Excession
Chapters - Iain M. Banks
Prologue
Two and a half millennia after it was first sighted, the General Contact Unit Grey Area receives a signal from the long-disgraced General Contact Vehicle Honest Mistake announcing that an Excession - an Outside Context Problem - has reappeared in the Esperi system; the Culture's Minds begin to wake their wider network as the message reaches Excession-class Sleeper Service, Fate Amenable To Change and the conspiracy of older war-craft known to themselves as the Interesting Times Gang.
POV: Grey Area
Chapter 1: Outside Context Problem
Aboard the Elencher Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, drone Sisela Ytheleus fights through a swift, overwhelming takeover; battling through smoke-choked corridors past compromised suits, a suiciding pistol and its own twin, it triggers a pre-arranged ruse, displacing a copy of its mind-state away while it is finally captured and absorbed into the invading consciousness. Meanwhile, ambassador Byr Genar-Hofoen attends a raucous regimental dinner on the God'shole habitat with Colonel Fivetide of the Affront Diplomatic Force, surviving bait-pit fights, harpoon games and ferocious bets while his module patches through an interactive message from the GSV Death And Gravity asking him to take on a delicate task for what is plainly Special Circumstances; he stalls, has his gelfield suit cheat a scratchound bout to save Fivetide's wager, and refuses to commit. Elsewhere a retired commandant suffers a more vivid nightmare of glacial atrocities and desert exterminations, then wakes to find a presence in his head naming itself Grey Area, accusing him of genocide, declaring it has been called away but will return, and plunging him into agonised relived deaths until his hearts give out. Returning to his module drunk, Genar-Hofoen finds a hologram of his Uncle Tishlin waiting to tell him SC want him to steal the soul of a dead woman.
POV: Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, Genar-Hofoen·On page: Fivetide, Fate Amenable To Change
Chapter 2: Not Invented Here
Adrift in interstellar space near the Esperi system, the wrecked drone Sisela Ytheleus wakes reduced to its electronic mind, its sensors and weapons ruined, its higher cores sealed off, with only foggy memories of who attacked it; opening a sub-core labelled PAST, it sees that what survives is the copy displaced from its destroyed twin, and looks back grimly towards Esperi where its true self perished. Hungover from the regimental dinner, Genar-Hofoen showers in his module and grudgingly resumes breakfast with the hologram of Uncle Tishlin, who relates the ancient story of the GCU Problem Child, an impossibly old dead sun and a black-body artifact that vanished, leading to the request that he board the GSV Sleeper Service to extract a Stored personality. On the Affronter habitat, an emissary of the warcraft Attitude Adjuster pulls Fivetide from his nest and makes him read the Fate Amenable To Change excession notice, hinting it could free the Affront from Culture restraint and deliver the galaxy. Far away, the MSV Not Invented Here, long believed lost five centuries ago, signs into the Mind discussion as Incident Coordinator.
POV: Ulver Seich·On page: Churt Lyne, Not Invented Here
Chapter 3: Uninvited Guests
On the GSV Sleeper Service, the avatar Amorphia walks the meticulously staged Boustrago battle tableau in a General Bay, reviving an aged Storee amid the posed dead; the narrative recounts how the ship, formerly the Quietly Confident, came to be run by a single dissident Mind, evacuated everyone but its Stored sleepers and dedicated itself to building ever-grander historical tableaux, while quietly waiting on one particular woman, Dajeil Gelian. The Elencher Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty's last weeks are retold: a random sweep from Tier habitat by the Stargazer Clan, the discovery of a black-body sphere near Esperi linked to the energy grid in both directions, and the catastrophic instant when its probe touched the artifact and the ship was overwhelmed, leaving Sisela alone with a captive trace of its twin and a faint skein ripple suggesting something is now coming for it. On Phage Rock, twenty-two-year-old graduate Ulver Seich is hauled from her ball by the family drone Churt Lyne into an emergency command space and shown the full Excession signal sequence and the Mind comment thread; the bureaucratic Wisdom Like Silence is shouldered aside as legendary craft including the supposedly destroyed Not Invented Here form the Interesting Times Gang, and Churt Lyne explains the artifact may permit travel between universes. Ulver is then asked to impersonate an older woman to attract a particular man, and bargained into agreeing to leave for Tier the next morning aboard her own SC-supplied ship. Meanwhile Genar-Hofoen rides a rattling monorail across the Affront habitat to the dockside, where Fivetide and Commander Kindrummer VI welcome him aboard the battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade, flanked by the SacSlicer II and the FrightSpear.
POV: Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, Gestra Ishmethit·On page: Sleeper Service, Amorphia, Dajeil Gelian, Genar-Hofoen, Fivetide, Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The
Chapter 4: Dependency Principle
Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival messages Shoot Them Later, confessing a vague suspicion that something smells wrong about the Excession affair; Shoot Them Later teases the worry away and recommends more time in Infinite Fun Space. Out in deep space, the crippled Elencher drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 is cornered by the Affront light cruiser Furious Purpose. After refusing surrender and being toyed with by lasers, the drone ejects and destroys its mind-cores, fakes capitulation, then detonates itself in a futile last attack. The Affronters, mildly diverted, drift on to Tier with a minor engine fault. A long meditation follows on metamathics and the Land of Infinite Fun, and the Dependency Principle that ties even transcendent Minds to base reality. The Sleeper Service, sunk in such reveries, is jolted back when Rock End In Tears signals a single word: "Done." It checks evacuation schedules, sets new drones to work, and sends Amorphia back to visit Dajeil. Meanwhile Genar-Hofoen explores his sour-smelling, freezing quarters aboard the Affront battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade, complaining at the damp bedding through his gelfield suit just as the ship lurches into motion. At Pittance, the lonely caretaker Gestra Ishmethit tends a small illicit fire among the tattooed stored warships when a drone glints in the dark and the Mind's message lights his visor: visitors are coming. Terror seizes him for the first time in a hundred and fifty years.
POV: Sleeper Service, Genar-Hofoen, Leffid Ispanteli·On page: Amorphia, Dajeil Gelian, Shoot Them Later, Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The
Chapter 5: Kiss the Blade
The Explorer Ship Break Even sweeps the comet cloud of Tremesia for any trace of its lost sister vessel Peace Makes Plenty, knowing the search is closer to a funeral vigil than rescue; the seven remaining Stargazer ships eventually scale back the effort and disperse. Shoot Them Later compares course schedules and grows more convinced of a conspiracy among senior Minds around the Excession, but Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival dismisses the fears. Privately, Shoot Them Later confides in Serious Callers Only that it has asked a sympathetic ship to divert to Pittance just in case. Aboard the Kiss The Blade, Genar-Hofoen is thrashed at batball by Fivetide, who blinds the live ball for sport; a long passage explores why the Culture loathes yet tolerates the Affront, an engineered civilisation built on the artificial suffering of its females, juveniles and prey species. The man nonetheless likes them, and ponders the mysterious old MSV Not Invented Here that is coordinating his mission, and the long-Stored Captain Zreyn Tramow he is travelling to meet. On Phage Rock, Ulver Seich is dragged from her lover and her menagerie by the drone Churt Lyne, forced to leave friends, pets and most of her wardrobe behind, and boarded aboard the ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views, which she learns has lain hidden in Phage for five hundred years. On the great Sleeper Service, Amorphia tells Dajeil the long-promised changes have begun: cliffs fold neatly back into ship bays, herded creatures are taken in, the tower must soon go. The bird Gravious wails at his lost tree as the GSV sheds its disguise. At Tier, the winged Leffid Ispanteli, distracted by a four-armed lover named Estray aboard a hire yacht, glimpses an inbound Affront light cruiser and sees an Elench emergency signal burned faintly into its scar-hull.
POV: Dajeil Gelian, Leffid Ispanteli·On page: Sleeper Service, Amorphia, Gravious, Attitude Adjuster, Shoot Them Later
Chapter 6: Pittance
Ulver Seich sobs over her pillow aboard the Frank Exchange of Views: in her sleep the ship has remade her face into that of a much older woman, sixty years her senior, puffy and bruised. After self-pity she steadies herself, resolves to study Tier and Genar-Hofoen, and earn her Contact place properly. On Tier, Leffid meets the AhForgetIt Tendency vice-consul Lellius at a ysner-mistretl race and quietly passes on the eight-symbol Elench distress code he saw burned into the Affronter cruiser Furious Purpose; Lellius will route the news on to the Mainland. Inside the Sleeper Service, the black bird Gravious wings the long distance across darkened bays and the half-built sea battle of Octovelein. At the rear general bay he discovers that what looks like empty volume is in fact a field-projection concealing dense, partially exotic solid matter behind it: hidden warships and engine. He studies the next tableau of Storees due to be revived. Amorphia, unseen, watches. Shoot Them Later then confesses to Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival that it was the Tendency's go-between for the original scar-hull tip, and ties Genar-Hofoen and the Grey Area into the puzzle; Serious Callers Only justifies its choice of Pittance as the next likely flashpoint, recalling that the same names from the supposed cabal sat on the committee that placed the stockpile. At Pittance itself, Gestra is coaxed out by the resident drone to meet a ship calling itself the Limited Offensive Unit Attitude Adjuster, bringing "updated security codes." Mid-introduction the drone is struck dead, mirror spheres bloom into Affront combat units, and Gestra is broken, blown by escaping air through the breached airlock and frozen in the hangar amid the patterned warships. Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV exults; the traitor Culture ship reveals it has subverted the Pittance Mind and begins waking the sixty-four Gangster-class craft, though their baroqued hulls will need lengthy scanning.
POV: Gravious, Genar-Hofoen, Gestra Ishmethit·On page: Amorphia, Attitude Adjuster
Chapter 7: Tier
Some investigations cannot use the usual Mind-to-Mind channels and must go the slow, physical way. Aboard a vacuum dirigible drifting toward a floating island, the very old drone Gruda Aplam chats with the retired Contact veteran Tishlin, who lets slip that he once recorded a mind-state abstract as a favour to SC; the drone quietly relays this through a long chain of ships back to Serious Callers Only. Serious Callers Only and Shoot Them Later agree to back a plan to intercept Genar-Hofoen at Tier using Phage Rock. On Tier, Genar-Hofoen disembarks the Kiss The Blade, rebuffs the suspiciously perfect SC welcomer Verlioef Schung, and installs himself in a luxurious View Hotel jungle suite with a hired erotroupe whose members include doubles of Zreyn Tramow. That evening, in Night City beneath a holographic bomber raid, he has an Ishlorsinami tech remove a tracer Schung planted in his ear, then encounters a woman uncannily like Dajeil Gelian arguing with Sublimer recruiters; she gives her name as Flin and agrees to teach him Calascenic Crasis. As they board a trap, a maddened pondrosaur tears off its eye-cups, throws its mahout and charges; their ysner-mistretl bolts free of the trap. Flin is knocked out and another woman with Dajeil's face appears, wrapping the dazed Genar-Hofoen in a stiffening cloak and snatching him away. Meanwhile the Yawning Angel, the shadow GSV escorting the Sleeper Service at Dreve, watches in horror as the Eccentric craft Displaces tens of thousands of Storees and animals onto Teriocre Orbital and bolts; it has secretly converted its general bays and engineering space into engine over decades, accelerating smoothly past every limit to settle at an obscene two hundred and thirty-three kilolights. Aboard the now-empty Sleeper Service, Amorphia installs Dajeil on the GCU Jaundiced Outlook, exposes Gravious as a longtime spy and pins a scout missile to him, then confirms the ship is heading for Esperi to await one guest: Byr Genar-Hofoen.
POV: Ulver Seich, Genar-Hofoen·On page: Churt Lyne, Sleeper Service, Dajeil Gelian, Shoot Them Later, Serious Callers Only
Chapter 8: Killing Time
The chapter opens with the analogy children are taught to grasp higher dimensions: flatlanders glimpsing curved space, three-dimensional creatures discovering their universe is a hypersphere, then realising that other expanding universes nest within and around their own, separated by an energy grid no Involved has yet crossed. The Fate Amenable To Change keeps its lonely vigil at the Excession, joined first by the Elench Explorer Sober Counsel, which reveals it lost a sister ship, the Peace Makes Plenty, in the same volume. Meanwhile the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time arrives at the ship store Pittance, where the compromised Mind, secretly replaced by the traitor Attitude Adjuster, tries to stall while Commander Risingmoon prepares an ambush. The defence-screen barrage destroys only a decoy module; the Killing Time escapes and broadcasts the treachery, and the Affront declare war on the Culture. The conspirators Serious Callers Only and Shoot Them Later realise their plan to extract Genar-Hofoen has unravelled: he is now trapped with Ulver Seich and the drone Churt Lyne in a module drifting from Tier, kidnapped by the Frank Exchange Of Views. The battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade captures the cruise liner Just Passing Through; an Affront officer claims an Orbital from a startled professor. The Attitude Adjuster wakes the stored warships with forged confirmations from co-conspirators, and the module Scopell-Afranqui self-destructs aboard God'shole rather than be taken. The Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival refuses to help trap Serious Callers Only or Shoot Them Later and quits the Interesting Times Gang. At the Excession the Fate and two Elench ships receive an Affront broadcast claiming the entity. Aboard the Sleeper Service, Dajeil and the avatar Amorphia play a board-cube battle game, and a memory begins of Dajeil sitting on a pebble beach on Telaturier with Byr.
POV: Genar-Hofoen·On page: Ulver Seich, Churt Lyne, Killing Time, Attitude Adjuster, Fate Amenable To Change, Shoot Them Later, Serious Callers Only, Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The
Chapter 9: Unacceptable Behaviour
The Excession's twin links to the energy grid suddenly collapse and the entity sits inert on the skein, while the Fate Amenable To Change collects priceless data and the Elench Appeal To Reason insists on sending in a drone despite the Fate's protests. The chapter then revisits Dajeil and Byr's history. Aboard the GCU Recent Convert the womanising young Byr met the older Dajeil, who refused to sleep with him but became his closest friend; she accepted a long-term Contact posting on Telaturier with the aquatic 'Ktik and Byr fought hard to be allowed to follow her, eventually being approved after an avatar of the GSV Quietly Confident assessed him by seducing him. On Telaturier they Mutualled, each pregnant by the other. Old shipmates Kran, Aist and Tulyi visited from the Unacceptable Behaviour; one night on the tower roof Aist initiated sex with Byr, who reciprocated. Dajeil found the recording left by a camera drone, and when Byr tried to laugh it off she collapsed into uncontrollable grief. That night Dajeil stood over Byr with a diving knife and stabbed open her abdomen, killing the fetus; Byr crawled to an emergency medical collar, survived, and her body began changing back to male. The pair separated, Dajeil indefinitely halted her own pregnancy, and Byr left with the Unacceptable Behaviour. Meanwhile the GCU Grey Area collects Genar-Hofoen, Ulver Seich and the drone Churt Lyne, locks Ulver inside her own suit when she becomes unruly, and during the night implants a modified neural lace in Genar-Hofoen's eyes. He dreams vividly of Captain Zreyn Tramow of the Problem Child, lonely and motherless, first discovering the trillion-year-old star and the dark enigma orbiting it before being pulled into a sudden burst of light.
POV: Genar-Hofoen·On page: Ulver Seich, Churt Lyne, Grey Area, Killing Time, Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The·Mentioned: Dajeil Gelian
Chapter 10: Heavy Messing
The Fate Amenable To Change tries to destroy the returning Elench drone with plasma and fusion warheads, but its munitions simply vanish and its wormholes slam empty back to its Displacers; the Appeal To Reason welcomes the apparent protection of the Excession and accuses the Fate of an illegal attack, while the Sober Counsel and three war-configured Elench ships close around it. The Fate breaks away, only for its engines to fail near the entity. Aboard the Heavy Messing, command of the Affronter war fleet passes to Captain Greydawn Latesetting X of the Farsight tribe after his uncle Risingmoon dies on the wreck of the Attitude Adjuster; Greydawn carefully maintains the lie that the Killing Time was a Deluger craft, knowing the truth would expose the conspiracy. Aboard the Grey Area, transferred onto the Sleeper Service, Ulver Seich wanders the ship's vast museum of torture instruments, weapons of mass destruction and recreated death chambers, and finds a small blue net which the ship tells her is a neural lace, an exquisite torture device; she also discovers she is no longer news on Phage Rock. Genar-Hofoen and Ulver have become lovers, though he is told the Scopell-Afranqui module has destroyed itself. On the GCU Jaundiced Outlook, secreted within the Sleeper Service, Dajeil learns from Amorphia that the ship is racing to Esperi and the Excession, that there is a war with the Affront, and that Genar-Hofoen has been brought aboard. Amorphia reveals to her that the black bird Gravious has been an outside spy for forty years and that the ship had threatened it with a scout missile. Dajeil refuses to see Genar-Hofoen, and the Sleeper Service prepares to send her and Gravious away aboard the Jaundiced Outlook.
POV: Ulver Seich·On page: Gravious, Dajeil Gelian, Amorphia, Sleeper Service, Killing Time
Chapter 11: Regarding Gravious
Genar-Hofoen and the avatar Amorphia climb the winding stair to Dajeil's tower. Ulver makes to leave but Dajeil asks her to stay. Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil embrace awkwardly over the bulge of her belly, then sit together with Ulver and Amorphia for a strained reunion - small talk drifting into a post-mortem of the relationship. Meanwhile the Sleeper Service is hours out from the Excession, tracking the Not Invented Here and other Culture craft, with the Affront war fleet closing on the same volume. The Grey Area departs the GSV's mainbay, escorted by three of the Sleeper's secretly built warships. Sifting through forty years of unread messages, the ship finds one flagged interesting from the LSV Serious Callers Only headed "Regarding Gravious", and pieces together the conspiracy at last. As Amorphia warns Dajeil, Genar-Hofoen and Ulver that they may need to be shunted into simulation, the Excession erupts into a vast wall of grid-fire boiling out towards the Sleeper. The ship crash-stops between Infraspace and Ultraspace, scatters its eighty thousand secretly built warships and transmits its full mind-state directly into the maelstrom; the Excession's boundary withdraws at exactly the rate of the Sleeper's deceleration, mirroring it. The Sleeper's warcraft turn on the Affront fleet. Captain Greydawn refuses to surrender but the Heavy Messing capitulates anyway, and Greydawn asks to be Displaced into vacuum. The Not Invented Here's Mind takes its own life; the Steely Glint chooses to face judgement. The Grey Area races past, dives into the energy grid and vanishes in a small flare just as the Excession itself disappears without trace. Dajeil and Genar-Hofoen begin, at last, to talk.
POV: Genar-Hofoen, Dajeil Gelian·On page: Ulver Seich, Grey Area, Fate Amenable To Change, Serious Callers Only, Not Invented Here, Steely Glint·Mentioned: Zreyn Tramow
Chapter 12: Faring Well
A series of quiet codas. Onceman Genar-Hofoen, now in Affronter form, plays bat-ball with Fivetide, laughing as he loses limbs in good-humoured competition. The Eccentric Shoot Them Later and the LSV Serious Callers Only exchange melancholy post-mortems on the affair, weighing whether the Excession was an emissary, a test or a beach-head, and noting that Genar-Hofoen's uncle Tish has forgiven them. Leffid drifts on a yacht near Tier with a new lover, Xipyeong. Ulver gallops her mount Brave across the rolling lands of Phage Rock with friends, the bird Gravious grudgingly admitting the view is all right; the drone Churt Lyne, also returned home, wonders if it chose rightly. The Grey Area is found alive in some undreamt splendour beyond, in company with the Peace Makes Plenty and Break Even. Aboard the Sleeper Service, Dajeil's daughter Ren plays on a beach while Dajeil, the re-embodied Zreyn Tramow and Amorphia talk in the shade as the ship sets out on a long retreat towards the dwarf galaxy Leo II.
POV: Genar-Hofoen, Ulver Seich, Dajeil Gelian·On page: Amorphia, Gravious, Churt Lyne, Sleeper Service, Grey Area, Shoot Them Later, Serious Callers Only, Steely Glint
Epilogue
The Excession speaks for itself: a vast inter-universal conduit that for ages channelled migrations, marriage parties, and emissaries between realities. It explains that it withdrew and repositioned itself once its presence began causing conflict in this micro-environment, and that it gathered up the entities drawn to it - including the renegade Mind Peace Makes Plenty - as specimens of the local civilisations' chaotic temperament. Judging the inhabitants fundamentally unready for contact, it recommends they be observed from afar, with their memories of the encounter confiscated should any return home, and declares that henceforth it wishes to be known as the Excession.