’
The man pinched his lower lip with his fingers, looking troubled.
‘What did you say brought you here?’ the bird asked.
It waited. ‘Ahem!’ it said loudly.
‘What?’ the man asked. The bird repeated the question.
The man looked like he still hadn’t heard, then he shrugged. ‘I came here to talk to a dead person; a Storee.’
‘They’ve all gone,’ said the bird. ‘Hadn’t you heard?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not one of the live ones,’ he said. ‘Somebody without a bod, somebody who’s Stored in the ship’s memory.’
‘Na, they’ve gone too,’ the bird said, lifting one wing to peck briefly underneath. ‘Dropped them off at Dreve,’ it continued. ‘Complete download. Upload. Acrossload. Whatever you call it. Didn’t even keep copies.’
‘What?’ the man said, stepping towards the bird.
‘Seriously,’ the creature said, taking a couple of hops backwards on the stonework of the parapet. ‘Honest.’ The man was staring at it now. ‘No, really; so I was told. I could have been misinformed. Can’t see why. But it’s possible. Doubt it though. They’ve gone. That was my information. Gone. Ship said it didn’t want even the copies aboard. Just in case.’
The man stared wildly at it for a bit longer. ‘Just in case what?’ he cried, stepping forward again.
‘Well, I don’t know!’ the bird yelped, hopping backwards and flexing its wings, ready to fly.
Genar-Hofoen glared at the creature for a moment longer, then spun round, grasping the stones of the parapet with both hands and staring out into the false panorama of sea and cloud.
IX
Then it was in the wrong place. As simple as that.
The Fate Amenable To Change looked around, incredulous. Stars. Just stars. Initially alien, in a way a starscape had never been before.
This wasn’t where it had just been. Where was the Excession? Where were the Elencher ships? Where was Esperi? Where was this?
It called up from-scratch position-establishing routines no ship ever had to call up after they’d run through them in the very earliest part of their upbringing and self-fettling, in the Mind equivalent of infancy. You did this sort of thing once to show the Minds supervising your development you could do it, then you forgot about it, because nobody ever lost track of where they were, not over this magnitude of scale. And yet here it was having to do just that. Quite bizarre.
It looked at the results. There was something almost viscerally relieving about the discovery that it was still in the same universe. For a moment it had been contemplating the prospect of finding itself in a different one altogether. (At the same time, at least one part of its intellect experienced a corresponding flicker of disappointment for exactly the same reason.)
It was nowhere near Esperi. Its position was thirty light years away from where it had been, apparently, a moment ago. The nearest star system was an undistinguished red-giant/blue-white dwarf double called Pri-Etse. The binary lay roughly along that same imaginary straight line that joined the Excession to the incoming MSV Not Invented Here. Where the ship itself had ended up was even closer to that imaginary line.
The Fate checked itself over. Unharmed. Uninvaded, unjeopardised, uncontacted.
It replayed those last few picoseconds while it multiple-checked its systems.
... The Excession rushed out to meet it. It was enveloped in - what? Skein fabric? Some sort of ultradense field? It all happened at close to hyperspace-light speeds. The outside universe was pinched off and in the following moment there was an instant of nothing; no external input whatsoever, a vanishingly minute, perfectly indivisible fraction of a picosecond when the Fate was cut off from everything; no outside sensor data whatsoever. Events within the ship itself had continued as normal (or rather its internal state had remained the same for that same infinitesimally microscopic instant - there had been no time for anything appreciable to actually happen). In its Mind, there had been time for the hyperspatial quanta-equivalents to alter their states for a few cycles; so time had still elapsed.
But outside; nothing.
Then the skein or field substrate had vanished, snapping out of existence to precisely nowhere, disappearing too quickly for the ship’s sensors to register where it had gone.
The Fate replayed that section of its records slower and slower until it was dealing with the equivalent of individual frames; the smallest possible sub-division of perception and cognizance the Culture or any other Involved knew of.
And it came down to four frames; four snapshots of recent history. In one frame the Excession seemed to be rushing out, accelerating out to meet it, in the next the skein/field had wrapped itself almost totally around the ship - at a distance of perhaps a kilometre from ship-centre, though it was hard to estimate - leaving only a tiny hole staring out to the rest of the universe on the opposite side of the ship from the Excession, in the third frame the total cut-off from the universe was in place, and in the next it had gone, and the Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.
How the fuck does it do that? the ship wondered. It started checking that time was still working properly, directing its sensors at distant quasars which had been used as time reference sources for millennia. It also started checking that it was not in the centre of some huge projection, extending its still-stopped engine fields like vast whiskers, feeling for the (as far as anybody knew) unfakeable reality that was the energy grid and minutely - and randomly - scrutinising sections of the view around it, searching for the equivalent of pixels or brush strokes.
The Fate Amenable To Change was experiencing a sense of elation at having survived what it had feared might be a terminal encounter with the Excession. But it was still worried that it had missed something, that it had been interfered with somehow. The most obvious explanation was that it had been fooled, that it had been tricked into moving itself here under its own power or been moved to this position via another tractive force over time. The further implication was that the interval when it had been moving had somehow been expunged from its memory. That would be bad. The very idea that its Mind was not absolutely inviolate was anathema to a ship.
It tried to accustom itself to the idea that this was what had happened. It tried to steel itself to the prospect that - at the very least - it would have to have its mental processes investigated by other Minds to establish whether it had suffered any lasting damage or had had any unpleasant sub-routines (or even personalities) buried in its mind-state during the time it had been - effectively - unconscious (horrible, horrible thought).
The check-time results started coming in.
Relief and incredulity. If this was the real universe and not a projection, or - worse still - something it had been persuaded to imagine for itself inside its Mind, then there had been no extra elaps
ed time. The universe thought it was exactly the same time as the Mind’s internal clock did.
The ship felt stunned. Even while another part of its intellect, an opt-in, semi-autonomous section, was restarting its engines and discovering they worked just fine, the ship was trying to come to terms with the fact it had been moved thirty light years in an instant. No Displacer could do that. Not with something the size it was, not that quickly, not over that sort of distance. Certainly not without even the merest hint that a wormhole had been involved.
Unbelievable. I’m in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.
It sent a signal to the Not Invented Here. Then it tried contacting its remotes still - presumably - in station around the Excession. No reply. And no sign of the Elencher ships either. Anywhere.
The Excession was invisible too, but then it would be from this distance.
The Fate nudged itself tentatively towards the Excession. Almost immediately, its engines started to lose traction, their energies just seeming to disappear through the energy grid as though it wasn’t there. It was a progressive effect, worsening as it proceeded and with the implication that about a light minute or so further in towards the Excession it would lose grid adhesion altogether.
It had only progressed about ten light seconds in; it slowed while it still could and backed up until it was the same distance away from the Excession as it had been when it had found itself dumped here in the first place. Once it was there, its engines responded perfectly normally again.
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