Excession

I

The Excession’s links with the two regions of the energy grid just fell away, twin collapsing pinnacles of fluted skein fabric sinking back into the grid like idealised renderings of some spent explosion at sea. Both layers of the grid oscillated for a few moments, again like some abstractly perfect liquid, then lay still. The waves produced on the grid surfaces damped quickly to nothing, absorbed. The Excession floated free on the skein of real space, otherwise as enigmatic as ever.

There was, for a while, silence between the three watching ships.

Eventually, the Sober Counsel asked, ~… Is that it?

— So it would appear, the Fate Amenable To Change replied. It felt terrified, elated, disappointed, all at once. Terrified to be in the presence of something that could do what it had just observed, elated to have witnessed it and taken the measurements it had — there were data here, in the velocity of the skein-grid collapse, in the apparent viscosity of the grid’s reaction to the links’ decoupling — that would fuel genuinely, utterly original science — and disappointed because it had a sneaking feeling that that was it. The Excession was going to sit here like this for a while, still doing nothing. Seemingly endless boredom, instants of blinding terror… endless boredom again. With the Excession around you didn’t need a war.

The Fate Amenable To Change started relaying all the data it had collected on the grid-skein links’ collapse to a variety of other ships, without even collating it properly first. Get it out of this one location first, just in case. Another part of its Mind was thinking about it, though.

— That thing reacted, it told the other two craft.

— To the Affront signal? the Appeal To Reason sent. ~ I was wondering about that.

— Could this be the state in which the Peace Makes Plenty discovered the entity? the Sober Counsel asked.

— It could indeed, couldn’t it? the Fate Amenable To Change agreed.

— The time has come, the Appeal To Reason sent. ~ I’m sending in a drone.

— No! You wait until the Excession assumes the configuration it probably possessed when it overpowered your comrade and then you decide to approach it just as it must have? Are you quite mad?

— We cannot just sit here any longer! the Appeal To Reason told the Culture craft. ~ The war is days away from us. We have tried every form of communication known to life and had nothing in return! We must do more! Launching drone in two seconds. Do not attempt to interfere with it!

II

“Well, we were going to have them at the same time; it seemed… I don’t know; more romantic, I suppose, more symmetrical.” Dajeil laughed lightly, and stroked Byr’s arm. They were in the big circular room at the top of the tower; Kran, Aist and Tulyi, and her and Byr. She stood by the log fire, with Byr. She looked to see if Byr wanted to take up the story, but she just smiled and drank from her wine goblet. “But then when we thought about it,” Dajeil continued, “it did kind of seem a bit crazy. Two brand new babies, and just the two of us here to look after them, and first-time mothers.”

“Only-time mothers,” Byr muttered, making a face into her goblet. The others laughed.

Dajeil stroked Byr’s arm again. “Well, however it turns out, we’ll see. But you see this way we can have… whatever time in between Ren being born and our other child.” She looked at Byr, smiling warmly. “We haven’t decided on the other name yet. Anyway,” she went on, “doing it this way will give me time to recover and get the two of us used to coping with a baby, before Byr has his… well, hers,” she said laughing, and put her arm round her partner’s shoulder.

“Yes,” Byr said, glancing at her. “We can practise on yours and then get it right with mine.”

“Oh, you!” Dajeil said, squeezing Byr’s arm. The other woman smiled briefly.

The term used for what Dajeil and Byr were doing was Mutualling. It was one of the things you could do when you were able — as virtually every human in the Culture had been able to do for many millennia — to change sex. It took anything up to a year to alter yourself from a female to a male, or vice-versa. The process was painless and set in action simply by thinking about it; you went into the sort of trance-like state Dajeil had accessed earlier that evening when she had looked within herself to check on the state of her fetus. If you looked in the right place in your mind, there was an image of yourself as you were now. A little thought would make the image change from your present gender to the opposite sex. You came out of the trance, and that was it. Your body would already be starting to change, glands sending out the relevant viral and hormonal signals which would start the gradual process of conversion.

Within a year a woman who had been capable of carrying a child — who, indeed, might have been a mother — would be a man fully capable of fathering a child. Most people in the Culture changed sex at some point in their lives, though not all had children while they were female. Generally people eventually changed back to their congenital sex, but not always, and some people cycled back and forth between male and female all their lives, while some settled for an androgynous in-between state, finding there a comfortable equanimity.

Long-term relationships in a society where people generally lived for at least three and a half centuries were necessarily of a different nature from those in the more primitive civilisations which had provided the Culture’s original blood-stock. Life-long monogamy was not utterly unknown, but it was exceptionally unusual. A couple staying together for the duration of an offspring’s entire childhood and adolescence was a more common occurrence, but still not the norm. The average Culture child was close to its mother and almost certainly knew who its father was (assuming it was not in effect a clone of its mother, or had in place of a father’s genes surrogated material which the mother had effectively manufactured), but it would probably be closer to the aunts and uncles who lived in the same extended familial grouping; usually in the same house, extended apartment or estate.

There were partnerships which were intended to last, however, and one of the ways that certain couples chose to emphasise their co-dependence was by synchronising their sex-changes and at different points playing both parts in the sexual act. A couple would have a child, then the man would become female and the woman would become male, and they would have another child. A more sophisticated version of this was possible due to the amount of control over one’s reproductive system which still further historic genetic tinkering had made possible.

It was possible for a Culture female to become pregnant, but then, before the fertilised egg had transferred from her ovary to the womb, begin the slow change to become a man. The fertilised egg did not develop any further, but neither was it necessarily flushed away or reabsorbed. It could be held, contained, put into a kind of suspended animation so that it did not divide any further, but waited, still inside the ovary. That ovary, of course, became a testicle, but — with a bit of cellular finessing and some intricate plumbing — the fertilised egg could remain safe, viable and unchanging in the testicle while that organ did its bit in inseminating the woman who had been a man and whose sperm had done the original fertilising. The man who had been a woman then changed back again. If the woman who had been a man also delayed the development of her fertilised egg, then it was possible to synchronise the growth of the two fetuses and the birth of the babies.

To some people in the Culture this — admittedly rather long-winded and time-consuming — process was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect way for two people to express their love for one another. To others it was slightly gross and, well, tacky.

The odd thing was that until he’d met and fallen in love with Dajeil, Genar-Hofoen had been firmly of the latter opinion. He’d decided twenty years earlier, before he was even fully sexually mature and really knew his own mind about most things, that he was going to stay male all his life. He could see that being able to change sex was useful and that some people would even find it exciting, but he thought it was weak, somehow.

But then Dajeil had changed Byr’s mind.

They had met aboard the General Contact Unit Recent Convert.

She was approaching the end of a twenty-five-year Contact career, he just starting a ten-year commitment which he might or might not request to extend when the time came. He had been the rake, she the unavailable older woman. He had decided when he’d joined Contact that he’d try to bed as many women as possible, and from the first had set about doing just that with a single-minded determination and dedication many women found highly fetching just by itself.

Then on the Recent Convert he cut his usual swathe through the female half of the ship’s human crew, but was brought to a sudden stop by Dajeil Gelian.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t sleep with him — there had been lots of women he’d asked who’d refused him, for a variety of reasons, and he’d never felt any resentment towards them or been any less likely to eventually count them as friends than the women he had made love to — it was that she told him she did find him attractive and ordinarily would have invited him to her bed, but wasn’t going to because he was so promiscuous. He’d found this a slightly preposterous reason, but had just shrugged and got on with life.

They became friends; good friends. They got on brilliantly; she became his best friend. He kept expecting that this friendship would as a matter of course include sex — even if it was just once — but it didn’t. It seemed so obvious to him, so natural and normal and right that it should. Not falling into bed together after some wonderfully enjoyable social occasion or sports session or just a night’s drinking seemed positively perverse to him.

She told him he was destroying himself with his licentiousness. He didn’t understand her. She was destroying him, in a way; he was still seeing other women but he was spending so much time with her — because they were such friends, but also because she had become a challenge and he had decided he would win her, whatever it took — that his usual packed schedule of seductions, affairs and relationships had suffered terribly; he wasn’t able to concentrate properly on all these other women who were, or ought to be demanding his attention.

She told him he spread himself too thinly. He wasn’t really destroying himself, he was stopping himself from developing. He was still in a sort of childish state, a boy-like phase where numbers mattered more than anything, where obsessive collecting, taking, enumerating, cataloguing all spoke of a basic immaturity. He could never grow and develop as a human being until he went beyond this infantile obsession with penetration and possession.

He told her he didn’t want to get beyond this stage; he loved it. Anyway, even though he loved it and wouldn’t care if he remained promiscuous until he was too old to do it at all, the chances were that he would change, sometime, eventually, over the course of the next three centuries or so of life which he could expect… There was plenty of time to do all this damned growing and developing. It would take care of itself. He wasn’t going to try and force the pace. If all this sexual activity was something he had to get out of his system before he could properly mature, then she had a moral duty to help him get rid of it as quickly as possible, starting right now…

She pushed him away, as ever. He didn’t understand, she told him. It wasn’t a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth. She was the still point in his life he needed, or at least a still point; he would probably need many more in his life, she had no illusions about that. But, for now, she was it. She was the rock the river of his turbulent passion had to break around. She was his lesson.

They both specialised in the same area; exobiology. He listened to her talk sometimes and wondered whether it was possible to feel more truly alien towards another being than it was to someone of one’s own species who ought to think in an at least vaguely similar way, but instead thought utterly differently. He could learn about an alien species, study them, get under their skin, under their carapaces, inside their spines or their membranes or whatever else you had to penetrate (ha!) to get to know them, get to understand them, and he could always, eventually, do that; he could start to think like them, start to feel things the way they would, anticipate their reactions to things, make a decent guess at what they were thinking at any given moment. It was an ability he was proud of.

Just by being so different from the creature you were studying you started out at a sufficiently great angle, it seemed to him, to be able to make that penetration and get inside their minds. With somebody who was ninety-nine per cent the same as you, you were too close sometimes. You couldn’t draw far enough away from them to come in at a steep enough angle; you just slid off, every time in a succession of glancing contacts. No getting through. Frustration upon frustration.

Then a post had come up on a world called Telaturier. A long-term situation, spending anything up to five years with an aquatic species called the ‘Ktik which the Culture wanted to help develop. It was the sort of non-ship-based Contact post people were often offered at the end of their career; Dajeil was regarded as a natural for it. It would mean one, maybe two people staying on the planet, otherwise alone save for the ‘Ktik, for all that time. There would be the occasional visit from others, but little time off and no extended holidays; the whole point was to establish a long-term personal relationship with ‘Ktik individuals. It wasn’t something to be entered into lightly; it would mean commitment. Dajeil asked to be considered for the post and was accepted.

Byr couldn’t believe Dajeil was leaving the Recent Convert. He told her she was doing it to annoy him. She told him he was being ridiculous. And unbelievably self-centred. She was doing it because it was an important job and it was something she felt she’d be good at. It was also something she was ready for now; she had done her bit scudding round the galaxy in GCUs and enjoyed every moment, but now she had changed and it was time to take on something more long-term. She would miss him, and she hoped he would miss her — though he certainly wouldn’t miss her for as long as he claimed he would, or even as long as he thought he would — but it was time to move on, time to do something different. She was sorry she hadn’t been able to stick around longer, being his still point, but that was just the way it was, and this was too great an opportunity to miss.

Later, he could never remember exactly when he’d made the decision to go with her, but he did. Perhaps he had started to believe some of the things she’d been telling him, but he too just felt that it was time to do something different, even if he had only been in Contact for a short while.

It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, harder than any seduction (with the possible exception of hers). To start with, he had to convince her it was a good idea. She wasn’t even initially flattered, not for a second. It was a terrible idea, she told him. He was too young, too inexperienced, it was far, far too early in his Contact stint. He wasn’t impressing her; he was being stupid. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t sensible, it wasn’t flattering, it wasn’t practical, it was just idiotic. And if by some miracle they did let him go along with her, he needn’t assume that just making this great commitment would ensure she’d sleep with him.

This didn’t prove anything except that he was as foolish as he was vain.

III

The General Contact Unit Grey Area didn’t hold with avatars; it spoke through a slaved drone. “Young lady—”

“Don’t you 'young lady' me in that patronising tone!” Ulver Seich said, putting her hands on her suited, gem-encrusted hips. She still had the suit helmet on, though with the visor plate hinged up. They were in the GCU’s hangar space with a variety of modules, satellites and assorted paraphernalia. It looked like the space was fairly crowded at the best of times, but it was even more cluttered-now with the small module that had belonged to the ROU Frank Exchange of Views sitting in it.

“Ms Seich,” the drone purred on, unaffected. “I was not supposed to pick up you or your colleague Dn Churt Lyne. I have done so because you were effectively adrift in the middle of a war zone. If you really insist—”

“We weren’t adrift!” Ulver said, waving her arms around and pointing back at the module. “We were in that! It’s got engines, you know!”

“Yes, very slow ones. I did say effectively adrift.” The ship-slaved drone, a casingless assemblage of components floating at head height, turned to the drone Churt Lyne. “Dn Churt Lyne. You too are welcome. Would it be possible for you to attempt to persuade your colleague Ms Seich—”

“And don’t talk about me as if I’m not here either!” Ulver said, stamping one foot. The deck under Genar-Hofoen’s feet resounded.

He had never been more glad to see a GCU. Release from that damned module and Ulver Seich’s abrasive moodiness. Bliss. The Grey Area had welcomed him first, he’d noticed.

Finally he was back on course. From here to the Sleeper, get the job done and then — if the war wasn’t totally fucking things up — off for some R&R somewhere while things were settled. He still found it hard to believe the Affront had actually declared war on the Culture, but assuming they really had then — once it was all over and the Affront had been put in their place — Culture people with Affront experience would be needed to help manage the peace and the Culturisation of the Affront. In a way he would be sorry to see it; he liked them the way they were. But if they were crazy enough to take on the Culture… maybe they did need teaching a lesson. A bit of enforced niceness might do them some good.

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 persuaded 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.

When, months later, she had suggested that they have a child, and later still, while they were still mulling this over, that they Mutual — for they had the time, and the commitment — he had been extravagant in his enthusiasm, as though through such loud acclaim he could drown out the doubts he heard inside himself.

“Byr?” a soft voice said from the little cupola that gave access from the steps to the roof.

She turned round. “Hello?”

“Hi. Couldn’t sleep either, eh?” Aist said, joining Byr at the parapet. She was dressed in dark pyjamas; her naked feet slap-slapped on the flagstones.

“No,” Byr said. She didn’t need much sleep. Byr spent quite a lot of time by herself these days, while Dajeil slept or sat cross-legged in one of her trances or fussed around in the nursery they had prepared for their children.

“Same here,” Aist said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and leaning out over the parapet, her head and shoulders dangling over the drop. She spat slowly; the little fleck fell whitely through the moonlight and disappeared against the dark slope of the tower’s bottom storey. She rocked back onto her feet and moved some of her medium-length brown hair off her eyes, while she studied Byr’s face, a small frown just visible on her brow. She shook her head. “You know,” she said, “I never thought you’d be one to change sex, let alone have a kid.”

“Same here,” Byr said, leaning on the parapet and gazing out to sea. “Still can’t believe it, sometimes.”

Aist leant beside him. “Still, it’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

Byr glanced at the other woman. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Aist was silent for a while. Eventually she said, “Dajeil loves you very much. I’ve known her twenty years. She’s changed completely too, you know; not just you. She was always really independent, never wanted to be a mother, never wanted to settle down with one person, not for a long time, anyway. Not until she was old. You’ve both changed each other so much. It’s… it’s really something. Almost scary, but, well, sort of impressive, you know?”

“Of course.”

There was silence for another while. “When do you think you’ll have your baby?” Aist asked. “How long after she has… Ren, isn’t it?”

“Yes; Ren. I don’t know. We’ll see.” Byr gave a small laugh, almost more of a cough. “Maybe we’ll wait until Ren is grown up enough to help us look after it.”

Aist made the same noise. She leant on the parapet again, lifting her feet off the flagstones and balancing, pivoting on her folded arms. “How’s it been here, being so far away from anybody else? Do you get many visitors?”

Byr shook her head. “No. You’re only the third lot of people we’ve seen.”

“Gets lonely, I suppose. I mean I know you’ve got each other, but…”

“The ‘Ktik are fun,” Byr said. “They’re people, individuals. I’ve met thousands of them by now, I suppose. There are something like twenty or thirty million of them. Lots of new little chums to meet.”

Aist sniggered. “Don’t suppose you can get it off with them, can you?”

Byr glanced at her. “Never tried. Doubt it.”

“Boy, you were some swordsman, Byr,” Aist said. “I remember you on the Quietly, first time we met. I’d never met anyone so focused.” She laughed. “On anything! You were like a natural force or something; an earthquake or a tidal wave.”

“Those are natural disasters,” Byr pointed out with feigned frostiness.

“Well, close enough then,” Aist said, laughing gently. She glanced slyly, slowly, at the other woman. “I suppose I’d have found myself in the firing line if I’d stuck around longer.”

“I imagine you might,” Byr said in a tired, resigned voice.

“Yup, could all have turned out completely different,” Aist said.

Byr nodded. “Or it could all have turned out exactly the same.”

“Well, don’t sound so happy about it,” Aist said. “I wouldn’t have minded.” She leant over the parapet and spat delicately again, moving her head just so, flicking the spittle outward. This time it landed on the gravel path which skirted the tower’s stone base. She made an approving noise and looked back at Byr, wiping her chin and grinning. She looked at Byr, studying his face again. “It’s not fair, Byr,” she said. “You look good no matter what you are.” She put one hand out slowly towards Byr’s cheek. Byr looked into her large dark eyes.

One moon started to disappear behind a ragged layer of high cloud and a small wind picked up, smelling of rain.

A test, for her friend, Byr thought, as the other woman’s long fingers gently stroked her face, feather soft. But the fingers were trembling. Still a test; determined to do it but nervous about it. Byr put her hand up and held the woman’s fingers lightly. She took it as a signal to kiss her.

After a little while, Byr said, “Aist…” and started to pull away.

“Hey,” she said softly, “this doesn’t mean anything, all right? Just lust. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

A little later still Byr said, “Why are we doing this?”

“Why not?” Aist breathed.

Byr could think of several reasons, asleep in the stony darkness beneath them. How I have changed, she thought. But then again, not that much.

VII

Ulver Seich strolled through the accommodation section of the Grey Area. At least there was a bit more strolling to be done on the GCU; had she come here straight from the family house on Phage it would have seemed horribly cramped, but after the claustrophobic confines of the Frank Exchange of Views, it appeared almost spacious (she had spent so little time on Tier, and passed the small amount of time she had there in such a frenetic haste of preparation that it hardly counted. As for the nine-person module — ugh!).

The Grey Area’s interior — built to house three hundred people in reasonable if slightly compact comfort, and now home only to her, Churt Lyne and Genar-Hofoen — was actually pretty interesting, which was an unexpected plus on this increasingly disillusioning expedition. The ship was like a museum to torture, death and genocide; it was filled with mementoes and souvenirs from hundreds of different planets, all testifying to the tendency towards institutionalised cruelty exhibited by so many forms of intelligent life. From thumbscrews and pilliwinks to death camps and planet-swallowing black holes, the Grey Area had examples of the devices and entities involved, or of their effects, or documentary recordings of their use.

Most of the ship’s corridors were lined with weaponry, the larger pieces standing on the floor, others on tables; bigger items took up whole cabins, lounges or larger public spaces and the very biggest weapons were shown as scale models. There were thousands of instruments of torture, clubs, spears, knives, swords, strangle cords, catapults, bows, powder guns, shells, mines, gas canisters, bombs, syringes, mortars, howitzers, missiles, atomics, lasers, field arms, plasma guns, microwavers, effectors, thunderbolters, knife missiles, line guns, thudders, gravguns, monofilament warps, pancakers, AM projectors, grid-fire impulsers, ZPE flux-polarisers, trapdoor units, CAM spreaders and a host of other inventions designed for — or capable of being turned to the purpose of producing death, destruction and agony.

Some of the cabins and larger spaces had been fitted out to resemble torture chambers, slave holds, prison cells and death chambers (including the ship’s swimming pool, though after she’d pointedly mentioned that she liked to start each day with a dip, this was now being converted back to its original purpose). Ulver supposed these… stage-sets… were a little like the famous tableaux the Sleeper Service was supposed to contain, except that the Grey Area’s had no bodies in them (something of a relief, in the circumstances).

Like a lot of people, she had always wanted to see the real thing. She had asked if she and Churt Lyne might go aboard the GSV when Genar-Hofoen did, but her request had been turned down; they would have to stay on the Grey Area until the GCU could find somewhere both safe and unrestricted to deposit them. What made it all even more annoying in a way was that the Grey Area expected it would be keeping in close contact with the Sleeper Service; inside its field envelope, if it was allowed to. So near and yet so far and all that crap. Whatever; it looked like she wouldn’t get to see even the remnants of the famous craft’s tableaux vivants, and would have to make do with the Grey Area and its tableaux mortants.

She thought they might have been more effective if they had contained the victims or the victims and tormentors, but they didn’t. Instead they contained just the rack, the iron maiden, the fires and the irons, the shackles and the beds and chairs, the buckets of water and acid and the electric cables and all the serried instruments of torture and death. To see them in action you had to stand before a nearby screen.

It was a little shocking, Ulver supposed, but kind of aloof at the same time; it was like you could just inspect this stuff and get some idea of how it worked and what it did (though watching the screens wasn’t really advisable; she watched one for a few seconds and nearly lost her breakfast; and it wasn’t even humans who were being tortured) and you could sort of ride it out; you could accept that this had happened and feel bad about it all right, but at the end of it you were still here, it hadn’t happened to you, stopping this sort of shit was exactly what SC, Contact, the Culture was about, and you were part of that civilisation, part of that civilising… and that sort of made it bearable. Just. If you didn’t watch the screens.

Still, just holding a little iron device designed to crush the sort of fingers that were holding it, looking at a knotted cord whose twin knots — once the cord was tightened behind the head — were set at just the right distance to compress and burst the sort of eyes that were looking at it… well, it was kind of affecting. She spent a fair bit of time shivering and rubbing the bits of her body that kept getting bumps.

She wondered how many people had looked upon this grisly collection of memorabilia. She had asked the ship but it had been vague; apparently it regularly offered its services as a sort of travelling museum of pain and ghastliness, but it rarely had any takers.

One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you’d put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn’t recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace.

— That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.

She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing.

— Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I’d never really thought of it that way.

— It is not generally a use much emphasised.

— I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device back into its bowl on the table.

She walked back to the cabin she’d been given, past the assorted arms and torture machines. She decided to check up on how the war was going, again through the lace. At least it would take her mind off all this torture shit.

Affront Declare War On Culture.

(Major events so far, by time/importance.

(Likely limits.

(Detailed events to date.

(Greatest conflict since Idiran War?

(Likely link with Esperi Excession.

(The Affront — a suitable case for treatment?

(So this is how the barbarians felt; the experience of war through the ages.

Ship Store at Pittance taken over by Affront; hundreds of ships appropriated.

(How could it happen?

(Insurance policies or weak points?

(Pundit paradise; placing their bets on what happens next.

(The psychology of warships.

Warcraft from other ship stores mobilised.

(Partial mobilisation earlier — so who knew what when?

(Technical stuff; lots of exciting figures for armamentaphiles.

Peace initiatives.

(Culture wants to talk — Affront just want to fight.

(Galactic Council sends reps everywhere. They look busy.

(Gosh, can we help? Have a laugh at the expense of sad superstitionists.

In jeopardy: the hostage habitats, the boarded ships.

(Five Orbitals, eleven cruise ships Affronted.

(Schadenfreude time; who’s all at risk at the moment.

(Tier gets sniffy.

Quick while they’re not looking.

(Primitives see exciting opportunities.

What’s in it for me?

(Design your own war; sim details and handy hints.

(Thinking positively; new tech, inspired art, heroic tales and better sex… war as hoot [for incurable optimists and people looking for party conversation stoppers only].

Other news:

Blitteringueh Conglo actuates Abuereffe Airsphere — latest.

S3/4 ravaged by nova in Ytrillo.

Stellar Field-Liners sweep Aleisinerih domain again.

Cherdilide Pacters in Phaing-Ghrotassit Subliming quandary.

Abafting Imorchi; sleaze, sleaze and more sleaze.

Sport.

Art.

DiaGlyph Directory.

Special Reports Directory.

Index.

Ulver Seich scanned the screen-set her neural lace threw across her left eye’s field of vision as she walked, one half of her brain paying attention to the business of walking and the other half watching the virtual screen. Not a thing about her. She wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or insulted. Let’s try:

(Tier gets sniffy… No, that was nothing but general stuff about the habitat throwing all Culture people and Affronters off. No names mentioned.

Index. P… Ph… Phage Rock.

(That war again; was PR a kind of minor ship store?

(Tier over-rated anyway; PR turns tail. New heading, but where exactly?

(Koodre wins IceBlast cup.

(New Ledeyueng exhibition opens in T41.

DiaGlyph subDirectory.

subIndex.

subIndex. S… Seich, Ulver.

(Oh Ulver, Where Are You? — new Poeglyph by Zerstin Hoei.

She stared at the entry. Grief, was that it? One lousy picture-poem by an irredeemable feeb she’d barely heard of (and even then only to discover he regularly changed his appearance to resemble her current boyfriend)? Ugh! She joggled the subIndex again, in the remote and forlorn chance there was some sort of ware glitch. There wasn’t. That was it. If she wanted more she’d have to hit Records.

Ulver Seich stopped in her tracks and stared at the nearest bulkhead, open mouthed.

She was no longer News on Phage.

VIII

It should not have made the difference that it did, and yet it did. Their three visitors stayed for two nights, going swimming with the ‘Ktik during the second day. Byr met Aist again that night. The following day the visitors left, climbing into the module which the Unacceptable Behaviour sent down for them. The ship was heading off to loop round a proto-nova a few thousand years distant. It would be back in two weeks to drop off any further supplies they might need. Dajeil’s baby would be born a couple of weeks after that. The next ship due to visit would be another year away, when they might have doubled the human population of the planet. They stood together on the beach. Dajeil held Byr’s hand as the module climbed into the slate-coloured clouds.

Later that evening Byr found Dajeil watching the recording in the tower’s top room, where the screens were. Tears ran down her face.

There were no monitor systems on the tower itself. It must have been one of the independent camera drones. This one must have landed on the tower that night, found two large mammals there, and started recording.

Dajeil turned to look at Byr, her face streaked with the tears. Byr felt a sudden welling of anger. On the screen, she watched the two people embracing, caressing on the tower’s moonlit roof, and heard the soft gasps and whisperings.

“Yes,” Byr said, smiling ironically as she pulled off the wet suit. “Old Aist, eh? Quite a lass. You shouldn’t cry, you know. Upsets the body’s fluid balance for baby.”

Dajeil threw a glass at her. It smashed behind Byr on the winding stair. A little servitor drone scurried past Byr’s feet and windmilled down the carpeted steps on its little limbs, to start cleaning up the mess. Byr looked into her lover’s face. Dajeil’s swollen breasts rose and fell within her shirt and her face was flushed. Byr continued to peel off bits of the wet suit.

“It was a bit of light relief, for grief’s sake,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Just a friendly fuck. A loose end sort of thing. It—”

“How could you do this to us?” Dajeil screamed.

“Do what?” Byr protested, still trying to keep her voice from rising. “What have I done?”

“Screwing my best friend, here! Now! After everything!”

Byr kept calm. “Does it count as screwing, technically, when neither of you has a penis?” She assumed a pained, puzzled expression.

“You shit! Don’t laugh about it!” Dajeil screamed. Her voice was hoarse, unlike anything Byr had heard from her before. “Don’t you fucking laugh about it!” Dajeil was suddenly up out of her seat and dashing towards her, arms raised.

Byr caught her wrists.

“Dajeil!” she said, as the other woman struggled and sobbed and tried to shake her hands free. “You’re being ridiculous! I always fucked other people; you were fucking other people when you were giving me all this shit about being my ‘still point’; we both knew, it wasn’t like we were juveniles or in some dumb monogamy cult or something. Shit; so I stuck my fingers in your pal’s cunt; so fucking what? She’s gone. I’m still here; you’re still here, the fucking kid’s still in your belly; yours is in mine. Isn’t that what you said is all that matters?”

“You bastard, you bastard!” Dajeil cried, and collapsed. Byr had to support her as she crumpled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.

“Oh, Dajeil, come on; this isn’t anything that matters. We never swore to be faithful, did we? It was just a friendly… it was politeness, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning… Come on, I know this is a tough time for you and there’s all these hormones and shit in your body, but this is crazy; you’re reacting… crazily…”

“Fuck off! Fuck off and leave me alone!” Dajeil spat, her voice reduced to a croak. “Leave me alone!”

“Dajeil,” Byr said, kneeling down beside her. “Please… Look, I’m sorry. I really am. I’ve never apologised for fucking anybody in my life before; I swore I never would, but I’m doing it now. I can’t undo it, but I didn’t realise it would affect you like this. If I had I wouldn’t have done it. I swear. I’d never have done it; it was she who kissed me first. I didn’t set out to seduce her or anything, but I’d have said No, I’d have said No, really I would. It wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t my fault. I’m sorry. What more can I say? What can I do…?”

It did no good. Dajeil wouldn’t talk after that. She wouldn’t be carried to her bed. She didn’t want to be touched or be brought anything to eat or drink. Byr sat at the screen controls while Dajeil whimpered on the floor.

Byr found the recording the camera drone had taken and wiped it.

IX

The Grey Area did something to his eyes. It happened in his sleep, the first night he was aboard. He woke up in the morning to the sound of song birds trilling over distant waterfalls and the faint smell of tree resin; one wall of his cabin impersonated a window high up in a forest-swathed mountain range. There was a memory of some strangeness, a buried recollection of some sort; half real, half not, but it slipped slowly away as he came fully to. The view was blurry for a moment, then slowly came clear as he recalled the ship asking him last night if it could implant the nanotechs while he slept. His eyes tingled a little and he wiped away some tears, but then everything seemed to settle back to normal.

“Ship?” he said.

“Yes?” replied the cabin.

“Is that it?” he asked. “With the implants?”

“Yes. There’s a modified neural lace in place in your skull; it’ll take a day or so to bed in properly. I hurried up a little repair-work your own systems were taking their time with near your visual cortex. You have hit your head recently?”

“Yeah. Fell out of a carriage.”

“How are your eyes?”

“Bit blurred and smarted a little. Okay now.”

“Later today we’ll go through a simulation of what happens when you’ve interfaced with the Sleeper Service’s Storage vault system. All right?”

“Fine. How’s our rendezvous with the Sleeper looking?”

“All is in hand. I expect to transfer you in four days.”

“Great. And what’s happening with the war?”

“Nothing much. Why?”

“I just wanted to know,” Genar-Hofoen said. “Have there been any major actions yet? Any more cruise ships been taken hostage?”

“I am not a news service, Genar-Hofoen. You have a terminal, I believe. I suggest you use it.”

“Well, thank you for your help,” muttered the man, swinging out of bed. He had never met so unhelpful a ship. He went for breakfast; at least it ought to be able to provide that.

He was sitting alone in the ship’s main mess watching his favourite Culture news service via a holo projected by his terminal. After the first flurry of Affront Orbital and cruise ship takeovers with no obvious Culture military reply but talk of a mobilisation taking place (frustratingly, almost entirely beyond the news services’ perceptions), the war seemed to have entered a period of relative quiescence. Right now the news service was running a semi-serious feature on how to ingratiate yourself with an Affronter if you happened to bump into one — when the dream he had had last night — the thing he had half remembered just after the point of waking — suddenly returned to him.

X

Byr awoke that night to find Dajeil standing over her with a diving knife held tightly in both hands, her eyes wide and full and staring, her face still puffy with tears. There was blood on the knife. What had she done to herself? Blood on the knife. Then the pain snapped back. The first reaction of Byr’s body had been just to blank it out. Now she was awake, it came back. Not the agony a basic human would have experienced, but a deep, shocking, awful awareness of damage a civilised creature could appreciate without the disabling suffering of crude pain. Byr took a moment to understand.

What? What had been done? What? Roaring in ears. Looking up, to find all the sheets red. Her blood. Belly; sliced. Open. Glistening masses of green, purple, yellow. Redness still pumping. Shock. Massive blood loss. What would Dajeil do now? Byr sank back. So this was how it ended.

Mess, indeed. Feel of systems shutting down. Losing the body. Brain drawing blood to it storing oxygen determined to stay alive as long as possible even though it had lost its life-support mechanism. They had medical gear in the tower that could save her still but Dajeil just stood there staring as though sleep-walking or mad with some overdone gland-drug. Standing staring at her standing staring at her dying.

Neatness to it, still. Women; penetration. He had lived for it. Now he died of it. Now he/she would die, and Dajeil would know that he had really loved her.

Did that make sense?

Did it? she asked the man she had once been.

Silence from him; not dead but certainly gone, gone for now. She was on her own, dying on her own. Dying at the hand of the only woman she/he had ever loved.

So did it make sense?

… I am who I ever was. What I called masculinity, what I celebrated in it was just an excuse for me-ness, wasn’t it?

No. No. No and fuck this, lady.

Byr stuck both hands over the wound and the awful, heavy flap of flesh and swung out of the bed on the far side, dragging the blood-heavy top sheet with her. She stumbled to the bathroom, holding her guts in and trying all the time to watch the other woman. Dajeil stood staring at the bed, as though not realising Byr had gone, as though staring at a projection she alone could see, or at a ghost.

Byr’s legs and feet were covered in blood. She slipped against the door jamb and almost blacked out, but managed to stagger into the room’s pastel fragrance. The bathroom door locked behind her. She sank to her knees. Loud roar in head now; tunnel vision, like wrong end of a telescope. Deep, sharp smell of blood; startling, shocking, all by itself.

The life-support collar was in a box with the other emergency medical supplies, thoughtfully located below waist level so you could crawl to it. Byr clamped the collar on and curled up on the floor, clamped and curled around the fissure in her abdomen and the long gory umbilical of shiningly red sheet. Something hissed and tingled around her neck.

Even staying curled up was too much effort. She flopped over on the tiles’ soft warmth. It was easy, all the blood made it so slippery.

XI

In the dream, he watched as Zreyn Tramow rose from a bed of pink petals. Some still adhered, like small local blushes dispensed upon her pink-brown nakedness. She dressed in her uniform of soft grey and made her way to the bridge, nodding to and exchanging pleasantries with the others on her shift and those going off-watch. She donned the sculpted shell of the induction helmet, and — in half an eye-blink — was floating in space.

Here was the vast enfolding darkness, the sheer astringent emptiness of space colossal, writ wide and deep across the entire sensorial realm; an unending presagement of consummate grace and meaninglessness together. She looked about the void, and far stars and galaxies went swivelling within her field of vision. The view settled on:

The strange star. The enigma.

At such moments she felt the loneliness not just of this fathomless wilderness and this near-utter emptiness, but of her own position, and of her whole life.

Ship names; she had heard of a craft called I Blame My Mother, and another called I Blame Your Mother. Perhaps, then, it was a more common complaint than she normally allowed for (and of course she had ended up on this ship, with its own particular chosen name, forever wondering whether it had been one of those little conceits of her superiors to pair them so). Did she blame her mother? She supposed she did. She did not think she could claim any technical deficiency in the love attending her upbringing, and yet — at the time — she had felt there was, and to this day she would have claimed that the technicalities of a childhood did not cover all that might be required by certain children; in short, her aunts had never been enough. She knew of many individuals raised by people other than their natural parent, and to a man and to a woman they all seemed happy and content enough, but it had not been that way for her. She had long ago accepted that whatever it was she felt was wrong, it was in some sense her fault, even if it was a fault that derived from causes she could do nothing to alter.

Her mother had chosen to remain in Contact following the birth of her child and had left to return to her ship not long after the girl’s first birthday.

Her aunts had been loving and attentive and she had never had the heart — or worked up the hurtful malice — to let them or anybody else know the aching void she felt inside herself, no matter how many times she had lain in tears in her bed, rehearsing the words she would use to do just that.

She supposed she might have transferred some of her need for a parent to her father, but she had scarcely felt that he was a part of her life; he was just another man who came to the house, sometimes stayed for a while, played with her and was kind and even loving, but (she had known instinctively at first, and later admitted rationally to herself after a few years of self-delusion) had played, been kind and even loved her in a more cheerily vague and off-hand sort of way than many of her uncles; she imagined now that he had loved her in his own fashion and had enjoyed being with her, and assuredly she had felt a certain warmth at the time, but still, before very long, even as an infant, before she knew the precise reasons, motives and desires involved, she had guessed that the frequency and length of his visits to the house had more to do with his interest in one or two of her aunts than in any abiding tenderness he felt towards his daughter.

Her mother returned now and again, for visits that for both of them veered wildly between painful feelings of love and furious rages of resentment. Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.

By the time her mother returned for good, she was like just another girlfriend; they both had better friends.

So she had always been alone. And she suspected, she almost knew, that she would end her days alone. It was a source of sadness — though she tried never to wallow in self-pity — and even, in a subsidiary way, of shame, for at the back of her mind she could not escape the nagging desire for somebody — some man, if she was honest with herself — to come to her rescue, to take her away from the vacuum that was her existence and make her no longer alone. It was something she had never been able to confess to anybody, and yet something that she had an inkling was known to the people and machines who had allowed her to assume this exalted, if onerous position.

She hoped that it was secret within herself, but knew too well the extent of the knowledge-base, the sheer experience behind those who exercised power over her and people like her. An individual did not outwit such intelligence; he or she might come to an understanding with it, an accommodation with it, but there was no outthinking or outsmarting it; you had to accept the likelihood that all your secrets would be known to them and trust that they would not misuse that knowledge, but exploit it without malice. Her fears, her needs, her insecurities, her compensating drives and ambitions; they could be plumbed, measured and then used, they could be employed. It was a pact, she supposed, and one she did not really resent, for it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. They and she each got what they wanted; they a canny, dedicated officer determined to prove herself in the application of their cause and she the chance to seek and gain approval, the reassurance that she was worth something.

Such trust, and the multiplying opportunities to provide proof of her diligence and exercised wisdom, ought at last to be enough for her, but still sometimes it was not, and she yearned for something that no fusion of herself with any conglomerative could provide; a need to be reassured of a personal worth, an appreciation of her individual value which would only be valid coming from another individual.

She went through cycles of admitting this to herself and hoping that one day she would find somebody she could finally feel comfortable with, finally respect, finally judge worthy of her regard when measured against her own strict standards… and then rejecting it all, fierce in her determination to prove herself on her terms and the terms of the great service she had entered, forging the resolve to turn her frustrations to her and their advantage, to redirect the energies resulting from her loneliness into her practical, methodically realisable ambitions; another qualification, a further course of study, a promotion, command, further advancement…

The enigma attracted her, no less than the impossibly old star. Here, in this discovery, might eventually lie a kind of fame that could sate her desire for recognition. Or so she told herself, sometimes. Here, after all, was already a strange kind of kinship, a sort of twinning, even if it was that of an implausibility and a mystery.

She directed her attention to the enigma, seeming to rush towards it in the darkness, swelling its black presence until it filled her field of vision.

A blink of light focused her awareness near its centre. Somehow, without much more than that single glimmer, the light had a kind of character to it, something familiar, recognisable; it was like the opening of a door, like gaining an unexpected glimpse into a brightly lit room. Attention drawn, she looked closer automatically.

And was instantly sucked into the light; it erupted blindingly, exploding out at her like some absurdly quick solar flare, engulfing her, snapping around her like a trap.

Zreyn Enhoff Tramow, captain of the General Contact Ship Problem Child, barely had time to react. Then she was plucked away and disappeared into the coruscating depths of the falling fire, struggling and trapped and calling for help. Calling to him.

He bounced awake on the bed-field, eyes suddenly open, breath fast and shallow, heart hammering. The cabin’s lights came on, dim at first and then brightening gently, reacting to his movements.

Genar-Hofoen wiped his face with his hands and looked around the cabin. He swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn’t meant to dream anything like that. It had been as vivid as an implanted dream or some game-scenario shared in sleep. He had meant to dream one of his usual erotic dreams, not look back two thousand years to the time when the Problem Child had first found the trillion-year-old sun and the black-body object in orbit around it. All he’d wanted was a sex-simulation, not an in-depth inquisition of a bleakly ambitious woman’s arid soul.

Certainly it had been interesting, and he’d been fascinated that he had somehow been the woman and yet not been her at the same time, and had been — non-sexually — inside her, in her mind, close as a neural lace to her thoughts and emotions and the hopes and fears she had been prompted to think about by the sight of the star and the thing she had thought of as the enigma. But it hadn’t been what he’d expected.

Another strange, unsettling dream.

“Ship?” he said.

“Yes?” the Grey Area said through the cabin’s sound system.

“I… I just had a weird dream.”

“Well, I have some experience in that realm, I suppose,” the ship said with what sounded like a heavy sigh. “I imagine now you want to talk about it.”

“No… well… no; I just wondered… you weren’t…?”

“Ah. You want to know was I interfering with your dreams, is that it?”

“It just, you know, occurred to me.”

“Well now, let’s see… If I had been, do you think I would answer you truthfully?”

He thought. “Does that mean you were or you weren’t?”

“I was not. Are you happy now?”

“No I’m not happy now. Now I don’t know if you were or you weren’t.” He shook his head, and grinned. “You’re fucking with my head either way, aren’t you?”

“As if I would do such a thing,” the ship said smoothly. It made a chuckling noise which contrived to be the most unsettling sound it had articulated so far. “I expect,” it said, “it was just an effect caused by your neural lace bedding in, Genar-Hofoen. Nothing to worry about. If you don’t want to dream at all, gland somnabsolute.”

“Hmm,” he said slowly, and then; “Lights out.” He lay back down in the darkness. “Good night,” he said quietly.

“Sweet dreams, Genar-Hofoen,” the Grey Area said. The circuit clicked ostentatiously off.

He lay awake in the darkness for a while, before falling asleep again.

XII

Byr woke up in bed, hopelessly weak, but cleansed and whole and starting to recover. The emergency medical collar lay, also cleaned, at the side of the bed. By it lay a bowl of fruit, a jug of milk, a screen, and the small figurine Byr had given Dajeil, from the old female ‘Ktik called G’Istig’tk’t’, a few days earlier.

The tower’s slave-drones brought Byr her food and attended to her toilet. The first question she asked was where Dajeil was, half afraid that the other woman had taken the knife to herself or just walked into the sea. The drones replied that Dajeil was in the tower’s garden, weeding.

On other occasions they informed Byr that Dajeil was working in the tower’s top room, or swimming, or had taken a flier to some distant island. They answered other questions, too. It was Dajeil — along with one of the drones — who had forced open the bathroom door. So she could still have killed Byr.

Byr asked Dajeil to come visit her, but she would not. Eventually, a week later, Byr was able to get out of bed by herself and walk around. A pair of drones fussed at her side.

Across her belly, the scar was already starting to fade.

Byr already knew her recovery would be complete. Whether Dajeil had actually intended murder or just some insane abortion, she didn’t know.

Looking down into herself, in a light trance to further judge the extent of the damage that had been done and was now diligently repairing itself, Byr noted that her body had come to the decision, apparently on its own accord, while she’d been unconscious, to become male again. She let the decision hold.

Byr walked out of the tower that day with one hand still held over the wide scar in her abdomen. She discovered Dajeil sitting cross-legged and big-bellied on the egg-round stones a few metres up from the surf line.

The sound of the stones sliding under Byr’s unsteady feet brought Dajeil out of her reverie. She looked round at Byr, then away again, out to sea. They sat together.

“I’m sorry,” Dajeil said.

“So am I.”

“Did I kill it?”

Byr had to think for a moment. Then she realised. She meant the fetus.

“Yes,” Byr said. “Yes, it’s gone.”

Dajeil lowered her head. She would not talk again.

Byr left with the Unacceptable Behaviour a week later. Dajeil had told her, through one of the tower’s drones, that she would not be having the baby in a week, as expected. She would halt its development. For a while. Until she knew her own mind again. Until she felt ready for it. She didn’t know how long the wait would be. A few months; a year, maybe. The unborn child would be safe and unharmed, just waiting, until then. When she did give birth, the tower and its drones would be able to look after her. She did not expect Byr to stay. They had done most of the work they had set out to do. It might be best if Byr left. Sorry was not remotely enough, but it was all there was to say. She would let Byr know when the child was born. They would meet again then, if she wanted, if he wanted.

Contact was never told what had happened. Byr claimed a bizarre accident had happened at sea to make her lose the fetus; a predator fish attacking; near death and saved by Dajeil… They seemed well enough pleased with what she and Dajeil had done and accepted Byr’s leaving early. The ‘Ktik were a highly promising species, hungry for advancement; Telaturier was in for some big-time development.

Genar-Hofoen became male again. One day, going through some old clothes, he found the little figurine of Dajeil the old ‘Ktik had carved. He sent it back to Dajeil. He didn’t know if she received it or not. Still on the Unacceptable Behaviour, he fathered a child by Aist. A Contact appointment a few months afterwards took him aboard the GSV Quietly Confident. One of the ship’s avatars — the same one he had slept with — gave him a very hard time for leaving Dajeil; they shouted at each other.

To his knowledge, the Quietly Confident subsequently blocked at least one request he put in for a post he wanted.

Over two years after he had left Telaturier he heard that Dajeil, still pregnant, had requested to be Stored. The place was becoming busy, and a whole new city was growing up round their old tower, which was going to become a museum. Later still he heard that she was not Stored after all, but had been picked up by the GSV turned Eccentric which had once been called the Quietly Confident, and which was now called the Sleeper Service.

XIII

— Don’t do this!

— I am determined.

— Well, at least let me get my avatar off!

— Take it.

— Thank you; beginning Displace sequence, the Fate Amenable To Change sent to the Appeal To Reason, and then continued: ~ Please; don’t risk this.

— I am risking only the drone; in cognizance of your concerns I shall not remain in contact with it in-flight.

— And if it returns apparently unharmed, what will you do then?

— Take every reasonable precaution, including a stepped-intellect-level throttled datastream-squirt approach, a—

— Sorry to interrupt, but don’t tell me any more, in case our friend is listening in. I appreciate the lengths you are prepared to go to try and ensure you remain free from contamination, but surely the point is that at any stage what you will find, or start to find, will look like the most valuable and interesting data available, and any intellectual restructuring suggested will look unambiguously like the most brilliant up-grade. You will be taken before you know it; indeed, you will cease to be in a sense, unless your own automatic systems attempt to prevent the take-over, and that will surely lead to conflict.

— I shall resist ingesting any data requiring or suggesting either intellect restructuring or mimetic redrafting.

— That may not be enough. Nothing may be enough.

— You are overly cautious, cousin, sent the Sober Counsel. ~ We are the Zetetic Elench. We have ways of dealing with such matters. Our experience is not without benefit, especially once we are fore-warned.

— And I am of the Culture, and I hate to see such risks being taken. Are you sure you have the full agreement of your human crews concerning such a foolhardy attempt at contact?

— You know we have; your avatar sat in on the discussions, sent the Appeal To Reason.

— That was two days ago, the Fate Amenable To Change pointed out. ~ You have just given a two-second launch notice; at least hold off long enough to carry out a poll of your humans and sentient drones and so ensure that they still agree with your proposed course of action now that the business is coming to a head. After all, another few minutes or so is not going to make much difference, is it? Think; I beg you. You know humans as well as I do; things can take a while to sink in with them. Perhaps some have only now finished thinking about the matter and have altered their position on it. Please, as a favour, hold back a few minutes.

— Very well. Reluctantly, but very well.

The Appeal To Reason stopped the drone’s launch countdown before a hundredth of a second had elapsed. The Fate Amenable To Change stood down its Displacer and left its avatar aboard.

It all made little difference. The Fate Amenable To Change had secretly been upgrading its effectors over the past couple of days and had intended attempting to carry out its own subtle jeopardising of any drones dispatched towards the Excession, but it was not to have the chance. Even while the hurriedly called vote was taking place on board the Appeal To Reason, the Fate received a message from another craft.

xExplorer Ship Break Even (Zetetic Elench, Stargazer, 5th)

oGCU Fate Amenable To Change (Culture)

Greetings. Please be advised I and my sister craft the Within Reason and Long View are also in attendance, just out of your primary scanner range. We have reconfigured to an Extreme Offence back-up form and shall soon be joined by the two remaining ships of our fleet, similarly recast. We would hope that you do not intend any interference with the plan our sister craft Appeal To Reason intends to effect.

Two other, confirmatory signals came in from divergent angles compared to that first message, purporting to be from the Within Reason and the Long View.

Shit, thought the GCU. It had been reasonably confident it could either fool the two nearby Elench craft or just plain overpower their efforts to contact the Excession, but faced with five ships, three of them on a war footing, it knew it would never be able to prevail.

It replied, saying that of course it intended no mischief, and glumly watched events unfold.

The vote aboard the Appeal To Reason went the same way as before, though a few more humans did vote against the idea of sending the drone in than had the last time. Two requested an immediate transfer to the Sober Counsel, then changed their minds; they would stay aboard. The Fate took its avatars off both the Elencher ships. It had used its heavy-duty displacer for the task, attenuating it to make it look as though it had utilised one of the lesser systems. It left the unit running at full readiness.

The Appeal To Reason’s drone was duly launched; a small, fragile-looking, gaily adorned thing, its extremities sporting ribbons, flowers and little ornaments and its casing covered with drawings, cartoons and well-wishing messages scrawled by the crew. It puttered hesitantly towards the Excession, chirpily beaming signals of innocent goodwill.

If the Fate Amenable To Change had been a human, at this point it would have looked down, put one hand over its eyes, and shaken its head.

The small machine took minutes to creep up to the seemingly unnoticing Excession’s dull skein-surface; an insect crawling up to a behemoth. It activated a short-range, one time hyperspace unit and disappeared from the skein as though passing through a mirror of dark fluid.

In Infraspace, it… disappeared too, for an instant.

The Fate Amenable To Change was watching the drone from a hundred different angles via its remotes. They all saw it just disappear. An instant later it reappeared. It looped back through its little quantum burrow, returning to the skein of real space to start back, no less hesitantly, towards the Appeal To Reason.

The Fate Amenable To Change crash-ramped its plasma chambers then isolated and readied a clutch of fusion warheads. At the same moment, it signalled urgently.

— Was the drone meant to disappear that way?

— Hmm, sent the Appeal To Reason. ~ Well…

— Destroy it, the Fate urged. ~ Destroy it, now!

— It has communicated, slim-text only, as per instructions, the Appeal To Reason replied, sounding thoughtful, if wary. ~ It has gathered vast quantities of data on the entity. There was a pause, then, excitedly; ~ It has located the mind-state of the Peace Makes Plenty!

— Destroy it! Destroy it!

— No! sent the Sober Counsel.

— How can I? the Appeal To Reason protested.

— I’m sorry, the Fate Amenable To Change signalled to both the nearby craft, an instant after initiating a Displace sequence which flicked compressed spheres of plasma and a spray of fusion bombs down their own instantaneous wormholes towards the returning drone.

XIV

Ulver Seich tossed her damply tangled black hair over her shoulder and plonked her chin on Genar-Hofoen’s chest. She traced gentle circles round his left nipple with one finger; he put a sweaty arm round her slim back, drew her other hand to his mouth and delicately kissed her fingers, one by one. She smiled.

Dinner, talk, drink, shared smoke-bowl, agreeing fuzzy heads might be cleared by a dip in the Grey Area’s pool, splashing, fooling around… and fooling around. Ulver had been holding back a little for part of the evening until she’d been certain the man didn’t just expect anything to happen, then when she’d convinced herself that he wasn’t taking her for granted, that he liked her and that — after that awful time in the module — they did get on, that was when she’d suggested the swim.

She raised her chin off his chest a little and flicked her finger back and forth over his tinily erect nipple. “You were serious?” she asked him. “An Affronter?”

He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “I just wanted to know what it was like to be one of them.”

“So now would you have to declare war on yourself?” she asked, pressing down on his nipple and watching it rise back up, her brows creased with concentration.

He laughed. “I suppose so.”

She looked into his eyes. “What about women? You ever wonder the same? You took the change once, didn’t you?” She settled her chin back on his chest.

He breathed in deeply, raising her head as though on an ocean swell. He put one arm behind his head and stared up at the roof of her cabin. “Yes, I did it once,” he said quietly.

She smoothed her palm over his chest for a while, watching his skin intently. “Was it just for her?”

He craned his head up. They looked at each other.

“How much do you know about me?” he asked her. He’d tried quizzing her over dinner on what she knew and why she’d been sent to Tier to intercept him, but she’d played mysterious (and, to be fair, he wasn’t able to tell her exactly why he was on his way to the Sleeper Service).

“Oh, I know all about you,” she said softly, seriously. Then she looked down. “Well, I know the facts. I suppose that’s not everything.”

He lowered his head to the pillow again. “Yes, it was just for her.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said. She continued to stroke his chest. “You must have loved her a lot.”

After a moment, he said, “I suppose I must have.”

She thought he sounded sad. There was a pause, then he sighed again and, in a more cheerful voice, he said; “What about you? Ever a guy?”

“No,” she said, with a laugh that might have held a trace of scorn. “Maybe one day.” She shifted a little and circled his nipple with the tip of her tongue for a moment. “I’m having too much fun being a girl.”

He reached down and pulled her up to kiss her.

Then in the silence, a tiny chime sounded in the room.

She broke off. “Yes?” she said, breathing hard and scowling.

“I’m very sorry to intrude,” said the ship, making no great effort to sound sincere. “May I speak to Mr Genar-Hofoen?”

Ulver made an exasperated noise and rolled off the man.

“Good grief, can’t it wait?” Genar-Hofoen said.

“Yes, probably,” said the ship reasonably, as though this had just occurred to it. “But people usually like to know this sort of thing immediately. Or so I thought.”

“What sort of thing?”

“The sentient module Scopell-Afranqui is dead,” the ship told him. “It conducted a limited destruct on the first day of the war. We have only just heard. I’m sorry. Were you close?”

Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. “No. Well… No. Not that close. But I’m sorry to hear it. Thank you for telling me.”

“Could it have waited?” the ship asked conversationally.

“It could, but I suppose you weren’t to know.”

“Oh well. Sorry. Good night.”

“Yes, good night,” the man said, wondering at his feelings.

Ulver stroked his shoulder. “That was the module you lived on, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “We never really got on,” he told her. “Mostly my fault, I suppose.” He turned his head to look at her. “I can be a scum-bag sometimes, frankly.” He grinned.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, climbing back on top of him.