The Grey Area was fascinated and appalled. It had never thought to experience anything like this. It had grown up within a universe almost totally free from threat; providing you didn’t try to do anything utterly stupid like plunge into a black or a white hole, there was simply no natural force that could threaten a ship of its power and sophistication; even a supernova held little threat, handled properly. This was different. Nothing like this had been seen in the galaxy since the worst days of the Idiran war five hundred years earlier, and even then not remotely on such a scale. This was terrifying. To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast. This was a fireball of energies from beyond the remit of reality; a monstrous wall of flame to devastate anything in its path.
Grief, this could swallow me too, thought the Grey Area. Meat shit. Same went for the Jaundiced Outlook for that matter…
It might be making-peace-with-oneself time.
VI
The Sleeper Service was having roughly similar thoughts. The combination of its own inward velocity and the out-rushing wall of the Excession’s annihilating boundary implied they would meet in one hundred and forty seconds. The Excession’s ferocious expansion had begun immediately after the Sleeper Service had swept its active sensors across the thing. It had all started happening then. As though it was reacting.
The Sleeper Service looked up its signal-sequence log, searching for messages from the craft nearer to the Excession. The Fate Amenable To Change and the MSV Not Invented Here were the closest craft. They had reported nothing. They were both now unreachable, either swallowed up within the event-horizon of the Excession’s expanding boundary or – if it was reaching out specifically towards the Sleeper Service, stretching out a single limb rather than expanding omnidirectionally – obscured from the GSV’s view by the sheer extent of that limb’s leading edge.
The Sleeper signalled the GSVs What Is The Answer And Why? and Use Psychology both directly and via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook, asking them what they could see. Trying to contact them directly was probably pointless; the Excession’s boundary was moving so fast it looked like it was going to eclipse any returning signal, but there was a decent chance the indirect route might provide a useful reply before it encountered that event-horizon.
It had to assume the expansion was not equidirectional. It still had its second front, the Affront’s war fleet, even if that was vastly less threatening than what it was faced with now. The Sleeper instructed its own warcraft to flee, to do all they could to escape the oncoming blast-front of the Excession’s inflation. If the distension was localised, some at least might escape; they had anyway been launched towards the Affronter fleet, not straight at the Excession. The Sleeper wondered with a fleeting sourness whether the bloating Excession – or whatever was controlling it – was capable of appreciating this distinction. Whatever, it was done; the warcraft were on their own for the moment.
Think. What had the Excession done up until now? What could it possibly be doing? What was it for? Why did it do what it did?
The GSV spent two entire seconds thinking.
(Back on the Jaundiced Outlook, that was long enough for the avatar Amorphia to interrupt Dajeil and say, ‘Excuse me. I beg your pardon, Dajeil. Ah, there’s been a development with the Excession…’)
Then the Sleeper swung its engine fields about, flourishing them into an entirely new configuration and instituting a crash-stop.
The giant ship poured every available unit of power it possessed into an emergency braking manoeuvre which threw up vast livid waves of disturbance in the energy grid; soaring tsunami of piled-up energies that rose and rose within the hyperspatial realm until they too threatened to tear into the skein itself and unleash those energies not witnessed in the galaxy for a half a thousand years. An instant before the wave fronts ripped into the fabric of real space the ship switched from one level of hyperspace to the other, ploughing its traction fields into the Ultraspace energy grid and producing another vast tumbling swell of fricative power.
The ship flickered between the two expanses of hyperspace, distributing the colossal forces at its command amidst each domain, hauling its velocity down at a rate barely allowed for in its design parameters while equally strained steering units edged their own performance envelopes in the attempt to turn the giant craft, angling it slowly ever further away from the centre.
For a moment, there was little enough to do. They were not sufficient to escape, but at least such actions made the point that it was trying to. All that could be done was being done. The Sleeper Service contemplated its life.
Have I done good, or bad? it thought. Well, or ill? The damnable thing was that you just didn’t know, until your life was over; well over. There was a necessary delay between drawing a line under one’s existence and being able to objectively evaluate its effects and therefore one’s own moral worth. It wasn’t a problem a ship was usually confronted with; faced with, yes; that implied a degree of volition and ships went into retreats or became Eccentric all the time, declaring that they’d done their bit for whatever cause they had believed in or been part of. It was always possible to withdraw, to take stock and look back and try to fit one’s existence into an ethical framework greater than that necessarily imposed by the immediacy of events surrounding a busy existence. But even then, how long did one have to make that evaluation? Not long. Probably not long enough. Usually one grew tired of the whole process or moved on to some other level of awareness before sufficient time had passed for that objective evaluation to come about.
If a ship lived for a few hundred or even a thousand years before becoming something quite different – an Eccentric, a Sublimed, whatever – and its civilisation, the thing of which it had been a part when it had been involved, then lived for a few thousand years, how long did it take before you really knew the full moral context of your actions?
Perhaps, an impossibly long time. Perhaps, indeed, that was the real attraction of Subliming. Real Subliming; the sort of strategic, civilisation-wide transcendence that genuinely did seem to draw a line under a society’s works, deeds and thoughts (in what it pleased people to call the real universe, at any rate). Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or meta-philosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just… accounting.
What a rather saddening thought, thought the Sleeper Service. All we’re looking for when we Sublime is our score…
It was getting near time, the ship thought sadly, to send off its mind-state, to parcel up its mortal thoughts and emotions and post them off, away from this – by the look of it – soon-to-be-overwhelmed physicality called the Sleeper Service (once called, a long time ago, the Quietly Confident) and consign it to the remembrance of its peers.
It would probably never live again in reality. Assuming there was what it knew as reality to come back to at all of course (for it was starting to think; What if the Excession’s expansion was equidirectional, and never stopped; what if it was a sort of new big-bang, what if it was destined to take in the whole galaxy, the whole of this universe?). But, even so, even if there was a reality and a Culture to come back to, there was no guarantee it would ever be resurrected. If anything, the likelihood was the other way; it was almost certainly guaranteed not to be regarded as a fit entity for rebirth in another physical matrix. Warships were; that guarantee of serial immortality was the seal upon their bravery (and had occasionally been the impetus for their foolhardiness); they knew they were coming back…
But it had been an Eccentric, and there were only a few other Minds who knew that it had been true and faithful to the greater aims and purposes of the Culture all the time rather than what everybody else no doubt thought it was; a self-indulgent fool determined to waste the huge resources it had been quite deliberately blessed with. Probably, come to think of it, those Minds who did know the extent of its secret purpose would be the last to rally to any call to resurrect it; their own part in the plan – call it conspiracy if you wished – to conceal its true purpose was probably not something they wished to broadcast. Better for them, they would think, that the Sleeper Service died, or at least that it existed only in a controllable simulationary state in another Mind matrix.