The Algebraist (37 page)

The slipstream howled and screamed around the Seer and the colonel. They watched the slave-children attempt their repairs. Clustered around the ends of the giant propeller blades, Fassin thought the Dweller young looked like a group of especially dogged flies clinging to a ceiling-mounted cooling fan.

Dweller children had a generally feral and entirely unloved existence. It was very hard for humans not to feel that adult Dwellers were little better than serial, congenital abusers,- and that Dweller children ought to be rescued from the relative brutality of their existence.

Even as Fassin watched, another infant was thrown from one of the giant blades, voice a high and anguished shriek. This latest unfortunate missed the prop guards but hit a high-tension stay cable and was almost cut in half. A Dweller in a skiff dipped back into the slipstream, wrestling with his craft, to draw level with the tiny, broken body. He stripped it of its welding kit and let the body go. It disappeared into the mist, falling like a torn leaf.

Dwellers cheerfully admitted that they didn’t care for their children. They didn’t particularly care for becoming female and getting pregnant, frankly, doing this only because it was expected, drew kudos and meant one had in some sense fulfilled a duty. The idea of having to do even more, of having to look after the brats afterwards
as well
was just laughable. They, after all, had had to endure being thrown out of the house and left to wander wild when
they
were young, they’d taken their chances with the organised hunts, the gangs of adolescents and lone-hunter specialists, so why shouldn’t the next generation? The little fuckers might live for billions of years. What was a mere century of weeding out?

The slave-children being used to carry out the repairs to the
Stormshear’s
damaged propeller would be regarded by most Dwellers as extremely lucky. They might be imprisoned and forced to carry out unpleasant and\or dangerous jobs but at least they were relatively safe, unhunted and properly fed.

Fassin looked out at them, wondering how many would survive to become adults. Would any of these skinny, trembling delta-shapes end up, billions of years from now, as utterly ancient, immensely respected Sages? The odd thing was, of course, that if you somehow knew for certain that they would, they wouldn’t believe you. Dweller children absolutely, to an infant, refused to believe even for a moment, even as a working assumption, even just for the sake of argument, that they would ever, ever,
ever
grow up to become one of these huge, fierce, horrible double-disc creatures who hunted them and killed them and captured them to do all the awful jobs on their big ships.

- Seer Taak?’

- Yes, colonel?

So they were back to close-communicating, using polarised light to keep their conversation as private as possible. The colonel had suggested coming up here. Fassin had wondered if it was for some private chat. He supposed ordinary talk might have been problematic, given the screech of the slipstream around the gantry and the thunderous clamour sounding from the choir of engines just behind.

- I have meant to ask for some time.

- What?

- This thing we are supposed to be looking for. Without mentioning the specifics, even like this, using whisper-signalling…

- Get on with it, colonel. Ma’am, he added.

- Do you believe what you told us, at that briefing on Third Fury? Hatherence asked. - The one with just yourself, Ganscerel, Yurnvic and myself present: could all that you told us there possibly be true?

The Long Crossing, the fabled ‘hole between galaxies, the List itself. - Does it matter? he asked.

- What we believe always matters.

Fassin smiled. - Let me ask you something. May I?

- On the condition that we return to my question, very well.

- Do you believe in the ‘Truth’?

- So capitalised?

- So in quotation marks.

- Well, of course!

The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind the Shrievalty, the Cessoria, in a sense behind the Mercatoria itself. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilisations. (With the interesting exception of the Dwellers, or so they claimed. Which some parties held was another argument against them being a civilisation in the first place.) However, everybody - well, virtually everybody, obviously - quickly or eventually came round to the idea that a difference that made no difference wasn’t a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life.

The Truth went a stage further, holding that this was a difference that could be made to make a difference. What was necessary was for people truly to believe in their hearts, in their souls, in their minds, that they really were in a vast simulation. They had to reflect upon this, to keep it at the forefront of their thoughts at all times and they had to gather together on occasion, with all due ceremony and solemnity, to express this belief. And they must evangelise, they must convert everybody they possibly could to this view, because - and this was the whole point - once a sufficient proportion of the people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those who had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse.

If they were all part of some vast experiment, then the fact that those on whom the experiment was being conducted had guessed the truth would mean that its value would be lost. If they were some plaything, then again, that they had guessed this meant they ought to be acknowledged, even - perhaps - rewarded. If they were being tested in some way, then this was the test being passed, this was a positive result, again possibly deserving a reward. If they had been undergoing punishment for some transgression in the greater world, then this ought to constitute cause for rehabilitation.

It was not possible to know what proportion of the simulated population would be required to bring things to a halt (it might be fifty per cent, it might be rather smaller or much greater), but as long as the numbers of the enlightened kept increasing, the universe would be constantly coming closer to this epiphany, and the revelation could come at any point.

The Truth claimed with some degree of justification to be the ultimate religion, the final faith, the last of all churches. It was the one which encompassed all others, contextualised all others, could account for and embrace all others. They could all ultimately be dismissed as mere emergent phenomena of the simulation itself. The Truth could too, in a sense, but unlike them it still had more to say once this common denominator had been taken out of the equation.

It could also claim a degree of universality that the others could not. All other major religions were either specific to their originating species, could be traced back to a single species - often a single subset of that species - or were consciously developed amalgams, syntheses, of a group of sufficiently similar religions of disparate origin.

The Truth, claiming no miracles (or at least no miracles of proof) and being the work of no individual, all-important prophet (it had arisen, naturally, many times within a multiplicity of different civilisations) was the first real post-scientific, pan-civilisational religion - or at least it was the first that had not been simply imposed on reluctant subjects by a conquering hegemony. The Truth could even claim to be not a religion at all, where such a claim might endear it to those not naturally religious by nature. It could be seen more as a philosophy, even as a scientific postulate backed up by unshakeably firm statistical likelihood.

The Mercatoria had simply adopted this belief system, properly codified it and made it effectively the state religion of the latest Age.

- You do not believe, Fassin? The colonel put sadness into her signal.

- I appreciate the intellectual force of the argument.

- But it is not held in your mind at all times?

- No. Sorry.

- Be not sorry. We all find it difficult on occasion. We shall, perhaps, talk further on the matter.

- I was afraid we might.

- To return to my question, then.

- Do I believe all that stuff?

- Correct.

Fassin looked around at the ship beneath them and the great assemblage of roaring engines, whirling blades and supporting structures. The Long Crossing: thirty million years between galaxies.

- The idea that anything built by Dwellers could make a journey of that length does place the credulity under a degree of tension, he admitted.

- The assertion that the outward journey was made so much more rapidly seems no less to belong to the realm of fantasy.

Ah yes, the great and almost certainly mythical intergalactic ‘hole.

- I would not argue with you, colonel. Though I would say it’s perfectly possible that these are all nonsense, but the specific object we’re looking for still exists.

- It keeps unlikely company.

- Again, I wouldn’t choose to dispute the matter. We are left with the fact that you are a colonel, I am some sort of honorary major and orders are orders.

- How assiduously one attempts to follow one’s orders might be affected by the extent to which one believes they are capable of being carried out successfully.

- There I would completely agree with you. What are you getting at?

- Just calibrating, major.

- Seeing how committed I am? Would I sacrifice my life for our… object of desire?

- Something like that.

- I suspect we’re both sceptics, colonel. Me more than you, I suppose. We also believe in doing our duty. You more than me, perhaps. Satisfied?

- Content.

- Me too.

- I received a communication from the Ocula this morning.

- Really?

And were you always going to tell me, or could I have been even more mission-sceptical during that last exchange, and been told nothing? Or has your ‘calibration’ meant I’m not going to get told everything now?

- Yes. Our orders remain as they were. There were several more attacks on the system in general at the time of the assault on the Third Fury moon. Further, less intense attacks have continued. The communications satellite system around Nasqueron is being repaired as a matter of urgency. In the meantime a Navarchy fleet is being stationed above the planet, to take the place of the satellites, to provide security and main force back-up for you and me, and to pick us up at the end of our mission, or in an emergency.

Fassin took a moment to think.

- Any word from my Sept, Sept Bantrabal?

- None. There was confirmation that all those on or in Third Fury were killed. I am sorry to report that Master Technician Hervil Apsile is also believed to be dead. There has been no sign of or communication with the drop ship. I have been asked by the Ocula to pass on their commiserations to you regarding all those deceased Seers and supporting staff, to which of course I add my own.

- Thank you.

The colonel might have executed a sort of rolling bow, or it might just have been the effects of the swirling, buffeting slipstream tearing around them.

The slave-children had suffered no further casualties. Their repairs appeared to be working. Even where they had not completed their renovations, the damaged blades were vibrating less, making the rest of the job easier.

- How many ships were they sending to Nasqueron, to do all these things?
That one small ship and two puck-sized satellites could do?

- This was not mentioned.

Fassin said nothing.

There were some potentially unfortunate consequences implicit in a profound belief in the Truth. One was that there was a possibility that when the simulation ended, all the people being simulated would cease to exist entirely. The sim might be turned off and everybody within the substrate running it would die. There might be no promotion, no release, no return to a bigger and better and finer outside: there might just be the ultimate mass extinction.

Also, back in the (apparently) real world, there was an argument that the Truth implied approval of its own extinctions, that it tacitly encouraged mass murder and genocide. Logically, if one way of upping the proportion of those who truly believed was to evangelise, convince and convert, another was to decrease the numbers of those who steadfastly refused to accept the Truth at all - if necessary by killing them. The tipping point into revelation and deliverance for all might come not at the moment when a sceptic became a believer but at the point that an un-reformable heathen breathed their last.

The
Stormshear
plunged into a great dark wall of thicker cloud, dimming the view. Lights started to come on, shining from the supporting structure and the Dweller skiffs. Soon they could see little, and the mad, overwhelming cacophony of the slipstream and the droning engines made sonosense near impossible. A methane hail rattled around them in the gathering gloom.