Excession

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.