The Algebraist (24 page)

- Fassin, Ganscerel sent with a sigh. - I think we’re all aware of the speed of light and the diameter of the planet. And these remotes are anyway not completely stupid, or unprotected. They have an extremely sophisticated collision-avoidance system built into them. One we had to clear specifically with your friends in the Shrievalty to have built in, it’s so close to… to being
clever.

- But if a Dweller points a laser at you for fun, Fassin asked, - just to see if you’ll flinch, what good is any collision-avoidance system to you then?

- Perhaps, Ganscerel suggested mellowly, - one ought not to mix with the kind of Dweller who would be likely to act in such a manner in the first place.

Except they’re the ones that are most likely to share interesting stuff with you, old man, not the desiccated, harmless but clueless pixie-brains you tend to spend your time flattering,
Fassin thought. He was fairly certain that it was just a thought. People always worried that in theory in VR you might say something you only meant to think, but he wasn’t so rusty in the techniques of remote delving that he was truly concerned. It might, anyway, even do Braam Ganscerel some good to hear a few politely unspeakable things now and again.

- Perhaps, indeed, Chief Seer, was all he said.

- Hmm. Let’s step out, shall we?

They returned to the reality of a remote-send suite buried deep in the Third Fury Facility, blinking in the light as technicians helped to unclip them from the couches, pushing themselves forward to clear the half-domes of the NMR assemblages, handing back earpieces and simple black velvet blindfolds, flexing and stretching as though they’d been under for a genuinely long delve rather than a mere hour or so at a one-to-one time ratio.

Paggs worked his fingers, undoing the last couple of soft tabs that connected him to the thin pneumo-tubes which had both sensed his movements and would have prevented him from throwing himself right off the couch in the event that he’d performed any especially energetic actions.

Ganscerel lay with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and letting the technicians detach him from the machinery.

Paggs glanced over. ‘Are we convincing you at all, Fass?’

‘You’re convincing me it’s even easier to remote delve these days than it used to be.’ Fassin levered himself from the couch with the steady application of force from one small finger and let himself float very gently towards the floor. ‘I would have taken your word for it.’

‘So, you only got one-third of the volumes concerned, young Taak,’ Ganscerel said.

Fassin was giving a very private briefing in an engineering store off the secondary ship hangar. Ganscerel had wanted it conducted in his quarters but there wasn’t a way of squeezing the colonel in there. Present were Fassin, Ganscerel, Paggs and Colonel Hatherence. Fassin wanted them each to know as much as he did - or at least as much as he thought they ought to know - about what he had found on his long-ago delve and what they would be looking for on the one they were hoping to begin the following day.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I traded some high-definition images of Earth Twentieth-Century European Expressionist paintings for - amongst a lot of other stuff - what was catalogued as a tri-translated text of a pre-Third Chaos Lutankleydar epic poem, a private, unpublished work by - or perhaps commissioned by - a Doge of the Enigmatics. It was all double-encrypted and compressed but it was known to be in three volumes. I got three volumes from Valseir, only - as it turned out years later, when it was finally de-mangled by the Jeltick - what I’d been given wasn’t Volumes One, Two and Three. It was Volume One, three times over, in three separate languages. And it wasn’t by an Enigmatic Doge either.

‘One of the volumes was in a previously known but untranslatable Penumbral language from the time of the Summation. When the translation was made it acted as a Rosetta; gave the key to a lot of other stuff, and that sidetracked everybody for a while. Then some pin-eyed Jeltick scholar spotted a note at the end, buried in the appendices in a crude but related slang-language, obviously added later, but not much later, that basically said the whole thing had been written during the Long Crossing of the Second Ship, by an Outcast Dweller skilled in the Penumbral language, and that, yes, of course there was a Dweller List, they - the ship, or its crew - had the key to it, and it would be included in Volume Two or Three of this epic poem. It was also, of course, in the ship, and the ship was heading for the Zateki system. That’s why the Jeltick sent an expedition straight there as soon as they had the translation.’

‘Why not come here, to Nasqueron, where they might have found the Third Volume?’ Paggs asked, smiling.

‘Because the Shrievalty hadn’t told them where the data had come from. Whether this was oversight or deliberate we haven’t been told. The Jeltick may have guessed it was from a Dweller Studies centre but they couldn’t be sure whether it was or not and, if so, which one. They probably did start making inquiries, but they didn’t want to alert anybody else to the importance of what they had. Don’t forget, the information had been copied and re-copied - it was lying about in data reservoirs all over the civilised galaxy. Quite possibly people had even already translated and read the main text but just hadn’t got round to the appendices, where the all-important note was. The slightest hint that there was anything of strategic interest in that tranche and everybody else would have dusted it off, read it and - bang - the Jeltick would have lost their edge. So they fuelled and tooled and set sail for Zateki instead.’

‘This could all be a hoax, you know,’ Ganscerel said, snorting. He adjusted his robes, frowning deeply. ‘I do believe I detect the laboured and tortuous signature of Dweller humour here. This could just be a joke at the expense of anyone foolish enough to fall for it.’

‘It could indeed, sir,’ Fassin agreed. ‘But we have our orders and we have to make the effort, just in case it is all true.’

‘So we are looking for the remaining two volumes of this… what is it called, exactly?’ Colonel Hatherence asked.

‘Best translation,’ Fassin said, ‘is,
The Algebraist.
It’s all about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, love, longing, honour, long voyages home… all that stuff.’

‘And what is or was this Long Crossing?’ Ganscerel asked irascibly. ‘I haven’t heard of it.’

‘The voyage back home from what humans used to call the Triangulum Nebula,’ Fassin said, with a small smile.

‘Well,’ Ganscerel said, frowning once more. ‘We are not really much further forward, are we? And what, pray, do we call the Triangulum Nebula now, Seer Taak?’

‘We call it the Lost Souls II Galaxy, Chief Seer. The crossing was called the Long Crossing because it took thirty million years. The outward journey allegedly took almost no time, because it was conducted through an intergalactic wormhole, the portal location of which is amongst those included in the Dweller List.’

Hervil Apsile, Master Technician of the Third Fury Shared Facility, ran the ultrasonic hand-held over the gascraft’s starboard nacelle one more time, smiling with some satisfaction at the smooth line on the screen. Above his head, one of the Shared Facility’s drop ships stood on extended legs, a squat lifting-body shape, hold doors open. To one side, the main hangar’s transparent dome showed a vast darkness, fitfully illuminated by long lighting flashes like sheets of tipped diamond catching the light of a dim blue sun.

‘Checking for scrits, Hervil?’ Fassin asked, approaching by bounce along the fused-rock floor.

Apsile grinned at the sound of Fassin’s voice but watched the hand-held’s screen until he’d got to the end of the seam he was inspecting. He switched the machine off and turned to Fassin. ‘Just the standard varieties detected so far, Seer Taak.’

Scrits were the almost certainly mythical creatures which Dwellers blamed when anything went badly wrong anywhere in their vicinity. The humans who had lately taken up the baton of Dweller Studies had adopted early on the idea of scrits to account for the high degree of malfunctions any interaction with - or indeed near - the Dwellers seemed to involve. It was either that or accept that the Dwellers’ endemic technological carelessness and congenital lack of enthusiasm for keeping machinery in reliably working order was somehow contagious.

Fassin patted the dark flank of the fat, arrowhead-shaped gascraft. This was his own machine, designed specifically for and partly by Fassin himself. It was about five metres long, four across the beam if you included the outboard manoeuvring nacelles and a little under two metres in height. Its smooth form was broken only by the shut lines of its various manipulators and manoeuvring impellers, a few sensor bulges, and the rear power assembly, vanes currently stowed. Fassin rubbed his hand over its port tail fin. ‘All prepped and ready, Herv?’

‘Entirely,’ Apsile said. He was Nubianly black, slim but muscled, sleekly bald. Only a few lines round his eyes made him look remotely as old as he was, which was very. Every year or so, before his annual depilatory treatment - he thought gene treatment too invasive - a white micro-stubble would start to appear on his scalp, giving his head the appearance of a bristling star field. ‘And you?’ he asked.

‘Oh, prepped and ready too,’ Fassin told him. He’d just come from the day’s final briefing, with the Dweller Current State people. It was their challenging brief to try and keep abreast of what was going on in the sheer and utter chaos that was Dweller society and, as a sideline, keep track of where the major Dweller structures, institutions and - especially - Individuals Of Interest were at any given moment.

The news was not good: a formal war was brewing between Zone two and Belt C, at least one long-term storm structure between Zone one and Belt D was collapsing while two were building elsewhere, and the movements of IOIs recently had been particularly fluid. One might even say capricious. As for the whereabouts of choal Valseir, well. Nobody had seen anything of the fellow for centuries.

Dwellers had always been hard to follow. In the past people had tried setting drone remotes on individuals to keep tabs on them. However, Dwellers regarded this as a gross intrusion on their privacy and had an uncanny ability to spot and destroy any such platforms, micro-gascraft or bugs, no matter how small or clever they were. Dwellers also sulked. When people had the temerity to try anything so underhand, cooperation was withdrawn. Sometimes over an entire population. Sometimes for years.

The Slow Seers of Nasqueron had a pretty good relationship with the local Dwellers. By Dweller Studies standards it was almost close, but only because the Seers tried to interfere as little as possible with Dweller life. In return the Dwellers were relatively cooperative, and broadcast a daily update on the location of their most important cities, structures and institutions. This eight-and-a-bit-hourly bulletin was a byword for trustworthiness - almost a legend - in Dweller Studies, on occasion approaching accuracy rates of very nearly ninety per cent.

‘Things fine with Sept Bantrabal?’ Apsile asked.

‘All well. Slovius sends his regards.’ Fassin had talked to his uncle a few hours earlier, still trying to persuade him to leave the Autumn House. The time delay between Third Fury and ‘glantine made a normal conversation just about possible. He’d caught up with Jaal too, on the other side of ‘glantine, at her Sept’s Spring House. Life appeared relatively normal back on ‘glantine, the new Emergency affecting people there less than it seemed to on Sepekte.

Apsile flicked a roll-screen from his sleeve and tapped a few patches. He looked casually up at the lifter ship poised above the little gascraft, ready to accept the smaller vessel inside its open hold and take it down to the gas-giant’s atmosphere. Fassin followed the Master Technician’s gaze. He looked at a dark shape already hanging inside the cargo space, protruding downwards from it like a thick wheel. He frowned. ‘That looks a lot like Colonel Hatherence,’ he said.

‘Not many places she’ll fit,’ muttered Apsile.

‘Eh?’ A voice bellowed. Then, quieter: ‘My name? Oh. Yes, that’s me. Seer Taak. Major Taak, I should say. Hello. Sorry; asleep. Well, you know, one does. Thought I’d try out this space here for size. Fits very well, must say. I shall be able to be transported to the atmosphere of Nasqueron most ably by this vessel, if needs be. Well, so I think. Think you so too, Master Technician?’

Apsile smiled broadly, revealing teeth as jet as his skin. ‘I think so too, ma’am.’

‘There we are agreed, then.’ The giant hanging discus dropped fractionally from its mountings inside the delta-shaped transporter, so that it could turn and twist towards them. ‘And so. Major Taak. How goes your attempt to persuade Chief Seer Braam Ganscerel that you ought to be allowed to delve directly?’

Fassin smiled. ‘It goes like a long-term delve, colonel; exceeding slow.’

‘A pity!’

Apsile thumbed a patch on his roll-screen, clicked the screen back into his sleeve and nodded at the little gascraft. ‘Well, she’s ready. Want to put her up?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ It had become something of a tradition that Apsile and Fassin lifted the craft into the carrier. They stooped, took an end each and - very slowly at first - hoisted the arrowhead into the space above, letting their feet lift off the floor at the end to slow it down. The gascraft weighed next to nothing in Third Fury’s minuscule gravity, but it massed over two tonnes and the laws regarding inertia and momentum still applied. They were carried three metres up inside the drop ship’s hold, towards the opened arms of the waiting gascraft cradle. The Colonel’s esuit took up the space of two of the little gascraft, but that still left room for another five in the drop ship’s hold. The arrowhead snicked into place alongside the tall discus that held Colonel Hatherence. Satisfied that the arrowhead was correctly fastened in, the two men let themselves fall back to the floor. The colonel drifted down alongside them.