The Algebraist (41 page)

Fassin looked at her. ‘He’d probably have got round to one of those after he’d done what he considered the proper cataloguing - getting everything down in some non-volatile form that can be read without intervening machinery.’

‘Our Dweller friends do seem to be remarkably purist about such things.’

‘When you live as long as they do, future-proofing becomes an obsession.’

‘Perhaps that is their curse. The Quick must endure the frustration of living in a universe with what seems like an annoyingly slow speed limit and the Slow must suffer the frenetic pace of change around them, resulting in a sort of exaggerated entropy.’

Fassin had been floating slowly closer to Hatherence. He tipped to make it clear that he was looking at her as he came to a stop a couple of metres from her. The glowing biostrips on the shelves painted soft lime stripes across the little gascraft. ‘You all right in there, colonel?’ he asked. ‘I realise it’s very hot and pressured down here.’ - Colonel, do you think we are wasting our time here?

‘I am fine. Yourself?’ - Very hard to say. There is so much still here, so much to be looked at.

‘Also fine. Feeling very rested.’ - That’s my point. We could be made to waste a lot of time here, looking for something that has already been removed.

‘I understand slow-time will have that effect.’ - That is a thought. I had the odd impression, from dust marks and so on, understand, that many of the shelves have recently been filled, or refilled. And many of the works seem to make no sense given what I’ve understood of Valseir’s subjects of study. Seemed most strange. Though, if all this is a sort of slow-trap for you and me, then that begins to make sense. But what else can we do? Where else is there to go?

‘I’ll have to talk to the Sage again,’ Fassin said. ‘There are many things I’d like to ask him.’ - Whereas in fact I’ll do everything I can to avoid talking to the old bore again. We have to get word out to any legitimate scholars who did take works from here, see if any of them have the catalogues, or anything else. There are two dozen separate libraries here; even if they’re only half-full we could be searching them for decades.

‘He is a most interesting and wise character.’ - Many tens of millions of works, and if most are unsorted, all are. I’ll signal to the
Poaflias,
have them put out word to the relevant scholars. Who might be trying to put obstacles in our way so?

‘Indeed he is.’ - I don’t know.

‘Well, I think I shall continue to search the shelves for a while. Will you join me?’ - Will you?

‘Why not?’

They drifted to different but nearby stacks, snicked holocrystal books out of their motion-proof shelves, and read.

‘His study?’ Nuern asked. A fringe flick indicated a glance at Livilido. They were afloat at table. The two Primes had invited Fassin and Hatherence to a semi-formal dinner in the house’s ovaloid dining room, a great, dim, echoing space strung vertically with enormous sets of carbon ropes, all splayed, separated into smaller and smaller cords and fibres and threads and filaments and then each thin strand minutely and multiply knotted. It was like being inside some colossal, frayed net.

Jundriance was still deep in slow-time and would not be joining them. Special food had been prepared that was suitable for the colonel. She ingested it via a sort of gaslock on the side of her esuit. Fassin, contained and sustained within the arrow-craft, was really only here to watch.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Where do you think it might be?’

‘I thought that Library One was his study,’ Nuern said, selecting a helping of something glowing dull blue from the central carousel, and then spinning the serving dish slowly towards his dining companions.

‘Me too,’ Livilido said. He looked at Fassin. ‘Why, was there another one? Has a bit dropped off the place?’

Fassin had taken a look round all the library spheres. Library One had always been Valseir’s formal study, where he received fellow scholars and other people, but it hadn’t been his
real
study, his den, his private space. Very few people were allowed in there. Fassin had felt flattered in the extreme to be invited to enter the nestlike nook that Valseir had made for himself inside the stretch of disused CloudTunnel tube which the rest of the house had been anchored to the last time Fassin had been here, centuries earlier. Library One still looked as it always had, minus a few thousand book-crystals and a big cylindrical low-temperature storage device in which Valseir had kept paper and plastic books. It certainly didn’t look as though the room had become Valseir’s proper study in the interim. And now it appeared as though these people didn’t even know he’d had a more private den in the first place.

‘I thought he had another study,’ Fassin said. ‘Didn’t he keep a house in… what city was it? Guldrenk?’

‘Ah! Of course,’ Nuern said. ‘That would be it.’

- Colonel, these guys know nothing.

- I had been coming to the same conclusion.

Library Twenty-One (Cincturia \ Clouders \ Miscellania) had a conceit, a Dweller equivalent of a door made from a bookcase. Valseir had shown it to Fassin after the human had stayed with him for an extended period after their first meeting. It led, inward at first, towards the centre of the cluster of library spheres, through a short passage to a gap between two more of the outer spheres, then into the open gas. The joke - a hidden door, a secret passage - was that the various Cincturia were the outsiders of the galactic community, and the particular bookcase hiding the secret passage was categorised ‘Escapees’.

After their meal, Fassin gave the impression of shutting himself away in the library for some late-night shelf-scanning. Instead he screened up the house’s system statements and looked back to just after the time of Valseir’s yachting accident and alleged death. He did something unusual, something barely legal by Mercatorial standards and usually pointless on Nasqueron; he speeded up, letting the gascraft’s legal-max computers and his own subtly altered nervous system rev to their combined data-processing limit. It still took nearly half an hour, but he found what he was looking for: the point, a dozen days after Valseir’s accident, when the house recorded a rerouting of power and ventilation plumbing. Its altimeter had registered a wobble, too - a brief blip upwards, then the start of the long, slow descent that was continuing even now.

Then Fassin had to work out where the CloudTunnel segment might be now. It would be beyond the start of the shear zone, past where the whole atmospheric band moved as a single vast mass, down into the semi-liquid Depths. These moved much more slowly than the gas above, the transition levels great turbidly elastic seas being dragged along as though reluctantly after the jet-stream whirl of atmosphere above.

It was all dead reckoning. By the Dweller way of judging such things, the atmosphere was static and the Depths - not to mention the remainder of Ulubis system, the stars and indeed the rest of the universe - moved. With only notionally fixed reference points, finding anything in the Depths was notoriously difficult. After two hundred years the section of CloudTunnel could be anywhere; it might have sunk beyond feasible reach, been broken up or even drifted to the Zone edge and been pulled into another Belt entirely, either north or south. The only thing working in Fassin’s favour was that the length of tube he was looking for was relatively large. Completely losing something forty-plus metres in diameter and eighty klicks long wasn’t that easy, even in Nasqueron. Still, he was relying on the CloudTunnel retaining the usual profile of buoyancy-decay.

The likely volume - though identified with a worrying degree of fuzziness - was about five thousand kilcks away, though coming closer all the time, having been all the way round the planet many times. In a dozen hours it would be almost right underneath the house again. He calculated. It was doable. He pinged a note to the screen on the library’s door saying that he didn’t want to be disturbed.

Fassin let himself out through the hidden door about an hour after he’d entered the library. He let the little gascraft grow, pushing trim-spaces out to create internal vacuums and a larger, near-spherical outer shape so that he fell gently at first, causing as little turbulence as possible beneath the house. Then gradually he heavied, slowly shrinking the arrowhead to its dart-slim minimum, diving unpowered into the dark depths and through the rough boundary of the near-static cylinder of depleted gas that was all that remained of the ancient storm.

He powered up twenty klicks deeper and levelled out, then rose quickly when he was thirty lateral kilometres clear, zooming up through the gradually cooling, slowly thinning gas above until he was through the haze layers and out amongst the cloud tops. Fassin increased to maximum speed, configuring the arrowhead for as stealthy a profile as it could support. The gascraft had never been designed for such shenanigans, but it had been gradually altered over the years by him and Hervil Apsile until - while no match for a genuine military machine - it made less of a fuss moving across the face of the planet than almost anything within the gas-giant’s atmosphere (always discounting the usual preposterous Dweller claims of invisible ships, inertialess drives and zero-point subspacials).

The little craft moved beneath the thin yellow sky, and the stars above seemed to slow down then go into reverse as Fassin flew faster than the combined speed of the planet revolving and the band beneath him jet-streaming in the same direction.

After less than an hour of flight, seeing nothing in the heavens above or in the skies beneath that would have led anyone to think there was life anywhere else in all the universe, he slowed and dropped, a shaftless arrowhead heading straight for the heart of the planet. He let the increasing density slow him further, feeling the resulting friction-heat leak through the gascraft’s hull and into his flesh.

Through the upper shear boundary - only hazily defined, kilometres thick, prone to vast slow waves and unpredictable swells and sudden troughs - he entered the shear zone itself, starting to circle through the crushing fluidity of jelly-thick atmosphere. If the section of CloudTunnel was still in the volume, this was where it ought to be, fallen amongst the depths, making its slow way down to an equilibrium of weight and buoyancy within the gradually thickening press of hydrogen gas turning to liquid.

There was always a chance that it had gone the other way, lifting towards the cloud tops, but that would be unusual. Disused CloudTunnel, ribbed with vacuum tubes, tended to gain gas and therefore additional weight through osmosis over the millennia. When Fassin had been here two hundred years earlier, Valseir was already having to add buoyancy to the Tunnel to keep it from sinking too fast and dragging the whole house and library complex with it. Anyway, if the derelict section had risen it ought to have stayed within the same atmospheric band and so shown up somewhere on the charts of the
Poaflias,
and it hadn’t.

He went on spiralling, keeping slow, sonosensing only gently so that there would be less chance of anybody who might be listening nearby overhearing him. (Could the colonel have followed him without him being aware of her? Probably. But why would she? Still, he had the feeling he ought to be as discreet as he could.) Light wasn’t much use. CloudTunnel wall would appear almost transparent down here. Probes for magnetic and radiation vestiges were of even less utility, and there would be no scent trace either.

After two hours, near the limit of the time that he thought he could reasonably spend away from the house, and some time after he’d decided the hell with discretion and ramped his active sensors up to maximum, Fassin found one end of the CloudTunnel, looming out of the gel-thick mist like a vast dark mouth. He took the little gascraft into the forty-metre-wide maw, turning up his sonosense now that the signals would be shielded by the walls of the CloudTunnel section itself. He increased his speed, too, barrelling along the great slowly curving tube like the ghost of some Dweller long gone.

The study shell was still there, a hollow sphere almost filling the CloudTunnel tube near the mid-point of its eighty-kilometre length, but it had been ransacked, stripped bare. Whatever secrets it might have held had long since been taken or trashed.

Fassin turned some lights on to check round the place, finding nothing intact, nothing beyond empty shelves and ragged lengths of carbon board, diamond dust like frosted ice and frayed fibres, waving in the turbulence of his passing.

He formed a tiny cavity with his sonosense and watched it collapse instantly, snapped to nothing by the grinding weight of the column of gas above it. A fine place to feel crushed, he thought, then went back the way he’d come and ascended slowly to the house and Library Twenty-One again.

The colonel was there. She looked startled when he appeared from behind the hidden door, even though he’d told her earlier what he intended to do.

‘Major. Seer Taak. Fassin,’ she said. She sounded… odd.

Fassin looked around. Nobody else here;
good,
he thought. ‘Yes?’ he said, letting the bookcase door close behind him.

Hatherence floated right up to him, stopping just a metre away. Her esuit showed a uniform dull grey he hadn’t seen her display before.

‘Colonel,’ he asked her. ‘Are you all right? Is everything--’

‘There is… you must prepare… I… I am sorry to…

There is bad news, Fassin,’ she said finally, in a rushed, broken voice. ‘Very bad news. I am so sorry.’