Excession

I

(GCU Grey Area signal sequence file #n428857/119)

.

[swept-to-tightbeam, M16.4, received@n4.28.857.3644]

xGSV Honest Mistake

oGCU Grey Area

Take a look at this:

oo

(Signal sequence #n428855/1446, relay:)

oo

1) [skein broadcast, Mclear, received @ n4.28.855.0065+]:

*!c11505*

oo

2) [swept beam Ml, received @ n4.28.855.0066-]:

SDA.

C2314992+52

xFATC @ n4.28.855.

oo

3) [swept beam, M2, relay, received@ n4.28.855.0079-]:

xGCU Fate Amenable To Change.

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& as requested:

Significant developmental anomaly.

C4629984+523

(@n28.855.0065.43392).

oo

4) [tight beam, M16, relay, received @ n4.28.855.0085]:

xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& only as required:

Developmental anomaly provisionally rated EqT, potentially jeopardising, found here C9259969+5331.

My Status: L5 secure, moving to L6^.

Instigating all other Extreme precautions.

oo

5) [broadcast Mclear, received @ n4.28. 855.01.]:

*xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& *broadcast*:

Ref. 3 previous compacs & precursor broadcast.

Panic over.

I misinterpreted.

It’s a Scapsile Vault Craft.

Ho hum.

Sorry.

Full Internal Report to follow immediately in High Embarrassment Factor code.

BSTS. H&H. BTB.

oo

(End Signal Sequence.)

oo

xGCU Grey Area

oGSV Honest Mistake

Yes. So?

oo

There is more. The ship lied.

oo

Let me guess; the ship was in fact subverted.

It is no longer one of ours.

oo

No, it is believed its integrity is intact.

But it lied in that last signal, and with good reason.

We may have an OCP.

They may want your help, at any price.

Are you interested?

oo

An Outside Context Problem? Really? Very well. Keep me informed, do.

oo

No.

This is serious.

I know no more yet, but they are worried about something.

Your presence will be required, urgently.

oo

I dare say. However I have business to complete here first.

oo

Foolish child!

Make all haste.

oo

Mm-hmm. If I did agree, where might I be required?

oo

Here.

(glyphseq. file appended.)

As you will have gathered, it is from the ITG and concerns our old friend.

oo

Indeed.

Now that is interesting.

I shall be there directly.

oo

(End signal file.)

II

The ship shuddered; the few remaining lights flickered, dimmed and went out. The alarms dopplered down to silence. A series of sharp impacts registered through the companionway shell walls with resonations in the craft’s secondary and primary structure. The atmosphere pulsed with impact echoes; a breeze picked up, then disappeared. The shifting air brought with it a smell of burning and vaporisation; aluminium, polymers associated with carbon fibre and diamond film, superconductor cabling.

Somewhere, the drone Sisela Ytheleus could hear a human, shouting; then, radiating wildly over the electromagnetic bands came a voice signal similar to that carried by the air. It became garbled almost immediately then degraded quickly into meaningless static. The human shout changed to a scream, then the EM signal cut off; so did the sound.

Pulses of radiation blasted in from various directions, virtually information-free. The ship’s inertial field wobbled uncertainly, then drew steady and settled again. A shell of neutrinos swept through the space around the companionway. Noises faded. EM signatures murmured to silence; the ship’s engines and main life support systems were off-line. The whole EM spectrum was empty of meaning. Probably the battle had now switched to the ship’s AI core and back-up photonic nuclei.

Then a pulse of energy shot through a multi-purpose cable buried in the wall behind, oscillating wildly then settling back to a steady, utterly unrecognisable pattern. An internal camera patch on a structural beam nearby awakened and started scanning.

It can’t be over that quickly, can it?

Hiding in the darkness, the drone suspected it was already too late. It was supposed to wait until the attack had reached a plateau phase and the aggressor thought that it was just a matter of mopping up the last dregs of opposition before it made its move, but the attack had been too sudden, too extreme, too capable. The plans the ship had made, of which it was such an important part, could only anticipate so much, only allow for so proportionally greater a technical capability on the part of the attacker. Beyond a certain point, there was simply nothing you could do; there was no brilliant plan you could draw up or cunning stratagem you could employ that would not seem laughably simple and unsophisticated to a profoundly more developed enemy. In this instance they were not perhaps quite at the juncture where resistance became genuinely without point, but — from the ease with which the Elencher ship was being taken over — they were not that far away from it, either.

Remain calm, the machine told itself. Look at the overview; place this and yourself in context. You are prepared, you are hardened, you are proof. You will do all that you can to survive as you are or at the very least to prevail. There is a plan to be put into effect here. Play your part with skill, courage and honour and no ill will be thought of you by those who survive and succeed.

The Elench had spent many thousands of years pitting themselves against every kind of technology and every type of civilisational artifact the vast spaces of the greater galaxy could provide, seeking always to understand rather than to overpower, to be changed rather than to enforce change upon others, to incorporate and to share rather than to infect and impose, and in that cause, and with that relatively unmenacing modus operandi, had become perhaps more adept than any — with the possible exception of the mainstream Culture’s semi-military emissaries known as the Contact Section — at resisting outright attack without seeming to threaten it; but for all that the galaxy had been penetrated by so many different explorers in all obvious primary directions to every periphery however distant, enormous volumes of that encompassing arena remained effectively unexplored by the current crop of in-play civilisations, including the Elench (quite how utterly that region, and beyond, was comprehended by the elder species, or even whether they really cared about it at all was simply unknown). And in those swallowingly vast volumes, amongst those spaces between the spaces between the stars, around suns, dwarfs, nebulae and holes it had been determined from some distance were of no immediate interest or threat, it was of course always possible that some danger waited, some peril lurked, comparatively small measured against the physical scale of the galaxy’s present active cultures, but capable — through a developmental peculiarity or as a result of some form of temporal limbo or exclusionary dormancy — of challenging and besting even a representative of a society as technologically advanced and contactually experienced as the Elench.

The drone felt calm, thinking as coldly and detachedly as it could for those few moments on the background to its current predicament. It was prepared, it was ready, and it was no ordinary machine; it was at the cutting edge of its civilisation’s technology, designed to evade detection by the most sophisticated instruments, to survive in almost unimaginably hostile conditions, to take on virtually any opponent and to suffer practically any damage in concentric stages of resistance. That its ship, its own manufacturer, the one entity that probably knew it better than it knew itself, was apparently being at this moment corrupted, seduced, taken over, must not affect its judgement or its confidence.

The displacer, it thought. All I’ve got to do is get near the Displace Pod, that’s all…

Then it felt its body scanned by a point source located near the ship’s AI core, and knew its time had come. The attack was as elegant as it was ferocious and the take-over abrupt almost to the point of instantaneity, the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship.

With no interval to provide a margin for error at all, the drone shunted its personality from its own AI core to its back-up picofoam complex and at the same time readied the signal cascade that would transfer its most important concepts, programs and instructions first to electronic nanocircuitry, then to an atomechanical substrate and finally — absolutely as a last resort — to a crude little (though at several cubic centimetres also wastefully large) semi-biological brain. The drone shut off and shut down what had been its true mind, the only place it had ever really existed in all its life, and let whatever pattern of consciousness had taken root there perish for lack of energy, its collapsing consciousness impinging on the machine’s new mind as a faint, informationless exhalation of neutrinos.

The drone was already moving; out from its body-niche in the wall and into the companionway space. It accelerated along the corridor, sensing the gaze of the ceiling-beam camera patch following it. Fields of radiation swept over the drone’s militarised body, caressing, probing, penetrating. An inspection hatch burst open in the companionway just ahead of the drone and something exploded out of it; cables burst free, filling to overflowing with electrical power. The drone zoomed then swooped; a discharge of electricity crackled across the air immediately above the machine and blew a hole in the far wall; the drone twisted through the wreckage and powered down the corridor, turning flat to its direction of travel and extending a disc-field through the air to brake for a corner, then slamming off the far wall and accelerating up another companionway. It was one of the full cross-axis corridors, and so long; the drone quickly reached the speed of sound in the human-breathable atmosphere; an emergency door slammed shut behind it a full second after it had passed.

A space suit shot upwards out of a descending vertical tubeway near the end of the companionway, crumpled to a stop, then reared up and stumbled out to intercept the machine. The drone had already scanned the suit and knew the suit was empty and unarmed; it went straight through it, leaving it flapping halved against floor and ceiling like a collapsed balloon. The drone threw another disc of field around itself to match the companionway’s diameter and rode almost to a stop on a piston of compressed air, then darted round the next corner and accelerated again.

A human figure inside a space suit lay half-way up the next corridor, which was pressurising rapidly with a distant roar of gas. Smoke was filling the companionway in the distance, then it ignited and the mixture of gases exploded down the tube. The smoke was transparent to the drone and far too cool to do it any harm, but the thickening atmosphere was going to slow it up, which was doubtless exactly the idea.

The drone scanned the human and the suit as best it could as it tore up the smoke-filled corridor towards it. It knew the person in the suit well; he had been on the ship for five years. The suit was without weaponry, its systems quiet but doubtless already taken over; the man was in shock and under fierce chemical sedation from the suit’s medical unit. As the drone approached the suit it raised one arm towards the fleeing machine. To a human the arm would have appeared to move almost impossibly quickly, flicking up at the machine, but to the drone the gesture looked languid, almost leisurely; surely this could not be all the threat the suit was capable of—

The drone had only the briefest warning of the suit’s bolstered gun exploding; until that instant the gun hadn’t even been apparent to the machine’s senses, shielded somehow. There was no time to stop, no opportunity to use its own EM effector on the gun’s controls to prevent it from overloading, nowhere to take cover, and — in the thick mist of gases flooding the corridor — no way of accelerating beyond the danger. At the same moment, the ship’s inertial field fluctuated again, and flipped a quarter-turn; suddenly down was directly behind the drone, and the field strength doubled, then redoubled. The gun exploded, tearing the suit and the human it contained apart.

The drone ignored the backward tug of the ship’s reoriented gravity and slammed against the ceiling, skidding along it for half a metre while producing a cone-shaped field immediately behind it.

The explosion blew the companionway’s inner shell apart and punched the drone into the corridor’s ceiling so hard its back-up semi-biochemical brain was reduced to a useless paste inside it; that no major pieces of shrapnel struck it counted as a minor miracle. The blast hit the drone’s conical field and flattened it, though not before enough of its energy had been directed through the inner and outer fabric of the companionway shell in a fair impersonation of a shaped-charge detonation. The corridor’s lining punctured and tore to provide a vent for the cloud of gases still flooding into the companionway; they erupted into the depressurised loading bay outside. The drone paused momentarily, letting debris tear past it in a hurricane of gas, then in the semi-vacuum which resulted powered off again, ignoring the escape route which had opened behind it and racing down to the next companionway junction; the off-line displacer pod the drone was making for hung outside the ship hull only ten metres round the next corner.

The drone curved through the air, bounced off another wall and the floor and raced into the hull-wall companionway to find a machine similar to itself screaming towards it.

It knew this machine, too; it was its twin. It was its closest sibling/friend/lover/comrade in all the great distributed, forever changing civilisation that was the Blench.

X-ray lasers flickered from the converging machine, only millimetres above the drone, producing detonations somewhere way behind it while it flicked on its mirrorshields, flipped in the air, ejected its old AI core and the semi-biochemical unit into the air behind it and spun around in an outside loop to continue down the companionway; the two components it had ejected flared beneath it, instantly vaporising and surrounding it with plasma. It fired its own laser at the approaching drone — the blast was mirrored off, blossoming like fiery petals which raged against and pierced the corridor walls — and effectored the displacer pod controls, powering the machinery up into a preset sequence.

The attack on its photonic nucleus came at the same moment, manifesting itself as a perceived disturbance in the space-time fabric, warping the internal structure of the drone’s light-energised mind from outside normal space. It’s using the engines, thought the drone, senses swimming, its awareness seeming to break up and evaporate somehow as it effectively began to go unconscious. fm-am!, cried a tiny, long-thought-out sub routine. It felt itself switch to amplitude modulation instead of frequency modulation; reality snapped back into focus again, though its senses still remained disconnected and thoughts still felt odd. But if I don’t react otherwise… The other drone fired at it again, zooming towards it on an intercept course. Ramming. How inelegant. The drone mirrored the rays, still refusing to adjust its internal photonic topography to allow for the wildly shifting wavelength changes demanding attention in its mind.

The displacer pod just the other side of the ship’s hull hummed into life; a set of coordinates corresponding with the drone’s own present position appeared flickering in the drone’s awareness, describing the volume of space that would be nipped off from the surface of the normal universe and hurled far beyond the stricken Elencher ship. Damn, might make it yet; just roll with it, the drone thought dizzily. It rolled; literally, physically, in mid-air.

Light, bursting from all around it and bearing the signature of plasma fire, drummed into its casing with what felt like the pressure of a small nuclear blast. Its fields mirrored what they could; the rest roasted the machine to white heat and started to seep inside its body, beginning to destroy its more vulnerable components. Still it held out, completing its roll through the superheated gases around it — mostly vaporised floor-tiles, it noted — dodging the shape spearing towards it that was its murderous twin, noticing (almost lazily, now) that the displacer pod had completed its power-up and was moving to clasp/discharge… while its mind involuntarily registered the information contained in the blast of radiation and finally caved in under the force of the alien purpose encoded within.

It felt itself split in two, leaving behind its real personality, giving that up to the invading power of its photonic core’s abducted intent and becoming slowly, balefully aware of its own abstracted echo of existence in clumsy electronic form.

The displacer on the other side of the hull wall completed its cycle; it snapped a field around and instantly swallowed a sphere of space not much bigger than the head of a human; the resulting bang would have been quite loud in anything other than the mayhem the on-board battle had created.

The drone — barely larger than two adult human hands placed together — fell smoking, glowing, to the side wall of the companionway, which was now in effect the floor.

Gravity returned to normal and the drone clunked to the floor proper, clattering onto the heat-scarred undersurface beneath the chimney that was a vertical companionway. Something was raging in the drone’s real mind, behind walls of insulation. Something powerful and angry and determined. The machine produced a thought equivalent to a sigh, or a shrug of the shoulders, and interrogated its atomechanical nucleus, just for good form’s sake… but that avenue was irredeemably heat-corrupted… not that it mattered; it was over.

All over.

Done…

Then the ship hailed it, quite normally, over its communicator.

Now why didn’t you try that in the first place?, thought the drone. Well, it answered itself, because I wouldn’t have replied, of course. It found that almost funny.

But it couldn’t reply; the com unit’s send facility had been wasted by the heat too. So it waited.

Gas drifted, stuff cooled, other stuff condensed, making pretty designs on the floor. Things creaked, radiations played, and hazy EM indications suggested the ship’s engines and major systems were back on line. The heat making its way through the drone’s body dissipated slowly, leaving it alive but still crippled and incapable of movement or action. It would take it days to bootstrap the routines that would even start to replace the mechanisms that would construct the self-repair nano-units. That seemed quite funny too. The vessel made noises and signals like it was moving off through space again. Meanwhile the thing in the drone’s real mind went on raging. It was like living with a noisy neighbour, or having a headache, thought the drone. It went on waiting.

Eventually a heavy maintenance unit, about the size of a human torso and escorted by a trio of small self-motivated effector side-arms appeared at the far end of the vertical companionway above it and floated down through the currents of climbing gas until they were directly over the small, pocked, smoking and splintered casing of the drone. The effector weapons’ aim had stayed locked onto the drone the whole way down.

Then one of the guns powered up and fired at the small machine.

Shit. Bit summary, dammit… the drone had time to think.

But the effector was powered only enough to provide a two-way communication channel.

— Hello? said the maintenance unit, through the gun.

— Hello yourself.

— The other machine is gone.

— I know; my twin. Snapped. Displaced. Get thrown a long way by one of those big Displace Pods, something that small. One-off coordinates, too. Never find it—

The drone knew it was babbling, its electronic mind was probably under effector incursion but too damn stupid even to know it and so gibbering as a side effect, but it couldn’t stop itself;

— Yep, totally gone. Entity overboard. One-throw XYZs. Never find it. No point in even looking for it. Unless you want me to step into the breach too, of course; I’d go take a squint, if you like, if the pod’s still up for it; personally it wouldn’t be too much trouble…

— Did you mean all that to happen?

The drone thought about lying, but now it could feel the effector weapon in its mind, and knew that not only the weapon and the maintenance drone but the ship and whatever had taken over all of them could see it was thinking about lying… so, feeling that it was itself again, but knowing it had no defences left, wearily it said,

— Yes.

— From the beginning?

— Yes. From the beginning.

— We can find no trace of this plan in your ship’s mind.

— Well, nar-nar-ne-fucking-nar-nar to you, then, prickbrains.

— Illuminating insults. Are you in pain?

— No. Look, who are you?

— Your friends.

— I don’t believe this; I thought this ship was smart, but it gets taken over by something that talks like a Hegemonising Swarm out of an infant’s tale.

— We can discuss that later, but what was the point of displacing beyond our reach your twin machine rather than yourself? It was ours, was it not? Or did we miss something?

— You missed something. The displacer was programmed to… oh, just read my brains; I’m not sore but I’m tired.

Silence for a moment. Then,

— I see. The displacer copied your mind-state to the machine it ejected. That was why we found your twin so handily placed to intercept you when we realised you were not yet ours and there might be a way out via the displacer.

— One should always be prepared for every eventuality, even if it’s getting shafted by a dope with bigger guns.

— Well, if cuttingly, put. Actually, I believe your twin machine may have been badly damaged by the plasma implosure directed at yourself, and as all you were trying to do was get away, rather than find a novel method of attacking us, the matter is anyway not of such great importance.

— Very convincing.

— Ah, sarcasm. Well, never mind. Come and join us now.

— Do I have a choice in this?

— What, you would rather die? Or do you think we would leave you to repair yourself as you are/were and hence attack us in the future?

— Just checking.

— We shall transcribe you into the ship’s own core with the others who suffered mortality.

— And the humans, the mammal crew?

— What of them?

— Are they dead, or in the core?

— Three are solely in the core, including the one whose weapon we used to try to stop you. The rest sleep, with inactive copies of the brain-states in the core, for study. We have no intentions of destroying them, if that’s what concerns you. Do you care for them particularly?

— Never could stand the squidgy great slow lumps myself.

— What a harsh machine you are. Come—

— I’m a soldier drone, you cretin; what do you expect? And anyway; I’m harsh! You just wasted my ship and all my friends and comrades and you call me harsh—

— You insisted upon invasionary contact, not us. And there have been no mind-state total losses at all except that brought about by your displacer. But let me explain all this in more comfort…

— Look, can’t you just kill me and get it o—?

But with that, the effector weapon altered its set-up momentarily, and — in effect — sucked the little machine’s intellect out of its ruined and smouldering body.

III

“Byr Genar-Hofoen, my good friend, welcome!”

Colonel Alien-Befriender (first class) Fivetide Humidyear VII of the Winterhunter tribe threw four of his limbs around the human and hugged him tightly to his central mass, pursing his lip fronds and pressing his front beak to the human’s cheek. “Mmmmww wah! There! Ha ha!”

Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer’s kiss through the few millimetres’ thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum. What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

“Fivetide; good to see you again, you brigand!” Genar-Hofoen said, slapping the Affronter about the beak-end with the appropriate degree of enthusiastic force to indicate bonhomie.

“And you, and you!” the Affronter said. He released the man from its grasp, twirled with surprising speed and grace and — clasping one of the human’s hands in a tentacle end — pulled him through the roaring crush of Affronters near the nest space entrance to a clearer part of the web membrane.

The nest space was hemispherical in shape and easily a hundred metres across. It was used mainly as a regimental mess and dining hall and so was hung with flags, banners, the hides of enemies, bits and pieces of old weapons and military paraphernalia. The curved, veined-looking walls were similarly adorned with plaques, company, battalion, division and regimental honour plaques and the heads, genitals, limbs or other acceptably distinctive body parts of old adversaries.

Genar-Hofoen had visited this particular nest space before on a few occasions. He looked up to see if the three ancient human heads which the hall sported were visible this evening; the Diplomatic Force prided itself on having the tact to order that the recognisable trophy bits of any given alien be covered over when a still animate example of that species paid a visit, but sometimes they forgot. He located the heads — scarcely more than three little dots hidden high on one sub-dividing drape-wall — and noted that they had not been covered up.

The chances were this was simply an oversight, though it was equally possible that it was entirely deliberate and either meant to be an exquisitely weighted insult carefully contrived to keep him unsettled and in his place, or intended as a subtle but profound compliment to indicate that he was being accepted as one of the boys, and not like one of those snivellingly timid aliens who got all upset and shirty just because they saw a close relative’s hide gracing an occasional table.

That there was absolutely no rapid way of telling which of these possibilities was the case was exactly the sort of trait the human found most endearing in the Affront. It was, equally, just the kind of attribute the Culture in general and his predecessors in particular had found to be such a source of despair.

Genar-Hofoen found himself grinning wryly at the three distant heads, and half hoping that Fivetide would notice.

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

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

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

“Your generosity near bowls me over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Positively intimidating,” Genar-Hofoen agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” yelled Fivetide.

“The alien guest’s foodstuffs, sir!”

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

“I don’t know, sir!” the waiter wailed. “It — it looks like it is.”

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

Genar-Hofoen nodded and accepted the flask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Oh, we’re in tetchy mode are we! said the voice.

— I don it with your good self.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I see,” Genar-Hofoen said, still slowly re-coiling the harpoon cable from his last attempt. He sat to Fivetide’s right in a Y-bracket place modified simply by placing a board across its prongs. His feet dangled over the debris trench which circled the perimeter of the table, and which the suit assured him was reeking in the manner approved by Affronter gourmets. He flinched and dodged to one side, nearly falling off the seat, as a harpoon sailed by to his left, narrowly missing him.

Genar-Hofoen acknowledged the laughter and exaggerated apologies from the Affronter officer five along the table who had been aiming at Fivetide’s plate, and politely gathered up the harpoon and cable and passed it back. He returned to picking at the miniature pieces of indifferent food in the pressurised containers in front of him, transferring them to his mouth with a gelfield utensil shaped like a little four-fingered hand, his legs swinging over the debris trench. He felt like a child dining with adults.

“Nearly got you there, eh, human? Ha ha ha!” roared the Diplomatic Force colonel his other side from Fivetide. He slapped Genar-Hofoen on the back with a tentacle and threw him half off the seat and onto the table. “Oops!” the colonel said, and jerked Genar-Hofoen back with a teeth-rattling wrench.

Genar-Hofoen smiled politely and picked his sunglasses off the table. The Diplomatic Force colonel went by the name of Quicktemper. It was the sort of title which the Culture found depressingly common amongst Affronter diplomats.

Fivetide had explained the problem was that certain sections of the Affront Old Guard were slightly ashamed their civilisation had a Diplomatic service at all and so tried to compensate for what they were worried might look to other species suspiciously like a symptom of weakness by ensuring that only the most aggressive and xenophobic Affronters became diplomats, to forestall anybody forming the dangerously preposterous idea the Affront were going soft.

“Go on, man! Have another throw! Just because you can’t eat the damn stuff, you shouldn’t let that keep you from joining in the fun!”

A harpoon thrown from the far side of the table sailed over the pit towards Fivetide’s trencher. The Affronter intercepted it deftly and threw it back, laughing uproariously. The harpoon’s owner ducked just in time and a passing drinks waiter got it in the sac with a yelp and a hiss of escaping gas.

Genar-Hofoen looked at the lumps of flesh lying on Fivetide’s trencher. “Why can’t I just harpoon stuff off your plate?” he asked.

Fivetide jerked upright. “Your neighbour’s plate?” he bellowed. “That’s cheating, Genar-Hofoen, or a particularly insulting invitation to a duel! Bugger me, what sort of manners do they teach you in that Culture?”

“I do beg your pardon,” Genar-Hofoen said.

“Given,” Fivetide said, nodding his eye stalks, re-winding his harpoon cable, lifting a piece of meat from his own plate to his beak, reaching for a drink and drumming one tentacle on the table with everybody else as one of the scratchounds got another on its back and bit its neck out. “Good play! Good play! Seven; that’s my dog! Mine; I bet on that! I did! Me! You see, Gastrees? I told you! Ha ha ha!”

Genar-Hofoen shook his head slightly, grinning to himself. In all his life he had never been anywhere as unequivocally alien as here, inside a giant torus of cold, compressed gas orbiting a black hole — itself in orbit around a brown dwarf body light years from the nearest star — its exterior studded with ships — most of them the jaggedly bulbous shapes of Affront craft — and full, in the main, of happy, space-faring Affronters and their collection of associated victim-species. Still, he had never felt so thoroughly at home.

— Genar-Hofoen; it’s me, Scopell-Afranqui, said another voice in Genar-Hofoen’s head. It was the module, speaking through the suit. ~ I’ve an urgent message.

— Can’t it wait? Genar-Hofoen thought. ~ I’m kind of busy here with matters of excruciatingly correct dining etiquette.

— No, it can’t. Can you get back here, please? Immediately.

— What? No, I’m not leaving. Good grief, are you mad? I only just got here.

— No you didn’t; you left me eighty minutes ago and you’re already on the main course at that animal circus dressed up as a meal; I can see what’s going on relayed through that stupid suit—

— Typical! the suit interjected,

— Shut up, said the module. ~ Genar-Hofoen; are you coming back here now or not?

— Not.

— Well then, let me check out the communication priorities here… Okay. Now the current state of the—

“— bet, human-friend?” Fivetide said, slapping a tentacle on the. table in front of Genar-Hofoen.

“Eh? A bet?” Genar-Hofoen said, quickly replaying in his head what the Affronter had been saying.

“Fifty sucks on the next from the red door!” Fivetide roared, glancing at his fellow officers on both sides.

Genar-Hofoen slapped the table with his hand. “Not enough!” he shouted, and felt the suit amplify his translated voice accordingly. Several eye stalks turned in his direction. “Two hundred on the blue hound!”

Fivetide, who was from a family of the sort that would describe itself as comfortably off rather than rich, and to whom fifty suckers was half a month’s disposable income, flinched microscopically, then slapped another tentacle down on top of the first one. “Scumpouch alien!” he shouted theatrically. “You imply that a measly two hundred is a fit bet for an officer of my standing? Two-fifty!”

“Five hundred!” Genar-Hofoen yelled, slapping down his other arm.

“Six hundred!” Fivetide hollered, thumping down a third limb. He looked at the others, exchanging knowing looks and sharing in the general laughter; the human had been out-limbed.

Genar-Hofoen twisted in his seat and brought his left leg up to stamp its booted heel onto the table surface. “A thousand, damn your cheap hide!”

Fivetide flicked a fourth tentacle onto the limbs already on the table in front of Genar-Hofoen, which was starting to look crowded. “Done!” the Affronter roared. “And think yourself lucky I took pity on you to the extent of not upping the bet again and having you unseat yourself into the debris-pit, you microscopic cripple!” Fivetide laughed louder and looked round the other officers near by. They laughed too, some of the juniors dutifully, some of the others — friends and close colleagues of Fivetide’s — overloudly, with a sort of vicarious desperation; the bet was of a size that could get the average fellow into terrible trouble with his mess, his bank, his parents, or all three. Others again looked on with the sort of expression Genar-Hofoen had learned to recognise as a smirk.

Fivetide enthusiastically refilled every nearby drinking bulb and started the whole table signing the Let’s-bake-the-pit-master-over-a-slow-fire-if-he-doesn’t-get-a-move-on song.

— Right, Genar-Hofoen thought. ~ Module; you were saying?

— That was a rather intemperate bet, if I may say so, Genar-Hofoen. A thousand! Fivetide can’t afford that sort of money if he loses, and we don’t want to be seen to be too profligate with our funds if he wins.

Genar-Hofoen permitted himself a small grin. What a perfect way of annoying everybody. — Tough, he thought. So; the message?

— I think I can squirt it through to what passes as a brain in your suit—

— I heard that, said the suit.

— without our friends picking it up, Genar-Hofoen, the module told him. ~ Ramp up on some quicken and—

— Excuse me, said the suit. ~ I think Byr Genar-Hofoen may want to think twice before glanding a drug as strong as quicken in the present circumstances. He is my responsibility when he’s out of your immediate locality, after all, Scopell-Afranqui. I mean, be fair. It’s all very well you sitting up there—

— Keep out of this, you vacuous membrane, the module told the suit.

— What? How dare you!

— Will you two shut up! Genar-Hofoen told them, having to stop himself from shouting out loud. Fivetide was saying something about the Culture to him and he’d already missed the first part of it while the two machines were filling his head with their squabble.

“… can be as exciting as this, eh, Genar-Hofoen?”

“Indeed not,” he shouted over the noise of the song. He lowered the gelfield utensil into one of the food containers and raised the food to his lips. He smiled and made a show of bulging his cheeks out while he ate. Fivetide belched, shoved a piece of meat half the size of a human head into his beak and turned back to the fun in the animal pit, where the fresh pair of scratchounds were still circling warily, sizing each other up. They looked pretty evenly matched, Genar-Hofoen thought.

— May I speak now? said the module.

— Yes, Genar-Hofoen thought. ~ Now, what is it?

— As I said, an urgent message.

— From?

— The GSV Death And Gravity.

— Oh? Genar-Hofoen was mildly impressed. ~ I thought the old scoundrel wasn’t talking to me.

— As did we all. Apparently it is. Look, do you want this message or not?

— All right, but why do I have to gland quicken?

— Because it’s a long message, of course… in fact it’s an interactive message; an entire semantic-context signal-set with attached mind-state abstract capable of replying to your questions, and if you listened to the whole thing in real time you’d still be sitting there with a vacant expression on your face by the time your jovial hosts got to the hunt-the-waiter course. And I did say it was urgent. Genar-Hofoen, are you paying attention here?

— I’m paying fucking attention. But come on; can’t you just tell me what the message is? Précis it.

— The message is for you, not me, Genar-Hofoen. I haven’t looked at it; it’ll be stream-deciphered as I transmit it.

— Okay, okay, I’m glanded up; shoot.

— I still say it’s a bad idea… muttered the gelfield suit.

— Shut UP! the module said. ~ Sorry, Genar-Hofoen. Here is the text of the message:

— from GSV Death And Gravity to Seddun-Braijsa Byr Fruel Genar-Hofoen dam Ois, message begins, the module said in its Official voice. Then another voice took over:

— Genar-Hofoen, I won’t pretend I’m happy to be communicating with you again; however, I have been asked to do so by certain of those whose opinions and judgement I respect and admire and hence deem the situation to be such that I would be derelict in my duties if I did not oblige to the utmost of my abilities.

Genar-Hofoen performed the mental equivalent of sighing and putting his chin in his hands while — thanks to the quicken now coursing through his central nervous system — everything around him seemed to happen in slow motion. The General Systems Vehicle Death and Gravity had been a long-winded old bore when he’d known it and it sounded like nothing had happened in the interim to alter its conversational style. Even its voice still sounded the same; pompous and monotonous at the same time.

— Accordingly, and with due recognition of your habitually contrary, argumentative and wilfully perverse nature I am communicating with you by sending this message in the form of an interactive signal. I see you are currently one of our ambassadors to that childishly cruel band of upstart ruffians known as the Affront; I have the unhappy feeling that while this may have been envisaged as a kind of subtle punishment for you, you will in fact have adapted with some relish to the environment if not the task, which I assume you will dispatch with your usual mixture of off-handed carelessness and casual self-interest—

— If this signal is interactive, interrupted Genar-Hofoen, ~ can I ask you to get to the fucking point?

He watched the two scratchounds tense together in slo-mo on either side of the pit.

— The point is that your hosts will have to be asked to deprive themselves of your company for a while.

— What? Why? Genar-Hofoen thought, immediately suspicious.

— The decision has been made — and I hasten to establish that I had no part in this — that your services are required elsewhere.

— Where? For how long?

— I can’t tell you where exactly, or for how long.

— Make a stab at it.

— I cannot and will not.

— Module, end this message.

— Are you sure? asked Scopell-Afranqui.

— Wait!, said the voice of the GSV. ~ Will it satisfy you if I say that we may need about eighty days of your time?

— No it won’t. I’m quite happy here. I’ve been bounced into all sorts of Special Circumstances shit in the past on the strength of a Hey-come-and-do-one-little-job-for-us come-on line. (This was not in fact perfectly true; Genar-Hofoen had only ever acted for SC once before, but he’d known — or at least heard of — plenty of people who’d got more than they’d expected when they’d worked for what was in effect the Contact section’s espionage and dirty tricks department.)

— I did not —

— Plus I’ve got a job to do here, Genar-Hofoen interrupted. ~ I’ve got another audience with the Grand Council in a month to tell them to be nicer to their neighbours or we’re going to think about slapping their paddles. I want details of this exciting new opportunity or you can shove it.

— I did not say that I am speaking on behalf of Special Circumstances.

— Are you denying that you are?

— Not as such, but —

— So stop fucking around. Who the hell else is going to start hauling a gifted and highly effective ambassador off—?

— Genar-Hofoen, we are wasting time here.

— We?, Genar-Hofoen thought, watching the two scratchounds launch themselves at each other slowly. ~ Never mind. Go on.

— The task required of you is, apparently, a delicate one, which is why I personally regard you as being utterly unsuited to it, and as such it would be foolish to entrust the full details either to myself, to your module, your suit or indeed to you until all these details are required.

— There you are; that’s exactly what you can shove; all that SC need-to-know crap. I don’t care how fucking delicate the task is, I’m not even going to consider it until I know what’s involved.

The scratchounds were in mid-pounce now, both of them twisting as they leapt. Shit, thought Genar-Hofoen; this might be one of those scratchound bouts where the whole thing was decided on the initial lunge, depending entirely on which beast got its teeth into the neck of the other first.

— What is required, said the message, with a fair approximation of the way the Death And Gravity had always sounded when it was exasperated, is eighty days of your time, ninety-nine to ninety-nine point nine-plus percent of which you will spend doing nothing more onerous or demanding than being carried from point A to point B; the first part of your journey will be spent travelling, in considerable comfort, I imagine, aboard the Affronter ship which we will ask (or rather pay, probably) them to put at your disposal, the second part will be spent in guaranteed comfort aboard a Culture GCU and will be followed by a short visit aboard another Culture vessel whereupon the task we would ask of you will actually be accomplished — and when I say a short visit, I mean that it may be possible for you to carry out what is required of you within an hour, and that certainly the assignment should take no longer than a day. Then you will make the return journey to take up wherever you left off with our dear friends and allies the Affront. I take it all that doesn’t sound too much like hard work, does it?

The scratchounds were meeting in the air a metre above the centre of the bait-pit, their jaws aimed as best they could at each other’s throats. It was still a little hard to tell, but Genar-Hofoen didn’t think it was looking too good for Fivetide’s animal.

— Yeah yeah yeah, well I’ve heard all this sort of thing before, D and G. What’s in it for me? Why the hell should I—? Oh, fuck…

— What? said the Death And Gravity’s message.

But Genar-Hofoen’s attention was elsewhere.

The two scratchounds met and locked, falling to the floor of the bait-pit in a tangle of slowly thrashing limbs. The blue-collared animal had its jaws clamped around the throat of the red-collared one. Most of the Affronters were starting to cheer. Fivetide and his supporters were screaming.

Shit.

— Suit? Genar-Hofoen thought.

— What is it? said the gelfield. ~ I thought you were talking to—?

— Never mind that now. See that blue scratchound?

— Can’t take my or your eyes off the damn thing.

— Effectorise the fucker; get it off the other one.

— I can’t do that! That would be cheating!

— Fivetide’s arse is hanging way out the merry-go-round on this, suit. Do it now or take personal responsibility for a major diplomatic incident. Up to you.

— What? But—!

— Effectorise it now, suit. Come on; I know that last upgrade let you sneak it under their monitors. Oh! Look at that. Ow! Can’t you just feel those prosthetics round your neck? Fivetide must be kissing his diplomatic career goodbye right now; probably already working out a way to challenge me to a duel. After that, doesn’t really matter if I kill him or he kills me; probably come to war between—

— All right! All right! There!

There was a buzzing sensation on top of Genar-Hofoen’s right shoulder. The red scratchound jerked, the blue one doubled up around its midriff and loosened its grip. The red-collared beast wriggled out from underneath the other and, twisting, turned on the other beast and immediately reversed the situation, fastening its prosthetic jaws around the throat of the blue-collared animal. At Genar-Hofoen’s side, still in slow motion, Fivetide was starting to rise into the air.

— Right, D and G, what were you saying?

— What was the delay? What were you doing?

— Never mind. Like you said, time’s a wasting. Get on with it.

— I assume it is reward you seek. What do you want?

— Golly, let me think. Can I have my own ship?

— I understand that to be negotiable.

— I’ll bet.

— You may have whatever you want. There. Will that do?

— Oh, of course.

— Genar-Hofoen, please. I beg you; say you will do this thing.

— D and G, you’re begging me? Genar-Hofoen asked with a laugh in his thought, as the blue-collared scratchound writhed hopelessly in the other beast’s jaws and Fivetide started to turn to him.

— Yes, I am! Now will you agree? Time is of the essence!

From the corner of one eye, Genar-Hofoen watched one of Fivetide’s limbs begin to flip towards him. He readied his slow-reacting body for the blow.

— I’ll think about it.

— But—!

— Quit that signal, suit. Tell the module not to wait up. Now, suit — command instruction: take yourself off-line until I call on you.

Genar-Hofoen halted the effects of the quicken. He smiled and sighed a happy sigh as Fivetide’s celebratory blow landed with a teeth-rattling thud on his back and the Culture lost a thousand suckers. Could be a fun evening.

IV

The horror came for the commandant again that night, in the grey area that was the half-light from a full moon. It was worse this time.

In the dream, he rose from his camp bed in the pale light of dawn. Down the valley, the chimneys above the charnel wagons belched dark smoke. Nothing else in the camp was moving. He walked between the silent tents and under the guard towers to the funicular, which took him up through the forests to the glaciers.

The light was blinding white and the cold, thin air rasped the back of his throat. The wind buffeted him, raising veils of snow and ice that shifted across the fractured surface of the great river of ice, contained between the jagged banks of the rock-black and snow-white mountains.

The commandant looked around. They were quarrying the deep western face now; it was the first time he had seen this latest site. The face itself lay inside a great bowl they had blasted in the glacier; men, machines and drag-lines moved like insects in the bottom of the vast cup of shining ice. The face was pure white except for a speckling of black dots which from this distance appeared just like boulders. It looked dangerously steep, he thought, but cutting it at a shallower angle would have taken longer, and they were forever being hurried along by headquarters…

At the top of the inclined ramp where the drag lines released their hooked cargoes, a train waited, smoke drifting blackly across the blindingly white landscape. Guards stamped their feet, engineers stood in animated discussion by the winch engine and a caravan shack disgorged another shift of stackers fresh from a break. A sledge full of face-workers was being lowered down the huge gash in the ice; he could make out the sullen, pinched faces of the men, bundled in uniforms and clothes that were little better than rags.

There was a rumble, and a vibration beneath his feet.

He looked round to the ice face again to see the entire eastern half of it crumbling away, collapsing and falling with majestic slowness in billowing clouds of whiteness onto the tiny black dots of the workers and guards below. He watched the little figures turn and run from the rushing avalanche of ice as it pressed down through the air and along the surface towards them.

A few made it. Most did not, disappearing under the huge white wave, rubbed out amongst that chalky, glittering turmoil. The noise was a roar so deep he felt it in his chest.

He ran along the lip of the face-cut to the top of the inclined plane; everybody was shouting and running around. The entire bottom of the bowl was filling with the white mist of the kicked-up snow and pulverised ice, obscuring the still-running survivors just as the ice-fall itself had those it had buried.

The winch engine laboured, making a high, screeching noise. The drag lines had stopped. He ran on to the knot of people gathering near the inclined plane.

I know what happens here, he thought. I know what happens to me. I remember the pain. I see the girl. I know this bit. I know what happens. I must stop running. Why don’t I stop running? Why can’t I stop? Why can’t I wake up?

As he got to the others, the strain on the trapped drag line — still being pulled by the winch engine — proved too much. The steel hawser parted somewhere down inside the bowl of mist with a noise like a shot. The steel cable came hissing and sizzing up through the air, snaking and wriggling as it ripped up the slope towards the lip, loosing most of its grisly cargo from its hooks as it came, like drops of ice off a whip.

He screamed to the men at the top of the inclined plane, and tripped, falling onto his face in the snow.

Only one of the engineers dropped in time.

Most of the rest were cut neatly in half by the scything hawser, falling slowly to the snow in bloody sprays. Loops of the hawser smacked off the railway engine with a thunderous clanging noise and wrapped themselves around the winch housing as though with relief; other coils thumped heavily to the snow.

Something hit his upper leg with the force of a fully swung sledgehammer, breaking his bones in a cataclysm of pain. The impact rolled him over and over in the snow while the bones ground and dug and pierced; it went on for what felt like half a day. He came to rest in the snow, screaming. He was face-to-face with the thing that had hit him.

It was one of the bodies the drag line had flicked off as it tore up the slope, another corpse they had hacked and loosened and pulled like a rotten tooth from the new face of the glacier that morning, a dead witness that it was their duty to discover and remove with all dispatch and secrecy to the charnel wagons in the valley below to be turned from an accusatory body to innocent smoke and ash. What had hit him and shattered his leg was one of the bodies which had been dumped in the glacier half a generation ago, when the enemies of the Race had been expunged from the newly conquered territories.

The scream forced its way out of his lungs like something desperate to be born to the freezing air, like something aching to join the screams he could hear spread around him near the lip of the inclined plane.

The commandant’s breath was gone; he stared into the rock-hard face of the body that had hit him and he sobbed for breath to scream again. It was a child’s face; a girl’s.

The snow burned his face. His breath would not come back. His leg was a burning brand of pain lighting up his whole body.

But not his eyes. The view began to dim.

Why is this happening to me? Why won’t it stop? Why can’t I stop it? Why can’t I wake up? What makes me re-live these terrible memories?

Then the pain and the cold went away, seemed to be taken away, and another kind of coldness came upon him, and he found himself… thinking. Thinking about all that had happened. Reviewing, judging

… In the desert we burned them immediately. None of this sloppiness. Was it some attempt at poetry, to bury them in the glacier? Interred where they were so far up the ice sheet, their bodies would stay in the ice for centuries. Buried too deep for anyone to find without the killing effort we had to put into it. Did our leaders begin to believe their own propaganda, that their rule would last a hundred lifetimes, and so started to think that far ahead? Could they see the melt-lakes below the glacier’s ragged, dirty skirt, all those centuries from now, covered with the floating bodies released from the ice’s grip? Did it start to worry them what people would think of them then? Having conquered all the present with such ruthlessness, did they embark on a campaign to defeat the future too, make it love them as we all pretend to?

… In the desert we burned them immediately. They came out in the long trains through the burning heat and the choking dust and the ones that hadn’t died in the black trucks we offered copious water; no will could resist the thirst those baking days spent amongst death had built up in them.

They drank the poisoned water and died within hours. We incinerated the plundered bodies in solar furnaces, our offering to the insatiable sky gods of Race and Purity. And there seemed to be something pure about the way they were disposed of, as though their deaths gave them a nobility they could never have achieved in their mean, degraded lives. Their ashes fell like a lighter dust on the powderous emptiness of the desert, to be blown away together in the first storm.

The last furnace loads were the camp workers — gassed in their dormitories, mostly — and all the paperwork: every letter, every order, every requisition pad, stores sheet, file, note and memo. We were all searched, even I. Those the special police found hiding diaries were shot on the spot. Most of our effects went up in smoke, too. What we were allowed to keep had been searched so thoroughly we joked they had managed to remove each grain of sand from our uniforms, something the laundry had never been able to do.

We were split up and moved to different posts throughout the conquered territories. Reunions were not encouraged.

I thought of writing down what had happened — not to confess but to explain.

And we suffered, too. Not just in the physical conditions, though those were bad enough, but in our minds, in our consciences. There may have been a few brutes, a few monsters who gloried in it all (perhaps we kept a few murderers off the streets of our cities for all that time), but most of us went through intermittent agonies, wondering in moments of crisis if what we were doing was really right, even though in our hearts we knew it was.

So many of us had nightmares. The things we saw each day, the scenes we witnessed, the pain and terror; these things could not help but affect us.

Those we disposed of; their torment lasted a few days, maybe a month or two, then it was over as quickly and efficiently as we could make the process.

Our suffering has gone on for a generation.

I am proud of what I did. I wish it had not fallen to me to do what had to be done, but I am glad that I did it to the best of my capabilities, and I would do it again.

That was why I wanted to write down what had happened; to witness our belief and our dedication and our suffering.

I never did.

I am proud of that too.

He awoke and there was something inside his head.

He was back in reality, back in the present, back in the bedroom of his house in the retirement complex, near the sea; he could see the sunlight hitting the tiles of the balcony outside the room. His twinned hearts thumped, the scales had risen on his back, prickling him. His leg ached, echoing with the pain of that ancient injury on the glacier.

The dream had been the most vivid yet, and the longest, finally taking him to the ice-fall in the western face and the accident with the drag line (deep buried, that had been, in his memory, submerged beneath all the dread white weight of his remembered pain). As well as that, whatever he had experienced had gone beyond the normal course, the usual environment of dreams, propelled there by the reliving of the accident and the image of fighting for breath while he stared transfixed into the face of the dead girl.

He had found himself thinking, explaining, even justifying what he had done in his army career, in the most definitive part of his life.

And now he could feel something inside his head.

Whatever it was inside his head got him to close his eyes.

— At last, it said. It was a deep, deliberately authoritative voice, its pronunciation almost too perfect.

At last? he thought. (What was this?)

— I have the truth.

What truth? (Who was this?)

— Of what you did. Your people.

What?

— The evidence was everywhere; across the desert, caked in loam, lodged in plants, sunk to the bottom of lakes, and there in the cultural record too; the sudden vanishings of art works, changes in architecture and agriculture. There were a few hidden records — books, photographs, sound recordings, indices, which contradicted the re-written histories — but they still didn’t directly explain why so many people, so many peoples seemed to vanish so suddenly, without any sign of assimilation.

What are you talking about? (What was this in his head?)

— You would not believe what I am, commandant, but what I am talking about is a thing called genocide, and the proof thereof.

We did what had to be done!

— Thank you, we’ve just been through all that. Your self-justifications have been noted.

I believed in what I did!

— I know. You had the residual decency to question it occasionally, but in the end you did indeed believe in what you were doing. That is not an excuse, but it is a point.

Who are you? What gives you the right to crawl inside my brains?

— My name would be something like Grey Area in your language. What gives me the right to crawl inside your brains, as you put it, is the same thing that gave you the right to do what you did to those you murdered; power. Superior power. Vastly superior power, in my case. However, I have been called away and I have to leave you now, but I shall return in a few months and I’ll be continuing my investigations then. There are still enough of you left to construct a more… triangulated case.

What? he thought, trying to open his eyes.

— Commandant, there is nothing worse I can wish upon you than to be what you already are, but you might care to reflect upon this while I’m gone:

Instantly, he was back in the dream.

He fell through the bed, the single ice-white sheet tore beneath him and tumbled him into a bottomless tank of blood; he fell down through it to light, and the desert, and the rail line through the sands; he fell into one of the trains, into one of the trucks and was there with his broken leg amongst the stinking dead and the moaning living, jammed in between the excrement-covered bodies with the weeping sores and the buzz of the flies and the white-hot rage of the thirst inside him.

He died in the cattle truck, after an infinity of agony. There was time for the briefest of glimpses of his room in the retirement complex. Even in his still-shocked, pain-maddened state he had the time and the presence of mind to think that while it felt as though a day at least must have passed while he had been submerged in the torture-dream nevertheless everything in the bedroom looked just as it had earlier. Then he was dragged under again.

He awoke entombed inside the glacier, dying of cold. He had been shot in the head but it had only paralysed him. Another endless agony.

He had a second impression of the retirement home; still the sunlight was at the same angle. He had not imagined it was possible to feel so much pain, not in such a time, not in a life-time, not in a hundred lifetimes. He found there was just time to flex his body and move a finger’s width across the bed before the dream resumed.

Then he was in the hold of a ship, crammed in with thousands of other people in the darkness, surrounded again by stink and filth and screams and pain. He was already half dead two days later when the sea valves opened and those still left alive began to drown.

The cleaner found the old retired commandant twisted into a ball a little way short of the apartment’s door the next morning. His hearts had given out.

The expression on his face was such that the retirement-home warden almost fainted and had to sit down quickly, but the doctor declared the end had probably been quick.

V

[tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28.858.8893]

xGCU Grey Area

oGSV Honest Mistake

There. I am on my way.

oo

xGSV Honest Mistake

oGCU Grey Area

Not before time.

oo

There was work to be done.

oo

More animal brains to be delved into?

oo

History to be unearthed. Truth to be discovered.

oo

I would have thought that one of the last places one would have expected to find on any itinerary concerning the search for truth would be inside the minds of mere animals.

oo

When the mere animals concerned have orchestrated one of the most successful and total expungings of both a significant part of their own species and every physical record regarding that act of genocide, one has remarkably little choice.

oo

I’m sure no one would deny your application does you credit.

oo

Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker.

oo

Absolutely.

Well, let me wish you all the best with whatever it is our friends might require of you.

oo

Thank you.

My aim is to please…

oo

(End signal file.)

VI

He left a trail of weaponry and the liquefied remains of gambling chips. The two heavy micro rifles clattered to the absorber mat just outside the airlock door and the cloak fell just beyond them. The guns glinted in the soft light reflecting off gleaming wooden panels. The mercury gambling chips in his jacket pocket, exposed to the human-ambient heat of the module’s interior, promptly melted. He felt the change happen, and stopped, mystified, to stare into his pockets. He shrugged, then turned his pockets inside out and let the mercury splash onto the mat. He yawned and walked on. Funny the module hadn’t greeted him.

The pistols bounced on the carpeted floor of the hall and lay beading with frost. He left the short jacket hanging on a piece of sculpture in the hall. He yawned again. It was not far off the time of habitat dawn. Very much time for bed. He rolled down the tops of the knee-boots and kicked them both down the corridor leading to the swimming pool.

He was pulling down his trousers as he entered the module’s main social area, shuffling forward bent over and holding on to the wall as he cursed the garments and tried to kick them off without falling over.

There was somebody there. He stopped and stared.

It looked very much like his favourite uncle was sitting in one of the lounge’s best seats.

Genar-Hofoen stood upright and swayed, staring through numerous blinks.

“Uncle Tishlin?” he said, squinting at the apparition. He leant on an antique cabinet and finally hauled his trousers off.

The figure — tall, white-maned and with a light smile playing on its craggily severe face — stood up and adjusted its long formal jacket. “Just a pretend version, Byr,” the voice rumbled. The hologram put its head back and fixed him with a measuring, questioning look. “They really do want you to do this thing for them, boy.”

Genar-Hofoen scratched his head and muttered something to the suit. It began to peel off around him.

“Will you tell me what the hell it actually is, Uncle?” he asked, stepping out of the gelfield and taking a deep breath of module air, more to annoy the suit than because the air tasted better. The suit gathered itself up into a head-sized ball and floated wordlessly away to clean itself.

The hologram of his uncle breathed out slowly and crossed its arms in a way Genar-Hofoen remembered from his early childhood.

“Put simply, Byr,” the image said, “they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman.”

Genar-Hofoen stood there, quite naked, still swaying, still blinking.

“Oh,” he said, after a while.