The Algebraist

The Algebraist Page 40

by Iain M. Banks

  'Oh, definitely,' his father had said. 'But there's opportunity in waste. And what some call waste others would call redun­dancy. But do you really want to know what it's all about?'

  Of course he did.

  'Divide and conquer. Even amongst your own. Competition. Also even amongst your own. In fact, especially amongst your own. Keep them all at each other's throats, keep them all watching each other, keep them all wondering what the other lot might be up to. Make them compete for your attention and approval. Yes, it's wasteful, looked at one way, but it's wise, looked at another. This is how the Culmina keep everything under control, young man. This is how they rule us. And it appears to work, don't you think? Hmm?'

  Saluus hadn't been sure at the time. The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more impor­tant than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way round).

  But they really were facing a mortal and imminent threat here. Was it right to encourage division and enmity between people who and organisations which all needed to pull together if they were to defeat the threat they were faced with?

  Oh, but fuck it. There would always be competition. Armed services were designed to protect turf, to engage with, to prevail against. Of course they'd compete with each other.

  And, if that supposedly fucking enormous and ultimately powerful Mercatoria fleet wasn't rushing towards them even now, would not some of the people in Ulubis - maybe quite a lot of the people in Ulubis - be contemplating not resisting the Beyonder-Starveling invasion at all? Might they not, instead, be thinking about how they could come to an accommodation with those threatening invasion?

  Despite all the propaganda they'd been subject to, secret polls and secret police reports indicated that a lot of ordinary people felt they might not be any worse off under the Beyonder Starveling forces. Some people in power would feel the same way, especially if they were being told to sacrifice property and wealth and even risk their own lives in what might turn out to be a lost cause.

  Even some of those round this impressively large round table in this impressively large and cool and subtly lit boardroom-resembling-meeting-chamber might have been tempted to think about ways to cope with the threatened invasion that didn't involve resistance to the last ship and soldier, if it hadn't been for the oncoming Mercatoria Fleet.

  Saluus supposed they had to assume that the fleet really was on the way. There were other possibilities, and he'd thought them all through - and talked them all through with his own advisers and experts - but ultimately they had to be dismissed. Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money: all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic.

  Never mind. After covering the latest intelligence and his own. shocking remissness in not making the refitted ships invulner­able to alien hyper-weapons, the meeting was finally getting round to something useful.

  Back to grisly reality.

  'The main thing,' Fleet Admiral Brimiaice told them (the quaup commander was keen on Main Things and In The Ends), 'is that the Dwellers don't seem to want to continue hostilities.'

  After their initial, furious take-no-prisoners attack and no-quarter polishing-off of those who'd got away, the Dwellers had just as suddenly gone back to their usual show of Shucks-us? ineptitude, claiming it had all been a terrible mistake and could they help with the Third Fury rebuild?

  'And thank fuck for that!' Guard-General Thovin said. 'If they did, we'd have absolutely no chance. Facing the Beyonder-Starveling lot and the Dwellers as well! Holy shit! No chance. No chance at all!' Thovin was a dumpy barrel of a man, dark and powerful-looking. His voice was suitably gruff.

  'Instead, only almost no chance,' Shrievalty Colonel Somjomion said with a thin smile.

  'We have every chance, madam!' Fleet Admiral Brimiaice thundered, banging the table with one tubular armling. His splendidly uniformed and decorated body, like a well-tailored airship the size of a small hippo, rose in the air. 'We need no defeatist talk here, of all places!'

  'We have seventy fewer ships than we had,' the Shrievalty colonel reminded them, without drama.

  'We still have the will,' Brimiaice said. 'That's the important point. And we have plenty of ships. And more being built all the time.' He looked at Saluus, who nodded and tried not to let his contempt show.

  'If they work,' muttered Clerk-Regnant Voriel. The Cessorian seemed to have a personal thing against Saluus. He had no idea why.

  'Now, we've dealt with all that,' First Secretary Heuypzlagger said quickly, glancing at Saluus. 'If there are any problems with the ships' construction, I'm sure the inquiry will show them up. We have to concentrate now on what else we can do.'

  Saluus was getting bored. Now was as good a time as any. 'An embassy,' he said. He looked round them all. 'That's what I'd like to suggest. An embassy to the Dwellers of Nasqueron, to secure peace, make sure there are no more "misunderstand­ings" between us and them, attempt to involve them in the defence of Ulubis system and, if possible, acquire from them -with their consent, preferably - some of the extremely impres­sive weaponry they appear to possess, either in physical or theo­retical form.'

  'Well,' Heuypzlagger said, shaking his head. 'Oh. Now our Acquisitariat friend is a diplomat,' Voriel observed, expression poised between sneer and smile.

  'Needing yet more supposedly gas-capable ships to protect it, no doubt!' Brimiaice protested.

  'Haven't we got one already?' Thovin asked.

  Colonel Somjomion just looked at him, eyes narrowed.

  The meeting only seemed to last for ever. Finally it was over. Saluus met up with his new lover that evening, at the water-column house on Murla, where he'd first really looked at her in the true light of day and decided, yes, he'd be interested. It had been at brunch, with his wife (and her new girlfriend) and Fass and the Segrette Twins, the day after their visit to the Narcateria in Boogeytown.

  *

  The RushWing Sheumerith rode high in the clear gas spaces between two high haze layers, flying into the vast unending jet stream of gas as though trying to keep pace with the stars which were sometimes visible, tiny and hard and remote, through the yellow haze and the thin quick amber clouds scudding eternally overhead.

  The giant aircraft was a single slim scimitar of wing pocked with engine nacelles, articulated like a wave, ten kilometres across, a hundred metres long and ten metres high, a thin filament forever jetting like a swift weather front made visible across the waste of clouds beneath. Dwellers, hundreds of them, hung from it, each anchored like refuelled aircraft by a cable strung out from the wing's trailing edge, riding in a little pocket of calm gas produced by simple shells of diamond, open to the rear and which, to the human eye, were shaped like a pair of giant cupped hands.

  In a long-term drug-trance, downshifted in time so that the flight seemed twelve or sixty or more times quicker than it really was - the vast continents of clouds racing beneath like foam, the wash of stars wheeling madly above, wisp-banks whipping towards and past like rags in a hurricane - the wing-hung Dwellers watched the days and nights flicker around them like some stupendous strobe and felt the planet beneath them turn like something reeling out their lives.

  Fassin Taak left the jetclipper and flew carefully in, matching velocities, then anchored the little gascraft, very slowly, to the underside of the diamond enclosure holding the Sage-youth Zosso, a slim, dark, rather battered-looking Dweller of two million years or so.

  Fassin slow-timed. The wing, the clouds, the stars, all seemed to pick up speed, rolling racing forward like over-cranked screenage. The roar of engines and slipstreaming gas rose and rose in pitch, becoming a high, shrill, faraway keening, then vanishing from hearing altogether.

  The Dweller above him, seeming to jerk and quiver in his
little retaining harness, waited for him to synch before sending, - And what might you be, person?

  - I am a human being, sir. A Seer at the Nasqueron Court,

  in a gascraft, an esuit. I am called Fassin Taak, of Sept Bantrabal.

  - And I am Zosso, of nowhere in particular. Of here. Good view, is it not?

  - It is.

  - However, I dare say that that is not why you are here.

  - You're right. It's not.

  - You wish to ask me something?

  - I am told I need to make passage to somewhere I've never heard of, to follow a Dweller I need to find. I'm told you can help.

  - I'm sure I can, if I choose to. Well, that is, if people still take any notice of what a silly old wing-hanger says. Who can say? I'm not sure that I would listen to somebody as old and out of things as I am if I was a young travelcaptain. Why, I think I should say something like, 'What, listen to that foolish old—?' Oh, I beg your pardon, young human. I seem to have

  distracted myself. Where was it you would like to go?

  - A place that is, apparently, sometimes called Hoestruem.

  Drunisine himself, alone, had come to the quarters that Fassin shared with the two Dwellers, in the mid-morning of the day after the battle in the storm.

  'We have delayed you long enough. You may go. A jetclipper is at your disposal for the next two dozen days. Goodbye.'

  'Now there,' Y'sul had observed, 'goes a Dweller of few words.'

  - Hoestruem?' Zosso asked. - No, I've never heard of it either.

  Night swept over them as he signalled, enveloping.

  - In or near Aopoleyin? Fassin sent. - Apparently, he told the old wing-hanger, when the Dweller was uncommunicative for a few moments. - Somewhere associated with Aopoleyin.

  All this was on Valseir's advice. Fassin couldn't find any mention of anywhere called Aopoleyin in his databases either. He was starting to wonder if the memory-scanning process he'd had to undergo before being allowed to leave the Isaut had scrambled some of the gascraft's information storage systems.

  - Ah, Zosso sent. - Aopoleyin. That I have heard of. Hmm. Well, in that case, if I were you, I'd talk to Quercer & Janath. Yes, you'll need them. I should think. Tell them I sent you. Oh. And ask for my mantle scarf back. Might do the trick. No guarantees, though. Mind.

  - Quercer and Janath. Your mantle scarf back.

  The old Dweller rolled a fraction, jerkily, and looked down at Fassin. - I'll have you know it was a very good mantle scarf.

  He rolled back, facing again into the never-ending rush of cloud and stars and day and night. - I could do with it up here. It's windy.

  FIVE:

  CONDITIONS OF PASSAGE

  Where?

  'You want to go where?'

  'Hoestruem, near Aopoleyin,' Fassin said. 'We know where Hoestruem is.'

  'We're not stupid.' 'Well, I'm not. Janath might be.'

  'I entirely fulfilled my Creat Minimum Stupidity Allocation by associating with you.'

  'Forgive my partner. We were asking for confirmation more out of shock at your unspeakable alienness than anything else. So. You want to go to Hoestruem.' 'Yes,' Fassin said.

  'And Zosso sent you.' 'Still banging on about that damn scarf.'

  'Useful code, though.' 'Hoestruem.'

  'Hoestruem.' 'Doable.'

  'Yes, but it's more the why of it, not the how.' 'The how is easy.'

  'The how is easy. Problem is definitely why.' 'As in bother.'

  'As in should we.' 'Well, should we?'

  'More rhetorical.' 'Has to be a joint decision.'

  'Absolutely.' 'Zosso asks.'

  'Zosso does.' 'Do we accommodate?'

  'We could just give him back his mantle scarf.' 'Was there ever a scarf?'

  'A real scarf?' 'Yes.'

  'Now you mention it.' 'Anyway.'

  'Beside the point.' 'Always a dangerous place to tarry'

  'Zosso. A travel request. This human gentleman in his gascraft esuit.'

  'Ahem,' said Y'sul. 'And his friend.' 'Not forgetting his friend.' 'And mentor,' Y'sul pointed out.

  'Yes, that too.' 'Do we do or do we don't?'

  'Is the question.' 'Does we does or don't we not?'

  'Yes. No. Select one of the aforementioned.' 'Quite.'

  'Precisely.'

  'In your own time,' Y'sul muttered.

  They were in a spinbar in Eponia, a globular stickycity in the cold chaotic wastes of the North Polar Region. The borrowed jetclipper had done its best impression of a suborb, skipping nearly into space in a series of bounced trajectories, finally slowing, sinking and coming to rest by the tenuous cloudlike structure of the great city, occupying hundreds of cubic kilometres of cold, stale gas just fifteen thousand klicks from the giant planet's North Pole. They'd tracked Quercer & Janath down to a spinbar called The Liquid Yawn. Valseir had demurred but Y'sul and Fassin had crammed into a crushpod, been accelerated up to speed and then - dizzily - joined the two travelcaptains in their booth.

  Fassin had never encountered a travelcaptain before. He'd heard of them, and knew that they were almost always found in the equatorial band, but they were elusive, even shy. He'd tried to meet with one many times in the past but there had always been some sort of problem, often at the last moment.

  The spinbar whirled madly, twisting and looping and rolling at extreme high speed, making the city outside its bubble-diamond walls seem to gyrate as though with the express inten­tion of disorientating the outward-looking bar-going public. The effect was intense and intentional. Dwellers had a superb sense of balance and it took a lot to make them dizzy. Being spun like a maniac was one Dweller idea of fun just because it led to a profound, giddy dislocation with one's surroundings. Taking drugs at the same time just added to the hilarity. Y'sul, however, it had seemed to Fassin, looked a little grey around the gills as they'd woven their way through the mostly empty spinbar to the travelcaptains' booth.

  'You all right?'

  'Perfectly'

  'Bringing back memories of heading through the storm wall in the Poaflias?'

  'Not at ... Well, just a little. Ulp. Perhaps.'

  Quercer & Janath, travelcaptains, were one. They looked like one big Dweller, of about Adult age, but there were two indi­viduals in there, one in each discus. Fassin had heard of truetwin Dwellers before, but never met a set. Usually a Dweller's brain was housed just off the central spine in the thickest, central part of one discus; generally the left one. Right-brain Dwellers were about fifteen per cent of the total population, though this varied from planet to planet. Very, very occasionally, two brains devel­oped in the one creature, and something like Quercer & Janath tended to be the result. The double-Dweller wore a shiny set of all-overs with transparent and mesh patches over the hub sense organs, and a shaded transparent section over the outer frill of sensory fringe.

  'You'll not be able to see much.' 'That's if we take you at all.'

  'Yes, that's if we do take you in the first.' 'Place. Which is by no means guaranteed.'

  'Indeed not. Decision not yet made.' 'Still pending.'

  'Absolutely. But.'

  'In any event.' 'You'll not be able to see much of anything.'

  'Not exactly a sightseeing trip.' 'Or a cruise.'

  'Either.' 'And you'll have to switch everything off.'

  'All non-bio systems.' 'At least.'

  'If, that is.' 'Big if.'

  'We do take you.'

  'I think we get the idea,' Fassin said. 'Good.'

  'Brilliant.'

  'When can we expect a decision?' Y'sul asked. He'd turned his right sense-fringe inward so that he was seeing with only one. This was the Dweller equivalent of a drunk human closing one eye.

  'Made it. I've made it. You made it?'

  'Yep, I've made it.' 'It's a Yes?'

  'It's a Yes.'

  'You'll take us?' Fassin asked. 'Are you deaf? Yes.'

  'Definitely.'

  'Thank you,' Fassin said. 'So where are we going?
' Y'sul asked tetchily. 'Ah.'

  'Ha!' 'Wait.'

  'And see.'

  The ship was no joke. Three hundred metres long, it was a polished ebony spike necklaced with drive pods like fat seeds. It lay in a public hangar deep under the stickycity, a semi-spher­ical space a kilometre across bounded by the hexagonal planes of adjacent smaller bubble volumes.

  Valseir was bidding them farewell here. The trip would begin with what the two travelcaptains described as an intense, frac­tally spiralled, high-acceleration, torque-intense manoeuvre complex, and was not for the faint-willed. The old Dweller had invoked his seniority to excuse himself the ordeal.

  'More spinning around,' Y'sul sighed, on hearing what awaited them.

  'My regards to Leisicrofe,' Valseir told Fassin. 'You still have the leaf image, I hope.'

  Fassin took the image-leaf with its depiction of sky and clouds out of its storage locker in the little gascraft and showed it to the old Dweller. 'I'll say hello.'

  'Please do. Best of luck.'

  'You too. How do I find you when I get back?'

  'Leave that to me. If I'm not readily available, try where we found Zosso. Or, perhaps at a StormSail regatta.'

  'Yes,' Y'sul said. 'But next time just don't bring any friends.'

  The black spike-ship was called the Velpin. It burst from the vast cloud of the city like a needle shot from a frozen waterfall of foam, disappeared into the gelid rush of gases forever swirling around the planet's distant pole and started its bizarre flight, spiralling, rolling, looping, rising and falling and rising again.

 

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