The Algebraist (53 page)

The Dweller above him, seeming to jerk and quiver in his little retaining harness, waited for him to synch before sending, - And what might you be, person?

- I am a human being, sir. A Seer at the Nasqueron Court, in a gascraft, an esuit. I am called Fassin Taak, of Sept Bantrabal.

- And I am Zosso, of nowhere in particular. Of here. Good view, is it not?

- It is.

- However, I dare say that that is not why you are here.

- You’re right. It’s not.

- You wish to ask me something?

- I am told I need to make passage to somewhere I’ve never heard of, to follow a Dweller I need to find. I’m told you can help.

- I’m sure I can, if I choose to. Well, that is, if people still take any notice of what a silly old wing-hanger says. Who can say? I’m not sure that I would listen to somebody as old and out of things as I am if I was a young travelcaptain. Why, I think I should say something like, ‘What, listen to that foolish old--?’ Oh, I beg your pardon, young human. I seem to have distracted myself. Where was it you would like to go?

- A place that is, apparently, sometimes called Hoestruem.

Drunisine himself, alone, had come to the quarters that Fassin shared with the two Dwellers, in the mid-morning of the day after the battle in the storm.

‘We have delayed you long enough. You may go. A jetclipper is at your disposal for the next two dozen days. Goodbye.’

‘Now there,’ Y’sul had observed, ‘goes a Dweller of few words.’

- Hoestruem? Zosso asked. - No, I’ve never heard of it either.

Night swept over them as he signalled, enveloping.

- In or near Aopoleyin? Fassin sent. - Apparently, he told the old wing-hanger, when the Dweller was uncommunicative for a few moments. - Somewhere associated with Aopoleyin.

All this was on Valseir’s advice. Fassin couldn’t find any mention of anywhere called Aopoleyin in his databases either. He was starting to wonder if the memory-scanning process he’d had to undergo before being allowed to leave the
Isaut
had scrambled some of the gascraft’s information storage systems.

- Ah, Zosso sent. - Aopoleyin. That I have heard of. Hmm. Well, in that case, if I were you, I’d talk to Quercer & Janath. Yes, you’ll need them. I should think. Tell them I sent you. Oh. And ask for my mantle scarf back. Might do the trick. No guarantees, though. Mind.

- Quercer and Janath. Your mantle scarf back.

The old Dweller rolled a fraction, jerkily, and looked down at Fassin. - I’ll have you know it was a very good mantle scarf.

He rolled back, facing again into the never-ending rush of cloud and stars and day and night. - I could do with it up here. It’s windy.

FIVE: CONDITIONS OF PASSAGE

‘Where?’

‘You want to go where?’

‘Hoestruem, near Aopoleyin,’ Fassin said.

‘We know where Hoestruem is.’

‘We’re not stupid.’

‘Well, I’m not. Janath might be.’

‘I entirely fulfilled my Creat Minimum Stupidity Allocation by associating with you.’

‘Forgive my partner. We were asking for confirmation more out of shock at your unspeakable alienness than anything else. So. You want to go to Hoestruem.’

‘Yes,’ Fassin said.

‘And Zosso sent you.’

‘Still banging on about that damn scarf.’

‘Useful code, though.’

‘Hoestruem.’

‘Hoestruem.’

‘Doable.’

‘Yes, but it’s more the why of it, not the how.’

‘The how is easy.’

‘The how
is
easy. Problem is definitely why.’

‘As in bother.’

‘As in should we.’

‘Well, should we?’

‘More rhetorical.’

‘Has to be a joint decision.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Zosso asks.’

‘Zosso does.’

‘Do we accommodate?’

‘We could just give him back his mantle scarf.’

‘
Was
there ever a scarf?’

‘A real scarf?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now you mention it.’

‘Anyway.’

‘Beside the point.’

‘Always a dangerous place to tarry’

‘Zosso. A travel request. This human gentleman in his gascraft esuit.’

‘Ahem,’ said Y’sul. ‘And his friend.’

‘Not forgetting his friend.’

‘And mentor,’ Y’sul pointed out.

‘Yes, that too.’

‘Do we do or do we don’t?’

‘Is the question.’

‘Does we does or don’t we not?’

‘Yes. No. Select one of the aforementioned.’

‘Quite.’

‘Precisely.’

‘In your own time,’ Y’sul muttered.

They were in a spinbar in Eponia, a globular stickycity in the cold chaotic wastes of the North Polar Region. The borrowed jetclipper had done its best impression of a suborb, skipping nearly into space in a series of bounced trajectories, finally slowing, sinking and coming to rest by the tenuous cloudlike structure of the great city, occupying hundreds of cubic kilometres of cold, stale gas just fifteen thousand klicks from the giant planet’s North Pole. They’d tracked Quercer & Janath down to a spinbar called The Liquid Yawn. Valseir had demurred but Y’sul and Fassin had crammed into a crushpod, been accelerated up to speed and then - dizzily - joined the two travelcaptains in their booth.

Fassin had never encountered a travelcaptain before. He’d heard of them, and knew that they were almost always found in the equatorial band, but they were elusive, even shy. He’d tried to meet with one many times in the past but there had always been some sort of problem, often at the last moment.

The spinbar whirled madly, twisting and looping and rolling at extreme high speed, making the city outside its bubble-diamond walls seem to gyrate as though with the express intention of disorientating the outward-looking bar-going public. The effect was intense and intentional. Dwellers had a superb sense of balance and it took a lot to make them dizzy. Being spun like a maniac was one Dweller idea of fun just because it led to a profound, giddy dislocation with one’s surroundings. Taking drugs at the same time just added to the hilarity. Y’sul, however, it had seemed to Fassin, looked a little grey around the gills as they’d woven their way through the mostly empty spinbar to the travelcaptains’ booth.

‘You all right?’

‘Perfectly’

‘Bringing back memories of heading through the storm wall in the
Poaflias?’

‘Not at… Well, just a little. Ulp. Perhaps.’

Quercer & Janath, travelcaptains, were one. They looked like one big Dweller, of about Adult age, but there were two individuals in there, one in each discus. Fassin had heard of truetwin Dwellers before, but never met a set. Usually a Dweller’s brain was housed just off the central spine in the thickest, central part of one discus; generally the left one. Right-brain Dwellers were about fifteen per cent of the total population, though this varied from planet to planet. Very, very occasionally, two brains developed in the one creature, and something like Quercer & Janath tended to be the result. The double-Dweller wore a shiny set of all-overs with transparent and mesh patches over the hub sense organs, and a shaded transparent section over the outer frill of sensory fringe.

‘You’ll not be able to see much.’

‘That’s if we take you at all.’

‘Yes, that’s if we do take you in the first.’

‘Place. Which is by no means guaranteed.’

‘Indeed not. Decision not yet made.’

‘Still pending.’

‘Absolutely. But.’

‘In any event.’

‘You’ll not be able to see much of anything.’

‘Not exactly a sightseeing trip.’

‘Or a cruise.’

‘Either.’

‘And you’ll have to switch everything off.’

‘All non-bio systems.’

‘At least.’

‘If, that is.’

‘Big if.’

‘We do take you.’

‘I think we get the idea,’ Fassin said.

‘Good.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘When can we expect a decision?’ Y’sul asked. He’d turned his right sense-fringe inward so that he was seeing with only one. This was the Dweller equivalent of a drunk human closing one eye.

‘Made it. I’ve made it. You made it?’

‘Yep, I’ve made it.’

‘It’s a Yes?’

‘It’s a Yes.’

‘You’ll take us?’ Fassin asked.

‘Are you deaf? Yes.’

‘Definitely.’

‘Thank you,’ Fassin said.

‘So where are we going?’ Y’sul asked tetchily.

‘Ah.’

‘Ha!’

‘Wait.’

‘And see.’

The ship was no joke. Three hundred metres long, it was a polished ebony spike necklaced with drive pods like fat seeds. It lay in a public hangar deep under the stickycity, a semi-spherical space a kilometre across bounded by the hexagonal planes of adjacent smaller bubble volumes.

Valseir was bidding them farewell here. The trip would begin with what the two travelcaptains described as an intense, fractally spiralled, high-acceleration, torque-intense manoeuvre complex, and was not for the faint-willed. The old Dweller had invoked his seniority to excuse himself the ordeal.

‘More spinning around,’ Y’sul sighed, on hearing what awaited them.

‘My regards to Leisicrofe,’ Valseir told Fassin. ‘You still have the leaf image, I hope.’

Fassin took the image-leaf with its depiction of sky and clouds out of its storage locker in the little gascraft and showed it to the old Dweller. ‘I’ll say hello.’

‘Please do. Best of luck.’

‘You too. How do I find you when I get back?’

‘Leave that to me. If I’m not readily available, try where we found Zosso. Or, perhaps at a StormSail regatta.’

‘Yes,’ Y’sul said. ‘But next time just don’t bring any friends.’

The black spike-ship was called the
Velpin.
It burst from the vast cloud of the city like a needle shot from a frozen waterfall of foam, disappeared into the gelid rush of gases forever swirling around the planet’s distant pole and started its bizarre flight, spiralling, rolling, looping, rising and falling and rising again.

Locked into a centrally positioned space which doubled as a passenger compartment and hold, restrained by webbing, Fassin and Y’sul felt the ship commit to spirals within spirals within spirals, tiny corkscrew motions threaded into a whole ramped course of greater coils, themselves part of a still wider set of ever quicker, tighter loops.

‘Fucking hell,’ Y’sul commented.

A faulty screen was set in the far wall, hazed over with static. It made buzzing noises and occasionally flashed with images of ragged, striated clouds whipping past in distorted twists of light and shade. Fassin could see and hear, though both senses were degraded. All the systems in the gascraft had been switched off. Webbed upright, he could see out of the de-opaqued plate over his face - he’d let some of the shock-gel drain away so he could see better. The sound that came through the little arrowhead was at once dulled and high. Y’sul’s voice sounded like squeaks, barely comprehensible.

Fassin and Y’sul were stuck to the inner surface of the compartment, pinned there by the ship’s wild spins.

‘Any idea why they have to do all this fractal spiralling?’ Fassin had asked when they’d both been secured and Quercer & Janath had gone to their command space a single compartment away.

‘Could just be pure mischief,’ Y’sul had said.

Fassin looked at Y’sul now. Both the Dweller’s sense fringes were turned in.

The ship accelerated hard, executing a broad curve. The screen flashed black pitted with stars, all revolving frantically, then blanked out.

The insane, nested sets of spirals resolved down to a single long-axis spin, as though the
Velpin
was a shell travelling down the barrel of some vast gun.

The ship resounded with a high, singing note around them and seemed to settle into something like a cruise. The rate of spin slackened off gradually. Fassin watched as Y’sul’s sense fringes gradually opened. The screen showed slowly spinning stars for several minutes. Then it blanked out again. The spinning picked up once more and Y’sul turned his fringes outside-in again. The spin built up until Fassin could feel his whole body being pressed through the shock-gel. It was his own coffin, he realised. Of course it was. He was getting tunnel vision now, starting to see the view down that great gun barrel, the view ahead shrunk to a single point far away; way, way in the distance, nothing but darkness and grey beyond darkness on either side, down that never-ending tube towards the last defined place they were aiming towards, never coming any closer.

Fassin woke up. Still spinning, but the rate was slackening off again. His nose itched and it felt like he needed to pee, even though he knew he didn’t. This never happened when the shock-gel and gillfluid were doing their jobs. He fell asleep.

*

Taince Yarabokin woke up. One of her first thoughts as she surfaced slowly to full consciousness was that Saluus Kehar would not have received the message she’d prepared for him, that there was still time for more reviewings and re-recordings and revisions, that she would be able to spend more time watching and listening to herself on the recording, and reduce herself to tears every time. Still time and a chance to confront him, maybe kill him, if that was both possible and something she felt driven to do at the time (she had no idea - sometimes she wanted to kill him, sometimes she wanted him alive to suffer the shame of knowing that she had released the story to the newsnets, and sometimes she just wanted him to know that she knew what had really happened that long-ago night in the ruined ship on the high desert).

She checked the time, feeling woozily around in virtual space for information. Still half a year out from Ulubis. She would be awake now until the attack itself, one of the first to be wakened for the final run-in, because she represented the closest thing they had to local knowledge. Privately she doubted she’d be able to offer much practical help, given that she’d last seen Ulubis over two centuries earlier and it might, to put it mildly, have changed somewhat after having been invaded, but she was the best they had. She thought of herself in that respect more as a talisman than anything else, a small symbol of the system that they would be fighting for. If that had been one consideration in her getting a place in the fleet, it didn’t bother her. She was confident that she was a good, competent and brave officer and deserved her post on merit alone. The fact that it was her own home system she was riding to the rescue of was just a bonus.

The fleet had spread out a little since the battle with the Beyonders in mid-voyage, sacrificing the immediate weight of arms it could bring to bear for a net of forward picket craft which would flag any trouble long before the main body of the fleet got to it. Taince had spent most of the intervening years slow-asleep in her pod, but - thanks to that relative security provided by the advance ships - she’d had some recreational and morale-time out of the shock-gel as well, walking around almost like a normal human being in the spun-gravity of the battleship, feeling odd and strange confronted with such normality, like an alien inhabiting a human’s body; clumsy, astonished at tiny things like fingernails and the hairs on an arm, awkward, especially at first, with meeting other off-duty humans, and missing the richness of her in-pod, wired-up virtual existence - with the ability to dip in and out of entire high-definition sensoria of data and meaning - like an amputated limb.