The Algebraist (72 page)
When he looked up, the stream was flowing through a large amphitheatre, and a great crowd of people were watching him intently.
At the transition point of the journey, where the
Protreptic
stopped accelerating, turned a half-somersault and pointed its engines at its destination to start deceleration, Quercer & Janath spent some time checking that Y’sul was still healing satisfactorily.
Fassin used the time to explore a little more of the Voehn ship, floating the arrowhead gascraft down the narrow circular access tubes, investigating crew quarters, storerooms and chambers. Camera remotes tracked his every move, the thoroughly internally surveillanced ship making it simple for Quercer & Janath to keep whatever fraction of an eye on him they thought appropriate.
He found what he thought was probably the commander’s cabin, a couple of bulkheads behind the command space. It was the most generously proportioned obviously personal space he’d encountered. It looked bare and alien. There was a slightly more comfortable version of one of the multi-spine cradle seats he was used to seeing throughout the ship by now, and some representations of coverings on certain walls, plus what might have been carpet designs on the floor. Only the designs existed, painted on or displayed by some thin-film technology - Fassin couldn’t tell. Similarly, there were no ornaments, just holos of ornaments. He’d heard most warships were like this; cutting down on weight and the possibilities of stuff flying about during hard manoeuvring by having the appearance of things rather than their physical presence.
He floated in front of one carpet design that looked like a piece of text, all small, curled glyphs in a network, but could find no record in the gascraft’s memories of such a language. He wondered what it said. He recorded the image. Quercer & Janath would probably wipe it when they went through the portal, but never mind.
The next time he met up with the ship, on the far side of the river there was a massive dark wall, rising sheer and jet from the waters, its summit crowned with crenellations and gun turrets. Further guns poked out of gun ports distributed in staggered lines over the whole top quarter of the huge wall, making it look like the side of some ancient sea-ship, only the biggest and most preposterously long one there had ever been, its vast hull diminishing into the distance. The guns were not static but moved in sequence, in waves of what appeared almost like locomotion, making the exposed barrels look oddly like ineffectual oars on some colossally mis-designed trireme or an impossible, upended millipede.
The ginger-haired ape sat nearby as usual. It had a new shield, round and highly polished. It sat looking at it and flicking imaginary specks from it. Sometimes it held it up to see it sparkle in the light, and sometimes it held it up so that it could look at itself in it.
‘Text?’ the elderly man asked. ‘On a floor display? No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any memory of that, not stored. If the ship still existed, if I still had access…’ He looked sad. Fassin glanced at the ginger-haired ape, but it looked away and started whistling, or at least trying to.
‘Maybe there’s some way I can patch through an image I have,’ Fassin said.
‘You have an image? You have been on the ship?’ The man looked surprised.
After some to-ing and fro-ing, Fassin having to jog back up the step and through the doorway back into normal reality to set things up, he was able to display the image he’d taken. The long-limbed ape held up his shield and the image appeared there.
‘Oh,
that?’
the man said. He stroked his short grey beard. ‘That’s something the Commander picked up a long time ago, in the days when he had command of a smaller ship. A translation into Ancient Sacred of something which I believe marks the end of an abomination, an AI.’
‘What does it say?’ Fassin asked.
‘It says, "I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter, ‘moon’ seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.
‘"If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one’s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon.
‘"Where a strange thing happened.
"‘For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from.
‘"This was, of course,--"
‘At which point it cuts off.’
Fassin thought. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘It was used by one of the anathematics that Commander Inialcah hunted down and killed as a kind of memory-death mantra, to remove any trace of what might have been in its memory. The AI concerned later turned out to have been one of those also seeking the so-called Transform. It was that pursuit which originally gave the commander an interest in the matter. The memory-death mantra he had translated and kept partly as a kind of talisman, though I believe he also always thought there might be some meaning to the specific piece the AI chose to overwrite its memories with which might prove useful if he could ever work it out, because AIs were known, as he said, for being too clever by half, and through their arrogance sometimes gave important information away. That was another reason for preserving it and keeping it constantly before him.’
In his dream, Fassin was standing with Saluus Kehar on a balcony over a volcanic caldera, full of red-hot bubbling lava. ‘We’re to gas-capable a whole load of stuff for--’ Sal was saying, when he paused, cleared his throat and waved one hand. ‘Heck,’ he continued, turning into a Dweller, but somehow with a human face and without getting any bigger. He floated out over the waves of lava. ‘Idiotic things, little Fassin. I took the original of the beast to a friend and fellow friend in the city of Direaliete. A friend and fellow friend.’
Fassin gazed at his own hands, to check that he was still himself.
When he looked up, Saluus had gone and the river he was standing in had temples on both sides, up steep flights of steps the height of prison walls.
‘Original of what?’ he heard himself ask.
The far side of the river showed a city from the age of waste, all medium-rise buildings, smoke and electric trains and multi-lane roads full of roaring cars and trucks. They had to raise their voices a little to make themselves heard over the noise. A sweet, oily burning smell wafted over the river towards them.
The ginger ape picked its gleaming teeth with a giant sword.
‘Another image?’ the man said. He looked fit in a lean way and was no longer young. His beard was mostly grey. ‘Let me see.’
Knowing what to do this time, Fassin showed the man the little image-leaf which depicted yellow sky and brown clouds.
‘Obviously the colour’s wrong,’ he told the man. ‘I couldn’t help noticing.’
‘Oh, yes, there’s an image there. I see it.’
‘I know, but what--?’
‘And some algebra, ciphered into the base code.’
At that, the ape’s long, curved sword came sweeping down and cut the man through, slicing him from neck to hip. The remains gushed down the steps to the river and wriggled away, all silver.
Fassin looked up at the great ape. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘it was just a--’
‘Who’s clever?’ the ape hissed, drawing back the terrible, glittering sword.
Fassin woke up shaking. He was in a coffin - he’d just hit his head on the inside of the lid. He tried to blink and couldn’t because something was in his eyes, surrounding them, surrounding every part of him, filling his mouth and nose and anus Shock-gel, gillfluid, the gascraft.
Fucking calm down,
he told himself.
How long you been a Seer again?
The
Protreptic,
the ex-Voehn craft en route for Nasqueron, Ulubis via the Direaliete system, under the command of the self-confessed twin AI Quercer & Janath, pirates and close-combat Voehn-wasting specialists.
They were back under moderate deceleration, on their way into the system and the hidden wormhole.
The details of the dream were starting to slip away from him, fish sine-waving goodbye through the water. And yet he felt he’d understood something. What had it been?
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.