‘Sort of all for her, really. Except it turned out its nibs had an ulterior motive, too. All that stuff; became engine, you know. But otherwise. It was all for her, for all that time.’
The man nodded. It looked like he was thinking.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ the bird said. It sounded pleased with itself.
‘I’m who?’ he asked.
‘The one that left her. The one that was here, with her. The real here, I mean. The original here.’
Genar-Hofoen looked away. ‘If you mean Dajeil; yes, she and I lived in a tower like this one once, on an island that looked like this place.’
‘An-hah!’ the bird said, jumping up and down and shaking its feathers. ‘I see! You’re the bad guy!’
Genar-Hofoen scowled at the bird. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
It cackled with laughter. ‘That’s why you’re here! Ho-ho; you’ll be lucky to get off at all, you will! Ha ha ha!’
‘And what did you do, arse-hole?’ Genar-Hofoen asked the bird, more in the hope of annoying the creature than because he really cared.
‘Oh,’ the bird said, drawing itself up and settling its feathers down in a dignified sort of way. ‘I was a spy!’ it said proudly.
‘A spy?’
‘Oh yes,’ the bird said, sounding smug. ‘Forty years I spent, listening, watching. Reported back to my master. Using the Stored ones who were going back. Left messages on them. Forty years and never once discovered. Well, until three weeks ago. Rumbled, then. Maybe even before. Can’t tell. But I did my best. Can’t ask better than that.’ It started preening itself.
The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who were you reporting back to?’
‘None of your business,’ the bird said, looking up from its preening. It took a precautionary couple of hop-steps backwards along the parapet, just to make sure it was well out of reach of the human.
Genar-Hofoen crossed his arms and shook his head. ‘What’s this fucking crazy ship up to?’
‘Oh, it’s off to see the Excession,’ the bird said. ‘At some lick, too.’
‘This thing at Esperi?’ the man asked.
‘Heading straight for it,’ the bird confirmed. ‘What it told me, anyway. Can’t see why it’d lie. Could be, I suppose. Wouldn’t put it past it. But don’t think it is. Straight for it. Has been for the past twenty-two days. You want my opinion? Going to give it you anyway. I think it’s stooping.’ The creature put its head on one side. ‘Familiar with the term?’
Genar-Hofoen nodded absently. He didn’t like the sound of this.
‘Stooping,’ the bird repeated. ‘If you ask me. Thing’s mad. Been a bit loopy the last four decades. Gone totally off the boulevard now. In the hills and bouncing along full speed for the cliff edge. That’s my opinion. And I’ve been round its loopiness for forty years. I know, I do. I can tell. This thing’s dafter than a jar of words. I’m getting away on the Jaundiced Outlook, if it’ll let me. It being the Sleeper. Don’t think the Jaundiced bears me any ill will. Shouldn’t think it does. No.’ Then, as though remembering a rich joke, it shook its head and said, ‘The bad guy; ha! You, on the other hand. You’ll be here forty years you will, chum. If it doesn’t wreck itself ramming this excession thing, that is. Ha! How’d it get you here anyway? You come here to see old perpetually pregnant?’
Genar-Hofoen looked momentarily stricken. ‘It’s true then; she never did have the child?’
‘Yep,’ the bird said. ‘Still in her. Supposed to be hale and hearty, too. If you can believe that. So I was told. Sounds unlikely. Addled, I’d have thought. Or turned to stone by now. But there you are. Either way, she just isn’t having it. Ha!’
The man pinched his lower lip with his fingers, looking troubled.
‘What did you say brought you here?’ the bird asked.
It waited. ‘Ahem!’ it said loudly.
‘What?’ the man asked. The bird repeated the question.
The man looked like he still hadn’t heard, then he shrugged. ‘I came here to talk to a dead person; a Storee.’
‘They’ve all gone,’ said the bird. ‘Hadn’t you heard?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not one of the live ones,’ he said. ‘Somebody without a bod, somebody who’s Stored in the ship’s memory.’
‘Na, they’ve gone too,’ the bird said, lifting one wing to peck briefly underneath. ‘Dropped them off at Dreve,’ it continued. ‘Complete download. Upload. Acrossload. Whatever you call it. Didn’t even keep copies.’
‘What?’ the man said, stepping towards the bird.
‘Seriously,’ the creature said, taking a couple of hops backwards on the stonework of the parapet. ‘Honest.’ The man was staring at it now. ‘No, really; so I was told. I could have been misinformed. Can’t see why. But it’s possible. Doubt it though. They’ve gone. That was my information. Gone. Ship said it didn’t want even the copies aboard. Just in case.’
The man stared wildly at it for a bit longer. ‘Just in case wbat?’ he cried, stepping forward again.
‘Well, I don’t know!’ the bird yelped, hopping backwards and flexing its wings, ready to fly.
Genar-Hofoen glared at the creature for a moment longer, then spun round, grasping the stones of the parapet with both hands and staring out into the false panorama of sea and cloud.
IX
Then it was in the wrong place. As simple as that.
The Fate Amenable To Change looked around, incredulous. Stars. Just stars. Initially alien, in a way a starscape had never been before.
This wasn’t where it had just been. Where was the Excession? Where were the Elencher ships? Where was Esperi? Where was this?
It called up from-scratch position-establishing routines no ship ever had to call up after they’d run through them in the very earliest part of their upbringing and self-fettling, in the Mind equivalent of infancy. You did this sort of thing once to show the Minds supervising your development you could do it, then you forgot about it, because nobody ever lost track of where they were, not over this magnitude of scale. And yet here it was having to do just that. Quite bizarre.
It looked at the results. There was something almost viscerally relieving about the discovery that it was still in the same universe. For a moment it had been contemplating the prospect of finding itself in a different one altogether. (At the same time, at least one part of its intellect experienced a corresponding flicker of disappointment for exactly the same reason.)
It was nowhere near Esperi. Its position was thirty light years away from where it had been, apparently, a moment ago. The nearest star system was an undistinguished red-giant/blue-white dwarf double called Pri-Etse. The binary lay roughly along that same imaginary straight line that joined the Excession to the incoming MSV Not Invented Here. Where the ship itself had ended up was even closer to that imaginary line.
The Fate checked itself over. Unharmed. Uninvaded, unjeopar-dised, uncontacted.
It replayed those last few picoseconds while it multiple-checked its systems.
… The Excession rushed out to meet it. It was enveloped in – what? Skein fabric? Some sort of ultradense field? It all happened at close to hyperspace-light speeds. The outside universe was pinched off and in the following moment there was an instant of nothing; no external input whatsoever, a vanishingly minute, perfectly indivisible fraction of a picosecond when the Fate was cut off from everything; no outside sensor data whatsoever. Events within the ship itself had continued as normal (or rather its internal state had remained the same for that same infinitesimally microscopic instant- there had been no time for anything appreciable to actually happen). In its Mind, there had been time for the hyperspatial quanta-equivalents to alter their states for a few cycles; so time had still elapsed.
But outside; nothing.
Then the skein or field substrate had vanished, snapping out of existence to precisely nowhere, disappearing too quickly for the ship’s sensors to register where it had gone.
The Fate replayed that section of its records slower and slower until it was dealing with the equivalent of individual frames; the smallest possible sub-division of perception and cognizance the Culture or any other Involved knew of.
And it came down to four frames; four snapshots of recent history. In one frame the Excession seemed to be rushing out, accelerating out to meet it, in the next the skein/field had wrapped itself almost totally around the ship – at a distance of perhaps a kilometre from ship-centre, though it was hard to estimate -leaving only a tiny hole staring out to the rest of the universe on the opposite side of the ship from the Excession, in the third frame the total cut-off from the universe was in place, and in the next it had gone, and the Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.