The Algebraist (33 page)

‘You are pregnant!’ Y’sul exclaimed. ‘How delightful!’

‘So people keep telling me,’ the Administrator said sourly. Dwellers were, for want of a better term, male for over ninety-nine per cent of their lives, only changing to the female form to become pregnant and give birth. Becoming female and giving birth was regarded as a social duty; the fact that the obligation was more honoured than not made it unique in Dweller mores. It contributed mightily to one’s kudos tally and anyway had a sort of sentimental attraction for all but the most determinedly misanthropic members of the species (statistically, about forty-three per cent). Still, it was undeniably a burden, and very few Dwellers went through the experience without complaining mightily about it.

‘I myself have thought of becoming female, oh, several times!’ Y’sul said.

‘Well, it’s overrated,’ the City Administrator told him. ‘And particularly burdensome when one had an invitation to the forthcoming war that one is now apparently morally obliged to turn down. Please; take a dent.’

They floated to a series of hollows in the audience area and rested gently within them.

‘Why, I too hope to be going to the war!’ Y’sul said brightly. ‘Well, somewhere very near it, at least. I have only just now returned from my tailor’s after being measured for the most lately fashionable conflict attire.’

‘Oh, really?’ the Administrator said. ‘Who’s your tailor? Mine just left for the war.’

‘Not Fuerliote?’ Y’sul exclaimed.

‘The same!’

‘He was mine also!’

‘Just the best.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘No, I had to go to Deystelmin.’

‘Is he any good?’

‘Weeeelll.’ Y’sul waggled his whole double-discus. ‘One lives in hope. Good mirror-side manner, as it were, but will it translate into a flattering cut? That’s the question one has to ask oneself.’

‘I know,’ agreed the Administrator. ‘And off to become a junior officer on a Dreadnought!’

‘Not even that! A rating!’

‘No!’

‘Yes!’

‘Very lowly, for someone so distinguished!’

‘I know, but a smart move. Getting in as a rating before the recruitment window even properly opens makes sense. The smoking-uniform effect.’

‘Ah! Of course!’

Fassin tried making a throat-clearing noise in the midst of all this, but to no effect.

- The smoking-uniform effect? The colonel light-whispered to him.

- Dead men’s shoes, Fassin explained. - They only promote from within once hostilities have begun. If he’s lucky this tailor’s Dreadnought will suffer heavy damage and lose a few officers and he’ll end up an officer after all. If he’s
really
lucky he could rise to admiral.

Hatherence thought about this. - Would a tailor, however distinguished, necessarily make a good admiral?

- Probably no worse than the one he’d be replacing.

The problem was that to the Dwellers all professions were in effect hobbies, all posts and positions sinecures. This tailor that Y’sul and the City Administrator were babbling on about would have had no real need to be a tailor, he was just somebody who’d found he possessed an aptitude for the pastime (or, more likely, for the gossiping and fussing generally associated with it). He would take on clients to increase his kudos, the level of which would increase proportionally the more powerful were the people he tailored for, so that somebody in a position of civil power would constitute a favoured client, even if that position of power had come about through a lottery, some arcanely complicated rota system or plain old coercive voting - jobs like that of City Administrator were subject to all those regimes and more, depending on the band or zone concerned, or just which city was involved. The City Administrator, in return, would be able to drop casually into just the right conversations the fact she had such a well-known, high-kudos tailor. Obviously Y’sul had had sufficient kudos of his own to be able to engage the services of this alpha-outfitter too. People further down the pecking order would have employed less well-connected tailors, or just got their clothes from Common, which was Dweller for, in this particular case, off-the-peg, and in general just meant mass-produced, kudos-free, available-as-a-matter-of-right-just-because-you’re-a-Dweller… well, pretty much anything, up to and including spaceships.

Though having seen round a few Dweller spaceships, Fassin thought the stack-’em-high-and-give-them-away-free approach had its limitations.

‘Indeed,’ Y’sul was saying. ‘My own bid for JO status has been languishing for centuries and wasn’t even mentioned this time round. Entering as a rating seems demeaning, but it could pay off big if there are casualties.’

‘Of course, of course,’ the Administrator said, then fastened her gaze on the colonel. ‘What’s this?’

‘An oerileithe, a little dweller,’ Y’sul said, with what sounded like pride.

‘Gracious! Not a child?’

‘Or food. I asked.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ the colonel said with as much dignity as she could muster. An oerileithe, it appeared, attracted even less respect amongst Dwellers than Fassin - and, he suspected, the colonel herself - had expected. The oerileithe had evolved relatively recently, quite independently of the vast, unutterably ancient mainstream of galactic Dwellerdom and as such were seen by their more venerable co-gas-giant-inhabitants as something between an annoying collective loose end and a bunch of impudent, planet-usurping interlopers.

‘And this must be the Slow Seer.’ The Administrator looked briefly at Fassin’s gascraft before returning her gaze to Y’sul. ‘Do we need to talk slowly for it?’

‘No, Administrator,’ Fassin said before Y’sul could reply. ‘I am running on your timescale at the moment.’

‘How fortunate!’ She flicked to one side and stabbed at a screen remote, her frontal radius edge lit up by the holo’s glow.

‘Hmm. I see. So all the mayhem of the last day or two is your fault, then?’

‘Has there been much mayhem, ma’am?’

‘Well, the partial destruction of a close-orbit moon would fit most people’s definition of mayhem,’ the Administrator said pleasantly. ‘An attractive feature in the sky whenever one ventured towards the cloud tops. Been there millions of years, slagged within a few per cent of breaking up completely, a ring of debris scattered round its orbit, that orbit itself changed significantly, causing everything else up there to have to shuffle round to accommodate the alteration, a small bombardment of debris across three bands, some chunks narrowly missing several items of infrastructure with more than sentimental value and others setting off automatic planetary-defence laser batteries, a cascade of satellite destruction that has yet to be put entirely right. Oh, and an unauthorised fusion explosion. Middle of nowhere, granted, but still. None of this, happily, within my jurisdiction, but trouble does appear to be rather following you around, human Taak, and here you are in my city.’ The Administrator rolled fractionally towards Fassin’s gascraft. ‘Thinking of staying long?’

‘Well--’ Fassin began.

‘The human is under my protection, Administrator!’ Y’sul interrupted. ‘I vouch for it entirely and will continue to accept all kudos consequences regarding its actions. I shall take all steps necessary to safeguard it from whatever hostile forces may wish it ill. May I count on your support for the expedition the human insists on making into the war zone?’

‘Given,’ the Administrator said.

‘How splendid! We can be ready to leave within a couple of days. Especially if the tailor Deystelmin is persuaded to prioritise my combat-clothing order.’

‘I’ll have a word.’

‘Too kind! I swear I shall never nominate you for a coercive vote again!’

‘My gratitude knows no bounds.’

If Dwellers could grit their teeth, Fassin thought, the Administrator’s words would have been spoken through them. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Yes, human Taak?’

‘Have you any word on events elsewhere in the system?’

‘As I say, the various rings and moons are shifting fractionally in their orbits to accommodate--’

‘I think he means the stellar system, not that of Nasqueron,’ Colonel Hatherence said.

The two Dwellers turned to look at her. Dwellers had sensing bands all the way round their outer rims, plus eye bubbles low on their outer hubs. They were not known as the best glarers in the galaxy but they were always willing to give it their best shot. To a Dweller, their own planet was pretty much everything. Most gas-giants had many more moons than the average stellar system possessed planets, and most radiated a lot more energy than they received from the star they orbited, their heat-transfer systems, weather and ecology arising largely from processes internal to the planet itself, not dependent on sunlight. Their inhabitants had to pay close attention to the skies, basically to watch out for incoming, but even that consideration led to an obviously gas-giant-centred way of thinking. The local star and the rest of its planetary system was of relatively little interest to the average Dweller.

‘That is not quite what I meant,’ Fassin told them quickly. ‘The moon ‘glantine, for example; has it been harmed?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ the Administrator said, with another stern look at Hatherence.

‘And the military ships that were in orbit around Third Fury?’ the colonel asked.

(- Shh! Fassin signalled Hatherence.

- No! she sent back.)

‘What ships?’ the Administrator said, apparently mystified.

‘How about the planet Sepekte?’ Fassin said.

‘I have no idea,’ the Administrator told him. She fixed her gaze on Fassin. ‘Is this why you wished to see me? To ask after the welfare of moons and distant planets?’

‘No, ma’am. The reason that I wanted to see you is that I am worried that there may be a threat to Nasqueron.’

‘You are?’ blurted Y’sul.

‘Really?’ the Administrator said with a sigh.

Even Hatherence was turned to look at him.

‘There is a war beginning amongst the Quick, ma’am,’ Fassin told the Administrator. ‘It is going to come to Ulubis and it is not impossible that some of the forces taking part may wish to involve Nasqueron and its Dwellers in that war in some way.’

The Administrator rolled fractionally back and sucked her outer trim-frill in, the Dweller equivalent of a frown.

(- Major? the colonel sent. - You said nothing of this. What do you base this on? Is there something you’re not telling me?

- A hunch. Just trying to get their attention. And I should point out that it’s considered impolite to signal-whisper like this.)

The Administrator continued to look at Fassin for a moment, then turned to Y’sul. ‘Is this human normally mad?’

Y’sul made a sucking sound. ‘Down to definitions.’

‘Nasqueron might be vulnerable to a further bombardment,’ Fassin persisted. ‘Even to some sort of raid.’

‘Ha!’ Y’sul laughed.

‘We are not defenceless, human Taak!’ the Administrator said loudly.

No, but your spaceships are leaky antiques and your planetary defences are set up for dumb rocks,
Fassin thought wearily.
You talk a good defence, but if the Epiphany 5 invaders decide to attack, or the Mercatoria decides I’m dead and they plump for a more obvious way to get hold of whatever might be in Valseir’s library, you won’t be able to do much to stop them. Going on what I’ve seen, a single Navarchy Military destroyer could lay waste to your whole planet, over time.

‘Of course not,’ he agreed. ‘But I would ask you to pass this information on to the relevant authorities. You will be still better defended if you are prepared.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ the Administrator told him levelly.

Oh shit,
Fassin thought.
You’re going to do fuck all. You aren’t going to bother telling anybody.

Y’sul was looking up. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

Fassin experienced a moment of horror. He looked up too. A stubby vaned cylinder a couple of metres high was hovering vertically above them in the darkness outside the ceiling’s still-open diamond petals. It was pointing something long and dark at them.

The Administrator groaned. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That is the press.’

‘Sholish! My
good
cuirass, you witless rind-nibbling waste of gas!’

Y’sul threw a piece of armour across the room at his servant.

The camo-painted carbon plate spun through the gas, changing colours rapidly as it tried to adapt, narrowly missed several other Dwellers - the large room was crowded and people had to duck, bob or dodge - just avoided Sholish and embedded itself in a FloatTree panel, producing a distinct thunk. Before it had much of a chance to blend in, Sholish tugged it out of the wall and disappeared into a side chamber, muttering.

‘Excuse me,’ Colonel Hatherence said sharply to a Dweller who’d just bumped into her in the general shuffling that had spread through the room to give the thrown piece of armour a clear trajectory.

‘Excused!’ the Dweller said, then continued his conversation with another of Y’sul’s relations.