The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  Fassin, still feeling very much looked-at, noticed that Colonel Somjomion, the human female who was acting chief of staff of the Shrievalty contingent in the Ulubis system, smiled cautiously at him from the podium across the chamber when the holo-gram said this. Unsure whether the Shrievalty saluted or not, Fassin rose fractionally in his seat, and nodded formally.

  Oh, fuck, were his precise thoughts.

  The image floating above the cooking-pot AI said, 'The reason that Seer - Major - Taak is here today to hear what I have had to tell you all is that it was something which he discov­ered - stumbled over might be an equally accurate description, with no disrespect to Seer Taak - that has led to my being here in the first place.'

  Oh, fucking hell. I always thought delving would be the death of me but I assumed it would be an equipment failure, not some­thing like this. On the other hand, that smile from Colonel Somjomion had been restrained, even careful, not mean or mocking. Might live yet.

  'Which brings us, of course, to the real, or at least the most pressing, reason for my appearance here, in this almost unprece­dented form,' the hologram said, then made a show of taking a deep breath.

  It looked around them all, slowly, before saying, 'Ulubis, I'm sure we would all agree, is a pleasant and fairly favoured system.' It paused again.

  Fassin was listening fairly hard at this point, and would have taken decent odds on the literal truth of the old you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop saying. 'And,' the projection said with a smile, radiantly confident that it now had their full attention, 'as a centre of Dweller Studies, it is not without significance galactically, unquestionably from an antiquarian and intellectual standpoint.' Another pause. It occurred to Fassin that an AI controlling a hologram could put a quite literal twinkle in its eye. 'However, one might think it reasonable to ask - again, with no disrespect intended, or, I hope, taken - why Ulubis has attracted the attention of our new-found adversaries from Cluster Epiphany Five. One might even - knowing the impor­tance that the Mercatoria attaches to reconnecting all the many, many systems which have been without Arteria access all these millennia - wonder why the expedition from Zenerre to Ulubis with a new portal was dispatched with such alacrity, given the arguably still greater claims that more populous, more classi­cally strategically important and more at-the-time obviously threatened systems might have had upon the resources and expertise of our esteemed colleagues in the Engineering faculty.

  'One might also pause to give thought to the reasons why the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir is accompanied by those elements of the Summed Fleet of which my original has the honour of being part - why, indeed, the Eship Est-taun Zhiffir is escorted by such a preponderance of force at all.' The holo­gram raised its head, looked all around again. 'It might not even be totally unreasonable to call into question the apparently unchallenged assumptions and settled conclusions concerning the destruction of the Ulubis portal by the Beyonders, over two centuries ago.'

  That caused a little frisson in the chamber, Fassin noticed. Is any of this still about me and anything I might have found? he wondered. The more I hear, the more I hope it isn't.

  'There is one circumstance, one nexus of contingent infor­mation,' the image said with a broad, unamused smile and some­thing like relish, 'which is, we strongly suspect, behind all of this.' The projection turned to look directly at the Hierchon Ormilla. 'Sir, at this point I must ask that those not specifically cleared to be present at this meeting be withdrawn. I believe we might make an exception for the troopers, providing their ear mikes are turned off, but I would be disobeying my orders if I continued with those not invited still present.'

  'Admiral Quile,' the Hierchon boomed, with just sufficient emphasis, 'I vouch for all those present who were inadvertently excluded from the clearance list you refer to. You may continue.'

  'And were it up to me, sir, that would of course be more than enough reason to proceed without care or reservation,' the Admiral's image said. 'However, devastated though I may be at being seen to offer even the slightest suggestion of an insult to your esteemed court, I am specifically forbidden to continue, bound as I am by the orders of the Complector Council.'

  Ouch, Fassin thought. He almost felt sorry for the Hierchon. He'd not just had rank pulled on him, he'd been made to look small. A Sarcomage outranked a Hierchon, and was in turn answerable to a Complector, any single one of which -supremely powerful as they were in every other exercise and iteration of power within the civilised galaxy - themselves had at least to take into account the will of the Complector Council. The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council were bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and were generally held to be putting considerable effort into getting round those.

  Hierchon Ormilla took his defeat with a degree of grace and within a few minutes the chamber was emptied of half its earlier occupants. The stepped sequence of podia in front of the Hierchon's imposing esuit now looked positively bare. All the court officials and courtiers had departed, with much muttering and the single highest quotient of affronted dignity Fassin had ever witnessed, by several factors. The military bigwigs were still present, but even their on-podium ranks had been depleted as Colonel Somjomion of the Shrievalty and Clerk-Regnant Voriel of the Cessoria were reduced to stepping down to floor level so that they could operate the two most important pieces of equipment monitoring the cooking-pot device embodying the AI. The mirror-finish troopers still stood in a wide circle beyond, armour locked in at-ease, deaf now.

  While all this had been going on, Fassin had been left to sit there, not knowing what to think. He knew what he ought to be thinking; he ought to be thinking, What the fuck could I ever have stumbled across that possibly warranted this level of right-to-the-top paranoia and secrecy? It was, however, hard to know what to think. He also knew what he ought to feel: fear. There, he was fine; he had a superabundance of high weapon-grade trepidation. 'Thank you,' the image of the Admiral said. 'Now then,' it said, looking round all those who remained. 'I have a question for you. What do you know of something called the Dweller List?' It held up one hand. 'Rhetorical question. You don't have to answer. Those of you who wish, feel free to consult your screens or equivalent. Take a moment.'

  There was a flurry of distant tapping. The Dweller List? thought Fassin. Oh, fucking hell; not that shit.

  The hologram smiled. 'Let me in due time tell you what we at this end - as we design and record this signal and projection - consider important regarding this subject.'

  Fassin had heard of the Dweller List, of course; no Seer hadn't. Unfortunately, lots of laypeople had heard of the List, too, and so it had become one of those tired, inward-groan-producing subjects that people tended to raise when they met a Seer at a party, along with other hoary old cliché-questions such as, 'Do Dwellers really hunt their own children?' and, 'Are they really as old as they say they are?'

  The Dweller List was a collection of coordinates. It had turned up, as far as anyone could be sure, towards the end of the Burster War four hundred million years earlier, and was probably well out of date even then. Allegedly, the list detailed all the Dwellers' own secret arteria portals. According to the story, these had been under development since the time of the Long Collapse, when the Dwellers had decided that the other species - or groups of species - with which they were forced to share the galaxy couldn't be trusted to keep their own or jointly owned 'hole networks safe, and so the Dwellers had better construct an arteria web which they controlled - and which preferably nobody else knew about - if they wanted to voyage from gas-giant to gas-giant reliably and without fuss.

  This, of course, completely ignored the Dwellers' attitudes to time and space and scale and more or less everything else. The Dwellers didn't need wormholes and the near-instantaneous travel between systems that they offered. They lived for billions of years, they could slow their metabolism and thoughts down as required so that a journey of a thousand years or ten thou­sand years or a hundred thousand years would ap
pear to be over in the course of a single sleep, or occupied no more time than that required to read a good book, or play a complicated game. Plus they were already everywhere; they claimed they had spread throughout the galaxy during the First Diasporian Age, which had ended when the universe was only two and a half billion years old. Even if that claim was a boast, a typical Dweller exaggeration, what was undeniable was that Dwellers were present in significant numbers in well over ninety-nine per cent of all the gas-giant planets in the galaxy, and had been for as long as anybody could remember. (Though not, as it had turned out, Jupiter. Humanity's own backyard gas-giant was unusual in being relatively water-poor. The Dwellers consid­ered it a desert planet and rarely visited.)

  After centuries of real-time and decades of seem-time spent with Dwellers, Fassin had gained the distinct impression that Dwellers both despised and felt sorry for the Quick - the species, like humans, like all the others in the Mercatoria, which felt the need to use wormholes.

  As the Dwellers saw it, to be Quick - to live life that precip­itously - was to condemn oneself to an early end. Life had an inescapable trajectory, a natural curve. Evolution, development, progress: all conspired to push a sentient species along in a certain direction, and all you could do was choose to run that road or saunter along it. The Slow took their time, adapting to the given scale and natural limits of the galaxy and the universe as it existed.

  The Quick insisted on short cuts and seemed determined to bend the very fabric of space to their frantic, impatient will. When they were smart they succeeded in this wilfulness, but they only brought their own end all the quicker. They lived fast and died faster, describing sudden, glorious but quickly fading trails across the firmament. The Dwellers, like the other Slow, wanted to be around for the long term, and so were prepared to wait.

  So quite why the Dwellers would ever have bothered building a secret wormhole network was something of a mystery, as was how they had managed to keep it secret all these hundreds of millions of years, not to mention how this fitted in with the rather obvious nature of each different Dweller community's isolation from each other.

  Nevertheless, the myth of the Dweller List continued to excite people in general and conspiracy theorists in particular, espe­cially in times of threat and desperation, when it would be really, really great if a secret wormhole network did exist.

  Fassin agreed with the textbooks that it had been no coincid­ence the List had first turned up during the Burster War, when the whole galactic community had seemed to be falling apart, and people were looking for salvation, for hope, anywhere. Then, the arteria total had been falling from its earlier - and then all-time - high of nearly 39,000 to under a thousand. At the nadir of the Third Chaos there had been less than a hundred 'holes in the whole galaxy, and the Dwellers hadn't stepped in then with an offer to let everybody else use this secret system. If not then, when the light of civilisation seemed to be fading from the great lens entirely, then when? When and why would they ever come galloping to the rescue?

  Part of the seductive attraction of the List was its sheer size. It contained over two million sets of alleged portal coordinates, implying more than one million arteria, presumably linked in a single enormous network. At the height of the Third Complex, eight thousand years earlier, there had been exactly 217,390 established wormholes threading the galaxy together, and that was as good, as far as was known, as it had ever got. If the Dweller List genuinely enumerated existing portals and arteria, it would represent the promise of instigating the single greatest change in the history of the galaxy; the sudden linking-up of two million systems, many of which had never had any connec­tion before, the bringing together of almost everybody every­where - the very furthest, most utterly isolated star would likely be a mere decade or two away from the nearest portal - and the near-instant revitalising, on a scale unheard of in nearly twelve billion years of tenacious, sporadically stuttering civili­sation, of the entire galactic community.

  It was, Fassin and almost all his fellow Seers had long thought, a forlorn hope. The Dwellers didn't need or show any sign of using wormholes. Being Dwellers, they naturally claimed they were experts at arteria and portal technology, and certainly they were not afraid of using wormholes, it was just that they didn't see the need for them . . . but if they ever had been seriously involved with wormhole production, those days were long gone. In any case, the List itself, which had been lying around in libraries and data reservoirs, multitudinously copied for hundreds of millions of years, accessible to anybody with a link, was not the end of the story; it just gave the rough coordinates of two million gas-giants in two million systems. What was needed was a more precise location.

  The obvious places to look were the relevant Trojan or Lagrange points, the gravitationally stable locations dotted around and between the orbits of the various planets in the named systems. However, these had all long since been elimi­nated. After that it got much more tricky. In theory a worm-hole mouth could be left in any stable orbit anywhere in a system and never be found unless you practically tripped over it. Working portals were anything up to a kilometre wide and had an effective mass of several hundred thousand tonnes, whereas a portal shrunk and stabilised and set up to keep itself that way with relatively simple automatics systems could lie in an orbit as far out as a system's Oort cloud with a gravitational footprint of less than a kilogramme more or less indefinitely. The problem was how to describe where it was.

  Allegedly there was some extra set of coordinates, or even a single mathematical operation, a transform, which, when applied to any given set of coordinates in the original list, somehow magically derived the exact position of that system's portal. The obvious objection to this was that after four hundred million years, minimum, there was no known coordinate system ever devised capable of reliably determining where something as small as a portal was. (Unless the holes had all somehow auto­matically kept themselves in the same relative position all that time. Given the haphazard and cavalier attitude that Dwellers tended to display towards anything especially high-tech, this was regarded as highly unlikely.)

  'So,' the image hovering above the dark device in the centre of the audience chamber said, 'if I may assume we are all happy we know what we're talking about . . .' It looked around them again. Nobody demurred.

  'The Dweller List,' the hologram said, 'supposedly giving the approximate location of two million ancient portals dating from the time of the Third Diasporian Age, has been dismissed as an irrelevance, a lie or a myth for over a quarter of a billion years. The so-called Transform, supposed to complete the information required to access this secret network, has proved as elusive as it is unlikely to work if it does exist. Nevertheless. Some new information has come to light, thanks to Seer, now Major, Taak.' Fassin was aware that he was being looked at again. He just kept staring at the hologram.

  'A little under four hundred years ago,' the hologram said, 'Seer Taak took part in an extended expedition - a "delve" as it is known - which took him amongst the Dwellers of Nasqueron, and specifically into the company of a group of Dweller youngsters called the Dimajrian Tribe. While with them, he encountered an antique Dweller who - in a fit of generosity unusual in his kind - granted Seer Taak access to a small library of information, part of a still larger hoard.'

  (This was the wrong way round - the myth, not the fact. Fassin had been with Valseir for centuries and the Dimajrian Tribe for less than a year. He hoped that the rest of the Admiral's information was more reliable. All the same, he had a sudden, vivid memory of choal Valseir, huge and ancient, accoutred with rags, draped in life-charms, floating absently within his vast nest-bowl of a study, deep in the lost section of abandoned CloudTunnel on the rim of a giant, dying storm which had long since broken up and dissipated. 'Clouds. You are like clouds,' Valseir had told Fassin. At the time he hadn't understood what the ancient Dweller had meant.)

  'The raw data containing this information was passed on to the Shrievalty for analysis,'
the image hovering above the black device said. 'Twenty years later, after the usual analysis and inter­pretation and, you'd imagine, with plenty of time for second thoughts, re-evaluations and sudden inspirations, it was shared with the Jeltick under the terms of an infotrade agreement.'

  The Jeltick were an arachnoid species, eight-limbed - 8ar, in the conventional shorthand of the galactic community. Obsessive cataloguers, they were one of the galaxy's two most convincing self-appointed historian species. Timid, cautious, deliberate and very inquisitive (at a safe remove), they had been around for much longer than Quick species usually lasted.

  'Somehow, the Jeltick contrived to notice something the Shrievalty had missed,' the hologram continued. (Now, Fassin noticed, it was Colonel Somjomion's turn to look awkward and aggrieved.) 'Heads have rolled due to this incompetence,' the image told them. It smiled. ‘Ido not speak figuratively'

  Colonel Somjomion compressed her lips and rechecked something on the machine she was in charge of.

  'Within months,' the hologram said, 'the Jeltick sent their best excuse for a battle fleet to the Zateki system - unexplored for millennia - which lies about eighteen years from the portal at Rijom; they got there in twenty years, so they were not exactly dawdling. It ought to be pointed out that the Jeltick would never normally try anything so dynamic, or risky.

  'Something at Zateki seriously chewed up the Jeltick ships and what is assumed to have been the sole survivor was later found by a Voehn craft. The surviving ship was fleeing, all upon it were dead and its biomind was deranged, invoking the mercy of an unknown god and babbling for forgiveness for what had been its mission, which had been to search for the remains of something called the Second Ship and, therein, the Dweller List Transform.'

  Ah, thought Fassin. The Second Ship Theory. That was a sub-fallacy of the whole Dweller List delusion. The further you looked into the List myth, the more complicated it got and the more possibilities appeared to open up. All nonsense, of course, or so everybody had thought.