Excession

'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.

How the fuck does it do that? the ship wondered. It started checking that time was still working properly, directing its sensors at distant quasars which had been used as time reference sources for millennia. It also started checking that it was not in the centre of some huge projection, extending its still-stopped engine fields like vast whiskers, feeling for the (as far as anybody knew) unfakeable reality that was the energy grid and minutely — and randomly — scrutinising sections of the view around it, searching for the equivalent of pixels or brush strokes. The Fate Amenable To Change was experiencing a sense of elation at having survived what it had feared might be a terminal encounter with the Excession. But it was still worried that it had missed something, that it had been interfered with somehow. The most obvious explanation was that it had been fooled, that it had been tricked into moving itself here under its own power or been moved to this position via another tractive force over time. The further implication was that the interval when it had been moving had somehow been expunged from its memory. That would be bad. The very idea that its Mind was not absolutely inviolate was anathema to a ship.

It tried to accustom itself to the idea that this was what had happened. It tried to steel itself to the prospect that — at the very least — it would have to have its mental processes investigated by other Minds to establish whether it had suffered any lasting damage or had had any unpleasant sub-routines (or even personalities) buried in its mind-state during the time it had been — effectively — unconscious (horrible, horrible thought).

The check-time results started coming in.

Relief and incredulity. If this was the real universe and not a projection, or — worse still — something it had been persuaded to. imagine for itself inside its Mind, then there had been no extra elapsed time. The universe thought it was exactly the same time as the Mind's internal clock did.

The ship felt stunned. Even while another part of its intellect, an opt-in, semi-autonomous section, was restarting its engines and discovering they worked just fine, the ship was trying to come to terms with the fact it had been moved thirty light years in an instant. No Displacer could do that. Not with something the size it was, not that quickly, not over that sort of distance. Certainly not without even the merest hint that a wormhole had been involved.

Unbelievable. I'm in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.

It sent a signal to the Not Invented Here. Then it tried contacting its remotes still — presumably — in station around the Excession. No reply. And no sign of the Elencher ships either. Anywhere.

The Excession was invisible too, but then it would be from this distance.

The Fate nudged itself tentatively towards the Excession. Almost immediately, its engines started to lose traction, their energies just seeming to disappear through the energy grid as though it wasn't there. It was a progressive effect, worsening as it proceeded and with the implication that about a light minute or so further in towards the Excession it would lose grid adhesion altogether.

It had only progressed about ten light seconds in; it slowed while it still could and backed up until it was the same distance away from the Excession as it had been when it had found itself dumped here in the first place. Once it was there, its engines responded perfectly normally again.

It had made the initial attempt in Infraspace; it tried again in Ultraspace, with exactly the same result. It went astern once more and resumed its earlier position. It tried moving at a right angle to its earlier course; the engines worked as they always did. Weird. It hove to again.

Its avatars amongst the crew started yet another explanation regarding what was going on. It compiled a preparatory report and signalled it to the MSV Not Invented Here. The report crossed with the MSVs reply to the Fate's earlier signal:

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28. 882.8367]

xMSV Not Invented Here

oGCU Fate Amenable To Change