The Algebraist (76 page)

Quercer & Janath seemed to be surrounded by well-wishers wanting to know more about the Voehn craft. The truetwin Dweller had seen Fassin looking at them through the crowd, and waved. Fassin had waved back.

He’d watched Y’sul being placed into the ambulance skiff and tried to work out what he knew and didn’t know, what he could and could not remember. He could have gone with Y’sul in the ambulance, he supposed, but he felt a need to get away for a while, to be alone for a time.

He’d come up here to see the stars, and wait, and think, and maybe do a bit of mathematical analysis.

He took the little image-leaf out of its locker in the gascraft’s flank. He looked at it. Since whatever had happened aboard the
Protreptic,
the little gascraft couldn’t see as well as it used to, but its close-up detail vision was good enough on one side for the image of blue sky and white clouds to be perfectly clear. He zoomed in, rechecking the image he had stored in the… The image wasn’t there in the craft’s memories.

That was strange. He had the feeling that he had recorded the image and already half-deciphered something that was hidden inside it. He was sure he had. It had seemed really important at the time, too, he was certain.

Fassin tried really hard to think back to what had occurred after they were attacked by the Voehn ship. He knew they’d been captured and interrogated and the Voehn had messed around with his brain and with the gascraft’s biomind and memories. Then a ship that the Ythyn had sent to rescue them had attacked the Voehn ship and - somehow - he and Y’sul and the truetwin had overpowered the surviving Voehn crew. They’d overpowered Voehn?

How had that happened? The Ythyn ship had been able to distract the Voehn, and the
Velpin
had played a part too, some sort of anti-piracy automatics kicking in and helping to take on the Voehn. Quercer & Janath had been distinctly cagey about what sort of techniques their old ship had used against the Voehn. Fassin had no idea. Maybe it had happened the way they said, maybe not. Maybe the
Velpin
had had an AI aboard and that had wasted the Voehn, only Quercer & Janath didn’t want people to know about it. They could have told him practically anything and he’d have believed them, the Voehn had messed with his memories so badly.

He remembered sitting on the steps of a temple looking out over a wide, slow-moving river, talking to an old… man? An old Dweller? This was quite a vivid image, rather than a linear strand of memory. That had to have happened in some form of VR, didn’t it? Maybe that old man had been the representation of the
Velpin’s
AI. Perhaps that was who or what he had been talking to, or at least met.

He tried to concentrate, and looked down at the image-leaf again. He’d been given this by Valseir. Was that right? It had been a sort of calling card, a letter of introduction, leading him to… He seemed to feel it had led him to Valseir, but that didn’t make sense.

No, wait: the house in the depths, and the old wandering Dweller.
He’d
given him the image-leaf. And it had led him, somehow, to Valseir. But there was something else. He’d discovered something else. He’d woken up thinking about this, before the wormhole transition. There was something hidden in the image-leaf. A message, a code.

Fassin looked round the empty platform. There was nobody else here. He let the little gascraft’s image processors drink in the view shown on the image-leaf in as much detail as it could offer. Various routines started running. In a few minutes, his gaze was torn away from the sparse but familiar-looking starscape above. He looked at the results.

There had been something in there.

It looked like alien algebra.

There was about a page and a half of it. It looked like one long equation, or maybe three or four shorter ones.

He felt very excited. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he had an idea that this linked into the Dweller List. The details evaded him, but he knew that he’d been looking for the Transform that was supposed to open up the famous List, and maybe - just possibly - this piece of alien mathematics had something to do with it. Maybe what he had before him here
was
the Transform, though that was a little difficult to believe.

Fassin tried to figure out what the symbols in front of him might mean, but couldn’t even get started. The gascraft’s comprehensively mucked-around memories might once have contained something which would have sent him in the right direction, but they didn’t any more.

He linked with the city’s data nets, synched with an equatorial university library and looked up a data reservoir specialising in alien mathematics. He chose a couple of symbols at random and pinged them to the database. It answered immediately, with references.

What he was looking at was expressed in Translatory V, a pan-species, universal notation of just under two billion years age, devised by the long-extinct Wopuld from earlier Dweller elements. He downloaded a full translation suite.

He had to stop, and look out over the cloud tops. He was experiencing a strange mix of emotions.

This might be the thing he’d been sent to look for, the very object of his mission. Their mission, rather; he ought not to forget Colonel Hatherence. This could well be what he’d been looking for, all that time. And yet, if the Mercatoria, or at least the Ulubine part of it, had hoped that this would save them, then it hadn’t. He’d got back too late, and the invasion had already happened. It was all over.

And there was so much he seemed to have forgotten! What had the Voehn
done
to him? Y’sul had been badly injured but apart from the effects of his healing coma he seemed - and professed himself to be - fine, mentally. Quercer & Janath didn’t seem to have suffered at all. Maybe that was just luck, or something to do with being a truetwin - he didn’t know.

Still, there was this to be done, this deciphering. It might still lead to something momentous. The invasion might have already happened but the counter-attack was still to take place, and anyway, there was his own take on the rights and wrongs of what was going on. He would still rather the Beyonders had the information, if there was any useful information to be had, in the equation.

Something glinted in space just over the horizon to the west, way out across the cloud tops. A ship, perhaps.

Fassin returned his attention to the equation and the alien translation suite. He applied one to the other. In the virtual space which the gascraft’s crippled biomind projected into his own mind, the image split and a copy of the equation appeared alongside the original. He watched the symbols shuffle and change in the copy, turning into Dweller standard notation. The symbols on both copies of the equation flickered and highlighted, turned different colours and seemed to swell out and then lapse back in again amongst the rest as the equation worked itself out.

It was truly an equation, too. He’d had some vague idea thanks to something that somebody had said that it might be a frequency and signal or something, but it wasn’t that. Or if it was it was very oddly disguised.

The last few terms flicked and flashed on both sides of the split image. The answer appeared right at the end, blinking slowly.

It was a zero.

He stared at it, at them.

A zero in Dweller standard notation was a dot with a short line under it. In Translatory V, it was a diagonal slash.

A dot with a short line under it winked at him from the copy of the equation. A diagonal slash lay at the end of the original, also slowly flashing.

He tried again. Same result.

He rechecked the image, pulled the hidden code out of it again, in case the processor systems had made a mistake the first time.

There had been no mistake. The equation he came up with the second time was the same as the first. He ran that one as well, anyway.

Zero.

Fassin laughed. He could feel himself inside the shock-gel nested within the little arrowhead craft, chest and belly shaking. He had a sudden, vivid image of standing on the rocky shore of a planet, waiting for something. He stopped laughing.

Zero.

So the final answer was nothing. He’d been sent to the far side of the galaxy, had the answer with him all the time anyway, and what it was, was ‘Fuck all’. But in maths.

He started laughing again.

Ah well.

Another glint, out over the cloud tops again, nearly directly north, and high. A scatter of tiny lights lit up the sky just beneath whatever it was that had just reflected the light. A hint of violet. Then white.

He watched the same region of space for a few moments, looking for more. Whatever it was, it had to be fairly far away. If it was the same thing that had glinted earlier near the horizon then it was something high over the equatorial zone, tens of kilo-klicks out.

Zero. Well, that was illuminating. Fassin wondered if there really was a true answer somewhere, if what he’d found - what Valseir had stumbled onto and then what Fassin had unknowingly brought out with him after his long-ago delve - was part of a whole suite of decoy answers. Was there just this one, or were there more? Was the myth of the Dweller List’s famous Transform footnoted with hundreds of false answers?

Well, if it was, he wasn’t going to go looking for them. He’d done his bit. He’d even, in a sense, accomplished his mission, when he’d thought it was never going to happen. He was too late, and the result was a nonsense, a joke, almost an insult, but - by any given god you cared to name - he’d done it.

He ought to start thinking about how he was going to get off the planet, or at least get the information out there, just for form’s sake. Share the indifferent news.

Another couple of flashes from space, near where the first crop had shone. One tiny blink, one longer flare. A few moments later what looked like a ship’s drive lit up and floated away, gathering speed quickly.

Fassin looked for evidence of any Shared Facility satellites, or indeed any Mercatorial hardware anywhere around Nasqueron. There didn’t seem to be anything. He’d told Aun Liss he’d try to ping a position between two Seer satellites, EQ4 and EQ5, but the satellites weren’t there any more. He wondered if he could work out where they would have been and so where the microsat that he’d suggested the Beyonders position between the two might be. He looked inside the gascraft’s memory, trying to find the sat schedules, dug them out, then fed in the local time and his current location.

A position blinked on his field of vision, away across the cloud tops, a little off due north, some few kilo-klicks beneath where the recent activity had been. In line of sight now. He decided to treat this piece of luck as a good omen, and sent a signal saying he was back, so that, if nothing else, he’d have done what he’d said he would do. He waited a while but there was no acknowledgement, let alone a reply. He hadn’t really expected one.

He wondered what was left of the Shrievalty Ocula, and whether he should even try to report to it. He needed to do some research into exactly how much had changed since the invasion, see whether he was listed as dead, and whether he was being looked for or not. Maybe people had forgotten about him in all the excitement.

Fassin laughed again. Oh, if only.

The whole E-5 Discon invasion, so they’d been told, was happening quite specifically because of the List and the Transform. If that was even partly, even slightly true, and his mission hadn’t been hidden from the invaders, then they probably would be looking for him, and quite hard, too, given that they might not have much time before the Summed Fleet crashed the party.

In a way the zero-result equation was a relief. The information he’d brought back was such that he didn’t mind sharing it with anybody and everybody. If it had truly told the location of the wormhole portals it would have been the most crushingly awful burden he could have borne, an infinitely precious and probably infinitely deadly possession. He should be glad it was a joke. If it had been the useful truth, if it had been what they had all hoped it was going to be, then almost certainly no matter who he chose to tell would first torture him or at the very least tear his mind apart to make sure he was telling the truth, and then kill him to make sure he couldn’t tell anybody else. He’d kind of hoped that the Beyonders might be more humane than that, but it was a big risk to take.

He’d be better just broadcasting the result, then disappearing if he could. Maybe the Dwellers would let him stay.

Valseir. If nothing else, he ought to let his Dweller friend know that the information they’d all been so concerned about in fact amounted to nothing more than a piddling little zero. Then there was the matter of telling Valseir that for this nothing, his friend and colleague Leisicrofe had killed himself. Not all good news he’d arrive bearing, then.

Fassin looked up the StormSailing news service. There were fewer regattas than usual, thanks to all the interest in the war, and a lot of sailors who’d normally be on the GasClippers and StormJammers would be required to crew the Dreadnoughts and other combat craft, but there were still a dozen meetings going on at any one time throughout the planet. If he was going to go looking for Valseir at regattas, he might have a long search.

He thought about contacting the City Administrator to arrange for transport - Y’sul would most likely be transferred back home to Hauskip city in a day or two, and Fassin could probably just accompany the injured Dweller back there - then he wondered if he ought to be more careful.