The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  The Truth, claiming no miracles (or at least no miracles of proof) and being the work of no individual, all-important prophet (it had arisen, naturally, many times within a multiplicity of different civilisations) was the first real post-scientific, pan-civil-isational religion - or at least it was the first that had not been simply imposed on reluctant subjects by a conquering hegemony. The Truth could even claim to be not a religion at all, where such a claim might endear it to those not naturally religious by nature. It could be seen more as a philosophy, even as a scientific postu­late backed up by unshakeably firm statistical likelihood.

  The Mercatoria had simply adopted this belief system, prop­erly codified it and made it effectively the state religion of the latest Age.

  - You do not believe, Fassin? The colonel put sadness into

  her signal.

  - I appreciate the intellectual force of the argument.

  - But it is not held in your mind at all times?

  - No. Sorry.

  - Be not sorry. We all find it difficult on occasion. We shall,

  perhaps, talk further on the matter.

  - I was afraid we might.

  - To return to my question, then.

  - Do I believe all that stuff?

  - Correct.

  Fassin looked around at the ship beneath them and the great assemblage of roaring engines, whirling blades and supporting structures. The Long Crossing: thirty million years between galaxies.

  - The idea that anything built by Dwellers could make a journey of that length does place the credulity under a degree of tension, he admitted.

  - The assertion that the outward journey was made so much more rapidly seems no less to belong to the realm of fantasy.

  Ah yes, the great and almost certainly mythical intergalactic 'hole.

  - I would not argue with you, colonel. Though I would say it's perfectly possible that these are all nonsense, but the specific object we're looking for still exists.

  - It keeps unlikely company.

  - Again, I wouldn't choose to dispute the matter. We are left with the fact that you are a colonel, I am some sort of honorary major and orders are orders.

  - How assiduously one attempts to follow one's orders might be affected by the extent to which one believes they are capable of being carried out successfully.

  - There I would completely agree with you. What are you getting at?

  - Just calibrating, major.

  - Seeing how committed I am? Would I sacrifice my life for our . . . object of desire?

  - Something like that.

  - I suspect we're both sceptics, colonel. Me more than you, I suppose. We also believe in doing our duty. You more than me, perhaps. Satisfied?

  - Content.

  - Me too.

  - I received a communication from the Ocula this morning.

  - Really?

  And were you always going to tell me, or could I have been even more mission-sceptical during that last exchange, and been told nothing? Or has your 'calibration' meant I'm not going to get told everything now?

  - Yes. Our orders remain as they were. There were several more attacks on the system in general at the time of the assault on the Third Fury moon. Further, less intense attacks have continued. The communications satellite system around Nasqueron is being repaired as a matter of urgency. In the mean­time a Navarchy fleet is being stationed above the planet, to take the place of the satellites, to provide security and main force back-up for you and me, and to pick us up at the end of our mission, or in an emergency.

  Fassin took a moment to think.

  - Any word from my Sept, Sept Bantrabal?

  - None. There was confirmation that all those on or in Third Fury were killed. I am sorry to report that Master Technician Hervil Apsile is also believed to be dead. There has been no sign of or communication with the drop ship. I have been asked by the Ocula to pass on their commiserations to you regarding all those deceased Seers and supporting staff, to which of course I add my own.

  - Thank you.

  The colonel might have executed a sort of rolling bow, or it might just have been the effects of the swirling, buffeting slip­stream tearing around them.

  The slave-children had suffered no further casualties. Their repairs appeared to be working. Even where they had not completed their renovations, the damaged blades were vibrating less, making the rest of the job easier.

  - How many ships were they sending to Nasqueron, to do all these things? That one small ship and two puck-sized satel­-lites could do?

  - This was not mentioned.

  Fassin said nothing.

  There were some potentially unfortunate consequences implicit in a profound belief in the Truth. One was that there was a possibility that when the simulation ended, all the people being simulated would cease to exist entirely. The sim might be turned off and everybody within the substrate running it would die. There might be no promotion, no release, no return to a bigger and better and finer outside: there might just be the ulti­mate mass extinction.

  Also, back in the (apparently) real world, there was an argu­ment that the Truth implied approval of its own extinctions, that it tacitly encouraged mass murder and genocide. Logically, if one way of upping the proportion of those who truly believed was to evangelise, convince and convert, another was to decrease the numbers of those who steadfastly refused to accept the Truth at all - if necessary by killing them. The tipping point into reve­lation and deliverance for all might come not at the moment when a sceptic became a believer but at the point that an un-reformable heathen breathed their last.

  The Stormshear plunged into a great dark wall of thicker cloud, dimming the view. Lights started to come on, shining from the supporting structure and the Dweller skiffs. Soon they could see little, and the mad, overwhelming cacophony of the slipstream and the droning engines made sonosense near impossible. A methane hail rattled around them in the gathering gloom.

  - Time to go in, perhaps, the colonel said.

  - Amen.

  * * *

  The next day brought target practice, as the Stormshear's weapons and crew were brought up to some form of war-readiness. Y'sul, Hatherence and Fassin were allowed to watch from inside an observation dome right at the front of the ship, a temporary struc­ture protruding from the Dreadnought's armoured nose like a little bubble of diamond. They shared the place with a few dozen interested civilians, mostly administrators of the various cities where the Stormshear had been paying courtesy calls during the last long period of peace. Uniformed pet-children floated amongst the VIPs, carrying trays of food and drugs.

  Ahead, through a ten-kilometre gap in the clouds, they could see an object like a small bright blue ship, a target being towed by another Dreadnought a hundred or more klicks still further ahead.

  The Stormshear shuddered mightily and an instant later there came a great blast of noise. Tracks like dozens of vapour trails appeared in the sky beneath and above them, great combs of thin, plaited gas racing in front of them headed by the barely glimpsed dark dots of the shells converging on the target. Screens set into each dent-seat - where working - showed a magnified view of the blue target; it shook as its hollow structure was punctured by the shells, holes appearing briefly on its hull before sealing up again.

  A desultory cheer went up from a few of the generally bored-looking Dwellers present. It was drowned out by the clicking of maniple fingers demanding service from the pet-children waiters.

  'I never asked,' Hatherence said, leaning close to Y'sul as he snorted up the coils of purple from a fuming stoke-pipe. 'What is the war actually about?'

  Y'sul turned jerkily and gave the impression of trying to get his outer sensory regions to focus on the colonel. 'About?' he said, looking confused. The exhausted stoke-stick attached to the pipe went out with a loud 'pop'. 'Well, it's about when two, ah, opposing groups of, ah people, ah, that is to say, Dwellers, in this case, obviously, decide to, umm, fight. Fight! Yes, usually over some
issue, and . . . and they use weapons of war to do so, until one side or other - did I say there are usually just two sides? That's kind of the conventional number, I believe. Sort of a quorum, you might say. Though—'

  'I wasn't looking for the definition of a war, Y'sul.'

  'No? Good. I thought you probably had such things of your own. Most people seem to.'

  'I meant, what is the point at issue? What is the cause of the war?'

  'The cause?' Y'sul asked, looking surprised. He roted as far back in his dent-seat as he could while the ship shuddered again and another salvo, from each side of the vessel this time, lanced forwards to the distant target. 'Well,' he said, distracted by the dancing dots of the shells dragging their gas trails after them. 'Well, I'm sure there is one . . .' He started mumbling. Hatherence seemed to realise she'd already got as much sense out of Y'sul as she was going to while he was sucking on the stoke-pipe, and settled back in her seat with a sigh.

  - Dweller Formal Wars are like duels fought on a huge scale, Fassin told her. The colonel turned fractionally towards him. - Normally about some aesthetic dispute. They're often the final stage of a planet-planning dispute.

  - Planet-planning?

  - A common one is where there's some dispute concerning the number of belts and zones a planet ought to have. Then, the Odds and the Evens are the two sides, usually.

  - Planet-planning? the colonel repeated, as though she hadn't picked up right the first time. - I did not think gas-giants were, well, planned.

  - The Dwellers claim they can alter the number of bands a planet has, over a sufficiently great amount of time. They've never been reliably observed doing this but that doesn't stop them claiming to be able to do it. Anyway, it's not the doing of the thing that matters, it's the principle. What sort of world

  do we want to live in? That's the question.

  - Even or Odd?

  - Exactly. A Formal War is just the working-out.

  Another salvo. The ship really shook this time, and a number of the slave-children yelped at the ragged boom resulting. Combs of gas trails leapt from all sides, a cone defining a tunnel of braided sky in front of them.

  - Wars are also fought over disagreements such as which GasClipper ought to be allowed to fly a certain pennant colour during a race.

  - A war for this? Hatherence sounded genuinely horrified. - Have these people never heard of committees?

  - Oh, they have committees and meetings and dispute proce-dures. They have lots of those. But getting Dwellers to stick with a decision that's gone against them, even after they've sworn on their life beforehand that they'll abide by it, is not the easiest thing to do, in this or any other world. So disagree­-ments tend to rumble on. Formal Wars are just the Dweller equivalent of a Supreme Court, a tribunal of last resort. Also, you have to understand that they don't really have standing armed forces as such. Between wars, the Dreadnoughts and other military bits and pieces are cared for by enthusiasts, by clubs. Even when a Formal War is declared, all that happens is that the clubs get bigger as ordinary people sign up. The clubs sound and feel like what you or I might understand as proper military authorities but they've no legal standing.

  The colonel shook as though just confronted with something of ultimate grisliness. - How perverse.

  - For them, it seems to work.

  - The verb 'work', Hatherence sent, - like so many other common terms, seems to be required to take on additional mean­-ings when one talks of Dwellers. How do they decide who's won one of these bizarre conflicts?

  - Occasionally a straight dead-count, or the number of Dreadnoughts destroyed or crippled. More usually there'll be an elegance threshold pre-agreed.

  - An elegance threshold?

  - Hatherence, Fassin said, turning to her, - did you do any research into Dweller life? All that time in—

  - I believe I encountered a mention of this concept but dismissed it at the time as fanciful. It genuinely counts in such matters?

  - It genuinely counts.

  - And they can't agree a workable disputes procedure for what ship flies which colourings without resorting to war, but they can happily agree on that resulting war being decided on a concept as fuzzy as elegance?

  - Oh, that's never disputed. They have an algorithm for it.

  Another terrific judder rang the Stormshear like a dull bell. The thin, uncoiling tracks combed the sky ahead of them.

  - An algorithm? the colonel said.

  - Elegance is an algorithm.

  The screens showed the blue target quaking under the impact of a handful of shells. Hatherence glanced at Y'sul, who was trying to blow purple smoke rings and pierce them with a rim arm.

  - And it's all run by clubs, she said. - Of enthusiasts.

  -Yes.

  - Clubs?

  - Big clubs, Hatherence.

  - So is all this why their war technology is so awful? She asked.

  - Is it?

  - Fassin, Hatherence said, sounding amused now. – These people claim to have been around since the week after reionisation and building these Dreadnought things for most of that time, yet that target is less than a dozen klicks ahead, each salvo

  is thirty-six shells—

  - Thirty-three. One of the turrets is out of action.

  - Regardless. They are only hitting that effectively unmoving target with every second or third round. That is simply pathetic.

  - There are rules, formulae.

  - Insisting on ludicrously inefficient gunnery?

  - In a sense. No guided shells, all guns and aiming systems to be based on ancient patterns, no jet engines for the Dreadnoughts, no rocket engines for the missiles, no particle or beam weapons at all.

  - Like duels fought with ancient pistols.

  - You're getting the idea.

  - And this is meant to keep them all in martial trim in case they are invaded by outside hostiles?

  - Well, yes, Fassin agreed. - That does begin to look like a slightly hollow claim when you actually see the technology, doesn't it? Of course, they claim they've got star-busting hyper-weapons hidden about the place somewhere, just in case, and the skills are somehow transferable, but . . .

  - Nobody's ever seen them.

  - Something like that.

  The Stormshear unleashed its mighty anti-ship missiles, loosing what was probably meant to be a twelve-strong broad­side. The eleven tiny, slim projectiles came screaming from all sides of the great vessel - the slave-children yelped again and some dropped their trays - and hurtled out towards the distant blue target drone on smoky, twisting plumes of jet exhaust like deranged darts. Two of the missiles drifted too close to one another; each appeared to identify the other as its intended target and so both swung wildly at their opposite number, missed, twisted round in a sweeping double braid, flew straight at each other and this time met and exploded in a modest double fire­ball. Some Dwellers in the observation lounge - distracted, perhaps sarcastic - cheered.

  A third missile seemed to take the nearby explosion as a sign that it ought to perform an upward loop and head straight back at the Stormshear. 'Oh-oh,' Y'sul said.

  The oncoming missile settled into a flat, steady course, becoming a small but rapidly enlarging dot, aimed straight at the nose of the Dreadnought.

  'They do have destructs, don't they?' Hatherence said, glancing at Fassin.

  Some Dwellers started looking at each other, then made a dash for the access tube to the Stormshear's armoured nose, creating a jam around the door. Slave-children, also trying to escape, either got through ahead of the rush or were thrown roughly out of the way, yelping.

  The dot in the sky was getting bigger.

  'They can just order it to blow up, can't they?' the colonel said, roting backwards. A high, whining noise seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the colonel's esuit. The yelling, cursing knot of Dwellers round the exit didn't seem to be shifting. The Stormshear was starting to turn, hopelessly slowly.

  'In theory they can destr
uct it,' Fassin said uneasily, watching the still unshifting melee around the exit. 'And they do have close-range intercept guns.' Another frantic slave-child was ejected upwards from the scrum by the door, screaming until it slapped into the ceiling and dropped lifeless to the slowly tilting deck.

  The missile had real shape now, no longer a large dot. Stubby wings and a tailplane were visible. The Stormshear continued to turn with excruciating slowness. The missile plunged in towards them on a trail of sooty exhaust. Hatherence rose from her dent-seat but moved closer to the diamond-sheath nose of the observation blister, not further away.

  - Stay back, major, she sent. Then a terrific tearing, ripping noise sounded from above and behind them, a net of finger-fine trails filled the gas ahead of the ship's nose and the missile first started to disintegrate and then blew up. The interceptor machine gun somewhere behind continued firing, scoring multiple hits on the larger pieces of smoking, glowing missile wreckage as they tumbled on towards the Stormshear, so that when the resulting shrapnel hit and punctured the observation blister it caused relatively little damage, and only minor wounds.

  The Dreadnought took them as far as Munueyn, a Ruined City fallen amongst the dark, thick gases of the lower atmosphere where slow coils of turbulence roiled past like the heavy, lasciv­ious licks of an almighty planetary tongue, a place all spires and spindles, near-deserted, long unfashionable, a one-time Storm-Centre now too far from anything to be of much interest to anybody, a place that might have garnered kudos for itself had it been near a war zone, but could hope for almost none at all because it was within one. A wing-frigate took them from the Dreadnought and deposited them in the gigantic echoing hall of what had once been the city's bustling StationPort, where they were greeted like returning heroes, like gods, by the local hirers and fliers. They found a guest house for negative kudos. They were, in effect, being paid to stay there.

  'Sir!' Sholish said, rising from the mass of petitioners in the small courtyard below. 'A hostelier of impeccable repute with excellent familial connections in the matter of wartime travel warrants beseeches you to consider his proposal to put at your disposal a veritable fleet of a half-half-dozen finely arrayed craft, all in the very best of condition and working order and ready to depart within less than an hour of their arrival.'