The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  The unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber with bands and shackles of thick stainless iron, his nutrition and bodily func­tions catered for by various tubes and implants. His mouth had also been sewn up, like that of Stinausin. For the first few months of his captivity the assassin's eyes had followed Luseferous around the chamber with a fierce, accusatory look that the Archimandrite eventually grew to find annoying, and so he'd had the man's eyes stitched shut too.

  The fellow's ears and mind still worked, however -Luseferous had been assured - and sometimes it amused him to come down and see for himself the progress that the teeth were making into the creature's body. On such occasions, having what one might term a captive - yet necessarily discreet - audi­ence, he sometimes liked to talk to the failed assassin.

  'Good day,' Luseferous said pleasantly as the lift door rumbled shut behind him. The chamber deep below the study was what the Archimandrite thought of as his den. Here, as well as the nameless assassin, he kept assorted souvenirs of old campaigns, booty from his many victories, items of high art looted from a dozen different stellar systems, a collection of weapons both ceremonial and high-power, various caged or tanked creatures, and the mounted, profoundly dead heads of all those major enemies and adversaries whose end had not been so complete as to reduce their mortal remains to radiation, dust, slime or unidentifiable strips of flesh and shards of bone (or the alien equivalents thereof).

  Luseferous crossed to a deep, dry tank part-set into the floor and looked in at the Recondite Splicer lying coiled and still on its floor. He slipped a thick elbow glove onto his arm, reached into a large pot standing on the broad, waist-high parapet of the tank and dropped a handful of fat black trunk-leeches into the tank.

  'And how are you? Are you keeping well? Hmm?' he asked.

  An observer would have been unsure whether the Archimandrite was talking to the human male pinned to the wall, the Recondite Splicer - now no longer still, but raising its blind, glistening brown head, sniffing the air while its long, segmented body twitched with anticipation - or indeed the trunk-leeches, thudding one by one onto the mossy floor of the tank and immediately flexing their way with a sort of sine-wave motion across the surface towards the nearest corner, as far away

  from the Recondite Splicer as it was possible to get. The brown mass of the Splicer began to shuffle massively towards them and they started trying to climb the sheer glass sides of the tank, climbing over each other and slipping back down as soon as they tried to haul themselves up.

  Luseferous peeled the elbow glove off and looked round the vaulted, subtly lit space. The chamber was a comfortable, quiet sort of place set well within the cliff, with no windows or light shafts, and he felt safe and relaxed here. He looked over at the long, tawny shape that was the suspended body of the assassin and said, 'Nowhere's quite as nice as home, eh, is it?' The Archimandrite even smiled, though there was nobody to smile at.

  There was a rasping noise and a heavy thump from inside the tank, followed by some almost inaudibly high keening sounds. Luseferous turned to watch the Recondite Splicer tear the giant leeches apart and eat them, violently shaking its great patchily brown head and tossing some bits of slimy black flesh all the way out of the tank. Once it had thrown a still-alive leech up and out of the tank and nearly hit the Archimandrite with it; Luseferous had chased the injured leech round the chamber with a shear-sword, cleaving deep slivers out of the dark red granite floor as he hacked and sliced at the creature.

  When the show in the tank was over, the Archimandrite turned back to the assassin. He put the elbow glove back on, picked another trunk-leech from the pot and strolled over to the man attached to the wall. 'Do you remember home, sir assassin?' he asked as he approached. 'Is there any memory of it in your head at all, hmm? Home, mother, friends?' He stopped in front of the man. 'Any of that stuff at all?' He waved the leech's moist, seeking snout in front of the assassin's face as he spoke. They sensed each other, the cold, writhing creature in the Archiman­drite's hand stretching out to try to fasten itself to the man's face, the man sucking breath through his nostrils and turning his head as far as it would go, seeming to try and shrink back into the wall behind (this would not be the first time the assassin had been introduced to a trunk-leech). The tusks digging into his chest prevented him from moving his head very far.

  Luseferous followed the movements of the man's head with the leech, keeping it in front of his lightly furred, leonine face, letting him smell the straining, quivering mass.

  'Or did they rip out all those memories when they cleaned you, before they sent you to try to kill me? Huh? Are they all gone? Eh?' He let the very tip of the trunk-leech's mouth parts just touch the fellow's nose, causing the failed assassin to wince and jerk and make a small, terrified whimpering noise. 'What, eh? Do you remember home, eh, sport? A pleasant place to be, a place you felt safe and secure and with people you trusted, and who maybe even loved you? What do you say? Eh? Eh? Come on.' The man tried to turn his head still further, straining the puckered skin around the puncture points on his chest, one of which started to bleed. The giant leech trembled in Luseferous's hand, stretching its mucus-tipped mouth parts still further as it tried to find purchase on the human male's flesh. Then, before the leech could properly attach itself to the fellow, the Archimandrite pulled it back and let it hang from his half-outstretched arm, where it swung and twisted muscularly with what felt for all the world like genuine frustration.

  'This is my home, sir assassin,' Luseferous told the man. 'This is my place, my refuge, this, which you . . . invaded, despoiled, dishonoured with your . . . your plot. Your attempt.' His voice quaked as he said, 'I invited you into my house, invited you to my table as ... as hosts have guests for ten thousand human years and you ... all you wanted to do was hurt me, kill me. Here, in my home, where I should feel safer than anywhere.' The Archimandrite shook his head in sorrow at such ingrati­tude. The failed assassin had nothing but a dirty rag to cover his nakedness. Luseferous pulled it away and the fellow flinched again. Luseferous stared. "They did make a bit of a mess of you, didn't they?' He watched the failed assassin's thighs quiver and twitch. He let the loincloth fall to the ground; a servant would replace it tomorrow.

  ‘I like my home,' he told the fellow quietly. 'I do, really. Everything I've had to do I've done just to make things safer, to make home safer, to make everybody safer.' He waved the trunk-leech towards what was left of the man's genitalia, but the leech seemed listless and the man already exhausted. Even the Archimandrite felt like some of the fun had gone out of the situation. He turned smartly and strode to the pot on the broad rail over the tank, dumping the leech inside and peeling the thick elbow glove off.

  'And now I have to leave home, mister assassin,' Luseferous said, and sighed. He gazed down at the long coiled shape of the once-again-still Recondite Splicer. It had changed colour from brown to yellow-green now, adopting the colours of the mosses it lay upon. All that was left of the trunk-leeches were some dark spots and smears on the walls, and a faint, tangy smell the Archimandrite had come to recognise as that of yet another species's blood. He turned back to look at the assassin. 'Yes, I have to go away, and for a very long time, and it would seem I have no choice.' He started to walk slowly towards the man. 'Because you can't delegate everything, because ultimately, espe­cially when it comes to the most important things, you can't really trust anybody else. Because sometimes, especially when you're going far away and communications take so long, there's no substitute for being there. What do you think of that? Eh? There's a fine thing. Don't you think? Me working all these years to make this place safe and now I have to leave it, still trying to make it even safer, even more powerful, even better.' He stepped up to the man again, tapping one of the curved fangs boring through the fellow's skull. 'And all because of people like you, who hate me, who won't listen, who won't do as they're told, who don't know
what's good for them.' He gripped the fang and pulled hard at it. The man mewed down his nose with pain.

  'Well, not really,' Luseferous said, shrugging, letting go. 'It's debatable whether this will really make us safer or not. I'm going to this ... this Ulubis ... system or whatever it is because there might be something valuable there, because my advisers advise so and my intelligence people have intelligence to this effect. Of course nobody's certain, nobody ever is. But they do seem uncommonly excited about this.' The Archimandrite sighed again, more deeply. 'And impressionable old me, I'm going to do as they suggest. Do you think I'm doing the right thing?' He paused, as though expecting an answer. 'Do you? I mean, I realise you might not be entirely honest with me if you did have an opinion, but, all the same . . . No? You sure?' He traced the line of a scar along the side of the man's abdomen, wondering idly if it was one of those that his own inquisitors had inflicted. Looked a bit crude and deep to be their work. The failed assassin was breathing quickly and shallowly but giving no sign that he was even listening. Behind his sealed mouth, his jaws seemed to be working.

  ‘You see, for once I'm not absolutely sure myself, and I could use some advice. Might not make us all safer at all, what we're planning to do. But it has to be done. The way some things just have to. Eh?' He slapped the man's face, not hard. The man flinched all the same. 'Don't worry, though. You can come too. Big invasion fleet. Plenty of room.' He looked around the chamber. 'Anyway, I feel you spend too much time stuck in here; you could do with getting out more.' The Archimandrite Luseferous smiled, though still there was nobody to smile at. 'After all this trouble I'd hate to miss watching you die. Yes, you come with me, why don't you? To Ulubis, to Nasqueron.'

  'Eh? Oh, yes.' Uncle Slovius raised a flipper-like hand and waved it vaguely. 'Please do.'

  'Thank you.'

  Fassin Taak hitched up his walking britches, gathered in his wide shirt sleeves and folded himself decorously into a sitting position at the side of the large circular pool of gently steaming and luminously blue liquid that his uncle floated within. Uncle Slovius had some years ago assumed the shape of a walrus. A beige-pink, relatively slim walrus, with tusks barely longer than the middle finger of a man's hand, but a walrus nevertheless. The hands Uncle Slovius had once possessed were no more -they were flippers now, on the end of two thin, rather odd and ineffectual-looking arms. His fingers were little more than stubs; a scalloped pattern fringing the ends of his flippers. He opened his mouth to speak, but then one of the household servants, a black-uniformed human male, approached him, kneeling at the side of the pool to whisper something into his ear. The servant held his long pigtail out of the water with one many-ringed hand. The dark clothes, long hair and rings all indicated that he was one of the most senior functionaries. Fassin felt he ought to know his name, but couldn't think of it immediately.

  He looked round the room. The chamber of Provisional Forgetting was one of the rarely used parts of the house, only called into action - if you could call it that - on such occasions, when a senior family member was approaching their end. The pool took up most of the floor space of a large roughly hemi­spherical room whose walls were translucently thin agate inlaid with veins of time-dulled silver. This dome formed part of one bubble-wing of the family's Autumn House, situated on the continent Twelve on the rocky planet-moon 'glantine, which orbited the gaudy, swirlingly clouded mass of the gas-giant Nasqueron like a pepper grain around a football. A tiny portion of the massive planet's surface was visible through the trans­parent centre section of the dome's roof, directly above Fassin and his uncle.

  The part of Nasqueron that Fassin could see was presently in daylight, displaying a chaotic cloudscape coloured crimson, orange and rust-brown, the summed shades producing a deep red light which fell through the violet skies of 'glantine's thinly breathable atmosphere and the dome's glazed summit and helped illuminate the chamber and the pool below, where the black-clad servant was supporting Uncle Slovius while he supped on a beaker of what might have been either refreshment or medi­cine. Some dribbles of the clear liquid escaped Uncle Slovius's mouth, trickling down his grizzled chin to the folds of his neck and dripping into the blue pool, where tall waves slopped to and fro in the half-standard gravity. Uncle Slovius made quiet grunting noises, his eyes closed.

  Fassin looked away. Another servant approached him, offering a tray of drinks and sweetmeats, but he smiled and raised one hand in a gesture of rejection and the servant bowed and retreated. Fassin fixed his gaze politely on the dome's roof and the view of the gas-giant, while watching from the corner of his eye as the servant attending his uncle dabbed at the old man's lips with a neatly folded cloth.

  Magisterial, oblivious, moving almost imperceptibly with a kind of tumultuous serenity, Nasqueron turned above them like some vast glowing coal hanging in the sky.

  The gas-giant was the largest planet in the Ulubis system, which lay within a remote strand of Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs on the galactic outskirts, fifty-five thousand years from the galaxy's nominal centre and about as remote as it was possible to get while still being part of the great lens.

  There were, especially in the current post-War age, different levels of remoteness, and Ulubis system qualified as back-of-beyond in all of them. Being on the outermost reaches of the galaxy - and hanging well underneath the galactic plane, where the last vestiges of stars and gas gave way to the emptiness beyond - did not necessarily mean that a place was inaccessible, providing it was close to an arteria portal.

  Arteria - wormholes - and the portals which were their exits and entrances meant everything in the galactic community; they represented the difference between having to crawl everywhere at less than the speed of light and making almost instantaneous transitions from one stellar system to another. The effect they had on a system's importance, economy and even morale was similarly dramatic and rapid. Without one, it was as though you were still stuck in one small village, one dull and muddy valley, and might be there all your life. Once a wormhole portal was emplaced, it was as though you suddenly became part of a vast and glittering city, full of energy, life and promise.

  The only way to get an arteria portal from one place to another was to put it in a spaceship and physically take it, slower than light, from one place to another, leaving the other end -usually - anchored where you'd started out. Which meant that if your wormhole was destroyed - and they could be destroyed, in theory at any point along their length, in practice only at their ends, at their portals - then you were instantly all the way back to square one, stuck in your isolated little village once again.

  Ulubis system had first been connected to the rest of the galaxy over three billion years earlier, during what was then known as the New Age. It had been a relatively young, not-long-formed system at the time, just a few billion years old, but was already multiply life-supporting. Its arteria connection had formed part of the Second Complex, the galactic community's second serious attempt at an integrated network of wormholes. It had lost that connection in the billion-year turmoil of the Long Collapse, the War of Squalls, the Scatter Anarchy and the Informorta breakdown, then - along with most of the rest of the civilised galaxy - slumbered as if comatose under the weight of the Second, or Major, Chaos, a time when only its Dweller population on Nasqueron had survived. The Dwellers, being numbered amongst the species meta-type known as the Slow, worked to a different timescale, and thought nothing of taking a few hundred thousand years to get from point A to point B; a billion years of nothing much happening was, they declared, merely like a long sabbatical to them.

  Following the Third Diasporian Age (and much more besides - galactic history wasn't really simple on any scale) another wormhole brought Ulubis back on-line to become part of the Third Complex. That arteria lasted for seventy million peaceful, productive years, during which several Quick species, none of them native to Ulubis, came and went, leaving only the Dwellers to bear consistent witness to the slow turn of life and events. T
he Arteria Collapse had plunged Ulubis into solitude once again, along with ninety-five per cent of the connected galaxy. More portals and wormholes disappeared during the War of the New Quick and the Machine War, and only the establishment of the Mercatoria - at least by the estimation of those who controlled it - brought about a lasting peace and the beginning of the Fourth Complex.

  Ulubis had been reconnected early on in this slow, still-at-the-early-stages process and for six thousand years that latest arteria had made the system an easily reached part of the grad­ually recovering galactic community. However, then that worm-hole too had been destroyed, and for over a quarter of a millennium Ulubis's nearest working access point had been fully two hundred and fourteen years away further down the increasing thickness of the Stream at Zenerre. That would change in about seventeen years or so, when the wormhole end-point currently being transported towards Ulubis system at rela­tivistic speeds aboard the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir arrived and was emplaced, probably where the old portal had been, at one of the Lagrange points near Sepekte, the principal planet of the Ulubis system. For the moment, though, Ulubis, despite its importance as a centre for Dweller Studies, remained remote chronologically as well as physically.

  Uncle Slovius waved the servant away with one flipper and drew himself up against the Y-shaped cradle which supported his head and shoulders above the blue glowing surface of the pool. The servant - Fassin recognised him now as Guime, the second-highest-ranking of his uncle's retainers - turned back and tried to help Slovius in this manoeuvre. However, Slovius made hissing, tutting noises and slapped at the male with one flipper hand. Guime dodged the weak, slow blow easily and stepped back again, bowing. He stood nearby, by the wall. Slovious struggled to lift his upper body any further out of the pool, his tailed torso stirring sluggishly under the luminescent waves.