The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  Down-arm, nearly parallel with the galaxy's wispy limit, heading into the thickening mass of gas and nebulae and stars, was Zenerre. Inwards, between Ulubis and the galactic centre spread a vast mass of Disconnect; the Cluster Epiphany Five Disconnect, millions of stars spread throughout cubic light-centuries which, it was believed, still supported worlds that had once been part of the civilised, connected, 'hole-networked galactic community until over seven thousand years earlier and the Arteria Collapse which had preceded the War of the New Quick and all the excitement and the woes that had flowed from it.

  * * *

  Two centuries, one decade, four years and twenty days after the portal attack, exactly when it might have been expected, the first signal arrived from Zenerre, the wavefront of what would become a constant stream of information from the rest of the connected galaxy. Where, Ulubis was informed, life was going on as usual. The attack on its portal had been unique, and all was basically well with the Mercatoria. Attacks and incursions by the various Beyonder groups continued throughout the civilised galaxy, as did operations against them, but these were on the usual mainly nuisance-value level that the Beyonder Wars had evidenced for thousands of years, the tactically distressing and annoyingly wasteful but strategically irrelevant distributed background micro-violence that people had started calling the Hum.

  Relief, puzzlement and a vague sense of victimisation spread throughout Ulubis system.

  The Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir, portal-carrying, set out from Zenerre for Ulubis less than a year after the disaster, with a travel time initially given as 307 years, later reduced by incre­ments to level out at 269 as the Eship upped its velocity even closer to light speed, the Engineers aboard fine-tuning the systems which insulated the hauled portal from the effects of its own and the ship's relativistic mass. People in Ulubis system relaxed, the last vestiges of martial law were hidden away from public sight again. Those many born after the portal's destruc­tion wondered what it would be like to have a connection to the rest of the galaxy, to this semi-mythical meta-civilisation they'd heard so much about.

  The flip-over point came, and Fassin was vaguely aware of it as the pressure on his chest and flesh and limbs faded away over the course of a few seconds, replacing that feeling of oppres­sion with a sensation of sudden blood-roaring bloatedness as his body struggled to cope with the change. He kept his eyes closed. Almost immediately there was a faint trace of force, a gentle push from somewhere beneath his head, then weight­lessness again, and a few moments later a matching tug from somewhere beneath his feet, and then weight returning, pres­sure quickly building, until the roaring in his head faded and became the distant thunder of the ship again.

  *

  The Archimandrite Luseferous, standing before the ruins of the city, stooped and dug gloved fingers into the soft earth by his feet, wrenching out a handful of soil. He held it to his face for a while, staring at it, then brought it close to his nose and smelled it, then let it fall and dusted off his gloves while staring down at the huge crater where a large part of the city had been.

  The crater was still filling from the sea, a slow curling curve of brown-white water spilling from the estuary beyond. The waterfall disappeared into the seat of the crater in a vast cloud-bank of vapour, and steam rose everywhere from the rolling, tumbling confusion of waters as the great rocky bowl cooled. A massive trunk of steam, three kilometres or more across, rose into the calm pastel sky, rolling up through thin layers of cloud, flat-heading where it achieved the middle reaches of the atmosphere.

  It was the Archimandrite's conceit, where a severe lesson had to be taught on a planet capable of supporting such a mark, that a city by the sea, which was either itself guilty of resisting or judged by him symbolic of resistance shown by others on the planet, be remade in the image of his beloved Junch City, back on Leseum9 IV. If a people would resist him, either while under­going conquest or enduring occupation, they would suffer, of course, but they would be part of something greater at the same time and they would, even in death, even in the death of much of their city, be the unwitting and unwilling participants in what was, indeed, a work of art. For here, seen from this hillside, was there not a new Faraby Bay? Was that slot through which the waters thundered, shaking the ground, not another Force Gap? Was that piling tower of steam, first drawn straight up then stroked to the horizon, not a kind of signature, his very own flourish?

  The Bay was overly circular, certainly, and the slot a mere break in a modest crater wall composed largely of estuarine mud, presenting no aesthetic match at all for the great kilo­metre-high cliffs of the real Force Gap - indeed, the whole setting for this new image of junch City entirely lacked the original's dramatic ring of surrounding mountains, and this little parkland hill on which he stood - with his admirals, generals and guard waiting obediently behind, allowing him this moment of reflection - was frankly a poor substitute for the vertical cliff of the Sheer Citadel and its magnificent views.

  Nevertheless, an artist had to work with what there was to hand, and where there had once been just another swarming seaside city, lying tipped upon the land, variously hilled, messily distributed round a tributary river, with the all usual urban sprawl, great buildings, docks, breakwaters and anchorages - in other words what it had always been, roughly, no matter that there had been earlier so-called catastrophes like earthquakes or floods or great fires or bombardment from sea or air or earlier invasion - now there was an image of a fair and distant place, now there was a new kind of savage beauty, now there was a fit setting for a new city reborn in the image of his sovereignty, now there was a sort of - even - healing joining with those other peoples and places who had surrendered to his will, in suffering and in image, for this majestic crater, this latest work, was just the most recent of his creations, one more jewel on a string stretching back to the primacy of elegance that was Junch City.

  Anyone with sufficient self-belief, enough ruthlessness and (Luseferous believed himself modest enough to admit) an adequate supply of luck could - if the will was there and the times required such determination - conquer and destroy. Judging how much to destroy for the effect one wished to achieve, knowing when to be ruthless, when to show leniency, even when to exhibit beguiling, rage-sapping generosity and a touch of humour; that required a more measured, a more subtle, a more - he could think of no other word for it - civilised touch. He had that touch. The record spoke for itself. To then go on from there and use the sad necessity of destruction to create art, to form an image of a better place and forge symbolic unity . . . that was on another level again, that elevated the mere war-maker, the mere politician, to the status of creator.

  Tendrils of smoke rose all around the central column of steam, dark paltry vines adorning a huge pale trunk. These marked where defending aircraft had fallen and where fires had been started by the crater-weapon's ground shock, no doubt. Part of the artistry involved in such a work was creating a great declivity without utterly destroying all around it (a new, reborn city had to grow here, after all). Some sophistication of weaponry was required to achieve such precision. His armaments experts attended to such details.

  The Archimandrite Luseferous looked about him, smiling to his chiefs of staff, all standing respectfully at his heel, looking a little nervous to be here in the fresh air of another newly subject planet. (Yet was it not good to breathe in that fresh air, for all its alien scents? Did those strange new odours not them­selves mean that another treasure had been added to their ever-increasing domain?) Above and behind, bristling war craft hovered and hummed, attended by small clouds of sensory and weapon platforms. Spread in a ring all around were his personal guards, most lying or kneeling on the grass, their darkly glinting weaponry poised. A few in military exoskels lumbered around or squatted, splayed feet squashing into the earth.

  At the foot of the hill, beyond another ring of guards, beneath a watchful buzz of guard drones, the refugees moved like a slow river of dun and grey.

  Stilte
rs; groundbats, whule. A Mercatorial species. Disconnected all these millennia, certainly, but still a Mercatorial species. Luseferous looked up into the pale green sky, imagining night, the veils of stars, and the one particular sun - pointed out to him from orbit just forty hours ago, while the invasion forces were being prepared for the initial drop - growing steadily closer as they crawled and fought their way towards it, which was called Ulubis.

  *

  In the bright, golden-hued air of Sepekte, with the Borquille Equatower a thin stem in the hazy distance, the little Navarchy ship approached the palace complex, sliding through an ancient forest of kilometres-tall atmospheric power columns and between more modest but still impressive administration and accommodation towers. It disappeared into a wide, gently sloped tunnel set into the reception plaza in front of the enor­mous ball that was the palace of the Hierchon, an eight-hundred-metre sphere modelled after Nasqueron itself by a long-departed Sarcomage, complete with individual bands of slowly contra-rotating floors all sliding round a stationary inner core. Changing orange-red, brown and ochre swirls of pattern, convincingly like the view of the distant gas-giant's cloud tops seen from space, moved across the face of the palace, hiding windows and balconies, sensors and transmitters.

  'Major Taak? Lieutenant Inesiji, palace guard. This way, please. Quick as we can, sir.' The speaker, whose voice sounded like a human child talking with a mouthful of ball bearings, was a jajuejein, a creature which in repose resembled an insectile tumbleweed sixty or seventy centimetres in diameter. This one had drawn itself up to Fassin's two-metre height, marshalling a host of twiglike components coloured dark green and steel blue to resemble a sort of openwork head like a bird's nest - thank­fully it had not tried to make a face - and had balanced itself on two vaguely leglike stalks. The rest of its body, offering glimpses of the reception cavern's floor beyond, was just a cylinder, adorned with belts of soft-looking material and small metallic components that might have been jewellery, gadgets or weapons. It half-turned, half-flowed to a small open cart where the ship's whule rating was already depositing Fassin's luggage.

  Fassin turned and waved to the groggily cheerful Dicogra, joined the jajuejein in the cart and was whisked away through a brief security reception area to a lift and a curving corridor which took him to a suite of rooms with what looked like a real outside view of the city - north, with pale, jagged hills in the far distance. Lieutenant Inesiji placed Fassin's bags on the bed with fluid grace and informed him that he had exactly three-fifths of an hour to freshen up, don his ceremonial court clothes and present himself outside his door, whereupon he would be escorted to the audience chamber.

  Fassin blipped a safe-arrival message to Bantrabal and then did as he'd been told.

  The circular audience chamber was glittering and warm, walls of white gold sparkling under a ceiling-filling galaxy-shaped cloud of tiny sharp lights impersonating stars. Lieutenant Inesiji showed Fassin to a position on one of the many platforms set into the shallow, stepped bowl of the chamber. A human-conforming seat malleabled its way up from the floor. He sat in it - stiffly, in his bulky court robes - and the lieutenant told him, 'Please stay where you are for now, sir' in a sort of gargled whisper, executed what might have been a bow, turned into what looked very like a cartwheel, and rolled away back up the slope of gangway to an exit.

  Fassin looked around. The chamber looked like it might hold a thousand people, but he was one of only about two dozen people present, distributed around the shallowly conical space as though to maximise the distance between each individual. Humans - all, like him, in cumbersome, rather gaudy court dress - just about outnumbered the others, but he saw another jajue­jein - balled, either resting or sleeping, criss-crossed with irides­cent ribbons - two whule sitting like angular grey tents covered in silver flowers, both looking at him, a pair of quaup, one of the two-metre-long red-tan ellipses floating and also looking at him (well, certainly pointing at him), and the other stood on its end, either also snoozing or possibly at attention - Fassin's knowledge of alien body language was wide but shallow except where Dwellers were concerned. Three large environment suits containing waterworlders completed the non-human contin­gent: two of the esuits, looking like aquamarine impersonations of the quaups, most likely contained kuskunde; the third was a matt black lozenge the size of a small bus, radiating warmth. That esuit would almost certainly contain an symbioswarm Ifrahile.

  In the centre of the chamber, at its deepest point, just before a set of wide, tall, concentric platforms which broke the symmetry of the space, there was an incongruous-looking device which looked like an ancient iron cooking pot: a black-bellied urn a couple of metres in diameter, capped with a shallow dome and sitting on a tripod of stubby legs on the buttery sheen of the solid gold floor. Its surface was pinstriped with thin vanes, but otherwise it resembled something almost prehistoric. Fassin had never seen anything like it before. He shivered, despite the warmth of the chamber.

  The quaup which might have been sleeping suddenly flicked level with a ripple of lateral mantle and turned towards its fellow creature thirty metres away, which swivelled to look back at it. Expression patterns flashed across their face nacelles, then they moved towards each other, hovering together, faces signal-flick­ering conversation for the few seconds it took for a small flutter drone to drop from the ceiling and - in spoken voice, with chirps and squeaks - apparently ordered them back to their places. The quaup shriek-popped back at the mechanical remote, but split up, drifting away to their earlier positions.

  They had just about resumed their allotted patches when a group of half a dozen jajuejein technicians, awkward in their shape-constraining formal court gear of dimly iridescent ribbons, entered from a door at one side of the chamber floor, pushing large pallets full of highly techy-looking equipment which they positioned in a rough circle round the cooking-pot device. Their body ribbons marked them out as Shrievalty, Fassin suddenly realised, wondering whether as a major of the Ocula he was senior enough to order them around. A similar-sized group - human Cessorian priests from their garb, though in their court best it was hard to be sure - could they even be Lustrals? - approached from the opposite direction. The priests stood close behind the technicians, who ignored them and busied themselves setting up and adjusting their arcane apparatus.

  Finally, an alarming group of four human and four whule troopers in full mirror-finish power-armour stalked in, complete with a variety of heavy infantry weapons. The ambience of the chamber changed; even across species the mood almost tangibly altered from one of some puzzlement and a degree of expecta­tion to one of alarm, even fear. The two quaup were exchanging rapid large-scale face signals, the Ifrahile esuit rose hissing from its platform and the whule pair were alternating between staring at each other and glaring down at their mirror-armoured kin. Who brought armed forces into an audience chamber? Was this a trap? Had all here offended the Hierchon? Were they all to be murdered?

  The soldiers deployed in a wide circle around the Shrievalty and Cessoria, standing at ease, weaponry poised, armour-locked. They were facing inwards, towards the black cooking-pot device. The mood in the room seemed to relax a little.

  Then the series of platforms beyond the giant urn and the various groups of functionaries shimmered once and dropped into the floor, to re-emerge some moments later, crowded with people.

  An outer ring of white-uniformed human court officials, an inner ring of species-varied, extravagantly emblazoned courtiers and an outer core, again mixed-species, of Ascendancy, Omnocracy, Administrata and Cessoria - Fassin recognised most of them from the news and the few formal visits he'd had to make to the court over the years - formed semicircular tiers of importance around the being in the centre: the Hierchon Ormilla himself, resplendent in his giant platinum-sheathed discus of an environment suit, floating humming just above the highest platform, the dark creature's great gaping face visible through the suit's forward diamond window amongst roiling clouds of crimson gas. Seven metres hig
h, three wide, the suit was by some margin the largest and most impressive of the micro-environments in the chamber. It quickly took on a frosted look, as humidity in the air condensed on its deep-chilled surfaces.

  As the Hierchon and his attendants appeared, Fassin's seat gave a warning vibration and began to sink back into the plat­form beneath. Fassin took the hint and stood, then bowed, while the various other people in the chamber performed their equi­valent actions. The giant esuit lowered fractionally so that its base touched the platform, and Fassin's seat rose smoothly from the platform again.

  The Hierchon Ormilla was an oerileithe: a gas-giant dweller, but - important distinction, this, to all concerned - not a Dweller, even if the shape of his esuit made him look like one. Ormilla had ruled the Ulubis system since his investiture nearly six thousand years earlier, long before the humans who now made up the bulk of its populace had arrived. He was gener­ally thought to be a competent if unimaginative governor, exer­cising what leeway a Hierchon had within the Mercatorial system with caution, sense and, on occasion, even a degree of compassion. His rule since the portal's destruction had, by the estimation of the officially sanctioned media, been a humbling combination of breathtaking majesty, heroic, utterly exemplary fortitude and a touching, steadfast solidarity with his human charges. Unkinder, unsanctioned, often human critics might have accused him of betraying an early disposition towards authoritarianism and even paranoid repression, eventually followed later by a more composed and lenient attitude, when he started listening to his advisers again.

  Looking more carefully at the high-ups present, Fassin realised that, basically, the gang was all here. Apart from Ormilla himself, the Hierchon's two most senior deputies, the Peregals Tlipeyn and Emoerte were in attendance, as was the most senior member of the Propylaea to survive the portal's destruction, sub-master Sorofieve, the top Navarchy officer, Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, Guard-General Thovin, First Secretary Heuypzlagger of the Administrata, Colonel Somjomion of the Shrievalty - his own ultimate superior officer for the duration of the current emergency, Fassin supposed - and Clerk-Regnant Voriel of the Cessoria. The absolute elite of the system.