The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  Confusing.

  Something about Saluus, and had Hatherence been in there too? Sal's house, only it had been a volcano, then the virtual environment where he met the ship, and it had looked at—

  In the shock-gel, pickled in it, surrounded by it, Fassin felt his eyes go wide and his skin prickle and crawl. His heart spasmed, thudding erratically in his chest.

  He could do it himself. He could wait until they got back, back to Nasq. and Ulubis, and take it to somebody - if he found Valseir he could just ask him, though he didn't think he'd be able to find Valseir - but that wasn't good enough. He had to know.

  He'd committed the image-leaf to the gascraft's memory. Lying there in the shock-gel, inside the little arrowhead, he called the photograph up and saw it floating before him. The picture of blue sky and white clouds looked odd to him, half-alien and wrong, and yet half-familiar at the same time, invoking a feeling of something between nostalgia and homesickness.

  He blew the image up to the point where it became a blocky abstract of colour. He scanned the whole image for smaller images, found nothing, then started running various routines that the gascraft's biomind held for finding patterns in random data. Had he recorded the image in fine enough detail to find anything hidden in it? Would the hidden data, if it was there, be findable without some other code?

  He wished he could access the original, stowed in a tiny locker on the outside of the gascraft, but he couldn't, not while he was pinned under this sort of force. Anyway, it might look suspi­cious to Quercer & Janath if he started peering too intently at the image-leaf. Because that was where the answer might lie, where it might - just, perhaps, maybe - have been lying all the time.

  '. . . I took the original of the folder to a friend and fellow collector in Deilte, a city in the south polar region, within a safekeep box . . .' That, or something very like it, was what Valseir had said.

  Fassin had recorded the conversation verbatim in the gascraft's memory, but it had been wiped aboard the Isaut. Didn't matter; he had a pretty good memory for detail himself. He hadn't realised at the time what the implication of Valseir's remark was - the Mercatorial ships had tried to mount their raid on the ships in the storm fleet shortly afterwards and things had all gone a bit exciting - but it meant there was probably a copy. Valseir was a scholar, and punctilious about word use and the terminology of editions and precedence. He wouldn't have talked about the original of something unless there was a need to distinguish it from a copy. So there was a copy. There was a back-up, and it had amused the old Dweller to have Fassin carry it with him all the time.

  Well, it was a plausible-enough theory.

  Fassin thought it would be a Valseir-like thing to have done, but he'd been wrong about the old Dweller before. Dwellers did become set in their ways and predictable, sometimes, given the ages they could live to, but sometimes they just became more devious, too.

  He fell asleep, the routines running on in front of him, and dreamed of streams of numbers, liquid algebra full of equations and meanings that started to make sense and then - just as he tried to study them and understand them - broke up and wrig­gled away, flickering to chaos.

  A soft chime woke him up.

  He was in the gascraft, in the stolen Voehn ship. The decel­eration felt gentler, as though they might be approaching their goal. He clicked to an outside view and saw an orange-red sun, dead ahead. The Dweller-shaped bulk in the seat ahead twisted fractionally.

  'Fassin?' Quercer & Janath said.

  If he hadn't been in the shock-gel inside the gascraft, he'd have jumped.

  'Mmm?' he said.

  'Going to have to put you in your own little cell for the next bit, all right?'

  'Yes. I understand.'

  'Soon as we're at one gee standard.'

  'I hear and obey,' he said, trying to sound unconcerned.

  Back in the gascraft's math-space, Fassin had a result.

  There was indeed data hidden in the image-leaf's depiction of a partially clouded blue sky. It had been there all the time. He'd had the answer, if that was really what it was, with him from the start.

  It looked like alien algebra.

  He tried to understand it.

  It meant nothing.

  It might mean everything.

  *

  The Archimandrite Luseferous had a tight, unpleasant feeling in his guts. He recognised it. It was the feeling that he got when he might have left something too late, or just got something wrong somehow. It was the feeling of being in a game and real­ising you might have made a terrible mistake a couple of turns or moves ago, of wanting to go back and undo what had been done, right the wrong, fix the error.

  When he'd been a child playing a game against another child and had made a mistake, he'd sometimes just say, 'Oh, look, I didn't mean to do that earlier, I meant to do this . . .' and had discovered that even though such behaviour might be forbidden by the rules of the game, you could get away with it amazingly often. At first he'd thought this was because he was just a more powerful character than whoever he was playing against, until he'd realised that the people this sort of tactic worked against tended to be those whose fathers weren't nearly as powerful as his. Later he'd become powerful himself, and found that cheating was still a workable tactic. Later still, he'd found that he didn't need to cheat. He could make the most awful blunder and never suffer for it because his opponent, guessing what was good for them in the greater context of life beyond the game, would never dare take advantage of that mistake. It was a kind of invincibility.

  Machines were different; they usually wouldn't let you make illegal moves or take back earlier errors. So you just reset them, or went back to the saved position or a time when the mistake could be unmade.

  Only this was not a game, or - if it was - it was one in which Luseferous didn't know how you changed the rules or swept your arm across the board or hit the Delete All sequence. Maybe the end of the game was death, and he'd wake to find himself in the greater reality that the Truth had always maintained existed. That was a sort of comfort, though even then he didn't want to wake up after a failure.

  Time was the problem. Time and the fucking Dwellers.

  The Luseferous VII swung ponderously into orbit around the planet Nasqueron. He watched it from his new flagship, the Main Fleet Combat Craft Rapacious (a super-battleship in all but name, he'd be prepared to concede).

  Insufficient time. How had it come to this? If he hadn't delayed so long before starting, if he hadn't stopped off along the way, if he hadn't, perhaps, insisted on full fleet dispositional discipline ... and yet he'd swung into action much more quickly than some democratic or committee-based organisation could have, and he would have been mad to leave strongholds intact along his line of advance and . . . and return. And discipline was important, keeping everything together was important. It symbolised loyalty, it betokened military and personal disci­pline.

  So there had been no choice, really. They'd got here as quickly as they could. The fucking Beyonders should have warned him the Summed Fleet squadrons were coming quicker than they'd anticipated. It was all their doing. It might even be a conspiracy against him. Oh, they'd taken part in the attacks on Ulubis when it had suited them, though they'd never been as decisive as they could and should have been. Fucking whining lily-livered moral­ists. Military targets! So they preserved their precious fucking scruples and left him to do the dirty work. If they'd been as emphatic and ruthless as he'd been, things might have turned out differently. Instead they'd supported him just enough to bring him here but now that he was where they'd wanted him all along, they were deserting him.

  Luseferous wished now that he hadn't let the Liss woman go. He'd given Saluus Kehar, the industrialist guy, back to his own people, largely to see what they'd do. Would they believe him when he told them he'd been kidnapped? Or not? Jury still out; the Guard had taken him for questioning. The woman who'd kidnapped him, and who had asked to take him back personally when she'd heard that
was what the Archimandrite had in mind, had disappeared before she'd even handed him over, probably returning to her Beyonder pals. Stupid to have let a potential lever like that go, but he'd had so many other things on his mind, and the full extent of the Beyonders' betrayal hadn't been clear at the time.

  Where were their craft? Where were their invasion troops or occupying forces? They were still staying on the outskirts, still not coming into the system itself, still too scared to commit them­selves. They'd professed horror and disappointment at his destruction of the city and the habitat, and at the way his troops had reacted to some elements of resistance. Fuck them! This was a fucking war! How the fuck did they think you won one? Casualties had been almost disappointingly light; Luseferous couldn't remember a full-scale invasion campaign which had ended with so few dead. They'd arrived in such overwhelming numbers that there had been little the other side could do apart from die pointlessly, surrender or run.

  They'd had a bit of luck, too, and the intelligence provided by the Beyonders about military preparations and fleet dispo­sitions had made a bit of a difference as well, he supposed. But basically it was just big guns and plenty of them that had done the trick, and the really impressive space battles he'd kind of been hoping for just hadn't materialised.

  So the system was his, even if the only ground he'd trodden personally was when making one brief appearance at a small mansion in the middle of a jungle to accept the formal surrender of the Hierchon. He'd have preferred the symbolic value of the big spherical palace in Borquille, even if it was damaged, but the security people felt there was still a danger from a well-hidden nuke or something equally unpleasant, so a house in the middle of nowhere it had been. The Hierchon and his people were being held aboard the Luseferous VII. Let the Summed Fleet kill him if that was the way it had to be.

  The Beyonders reported that there had been a few engage­ments with elements of the Ulubine Mercatoria military which had turned tail to run and then encountered their forces. But even there the Archimandrite was hearing rumours that the fleeing Navarchy ships were being allowed to surrender, or even accept a sort of neutral internment, still fully crewed and armed, rather than being destroyed or captured.

  So Luseferous was alone again, abandoned by his treacherous allies. They'd lured him here, got him to remove part of the threat against them, and now no doubt hoped that he'd take on the Summed Fleet squadrons when they arrived, doing the work they were too cowardly to do themselves.

  Well, the strategists and tacticians were seriously considering cutting their losses and heading back home again. This would seem ignominious to some, but if it was the best thing to be done then that was all there was to it. Again, he'd kept calm when he'd first heard this latest galling concept. He wasn't stupid; he could see the situation for himself. Do what the enemy least expected, what they would least want you to do.

  They might - it was still just a might - set off back for the relative safety of Epiphany 5, far away across the empty regions of space they'd spent all those years crossing. It would be unfor­tunate, but it might be the best thing to do all the same. They'd have to leave a lot of ships behind and they'd certainly have to abandon the Luseferous VII - it was too slow and too tempting a target - but they could do it. They'd leave behind sufficient forces to force the Summed Fleet to first fight within the system and then station some craft there, they'd take only the fastest ships and so have a head start, and they'd hope to lure away the main part of the remainder of the Summed Fleet squadrons - the bit that would be likely to come after them - by sending the Luseferous VII and a small escort screen of lesser ships off in a different direction.

  It was a horrible thing to have to think about, this running away so soon after getting here and achieving complete victory. But it might be better than standing and fighting when the outcome of the resulting battle was so finely balanced.

  Or, of course, they could find what they had really come for. This Dweller List key, this Transform, this magic formula. With that in his possession, Luseferous would have a bargaining counter of almost infinite value. So he was told, anyway, and for the sake of their own hides his advisers had better be utterly spot-on right with this one. Literally. He'd have the fuckers skinned alive if they'd led him all this way for nothing.

  In the meantime, one last throw, one final chance to find what they'd come for. All far too rushed and desperate, but - like all the greatest leaders - the Archimandrite knew that he was at his best when he was under pressure, when the odds were against him and victory was far from certain. Of course, this didn't happen very often to him because he didn't allow it to - always better to win easily - but he'd had his share of narrow victo­ries and pressure situations in the past and come out on top, and he hadn't forgotten and he certainly hadn't lost his touch. He knew he would prevail. He always did. Victory was the only thinkable option.

  He could do it. He just had to be decisive and determined. That was what he was best at. It was almost better this way; with so little time, with just the one chance, there was no ques­tion that it had to be an all-or-nothing, no-holds-barred approach. There was simply no time to go through all the other more 'reasonable' techniques. Forget playing it calm and quiet, fuck diplomacy, abandon all thought of being reasonable and hoping people would be reasonable in return. Just fucking do it.

  The Archimandrite had made his preparations as best he could. The tacticians thought the first elements of the Summed Fleet could be hurtling past at near-light speed in less than a dozen days, with the rest not far behind. No more waiting. It was now or never.

  They were in the belly of the great ship. The hideous, swirling, hallucinogenic face of Nasqueron lay beneath their feet, visible through diamond film. The Archimandrite had risked coming aboard the Luseferous VII for this. If there was some attack on it - unlikely, but not impossible, so far ahead of the main part of the Summed Fleet squadrons - then it would almost certainly have to come from above, and the sheer bulk of the vessel ought to protect them. He had the Rapacious waiting immediately underneath the main hull nearby, linked by a short ship-to-ship. He could be out of his impressively large seat, across the chamber and aboard and away in a minute. To be on the safe side, he had dressed in an emergency esuit, a thin, constrictive but reassuring presence beneath his formal robes. The collar-helmet was hidden by his cowl, which, like the rest of his outer garment, was made of tanned Voehn blizzardskin.

  Cradled against the Rapacious, now that it had been fully checked for bugs and bombs, was the ship that the Liss woman had used to bring the man Saluus Kehar to him. The tech people were very impressed with it. They thought it could probably outrun any ship the other side had. Luseferous would have been more impressed if it could outrun any missile or beam the other side had.

  They were here for a conference, a meeting ostensibly to discuss how the new regime in power within the rest of Ulubis system might liaise with the Dwellers.

  The Hierchon Ormilla was present, as was the rest of the surviving Mercatoria top brass. There hadn't really been time to start serious alterations on the Mercatorial power structure, and when he'd found that, as the Beyonders had reported, the Mercatoria was disliked and resented by most of its citizenssubjects, but not actively hated by them, Luseferous had left the bulk of the civil authorities in place. The main players had all pledged allegiance to him, apart from Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, who'd been killed in action, the Shrievalty colonel Somjomion, who'd disappeared and was probably on one of the ships that had run away, and the Cessorian Clerk-Regnant, Voriel, who'd chosen death rather than what he seemed to regard as the dishonour of recanting his religious vows. Idiot. Luseferous had shot him himself.

  He'd had some of the people who'd been involved in the Dweller Embassy - set up a few months before the invasion -brief him on what to expect from the floats. Most of the Embassy people had been killed when the commander of the ship they were in had refused to surrender, but a few had survived. Luseferous wasn't sure he trusted them, thou
gh.

  Three of his own top half-dozen commanders were present too. The rest were engaged elsewhere, keeping an armed pres­ence wherever it might be needed and preparing for the antici­pated high-speed pass-through of the Summed Fleet's advance units.

  No Beyonders, of course. They were still in shock from his unconscionable behaviour in the matter of the single small city and a habitat full of artists, weirdos and do-gooders. He must tell them he'd only chosen the city - whatever it was called, he'd forgotten - because it was on the coast and sheltered by mountains, so that he could do his sculpting trick again. That would horrify them all over again, with luck.

  The - delegates? representatives? whatever the fuck they were - from the Dweller side were an unprepossessing bunch. They looked big and impressive, especially in their giant wheel-like esuits, but there was the - apparently perennial - Dweller problem of finding somebody with sufficient authority to speak for a whole planet. He'd learned early on in his career that Dwellers were best avoided. Leave them alone and they'd leave you alone. He wouldn't have chosen to have anything whatso­ever to do with the damn floats if he could possibly have avoided it. But he couldn't, so he was doing his best.

  Present were three Dwellers. All were supposedly as senior as each other, and they were each alone - no aides or secretaries or underlings of any sort, which with any other species would have indicated that these were not serious people at all but with Dwellers meant nothing in particular.

  They were Feurish, some sort of political scholar who spoke for the great red-brown equatorial band they could see beneath them, Chintsion, who was the current chief-of-chiefs of an umbrella organisation representing all their clubs and other voluntary organisations (sounded insulting, but allegedly their 'clubs' included their supposedly highly effective military) and Peripule, who was the City Administrator of their largest city, though this was not a capital city in the accepted sense, and apparently being voted to be City Administrator was regarded as an imposition, not an honour or a chance to enjoy power. They all had grandiose-sounding titles that didn't really mean anything. All they did was tell you how old the Dwellers were.