The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

WILL TRY.

  TRY HRD.

  PROMIS.

  OK. IF I DO FIND ANYTHING ON NASQ WILL GET 2 U, NT MRCTRIA.

  OK. GOOD. HOW?

  STN A MICROSAT MIDWY BTWN OUR SATS EQ4 & EQ5. I AIM BRST THER. MY OLD CODE & FREQ STL GOOD?

  THNK SO. TAK TYM 2 SET UP.

  TAK I MNTHS 2 FIND NYTHNG. PRBLY 0 TO FIND ANYWY. HAV MICROSAT ABL 2 RCV FRM B-LOW 2, IN CASE I IN NASQ.

  WILL PASS ON.

  A little later:

  LUV U.

  YR CRZY.

  TRU.

  B MOR PASSYN8.

  He pulled the sheet further over his Beyonder girl. CVR SLPNG AGEN?

  NO, JST B MOR PASSYN8 . . .

  THREE:

  NOWHERE LEFT TO FALL

  Uncle Slovius took him up on his shoulders. They were going to watch the bad machine being killed. He put his hands over Uncle Slovius's forehead and got him to crinkle it, which felt funny and made him squirm and wriggle and laugh and meant Uncle Slovius had to hold his ankles tight to stop him falling off.

  'Fass, stop wriggling.'

  'I fine, honest.'

  He already knew you were supposed to say, 'I'm fine,' or, 'I am fine,' but saying things like 'I fine' was better because it made adults smile and sometimes hug. Sometimes it made them put a hand on your head and make a mess of your hair, but never mind.

  They went through the port door. It was spring and so that was the house they were in. He was big. He'd lived in all the houses except the Summer House. That one came next. Then he would have lived in them all. Then you started again. That was how it worked. Uncle Slovius ducked as they went through the doorway so he didn't bash his head.

  'Umm, mind your head,' he heard his dad say quietly some­where behind him.

  His mum sighed. 'Oh, stop fussing. Dear.'

  He couldn't see his mum and dad because they were behind him and Uncle Slovius but he could hear them.

  'Look, I wasn't fussing, I was just—'

  'Yes, you—'

  He got that funny feeling in his tummy he got when Mum and Dad talked like that. He did a slap-a-slap-slap on Uncle Slovius's forehead and said, 'More about history! More about history!' as they walked down to the flier.

  Uncle Slovius laughed. The shake came up through Uncle Slovius's shoulders into his bottom and whole body. 'My, we are a keen student.'

  'One word for it,' his mother said.

  'Oh, come on,' his dad said. 'The boy's just inquisitive.'

  'Yes, yes, you're right,' his mum said. You could hear her breath through her words. 'My mistake. Pardon me for expressing an opinion.'

  'Oh, now, look, I didn't mean—'

  'More about Voerin!'

  'Voehn,' Uncle Slovius said.

  'I've got a Voerin! I've got a big one that talks and climbs and swims and jumps or can walk under the water too. It's got a gun that shoots other toys. And I've got lots of little ones that just move. They've got guns too but they're a bit small to see but they can make each other fall over. I've nearly a hundred. I watch Attack Squad Voerin all the time! My favourite is Captain Chunce cos he's clever. I like Commander Saptpanuhr too and Corporal Qump cos he's funny. Jun and Yoze both like Commander Saptpanuhr best. They're my friends. Do you watch Attack Squad Voerin, Uncle Slovius?'

  'Can't say I've ever caught it, Fass.'

  Fassin frowned, thinking. He decided this probably meant 'No'. Why didn't adults just say no when they meant no?

  They sat in the flier. He had to come down off Uncle Slovius's shoulders but he got to sit beside him in the front. He didn't even need to tell people he'd be sick if he sat in the back any more. A servant sat on the other side of him. Great-uncle Fimender was behind with two old ladies who were girlfriends. He was laughing and they were too. His mum and dad were further back, talking quiet. His mum and dad were old but Uncle Slovius was really old and Great-uncle Fimender was really, really old.

  The flier went up into the air and went through the air making a noise like the Attack-ship Avenger did in Attack Squad Voerin. His model of the Attack-ship Avenger flew but only in Supervised Areas Outdoors and shot guns and missiles and made the same noise. He'd wanted to bring it with him, but not been allowed, even after he'd shouted. He hadn't been allowed to bring any toys. No toys at all!

  He pulled at Uncle Slovius's sleeve. 'Tell me about the Voerin!' He tried to think what had made Uncle Slovius laugh. 'More about history!'

  Uncle Slovius smiled.

  'The Voehn are the Culmina's bully boys, child,' said Great-uncle Fimender from the seat behind. He was leaning over. His breath had that funny sweet smell like it usually did. Great-uncle Fimender was fond of a drink. His voice was funny also sometimes, like all the words were sort of one big word. 'I wouldn't fixate too enthusiastically on the scum that stole our species birthright.'

  'Steady, now, Fim,' Uncle Slovius said. He looked round at Great-uncle Fimender but looked first at the servant except the servant didn't move or look back or anything. 'If the wrong person took you seriously you might find yourself joining this rogue AI. Hmm?' He made a smile at Great-uncle Fimender, who sat back again in the seat between the old-lady girlfriends and took a glass with a drink in it from a picnic tray.

  'Be an honour,' he said in a quiet voice.

  Uncle Slovius smiled down at Fass. 'The Voehn went to Earth a long, long time ago, Fassin. Before humans made spaceships - before they made sea ships, almost.'

  'How long ago?'

  'About eight thousand years ago.'

  '4051 BCE,' Great-uncle Fimender said, though only just loud enough to hear. Uncle Slovius didn't seem to hear. Fassin wasn't sure if Great-uncle Fimender was disagreeing with Uncle Slovius or not. Fassin stored 4051 BCE away as an Important Number anyway.

  'They met human people on Earth,' Uncle Slovius said, 'and took them away with them on their ship, to other stars and planets.'

  'Kidnapping the prims!' Great-uncle Fimender said. 'Sampling the barbs, with prejudice! Eh?' He didn't sound like he was talking to him and Uncle Slovius. Fass didn't under­stand what Great-uncle Fimender was saying anyway. The old-lady girlfriends were laughing.

  'Well,' Uncle Slovius said, with a small smile, 'who's to say whether humans were kidnapped or not? People in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and China were too primitive to know what was going on. They probably thought the Voehn were gods, so they might have gone with them without being kidnapped and we don't even know that the Voehn took whole people. Maybe they just took their cells.'

  'Or babies, or foetuses, or excised a few thousand fertilised eggs,' Great-uncle Fimender said. Then, 'Oh, thank you, my dear. Oops! Steady, there.'

  'In any event,' Uncle Slovius said, 'the Voehn took some human people and put them down on planets far away from Earth and the human people grew up with other people, and the Culmina had the other people help the humans so that they became civilised quickly, and invented all the things humans back on Earth ever invented, but these human people on the other planets always knew they were part of a galactic commu­nity, hmm?' Uncle Slovius looked at him with a question-look on his face. Fass nodded quickly. He knew what a galactic community meant: everybody else.

  'Anyway, people on Earth kept on inventing things, and even­tually invented wormholes and portals—'

  'The Attack-ship Avenger goes through wormholes and portals,' he told Uncle Slovius.

  'Of course,' Uncle Slovius said. 'And so when human people went out and met other alien people and joined their worm-hole up with everybody else's wormhole, they found out that they weren't the first humans the alien people had met or had heard of, because the humans who had been taken away to the other planets by the Voehn were already quite well known.'

  'Remainder humans,' Great-uncle Fimender said from the seat behind. His voice sounded funny, like he might be going to burst out laughing or something.

  Uncle Slovius looked round at him for a short bit. 'Well, the terms don't matter too much, even if they might sound a little harsh sometimes.'<
br />
  'Carefully chosen to keep us in our place, remind us we owe them, either way,' Great-uncle Fimender said.

  'The Culmina tell us they had people look after Earth after the Voehn took the humans away to the other stars. They made sure that nothing bad happened to Earth, like it being hit by a big rock.'

  Great-uncle Fimender made a sort of cough-laugh. 'Easy to claim.'

  Fass looked round at Great-uncle Fimender. He sort of wanted Great-uncle Fimender to be quiet so he could listen to Uncle Slovius but sort of didn't because the things Great-uncle Fimender was saying, even if he didn't always understand all of them, seemed to be saying things about the things Uncle Slovius was saying. It was like they sort of agreed and didn't agree at the same time. Great-uncle Fimender winked at him and gestured towards Uncle Slovius with his glass. 'No, no; listen!'

  'So, people from Earth got into the stars at last and found that there were aliens everywhere,' Uncle Slovius told him. 'And some of them were us!' He smiled a broad smile.

  'And there were a lot more of the alien humans than there were of the ones who thought they were humanity,' Great-uncle Fimender said. It sounded like he was sneering. Uncle Slovius sighed and looked ahead.

  The flier was flying over mountains with snow on them. In front was a big bit of desert like a circle. Uncle Slovius shook his head and didn't seem to want to say anything but Great-uncle Fimender did so Fass turned round in his seat and listened to him.

  'And they were more technically advanced, these so-called aHumans. Advanced but cowed. Servant species, just like every­body else. While all Earth's dreams of wild expansion were made to look like so much belly-gas. The answer to "Where is every­body?" turned out to be, "Everywhere", but the stake at the galactic poker game is a wormhole and so we had to fund our own and bring that to the table. Then discover that Everywhere really meant Everywhere, and every damn thing you could see and every damn thing you couldn't belonged to some bugger: every rock, every planet, moon and star, every comet, dust cloud and dwarf, even the bloody null-foam of space itself was some­body's home. Land on some godforsaken cinder, pull out a shovel thinking you could dig something, build something or make something of it and next thing you know an alien with two heads was poking both of them out of a burrow and telling you to fuck off, or pointing a gun at you. Or a writ - ha! Worse still!'

  He'd never heard Great-uncle Fimender talk so much. He wasn't sure that Great-uncle Fimender was really talking to Uncle Slovius or to him or even to his two old-lady girlfriends because he wasn't looking at any of them, he was looking at the picnic table hinged down from the seat in front, maybe looking at the glass and the decanter bottle on it, and looking sad. The two old-lady girlfriends patted him and one smoothed his hair which was very black indeed but still looked old.

  'Prepping, they call it,' he said, maybe to himself or maybe to the picnic table. 'Bloody kidnapping.' He snorted. 'Putting people in their place, holding them there. Letting us build our dreams then puncturing them.' He shook his head, and drank from his shiny glass.

  'Prepping?' Fass asked, to make sure he had the word right.

  'Hmm? Oh, yes.'

  'Well, it's something that's gone on for as long as anybody can remember,' Uncle Slovius said. He sounded gentle, and Fass wasn't sure if Uncle Slovius was talking to him or to Great-uncle Fimender. He sort of half-listened while he pulled out one of the flier's screens. If he'd been allowed to bring any toys he'd definitely have brought his BotPal and just asked, but now these damn adults were making him use a screen. He stared at the letters and numbers and things (Uncle Slovius and Great-uncle Fimender were still talking).

  He didn't want to have to talk, he wanted to tap-in like adults did. He tried a few buttons. After a while he got a lots-of-books symbol with a big kid standing next to it and an ear symbol. The big kid looked scruffy and was holding a drug bowl and his head was surrounded with lines and little moving satellites and flying birds. Oh well.

  'Prepping,' he said, but pressed Text. The screen said:

  Prepping. A very long-established practice, used lately by the Culmina amongst others, is to take a few examples of a pre-civilised species from their home world (usually in clonoclastic or embryonic form) and make them subject speciesslavesmercenariesmentored. so that when the people from their home world finally assume the Galactic stage, they are not the most civilisedadvanced of their kind (often they're not even the most numerous grouping of their kind). Species so treated are expected to feel an obligation to their so-called mentors (who will also gener­ally claim to have diverted comets or otherwise prevented catastrophes in the interim, whether they have or not). This practice has been banned in the past when pan-Galactic laws (see Galactic Council) have been upheld but tends to reappear in less civilised times. Practice variously referred to as Prepping, Lifting or Aggressive Mentoring. Local-relevant terminology: aHuman & rHuman (advanced and remainder Human).

  And that was just the start. He scratched his head. Too many long words. And this wasn't even an adult pedia. Maybe he should have found the not-so-big kids' site.

  They were landing. Wow! He hadn't even noticed they were near the ground. The desert was covered with fliers of different sizes and there were lots in the air too and lots of people.

  They got out and walked across the sand though a lot of people stayed in their fliers. He got to go on Uncle Slovius's shoulders again.

  Away in the distance in the centre of a big circle was a tower with a big blob on top and that was where the bad machine was which had been found hiding in a cave in the mountains and caught by the Cessoria. (The Cessoria and the Lustrals caught bad machines. He'd tried watching Lustral Patrol a few times but it was too much for old people with talk and kissing.)

  The bad machine in the blob on top of the big tower was allowed to make a speech but it was too full of long words. He was getting bored and it was very hot. No toys! Uncle Slovius said 'Shush' at him, twice. He sort of tried to pretend-strangle Uncle Slovius with his thighs and knees to get back at him for going 'Shush' twice, but Uncle Slovius didn't seem to notice. Mum and Dad were still talking quietly, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads at each other as usual. Great-uncle Fimender and the two old-lady girlfriends had stayed in the flier.

  Then Lustrals in a flier - humans and a whule like a big grey bat - said things, then at last it was time and the bad machine was killed but even that wasn't very good, the blob on top of the tower just went red and made lots of smoke and then there was a big bright flash but not that big or bright and then there

  was a bang and bits fell down, with smoke, and some people cheered but mostly there was silence, just the bang being an echo round the mountains.

  When they got back to the flier Great-uncle Fimender had very red eyes and said in his opinion they had just seen a terrible crime committed.

  *

  'Ah, young Taak. Now then, what is this nonsense about not being able to delve properly, by which of course one means remotely?'

  Braam Ganscerel, Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon and therefore the most senior Seer of all - and Fassin's future paterfamilias-in-law - was tall and thin and maned in white hair. He looked younger than he was, but then he was nearly seventeen hundred years old by the most obvious way of reckoning such matters. He had a sharp, angular face with a large nose, his skin was pale, waxy and translucent and his fingers and hands were long and fragile-seeming. He habitually walked and stood with his head back and chest out, as though he had long ago vowed not to appear stooped as he grew into great old age and had gone too far in the other direction. This curious stance meant that his head was angled so far back on his neck that he had no choice but to look down his splendidly monumental nose at those he talked with, to or at. He held two long shining black staffs as though just returned from - or about to set off for -some particularly fashionable ski slopes.

  With his long, bunned white hair, pale complexion and simple but elegantly cut Seer robes - black puttees, pantaloons and long jacket -
he contrived to look appealingly frail, sweetly elderly, breathtakingly distinguished and only a little less authoritative than a supreme deity.

  He swept into the senior officers' mess of the heavy cruiser Pyralis in a clatter of clicks from his twin staffs and boot heels, attended by a pale train of half a dozen junior Seers - half of them men, half of them women, all of them greyly deferential - and, bringing up the rear, the gangly, smiling form of Paggs Yurnvic, a Seer whom Fassin had helped teach but who, having spent less time subsequently in the slowness of actual delving than Fassin had, was now older in both adjusted time and appearance.

  'Chief Seer,' Fassin said, standing and executing a formal nod that just avoided being a bow. The heavy cruiser was taking their party to Third Fury, the close-orbit moon of Nasqueron from which they would delve - either all remotely, or, if Fassin had his way, through a combination of remote and direct pres­ences.

  Braam Ganscerel had insisted that his years and frailty made a high-gee journey to the moon out of the question - esuits, life-pods and shock-gel notwithstanding - and so the ship was making a gentle standard one gee, creating what felt like about twice 'glantine's gravity and a fraction less than Sepekte's. Even this standard gee, Braam Ganscerel let it be known, necessitated that he use both his staffs to support himself. This was, however, in the current grave circumstances, a sacrifice he felt it was only right and proper and indeed required that he make. Fassin thought it made him look like a stilter, like a whule.

  'Well?' the Chief Seer demanded, stopping in front of Fassin. 'Why can't you remote delve, Fassin? What's wrong with you?'

  'Fear, sir,' Fassin told him.

  'Fear?' Braam Ganscerel seemed to experiment with putting his head even further back than it already was, found it was possible, and left it there.

  'Fear of being shown up by you, sir, as a merely competent Slow Seer.'

  Braam Ganscerel half-closed one eye. He looked at Fassin for a while. 'You're mocking me, Fassin.'

  Fassin smiled. 'I delve better direct, Braam. You know that.'