The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  Oh, shit.

  - The Dwellers, Fassin told her, - can be ... pernickety about that sort of thing. Pernickety, he thought. They were liable to declare the colonel an honorary child, give her a half-hour start and set off to hunt her. - They take their privacy quite seri-­ously. Unauthorised entries are severely discouraged.

  - Well, I'm aware of that.

  - You are? Good.

  - I shall throw myself upon their mercy.

  - Right. I see.

  You are either quite brave and possessed of a decent sense of humour, Fassin thought, or you really should have done more homework.

  - So, Seer Fassin Taak, in which direction ought we to proceed?

  - Should be a CloudTunnel about four hundred klicks . . . that way, Fassin sent, turning the gascraft to point more or less south and slightly down. - Unless it's moved, obviously.

  - Shall we? the colonel said, drifting in that direction.

  - Going to ping one of our sats, let them know we're alive,

  Fassin told her.

  - This is wise?

  Was it wise? Fassin wondered. There had been some sort of attack on the Seer infrastructure around Nasqueron, but that didn't mean the whole near-planet environment had been taken over. On the other hand . . .

  - How fast can that esuit go? he asked the colonel.

  - At this density, about four hundred metres per second.

  About half that, on sustained cruise.

  Fassin's arrowcraft could just about keep pace with that. Disappointing. He was still hoping to give the colonel the slip at some point. It looked like he wasn't going to be able to just outrun her.

  - Ping sent, he told Hatherence. - Let's go.

  They went, quickly. They'd got about a hundred metres away when a flash of violet light ripped the cloud apart behind them and a stark, short-lived beam-cluster splayed through the volume of gas they'd been floating within a few seconds earlier. Further beams radiated out from the initial target point, pulsing through the atmosphere in slowly spreading semi-random stabs. One flicked into existence about fifty metres from them, booming and crackling. All the rest were much further away and after a minute or so they ceased altogether.

  - Somebody would seem to be ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak, the colonel sent as they flew through the gas.

  - So it would appear.

  The flash and EMP came a couple of minutes after that. A low, rumbling concussion caught up with them some time later.

  - Was that a nuke? Fassin sent. His instruments seemed to leave no other interpretation, but he still found it hard to believe.

  - I am unaware of any phenomenon able to mimic one so convincingly.

  - Fucking hell.

  - I float corrected. Somebody would seem to be extremely ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak.

  - The Dwellers are not going to be happy, he told Hatherence. - Only they're allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere, he explained. - And it isn't even fireworks season.

  They found the CloudTunnel about where Fassin had thought it ought to be, only a hundred kilometres out laterally and two kilometres further down: bang on by Nasqueron standards. The CloudTunnel was a bundle of a dozen or so carbon-carbon tubes like some vast, barely braided cable-cluster floating in the midst of an unending cloudscape of gently billowing yellow, orange and ochre. The CloudTunnel's two main tubes were about sixty metres in diameter, the smallest - basically comms and telemetry wave guides - less than half a metre. The whole cluster had looked thread-thin when they'd first caught sight of it, tens of kilometres away, but up close it looked like a hawser fit to tether a moon. A great, deep rushing sound rumbled from inside the two main pipes.

  - What now? the colonel sent.

  - We see if my vicarious kudos credit is still good.

  Fassin used one of the arrowcraft's manipulators to prod one of the wave guides, working the filaments through the tube's protective sheath without breaking it. A hair-thin wire extended into the matrix of light filling the narrow tube. Information streamed from the far end of the wire, into the gascraft's biomind, its transitional systems and then into Fassin's head, forming a coded chaos of babbling sound, wildly scintillating visuals and other confused sensory experiences. The interrup­tion in the light streams had already been noticed and allowed for. A pulse of information aimed right at the filament sent an identity request and inquired whether assistance was required, otherwise stop interfering with a public information highway.

  -A human, Fassin Taak, privileged to be Slow Seer at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, he sent. - I'd like some assis-tance in the shape of transport at the given location, bound for Hauskip City.

  He was told to wait.

  'Fassin Taak, Out-Bander, Stranger, Alien, Seer, Human! And . . . what's this?'

  'This is Colonel Hatherence of the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula, an oerileithe.'

  'Good day, Dweller Y'sul,' Hatherence said. They had switched to using ordinary sound-speech.

  'A little dweller! How fascinating! Not a child, then?'

  Y'sul, a sizeable mid-adult a good nine metres or so in diam­eter, rolled through the gas and, extending one long spindle-arm, clunked a fist-bunch (bink-bink-bink!) on the esuit of the Colonel.

  'Hellooo in there!' Y'sul said.

  Hatherence's discus of esuit leaned to one side under the rain of not-so-gentle blows. 'Pleased to meet you,' she replied tersely.

  'Not a child,' Fassin confirmed.

  They were in a giant bowl-like room, roofed with slate-diamond micrometres thin, in a Thickeneers' Club in Hauskip City.

  Hauskip lay within the equatorial zone of Nasqueron, one of the hundred thousand or so major conurbations in that partic­ular atmospheric band. Seen from the right angle in a sympa-thetic light, it looked a lot like the internal workings of an ancient mechanical clock, multiplied and magnified several thou­sand times. From far enough away, or just seen in a schematic, it resembled millions of toothed-looking wheels caught up in amongst each other, with larger sets of wheels interconnecting with them through hubs and spines and spindles, themselves linking up with still greater sets of wheels. The whole mighty, slowly gyrating and spinning assemblage, easily a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, floated within a thick soup of gas a hundred kilometres beneath the cloud tops.

  The city was the hub for several CloudTunnel lines. Once an empty car had made its way to the access hatch nearest to where Fassin and Hatherence pitched up alongside the CloudTunnel, it had taken two changes of line, riding in the same car, for Fassin and the colonel to get there through the network of partially evacuated, high-speed transit tubes. The whole journey had taken one of Nasqueron's short day-night cycles. They had each slept for most of the time, though just before Fassin had dozed off, the colonel had said, 'We go on. You agree, major? We continue our mission. Until we are ordered to cease.'

  ‘Iagree,' he said. 'We go on.'

  The TunnelCar had docked, sphinctered its way through a TunnelBud wall in Hauskip's Central Station and sped through the gelatinous atmosphere straight to the equatorial Eighth Progression Thickeneers' Club, where Y'sul, Fassin's long-time guide-mentor-guard had been attending a party to celebrate the Completion and Expulsion Ceremony of one of the club's members.

  Dwellers started out looking like anorexic manta rays - this was in their brief, occasionally hunted childhood phase - then grew, fattened, split most of the way down the middle (adoles­cence, kind of), shifted from a horizontal to a vertical axis and ended up, as adults, basically, resembling something like a pair of large, webbed, fringed cartwheels connected by a short, thick axle with particularly bulbous outer hubs onto each of which had been fastened a giant spider crab.

  Part of the transition from recent- to mid-adulthood involved a period called Thickening, when the slim and flimsy discs of youth became the stout and sturdy wheels of later life, and it was customary for Dwellers to join a club of their approximate contemporaries while this was takin
g place. There was no specific reason for Dwellers to band together at this point in their lives, they just in general enjoyed joining clubs, sodalities, orders, leagues, parties, societies, associations, fellowships, fraternities, groups, guilds, unions, fractionals, dispensationals and recreationalities, while always, of course, leaving open the possibility of taking part in ad hoc non-ceremonial serendipi­tous one-time gatherings as well. The social calendar was crowded.

  Y'sul had invited them to this private book-crystal-lined library room in his Thickeneers' Club rather than to his home so that, as he explained, if they were too boring or in too great a hurry, he could get back without an over-great delay to his chums taking part in the ceremonial dinner and spree in the banqueting hall below.

  'So, Fassin, good to see you!' Y'sul said. 'Why have you brought this little dweller with you? Is she food?' 'No, of course not. She is a colleague.' 'Of course! Though there are no oerileithe Seers.' 'She is not a Seer.' 'Then not a colleague?'

  'She has been sent to escort me, by the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula.'

  ‘I see.' Y'sul, dressed in his best smart-but-casual finery, all brightly coloured fringes and lacily ornate ruffs, rocked back, rotating slightly, then came forward again. 'No, I don't! What am I saying? What is this "Ocula"?' 'Well . . .'

  It took a while to tell. After about a quarter of an hour - this all, thankfully, in real-time, with no slow-down factor - Fassin thought he'd pretty much briefed Y'sul as well and as completely as he could without giving too much away. The colonel had contributed now and again, not that Y'sul seemed to have taken any notice of her.

  Y'sul was about fifteen thousand years old, a full-adult who was perhaps another one or two millennia away from becoming a traav, the first stage of Prime-hood. At nine metres vertical diameter (not including his semi-formal dinner clothes, whose impressive body ruff added another metre), he was about as large as a Dweller ever got. His double disc was nearly five metres across, the modestly clothed central axle barely visible as a separate entity, more of an unexpected thinning between the two great wheels. Dwellers shrank very slightly as they aged after mid-adulthood and slowly lost both hub and fringe limbs until, by the time they were in their billions, they were often nearly limb-disabled.

  Even then they could still get about, as a rule. Their motive force came from a system of vanes extending from the inner and outer surfaces of their two main discs. These extended to beat - sometimes twisting to add extra impetus or to steer -and lay flat on the backstroke, so that a moving Dweller seemed to roll through the atmosphere. This was called roting. Very old Dwellers often lost the use of - or just lost - the vanes on the outside of their discs, but usually retained those on the inside so that no matter how decrepit they might get, they could still wheel themselves around.

  'It boils down,' Y'sul said at the end, 'to the fact that you are looking for the choal Valseir, to resume subject-specific studies in a library within his control.'

  'Pretty much,' Fassin agreed.

  'I see.'

  'Y'sul, you have always been a great help to me. Can you help me in this?'

  'Problem,' Y'sul said.

  'Problem?' Fassin asked.

  'Valseir is dead and his library has been consigned to the depths, or split up, possibly at random, amongst his peers, allies, families, co-specialists, enemies or passers-by. Probably all of the above.'

  'Dead?' Fassin said. He let horror show on the signalling carapace of the gascraft; a quite specific whorl pattern which indicated being intellectually and emotionally appalled at the demise of a Dweller friendacquaintance not least because they had died in the course of pursuing a line of inquiry that one was oneself deeply fascinated by. 'But he was only a choal! He was billions of years from dying!'

  Valseir had been about a million and a half years old and on the brink of passing from the Cuspian level to that of Sage. Choal was the last phase of being a Cuspian. The average age of progressing from Cuspian-choal to Sage-child was over two million years but Valseir had been judged by his elders and allegedly betters as being ready even at such a modest count of time. He was, or had been, a one-and-a-half-million-year-old prodigy. He had also, last time Fassin had seen him, seemed strong, vigorous and full of life. Agreed, he spent most of his life with his rotary snout stuck in a library and didn't get out much, but still Fassin could not believe he was dead. The Dwellers didn't even have any diseases he could have died of. How could he be dead?

  'Yachting accident, if I recall,' Y'sul said. 'Do I?' Fassin sensed the Dweller radioing an inforequest to the patch-walls of the library room. 'Yes, I do! Yes, a yachting accident. His StormJammer got caught in a particularly vicious eddy and it came apart on him. Skewered with a main beam or a yard arm or something. On a brighter note, they salvaged most of the yacht before it descended to the Depths. He was a very keen sailor. Terribly competitive.' .

  'When?' Fassin asked. 'I heard nothing.' 'Not long ago,' Y'sul said. 'Couple of centuries at the most.' 'There was nothing on the news nets.'

  'Really? Ah! Wait.' (Another radioed inforequest.) 'Yes. I understand he left instructions that in the event of his death it was to be regarded as a private matter.' Y'sul flexed his hub-mounted spindle-arms on either side. All of them. Right out. 'Quite understand! Done the same myself.'

  'Is there any record of what happened to his library?' Fassin asked.

  Y'sul rocked back again, a pair of giant conical wheels rotating slowly away, then pitching forward once more. He hung in mid-gas and said, 'D'you know what?' 'What?'

  'No, there isn't! Is that not strange?'

  'We ... I would really like to look into this matter further, Y'sul. Can you help us in this?'

  'I most certainly . . . ah, talking about news nets, there is something about an unauthorised fusion explosion not far from the point you accessed the CloudTunnel from. Anything to do with you?'

  Oh, shit, Fassin thought, again. 'Yes. It would appear that somebody is trying to kill me. Or possibly the colonel here.' He waved at Hatherence's esuit, still floating next to him. She had been silent for some time. Fassin was not certain this was a good sign.

  ‘I see,' Y'sul said. 'And talking about the good colonel, I am struggling to discover her authorisation. For being here at all, I mean.'

  'Well,' Fassin said, 'we were forced to take refuge in Nasqueron, some time before we imagined it would be neces­sary, due to unprovoked hostile action. The colonel's permis­sions were being sought some time before we left but had not yet come through when we had to make our emergency entry. The colonel is, technically, here without explicit permission, and therefore throws herself upon your mercy as a shipwreckee, a wartime asylumee and a fellow gas-giant dweller in need of shelter.' Fassin turned and looked at the colonel, who shifted about her vertical axis to return his gascraft-directed gaze. 'She claims sanctuary,' he finished.

  'Provisionally given, of course,' Y'sul said. 'Though the precise meaning of "unprovoked" might be challenged in a wider context, and the exact definition of "shipwreckee", equally, could well be open to dispute if one wished to be picky. That aside, though, do I understand there is some sort of dispute in progress, out amongst you people?'

  'You understand correctly,' Fassin told the Dweller.

  'Oh, not another one of your wars, please!' Y'sul protested, with a rolling-back of his whole body which was actually rela­tively easy for a human to interpret, correctly, as an equivalent of rolling one's eyes. (Though, to be fair, there was quite a lot of Dweller gestures with this translation.)

  'Well, pretty much, yes,' Fassin told him.

  'Your passion for doing each other harm never ceases to amaze, delight and horrify!'

  'I'm told there is to be a Formal War between Zone 2 and Belt C,' Fassin said.

  'I too am told that!' Y'sul said brightly. 'Do you really think it will happen? I'm not optimistic, frankly. Some appallingly good negotiators have been drafted in, I understand . . . Ah. Your hull carapace, doing the j
ob of standing in, feebly, for the body you so sadly lack, bears marks upon it which I take to mean you were being sarcastic earlier.'

  'Never mind, Y'sul.'

  'Right then, shan't. Now then: Valseir. There is a point of congruency'

  'There is?'

  'Yes!'

  'With what? Between what and what?'

  'His demise and this war we've been promised!'

  'Really?'

  'Yes! His old study - it is in the current zone of disputation, I believe.'

  'But if it's already been broken up—' Fassin began.

  'Oh, there are bound to be back-ups, and I'm not even sure the old fellow has been finally put to rest.'

  'After two hundred years?'

  'Come now, Fassin, there were matters of probate.'

  'And it's in the war zone?'

  'Very likely, yes! Isn't it exciting? I think we ought to go there immediately!' Y'sul waved all his limbs at once. 'Let's form an expedition! We shall go together.' He looked at Hatherence. 'You can even bring your little friend.'

  - I have been considering whether to attempt to communicate with your Shared Facility, via your satellites or directly, the colonel told him.

  - I wouldn't, Fassin sent. - But if you decide you must, tell me before you try. I want to be well out of the volume.

  - You think the same sort of attack directed against us following your 'ping' might be directed against us here?

  - Probably not here, in a Dweller city. But then, why risk it? We don't know that whoever's been shooting at us quite understands what they'd be letting themselves in for, so they might just waste us and have to deal with the consequences later.

  We won't be around to jeer.

  - We need to find out what is going on, Major Taak, Hatherence informed him.

  - I know, and I'm going to send a request for information up to a sat from a remote site as soon as I've checked out what's been going on via the local nets.