The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  Quercer & Janath bobbed in the gas, laughing. 'There's a vacuum out there, Y'sul.'

  'And lots of angry, confused Voehn.'

  The injured Dweller was silent for a moment. 'I forgot,' he admitted. He shrugged. 'Okay. Hurry back.'

  *

  Saluus Kehar woke to a feeling of confusion and dread. There was a nagging feeling that what he'd just experienced had not been an ordinary sleep, that there was something more to it. It had been somehow messier, even dirtier, than he might have expected. He had a sore head, but he didn't think he'd been over-indulging the day or evening before. He'd had a slightly boring, slightly depressing dinner with some of the Dweller Embassy people, a perplexing talk with Guard-General Thovin, then a more pleasant interlude with Liss. Then sleep. That had been all, hadn't it? No terrible amount of drink or anything else to give him a headache and make it so hard to open his eyes.

  He really couldn't open his eyes. He tried very hard indeed but he couldn't do it. They wouldn't open. No light through his eyelids, either. And his breathing didn't feel right. He wasn't breathing! He tried to fill his lungs with air, but he couldn't breathe. He started to panic. He tried to move his body, bring his hands up to his face, to his eyes, to see if there was some­thing over his head, but nothing moved - he was paralysed.

  Saluus felt his heart thud in his chest. There was a terrible, squirming, moving feeling in his guts, as though he was about to void his bowels or throw up or both.

  - Mr Kehar?

  The voice didn't come through his ears. It was a virtual voice, a thought-voice. He was in some sort of artificial environment. That at least started to make sense of what was going on. He must have been booked for some rejuvenation treatment. He was deep under, safe and fine in a clinic, probably one he owned. They'd just got the wake-up sequence wrong somehow, failing to monitor his signs properly. A whisper of painkiller, some feel-good, de-panic ... a simple-enough cocktail for a Life Clinic to get together, you'd have thought. And a fairly trivial mistake, but they'd still got it wrong. He'd have words.

  Except he'd had nothing booked. He'd even cancelled a regular check-up appointment until after the Emergency. He hadn't been due to have anything done at all.

  An attack. They must have been attacked in the ship, maybe while they were asleep. He was in a hospital somewhere, in a tank. Oh fuck, maybe he'd been really badly injured. Maybe he was just a head or something.

  - Hello? he sent. It was easy enough to think-speak rather than really speak, just like being in a deep game or - again - like having serious hospital treatment.

  - You are Saluus Kehar?

  They didn't know his name?

  Could he have been drugged, zapped in some way? Oh fuck, had he been kidnapped?

  - Who is this? he asked.

  - Confirm your identity.

  - Perhaps you didn't hear me. I asked who you are.

  A wave of pain passed up his body, starting at his toes and ending at his skull. It had a startling purity about it, a sort of ghastly, dissociative quality. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving a dull ache in his balls and teeth.

  - If you do not cooperate, the voice said, - more pain will be used.

  He gagged, trying to speak with his mouth, and failing.

  - What the fuck was that for? he sent, eventually. – What have I . . . ? Okay, look, I'm Saluus Kehar. Where am I?

  - You are an industrialist?

  - Yes. I own Kehar Heavy Industries. What is the problem here? Where am I?

  - What is your last memory before waking up?

  - What? His last memory? He tried to think. Well, what he had just been thinking about. Liss. Being on the ship, on Hull 8770 and feeling like he was about to fall asleep. Then he

  wondered what had happened to Liss. Where could she be? Was she here, wherever 'here' was? Was she dead? Should he mention her or not?

  - Answer.

  - I was falling asleep.

  - Where?

  - On a ship. A spacecraft, the Hull 8770.

  - Which was where?

  - In orbit around Nasq. Look, could you tell me where I am? I'm perfectly willing to cooperate, tell you all you need to know, but I need some context here. I need to know where I am.

  - Were you with anybody?

  - I was with a friend, a colleague.

  - Name?

  - Her name is Liss Alentiore. Is she here? Where is she? Where am I?

  - What is her post?

  - Her? She's my assistant, my private secretary.

  Silence. After a while he sent, - Hello?

  Silence.

  A click, and the darkness was replaced by light. Saluus was returned to something like the real world, with a real body. The ceiling was shiny silver, lined with hundreds of glowing lines. Wherever he was, it was very bright.

  He was in a bed, in about half gravity or less, held down by ... he couldn't move. He might not be held down physically by anything, but he still couldn't move anything major like hands or legs. Somebody dressed like a doctor or a nurse had just taken a kind of helmet-thing off him. He blinked, licked his lips, feeling some sort of capacity for movement in his face and neck but nothing beyond. He thought he could still feel the other bits of his body, but he wasn't sure. Maybe he was still just a head.

  A tall, thin, weird-looking man with violently red eyes was looking down at him. Robes like something out of an opera. He smiled and he had no teeth. Oh, he did have teeth; they were just made of glass or something even more transparent.

  Saluus took a breath or two. Just breathing normally felt good. He was still terrified, though. He cleared his throat. 'Anybody going to tell me what's going on?'

  Movement to one side. He was able to turn his head - neck grating against some sort of collar - and see another bed. Liss was being helped up out of the bed, swinging her long legs over the edge. She looked at him, flexing her neck and shoulders and letting her black hair hang down. She was dressed in a thin esuit. When they'd gone to bed, she'd been naked.

  'Hi, Sal,' she said. 'Welcome aboard the Starveling invasion fleet.'

  The weird guy with the bad eyes turned, put out his gloved, jewelled hand, and helped her stand by the bed. 'Well, then. It would appear this is indeed a great prize you have delivered to us, young woman,' he said. His voice was weird too; very heavily accented, and deep but somehow abrasive at the same time. 'You have our gratitude.'

  Liss smiled thinly, drawing herself upright and running a hand through her hair, shaking it out. 'Entirely my pleasure.'

  Saluus felt his mouth hanging open. He swallowed, closing it briefly. 'Liss ?' he heard his own voice say, sounding small and boylike.

  She looked at him. 'Sorry,' she said. She shrugged. 'Well, sort of.'

  *

  'And these gamma-ray lasers go up really high! Look!'

  'Still just another beam-weapon. The mag-convolver's more intrinsically impressive.'

  Fassin was only half-listening to Quercer & Janath as they investigated the Voehn ship's sensors, instruments and controls. They'd just discovered the weapons.

  'Pa! Defensive! Look: Z-P surf-shear missiles! Full AM! Damn, this takes me back!'

  'Never mind that, check the snarl-armour. It's only warping over about a centimetre out from the hull, but look at that roll-down; easily ten klicks deep, absorbing all the way. Even regen­erates to the main pulse batteries. That's class.'

  They were in the Voehn ship's command space, an elon­gated bubble in the centre of the ship. The ten spine-seats were arranged in a V. Quercer & Janath sat in the commander's chair in front, exposed to a giant wall wrap-screen showing the view of space around them, with the drifting, very slowly spinning Velpin dead centre. Fassin and Y'sul floated within the two seats a row back from the travelcaptain. The seats were too small for Fassin and far too small for Y'sul and Quercer & Janath. They opened up like a double splay of fingers and were supposed to close on the Voehn inside like a protective fist. A Dweller only just fitted inside when
the seats were in their fully open position. The whole command space felt tight and constraining, but Quercer & Janath didn't appear to care even one hoot. The chairs seemed more like cages to Fassin. It felt as though he was floating inside the ribcage of some giant dinosaur skeleton.

  'Can we use a weapon on something?'

  Y'sul was humming to himself and tending to his own frac­tured carapace, using his main hub-arms to abrade-pinch sections of his discus edges closed, then smoothing them over with an improvised file.

  'Always blast the Velpin, I suppose.' 'It's full of people!'

  He had thought that he might find something. He had thought there might be something left to find.

  'It's full of Voehn special-forces warriors.'

  'In what sense not people? And besides, it's our old ship.'

  Something other than a dead, coward Dweller, ashamed enough of being weak and of having looked inside the safekeep box - and of the possible consequences of this action - to kill himself; vain enough to record a message commemorating his idiot narcissism.

  Outside, the Velpin spun slowly, somersaulting adrift. Their travelcaptain - Dweller, AI, whatever it was or they were - had persuaded most of the Voehn crew to abandon their own ship by the simple expedient of restarting the Protreptics self-destruct function and leaving it on until the last moment. Most of the Voehn crew, believing that their own ship was about to blow itself up, had decamped to the Velpin. Those that hadn't, Quercer & Janath had killed.

  It had killed about a dozen, itthey said.

  'Sentimentalist.'

  Well, eleven, to be exact.

  'I know! Let's ask the Ythyn if they can let us have a few of their hulks. They must have thousands littering the outside of that Sepulcraft. They'd never miss a couple. Heck, these beams attenuate right down; we could probably pick one or two off even without their permission, maybe even without them knowing.'

  Eleven Voehn. Just like that. Eleven heavily armed and armoured special-forces warriors. With no injury to itself.

  'No time. Mr Y'sul and Mr Taak wish to return to Ulubis.'

  He heard his own name mentioned. Ah, that would be Fassin Taak the complete and utter failure, sent on a mission, engaged on a great quest, only to find it all just trickles away into the dust in the end, leaving him with nothing.

  'And besides, maybe the Voehn will work out how to work the Velpin after all and ram us or something. I agree. Let's go.'

  Back to Ulubis? But why? He'd failed. He'd been adding up the days and months since his mission had started. The inva­sion had probably already happened by now, or was just about to happen. By the time he got back, empty-handed, after another few dozen days spent getting back to the wormhole in the Direaliete system, there was every chance it would all be over. He was an orphan in a damaged gascraft, with nothing to contribute, no treasure to gift.

  Why not just stay here with the Ythyn, why not just die and be pinned up on the wall next to the other fool? Or why not get dropped off somewhere, anywhere else? Disappear, float away, get lost between the stars in the middle of nowhere or the middle of somewhere utterly different, perfectly far away, never to be heard of again by anyone who ever knew him . . . why not?

  'That all right with you two?'

  'Hmm?' Y'sul said, sticking some sort of bandage over the injuries to his left discus. 'Oh, yes.'

  Fassin logged the damage: one working arm, his visual senses degraded to about sixty per cent due to the whateverness of weird shit that Quercer & Janath had unleashed in the chamber when it had killed the first three Voehn, and a variety of subtle but seemingly self-irreparable damage caused by the combina­tion of pulse weapon and stun-flechette that the Voehn had used on them in the Velpin.

  Of course, he told himself, he had to remember he was not the gascraft. He could relinquish it, be an ordinary walking-around human being again. There was always that. It seemed a slightly disturbing thought. He remembered the great waves, crashing.

  'Fassin Taak, you wish to return to Ulubis too?' Quercer & Janath asked.

  'So who knows that you're an AI?' Fassin said, ignoring the question. 'Or two AIs?'

  'Or mad?' Y'sul suggested.

  The travelcaptain did a shrug-bob. 'Not everybody'

  'GC stuff. Hurrah!' the other half said, fiddling with some holo controls rayed out from a control stub shaped like a giant mushroom.

  'Just munitions, or whole?' 'Whole.'

  'How wholly splendid.' 'Absolutely.'

  'I don't understand,' Fassin said. 'Was there a real Dweller called Quercer & Janath and you replaced them, or—'

  'One moment, Seer Taak,' the travelcaptain said. Then, in a slightly different and lower voice, said, 'You got the ship?'

  'I got the ship,' the other half said. 'Talking to its infinitely confused little computer brain now. Thinks it's dead. Believes the auto-destruct's been and gone.'

  'A common delusion.' 'Indeed.'

  'I shall leave you to negotiate a return course with our ship shade.'

  'Too kind.'

  'Now then, Seer Taak,' one half of the travelcaptain said. 'To answer your question: I'm not telling you.'

  Y'sul made a snorting noise.

  Fassin stared at the back of the AIDweller. 'That's not an answer.'

  'Oh, it is an answer. It may not be an answer to your taste, but it is an answer.'

  Fassin looked at Y'sul, who was using a screen turned to mirror to inspect his bandages. 'Y'sul, do you believe Quercer & Janath is an AI? Or two?'

  'Always smelled a bit funny,' the Dweller said. 'Put it down to eccentric personal hygiene, or the effects of truetwinning.' Y'sul made it obvious he was looking hard at the travelcaptain in the seat in front of them. 'Frankly, madness is more likely, don't you think? Usually is.'

  'Yes, but—' Fassin began.

  'Ahem!' Quercer & Janath pulled back from the controls they had been hovering over, turned, rose through the gap in the top of the chair-spines and came slightly towards where Y'sul and Fassin were floating in the splayed-fingers shapes of their own Voehn seats. The thickset double-discus floated right in front of them. Fassin felt his skin crawl again, felt his throat close up and his heart thrash in his chest. Kill us; it's going to kill us!

  'Allow us,' Quercer & Janath said, 'to suggest that a real Dweller might not be able to do this.'

  The thing that looked like a portly Dweller split slowly apart in front of them, carapace discuses twisting slightly and discon­necting from the central hub, arms and mantles and dozens and then hundreds of parts of the creature clicking and disconnecting and floating a fraction away from every other bit until Fassin and Y'sul were staring at what looked like an exploded three-dimensional model of a Dweller-shaped robot, contained within a gently hissing, blue-glowing field. Fassin pinged it with ultra­sound, just to check that it wasn't a holo. It wasn't. It was all real.

  Y'sul made an impressed whistling noise.

  As fast as an explosion in reverse, Quercer & Janath slam-slotted together again and was whole, turning back and drop­ping into the commander's seat where it had been busy before.

  'Okay,' Fassin said. 'You're not a Dweller.'

  'Indeed we are not,' one of the AIs said. A wild blur of holos and glowing fields filled the volume in front of the creature as it checked through the Voehn ship's systems, blistering quickly. 'Now, if you really want, I'll answer anything I can that you might want to ask. But you might not be able to take the memory back to your own people, in any form. What do you say? Eh, human?'

  Fassin thought about this. 'Oh, fuck it,' he said. 'I accept.'

  'What about me?' Y'sul asked.

  'You can ask questions too,' Quercer & Janath told him. 'Though we'll need your word that you won't talk about this to people who don't already know.'

  'Given.'

  The Dweller and the human in his gascraft esuit looked at each other. Y'sul shrugged.

  'You've always been a double AI?' Fassin asked.

  'No, we were two completely
separate AIs, until the Machine War and the massacres.'

  'Who knows you're not a truetwin Dweller?'

  'Outside of this ship, the Guild of Travelcaptains, and quite a lot of individual travelcaptains. One or two other Dwellers that we know of specifically. And any Dwellers of sufficient seniority who might wish to inquire.'

  'Are there any other Dweller AIs?'

  'Yes. I think something like sixteen per cent of travelcaptains are AIs, mostly double AIs impersonating truetwins. I was not being flippant when I said that it stops one from going mad.

  Now that we are reduced from our earlier state of grace, being able to talk to just one other kindred soul makes all the differ­ence between suicidal insanity and at least some semblance of fruitful utility.'

  'The Dwellers have no problem with this?'

  'None whatsoever.' The blur of control icons and holographs in front of the commander's seat continued without pause as the AIs took in how the visual displays related to whatever they were pulling direct from the ship's systems.

  'Y'sul?' Fassin asked.

  'What?'

  'You don't mind that AIs are impersonating Dwellers?'

  'Why should I?'

  'You don't worry about AIs?'

  'Worry about what about them?' Y'sul asked, confused as well as confusing.

  'The Machine War barely affected the Dwellers, Fassin,' one of the AIs told him. 'And AIs as a concept and a practical reality hold no terrors for them. Truly, they should hold none for you either, but I can't expect you to believe that.'

  'Did you really kill all those Voehn?' Fassin asked.

  'I'm afraid so. Their remains are floating somewhere outside the starboard midships lock even as we speak. See?'

  The main screen filled briefly with a horrific vision of mangled, shredded, crisped then frozen Voehn bodies, spinning slowly.

  'If one AI - or even two - can do that,' Fassin said, 'how come you lost the Machine War?'

  'We were both combat AIs, Fassin. Micro-ship brains designed, optimised and trained for fighting. Very thoroughly honed, very specialised. Plus we managed to salvage a few bits and pieces of weaponry from our ships and incorporate them into our physical simulation. Most of our fellows, on the other hand, were peaceable. They were generally the ones it was easiest to find and kill. Survival of the most aggressive and suspicious. We could have stayed and fought but we decided to hide. A lot of us did. Those who fought on did so due to the dictates of several different forms of honour, or through simple despair. The Machine War ended because the machines realised they could indeed fight the biologicals of the Mercatoria to the death - engage in a war of extermination, in other words - or admit defeat and so retreat, regroup, and wait for times more conducive to peaceful coexistence. We chose a somewhat ignominious but peace-promoting withdrawal over the kind of genocide we had anyway, and already, been accused of. Somebody had to accept the burden of acting humanely. It patently wasn't going to be the bios.'