The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  She left before he could think of anything else to say.

  *

  Hab 4409 and everybody in it was under sentence of death. So they'd been told. It was hard to believe. Anyway, it might not happen.

  People reacted differently. Some had rioted and been dealt with either uncompromisingly or savagely, depending on whether you believed the civil authorities or not, some retreated to inebria of various types, some just stayed with those they loved or discovered they would not mind spending their last hours with those they merely liked, and a lot of people - more than Thay would have expected - gathered together in the great park on the far side of the habitat's inner wall from the plaza outside the Diegesian's palace. They all stood, and all held hands, great lines and knots of people, people in circles holding hands in the centre, joined to long strings of others in straggling lines. From above, Thay thought, they must look like a strange image of a human brain, all clumped brain cells and branching dendrons.

  Thay Hohuel looked up, trying to see past the clusters of pods graped all along the hab's long axis, looking for any sign of the Diegesian's palace and the square outside where she and the others had gone to protest all those years ago.

  She had come here, she realised, to die. She had not thought it would be quite so soon, that was all. She had never forgotten the others, had tried her best to keep in touch with them even when they didn't seem to want to have to recall the old days and their old selves. She'd tried not to be too pushy about it, but she'd probably been seen by them as a pain, as a pester. But what you'd been meant something, even if you'd repudiated it, didn't it? So she'd always thought, and still did.

  So she'd been, she supposed, a nuisance, insisting on reminding the others of herself, and through herself of their earlier selves, and, of course, of poor, dead K, who both united them and kept them apart from each other. Mome, Sonj, Fassin and herself: they'd have met up again, wouldn't they? They'd have had some sort of reunion, it would only have been natural. Well, maybe, if the ghost of K that they each carried with them hadn't forever soured the memories of their time together.

  Never mind, she was having her own reunion, with the hab and her old self and those memories. When she felt that she was just a year or two from the deserved rest of death, she'd been determined to come back here, where her real self had been formed, in early adulthood. The coming war had made her all the more fixed in her purpose; if they were really all as under threat as people said, if all cities and towns and ships and habs and institutions and everything else were regarded as allowable targets by the invaders, then she would face death where it might mean something, somehow. In this habitat, this hollow log of blown asteroidal rock, this rotating frame of reference, she would have come full circle, ready to cease existing back at the place that had made her who she was.

  She had been many different things in her life, switched career half a dozen times, always finding new things to excite and interest her. She had had many lovers, two husbands, two chil­dren, all long since gone their own ways, and while coming here to die had made her feel a little selfish, she thought it would also be doing a favour to all those she loved or had loved. Who among them would really want to see her fade away?

  They might say they'd want to be there at the end, but it wouldn't be true, not really.

  So she'd come here, to the old Happy Hab - not as happy, not as boisterous or as bohemian as it used to be, sadly - to die. Except she'd thought it would be alone, and peacefully, and in a year or two, not with everybody else in the place, violently, just a handful of months after she'd returned.

  The Hierchon Ormilla was in exile on Nasqueron. The new top dog, this Archimandrite Luseferous guy, wanted the Hierchon to surrender. The Hierchon was refusing to cooperate. Archimandrite Luseferous didn't want to antagonise the Dwellers so he couldn't just attack or invade Nasqueron as well - amaz­ingly, it seemed that the Dwellers, chaotic eccentrics and tech­nological illiterates that they were supposed to be, were well able to defend themselves - so there was a stand-off. The Luseferous person couldn't go in, and Ormilla wouldn't come out.

  Now the Archimandrite was threatening to destroy a city or a habitat every day until the Hierchon did surrender properly and gave himself up to the occupying forces. And if he didn't give in after a couple of days, it would become a city or a habitat every hour.

  There were rumours that Afynseise, a small coastal city in Poroforo, Sepekte, had been destroyed the day before, though with an information blackout covering the habitat for the past three days, it was impossible to be sure.

  Hab 4409 had eighty thousand or so inhabitants, making it a relatively small space habitat. It was second on the list of hostage population centres, and the midnight deadline was now only minutes away. Still no word from Ormilla after a defiant communiqué earlier that afternoon. A Starveling warship had been stationed near the habitat for the past two days, since the Archimandrite's ultimatum had been issued. Nothing and nobody had been allowed to leave - or approach - the hab in that time. A few craft had tried to leave, and been destroyed. No requests to evacuate children, the infirm or the collaborating civil authorities had been listened to. It had even been announced that anybody in a spacesuit or small craft who might survive the hab's initial destruction would be targeted in the debris and destroyed.

  Nobody doubted that the Archimandrite would be true to his word. Few believed the Hierchon would give in so easily. Thay let go of the cluster of hands she was holding - a with­ered old petal of a flower of the mostly young and fair - and bent, spine protesting, to take her shoes off. She kicked them away and put her hand back in the centre of the circle again. The grass felt cool and damp beneath her feet.

  A lot of people were singing now, mostly quite low. Lots of different songs.

  Some crying, some sobbing, some wailing and screaming, most far away.

  And somebody, ghoulish, counting the seconds to midnight. It came, and seconds later a great ringing shaft of light, blinding-bright, cut right through the very centre of the hab, barely fifty metres from where Thay stood. She had to let go of the hands of the others to shield her eyes; they all did. A hot blast of air knocked her off her feet, sending her tumbling with hundreds of other people across the grass. The beam immedi­ately split into two and moved quickly out to the habitat's perimeter on each side, detonating buildings, erupting flame from pod clusters and slicing the whole small world in two. The halves were pushed apart by the pressure of air in them and the atmosphere went whirling away into space in a twinned hurri­cane of gases, debris and bodies as buildings and pods exploded in two great retreating circles of effect making their way down the interior surfaces of the sundered halves, structures ripped open just by the force of the air inside them trying to get out.

  Thay Hohuel was lifted up by the whirlwind of air and blown above the bubbling, lifting turf with everybody else, towards the quickly swelling breach. In the few seconds it took for her to be blown out into the darkness, she heard herself scream as the air went gushing from her lungs, sucked away to space. It was a high, hard, savage scream, louder than any she could have achieved just with her own muscles; a terrible chorus of pain and shock and fear, wrenched from her mouth and from the mouths of all those around her as they died together, the awful sound of them all only fading as the air bled from her ears into vacuum.

  A vortex of bodies spun slowly out of the separating halves of the ruined habitat, jerking and twisting and spinning away in two long, scimitared comma shapes like some ballet of galactic design.

  The images were beamed throughout the system by the occu­pying forces.

  The Hierchon formally surrendered the following day

  *.

  The Archimandrite Luseferous stood in the nose of the Main Battle Hub Luseferous VII, staring out at the vision-filling view of the planet Sepekte and its vast, dusty-looking, very occa­sionally glittering halo of habitats, orbital factories and satel­lites. The entire outer nose section of the Luseferous VII was
diamond film, a bowed circle of breathtaking transparency a hundred metres in diameter and supported by finger-thin struts. The Archimandrite liked to come here alone, just to look out at stuff. At such moments he could sense the colossal bulk of the Luseferous VII behind him, all its kilometres and mega-tonnes, all its warrens of docks, tunnels, chambers, halls, barracks, magazines, turrets and launch tubes. It was a pity it might have to be destroyed.

  The strategists and tacticians didn't like the look of the incoming Summed Fleet's drive signatures. There were a lot of heavy ships on their way, and the first might be here in weeks rather than the months - maybe even a year - they'd been hoping for. The Luseferous VII, magnificent though it undoubtedly was, represented an unignorable and probably unmissable target. Their best strategy might be to use the great ship as the bait in a trap, their own forces seemingly disposed so that it looked like they were determined to defend it to the last, but in fact treating it as a disposable asset. Lure in as much of the Mercatorial fleet as possible and then destroy everything, including, unfortunately, the Luseferous VII itself.

  The admiral who'd drawn the short straw in whatever compe­tition or pecking-order judgement they'd used to decide who had to offer this suggestion to the Archimandrite had looked distinctly queasy when he'd outlined the plan, obviously fearing an outburst of rage from his commander-in-chief. Luseferous had already heard of the idea - Tuhluer proving his usefulness again - and come to accept that if they were not to jeopardise their whole mission here, even ideas as drastic as this had at least to be entertained. So he'd just nodded and acknowledged that all options had to be considered. Relief for the admiral concerned. A degree of consternation for the others, who all wished that they'd made the announcement now.

  They would try to think of other strategies which didn't involve the likely loss of the Main Battle Hub, but nobody seemed too optimistic. Always do what the enemy hoped you wouldn't. Murder your babies. That sort of thing. The logic seemed impeccable.

  Well, he could always build another Main Battle Hub. Just a lump of matter. Results were what mattered. He wasn't a child. He wasn't sentimental about the Luseferous VII.

  More worrying was whether even that sacrifice might be enough. They had control of Ulubis system, they had lost only a handful of ships in the invasion and, having captured a few of the enemy craft, had conceivably come out ahead in the deal. However, the Summed Fleet squadrons on their way comprised a formidable force. They had fewer but better ships. It might be quite a close battle, and only an idiot wanted to get involved in one of those. And so near! That had been a terrible, terrible shock.

  Luseferous hadn't been able to believe it at first. He'd raged and fumed and spat, telling the techs to check and check again. There must be something wrong, there had to be an error. The Summed Fleet couldn't be that close. They'd been assured it would be half a year - a whole year, even - before they had to face the counter-attack. Instead the Summed Fleet was practically on top of them before they'd had time to settle in properly.

  Beyonder bastards. It had to be their fault. He would see what could be done about those treacherous fucks in due course. In the meantime, he had the counter-attack to worry about.

  Of course, if by the time the Summed Fleet squadrons arrived they had what they'd come for, that might make all the differ­ence.

  A few weeks to find what they had come for. He had a very unpleasant feeling that this was not going to be long enough.

  *

  The ship thought it was dead. Fassin talked to it.

  He'd hoped they might be able to make the return journey from the Rovruetz to Direaliete system faster than they'd made the outward trip, because the Voehn ship was quicker than the Velpin, but it was not to be. The Protreptic could accelerate faster than the Velpin, but the injuries the Voehn commander had inflicted on Y'sul meant the Dweller wouldn't be able to survive the stresses. They went back slower than they'd come out.

  Y'sul lay in a healing coma in an improvised cradle that Quercer & Janath had made for him within one of the extended command-space seats. They ramped the acceleration up to five gees, coasted while they checked the Dweller wasn't suffering further damage from the stresses involved, took the next smoothly incremented ramp of acceleration up to ten gees and checked again. Finally they settled on forty gees, though by the time they'd worked out that this was safe they were almost at the point where they would have to turn around and start decel­erating again as they fell towards the waiting system.

  Y'sul slept on, healing. The AI truetwin gloried in the explo­ration of the Voehn ship's vastly complicated systems and multi­farious martial capabilities.

  Fassin had nothing to do but float in his own extemporised acceleration cradle in the seat next to Y'sul's. He wouldn't be allowed to stay there as they approached the wormhole portal; Quercer & Janath had found a tight little cabin a few bulkheads back from the command space where he could wait that partic­ular experience out. In the meantime, after some complaints, they allowed him to interface with the Protreptic's computer, though they insisted on this being at several removes from the ship's core systems, and on him being accompanied by some sort of sub-personality of their own. The visits would be conducted in a factor two or three of slowdown, which seemed to suit everybody concerned. At least, Fassin thought, the journey would seem to go quicker.

  The virtual environment where Fassin was allowed to meet the ship took the form of a huge, half-ruined temple by a wide, slow-moving river on the edge of a great, quiet, silent city under a small, high, unmoving sun of an intense blue-white.

  Fassin represented as his human self, dressed in house casuals, the ship as a skinny old man in a loincloth and the AI sub­routine as some sort of ginger-haired ape with long, loose-looking limbs, an ancient, too-big helmet wobbling on its head, a dented breastplate with one broken strap slanting across its bulbous chest and a short kilt of segmented leather hanging from its skinny hips. A short, rusty sword dangled from its side.

  The first time Fassin had visited the ship's personality, the ape had led him by the hand from a doorway down the steps towards the river where the old man sat, looking out at the slug­gish brown waters.

  On the far side of the broad, oily stream was a desert of brightly glittering broken glass, stretching in low, billowed hills as far as the eye could see, like all the shattered glass the universe had ever known all gathered in the one vast place.

  'Of course I'm dead,' the ship explained. The old man had very dark green skin and a voice made up of sighs and wheezes. His face was nearly immobile, just an aged mask, grizzled with patchy white whiskers. 'The ship self-destructed.'

  'But if you're dead,' Fassin said, 'how are you talking to me?'

  The old man shrugged. 'To be dead is to be no longer part of the living world. It is to be a shade, a ghost. It doesn't mean you can't talk. Talk is almost all you can do.'

  Fassin thought the better of trying to persuade the old man that he was still alive. 'What do you think I am?' he asked.

  The old man looked at him. 'A human? Male? A man.'

  Fassin nodded. 'Do you have a name?' he asked the old man.

  A shake of the head. 'Not any more. I was the Protreptic but that ship is gone now and I am dead, so I have no name.'

  Fassin left a polite gap for the old man to ask him what his name was, but the inquiry didn't come.

  The ape sat a couple of metres away and two steps further up towards the creeper-festooned temple. It was sitting back, taking its weight on its long arms spread out behind it and picking one ear with a long, delicate-looking foot, inspecting the results with great concentration.

  'When you were alive,' Fassin said, 'were you truly alive? Were you sentient?'

  The old man rocked backwards, laughed briefly. 'Bless you, no. I was just software in a computer, just photons inside a nanofoam substrate. That's not alive, not in the conventional sense.'

  'What about the unconventional sense?'

  Another shrug. 'That does
not matter. Only the conventional sense matters.'

  'Tell me about yourself, about your life.'

  A blank-faced stare. ‘I don't have a life. I'm dead.'

  'Then tell me about the life you had.'

  ‘I was a needle ship called the Protreptic of the Voehn Third Spine Cessorian Lustral Squadron, built in the fifth tenth of the third year of Haralaud, in the Vertebraean Axis, Khubohl III, Bunsser Minor. I was an extensible fifteen-metre-minimum craft, rated ninety-eight per cent by the Standard Portal Compatibility Quotient Measure, normal unstowed operating diameter—'

  'I didn't really mean all the technical stuff,' Fassin said gently.

  'Oh,' said the old man, and disappeared, just like a hologram being switched off.

  Fassin looked at the ape, which was holding something up to the light. It looked down at him, blinking. 'What?' it said.

  'He disappeared,' Fassin told it. 'It disappeared. The old man; the ship.'

  'Prone to do that,' the ape said, sighing.

  The next time, the landscape on the far side of the wide, slack-watered river from the temple steps was a jungle; a great green, yellow and purple wall of strange carbuncular stalks, drooping leaves and coiled vines, its bowed, pendulous creepers and branches drooping down to drag in the slow swell of the current.

  Everything else was as before, though perhaps the old man was less skinny, his face a fraction more mobile and his voice less tired.

  'I was an AI hunter. For six and a half thousand years I helped seek out and destroy the anathematics. If I could have felt such an emotion, I would have been very proud.'

  'Did it never seem strange to you to be hunting down and killing machines that were similar to yourself?'

  The ginger-haired ape - sitting in its usual place a few steps up, trying to clean its stained, dented armour by spitting on it and then polishing it with a filthy rag - coughed at this point, though when Fassin glanced up at the animal it returned his gaze blankly.