Iain Banks - Culture 5 Excession

First published in Great Britain in 1996.

ISBN: 1 85723 394 8

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year old dying sun from a different univese. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.

Silent, motionless, and resisting all efforts to make contact, the artifact waits. The Culture ships, however, cannot. For the artifact is something they need to understand first, before it falls into less understanding hands - and triggers a political and military crisis which will threaten everything the Culture has achieved.

One person who saw the artifact when it first appeared may have information concerning its purpose, but she is living out her death in the immense Eccentric ship, the Sleeper Service. The Culture ships formulate a plan to retrieve her. The Sleeper Service has other things on its mind.

A novel of extraordinary imagination, richness and energy, Excession is Iain M. Banks at his magnificent best.

A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visited in her lonely tower overlooking the sea by an avatar of the great ship that was her home.

Far out amongst the heaving grey waves, beneath drifting banks of mist, the great slow bodies of some of the small sea's larger inhabitants humped and slid. Jets of vapour issued from the animals' breathing holes in exhaled blasts that rose like ghostly, insubstantial geysers amongst the flock of birds accompanying the school, causing them to climb and wheel and scream, side-slipping and fluttering in the cool air. High above, slipping in and out of pink-rubbed layers of cloud like small slow clouds themselves, other creatures moved, dirigibles and kites cruising the upper atmosphere with wings and canopies extended, warming in the watery light of a new day.

That light came from a line, not a point in the sky, because the place where Dajeil Gelian lived was not an ordinary world. The single strand of fuzzy incandescence began near the far, seaward horizon, stretched across the sky and disappeared over the foliage-strewn lip of the two-thousand-metre-high cliff a kilometre behind the beach and the single tower. At dawn, the sun-line would have appeared to rise from the horizon to starboard; at mid-day it would be directly above the tower, and at sunset it would seem to disappear into the sea to port. It was mid-morning now, and the line lay about half-way up the sky, describing a glowing arc across the vault like some vast slow-moving skipping rope forever twirling above the day.

On either side of the bar of yellow-white light the sky beyond - the real sky; the sky above the clouds - could be seen; a solid-looking brown-black over-presence that hinted at the extreme pressures and temperatures contained within, and where other animals moved in a cloudscape of chemistries entirely toxic to that below, but which in shape and density mirrored the grey, wind-ruffled sea.

Steady lines of waves broke on the grey slope of the shingle beach, beating on shattered, ground-up shells, tiny fragments of hollow animal carapaces, brittle lengths of light-blighted sea-wrack, water-smoothed slivers of wood, pitted pebbles of foamstone like dainty marbles of porous bone and a general assortment of seaside detritus collected from a handful-hundred different planets strewn across the greater galaxy. Spray lifted from where the waves fell against the shore and brought the salty smell of the sea across the beach and the tangle of scrawny plants at its margin, over the low stone wall providing some protection to the tower's seaward garden, and - wrapping around the stubby construction itself and scaling the high wall beyond - intermittently brought the sea's iodine tang to the enclosed garden within, where Dajeil Gelian tended raised carpets of bright spreadling-flowers and the rustling, half-stunted forms of barb trees and shadow-flowering wilderbush.

The woman heard the landward gate-bell tinkle, but already knew that she had a visitor because the black bird Gravious had told her, swooping from the misty sky a few minutes earlier to screech, 'Company!' at her through a writhing collection of beak-held prey before beating off again in search of more airborne insects for its winter larder. The woman had nodded at the bird's retreating form, straightening and holding the small of her back as she did so and then absently stroking her swollen abdomen through the rich fabric of the heavy dress she wore.

The message borne by the bird had not needed to be any more elaborate; throughout the four decades she had lived here alone, Dajeil had only ever had to receive one visitor, the avatar of the vessel she thought of as her host and protector, and who was now quickly and accurately pushing aside the barb-tree branches as it made its way down the path from the land-gate. The only thing that Dajeil now found surprising was that her visitor was here at this moment; the avatar had attended her regularly - entirely as though dropping casually by while on a walk along the shore - for a short visit every eight days, and habitually arrived for a longer, more formal call - at which they ate breakfast, lunch or supper, accordingly - every thirty-two days. Going by that schedule, Dajeil ought not to be expecting a visit from the ship's representative for another five days.

Dajeil carefully tucked a stray strand of her long, night-black hair back beneath her plain hair band and nodded to the tall figure making its way between the twisted trunks. 'Good morning,' she called.

The ship's avatar called itself Amorphia, which apparently meant something reasonably profound in a language Dajeil did not know and had never considered worth studying. Amorphia was a gaunt, pale, androgynous creature, almost skeletally thin and a full head taller than Dajeil, who was herself both slender and tall. For the last dozen or so years, the avatar had taken to dressing all in black, and it was in black leggings, black tunic and a short black jerkin that it appeared now, its cropped blonde hair covered by a similarly dark skull cap. It took the cap off and bowed to Dajeil, smiling as though uncertain.

'Dajeil, good morning. Are you well?'

'I'm well, thank you,' Dajeil said, who had long since given up protesting at or indeed being bothered by such probably redundant niceties. She was still convinced that the ship monitored her closely enough to know exactly how well she was - and she was anyway always in perfect health - but was nevertheless prepared to go along with the pretence that it did not watch over her so scrupulously, and so had to ask. Still, she did not respond in kind by asking after whatever might pass as the health of either a humanly formed but ship-controlled entity which functioned - as far as she knew - solely as the vessel's contact with her, or indeed the ship itself. 'Shall we go inside?' she asked.

'Yes. Thank you.'

The upper chamber of the tower was lit from above by the building's translucent glass dome - which looked up to an increasingly cloudy, grey sky - and from the edges by gently glowing in-holo'd screens, a third of which showed blue-green underwater scenes, usually featuring some of the larger mammals and fish the sea outside contained, another third of which displayed bright images of soft-looking water-vapour clouds and the huge airborne creatures which played among them, and the last third of which seemingly looked out - on frequencies inaccessible directly to the human eye - into the dense dark turmoil of the gas-giant atmosphere held compressed in the artificial sky above, where yet stranger beasts moved.