BooksBarbecue
Back Excession
Chapters (108)
  1. About the Author
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. 1 - Outside Context Problem
  6. I
  7. II
  8. III
  9. IV
  10. V
  11. VI
  12. 2 - Not Invented Here
  13. I
  14. II
  15. III
  16. 3 - Uninvited Guests
  17. I
  18. II
  19. III
  20. IV
  21. 4 - Dependency Principle
  22. I
  23. II
  24. III
  25. IV
  26. V
  27. 5 - Kiss The Blade
  28. I
  29. II
  30. III
  31. IV
  32. V
  33. VI
  34. 6 - Pittance
  35. I
  36. II
  37. III
  38. IV
  39. V
  40. VI
  41. 7 - Tier
  42. I
  43. II
  44. III
  45. IV
  46. 8 - Killing Time
  47. I
  48. II
  49. III
  50. IV
  51. V
  52. VI
  53. VII
  54. VIII
  55. 9 - Unacceptable Behaviour
  56. I
  57. II
  58. III
  59. IV
  60. V
  61. VI
  62. VII
  63. VIII
  64. IX
  65. X
  66. XI
  67. XII
  68. XIII
  69. XIV
  70. 10 - Heavy Messing
  71. I
  72. II
  73. III
  74. IV
  75. V
  76. VI
  77. VII
  78. VIII
  79. IX
  80. X
  81. XI
  82. XII
  83. XIII
  84. XIV
  85. XV
  86. 11 - Regarding Gravious
  87. I
  88. II
  89. III
  90. IV
  91. V
  92. VI
  93. VII
  94. VIII
  95. IX
  96. X
  97. XI
  98. XII
  99. XIII
  100. XIV
  101. 12 - Faring Well
  102. I
  103. II
  104. III
  105. IV
  106. V
  107. VI
  108. Epilogue

Her face had been altered. While she’d slept, during the night, one day out from Phage. Her face, her beautiful, heart-shaped, heart-winning, heart-melting, heart-breaking face, the face which she had sat and gazed at in a mirror or a reverser field for hours at a time on occasion when she’d been old enough for her drug glands to come on line and young enough to experiment with them, the face she had gazed at and gazed at not because she was stoned but because she was just so damned lovely . . . her face had been made to look like somebody else’s. And there was worse.

It might be hurting a little now if she wasn’t keeping the pain turned off, but that wasn’t what mattered; what mattered was that her face was: a) puffy, swollen and discoloured after the nanotechs had done their work, b) not her own any longer, and, c) older! The woman she was supposed to look like was older than she! Much older! Sixty years older!

People claimed that nobody in the Culture really changed much in appearance between about twenty-five and two hundred and fifty (then there was a slow but sure ageing to the three-fifty, four hundred mark, by which time your hair would be white (or gone!) your skin would be wrinkled like some basic’s scrotum and your tits swinging round your belly-button - ugh!) but she had always been able to tell how old people were; she was rarely more than five or ten years out - never more than twenty, at any rate - and she could see how old she was now, even beneath the puffiness and shadowy bruising; she was seeing how she would look when she was older, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t her own face, it didn’t matter that she would probably look much better than this by the time she was in her mid-eighties (she had pictures of 99.9 per cent certain projections prepared for her by the house AI which showed exactly how she’d look at every decade for two centuries ahead, and they looked great); what mattered was that she looked old and dowdy and that would make her feel old and dowdy and therefore that would make her behave old and dowdy, and that feeling and that way of behaving and therefore that look might not go away when she was returned to her normal, her natural, her own appearance.