Iain Banks: Excession

Dajeil sipped her own drink, feeling its warmth make its way down her throat. Within her, her child stirred, and she patted her belly gently, without really thinking.

The avatar’s gaze seemed fixed on one particular holo screen. Dajeil twisted on the couch to look in the same direction and discovered violent action in a couple of the screens displaying the views from the gas-giant environment; a school of the habitat’s food-chain-topping predators — sharp, arrow-headed things, finned like missiles, venting gas from steering orifices — were shown from different angles as they fell together out of some towering column of cloud and swept through clearer atmosphere down upon a group of vaguely bird-like grazing animals clustered near the edge of an up-welling cloud-top. The avian creatures scattered, some crumpling and falling, some beating frantically away to the side, some disappearing, balled in fright, into the cloud. The predators darted and spun amongst them, most missing their fleeing prey, a few connecting; biting, slashing and killing.

Dajeil nodded. “Migration time, up there,” she said. “Breeding season soon.” She watched a grazer being torn apart and gulped down by a couple of the missile-bodied predators. “Mouths to feed,” she said quietly, looking away. She shrugged. She recognised some of the predators and had given them her own nick-names, though the creatures she was really interested in were the much bigger, slower-moving animals — generally untroubled by the predators — which were like larger, more bulbous relations of the unfortunate grazer flock.

Dajeil had on occasion discussed details of the various ecologies contained within the ship’s habitats with Amorphia, who seemed politely interested and yet frankly ignorant on the subject even though the ship’s knowledge of the ecosystems was, in effect, total; the creatures belonged to the vessel, after all, whether you regarded them as passengers or pets. Much like herself, Dajeil thought sometimes.

Amorphia’s gaze remained fixed on the screens displaying the carnage taking place in the sky beyond the sky. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” the avatar said, sipping at the drink again. It glanced at Dajeil, who was looking surprised. “In a way,” Amorphia added quickly.

Dajeil nodded slowly. “In its own way, yes of course.” She leant forward and put her goblet on to the carved-bone table. “Why are you here today, Amorphia?” she asked.

The ship’s representative looked startled. It came close, Dajeil thought, to spilling its drink.

“To see how you are,” the avatar said quickly.

Dajeil sighed. “Well,” she said, “we have established that I’m well, and—”

“And the child?” Amorphia asked, glancing at the woman’s belly.

Dajeil rested her hand on her abdomen. “It is… as ever,” she said quietly. “It is healthy.”

“Good,” Amorphia said, folding its long arms about itself and crossing its legs. The creature glanced at the holo screens again.

Dajeil was losing patience. “Amorphia, speaking as the ship; what is going on?”

The avatar looked at the woman with a strange, lost, wild look in its eyes, and for a moment Dajeil was worried that something had gone wrong, that the ship had suffered some terrible injury or division, that it had gone quite mad (after all, its fellows regarded it as being half-mad already, at best) and left Amorphia abandoned to its own inadequate devices. Then the black-clad creature unfolded itself from the chair and paced to the single small window that faced the sea, drawing aside curtains to inspect the view. It put its hands to its arms, hugging itself.

“Everything might be about to change, Dajeil,” the avatar said hollowly, seemingly addressing the window. It glanced back at her for a moment. It clasped its hands behind its back. “The sea may have to become as stone, or steel; the sky, too. And you and I may have to part company.” It turned to look at her, then came over to where she sat and perched on the other end of the couch, its thin frame hardly making an impression on the cushions. It stared into her eyes.

“Become like stone?” Dajeil said, still worrying about the mental health of the avatar or the ship controlling it, or both. “What do you mean?”

“We — that is the ship…” Amorphia said, placing one hand on its chest, “… we may finally have… a thing to do.”

“A thing to do?” Dajeil said. “What sort of thing to do?”

“A thing which will require that our world here changes,” the avatar said. “A thing which requires that — at the least — we have to put our animated guests into storage with everybody else — well, save for yourself — and then, perhaps, that we leave all our guests — all our guests — behind in appropriate other habitats.”

“Including me?”

“Including you, Dajeil.”

“I see.” She nodded. Leaving the tower; leaving the ship. Well, she thought, what a sudden end to my protected isolation. “While you?” she asked the avatar. “You go off to do… what?”

“Something,” Amorphia told her, without irony.

Dajeil smiled thinly. “Which you won’t tell me about.”

“Which I can’t tell you about.”

“Because—”

“Because I don’t yet know myself,” Amorphia said.

“Ah.” Dajeil thought for a moment, then stood up and went to one of the holo screens, where a camera drone was tracking a light-dappled school of triangular purple-winged rays across the floor of a shallow part of the sea. She knew this school, too; she had watched three generations of these huge, gentle creatures live and die; she had watched them and she had swum with them and — once — assisted in the birth of one of their young.

Huge purple wings waved in slow motion, tips intermittently disturbing little golden wisps of sand.

“This is a change indeed,” Dajeil said.

“Quite so,” the avatar said. It paused. “And it may lead to a change in your own circumstances.”

Dajeil turned to look at the creature, which was staring intently over the couch at her with wide, unblinking eyes.

“A change?” Dajeil said, her voice betraying her in its shakiness. She stroked her belly again, then blinked and looked down at her hand as though it too had turned traitor.

“I cannot be sure,” Amorphia confessed. “But it is possible.”

Dajeil tore off her hair-band and shook her head, setting free her long dark hair so that it half covered her face as she paced from one side of the room to the other.

“I see,” she said, staring up at the tower’s dome, now sprinkled with a light, drizzling rain. She leant against the wall of holo screens, her gaze fixed on the avatar. “When will all this happen?”

“A few small changes — inconsequential, but capable of saving us much time in the future if carried out now — are happening already,” it said. “The rest, the main part of it… that will come later. In a day or two, or maybe a week or two… if you agree.”

Dajeil thought for a moment, her face flickering between expressions, then she smiled. “You mean you’re asking my permission for all this?”

“Sort of,” the ship’s representative mumbled, looking down and playing with its fingernails.

Dajeil let it do this for a while, then she said, “Ship, you have looked after me here, indulged me…” she made an effort to smile at the dark-clad creature, though it was still intently studying its nails, “… humoured me for all this time, and I can never express my gratitude sufficiently or hope even to begin paying you back, but I can’t make your decisions for you. You must do as you see fit.”

The creature looked up immediately. “Then we’ll start tagging all the fauna now,” it said. “That’ll make it quicker to round them up when the time comes. It’ll take a few more days after that before we can start the transformation process. From that point…” It shrugged. It was the most human gesture she had ever seen the avatar make. “… there may be twenty or thirty days before… before some sort of resolution is reached. Again, it’s hard to say.”