Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

  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 The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as ever, created enormous casualties on both sides.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; their 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 grace 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 ten 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 w
as 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 allowed 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.

  Following its renaming, and paying no apparent heed to the craft now tailing it, the Sleeper Service's next step was to evacuate everybody else remaining aboard. Most of the ships had already gone, and the rest were asked to leave. Then the drones, aliens and all the human personnel and their pets were deposited on the first Orbital it came to. The only people left aboard were those in Storage.

  After that the ship went in search of others (and one other in particular), and let it be known throughout the Culture, through its information network, that it was willing to travel anywhere to pick up those who might wish to join it, so long as they were in Storage and happy to be set amongst one of its tableaux.

  People were reluctant at first; this was definitely the sort of behaviour that earned a ship the title Eccentric, and Eccentric ships had been known to do odd, even dangerous things. Still, the Culture had its share of brave souls, and a few took up the craft's strange invitation, without apparent ill effect. When the first few people who had been Stored aboard the GSV were safely returned on the realisation of their revival criteria, again without seeming to have suffered for the strangeness of their temporary lodgings, the slow trickle of adventurous individuals began to turn into a steady stream of slightly perverse or just romantic ones; as the reputation of the Sleeper Service spread, and it released holograms of its more and more ambitious tableaux (important historical incidents, then small battles and details from greater conflicts), so more and more people thought it rather amusing to be Stored within this eccentric Eccentric, where they might be said to be forming part of a work of art even while they slept, rather than just plonked in a boring box somewhere underneath their local Plate.

  And so taking a ride aboard the Sleeper Service as a kind of vicariously wandering soul became nothing less than fashionable, and the ship slowly filled with undead people in Storage suits whom it posed into larger and larger scenes, until eventually it was able to tackle whole battlefields and lay them out in the sixteen square kilometres of territory it possessed in each of its General Bays.

  Amorphia completed its sweeping gaze across the bright, silent stillness of the vast killing ground. As an avatar it possessed no real thoughts of its own, but the Mind that was the Sleeper Service liked to run the creature off a small sub-routine that was only a little more intelligent than the average human being — while both retaining the option of stepping in, full force, if it needed to and making the avatar behave in a confused, distracted state that the ship believed somehow reflected, on the nearly infinitely smaller human scale, its own philosophical perplexities.

  So it was that the semi-human sub-routine looked out across that great tableau, and felt a kind of sadness that it might all have to be dismantled. There was an extra, perhaps deeper melancholy at the thought that it would no longer be able to play host to the living things aboard; the creatures of the sea and the air and the gas-giant atmosphere, and the woman.

  Its thoughts turned to that woman; Dajeil Gelian, who in one sense had been the cause, the seed for all of this, and the one person it had wanted to find, the one soul — asleep or awake — it had been determined to offer sanctuary to when it had first renounced the Culture's normality. Now that sanctuary was compromised, and she too would have to be offloaded with all the rest of its waifs and strays and teeming undead. A promise being fulfilled leading to a promise to her being broken, as though she had not experienced enough of that in her life. Still, it would make amends, and for that reason there were a lot of other promises being made and — so far, it would seem — kept. That would have to do.

  Movement on the motionless tableau; Amorphia turned its attention there and saw the black bird Gravious flapping away across t
he field. More movement. Amorphia walked towards it, around and over the poised, charging cavalry and the fallen soldiers, between a pair of convincing-looking hanging fountains of earth where two cannon balls were slamming into the ground and over a small, blood-swollen stream to another part of the battlefield, where a team of three revival drones were floating above a revivee.

  This was unusual; people normally wanted to be woken back in their home and in the presence of friends, but over the last couple of decades — as the tableaux had become more impressive — more people had wished to be brought back to life here, in the midst of them.

  Amorphia squatted down by the woman, who had been lying posed as a dying soldier, her tunic punctured by bullet holes and stained red. She lay on her back, blinking in the sunlight, attended by machines. The head of the Storage suit had been slipped off and lay like a rubbery mask on the grass beside her; her face looked pale and just a little blotchy; she was an old woman, but her depilated head gave her a curious, baby-like quality of nakedness.

  "Hello?" Amorphia said, taking one of the woman's hands in hers and gently detaching that part of the suit too, pulling the hand-covering off inside-out, like a tight glove.

  "Whoa," the woman said, swallowing, her eyes watering.

  Sikleyr-Najasa Croepise Ince Stahal da Mapin, Stored thirty-one years ago at the age of three-hundred and eighty-six. Revival criterion: on the acclamation of the next Line Messiah-elect on the planet Ischeis. She had been a scholar of the planet's major religion and had wanted to be present at the Elevation of its next Saviour, an event which had not been anticipated for another two hundred years or so.

  Her mouth twisted, and she coughed. "How-?" she began, then coughed again.

  "Just thirty-one standard years," Amorphia told her.

  The woman's eyes widened, then she smiled. "That was quick," she said.