The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  Us? Oh, we were like ghosts in the cabling.

  *

  Slave-children were crawling along the giant blades of one of the Dreadnought's main propellers, packing welding gear, back-sacks of carbon weave and heavy glue-throwers. The pulsing drone of the vessel's engines and main propulsion thrummed through the wrap-cloak of brown, billowing mist, filling the slipstreamed gas and the structure of the huge ship with buzzing, building, rising and fading harmonics like a vast unending symphony of industrial sound.

  Fassin and the colonel watched from an open gantry over­looking the ring of giant engines as the two teams of Dweller infants crawled along the massive blades to the warped and flap­ping blade ends.

  The starboard-most propeller had been hit by a section of DewCloud root. The root had fallen out of the clouds above, probably from a dying DewCloud floating and decomposing tens of kilometres above. DewClouds were enormous, foamy plants anything up to ten kilometres across and five or six times that in height. Like all gas-giant flora, they were mostly gas -a Dweller in a hurry could probably rip right through the canopy of one, hardly noticing they were in the midst of a plant, not an ordinary cloud. To a human they looked like some monstrous cross between an elongated mushroom and a jelly­fish the size of a thunder cloud. Part of an Ubiquitous clade, found wherever Dwellers were, they harvested water conden­sation out of Dwellerine gas-giant atmospheres, using their dangling, thick and relatively solid roots to exploit the temper­ature difference between the various atmospheric layers.

  When they approached the ends of their lives they floated up to the cold cloud tops and the higher haze layers, and bits broke off. The Dreadnought had prop guards to stop floatingfalling rising stuff interfering with its main propulsion units, but the section of root had slipped in between the guard and the propeller itself, wreaking brief havoc with the thirty-metre-long vanes before being chewed up and thrown out. Now the child-slaves had to climb out along the blades, from the hubs to the tips, to make repairs. Shaped like slim deltas with thin, delicate-looking tentacles which had to both clamp them on to the still-revolving blades and hold the various repair materials, the infants were making heavy weather of it. Dweller officers in motor skiffs rode nearby, bellowing orders, threats and impre­cations at the young.

  'They could just stop the fucking propeller,' the colonel shouted to Fassin. The open gantry they were holding on to was four-fifths, of the way back from the bulbous nose of the giant ship, an ellipsoid a little over two kilometres in length and four hundred across the beam. The Dreadnought's twenty-four giant engine-sets protruded from near its rear in a monumental collar of pylons, wires, tubular prop guards and near-spherical engine pods. The wind howled round Hatherence's esuit and Fassin's little arrowcraft.

  'Slow them down too much, apparently!' Fassin yelled back.

  The Dreadnought's captain had cut the starboard-most engine-set to quarter-power to give the slave-children a better chance of completing their repairs without too many casualties. The ship's giant rudders, mounted on the octiform tailplane assembly just aft of the engines, were appropriately deployed to compensate for the resulting skewed distribution of thrust.

  Fassin glimpsed an escort cruiser through a short-lived break in the clouds a few kilometres away. Other Dreadnoughts and their escorting screens of minor craft were spread out around them in a front a hundred kilometres across and thirty deep. A slave-child near one of the vane tips lost its grip and whirled off the end with a distant shriek, crashing into the inner edge of the outer prop guard. Its scream cut off and the limp body was caught in the combined prop wash and sent whirling back, narrowly avoiding a further collision with the tail assembly. It disappeared behind a giant vertical fin. When it came back into sight it was already starting to spiral slowly down into the enveloping cloud haze. None of the skiff-riding Dwellers spared it a second glance. The dozens of remaining slave-children continued to inch their way along the giant blades.

  Fassin looked at the colonel. 'Woops,' he said.

  They were hitching a ride to the war zone.

  A TunnelCar had taken them from Y'sul's house - well, two TunnelCars, a second proving necessary to carry all Y'sul's baggage and extra clothing, plus Sholish - to the Central Station. From there they joined a long-distance train of ninety or so cars making its way towards the border of Zone Zero - the equatorial zone - and Band A, twenty thousand kilometres away. Y'sul spent a large part of the journey complaining about his hangover.

  'You claim to have been around in your present form for ten billion years and you still haven't developed a decent hangover cure?' Hatherence had asked, incredulous.

  They'd been floating in a restaurant car, waiting for the galley to figure out the exact chemical composition of oerileithe food.

  Y'sul, his voice muffled, issuing from within a translucent coverall that was the Dweller equivalent of dark glasses, had replied, 'Suffering is regarded as part of the process, as is the mentioning of it. As is, one might add, the sympathy one receives from one's companions.'

  The colonel had looked sceptical. 'I thought you felt no pain?'

  'Mere physical pain, no. Ours is the psychic pain of realising that the world is not really as splendid as it seemed the evening before, and that one may have made something of a fool of oneself. And so on. I wouldn't expect a little dweller to under­stand.'

  They'd detrained at Nuersotse, a sphere city riding mid-alti­tude in the boiling ragged fringes of the equatorial Belt's northern limits. Nuersotse was barely thirty kilometres in diam­eter, relatively dense by Dweller city standards and built for strength and manoeuvrability. High-speed transport craft left in convoys every hour or so, as one of the Band Border Wheels swung near.

  They'd crossed on the Nuersotsian-Guephuthen Band Border Wheel One, a colossal, articulated structure two thou­sand kilometres across held rotating on the border of two atmos­pheric gas-giant bands, protruding a kilo-klick into each, its whole enormous mass spun by the contra-rotating gas-streams on either side. Band Border Wheels were the largest moving structures most gas-giant planets possessed, if one discounted the globe-girdling CloudTunnel networks. These only moved in the trivial sense of being whisked round the globe at a few hundred klicks an hour like everything else within a planetary band. To a Dweller that was stationary.

  Band Border Wheels really spun, transferring transport and materials from one band to another with minimal turbulence and in relative safety, with the added bonus that they produced prodigious amounts of electricity from their spindle drive-shafts. These protruded from the upper and lower hubs, vast hemispheres whose lower rims were pocked with microwave dishes hundreds of metres across, geared up to tear round at blurring, mind-numbing speeds and beaming their power to an outer collecting ring of equally enormous stationary dishes which then pumped the energy into docked bulk accumulator carriers.

  The Wheel and the city had been caught in the outer edges of a small boundary-riding storm when they'd arrived, though both were being moved out of the way as quickly as they could be. Everything, from the planet itself to Fassin's teeth, had seemed to vibrate around them as the turbulence-hardened transfer ship hurried them empodded from the CloudTunnel station to the Wheel, engines labouring, wind screaming, ammonia hail pelting, lightning flashing and magnetic fields making various parts of Y'sul's baggage and accoutrements buzz and fizz and spark.

  Hurled round in the giant centrifuge of the Wheel, stuck against its inner perimeter, the time that they'd spent inside had seemed almost calm by comparison, even allowing for the wild, wavelike bucking as they'd crossed the zonebelt border shear-face itself.

  The storm had been affecting Guephuthe more severely than Nuersotse. The outer equatorial ring of the city was spinning hard, parts of its peripheral suburbs and less well-maintained districts coming apart and peeling away in a welter of thrown-out shrapnel. Their transfer had to buck and weave to dodge the wreckage, then take them straight to a TunnelCar marshalling yard beyond the city proper, a spl
ay of cable fila­ments waving slowly in the gale like a vast anemone.

  Another multi-kiloklick CloudTunnel journey through the vastness of Belt A, the Northern Tropical, another Wheel transfer - calmer this time - into Zone 2, and finally, crossing the mid-line of the Zone, they'd started to encounter more mili­tary traffic than civilian, the cars and trains packed with people, supplies and materiel all heading for the war.

  At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they'd been thrown off the train by military police who weren't falling for Y'sul's pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition - nay, a quest! - he was undertaking with these -yes, these, two - famous, well-connected, honoured alien guests of immeasurably high intrinsic pan-systemic cross-species repu­tation, concerning a matter of the utmost import the exact details of which he was sadly not at liberty to divulge even to such patently important and obviously discreet members of the armed forces as themselves, but who would, nevertheless, he was sure, entirely understand the significance of their mission and thus their clear right to be accorded unhindered passage due to simple good taste and a fine appreciation of natural justice and would in no way be swayed by the fact that their cooper­ation would be repaid in levels of subsequent kudos almost beyond crediting . . .

  They'd floated in the TunnelBud, watching the train of cars pulling out. Sholish had darted around the echoing space trying to round up all the floating and fallen pieces of just-ejected luggage.

  Fassin and Hatherence had looked, glowering, at Y'sul.

  He'd finished dusting himself down and straightening his clothing, then done a double take at their aggregated gaze and announced, defensively, 'I have a cousin!'

  The cousin was an engineering officer on the Dreadnought Stormshear, a thirty-turreter with the BeltRotationeers' 487th 'Rolling Thunder' Fleet. Bindiche, the cousin, bore a long­standing familial grudge against Y'sul and so naturally had been only too happy to accept a great deal of kudos from an inwardly mortified, outwardly brave-facing, hail-cuz-bygones-now Y'sul by doing him the enormous, surely never-to-be-forgotten favour of vouching for him and his alien companions to his captain and so securing passage into the war zone, though even that only happened after a quick suborb flight in a nominally freight-only moonshell pulsed from High Tolimundarni to Lopscotte (again covered by cousin Bindiche and his endlessly handy military connections, said vile spawn of a hated uncle amassing anguished Y'sul-donated kudos like the Stormshear's mighty capacitors accumulated charge), scudding over the cloud tops, briefly in space (but no windows, not even any screen to see it), listening to Y'sul complain about the uncannily hang­over-resembling after-effects of the fierce acceleration in the magnetic-pulse tube and the fact that he'd had to leave behind most of his baggage, including all the war-zone presents his friends had given him and the bulk of the new combat attire he'd ordered.

  The slipstream howled and screamed around the Seer and the colonel. They watched the slave-children attempt their repairs. Clustered around the ends of the giant propeller blades, Fassin thought the Dweller young looked like a group of especially dogged flies clinging to a ceiling-mounted cooling fan.

  Dweller children had a generally feral and entirely unloved existence. It was very hard for humans not to feel that adult Dwellers were little better than serial, congenital abusers,- and that Dweller children ought to be rescued from the relative brutality of their existence.

  Even as Fassin watched, another infant was thrown from one of the giant blades, voice a high and anguished shriek. This latest unfortunate missed the prop guards but hit a high-tension stay cable and was almost cut in half. A Dweller in a skiff dipped back into the slipstream, wrestling with his craft, to draw level with the tiny, broken body. He stripped it of its welding kit and let the body go. It disappeared into the mist, falling like a torn leaf.

  Dwellers cheerfully admitted that they didn't care for their children. They didn't particularly care for becoming female and getting pregnant, frankly, doing this only because it was expected, drew kudos and meant one had in some sense fulfilled a duty. The idea of having to do even more, of having to look after the brats afterwards as well was just laughable. They, after all, had had to endure being thrown out of the house and left to wander wild when they were young, they'd taken their chances with the organised hunts, the gangs of adolescents and lone-hunter specialists, so why shouldn't the next generation? The little fuckers might live for billions of years. What was a mere century of weeding out?

  The slave-children being used to carry out the repairs to the Stormshear's damaged propeller would be regarded by most Dwellers as extremely lucky. They might be imprisoned and forced to carry out unpleasant andor dangerous jobs but at least they were relatively safe, unhunted and properly fed.

  Fassin looked out at them, wondering how many would survive to become adults. Would any of these skinny, trembling delta-shapes end up, billions of years from now, as utterly ancient, immensely respected Sages? The odd thing was, of course, that if you somehow knew for certain that they would, they wouldn't believe you. Dweller children absolutely, to an infant, refused to believe even for a moment, even as a working assumption, even just for the sake of argument, that they would ever, ever, ever grow up to become one of these huge, fierce, horrible double-disc creatures who hunted them and killed them and captured them to do all the awful jobs on their big ships.

  - Seer Taak?'

  - Yes, colonel?

  So they were back to close-communicating, using polarised light to keep their conversation as private as possible. The colonel had suggested coming up here. Fassin had wondered if it was for some private chat. He supposed ordinary talk might have been problematic, given the screech of the slipstream around the gantry and the thunderous clamour sounding from the choir of engines just behind.

  - I have meant to ask for some time.

  - What?

  - This thing we are supposed to be looking for. Without mentioning the specifics, even like this, using whisper-signalling . . .

  - Get on with it, colonel. Ma'am, he added.

  - Do you believe what you told us, at that briefing on Third Fury? Hatherence asked. - The one with just yourself, Ganscerel, Yurnvic and myself present: could all that you told us there possibly be true?

  The Long Crossing, the fabled 'hole between galaxies, the List itself. - Does it matter? he asked.

  - What we believe always matters.

  Fassin smiled. - Let me ask you something. May I?

  - On the condition that we return to my question, very well.

  - Do you believe in the 'Truth'?

  - So capitalised?

  - So in quotation marks.

  - Well, of course!

  The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind the Shrievalty, the Cessoria, in a sense behind the Mercatoria itself. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilisa­tions. (With the interesting exception of the Dwellers, or so they claimed. Which some parties held was another argument against them being a civilisation in the first place.) However, everybody - well, virtually everybody, obviously - quickly or eventually came round to the idea that a difference that made no differ­ence wasn't a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life.

  The Truth went a stage further, holding that this was a differ­ence that could be made to make a difference. What was neces­sary was for people truly to believe in their hearts, in their souls, in their minds, that they really were in a vast simulation. They had to reflect upon this, to keep it at the forefront of their thoughts at all times and they had to gather together on occa­sion, with all due ceremony and sol
emnity, to express this belief. And they must evangelise, they must convert everybody they possibly could to this view, because - and this was the whole point - once a sufficient proportion of the people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those who had set it up would disap­pear and the whole thing would collapse.

  If they were all part of some vast experiment, then the fact that those on whom the experiment was being conducted had guessed the truth would mean that its value would be lost. If they were some plaything, then again, that they had guessed this meant they ought to be acknowledged, even - perhaps -rewarded. If they were being tested in some way, then this was the test being passed, this was a positive result, again possibly deserving a reward. If they had been undergoing punishment for some transgression in the greater world, then this ought to constitute cause for rehabilitation.

  It was not possible to know what proportion of the simu­lated population would be required to bring things to a halt (it might be fifty per cent, it might be rather smaller or much greater), but as long as the numbers of the enlightened kept increasing, the universe would be constantly coming closer to this epiphany, and the revelation could come at any point.

  The Truth claimed with some degree of justification to be the ultimate religion, the final faith, the last of all churches. It was the one which encompassed all others, contextualised all others, could account for and embrace all others. They could all ulti­mately be dismissed as mere emergent phenomena of the simu­lation itself. The Truth could too, in a sense, but unlike them it still had more to say once this common denominator had been taken out of the equation.

  It could also claim a degree of universality that the others could not. All other major religions were either specific to their origi­nating species, could be traced back to a single species - often a single subset of that species - or were consciously developed amalgams, syntheses, of a group of sufficiently similar religions of disparate origin.