The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  'I do,' Ganscerel said. He turned with a sort of staccato grace and let himself flop into the couch where Fassin had been sitting, watching screen news. Fassin sat too. Paggs perched on one arm of the next-nearest couch and the rest of Braam Ganscerel's retinue sited themselves nearby according to some arcane pecking order.

  Fassin nodded at Paggs. 'Seer Yurnvic,' he said with a smile and a formality he hoped Paggs wouldn't take seriously.

  Paggs grinned. 'Good to see you, Fass.' That was all right, then.

  'However, we must do this together, I believe,' Braam Ganscerel said, looking ahead at the wall screen, where the news went silently on. The funerals were taking place of some more of the Navarchy people who'd died in the attack on the dock-habitat at Sepekte's trailing Lagrange. Ganscerel had let one of his twin staffs rest on the couch beside him, but still held the other. He waved it at the screen and it obligingly went back to being a bulkhead again. The heavy cruiser's senior officers' mess was a large space, but much broken up by vertical columns and diagonal reinforcing struts. Like the rest of the vessel it was quite comfortable by human standards, though Colonel Hatherence had had to be content with a cabin that was extremely cramped for an oerileithe. She had been offered passage on an escorting cruiser with more suitable accommo­dation but had declined.

  'We can be together,' Fassin said. 'You and Paggs remotely, the Colonel and I directly. That way we're backed up so if anything happens to either group—'

  'Ah,' Ganscerel said. 'You see, young Taak, this is the point. If we are all on Third Fury, with this fine vessel and its escort craft to protect us, we shall all be safe. You wish to take a tiny gascraft into the unending violence of the planet's atmosphere. A dangerous enterprise at the best of times. In wartime, posi­tively foolhardy.'

  'Braam, the old portal was protected by an entire fleet and it still got blasted. Third Fury might move, but it moves very predictably. If somebody did want to attack it they could accel­erate a small rock to just under light speed and send it on an intercept course. If that happens, the only way a heavy cruiser is going to help is if by some million-to-one chance it happens to be in the way at the time and takes the hit itself. As nobody's going to surround the entire moon with a shell of ships, I think it's unwise to rely on a few war craft to protect us from some­thing there's almost no defence against.'

  'Why would anybody target a moonlet like Third Fury?' Paggs asked.

  'Indeed,' Ganscerel said, as though he had been just about to ask that very question.

  'No good reason,' Fassin said. 'But then a lot of places there's been no good reason to hit have been getting attacked recently.'

  'This might well include Nasqueron itself,' Ganscerel pointed out.

  'Which can absorb a lot more punishment than Third Fury.'

  'You might still be targeted.'

  'If I'm in there in a gascraft, even with Colonel Hatherence riding shotgun, I should be effectively untraceable,' Fassin told them.

  'Unless,' Paggs said, 'she's supposed to be in constant touch with her superiors.'

  'And that might be the real reason we are all expected to stay together on Third Fury, delving remotely,' Ganscerel said, sighing. He looked at Fassin. 'Control. Or at least the illusion of it. Our masters are fully aware how important this mission is, even if they think themselves for the moment above explaining its precise nature to all who need to know. They are naturally terrified that if it goes wrong some of the blame will stick to them. Really, it is all up to us: a bunch of academics they've never particularly cared about or for, even though -' Ganscerel looked round the assembled junior Seers '- being a centre of Dweller Studies repre­sents the only thing which makes Ulubis in any way remark­able.' He directed his gaze on Fassin again. 'There is very little they can do, therefore they will attend with extreme diligence to what trivial matters they are able to affect. With us all apparently safe on Third Fury protected by a small fleet of warships, they will feel they are doing all they can to assist us. If they let you go down into Nasqueron, and something does go wrong, they will be blamed. In that they are right.'

  'It won't work, Braam.'

  'I think we have to try,' the older man said. 'Look.' He patted Fassin's arm. Fassin was dressed in his Shrievalty major's uniform and feeling awkward amidst fellow Seers. 'Have you tried remote delving recently?'

  'Not for a long time,' Fassin admitted.

  'It's changed,' Paggs said, nodding. 'It's much more lifelike, if you know what I mean; more convincing.' Paggs smiled. 'There have been a lot of improvements over the last couple of centuries. Largely thanks to the Real Delving movement, frankly.'

  Oh, Paggs, flattery? Fassin thought.

  Ganscerel patted his arm again. 'Just try it, will you, Fassin? Will you do that for me?'

  Fassin didn't want to say yes immediately. This is all beside the point, he thought. Even if I didn't know there was a poten­tial threat to Third Fury, the argument that matters is that the Dwellers we need to talk to just won't take us seriously if we turn up in remotes. It's about respect, about us taking risks,

  sharing their world with them, really being there. But he mustn't seem intransigent. Keep some arguments back; always have reserves. After a moment he nodded slowly. 'Very well. I'll do that. But only as a trial delve. A day or two. That'll be enough to feel any difference. Then we have to make a final decision.' Ganscerel smiled. They all did.

  They had a very pleasant dinner with the senior officers of the small fleet taking them to Third Fury.

  Fassin got Ganscerel alone at one point. 'Chief Seer,' he said. 'I will do this remote delve, but if I feel it's not good enough I'm going to have to insist on going direct.' He gave Ganscerel space to say something, but the old man just looked him in the eye, head thrown back. 'I do have authority,' Fassin continued. 'From the briefing, from Admiral Quile and the Complector Council. I realise it's been compromised by people in-system coming to their own conclusions about the best way to tackle this problem, but if I think I need to, I'll go as high and wide as I can to get my way.'

  Ganscerel thought for a while, then smiled. 'Do you think this delve - or delves, this mission - will be successful?' 'No, Chief Seer.'

  'Neither do I. However, we must make the attempt and do all we can to make it successful, even so, and even though failure is probably guaranteed. We must be seen to do what we can, attempt not to offend those above us, and aim to protect the good name and the future prospects of the Slow Seers in general. These things we can definitely do. You agree?' 'So far, yes.'

  'If you genuinely believe that you must delve directly, I shall not stand in your way. I shall not back you, either, because to do that in my position would be to tie myself too directly to a course of action I still regard as fundamentally foolhardy. In any other set of circumstances I would simply order you to do as your most senior Chief Seer tells you to do. However, you have been instructed from on high - from extremely on high -Fassin Taak, and that does alter things somewhat. However. Try this remote delve. You might be surprised. Then make your own mind up. I won't stand in your way. The responsibility will be entirely yours. You have my full support in that.' With a wink, Ganscerel turned away to talk to the heavy cruiser's captain.

  Fassin reflected that being given full support had never felt so much like being hung out to dry.

  The Pyralis blazed with its own trailed aurora as it entered the protective magnetombra of Third Fury, a little twenty-kilo­metre-wide ball of rock and metal orbiting just 120,000 kilo­metres above Nasqueron's livid cloud tops. The gas-giant filled the sky, so close that its rotund bulk took on the appearance of a vast wall, its belts and zones of tearing, swirling, ever-eddying clouds looking like colossal contra-rotating, planet-wide streams of madly coloured liquid caught whirling past each other under perfectly transparent ice.

  Third Fury had no appreciable atmosphere and only the vaguest suggestion of gravity. The heavy cruiser could almost have docked directly with the Seer base complex on the side of the
little moon which always faced Nasqueron. However, a troop landing craft took them from one to the other. The Pyralis lay a few kilometres off, effectively another temporary satellite of the gas-giant. Its escort of two light cruisers and four destroyers took up station a few tens of kilometres further out in a complicated cat's cradle of nested orbits around the moon, slim slow shadow shapes only glimpsed when they passed in front of the planet's banded face.

  Third Fury had been constructed, or converted, from an already existing moonlet, billions of years earlier, by one of the first species to pay homage at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. Given that Dwellers were the most widespread of the planet-based species of the galaxy, with a presence in almost all gas-giants - themselves the most common type of planets - the fact that out of those ninety million-plus Dweller-inhabited super-globes there were exactly eight with populations willing to play host to those wishing to carry on more than the most fleeting conversation with their inhabitants spoke volumes - indeed, appropriately, libraries - about their almost utter lack of interest in the day-to-day life of the rest of the galactic community.

  It was, though, only almost utter; the Dwellers were not perfectly anything, including reclusive. They sought, gathered and stored vast quantities of information, albeit with no discernible logical system involved in the acquisition or the storage, and when quizzed on the matter seemed not only completely unable to present any obvious or even obscure rationale for this effectively mindless accumulation of data, but even genuinely puzzled that the question should be asked at all.

  There had also, throughout recorded time - even discounting the notoriously unreliable records kept on such matters by the Dwellers themselves - always been a few of their populations available for discourse and informational trading, though this was invariably only granted on the eccentric and capricious terms of the Dwellers. Since the end of the First Diasporian Age, when the galaxy and the universe were both around two and a half billion years old, there had never been no working centres of Dwellers Studies, but in the following ten and a half billion years there had never been more than ten such centres operating at any one time either.

  Acceptable companions came and went.

  The Dwellers were of the Slow, the category of species that stuck around in a civilised form for at least millions of years. The people they let come and visit them and talk to them, and with whom they were prepared to trade information, were usually numbered amongst the Quick, the kind of species that often counted its time as a civilised entity in tens of thousands of years, and sometimes not even that long. The Dwellers would tolerate and talk to other Slow species as well, though normally on a less regular and frequent basis. The suspicion was that the Dwellers, for all their fabled patience - no species colonised the galaxy at speeds averaging less than one per cent of the speed of light (not counting stopovers) unless it was supremely patient - could get bored with the species that came to talk to them, and by selecting only those numbered amongst the Quick they ensured that they would never have to endure for too long a time the attentions of people they only looked forward to seeing the back of. Just wait a bit and - in a twinkling of an eye by Dweller standards - their troublesome guests would evolve out of nuisancehood.

  For the last sixteen hundred years or so - barely half a Dweller eye-twinkling - humans had been adjudged as acceptable confi­dants for the Dwellers of Nasqueron in the system of Ulubis, their presence mostly tolerated, their company usually accepted, their safety almost always guaranteed and their attempts to talk to the Dwellers and mine their vast but defiantly imaginatively organised and indexed data shales met with only the most formal of obstructiveness, the lighter forms of derision and the least determinedly obfuscatory strategies.

  That such playful coynesses, such nearly-too-small-to-measure diffidences and such gentle, barely-meriting-the-name hindrances appeared to the humans concerned to be obstacles of monumental scale, hideous complexity and inexhaustibly fiendish invention just went to show who'd been doing this for most of the lifetime of the universe and who for less than two thousand years.

  Other approaches had, of course, been tried.

  Bribing creatures who found the concept of money merely amusing tended to tax even the most enterprising and talented arbitrageur. The Dwellers clove to a system in which power was distributed, well, more or less randomly, it sometimes seemed, and authority and influence depended almost entirely on one's age; little leverage there.

  Alternatively, every now and again a species would attempt to take by force of arms what those involved in Dweller Studies attempted to wrest from the Dwellers by polite but dogged inquiry. Force, it had been discovered - independently, amaz­ingly often - did not really work with Dwellers. They felt no pain, held their own continued survival (and that of others, given the slightest provocation) to be of relatively little consequence and seemed to embody, apparently at the cellular level, the belief that all that really mattered, ever, was a value unique to them­selves which they defined as a particular kind of kudos, one of whose guiding principles appeared to be that if any outside influence attempted to mess with them they had to resist it to the last breath in the bodies of all concerned, regardless.

  Dwellers were almost everywhere and had been there prac­tically for ever. They had learned a few things about making war over that time, and while their war machines were believed to be as customarily unreliable - and eccentrically designed, built and maintained - as every other piece of technology they deigned to involve themselves with, that didn't mean they weren't deadly; usually for all concerned, and within a discon­certingly large volume.

  Other species had prevailed against Dwellers on occasion. Entire planetary populations of them had been wiped out and whole gas-giants dismantled to provide the raw material for one of those monstrous megastructure projects that Quick species in particular seemed so keen on building, apparently just because they could. But the long-term results were, to date, inevitably unhappy.

  Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, iras­cible and - when it suited them - single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when - or even geological ages after when - you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, them­selves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide's worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection trav­elling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of 'What the fu—?' before they disap­peared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.

  Retaliation, where it was still possible, and on the few occa­sions it had been tried, led without fail towards a horribly messy war of attrition, whereupon the realisation of the sheer scale of the Dweller civilisation (if one could even call it that) and its past - and therefore probably future - longevity more often than not had a sobering effect on whatever species had been unwise enough to set themselves against the Dwellers in the first place.

  Attempting to hold your local Dweller population hostage in the hope of influencing another one - or a group of others - was an almost laughably lame and even counter-productive strategy. Dwellers of any given gas-giant thought little enough of their own collective safety; giving them an excuse to show how little solidarity they felt with any other group of their own kind only led to events of particular and spectacular grisliness, for all that the genetic and cultural variation between Dweller populations was much less than that displayed by any other galaxy-wide grouping.

  The long, long-arrived-at consensus, particularly amongst those still nursing civilisational bruises from earlier encounters with what was arguabl
y one of the galaxy's most successful species, or those with the images of what had happened to others still fresh in their data banks, was that, on balance, it was best just to leave the Dwellers alone.

  Left to themselves the Dwellers disturbed nobody except occasionally themselves and those who thought too deeply about what they really represented. Their history, after all, like that of the galaxy as a whole, was one of almost but not quite uninterrupted peace and tranquillity: billions and billions of years of thankfully nothing much happening at all. In over ten billion years of civilisation there had been only three major Chaoses and the number of genuine galaxy-spanning wars didn't even make it into double figures. In base eight!

  That was a record that the Dwellers seemed to feel every­body concerned ought to feel mildly proud of. Especially them­selves.

  'Welcome all! Chief Seer, good to see you! Seer Taak, Seer Yurnvic. Young friends. And this must be Colonel Hatherence. Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma'am.' Duelbe, the bald, nearly spherical major-domo of the Third Fury Shared Facility, greeted them in the transit hall as the military troop carrier disengaged and turned back towards the Pyralis. A couple of the youngest Seers, who had patently never encountered the positively ball-like form of Duelbe before, stared. It was as a rule at such moments that comparisons regarding the similarity in shape of Third Fury and the major-domo of its Shared Facility came to mind. Happily, on this occasion, if they were thought they went unvoiced.

  Servants took charge of luggage pallets. Hatherence shooed away retainers who offered to help her manoeuvre in the rela­tively confined space - the dome-like hall, like the rest of the mostly underground facility, had been rebuilt on a human scale since the departure of the last species to be granted Seer status, with little spatial concession to other, effectively larger species. Colonel Hatherence was happy to float where she could without assistance, thank you, using trim-vanes on the outside of her discus of esuit to propel her from place to place.