The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  'Well—' Fassin began.

  'The human is under my protection, Administrator!' Y'sul interrupted. 'I vouch for it entirely and will continue to accept all kudos consequences regarding its actions. I shall take all steps necessary to safeguard it from whatever hostile forces may wish it ill. May I count on your support for the expedition the human insists on making into the war zone?'

  'Given,' the Administrator said.

  'How splendid! We can be ready to leave within a couple of days. Especially if the tailor Deystelmin is persuaded to priori­tise my combat-clothing order.'

  'I'll have a word.'

  'Too kind! I swear I shall never nominate you for a coercive vote again!'

  'My gratitude knows no bounds.'

  If Dwellers could grit their teeth, Fassin thought, the Administrator's words would have been spoken through them. 'Excuse me, ma'am,' he said.

  'Yes, human Taak?'

  'Have you any word on events elsewhere in the system?'

  'As I say, the various rings and moons are shifting fraction­ally in their orbits to accommodate—'

  'I think he means the stellar system, not that of Nasqueron,' Colonel Hatherence said.

  The two Dwellers turned to look at her. Dwellers had sensing bands all the way round their outer rims, plus eye bubbles low on their outer hubs. They were not known as the best glarers in the galaxy but they were always willing to give it their best shot. To a Dweller, their own planet was pretty much every­thing. Most gas-giants had many more moons than the average stellar system possessed planets, and most radiated a lot more energy than they received from the star they orbited, their heat-transfer systems, weather and ecology arising largely from processes internal to the planet itself, not dependent on sunlight. Their inhabitants had to pay close attention to the skies, basi­cally to watch out for incoming, but even that consideration led to an obviously gas-giant-centred way of thinking. The local star and the rest of its planetary system was of relatively little interest to the average Dweller.

  'That is not quite what I meant,' Fassin told them quickly. 'The moon 'glantine, for example; has it been harmed?'

  'Not to my knowledge,' the Administrator said, with another stern look at Hatherence.

  'And the military ships that were in orbit around Third Fury?' the colonel asked.

  (- Shh! Fassin signalled Hatherence.

  - No! she sent back.)

  'What ships?' the Administrator said, apparently mystified.

  'How about the planet Sepekte?' Fassin said.

  'I have no idea,' the Administrator told him. She fixed her gaze on Fassin. 'Is this why you wished to see me? To ask after the welfare of moons and distant planets?'

  'No, ma'am. The reason that I wanted to see you is that I am worried that there may be a threat to Nasqueron.'

  'You are?' blurted Y'sul.

  'Really?' the Administrator said with a sigh.

  Even Hatherence was turned to look at him.

  'There is a war beginning amongst the Quick, ma'am,' Fassin told the Administrator. ‘It is going to come to Ulubis and it is not impossible that some of the forces taking part may wish to involve Nasqueron and its Dwellers in that war in some way.'

  The Administrator rolled fractionally back and sucked her outer trim-frill in, the Dweller equivalent of a frown.

  (- Major? the colonel sent. - You said nothing of this. What do you base this on? Is there something you're not telling me?

  - A hunch. Just trying to get their attention. And I should point out that it's considered impolite to signal-whisper like this.)

  The Administrator continued to look at Fassin for a moment, then turned to Y'sul. Ts this human normally mad?'

  Y'sul made a sucking sound. 'Down to definitions.'

  'Nasqueron might be vulnerable to a further bombardment,' Fassin persisted. 'Even to some sort of raid.'

  'Ha!' Y'sul laughed.

  'We are not defenceless, human Taak!' the Administrator said loudly.

  No, but your spaceships are leaky antiques and your plan­etary defences are set up for dumb rocks, Fassin thought wearily. You talk a good defence, but if the Epiphany 5 invaders decide to attack, or the Mercatoria decides I'm dead and they plump for a more obvious way to get hold of whatever might be in Valseir's library, you won't be able to do much to stop them. Going on what I've seen, a single Navarchy Military destroyer could lay waste to your whole planet, over time.

  'Of course not,' he agreed. 'But I would ask you to pass this information on to the relevant authorities. You will be still better defended if you are prepared.'

  'I'll bear that in mind,' the Administrator told him levelly.

  Oh shit, Fassin thought. You're going to do fuck all. You aren't going to bother telling anybody.

  Y'sul was looking up. 'What's that?' he asked.

  Fassin experienced a moment of horror. He looked up too. A stubby vaned cylinder a couple of metres high was hovering vertically above them in the darkness outside the ceiling's still-open diamond petals. It was pointing something long and dark at them.

  The Administrator groaned. 'Oh no,' she said. 'That is the press.'

  'Sholish! My good cuirass, you witless rind-nibbling waste of gas!'

  Y'sul threw a piece of armour across the room at his servant.

  The camo-painted carbon plate spun through the gas, changing colours rapidly as it tried to adapt, narrowly missed several other Dwellers - the large room was crowded and people had to duck, bob or dodge - just avoided Sholish and embedded itself in a FloatTree panel, producing a distinct thunk. Before it had much of a chance to blend in, Sholish tugged it out of the wall and disappeared into a side chamber, muttering.

  'Excuse me,' Colonel Hatherence said sharply to a Dweller who'd just bumped into her in the general shuffling that had spread through the room to give the thrown piece of armour a clear trajectory.

  'Excused!' the Dweller said, then continued his conversation with another of Y'sul's relations.

  Y'sul was getting ready to quit Hauskip and leave for the war along with his charges, Fassin and the oerileithe. His new combat clothing had arrived just that morning (kudos-enhanc­ingly quickly!) along with various gifts from friends and family, most of whom, it seemed, had thought it best to show up in person to present their mostly useless or positively dangerous gifts and offer vast amounts of generally contradictory but extremely loudly proffered advice.

  Y'sul, flattered and excited to be the centre of so much atten­tion, had invited them all into his dressing room for snacks and whatever while he tried on all his new clothing, checked that his antique, inherited familial armour still more or less fitted and played with all the new bits and pieces he'd been given. Fassin counted over thirty Dwellers in the chamber, which was one of the larger spaces in the wheel-shaped house. There was a saying to the effect that one Dweller constituted an argument-in-waiting, two a conspiracy and three a riot. Quite what a gath­ering of thirty-plus was supposed to represent he wasn't sure, but it would assuredly have nothing to do with silence or subtlety. The noise rang off the curved walls. The clothing competed for loudness. Expressive patterns spread across exposed carapace skin like flip-books of geometric artwork. Magnetic chatter swirled, infrasound bounced confusion from one wall to another and a heady mix of pheromones bathed the place in frantic currents of Dweller hilarity.

  - Are there other guides-cum-guards we might employ beside this one? Hatherence asked, pressing up to the wall beneath where Fassin floated as another Dweller bearing gifts arrived and pushed his way through the throng towards Y'sul.

  - Not really, Fassin told her. - Y'sul suffered a significant kudos-loss within the Guard-mentors Guild taking on an alien outworlder, back when he agreed to be Uncle Slovius's mentor. He got that back eventually but it was a brave thing to do. Few of them will accept that kind of loss. Starting from scratch to

  find somebody new would take years, even if Y'sul did agree.

  Something small, round, pink and gooey bumped
into the top of the colonel's esuit, and stuck. She batted it away. - What are all these things? she said, exasperated.

  - Just hospitality, Fassin sent, with a resigned expression.

  Floating, drifting round the room were bobfruits, flossballs, chandelier-gumbushes and wobbling breezetrays loaded with sweetmeats, mood-balloons, narcopastes and party-supposito­ries. The guests helped themselves, eating, ingesting, snorting, rubbing and inserting away as appropriate. The noise seemed to be swelling by the minute, as was the collision rate - always a sure indicator that Dwellers were getting out of it (lots of loud bumps, hasty cries of 'Excuse me!', sudden, alarming tiltings, and bursts of the sort of especially raucous laughter which invariably accompanied the realisation by a Dweller that one of its companions had lost control of their buoyancy).

  - Oh dear, Fassin said. - I do believe this is turning into a party.

  - Are these people intoxicated? Hatherence asked, sounding genuinely shocked.

  Fassin looked at her, letting his incredulity show. - Colonel, he told her, - they are rarely anything else.

  There was a bang and a yelp from somewhere near where Y'sul floated. A bobfruit exploded in mid-gas and fell limply to the floor. People nearby wiped foamy pieces of fruit off their clothes.

  'Oops!' Y'sul said, amidst widespread laughter.

  - He can't be the only guide! the colonel protested. – What about other Seers? They must have guides too.

  - They do, but it's a one-to-one thing, an exclusive relation­ship. Abandoning your Guard-mentor would be a terrible insult. They'd lose all kudos.

  - Major Taak, we cannot afford to be sentimental here! If there is even a possibility that we might find a better, less idiotic guide, we ought at least to start looking.

  - The Guard-mentors are a Guild, colonel. They run a closed shop. If you dumped one of them, none of the rest would touch you. You'd certainly then find some clown who'd offer to act as a guide, mentor, guard, whatever - in fact they'd probably have to form a queue - but they'd be very young and stupid, or very old and, ah, eccentric, and they'd assuredly get you into far more trouble than they were ever likely to get you out of. The Guard-mentors Guild would harass them from the start, for one thing, and the vast majority of other Dwellers wouldn't talk to you at all. Librarians, archive-keepers, antiquarians, exo-specialists - all the people we most need to talk to, in other words - in particular would not even give you the time of day.

  They made room for Y'sul's servant, Sholish, returning from the side chamber with a two-piece, highly polished, mirror-finished cuirass. Sholish was an adolescent, only a few hundred years old, barely three-quarters grown and skinny. Personal servants, always at least two generational stages younger than their masters, were fairly common in Dweller society, especially where the senior Dweller was bothering to pursue a hobby-cum-profession which actually involved a degree of study andor training, when the servant had a fighting chance of picking up the basics of the given trade. The better masters regarded their servants more as apprentices than servants and the occasional especially aberrant ones treated their underlings almost as equals.

  Y'sul had yet to fall prey to such sentimentality.

  'And about time, you custard-brained phlegm-wart!' Y'sul yelled, snatching the cuirass from Sholish's grasp. 'Did you have to forge and weave the armour yourself? Or did you start gazing at your own reflection and lose all track?'

  Sholish mumbled, retreated.

  - I refuse to accept that we are as powerless as you imply, major, the colonel told Fassin.

  He turned to look at the oerileithe. - We are here very much on sufferance, colonel. The Dwellers can go off entire species of Seers, for no accountable reason. Nobody's ever worked out a pattern to this. You just suddenly find that you and your kind aren't welcome any more. It doesn't usually happen while they're still getting to know a new-to-civilisation species, but even that's no guarantee. They certainly get fed up with individuals - I've seen it happen - and that's equally random. Every time I come down here I have to accept that no matter how friendly and helpful everybody might have been during my last visit - (the colonel gave a sceptical laugh) - they might have nothing more to do with me this time or ever again. In fact, they might tell me I've got a day to get out or become the object of a hunt. And a Seer faces that prospect every single time they delve, either remotely or directly. We just have to get used to it. They don't even need to have met you; there are records of Seers-to-be who've spent decades getting trained up, who've been part of respected Seer Septs going back millennia who've been about to go on their very first delve and been told not to bother and to stay away for ever. It's a minor miracle they've accepted you the way they have. And don't forget the only reason you're not constantly being challenged as an interloper is because Y'sul is on record as vouching for you.

  - You are saying we are stuck with this buffoon.

  - We are. I know it's hard to believe, but he's one of the better ones.

  - Core help us. Why waste time? I shall apply for my posthu-mous decoration immediately.

  The Volunteer Guild of Guard-mentors existed to look after Dwellers visiting from other bands of the same planet, or, very rarely, from another gas-giant, usually one within the same stellar system. Dwellers - almost always alone - did make jour­neys from one stellar system to another, but it didn't happen often and it usually meant that the individual concerned had been thrown out of their own home gas-giant for some partic­ularly heinous crime or unforgivable character defect.

  The Dwellers had pretty much stopped making deep space trips en masse after the Second Diasporian Age, when the galaxy had been half the age it was now. It was generally held that seven billion years' lack of practice probably accounted for the sheer awfulness of Dweller spaceship design and building stan­dards, though Fassin wasn't convinced that cause and effect hadn't been confused here.

  They were due to leave for the war zone the following day. The interval since the frustrating audience with the City Administrator had been spent fending off Dweller journalists and their news remotes and trying to find out what they could about events in the wider system. Eventually they'd had to compromise and trade. One journalist got a very guarded but

  exclusive interview from Fassin (very guarded indeed - Colonel Hatherence kept coughing loudly whenever they approached any subject remotely to do with their mission) in return for news of the outside.

  The Third Fury moon had been devastated and all on or in it had perished. There was no news of a drop ship surviving, though equally there was no news of any wreckage from such a ship being found. However, of course, if it had just dropped into the Depths . . . Many satellites had been destroyed or damaged. Those belonging to the Quick (this meant the Mercatoria) appeared to be either missing or out of action. Some warships belonging to the current local Quick species had spent an amount of time investigating the rubble of the moon Third Fury. The moon 'glantine appeared much as it always had. Stellar-system ship traffic appeared light, as it had for some days now, but not anomalous. A signal had been sent on the behalf of Oculan Colonel Hatherence, on the authority of Guard-mentor Y'sul of Hauskip, to the moon 'glantine. No reply had yet been received. Nothing untoward had happened to the trans­mitting station responsible following the transmission.

  According to the journalist, this was all stuff they could have found out themselves, eventually. The trick was knowing where to look. The journalist seemed to feel miffed that they'd got the better end of the deal, too, because everything he'd told them was at least ninety per cent true, specifically to avoid upsetting them. He knew aliens could be funny that way.

  'What, exactly, did your friend say?'

  'He said they wanted him to ... "to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for ..." I'm pretty certain those were his exact words. Then he seemed to realise he was saying too much, giving too much away, and he changed the subject. The . . . hesitation, that sudden change of subject made the earlier form of words all the more important. He realis
ed he was speaking to somebody who spent a lot of his life in Nasqueron, who might not feel the same way he would about the implications of what he was talking about.'

  'This was spoken in . . .?'

  'Humanised G-Clear, very close to this. Meanings are pretty much identical, just altered pronunciation for the human voice.'

  'No Anglish words involved?'

  'None.'

  'So, he said "gas-lined" not "streamlined" or "air-lined"?'

  'One wouldn't say "air-lined" as far as I know. The normal form of words would be "streamlined". He chose "gas-lined" without thinking because it was more technically correct, because it has a narrower meaning. In this context it means altering a vacuum-capable craft so that it can also operate in an atmosphere like Nasqueron's.'

  'Which you take to mean that an invasion or large-scale destructive raid upon us is imminent?'

  'I think some sort of raid is a distinct possibility.'

  'This seems a thin thread to hang such a weighty fear upon.'

  'I know. But please understand, the guy's company builds and refits three-quarters of the system's war craft. The phrase "gas-lined" is quite specific and that sudden change of tack when he realised he was talking to somebody who might be senti­mentally or emotionally attached to Nasqueron and sympathetic towards Dwellers is significant. I know this man, I've known him since I was a child. I know how his mind works.'

  'Attempting to invade a gas-giant would, nevertheless, be a momentous action. In seven thousand years, the Mercatoria has done no such thing.'

  'The situation is desperate for them locally. They are under threat of invasion within the year. A standard year, not one of yours. Help is at least one more standard year away beyond that. In fact, the invasion may already be beginning. The attacks on Third Fury and the Mercatoria's other assets around Nasq. could be part of it.'