Excession

I

The battle of Boustrago had taken place on Xlephier Prime thirteen thousand years earlier. It had been the final, decisive battle in the Archipelagic War (though it had, inappropriately, been fought near to the centre of a continent), a twenty-year conflict between that world’s first two great imperial nation states. The muzzle-loading cannon and rifle were state-of-the-art munitions at the time, though the cavalry charge was still very much regarded as both the most decisive battlefield manoeuvre and quite the finest and most stirring sight that warfare had to offer by the military high commands on each side. The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as ever, created enormous casualties on both sides.

Amorphia wandered amongst the dead and dying of Hill 4. The battle had by this time moved on; the few defenders who’d survived and repelled the initial rush had been ordered to pull back just as the next wave of opposing troops had appeared out of the cannon smoke and fallen upon them; they had been slaughtered almost to a man and the victors had swept on to the next redoubt across the shallow valley beyond. Shattered palisades, lines of stakes and bunkers had been chewed up by the initial bombardment and later by the hooves of the cavalry. Bodies lay scattered like twisted, shredded leaves amongst the torn-up grassland and the rich brown-red soil. The blood of men and animals saturated the grass in places, making it thick and glossy, and collected in little hollows like pools of dark ink.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky; the only cover was the wispy remnants of cannon smoke. Already a few carrion birds — no longer too concerned by the noise of the battle near by — had landed and started to investigate the corpses and the shattered bodies of the wounded.

The soldiers wore brightly coloured, cheery-looking uniforms with lots of metal buckle-work and very tall hats. Their guns were long, simple-looking things; their pikes, swords and bayonets lay glittering in the sunlight. The animals lying tangled amongst the traces of the smashed cannon trains were big, thick-set beasts, almost unadorned; the cavalry mounts were almost as gaily decorated as their riders. They all lay together, some with the collapsed shapelessness of death, some in a pool of their own internal organs, some missing limbs, some in a posture appropriate to a still vital suffering, caught in expressions appropriate to their agony, thrashing or writhing or — in the case of some of the soldiers — supporting themselves on one limb and reaching out to plead for help, or water, or a coup de grace to end their torment.

It was all quite still, frozen like a three-dimensional photograph, and it all lay, spread out like some military society’s model scene made real, in General Bay Three Inner of the GSV Sleeper Service.

The ship’s avatar achieved the top of the low hill and looked out over the battle-scene beyond. It stretched for kilometres in all directions across the sunlit rolling downland; a grand confusion of posed men, dashing mounts, cavalry charges, cannons and smoke and shadows.

Getting the smoke right had been the hardest part. The landscape was simplicity itself; a covering of artificial flora on a thin layer of sterilised soil lying on a structure of foametal. The great majority of the animals were simply very good sculptures the ship had created. The people were real, of course, though the ones who’d been disembowelled or particularly severely mutilated were generally sculptures too.

The details of the scene were as authentic as the ship could make them; it had studied every painting, etching and sketch of the battle and read every account, military and media report of it, even taking the trouble to track down the records of the diary entries of individual soldiers, while at the same time undertaking exhaustive research into the whole historical period concerned including the uniforms, weaponry and tactics in use when the battle had taken place. For what it was worth after so much time, a drone team had visited the preserved battle site itself and conducted their own deep-scan of the ground. The fact that Xlephier Prime was one of the twenty or so planets that could fairly claim to have been one of the home worlds of the Culture — not that it really admitted to having such things — made the task easier.

The GSV had studied the real-time recordings Contact craft and their emissaries had taken over the years of battles fought by humanoid societies with similar technology, to get a feel for the way such events really looked and felt without the possibly prejudiced and partial eyes and memories of the participants or spectators getting in the way.

And it had, eventually, got the smoke right. It had taken a while, and eventually it had had to resort to a rather higher-tech solution than it would have preferred, but it had done it. The smoke was real, each particle held and isolated in the grip of a localised anti-gravity field produced by projectors hidden underneath the landscape. The ship was quietly proud of the smoke.

Even the fact that the scene still wasn’t perfect — many of the soldiers looked female, and/or foreign, or indeed alien, when you looked closely at them, and even the males of the appropriate and not-too-meddled-with genetic stock were too big and too generally healthy to be right for the time — didn’t really disturb the ship. The people hadn’t been the most difficult thing to get right, but they were the most important component of the scene; they were the reason it was all here.

It had all started eighty years ago, on a very small scale.

Every Culture habitat — whether it was an Orbital or other large structure, a ship, a Rock, or a planet — possessed Storage facilities. Storage was where some people went when they had reached a certain age, or if they had just grown tired of living. It was one of the choices that Culture humans faced towards the end of their artificially extended three-and-a-half to four centuries of life. They could opt for rejuvenation and/or complete immortality, they could become part of a group mind, they could simply die when the time came, they could transfer out of the Culture altogether, bravely accepting one of the open but essentially inscrutable invitations left by certain Elder civilisations, or they could go into Storage, with whatever revival criterion they desired.

Some people slept for — say — a hundred years at a time then lived a single day before returning to their undreaming, unageing slumbers, some wanted simply to be woken after a set time had passed to see what had changed while they’d been gone, some desired to come back when something especially interesting was happening (content to leave that judgement to others), and some only wanted to be brought back if and when the Culture finally became one of the Elders itself.

That was a decision the Culture had been putting off for many millennia; in theory it could have sublimed anything up to ten thousand years ago, but — while individuals and small groups of people and Minds did sublime all the time, and other parts of the society had hived off and split away, to make their own decisions on the matter — the bulk of the Culture had chosen not to, determining instead to surf a line across the ever-breaking wave of galactic life continuation.

Partly it was a kind of curiosity that no doubt seemed childish to any sublimed species; a feeling that there was still more to discover in base reality, even if its laws and rules were all perfectly known (and besides, what of other galaxies, what of other universes? Did the Elders have access to these but none of them had ever seen fit to communicate the truth to the unsublimed? Or did all such considerations simply cease to matter, post-sublimation?).

Partly it was an expression of the Culture’s extrovertly concerned morality; the sublimed Elders, become as gods to all intents and purposes, seemed to be derelict in the duties which the more naive and less developed societies they left behind ascribed to such entities. With certain very limited exceptions, the Elder species subsequently took almost nothing to do with the rest of life in the galaxy whose physical trappings they invariably left behind; tyrants went unchecked, hegemonies went unchallenged, genocides went unstopped and whole nascent civilisations were snuffed out just because their planet suffered a comet-strike or happened to be too near a super-nova, even though these events occurred under the metaphorical noses of the sublimed ones.

The implication was that the very ideas, the actual concepts of good, of fairness and of justice just ceased to matter once one had gone for sublimation, no matter how creditable, progressive and unselfish one’s behaviour had been as a species pre-sublimation. In a curiously puritanical way for society seemingly so hell-bent on the ruthless pursuit of pleasure, the Culture thought this was itself wrong, and so decided to attempt to accomplish what the gods, it seemed, could not be bothered with; discovering, judging and encouraging — or discouraging — the behaviour of those to whom its own powers were scarcely less than those of a deity. Its own Elderhood would come eventually, it had no doubt, but it would be damned if it would let that happen until it had grown tired of doing (what it hoped was) good.

For those who wished to await that judgment day without having to live through every other day in between, Storage was the answer, as it was for others, for all those other reasons.

The rate of technological change in the Culture, at least at the level which directly affected the humans within it, was fairly modest. For millennia the accepted and normal method of Storing a human was to place each in a coffin-like box a little over two metres long, just under one across and half a metre deep; such units were easy to make and suitably reliable. However, even such unglamorous staples of Culture existence couldn’t escape improvement and refinement for ever. Eventually, along with the development of the gelfield suit, it became possible to put people into the stasis of long-term Storage within a covering that was even more reliable than the old coffin-boxes, and yet scarcely thicker than a second skin or a layer of clothing.

The Sleeper Service — which was not called that then — had simply been the first ship fully to take advantage of this development. When it Stored people it usually did so in small tableaux after the manner of famous paintings, at first, or humorous poses; the Storage suits allowed their occupants to be posed in any way that would have been natural for a human, and it was a simple matter to add a pigmentation layer to the surface which did such a good job of impersonating skin that a human would have to look very closely indeed to spot the difference. Of course, the ship had always asked the permission of the Storees in question before it used their sleeping forms in this way, and respected the wishes of the few people who preferred not to be Stored in a situation where they might be gazed upon as though they were figures in a painting, or sculptures.

Back then, the GSV had been called the Quietly Confident, and it had been run, as ships of that class normally were, by not one but three Minds. What happened next depended on who you believed.

The official version was that when one of the three Minds had decided it wanted to quit the Culture the other two Minds had argued with it and then made the unusual decision to leave the structure of the GSV to the single dissenting Mind, rather than, as would have been more normal, just giving it a smaller ship.

The perhaps more plausible and certainly more interesting rumour was that there had been a good old-fashioned wing-ding battle between the Minds, two against one, and the two had lost, very much against the odds. The two losing Minds had been kicked out, taking to commandeered GCUs like officers given life boats after a mutiny. And that was why, this version went, the whole of the Quietly Confident — which promptly renamed itself the Sleeper Service, had been turned over to the single dissident Mind; it hadn’t been some gentlepeople’s agreement; it had been a revolution.

Whatever version you chose to believe, it was no secret that the Culture proper had chosen to dedicate another, smaller, GSV to the task of following the Sleeper Service wherever it went, presumably to keep an eye on it.

Following its renaming, and paying no apparent heed to the craft now tailing it, the Sleeper Service’s next step was to evacuate everybody else remaining aboard. Most of the ships had already gone, and the rest were asked to leave. Then the drones, aliens and all the human personnel and their pets were deposited on the first Orbital it came to. The only people left aboard were those in Storage.

After that the ship went in search of others (and one other in particular), and let it be known throughout the Culture, through its information network, that it was willing to travel anywhere to pick up those who might wish to join it, so long as they were in Storage and happy to be set amongst one of its tableaux.

People were reluctant at first; this was definitely the sort of behaviour that earned a ship the title Eccentric, and Eccentric ships had been known to do odd, even dangerous things. Still, the Culture had its share of brave souls, and a few took up the craft’s strange invitation, without apparent ill effect. When the first few people who had been Stored aboard the GSV were safely returned on the realisation of their revival criteria, again without seeming to have suffered for the strangeness of their temporary lodgings, the slow trickle of adventurous individuals began to turn into a steady stream of slightly perverse or just romantic ones; as the reputation of the Sleeper Service spread, and it released holograms of its more and more ambitious tableaux (important historical incidents, then small battles and details from greater conflicts), so more and more people thought it rather amusing to be Stored within this eccentric Eccentric, where they might be said to be forming part of a work of art even while they slept, rather than just plonked in a boring box somewhere underneath their local Plate.

And so taking a ride aboard the Sleeper Service as a kind of vicariously wandering soul became nothing less than fashionable, and the ship slowly filled with undead people in Storage suits whom it posed into larger and larger scenes, until eventually it was able to tackle whole battlefields and lay them out in the sixteen square kilometres of territory it possessed in each of its General Bays.

Amorphia completed its sweeping gaze across the bright, silent stillness of the vast killing ground. As an avatar it possessed no real thoughts of its own, but the Mind that was the Sleeper Service liked to run the creature off a small sub-routine that was only a little more intelligent than the average human being — while both retaining the option of stepping in, full force, if it needed to and making the avatar behave in a confused, distracted state that the ship believed somehow reflected, on the nearly infinitely smaller human scale, its own philosophical perplexities.

So it was that the semi-human sub-routine looked out across that great tableau, and felt a kind of sadness that it might all have to be dismantled. There was an extra, perhaps deeper melancholy at the thought that it would no longer be able to play host to the living things aboard; the creatures of the sea and the air and the gas-giant atmosphere, and the woman.

Its thoughts turned to that woman; Dajeil Gelian, who in one sense had been the cause, the seed for all of this, and the one person it had wanted to find, the one soul — asleep or awake — it had been determined to offer sanctuary to when it had first renounced the Culture’s normality. Now that sanctuary was compromised, and she too would have to be offloaded with all the rest of its waifs and strays and teeming undead. A promise being fulfilled leading to a promise to her being broken, as though she had not experienced enough of that in her life. Still, it would make amends, and for that reason there were a lot of other promises being made and — so far, it would seem — kept. That would have to do.

Movement on the motionless tableau; Amorphia turned its attention there and saw the black bird Gravious flapping away across the field. More movement. Amorphia walked towards it, around and over the poised, charging cavalry and the fallen soldiers, between a pair of convincing-looking hanging fountains of earth where two cannon balls were slamming into the ground and over a small, blood-swollen stream to another part of the battlefield, where a team of three revival drones were floating above a revivee.

This was unusual; people normally wanted to be woken back in their home and in the presence of friends, but over the last couple of decades — as the tableaux had become more impressive — more people had wished to be brought back to life here, in the midst of them.

Amorphia squatted down by the woman, who had been lying posed as a dying soldier, her tunic punctured by bullet holes and stained red. She lay on her back, blinking in the sunlight, attended by machines. The head of the Storage suit had been slipped off and lay like a rubbery mask on the grass beside her; her face looked pale and just a little blotchy; she was an old woman, but her depilated head gave her a curious, baby-like quality of nakedness.

“Hello?” Amorphia said, taking one of the woman’s hands in hers and gently detaching that part of the suit too, pulling the hand-covering off inside-out, like a tight glove.

“Whoa,” the woman said, swallowing, her eyes watering.

Sikleyr-Najasa Croepise Ince Stahal da Mapin, Stored thirty-one years ago at the age of three-hundred and eighty-six. Revival criterion: on the acclamation of the next Line Messiah-elect on the planet Ischeis. She had been a scholar of the planet’s major religion and had wanted to be present at the Elevation of its next Saviour, an event which had not been anticipated for another two hundred years or so.

Her mouth twisted, and she coughed. “How—?” she began, then coughed again.

“Just thirty-one standard years,” Amorphia told her.

The woman’s eyes widened, then she smiled. “That was quick,” she said.

She recovered rapidly for one of her age; in a few minutes she was able to be helped to her feet and — taking Amorphia’s arm, and trailed by the three drones — they walked across the battlefield towards the nearest edge of the tableau.

They stood on the small hill, Hill 4, that Amorphia had stood on a little earlier. Amorphia was distantly, naggingly aware of the gap the woman’s revival had left in the scene. Normally she would have been replaced within the day with another Storee, posed in the same position, but there were none left; the gap she had left would remain unless the ship plundered another tableau to repair the hole in this one. The woman gazed around her for some time, then shook her head.

Amorphia guessed what she was thinking. “It is a terrible sight,” it said. “But it was the last great land battle on Xlephier Prime. To have one’s final significant battle at such an early technological stage is actually a great achievement for a humanoid species.”

The woman turned to Amorphia. “I know,” she said. “I was just thinking how impressive all this was. You must be proud.”

II

The Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, had been investigating a little-explored part of the Upper Leaf Swirl on a standard random search pattern. It had left Tier habitat on n4.28.725.500 along with the seven other Stargazer vessels; they had scattered like seeds into the depths of the Swirl, bidding each other farewell and knowing they might never see each other again.

One month in, and the ship had turned up nothing special; just a few bits of uncharted interstellar debris, duly logged, and that was all. There was a hint — a probably false-signal resonation in the skein of space-time behind them — that there might be a craft following them, but then it was not unusual for other civilisations to follow ships of the Zetetic Elench.

The Elench had once been part of the Culture proper; they had split off fifteen hundred years ago, the few habitats and the many Rocks, ships, drones and humans concerned preferring to take a slightly different line from the mainstream Culture. The Culture aimed to stay roughly as it was and change at least a proportion of those lesser civilisations it discovered, while acting as an honest broker between the Involved — the more developed societies who made up the current players in the great galactic civilisational game.

The Elench wanted to alter themselves, not others; they sought out the undiscovered not to change it but to be changed by it. The Elencher ideal was that somebody from a more stable society — the Culture itself was the perfect example — could meet the same Elencher — Rock, ship, drone or human — on successive occasions and never encounter the same entity twice. They would have changed between meetings just because in the interim they had encountered some other civilisation and incorporated some different technology into their bodies or information into their minds. It was a search for the sort of pan-relevant truth that the Culture’s monosophical approach was unlikely ever to throw up; it was a vocation, a mission, a calling.

The results of this attitude were as various as might be imagined; entire Elencher fleets had either never come back from expeditions, and remained lost, or had eventually been found, the vessels and their crews completely, if willingly, subsumed by another civilisation.

At its most extreme, in the old days, some craft had been discovered turned entirely into Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects; selfishly auto-replicating organisms determined to turn every piece of matter they found into copies of themselves. There were techniques — beyond simple outright destruction, which was always an option — for dealing with this sort of eventuality which normally resulted in the Objects concerned becoming Evangelical Hegemonising Swarm Objects rather than Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects, but if the Objects concerned had been particularly single-minded, it still meant that people had died to contribute to its greedily ungracious self-regard.

These days, the Elench very rarely ran into anything like that sort of trouble, but they did still change all the time. In a way, the Elench, even more than the Culture, was an attitude rather than an easily definable grouping of ships or people. Because parts of Elench were constantly being subsumed and assimilated, or just disappearing, while at the same time other individuals and small groups were joining it (both from the Culture and from other societies, human and otherwise), there was anyway a turn-over of personnel and secondary ideas that made it one of the most rapidly evolving in-play civilisations. Somehow, though, despite it all, and perhaps because it was more an attitude, a meme, than anything else, the Elench had developed an ability that it had arguably inherited from its parent civilisation; the ability to remain roughly the same in the midst of constant change.

It also had a knack of turning up intriguing things — ancient artifacts, new civilisations, the mysterious remnants of Sublimed species, unguessably old depositories of antique knowledge — not all of which were of ultimate interest to the Elench itself, but many of which might excite the curiosity, further the purposes and benefit the informational or monetary funds of others, especially if they could get to them before anybody else. Such opportunities arose but rarely, but they had occurred sufficiently often in the past for certain societies of an opportunistic bent to consider it worth the expense or the bother of dedicating a ship to follow an Elencher craft, for a while at least, and so the Peace Makes Plenty had not been unduly alarmed by the discovery that it might be being tailed.

Two months in. And still nothing exciting; just gas clouds, dust clouds, brown dwarfs and a couple of lifeless star systems. All well enough charted from afar and displaying no sign of ever having been touched by anything intelligent.

Even the hint of the following ship had disappeared; if it ever had been real, the vessel concerned had probably decided the Peace Makes Plenty was not going to strike lucky this trip. Nevertheless, everything the Elencher ship came within range of was scanned; passive sensors filtered the natural spectrum for signs of meaning, beams and pulses were sent out into the vacuum and across the skein of space-time, searching and probing, while the ship consumed whatever echoes came back, analysing, considering, evaluating…

Seventy-eight days after leaving Tier, approaching a red giant star named Esperi from a direction which according to its records nobody had ever taken before, the Peace Makes Plenty had discovered an artifact, fourteen light months distant from the sun itself.

The artifact was a little over fifty kilometres in diameter. It was black-body; an ambient anomaly, indistinguishable from a distance from any given volume of almost empty interstellar space. The Peace Makes Plenty only noticed it at all because it occluded part of a distant galaxy and the Elencher ship, knowing that bits of galaxies did not just wink off and back on again of their own accord, had turned to investigate.

The artifact appeared to be either almost completely massless, or — perhaps — some sort of projection; it seemed to make no impression on the skein, the fabric of space-time which any accumulation of matter effectively dents with its mass, like a boulder lying on a trampoline. The artifact/projection gave the impression that it was floating on the skein, making no impression on it whatsoever. This was unusual; this was certainly worth investigating. Even more intriguingly, there was also a possible anomaly in the lower energy grid, which underlay the fabric of real space. There was a region directly underneath the three-dimensional form of the artifact that, intermittently, seemed to lack the otherwise universally chaotic nature of the Grid; there was a vaguest-of-vague hint of order there, almost as if the artifact was casting some sort of bizarre — indeed, impossible — shadow. Even more curious.

The Peace Makes Plenty hove to, sitting in front of the artifact — in as much as it could be said to have a front — and trying both to analyse it and communicate with it.

Nothing; the black-body sphere appeared to be massless and inviolable, almost as though it was a blister on the skein itself, as though the signals the ship was sending towards it could never connect with a thing there because all they did was slide flickering over that blister almost as though it wasn’t there and pass on undisturbed into space beyond; as though, trying to pick up a stone that appeared to be resting on the surface of a trampoline, one discovered that the trampoline surface itself was bulged up to cover the stone.

The ship decided to attempt to contact the artifact in a more direct manner; it would send a drone-probe underneath the object in hyperspace, below the surface of space-time; effectively making a tear, a rent in the fabric of the skein — the sort of opening it would normally create to fashion a way into HS through which it could travel. The drone-probe would attempt, as it were, to surface inside the artifact; if there was nothing there but a projection, it would find out; if there was something there, it would presumably either be prevented from entering it, or accepted within. The ship readied its emissary.

The situation was so unusual the Peace Makes Plenty even considered breaking with Elench precedent by informing Tier habitat or one of its peers what was going on; the nearest other Stargazer craft was a month’s travel away, but might be able to help if the Peace Makes Plenty got itself into trouble. In the end, however, it stuck with tradition and kept quiet. There was a kind of stealthy pragmatism in this; an encounter of the sort the ship was embarking upon might only be successful if the Elencher craft could fairly claim to be acting on its own, without having made what might, to a suspicious contactee, look like a request for reinforcements.

Plus, there was simple pride involved; an Elencher ship would not be an Elencher ship if it started acting like part of a committee; why, it might as well then be a Culture ship!

The drone-probe was dispatched with the Peace Makes Plenty keeping in close contact. The instant the probe passed within the horizon of the artifact, it—

The records the drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 had access to ended there.

Something, obviously, had happened.

The next thing it personally knew, the Peace Makes Plenty had been under attack. The assault had been almost unbelievably swift and ferocious; the drone-probe must have been taken over almost instantaneously, the ship’s subsystems surrendered milliseconds later and the integrity of the ship’s Mind shattered within — at a guess — less than a second after the drone-probe had infringed the space beneath the artifact.

A few more seconds later and Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 itself had been involved in a last desperate attempt to get word of the ship’s plight to the outside galaxy while the vessel’s usurped systems did their damnedest to prevent it; by destroying it if necessary. The long-agreed, carefully worked-out ruse using itself and its twin and the preprogrammed independent Displacer unit had worked, though only just, and even so, with considerable damage to the drone that had been Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 and was now Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, with a kind of twisted remnant of Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 lodged within it.

The drone had carried out the equivalent of pressing an ear to the wall of the core with its twin’s mind in it, carefully accessing a meaning-free abstract of the activity inside the closed-off core to find out what was happening in there. It was like listening to a furious argument going on in an adjoining room; a chilling, frightening sound; the sort of bawling match that made you expect the sound of screams and things breaking, any moment.

Its original self had probably died in the process of escape; instead of its own body it now inhabited that of its twin, whose violated, defected mind-state now raged helplessly within the core labelled 2/2.

The drone, still tumbling through interstellar space at two hundred and eighty kilometres a second, felt a kind of revulsion at the very idea of having a treacherous, perverted version of its twin locked inside its own mind. Its first reaction was to expunge it; it thought about just dumping the core into the vacuum and wasting it with its laser, the one weapon which still seemed to be working at close to normal capacity; or it could just shut off power to the core, letting whatever was in it die for want of energy.

And yet it mustn’t; like the two higher mind components, the ravaged version of its twin’s mind-state might contain clues to the nature of the artifact’s own mind-type. It, the AI core and the photonic nucleus all had to be kept as evidence; retained, perhaps, as samples from which a kind of antidote to the artifact’s poisonous infectivity might be drawn. There was even a chance that something of its twin’s true personality might be retained in the rapacious mind-state the two upper minds and the core contained.

Equally, there was a possibility that the ship’s Mind had lost control but not integrity; perhaps — like a small garrison quitting the undefendable curtain wall of a great fortress to take refuge in an all-but-invulnerable central keep — the Mind had been forced to dissociate itself from all its subsystems and given up command to the invader, but succeeded in retaining its own personality in a Mind core as invulnerable to infiltration as the electronic core within the drone’s mind (where what was left of its twin now seethed) was proof against escape.

Elencher Minds had been in such dire situations before and survived; certainly such a core could be destroyed (they could not have their power turned off, as the drone’s core could; Mind cores had their own internal energy sources) but even the most brutal aggressor would far rather lay siege to that keep-core in the knowledge that the information contained within must surely fall to it eventually, than just destroy it.

There was always hope, the drone told itself; it must not give up hope. According to the specifications it had, the Displacer which had catapulted it out of the ill-fated ship had a range — with something the volume of Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 — of nearly a light second. Surely that was far enough to put it beyond range of detection? Certainly the Peace Makes Plenty’s sensors wouldn’t have had a hope of spotting something so small so far away; it just had to hope that neither could the artifact.

Excession; that was what the Culture called such things. It had become a pejorative term and so the Elench didn’t use it normally, except sometimes informally, amongst themselves. Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering.

So, now it knew what had happened to it and what the core 2/2 contained, the question was; what was to be done?

It had to get word to outside; that was the task it had been entrusted with by the ship, that was what its whole life-mission had become the instant the ship came under such intensive attack.

But how? Its tiny warp unit had been destroyed, its bom-com unit likewise, its HS laser too. It had nothing that worked at translight speeds, no way of unsticking itself or even a signal from the glutinous slowness that trapped anything unable to step outside the skein of space-time. The drone felt as if it was some quick, graceful flying insect, knocked down to a stagnant pond and trapped there by surface tension, all grace abandoned in its bedraggled, doomed struggle with a strange, cloyingly foreign medium.

It considered again the sub-core where its self-repair mechanisms waited. But not its own repair systems; those of its turncoat twin. It was beyond belief that those too had not been subverted by the invader. Worse than useless; a temptation. Because there was a vanishingly small chance that in all the excitement they had not been taken over.

Temptation… But no; it couldn’t risk it. It would be folly.

It would have to make its own self-repair units. It was possible, but it would take forever; a month. For a human a month was not that long; for a drone — even one thinking at the shamefully slow speed of light on the skein — it was like a sequence of life sentences. A month was not a long time to wait; drones were very good at waiting and had a whole suite of techniques to pass the time pleasantly or just side-step it, but it was an abominably long time to have to concentrate on anything, to have to work at a single task.

Even at the end of that month, it would just be the start. At the very least there would be a lot of fine tuning to be done; the self-repair mechanisms would need direction, amendment, tinkering with; some would doubtless dismantle where they were supposed to build, others would duplicate what they were meant to scour. It would be like releasing millions of potential cancer cells into an already damaged animal body and trying to keep track of each one. It could quite easily kill itself by mistake, or accidentally breach the containment around the core of its corrupted twin or the original self-repair mechanisms. Even if all went well, the whole process could take years.

Despair!

It set the initial routines under way all the same — what else could it do? — and thought on.

It had a few million particles of anti-matter stored, it had some maniple-field capability left (somewhere between finger- and arm-strength, but down-scalable to the point of being able to work at the micrometer scale, and capable of slicing molecular bonds; it would need both capabilities when it came to building the prototype self-repairer constructs), it possessed two hundred. and forty one-millimetre-long nanomissiles, also AM tipped, it could still put up a small mirror field about it, and it had its laser, which was not far off maximum potential. Plus it still had the thimbleful of mush that had been the final-resort back-up biochemical brain… Which might no longer be able to support thought, but could still inspire it…

Well, it was one way to use the nasty gooey mess. Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 started to fashion a shielded reaction chamber and began working out both how best to bring the anti-matter and the cellular gunge together to provide itself with the most reaction mass and maximum thrust and how to direct the resulting exhaust plume so as to minimise the chances of attracting attention.

Accelerating into the stars using a wasted brain; it had its amusing side, it supposed. It set those routines in motion too and — with the equivalent of a long sigh and the taking off of a jacket and the rolling up of sleeves — returned its attention to the self-repairer-building problem.

At that instant a skein wave passed around and through it; a sharp, purposeful ripple in space-time.

It stopped thinking for a nanosecond.

A few things produced such waves. Several were natural; collapsing stellar cores, for example. But this wave was compressed, tightly folded; not the massive, swell-long surge created when a star contracted into a black hole.

This wave was not natural; it had been made. It was a signal. Or it was part of a sense.

The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 was helplessly aware of its body, the few kilos of mass it represented, resonating; producing an echoing signal that would transmit back along the radius of that expanding circular disturbance in the skein to whatever instrument had produced the pulse in the first place.

It felt… not despair. It felt sick.

It waited.

The reaction was not long in coming; a delicate, fanning, probing cluster of maser filaments, rods of energy seeming to converge almost at infinity, some distance off to one side from where it had guessed the artifact was, three hundred thousand or so kilometres away…

The drone tried to shield itself from the signals, but they overcame it. It started to shut down certain systems which might conceivably be corrupted by an attack through the maser signal itself, though the characteristics of the beam had not looked particularly sophisticated. Then suddenly the beam shut off.

The drone looked around. Nothing to be seen, but even as it scanned the cold, empty depths of the space around it, it felt the surface of space-time itself tremble again, all around it, ever so slightly. Something was coming.

The distant vibration increased slowly… The insect trapped in the surface tension of the pond would have gone still now, while the water quivered and whatever was advancing upon it — skating across the water’s surface or angling up from underneath — approached its helpless prey.

III

The car zipped along, slung under one of the monorails that ran amongst the superconducting coils beneath the ceiling of the habitat. Genar-Hofoen looked down through the angled windows of the car at the clouded framescape below.

God’shole habitat (it was much too small to be called an Orbital according to the Culture’s definitive nomenclature, plus it was enclosed) was — at nearly a thousand years old — one of the Affront’s older outposts in a region of space most civilisations had long since agreed to call the Fernblade. The small world was in the shape of a hollow ring; a tube ten kilometres in diameter and two thousand two hundred long which had been joined into a circle; the superconducting coils and EM wave guides formed the inner rim of the enormous wheel. The tiny, rapidly spinning black hole which provided the structure’s power sat where the wheel’s hub would have been. The circular-sectioned living space was like a highly pressurised tyre bulging from the inner rim, and where its tread would have been hung the gantries and docks where the ships of the Affront and a dozen other species came and went.

The whole lot was in a slow, distant orbit about an otherwise satellite-less brown dwarf mass just too small to be a proper star but which had long had the honour of being in exactly the right place to further the continuing expansion and consolidation of the Affront sphere of influence.

The monorail car rushed towards a huge wall spread entirely across the view ahead. The rails disappeared into a small, circular door, which opened like a sphincter as the car approached, then closed again behind it. It was dim in the car for a while as it traversed a short tunnel, then another door ahead of it dilated and it shot out into a huge open, mist-filled space where the view just disappeared amongst clouds and haze.

The interior of God’shole habitat was sectioned off into about forty individually isolable compartments, most of them crisscrossed by a web-work of frames, girders and tubular members, partly to provide additional strength for the structure but partly because these created a multitude of places for the Affront to anchor the nest spaces that were the basic cellular building-block of their architecture. There were more open compartments every few sections along the habitat, filled with little more than layers of cloud, a few floating nest space bundles and a selection of flora and fauna. These were the sections which more closely mirrored conditions on the sort of mainly methane-atmosphered planets and moons the Affront preferred, and it was in these the Affront indulged their greatest passion, by going hunting. It was one of these immense game reserves that the car was now crossing. Genar-Hofoen looked downwards again, but he couldn’t see a hunt in progress.

As much as a fifth of the whole habitat was devoted to hunting space, and even that represented a huge concession to practicality by the Affront; they’d probably have preferred the proportions to be about half-and-half hunting space and everything else, and even then have thought they were being highly responsible and self-sacrificing.

Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the tradeoff between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture’s standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species (though of course the Culture was sophisticated enough to know that this was just its, admittedly subjective, way of looking at things; and besides, the more time the Affront spent dallying in their hunting parks and regaling each other with hunting tales in their carousing halls, the less they had for rampaging across their bit of the galaxy being horrible to people).

But if the Affront didn’t love hunting as much as they did, would they still be the Affront? Hunting, especially the highly cooperative form of hunting in three dimensions which the Affront had evolved, required and encouraged intelligence, and it was generally — though not exclusively — intelligence that took a species into space. The required mix of common sense, inventiveness, compassion and aggression required was different for each; perhaps if you tried to make the Affront just a little less enraptured by hunting you would only be able to do so by making them much less intelligent and inquisitive. It was like play; it was fun at the time, when you were a child, but it was also training for when you became an adult. Fun was serious.

Still no sign of a hunt in progress, or even of any herds of prey animals. Just a few filmy mats and hanging verticals of floating plant life. Doubtless some of the smaller animals which a few species of the prey-creatures themselves predated would be hanging munching away on the membranes and gas sacs of the flora, but they were invisible from this distance with the haze preventing closer inspection.

Genar-Hofoen sat back. There was no seat to sit back on because the monorail car wasn’t built for humans, but the gelfield suit was imitating the effects of a seat. He wore his usual gilet and holster. At his feet was his gelfield hold-all. He looked at it, then prodded it with a foot. It didn’t look much to be taking on a round trip of six thousand light years.

— Bastards, the module said inside his head.

— What? he asked it.

— They seem to enjoy leaving everything to the last moment, the module said, sounding annoyed. ~ You know, we only just finished negotiating for the hire of the ships? I mean, you’re due to leave in about ten minutes; how late can these maniacs leave things?

— Ships plural? he asked.

— Ships plural, the module said. ~ They insist we hire three of their ridiculous tubs. Any one of which could easily accommodate me, I might add; that’s another point at issue. But three! Can you believe? That’s practically a fleet by their standards!

— Must need the money.

— Genar-Hofoen, I know you think it amusing to be the cause of the transfer of funds to the Affront, but might I point out to you that where it is not to all intents and purposes irrelevant, money is power, money is influence, money is effect.

— “Money is effect”, Genar-Hofoen mused. ~ That one of your own, Scopell-Afranqui?

— The point is that every time we donate the Affront extra means of exchange we effectively become part of their expansionist drive. It is not moral.

— Shit, we gave them Orbital-building technology; how does that compare with a few gambling debts?

— That was different; we only gave them that so they’d stop taking over so many planets and because they didn’t trust the Orbitals we made for them. And I’m not talking about your gambling debts, however outrageous, or your bizarre habit of bidding-up the price of bribes. I’m talking about the cost of hiring three Affronter Nova Class Battle-Cruisers and their crews for two months.

Genar-Hofoen almost laughed out loud. ~ SC isn’t putting that on your tab, is it?

— Of course not. I was thinking of the wider picture.

— What the fuck am I supposed to do? he protested. ~ This is the fastest way of getting me where SC wants me to be. Not my fault.

— You could have said No.

— Could have. And you’d have spent the next year or so biting my ear about not doing my duty to the Culture when I was asked.

— Your only motive, I’m sure, Scopell-Afranqui said sniffily as the monorail car slowed. The module went off-line with an ostentatious click.

Prick, Genar-Hofoen thought, unheard.

The monorail car passed through another couple of habitat section walls, exiting into a crowded-looking industrial section where the keel skeletons of newly begun Affronter ships rose out of the haze like oddly inappropriate collections of spines and ribs, ornate elaborations within the greater framework of buttresses and columns supporting the habitat itself. The monorail car continued to slow until it drew to a stop within a web-tube attached to one of the structural members. The car started to drop, almost in free-fall.

The car vibrated. In fact, it was rattling. Genar-Hofoen had grown up on a Culture Orbital where only sporting vehicles and things you built yourself for a laugh ever vibrated; normal transport systems rarely ever even made a noise unless it was to ask which floor you wanted or whether you’d like the on-board scent changed.

The monorail car flashed through a floor and into another gigantic hangar space where the towering shapes of half-finished craft rose like barbed pinnacles out of the mist-shrouded framework of slender girders below. The bladed hulls of the ships blurred past to one side.

— Wee-hee! said the gelfield suit, which thought Affronter free-fall was just a total hoot.

— Glad you’re amused, Genar-Hofoen thought.

— I hope you realise that if this thing crashes now, even I won’t be able to stop you breaking most of your major bones, the suit informed him.

— If you can’t say something helpful, shut the fuck up, he told it.

Another floor rushed up to meet the car; it plummeted through to a vast, misty hall where almost-finished Affronter ships rose like jagged sky-scrapers. The car came juddering and screeching to a halt near the floor of the huge space — the suit clamped around him in support, but Genar-Hofoen could feel his insides doing uncomfortable things under the effects of the additional apparent gravity — then the car cycled through a pair of airlocks and rumbled down a dark tunnel.

It came out on to the edge of the underside of the habitat where, a succession of docks shaped like giant rib-cages disappeared away along the lazy curve of the little world; there was a lot of glare but a few bright stars shone in the darkness. About half the docks were occupied, some with Affronter ships, some with craft from a handful of other species. Dwarfing all the others were three huge dark craft, each of which looked vaguely as though it had been modelled by taking a free-fall aerial bomb from one age and welding onto it a profusion of broad swords, scimitars and daggers from an even earlier time and then magnifying the result until each was a couple of kilometres in length. They hung cradled in docks a few kilometres off; the car swung round and headed towards them.

— The good ships SacSlicer II, FrightSpear and Kiss The Blade, the suit announced as the car slowed again and the bulbous black bulks of the craft blotted out the stars.

— Charmed, I’m sure, thought Genar-Hofoen, picking up his hold-all. He studied the hulls of the three warships, looking for the signs of damage that would indicate the craft were veterans. The signs were there; a delicate tracery of curved lines, light grey on dark grey and black, spread out across the spines, blades and curtain hull of the middle ship indicated a probably glancing blow from a plasma blast (which even Genar-Hofoen, who found weapons boring, could recognise); blurred grey roundels like concentric bruises on that middle ship and the nearest vessel were the marks of another weapon system, and sharp, straight lines etched across the various surfaces of the third craft looked like the effects of yet another.

Of course, the Affront’s ships were as self-repairing as any other reasonably advanced civilisation’s, and the marks that had been left on the vessels were just that; they would be no thicker than a coat of paint and have negligible effect on the ships’ operational capability. However, the Affront thought that it was only right that their ships should — like themselves — bear the scars of honour that battle brings, and so allowed their warships’ self-repair mechanisms to stop just short of perfection, the better to display the provenance of their war fleets’ glorious reputations.

The car stopped directly underneath the middle warcraft in the midst of a forest of giant pipes and tubes which disappeared into the belly of the ship. Crunches, thumps and hisses from outside the car announced all was being made safe. A wisp of vapour burst from a seal, and the car’s door swung out and up. There was a corridor beyond. An honour guard of Affronters jerked to attention; not for him, of course, but for Fivetide and the Affronter at his side dressed in the uniform of a Navy Commander. Both of them were half floating, half walking along towards him, paddles rowing and dangling limbs pushing.

“And here’s our guest!” Fivetide shouted. “Genar-Hofoen; allow me to present Commander Kindrummer VI of both the Blades-corner tribe and the Battle-Cruiser Kiss The Blade. So, human; ready for our little jaunt?”

“Yup,” he said, and stepped out into the corridor.

IV

Ulver Seich, barely twenty-two, famed scholastic overachiever since the age of three, voted Most Luscious Student by her last five University years and breaker of more hearts on Phage Rock than anybody since her legendary great-great-great grandmother, had been summarily dragged away from her graduation ball by the drone Churt Lyne.

“Churt!” she said, balling her fists in her long black gloves and nodding her head forward; her high heels clicked along the inlaid wood of the vestibule floor. “How dare you; that was a deeply lovely young man I was dancing with! He was utterly, utterly gorgeous; how could you just drag me away like that?”

The drone, hurrying at her back, dived round in front of her and opened the ancient, manually operated double doors leading from the ballroom vestibule, its suitcase-sized body rustling against the bustle of her gown as it did so. “I’m sorry beyond words, Ulver,” it told her. “Now, please let’s not delay.”

“Mind my bustle,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“He was gorgeous,” Ulver Seich said vehemently as she strode down a stone-flagged hallway lined with paintings and urn plants, following the floating drone as it headed for the traveltube doors.

“I’ll take your word for it,” it said.

“And he liked my legs,” she said, looking down at the slashed front of the gown. Her long, exposed legs were sheathed in sheer blackness. Violet shoes matched her deep-cut gown; its short train hurried after her in quick, sinuous flicks.

“They’re beautiful legs,” the drone agreed, signalling ahead to the traveltube controls to hurry things up.

“Damn right they are,” she said. She shook her head. “He was gorgeous.”

“I’m sure.”

She stopped abruptly. “I’m going back.” She turned on her heel, just a little unsteadily.

“What?” yelped Churt Lyne. The drone darted round in front of her; she almost bumped into it. “Ulver!” the machine said, sounding angry. Its aura field flashed white. “Really!”

“Get out the way. He was gorgeous. He’s mine. He deserves me. Come on; shift.”

It wouldn’t get out of the way. She balled her fists again and beat at its snout, stamping her feet. She hiccuped.

“Ulver, Ulver,” the drone said, gently taking her hands in its fields. She stuck her head forward and frowned as hard as she could at the machine’s front sensory band. “Ulver,” it said again. “Please. Please listen; this is—”

“What is it, anyway?” she cried.

“I told you; something you have to see; a signal.”

“Well, why can’t you show it to me here?” She looked round the hallway, at the softly lit portraits and the variegated fronds, creepers and parasols of the urn plants. “There isn’t even anybody else around!”

“Because it just doesn’t work that way,” Churt Lyne said, sounding exasperated. “Ulver, please; this is important. You still want to join Contact?”

She sighed. “I suppose so,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Join Contact and go exploring…”

“Well, this is your invitation.” It let go of her hands.

She stuck her head forward at it again. Her hair was an artful tangle of masked black curls studded with tiny helium-filled globes of gold, platinum and emerald. It brushed against the drone’s snout like a particularly decorative thundercloud.

“Will it let me go exploring on that young man?” she asked, trying to keep her face straight.

“Ulver, if you will just do as I ask there is every chance Contact will happily provide you with entire ships full of gorgeous young men. Now, please turn round.”

She snorted derisively and went on tip-toes to look wobblingly over the machine’s casing in the direction of the ballroom. She could still hear the music of the dance she’d left. “Yeah, but it was that one I was interested in…”

The drone took her hands again in fields coloured yellow green with calm friendliness, bringing her down off her toes. “Young lady,” it said. “I shall never say anything more truthful to you than these two things. One; there will be plenty more gorgeous young men in your life. Two; you will never have a better chance of getting into Contact, even Special Circumstances, and with them owing you a favour; or two. Do you understand? This is your big chance, girl.”

“Don’t you ‘girl’ me,” she told it sniffily. The drone Churt Lyne had been a family friend for nearly a millennium and parts of its personality were supposed to date back to when they’d been programs in a house-systems computer nine thousand years earlier. It wasn’t in the habit of pulling age on her like this and reminding her that she was a mere day-fly to its creakingly venerable antiquity, but it wasn’t above doing so when it thought the situation demanded it, either. She closed one eye and looked closely at the machine. “Did you say ‘Special Circumstances’ just there?”

“Yes.”

She drew back. “Hmm,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

Behind her, the traveltube chimed and the door rolled open. She turned and started walking towards it. “Well, come on, then!” she said over her shoulder.

Phage Rock had been wandering the galaxy for nearly nine thousand years. That made it one of the Culture’s oldest elements. It had started out as a three-kilometre-long asteroid in a solar system which was one of the first explored by a species that would later form part of the Culture; it had been mined for metals, minerals and precious stones, then its great internal voids had been sealed against the vacuum and flooded with air, it had been spun to provide artificial gravity and it had become a habitat orbiting its parent sun.

Later, when the technology made it possible and the political conditions prevailing at the time made it advisable to quit that system, it had been fitted with fusion-powered steam rockets and ion engines to help propel it into interstellar space. Again due to those political conditions, it armed itself with up-rated signal lasers and a number of at least partially targetable mass launchers which doubled as rail guns. Some years later, scarred but intact, and finally accepted as personally sentient by its human inhabitants, it had been one of the first space-based entities to declare for the new pan-civilisational, pan-species grouping which was calling itself the Culture.

Over the years, decades, centuries and millennia that had followed, Phage had journeyed through the galaxy, wandering from system to system, concentrating on trading and manufacturing at first and then on a gradually more cultural, educatory role as the advances in technology the Culture was cultivating began to distribute the society’s productive capacity so evenly throughout its fabric that the ability to manufacture almost anything developed almost everywhere, and trade became relatively rare.

And Phage Rock — by now recognised as one of a distinct category of Culture artifacts which were neither ships nor worlds but something in between — had grown, accruing new bits of systemic or interstellar debris about it as its needs required and its population increased, securing the chunks of metal, rock, ice and compacted dust to its still gnarled outer surface in a slow process of acquisition, consumption and evolution, so that within just a millennium of its transition from mine to habitat its earlier, original self wouldn’t have recognised it; it was thirty kilometres long by then, not three, and only the front half of that initial body still peeped out from the prow of the knobbly collection of equipment-scattered mountains and expanded, balloon-like hangar and accommodation rotundae that now formed its roughly conical body.

Phage Rock’s rate of accretion had slowed after that, and it was now just over seventy kilometres long and home to one hundred and fifty million people. It looked like a collection of craggy rocks, smooth stones and still smoother shells brought from a beach and cemented into a rough cairn, all dotted with what looked like a museum collection of Culture Equipment Through the Ages: launch pads, radar pits, aerial frames, sensory arrays, telescope dishes, rail-gun pylons, crater-like rocket nozzles, clamshell hangar doors, iris apertures and a bewildering variety of domes large and small, intact and part-dismantled or just ruined.

As its size and its population had grown, so had the speeds Phage Rock was capable of. It had been successively fitted with ever-more efficient and powerful drives and engines, until eventually it was able to maintain a perfectly respectable velocity either warping along the fabric of space-time or creating its own induced-singularity pathway through hyperspace beneath or above it.

Ulver Seich’s had been one of the Rock’s Founding Families; she could trace her ancestry back through fifty-four generations on Phage itself and numbered amongst her ancestors at least two forebears who were inevitably mentioned in even one-volume Histories of the Culture, as well as being descended from — as the fashions of the intervening times had ordained — people who had resembled birds, fish, dirigible balloons, snakes, small clouds of cohesive smoke and animated bushes.

The tenor of the time had generally turned against such outlandishness and people had mostly returned to looking more like people over the last millennium, albeit assuredly pretty good-looking people, but still, some part of one’s appearance was initially at least left to luck and the random nature of genetic inheritance, and it was a matter of some pride to Ulver that she had never had any form of physical alteration carried out (well, apart from the neural lace of course, but that didn’t count). It would have been a brave or deranged human or machine who told Ulver Seich to her face that the give-or-take-a-bit human-basic form was not almost unimprovably graceful and alluring, especially in its female state, and even more especially when it was called Ulver Seich.

She looked round the room the drone had brought her to. It was semicircular and moderately big, shaped like an auditorium or a shallowly sloped lecture hall, but most of the steps or seats seemed to be filled with complicated-looking desks and pieces of equipment. A huge screen filled the far wall.

They’d entered the room through a long tunnel which she’d never seen before and which was blocked by a series of thick, mirror-coated doors which had rolled silently back into recesses as they’d approached, and revolved back into place behind them once they’d passed. Ulver had admired her reflection in every one of them, and drawn herself up even straighter in her spectacular violet gown.

The lights had come on in the semicircular room as the last door had rolled back into place. The place was bright, but dusty. The drone whooshed off to one side and hovered over one of the desks.

Ulver stood looking round the space, wondering. She sneezed.

“Bless you.”

“Thank you. What is this place, Churt?” she asked.

“Emergency Centre Command Space,” the drone told her, as the desk beneath it lit up in places and various panes and panels of light leapt up to waver in the air above its surface.

Ulver Seich wandered over to look at the pretty displays.

“Didn’t even know this place existed,” she said, drawing one black-gloved finger along the desk’s surface. The displays altered and the desk made a chirping noise; Churt Lyne slapped her hand away, going “tssk” while its aura field flashed white. She glowered at the machine, inspected the grey rim of dust on her finger tip, and smeared it on the casing of the drone.

Normally Churt Lyne would have slicked that part of its body with a field and the dust would just have fallen off, having literally nothing to cling to, but this time it ignored her and just kept on hovering over the desk and its rapidly changing displays, obviously controlling both it and them. Ulver crossed her black-gloved arms in annoyance.

The sliding panels of lights hanging in the air changed and rotated; figures and letters slid across their surfaces. Then they all disappeared.

“Right,” the drone said. A maniple field coloured formal blue extended from the machine’s casing and dragged a small sculpted metal seat over, placing it behind her and then shoving it quickly forward; she had no choice but to plonk down into it.

“Ow,” she said, pointedly. She adjusted her bustle and glared at the drone but it still wasn’t paying attention.

“Here we go,” it said.

What looked like a pane of brown smoked glass suddenly leapt into existence above the desk. She studied it, attempting to see her reflection.

“Ready?” the drone asked her.

“Mm-hmm,” she said.

“Ulver, child,” the drone said, in a voice she knew it had spent centuries investing with gravitas. It swivelled through the air until it was directly in front of her.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes? What?”

“Ulver, I know you’re a little—”

“I’m drunk, drone, I know,” she told it. “But I haven’t lost my wits.”

“Well, good, but I need to know you’re fit to make this decision. What you’re about to see might change your life.”

She sighed and put her gloved elbow on the surface of the desk, resting her chin on her hand. “I’ve had a few young fellows tell me that before,” she drawled. “It always turns out to be a disappointment, or a joke of the grossest nature.”

“This is neither. But you must understand that just seeing what I’m about to show you might give Special Circumstances an interest in you that will not pass; even if you decide you don’t want to join Contact, or even if you do but you’re still refused, it is possible they might watch you for the rest of your life, just because of what you’re about to see. I’m sorry to sound so melodramatic, but I don’t want you to enter into anything you don’t understand the full implications of.”

“Me neither.” She yawned. “Can we get on with this?”

“You’re sure you’ve understood what I’ve said?”

“Hell yes!” she exclaimed, waving her arms around. “Just get on with it.”

“Oh; just one other thing—”

“What?” she yelled.

“Will you travel to a distant location in the guise of somebody else and — probably — help kidnap somebody, another Culture citizen?”

“Will I what?” she said, wrinkling her nose and snorting with laughter and disbelief.

“Sounds like a ‘No’ to me,” the drone said. “Didn’t think you would. Had to ask though. That means I have no choice but to show you this.” It sounded relieved.

She put both her black-gloved arms on the desk, rested her chin on them and looked as soberly as she could at the drone. “Churt,” she said. “What is going on here?”

“You’ll see,” it told her, getting out of the way of the screen. “You ready?”

“If I get any more ready I’ll be asleep.”

“Good. Pay attention.”

“Oh yes, sir,” she said, glancing narrow-eyed at the machine.

“Watch!” it said.

She sat back in the seat with her arms folded.

Words appeared on the screen:

“What’s ‘nonary’ mean?”

“Based on nine. Ordinary Marain; the stuff you learned in kindergarten, for goodness’ sake; the three-by-three dot grid.”

“Oh.”

The text scrolled on:

“Could we lose all these strings of figures?” she asked the drone. “They’re not really telling me anything I need to know, are they?”

“I suppose not. There.”

“Is that it?” she cried, staring at the drone. “That’s the most boring—!”

“No it isn’t; look!”

She looked back; the text scrolled on.

“You weren’t supposed to do that!” Churt Lyne yelped.

Ulver had spotted the part of the text panel that overrode the read-out, and pressed it. She snorted. “Shh!” she said, nodding at the screen. “You’re missing it!”

“We’ll dip out here for now,” the drone said.

“I wish you’d stop doing that,” the drone muttered.

“Sorry,” she said. Ulver Seich shook her head slowly at the text hanging in the air in front of her and the drone Churt Lyne. She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. “Is this as important as I think it is?”

“Almost certainly much more so.”

“Oh,” she said, “fuck.”

“Indeed,” the drone replied. “Any other questions so far?”

She looked at the last word of the GCU’s main signal:

Gulp. Well, she could relate to that all right.

“Questions…” Ulver Seich said, staring at the holo screen and blowing her cheeks out. She turned to the drone, her violet ball gown rustling. “Lots. First, what are we really…? No; hold on. Just take me through the signal. Never mind all the translations or whatever; what’s it actually saying?”

“The General Contact Unit issues an excession notice through its home General Systems Vehicle,” the drone told her, “but it’s prevented from being broadcast by another GSV which the first one obviously contacted before doing anything. The GCU tells us that its sensors clipped this artifact, which then hailed the GCU using an old Elench greeting and an even older Galactic Common Language; then the GCU spends a great deal of the signal detailing how clever it was pretending that it’s slower, not as manoeuvrable and less well equipped in the sensor department than actually it is. It describes the object and a few surrounding bits and pieces of debris which imply there was some sort of small-scale military action there fifty-three days earlier, then it assures it’s well and unviolated but it’s ready to blow itself up, or let somebody else blow it up if its integrity is threatened… not a step a GCU takes lightly.

“However, entirely the most important aspect of the signal is that the object it has discovered is linked to the energy grid in both hyperspatial directions; that alone puts it well outside all known parameters and precedents. We have no previous experience whatsoever with something like this; it’s unique; beyond our ken. I’m not surprised the GCU is scared.”

“Okay, okay, that’s kind of what I thought; shit.” She belched delicately. “Excuse me.”

“Of course.”

“Now, like I was going to say; what are we really dealing with here; an excession, or something else?”

“Well, if you take the definition of an excession as anything external to the Culture that we should be worried about, this is an excession all right. On the other hand, if you compare it to the average — or even an exceptional — Hegemonising Swarm, it’s small, localised, non-invasive, unaggressive, unshielded, immobile… and almost chatty, using Galin II to communicate.” The drone paused. “The crucial characteristic then remains the fact that the thing’s linked to the energy grid, both up and down. That’s interesting, to put it mildly, because as far as we know, nobody knows how to do that. Well, nobody apart from the Elder civilisations… probably; they won’t say and we can’t tell.”

“So this thing can do something the Culture can’t?”

“Looks like it.”

“And I take it the Culture would like to be able to do what it can do.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, very much so. Or, even if it couldn’t partake of the technology, at least it would like to use the implied opportunity the excession may represent.”

“To do what?”

“Wehhll,” Churt Lyne said, drawing the word out while its aura-field coloured with embarrassment and its body wobbled in the air, “technically — maybe — the ability to travel — easily — to other universes.” The machine paused again, looking at the human and waiting for her sarcastic reply. When she didn’t say anything, it continued. “It should be possible to step outside the time-strand of our universe as easily as a ship steps outside the space-time fabric. It might then become feasible to travel through superior hyperspace upwards to universes older than ours, or through inferior hyperspace downwards to universes younger than our own.”

“Time travel?”

“No, but affording the opportunity to become time proof. Age proof. In theory, one might become able to step down consecutively through earlier universes… well, forever.”

“Forever?”

“Real forever, as far as we understand it. You could choose the size and therefore age of the universe you wanted to remain within, and/or visit as many as you wanted. You could, for example, head on up through older universes and attempt to access technologies perhaps beyond even this one. But just as interesting is the point that because you wouldn’t be tied to one universe, one time stream, you need be involved in no heat death when the time came in your original universe; or no evaporation, or no big crunch, depending.

“It’s like being on an escalator. At the moment, confined to this universe, we’re stuck to this stair, this level; the possibility this artifact appears to offer is that of being able to step from one stair to another, so that before your stair on the escalator comes to the end of its travel — heat-death, big crunch, whatever — you just step off one level down to another. You could, in effect, live for ever… well, unless it’s discovered that cosmic fireball engines themselves have a life-cycle; as I understand it the metamath on that implies but does not guarantee perpetuity.”

Seich looked at the drone for a while, her brows furrowed. “Haven’t we ever found anything like this before?”

“Not really. There are ambiguous reports of vaguely similar entities turning up in the past — though they tend to disappear before anybody can fully investigate — but as far as we know, nobody has ever found anything quite like this before.”

The human was silent for a while. Then she said, “If you could access any universe, and go back to one universe at a very early, pre-sentience stage with an already highly developed civilisation…”

“You could take over the whole thing,” the drone confirmed. “An entire universe would be yours alone. In fact, go back far enough — that is, to a small enough, early enough, just-post-singularity universe — and you could, conceivably, customise it; mould it, shape it, influence its primary characteristics. Admittedly, that sort of control may well remain in the realm of the fantastic, but it might be possible.”

Ulver Seich drew a deep breath, and, looking at the floor, nodded slowly. “…And of course,” she said, “if this thing is what it appears to be, it could be an exit, as well as an entrance.”

“Entirely so; it is almost certainly both at once. As you imply; never mind us getting into it, we don’t know what might come out of it.”

Ulver Seich nodded slowly. “… Holy shit,” she said.

“Let’s call up the comments,” Churt Lyne suggested.

“Can we miss out the preparatory junk at the start?”

“Allow me. There.”

“… And skip all the detailology crap, too. Just who said what.”

“As you wish.”

“Po-faced bastard. Are all Continents this up themselves?”

“Want me to ask somebody?”

“Yeah, I’m sure we’d get a straight answer to that one.”

“Just so.”

“Hmm. Meanwhile the bullshit rolls on.”

“Sit on it, in other words,” Seich said tartly. “What exactly is a Continent class’s multiple mode, anyway?”

“Three-Mind grouping, usually.”

“That’s why it’s saying everything in triplicate…”

The holo screen disappeared. “So what does all that mean?” she asked.

“… Good grief, Ulver,” the drone said, giving a fair impression of spluttering. “It’s the Heavy Crew! It’s the Ghosts!”

“What? The who?” She swivelled in the seat to face the drone.

“Child, there were names appearing there I hadn’t seen for five centuries. Some of those Minds are legends!”

“This is the Interesting Times Gang we’re talking about, I take it?”

“That’s obviously what they call themselves.”

“Well, good for them, but I still want to know what all that was about.”

“Well, a normal enough but pretty high-power Mind Incident Group gets together to discuss what’s going on, then — allowing for signal travel duration — within real-time seconds it’s taken over by probably the most respected not to mention enigmatic group of Minds ever assembled together in the same signal sequence since the end of the Idiran War.”

“You don’t say,” Ulver said, yawning a little and putting one black-gloved hand over her mouth.

“Yes; in the case of the Not Invented Here, everybody I know thought the thing had been lost half a millennium ago! Then they dump the boring, pedantic GSV that happened to be on the Incident Coordinating Rota, agree to wait-and-see with the Excession itself while sending investigatory reinforcements, start a localised mobilisation — mobilisation! — and release a half-truth about the Excession when there’s some more exciting news breaking.”

Ulver frowned. “When did all this happen?”

“Well, if you hadn’t turned off the date/time function…” muttered the drone, colouring frosty blue. Ulver rolled her eyes again. “The Excession was discovered and that signal sequence plus comments dates from twelve days ago. The Excession’s discovery was announced through the standard channels the day before yesterday.”

The human shrugged. “I missed it.”

“The headlines concerned the resolution of the Blitteringueh situation.”

“Ah-hah. That would do it, I suppose.”

Most of the developed galaxy had been following that story for the past hundred days, as the aftermath of the short but bitter Blitteringueh-Deluger War played itself out on the CAM-bomb-mined Blitteringueh home planets and the Deluger fleets fleeing with their precious holy relics and Grand House captives. It had ended with relatively little loss of life, but in high drama, and with continuing, developing repercussions; little wonder anything else announced that day had slipped by almost unnoticed and stayed that way.

“And what was that thing towards the end there, about ‘Calling our mutual friend’?”

“That’ll probably turn out to be something to do with inviting some other Mind onto the group.” The drone was silent for a moment. “Though of course it could be some pre-agreed form of words, a secret signal amongst the group.”

Seich stared at the drone. “A secret signal?” she said. “In an M32-level transmission?”

“It’s possible; no more.”

Seich continued to stare at the machine for a moment. “You’re saying that these Minds are discussing something… agreeing to something that’s so sensitive, so secret they won’t even talk about it in Special Circumstances’ top-end code, the fucking holy of holies, the unbreakable, inviolable, totally secure M32?”

“No I’m not. I’m just saying it’s… semi-possible.” The drone’s aura field flickered grey with frustration. “In that event, though, I don’t think it would be breakability they’d be worried about.”

“What then?” Seich’s eyes narrowed. “Deniability?”

“If we’re thinking in such paranoid terms in the first place, yes, that’d be my guess,” the drone said, dipping its front once in a nod and making a noise like a sigh.

“So they’re up to something.”

“Well, they’re up to a lot, by the sound of it. But it’s just possible that some part of what they’re up to might be, well, risky.”

Ulver Seich sat back, staring at the empty square of the projected screen, hanging in the air in front of her and the drone Churt Lyne like a pane of slightly opaque smoked glass. “Risky,” she said. She shook her head and felt a strange urge to shiver, which she suppressed. “Shit, don’t you hate it when the Gods come out to play?”

“In a word,” said the drone, “yes.”

“So what am I supposed to do? And why?”

“You’re supposed to look like this woman,” the drone said, as a bright, still picture flashed on to the smoky screen in front of her.

Ulver studied the face, chin in her hand again. “Hmm,” she said. “She’s older than me.”

“True.”

“And not as pretty.”

“Fair enough.”

“Why do I have to look like her?”

“To draw the attention of a certain man.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute; I’m not expected to fuck this guy, am I?”

“Oh good grief, no,” the drone said, its aura field briefly grey again. “All you have to do is look like an old flame of his.”

She laughed. “I bet I am expected to fuck him!” She rocked back in the little metal seat. “How quaint! Is this really what SC gets up to?”

“No you’re not,” hissed the drone, aura fields going deep grey. “You just have to be there.”

“I’ll bet,” she guffawed, and sat back, crossing her arms. “So who is he, anyway?”

“Him,” the drone said. Another still face appeared on the screen.

Ulver Seich sat forward again, raising one hand. “Hold on. I take it all back; actually he’s pretty enticing…”

The drone made a sighing noise. “Ulver, if you will please try to hold your hormones in check for just a second…”

“What?” she shouted, spreading her arms.

“Will you do this or not?” it asked her.

She closed one eye and wobbled her head from side to side. “Maybe,” she slurred.

“It means a trip,” the drone said. “Leaving tonight—”

“Pah!” She sat back, crossing her arms and looking up at the ceiling. “Out of the question. Forget it.”

“All right; tomorrow.”

She turned to the drone. “After lunch.”

“Breakfast.”

“Late breakfast.”

“Oh,” the machine said, aura field briefly grey with frustration. “All right. Late breakfast. But before noon, in any event.”

Ulver opened her mouth to protest, then gave a tiny shrug and settled for scowling. “Okay. How long for?”

“You’ll be back in a month, if all goes well.”

She tipped her head back, narrowed her eyes again and said quite soberly and precisely, “Where?”

The drone said, “Tier.”

“Huh,” she said, tossing her head.

A sore point; Phage had been heading to Tier specifically for that year’s Festival but had been diverted off course to help build an Orbital after the part-evacuation of some stupid planet; it had taken forever. The Festival only lasted a month and was now almost over; the Rock was still heading that way but wouldn’t arrive for two hundred days or so.

She frowned. “But that’s a couple of months away even on a fast ship.”

“Special Circumstances has its own ships and they’re faster; ten days to get there on the one they’re giving you.”

“My own ship?” Ulver asked, eyes flashing.

“All yours; not even any human crew.”

“Wow!” she said, sitting back and looking pleased with herself. “Aloof!”