Excession

by Iain M. Banks

  Fivetide’s eye stalks swivelled. ‘Waiter-scum!’ he bellowed at a hovering juvenile eunuch. ‘Here, wretch!’

  The waiter was half the size of the big male and childishly unscarred unless you counted the stump of the creature’s rear beak. The juvenile floated closer, trembling even more than politeness dictated, until it was within a tentacle reach. ‘This thing,’ roared Fivetide, flicking a limb-end to indicate Genar-Hofoen, ‘is the alien beast-human you should already have been briefed on if your Chief is to avoid a sound thrashing. It might look like prey but it is in fact an honoured and treasured guest and it needs feeding much as we do; rush to the animals’ and outworlders’ serving table and fetch the sustenance prepared for it. Now!’ Fivetide screamed, his voice producing a small visible shockwave in the mostly nitrogen atmosphere. The juvenile eunuch waiter vented away with suitable alacrity.

  Fivetide turned to the human. ‘As a special treat for you,’ he shouted, ‘we have prepared some of the disgusting glop you call food and a container of liquid based on that poisonous water stuff. God-shit, how we spoil you, eh!’ He tentacle-slapped the human in the midriff. The gelfield suit absorbed the blow by stiffening; Genar-Hofoen staggered a little to one side, laughing.

  ‘Your generosity near bowls me over.’

  ‘Good! Do you like my new uniform?’ the Affronter officer asked, sucking back a little from the human and pulling himself up to his full height. Genar-Hofoen made a show of looking the other being up and down.

  The average fully grown Affronter consisted of a mass the shape of a slightly flattened ball about two metres in girth and one and a half in height, suspended under a veined, frilled gas sac which varied in diameter between one and five metres according to the Affronter’s desired buoyancy and which was topped by a small sensor bump. When an Affronter was in aggressive/defensive mode, the whole sac could be deflated and covered by protective plates on the top of the central body mass. The principal eyes and ears were carried on two stalks above the fore beak covering the creature’s mouth; a rear beak protected the genitals. The anus/gas vent was positioned centrally under the main body.

  To the central mass were attached, congenitally, between six and eleven tentacles of varying thicknesses and lengths, at least four of which normally ended in flattened, leaf-shaped paddles. The actual number of limbs possessed by any particular adult male Affronter one encountered entirely depended on how many fights and/or hunts it had taken part in and how successful a part in them it had played; an Affronter with an impressive array of scars and more stumps than limbs was considered either an admirably dedicated sportsman or a brave but stupid and probably dangerous incompetent, depending entirely on the individual’s reputation.

  Fivetide himself had been born with nine limbs - considered the most propitious number amongst the best families, providing one had the decency to lose at least one in duel or hunt - and had duly lost one to his fencing master while at military college in a duel over the honour of the fencing master’s chief wife.

  ‘It’s a very impressive uniform, Fivetide,’ Genar-Hofoen said.

  ‘Yes, it is rather, isn’t it?’ the Affronter said, flexing his body.

  Fivetide’s uniform consisted of multitudinous broad straps and sashes of metallic-looking material which were crisscrossed over his central mass and dotted with holsters, sheaths and brackets - all occupied by weapons but sealed for the formal dinner they were here to attend - the glittering discs Genar-Hofoen knew were the equivalents of medals and decorations, and the associated portraits of particularly impressive game-animals killed and rivals seriously maimed. A group of discreetly blank portrait discs indicated the females of other clans Fivetide could honourably claim to have successfully impregnated; the discs edged with precious metals bore witness to those who had put up a struggle. Colours and patterns on the sashes indicated Fivetide’s clan, rank and regiment (which was what the Diplomatic Force, to which Fivetide belonged, basically was . . . a point not wisely ignored by any species who wished to have - or just found themselves having - any dealings with the Affront).

  Fivetide pirouetted, gas sac swelling and buoying him up so that he rose above the spongy surface of the nest space, limbs dangling, taking hardly any of his weight. ‘Am I not . . . resplendent?’ The gelfield suit’s translator decided that the adjective Fivetide had chosen to describe himself should be rendered with a florid rolling of the syllables involved, making the Affronter officer sound like an overly stagey actor.

  ‘Positively intimidating,’ Genar-Hofoen agreed.

  ‘Thank you!’ Fivetide said, sinking down again so that his eye stalks were level with the human’s face. The stalks’ gaze rose and dipped, looking the man up and down. ‘Your own apparel is . . . different, at long last, and, I’m sure, most smart by the standards of your own people.’

  The posture of the Affronter’s eye stalks indicated that he found something highly pleasing in this statement; probably Fivetide was congratulating himself on being incredibly diplomatic.

  ‘Thank you, Fivetide,’ Genar-Hofoen said, bowing. He thought himself rather overdressed. There was the gelfield suit itself of course, so much a second skin it was possible to forget he wore it all. Normally the suit was nowhere more than a centimetre thick and averaged only half that, yet it could keep him comfortable in environments even more extreme than that required for Affronter life.

  Unfortunately, some idiot had let slip that the Culture tested such suits by Displacing them into the magma chambers of active volcanoes and letting them pop out again (not true; the laboratory tests were rather more demanding, though it had been done once and it was just the sort of thing a show-off Culture manufactory would do to impress people). This was definitely not the kind of information to bandy about in the presence of beings as inquisitive and physically exuberant as Affronters; it only put ideas into their minds, and while the Affront habitat Genar-Hofoen lived within didn’t re-create conditions on a planet to the extent that it had volcanoes, there had been a couple of times after Fivetide had asked the human to confirm the volcano story when he’d thought he’d caught the Diplomatic Force officer looking at him oddly, exactly as though he was trying to work out what natural phenomena or piece of apparatus he had access to he could use to test out this remarkable and intriguing protectivity.

  The gelfield suit possessed something called a node-distributed brain which was capable of translating with seeming effortlessness every nuance of Genar-Hofoen’s speech to the Affronters and vice versa, as well as effectively rendering any other sonic, chemical or electromagnetic signal into human-meaningful information.

  Unhappily, the processing power required for this sort of technical gee-whizzery meant that according to Culture convention the suit had to be sentient. Genar-Hofoen had insisted on a model with the intelligence fixed at the lower limit of the acceptable intellectual range, but it still meant that the suit literally had a mind of its own (even if it was ‘node-distributed’, - one of those technical terms Genar-Hofoen took some pride in having no idea concerning the meaning of). The result was a device which was almost as much a metaphorical pain to live with as it was in a literal sense a pleasure to live within; it looked after you perfectly but it couldn’t help constantly reminding you of the fact. Typical Culture, thought Genar-Hofoen.

  Ordinarily Genar-Hofoen had the suit appear milkily silver to an Affronter over most of its surface while keeping the hands and head transparent.

  Only the eyes had never looked quite right; they had to bulge out a bit if he was to be able to blink normally. As a result he usually wore sunglasses when he went out, which did seem a little incongruous, submerged in the dim photochemical fog characteristic of the atmosphere a hundred kilometres beneath the sun-lit cloud-tops of the Affront’s home world, but which were useful as a prop.

  On top of the suit he usually wore a gilet with pockets for gadgets, gifts and bribes and a crotch-cupping hip holster containing a couple of antique but impressive-looking hand guns. In t
erms of offensive capability the pistols provided a sort of minimum level of respectability for Genar-Hofoen; without them no Affronter could possibly allow themselves to be seen taking so puny an outworlder seriously.

  For the regimental dinner, Genar-Hofoen had reluctantly accepted the advice of the module in which he lived and dressed in what it assured him was a most fetching outfit of knee boots, tight trousers, short jacket and long cloak - worn off the shoulder - and (in addition to an even bigger pair of pistols than usual) had slung over his back a matched pair of what the module assured him were three-millimetre-calibre Heavy Micro Rifles, two millennia old but still in full working order, and very long and gleamingly impressive. He had balked at the tall, drum-shaped much betassled hat the module had suggested and they’d compromised on a dress/armoured half-helm which made it look as though something with six long metallic fingers was cradling his head from behind. Naturally, each article in this outfit was covered in its own equivalent of a gelfield, protecting it from the coldly corrosive pressure of the Affronter environment, though the module had insisted that if he wanted to fire the micro rifles for politeness’ sake, they would function perfectly well.

  ‘Sire!’ yelped the eunuch juvenile waiter, skittering to a stop on the nest-space surface at Fivetide’s side. Cradled in three of its limbs was a large tray full of transparent, multi-walled flasks of various sizes.

  ‘What?’ yelled Fivetide.

  ‘The alien guest’s foodstuffs, sir!’

  Fivetide extended a tentacle and rummaged around on the tray, knocking things over. The waiter watched the containers topple, fall and roll on the tray it held with an expression of wide-eyed terror Genar-Hofoen needed no ambassadorial training to recognise. The genuine danger to the waiter of any of the containers breaking was probably small - implosions produced relatively little shrapnel and the Affronter-poisonous contents would freeze too quickly to present much of a danger - but the punishment awaiting a waiter who made so public a display of its incompetence was probably in proportion to that conspicuousness and the creature was right to be concerned. ‘What is this?’ Fivetide demanded, holding up a spherical flask three-quarters full of liquid and shaking it vigorously in front of the eunuch juvenile’s beak. ‘Is this a drink? Is it? Well?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir!’ the waiter wailed. ‘It - it looks like it is.’

  ‘Imbecile,’ muttered Fivetide, then presented the flask gracefully to Genar-Hofoen. ‘Honoured guest,’ he said. ‘Please; tell us if our efforts please you.’

  Genar-Hofoen nodded and accepted the flask.

  Fivetide turned on the waiter. ‘Well?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t just float there, you moron; take the rest to the Savage-Talker Battalion table!’ He flicked a tentacle towards the waiter, who flinched spectacularly. Its gas sac deflated and it ran across the floor membrane for the banqueting area of the nest space, dodging the Affronters gradually making their way in that direction.

  Fivetide turned briefly to acknowledge the greeting slap of a fellow Diplomatic Force officer, then rotated back, produced a bulb of fluid from one of the pockets on his uniform and clinked it carefully against the flask Genar-Hofoen held. ‘To the future of Affront-Culture relations,’ he rumbled. ‘May our friendship be long and our wars be short!’ Fivetide squeezed the fluid into his mouth beak.

  ‘So short you could miss them entirely,’ Genar-Hofoen said tiredly, more because it was the sort of thing a Culture ambassador was supposed to say rather than because he sincerely meant it. Fivetide snorted derisively and dodged briefly to one side, apparently attempting to stick one tentacle-end up the anus of a passing Fleet Captain, who wrestled the tentacle aside and snapped his beak aggressively before joining in Fivetide’s laughter and exchanging the heartfelt hellos and thunderous tentacle-slaps of dear friends. There would be a lot of this sort of stuff this evening, Genar-Hofoen knew. The dinner was an all-male gathering and therefore likely to be fairly boisterous even by Affronter standards.

  Genar-Hofoen put the flask’s nozzle to his mouth; the gelfield suit attached itself to the nozzle, equalised pressures, opened the flask’s seal and then - as Genar-Hofoen tipped his head back - had what for the suit’s brain was a good long think before it permitted the liquid inside to wash through it and into the man’s mouth and throat.

  ~ Fifty-fifty water/alcohol plus traces of partially toxic herb-like chemicals; closest to Leisetsiker spirit, said a voice in Genar-Hofoen’s head. ~ If I were you I’d by-pass it.

  ~ If you were me, suit, you’d welcome inebriation just to mitigate the effects of having to suffer your intimate embrace, Genar-Hofoen told the thing as he drank.

  ~ Oh, we’re in tetchy mode are we? said the voice.

  ~ I don it with your good self.

  ‘It is good, by your bizarre criteria?’ Fivetide inquired, eye stalks nodding at the flask.

  Genar-Hofoen nodded as the drink warmed its way down his throat to his stomach. He coughed, which had the effect of making the gelfield ball out round his mouth like silvery chewing gum for a moment - something which he knew Fivetide thought was the second funniest thing a human could do in a gelfield suit, only beaten for amusement value by a sneeze. ‘Unhealthy and poisonous,’ Genar-Hofoen told the Affronter. ‘Perfect copy. My compliments to the chemist.’

  ‘I’ll pass them on,’ Fivetide said, crushing his drinking bulb and flicking it casually at a passing servant. ‘Come now,’ he said, taking the human by the hand again. ‘Let’s to table; my stomach’s as empty as a coward’s bowels before battle.’

  ‘No no no, you have to flick it, like this, you stupid human, or the scratchounds’ll get it. Watch . . .’

  Affronter formal dinners were held round a collection of giant circular tables anything up to fifteen metres across, each of which looked down into a bait-pit where animal fights took place between and during courses.

  In the old days, at banquets held by the military and within the higher reaches of Affront society, contests between groups of captured aliens had been a particular and reasonably regular highlight, despite the fact that mounting such fights was often hideously expensive and fraught with technical complications due to the different chemistries and pressures involved. (Not to mention frequently presenting a very real danger to the observing dinner guests; who could forget the ghastly explosion at the Deepscars’ table five back in ’334, when every single guest had met a messy but honourable end due to the explosion of a highly pressurised bait-pit domed to simulate the atmosphere of a gas-giant?) Indeed, amongst the people who really mattered it was one of the most frequently voiced objections to the Affront’s membership of the informal association of other space-faring species that having to be nice to other, lesser species - rather than giving the brutes a chance to prove their mettle against the glorious force of Affront arms - had resulted in a distinct dulling of the average society dinner.

  Still, on really special occasions these days the fights would be between two Affronters with a dispute of a suitably dishonourable nature, or between criminals. Such contests usually required that the protagonists be hobbled, tied together, and armed with sliver-knives scarcely more substantial than hat pins, thus ensuring that the fights didn’t end too quickly. Genar-Hofoen had never been invited to one of those and didn’t expect he ever would be; it wasn’t the sort of thing one let an alien witness, and besides, the competition for seats was scarcely less ferocious than the spectacle everyone desired to witness.

  For this dinner - held to commemorate the eighteen hundred and eighty-fifth anniversary of the Affront’s first decent space-battle against enemies worthy of the name - the entertainment was arranged to bear some relationship to the dishes being served, so that the first fish course was accompanied by the partial flooding of the pit with ethane and the introduction into it of specially bred fighting fish. Fivetide took great pleasure in describing to the human the unique nature of the fish, which were equipped with mouth parts so specialised the fish could not feed normally and had to be r
aised leeching vital fluids from another type of fish bred specially to fit into their jaws.

  The second course was of small edible animals which to Genar-Hofoen appeared furry and arguably even cute. They raced round a trench-track set into the top of the pit at the inner edge of the circular table, pursued by something long and slithery looking with a lot of teeth at each end. The cheering, hooting Affronters roared, thumped the tables, exchanged bets and insults, and stabbed at the little creatures with long forks while shovelling cooked, prepared versions of the same animals into their beaks.

  Scratchounds made up the main course, and while two sets of the animals - each about the size of a corpulent human but eight-limbed - slashed and tore at each other with razor-sharp prosthetic jaw implants and strap-claws, diced scratchound was served on huge trenchers of compacted vegetable matter. The Affronters considered this the highlight of the whole banquet; one was finally allowed to use one’s miniature harpoon - quite the most impressive-looking utensil in each place setting - to impale chunks of meat from the trenchers of one’s fellow diners and - with the skilful flick of the attached cable which Fivetide was now trying to teach the human - transfer it to one’s own trencher, beak or tentacle without losing it to the scratchounds in the pit, having it intercepted by another dinner guest en route or losing the thing entirely over the top of one’s gas sac.

  ‘The beauty of it is,’ Fivetide said, throwing his harpoon at the trencher of an Admiral distracted by a failed harpoon strike of his own, ‘that the clearest target is the one furthest away.’ He grunted and flicked, snapping the piece of speared scratchound up and away from the other Affronter’s place an instant before the officer to the Admiral’s right could intercept the prize. The morsel sailed through the air in an elegant trajectory that ended with Fivetide barely having to rise from his place to snap his beak shut on it. He swivelled left and right, acknowledging appreciative applause in the form of whip-snapped tentacles, then settled back into the padded Y-shaped bracket that served as a seat. ‘You see?’ he said, making an obvious swallowing motion and spitting out the harpoon and its cable.