Excession

I

Hup!… and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem… Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That’s funny. View’s a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that’s a bad sign. Don’t feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here… Clock running way slow, like it’s down amongst the electronics crap… Run full system check.

… Oh, good grief!

The drone drifted through the darkness of interstellar space. It really was alone. Profoundly, even frighteningly alone. It picked through the debris that had been its power, sensory and weapon systems, appalled at the wasteland it was discovering within itself. The drone felt weird. It knew who it was — it was Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, a type D4 military drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench — but its real-time memories only began from the instant it had woken up here, a zillion klicks from anywhere, slap bang in the middle of nothing with the shit kicked out of it. What a mess! Who had done this? What had happened to it? Where were its memories? Where was its mind-state?

Actually it suspected it knew. It was functioning on the middle level of its five stepped mind-modes; the electronic.

Below lay an atomechanical complex and beneath that a biochemical brain. In theory the routes to both lay open; in practice both were compromised. The atomechanical mind wasn’t responding correctly to the system-state signals it was receiving, and the biochemical brain was simply a mush; either the drone had been doing some hard manoeuvring recently or it had been clobbered by something. It felt like dumping the whole biochemical unit into space now but it knew the cellular soup its final back-up mind-substrate had turned into might come in handy for something.

Above, where it ought to be right now, there were a couple of enormously wide conduits leading to the photonic nucleus and beyond that the true AI core. Both completely blocked off, and metaphorically plastered with warning signals. The equivalent of a single lit tell-tale adjacent to the photonic pipe indicated there was activity of some sort in there. The AI core was either dead, empty or just not saying.

The drone ran another systems-control check. It seemed to be in charge of the whole outfit, what was left of it. It wondered if the sensor and weaponry systems degradation was real. Perhaps it was an illusion; perhaps those units were in fact in perfect working order and under the control of one or both of the higher mind components. It dug deeper into the units’ programming. No, it didn’t look possible.

Unless the whole situation was a simulation. That was possible. A test: what would you do if you suddenly found yourself drifting alone in interstellar space, almost every system severely damaged, reduced to a level-three mind-state with no sign of help anywhere and no recollection how you got here or what happened to you? It sounded like a particularly nasty simulation problem; a nearly-worst-case scenario dreamt up by a Drone Training and Selection Board.

Well, there was no way of telling, and it had to act as though it was all real.

It kept looking around inside its own mind-state. Ah ha.

There were a couple of closed sub-cores intact within its electronic mind, sealed and labelled as potentially — though not probably — dangerous. There was a similar warning attached to the self-repair control-routine matrices. The drone let those be for the moment. It would check out everything else that it could before it started opening packages with what might prove to be nasty surprises inside.

Where the hell was it? It scanned the stars. A matrix of figures flashed into its consciousness. Definitely the middle of nowhere. The general volume was called the Upper Leaf-Swirl by most people; forty-five kilolights from galactic centre. The nearest star — fourteen standard light months away — was called Esperi, an old red giant which had long since swallowed up its complement of inner planets and whose insubstantial orb of gases now glowed dully upon a couple of distant, icy worlds and a distant cloud of comet nuclei. No life anywhere; just another boring, barren system like a hundred million others.

The general volume was one of the less well-visited and relatively uninhabited regions of the galaxy. Nearest major civilisation point; the Sagraeth system, forty light years away, with a stage-three lizardoid civilisation first contacted by the Culture a decade ago. Nothing special there. Voluminal influences/interests rated Creheesil 15%, Affront 10%, Culture 5% (the normal claimed minimum, the Culture’s influence/interest equivalent of background radiation), and a smattering of investigations and flybys by twenty other civilisations making up a nominal 2%; otherwise not a place anybody was really interested in; a two-thirds forgotten, disregarded region of space. Never before directly investigated by the Elench, though there had been the usual deep-space remote scans from afar, showing nothing special. No clues there.

Date; n4.28.803, by the chronology the Elench still shared with the Culture. The drone’s service log abstract recorded that it had been built as part of a matched pair by the Peace Makes Plenty in n4.13, shortly after the ship’s own construction had been completed. Most recent entry; ‘28.725.500: ship leaving Tier habitat for a standard sweep-search of the outer reaches of the Upper Leaf-Swirl. The detailed service log was missing. The last flagged event the drone could find in its library dated from ‘28.802; a daily current affairs archive update. So had that been just yesterday, or could something have happened to its clock?

It scrutinised its damage reports and searched its memories. The damage profile equated to that caused by plasma fire, and — from the lack of obvious patterning — either an enormous plasma event very far away or plasma fire — possibly fusion-sourced — much closer but buffered in some way. A nearby plasma implosure was the most obvious example. Not something it could do itself. The ship could, though.

Its X-ray laser had been fired recently and its field-shields projectors had soaked up some leak-through damage. Consistent with what would have happened if something just like itself had attacked it. Hmm. One of a matched pair.

It thought. It searched. It could find no further mention of its twin.

It looked about itself, gauging its drift, and searching.

It was drifting at about two-eighty klicks a second, almost directly away from the Esperi system. In front of it — it focused all its damaged sensory capacity to peer ahead — nothing; it didn’t appear to be aimed at anything.

Two-eighty klicks a second; that was somewhere just underneath the theoretical limit beyond which something of its mass would start to produce a relativistic trace on the surface of space-time, if one had perfect instrumentation. Now, was that a coincidence, or not? If not, it might have been slung out of the ship for some reason; Displaced, perhaps. It concentrated its senses backwards. No obvious point of origin, and nothing coming after it, either. Hint of something though.

The drone refocused, cursing its hopelessly degraded senses. Behind it, it found… gas, plasma, carbon. It widened the cone of its focus.

What it had discovered was an inflating shell of debris, drifting after it at a tenth of its speed. It ran a rewind of the debris shell’s expansion; it originated at a point forty klicks behind the position where it had first woken up, eighteen fifty-three milliseconds ago.

Which implied it had been drifting totally unconscious for nearly half a second. Scary.

It scanned the distant shell of expanding particles. They’d been hot. Messy. That was wreckage. Battle wreckage, even. The carbon and the ions could originally have been part of itself, or part of the ship, or even part of a human. A few molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. No oxygen.

But all of it doing just 10% of its own velocity. Odd, that. As though it had somehow been prioritised out of a sudden appearance of matter. Again, as though it had been Displaced, perhaps.

The drone flicked part of its attention back inside, to the sealed cores in its mind substrate with their warning notices. Can’t put this off any longer, I suppose, it thought.

It interrogated the two cores. PAST, the first was labelled. The other one was simply called 2/2.

Uh-huh, it thought.

It opened the first core and found its memories.

II

Genar-Hofoen floated within the shower, buffeted from all sides by the streams of water. The fans sucking the water back out of the AG shower chamber sounded awfully loud this morning. Part of his brain told him he was running short of oxygen; he’d either have to leave the shower or grope for the air hose which was probably in the last place he’d feel for it. It was either that or open his eyes. It all seemed too much bother. He was quite comfortable where he was.

He waited to see what would give first.

It was his brain’s indifference to the fact he was suffocating. Suddenly he was wide awake and flailing around like some drowning basic-human, desperate for breath but afraid to breathe in the constellation of water globules he was floating within. His eyes were wide open. He saw the air hose and grabbed it. He breathed in. Shit it was bright. His eyes dimmed the view. That was better.

He felt he’d showered enough. He mumbled, “Off, off,” into the air hose mask a few times, but the water kept on coming. Then he remembered that the module wasn’t talking to him right now because he’d told the suit to accept no more communications last night. Obviously such irresponsibility had to be punished by the module being childish. He sighed.

Luckily the shower had an Off button. The water jets cut off. Gravity was fed gently back into the chamber and he floated slowly down with the settling blobs of water. A reverser field clicked on and he looked at himself in it while the last of the water drained away, sucking in his belly and sticking out his chin while he turned his face to the best angle and smoothed down a few upstart locks of his blond curls.

“Well, I may feel like shit but I still look great,” he announced to nobody in particular. For once, probably even the module wasn’t listening.

“Sorry to force the pace,” the representation of his uncle Tishlin said.

“’s all right,” he said through a mouthful of feyl steak. He washed it down with some warmed-over infusion the module had always assured him was beneficial when you hadn’t had enough sleep. It tasted disgusting enough to be either genuinely good for you, or just one of the module’s little jokes.

“Sleep okay?” his uncle’s image asked. He was, apparently, sitting across the table from Genar-Hofoen in the module’s dining room, a pleasantly airy space filled with porcelain and flowers and boasting a seemingly real-time view on three sides of a sunlit mountain valley, which in reality was half a galaxy away. A small serving drone hovered near the wall behind the man.

“Good two hours,” Genar-Hofoen said. He supposed he could have stayed awake the night before when he’d first discovered his uncle’s hologram waiting for him; he could have glanded something to keep him bright and awake and receptive and got all this over with then, but he’d known he’d end up paying for it eventually and besides, he wanted to show them that just because they’d gone to the trouble of persuading his favourite uncle to record a semantic-signal-mind-abstract-state or whatever the hell the module had called it, he still wasn’t going to jump just because they said so. The only concession he’d made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going at the moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully good and satisfying sex, and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.

So he’d gone to bed and had a pretty good if maybe still not quite long enough sleep and Uncle Tishlin’s message had just had to sit twiddling its abstract semantics in the module’s AI core, waiting till he got up.

So far all they’d done was exchange a few pleasantries and talk a little about old times; partly, of course, so that Genar-Hofoen could satisfy himself that this apparition had genuinely been sent by his uncle and SC had paid him the enormous compliment of sending not one but two personality-states to him in order to argue him round to doing whatever it was they wanted from him (that the hologram might be a brilliantly researched forgery created by SC would be even more of a compliment… but that way lay paranoia).

“I take it you had a good evening,” Tishlin’s simulation said.

“Enormous fun.”

Tishlin looked puzzled. Genar-Hofoen watched the expression form on his uncle’s face and wondered how comprehensive was the duplication of his uncle’s personality now encoded — living, if you wanted to look at it that way — in the module’s AI core. Did whatever was in there — sent here enciphered with the specific task of persuading him to cooperate with Special Circumstances — actually feel? Or did it just appear to?

Shit, I must be feeling bad, Genar-Hofoen thought. I haven’t bothered about that sort of shit since university.

“How can you have enormous fun with… aliens?” the hologram asked, eyebrows gathering.

“Attitude,” Genar-Hofoen said cryptically, slicing off more steak.

“But you can’t drink with them, eat with them, can’t really touch them, or want the same things…” Tishlin said, still frowning.

Genar-Hofoen shrugged. “It’s a kind of translation,” he said. “You get used to it.” He munched away for a moment while his uncle’s program — or whatever it was — digested this. He pointed his knife at the image. “That’s something I’d want, in the unlikely event I agree to do whatever it is they want me to do.”

“What?” Tishlin said, leaning back, arms crossed.

“I want to become an Affronter.”

Tishlin’s eyebrows elevated. “You want what, boy?” he said.

“Well, some of the time,” Genar-Hofoen said, half turning his head to the drone behind him; the machine came quickly forward and refilled his glass with the infusion. “I mean, all I want is an Affronter body, one that I can just sort of zap into and… well, just be an Affronter. You know; socialise. I don’t see what the problem is, really. In fact I keep telling them it’ll be a great thing for Culture-Affront relations. I’d really be able to relate to these guys; I could really be one of them. Hell; isn’t that what this ambassador shit is supposed to be all about?” He belched. “I’m sure it could be done. The module says it could but it shouldn’t and says it’s asked elsewhere and I know all the standard objections, but I think it’d be a great idea. I’m damn sure I’d enjoy it, I mean I could always sort of zap back into my own body anytime… this is really shocking you, isn’t it, Uncle?”

The image shook its head. “You always were the oddest child, Byr. I suppose I should have known what to expect from you. Anybody who’d go out there to live with the Affront in the first place has to be slightly strange.”

Genar-Hofoen held his arms out wide. “But I’m just doing what you did!” he protested.

“I only wanted to meet weird aliens, Byr; I didn’t want to become one of them.”

“Heck, and I thought you’d be proud of me.”

“Proud but worried. Byr, are you seriously suggesting that becoming an Affronter would be part of your price for doing what SC asks?”

“Certainly,” Genar-Hofoen said, and squinted up at the hammer-beamed ceiling. “I vaguely recall asking for a ship as well last night and the Death And Gravity saying yes…” he shook his head and laughed. “Must have imagined it.” He finished the last of the steak.

“They’ve told me what they’re prepared to offer, Byr,” Tishlin said. “You didn’t imagine it.”

Genar-Hofoen looked up. “Really?” he asked.

“Really,” Tishlin said.

Genar-Hofoen nodded slowly. “And how did they persuade you to act as go-between, Uncle?” he asked.

“They only had to ask, Byr. I may not be in Contact any more but I’m happy to help out when I can, when they have a problem.”

“This isn’t Contact, Uncle, this is Special Circumstances,” Byr said quietly. “They tend to play by slightly different rules.”

Tishlin looked serious; the image sounded defensive. “I know that, boy. I asked around some of my contacts before I agreed to do this; everything checks out, everything seems to be… reliable. I suggest you do the same, obviously, but from what I can see, what I’ve been told is the truth.”

Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. “Okay. So what have they told you, Uncle?” he asked, draining the last of the infusion. He frowned, wiped his lips and inspected the napkin. He looked at the sediment in the bottom of the glass, then glared at the servant drone. It wobbled in the drone equivalent of a shrug and took the glass from his hand.

Tishlin’s representation sat forward, putting its arms on the table. “Let me tell you a story, Byr.”

“By all means,” Genar-Hofoen said, picking something from his lips and wiping it on the napkin. The serving drone started to remove the rest of the breakfast things.

“Long ago and far away — two and a half thousand years ago,” Tishlin said, “in a wispy tendril of suns outside the Galactic plane, nearest to Asatiel Cluster, but not really near to that or anywhere else — the Problem Child, an early General Contact Unit, Troubadour Class, chanced upon the ember of a very old star. The GCU started to investigate. And it found not one but two unusual things.”

Genar-Hofoen drew his gown about him and settled back in his seat, a small smile on his lips. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Some of Genar-Hofoen’s earliest memories were of the long, sunlit kitchen of the house at Ois, back on Seddun Orbital; his mother, the other adults of the house and his various cousins would all be milling around, chattering and laughing while he sat on his uncle’s knee, being told tales. Some of them were ordinary children’s stories — which he’d heard before, often, but which always sounded better when Uncle Tish told them — and some of them his uncle’s own stories, from when he’d been in Contact, travelling the galaxy in a succession of ships, exploring strange new worlds and meeting all sorts of odd folk and finding any number of weird and wonderful things amongst the stars.

“Firstly,” the hologram image said, “the dead sun gave every sign of being absurdly ancient. The techniques used to date it indicated it was getting on for a trillion years old.”

“What?” Genar-Hofoen snorted.

Uncle Tishlin spread his hands. “The ship couldn’t believe it either. To come up with this unlikely figure, it used…” the apparition glanced away to one side, the way Tishlin always had when he was thinking, and Genar-Hofoen found himself smiling, “… isotopic analysis and flux-pitting assay.”

“Technical terms,” Genar-Hofoen said, nodding. He and the hologram both smiled.

“Technical terms,” the image of Tishlin agreed. “But no matter what it was they used or how they did their sums, it always came out that the dead star was at least fifty times older than the universe.”

“I never heard that one before,” Genar-Hofoen said, shaking his head and looking thoughtful.

“Me neither,” Tishlin agreed. “Though as it turns out it was released publicly, just not until long after it had all happened. One reason there was no big fuss at the time was that the ship was so embarrassed about what it was coming up with it never filed a full report, just kept the results to itself, in its own mind.”

“Did they have proper Minds back then?”

Tishlin’s image shrugged. “Mind with a small ‘m’; AI core, we’d probably call it these days. But it was certainly sentient and the point is that the information remained in the ship’s head, as it were.”

Where, of course, it would remain the ship’s. Practically the only form of private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory. Any publicly filed report or analysis was theoretically available to anybody, but your own thoughts, your own recollections — whether you were a human, a drone or a ship Mind — were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad manners even to think about trying to read somebody else’s — or something else’s — mind.

Personally, Genar-Hofoen had always thought it was a reasonable enough rule, although along with a lot of people over the years he’d long suspected that one of the main reasons for its existence was that it suited the purposes of the Culture’s Minds in general, and those in Special Circumstances in particular.

Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to themselves and hatch little schemes and plots to their hearts’ content. The trouble was that while in humans this sort of behaviour tended to manifest itself in practical jokes, petty jealousies, silly misunderstandings and instances of tragically unrequited love, with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to try to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already did know about (with the almost unspeakable implication that one day they might do just that not with a culture but with the Culture… always assuming they hadn’t done so already, of course).

“What about the people on board the Culture ship?” Genar-Hofoen asked.

“They knew as well, of course, but they kept quiet, too. Apart from anything else, they had two weirdnesses on their hands; they assumed they had to be linked in some way but they couldn’t work out how, so they decided to wait and see before they told everybody else.” Tishlin shrugged. “Understandable, I suppose; it was all so outlandish I suppose anybody would think twice about shouting it to the rooftops. You couldn’t get away with such reticence these days, but this was then; the guidelines were looser.”

“What was the other unusual thing they found?”

“An artifact,” Tishlin said, sitting back in the seat. “A perfect black-body sphere fifty klicks across, in orbit around the unfeasibly ancient star. The ship was completely unable to penetrate the artifact with its sensors, or with anything else for that matter, and the thing itself showed no signs of life. Shortly thereafter the Problem Child developed an engine fault — something almost unheard of, even back then — and had to leave the star and the artifact. Naturally, it left a load of satellites and sensor platforms behind it to monitor the artifact; all it had arrived with, in fact, plus a load more it had made while it was there.

“However, when a follow-up expedition arrived three years later — remember, this all happened on the galactic outskirts, and speeds were much lower then — it found nothing; no star, no artifact, and none of the sensors and remote packages the Problem Child had left behind; the outgoing signals apparently coming from the sentry units stopped just before the follow-up expedition arrived within monitoring range. Ripples in the gravity field near by implied the star and presumably everything else had vanished utterly the moment the Problem Child had been safely out of sensor range.”

“Just vanished?”

“Just vanished. Disappeared without trace,” Tishlin confirmed. “Most damnable thing, too; nobody’s ever just lost a sun before, even if it was a dead one.

“In the meantime, the General Systems Vehicle which the Problem Child had rendezvoused with for repairs had reported that the GCU had effectively been attacked; its engine problem wasn’t the result of chance or some manufacturing flaw, it was the result of offensive action.

“Apart from that, and the still unexplained disappearance of an entire star, everything was normal for nearly two decades.” Tishlin’s hand flapped once on the table. “Oh, there were various investigations and boards of inquiry and committees and so on, but the best they could come up with was that the whole thing had been some sort of hi-tech projection, maybe produced by some previously unknown Elder civilisation with a quirky sense of humour, or, even less likely, that the sun and all the rest had popped into Hyperspace and just sped off — though they should have been able to observe that, and hadn’t — but basically the whole thing remained a mystery, and after everybody had chewed it over and over till there was nothing but spit left, it just kind of died a natural death.

“Then, over the following seven decades, the Problem Child decided it didn’t want to be part of Contact any more. It left Contact, then it left the Culture proper and joined the Ulterior — again, very unusual for its class — and meanwhile every single human who’d been on board at the time exercised what are apparently termed Unusual Life Choices.” Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language. The image made a throat-clearing noise and went on: “Roughly half of the humans opted for immortality, the other half autoeuthenised. The few remaining humans underwent subtle but exhaustive investigation, though nothing unusual was ever discovered.

“Then there were the ship’s drones; they all joined the same Group Mind — again in the Ulterior — and have been incommunicado ever since. Apparently that was even more unusual. Within, a century, almost all of those humans who’d opted for immortality were also dead, due to further ‘semi-contradictory’ Unusual Life Choices. Then the Ulterior, and Special Circumstances — who’d taken an interest by this time, not surprisingly — lost touch with the Problem Child entirely. It just seemed to disappear, too.” The apparition shrugged. “That was fifteen hundred years ago, Byr. To this day nobody has seen or heard of the ship. Subsequent investigations of the remains of a few of the humans concerned, using improved technology, has thrown up possible discrepancies in the nanostructure of the subjects’ brains, but no further investigation has been deemed possible. The story was made public eventually, nearly a century and a half after it all happened; there was even a bit of a media fuss about it at the time, but by then it was a portrait with nobody in it: the ship, the drones, the people; they’d all gone. There was nobody to talk to, nobody to interview, nothing to do profiles of. Everybody was off-stage. And of course the principal celebrities — the star and the artifact — were the most off-stage of all.”

“Well,” Genar-Hofoen said. “All very—”

“Hold on,” Tishlin said, holding up one finger. “There is one loose end. A single traceable survivor from the Problem Child who turned up five centuries ago; somebody it might be possible to talk to, despite the fact they’ve spent the last twenty-four millennia trying to avoid talking.”

“Human?”

“Human,” Tishlin confirmed, nodding. “The woman who was the vessel’s formal captain.”

“They still had that sort of thing back then?” Genar-Hofoen said. He smiled. How quaint, he thought.

“It was pretty nominal, even back then,” Tishlin conceded. “More captain of the crew than of the boat. Anyway; she’s still around in a sort of abbreviated form.” Tishlin’s image paused, watching Genar-Hofoen closely. “She’s in Storage aboard the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service.”

The representation paused, to let Genar-Hofoen react to the name of the ship. He didn’t, not on the outside anyway.

“Just her personality is in there, unfortunately,” Tishlin continued. “Her Stored body was destroyed in an Idiran attack on the Orbital concerned half a millennium ago. I suppose for our purposes that counts as a lucky break; she’d managed to cover her tracks so well — probably with the help of some sympathetic Mind — that if the attack hadn’t occurred she’d have remained incognito to this day. It was only when the records were scrutinised carefully after her body’s destruction that it was realised who she really was. But the point is that Special Circumstances thinks she might know something about the artifact. In fact, they’re sure she does, though it’s almost equally certain that she doesn’t know what she knows.”

Genar-Hofoen was silent for a while, playing with the cord of his dressing gown. The Sleeper Service. He hadn’t heard that name for a while, hadn’t had to think about that old machine for a long time. He’d dreamt about it a few times, had had a nightmare or two about it even, but he’d tried to forget about those, tried to shove those echoes of memories to some distant corner of his mind and been pretty successful at it too, because it felt very strange to be turning over that name in his mind now.

“So why’s this all suddenly become important after two and a half millennia?” he asked the hologram.

“Because something with similar characteristics to that artifact has turned up near a star called Esperi, in the Upper Leaf-Swirl, and SC needs all the help it can get to deal with it. There’s no trillion-year-old sun-cinder this time, but an apparently identical artifact is just sitting there.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“Go aboard the Sleeper Service and talk to this woman’s Mimage — that’s the Mind-stored construct of her personality apparently…” The image looked puzzled. “… New one on me… Anyway, you’re supposed to try to persuade her to be reborn; talk her into a rebirth so she can be quizzed. The Sleeper Service won’t just release her, and it certainly won’t cooperate with SC, but if she asks to be reborn, it’ll let her.”

“But why—?” Genar-Hofoen started to ask.

“There’s more,” Tishlin said, holding up one hand. “Even if she won’t play, even if she refuses to come back, you’re to be equipped with a method of retrieving her through the link you’ll forge when you talk to the Mimage, without the GSV knowing. Don’t ask me how that’s supposed to be accomplished, but I think it’s got something to do with the ship they’re going to give you to get you to the Sleeper Service, after the Affronter ship they’re going to hire for you has rendezvoused with it at Tier.”

Genar-Hofoen did his best to look sceptical. “Is that possible?”, he asked. “Retrieving her like that, I mean. Against the wishes of the Sleeper.”

“Apparently,” Tishlin said, shrugging. “SC thinks they’ve got a way of doing it. But you see what I mean when I said they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman…”

Genar-Hofoen thought for a moment. “Do you know what ship this might be? The one to get me to the Sleeper?”

“They haven’t—” began the image, then paused and looked amused. “They just told me; it’s a GCU called the Grey Area.” The image smiled. “Ah; I see you’ve heard of it, too.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” the man said.

The Grey Area. The ship that did what the other ships both deplored and despised; actually looked into the minds of other people, using its Electro Magnetic Effectors — in a sense the very, very distant descendants of electronic countermeasures equipment from your average stage three civilisation, and the most sophisticated, powerful but also precisely controllable weaponry the average Culture ship possessed — to burrow into the grisly cellular substrate of an animal consciousness and try to make sense of what it found there for its own — usually vengeful — purposes. A pariah craft; the one the other Minds called Meatfucker because of its revolting hobby (though not, as it were, to its face). A ship that still wanted to be part of the Culture proper and nominally still was, but which was shunned by almost all its peers; a virtual outcast amongst the great inclusionary meta-fleet that was Contact.

Genar-Hofoen had heard about the Grey Area all right. It was starting to make sense now. If there was one vessel that might be capable of plundering — and, more importantly, that might be willing to plunder — a Stored soul from under the nose of the Sleeper, the Grey Area was probably it. Assuming what he’d heard about the ship was true, it had spent the last decade perfecting its techniques of teasing dreams and memories out of a variety of animal species, while the Sleeper Service had by all accounts been technologically stagnant for the last forty years, its time taken up with the indulgence of its own scarcely less eccentric pastime.

The image of Uncle Tishlin bore a distant expression for a moment, then said, “Apparently that’s part of the beauty of it; just because the Sleeper Service is another oddball doesn’t mean that it’s any more likely than any other GSV to have the Grey Area aboard; the GCU will have to lie off, and that’ll make this Mimage-stealing trick easier. If the Grey Area was actually inside the GSV at the time it probably couldn’t carry it off undetected.”

Genar-Hofoen was looking thoughtful again. “This artifact thing,” he said. “Could almost be a what-do-you-call it, couldn’t it? An Outside Context Paradox.”

“Problem,” Tishlin said. “Outside Context Problem.”

“Hmm. Yes. One of those. Almost.”

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

That was an Outside Context Problem; so was the suitably up-teched version that happened to whole planetary civilisations when somebody like the Affront chanced upon them first rather than, say, the Culture.

The Culture had had lots of minor OCPs, problems that could have proved to be terminal if they’d been handled badly, but so far it had survived them all. The Culture’s ultimate OCP was popularly supposed to be likely to take the shape of a galaxy-consuming Hegemonising Swarm, an angered Elder civilisation or a sudden, indeed instant visit by neighbours from Andromeda once the expedition finally got there.

In a sense, the Culture lived with genuine OCPs all around it all the time, in the shape of those Sublimed Elder civilisations, but so far it didn’t appear to have been significantly checked or controlled by any of them. However, waiting for the first real OCP was the intellectual depressant of choice for those people and Minds in the Culture determined to find the threat of catastrophe even in Utopia.

“Almost. Maybe,” agreed the apparition. “Perhaps it’s a little less likely to be so with your help.”

Genar-Hofoen nodded, staring at the surface of the table. “So who’s in charge of this?” he asked, grinning. “There’s usually a Mind which acts as incident controller or whatever they call it in something like this.”

“The Incident Coordinator is a GSV called the Not Invented Here,” Tish told him. “It wants you to know you can ask whatever you want of it.”

“Uh-huh.” Genar-Hofoen couldn’t recall having heard of the ship. “And why me, particularly?” he asked. He suspected he already had the answer to that one.

“The Sleeper Service has been behaving even more oddly than usual,” Tishlin said, looking suitably pained. “It’s altered its course schedule, it’s no longer accepting people for Storage, and it’s almost completely stopped communicating. But it says it will allow you on board.”

“For a brow-beating, no doubt,” Genar-Hofoen said, glancing to one side and watching a cloud pass over the meadows of the valley shown on the dining room’s projector walls. “Probably wants to give me a lecture.” He sighed, still looking round the room. He fastened his gaze on Tishlin’s simulation again. “She still there?” he asked.

The image nodded slowly.

“Shit,” Genar-Hofoen said.

III

“But it makes my brain hurt.”

“Nevertheless, Major. This is of inestimable importance.”

“I only looked at the first bit there and it’s already given me a thumping case-ache.”

“Still, it has to be done. Kindly read it all carefully and then I’ll explain its significance.”

“Knot my stalks, this is a terrible thing to ask of a chap after a regimental dinner.” Fivetide wondered if humans suffered so for their self-indulgence. He doubted it, no matter what they claimed; with the possibly honourable, possibly demented exception of Genar-Hofoen, they seemed a bit too stuffy and sensible willingly to submit to such self-punishment in the cause of fun. Besides, they were so insecure in their physical inheritance they had meddled with themselves in all sorts of ways; probably they thought hangovers were just annoying, rather than character-forming and so had, shortsightedly, dispensed with them.

“I realise it’s early and it is the morning after the night before, Major. But please.”

The emissary — which Fivetide had met once before, and which possessed the irritating trait of looking somewhat like a better-built version of Fivetide’s dear departed father — had just appeared in the nest house without notice or warning. If he hadn’t known the way these things worked, Fivetide would right now be thinking of ways to torture the head of nest security. Tentacles had rolled, beaks had been separated, for less.

Lucky he’d been able to whip the bed covers round his deputy wife and both vice courtesans before the blighter had announced his/its presence by just floating into the nest.

Fivetide clapped his forebeak together a couple of times. Tastes like I’ve had me beak up me arse, he thought. “Can’t you just tell me what the damn signal means now?” he asked.

“You won’t know what I’m referring to. Come now; the sooner you read it the sooner I’ll be able to tell you what it means, and the sooner I’ll be able to demonstrate how it is just possible that this information will — at the very least — enable you to remove the harness of Culture interference forever.”

“Hmm. I’m sure. And what’ll it do at most?”

The emissary of the ship let its eye stalks dip to either side, the Affronter equivalent of a smile. “At most, the information in this signal will lead to you being able to dominate the Culture as completely as it — if it chose to — could dominate you.” The creature paused. “This signal could conceivably presage the start of a process which will deliver the entire Galaxy into your hands, and subsequently open up territories for expansion and exploitation beyond that which you cannot even begin to guess at. And I do not exaggerate. Have I your attention now, Major?”

Fivetide snorted sceptically. “I suppose you have,” he said, shaking his limbs and rubbing his eyes. He returned his gaze to the note screen, and read the signal.

xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,

oGSV Ethics Gradient

& strictly as SC cleared:

Excession notice @c18519938.52314.

Constitutes formal All-ships Warning Level 0

[(in temporary sequestration) — textual note added by GSV Wisdom Like Silence @ n4.28.855.0150.650001].

Excession.

Confirmed precedent-breach. Type K7^. True class non-estimal. Its status: Active. Aware. Contactiphile. Uninvasive sf. LocStatre: Esperi (star).

First ComAtt (its, following shear-by contact via my primary scanner @ n4.28.855.0065.59312) @ n4.28.855.0065.59487 in M1-a16 & Galin II by tight beam, type 4A. PTA & Handshake burst as appended, x@ 0.7Y. Suspect signal gleaned from Z-E/lalsaer ComBeam spread, 2nd Era. xContact callsigned “I”. No other signals registered.

My subsequent actions: maintained course and speed, skim-declutched primary scanner to mimic 50% closer approach, began directed full passive HS scan (sync./start of signal sequence, as above), sent buffered Galin II pro-forma message-reception confirmation signal to contact location, dedicated track scanner @ 19% power and 300% beamspread to contact @ -5% primary scanner roll-off point, instigated Exponential slow-to-stop line manoeuvre synchronised to skein-local stop-point @ 12% of track scanner range limit, ran full systems check as detailed, executed slow/4 swing-around then retraced course to previous closest approach point and stop @ standard ²ex curve. Holding there.

Excession’s physical characteristics: (¡am!) sphere rad. 53.34km, mass (non-estimal by space-time fabric influence — locality ambiently planar — estimated by pan-polarity material density norms at) 1.45x8¹³t. Layered fractal matter-type-intricate structure, self supporting, open to (field-filtered) vacuum, anomalous field presence inferred from 8²¹ kHz leakage. Affirm K7^ category by HS topology & eG links (inf. & ult.). eG link details non-estimal. DiaGlyph files attached.

Associated anomalous materials presence: several highly dispersed detritus clouds all within 28 minutes, three consistent with staged destruction of >.1m³ near-equiv-tech entity, another ditto approx 3⁸ partially exhausted M-DAWS .1cal rounds, another consisting of general hi-soph level (O₂-atmosphered) ship-internal combat debris. Latter drifting directly away from excession’s current position. Retracks of debris clouds’ expansion profiles indicates mutual age of 52.5 days. Combat debris cloud implicitly originating @ a point 948 milliseconds from excession’s current position. DiaGlyph files attached.

No other presences apparent to within 30 years.

My status: H&H, unTouched. L8 secure post system-scour (100%). ATDPSs engaged. CRTTDPSs engaged.

Repeat:

Excession eG (inf. & ult.) linked, confirmed.

eGrid link details non-estimal. True class non-estimal.

Awaiting.

@ n4.28.855.0073.64523…

… PS:

Gulp.

Fivetide shook his stalks. Gods, this hangover was fierce.

“All right,” he said, “I’ve read, but I still don’t understand.”

The emissary of the war vessel Attitude Adjuster smiled again. “Allow me to explain.”