Excession c-5

by Iain M. Banks

  They weren't going to like it though, because it would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty the Culture couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing. Probably the Affront would rather have been pulverised and then dictated to. Anyway, whatever else happened between now and then, Genar-Hofoen was sure they'd give a good account of themselves.

  Ulver Seich was doing not badly in that line herself. Now she was demanding she and the drone be put back in the module immediately and allowed to continue on their way. Given that the first thing she'd done when the Grey Area had contacted them was demand to be rescued and taken aboard at once, this was a little cheeky, but the girl obviously didn't see it that way.

  "This is piracy!" she hollered.

  "Ulver…" the drone Churt Lyne said calmly.

  "And don't you go taking its side!"

  "I'm not taking its side, I'm just-"

  "You are so!"

  The argument went on. The ship's slave-drone looked from the girl to the elderly drone and then back again. It rose once in the air fractionally, then settled back down again. It swivelled to Genar-Hofoen. "Excuse me," it said quietly.

  Genar-Hofoen nodded.

  The drone Churt Lyne was cut off in mid-sentence and floated gently down to the floor of the hangar. Ulver Seich scowled, furious. Then she understood. She turned on the slave-drone, whirling round and jabbing a finger at it. "How da-!"

  The visor plate of her suit clanked shut; her suit powered down to statue-like immobility. The jewelled face plate sparkled in the hangar's lights. Genar-Hofoen thought he could hear some distant, muffled shouting from inside the girl's suit.

  "Ms Seich," the drone said. "I know you can hear me in there. I'm terribly sorry to be so impolite, but I regret to say I was finding these exchanges somewhat tedious and unproductive. The fact is that you are now entirely in my power, as I hope this little demonstration proves. You can accept this and pass the next few days in relative comfort or refuse to accept this and either be locked up, followed by a drone intervention team or drugged to prevent you getting into mischief. I assure you that in any other circumstance save that of war I would happily consign you and your colleague to your module and let you do as you wished. However, as long as I am not called upon to perform any overtly military duties, you are almost certainly much safer with me than you are drifting along — or even purposefully moving along — in a small, unarmed and all but defenceless module which, I would beg you to believe, could nevertheless all too easily be mistaken for a munition or some sort of hostile craft by somebody inclined towards the reconnaissance-by-fire approach."

  Genar-Hofoen could see the girl's suit shaking; it started to rock from side to side. She must be throwing herself around inside it as best she could. The suit came close to overbalancing and falling. The little slave-drone extended a blue field to steady it. Genar-Hofoen wondered how strong the urge had been to just let it fall.

  "If I am called upon to lend my weight to the proceedings, I shall let you go," the ship's drone continued. "Likewise, once I have discharged my duty to Mr Genar-Hofoen and the Special Circumstances section, you will, I imagine, be free to leave. Thank you for listening."

  Churt Lyne bobbed into the air and continued where it had left off. "-easonable for once in your pampered bloody life…!" then its voice trailed away. It gave a wonderful impression of being confused, turning this way and that a couple of times.

  Ulver's face plate came up. Her face was pale, her lips compressed into a line. She was silent for a while. Eventually she said, "You are a very rude ship. You had better hope you never have cause to call upon the hospitality of Phage Rock."

  "If that is the price of your acquiescence to my entirely reasonable requests, then, young lady, you have a deal."

  "And you'd better have some decent accommodation aboard this heap of junk," she said, jabbing a thumb at Genar-Hofoen. "I'm fed up inhaling this guy's testosterone."

  IV

  He wore her down. There was a half-year wait between her being accepted for the post on Telaturier and actually taking it up. It took him almost all that time to talk her round. Finally, a month before the ship would stop at Telaturier to deposit her there, she agreed that he could ask Contact if he could go with her. He suspected that she only did so to get him to shut up and stop annoying her; she didn't imagine for a moment that he'd be accepted too.

  He dedicated himself to arguing his case. He learned all he could about Telaturier and the "Ktik; he reviewed the exobiological work he'd done until now and worked out how to emphasise the aspects of it that related to the post on Telaturier. He built up an argument that he was all the more suited to this sort of stoic, sedentary post just because he had been so frenetic and busy in the past; he was, well, not burnt-out, but fully sated. This was exactly the right time to slow down, draw breath, calm down. This situation was perfect for him, and he for it.

  He set to work. He talked to the Recent Convert itself, a variety of other Contact craft, several interested drones specialising in human psychovaluation and a human selection board. It was working. He wasn't meeting with unanimous approval — it was about fifty-fifty, with the Recent Convert leading the No group — but he was building support.

  In the end it came, down to a split decision and the casting vote was held by the GSV Quietly Confident, the Recent Convert's home craft. By that time they were back aboard the Quietly Confident, hitching a lift towards the region of space where Telaturier lay. An avatar of the Quietly Confident, a tall, distinguished man, spoke at length to him about his desire to go with Dajeil to Telaturier. He left saying that there would be a second interview.

  Genar-Hofoen, happy to be back on a ship with a hundred million females aboard, though not able to throw himself into the task of bedding as many of them as possible in the two weeks available, nevertheless did his best. His fury at discovering, one morning, that the agile, willowy blonde he had spent the night with was another avatar of the ship was, by all accounts, a sight to behold.

  He raged, he seethed. The quietly spoken avatar sat, winsomely dishevelled in his bed and looked on with calm, untroubled eyes.

  She hadn't told him she was an avatar!

  He hadn't asked, she pointed out. She hadn't told him she was a human female, either. She had been going to tell him she was there to evaluate him, but he had simply assumed that anyone he found attractive who came up to talk to him must want sex.

  It was still deceit!

  The avatar shrugged, got up and got dressed.

  He was desperately trying to remember what he'd said to the creature the previous evening and night; it had been a pretty drunken time and he knew he'd spoken about Dajeil and the whole Telaturier thing, but what had he said? He was sickened at the ship's duplicity, appalled that it could trick him like this. It wasn't playing fair. Never trust a ship. Oh, grief, he'd just been wittering on about Dajeil and the post with the "Ktik, completely off-guard, not trying to impress at all. Disaster. He was certain the Recent Convert had put its mother ship up to it. Bastards.

  The avatar had paused at the door of his cabin. For what it was worth, she told him, he'd talked very eloquently about both his past life and the Telaturier post, and the ship was minded to support his application to accompany Dajeil Gelian there. Then she winked at him and left.

  He was in. There was just a moment of panic, but then an overwhelming feeling of victory. He'd done it!

  V

  The Killing Time was still racing away from the ship store at Pittance at close to its maximum sustainable velocity; any faster and it would have started to degrade the performance of its engines. It was approaching a position about half-way between Pittance and the Excession when it cut power and let itself coast down towards lightspeed. It deliberately avoided doing its skidding-to-a-stop routine. Instead it carefully extended a huge light-seconds-wide field across the skein of real space and
slowly dragged itself to an absolute stop, its position within the three dimensions of normal space fixed and unchanging; its only appreciable vector of movement was produced by the expansion of the universe itself; the slow drawing away from the assumed central point of the Reality which all 3-D matter shared. Then it signalled.

  [tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.1008]

  xROU Killing Time

  oGCV Steely Glint

  I understand you are de facto military commander for this volume.

  Will you receive my mind-state?

  oo

  [tight beam, M32, tra. @n4. 28.885.1065]

  xGCV Steely Glint

  oROU Killing Time

  No. Your gesture — offer — is appreciated. However, we do have other plans for you. May I ask you what led you to Pittance in the first place?

  oo

  This is something personal. I remain convinced there was another ship, an ex-Culture ship, at Pittance, to which I went because I saw fit to do so. This ex-Culture ship thought to facilitate my destruction. This cannot be tolerated. Pride is at stake here. My honour. I will live again. Please receive my mind-state.

  oo

  I cannot. I appreciate your zeal and your concern but we have so few resources we cannot afford to squander them. Sometimes personal pride must take a subsidiary place to military pragmatism, however hateful we may find this.

  oo

  I understand. Very well. Please suggest a course of action. Preferably one which at least leaves open the possibility that I might encounter the treacherous ship at Pittance.

  oo

  Certainly (course schedule DiaGlyph enclosed). Please confirm receipt and signal when you have reached the first detailed position.

  oo

  (Receipt acknowledged).

  oo

  [tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.1122]

  xROU Killing Time

  oEccentric Shoot Them Later

  I appeal to you following this (signal sequence enclosed). Will you receive my mind-state?

  oo

  [tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.1309]

  xEccentric Shoot Them Later

  oROU Killing Time

  My dear ship. Is this really necessary?

  oo

  Nothing is necessary. Some things are to be desired. I desire this. Will you receive my mind-state?

  oo

  Will it stop you if I don't?

  oo

  Perhaps. It will certainly delay me.

  oo

  Dear me, you don't believe in making things easy for people, do you?

  oo

  I am a warship. That is not my function. Will you receive my mind-state?

  oo

  You know, this is why we prefer to have human crews on ships like you; it helps prevent such heroics.

  oo

  Now you are attempting to stall. If you do not agree to receive my mind-state I shall transmit it towards you anyway. Will you receive my mind-state?

  oo

  If you insist. But it will be with a troubled conscience…

  The ship transmitted a copy of what in an earlier age might have been called its soul to the other craft. It then experienced a strange sense of release and of freedom while it completed its preparations for combat. Now it felt a strange, at once proud and yet humbling affinity with the warriors of all the species through every age who had bade their lives, their loves, their friends and relations goodbye, made their peace with themselves and with whatever imagined entities their superstitions demanded, and prepared to die in battle.

  It experienced the most minute moment of shame that it had ever despised such barbarians for their lack of civilisation. It had always known that it was not their fault they had been such lowly creatures, but still it had found it difficult to expunge from its feelings towards such animals the patrician disdain so common amongst its fellow Minds. Now, it recognised a kinship that crossed not just the ages, species or civilisations, but the arguably still greater gap between the fumblingly confused and dim awareness exhibited by the animal brain and the near-infinitely more extended, refined and integrated sentience of what most ancestor species were amusingly, quaintly pleased to call Artificial Intelligence (or something equally and — appropriately, perhaps — unconsciously disparaging).

  So now it had discovered the truth in the idea of a kind of purity in the contemplation of and preparations for self-sacrifice. It was something its recently transferred mind-state — its new self, to be born in the matrix of a new warship, before too long — might never experience. It briefly considered transmitting its current mind-state to replace the one it had already sent, but swiftly abandoned the idea; just more time to be wasted, for one thing, but more importantly, it felt it would insult the strange calmness and self-certainty it now felt to place it artificially in a Mind which was not about to die. It would be inappropriate, perhaps even unsettling. No; it would cleave to this clear surety exclusively, holding it to its exculpated soul like a talisman of holy certitude.

  The warship looked about its internal systems. All was ready; any further delay would constitute prevarication. It turned itself about, facing back the way it had come. It powered up its engines slowly to accelerate gradually, sleekly away into the void. As it moved, it left the skein of space behind it seeded with mines and hyper-space-capable missiles. They might only remove a ship or two even if they were lucky, but they would slow the rest down. It ramped its speed up, to significant engine degradation in 128 hours, then 64, then 32. It held there. To go any further would be to risk immediate and catastrophic disablement.

  It sped on through the dark hours of distance that to mere light were decades, glorying in its triumphant, sacrificial swiftness, radiant in its martial righteousness.

  It sensed the oncoming fleet ahead, like a pattern of brightly rushing comets in that envisaged space. Ninety-six ships arranged in a rough circle spread across a front thirty years of 3-D space across, half above, half below the skein. Behind them lay the traces of another wave, numerically the same size as the first but taking up twice the volume.

  There had been three hundred and eighty-four ships stored at Pittance. Four waves, if each was the same size as the first. Where would it position itself if it was in command?

  Near but not quite actually in the centre of the third wave.

  Would the command vessel guess this and so position itself somewhere else? On the outside edge of the first wave, somewhere in the second wave, right at the back, or even way on the outside, independent of the main waves of craft altogether?

  Make a guess.

  It looped high out across the four-dimensional range of infra-space, sweeping its sensors across the skein and readying its weapon systems. Its colossal speed was bringing the war fleet closer faster than anything it had ever seen before save in its most wildly indulged simulations. It zoomed high above them in hyperspace, still, it seemed, undetected. A pulse of sheer pleasure swept its Mind. It had never felt so good. Soon, very soon, it would die, but it would die gloriously, and its reputation pass on to the new ship born with its memories and personality, transmitted in its mind-state to the Shoot Them Later.

  It fell upon the third wave of oncoming ships like a raptor upon a flock.

  VI

  Byr stood on the circular stone platform at the top of the tower, looking out to the ocean where two lines of moonlight traced narrow silver lines across the restless waters. Behind her, the tower's crystal dome was dark. She had gone to bed at the same time as Dajeil, who tired more quickly these days. They had made their apologies and left the others to fend for themselves. Kran, Aist and Tulyi were all friends from the GCU Unacceptable Behaviour, another of the Quietly Confident's daughter ships. They had known Dajeil for twenty years; the three had been aboard the Quietly Confident four years earlier and were some of the last people Byr and Dajeil had seen before they'd left for Telaturier.

  The Unacceptable Behaviour was looping through this volume and they'd per
suaded it to let them stop off here for a couple of days and see their old friend.

  The moons glittered their stolen light across the fretful dance of waves, and Byr too reflected, glanding a little Diffuse and thinking that the moons" V of light, forever converging on the observer, encouraged a kind of egocentricity, an overly romantic idea of one's own centrality to things, an illusory belief in personal precedence. She remembered the first time she had stood here and thought something along these lines, when she had been a man and he and Dajeil had not long arrived here.

  It had been the first night he and Dajeil had — finally, at last, after all that fuss — lain together. Then he had come up here in the middle of the night while she'd slept on, and gazed out over these waters. It had been almost calm, then, and the moons" tracks (when they rose, and quite as though they rose and did not rise for him) lay shimmering slow and near unbroken on the untroubled face of the ocean's slack waters.

  He'd wondered then if he'd made a terrible mistake. One part of his mind was convinced he had, another part claimed the moral high ground of maturity and assured him it was the smartest move he'd ever made, that he was indeed finally growing up. He had decided that night that even if it was a mistake that was just too bad; it was a mistake that could only be dealt with by embracing it, by grasping it with both hands and accepting the results of his decision; his pride could only be preserved by laying it aside entirely for the duration. He would make this work, he would perform this task and be blameless in the self-sacrifice of his own interests to Dajeil's. His reward was that she had never seemed happier, and that, almost for the first time, he felt responsible for another's pleasure on a scale beyond the immediate.