At this stage, coming out of a long tream, it was as though she had been diving in some abyssal depths and was now swimming slowly back in through a few kilometres of sunlit shallows. You could wade out to meet the person coming in without surrendering yourself to the whole para-lucid chemical-NMR-holo-induced dream state, you could sort of snorkel with them while they still gilled, heading for the beach that was mundane reality.
- Hey, Fass! she'd sent when he first dipped in to join her, slipping on a small NMR collar and becoming part of the slowly evaporating tream. She'd been away for a day and a half; a long one. - You came to meet me? Thanks, part!
- Have fun? he asked.
- More than fun. Guess where I've been?
He sent a shrug. - Faintest.
- I did a delve! I treamed a delve like Seers do, into Nasqueron! Well, it wasn't really Nasq, it was another gas-giant called Furenasyle. That's where the chip must have been templated. You heard of Furenasyle?
- Yeah, it's another place they do Dweller Studies. So you treamed you were there? Delving, yeah?
- Surely did. You make it sound so amazing. And, Fass, it was great! Best tream . .. well, second-best tream I've ever had! K sent a kind of complicit, sexy smirk in his direction. He guessed the tream she was referring to. They'd experienced it together. A love-tream, a joint immersion in what they felt for each other. Well, supposedly. Love treams were tacky in some ways - you could still lie about your feelings in them, and if you selected the right template from the traumalyser device and suitable accompanying chemicals from the subsal, you could pretty much guarantee a tream of surpassing, wide-eyed heart-throbbing bliss even between two people who basically hated each other. But it had been good, between the two of them. Good, but not something that he'd wanted to do again. He supposed he was suspicious of the whole Virtual Reality experience, and treaming, especially with a synched-in subsal providing appropriate synthesised chemicals for delivery to the brain, was the most immersive VR you could find. Legally or semi-legally, anyway.
- You should try it! Really! It would be like practice, don't you think?
- I suppose. If delving is what I'm going to end up doing. I take it you'd recommend it.
- If it's like that, sure!
Sure was what he was not. He was still young, still undecided. Should he become a Slow Seer, like everybody seemed to expect him to become, even including the people he shared the nest with on Hab 4409 ('The Happy Hab!')? Or should he do something else entirely? He still didn't know. The very fact that everybody thought he would become a Seer eventually, after a few wild years - and these were surely wild years, not something that you ever imagined could go on for ever or even for very long - made him all the more determined not to do what was expected of him . . . well, maybe 'determined' was too strong a word, he admitted. Reluctant. Made him more reluctant. He supposed that was better. Still, he might surprise them all. He might go off and do something entirely, utterly and excitingly different. He just had to experience Jots of different things until he found the right thing, was all.
- Listen, I'm probably going with the others to the protest.
Well, unless you need me, you know . . .
- Good for you! I don't mind. You go. I'd come too, but I need to ramp out of this shallow. That last time I steeped really crawled. Ugh!
- Okay. See you.
- Later, part!
He left the nest.
The nest - a low-gee pod of forty or so mostly small spherical rooms housing a kind of commune of (all human) gappers, nopers, treamers, trustafarians, zealers and zonkers - was in a big bunch of living spaces up near the hab's long axis, near the (rather arbitrarily termed) 'west' end, not far beneath the suntube. The nest allegedly belonged to the mother of one of the trustafarians, though unofficially it was the Immaturian People's Republic of Whateverness (and had semi-official paperwork and software to prove it, too).
Hab 4409 was one of a few hundred thousand habitats orbiting Sepekte. It was average size, a cylinder of re-formed asteroid material fifty kilometres long and ten across, spinning to create about two-thirds of a gee at its internal diameter surface. It turned in the unending sunlight like a giant garden roller flattening photons. Two twelve-kilometre mirror-lens systems - one at either end - faced Ulubis star like a pair of vast, unbearably thin flowers. Further mirror complexes funnelled the captured sunlight through two windows of diamond sheet into the hab's long axis, where a final set of mirrors - moving up and down the suntube to create something like the feel of a planetary day - finally directed the light towards the internal surface. Or at least finally directed the light towards the internal surface if there wasn't something like one of the grape-bunch-like nest complexes in the way (more mirrors).
Many more people lived in the habs than lived on planets in the system and most of the habs were somewhere near Sepekte. Hab 4409 had been a fairly liberal, free-flowing, laissez-faire, who-cares kind of place almost since its inception - as part of a horrendously intricate incumbent species asset-swap write-off dodge - two millennia earlier. Even its ultimate ownership had never fully been settled, and several generations of lawyers had gone to their plush retirements - having followed the saga of Hab 4409's provenance and title since their days as articled clerks - still lacking a sense of closure re the above.
So the place attracted drifters, artists, misfits, natural exiles, political and other eccentrics and slightly deranged or badly messed-up people of more or less every sort, and always had. Most were from Ulubis but some were more exotic and from further afield, generally trustafarians and-or gappers portaling in from the rest of the Mercatoria, taking time out between education and responsibility to relax a little. The place produced good art, it was an unofficial - but tax-deductible - finishing school for the aforesaid children of the rich (give the darling brats true freedom and let them see how empty it was, was the idea), it was a way station for those heading out to disgrace or back from perdition, and it was a halfway house for those who might or might not ever again contribute anything useful to society but who just might galvanise it fundamentally. (And, if you wanted to be really paranoid about stuff, it was - as far as the authorities were concerned - a relatively easy-to-watch and even easier-to-close-down sump for dangerous ideas: a radical trap.) It was useful, in other words. It fulfilled a purpose, if not several. In a society as large as that which existed around Ulubis, somewhere had to provide that sort of service.
People were people. Some would always be straight, some would always be a bit twisted, but they all had some sort of part to play, and they were all in some sense valuable, were they not?
But now the fucking Mercatoria, the fucking Ascendancy or fucking Omnocracy, or whatever they fucking were, the fucking Hierchon (more likely, one of his new rotational crop of advisers who saw a way to make some money and gain some extra power), or the Peregal below him or Apparitor below him or just the Diegesian gimplet who was actually nominally the governor or mayor or whatever he was supposed to fucking be (his post, his presence and his protecting bully boys only here at all thanks to an earlier dispute over who controlled what, resulting in a grubby, century-old compromise), anyway the fucking big boys, the fucking people who owned fucking everything or thought some fucker ought to own fucking everything had decided, decreed, deemed that proprietorship of the whole fucking place - and that of lots of other similar habs in similar situations of disputeduncertaindubioushappily contingent ownership - should pass to what they called a properly accredited and responsible authority. Which basically meant them. Or if not them, their chums. Somebody who took things like ownership and rent-gathering and petty law-enforcement and so on seriously. It was the law-makers, the law-givers, being outlaws, and it would not be allowed to stand, it would not be allowed to pass, it would not go unchallenged, it would not go into the local statutes without a serious fucking challenge. These people, for whatever fuckwit reason, were destroying part of what was good about the habs, about Sepekte
-Orbit, about Ulubis system, about the society they were all in the end a part of. Ultimately they were being stupid and self-destructive, and all that was required was that the people who could see all this clearly - because they were right here, at the sharp end, at the cutting edge - pointed this out to them. They were all on the same side in the end, it was just that sometimes the fuckers in authority got too far away from the reality of life as the mass of people lived it, and that was when you had to make a stand, make a point and make yourself heard.
So they went to the protest, down the friction tubes and the bungees and along the tramways to the central plaza and the makings of a great crowd.
'You just have to think about it,' Mome said as they walked the last street into the plaza. 'The Beyonders never attack habs, never attack whole cities, never attack anything big and easy and defenceless. They attack the military and the authorities and big infrastructure stuff. Their attacks, their violence, their military strategy is a discourse amenable to analysis if one is prepared to approach it shorn of propagandistic preconceptions. And the message is clear: their argument, their war is with the Mercatorial system, with the Ascendancy and the Omnocracy and the Administrata and not with the common people, not with us.'
'Resent being called common!' Sonj protested. 'Erring on the side of generosity including you in the category "people", Sonj,' Mome shot back. Mome was a little guy, pale, intense and always slightly hunched, as though perpetually preparing either to pounce or duck. Sonj was huge; a big bumbling dark brown geezer of changeable moods and intensely curly short red hair who only looked at home or even slightly graceful in low gee.
'Doesn't necessarily make them the good guys,' Fassin insisted.
'Makes them people open to reason, people capable of indulging in meaningful dialogue,' Mome said. 'Not just mad fuckers to be put down like vermin, which is pretty much what we're told they are.'
'So what's stopping them talking to us?' Fassin asked.
'Us,' Mome said. 'Takes two to talk.'
They all looked at him. Mome was known to talk a lot. Sometimes to audiences who had, basically, long since fallen asleep. He shrugged.
'My cousin Lain—' Thay said.
'Another one?' Mome asked, feigning incredulity.
'Sister of cousin Kel, half-sister of cousin Yayz,' Thay explained patiently. She was Sonj's part, also generously made; awkward in low gee but bouncily agile on the hab's internal surface at two-thirds of a gee. 'My cousin Lain,' she continued determinedly, 'the one in the Navarchy, says that she reckons the reason the Beyonders attack so much at all is because if they don't the Navarchy and the Summed Fleet goes after them. And we don't just attack military stuff. She says we hit their habs. Kill millions of them. Lot of offs unhappy with—'
'Lots of whats unhappy with?' Mome asked.
'Lots of offs,' Thay repeated.
‘I got the word,' Mome repeated with a sigh, ‘I just didn't get the meaning.' He snapped his fingers. 'Wait. Short for "officers", right?'
'Correct.'
'Brilliant. Carry on.'
'Lot of offs unhappy with this,' Thay said again, 'so the 'yonds - the Beyonders - just attack us to keep us on the defensive.' She nodded once. 'That's what my cousin Lain says.'
'Ayee! Crazy 'yonding talk,' Mome said, putting his hands over his ears. 'Get us all arrested.' They laughed.
'At least we have the freedom to say this sort of thing,' Fassin pointed out.
Mome did his special Hollow Laugh.
In the central plaza, Fassin greeted people, drank in the sense of solidarity and slightly edgy fun - lots of inventive costumes, towering floss-sculptures and buzzing balloonderers (trailing slogan banners, yelling chants and scattering narconfetti) - but still felt oddly apart from it all. He looked up and around, ignoring for the moment the people - mostly human - and the circle of domed and gleaming buildings.
The hab was a giant, verdant city rolled up into a spinning tube, with small hills and many lakes and criss-cross avenues between low-rise hanging-garden apartments and winding rivers and spindly towers, some arched like bows and reaching all the way up to the suntube, where they curved - or needle-eyed -round to meet towers on the far side. Bunches of nests -surrounded by mirrors, trailed with friction tubes like jungle creepers - clustered near the long axis, and dirigiblisters floated like strange, semi-transparent clouds beneath them.
Then Fassin heard some sort of shout at one edge of the crowd, nearest the palace of the Diegesian, which was the focus for the protest. He might have smelled something strange, but then that was probably just one of the cruising balloonderers disseminating some drug that Fassin's immedio-immune system hadn't recognised. Then he realised maybe it wasn't, because all the balloonderers dropped suddenly, as one, out of the air. Also, the sun in the suntube went out. Which never happened. He heard lots of odd noises, some of which might have been screaming. It seemed to get cold very quickly. That was odd too. People were hitting him, with their shoulders mostly, as they went running past him, then they were falling over him, and he realised he was Fassin?, realised he was Fassin lying down, then he was Fassin getting hit again, but he was Fassin trying to get up and stand again, and he was Fassin, he was Fassin, he was on his knees and he was Fassin just about to get up from his knees onto his feet - swaying, feeling very strange, wondering what all the people were doing lying down around him - when - Fassin - he was knocked down again. By a man in armour, steel grey, with a big trunchbuster club and no face and a couple of little buzz-drones at each shoulder, spraying gas and making a high, terrible keening noise that he - Fassin! - wanted to get away from, but his nose and eyes and everything else stung and hurt and he didn't know what to do, he was Fasssin! just standing there and the guy with the big club thing as long as a spear came up to him and he Fasssin? stupidly thought he might ask him what was going on and what was wrong with Faaassssiiinnn? wrong when the man swept his club-spear trunchbuster thing round and into his face, knocking some teeth out and sending him spinning to 'Fassin?'
His name finally jolted him awake. 'Back with us? Good.'
The speaker was a small man in a large chair across a cramped-looking metal desk. The room - or whatever - was too dark to see into, even with IR. The sound of the man's voice in the space suggested it was not a big space. Fassin was aware that his face and especially his mouth hurt. He tried to wipe his mouth. He looked down. His hands could not move because his forearms were - he tried to think of the right word - shackled? They were shackled to the seat he was sitting in. What the hell was this? He started laughing.
Somebody hit him in his bones. It was like his entire skeleton was a wind chime and his flesh and muscles and organs were somewhere else, only nearby but still connected somehow and some fucker - actually, some very large group of fuckers - had taken a whole load of hammers and whacked each one of his bones really hard at the same time. The pain went almost as quickly as it arrived, leaving just a weird sort of echo in his nerves.
'What the fuck was zhat?' he asked the little man. His voice sounded comical with some of his teeth knocked out. His tongue probed the gaps. Felt like two out, one loose. He tried to remember how long it took adult teeth to grow back. The little man was quite a jolly-looking soul, with a plump, amused-seeming face and chubby, rosy cheeks. His hair was black, cropped. He wore a uniform of a type that Fassin didn't recognise. 'Are you shucking torturing me?' Fassin asked.
'No,' the little man said in a very reasonable tone of voice. 'I'm just doing this to get your attention.' One of his hands moved on the desk's surface.
Fassin's bones clattered as though played upon again. His nerves, having experienced this twice now, decided that really this was no joke, and in fact felt extremely sore.
'All right! All right!' he heard himself saying. ‘Itake the shucking point. Fucking point,' he said, working out how to adapt his pronunciation to his new dental layout.
'Don't swear,' the little man said, and hurt him again.
'Okay!' he screamed. His head hung. Snot dripped from his nose, saliva and blood from his mouth.
'Please don't swear,' the little man said. 'It indicates an untidy mind.'
'Just tell me what the f— what you want,' Fassin said. Was this real? Had he been in some sort of weird VR dream ever since he'd joined K for the coming-out-of-the-shallows end-of-tream thing earlier? Was this what happened when you got tream templates cheap, or illegally copied or something? Was this real? It felt painful enough to be real. He looked down at his legs and the hems of his shorts, all covered in blood and mucus and snot. He could see individual hairs on his legs, some standing, some plastered to his skin. He could see pores. Didn't that mean it was real? But of course it didn't. Treams, simcasts, VR, all depended on the fact that the mind could really only concentrate on one thing at a time. The rest was illusion. Human sight, the most complicated sense the species possessed, had been doing that for millions of years, fooling the mind behind the eyes. You thought you had colour vision, and in some detail, over this wide angle but really you didn't; accurate colour vision was concentrated within a tiny part of the visual field, with only vague, movement-wary black-and-white awareness extending over the rest.
The brain played tricks on itself to pretend that it saw as well away from the centre of its visual target as it did right at that bull's-eye. Smart VR used that same deception; zoom in on a detail and it would be created for you in all its pinpoint exactitude, but everything else you weren't attending to with such concentration could safely be ignored until your attention swung that way, keeping the amount of processing power within acceptable limits.
Fassin dragged his attention away from his blood-spattered leg. 'Is this real?' he asked.
The little man sighed. 'Mr Taak,' he said, glancing down at a screen, 'your profile indicates that you are from a respectable family and may one day even become a useful member of society. You shouldn't be mixing and living with the sort of people you have been mixing and living with. You've all been very foolish and people have suffered because of that stupidity. You've been living in a kind of dream, really, and that dream is now over. Officially. I think you ought to go back home. Don't you?'
The Algebraist Page 20
