The Algebraist (13 page)

Restricted by martial law in new and annoying but sometimes oddly exciting ways, coming to terms with their sudden isolation and newly appreciated vulnerability, people lived more for the short term, clutching at what pleasures and rewards might be available today, just in case there really was no tomorrow. No great breakdown in society took place and there were no significant riots or rebellions, though there were protests and crack-downs, and, as the authorities admitted much later - much later - Mistakes Were Made. But the system held together rather than fell apart, and many people would look back on that strange, unsettled epoch with a sort of nostalgia. There had been something feverish but vivid about the time, a reconnection with life after the disconnection with everybody else, which led to what even looked from some angles suspiciously like a cultural renaissance for what people were now starting to call the Ulubine Disconnect.

Fassin missed out on most of the excitement, taking every opportunity he could to go delving, as if frightened that he might not be able to do so in the future. Even when he was living back in real-time he was insulated from the extremes of the system-wide turmoil of fear and nervous energy by being on ‘glantine rather than Sepekte or its ring habitats, then by living within the Sept, at one of its five seasonal houses, rather than in Pirrintipiti or any of the planet-moon’s other major cities. He still travelled, spending occasional holidays in Pirri or off-’glantine, and that was when he felt the strange new atmosphere of freneticism most keenly.

Mostly, though, he was in Nasqueron, nestled in a fragile little gascraft, occasionally at normal life-speed, flying with the younger Dwellers, riding the gases alongside them, buffeted by the gas-giant-girdling, planet-swallowing super-winds and whirling hyper-storms of the planet, sometimes - more often and much more productively, though far less excitingly - floating sedately in a study or a library in one of the millions of Dweller cities with one of the more elderly and scholarly Dwellers, who alone in the system seemed perfectly unconcerned about the portal’s demise. A few of the (rare) polite ones expressed the sort of formal shame-but-there-you-go sympathy people tend to exhibit when an acquaintance’s elderly relative expires peacefully, but that was about it.

Fassin supposed that it was foolish to expect anything else from a race that was as ancient as the Dwellers claimed to be, who had supposedly explored the galaxy several times over at velocities of only a few per cent of light speed long before the planetary nebula that gave birth to Earth, Jupiter and the Sun had even formed out of the debris of still more antique generations of stars, and who still maintained they felt vaguely restricted not by that absolute limit on the conventional pace of travel but rather by the modest scale of the galaxy that these staggeringly long-ago, almost wilfully leisurely sets of voyages had revealed.

The days, weeks and months of waiting and preparation for an invasion became a year. The Beyonder attacks, rather than increasing, faded away almost to nothing, as though the portal assault had been one last insane hurrah rather than the logical, if wasteful, precursor to a war of conquest. The years added up towards a decade and gradually people and institutions relaxed and came to believe that the invasion might never come. The majority of the emergency powers lapsed, though the armed forces remained in high numbers and on high alert, sensors and patrols sweeping the volumes of space around Ulubis, seeking a threat that seemed to have disappeared.

In four directions lay almost empty intergalactic nothingness: barren volumes holding a few ancient, exhausted cinder suns with life-free systems or none at all, a scattering of dust and gas clouds, brown dwarfs, neutron stars and other debris - some of these, or the space in between, technically life-supporting for Slow exotics, Cincturia and Enigmatics, but patently devoid of any species who cared or could even understand the fate or concerns of the people of Ulubis - but no allies, no one to help or offer assistance or support, and certainly no portal connections.

Down-arm, nearly parallel with the galaxy’s wispy limit, heading into the thickening mass of gas and nebulae and stars, was Zenerre. Inwards, between Ulubis and the galactic centre spread a vast mass of Disconnect; the Cluster Epiphany Five Disconnect, millions of stars spread throughout cubic light-centuries which, it was believed, still supported worlds that had once been part of the civilised, connected, ‘hole-networked galactic community until over seven thousand years earlier and the Arteria Collapse which had preceded the War of the New Quick and all the excitement and the woes that had flowed from it.

* * *

Two centuries, one decade, four years and twenty days after the portal attack, exactly when it might have been expected, the first signal arrived from Zenerre, the wavefront of what would become a constant stream of information from the rest of the connected galaxy. Where, Ulubis was informed, life was going on as usual. The attack on its portal had been unique, and all was basically well with the Mercatoria. Attacks and incursions by the various Beyonder groups continued throughout the civilised galaxy, as did operations against them, but these were on the usual mainly nuisance-value level that the Beyonder Wars had evidenced for thousands of years, the tactically distressing and annoyingly wasteful but strategically irrelevant distributed background micro-violence that people had started calling the Hum.

Relief, puzzlement and a vague sense of victimisation spread throughout Ulubis system.

The Engineership
Est-taun Zhiffir,
portal-carrying, set out from Zenerre for Ulubis less than a year after the disaster, with a travel time initially given as 307 years, later reduced by increments to level out at 269 as the Eship upped its velocity even closer to light speed, the Engineers aboard fine-tuning the systems which insulated the hauled portal from the effects of its own and the ship’s relativistic mass. People in Ulubis system relaxed, the last vestiges of martial law were hidden away from public sight again. Those many born after the portal’s destruction wondered what it would be like to have a connection to the rest of the galaxy, to this semi-mythical meta-civilisation they’d heard so much about.

The flip-over point came, and Fassin was vaguely aware of it as the pressure on his chest and flesh and limbs faded away over the course of a few seconds, replacing that feeling of oppression with a sensation of sudden blood-roaring bloatedness as his body struggled to cope with the change. He kept his eyes closed. Almost immediately there was a faint trace of force, a gentle push from somewhere beneath his head, then weightlessness again, and a few moments later a matching tug from somewhere beneath his feet, and then weight returning, pressure quickly building, until the roaring in his head faded and became the distant thunder of the ship again.

*

The Archimandrite Luseferous, standing before the ruins of the city, stooped and dug gloved fingers into the soft earth by his feet, wrenching out a handful of soil. He held it to his face for a while, staring at it, then brought it close to his nose and smelled it, then let it fall and dusted off his gloves while staring down at the huge crater where a large part of the city had been.

The crater was still filling from the sea, a slow curling curve of brown-white water spilling from the estuary beyond. The waterfall disappeared into the seat of the crater in a vast cloud-bank of vapour, and steam rose everywhere from the rolling, tumbling confusion of waters as the great rocky bowl cooled. A massive trunk of steam, three kilometres or more across, rose into the calm pastel sky, rolling up through thin layers of cloud, flat-heading where it achieved the middle reaches of the atmosphere.

It was the Archimandrite’s conceit, where a severe lesson had to be taught on a planet capable of supporting such a mark, that a city by the sea, which was either itself guilty of resisting or judged by him symbolic of resistance shown by others on the planet, be remade in the image of his beloved Junch City, back on Leseum9 IV. If a people would resist him, either while undergoing conquest or enduring occupation, they would suffer, of course, but they would be part of something greater at the same time and they would, even in death, even in the death of much of their city, be the unwitting and unwilling participants in what was, indeed, a work of art. For here, seen from this hillside, was there not a new Faraby Bay? Was that slot through which the waters thundered, shaking the ground, not another Force Gap? Was that piling tower of steam, first drawn straight up then stroked to the horizon, not a kind of signature, his very own flourish?

The Bay was overly circular, certainly, and the slot a mere break in a modest crater wall composed largely of estuarine mud, presenting no aesthetic match at all for the great kilometre-high cliffs of the real Force Gap - indeed, the whole setting for this new image of Junch City entirely lacked the original’s dramatic ring of surrounding mountains, and this little parkland hill on which he stood - with his admirals, generals and guard waiting obediently behind, allowing him this moment of reflection - was frankly a poor substitute for the vertical cliff of the Sheer Citadel and its magnificent views.

Nevertheless, an artist had to work with what there was to hand, and where there had once been just another swarming seaside city, lying tipped upon the land, variously hilled, messily distributed round a tributary river, with the all usual urban sprawl, great buildings, docks, breakwaters and anchorages - in other words what it had always been, roughly, no matter that there had been earlier so-called catastrophes like earthquakes or floods or great fires or bombardment from sea or air or earlier invasion - now there was an image of a fair and distant place, now there was a new kind of savage beauty, now there was a fit setting for a new city reborn in the image of his sovereignty, now there was a sort of - even - healing joining with those other peoples and places who had surrendered to his will, in suffering and in image, for this majestic crater, this latest work, was just the most recent of his creations, one more jewel on a string stretching back to the primacy of elegance that was Junch City.

Anyone with sufficient self-belief, enough ruthlessness and (Luseferous believed himself modest enough to admit) an adequate supply of luck could - if the will was there and the times required such determination - conquer and destroy. Judging how much to destroy for the effect one wished to achieve, knowing when to be ruthless, when to show leniency, even when to exhibit beguiling, rage-sapping generosity and a touch of humour; that required a more measured, a more subtle, a more - he could think of no other word for it -
civilised
touch. He had that touch. The record spoke for itself. To then go on from there and use the sad necessity of destruction to create art, to form an image of a better place and forge symbolic unity… that was on another level again, that elevated the mere war-maker, the mere politician, to the status of creator.

Tendrils of smoke rose all around the central column of steam, dark paltry vines adorning a huge pale trunk. These marked where defending aircraft had fallen and where fires had been started by the crater-weapon’s ground shock, no doubt. Part of the artistry involved in such a work was creating a great declivity without utterly destroying all around it (a new, reborn city had to grow here, after all). Some sophistication of weaponry was required to achieve such precision. His armaments experts attended to such details.

The Archimandrite Luseferous looked about him, smiling to his chiefs of staff, all standing respectfully at his heel, looking a little nervous to be here in the fresh air of another newly subject planet. (Yet was it not good to breathe in that fresh air, for all its alien scents? Did those strange new odours not themselves mean that another treasure had been added to their ever-increasing domain?) Above and behind, bristling war craft hovered and hummed, attended by small clouds of sensory and weapon platforms. Spread in a ring all around were his personal guards, most lying or kneeling on the grass, their darkly glinting weaponry poised. A few in military exoskels lumbered around or squatted, splayed feet squashing into the earth.

At the foot of the hill, beyond another ring of guards, beneath a watchful buzz of guard drones, the refugees moved like a slow river of dun and grey.

Stilters; groundbats, whule. A Mercatorial species. Disconnected all these millennia, certainly, but still a Mercatorial species. Luseferous looked up into the pale green sky, imagining night, the veils of stars, and the one particular sun - pointed out to him from orbit just forty hours ago, while the invasion forces were being prepared for the initial drop - growing steadily closer as they crawled and fought their way towards it, which was called Ulubis.

*

In the bright, golden-hued air of Sepekte, with the Borquille Equatower a thin stem in the hazy distance, the little Navarchy ship approached the palace complex, sliding through an ancient forest of kilometres-tall atmospheric power columns and between more modest but still impressive administration and accommodation towers. It disappeared into a wide, gently sloped tunnel set into the reception plaza in front of the enormous ball that was the palace of the Hierchon, an eight-hundred-metre sphere modelled after Nasqueron itself by a long-departed Sarcomage, complete with individual bands of slowly contra-rotating floors all sliding round a stationary inner core. Changing orange-red, brown and ochre swirls of pattern, convincingly like the view of the distant gas-giant’s cloud tops seen from space, moved across the face of the palace, hiding windows and balconies, sensors and transmitters.