The Algebraist (30 page)

Treat life like the game it was. This might be the truth behind the Truth, the religion Luseferous had been raised within as an obedient member of the Mercatoria: that nothing you did or seemed to do really mattered, because it was all - or might be all - a game, a simulation. It was all, in the end, just pretend. Even this Starveling cult he was titular head of was just something he’d made up because it sounded good. A variation of the Truth with added self-denial every now and again, the better to contemplate the gullibility of people. People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded.

So you seemed cruel. So people died and suffered and grew up hating you. So what? There was at least a chance that none of it was real.

And if it
was
all real, well, then life was struggle. It always had been and it always would be. You recognised this and lived, or fell for the lie that progress and society had made struggle unnecessary, and just existed, were exploited, became prey, mere fodder.

He wondered to what extent even the supposedly feral and lawless Beyonders understood this basic truth. They let women rise to the pinnacle of their military command structure; that didn’t bode particularly well. And the marshal didn’t seem to have realised that when he’d said he’d heard her request and would pay it all due heed, it meant nothing.

‘Well, thank you, Archimandrite,’ she said.

Still, he smiled. ‘You will stay? We shall have a banquet in your honour. We have had so little to celebrate out here, between the stars.’

‘An honour indeed, Archimandrite.’ The marshal gave that little head nod again.

And we shall try to pick each other’s brains over dinner,
he thought.
My, what highbrow fun. Give me a planet to plunder any day.

*

-
Do you have any idea where we are? the colonel signalled, using a spot-laser. They reckoned this was their most secure form of comms.

- Zone Zero, the equatorial, Fassin sent. - Somewhere ahead of the latest big storm, about ten or twenty kilo-klicks behind the Ear Festoon. I’m checking the latest update they loaded before the drop.

They were floating in a slow eddy around a gentle ammonia upwell the diameter of a small planet, about two hundred klicks down from the cloud tops. The temperature outside was relatively balmy by human standards. There were levels, places in almost all gas-giants where a human could, in theory, exist exposed to the elements without any protective clothing at all. Of course they would probably need to be prone and lying in a tub of shock-gel or something similar because weighing six times what their skeleton was used to coping with would make standing up or moving around problematic, their lungs would have to be full of gillfluid or the like, to let them breathe within a mix of gases which included oxygen only as a trace element, and also to let their ribs and chest muscles work under the pressure of that gravitational vice, plus they wouldn’t want to be exposed to a charged-particle shower, but all the same: by gas-giant great-outdoors standards, this was about as good as it humanly got.

Colonel Hatherence found it a bit hot, but then as an oerileithe she would be more at home closer to the cloud tops. She had already loudly pronounced her esuit undamaged and capable of protecting her anywhere from space-vacuum down to Nasqueron’s ten-kilo-klick level, where the pressure would be a million times what it was here and the temperature somewhat more than half what it was on the surface of the Ulubis star. Fassin chose not to join in a mine’s-better-than-yours competition; his own gascraft was also space-capable in an emergency but untested at those depths.

He’d tried contacting Apsile in the drop ship but had come up with static. The passive positioning grid cast by the equatorial satellites was functioning but both scale-degraded and patchy, indicating there were some satellites gone or not working.

Knowing where you were in Nasqueron or any gas-giant was important, but still less than half the story. There was a solid rocky core to the planet, a spherical mass of about ten Earth-sized planets buried under seventy thousand vertical kilometres of hydrogen, helium and ice, and there were purists who would call the transition region between that stony kernel and the high-temperature, high-pressure water ice above it the planet’s surface. But you had to be a real nit-picker even to pretend to take that definition seriously. Beyond the water ice - technically ice because it was effectively clamped solid by the colossal pressure, but at over twenty thousand degrees, confusingly hot for the human image of what ice was supposed to be like – came over forty thousand vertical kilometres of metallic hydrogen, then a deep transition layer to the ten-kilo-klick layer of molecular hydrogen which, if you were of an especially imaginative turn of mind, you might term a sea.

Above that, in the relatively thin - at a mere few thousand kilometres - but still vastly complicated layers reaching up towards space, were the regions where the Dwellers lived, in the contra-rotating belts and zones of rapidly spinning gases which - dotted with storms great and small, spattered with eddies, embellished with festoons, bars, rods, streaks, veils, columns, clumps, hollows, whirls, vortices, plume-heads, shear fronts and subduction flurries - girdled the planet. Where the Dwellers lived, where everything happened, there was no solid surface, and no features at all which lasted more than a few thousand years save for the bands of gas forever charging past each other, great spinning wheels of atmosphere whirling like the barely meshed cogs in some demented gearbox a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across.

The convention was that the equatorial satellites followed the averaged-out progress of the broad equatorial zone, establishing a sort of stationary parameter-set from which everything else could be worked out relatively. But it was still confusing. Nothing was fixed. The zones and belts were relatively stable, but they shot past each other at combined speeds of what humans were used to thinking of as the speed of sound, and the margins between them changed all the time, torn by furiously curling eddies writhing this way and that, or thrown out, compressed and disturbed by giant storms like the Great Red Spot of the Solar System’s Jupiter, riding between a zone travelling one way and a belt going the other like a vast squashed whirlpool caught in some mad clash of violently opposed currents, developing, raging and slowly dissipating over the centuries that humanity had been able to watch it. In a gas-giant, everything either evolved, revolved or just plain came and went, and the whole human mindset of surfaces, territory, land, sea and air was thrown into confusion.

Add the effects of a vastly powerful magnetic field, swathes of intense radiation and the sheer scale of the environment - you could drop the whole of a planet the size of Earth or Sepekte into a decent-sized gas-giant storm - and the human brain was left with a lot to cope with.

And all this before one took into account the - to be generous - playful attitude which the Dwellers themselves so often exhibited to general planetary orientation and the help, or otherwise, conventionally seen as being fit and proper to be extended to directionally challenged alien visitors.

- I thought we’d be in the midst of them, the colonel sent.

- Dwellers? Fassin asked, studying the complex schematic of who and what might be where at the moment.

- Yes, I imagined we would find ourselves in one of their cities.

They both looked around at the vast haze of slowly swirling gas, extending - depending on which frequency or sense one chose to experience it in - a few metres or a few hundred kilometres away on every side. It felt very still, even though they were part of the equatorial zone and so being spun around the planet at over a hundred metres a second, while swirling slowly around the upwelling and rising gradually with it too.

Fassin felt himself smiling in his wrapping of shock-gel.

- Well, there’s a lot of Dwellers, but it’s a big planet.

It seemed odd to be explaining this to a creature whose kind had evolved in planets like this and who surely ought to be familiar with the scale of a gas-giant, but then oerileithe, in Fassin’s admittedly limited experience of them, often did display a kind of half-resentful awe towards Dwellers, entirely consistent with a belief that the instant you dropped beneath the cloud tops you’d find yourself surrounded by massed ranks of magisterial Dwellers and their astoundingly awesome structures (a misapprehension it was hard to imagine any Dweller even considering correcting). The oerileithe were an ancient people by human standards and by those of the vast majority of species in the developed galaxy, but - with a civilisation going back about eight hundred thousand years - they were mere mayflies by Dweller standards.

A thought occurred to Fassin. - You ever been in a Dweller planet before, colonel?

- Indeed not. A privilege denied until now. Hatherence made a show of looking about. - Not unlike home, really.

Another thought occurred. - You
did
receive clearance? Didn’t you, colonel?

- Clearance, Seer Taak?

- To come down. To enter Nasq.

- Ah, the colonel sent. - Not as such, I do confess. It was thought that I would be remote delving with you and your colleagues, from the Shared Facility on the Third Fury moon. Braam Ganscerel himself took the time to assure me of this personally. No objection was raised regarding such a presence. I believe that permission was in the process of being sought for me to accompany you physically into the atmosphere if that became necessary - as indeed it now has - however, the last that I heard in that regard indicated that the relevant clearances had yet to materialise. Why? Do you envisage there being a problem?

Oh, shit.

- The Dwellers, Fassin told her, - can be… pernickety about that sort of thing.
Pernickety,
he thought. They were liable to declare the colonel an honorary child, give her a half-hour start and set off to
hunt
her. - They take their privacy quite seriously. Unauthorised entries are severely discouraged.

- Well, I’m aware of that.

- You are? Good.

- I shall throw myself upon their mercy.

- Right. I see.

You are either quite brave and possessed of a decent sense of humour,
Fassin thought,
or you really should have done more homework.

- So, Seer Fassin Taak, in which direction ought we to proceed?

- Should be a CloudTunnel about four hundred klicks… that way, Fassin sent, turning the gascraft to point more or less south and slightly down. - Unless it’s moved, obviously.

- Shall we? the colonel said, drifting in that direction.

- Going to ping one of our sats, let them know we’re alive, Fassin told her.

- This is wise?

Was it wise?
Fassin wondered. There had been some sort of attack on the Seer infrastructure around Nasqueron, but that didn’t mean the whole near-planet environment had been taken over. On the other hand…

- How fast can that esuit go? he asked the colonel.

- At this density, about four hundred metres per second. About half that, on sustained cruise.

Fassin’s arrowcraft could just about keep pace with that. Disappointing. He was still hoping to give the colonel the slip at some point. It looked like he wasn’t going to be able to just outrun her.

- Ping sent, he told Hatherence. - Let’s go.

They went, quickly. They’d got about a hundred metres away when a flash of violet light ripped the cloud apart behind them and a stark, short-lived beam-cluster splayed through the volume of gas they’d been floating within a few seconds earlier. Further beams radiated out from the initial target point, pulsing through the atmosphere in slowly spreading semi-random stabs. One flicked into existence about fifty metres from them, booming and crackling. All the rest were much further away and after a minute or so they ceased altogether.

- Somebody would seem to be ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak, the colonel sent as they flew through the gas.

- So it would appear.

The flash and EMP came a couple of minutes after that. A low, rumbling concussion caught up with them some time later.

- Was that a
nuke?
Fassin sent. His instruments seemed to leave no other interpretation, but he still found it hard to believe.

- I am unaware of any phenomenon able to mimic one so convincingly.

- Fucking hell.

- I float corrected. Somebody would seem to be
extremely
ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak.

- The Dwellers are
not
going to be happy, he told Hatherence. - Only they’re allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere, he explained. - And it isn’t even fireworks season.

They found the CloudTunnel about where Fassin had thought it ought to be, only a hundred kilometres out laterally and two kilometres further down: bang on by Nasqueron standards. The CloudTunnel was a bundle of a dozen or so carbon-carbon tubes like some vast, barely braided cable-cluster floating in the midst of an unending cloudscape of gently billowing yellow, orange and ochre. The CloudTunnel’s two main tubes were about sixty metres in diameter, the smallest - basically comms and telemetry wave guides - less than half a metre. The whole cluster had looked thread-thin when they’d first caught sight of it, tens of kilometres away, but up close it looked like a hawser fit to tether a moon. A great, deep rushing sound rumbled from inside the two main pipes.