Excession

I

Such investigations took time. There was the time that even hyperspacially transmitted information took to traverse the significant percentages of the galaxy involved, there were complicated routes to arrange, other Minds to talk to, sometimes after setting up appointments because they were absent in Infinite Fun space for a while. Then the Minds had to be casualed up to, or gossip or jokes or thoughts on a mutual interest had to be exchanged before a request or a suggestion was put which re-routed and disguised an information search; sometimes these re-routes took on extra loops, detours and shuntings as the Minds concerned thought to play down their own involvement or involve somebody else on a whim, so that often wildly indirect paths resulted, branching and re-branching and doubling back on themselves until eventually the relevant question was asked and the answer, assuming it was forthcoming, started the equally tortuous route back to the original requester. Frequently simple seeker-agent programs or entire mind-state abstracts were sent off on even more complicated missions with detailed instructions on what to look for, where to find it, who to ask and how to keep their tracks covered.

Mostly it was done like that; through Minds, AI core memories and innumerable public storage systems, information reservoirs and databases containing schedules, itineraries, lists, plans, catalogues, registers, rosters and agenda.

Sometimes, though, when that way — the relatively easy, quick and simple way — was closed to the inquirer for some reason, usually to do with keeping the inquiry secret, things had to be done the slow way, the messy way, the physical way. Sometimes there was no alternative.

The vacuum dirigible approached the floating island under a brilliantly clear night sky awash with moon and star light. The main body of the airship was a giant fat disk half a kilometre across with a finish like brushed aluminium; it glinted in the blue-grey light as if frosted, though the night was warm, balmy and scented with the heady perfume of wineplant and sierra creeper. The craft’s two gondolas — one on top, one suspended underneath — were smaller, thinner disks only three storeys in height, each slowly revolving in different directions, their edges glowing with lights.

The sea beneath the airship was mostly black-dark, but in places it glowed dimly in giant, slowly fading Vs as giant sea creatures surfaced to breathe or to sieve new levels of the waters for their tiny prey, and so disturbed the light-emitting plankton near the surface.

The island floated high in the breeze-ruffled waters, its base a steeply fluted pillar that extended a kilometre down into the sea’s salty depths, its thin, spire-like mountains thrusting a similar distance into the cloudless air. It too was scattered with lights; of small towns, villages, individual houses, lanterns on beaches and smaller aircraft, most of them come out to welcome the vacuum dirigible.

The two slowly revolving gondola sections slid gradually to a halt, preparatory to docking. People in both segments congregated on the sides nearest the island, for the view. The airship’s system registered the imbalance building up and pumped bubblecarbon spheres full of vacuum from one lot of tanks to another, so maintaining a suitably even keel.

The island’s main town drifted slowly closer, the docking tower bright with lights. Lasers, fireworks and searchlights all fought for attention.

“I really should go, Tish,” the drone Gruda Aplam said. “I didn’t promise, but I did kind of say I’d probably stop by…”

“Ah, stop by on the way back,” Tishlin said, waving his glass. “Let them wait.”

He stood on the balcony outside one of the lower gondola’s mid-level bars. The drone — a very old thing, like two grey-brown rounded cubes one on top of the other and three-quarters the size of a human — floated beside him. They’d only met that day, four days into the cruise over the Orbital’s floating islands and they’d got on famously, quite as though they’d been friends for a century or more. The drone was much older than the man but they found they had the same attitudes, the same beliefs and the same sense of humour. They both liked telling stories, too. Tishlin had the impression he hadn’t yet scratched the veneer off the old machine’s tales of when it had been in Contact — a millennium before he had, and goodness knew he was considered an old codger these days.

He liked the ancient machine; he’d really come on this cruise looking for romance, and he still hoped to find it, but in the meantime finding such a perfect companion and raconteur had already made him glad he’d come. The trouble was the drone was supposed to get off here and go to visit some old drone pals who lived on the island, before resuming its cruise on the next dirigible, due in a few days’ time. A month from now, it would be leaving on the GSV that had brought it here.

“But I feel I’d be letting them down.”

“Look, just stay another day,” the man suggested. “You never did finish telling me about — what was it, Bhughredi?”

“Yes, Bhughredi.” The old drone chuckled.

“Exactly. Bhughredi; the sea nukes and the interference effect thing or whatever it was.”

“Damnedest way to launch a ship,” the old drone agreed, and made a sighing noise.

“So what did happen?”

“Like I said, it’s a long story.”

“So stay tomorrow; tell me it. You’re a drone for goodness’ sake; you can float back by yourself…”

“But I said I’d visit them when the airship got here, Tish. Anyway; my AG units are due a service; they’d probably fail and I’d end up at the bottom of the sea having to be rescued; very embarrassing.”

“Take a flyer back!” the man said, watching the island’s shore slide underneath. People gathered round fires on the beach waved up at the craft. He could hear music drifting on the warm breeze.

“Oh, I don’t know… They’d probably be upset.”

Tishlin drank from his glass and frowned down at the waves breaking on the beach which led towards the lights of the town. A particularly large and vivid firework detonated in the air directly above the bright docking tower. Oos and Aahs duly sounded round the crowded balcony.

The man snapped his fingers. “I know,” he said. “Send a mind-state abstract.”

The big drone hesitated, then said, “Oh, one of those. Hmm. Well; still not really the same thing, I think. Anyway, I’ve never done one. Not sure I really approve. I mean, it’s you but it’s not you, you know?”

Tishlin nodded. “Certainly do know. Can’t say I think they’re as, you know, benign as they’re cracked up to be either; I mean, it’s supposed to act sentient without being sentient, so isn’t it actually sentient? What happens to it when it’s just turned off? I’m not convinced there isn’t some sort of iffy morality here, either. But I’ve done it myself. Talked into it. Reservations, like you say, but…” He looked round, then leant closer to the machine’s dull brown casing. “Bit of a Contact thing, actually.”

“Really?” the old machine said, tipping its whole body away from him for a moment, then tipping it back so that it leant towards him. It extended a field round the two of them; the exterior sounds faded. When it spoke again, it was with a slight echo that indicated the field was keeping whatever they said between the two of them. “What was that… Well, wait a moment, if you aren’t supposed to tell anybody…”

Tishlin weaved his hand. “Well, not officially,” he said, brushing white hair over one ear, “but you’re a Contact veteran, and you know how SC always dramatises things.”

“SC!” the drone said its voice rising. “You didn’t say it was them! I’m not sure I want to hear this,” it said, through a chuckle.

“Well, they asked… a favour,” the man said, quietly pleased that he seemed finally to have impressed the old drone. “Sort of a family thing. Had to record one of these damn things so it could go and convince a nephew of mine he should do his bit for the great and good cause. Last I heard the boy had done the decent thing and taken ship for some Eccentric GSV.” He watched the outskirts of the town slide underneath. A flower-garlanded terrace held groups of people pattern-dancing; he could imagine the whoops and wild, whirling music. The scent of roasting meat came curling over the balcony parapet and made it through the hushfield.

“They asked if I wanted it to be reincorporated after it had done its job,” he told the drone. “They said it could be sent back and sort of put back inside my head, but I said no. Gave me a creepy feeling just thinking about it. What if it had changed a lot while it was away? Why, I might end up wanting to join some retreatist order or autoeuthenise or something!” He shook his head and drained his glass. “No; I said no. Hope the damn thing never was really alive, but if it was, or is, then it’s not getting back into my head, no thank you, I’m sorry.”

“Well, if what they told you was true, it’s yours to do with as you wish, isn’t it?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I don’t think I’ll take the same step,” the drone said, sounding thoughtful. It swivelled as though to face him. The field around them collapsed. The sound of the fireworks returned. “Tell you what,” the old drone said. “I will get off here and see the guys, but I’ll catch up with you in a couple of days, all right? We’ll probably fall out in a day or two anyway; they’re cantankerous old buggers, frankly. I’ll take a flyer or try floating myself if I feel adventurous. Deal?” It extended a field.

“Deal,” Tishlin said, slapping the field with his hand.

The drone Gruda Aplam had already contacted its old friend the GCU It’s Character Forming, currently housed in the GSV Zero Gravitas which was at that point docked under a distant plate of Seddun Orbital. The GCU communicated with the Orbital Hub Tsikiliepre, which in turn contacted the Ulterior Entity Highpoint, which signalled the LSV Misophist, which passed the message on to the University Mind at Oara, on Khasli plate in the Juboal system, which duly relayed the signal, along with an interesting series of rhyme-scheme glyphs, ordinary poems and word games all based on the original signal, to its favoured protégé, the LSV Serious Callers Only…

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28. 866.2083]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

It is Genar-Hofoen. I am now convinced. I am not certain why he may be important to the conspiracy, but he surely is. I have drawn up a plan to intercept him, on Tier. The plan involves Phage Rock; will you back me up if I request its aid?

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.866.2568]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oLSV Serious Callers Only

My dear old friend, of course.

oo

Thank you. I shall make the request immediately. We shall be reduced to dealing with amateurs, I’m afraid. However, I hope to find a high-profile amateur; a degree of fame may protect where SC training is not available. What of our fellow counter-conspirator?

No word. Perhaps it’s spending more time in The Land of IF.

oo

And the ship and Pittance?

oo

Arriving in eleven and a half days’ time.

oo

Hmm. Four days after the time it will take for us to get somebody to Tier.

It is within the bounds of possibility this ship will be heading into a threatening situation. Is it able to take care of itself?

oo

Oh, I think it capable of giving a good account of itself. Just because I’m Eccentric doesn’t mean I don’t know some big hitters.

oo

Let us hope such throw-weight is not required.

oo

Absolutely.

II

A Plate class General Systems Vehicle was quite a simple thing, in at least one way. It was four kilometres thick; the lowest kilometre was almost all engine, the middle two klicks were ship space — an entire enclosed system of sophisticated dockyards and quays, in effect — and the topmost thousand metres was accommodation, most of it for humans. There was, of course, a great deal more to it than that, but this covered the essentials.

Using these broad-brush figures, it was a simple matter for anybody to work out the craft’s approximate maximum speed from the cubic kilometrage of its engines, the number of ships of any given size it could contain according to the volume given over to the various sizes of bays and engineering space, and the total number of humans it could accommodate by simply adding up how many cubic kilometres were given over to their living-space.

The Sleeper Service had retained an almost pristine original specification internally, which was a rare thing in an Eccentric vessel; usually the first thing they did was drastically reconfigure their physical shape and internal lay-out according to the dictates of some private aesthetic, driving obsession or just plain whim, but the fact the Sleeper Service had stuck to its initial design and merely added its own private ocean and gas-giant environment on the outside made it relatively easy to measure its actual behaviour against what it ought to be capable of, and so ensure that it wasn’t up to any extra mischief besides being Eccentric in the first place.

In addition to such simple, arithmetical estimates of a ship’s capability, it was, of course, always a good idea when dealing with an Eccentric craft to have just that little extra bit of an edge. Intelligence, to be specific; an inside view; a spy.

As it approached the Dreve system, the Plate class GSV Sleeper Service was travelling at its usual cruising speed of about forty kilolights. It had already announced its desire to stop off in the inner system, and so duly started braking as it passed through the orbit of the system’s outer-most planet, a light week distant from the sun itself.

The Yawning Angel, the GSV which was shadowing the larger craft, decelerated at the same rate, a few billion kilometres behind. The Yawning Angel was the latest in a long line of GSVs which had agreed to take a shift as the Sleeper Service’s escort. It wasn’t a particularly demanding task (indeed, no sensible GSV would wish it to be), though there was a small amount of vicarious glamour associated with it; guarding the weirdo, letting it roam wherever it wanted, but maintaining the fraternal vigilance that such an enormously powerful craft espousing such an eccentric credo patently merited. The only qualifications for being a Sleeper Service shadow were that one was regarded as being reliable, and that one was capable of staying with the SS if it ever decided to make a dash for it; in other words, one had to be quicker than it.

The Yawning Angel had done the job for the best part of a year and found it undemanding. Naturally, it was somewhat annoying not to be able to draw up one’s own course schedule, but providing one took the right attitude and dispensed with the standard Mind conviction that held efficiency to the absolute bottom line of everything, it could be an oddly enhancing, even liberating experience. GSVs were always wanted in many more places at the same time than it was possible to be, and it was something of a relief to be able to blame somebody else when one had to frustrate people’s and other ships’ wishes and requests.

This stop at Dreve had not been anticipated, for example — the SS’s course had seemed set on a reasonably predictable path which would take it through the next month — but now it was here, the Yawning Angel would be able to drop off a few ships, take another couple on, and swap some personnel. There should be time; the SS had never acknowledged the presence of any of the vessels tailing it, and it hadn’t posted a course schedule since it had turned Eccentric forty years earlier, but it had certain obligations in terms of setting re-awakened people back in the land of the living again, and it always announced how long it would be staying in the systems it visited.

It would be here in Dreve for a week. An unusually long time; it had never stayed anywhere for longer than three days before. The implication, according to the group of ships considered experts on the behaviour of the Sleeper Service, and given what the GSV itself had been saying in its increasingly rare communications, was that it was about to off-load all its charges; all the Storees and all the big sea, air and gas-giant-dwelling creatures it had collected over the decades would be moved — physically, presumably, rather than Displaced — to compatible habitats.

Dreve would be an ideal system to do this in; it had been a Culture system for four thousand years, comprising nine more or less wilderness worlds and three Orbitals — hoops, giant bracelets of living-space only a few thousand kilometres across but ten million kilometres in diameter — calmly gyrating in their own carefully aligned orbits and housing nearly seventy billion souls. Some of those souls were far from human; one third of each of the system’s Orbitals was given over to ecosystems designed for quite different creatures; gas-giant dwellers on one, methane atmospherians on another and high temperature silicon creatures on another. The fauna the SS had picked up from other gas-giant planets would all fit comfortably into a sub-section of the Orbital designed with such animals in mind, and the sea and air creatures ought to be able to find homes on that or either of the other worlds.

A week to hang around; the Yawning Angel thought that would go down particularly well with its human crew; one of the many tiny but significant and painful ways a GSV could lose face amongst its peers was through a higher than average crew turn-over rate, and, while it had been expecting it, the Yawning Angel had found the experience most distressing when people had announced they were fed up not being able to have any reliable advance notice of where they were going from week to week and month to month and so had decided to live elsewhere; all its protestations had been to no avail. What would in effect be a week’s leave in such a cosmopolitan, sophisticated and welcoming system really should convince a whole load of those currently wavering between loyalty and ship-jumping that it was worth staying on with the good old Yawning Angel, it was sure.

The Sleeper Service came to an orbit-relative stop a quarter-turn in advance along the path of the middle Orbital, the most efficient position to assume to distribute its cargo of people and animals evenly amongst all three worlds. Permission to do so was finally received from the last of the Orbitals’ Hub Minds, and the Sleeper Service duly began getting ready to unload.

The Yawning Angel watched from afar as the larger craft detached its traction fields from the energy grid beneath real space, closed down its primary and ahead scan fields, dropped its curtain shields and generally made the many great and small adjustments a ship normally made when one was intending to stick around somewhere for a while. The Sleeper Service’s external appearance remained the same as ever; a silvery ellipsoid ninety kilometres long, sixty across the beam and twenty in height. After a few minutes, however, smaller craft began to appear from that reflective barrier, speeding towards the three Orbitals with their cargoes of Stored people and sedated animals.

All this matched with the intelligence the Yawning Angel had already received regarding the set-up and intentions of the Eccentric GSV. So far so good, then.

Content that all was well, the Yawning Angel drifted in to match velocities with Teriocre, the middle Orbital and the one with the gas-giant environments. It docked underneath the Orbital’s most populous section and drew up a variety of travel and leave arrangements for its own inhabitants while setting up a schedule of visits, events and parties aboard to thank its hosts for their hospitality.

Everything went swimmingly until the second day.

Then, without warning, just after dawn had broken over the part of the Orbital the Yawning Angel had docked beneath, Stored bodies and giant animals started popping into existence all over Teriocre.

Posed people, some still in the clothes or uniforms of the tableaux they had been part of on board the Sleeper Service, suddenly appeared inside sports halls, on beaches, terraces, boardwalks and pavements, in parks, plazas, deserted stadia and every other sort of public space the Orbital had to offer. To the few people who witnessed these events, it was obvious the bodies had been Displaced; the appearance of each was signalled by a tiny point of light blinking into existence just above waist level; this expanded rapidly to a two-metre grey sphere which promptly popped and disappeared, leaving behind the immobile Storee.

Unmoving people were left lying on dewy grass or sitting on park benches or scattered by the hundred across the patterned mosaic of squares and piazzas as though after some terrible disaster or a particularly assertive public sculpture exhibition; dim cleaning machines spiralling methodically within such spaces were left bemused, picking erratic courses amongst the rash of new and unexpected obstructions.

In the seas, the surface swelled and bulged in hundreds of different places as whole globes of water were carefully Displaced just beneath the surface; the sea creatures contained within were still gently sedated and moved sluggishly in their giant fish bowls, each of which retained its separation from the surrounding water for a few hours, osmosing fields gradually adjusting the conditions within to those in the sea outside.

In the air, similar gauzy fields surrounded whole flocks of buoyant atmosphere fauna, bobbing groggily in the breeze.

Further along the vast shallow sweep of the Orbital, the gas-giant environments were witness to equivalent scenes of near-instant immigration followed by gradual integration.

The Yawning Angel’s own drones — its ambassadors on the Orbital — were witness to a handful of these sudden manifestations. After a nanosecond’s delay to ask permission, the GSV clicked into the Orbital’s own monitoring systems, and so watched with growing horror as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more Stored bodies and animals came thumping into existence all over the surface and all through the air, water and gas-ecologies of Teriocre.

The Yawning Angel flash-woke all its systems and switched its attention to the Sleeper Service.

The big GSV was already moving, rolling and twisting to point directly upwards out of the system. Its engine fields reconnected with the energy grid, its scanners were all already back on line and the rest of its multi-layered field complex was rapidly configuring itself for sustained deep-space travel.

It moved off, not especially quickly. Its Displacers had switched to pick rather than put now; in a matter of seconds they had snapped almost its entire fleet of smaller ships out of the system, their genuine yet deceptive delivery missions completed. Only the furthest, most massive vessels were left behind.

The Yawning Angel was already frantically making its own preparations to depart in pursuit, closing off most of its transit corridors, snap-Displacing drones from the Orbital, hurrying through a permission-to-depart request to the world’s Hub and drawing up schedules for ferrying people back to the Orbital on smaller craft once it had got under way while at the same time bringing other personnel back before its own velocity grew too great.

It knew it was wasting its energy, but it signalled the Sleeper Service anyway. Meanwhile, it watched intently as the departing ship accelerated away.

The Yawning Angel was gauging, judging, calibrating.

It was looking for a figure, comparing an aspect of the reality that was the absconding craft with the abstraction that was a simple but crucial equation. If the Sleeper Service’s velocity could at any point over time be described by a value greater than .54 x ns2, the Yawning Angel might be in trouble.

It might be in trouble anyway, but if the larger vessel was accelerating significantly quicker than its normal design parameters implied — allowing for the extra mass of the craft’s extraneous environments — then that trouble started right now.

As it was, the Yawning Angel was relieved to see, the Sleeper Service was moving away at exactly that rate; the ship was still perfectly apprehendable, and even if the Yawning Angel waited for another day without doing anything it would still be able to track the larger craft with ease and catch up with it within two days. Still suspecting some sort of trick, the Yawning Angel started an observation routine throughout the system for unexpected Displacings of gigatonnes of water and gas-giant atmosphere; suddenly dumping all that extra volume and mass now would be one way the Sleeper Service could put on an extra burst of speed, even if it would still be significantly slower than the Yawning Angel.

The smaller GSV retransmitted its polite but insistent signal. Still no reply from the Sleeper Service. No surprise there then.

The Yawning Angel signalled to tell other Contact craft what was happening and sent one of its fastest ships — a Cliff class superlifter stationed in space outside the GSV’s own fields for exactly this sort of eventuality — in pursuit of the escaping GSV, just so it would know this precocious, irksome action was being taken seriously.

Probably the Sleeper Service was simply being awkward rather than up to something more momentous, but the Yawning Angel couldn’t ignore the fact the larger craft was abandoning a significant proportion of its smaller ships, and had resorted to Displacing people and animals. Displacing was — especially at such speed — inherently and unfinessably dangerous; the risk of something going horribly, terminally wrong was only about one in eighty million for any single Displacement event, but that was still enough to put the average, fussily perfectionist ship Mind off using the process for anything alive except in the direst of emergencies, and the Sleeper Service — assuming it had rid itself of its entire complement of souls — must have carried out thirty-thousand plus Displacements in a minute or less, nudging the odds up well into the sort of likelihood-of-fuck-up range any sane Mind would normally recoil from in utter horror. Even allowing for the Sleeper Service’s Eccentricity, that did tend to indicate that there was something more than usually urgent or significant about its current actions.

The Yawning Angel looked up what was in effect an annoyance chart; it could leave right now — within a hundred seconds — and aggravate lots of people because they were on board itself instead of the Orbital, or vice-versa… or it could depart within twenty hours and leave everybody back where they ought to be, even if they were irritated at their plans being upset.

Compromise; it set an eight-hour departure time. Terminals in the shape of rings, pens, earrings, brooches, articles of clothing — and the in-built versions, neural laces — woke startled Culture personnel all over the Orbital and the wider system, insisting on relaying their urgent message. So much for keeping everybody happy with a week’s leave…

The Sleeper Service accelerated smoothly away into the darkness, already well clear of the system. It began to Induct, flittering between inferior and superior hyperspace. Its apparent real-space velocity jumped almost instantly by a factor of exactly twenty-three. Again, the Yawning Angel was comforted to see, spot on. No unpleasant surprises. The superlifter Charitable View raced after the fleeing craft, its engines unstressed, energy expenditure throttled well back, also threading its way between the layers of four-dimensional space. The process had been compared to a flying fish zipping from water to air and back again, except that every second air-jump was into a layer of air beneath the water, not above it, which was where the analogy did rather break down.

The Yawning Angel was quickly customising thousands of carefully composed, exquisitely phrased apologies to its personnel and hosts. Its schedule of ship returns, varied to reflect the different courses the Sleeper Service might take if it didn’t remain on its present heading, didn’t look too problematic; it had delayed letting people venture far away until the Sleeper Service had sent most of its own fleet out, an action even it had thought over-cautious at the time but which now seemed almost prescient. It delegated part of its intellectual resources to drawing up a list of treats and blandishments with which to mollify its own people when they returned, and planned for a two-week return to Dreve, packed with festivities and celebrations, to say sorry when it was free of the obligation to follow this accursed machine and was able to draw up its own course schedule again.

The Charitable View reported that the Sleeper Service was still proceeding as could be expected.

The situation, it appeared, was in hand.

The Yawning Angel reviewed its own actions so far, and found them exemplary. This was all very vexing, but it was responding well, playing it by the book where possible and extemporising sensibly but with all due urgency where it had to. Good, good. It could well come out of this shining.

Three hours, twenty-six minutes and seventeen seconds after setting off, the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service reached its nominal Terminal Acceleration Point. This was where it ought to stop gaining speed, plump for one of the two hyperspatial volumes and just cruise along at a nice steady velocity.

It didn’t. Instead it accelerated harder; that .54 figure zoomed quickly to .72, the Plate class’s normal design maximum.

The Charitable View communicated this turn of events back to the Yawning Angel, which went into shock for about a millisecond.

It rechecked all its in-system ships, drones, sensors and external reports. There was no sign that the Sleeper Service had dumped its extra mass anywhere within range of the Yawning Angel’s sensors.

Yet it was behaving as though it had. Where had it done it? Could it have secretly built longer-range Displacers? (No; half its mass would have been required to construct a Displacer capable of dumping so much volume beyond the range of the Yawning Angel’s sensors, and that included all the extra mass it had taken on board over the years in the form of the extraneous environments in the first place… though — now that it was thinking in such outrageous terms — there was another, associated possibility that just might… but no; that couldn’t be. There had been no intelligence, no hint… no, it didn’t even want to think about that…)

The Yawning Angel rescheduled everything it had already arranged in a flurry of re-drafted apologies, pleas for understanding and truncated journeys. It halved the departure warning time it had given. Thirty-three minutes to departure, now. The situation, it tried to explain to everybody, was becoming more urgent.

The Sleeper Service’s acceleration figures remained steady at their design maxima for another twenty minutes, though the Charitable View — keeping a careful watch on every aspect of the GSV’s performance from its station a few real-space light days behind — reported some odd events at the junctions of the Sleeper Service’s traction fields with the energy grid.

By now the Yawning Angel was existing in a state of quiveringly ghastly tension; it was thinking at maximum capacity, worrying at full speed, suddenly and appallingly aware how long things took to happen; a human in the same state would have been clutching a churning stomach, tearing their hair out and gibbering incoherently.

Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!

Ships, even ships; they were restricted to speeds below the speed of sound in the bubble of air around the ship and the docks it was joined to. It reviewed how practicable it would be to just let the air go and move everything in vacuum. It made sense. Thankfully, it had already shifted all vulnerable pleasure craft out of the way and sealed and secured its unconnected hull apertures. It told the Hub what it was doing; the Hub objected because it was losing some of its air. The GSV dumped the air anyway. Everything started moving a little faster. The Hub screamed in protest but it ignored it.

Calm; calm; it had to remain calm. Stay focused, keep the most important objectives in mind.

A wave of what would have been nausea in a human swept through the Yawning Angel’s Mind as a signal came in from the Charitable View. Now what?

Whatever it might have feared, this was worse.

The Sleeper Service’s acceleration factor had started to increase. Almost at the same time, it had exceeded its normal maximum sustainable velocity.

Fascinated, appalled, terrified, the Yawning Angel listened to a running commentary on the other GSV’s progress from its increasingly distant child, even as it started the sequence of actions and commands that would lead to its own near-instant departure. Twelve minutes early, but that couldn’t be helped, and if people were pissed off, too bad.

Still increasing. Time to go. Disconnect. There.

The Charitable View signalled that the Sleeper Service’s outermost field extent had shrunk to within a kilometre of naked-hull minima.

The Yawning Angel dropped away from the orbital, twisting and aiming and punching away into hyperspace only a few kilometres away from the world’s undersurface, ignoring incandescent howls of protest from the Hub over such impolite and feasibly dangerous behaviour and the astonished — but slow, so slow — yelps from people who an instant earlier had been walking down a transit corridor towards a welcoming foyer in the GSV and now found themselves bumping into emergency seal-fields and staring at nothing but blackness and stars.

The superlifter’s continuous report went on: the Sleeper Service’s acceleration kept on increasing slowly but steadily, then it paused, dropping to zero; the craft’s velocity remained constant. Could that be it? It was still catchable. Panic over?

Then the fleeing ship’s velocity increased again; as did its rate of acceleration. Impossible!

The horrific thought which had briefly crossed the Yawning Angel’s mind moments earlier settled down to stay with all the gruesome deliberation of a self-invited house guest.

It did the arithmetic.

Take a Plate class GSV’s locomotive power output per cubic kilometre of engine. Add on sixteen cubic klicks of extra drive at that push-per-cube value… make that thirty-two at a time… and it matched the step in the Sleeper Service’s acceleration it had just witnessed. General bays. Great grief, it had filled its General bays with engine.

The Charitable View reported another smooth increase in the Sleeper Service’s rate of progress leading to another step, another pause. It was increasing its own acceleration to match.

The Yawning Angel sped after the two of them, already fearing the worst. Do the sums, do the sums. The Sleeper Service had filled at least four of its General bays with extra engine, bringing-them on line two at a time, balancing the additional impetus…

Another increase.

Six. Probably all eight, then. What about the engineering space behind? Had that gone too?

Sums, sums. How much mass had there been aboard the damn thing? Water; gas-giant atmosphere, highly pressurised. About four thousand cubic kilometres of water alone; four gigatonnes. Compress it, alter it, transmute it, convert it into the ultra dense exotic materials that comprised an engine capable of reaching out and down to the energy grid that underlay the universe and pushing against it… ample, ample, more than enough. It would take months, even years to build that sort of extra engine capacity… or only days, if you’d spent, say, the last few decades preparing the ground.

Dear holy shit, if it was all engine even the superlifter wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. The average Plate class could sustain about one hundred and four kilolights more or less indefinitely; a good Range class, which was what the Yawning Angel had always been proud to count itself as, could easily beat that by forty kilolights. A Cliff class superlifter was ninety per cent engine; faster even than a Rapid Offensive Unit in short bursts. The Charitable View could hit two-twenty-one flat out, but that was only supposed to be for an hour or two at a time; that was chase speed, catch-up speed, not something it could maintain for long.

The figure the Yawning Angel was looking at was the thick end of two-thirty-three, if the Sleeper Service’s engineering space had been packed with engine too.

The Charitable View’s tone had already turned from one of amusement to amazement, then bewilderment. Now it was plain peevish. The Sleeper Service was topping the two-fifteen mark and showing no signs of slowing down. The superlifter would have to break away within minutes if it didn’t top-out soon. It asked for instructions.

The Yawning Angel, still accelerating for all its worth, determined to track and follow for as long as it could or until it was asked to give up the chase, told its offspring craft not to exceed its design parameters, not to risk damage.

The Sleeper Service went on accelerating. The superlifter Charitable View gave up the chase at two-twenty. It settled back to a less frenetic two hundred, dropping back all the time; even so it was still not a speed it could maintain for more than a few hours.

The Yawning Angel topped out at one forty-six.

The Sleeper Service finally hit cruise at around two-thirty-three and a half, disappearing ahead into the depths of galactic space. The superlifter reported this but sounded like it couldn’t believe it.

The Yawning Angel watched the other GSV race away into the everlasting night between the stars, a sense of hopelessness, of defeat, settled over it.

Now it knew it had shaken off its pursuers the Sleeper Service’s course was starting to curve gently, no doubt the first of many ducks and weaves it would carry out, if it was trying to conceal its eventual goal, and assuming that it had a goal other than simply giving the slip to its minders… Somehow, the Yawning Angel suspected its Eccentric charge — or ex-charge — did have a definite goal; a place, a location it was headed for.

Two hundred and thirty-three thousand times the speed of light. Dear holy fucking shit. The Yawning Angel thought there was something almost vulgar about such a velocity. Where the hell was it heading for? Andromeda?

The Yawning Angel drew a course-probability cone through the galactic model it kept in its mind.

It supposed it all depended how devious the Sleeper Service was being, but it looked like it might be headed for the Upper Leaf Swirl. If it was, it would be there within three weeks.

The Yawning Angel signalled ahead. Look on the bright side; at least the problem was out of its fields now.

The avatar Amorphia stood — arms crossed, thin, black-gloved hands grasping at bony elbows — gaze fastened intently upon the screen on the far side of the lounge. It showed a compensated view of hyperspace, vastly magnified.

Looking into the screen was like peering into some vast planetary airscape. Far below was a layer of glowing mist representing the energy grid; above was an identical layer of bright cloud. The skein of real space lay in between both of these; a two-dimensional layer, a simple transparent plane which the GSV went flickering through like a weaving shuttle across an infinite loom. Far, far behind it, the tiny dot that was the superlifter shrank still further. It too had been bobbing up and down through the skein on a sine wave whose length was measured in light minutes, but now it had stopped oscillating, settling into the lower level of hyperspace.

The magnification jumped; the superlifter was a larger dot now, but still dropping back all the time. A light-point tracing its own once wavy now straight course even further behind was the pursuing GSV. The star of the Dreve system was a bright spot back beyond that, stationary in the skein.

The Sleeper Service reached its maximum velocity and also ceased to oscillate between the two regions of hyperspace, settling into the larger of the two infinities that was ultraspace. The two following ships did the same, increasing their speed fractionally but briefly. A purist would call the place where they now existed ultraspace one positive, though as nobody had ever had access to ultraspace one negative — or infraspace one positive, for that matter — it was a redundant, even pedantic distinction. Or it had been until now. That might be about to change, if the Excession could deliver what it appeared to promise… Amorphia took a deep breath and then let it go.

The view clicked off and the screen disappeared.

The avatar turned to look at the woman Dajeil Gelian and the black bird Gravious. They were in a recreation area on the Ridge class GCU Jaundiced Outlook, housed in a bay in one of the Sleeper Service’s mid-top strakes. The lounge was pretty well standard Contact issue; deceptively spacious, stylishly comfortable, punctuated by plants and subdued lighting.

This ship was to be the woman’s home for the rest of the journey; a life boat ready to quit the larger craft at a moment’s notice and take her to safety if anything went wrong. She sat on a white recliner chair, dressed in a long red dress, calm but wide-eyed, one hand cupped upon her swollen belly, the black bird perched on one arm of the seat near her hand.

The avatar smiled down at the woman. “There,” it said. It made a show of looking around. “Alone at last.” It laughed lightly, then looked down at the black bird, its smile disappearing. “Whereas you,” it said, “will not be again.”

Gravious jerked upright, neck stretching. “What?” it asked. Gelian looked surprised, then concerned.

Amorphia glanced to one side. A small device like a stubby pen floated out of the shadows cast by a small tree. It coasted up to the bird, which shrank back and back from the small, silent missile until it almost fell off the arm of the chair, its blue-black beak centimetres from the nose cone of the tiny, intricate machine.

“This is a scout missile, bird,” Amorphia told it. “Do not be deceived by its innocent title. If you so much as think of committing another act of treachery, it will happily reduce you to hot gas. It is going to follow you everywhere. Don’t do as I have done; do as I say and don’t try to shake it off; there is a tracer nanotech on you — in you — which will make it a simple matter to follow you. It should be correctly embedded by now, replacing the original tissue.”

“What?” the bird screeched again, head jerking up and back.

“If you want to remove it,” Amorphia continued smoothly, “you may, of course. You’ll find it in your heart; primary aortic valve.”

The bird made a screaming noise and thrashed vertically into the air. Dajeil flinched, covering her face with her hands. Gravious wheeled in the air and beat hard for the nearest corridor. Amorphia watched it go from beneath cold, lid-hooded eyes. Dajeil put both her hands on her abdomen. She swallowed. Something black drifted down past her face and she picked it out of the air. A feather.

“Sorry about that,” Amorphia said.

“What… what was all that about?” Gelian asked.

Amorphia shrugged. “The bird is a spy,” it said flatly. “Has been from the first. It got its reports to the outside by encoding them on a bacterium and depositing them on the bodies of people about to be returned for re-awakening. I knew about it twenty years ago but let it pass after checking each signal; it was never allowed to know anything the disclosure of which could pose a threat. Its last message was the only one I ever altered. It helped facilitate our escape from the attentions of the Yawning Angel.” Amorphia grinned, almost childishly. “There’s nothing further it can do; I set the scout missile on it to punish it, really. If it distresses you, I’ll call it off.”

Dajeil Gelian looked up into the steady grey eyes of the cadaverous, dark-clad creature for some time, quite as if she hadn’t even heard the question.

“Amorphia,” she said. “Please; what is going on? What is really going on?”

The ship’s avatar looked pained for a moment. It looked away, towards the plant the scout missile had been hiding underneath. “Whatever else,” it said awkwardly, formally, “always remember that you are free to leave me at any time; this GCU is entirely at your disposal and no order or request of mine will affect its actions.” It looked back at her. It shook its head, but its voice sounded kinder when it spoke again; “I’m sorry, Gelian; I still can’t tell you very much. We are going to a place near a star called Esperi.” The creature hesitated, as though unsure, gaze roaming the floor and the nearby seats. “Because I want to,” it said eventually, as though only realising this itself for the first time. “Because there may be something I can do there.” It raised its arms out from its body, let them fall again. “And in the meantime, we await a guest. Or at any rate, I await a guest. You may not care to.”

“Who?” the woman asked.

“Haven’t you guessed?” the avatar said softly. “Byr Genar-Hofoen.”

The woman looked down then, and her brows slowly creased, and the dark feather she had caught fell from her fingers.

III

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28. 867.4406]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

Have you heard? Was I not right about Genar-Hofoen? Do the times not now start to tally?

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.4886]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oLSV Serious Callers Only

Yes. Two three three. What’s it doing — going for some kind of record? Yes yes yes all right you were correct about the human. But why didn’t you have any warning of this?

oo

I don’t know. Two decades of reliable but totally boring reports and then just when it might have been handy to know what the big bugger was really up to, the intelligence conduit caves in. All I can think of is that our mutual friend… oh, hell, might as well call it by its real name now I suppose… is that the Sleeper Service discovered the link — we don’t know when — and waited until it had something to hide before it started messing with our intelligence.

oo

Yes, but what’s it doing? We thought it was just being invited to join the Group out of politeness, didn’t we? Suddenly it’s acting like a fucking missile. What is it up to?

oo

This may seem rather obvious, but we could always just ask it.

oo

Tried that. Still waiting.

oo

Well you could have said…

oo

I beg your pardon. So now what?

oo

Now I get a load of bullshit from the Steely Glint. Excuse me.

oo

[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 868.8243]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oGCV Steely Glint

Our mutual friend with the velocity obsession. This wouldn’t be what we really expected, would it? Some private deal, by any chance?

oo

[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 868. 8499]

xGCV Steely Glint

oLSV Serious Callers Only

No it isn’t! I’m getting fed up repeating this; I should have posted a general notice. No; we wanted the damn thing’s views, some sort of entirely outside viewpoint, not it tearing off to anywhere near the Excession itself.

It was part of the Gang before, you know. We owed it that, no matter that it is now Eccentric. Would that we had known how much…

Now we’ve got another horrendous variable screwing up our plans.

If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8978]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

(signal file attached) What did I tell you? I don’t know about this. Looks suspicious to me.

oo

Hmm. And I don’t know, either. I hate to say it, but it sounds genuine. Of course, if I prove to be wrong you will never confront me with this, ever, all right?

oo

If, after all this is over, we are both still in a position for me to confer and you to benefit from such leniency, I shall be infinitely glad to extend such forbearance.

oo

Well, it could have been expressed more graciously, but I accept this moral blank cheque with all the deference it merits.

oo

I’m going to call the Sleeper Service. It won’t take any notice of me but I’m going to call the mealworm anyway.

IV

Genar-Hofoen didn’t take his pen terminal with him when he went out that evening, and the first place he visited in Night City was a Tier-Sintricate/Ishlorsinami Tech. store.

The woman was small for an Ishy, thought Genar-Hofoen. Still, she towered over him. She wore the usual long black robes and she smelled… musty. They sat on plain, narrow seats in a bubble of blackness. The woman was bent over a tiny fold-away screen balanced on her knees. She nodded and craned her body over towards him. Her hand extended, close to his left ear. A sequence of shining, telescoping rods extended from her fingers. She closed her eyes. In the dimness, Genar-Hofoen could see tiny lights flickering on the inside of her eyelids.

Her hand touched his ear, tickling slightly. He felt his face twitch. “Don’t move,” she said.

He tried to stay still. The woman withdrew her hand. She opened her eyes and peered at the point where the tips of three of the delicate rods met. She nodded and said, “Hmm.”

Genar-Hofoen bent forward and looked too. He couldn’t see anything. The woman closed her eyes again; her lid screens glowed again.

“Very sophisticated,” she said. “Could have missed it.”

Genar-Hofoen looked at his right palm. “Sure there’s nothing on this hand?” he asked, recalling Verlioef Schung’s firm handshake.

“As sure as I can be,” the woman said, withdrawing a small transparent container from her robe and dropping whatever she had taken out of his ear into it. He still couldn’t see anything there.

“And the suit?” he asked, fingering one lapel of his jacket.

“Clean,” the woman said.

“So that’s it?” he asked.

“That is all,” she told him. The black bubble disappeared and they were sitting in a small room whose walls were lined with shelves overflowing with impenetrably technical-looking gear.

“Well, thanks.”

“That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents.”

“Oh, call it a round thousand.”

He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you’d have no excuse for not having fun.

Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take its cue from each year’s Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The theme that year had been the Sea; Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves’ surfaces had been balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave’s looming, overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street beneath. At either end of the Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect — through oceanically inauthentic tunnels — with other highways.

The theme this year was the Primitive and the City had chosen to interpret this as a gigantic early electronic circuit board; the network of silvery streets formed an almost perfectly flat cityscape studded with enormous resistors, dense-looking, centipedally legged flat-topped chips, spindly diodes and huge semi-transparent valves with complicated internal structures, each standing on groups of shining metal legs embedded in the network of the printed circuit. Those were the bits that Genar-Hofoen sort of half recognised from his History of Technical Stuff course or whatever it had been called when he’d been a student; there were lots of other jagged, knobbly, smooth, brightly coloured, matt black, shiny, vaned, crinkled bits he didn’t know the purpose or the name of.

Street Six this year was a fifteen-metre wide stream of quickly flowing mercury covered with etched diamond sheeting; every now and again large coherent blobs of sparkling blue-gold went speeding along the mercury stream underfoot. Apparently these were symbolised electrons or something. The original idea had been to incorporate the mercury channels into the City transport system, but this had proved impractical and so they were there just for effect; the City tube system ran deep underground as usual. Genar-Hofoen had jumped on and off a few of the underground cars on his way to the City and on and off a couple more once he’d arrived, hoping to give the slip to anybody following. Having done this and had the tracer in his ear removed, he was happy he’d done the best he could to ensure that his evening’s fun would take place unobserved by SC, though he wasn’t particularly bothered if they were still watching him; it was more the principle of the thing. No point getting obsessive about it.

Street Six itself was packed with people, walking, talking, staggering, strolling, rolling along within bubblespheres, riding on exotically accoutred animals, riding in small carriages drawn by ysner-mistretl pairs and floating along under small vacuum balloons or in force field harnesses. Above, in the eternal night sky beneath the City’s vast dome, this part of the evening’s entertainment was being provided by a city-wide hologram of an ancient bomber raid.

The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or six piston engines each, many of them picked out by searchlights. Spasms of light leaving black-on-black clouds and blossoming spheres of dimming red sparks were supposed to be anti-aircraft fire, while in amongst the bombers smaller single and twin-engined aircraft whizzed; the two sorts of aircraft were shooting at each other, the large planes from turrets and the smaller ones from their wings and noses. Gently curving lines of white, yellow and red tracer moved slowly across the sky and every now and again an aircraft seemed to catch fire and start to fall out of the sky; occasionally one would explode in mid air. All the time, the dark shapes of bombs could be glimpsed, falling to explode with bright flashes and vivid gouts of flame on parts of the City seemingly always just a little way off. Genar-Hofoen thought it all looked a little contrived, and he doubted there’d ever been such a concentrated air battle, or one in which the ground fire kept up while interceptor planes did their intercepting, but as a show it was undeniably impressive.

Explosions, gunfire and sirens sounded above the chatter of people filling the street and was sporadically submerged by the music spilling from the hundreds of bars and multifarious entertainment venues lining the Street. The air was full of half-strange, half-familiar, entirely enticing smells and wild pheromonic effects understandably banned everywhere else on Tier.

Genar-Hofoen strolled down the middle of the Street, a large glass of Tier 9050 in one hand, a cloud cane in the other and a small puff-creant nestling on one shoulder of his immaculately presented ownskin jacket. The 9050 was a cocktail which notoriously involved about three hundred separate processes to make, many of them involving unlikely and even unpleasant combinations of plants, animals and substances. The end result was an acceptable if strong-tasting drink composed largely of alcohol, no more, but you didn’t really drink it for the internal effect, you drank it to show you could afford to; they put it in a special crystal field-goblet so you could show that you could. The name was meant to imply that after sinking a few you were ninety per cent certain to get laid and fifty per cent assured of ending up in legal trouble (or it may have been the other way round — Genar-Hofoen could never remember).

The cloud cane was a walking stick burning compressed pellets of a mildly and brief-acting psychotropic mixture; taking a suck on its pierced top cap was like sliding two distorting lenses in front of your eyes, sticking your head underwater and shoving a chemical factory up your nose while standing in a shifting gravity field.

The puff-creant was a small symbiont, half animal half vegetable, which you paid to squat on your shoulder and cough up your nose every time you turned your face towards it. The cough contained spores that could do any one of about thirty different and interesting things to your perceptions and moods.

Genar-Hofoen was particularly pleased with his new suit. It was made of his own skin, genetically altered in various subtle ways, specially vat-grown and carefully tailored to his exact specifications. He’d donated a few skin cells to — and left the order and payment with — a gene-tailor here on Tier two and a half years earlier when he was on his way to God’shole habitat. It had been a whim after a drinking session (as had an animated obscene tattoo he’d removed a month later). He hadn’t really expected to pick the suit up for a while. Fortunately long-term fashions hadn’t changed too much in the interim. The suit and its accompanying cloak looked terrific. He felt great.

SPA’DASSINS DIGLADIATE; ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND! GOL-IARD DUNKING!

Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning ‘scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, suggesting, offering, providing entrance, stimulating appetites, prompting desires; suggesting, propositioning, pandering.

RHYPAROGRAPHY! KELOIDAL ANAMNESIS! IVRESSE!

Genar-Hofoen walked through it all, soaking it all in, refusing all the offers and suggestions, politely turning down the overtures and come-ons, the recommendations and invitations.

ZUFULOS! ORPHARIONS! RASTRAE! NAUMACHIA HOURLY!

For now, he was content just to be here, walking, promenading, watching and being watched, sizing up and — with any luck — being sized up. It was evening — real evening — in this level of Tier, the time when Night City started to become busy; everywhere was open, nowhere was full, everybody wanted your custom, but nobody was really settling on a venue yet; just cruising, grazing, petting. Genar-Hofoen was happy to be part of that general drift; he loved this, he gloried in it. This was where he felt most himself. For now, there was simply no better place to be, and he believed in entering into the experience with all due and respectful intensity; these were his sort of people, here was where his sort of thing happened and this was his sort of place.

PILIOUS OMADHAUNS INVITE RASURE! LAGOPHTHALMISCITY GUARANTEED WHEN YOU SEE THE JEISTIECORS AND LORICAS OF OUR MARTICHORASTIC MINIKINS!

He saw her outside a Sublimer sekos set under the rotundly swollen bulk of a building shaped like a giant resistor. The entrance to the cult’s sacred place was a brightly shining loop, like a thick but tiny rainbow layered in different shades of white. Young Sublimers stood outside the enclosure, clad in glowing white robes. The Sublimers — each tall and thin — glowed, too; their skin glowed gently, pallid to the point of unhealthy-looking bloodlessness. Their eyes shone, soft light spilling from the wide, open whites, while the same half-silvery light was projected from their teeth when they smiled. They smiled all the time, even when they were talking. The woman was standing looking at the pair of enthusiastically gesticulating Sublimers with an expression of amused disdain.

She was tall, tawny-skinned. Her face was broad, her nose thin and almost parallel with the planes of her cheeks; her arms were crossed, her body tilted back from the two young people, her weight taken on one black-booted heel as she looked down that long nose at the shining Sublimers. Her eyes and her hair looked as dark as the featureless shadowrobe which hid the rest of her frame.

He stopped in the middle of the street and watched her arguing with the two Sublimers for a few moments. Her gestures and the way she held her body were different but the face was very similar to the way he remembered her looking, forty years ago; just a little older, perhaps. He had always wondered how much she’d changed.

But it couldn’t be her. Tishlin had said she was still on board the Sleeper. They’d have mentioned if she’d left, wouldn’t they?

He let a group of squatly chortling Bystlians pass him, then sauntered a little way back up the street, studying the architecture of the giant valve bulging over it from the opposite pavement and sniffing from his cloud cane in a vague, bored manner while watching a line of dark bombs flit out of the darkness above to fall and detonate somewhere beyond the line of barrel-like resistors that formed the other side of the street; bright yellow-orange explosions lit up the sky and debris rose slowly and fell. Further up the avenue, some sort of commotion surrounded a large animal.

He turned and looked back down the crowded street. At that moment a giant blue-gold shape slid under his feet, rushing silently along within the mercury stream beneath the diamond plate. The girl arguing with the Sublimers turned, glancing at the street as the blob went gliding past. As she looked back to the two young glowing people she caught sight of him watching her. Her gaze settled on him for a moment and the flicker of an expression — a glimmer of recognition? — passed briefly over her face before she started talking to the Sublimers again. He hadn’t had time to look away even if he’d wanted to.

He was wondering whether he ought to go over to her now, wait and see if she stepped back into the thoroughfare and maybe approach her then, or just walk away, when a tall girl in a glowing gown stepped up to him and said, “May I help you, sir? You seem taken with our place of exaltation. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Is there anything I can do to enlighten you?”

He turned to the Sublimer. She was almost as tall as he; her face was pretty but somehow vacuous, though he knew that might have been prejudice on his part.

Sublimers had turned what was a normal but generally optional part of a species’ choice of fate into a religion. Sublimers believed that everybody ought to Sublime, that every human, every animal, every machine and Mind ought to head straight for ultimate transcendence, leaving the mundane life behind and setting as direct a course as possible for nirvana.

People who joined the cult spent a year trying to persuade others of this before they Sublimed themselves, joining one of the sect’s group-minds to contemplate irreality. The few drones, other AIs and Minds that became persuaded of the merit of this course of action through the arguments of the Sublimers tended to do what any other machine did on such occasions and disappear in the direction of the nearest Sublimed Entity, though one or two stuck around in a pre-Sublimed state long enough to help the cause. In general, though, the cult was regarded as rather a pointless one. Subliming was seen as something that usually happened to entire societies, and more as a practical lifestyle alteration than a religious commitment; more like moving house than entering a sacred order.

“Well, I don’t know,” Genar-Hofoen said, sounding wary. “What exactly do you people believe in again?”

The Sublimer looked up the street behind him. “Oh, we believe in the power of the Sublime,” she said. “Let me tell you more.” She glanced up the avenue again. “Oh; perhaps we ought to get off the street, don’t you think?” She held out her hand and took a step back towards the pavement.

Genar-Hofoen looked back, to where things were getting noisy. The giant animal he’d noticed earlier — a sexipedal pondrosaur — was advancing slowly down the avenue in the midst of a retinue and a crowd of spectators. The shaggy, brown-furred animal was six metres tall, splendidly liveried with long, gaudy banners and ribbons and commanded by a garishly uniformed mahout brandishing a fiery mace. The beast was surmounted by a glitteringly black and silver cupola whose bulbously filigreed windows gave no hint of who or what might be inside; similarly ornamented bowls covered the great animal’s eyes. It was attended by five loping kliestrithrals, each black tusked creature pawing at the street surface and snorting and held on a tight lead by a burly hire guard. A knot of people held the procession up; the pondrosaur paused and put its long head back to let out a surprisingly soft, subdued roar, then it adjusted its eye-cups with its two leg-thick fore-limbs and bobbed its head to either side. The gaggle of promenaders began to disperse and the great beast and its escorts moved forward again.

“Hmm, yes,” Genar-Hofoen said. “Perhaps we’d better move out the way.” He finished the 9050 and looked round for a place to deposit the empty container.

“Please; allow me.” The Sublimer girl took the field-goblet from him as though it was some sort of holy object. Genar-Hofoen followed her onto the sidewalk; she put an arm through his and they proceeded slowly towards the entrance to the sekos, where the woman was still standing talking to the other two Sublimers with her look of ironic curiosity.

“Have you heard of Sublimers before?” the girl on his arm asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said, watching the other woman’s face as they approached. They stopped on the pavement outside the Sublimer building, entering a hushfield in which the only sound was gently tinkling music and a background of waves on a beach. “You believe everybody should just sort of disappear up their own arses, don’t you?” he asked with every appearance of innocence. He was only a few metres from the woman in the shadowrobe, though the compartmented hushfield meant he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her face was much like he remembered it; the eyes and mouth were the same. She had never worn her hair up like that, but even its shade of black-blue was the same.

“Oh, no!” the Sublimer girl said, her expression terribly serious. “What we believe in takes one completely away from such bodily concerns…”

Out of the corner of his eye he could see up the street, where the pondrosaur was shuffling forwards through a thick crowd of admirers. He smiled at the Sublimer girl as she talked on. He shifted a little so that he could see the other woman better.

No, it wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t. She’d have recognised him, she’d have reacted by now. Even if she’d been trying to pretend she hadn’t seen him he’d have been able to tell; she’d never been very good at hiding her feelings from anybody, least of all from him. She glanced at him again, then quickly away. He felt a sudden, unbidden sensation of fearful pleasure, a jolt of excitement which left his skin tingling.

“… highest expression of our quintessential urge to be greater than we…” He nodded and looked at the Sublimer girl, who was still babbling away. He frowned a little and stroked his chin with his free hand, still nodding. He kept watching the other woman. Out on the street, the pondrosaur and its retinue had come to a stop almost alongside them; a Tier Sintricate was hovering level with the giant animal’s mahout, who seemed to be arguing angrily with it.

The woman was smiling at the other two Sublimers with what appeared to be an expression of tolerant ridicule. She kept her eyes on the Sublimer fellow doing the talking at that point, but took a long, deep breath, and — just as she let it out — glanced at Genar-Hofoen again with the briefest of smiles and a flick of her eyebrows before looking back at the Sublimers and tipping her head just a little to one side.

He wondered. Would SC really go this far to keep him under their control, or at least under their eye? How likely was it that he should find somebody who looked so much like her? He supposed there must be hundreds of people who bore a passing resemblance to Dajeil Gelian; perhaps there were even a few who had heard something about her and deliberately assumed her appearance; that happened all the time with genuinely famous people and just because he’d never heard of anybody taking on Dajeil’s looks didn’t mean nobody had ever done so. If this person was one of them, it was just possible he would have to be on his guard…

“… personal ambition or the desire to better oneself or to provide opportunities for one’s children is but a pale reflection of, compared to the ultimate transcendence which true Subliming offers; for, as it is written…”

Genar-Hofoen leant closer to the girl talking to him and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sure,” he said quietly. “Would you excuse me for just a moment?”

He took the two steps over to the woman in the shadowrobe. She turned her head from the two Sublimers and smiled politely at him. “Excuse me,” he asked. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He grinned as he said it, acknowledging both the well-worn nature of the line and the fact that neither he nor she was really interested in what the Sublimers had to say.

She nodded her head politely to him. “I don’t think so,” she said. Her voice was higher than Dajeil’s; more girlish, and with a quite different accent. “Though if we had met and you hadn’t altered in some way and I’d forgotten, certainly I’d be far too ashamed to admit it.” She smiled. He did the same. She frowned. “Unless… do you live on Tier?”

“Just passing through,” he told her. A bomber, in flames, tore past just overhead and exploded in a burst of light behind the Sublimer building. On the street, the argument around the pondrosaur seemed to be getting more heated; the animal itself was staring intently at the Sintricate and its mahout was standing up on its neck, pointing the flaming mace at the darkly spiny being to emphasise whatever points he was making.

“But I’ve been this way before,” Genar-Hofoen said. “Perhaps we bumped into each other then.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps,” she conceded.

“Oh, you two know each other?” said the young Sublimer man she’d been talking to. “Well, many people find that Subliming in the company of a loved one or just somebody they know is—”

“Do you play Calascenic Crasis?” she asked, cutting across the young Sublimer. “You may have seen me at a game here.” She put her head back, looking down that long nose at him. “If so, I’m disappointed you left it till now to say hello.”

“Ah!” the Sublimer lad said. “Games; an expression of the urge to enter into worlds beyond ourselves! Another—”

“I’ve never even heard of the game,” he confessed. “Do you recommend it?”

“Oh yes,” she said, and sounded ironic. “It benefits all who play.”

“Well, I’m always willing to entertain some new experience. Perhaps you could teach me.”

“Ah, now; the ultimate new experience—” began the Sublimer lad.

Genar-Hofoen turned to him and said, “Oh, shut up!” It had been an instinctive reaction, and for a moment he was worried he might have said the wrong thing, but she didn’t seem to be regarding the young Sublimer’s hurt look with any great degree of sympathy.

She looked back to him. “All right,” she said. “You stand me my stake and I’ll teach you Crasis.”

He smiled, wondering if that had been too easy. “It’s a deal,” he said. He waved the cloud cane under his nose and took a deep breath, then bowed. “My name’s Byr.”

“Pleased to meet you.” She nodded again. “Call me Flin,” she said, and, taking hold of the cane, waved it under her own nose.

“Shall we, Flin?” he said, and indicated the street beyond, where the pondrosaur had sunk to its belly, its four legs doubled up underneath it and both fore-limbs folded beneath its chin, as though bored. Two Sintricates were shouting at the enraged mahout, who was shaking the flaming mace at them. The hire guards were looking nervous and patting the restless kliestrithrals.

“Certainly.”

“Remember where you met!” the Sublimer called after them. “Subliming is the ultimate meeting of souls, the pinnacle of…” They left the hushfield. His voice was drowned out by the thudding of projected anti-aircraft fire as they walked along the pavement.

“So, where are we going?” he asked her.

“Well, you can take me for a drink and then we’ll hit a Crasis bar I know. Sound all right?”

“Sounds fine. Shall we take a trap?” he said, pointing a little way up the street to a two-wheeled open vehicle waiting by the kerb. A ysner-mistretl pair were harnessed between the traces, the ysner craning its long neck down to peck at a feed bag in the gutter, the small, smartly uniformed mistretl on its back looking around alertly and tapping its thumbs together.

“Good idea,” she said. They walked up to the trap and climbed aboard. “The Collyrium Lounge,” the woman said to the mistretl as they sat in the rear of the small vehicle. It saluted and pulled a whip out from its fancy jerkin. The ysner made a sighing noise.

The trap shook suddenly. A great deep burst of noise came from the street behind them. They all looked round. The pondrosaur was rearing up, bellowing; its mahout nearly fell off its neck. His mace tumbled from his grasp and bounced on the street. Two of the kliestrithrals jumped up and leapt into the crowd, snarling and dragging their handlers with them. The two Sintricates who’d been arguing with the mahout rose quickly into the air out of the way; people in float harnesses took avoiding action through the confusion of searchlight beams and anti-aircraft fire. Flin and Genar-Hofoen watched people scatter in all directions as the pondrosaur leapt forward with surprising agility and started charging down the street towards them. The mahout clung desperately to the beast’s ears, screeching at it to stop. The stabilised black and silver cupola on the animal’s back seemed to float along above it until the animal’s increasing speed forced it to oscillate from side to side. At Genar-Hofoen’s side, Flin seemed frozen.

Genar-Hofoen glanced round at the mistretl. “Well,” he said, “let’s get going.” The little mistretl blinked quickly, still staring up the street. Another bellow echoed off the surrounded buildings. Genar-Hofoen looked back again.

The charging pondrosaur reached up with one fore-limb and ripped its eye-cups off to reveal huge, faceted blue eyes like chunks of ancient ice. With its other limb it gripped the mahout by one shoulder and wrenched him off its neck; he wriggled and flailed but it brushed him to one side and onto the pavement; he landed running, fell and rolled. The pondrosaur itself thundered on down the street; people threw themselves out of its way. Somebody in a bubblesphere didn’t move fast enough; the giant transparent ball was kicked to the side, smashing into a hot food-stall; flames leapt from the wreckage.

“Shit,” Genar-Hofoen said as the giant bore down upon them. He turned to the mistretl driver again. He could see the face of the ysner, turned back to look up the street behind too, its big face expressing only mild surprise. “Move!” he shouted.

The mistretl nodded. “Goo’ i’ea,” it chirped. It reached behind to slip a knot on the rear of the ysner and jabbed its bootheels into the animal’s lower neck. The startled ysner took off, leaving the trap behind; the vehicle tipped forward as the ysner-mistretl pair disappeared down the rapidly clearing street. Genar-Hofoen and Flin were thrown forward in a tangle of harnesses. He heard her shout, “Fuck!” then go oof as they hit the street.

Something hit him hard on the head. He blacked out for a moment then came to looking up at a huge face, a monstrous face, gazing down at him with huge prismed blue eyes. Then he saw the woman’s face. The face of Dajeil Gelian. She had blood on her top lip. She looked groggily at him and then turned to gaze up at the huge animal face looking down at them. There was a sort of buzzing sensation from somewhere; Genar-Hofoen felt his legs go numb. The woman collapsed over his legs. He felt sick. Lines of red dots crossing the sky floated behind his eyelids when they closed. When he forced his eyes open again, she was there again. Somebody looking like Dajeil Gelian who wasn’t her. Except it wasn’t Flin either. She was dressed differently, she was taller and her expression was… not the same. And anyway, Flin was still draped unconscious over his legs.

He really didn’t understand what was going on. He shook his head. This hurt.

The girl who wasn’t Dajeil or Flin stooped quickly, looked into his eyes, whirled the cloak off her shoulders and onto the street beside him in one movement, then rolled him over onto it, heaving Flin’s immobile body out of the way as she did so. He tried waving his arms around but it didn’t do much good.

The cloak went rigid underneath him and floated into the air, wrapping round him. He cried out and tried to fight against its enclosing black folds, but the buzzing came again and his vision faded even before the cloak finished wrapping itself round him.