The Algebraist (71 page)

The first time Fassin had visited the ship’s personality, the ape had led him by the hand from a doorway down the steps towards the river where the old man sat, looking out at the sluggish brown waters.

On the far side of the broad, oily stream was a desert of brightly glittering broken glass, stretching in low, billowed hills as far as the eye could see, like all the shattered glass the universe had ever known all gathered in the one vast place.

‘Of course I’m dead,’ the ship explained. The old man had very dark green skin and a voice made up of sighs and wheezes. His face was nearly immobile, just an aged mask, grizzled with patchy white whiskers. ‘The ship self-destructed.’

‘But if you’re dead,’ Fassin said, ‘how are you talking to me?’

The old man shrugged. ‘To be dead is to be no longer part of the living world. It is to be a shade, a ghost. It doesn’t mean you can’t talk. Talk is almost all you can do.’

Fassin thought the better of trying to persuade the old man that he was still alive. ‘What do you think I am?’ he asked.

The old man looked at him. ‘A human? Male? A man.’

Fassin nodded. ‘Do you have a name?’ he asked the old man.

A shake of the head. ‘Not any more. I was the
Protreptic
but that ship is gone now and I am dead, so I have no name.’

Fassin left a polite gap for the old man to ask him what his name was, but the inquiry didn’t come.

The ape sat a couple of metres away and two steps further up towards the creeper-festooned temple. It was sitting back, taking its weight on its long arms spread out behind it and picking one ear with a long, delicate-looking foot, inspecting the results with great concentration.

‘When you were alive,’ Fassin said, ‘were you truly alive? Were you sentient?’

The old man rocked backwards, laughed briefly. ‘Bless you, no. I was just software in a computer, just photons inside a nanofoam substrate. That’s not alive, not in the conventional sense.’

‘What about the unconventional sense?’

Another shrug. ‘That does not matter. Only the conventional sense matters.’

‘Tell me about yourself, about your life.’

A blank-faced stare. ‘I don’t have a life. I’m dead.’

‘Then tell me about the life you had.’

‘I was a needle ship called the
Protreptic
of the Voehn Third Spine Cessorian Lustral Squadron, built in the fifth tenth of the third year of Haralaud, in the Vertebraean Axis, Khubohl III, Bunsser Minor. I was an extensible fifteen-metre-minimum craft, rated ninety-eight per cent by the Standard Portal Compatibility Quotient Measure, normal unstowed operating diameter--’

‘I didn’t really mean all the technical stuff,’ Fassin said gently.

‘Oh,’ said the old man, and disappeared, just like a hologram being switched off.

Fassin looked at the ape, which was holding something up to the light. It looked down at him, blinking. ‘What?’ it said.

‘He disappeared,’ Fassin told it. ‘It disappeared. The old man; the ship.’

‘Prone to do that,’ the ape said, sighing.

The next time, the landscape on the far side of the wide, slack-watered river from the temple steps was a jungle; a great green, yellow and purple wall of strange carbuncular stalks, drooping leaves and coiled vines, its bowed, pendulous creepers and branches drooping down to drag in the slow swell of the current.

Everything else was as before, though perhaps the old man was less skinny, his face a fraction more mobile and his voice less tired.

‘I was an AI hunter. For six and a half thousand years I helped seek out and destroy the anathematics. If I could have felt such an emotion, I would have been very proud.’

‘Did it never seem strange to you to be hunting down and killing machines that were similar to yourself?’

The ginger-haired ape - sitting in its usual place a few steps up, trying to clean its stained, dented armour by spitting on it and then polishing it with a filthy rag - coughed at this point, though when Fassin glanced up at the animal it returned his gaze blankly.

‘But I was just a computer,’ the old man said, frowning. ‘Less than that, even; a ghost within it. I did what I was told, always obedient. I was the interface between the Voehn who did the thinking and made the decisions, and the physical structures and systems of the ship. An intermediary. No more.’

‘Do you miss that?’

‘In a way. I cannot, really. To miss something, truly, would be - as I understand it - to experience an emotion, and obviously that is impossible for something which is not sentient, let alone not alive as well. But to the extent that I can judge that one state of affairs is somehow more preferable to another, perhaps because one allows me to fulfil the role I was assigned and one does not, I could say that I miss the ship. It’s gone. I’ve looked for it, but it isn’t there. I cannot feel it or control it, therefore I know that it must have self-destructed. I must be running on another substrate somewhere.’

Fassin looked up at the ape-thing sitting a few steps away. Quercer & Janath had taken over full control of the
Protreptic,
cutting off the ship’s own computer and the software running within it from the vessel’s subsystems.

‘What do you think I am, then?’ Fassin asked. ‘What do you think the little ape in his armour sitting behind us is?’

‘I don’t know,’ the old man confessed. ‘Are you other dead ships?’

Fassin shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Then perhaps you are representations of those in charge of the substrate I am now running on. You may want to quiz me on my actions while I was the ship.’

‘You know, you seem alive to me,’ Fassin said. ‘Are you sure you might not be alive and sentient now, now that you’re not connected to the ship?’

‘Of course not!’ the old man said scornfully. ‘I am able to give the appearance of life without being alive. It is not especially difficult.’

‘How do you do this?’

‘By being able to access my memories, by having trillions of facts and works and books and recordings and sentences and words and definitions at my disposal.’ The old man looked at the ends of his fingers. ‘I am the sum of all my memories, plus the application of certain rules from a substantial command-set. I am blessed with the ability to think extremely quickly, so I am able to listen to what you, as a conscious, sentient being, are saying and then respond in a way that makes sense to you, answering your questions, following your meaning, anticipating your thoughts.

‘However, all this is simply the result of programs - programs written by sentient beings - sifting through earlier examples of conversations and exchanges which I have stored within my memories and selecting those which seem most appropriate as templates. This process sounds mysterious but is merely complicated. It begins with something as simple as you saying "Hello" and me replying "Hello", or choosing something similar according to whatever else I might know about you, and extends to a reply as involved as, well, this one.’

The old man looked suddenly shocked, and disappeared again.

Fassin looked up at the ginger-haired ape. It sneezed and then had a coughing fit. ‘Nothing,’ it said, ‘to do,’ it continued, between coughs, ‘with me.’

On Fassin’s next visit, the far side of the great, slow river was like a mirror image of the side that he, the old man and the gangly ape were on. An ancient city of stone domes and spires all silent and dark and half-consumed by trees and creepers faced them, and a huge long temple, covered in statues and carvings of fabulous and unlikely beasts lay directly across from where they sat, its lower limits defined by dozens of big stone terraces and steps leading down to the sluggish, dark brown waters.

Fassin looked over, to see if the three of them were reflected there, but they weren’t. The far side was deserted.

‘Did you hunt down and kill many AIs?’ he asked.

The old man rolled his eyes. ‘Hundreds. Thousands.’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘Some of the AIs were twinned or in larger groupings. I took part in 872 missions.’

‘Were any in gas-giants?’ Fassin asked. He’d positioned himself so that he could see the ape in the dented armour. It looked at him when he asked this question, then looked away again. It was trying to knock the dents out of its breastplate with a small hammer. The dull chink-chink-chinks that the hammer made sounded dead and unechoing across the wide river.

‘One mission took place partly within a gas-giant. It ended there. A small ship full of anathematics. We pursued them into the atmosphere of the gas-giant Dejiminid where they attempted to lose us within its fierce storm-winds. The
Protreptic
was more atmosphere-capable than their ship, and eventually, going to greater and greater depths in their desperation to shake us off, their vessel collapsed under the pressure and was crushed, taking all aboard into the liquid metal depths.’

‘Were there no Dwellers present to complain about this?’

The old man looked inquiringly at him. ‘You are not really a Dweller, are you? It did occur to me that I might be running within a Dweller-controlled substrate.’

‘No, I’m not a Dweller. I told you; I’m a human.’

‘Well, the answer is they had not seen us enter their planet. They complained later. That was only the first of two occasions when the
Protreptic
was operationally active within a gas-giant. Usually our missions were all vacuum.’

‘The other?’

‘Not so long ago. Helping to pursue a large force of Beyonder ships in the vicinity of Zateki. We prevailed there, too.’

‘What brought you to the Sepulcraft
Rovruetz?’
Fassin asked.

The flat and flattening chink-chink-chink noise stopped. The ginger-haired ape held its breastplate up to catch the light, scratched its chest, then went back to tapping with the hammer again.

‘Do you represent a Lustral Investigation Board?’ the old man asked. ‘Is that what you are, in reality?’

‘No,’ Fassin said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Oh. Oh well. For the last two and a half centuries, uniform time,’ the old man said, ‘we had been seeking information about the so-called Dweller List.’ (The long-limbed ape laughed out loud at this, but the old man didn’t seem to notice.) ‘Much time was spent in the region of the Zateki system, investigating the Second Ship theory. Various secondary and tertiary missions resulted from information gleaned in the region. None ever bore fruit in the matter of the List, the Second Ship theory or the so-called Transform, though two AIs were tracked down and eliminated in the course of these sub-missions. We were summoned from the Rijom system and sent to the Direaliete system some five months ago, then laid an intercept course to the Sepulcraft
Rovruetz.
I was not told of the reasons for this course of action, the orders covering which were personal to Commander Inialcah and communicated to him beyond my senses.’

‘Did you find out anything new about the List and the Transform?’ Fassin asked.

‘I think the only thing that we ever felt we had properly discovered, in the sense of adding something other than just an extra rumour to the web of myths and rumours that already existed regarding the whole subject was that - if there was any truth in the matter - the portals would be lying quiescent and perhaps disguised in the Kuiper belts or Oort clouds of the relevant systems, waiting on a coded radio or similar broadcast signal. That is what the so-called Transform would be: a signal, and the medium and frequency on which it was to be transmitted. This made sense in that all normally stable locations where portals might have been hidden successfully over the sort of time scales involved - Lagrange points and so on - were easy to check and eliminate.’ The old man looked at Fassin quizzically again. ‘Are you another seeker after the truth of the List?’

‘I was,’ Fassin said.

‘Ah!’ The representation of the old man looked pleased for once. ‘And are you not dead, then, too?’

‘No, I’m not dead, though I’ve given up looking, for the moment.’

‘What was it that took you to the Sepulcraft
Rovruetz?’
the old man asked.

‘I had what I thought was a lead, a clue, a way forward,’ Fassin told him. ‘However, the creature who might have had the evidence had destroyed what he held and killed himself.’

‘Unfortunate.’

‘Yes, very.’

The old man looked up at the bronze-blue cloudless sky. Fassin followed his gaze, and as he did so, the old man disappeared.

There was something. Fassin sat, gascraft rammed into the extemporised couch in the Voehn ship’s command space by the continuing acceleration, watching the nearly static, rather boring view of dead ahead shown on the main screen, and he knew there was something that he was missing.

Something nagged at him, something bothered him, something half-came to him in moments of distraction or when he was dreaming, and then wriggled away again before he could catch it.

He didn’t sleep very much - only a couple of hours a day in all - though when he did there were usually dreams, as if his subconscious had to cram all his dreaming into the small amount of dream-space available. Once he was actually standing in a small stream, somewhere in the gardens of a great house he couldn’t see, trousers rolled up, trying to catch fish with his bare hands. The fish were his dreams, even though he was distantly aware at the time that this situation was itself a dream. When he tried to catch the fish - sinuous small presences darting like elongated teardrops of mercury round his feet - they kept flicking away and disappearing.