The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  'I confess,' Setstyin said, 'I have no idea what form of words one ought to use on such occasions, Seer Taak. Do you?'

  'Amongst some aHumans there is a saying that we come from and go to nothing, a lack like shadow that throws the sum of life into bright relief. And with the rHumans, something about dust to ashes.'

  'Do you think she would have minded being treated as a Dweller?' Setstyin asked.

  'No,' Fassin said. 'I don't think she would have minded. I think she would have felt honoured.'

  'Here, here,' Y'sul muttered.

  Valseir gave a small formal bow.

  'Well, Colonel Hatherence,' Setstyin said, with what sounded like a sigh as he looked down at the body lying in the coffin. 'You ascended to the age and rank of Mercatorial Colonel, which is a very considerable achievement for your kind. We think you lived well and we know you died well. You died with many others but in the end we all die alone. You died more alone than others, amongst people like you but alien to you, and far from your home and family. You fell and were found and now we send you down again, further into those Depths, to join all the revered dead on the surface of rock around the core.' He looked at Fassin. 'Seer Taak, would you like to say anything?'

  Fassin tried to think of something. In the end he just said, 'I believe Colonel Hatherence was a good person. She was certainly a brave one. I only knew her for less than a hundred days and she was always my military superior, but I came to like her and think of her as a friend. She died trying to protect me. I'll always honour her memory.'

  He signalled that he could think of nothing else. Setstyin roll-nodded and indicated the open coffin lid.

  Fassin went forward and used a manipulator to close the casket's iron hatch, then he lowered a little more and together he and Setstyin took one edge of the bier that the coffin lay on. They raised it, letting the heavy container slide silently off, over the edge of the balcony and down into the next bruise-dark layer of clouds, far below.

  They all floated over the edge and waited until the coffin disap­peared, a tiny black speck vanishing into the darkly purple wastes.

  'Great-cousin of mine, diving deep, got hit by one of those once,' Y'sul said thoughtfully. 'Never knew what hit him. Stone dead.'

  The others were looking at him.

  He shrugged. 'Well? It's true.'

  Valseir found Fassin in a gallery, looking out at the deep night stream of gas, rushing quietly in infrared as the Isaut powered its way to who knew where.

  'Fassin.'

  'Valseir. Are we free to leave yet?'

  'Not that I've heard. Not yet.'

  They watched the night flow round them together for a while. Fassin had spent time earlier looking at reports on the storm battle, from both sides. The Dwellers had high-selectivity visuals which made it look like the Dreadnoughts had won the day, not the Isaut. The little he'd got from the Mercatoria's nets just gave dark hints that an entire fleet was missing, and included no visuals at all. Unseen was pretty much unheard-of. It appeared that everybody had instantly assumed there was some vast cover-up going on. Both sides were downplaying like crazy, implying that some terrible misunderstanding had taken place and they'd both suffered appallingly heavy losses, which was, when Fassin thought about it, somewhere between half and three-quarters true, and hence closer to reality than might have been expected in the circumstances.

  'So what did happen to this folder?' Fassin asked. 'If there was a folder.'

  'There was and is a folder, Fassin,' Valseir told him. ‘Iheld on to it for a long time but eventually, twenty-one, twenty-three years ago, I gave it to my colleague and good friend Leisicrofe. He was departing on a research trip.'

  'Has he returned?'

  'No.'

  'When will he?'

  'Should he return, he won't have the data.'

  'Where will it be?'

  'Wherever he left it. I don't know.'

  'How do I find your friend Leisicrofe?'

  'You'll have to follow him. That will not be so easy. You will need help.'

  'I have Y'sul. He's always arranged—'

  'You will need rather more than he can provide.'

  Fassin looked at the old Dweller. 'Off-planet? Is that what you mean?'

  'Somewhat,' Valseir said, not looking at him, gazing out at the onward surge of night.

  'Then who should I approach for this help?'

  'I've already taken the liberty.'

  'You have? That's very kind.'

  Valseir was silent for a while, then said, 'None of this is about kindness, Fassin.' He turned to look directly at the arrowhead. 'Nobody in their right mind would ever want to be involved with something as momentous as this. If the slightest part of what you're looking for has any basis in reality, it could change every­thing for all of us. I am Dweller. My species has made a good, long - if selfish - life for itself, spread everywhere, amongst the stars. We do not appreciate change on the scale we are here talking about. I'm not sure that any species would. Some of us will do anything to avoid such change, to keep things just as they are.

  'You have to realise, Fassin; we are not a monoculture, we are not at all perfectly homogenised. We are differentiated in ways that even now, after all your exposure to us, you can scarcely begin to comprehend. There are things within our own worlds almost entirely hidden from most of us, and there are deep and profound differences of opinion between factions amongst us, just as there are between the Quick.'

  Factions, thought Fassin.

  Valseir went on, 'Not all of us are quite so studiedly indif­ferent to events taking place within the greater galaxy as we generally contrive to appear. There are those of us who, without ever wanting to know the full details of your mission, in fact knowing that they'd be unable to square knowledge of its substance with their species loyalty, would help you neverthe­less. Others . . . others would kill you instantly if they even began to guess what it was you're looking for.' The old Dweller floated over, came close to a kiss-whisper as he said, - And believe it or not, Fassin Taak, Drunisine is of the former camp, while your friend Setstyin is of the latter.

  Fassin pulled away to look at the old Dweller, who added, -Truly.

  After a few more moments, Fassin asked, 'When will I be able to follow your friend Leisicrofe?'

  'I think you'll know one way or the other before the night is out. And if we both don't at least begin to follow Leisicrofe, we may both follow your Colonel Hatherence.'

  Fassin thought this sounded a little melodramatic. 'Truly?' he asked, signalling amusement.

  'Oh, truly, Fassin,' Valseir said, signalling nothing. 'Let me repeat: none of this is about kindness.'

  *

  Saluus Kehar was not happy. He had his own people in certain places, his own ways of finding things out, his own secure and reliable channels of intelligence quite independent of the media and the official agencies - you didn't become and stay a major military supplier unless you did - and he knew about as well as anybody did what had happened during the disastrous Nasqueron raid, and it was simply unjust to blame him or his firm.

  For one thing, they'd been betrayed, or their intelligence or signals had been compromised, or at the very least they'd been out-thought (by Dwellers!). And because of that failing - which was unquestionably nothing to do with him - they'd been ambushed and out-outnumbered. Dozens of those heretofore un-fucking-heard-of super-Dreadnought ships had turned up when the incursionary force had been expecting no more than a handful - at most - of the standard ones, the models without the reactive mirror armour, the plasma engines and the wide­band lasers. Plus the Dwellers had simply done a very good job of lying over the years - years? Aeons - presenting themselves as hopeless bumblers and technological incompetents when in fact - even if they couldn't build anything very impressive from scratch any more - they still had access to weaponry of serious lethality.

  The military had fucked up. It didn't matter how good the tool was, how clever the craftsman had been, how well-made the we
apon was; if the user dropped it, didn't switch it on or just didn't know how to use it properly, all that good work went for nothing.

  They'd lost all the ships. All of them. Every single damn one, either on the raid or supporting it from space immediately above. Even a few of the ships not involved at all - those standing guard round Third Fury while the recovery and construction teams worked - had been targeted and annihilated by some sort of charged-particle-beam weapon, with two craft on the far side of the moon each chased by some type of hyper-velocity missile and blown to smithereens as well.

  Unwilling to accept that they'd made a complete mess of the operation, the military had decided it mustn't be their fault. Kehar Heavy Industries must be to blame. There must, to quote an ancient saying, be something wrong with our bloody ships. The sheer completeness of the catastrophe, and the frustrating lack of detail regarding exactly what had gone wrong, actually made it easier to blame the tool rather than the workman. All the ships had been made gas-capable by Saluus's shipyards, all had been lost on their first mission using their new abilities, so - according to that special logic only the military mind seemed to appreciate - it must be a problem with the process of making them capable of working in an atmosphere that was respon­sible.

  Never mind that the battlecruiser acting as Command and Control for the whole operation and both the Heavy-Armour Battery Monitors had been blasted to atoms just as effortlessly as the ships working in the planet's clouds, even though they'd never been gas-capabled and were still in space at the time; that little detail somehow got rolled up into greater disaster and conveniently forgotten about in the hysteria.

  So now they'd lost Fassin and they'd lost their lead to this Dweller List thing. Worse, they had a serious intelligence problem, because, basically, they'd been duped. The old Dweller Valseir must have suspected something or been tipped off. They knew this for the simple reason that the information he'd provided - almost the last data that had got relayed back to the top brass on Sepekte before everything went haywire - had proved, when checked later, to be a lie. The Dweller he'd told Fassin to look for in Deilte city didn't exist. For the sake of this they'd lost over seventy first-rate warships for no gain what­soever - ships they would seriously miss when the Beyonder-Starveling invasion hit home for real - and they'd thoroughly antagonised the Dwellers, who'd never been people it was advisable to get on the wrong side of even before they'd suddenly shown they still packed the kind of punch that could humiliate a Mercatorial fleet. As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up.

  In fact it was only that last item on the long list of calami­tous consequences - dealing with the Dwellers' subsequent actions and signals - that had worked out less badly than it might have. Finally, something positive.

  Saluus was in a meeting. He hated meetings. They were an entirely vital part of being an industrialist, indeed of being a businessman in any sort of organisation, but he still hated them. He'd learned, partly at his father's side, to get good at meet­ings, working people and information before, during and after them, but even when they were short and decided important stuff they felt like a waste of time.

  And they were rarely short and rarely decided important stuff.

  This one wasn't even his meeting. Unusually, he wasn't in control. He'd been summoned. Summoned? He'd been brought before them. That caught the mood better.

  He far preferred conference calls, holo meetings. They tended to be shorter (though not always - if you had one where every­body was somewhere they felt really comfortable, they could go on for ever too) and they were easier to control — easier to dismiss, basically. But there seemed to be this distribution curve of meeting reality: people at the bottom of the organisational pile had lots of real all-sat-down-together meetings - often, Saluus had long suspected, because they had nothing useful to do and so had the time to spare and the need to seem impor­tant that meetings could provide. Those in the middle and towards the top had more and more holo meetings because it was just more time-efficient and the people they needed to meet with were of similarly high stature with their own time prob­lems and often far away. But then - this was the slightly weird bit - as you got to the very highest levels, the proportion of face-to-face meetings started to rise again.

  Maybe because it was a sign of how much you'd been able to delegate, maybe because it was a way of imposing your authority on those in the middle and upper-middle ranks beneath you, maybe because the things being discussed at high-level meetings were so important that you needed the very last nuance of physicality they provided over a holo conference to be sure that you were working with all the relevant informa­tion, including whether somebody was sweating or had a nervous tic.

  This was the sort of stuff a good holo would show up, of course, though equally the sort of stuff a good pre-transmission image-editing camera would smooth away. In theory somebody in a conference call could be sitting there sweating a river and jumping like they'd been electrocuted, but if they had decent real-time image-editing facilities they could look the perfect epitome of unruffled cucumber-chill.

  Though there was stuff you could do in reality, too, of course. For his thirteenth birthday, Saluus's father had given his son a surprise party and, later, a surprise present in the shape of a visit to a Finishing Clinic, where, over the course of a long and not entirely pain-free month, they fixed his teeth, widened his eyes and altered their colour (Saluus had been womb-sculpted for the appearance he'd had, but, hey, a father could change his mind). More to the point, they made him much less fidgety, upped his capacity to concentrate and gave him control over his sweat glands, pheromone output and galvanic skin response (the last three not strictly legal, but then the clinic was owned by a subsidiary of Kehar Heavy Industries). All good for giving one an edge in meetings, discussions and even informal get-togethers. And usefully applicable to the art of seduction, too, where one's blatant proximity to and control over astounding quantities of cash had somehow failed to have the desired effect.

  This was a meeting of the Emergency War Cabinet, a high-level top-brass get-together in a klicks-deep command-bunker complex beneath one of a handful of discreetly well-guarded mansions dotted round the outskirts of greater Borquille State.

  A high-level top-brass get-together minus the Hierchon Ormilla himself, however. He was patently too grand to attend a mere meeting, even of something as important as the Emergency War Cabinet, even when the fate of the System was in even greater jeopardy than it had been before the disastrous decision to go mob-handed into the atmosphere of Nasqueron the instant they thought they had a firm lead to the - anyway probably mythical - Dweller List.

  And why did meetings always make his mind wander, and, specifically, make it wander towards - wander towards? Head straight for - sex?

  He looked at women he was attending meetings with and found it very hard not to imagine them naked. This happened when they weren't especially attractive, but was inevitable and often vivid if they were even slightly good-looking. Something about being able to look at them for long periods when they were talking, he suspected. Or just the urge to shuck off the whole civilised thing of being good little officers of the company and get back to being cave people again, humping in the dirt.

  First Secretary Heuypzlagger was wittering. Saluus was confi­dent that he looked like he was hanging on the First Secretary's every word, and that his short-term memory would snick him back in should he need to return his full attention to proceed­ings if and when anything else of genuine import stumbled into view. But in the meantime, having already gleaned as much as he felt he was likely to regarding the real state of things from the body language and general demeanour of his fellow meeters, he felt free to let his mind wander.

  He glanced at Colonel Somjomion, who was the only woman at this meeting. She didn't tend to say very much so you didn't get too many opportunities to look straig
ht at her. Not espe­cially attractive (though he was, he'd been telling himself recently, starting to appreciate women rather than girls, and see past the more obvious sexual characteristics). There was, certainly, something especially exciting about the idea of undressing a woman in uniform, but he'd long since been there and done that and had the screenage to prove it. He thought of his latest lover instead.

  Saluus thought of her last night, this morning, he thought of her the night they'd first met, first slept together. He quickly got an almost painfully hard erection. They'd sculpted him to have control over that at the Finishing Clinic as well, but he usually just let things rise and fall of their own accord down there, unless either the presence or the absence was going to be socially embarrassing. Anyway, he'd long since accepted that maybe it was a way of getting back at dear old dad, for forcing all this amendment stuff on him in the first place, however useful it had proved.

  He still hated meetings.

  Saluus supposed things had gone reasonably well for him in this one so far, considering. He'd had to agree to a full inquiry into the gas-capabling of the ships they'd modified as part of the general investigation into what had gone wrong, but - even allowing for the implied insult and the waste of time, just when they didn't need it - that wasn't too terrible. He'd managed to deflect most of the criticism by getting the Navarchy, the Guard and the Shrievalty Ocula representatives to compete for who was least to blame for the whole botched-raid thing.

  That had worked well. Divide and conquer. That wasn't difficult in the current system. In fact it was set up for it. He remembered asking his father about this back when Saluus was still being tutored at home. Why the confusion of agencies? Why the plethora (he'd just discovered the word, enjoyed using it) of military and security and other organisations within the Mercatoria? Just look at warships: there were the Guard - they had warships, the Navarchy Military - they had warships, the Ambient Squadrons - they had warships, the Summed Fleet - obviously they had warships, and then there were the Engineers, the Propylaea, the Omnocracy, the Cessorian Lustrals, the Shrievalty, the Shrievalty Ocula and even the Administrata. They all had their own ships, and each even had a few warships as well, for important escort duties. Why so many? Why divide your forces? The same went for security. Everybody seemed to have their own security service too. Wasn't this wasteful?