The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  They were to be seen at once. Nuern had shown them into one of the outer library pods. The library had a roof of diamond leaf looking directly upwards into the vermilion-dark sky. Jundriance was settled into a dent-desk near the centre of the near-spherical room, facing a read-screen. Around him, the walls were lined with shelves, some so widely spaced that they might have doubled as bunk space for humans, others so small that a child's finger might have struggled to fit. Mostly these held books, of some sort. Spindle-secured carousels tensioned between the walls and between the floor and a network of struts above held hundreds of other types of storage devices and systems: swave crystals, holoshard, picospool and a dozen more obscure.

  They'd joined Jundriance at his desk, floating through the thick atmosphere to his side. Nuern had swung dent-seats into place and they'd both clamped onto one, Hatherence positioning herself with Fassin between her and the Sage. Jundriance, of course, gave no sign of having noticed them.

  They'd slowed. It had been much easier for Fassin than for Hatherence. He'd been doing this for centuries; she'd been trained in the technique but had never attempted it for real. The experience would be a jerky, shaky journey for her, at least until they smoothed out at the Sage's pace.

  The day darkened quickly, then the night seemed to last less than an hour. Fassin concentrated on his own smooth slow­down, but was aware of the colonel seeming to wriggle and shift in her dent-seat. The Sage Jundriance appeared to stir. By the next quick morning, something actually changed on his reading screen; another page. That day passed quickly, then the next night went quicker still. The process continued until they were down to a factor of about one-in-sixty-four, which was what they had been told Jundriance had come up to meet them at -he'd been even slower until their arrival.

  They were about halfway there when a signal-whisper had pinged into the little gascraft. - You receiving this all right, major?

  - Yes. Why?

  - I just interrogated the screen reader. It was working in realtime until the Poaflias arrived.

  - You sure?

  - Perfectly.

  - Interesting.

  Finally they were there, synchronised to the same life-pace as the Sage. The short days became a slow, slow flicker above them, the orange-purple sky beyond the diamond leaf alter­nately lightening and dimming. Even at this pace, the great tall veils of gas seemed to hang above them in the sky, unmoving. Fassin had experienced the feeling he always got when he first went into slowdown during a delve, the disquieting sensation that he was a lost soul, the feeling of being in a strange sort of prison, trapped in time inside while life went on at a quicker pace outside, above, beyond.

  Jundriance had turned off his read-screen and greeted them. Fassin had asked about Valseir but somehow they'd got onto the subject of life-pace itself.

  'One feels sorry for the Quick, I suppose,' the Sage said. 'They seem ill-suited to the universe, in a way. The distances between the stars, the time it takes to travel from one to another . . . Even more so, of course, if one is thinking of travelling between galaxies.'

  A hole in the conversation. 'Of course.' Fassin said, to fill it. Are you fishing for something, old one? he thought.

  'The machines. They were much worse, of course. How unbearable, to live so quickly.'

  'Well, they mostly don't live at all now, Sage,' Fassin told him.

  'That is as well, perhaps.'

  'Sage, can you tell us any more about Valseir's death?'

  'I was not there. I know no more than you.'

  'You were . . . quite close to him?' Fassin asked.

  'Close? No. No, I would not say so. We had corresponded on matters of textual verification and provenance, and debated at a remove on various questions of scholarship and interpre­tation, though not regularly. We never met. I would not say that that constituted closeness, would you?'

  'I suppose not. I just wondered what drew you here, that's all.'

  'Oh, the chance to look through his library. To take what I might for myself. That is what drew me. His servants took some material before they left, others - mostly scholars or those who chose to call themselves such - came and took what they wanted, but there is still much here, and while the most obvious treas­ures are gone, much of value may remain. It would be derelict to ignore.'

  'I see. And what of Valseir's libraries? I understand you are continuing to catalogue them?'

  A pause. 'Continuing. Yes.' The old, dark-carapaced Sage seemed to stare at the dark read-screen. 'Hmm,' he said. He turned fractionally to look at Fassin. 'Let me see. Your use of the word "continuing" there.'

  'I understood that Valseir had been cataloguing his libraries Wasn't he?'

  'He was always so secretive. Was he not?'

  - I'm getting light-comms leakage here, Hatherence sent.

  - Tell me if there's a burst after this:

  'And dilatory. Hapuerele always said that Valseir was more likely to win the All-Storms Yachting Cup than ever finish cata­loguing his libraries.'

  Another pause. 'Quite so, quite so. Hapuerele, yes.'

  - Leakage. Hapuerele does not exist?

  - Exists, but he had to ask elsewhere just there. Shouldn't have.

  'I would like to take a look round some of the libraries myself. I hope you don't mind. I shan't disturb you.'

  'Ah. I see. Well, if you think you can be discreet. Are you seeking anything in particular, Mr Taak?'

  'Yes. And you?'

  'Only enlightenment. And what would it be that you are looking for, if I may ask?'

  'Exactly the same.'

  The old dweller was silent for a while. In real-time, most of an hour passed. 'I may have something for you,' he said even­tually. 'Would you care to slow down a little more? No doubt this, our present pace, seems surpassing slow to you; however, I find it something of a strain.'

  'Of course,' Fassin told Jundriance.

  - I'll have to leave you here, major.

  - Lucky you. I'll try to keep this short.

  - Good luck, Hatherence sent.

  'However, I shall leave you at this point, sir,' the colonel said to the Sage.

  'Pleasant to have met you, Reverend Colonel,' Jundriance told her. 'Now then,' he said to Fassin. 'Let me see. Half this pace, I think, Seer Taak, would suit me better. A quarter would suit me better still.'

  'Shall we try half, then, initially?'

  He was back in just three days. Hatherence was inspecting the contents of another library when he found her. The room was almost perfectly spherical, with no windows, just a circle of dim light shining from the ceiling's centre and further luminescence provided by bio strips inlaid on each shelf, glowing ghostly green. Further stacks of shelves like enormous inward-pointing vanes made the place feel oddly organic, as though these were ribs, and they were inside some vast creature. The colonel was floating near one set of close-stacked shelves near the library's centre, strips of green light ribbing her esuit.

  'So soon, major?' Hatherence said, replacing a slim holocrystal on a shelf half full of them. At the same time as she spoke, she sent: - Our friend had nothing of interest?

  'Sage Jundriance gave me so much to think about that I decided I'd better come back to normal speed to think it over,' Fassin replied, then signalled, - The old bastard gave me fuck all; basically he's trying to stall us.

  'Well, I have been studying while you were conversing.'

  'Anything of interest?' he asked, floating over towards her.

  - There are signs that many more Dwellers were staying here until not long ago. Perhaps only a few days long ago. 'The house system seems to think there ought to be a catalogue of cata-logues somewhere. In fact that there ought to be multiple copies of it lying around.'

  'A catalogue of catalogues?' Fassin said. - Other Dwellers?

  'The first catalogue that Valseir compiled, listing the cata­logues of individual works he would then draw up.' - Perhaps as many as ten or twelve. Also, I get the impression Livilido and Nuern are more, o
r at least other, than they appear.

  'One catalogue for everything would be too simple?' Fassin asked, then sent, - I didn't think they seemed like ordinary servants either. So where are all these multiple copies?

  - I suspect they have been removed. They would be the key to beginning a methodical search, the colonel replied, then said, 'I gather it seemed to him the logical way to proceed. Certainly there is no shortage of material, even yet, when much of it

  has been removed. One catalogue would, I suppose, be cumbersome.' The Colonel paused. 'Of course, a single giant database with freely dimensioned subdivisions, partially over­lapping categories and subcategories, a hierarchically scalable cross-reference hyperstructure and inbuilt, semi-smart user-learning routines would be even more to the point and far more useful.'

  Fassin looked at her. 'He'd probably have got round to one of those after he'd done what he considered the proper cata­loguing - getting everything down in some non-volatile form that can be read without intervening machinery.'

  'Our Dweller friends do seem to be remarkably purist about such things.'

  'When you live as long as they do, future-proofing becomes an obsession.'

  'Perhaps that is their curse. The Quick must endure the frus­tration of living in a universe with what seems like an annoy­ingly slow speed limit and the Slow must suffer the frenetic pace of change around them, resulting in a sort of exaggerated entropy.'

  Fassin had been floating slowly closer to Hatherence. He tipped to make it clear that he was looking at her as he came to a stop a couple of metres from her. The glowing biostrips on the shelves painted soft lime stripes across the little gascraft. 'You all right in there, colonel?' he asked. 'I realise it's very hot and pressured down here.' - Colonel, do you think we are wasting our time here?

  'I am fine. Yourself?' - Very hard to say. There is so much still here, so much to be looked at.

  'Also fine. Feeling very rested.' - That's my point. We could be made to waste a lot of time here, looking for something that has already been removed.

  'I understand slow-time will have that effect.' - That is a thought. I had the odd impression, from dust marks and so on, understand, that many of the shelves have recently been filled, or refilled. And many of the works seem to make no sense given what I've understood of Valseir's subjects of study. Seemed most strange. Though, if all this is a sort of slow-trap for you and me, then that begins to make sense. But what else can we do? Where else is there to go?

  'I'll have to talk to the Sage again,' Fassin said. 'There are many things I'd like to ask him.' - Whereas in fact I'll do every­thing I can to avoid talking to the old bore again. We have to get word out to any legitimate scholars who did take works from here, see if any of them have the catalogues, or anything else. There are two dozen separate libraries here; even if they're only half-full we could be searching them for decades.

  'He is a most interesting and wise character.' - Many tens of millions of works, and if most are unsorted, all are. I'll signal to the Poaflias, have them put out word to the relevant scholars. Who might be trying to put obstacles in our way so?

  'Indeed he is.' - I don't know.

  'Well, I think I shall continue to search the shelves for a while. Will you join me?' - Will you?

  'Why not?'

  They drifted to different but nearby stacks, snicked holocrystal books out of their motion-proof shelves, and read.

  'His study?' Nuern asked. A fringe flick indicated a glance at Livilido. They were afloat at table. The two Primes had invited Fassin and Hatherence to a semi-formal dinner in the house's ovaloid dining room, a great, dim, echoing space strung verti­cally with enormous sets of carbon ropes, all splayed, separated into smaller and smaller cords and fibres and threads and fila­ments and then each thin strand minutely and multiply knotted. It was like being inside some colossal, frayed net.

  Jundriance was still deep in slow-time and would not be joining them. Special food had been prepared that was suitable for the colonel. She ingested it via a sort of gaslock on the side of her esuit. Fassin, contained and sustained within the arrow-craft, was really only here to watch.

  'Yes,' he said. 'Where do you think it might be?'

  'I thought that Library One was his study,' Nuern said, selecting a helping of something glowing dull blue from the central carousel, and then spinning the serving dish slowly towards his dining companions.

  'Me too,' Livilido said. He looked at Fassin. 'Why, was there another one? Has a bit dropped off the place?'

  Fassin had taken a look round all the library spheres. Library One had always been Valseir's formal study, where he received fellow scholars and other people, but it hadn't been his real study, his den, his private space. Very few people were allowed in there. Fassin had felt flattered in the extreme to be invited to enter the nestlike nook that Valseir had made for himself inside the stretch of disused CloudTunnel tube which the rest of the house had been anchored to the last time Fassin had been here, centuries earlier. Library One still looked as it always had, minus a few thousand book-crystals and a big cylindrical low-temperature storage device in which Valseir had kept paper and plastic books. It certainly didn't look as though the room had become Valseir's proper study in the interim. And now it appeared as though these people didn't even know he'd had a more private den in the first place.

  'I thought he had another study,' Fassin said. 'Didn't he keep a house in ... what city was it? Guldrenk?'

  'Ah! Of course,' Nuern said. 'That would be it.'

  - Colonel, these guys know nothing.

  - I had been coming to the same conclusion.

  Library Twenty-One (CincturiaCloudersMiscellania) had a conceit, a Dweller equivalent of a door made from a bookcase. Valseir had shown it to Fassin after the human had stayed with him for an extended period after their first meeting. It led, inward at first, towards the centre of the cluster of library spheres, through a short passage to a gap between two more of the outer spheres, then into the open gas. The joke - a hidden door, a secret passage - was that the various Cincturia were the outsiders of the galactic community, and the particular book­case hiding the secret passage was categorised 'Escapees'.

  After their meal, Fassin gave the impression of shutting himself away in the library for some late-night shelf-scanning. Instead he screened up the house's system statements and looked back to just after the time of Valseir's yachting acci­dent and alleged death. He did something unusual, something barely legal by Mercatorial standards and usually pointless on Nasqueron; he speeded up, letting the gascraft's legal-max computers and his own subtly altered nervous system rev to their combined data-processing limit. It still took nearly half an hour, but he found what he was looking for: the point, a dozen days after Valseir's accident, when the house recorded a rerouting of power and ventilation plumbing. Its altimeter had registered a wobble, too - a brief blip upwards, then the start of the long, slow descent that was continuing even now.

  Then Fassin had to work out where the CloudTunnel segment might be now. It would be beyond the start of the shear zone, past where the whole atmospheric band moved as a single vast mass, down into the semi-liquid Depths. These moved much more slowly than the gas above, the transition levels great turbidly elastic seas being dragged along as though reluctantly after the jet-stream whirl of atmosphere above.

  It was all dead reckoning. By the Dweller way of judging such things, the atmosphere was static and the Depths - not to mention the remainder of Ulubis system, the stars and indeed the rest of the universe - moved. With only notionally fixed reference points, finding anything in the Depths was notori­ously difficult. After two hundred years the section of CloudTunnel could be anywhere; it might have sunk beyond feasible reach, been broken up or even drifted to the Zone edge and been pulled into another Belt entirely, either north or south. The only thing working in Fassin's favour was that the length of tube he was looking for was relatively large. Completely losing something forty-plus metres in diame
ter and eighty klicks long wasn't that easy, even in Nasqueron. Still, he was relying on the CloudTunnel retaining the usual profile of buoyancy-decay.

  The likely volume - though identified with a worrying degree of fuzziness - was about five thousand kilcks away, though coming closer all the time, having been all the way round the planet many times. In a dozen hours it would be almost right underneath the house again. He calculated. It was doable. He pinged a note to the screen on the library's door saying that he didn't want to be disturbed.

  Fassin let himself out through the hidden door about an hour after he'd entered the library. He let the little gascraft grow, pushing trim-spaces out to create internal vacuums and a larger, near-spherical outer shape so that he fell gently at first, causing as little turbulence as possible beneath the house. Then gradu­ally he heavied, slowly shrinking the arrowhead to its dart-slim minimum, diving unpowered into the dark depths and through the rough boundary of the near-static cylinder of depleted gas that was all that remained of the ancient storm.

  He powered up twenty klicks deeper and levelled out, then rose quickly when he was thirty lateral kilometres clear, zooming up through the gradually cooling, slowly thinning gas above until he was through the haze layers and out amongst the cloud tops. Fassin increased to maximum speed, configuring the arrowhead for as stealthy a profile as it could support. The gascraft had never been designed for such shenanigans, but it had been gradually altered over the years by him and Hervil Apsile until - while no match for a genuine military machine -it made less of a fuss moving across the face of the planet than almost anything within the gas-giant's atmosphere (always discounting the usual preposterous Dweller claims of invisible ships, inertialess drives and zero-point subspacials).

  The little craft moved beneath the thin yellow sky, and the stars above seemed to slow down then go into reverse as Fassin flew faster than the combined speed of the planet revolving and the band beneath him jet-streaming in the same direction.