The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  'So I couldn't just have asked on my own behalf?' Fassin said. 'Oh, you could have asked.' 'Best leave that hanging.' 'Attempt not to insult passengers.'

  'Unwritten law.'

  'Do you know of any other humans who've been allowed to use Dweller wormholes?' 'No.'

  'No, indeed. Not that we'd know, necessarily.' 'Any other Seers?' 'Not to our knowledge.'

  'Which is admittedly vague.' 'Okay,' Fassin said. He could feel his heart thudding in his chest, deep inside the little gascraft. 'Do you make journeys through the wormhole often?'

  'Define "often".'

  'Let me rephrase: how many times have you used the worm-hole in the last ten years standard?'

  'Easy question.' 'To sidestep.'

  'But - say - a few hundred.'

  'Excuse our vagueness. Conditions of Passage.'

  'A few hundred?' Fassin asked. Good grief, if that was true these guys were running round the galaxy in their hidden worm-hole system like subway trains under a city.

  'No more, assuredly.'

  'Are there many other ships like . . . ? No, let me rephrase: how many other ships in Nasqueron make regular wormhole journeys?'

  'No idea.'

  'Haven't the haziest.'

  'Not even roughly? Would there be dozens, hundreds?'

  The left side of Quercer & Janath briefly turned its shiny overalls transparent and flashed a pattern of high amusement over its signal skin.

  The right side made the whistling noise again.

  Fassin gave them time for a spoken answer, but it didn't appear. 'Are there a lot?' he asked.

  Silence a while longer.

  'There are a few.' 'Not a few.'

  'Make what you will.'

  'Again, vagueness to be excused. Conditions of Passage.'

  'Thousands?' Fassin asked. No response from the truetwin Dweller. He felt himself gulp. 'Tens of—?'

  'No point going pursuing numbers uppage.' 'See last answer given above.'

  He had no idea. There just couldn't be all that many ships, could there? No matter how impressive your stealth tech, surely out of hundreds or thousands of ship movements within a system every year a few had to betray itself on some sort of sensor, now and again. No system was perfect, no technology never failed. Something had to show up. How far out did portals have to be? Fassin wasn't an expert on the physics, but he was fairly certain that you needed relatively flat space, well away from a gravity gradient as steep as that round a gas-giant. Could their portals be as near to the planet as a close-orbit moon?

  'And Nasqueron?' he asked. 'Would it be a typical sort of Dweller planet in this regard?'

  'All Places of Dwelling are special.'

  'Nasqueron - Nest of Winds - no less special than any.'

  'But yes.'

  Yes. Fassin felt that if he'd been standing up in normal gravity asking these questions and getting these answers, he'd have had to sit down some time ago. Or just plain fallen over.

  'Have you ever been here before, to Aopoleyin?' he asked.

  Silence. Then, 'No.'

  'Or if yes, can't remember.'

  Fassin got something like Swim, that feeling of intense discon­nection when the sheer implicatory outlandishness of a situa­tion suddenly hit home to the unprepared human.

  'And if - when - we go back to Nasqueron, am I free to just tell people where I've been?'

  'If you remember.' 'Then yes.'

  'Is there a reason I might not remember?'

  'Cannula travel plays strange tricks, Seer Taak.'

  'You'd try to remove the memory from my brain?' Fassin felt his skin crawl. 'Human brains are difficult to do that sort of thing to without harming them.'

  'We've heard.'

  'Working on assumption nobody will believe you.'

  'Don't distress.'

  'Might believe me!' Y'sul said, suddenly turning away from the screens he'd busied himself with earlier.

  Quercer & Janath bobbed dramatically, like they'd forgotten he was there.

  'You're not serious!'

  'Not serious!' they yelped, nearly together.

  Y'sul snorted and flashed high amusement. "Course not.' He turned back to the screens, muttering while chuckling, 'What you take me for. Like life too much anyway. Hang on to my memories, thank you . . .'

  * * *

  The search went on. Fassin tried interrogating the Velpin's systems to discover if it carried its own Dweller List, its own map of the unknown wormhole network, or even just the loca­tion of the portal they'd entered in Ulubis system to get here. The ship's computers - easily accessed, barely shielded - seemed completely free of anything but the most basic star charts. The greater galaxy was mapped down to a scale that showed where all the stars and major planets should be, and that was it. No habs and no traces of megastructures were shown, and only the vaguest indications of Oort and Kuiper bodies and asteroid belts were given. It wasn't like a proper star-chart set at all, it was more like a school atlas. The little gascraft had a more detailed star map. Fassin searched the ship electronically as best he could without making it too obvious, but found nothing else more detailed.

  He supposed the real stuff must be hidden away somewhere, but had an odd, nagging feeling that it wasn't. The Velpin seemed a well-built ship - by Dweller standards exceptionally well-built - with relatively sophisticated but elegantly simple engines and lots of power, no weapons and some carrying capacity. No more. The rudimentary star data somehow fitted.

  Fassin tried to work out a way to commandeer the ship, just take it over. Could he hijack the Velpin? He'd spent enough time in the cluttered sphere of the ship's command space to see how Quercer & Janath controlled the vessel. It didn't look diffi­cult. He had, even, just asked.

  'How do you navigate this thing?'

  'Point.'

  'Point?'

  'Get to the general volume and then point in the right direc­tion.'

  'Secret is plenty of power.'

  'Delicate finessing of delta-V is sign you haven't really got enough power.' 'Power is all.'

  'You can do a lot by just pointing.' 'If you've got enough power.'

  'Though sometimes you have to sort of allow a bit for deflec­tion.'

  'That's a technical term.'

  Fassin couldn't work out how to take the ship over. Dwellers could, if they were determined, go years without experiencing anything a human would recognise as sleep, and Quercer & Janath claimed that they could get by without any at all, not even little slow-down style snoozes. His gascraft had no weapons apart from the manipulators, he had never trained to use the arrowhead as a close-combat device and anyway an Adult Dweller was bigger and probably more powerful -except in top speed - than the little gascraft. Dwellers were, anyway, generally regarded as being very hard to disable andor kill.

  He remembered Taince Yarabokin talking about her close-combat briefings. The basic advice when confronting a Dweller who meant you harm - if you, as a human, were in a conven­tional spacesuit, say - was to make sure you had a big gun. There was no known way an unarmed human, even in an armoured suit, could take on a fit young Dweller. If you didn't have a big gun, then Run Away Very Quickly was the best advice. Of all the Mercatorial species, only the Voehn were known to be able to tackle a Dweller unarmed, and even then it wasn't a foregone conclusion.

  Fassin supposed he could just ram Quercer & Janath. Crashing the little gascraft into them nose first might knock them out or disable them, but he wasn't sure there was suffi­cient room to work up enough speed for such a manoeuvre in any single part of the ship. He'd need to start a few compart­ments back and come slamming into the command space, hoping for a lucky hit, and that they wouldn't hear him coming and just rote out of the way to leave him to smash into the instru­ments. He wondered what Hatherence would have done. He wondered if she'd have been allowed to come in the first place. Almost certainly not with any weapons. On the other hand there was that standard Dweller casualness about such things. On the other hand, this
ship didn't seem that casual.

  Even if he could get Quercer & Janath out of the way, what about Y'sul? He didn't think the older Dweller would conspire or even cooperate. Y'sul had made it very clear that he was an entirely loyal Dweller who was simply being a good guide and mentor, not some treacherous human-lover in league with or harbouring any sympathy for the Mercatoria, an entire power structure and civilisation he professed neither to understand nor care about.

  And even if Fassin could somehow get control of the ship by himself, tricking both Dwellers - or all three, depending how you looked at it - what then? He still hadn't been able to find any sign of a hidden navigational matrix on the ship. Where was he supposed to go? How did he find the wormhole portal that had brought them here? When he found it, how did he get through, assuming it was in any way guarded or just adminis­tered? Mercatorial portals were some of the most intensely monitored and heavily guarded locations in the galaxy. Even allowing for the semi-chaotic indifference that Dwellers tended to display regarding such matters, could he really expect to fly unchallenged through one of their portals as though it was just another patch of space?

  He'd tried to find out more about the whole process of finding and traversing a Dweller wormhole portal - an Adjutage - from Quercer & Janath, but they had, to even his surprise, given their conspicuous gift for the technique, comprehensively out-vagued themselves on the matter, surpassing their most studiedly unhelpful earlier replies by some margin.

  Fassin had been allowed out of the ship. He'd floated free of it as it cruised gently through the tenuous, near-vacuum body of the Clouder Hoestruem. He wanted to check as best he could that this was not all faked somehow. How, after all, did he really know that he was where Quercer & Janath said he was? They'd told him. He'd seen information displayed on some screen and in or out of some holo displays. It could all be a joke, or a way of setting him up for something. So he had to check.

  Outside the Velpin, keeping pace with the ship as it slid through the allegedly self-aware interstellar cloud, he used the little gascraft's senses to gauge whether he was in some vast arti­ficial environment.

  As far as Fassin could tell, he wasn't. He genuinely was in a chemicaldust cloud on the edge of a planetary system a quarter of the way round the galaxy from his home and halfway in towards the galactic core. The stars looked completely different. Only the distant galaxies still aligned. If it wasn't really the edge of deep space, it was a brilliant simulation of it. He used up a little of his reaction mass - water, basically - to fly a few kilo­metres away from the Velpin, and still encountered no wall, no giant screen. So either he was in a truly prodigious VR space, or it was all being done directly, through his brain, or through the gascraft's own collar, somehow uprated to one hundred per cent immersion, beyond check.

  He thought back to something Valseir had said once: Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an expla­nation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.

  Valseir had been talking about the Truth and other religions, but Fassin felt he was in a similar situation here. He had no real choice but to act as though all this was genuine. Even so, he had to keep the idea that it wasn't at the back of his head, just in case. Because if all this was real then he was, maybe, on the brink of the most astounding discovery in all human history, a revelation that could do untold harm or bring inestimable bene­fits to any combination of the Mercatoria, its adversaries and just about every other space-faring species in the galaxy. He remembered confronting the emissarial projection, what seemed like an age ago, back in the Autumn House. Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a set­up, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.

  He ran every check he could while he was outside the hull of the Velpin. He was in space. Everything checked out. Or he was in a sim so complete that there was no disgrace in being taken in by it. Back to the Truth again. Hatherence would have appreciated the dilemma.

  He could, if he really wanted, he supposed, just try and run away. The gascraft would support him indefinitely, it was capable of independent entry into a planetary atmosphere, and if he used almost all his reaction mass he could be in the inner system of this star Aopoleyin in a few years. He could even sleep most of the way and hardly notice the journey. But then what? He'd never heard of the place. It was somewhere in the Khredeil Tops (whatever those were) according to the gascraft's rudimentary star atlas, but it wasn't listed as a human or Mercatorial inhabited system and there was no mention of it having any inhabitants at all. That didn't mean there was nobody there - everywhere seemed to support somebody who called it home - but it meant that he'd probably be no further forward trying to get back home.

  He came back to the ship when Quercer & Janath signalled excitedly that they'd found something. It wasn't Leisicrofe's ship; it was the delicate ball of gas and chemicals - a lacework ball of cold and dirty string open to the vacuum, held together by just a trace of gravity - that was the Clouder's mind.

  . . . Looking for . . . ?

  - A Dweller. A gas-giant Dweller, called Leisicrofe.

  . . . Image . . .

  - Image?

  . . . Told image expect . . . specific image . . .

  - Ah. I have an image with me. How . . . ? Where, I mean what do I show it to, so you can see it?

  . . . No . . . describe . . .

  - Okay. It's an image of white clouds in a blue sky.

  . . . Accords . . .

  - So you can tell me? Where Leisicrofe is?

  . . . Went . . .

  - When did he go?

  . . . Measure time how you . . . ?

  - Standard system?

  . . . Known . . . being Leisicrofe went 7.35 x 10° seconds ago...

  Fassin did the calculation. About twenty years earlier.

  He was nestled into the outer regions of the Clouder's mind, the little gascraft resting gently between two broad strands of gas a fraction less cold than the surrounding chill of deep space. He was, in effect, delving, stopped right down to talk to some­thing that made a deep, slow-timing Dweller look like a speed-freak. Clouders thought surpassingly slowly.

  A signal from outside, from the Velpin. To the Clouder he sent,

  - Where did Leisicrofe go?

  Then he clicked up to normal speed.

  'Are you going to be much longer?' Y'sul asked, sounding irritable. 'I am rapidly running out of patience with this bilat­eral monomaniac. It's been ten days, Fassin. What's happened? Fallen asleep?'

  'I'm going as fast as I can. Only been a few tens of seconds for me.'

  'You could just stay and think at normal speed, you know. Give us all time to mull over whatever this gas-brain's saying. No need to go doing this show-off delving stuff.'

  'Less of a conversation that way. This shows respect. You get more out of people if you—'

  'Yes yes yes. Well, you just carry on. I'll try and find more games to keep this split-personality cretin occupied. You rote off and commune with this space-vegetable. I'll do the real hard work. Sorry I came along now. If I've missed any more good battles while I've been away . . .' His voice faded into the distance.

  Fassin descended into extreme slow-time again. The Clouder still hadn't replied.

  At least this time there was no insane spiralling. There was the same fuzzy, low-reliability screen to distract them as they wafted away from the Clouder and made for the hidden wormhole mouth, and the doors out of the passenger compartment were just as locked, but there was no fierce spinning. Fassin let Quercer & Janath take over the gascraft remotely and turn off its systems. He didn't bother to clear any of the shock-gel or turn the faceplate clear this time, he just put himself into a trance. It was easy, a lot like preparing to go down into slow-time. And it meant he couldn't see or hear Y'sul complaining about the ignominy of being zapped unconscious just because they were going on a space journey.

  They were making for somewhere called Mavirouelo - yet anoth
er place Fassin had never heard of. This was where Hoestruem had said that Leisicrofe was going next. The Clouder hadn't known if this was a system, a planet, another Clouder or what. Quercer & Janath had gone silent for a moment when they heard the name, and Fassin had sensed them consulting the ship's crude galactic atlas. They declared that they knew the place. A planet, in the Ashum system. (Fassin, or at least the gascraft's memory, did know of this place. It was even connected, with its own Mercatorial-controlled wormhole, though Fassin suspected they wouldn't be using it.) Total travel time to be expected was 'a few days'.

  As he slid into unconsciousness, Fassin's thoughts were of how beautiful the Clouder had looked. The vast being was like a million great long gauzy scarves of light, a whisper of matter and gravity close to nothingness that massed more than many solar systems, drifting yet purposeful, intent by ancient decision, along a course charted out over millions of years, propelled, dirigible by minute flexings of cold plasmas, by the force of near-not-there-at-all magnetic fields, by sigh-strength expulsions and drawings-in of interstellar material. Cold and dead-seeming yet alive and thinking. And beautiful, in the right light. Seen in a fitting wash of wavelengths, there was something endlessly, perfectly sublime about . . .

  *

  Saluus stood on a balcony of ice and metal, looking out at the view, his breath misting in the air before him.

  The Shrievalty retreat was embedded in and partially sculpted from the frozen waterfall Hoisennir, a four-hundred-metre-high, klick-wide cliff of ice marking where the river Doaroe began its long fall from the high semi-arctic plateau towards the tundra and plains beyond. A low winter sun provided a grand display of Sepektian clouds and a fuzzy purple-red sunset, but nowhere near enough heat to start melting the ice.

  Sepekte wobbled slowly and not especially significantly. Its arctic and antarctic circles, where the sun alternately never set or never rose during the heights of summer and depths of winter, were less than a thousand kilometres in diameter. Officially classed as a hottemperate planet by human standards, its winters were longer but less severe than those of Earth and their worst effects were confined to smaller areas than on humanity's original home. But the Hoisennir waterfall was far north and high up in the arctic-shield mountains, and the Doaroe spent standard years at a time entirely frozen.