The Algebraist (52 page)

Though there was stuff you could do in reality, too, of course. For his thirteenth birthday, Saluus’s father had given his son a surprise party and, later, a surprise present in the shape of a visit to a Finishing Clinic, where, over the course of a long and not entirely pain-free month, they fixed his teeth, widened his eyes and altered their colour (Saluus had been womb-sculpted for the appearance he’d had, but, hey, a father could change his mind). More to the point, they made him much less fidgety, upped his capacity to concentrate and gave him control over his sweat glands, pheromone output and galvanic skin response (the last three not strictly legal, but then the clinic was owned by a subsidiary of Kehar Heavy Industries). All good for giving one an edge in meetings, discussions and even informal get-togethers. And usefully applicable to the art of seduction, too, where one’s blatant proximity to and control over astounding quantities of cash had somehow failed to have the desired effect.

This was a meeting of the Emergency War Cabinet, a high-level top-brass get-together in a klicks-deep command-bunker complex beneath one of a handful of discreetly well-guarded mansions dotted round the outskirts of greater Borquille State.

A high-level top-brass get-together minus the Hierchon Ormilla himself, however. He was patently too grand to attend a mere meeting, even of something as important as the Emergency War Cabinet, even when the fate of the System was in even greater jeopardy than it had been before the disastrous decision to go mob-handed into the atmosphere of Nasqueron the instant they thought they had a firm lead to the - anyway probably mythical - Dweller List.

And why did meetings always make his mind wander, and, specifically, make it wander towards - wander towards? Head straight for - sex?

He looked at women he was attending meetings with and found it very hard not to imagine them naked. This happened when they weren’t especially attractive, but was inevitable and often vivid if they were even slightly good-looking. Something about being able to look at them for long periods when they were talking, he suspected. Or just the urge to shuck off the whole civilised thing of being good little officers of the company and get back to being cave people again, humping in the dirt.

First Secretary Heuypzlagger was wittering. Saluus was confident that he looked like he was hanging on the First Secretary’s every word, and that his short-term memory would snick him back in should he need to return his full attention to proceedings if and when anything else of genuine import stumbled into view. But in the meantime, having already gleaned as much as he felt he was likely to regarding the real state of things from the body language and general demeanour of his fellow meeters, he felt free to let his mind wander.

He glanced at Colonel Somjomion, who was the only woman at this meeting. She didn’t tend to say very much so you didn’t get too many opportunities to look straight at her. Not especially attractive (though he was, he’d been telling himself recently, starting to appreciate women rather than girls, and see past the more obvious sexual characteristics). There was, certainly, something especially exciting about the idea of undressing a woman in uniform, but he’d long since been there and done that and had the screenage to prove it. He thought of his latest lover instead.

Saluus thought of her last night, this morning, he thought of her the night they’d first met, first slept together. He quickly got an almost painfully hard erection. They’d sculpted him to have control over that at the Finishing Clinic as well, but he usually just let things rise and fall of their own accord down there, unless either the presence or the absence was going to be socially embarrassing. Anyway, he’d long since accepted that maybe it was a way of getting back at dear old dad, for forcing all this amendment stuff on him in the first place, however useful it had proved.

He still hated meetings.

Saluus supposed things had gone reasonably well for him in this one so far, considering. He’d had to agree to a full inquiry into the gas-capabling of the ships they’d modified as part of the general investigation into what had gone wrong, but - even allowing for the implied insult and the waste of time, just when they didn’t need it - that wasn’t too terrible. He’d managed to deflect most of the criticism by getting the Navarchy, the Guard and the Shrievalty Ocula representatives to compete for who was least to blame for the whole botched-raid thing.

That had worked well. Divide and conquer. That wasn’t difficult in the current system. In fact it was set up for it. He remembered asking his father about this back when Saluus was still being tutored at home. Why the confusion of agencies? Why the plethora (he’d just discovered the word, enjoyed using it) of military and security and other organisations within the Mercatoria? Just look at warships: there were the Guard - they had warships, the Navarchy Military - they had warships, the Ambient Squadrons - they had warships, the Summed Fleet - obviously they had warships, and then there were the Engineers, the Propylaea, the Omnocracy, the Cessorian Lustrals, the Shrievalty, the Shrievalty Ocula and even the Administrata. They all had their own ships, and each even had a few warships as well, for important escort duties. Why so many? Why divide your forces? The same went for security. Everybody seemed to have their own security service too. Wasn’t this wasteful?

‘Oh, definitely,’ his father had said. ‘But there’s opportunity in waste. And what some call waste others would call redundancy. But do you really want to know what it’s all about?’

Of course he did.

‘Divide and conquer. Even amongst your own. Competition. Also even amongst your own. In fact, especially amongst your own. Keep them all at each other’s throats, keep them all watching each other, keep them all wondering what the other lot might be up to. Make them compete for your attention and approval. Yes, it’s wasteful, looked at one way, but it’s wise, looked at another. This is how the Culmina keep everything under control, young man. This is how they rule us. And it appears to work, don’t you think? Hmm?’

Saluus hadn’t been sure at the time. The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way round).

But they really were facing a mortal and imminent threat here. Was it right to encourage division and enmity between people who and organisations which all needed to pull together if they were to defeat the threat they were faced with?

Oh, but fuck it. There would always be competition. Armed services were designed to protect turf, to engage with, to prevail against. Of course they’d compete with each other.

And, if that supposedly fucking enormous and ultimately powerful Mercatoria fleet wasn’t rushing towards them even now, would not some of the people in Ulubis - maybe quite a lot of the people in Ulubis - be contemplating not resisting the Beyonder-Starveling invasion at all? Might they not, instead, be thinking about how they could come to an accommodation with those threatening invasion?

Despite all the propaganda they’d been subject to, secret polls and secret police reports indicated that a lot of ordinary people felt they might not be any worse off under the Beyonder\ Starveling forces. Some people in power would feel the same way, especially if they were being told to sacrifice property and wealth and even risk their own lives in what might turn out to be a lost cause.

Even some of those round this impressively large round table in this impressively large and cool and subtly lit boardroom-resembling-meeting-chamber might have been tempted to think about ways to cope with the threatened invasion that didn’t involve resistance to the last ship and soldier, if it hadn’t been for the oncoming Mercatoria Fleet.

Saluus supposed they had to assume that the fleet really was on the way. There were other possibilities, and he’d thought them all through - and talked them all through with his own advisers and experts - but ultimately they had to be dismissed. Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money: all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic.

Never mind. After covering the latest intelligence and his own, shocking remissness in not making the refitted ships invulnerable to alien hyper-weapons, the meeting was finally getting round to something useful.

Back to grisly reality.

‘The main thing,’ Fleet Admiral Brimiaice told them (the quaup commander was keen on Main Things and In The Ends), ‘is that the Dwellers don’t seem to want to continue hostilities.’

After their initial, furious take-no-prisoners attack and no-quarter polishing-off of those who’d got away, the Dwellers had just as suddenly gone back to their usual show of Shucks-us? ineptitude, claiming it had all been a terrible mistake and could they help with the Third Fury rebuild?

‘And thank fuck for that!’ Guard-General Thovin said. ‘If they did, we’d have absolutely no chance. Facing the Beyonder-Starveling lot and the Dwellers as well! Holy shit! No chance. No chance at all!’ Thovin was a dumpy barrel of a man, dark and powerful-looking. His voice was suitably gruff.

‘Instead, only almost no chance,’ Shrievalty Colonel Somjomion said with a thin smile.

‘We have every chance, madam!’ Fleet Admiral Brimiaice thundered, banging the table with one tubular armling. His splendidly uniformed and decorated body, like a well-tailored airship the size of a small hippo, rose in the air. ‘We need no defeatist talk here, of all places!’

‘We have seventy fewer ships than we had,’ the Shrievalty colonel reminded them, without drama.

‘We still have the will,’ Brimiaice said. ‘That’s the important point. And we have plenty of ships. And more being built all the time.’ He looked at Saluus, who nodded and tried not to let his contempt show.

‘If they work,’ muttered Clerk-Regnant Voriel. The Cessorian seemed to have a personal thing against Saluus. He had no idea why.

‘Now, we’ve dealt with all that,’ First Secretary Heuypzlagger said quickly, glancing at Saluus. ‘If there are any problems with the ships’ construction, I’m sure the inquiry will show them up. We have to concentrate now on what else we can do.’

Saluus was getting bored. Now was as good a time as any. ‘An embassy,’ he said. He looked round them all. ‘That’s what I’d like to suggest. An embassy to the Dwellers of Nasqueron, to secure peace, make sure there are no more "misunderstandings" between us and them, attempt to involve them in the defence of Ulubis system and, if possible, acquire from them - with their consent, preferably - some of the extremely impressive weaponry they appear to possess, either in physical or theoretical form.’

‘Well,’ Heuypzlagger said, shaking his head. ‘Oh. Now our Acquisitariat friend is a diplomat,’ Voriel observed, expression poised between sneer and smile.

‘Needing yet
more
supposedly gas-capable ships to protect it, no doubt!’ Brimiaice protested.

‘Haven’t we got one already?’ Thovin asked.

Colonel Somjomion just looked at him, eyes narrowed.

The meeting only seemed to last for ever. Finally it was over. Saluus met up with his new lover that evening, at the water-column house on Murla, where he’d first really looked at her in the true light of day and decided, yes, he’d be interested. It had been at brunch, with his wife (and her new girlfriend) and Fass and the Segrette Twins, the day after their visit to the Narcateria in Boogeytown.

*

The RushWing
Sheumerith
rode high in the clear gas spaces between two high haze layers, flying into the vast unending jet stream of gas as though trying to keep pace with the stars which were sometimes visible, tiny and hard and remote, through the yellow haze and the thin quick amber clouds scudding eternally overhead.

The giant aircraft was a single slim scimitar of wing pocked with engine nacelles, articulated like a wave, ten kilometres across, a hundred metres long and ten metres high, a thin filament forever jetting like a swift weather front made visible across the waste of clouds beneath. Dwellers, hundreds of them, hung from it, each anchored like refuelled aircraft by a cable strung out from the wing’s trailing edge, riding in a little pocket of calm gas produced by simple shells of diamond, open to the rear and which, to the human eye, were shaped like a pair of giant cupped hands.

In a long-term drug-trance, downshifted in time so that the flight seemed twelve or sixty or more times quicker than it really was - the vast continents of clouds racing beneath like foam, the wash of stars wheeling madly above, wisp-banks whipping towards and past like rags in a hurricane - the wing-hung Dwellers watched the days and nights flicker around them like some stupendous strobe and felt the planet beneath them turn like something reeling out their lives.

Fassin Taak left the jetclipper and flew carefully in, matching velocities, then anchored the little gascraft, very slowly, to the underside of the diamond enclosure holding the Sage-youth Zosso, a slim, dark, rather battered-looking Dweller of two million years or so.

Fassin slow-timed. The wing, the clouds, the stars, all seemed to pick up speed, rolling racing forward like over-cranked screenage. The roar of engines and slipstreaming gas rose and rose in pitch, becoming a high, shrill, faraway keening, then vanishing from hearing altogether.