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Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug notice. No; we
wanted the damn thing's views, some sort of entirely outside viewpoint, not it
tearing off to anywhere near the Excession itself.
It was part of the Gang before, you know. We owed it that, no matter that it
is now
Eccentric. Would that we had known how much&
Now we've got another horrendous variable screwing up our plans.
If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you
can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned
if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare
time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
oo
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8978]
xLSV
Serious Callers Only oEccentric
Shoot Them Later
(signal file attached) What did I tell you? I don't know about this. Looks
suspicious to me.
oo
Hmm. And I don't know, either. I hate to say it, but it sounds genuine. Of
course, if I prove to be wrong you will never confront me with this, ever, all
right?
oo
If, after all this is over, we are both still in a position for me to confer
and you to benefit from such leniency, I shall be infinitely glad to extend
such forbearance.
oo
Well, it could have been expressed more graciously, but I accept this moral
blank cheque with all the deference it merits.
oo
I'm going to call the
Sleeper Service.
It won't take any notice of me but I'm going to call the mealworm anyway.
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Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug
IV
Genar-Hofoen didn't take his pen terminal with him when he went out that
evening, and the first place he visited in Night City was a
Tier-Sintricate/Ishlorsinami Tech.
store.
The woman was small for an Ishy, thought Genar-Hofoen. Still, she towered
over him. She wore the usual long black robes and she smelled& musty. They
sat on plain, narrow seats in a bubble of blackness. The woman was bent over
a tiny fold-
away screen balanced on her knees. She nodded and craned her body over
towards him. Her hand extended, close to his left ear. A sequence of
shining, telescoping rods extended from her fingers. She closed her eyes. In
the dimness, Genar-
Hofoen could see tiny lights flickering on the inside of her eyelids.
Her hand touched his ear, tickling slightly. He felt his face twitch. 'Don't
move,' she said.
He tried to stay still. The woman withdrew her hand. She opened her eyes and
peered at the point where the tips of three of the delicate rods met. She
nodded and said, 'Hmm.'
Genar-Hofoen bent forward and looked too. He couldn't see anything. The
woman closed her eyes again; her lid screens glowed again.
'Very sophisticated,' she said. 'Could have missed it.'
Genar-Hofoen looked at his right palm. 'Sure there's nothing on this hand?' he
asked, recalling Verlioef Schung's firm handshake.
'As sure as I can be,' the woman said, withdrawing a small transparent
container from her robe and dropping whatever she had taken out of his ear
into it. He still couldn't see any-thing there.
'And the suit?' he asked, fingering one lapel of his jacket.
'Clean,' the woman said.
'So that's it?' he asked.
'That is all,' she told him. The black bubble disappeared and they were
sitting in a small room whose walls were lined with shelves overflowing with
impenetrably file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Excession.html
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Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug technical-looking
gear.
'Well, thanks.'
'That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents.'
'Oh, call it a round thousand.'
He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night
Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium
franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night
Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them
was that it would always be night when you got there, and you'd have no excuse
for not having fun.
Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small
island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome
ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take
its cue from each year's Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here
the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its
buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The
theme that year had been the Sea;
Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept
surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves' surfaces had been
balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave's looming,
overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street
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beneath. At either end of the
Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect -
through oceanically inauthentic tunnels - with other highways.
The theme this year was the Primitive and the City had chosen to interpret
this as a gigantic early electronic circuit board; the network of silvery
streets formed an almost perfectly flat cityscape studded with enormous
resistors, dense-looking, centipedally legged flat-topped chips, spindly
diodes and huge semi-transparent valves with complicated internal structures,
each standing on groups of shining metal legs embedded in the network of the
printed circuit. Those were the bits that
Genar-Hofoen sort of half recognised from his History of Technical Stuff
course or whatever it had been called when he'd been a student; there were
lots of other jagged, knobbly, smooth, brightly coloured, matt black, shiny,
vaned, crinkled bits he didn't know the purpose or the name of.
Street Six this year was a fifteen-metre wide stream of quickly flowing
mercury covered with etched diamond sheeting; every now and again large
coherent blobs of sparkling blue-gold went speeding along the mercury stream
underfoot. Apparently
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Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug these were symbolised
electrons or something. The original idea had been to incorporate the mercury
channels into the City transport system, but this had proved impractical and
so they were there just for effect; the City tube system ran deep underground
as usual. Genar-Hofoen had jumped on and off a few of the underground cars on
his way to the City and on and off a couple more once he'd arrived, hoping to
give the slip to anybody following. Having done this and had the tracer in
his ear removed, he was happy he'd done the best he could to ensure that his
evening's fun would take place unobserved by SC, though he wasn't particularly
bothered if they were still watching him; it was more the principle of the
thing. No point getting obsessive about it.
Street Six itself was packed with people, walking, talking, staggering,
strolling, rolling along within bubblespheres, riding on exotically accoutred
animals, riding in small carriages drawn by ysner-mistretl pairs and floating
along under small vacuum balloons or in force field harnesses. Above, in the
eternal night sky beneath the City's vast dome, this part of the evening's
entertainment was being provided by a city-wide hologram of an ancient bomber
raid.
The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or
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