Excession

I

The usual way to explain it was by analogy; this was how the idea was introduced to you as a child. Imagine you were travelling through space and you came to this planet which was very big and almost perfectly smooth and on which there lived creatures who were composed of one layer of atoms; in effect, two-dimensional. These creatures would be born, live and die like us and they might well possess genuine intelligence. They would, initially, have no idea or grasp of the third dimension, but they would be able to live perfectly well in their two dimensions. To them, a line would be like a wall across their world (or, from the end, it would look like a point). An unbroken circle would be like a locked room.

Perhaps, if they were able to build machines which allowed them to journey at great speed along the surface of their planet — which to them would be their universe — they would go right round the planet and come back to where they had started from. More likely, they would be able to work this out from theory. Either way, they would realise that their universe was both closed, and curved, and that there was, in fact, a third dimension, even if they had no practical access to it. Being familiar with the idea of circles, they would probably christen the shape of their universe a “hypercircle” rather than inventing a new word. The three-dimensional people would, of course, call it a sphere.

The situation was similar for people living in three dimensions. At some point in any civilisation starting to become advanced it was realised that if you set off into space in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line, eventually you would arrive back at where you started, because your three-dimensional universe was really a four-dimensional shape; being familiar with the idea of spheres, people tended to christen this shape a hypersphere.

Usually around the same point in a society’s development it was understood that — unlike the planet where the two-dimensional creatures lived — space was not simply curved into a hypersphere, it was also expanding; gradually increasing in size like a soap-bubble on the end of a straw which somebody was blowing into. To a four-dimensional being looking from far enough away, the three-dimensional galaxies would look like tiny designs imprinted onto the surface of that expanding bubble, each of them, generally, heading away from all the others because of the hypersphere’s general expansion, but — like the shifting whorls and loops of colour visible on the skin of a soap bubble — able to slide and move around on that surface.

Of course, the four-dimensional hypersphere had no equivalent of the straw, blowing air in from outside. The hypersphere was expanding all by itself, like a four-dimensional explosion, with the implication that, once, it had been simply a point; a tiny seed which had indeed exploded. That detonation had created — or at least had produced — matter and energy, time and the physical laws themselves. Later — cooling, coalescing and changing over immense amounts of time and expansion — it had given rise to the cool, ordered, three-dimensional universe which people could see around them.

Eventually in the progress of a technologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace, more usually after theoretical work, it was realised that the soap bubble was not alone. The expanding universe lay inside a larger one, which in turn was entirely enclosed by a bubble of space-time with a still greater diameter. The same applied within the universe you happened to find yourself on/in; there were smaller, younger universes inside it, nested within like layers of paper round a much-wrapped spherical present.

In the very centre of all the concentric, inflating universes lay the place they had each originated from, where every now and again a cosmic fireball blinked into existence, detonating once more to produce another universe, its successive outpourings of creation like the explosions of some vast combustion engine, and the universes its pulsing exhaust.

There was more; complications in seven dimensions and beyond that involved a giant torus on which the 3-D universe could be described as a circle, contained and containing other nested tori, with further implications of whole populations of such meta-Realities… but the implications of multiple, concentric, sequential universes was generally considered enough to be going on with for the moment.

What everybody wanted to know was whether there was any way of travelling from one universe to another. Between any pair of universes there was more than just empty hyperspace; there was a thing called an energy grid. It was useful — strands of it could help power ships, and it had been used as a weapon — but it was also an obstacle, and — by all accounts so far — one which had proved impenetrable to intelligent investigation. Certain black holes appeared to be linked to the grid and perhaps therefore to the universe beyond, but nobody had ever made it intact into one, or ever reappeared in any recognisable form. There were white holes, too; ferociously violent sources spraying torrents of energy into the universe with the power of a million suns and which also seemed to be linked to the grid… but no body, no ship or even information had ever been observed appearing from their tumultuous mouths; no equivalent of an airborne bacteria, no word, no language, just that incoherent scream of cascading energies and super energetic particles.

The dream that every Involved had, which virtually every technologically advanced civilisation clove to with almost religious faith, was that one day it would be possible to travel from one universe to another, to step up or down through those expanding bubbles, so that — apart from anything else — one need never suffer the final fate of one’s own universe. To achieve that would surely be to Sublime, truly to Transcend, to consummate the ultimate Surpassing and accomplish the ultimate empowerment.

The River class General Contact Unit Fate Amenable To Change lay in space. It was locally stationary, taking its reference from the Excession. The Excession was equally static, taking its reference from the star Esperi. The entity sat there, a few light minutes away, a featureless dot on the skein of real space with a single equally dull-looking strand of twisted, compressed space-time fabric leading down to the lower layer of energy grid… and a second leading upwards to the higher layer.

The Excession was doing exactly what it had been doing for the past two weeks; nothing. The Fate Amenable To Change had carried out all the standard initial measurements and observations of the entity, but had been very forcefully advised indeed not to do any more; no direct contact was to be attempted, not even by probes, smaller craft or drones. In theory it could disobey; it was its own ship, it could make up its own mind… but in practice it had to heed the advice of those who knew if not more than it, better than it.

Collective responsibility. Also known as sharing the blame.

So all it had done after the first exciting bit, when it had been the centre of attention and everybody had wanted to know all it could tell them about the thing it had found, had been to hang around here, still at the focus of events in a sense, but also feeling somehow ignored.

Reports. It filed reports. It had long since stopped trying to make them different or original.

The ship was bored. It was also aware of a continuing undercurrent of fear; a real emotion that it was by turns annoyed at, ashamed of and indifferent to, according to its mood.

It waited. It watched. Beyond it, around it, most of its small fleet of modules and satellites, a few of its most space-capable drones and a variety of specialist devices it had constructed specifically for the purpose also floated, watching and waiting. Inside the vessel its human crew discussed the situation, monitored the data coming in from the ship’s own sensors and those coming in from the small cloud of dispersed machines. The ship passed some of the time by making up elaborate games for the humans to play. Meanwhile it kept up its observation of the Excession and scanned the space around, waiting for the first of the other ships to arrive.

Sixteen days after the Culture craft had stumbled upon the Excession and six days after the discovery had been made public, the first ship appeared, its presence noted initially within the Fate Amenable To Change’s main sensor array. The GCU moved one state of readiness higher, signalled what was happening to the Ethics Gradient and the Not Invented Here, fastened its track scanner on the incoming signal, began a tentative reconfiguration of its remote sensor platforms and started to move towards the newcomer round the perimeter of the Excession’s safe limit at a speed it hoped was pitched nicely between polite deliberation and alarm-raising urgency. It sent a standard interrogatory signal burst to the approaching craft.

The vessel was the Sober Counsel, an Explorer Ship of the Zetetic Elench’s Stargazer Clan’s Fifth fleet. The Fate Amenable To Change felt relief; the Elench were friends.

Identifications completed, the two ships rendezvoused, locally stationary just a few tens of kilometres apart on the outskirts of the safe limit from the Excession the Culture vessel had set.

— Welcome.

— Thank you… Dear holy stasis. Is that thing attached to the grid, or is it my sensors?

— If it’s your sensors, it’s mine too. Impressive, isn’t it? Becomes greatly less so once you’ve sat looking at it for a week or two, take my word for it. I hope you’re just here to observe. That’s all I’m doing.

— Waiting on the big guns?

— That’s right.

— When do they arrive?

— That’s restricted. Promise this won’t go outside the Elench?

— Promise.

— A Medium SV gets here in twelve days; the first General SV in fourteen, then one every few days for a week, then one a day, then several a day, by which time I expect a few other Involveds will probably have started to show. Don’t ask me what the GSVs will consider a quorum before they act. How about you?

— Can we talk off the record, just the two of us?

— All right.

— We have another ship heading here, two days away still. The rest of the fleet are still undecided, though they have stopped drawing further away. We lost a ship somewhere round here. The Peace Makes Plenty.

— Ah. Did you indeed? About when?

— Some time between 28.789 and 805.

— This is still confidential within the Elench, then?

— Yes. We searched this volume as best we could for two weeks but found nothing. What brought you here?

— Suggestion by my home GSV, the Ethics Gradient. That was in 841. Wanted me to look in the Upper Leaf Swirl Cloud Top. No reason given. Bumped into this on the way there. That’s all I know. (And the Fate Amenable To Change thought coldly about that suggestion. The Cloud Top volume was a long way from here, but that meant nothing. What mattered was that it had been given a relatively precise location within the Cloud Top to head for, and been given the subtlest of hints to watch out for anything interesting while en route. Given where it had been when it had received the suggestion from its home GSV, its route had inevitably taken it near the Excession… Thirty-six days had elapsed between the date the Elench knew they might have lost a ship and the time when it had been dispatched on what was starting to look a little like a set-up… It wondered what had taken place in between. Could some Elench ship have leaked word to the Culture? But then how had such a leak apparently produced such accuracy, given that it, a single ship, had practically run straight into the damn Excession, while the Elench had spent two weeks here with seven-eighths of a full fleet and spotted nothing?) ~ Feel free to ask the Ethics Gradient what prompted its suggestion, it added.

— Thank you.

— You’re welcome.

— I’d like to try contacting the Excession. This might be where our comrade disappeared. At the least it might have some information. At most, and for all we know, our ship is still in there. I want to talk to it, maybe send a drone-ship in if it doesn’t reply.

— Madness. This thing is welded into the grids, both directions. Know anything that can do that? Me neither. I’m not even going to start feeling safe until there’s a fleet of GSVs round here. Heck, I was pleased to see you there; Company at last, I thought. Somebody to pass the time with while I sit out my lonely vigil. Now you want to start poking this thing with a stick. Are you crazy?

— No, but we might have a ship in distress in there. I can’t just sit here doing nothing. Have you attempted to contact the entity?

— No. I sent back a pro forma to its initial Hello, but… wait a moment. Look at the signal it sent (signal enclosed).

— There. You see? I told you! That was probably an Elench-sourced handshake burst.

— Meatshit. Yes, I see. Well, maybe your pal did find the damn thing first, but if it did, it probably did exactly what you’re proposing to do. And it’s gone. Disappeared. You seeing where this is leading?

— I intend to be careful.

— Uh-huh. Was your comrade vessel notoriously careless?

— Indeed not.

— Well then.

— I appreciate your concern. Was there any sign of contention in the volume when you got here? Emergency or distress signals? Voyage Event Record Ejectiles?

— There was this, here (material analysis/location enclosed), but if you want to mention any of this stuff on record you’d better make it look like you just stumbled across the debris, all right?

— Thank you. Yes, of course… Looks like one of our little-drones was caught up in something. Hmm. Sort of… smells subsidiary somehow, don’t you think?

— Possibly. I know what you mean. It’s untidy.

— Back on record?

— Okay.

— I hereby give notice I intend to attempt to contact the entity.

— I beg you not to. Let me make a request that you be allowed to take part in the Culture investigation when it takes place. I’m sure there is every chance you will be welcome to share in the relevant data.

— I’m sorry, I have my own reasons for considering the matter urgent.

— Off record again?

— All right.

— My records show you to be — to all intents and purposes — identical to the Peace Makes Plenty.

— Yes. Go on?

— Don’t you see? Look, if this thing jeopardised your comrade with no more fuss than an escaped little-drone, what’s it going to be able to do now that it’s had a chance to pick over the structure and mind-set of your sister craft for at least sixty-six days?

— I have the benefit of being forewarned. And the entity may not have been able entirely to take over the Peace Makes Plenty yet. The ship might be inside there, under siege. Perhaps all the entity’s intellectual energies are being absorbed in the maintenance of that blockade. That being the case my intervention may lift the siege and free my comrade.

— Cousin, this is self-delusion. We have already dealt with the issue of the minimal extra safeguarding provided by you having been alerted to the entity’s potential danger; the Peace Makes Plenty could hardly have been less prepared. I appreciate your feelings towards your fellow craft and Fleet-mate, but it rends the bounds of possibility to believe that something capable of perpetuating E-grid links in both directions is going to be substantially troubled by craft with the capabilities of ourselves. The Excession has not troubled me but then I did not trouble it; we exchanged greetings, no more. What you propose might be construed as interference, or even as a hostile act. I have accepted a duty to observe and won’t be able to help you if you get into trouble. Please, please reconsider.

— I take your point. I still intend to attempt communication with the entity but I shall not recommend that a drone approach be made. I have to put all this to my humans, of course, but they usually concur.

— Naturally. I urge you to argue strongly against sending any object towards the Excession, should your human crew suggest this.

— I’ll see which way they jump. This could take a while; they like arguing.

— Don’t be in any rush on my account.

II

The Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time swung out of the darkness between the stars and braked hard, scrubbing velocity off in a wild, extravagant flare of energies which briefly left a livid line of disturbance across the surface of the energy grid. It came to a local-relative stop a light month out from the cold, dark, slowly tumbling body that was the ship store Pittance, some way beyond the outside edge of the tiny world’s spherical cloud of defence/attack mechanisms. It flashed a Permission-To-Approach signal at the rock.

The reply took longer than it would have expected.

tightbeam, M16, tra. @n4.28. 882.1398]

xPittance Store

oROU Killing Time

(Permission withheld.) What is your business here?

oo

[tightbeam, M16, tra. @n4.28.882.1399]

xROU Killing Time

oPittance Store

Just stopping by to make sure you’re all right. What’s the problem? (PTA burst.)

oo

(Permission withheld.) Who sent you?

oo

What makes you think I had to be sent? (PTA burst.)

oo

(Permission withheld.) I am a restricted entity. I have no duty or obligation to permit any other craft to approach my vicinity. Traditionally Stores are only approached on a need-to basis. What is your need?

oo

There is some activity in the volume which includes your current location. People are concerned. A neighbourly check-up seemed timely. (PTA burst.)

oo

(Permission withheld.) Such concern would be better expressed by leaving me alone. Your visit might even attract attention, all of which I find intrinsically unwelcome. Please leave immediately, and kindly create less of a display on departure than you made on your arrival.

oo

I consider it my duty to assess your current state of integrity. I regret to say I have not been reassured by your recalcitrant attitude. You will do me the minimally polite honour of allowing me to interface with your independent external event-monitoring systems. (PTA burst.)

oo

(Permission withheld.) No! I shall not! I am perfectly able to take care of myself and there is nothing of interest contained within my associated independent security systems. Any attempt to access them without my permission will be treated as an act of aggression. This is your last chance to quit my jurisdiction before I emit a protest-registering signal concerning your unreasonable and boorish behaviour.

oo

I have already composed my own report detailing your bizarre and uncooperative attitude and copying this signal exchange. I shall release the compac immediately if a satisfactory reply is not received to this message. (PTA burst.)

…

Acknowledge signal.

…

Acknowledge signal!

I repeat: I have already composed my own report detailing your bizarre and uncooperative attitude. I shall release the compac immediately if a satisfactory reply is not received to this message. I shall not warn you again. (PTA burst.)

oo

(Permission granted.) Purely in the interests of a quiet life, only on condition that my associate security monitoring systems remain untouched, and under protest.

oo

Thank you; of course.

Under way. Heaving to at 2km from your rotational envelope in thirty minutes.

— Thanks to your delaying tactics, Commander, it probably already suspects something and may well have signalled back to whoever sent it already. Think yourself lucky we have as much as half an hour to prepare; it is being cautious.

They had re-sealed the airlocks from the accommodation section and pumped in some real atmosphere. Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe had been able to shed his space suit some days earlier. The gravity was still far too mild but it was better than floating. The Commander clicked his beak at the image on the screen presented by the mobile command centre they’d set up in what had been the humans’ pool/growing unit. A lieutenant at the Commander’s side spoke quietly but urgently to the twenty other Affronters distributed throughout the base’s caverns, letting them know what was going on.

The Commander looked back impatiently, waiting for the servant who’d been sent to fetch his suit the instant the Culture warship had appeared on the other craft’s sensors. On secondary screens, he could see suited Affronter technicians, their machines and some slaved drones working on the exteriors of the stored ships. They had about half of them ready to get out and go; a decent fleet, but they needed the rest, and preferably all at once, and as a complete surprise to the Culture and everybody else.

“Can’t you destroy it?” the Commander asked the traitor Culture vessel. He glanced at the status of the nearest Affront vessels. Far too far away. They had avoided approaching Pittance in case they could be monitored by other Culture craft.

The Attitude Adjuster didn’t like vocalising; it preferred to print out its side of a conversation:

— If it gets to within a few minutes, yes, perhaps. It might have been relatively easy, if I could have caught it completely unawares. However, I doubt that was ever very likely given that it must have been suspicious to come here in the first place and is almost certainly completely out of the question now.

“What about the ships we’ve cleared?”

— Commander, they haven’t been woken up yet. Until I’ve done that they’re useless. And if we wake half of them now they’ll have too long to think, too much time to do their own checking around before we need them for the main action. Our project must all happen in a rush, in a state of perceived chaos, panic and urgency, or it cannot happen effectively at all.

There was a pause while the message scrolled along and off the screen, then:

— Commander, I suspect this will be a formality, but I have to ask; do you wish to admit to what has happened here and turn your command over without a fight to the ROU Killing Time? This will probably be our last opportunity to avoid hostilities.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Commander said sourly.

— I thought not. Very well. I shall vector away in the skein-shadow of the rock and try to loop round behind the ROU. Let it enter the defence system. Wait until it’s a week inside, no more, and then set everything you have upon it. I urge you again, Commander; turn over the tactical command apparatus to me.

“No,” the Commander said. “Leave and do whatever you think will best jeopardise the Culture vessel. I shall allow it to arrive at a point three weeks in and then attack.”

— I am on my way. Do not let the ship come within a light week of the store itself, Commander. I know how it will think if it is attacked; this is not some genteel Orbital Mind or a nicely timorous General Contact Unit; this is a Culture warship showing every sign of being fully armed and ready to press matters.

“What, creeping in as it is?” the Commander sneered.

— Commander, you would be amazed and appalled at how few bright sides there are concerning the appearance and behaviour of a warship like this. The fact it’s not charging in through the defence screen and metaphorically skidding to a stop is almost certainly a bad sign; it probably means it’s one of the wily ones. I repeat; do not wait until it is most of the way into the defence system before opening fire. Assaulted so far inside the defensive field it may well figure that it has no chance of escape and so might as well continue towards you and attack, and at that sort of range it would stand a decent chance of being able to obliterate the entire store and all the ships within it.

The Commander felt almost annoyed that the ship hadn’t appealed to his own personal sense of self-preservation. “Very well,” he snapped. “Half way in; two weeks.”

— Commander, no! That is still too close. If we cannot destroy the ship in the first instant of the engagement it must be presented with a reasonable opportunity to escape, otherwise it may go for glory rather than attempt to extricate itself.

“But if it escapes it can alert the Culture!”

— If our attack is not immediately successful it will signal elsewhere anyway, assuming it has not already done so. We shall not be able to stop it. In that case, we shall have been discovered… though with any luck that will only put our plans out by a few days. Believe me, the craft’s physical escape will not bring the Culture here any quicker than a signal would. You will be putting this entire mission in jeopardy if you allow the vessel to come within more than three light weeks of the store.

“All right!” the Commander spat. He flicked a tentacle over the glowing board of the command desk. The communication link was cut. The Attitude Adjuster did not attempt to re-establish it.

“Your suit, sir,” said a voice from behind. The Commander whirled round to find the gelding midshipman — uniformed but not suited — with his space suit in his limbs.

“Oh, at last!” the Commander screamed; he flicked a tentacle at the creature’s eye stalks; the blow bounced them back off its casing. The gelding whimpered and fell back, gas sac deflating. The Commander grabbed his suit and pulled himself inside it. The midshipman staggered along the floor, half blinded.

The Commander ordered his lieutenant to reconfigure the command desk. From here they could personally control all the systems that had been entrusted by the Culture to the Mind which the traitor ship had killed. The command desk was like an ultimate instrument of destruction; a giant keyboard to play death tunes on. Some of the keys, admittedly, had to be left to trigger themselves once set, but these controls really did control.

The holo screen projected a sphere out towards the Commander. The globe displayed the volume of real space around Pittance, with tiny green, white and gold flecks representing major components of the defence system. A dull blue dot represented the approaching warship, coasting in towards them. Another dot, bright red, on the directly opposite side of the ship store from the blue dot and much closer — though drawing quickly away — was the traitor ship Attitude Adjuster.

Another screen alongside showed an abstracted hyperspatial view of the same situation, indicating the two ships on different surfaces of the skein. A third screen showed a transparent abstract of Pittance itself, detailing its ship-filled caverns and surface and internal defence systems.

The Commander finished getting into his space suit and powering it up. He settled back into position. He reviewed the situation. He knew better than to try to conduct matters at a tactical level, but he appreciated the strategic influence he could wield here. He was dreadfully tempted, all the same, to take personal control and fire all the defence systems personally, but he was aware of the enormous responsibility he had been given in this mission and was equally conscious that he had been carefully selected for this task. He had been chosen because he knew when not to — what had the traitor ship called it? Go for glory. He knew when not to go for glory. He knew when to back off, when to take advice, when to retreat and regroup.

He flicked open the communicator channel to the traitor ship. “Did the warship stop exactly a light month out?” he asked.

— Yes.

“That’s thirty-two standard Culture days.”

— Correct.

“Thank you.” He closed the channel.

He looked at the lieutenant at his side. “Set everything within range to open fire on the warship the instant it crosses the eight-point one days’ limit.” He sat back as the lieutenant’s limbs flickered over the holo displays, putting his command into effect. Only just in time, the Commander noted. He’d been longer getting into his suit than he’d thought.

“Forty seconds, sir,” the lieutenant said.

“… Give it just enough time to relax,” the Commander said, more to himself than to anybody else. “If that is how these things work…”

Exactly eight and a tenth light days in from the position the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had held while negotiating its permission to approach, space all around the blue dot on the screen scintillated abruptly as a thousand hidden devices of a dozen different types suddenly erupted into life in a precisely ordered sequence of destruction; in the real-space holo sphere it looked like a miniaturised stellar cluster suddenly bursting into existence all around the blue dot. The trace disappeared instantly inside a brilliant sphere of light. In the hyperspace holo sphere, the dot lasted a little longer; slowed down, it could be seen firing some munitions back for a microsecond or so, then it too disappeared in the wash of energies bursting out of the real-space skein and into hyperspace in twin bulging plumes.

The lights in the accommodation space flickered and dimmed as monumental amounts of power suddenly diverted to the rock’s own long-range weaponry.

The Commander left the comm channel to the traitor ship open. Its own course had altered the instant the defence weaponry had been unleashed; now its course was hooked, changing colour from red to blue and curving up and round and vectoring in hyperspace too, looping round to the point where the slowly fading and dissipating radiation shells marked the focus of the system’s annihilatory power.

A flat screen to the Commander’s left wavered, as if some still greater power surge had sucked energy even from its protected circuits. A message flashed up on it:

— Missed, you fuckers! the legend read.

“What?” the Commander said.

The display flashed once and came clear again.

— Commander; the Attitude Adjuster here again. As you may have gathered, we have failed.

“What? But..!”

— Keep all defence and sensory systems at maximum readiness; ramp the sensor arrays up to significant degradation point in a week; we shall not need them beyond then.

“But what happened? We got it!”

— I shall move to plug the gap the attack left in our defences. Ready all the cleared ships for immediate awakening; I may have to rouse them within a day or two. Complete the tests on the Displacers; use a real ship if you have to. And run a total level-zero systems check of your own equipment; if the ship was able to insert a message into your command desk it may have been able to carry out more pertinent mischief therein.

The Commander slammed a limb end down on the desk. “What is going on?” he roared. “We got the bastard, didn’t we?”

— No, Commander. We “got” some sort of shuttle or module. Somewhat faster and better equipped than the average example such a ship would normally carry, but possibly constructed en route with such a ruse in mind. Now we know why its approach appeared so politely leisurely.

The Commander peered into the holo spheres, juggling with magnifications and field-depths. “Then where the hell is it?”

— Give me control of the primary scanner, Commander, just for a moment, will you?

The Commander fumed in his space suit for a moment, then nodded his eye stalks at the lieutenant.

The second holo sphere became a narrow, dark cone and swung so that the wide end was directed towards the ceiling. Pittance glowed at the very point of the other end of the projection, the screen of defence devices reduced to a tiny florette of coloured light, close in to the cone’s point. At the far, wide end there was a tiny, fiercely, almost painfully red dot.

— There is the good ship Killing Time, Commander. It set off at almost the same time I did. Regrettably, it is both quicker and faster than I. It has already done us the honour of copying to me the signal it sent to the rest of the Culture the moment we opened fire on its emissary. I’ll transmit you a copy too, minus the various, venomous unpleasantnesses directed specifically at myself. Thank you for the use of your control desk. You can have it back now.

The cone collapsed to become a sphere again. The traitor ship’s last message scrolled off the side of the flat screen. The Commander and the lieutenant looked at each other. The small screen came up with another incoming signal.

— Oh, and will you contact Affront High Command, or shall I? Somebody had better tell them we’re at war with the Culture.

III

Genar-Hofoen woke up with a headache it took minutes to calm down; performing the relevant pain-management inside his head took far too much concentration for somebody feeling this bad to perform quickly. He felt like he was a child on a beach, swinging a toy spade and building a sea wall all around him as the tide rushed in; waves kept over-topping and he was constantly shovelling sand up to small breaches in his defences, and the worst of it was the more sand he piled up the deeper he dug and higher he had to throw. Eventually water started seeping in from the bottom of his sea fort, and he gave in; he just blanketed all pain. If somebody started holding flames to his feet or he jammed his fingers in a door that’d just be too bad. He knew better than to shake his head, so he imagined shaking his head; he’d never had a hangover this bad.

He tried opening one eye. It didn’t seem too keen on cooperating. Try the other one. No, that one didn’t want to face the world either. Very dark. Like being wrapped up inside a big dark cloak or some—

He jerked; both eyes tore open, making both smart and water.

He was looking at some sort of big screen, in-holo’d. Space; stars. He looked down, finding it difficult to move his head. He was held inside a large, very comfortable but very secure chair; it was made of some sort of soft hide, it was half reclined and it smelled very pleasant, but it had big padded hoops that had clamped themselves over his forearms and his lower legs. A similar hide-covered bar looped over his lower abdomen. He tried moving his head again. It was held inside some sort of open-face helmet which felt like it was attached to the headrest of the chair.

He looked to one side. Hide-covered wall; polished wood. A panel or screen showing what looked like an abstract painting. It was an abstract painting; a famous one. He recognised it. Ceiling black, light studded. In front just the screen. Floor carpeted. Looked much like the inside of a standard Culture module so far. Very quiet. Not that that meant anything. He looked to his right.

There were two more seats like his across the width of the cabin — it was probably a cabin and this was almost certainly a nine or twelve person module; he couldn’t see behind to tell. The seat in the middle, the one nearer him, was occupied by a bulky, rather antique-looking drone, its flat-topped bulk resting on the cushion of the seat. People always said drones looked a bit like suitcases but this one reminded Genar-Hofoen of an old-fashioned sledge. Somehow, it gave the impression that it was staring at the screen. Its aura field was flickering as though it was undergoing rapid mood-changes; mostly it displayed a mixture of grey, brown and white.

Frustration, displeasure and anger. Not an encouraging combination.

The seat on the far side of the cabin held a beautiful young woman who looked just a little like Dajeil Gelian. Her nose was smaller, her eyes were the wrong colour, her hair was quite different. It was hard to tell whether her figure bore any resemblance to the other woman because she was inside what looked like a jewelled space suit; a standard-ish Culture hard suit plated in platinum or silver and liberally plastered in gems that certainly glittered and flashed in the overhead lights as though they were things like rubies, emeralds, diamonds and so on. The suit’s helmet, equally encrusted, rested on the arm of her seat. She wasn’t shackled into place in the seat, he noticed.

The girl bore on her face a frown so deep and severe he imagined it would have made almost anybody else look quite supremely ugly. On her it looked rather fetching. Probably not the desired effect at all. He decided to risk a smile; the open-faced helmet he was wearing ought to let her see it.

“Umm, hello,” he said.

The old drone rose and flicked round as if glancing at him. It thumped back into the seat cushion, its aura fields off. “It’s hopeless,” it announced, as though it hadn’t heard what the man had said. “We’re locked out. Nowhere to go.”

The girl in the far seat narrowed her fiercely blue eyes and glared at Genar-Hofoen. When she spoke, her voice was like an ice stiletto. “This is all your fault, you ghastly piece of shit,” she said.

Genar-Hofoen sighed. He was losing consciousness once more but he didn’t care. He had absolutely no idea who this creature was, but he liked her already.

It went dark again.

IV

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.882.4656]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

It’s war! Those insane fucks have declared war! They’re mad!

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.882.4861]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oLSV Serious Callers Only

I was about to call. I just got the message from the ship I requested attend Pittance. This looks bad.

oo

Bad? It’s a fucking catastrophe!

oo

Did your girl get her man?

oo

Oh, she got him all right, but then a few hours later the Affront High Command announced the birth of a bouncing baby war. The ship Phage sent to Tier was standing a day’s module travel away; it decided it had better things to do than hang around on a mission it had never been very happy with even from the beginning. I think the declaration of war came almost as a relief to it. It promptly announced its position to the Steely Glint and was immediately asked to ship out at maximum speed on some desperate defence mission. Bastard wouldn’t even tell me where. Took me real milliseconds to argue it out of confessing all to the Steely Glint and telling it exactly why it was anywhere near Tier in the first place. I was able to persuade it Phage’s honour rested on it keeping quiet; I don’t think it’ll squeal. I let it know I give serious grudge.

oo

But it was Demilled. Hasn’t it just gone back to Phage for munitioning?

oo

Ha! Demilitarised my backup. Fucker left Phage fully tooled. Phage’s own idea, sneaky scumbag. Always was over-protective. What comes of being that geriatric I suppose. Anyway, the Frank Exchange Of Views is cannoned to the gunwales and itching for a brawl, apparently. Whatever; it has gone. Which leaves our lass and the captive Genar-Hofoen floating in a module nearly a day out of Tier with nowhere to go. Tier is requesting — make that insisting — all Culture and Affront craft and personnel leave it for the duration of the hostilities and nobody’s being allowed in. I’ve tried to find somebody else within range to pick them up but it’s hopeless.

A Tier deep-scan inventory has already identagged their module. The Meatfucker is skimming in a day away and the module can make, oh, all of two hundred lights… Guess what happens next. We’ve failed.

oo

So it would appear. Was this the aim and is this now the result of the conspiracy? War with the Affront?

oo

I believe so. The Excession is still the more important matter, but its appearance and the possibilities it may open up have been used by the conspiracy to tempt the Affront into initiating hostilities. Pittance is worse, though.

That Pittance has fallen implies entrapment. It points to treachery. The Killing Time believes there was another Culture or ex-Culture ship there; not one of the stored vessels but another craft, something no less old than the stored vessels, but wiser and more experienced; something that’s been around as long as they, but awake all that time.

It believes that this ship was taking the part of the Pittance Mind when it communicated with it on its approach. I suspect it will prove to be a warship which apparently went Eccentric or Ulterior at some point in the last five hundred years and was — supposedly, not actually — demilitarised by one of the conspirators. I have a list of suspects.

The Killing Time suggests that this ship tricked its way beneath the Pittance Mind’s guard and either destroyed it or took it over. The store was then turned over to the Affront. They now have a ready-made instant battle fleet of Culture warcraft tech generations of development beyond their own ships and just nine days’ journey from the Excession. Nothing we can put in place in the time available can stop them.

For what it’s worth, the Killing Time is making all speed for Esperi. Nine days from now we’ll have the Not Invented Here and the Different Tan from the Gang there. The NIH has two operational Thug class ROUs it’s in the process of cannoning-up, a Hooligan LOU and a Delinquent GOU. Another couple of GSVs should be there too if they aren’t diverted because of the war, with a total of five OUs, two of them Torturer class. Eight of Phage’s Psychopath ROUs are bound for the Excession but the rest are down for defensive duties elsewhere to cope with likely threats from Affront battle units. Even those eight won’t get within punch-throwing range of the Excession until two days after the Affront can be there. Bottom line is there are a total of ten warships of various classes capable of making it to the Excession in time to make a stand against the Affront; enough to hold off the entire Affront navy if that was all we were going to be faced with, but simply not capable of holding back more than an eighth of the ships that could come out of Pittance. If they all go straight to the Excession, it will be theirs.

For the record, all the remaining ship stores are breaking themselves open, but the nearest is over five weeks’ travel away. A gesture, that’s all.

Oh, and a few other Involveds have offered help but they’re all either too weak or too far away. A couple of other barbarics are probably going to declare for the Affront once they’ve stopped scratching their heads and worked out what they might be able to get up to with the Culture’s attention diverted, but they’re even less relevant.

And if we were expecting some well-disposed Elders to step into the nursery and confiscate all our toys and restore order, it doesn’t look very likely so far; no notice taken, as far as anybody can tell.

oo

So. That just leaves our old friend, currently — possibly, probably, almost certainly — also en route. Wild card? Somehow part of the conspiracy? Have we any more thoughts? Come to that, have you had any reply from it?

oo

None, and no. No offence, but the SS is one of the more unfathomable Eccentrics. Perhaps it thinks the Excession requires Storing, perhaps it intends to ram it at that speed, or attempt to plunge into it and access other universes… I don’t know. There is some private issue being played out in this, I believe, and Genar-Hofoen fits in somewhere. I have almost given up thinking about this aspect of affairs. I shall continue my attempts to contact it but I don’t think it’s even looking at its signal files. The point is that the war itself takes precedence, with the Excession prioritised beyond that.

oo

No offence taken. So we are left with the Affront on the cusp of apotheosis or nemesis.

oo

Indeed. Quite how they intend to use these elderly but still potent warships to take control of the Excession one can only hazard at; perhaps they intend surrounding it and charging admission… But they have begun a war which — unless they can somehow gain control of the Excession and exploit it — they can only lose. They have a few hundred half-millennium-old warships; capable of inflicting untold damage let loose in a peaceable, un-militarised if relatively un-populated section of the galaxy, certainly, but only for a month or two at most. Then the Culture gathers the force to crush them utterly, and moves on to rip the Affront hegemony to shreds and impose its own peace upon it. There can be no other outcome. Unless the Excession does come into play. Which I doubt.

Maybe it is some sort of projection; maybe its appearance was not fortuitous but planned. This looks unlikely, I know, but everything else about this has been so cunningly put together… Whatever; the argument which everybody had thought was lost at the end of the Idiran War is about to be won. The agreement come to then is in the process of being overturned.

I for one am not going to stand for this. We may have failed to frustrate the conspiracy but it will still be possible to work towards the discovery of the guilty parties involved in its planning and implementation, both during and after the hostilities. I intend to copy all my thoughts, theories, evidence, communications and all other relevant documentation to every trusted colleague and contact I possess. If you have any intention of taking part in the course of action I am suggesting, I urge you to do the same and to relay this advice to The Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival.

I intend to pursue the perpetrators of this unnecessary war for as long as it takes until they are brought to justice, and I am aware both that I will no longer be able to do so without them knowing that I am doing so, and that there is no better circumstance to arrange for the jeopardisation of a fellow Mind than in time of war, when blanket secrecies are imposed, warcraft of every sort are loosed, mistakes can be claimed to have been made, deals done, mercenaries hired and old scores settled.

I do not believe I am being melodramatic in this. I will be under terminal threat and so will anybody else who determines to adopt the same course as I. The conspirators have played exceedingly dirty until this point and I cannot imagine they will do other than continue to do so now that their filthy scheme is on the very brink of success.

What do you say? Will you join in this perilous mission?

oo

How I wish that I could persuade myself, never mind you, that you are being melodramatic.

You risk more than I. My Eccentricity might save me. We have gone this far together. Count me in.

Oh, meat, they never said this would happen when they invited me onto the Group and into the Gang…

Hmm. I had forgotten how unpleasant the emotion of fear is. This is hateful! You’re right. Let’s get these bastards. How dare they disturb my peace of mind so just to teach some tentacled bunch of backwoods barbarians a lesson!

V

The battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade caught the cruise ship Just Passing Through on the outskirts of the Ekro system. The Culture craft — ten-kilometres of sleek beauty host to two hundred thousand holidaying travellers of umpteen different species-types — hove to as soon as the battle-cruiser came within range but the Affronter vessel put a shot across its bows anyway, just on general principles. The more determinedly assiduous revellers hadn’t believed the announcement about the war anyway, and thought the missile warhead’s detonation which lit up the skies ahead of the ship was just some particularly big but otherwise unimpressive firework.

It had been close. Another hour’s warning and the Culture ship’s hurried reconfiguring and matter-scavenging engine-rebuild would have ensured its escape. But it wasn’t to be.

The two ships joined. In the reception vestibule, a small party of people met a trio of suited Affronters as they emerged from the airlocks in a swirl of cool mists.

“You are the ship’s representative?”

“Yes,” the squat figure at the front of the humans said. “And you?”

“I am Colonel Alien-Befriender (first class) Fivetide Humidyear VII of the Winterhunter tribe and the battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade. This ship is claimed as prize in the name of the Affront Republic according to the normal rules of war. If you obey all our instructions promptly, there is every possibility that no harm will come to you, your passengers or crew. In case you have any illusions concerning your status, you are now our hostages. Any questions?”

“None that I either can’t guess the answer to or imagine you’d answer truthfully,” the avatar said. “Your jurisdiction is accepted under force of arms alone. Your actions while this situation persists will be recorded. Nothing less than the total destruction of this vessel atom by atom will wipe out that record, and when in due course—”

“Yes, yes. I’ll contact my lawyers now. Now take me to your best suite fitted out for Affront physiology.”

The girl was indignant with a kind of ferocity probably only somebody from the Peace faction could muster in such a situation. “But we’re the Peace faction,” she protested for the fifth or sixth time. “We’re… we’re like the true Culture, the way it used to be…”

“Ah,” Leffid said, grimacing as somebody pushed behind him and forced his chest into the front of the bar. He glanced round, scowling, and ruffled his wings back into shape. The Starboard lounge of the Xoanon was crowded — the ship was crowded — and he could see his wings were going to end up in a terrible shape by the time this was over. Mind you, there were compensations; somebody pushed into the bar and squeezed the Peace faction girl closer to him, so that her bare arm touched him and he could feel the warmth of her hip against his. She smelled wonderful. “Now that could be your problem,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic. “Calling yourselves the true Culture, you see? To the Tier Sintricates, and even to the Affront, that could sound, well confusing.”

“But everybody knows we won’t have anything to do with war. It’s just so unfair?” She flicked her short black hair and stared into the drug bowl she held. It was fuming too. “Fucking war!” She sounded close to tears.

Leffid judged the time right to put his arm round her. She didn’t seem to mind. He thought the better of hinting that in his own small way he might have helped start the war. Sort of thing some people might be impressed with, but not all.

Besides, he’d given his word, and the Tendency had been rewarded for its tip-off to the Mainland with this very ship, currently engaged in the highly humanitarian task of helping to evacuate Tier habitat of all Temporarily Undesirable Aliens, not to mention earning the Tendency some much-needed cordiality credit with a whole raft of other Involveds and strands of the Culture. The girl sighed deeply and held the drug bowl to her face, letting some of the heavy grey smoke tip towards her exceedingly pretty little nose. She glanced round at him with a small brave smile, her gaze rising over his shoulder.

“Like your wings,” she said.

He smiled. “Why, thank you…” (Damn!) “… ah, my dear.”

The professor blinked. Yes, it really was an Affronter floating at the far end of the room, near the windows. Suit like a small, tubby spacecraft, all gleaming knobbly bits, articulated limbs and glistening prisms. The gauzy white curtains blew in around it, letting bright, high-angled sunlight flow in waves across the carpet. Oh dear, was that her underwear draped over a hassock in the Affronter’s shadow?

“I beg your pardon?” she said. She wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

“Phoese Cloathel-Beldrunsa Khoriem lei Poere da’Merire, you have been deemed the senior human representative on the Orbital named Cloathel. You are hereby informed that this Orbital is claimed in the name of the Affront Republic. All Culture personnel are now Affront citizens (third class). All orders from superiors will be obeyed. Any resistance will be treated as treason.”

The professor rubbed her eyes.

“Cloudsheen, is that you?” she asked the Affronter. The destroyer Wingclipper had arrived the day before with a cultural exchange group the university had been expecting for some weeks. Cloudsheen was the ship’s captain; they’d had a good talk about pan-species semantics at the party just the night before. Intelligent, surprisingly sensitive creature; not remotely as aggressive as she’d expected. This looked like him, but different. She had a disquieting feeling the extra bits on his suit were weapons.

“Captain Cloudsheen, if you please, professor,” the Affronter said, floating closer. It was directly above her skirt, lying crumpled on the floor. Heavens, she had been messy last night.

“Are you serious?” she asked. She had a strong urge to fart but she held it in; she was oddly concerned that the Affronter would think she was being insulting.

“I am perfectly serious, professor. The Affront and the Culture are now at war.”

“Oh,” she said. She glanced over at her terminal brooch, lying on an extension of the bed’s headboard. Well, the Newsflash light was winking, right enough; practically strobing in fact; must be urgent indeed. She thought. “Shouldn’t you be addressing this to the Hub?”

“It refuses to communicate,” the Affronter officer said. “We have surrounded it. You have been deemed most senior Culture — ex-Culture, I should say — representative in its place. This is not a joke, professor, I’m sorry to say. The Orbital has been mined with AM warheads. If it proves necessary, your world will be destroyed. The full cooperation of yourself and everybody else on the Orbital will help ensure this does not happen.”

“Well, I don’t accept this honour, Cloudsheen. I—”

The Affronter had turned and was floating back towards the windows again. It swivelled in the air as it retreated. “You don’t have to,” it said. “As I said, you have been deemed.”

“Well then,” she said, “I deem you to be acting without any authority I care to recognise and—”

The Affronter darted through the air towards her and stopped directly above the bed, making her flinch despite herself. She smelled… something cold and toxic. “Professor,” Cloudsheen said. “This is not an academic debate or some common room word-game. You are prisoners and hostages and all your lives are forfeit. The sooner you understand the realities of the situation, the better. I know as well as you that you are in no way in charge of the Orbital, but certain formalities have to be observed, regardless of their practical irrelevance. I consider that duty has now been discharged and frankly that’s all that matters, because I have the AM warheads; and you don’t.” It drew quickly away, sucking a cool breeze behind it. It stopped just before the windows again. “Lastly,” it said, “I am sorry to have disturbed you. I thank you personally and on behalf of my crew for the reception party. It was most enjoyable.”

He left. The curtains soughed in and out, slowly golden.

Her heart, she was surprised to discover, was pounding.

The Attitude Adjuster woke them one by one, telling each the same story; Excessionary threat near Esperi, Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Some of the vessels were immediately suspicious, or at least puzzled. The confirmatory messages from other craft — the No Fixed Abode, the Different Tan and the Not Invented Here — convinced them in every case.

Part of the Attitude Adjuster felt sick. It knew it was doing the right thing, in the end, but at a simple, surface level it felt disgust at the deception it was having to foist upon its fellow ships. It tried to tell itself that it would all end with little or no blood spilled and few or no Mind-deaths, but it knew that there was no guarantee. It had spent years thinking all this through, shortly after the proposition had been put to it seventy years earlier, and had known then, accepted then that it might come to this, but it had always hoped it would not. Now the moment was at hand it was starting to wonder if it had made a mistake, but knew it was too late to turn back now. Better to believe that it had been right then and now it was merely being short-sighted and squeamish.

It could not be wrong. It was not wrong. It had had an open mind and it had become convinced of the rightness of the course which was being suggested and in which it would play such an important part. It had done as it had been asked to do; it had watched the Affront, studied them, immersed itself in their history, culture and beliefs. And in all that time it had achieved a kind of sympathy for them, an empathy, even, and at the start perhaps a degree of admiration for them, but it had also built up a cold and terrible hatred of their ways.

In the end, it thought it understood them because it was just a little like them.

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that — by some criteria — a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

The Attitude Adjuster thought it could see into the souls of the Affronters. They were not the happy-go-lucky life-and-soul-of-the-party grand fellows with a few bad habits they were commonly thought to be; they were not thoughtlessly cruel in the course of seeking to indulge other more benign and even admirable pleasures; they were not merely terrible rascals.

They gloried, first and foremost, in their cruelty. Their cruelty was the point. They were not thoughtless. They knew they hurt their own kind and others and they revelled in it; it was their purpose. The rest — the robust joviality, the blokish vivacity — was part happy accident, part cunningly exaggerated ploy, the equivalent of an angelic-looking child discovering that a glowing smile will melt the severest adult heart and excuse almost any act, however dreadful.

It had agreed to the plan now coming to fruition with a heavy soul. People would die, Minds be destroyed because of what it was doing. The ghastly danger was gigadeathcrime. Mass destruction. Utter horror. The Attitude Adjuster had lied, it had deceived, it had acted — by what it knew would be the consensual opinion of all but a few of its peers — with massive dishonour. It was all too well aware its name might live for millennia hence as that of a traitor, as an abhorrence, an abomination.

Still, it would do what it had become convinced had to be done, because to do otherwise would be to wish an even worse self-hatred upon itself, the ultimate abomination of disgust at oneself.

Perhaps, it told itself as it brought another slumbering warcraft to wakefulness, the Excession would make everything all right. The half-thought was already ironic, but it continued with it anyway. Yes; maybe the Excession was the solution. Maybe it really was worth all that was being risked in its name, and capable of bringing placid resolution. That would be sweet; the excuse takes over, the casus belli brings peace… Like fuck, it thought. The ship sneered at itself, examining the idiotic thought and then discarding it with probably less contempt than it deserved.

It was, anyway, too late to reconsider now. Too much had been done already. The Pittance Mind was already dead, choosing self-destruction rather than compromise; the human who had been the only other conscious sentience in the rock had been killed, and the de-stored ships would speed, utterly deceived, to what could well prove to be their doom; the future alone knew who or what else they would take with them. The war had begun and all the Attitude Adjuster could do was play out the part it had agreed to play.

Another warship Mind surfaced to wakefulness.

… Excessionary threat near Esperi, the Attitude Adjuster told the newly woken ship; Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Confirmatory messages from the GSV No Fixed Abode, the GCU Different Tan and the MSV Not Invented Here attached…

The module Scopell-Afranqui left the urgencies of the instant behind for a moment and retreated into a kind of simulation of its plight.

The craft had a romantic, even sentimental streak which Genar-Hofoen had rarely glimpsed in all the two years they had spent together on God’shole habitat (and which, indeed, it had deliberately kept hidden for fear of his ridicule), and it saw itself now as being like the castellan of some small fortified embassy in a teeming barbarian city, far from the civilised lands that were his home; a wise, thoughtful man, technically a warrior, but more of a thinker, one who saw much more of the realities behind the embassy’s mission than those in his charge, and who had devoutly hoped that his warrior skills would never be called upon. Well, that time had come; the native soldiers were hammering at the compound’s gates right now and it was only a matter of time before the embassy compound fell. There was treasure in the embassy and the barbarians would not rest until they had it.

The castellan left the parapet where he had looked out upon the besieging forces and retreated to his private chamber. His few troops were already putting up the best defence they could; nothing he could do or say would do other than hinder them now. His few spies had been dispatched some time ago through secret passageways into the city, to do what damage they could once the embassy itself was destroyed, as it surely must be. There was nothing else which awaited his attention. Save this one decision.

He had already opened the safe and taken out the sealed orders; the paper was in his hand. He read it again. So it was to be destruction. He had guessed as much, but it was still a shock somehow.

It should not have come to this, but it had. He had known the risks, they had been pointed out at the beginning, when he had taken up this position, but he had not really imagined for a moment that he would really be faced with either utter dishonour and the vicarious treachery of forced collaboration, or death at his own hand.

There was, of course, no real choice. Call it his upbringing. He looked ruefully around the small private chamber that held the memories of home, his library, his clothes and keepsakes. This was him. This was who he was. The same beliefs and principles that had led him here to this lonely outpost required that there was no choice over surrender or death. But there was still one choice to make, and it was a bitter one to be given.

He could destroy the embassy — and himself with it, of course — completely, so that all that would be left to the barbarians would be its stones. Or he could take the entire city with him. It was not just a city; in one sense it was not even principally a city; it was a vast arsenal, a crowded barracks and a busy naval port; altogether an important component of the barbarians’ war effort. Its destruction would benefit the side that the castellan was loyal to, the cause that he absolutely believed in; arguably it would save lives in the long run. Yet the city had its civilians too; the out-numbering innocents that were the women and children and the subjugated underclasses, not to mention the blameless others from neutral lands who just happened to find themselves caught up in the war through no fault of their own. Had he a right to snuff them out too by destroying the city?

He put the piece of paper down. He looked at his reflection in a distant looking glass.

Death. In all this choice there was no doubt about his own fate, only about how he would be remembered. As humanitarian, or weakling? As mass-murderer, or hero?

Death. How strange to contemplate it now.

He had always wondered how he would face it. There was a certain continued existence, of course. He had faith in that; the assurances of the priests that his soul was recorded in a great book, somewhere, and capable of resurrection. But the precise he he was right now; that would assuredly end, and soon; that was over.

Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on for ever risked ending up in some as yet unglimpsed horror-future. What if you lived for ever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?

Better to die than risk that.

Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.

The outer gates fell; he heard them go. The castellan stood up and went to the casement. In the courtyard, the barbarian soldiers flowed through to the last line of defence.

Soon. The choice, the choice. He could spin a coin, but that would be… cheap. Unworthy.

He walked to the device that would destroy the embassy compound, and the city too, if he chose.

There was no choice here, either. Not really.

There would be peace again. The only question was when.

He could not know if ultimately more people would suffer and die because he was choosing not to destroy the city, but at least this way the damage and the casualties would be confined to the minimum for the longest possible time. And if in the future he would be judged to have done the wrong thing and to have made the incorrect decision… well, death had the other advantage that he would not be present to suffer that knowledge of that judgement.

He double-checked that the device was set so that only the embassy would be destroyed, he waited a moment longer to be sure that he was calm and clear about what he was doing, then as the tears came to his eyes, he activated the device.

The module Scopell-Afranqui self-destructed in a blink of annihilatory energies centred on its AI core, obliterating it entirely; the module itself was blasted into a million pieces. The explosion sent a shiver through the fabric of God’shole habitat that was felt all the way round that great wheel; it took out a significant section of the surrounding inner docks area and caused a rupture in the skin of the engineering compartment beneath; this was quickly repaired.

The destroyer Riptalon was damaged and would require a further week in dock, though there were no fatalities or serious injuries on board. The explosion killed five officers and a few dozen soldiers and technicians in the docks and smaller craft alongside the module; a number of semi-aware AI entities were also lost and their cores later found to be corrupted by agent entities the module had succeeded in infiltrating into the habitat’s systems shortly before its destruction, despite every precaution. These, or their descendants, continued to significantly reduce the habitat’s contribution to the war effort for the duration of hostilities.

— So what’s it like being at war?

— Scary, when you have every reason to believe you may be sitting next to the real reason it was declared.

The GCU Fate Amenable To Change floated in a triangular pattern with the two Elencher vessels Sober Counsel and Appeal To Reason. The two Elench ships had repeatedly attempted to communicate with the Excession, entirely without success. The Fate was getting nervous, just waiting for the pressure building up with the crews of the two Elencher ships for more intrusive action to overcome the reticence of the craft themselves.

The three craft had secretly declared their own little pact over the last few days after the second Elencher ship had appeared on the scene. They had exchanged drone and human avatars, opened up volumes of their mind-sets they would not normally have exposed to craft of another society, and pledged not to act without consulting the others. That agreeable agreement would lapse if the Elenchers chose to try to interfere with the Excession. It would have to lapse to some extent anyway in a couple of days when the MSV Not Invented Here arrived and — the Fate suspected — started bossing everybody about, but it was trying desperately to dissuade the two Elencher ships from doing anything rash in the meantime.

— Are there any Affront warships known to be anywhere in this volume? the Appeal To Reason asked.

— No, the Fate Amenable To Change replied. ~ In fact they’ve been staying away and telling everybody else to do so as well. I suppose we should have guessed that was suspicious in itself. That’s the trouble with people like them I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.

— You think they want the Excession? the Sober Counsel asked.

— It’s possible.

— Perhaps they’re not coming here, suggested the Appeal To Reason. ~ Aren’t they attacking the whole Culture? There are reports of scores of ships and Orbitals being taken…

— I don’t know, the Fate admitted. It looks like madness to me; they can’t defeat the whole Culture.

— But they’re saying a ship-store at this rock Pittance has fallen, the Sober Counsel sent.

— Well, yes. Officially there’s still a blackout on that, but (off record, of course), if they are coming in this direction I wouldn’t want to be here in about a week’s time.

— So if we’re going to get through to the entity, we’d better do it soon, the Appeal To Reason sent.

— Oh, don’t start on about that again; you said yourself they might not be coming… the Fate began, then broke off. ~ Hold on. Are you getting this?

…(SEMIWIDE BEAM, AFFRONTBASE ALLTRANS, LOOP.)

ATTENTION ALL CRAFT IN ESPERI NEAR SPACE: THE ENTITY LOCATED AT (location sequence enclosed) WAS FIRST DISCOVERED BY THE AFFRONT CRUISER FURIOUS PURPOSE ON (trans; n4.28.803.8+) AND IS HEREBY FULLY AND RIGHTFULLY CLAIMED ON THE BEHALF OF THE AFFRONT REPUBLIC AS AN INTEGRAL AND FULLY SOVEREIGN AFFRONT PROPERTY SUBJECT TO AFFRONT LAWS, EDICTS, RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES.

IN THE LIGHT OF THE CULTURE-PROVOKED HOSTILITIES NOW EXISTING BETWEEN THE AFFRONT AND THE CULTURE, THE FULL CUSTODIAL PROTECTION OF AFFRONT ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO THE FOREMENTIONED VOLUME AND TO THAT END AN ORDINANCE ABSOLUTELY PROHIBITING ALL NON-AFFRONT TRAFFIC WITHIN TEN STANDARD LIGHT YEARS AROUND THE ENTITY HAS BEEN ISSUED WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT AND HENCE ALL CRAFT INSIDE THIS VOLUME ARE ORDERED TO VACATE SAID VOLUME FORTHWITH.

ALL CRAFT AND MATERIAL FOUND TO BE WITHIN THIS VOLUME WILL BE DEEMED TO BE IN CONTRAVENTION OF AFFRONT LAW AND IN CONTEMPT OF THE AFFRONT SUPREME COMMITTEE THUS SUBJECTING THEMSELVES TO THE FULL PUNITIVE MIGHT OF THE AFFRONT MILITARY.

TO ENFORCE SAID ORDINANCE A HUNDREDS-STRONG WAR FLEET OF EX-CULTURE CRAFT WHICH HAVE CHOSEN TO RENOUNCE THEIR PREVIOUS ALLEGIANCE TO THE ENEMY HAVE BEEN DISPATCHED TO THE ABOVE-MENTIONED LOCATION WITH INSTRUCTIONS RUTHLESSLY TO ENFORCE THIS ORDER.

GLORY TO THE AFFRONT!

— So there, the Sober Counsel communicated. ~ That’s us told.

— And they can be here in a week, added the Appeal To Reason.

— Hmm. That location they gave, the Fate sent. ~ Look where it’s centred.

— Ah-hah, replied the Sober Counsel.

— Ah-hah what? asked the Appeal To Reason.

— It’s not centred on the entity itself, the other Elench ship pointed out. ~ It’s just off-centre where whatever happened to that little-drone took place.

— The Furious Purpose is one of a couple of Affronter craft that left Tier at the same time the fleet did; it could have been following the Peace Makes Plenty, the Sober Counsel told the Culture ship. ~ It is certainly the ship that returned to Tier… thirty-six days after whatever happened here.

— That’s a little slow, the Fate sent. ~ According to my records a meteorite-class light cruiser should have been able to do it in… oh, wait a moment; it had an engine fault. And then while it was on Tier it suffered some sort of… hmm. Oh; look!

The Excession was doing something.

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883.1344]

xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

oGSV Sabbaticaler No Fixed Abode

Right. I have thought about this. No, I will not help in trapping the Serious Callers Only or the Shoot Them Later. I reported my previous misgivings and the fact that I had shared them with the other two craft because in the course of my investigations into what I perceived as a dangerous conspiracy I became convinced of the need to deal decisively with the Affront. I still do not approve of the way this has been done, but by the time your plans became uncovered it would arguably have caused more damage attempting to arrest them than letting them go ahead. I still find it nard to believe tnat the rogue ship which tricked the ship store at Pittance was acting alone and that you merely took advantage of the ruse, despite your assurances. However, I have no evidence to the contrary. I have given my word and I will not go public with all this, but I will consider that agreement dependent on the continued well-being and freedom from persecution of both the Serious Callers Only and the Shoot Them Later, as well, of course, as being contingent upon my own continued integrity. I don’t doubt you will think me either paranoid or ridiculous for systematising this arrangement with various other friends and colleagues, particularly given the hostilities which commenced yesterday. I am thinking of taking some sabbatical time myself soon, and going off course-schedule. I shall, in any event, be quitting the Group.

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883.2182]

xGSV Sabbaticaler No Fixed Abode

oGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

I understand completely. There is, you must, must believe, no desire on our part to cause any harm to you or the two craft you mention. We have been concerned purely to expedite the resolution of this unfortunate state of affairs; there will be no recriminations, no witch-hunts, no pogroms or purges on our behalf. With your assurance that this ends here, we are perfectly, quintessentially content. A great relief!

Let me add that it is hard for me to find the words to communicate to you the depth of my — our — gratitude in this matter. You have shown irreproachable moral integrity combined with a truly objective open-mindedness; virtues that all too often are regarded as being as tragically incompatible as they are infinitely desirable. You are an example to all of us. I beg you not to leave the Group. We would lose too much. Please; reconsider. No one would deny that you have earned a thousand rests, but please take pity on those who would dare ask you to forgo one, for their own selfish benefit.

oo

Thank you. However, my decision is irrevocable. Should I still be welcome, I may hope for a request to rejoin you at some point in the future should some exceptional situation stimulate the thought that I might again be of service.

oo

My dear, dear ship. If you really must go, please do so with our fondest regards, so long as you swear never to forget that your invitation to restore your wisdom and probity to our small team stands in perpetuity!

VI

Genar-Hofoen spent quite a lot of time on the toilet. Ulver Seich was hell when she was cross and she had been in a state of virtually permanent crossness ever since he’d properly woken up; in fact, since well before. She’d been cross — cross with him — while he’d been unconscious, which seemed unfair somehow.

If he slept too long or day-dozed she got even crosser, so he went to the toilet for fairly long intervals. The toilet in a nine-person module consisted of a sort of thick flap that hinged down from a recess in the back wall of the small craft’s single cabin. A semi-cylindrical field popped into being when the flap was in place, isolating the enclosed space from the rest of the cabin, and there was just enough room to make the necessary adjustments to one’s clothing and stand or sit in comfort; usually some pleasantly bland music played, but Genar-Hofoen preferred the perfect silence the field enclosure produced. He sat there in the gentle, pleasantly perfumed downward breeze, not, as a rule, actually doing anything, but content to have some time to himself.

Stuck on a tiny but perfectly comfortable module with a beautiful, intelligent young woman. It ought to be a recipe for unbridled bliss; it was practically a fantasy. In fact, it was sheer hell. He’d felt trapped before, but never like this, never so completely, never so helplessly, never with somebody who seemed to find him quite so annoying just to be in the presence of. He couldn’t even blame the drone. The drone was, in a sense, in the way, but he didn’t mind. Just as well it was, in fact; he didn’t know what Ulver Seich might have done to him if it hadn’t been in the way. Hell, he quite liked the drone. The girl he could easily fall in love with, and in the right circumstances certainly admire and be impressed by and, yes, perfectly possibly like, even be friends with… but right now he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she really didn’t like him a lot.

He supposed these just were not the right circumstances. The right circumstances would involve them both being somewhere extremely civilised and cultured with lots of other people around and things happening and stuff to do and opportunities to choose when and where to get to know each other, not cooped up — grief, and it was only for two days so far but it felt more like a month — in a small module in the middle of a war with no apparent idea where they were supposed to go and all their plans seemingly thwarted. It probably didn’t help that he was effectively their prisoner, either.

“So who was the first girl?” he asked her. “The one outside the Sublimers’ place?”

“Probably SC,” Ulver Seich told him grumpily. She glared back at the drone. The two humans were in the same seats they’d been in when he’d first woken up. The floor of the cabin area behind them could contort and produce various combinations of seats, couches, tables and so on, but every now and again they just sat in the forward-facing seats, looking at the screen and the stars. The drone Churt Lyne sat oblivious on the floor of the cabin, taking no apparent notice of the girl’s glare. The drone seemed to be glare-proof. Somehow it was allowed to get away with being uncommunicative.

Genar-Hofoen sat back in the seat. The stars ahead looked the same as they had a few minutes ago. The module wasn’t really heading anywhere purposefully; it was just moving away from Tier, down one of the many corridors approved by Tier traffic control as free from warships and/or volume warnings or restrictions. The girl and the drone hadn’t allowed him to contact Tier or anybody else. They had been in touch with what sounded like a ship Mind, communicating by screen-written messages he wasn’t allowed to see. Once or twice the girl and the drone had gone quiet and still together, obviously in touch through its communicator and a neural lace.

In theory he might have been able to wrest control of the module from them at such a point, but in practice it would have been futile; the module had its own semi-sentient systems which he had no way of subverting and little chance of arguing round even if he had somehow got the better of the girl and the drone, and anyway, where was he supposed to go? Tier was out, he had no idea where the Grey Area or the Sleeper Service were and suspected that probably nobody else knew where the two ships were either. He assumed SC would be looking for him. Better to let himself be found.

Besides, when they’d finally released him from the chair he’d been secured to while he’d been unconscious, the drone had shown him an old but shinily mean-looking knife missile it contained within its casing and given him a brief but nasty stinging sensation in his left little finger that it assured him was about a thousandth of the pain its effector was capable of inflicting on him if he tried anything silly. He had assured the machine that he was no warrior and that any martial skills he might have been born with had entirely atrophied at the expense of an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation.

So he was content to let them get on with it when they communicated silently. Made a welcome change, in fact. Anyway, whatever it was they had discovered through all this communicating, they didn’t seem terribly happy with it. The girl in particular seemed upset. He got the impression she felt cheated, that she’d discovered she’d been lied to. Perhaps because of that she was telling him things she wouldn’t have told him otherwise. He tried to put together what she’d just said about Special Circumstances with what she’d already let him know.

His head ached briefly with the effort. He’d hit it when he’d fallen out of the trap, in Night City. He was still trying to work out what happened there.

“But I thought you said you were with SC?” he said. He couldn’t help it; he knew it would just annoy her again, but he was still confused.

“I said,” she hissed, through gritted teeth, “that I thought I was working for SC.” She looked to one side and sighed heavily, then turned back to him. “Maybe I am, maybe I was, maybe there’s different bits of SC, maybe something else entirely, I just don’t know, don’t you understand?”

“So who sent you?” he asked, crossing his arms. The ownskin jacket slid round his torso; the module’s bio unit was cleaning his shirt. The suit still looked pretty good, he thought. The girl hadn’t changed out of her jewelled space suit (though she had used the module’s toilet, rather than whatever built-in units the suit had). She looked less and less like Dajeil Gelian every hour, he thought, her face becoming younger and finer and more beautiful all the time. It was a fascinating transformation to watch and if the circumstances had been different he’d have been aching at least to test the waters with her to see if there was any sort of mutuality of attraction here… but the circumstances were as they were, and right now the last thing he wanted to do was give her any impression he was ogling her.

“I told you who sent me,” she said, her voice cold. “A Mind. With the help… well, it looks more like collusion now, actually,” she said with an insincere smile, “of my home world’s Mind.” She took a deep breath, then set her lips in as tight a line as their fullness would permit. “I had my own warship for grief’s sake,” she said bitterly, addressing the stars on the screen ahead of them. “Is it any wonder I thought it was all SC-arranged?”

She glanced back at the silent drone, then looked at him again.

“Now we’re told our ship’s fucked off and we’ve to keep quiet about where we are. And the sort of trouble we had getting you off Tier…” She shook her head. “Looked like SC to me… not that I know that much, but the machine thinks so too,” she said, jerking her head to indicate the drone again. She looked him down and up. “Wish we’d left you there now.”

“Well, so do I,” he said, trying to sound reasonable.

She’d got to Tier a few days before him, sent to look for him, in effect given a blank cheque and yet not able to find out where he was the easy way, through just asking; hence the business with the pondrosaur. Which made sense if it wasn’t Special Circumstances which had sent her, because it was SC who had been looking after him on Tier, and why would they be trying to kidnap him from themselves? And yet she’d had her own warship, apparently, and been given the intelligence that had led her to Tier to intercept him in the first place; information SC would naturally restrict to a small number of trusted Minds. Mystifying.

“So,” she said. “What exactly were you supposed to be doing after you left Tier, or was this rather pathetic attempt to reclaim your lost youth by trying to seduce women who looked like an old flame the totality of your mission?”

He smiled as tolerantly as he could. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

Her eyes narrowed further. “You know,” she said, “they might just ask us to throw you outboard.”

He allowed himself to sit back, looking surprised and hurt. A little shiver of real fear did make itself felt in his guts. “You wouldn’t, would you?” he asked.

She looked forward at the stars again, eyebrows gathered, mouth set in a down-turned line. “No,” she admitted, “but I’d enjoy thinking about it.”

There was silence for a while. He was conscious of her breathing, though he looked in vain at the attractively sculpted chest of her suit for any sign of movement. Suddenly, her foot clunked down on the carpet beneath her jewel-encrusted boot. “What were you supposed to be doing?” she demanded angrily, turning to face him. “Why did they want you? Fuck it, I’ve told you why I was there. Come on; tell me.”

“I’m sorry,” he sighed. She was already starting to blush with anger. Oh no, here we go, he thought. Tantrum time again.

Then the drone jerked up into the air behind them and something flashed round the edges of the module’s screen.

“Hello in there,” said a large, deep voice, all around them.

VII

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883.4700]

xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

oLSV Serious Callers Only

I regret to inform you that I have changed my position concerning the so-called conspiracy concerning the Esperi Excession and the Affront. It is now my judgement that while there may have been certain irregularities of jurisdiction and of operational ethics involved, these were of an opportunistic rather than a conspiratorial nature. Further, I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

There are inevitably occasions when such — if I may characterise them so — civilian considerations must be set aside (and indeed, is this not what the very phrase and title Special Circumstances implies?) the better to facilitate actions which, while distasteful and regrettable perhaps in themselves, might reasonably be seen as reliably leading to some strategically desirable state or outcome no rational person would argue against.

It is my profoundly held conviction that the situation regarding the Affront is of this highly specialised and rare nature and therefore merits the measures and policy currently being employed by the Minds you and I had previously suspected of indulging in some sort of grand conspiracy.

I call upon you to talk with our fellows in the Interesting Times Gang whom you have — unjustly, I now believe — distrusted, with a view to facilitating an accord which will allow all parties to work together towards a satisfactory outcome both to this regrettable and unnecessary misunderstanding and, perhaps, to the conflict that has now been initiated by the Affront.

For myself, I intend to go into a retreat for some time, starting immediately from the end of this signal. I shall no longer be in a position to correspond; however, messages may be left for me with the Independent Retreats Council (ex-Culture section) and will be reviewed every hundred days (or thereabouts).

I wish you well and hope that my decision might help precipitate a reconciliation I devoutly wish will happen.

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.883.6723]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

Meat. Take a look at the enclosed bullshit from the AOANL’sA (signal enclosed). I almost hope it’s been taken over. If this is the way it really feels, I’d feel slightly worse.

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883.6920]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oLSV Serious Callers Only

Oh dear. Now we’re both really under threat. I’m heading into the Homomdan Fleet Base at Ara. I suggest you seek sanctuary as well. As a precaution, I am distributing locked copies of all our signals, researches and suspicions to a variety of trustworthy Minds with instructions that they only be opened on the event of my demise. This I also urge you to do. Our only alternative is to go public, and I am not convinced we have sufficient evidence of a non-circumstantial nature.

oo

This is despicable. To be on the run from our own kind, our own peer Minds. Meat, am I miffed. Personally I’m running for a nice sunny Orbital (DiaGlyph enclosed). I too have deposited all the facts on this matter with friends, Minds specialising in archiving and the more reliable news services (I agree we cannot yet bruit our suspicions abroad; there probably never was a proper moment for that, but if there was, the war has negated its relevance), as well as the Sleeper Service, in what has become my daily attempt to contact it. Who knows? Another opportunity may present itself once the dust has cleared from around the Excession — if it ever does; if there is anyone left to witness it.

Oh well; it’s out of our fields now.

Best of luck, like they say.

VIII

The avatar Amorphia moved one of its catapults forward an octagon, in front of the woman’s leading tower; the noise of solid wooden wheels rumbling and squeaking along on equally solid axles, and of lashed-together wooden spars and planks flexing and creaking, filled the room. A curious smell which might have been wood rose gently from the board-cube.

Dajeil Gelian sat forward in her fabulously sculpted chair, one hand absently tapping her belly gently, the other at her mouth. She sucked at one finger, her brows creased in concentration. She and Amorphia sat in the main room of her new accommodation aboard the GCU Jaundiced Outlook, which had been restructured to mimic precisely the lay-out of the tower she had lived in for nearly forty years. The big, round room, capped by its transparent dome, resounded — between the sound effects produced by the game-cube — to the noise of rain. The surrounding screens showed recordings of the creatures Dajeil had studied, swum and floated with during most of those four decades. All around, the woman’s collected curios and mementoes were placed and set just where they had been in the tower by its lonely sea. In the broad grate, a log fire crackled exuberantly.

Dajeil thought for a while, then took a cavalarian and shifted it across the board to the noise of thundering hooves and the smell of sweat. It came to a halt by a baggage train undefended save for some irregulars.

Amorphia, sat blackly folded on a small stool on the other side of the board, went very still. Then it moved an Invisible.

Dajeil looked round the board, trying to work out what all the avatar’s recent Invisible moves were leading up to. She shrugged; the cavalry piece took the irregulars almost without loss, to the sound of iron clashing on iron and screams, and the smell of blood.

Amorphia made another Invisible move.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then there was an almost subsonic rumbling sound. Dajeil’s tower collapsed, sinking through the octagon in the board in a convincing-looking cloud of dust and the floor-shaking sound of grinding, crunching rocks. And more screams. A lot of the important moves seemed to be accompanied by those. A smell of turned-over earth and stone-dust filled the air.

Amorphia looked up almost guiltily. “Sappers,” it said, and shrugged.

Dajeil cocked one eyebrow. “Hmm,” she said. She surveyed the new situation. With the tower gone, the way lay open to her heartland. It didn’t look good. “Think I should sue for peace?” she asked.

“Shall I ask the ship?” the avatar asked.

Dajeil sighed. “I suppose so,” she sighed.

The avatar glanced down at the board again. It looked up. “Seven-eighths chance it would go to me,” the avatar told the woman.

She sat back in the great chair. “It’s yours, then,” she said. She leant forward briefly and picked up another tower. She studied it. The avatar sat back, looking moderately pleased with itself. “Are you happy here, Dajeil?” it asked.

“Thank you, yes,” she replied. She returned her attention to the miniature tower-piece held in her fingers. She was silent for a while, then said, “So. What is going to happen, Amorphia? Can you tell me yet?”

The avatar gazed steadily at the woman. “We are heading very quickly towards the war zone,” it said in a strange, almost childish voice. Then it sat forward, inspecting her closely. “War zone?” Dajeil said, glancing at the board. “There is a war,” the avatar confirmed, nodding. It assumed a grim expression.

“Why? Where? Between whom?”

“Because of a thing called an excession. Around the place where we are heading. Between the Culture and the Affront.” It went on to explain a little of the background.

Dajeil turned the little tower-model over and over in her hands, frowning at it. Eventually she asked, “Is this Excession thing really as important as everybody seems to think?”

The avatar looked thoughtful for just a moment, then it spread its arms and shrugged. “Does it really matter?” it said.

The woman frowned again, not understanding. “Doesn’t it matter more than anything?”

It shook its head. “Some things mean too much to matter,” it said. It stood up and stretched. “Remember, Dajeil,” it told her, “you can leave at any point. This ship will do as you wish.”

“I’ll stick around for now,” she told it. She looked briefly up at it. “When—?”

“A couple of days,” it told her. “All being well.” It stood looking down at her for a while, watching her turn the small tower over and over in her fingers. Then it nodded and turned and quietly walked out of the room.

She hardly noticed it go. She leant forward and placed the small tower on an octagon towards the rear margin of the board, on a region of shore bordering the hem of blue that was supposed to represent the sea, near where, a few moves earlier, a ship-piece of Amorphia’s had landed a small force which had established a bridge-head. She had never placed a tower in such a position, in all their games. The board interpreted the move with the sound of screams once more, but this time the screams were the plaintive, plangent calls of sea birds calling out over the sound of heavy, pounding surf. A sharply briny odour filled the air above the board cube and she was back there, back then, with the sound of the sea birds and the smell of the dashing wild sea tangled in her hair, and the growing child continually heavy and sporadically lively, almost violent with its sudden, startling kicks, in her belly.

She sat cross-legged on the pebble shore, the tower at her back, the sun a great round red shield of fire plunging into the darkly unruly sea and throwing a blood-coloured curtain across the line of the cliffs a couple of kilometres inland. She gathered her shawl about her and ran a hand through her long black hair as best she could. It stuck, held up by knots. She didn’t try to pull them out; she’d rather look forward to the long, slow process of having them combed and cajoled and carefully teased out, later in the evening, by Byr.

Waves crashed on the shingle and rocks of the shore to either side of her in great sighing, soughing intakings of what sounded like the breath of some great sea creature, a gathering, deepening sound that ended in the small moment of half-silence before each great wave fell and burst against the tumbled, growling slope of rocks and stones, pushing and pulling and rolling the giant glistening pebbles in thudding concussions of water forcing its way amongst their spaces while the rocks slid and smacked and cracked against each other.

Directly in front of her, where there was a raised shelf of rock just under the surface of the sea, the waves breaking on the shallower slope in front of her were smaller, almost friendlier, and the main force of the grumbling, swelling ocean was met fifty metres out at a rough semicircle marked by a line of frothing surf.

She clasped her hands palm up on her lap, beneath the bulge of her belly, and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, the ozone and the brine sharp in her nostrils, connecting her to the sea’s salty restlessness, making her, in her mind, again part of its great fluid coalescing of constancy and changefulness, imbuing her thoughts with something of that heaving, sheltering vastness, that world-cleaving cradle of layered, night-making depth.

Inside her mind, in the semi-trance she now assumed, she stepped smilingly down through her own fluid layers of protection and conformation, to where her baby lay, healthy and growing, half awake, half asleep, wholly beautiful.

Her own genetically altered body gently interrogated the placental processes protecting the joined but subtly different chemistries and inheritance of her child’s body from her own immune system and carefully, fairly managing the otherwise selfishly voracious demands the baby made upon her body’s resources of blood, sugars, proteins, minerals and energy.

The temptation was always to tamper, to fiddle with the settings that regulated everything, as though by such meddling one proved how carefully painstaking and watchful one was being, but she always resisted, content that there were no warning signs, no notice that some imbalance was threatening either her health or that of the fetus and happy to leave the body’s own systemic wisdom to prevail over the brain’s desire to intervene.

Shifting the focus of her concentration, she was able to use another designed-in sense no creature from any part of her typically distributed Cultural inheritance had ever possessed to look upon her soon-to-be child, modelling its shape in her mind from the information provided by a subset of specialised organisms swimming in the as yet unbroken water surrounding the fetus. She saw it; hunched and curled in an orbed spectrum of smooth pinks, crouched round its umbilical link with her as though it was concentrating on its supply of blood, trying to increase its flow-rate or nutritional saturation.

She marvelled at it, as she always did; at its bulbously headed beauty, at its strange air of blankly formless intensity. She counted its fingers and toes, inspected the tightly closed eyelids, smiled at the tiny budded cleft that spoke of the cells’ unprompted selection of congenital femaleness. Half her, half something strange and foreign. A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn would be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.

Reassured that all was well, she left the dimly aware being to continue its purposeful, unthinking growth, and returned to the part of the real world where she was sitting on the pebbled beach and the waves fell loud and foaming amongst the tumbled, rumbling rocks.

Byr was there when she opened her eyes, standing knee-deep in the small waves just in front of her, wet-suited, golden hair damply straggled in long ringlets, face dark against the display of ruddy sunset behind, found just in the act of taking off the suit’s face-mask.

“Evening,” she said, smiling.

Byr nodded and splashed up out of the water, sitting down beside her and putting an arm round her. “You okay?”

She held the fingers of the hand over her shoulder. “Both fine,” she said. “And the gang?”

Byr laughed, peeling off the suit’s feet to reveal wrinkled pink-brown toes. “Sk’ilip’k’ has decided he likes the idea of walking on land; says he’s ashamed his ancestors went out of the ocean and then went back in again as if the air was too cold. He wants us to make him a walking machine. The others think he’s crazy, though there is some support for the idea of them all somehow going flying together. I left them a couple more screens and increased some of their access to the flight archives. They gave me this; for you.”

Byr handed her something from the suit’s side pouch.

“Oh; thank you.” She put the small figurine in one palm and turned it over carefully with her fingers, inspecting it by the fading red light of the day’s end. It was beautiful, worked out of some soft stone to perfectly resemble their idea of what they thought a human ought to look like; naturally flippered feet, legs joined to the knees, body fatter, shoulders slender, neck thicker, head narrower, hairless. It did look like her; the face, for all that it was distorted, bore a distinct resemblance. Probably G’Istig’tk’t’s work; there was a delicacy of line and a certain humour about the figurine’s facial expression that spoke to her of the old female’s personality. She held the little figure up in front of Byr. “Think it looks like me?”

“Well, you’re certainly getting that fat.”

“Oh!” she said, slapping Byr lightly on the shoulder. She glanced down at her lap, reaching to pat her belly. “I think you’re starting to show yourself, at last,” she said.

Byr smiled, her face still freckled with droplets of water, catching the dying light. She looked down, holding Dajeil’s hand, patting her belly. “Na,” she said, rising to her feet. She held out a hand to Dajeil and glanced round to the tower. “You coming in or are you going to sit around communing with the ocean swell all evening? We’ve got guests, remember?”

She took a breath to say something, then held up her hand. Byr helped pull her up; she felt suddenly heavy, clumsy and… unwieldy. Her back hurt dully. “Yes, let’s go in, eh?”

They turned towards the lonely tower.