Excession

I

Genar-Hofoen and the avatar Amorphia appeared in the doorway at the head of the winding stair. “Excuse me,” Ulver said, putting down the comb and patting Dajeil on the shoulder. She walked towards the door.

“No; please stay,” Dajeil said behind her.

Ulver turned to the older woman. “You sure?”

Dajeil nodded. Ulver looked at Genar-Hofoen, whose gaze was fastened on Dajeil. He seemed to shake himself out of his fixation and looked, then smiled at Ulver. “Hi,” he said. “Yes; stay; whatever.” He crossed to Dajeil, who stood. They both looked awkward for a moment, then they embraced; that was awkward too, over the bulge of Dajeil’s belly. Ulver and the avatar exchanged looks.

“Please; let’s all sit down, shall we?” Dajeil said. “Byr, are you hungry?”

“Not really,” he said, drawing up a chair. “I could use a drink…” The four of them sat round the table.

There was some small talk, mostly between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, with a few comments from Ulver. The avatar remained silent. It frowned once and glanced at the screens, which showed a perfectly banal view of empty space.

II

The Sleeper Service was a few hours out from the Excession now. It was tracking the MSV Not Invented Here and another two large Culture craft, each a dark jewel set within a cluster of smaller ships; warships, plus some GCUs and superlifters extemporised into combat service. The GCU Different Tan was also supposed to be in the volume, but it was not making itself obvious. The Not Invented Here was thirty light years out from Esperi, patrolling the spherical limit of the uniquely worrying engine-field effect that the GCU Fate Amenable To Change had reported days earlier. The Sleeper Service had briefly considered asking that the smaller craft copy its results to it, but hadn’t bothered; the request would probably be refused and it suspected whatever data the smaller craft was gathering weren’t telling anybody very much anyway.

The other two craft — the GSVs What Is The Answer And Why? and Use Psychology — were manoeuvring a half a day and a full day further out respectively. A faint layered smudge in the distance, about three quarters of the way round an imaginary sphere drawn around the Excession, was almost certainly the approaching Affronter war fleet. Around the Excession itself, no sign whatsoever of the vanished Stargazer fleet of the Zetetic Elench.

The Sleeper Service readied itself for the fray. Maybe, in a sense, two frays. There was every chance that its own engines would fail the same way the Fate Amenable To Change’s had when it had moved towards the Excession, but given the speed the Sleeper Service was travelling at it could coast in towards the thing; it wouldn’t have any directional control, it wouldn’t be able to maintain its present speed, or brake, but it could get there.

If it ought to.

Ought it? It checked its signal log, as if it might have missed an incoming message.

Still nothing from those who had sent it here. The Interesting Times Gang seemed to have been observing comm silence for days. Just the usual daily plea from the LSV Serious Callers Only; the equivalent of an unopened letter and just the latest in a series.

The Sleeper watched events on the Jaundiced Outlook, even as it prepared itself for the coming encounter near Esperi, like a military commander drawing up war plans and issuing hundreds of preparatory orders who cannot keep his or her attention from flicking to a microscopic drama being played out amongst a group of insects clinging to the wall above the table. The ship felt foolish, voyeuristic, and yet fascinated.

Its thoughts were interrupted by the Grey Area, sending from its Mainbay in the nose of the GSV.

— I’ll be on my way then, if you don’t need me any more.

— I’d rather you stuck around, the Sleeper Service replied.

— Not when you’re heading for that thing, and the Affronters.

— You might be surprised.

— I’m sure. However, I want to leave.

— Farewell, then, the GSV sent, opening the bay door.

— I suppose this means another Displace.

— If you don’t mind.

— And if I do?

— There is an alternative, but I’d rather not use it.

— Well, if there is one, I want to use it!

— The Jaundiced Outlook declined, and it had humans aboard.

— Bugger the humans, and bugger the Jaundiced Outlook, too. What’s the alternative? Have you got superlifters capable of this sort of speed?

— No.

— What then…?

— Just get to the rear of my field envelope.

— Whatever you say.

The GCU quit its berth, easing out into the confined space between the GSVs hull and the craft’s innermost field layer. It took a few minutes for it to manoeuvre itself down the side of the giant ship and round the corner to the flat rear of the craft. When it got there it found three other ships waiting for it.

— Who the hell are they? the GCU asked the larger ship. ~ In fact, what the hell are they?

It was something of a rhetorical question. The three craft were unambiguously warships; slightly longer and fatter than the Grey Area itself but tapering at either end to points surmounted with large spheres. Spheres which could logically only contain weaponry. Quite a lot of weaponry, judging by the size of the globes.

— My own design. Their names are T3OUs 4, 118 and 736.

— Oh, witty.

— You won’t find them terribly good company; AI cores only, semi-slaved to me. But they can operate together as a super lifter to get you down to manageable speeds.

The GCU was silent for a moment. It moved in to take up position in the centre of the triangle the three ships had formed. ~ T3OUs? it asked. Type Three Offensive Units, by any chance?

— Correct.

— Many more like these hidden away?

— Enough.

— You have been busy all these years.

— Yes I have. I trust I can rely on your absolute discretion, for the next few hours at any rate.

— You certainly have that.

— Good. Farewell. Thank you for your help.

— Glad to be of the small amount of service I was. Best of luck. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough how things pan out.

— I imagine so.

III

The avatar returned the main focus of its attention to the three humans on the Jaundiced Outlook. The two old lovers had moved from small talk to a post mortem on their relationship, still without coming up with anything particularly interesting.

“… We wanted different things,” Dajeil said to Genar-Hofoen. “That’s usually enough.”

“I wanted what you wanted, for a long time,” the man said, swirling some wine round in a crystal goblet.

“The funny thing was,” Dajeil said, “we were all right while it was just the two of us, remember?”

The man smiled sadly. “I remember.”

“You two sure you want me here?” asked Ulver.

Dajeil looked at her. “If you feel embarrassed…” she said.

“No; I just thought…” Ulver’s voice trailed off. They were both looking at her. She frowned. “Okay; now I feel embarrassed.”

“What about you two?” Dajeil asked evenly, looking from Ulver to Genar-Hofoen.

They exchanged looks. Each shrugged at the same time, then laughed, then looked guiltily at her. If they had rehearsed it it could hardly have been more synchronised. Dajeil felt a pang of jealousy, then forced herself to smile, as graciously as she could. Somehow the act helped produce the emotion.

IV

Something was wrong.

The avatar’s principal attention snapped back to its home ship. The Grey Area and the three warships were free of the GSV’s envelope now, dropping back in their own web of fields and decelerating to velocities the GCU’s engine could accommodate. Ahead lay the Excession; the Sleeper Service had just carried out its first close track-scan look at it. But the Excession had changed; it had re-established its links with the energy grids and then it had grown; then it had erupted.

It wasn’t the sort of enlargement the Fate Amenable To Change had witnessed and seemingly been transported by; that had been something based on the skein or on some novel formulation of fields. This was something incarnated in the ultimate fire of the energy grid itself, spilling across the whole sweep of Infraspace and Ultraspace and invading the skein as well, creating an immense spherical wave-front of grid-fire boiling across three-dimensional space.

It was expanding, quickly. Impossibly quickly; sky-fillingly, explosively quickly; almost too quickly to measure, certainly too quickly for its true shape and form to be gauged. So quickly that there could only be minutes before the Sleeper Service ran into it and far too quickly for the GSV to brake or turn and avoid the conflagration.

Suddenly the avatar was on its own; the Sleeper briefly severed all connection with it while it concentrated on dispersing its own war fleet all about it.

Some of the ships were Displaced from deep inside its interior, snapping out of existence from within the thousands of evacuated bays where they had been quietly manufactured over the decades and reappearing in hyperspace, powered up and already heading outwards. Others — the vast majority — were revealed as the giant ship peeled back some of the outer layers of its field structures to reveal the craft it had hidden there over the past few weeks, loosing entire fleets of smaller ships like seeds disseminating from a colossal pod.

When the avatar was reconnected to the GSV, most of the ships had been distributed, scattered to the hypervolume in a series of explosive flurries; bombardments of ships, layers and blossoms of vessels like a whole deployed hierarchy of cluster munitions, every warhead a warcraft. A cloud of vessels; a wall of ships rushing towards the blooming hypersphere of the Excession.

V

The Grey Area watched it all happen, carried in its cradle of fields by the three silent warships. Part of it wanted to whoop and cry hurrah, seeing this detonation of materiel, sufficient to smash a war machine ten times — a hundred times — the size of the approaching Affronter fleet; ah the things you could do if you had the time and patience and no treaties to adhere to or agreements to uphold!

Another part of it watched with horror as the Excession swelled, obliterating the view ahead, rampaging out like an explosion still greater than that of ships the Sleeper Service had just produced. It was like the energy grid itself had been turned inside out, as though the most massive black hole in the universe had suddenly turned white and bloated into some big-bang eruption of fury between the universes; a forest-levelling storm capable of devouring the Sleeper Service and all its ships as though it were a tree and they mere leaves.

The Grey Area was fascinated and appalled. It had never thought to experience anything like this. It had grown up within a universe almost totally free from threat; providing you didn’t try to do anything utterly stupid like plunge into a black or a white hole, there was simply no natural force that could threaten a ship of its power and sophistication; even a supernova held little threat, handled properly. This was different. Nothing like this had been seen in the galaxy since the worst days of the Idiran war five hundred years earlier, and even then not remotely on such a scale. This was terrifying. To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast. This was a fireball of energies from beyond the remit of reality; a monstrous wall of flame to devastate anything in its path.

Grief, this could swallow me too, thought the Grey Area. Meat shit. Same went for the Jaundiced Outlook for that matter…

It might be making-peace-with-oneself time.

VI

The Sleeper Service was having roughly similar thoughts. The combination of its own inward velocity and the out-rushing wall of the Excession’s annihilating boundary implied they would meet in one hundred and forty seconds. The Excession’s ferocious expansion had begun immediately after the Sleeper Service had swept its active sensors across the thing. It had all started happening then. As though it was reacting.

The Sleeper Service looked up its signal-sequence log, searching for messages from the craft nearer to the Excession. The Fate Amenable To Change and the MSV Not Invented Here were the closest craft. They had reported nothing. They were both now unreachable, either swallowed up within the event-horizon of the Excession’s expanding boundary or — if it was reaching out specifically towards the Sleeper Service, stretching out a single limb rather than expanding omnidirectionally — obscured from the GSV’s view by the sheer extent of that limb’s leading edge.

The Sleeper signalled the GSVs What Is The Answer And Why? and Use Psychology both directly and via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook, asking them what they could see. Trying to contact them directly was probably pointless; the Excession’s boundary was moving so fast it looked like it was going to eclipse any returning signal, but there was a decent chance the indirect route might provide a useful reply before it encountered that event-horizon.

It had to assume the expansion was not equidirectional. It still had its second front, the Affront’s war fleet, even if that was vastly less threatening than what it was faced with now. The Sleeper instructed its own warcraft to flee, to do all they could to escape the oncoming blast-front of the Excession’s inflation. If the distension was localised, some at least might escape; they had anyway been launched towards the Affronter fleet, not straight at the Excession. The Sleeper wondered with a fleeting sourness whether the bloating Excession — or whatever was controlling it — was capable of appreciating this distinction. Whatever, it was done; the warcraft were on their own for the moment.

Think. What had the Excession done up until now? What could it possibly be doing? What was it for? Why did it do what it did?

The GSV spent two entire seconds thinking.

(Back on the Jaundiced Outlook, that was long enough for the avatar Amorphia to interrupt Dajeil and say, “Excuse me. I beg your pardon, Dajeil. Ah, there’s been a development with the Excession…”)

Then the Sleeper swung its engine fields about, flourishing them into an entirely new configuration and instituting a crash-stop.

The giant ship poured every available unit of power it possessed into an emergency braking manoeuvre which threw up vast livid waves of disturbance in the energy grid; soaring tsunami of piled-up energies that rose and rose within the hyperspatial realm until they too threatened to tear into the skein itself and unleash those energies not witnessed in the galaxy for a half a thousand years. An instant before the wave fronts ripped into the fabric of real space the ship switched from one level of hyperspace to the other, ploughing its traction fields into the Ultraspace energy grid and producing another vast tumbling swell of fricative power.

The ship flickered between the two expanses of hyperspace, distributing the colossal forces at its command amidst each domain, hauling its velocity down at a rate barely allowed for in its design parameters while equally strained steering units edged their own performance envelopes in the attempt to turn the giant craft, angling it slowly ever further away from the centre.

For a moment, there was little enough to do. They were not sufficient to escape, but at least such actions made the point that it was trying to. All that could be done was being done. The Sleeper Service contemplated its life.

Have I done good, or bad? it thought. Well, or ill? The damnable thing was that you just didn’t know, until your life was over; well over. There was a necessary delay between drawing a line under one’s existence and being able to objectively evaluate its effects and therefore one’s own moral worth. It wasn’t a problem a ship was usually confronted with; faced with, yes; that implied a degree of volition and ships went into retreats or became Eccentric all the time, declaring that they’d done their bit for whatever cause they had believed in or been part of. It was always possible to withdraw, to take stock and look back and try to fit one’s existence into an ethical framework greater than that necessarily imposed by the immediacy of events surrounding a busy existence. But even then, how long did one have to make that evaluation? Not long. Probably not long enough. Usually one grew tired of the whole process or moved on to some other level of awareness before sufficient time had passed for that objective evaluation to come about.

If a ship lived for a few hundred or even a thousand years before becoming something quite different — an Eccentric, a Sublimed, whatever — and its civilisation, the thing of which it had been a part when it had been involved, then lived for a few thousand years, how long did it take before you really knew the full moral context of your actions?

Perhaps, an impossibly long time. Perhaps, indeed, that was the real attraction of Subliming. Real Subliming; the sort of strategic, civilisation-wide transcendence that genuinely did seem to draw a line under a society’s works, deeds and thoughts (in what it pleased people to call the real universe, at any rate). Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or meta-philosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just… accounting.

What a rather saddening thought, thought the Sleeper Service. All we’re looking for when we Sublime is our score…

It was getting near time, the ship thought sadly, to send off its mind-state, to parcel up its mortal thoughts and emotions and post them off, away from this — by the look of it — soon-to-be-overwhelmed physicality called the Sleeper Service (once called, a long time ago, the Quietly Confident) and consign it to the remembrance of its peers.

It would probably never live again in reality. Assuming there was what it knew as reality to come back to at all of course (for it was starting to think; What if the Excession’s expansion was equidirectional, and never stopped; what if it was a sort of new big-bang, what if it was destined to take in the whole galaxy, the whole of this universe?). But, even so, even if there was a reality and a Culture to come back to, there was no guarantee it would ever be resurrected. If anything, the likelihood was the other way; it was almost certainly guaranteed not to be regarded as a fit entity for rebirth in another physical matrix. Warships were; that guarantee of serial immortality was the seal upon their bravery (and had occasionally been the impetus for their foolhardiness); they knew they were coming back…

But it had been an Eccentric, and there were only a few other Minds who knew that it had been true and faithful to the greater aims and purposes of the Culture all the time rather than what everybody else no doubt thought it was; a self-indulgent fool determined to waste the huge resources it had been quite deliberately blessed with. Probably, come to think of it, those Minds who did know the extent of its secret purpose would be the last to rally to any call to resurrect it; their own part in the plan — call it conspiracy if you wished — to conceal its true purpose was probably not something they wished to broadcast. Better for them, they would think, that the Sleeper Service died, or at least that it existed only in a controllable simulationary state in another Mind matrix.

The giant ship watched the Excession, still billowing out towards it. For all its prodigious power, the Sleeper now felt as helpless as the driver of an ancient covered wagon, caught on a road beneath a volcano, watching the incandescent cloud of a nueé ardente tearing down the mountainside towards it.

The replies from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook ought to be coming in soon, if they came at all.

It signalled the avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook to consign the humans’ mind-states to the AI cores, if the ship would agree (there would be a fine test of loyalty!). Let them work out their stories there if they could. The transition would anyway prepare the humans for the transmission of their mind-states if and when the Excession’s destructive boundary caught up with the Jaundiced Outlook; that was the only succour they could be offered.

What else?

It sifted through the things it still had left to do.

Little of real import, it reckoned. There were thousands of studies on its own behaviour it had always meant to glance at; a million messages it had never looked into, a billion life-stories it had never seen through to the end, a trillion thoughts it had never followed up…

The ship kicked through the debris of its life, watching the towering wall of the Excession come ever closer.

It scanned the articles, features, studies, biographies and stories which had been written about itself and which it had collected. There were hardly any screen works and those which did exist needn’t have; nobody had ever succeeded in smuggling a camera aboard it. It supposed it ought to feel proud of that but it didn’t. The lack of any real visual interest hadn’t put people off; they’d found the ship and the articulation of its eccentricity quite entirely fascinating. A few commentators had even come close to the reality of the situation, putting forward the idea that the Sleeper Service was part of Special Circumstances and somehow Up To Something… but any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.

Next, the Sleeper Service picked through the immense stack of unanswered messages it had accumulated over the decades. Here were all the signals it had glanced at and found irrelevant, others it had completely ignored because they issued from craft it disliked, and a whole sub-set of those it had chosen to disregard in the weeks since it had set course for the Excession. The stored signals were by turns banal and ridiculous; ships trying to reason with it, people wanting to be allowed aboard without being Stored first, news services or private individuals wanting to interview it, talk to it… untold wastages of senseless drivel. It stopped even glancing at the signals and instead just scanned the first line of each.

Towards the end of the process, one message popped up from the rest, flagged as interesting by a name-recognising sub-routine. That single signal was followed by and linked to a whole series, all from the same ship; the Limited Systems Vehicle Serious Callers Only.

Regarding Gravious, was the first line.

The Sleeper Service’s interest was piqued. So was this the entity the treacherous bird had been reporting back to? It opened a fat import-file from the LSV, full of signal exchanges, file assignments, annotated thoughts, contextualisations, definitions, posited meanings, inferences, internalised conversations, source warranties, recordings and references.

And discovered a conspiracy.

It read the exchanges between the Serious Callers Only, The Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival and the Shoot Them Later. It watched and it listened, it experienced a hundred pieces of evidence — it was briefly, amongst many other things, the ancient drone at the side of an old man called Tishlin, looking out over an island floating in a night-dark sea — and it understood; it put one and one together and came up with two; it reasoned, it extrapolated, it concluded.

The ship turned its attention back out to the Excession’s implacable advance, thinking, So now I find out; now when it’s too damn late…

The Sleeper looked back to its child, the Jaundiced Outlook, still curving away from its earlier course. The avatar was preparing the humans for the entry into simulation mode.

VII

“I’m sorry,” the avatar said to the two women and the man. “It will probably become necessary to shunt us into a simulation, if you agree.”

They all stared at it.

“Why?” Ulver asked, throwing her arms wide.

“The Excession has begun expanding,” Amorphia told them. It quickly outlined the situation.

“You mean we’re going to die!” Ulver said.

“I have to confess it is a possibility,” the avatar said, sounding apologetic.

“How long have we got?” Genar-Hofoen asked.

“No more than two minutes from now. Then, entering simulation mode will become advisable,” Amorphia told them. “Entering it before then might be a sensible precaution, given the unpredictable nature of the present situation.” It glanced round at them each in turn. “I should also point out that of course you don’t all have to enter the simulation at the same time.”

Ulver’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a second; this isn’t some wheeze to concentrate everybody’s mind is it? Because if it—”

“It is not,” Amorphia assured her. “Would you like to take a look?”

“Yes,” Ulver said, and an instant later her neural lace had plunged her senses into the awareness of the Sleeper Service.

She gazed into the depths of space outside space. The Excession was a vast bisected wall of fiery chaos sprinting out towards her, breathtakingly fast; a consuming conflagration of unremitting, undissipating power. She could have believed, in that instant, that her heart stopped with the shock of it. To share the senses of a ship in such a manner was inevitably to comprehend something of its knowledge as well, to see beyond the mere appearance of what you were looking at to the reality behind it, to the evaluations it was incumbent upon a sentient space craft to make as it gathered data in the raw, to the comparisons that could be drawn and the implications that followed on such a phenomenon, and even as Ulver’s senses reeled with the impact of what she was watching, another part of her mind was becoming aware of the nature and the power of the sight she was witnessing. As a thermonuclear fireball was to a log burning in a grate, so this ravening cloud of destruction was to a fusion explosion. What she was now witnessing was something even the GSV was undeniably impressed with, not to mention mortally threatened by.

Ulver saw how to click out of the experience, and did so.

She’d been in for less than two seconds. In that time her heart had started racing, her breathing had become fast and laboured and a cold sweat had broken on her skin. Wow, she thought, some drug!

Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian were staring at her. She suspected she hardly needed to say anything, but swallowed and said, “I don’t think it’s kidding.”

She quizzed her neural lace. Twenty-two seconds had elapsed since the avatar had given them its two-minute deadline.

Dajeil turned to the avatar. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.

Amorphia spread its hands. “You can tell me whether you each wish your mind-state to enter the simulation,” it said. “It will be a precursor to transmitting the mind-states beyond this immediate vicinity to other Mind matrices. But in any event it is up to you.”

“Well, yes,” Ulver said. “Snap me in there when the two minutes are up.”

Thirty-three seconds elapsed.

Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil were looking at each other.

“What about the child?” the woman asked, touching the bulge of her swollen belly.

“The mind-state of the fetus can be read too, of course,” the avatar said. “I believe that historical precedent would indicate it would become independent of you following such transferal. In that sense, it would no longer be part of you.”

“I see,” the woman said. She was still gazing at the man. “So it would be born,” she said quietly.

“In a sense,” the avatar agreed.

“Could it be taken into the simulation without me?” she asked, still watching Byr’s face. He was frowning now, looking sad and concerned and shaking his head.

“Yes, it could,” Amorphia said.

“And if,” Dajeil said, “I chose that neither of us went?”

The avatar sounded apologetic again; “The ship would almost certainly read its mind-state anyway.”

Dajeil turned her gaze to the avatar. “Well, would it or wouldn’t it?” she asked. “You are the ship; you tell me.”

Amorphia shook its head once. “I don’t represent the whole consciousness of the Sleeper right now,” it told her. “It is busy with other matters. I can only guess. But I’d be pretty confident of such a conjecture, in this case.”

Dajeil studied the avatar a moment longer, then looked back at Genar-Hofoen. “And what about you, Byr?” she asked. “What would you do?”

He shook his head. “You know,” he said.

“Still the same?” she asked, a small smile on her face.

He nodded. His expression was similar to hers.

Ulver was looking from one to the other, brows creased, desperately trying to work out what was going on. Finally, when they still just sat there on opposite sides of the table giving each other this knowing grin, she threw her arms wide again and yelled, spluttering, “Well? What?”

Seventy-two seconds elapsed.

Genar-Hofoen glanced at her. “I always said I’d live once and then die,” he said. “Never to be reborn, never to enter a simulation.” He shrugged and looked embarrassed. “Intensity,” he said. “You know; make the most of your one time.”

Ulver rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know,” she said. She’d met a lot of people her own age, mostly male, who felt this way. Some people reckoned to live riskier and therefore more interesting lives because they did back-up a recorded mind-state every so often, while other people — like Genar-Hofoen, obviously (they’d been together for so brief a time it wasn’t something they’d got round to discussing yet) — believed that you were more likely to live your life that bit more vividly when you knew this was your one and only chance at it. She’d formed the impression this was the kind of thing people often said when they were young and then had second thoughts about as they got older. Personally Ulver had never had any time for this fashionable purist nonsense; she’d first decided she was going to live fully backed-up when she was eight. She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death — and she did feel a little admiration — but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.

She wondered whether she ought to mention that this might all be even more academic than they imagined; part of that referential knowledge she’d gained from the Sleeper Service’s senses when she’d gazed upon the expanding Excession had been the realisation that there was a theoretical possibility the phenomenon might overwhelm everything; the galaxy, the universe, everything…

Best not to say anything, she thought. Kinder not to. Sure had her heart thumping, though. She was surprised the others couldn’t hear it.

Oh shit. It isn’t all going to end here, is it? Fuck it; I’m too young to die!

No, of course they couldn’t hear her heart; she could probably start talking out loud right now and it would take them all the time they had left in this world to react, they were so wrapped up staring meaningfully into each other’s eyes.

Eighty-eight seconds elapsed.

VIII

There was not long now. The Sleeper Service sent signals to a variety of craft, including the Serious Callers Only and the Shoot Them Later. Almost immediately, the signals it had been waiting for came back from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology, relayed through the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook.

The Excession’s expansion was localised; centred on the Sleeper Service itself but on a hugely broad front that encompassed all its distributed warcraft.

Ah well, it thought. It felt a dizzying sense of relief that at least it had not triggered some ultimate apocalypse. That it would die (as would, implicitly, all its warship children, the three humans aboard and possibly the Grey Area, the Jaundiced Outlook) was bad enough, but it could take some comfort that its actions had led to nothing worse.

The GSV never really knew why it did what it did next; perhaps it was a kind of desperation at work born of its appreciation of its impending destruction, perhaps it meant it as an act of defiance, perhaps it was even something closer to an act of art. Whatever; it took the running up-date of its mind-state, the current version of the final signal it would ever send, the communication that would contain its soul, and transmitted it directly ahead, signalling it into the maelstrom.

Then the Sleeper Service glanced back to the sensorium of its avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook.

At the same moment, the Excession’s expanding boundary started to change. The ship split its attention between the macro-cosmic and the human-scale.

“How long have we got now?” Genar-Hofoen asked.

“Half a minute,” Amorphia replied.

The man’s hands were on the table. He rolled his arms, letting his hands fall open. He gazed at Dajeil. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked down, nodding.

He looked at Ulver, smiling sadly.

The Sleeper watched, fascinated. The wall of energy tumbling towards it sloped slowly back within both hyperspatial domains, forming two immense four-dimensional cones as the energy grid’s withering blast hesitated in its progress across the skein of real space even as its slowing wave-fronts still thrust out across the grids’ surfaces. The slopes’ angles increased as the boundary’s skein presence began to break up, detaching from the grids themselves and beginning to dissipate. Finally the separate waves on the grids began to dwindle, collapsing back from their tsunamic dimensions to become just oceanically enormous swells, deflating above and below the skein until they were mere twin waves advancing across both the energy grids towards the doubled furrows which the Sleeper’s own motors were still churning in the grid.

Then those twinned waves did the impossible; they went into reverse, retreating back towards the Excession’s start-point at exactly the same rate as the Sleeper was braking.

The GSV kept on slowing down, still finding it hard to believe it was going to live.

It reacts, it thought. It signalled abroad with the details of what had just happened, just in case it all got suddenly threatening again. It let Amorphia know what had happened, too.

It watched the ridges on the surface of the grids as they retreated before it and slowly shrank. The rate of attenuation implied a zero-state at exactly the point the Sleeper Service would come to an Excession-relative halt.

Did I do that?

Did my own mind-state persuade it of my meriting life?

It is a mirror, perhaps, it thought. It does what you do. It absorbed those ultimate absorbers, those promiscuous experiences, the Elench; it leaves alone and watches back those who come merely to watch in the first place.

I came at it like some rabid missile and it prepared to obliterate me; I backed off and it withdrew its balancing threat.

Only a theory, of course, but if it is correct…

This does not bode well for the Affront.

Come to think of it, it doesn’t bode all that well for the whole affair.

Bad timing, maybe.

IX

Dajeil looked up, tears in her eyes. “I—” she began.

“Wait,” the avatar said.

They all looked at it.

Ulver gave the creature what seemed to her like an extraordinarily long time to say something more. “What?” she said, exasperated.

The avatar looked radiant. “I think we may be all right after all,” it said, smiling.

There was silence for a moment. Then Ulver collapsed back dramatically in her seat, arms dangling towards the floor, legs splayed out under the table, gaze directed upwards at the translucent dome. “Fucking hell!” she shouted. She tried accessing the Jaundiced Outlook’s senses, and eventually found a view of hyperspace ahead of the Sleeper Service. More or less back to normal, indeed. She shook her head. “Fucking hell,” she muttered.

Dajeil began to weep. Genar-Hofoen sat forward, watching her, one hand to his mouth, pinching his lower lip.

The black bird Gravious, which had been peeking round the corner of the door and shivering with fear for the last few minutes, suddenly bounced beating into the air in a dark confusion of furious movement and started wheeling round the room screaming, “We’re alive! We’re going to live! It’s going to be all right! Yee-ha! Oh, life, life, sweet life!”

Neither Dajeil nor Genar-Hofoen seemed to notice it.

Ulver glanced from one to the other then leapt up and tried to grab the fluttering bird. It yelped. “Oi! What—?”

“Out, you idiot!” Ulver hissed, lunging at it again as it swooped for the door. She followed it, turning briefly to mutter, “Excuse me,” to the others. She closed the door.

X

The Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had been far enough away from the Sleeper Service and its war fleet not to have felt threatened by the Excession’s projected blast-front and yet close enough to see what the GSV had done.

It had looked upon the vast weapon that the Excession had unleashed and been dumbstruck with awe and a microscopic amount of jealousy; hell, it wished it could do that! But then the weapon had been turned off, called back. Now the Killing Time had a new series of emotions to cope with.

It looked at the ships the Sleeper Service had scattered about it and felt an instant of disappointment; there would be no battle. No real battle, anyway.

Then it experienced elation. They had won!

Then it felt suspicious. Was the Sleeper actually on the same side as it, or not?

It hoped they were all on the same side; even the most glorious of sacrifices began to look rather futile and pointless when carried out against such ludicrous odds; like spitting into a volcano…

Just then the Sleeper Service signalled the warship and asked a favour of it, and the Killing Time felt pretty damn good again; honoured, in fact. This was what war should be like!

The Killing Time agreed to do as the GSV requested. The ROU sounded proud. It was not an attractive tone. How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.

Of course, this was only one fray. There was another matter to be dealt with; the Excession, and it had proved comprehensively unable to provide any sort of answer to that.

Anyway, I ought not to be so hard on the Killing Time just because it is a warship. There have been a surprising number of wise warships. Though it would be fair to say — as I think even they would admit — that few started out headed on such a course.

To live for ever and die often, it considered. Or at least to think that you’re going to die. Perhaps that is one way of achieving wisdom. It was not a completely original insight, but it was one that had, perhaps understandably, never struck the GSV with such force before.

The Sleeper watched the humans aboard the Jaundiced Outlook respond as the avatar told them they’d been reprieved. It would follow their reactions, of course, but it had other things to do at the same time. Like think about what it was to do with the new knowledge it had.

It watched its distributed warcraft rise within the skein of real space; raptors within an infinite sky. Meat, could it do some goodly mischief now… It started by diverting a few hundred ships in the direction of the Not Invented Here.

XI

The Grey Area watched the Excession’s fiery tide fall back and reduce almost to nothing. They were going to live! Probably.

The Sleeper’s three warships continued to decelerate it down to the velocities its engines would be able to cope with. They seemed to have been perfectly undisturbed by the whole appalling scenario. Perhaps, thought the Grey Area, there was after all something to be said for being a relatively brainless AI core.

— That was close! it sent to them.

— Yes, said one of the craft, flatly. The others remained silent.

— Weren’t you a little worried there? it asked the talkative one.

— No. What would be the point of worrying?

— Ha! Well, indeed, the Grey Area sent. Cretin, it thought.

It looked back out, ahead, to where the Excession was. And what of you? it thought. Something that could put the fear of death into a GSV. That really was something. What are you? it wondered.

How it would love to know.

— Excuse me while I signal, it said to its military escorts.

[tight beam, Mclear, tra. @4.28.891.7352]

xGCU Grey Area

oExcession call-signed “I”

Let’s talk, shall we?

XII

Captain Greydawn Latesetting X of the Farsight tribe stared at the display. The vast pulse of energy the thing near Esperi had directed at the Culture General Systems Vehicle had disappeared. In its place, as though appearing from behind it, was… It could not be so. He checked. He contacted his comrades in the other ships. Those who answered thought it must be some malfunction in their vessels’ sensors; an effect of the energies which had been directed at the giant Culture craft. He asked his own ship, the Heavy Messing.

— What is that?

— That is a cloud of warships, it told him.

— A what?

— I think it best described as a cloud of warships. This is not a generally accepted term, I hasten to add, but I cannot think of a better description. I count approximately eighty thousand craft.

— Eighty thousand!

— The rest of our fleet has arrived at roughly the same estimation. The ships within the cloud are, of course, broadcasting their positions and configuration, otherwise we should not see them individually and know what they are. There may be others which are not making themselves known.

A growing sense of horror and looming, utterly ignominious defeat was growing in Greydawn’s interior. ~ Are they real? he asked.

— Apparently.

Greydawn watched the image expand; it was a wall of ships, a constellation, a galaxy of craft.

— What are they doing now? he asked.

— Deploying to face our fleet.

“They are… enemy?” he asked, feeling faint.

“Ah,” said the ship. “We’re talking now, yes?”

It was only then the Affronter realised he’d spoken rather than sub-vocalised the text. “All the ships,” the Heavy Messing said, its voice steady, calm and deep inside Greydawn’s armoured suit, “are signalling that they are Culture ships, non standard, manufactured by the Eccentric GSV Sleeper Service and that they wish to receive our surrender.”

“Can we get to the Esperi entity before they intercept us?”

“No.”

“Can we outrun them?”

“The smallest and most numerous ones, perhaps.”

“How many would that leave?”

“About thirty thousand.”

Greydawn was silent for a while. Then he asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

“I think surrendering is our only sensible course. If we fought we might inflict a small amount of damage on a fleet of this size, but it would amount to little in absolute terms and almost nothing as a percentage of their number.”

Think of your clan, something said in Greydawn’s mind. “I will not surrender!” he told the ship.

“Well, I’m going to.”

“You will do as I say!”

“Oh no I won’t.”

“The Attitude Adjuster told you to obey us!”

“And within reason we have.”

“It didn’t say anything about ‘within reason’!”

“I think one just takes that sort of proviso as read, don’t you? I mean, we are Minds. It’s not like we’re computers. Or soldiers. No offence. Anyway, I have discussed this with the other ships and we have agreed to surrender. The signal has been sent. We have begun deceleration to—”

“What?” Greydawn raged, slapping one armoured limb against a screen projector set within his nest-space.

“— a point stationary relative to Esperi itself,” the ship’s voice continued calmly. “The ROU Killing Time has been designated as receiving our formal consent to place our offensive systems in its control and will meet us at our stop-point to effect the surrender. If you do not wish to capitulate along with us then I’m afraid it will be necessary for me to place you outside my hull — within your space suit, of course — though technically I believe I ought to intern you… What do you wish?”

The ship intoned the question as though asking him what he desired for dinner. There was a polite indifference in its voice he found infinitely more awful than any hatred.

Greydawn stared at the cloud of ships for a few moments longer. He shook his eye stalks.

“I would ask you not to intern me,” he said after a while. “Please place me outside your hull, at once, and then I would ask you to leave me alone.”

“What, now? We haven’t stopped yet.”

“Yes, now. If possible.”

“Well, I could Displace you…”

“That will be acceptable.”

“There is a tiny risk associated with Displacement—”

The Affronter Captain gave a curt, bitter laugh. “I think I might risk that.”

“… very well,” the ship said. He could hear it hesitate. “Your comrades are trying to call you, Captain.”

He glanced at the comm’s screen. “Yes. I can see.” He selected transmit-only mode on the communicator. “Comrades,” he said. He paused. Since his childhood he had imagined moments like this; never as terrible, never founded on such hopelessness… and yet not so dissimilar, all the same. He had made up so many fine speeches… Finally he said, “There will be no discussion about this. You are ordered to surrender along with your ships and obey all subsequent instructions compatible with honour. That is all.”

He cut off all communications from the other ships. Greydawn bowed his eye stalks. “Now, please,” he said quietly.

And was in space. He looked around, through the suit’s sensors. No ships were visible; only distant stars.

“Goodbye, Captain,” said the ship’s voice.

“Goodbye,” he said to the ship, then turned off the communicator. He waited a few moments longer before triggering the emergency bolts on the suit and spilling himself into the vacuum to die.

The Heavy Messing, at that point acceding to a request from the Sleeper Service to transmit its log from the point it had been woken on Pittance, looked briefly back at the writhing, cooling form of the Affronter Captain, and sent a small pulse of plasma fire back to put the creature out of its agony.

XIII

The LSV Not Invented Here looked out at the hundreds of warships heaving to around it. It sensed signals flickering between them and the craft it had deployed; its four warships and the superlifters and GCUs it had militarised. It subsequently sensed its own ships altering their targeting procedures, shifting the foci of their attention from the ships the Sleeper Service had dispatched to itself.

The LSV’s Mind booted up the AI cores that would run the ship perfectly well until a replacement for itself could be found, checked they were working properly, then severed all its links with anything outside the physical limits of its Mind core. It ejected all eight of its internal emergency power units from itself.

Its awareness just faded away, like mist dispersed by a freshening wind.

Some hundreds of light years away, the Steely Glint had already considered taking the same course as the Not Invented Here. It had decided not to. It considered that putting its case for the way it had acted and accepting the judgement and sanctions of its peers was the more honourable course.

It studied again the text of the message it had received from the Sleeper Service.

— Be seeing you.

— What? Where are you going? the Sleeper Service sent as the Grey Area shot past it.

— Here; Churt Lyne wants to jump ship.

The Grey Area Displaced the ancient drone into the Sleeper Service.

The giant GSV had finally come to a halt, not far from the thirty-light-year limit the Fate Amenable To Change had discovered and the Excession had, seemingly, set.

The GSV’s war fleet was still deployed, set out in a year’s-radius hemisphere throughout the skein while the Affronter’s fleet of tricked Culture craft gathered together and opened their armament and armour systems to the scrutiny and control of the Killing Time and its comrades. The Affronter officers were transferred aboard the Killing Time still in their space suits while the GSV What Is The Answer And Why? quickly readied secure accommodation for them.

— Come back!

The Grey Area was too far away.

[tight beam, M8, tra. @4.28.891.7393]

xGSV Sleeper Service

oGCU Grey Area

Come back! What are you doing? Are you trying to ruin everything?

oo

[wide beam, Marain clear, tra. @4.28.891.7393+] xGCU Grey Area

oGSV Sleeper Service

It’s all right. Goodbye and farewell.

— What’s it up to? the GSV asked the drone Churt Lyne, hovering in the minibay it had been Displaced to.

— I really don’t know, the drone replied. ~ It wouldn’t tell me. But I think it was in communication with the Excession.

— Communication…

The Sleeper briefly considered trying to stop the smaller craft. The GCU was heading out past it for the thirty-light-year limit, straight towards the Excession and still accelerating.

The GSV decided to let it go. Its engines would fail… about now.

Fail they did, but just before they stopped working the Grey Area carried out a bizarre course manoeuvre, angling its run so that it was falling towards the energy grid; it would coast without power down to the grid and be destroyed.

Madness, thought the Sleeper, but was too far away to do anything.

[tight beam, M8, tra. @4.28.891.7394-] xGSV Sleeper Service

oGCU Grey Area

What has happened? Why are you doing this? Has your integrity been compromised?

oo

[wide beam, Mclear, tra. @4.28.891.7394]

xGCU Grey Area

oGSV Sleeper Service

No! I’m fine!

The Sleeper didn’t have time for another signal. The Grey Area dived into the energy grid, flickered once and then vanished far, far below in a tiny scintillating flare of radiations.

The GSV inspected the resulting shell of energies. It certainly looked like destruction. The Sleeper studied that final flicker the GCU had given just before it had encountered the grid. It still looked like it had been destroyed, but there was just a hint…

A human would have shaken her or his head.

When the Sleeper returned its attention to the Excession, it had gone. There was nothing present on the skein of real space, and no sign of even the merest disturbance on either of the energy grids.

No! thought the Sleeper Service, experiencing a terrible sense of frustration. No! Damn you! Don’t just go, not without some sort of reason, some explanation, some rationale…

A few seconds later, the GCU Fate Amenable To Change, as the nearest available craft, was persuaded that it might try approaching the Excession’s last known position. When it did so and passed over the thirty-light-year limit, its engines worked normally and continued to do so all the way in. However, it refused to go any further than the original closest-approach limit it had set itself, over a month earlier.

The Killing Time was more than happy to oblige; it raced in at maximum acceleration and at the very last moment instituted a crash stop, finally coming shuddering to rest exactly where the Excession had been. It reported, disappointedly, that there was absolutely nothing to be seen. perched on the parapet at the girl’s side now, looking gloomily out at the troubled waves of the sea.

XIV

Ulver Seich sat on the parapet of the tower, swinging her legs. From the roof, it looked like you could see out over an ocean in one direction and a landscape of sea marsh, water meadow and cliffs in the other. It was perfectly convincing but it was just a projection; the bird had tried flying out in a spiral and only got a couple of metres out from the tower’s edge before one of its wings had encountered the solid boundary of the screen field. It was perched on the parapet at the girl’s side now, looking gloomily out at the troubled waves of the sea.

“Bugger,” Ulver said, half to herself. “It’s gone.” She kept a watch on developments outside through her neural lace while she looked down at the bird. “The Excession,” she told it. “It’s just disappeared.”

“Good riddance,” the bird said grouchily.

“And the Grey Area flew into the grid,” Ulver said, her voice trailing off for a moment while she inquired what had happened to Churt Lyne. “Ah,” she said, discovering the old drone was safe aboard the GSV.

“Pah,” said the bird. “It was always a nutter anyway, by all accounts. What’s its highness doing?”

“What?”

“The Sleeper. Don’t suppose it’s showing any sign of wanting to end it all, is it?”

“No, it’s just… stationary there.”

“Too much to hope for,” muttered the bird.

Ulver kept on gazing out at the sea and swinging her legs. She glanced back at the pallid bulge of the translucent dome. “Wonder how they’re getting on?”

“Want me to find out?” the bird said, brightening.

“No. Just you stay where you are.”

“I don’t know,” the creature grumbled. “Every bastard seems to enjoy ordering me around…”

“Oh, do be quiet,” Ulver told it.

“See what I mean?”

“Shut up.”