The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  The situation in Ulubis system was no less desperate and the importance of what they had been asked to do had if anything increased with the latest hostile actions of the InvaderBeyonders. Even as it all came through, even as the signals downloaded into the gascraft's memory, with all the codes intact, all the rout­ings displayed, he kept thinking, Maybe it's all a hoax, maybe it's all just some terrible mistake. Even when he saw the news screenage of the still-smoking crater where the Winter House had been, in the rolling hills of Ualtus Great Valley, he had wanted to believe it wasn't true; this was faked, all of it was faked.

  It had happened more or less at the same time as the bombard­ment of Third Fury. The tiny flash he had seen on the surface of 'glantine as they fell towards Nasqueron in the escaping drop ship: that had been the impact, that had been the instant of their deaths, that had been the very second in which he became alone. The earlier Shrievalty message, slipping through before the data jam that had kept them ignorant all these days and recording the organisation's sympathy for his loss had been referring to this catastrophe as well, not just to the loss of life in Third Fury.

  The wreckage of the drop ship had been found, in the upper Depths, the body of Master Technician Hervil Apsile within. It was as though nothing was to be left aside, nothing and nobody saved, nothing, almost nothing, left to him. Some servants he hardly knew and a second cousin he was moderately fond of, plus an infant he couldn't even picture. And Jaal. But would that - could that - ever be the same now? He liked but did not love her, and was fairly sure she felt the same way. It would have been a good match, but after this he would be different, another person altogether, even if he did return from this idiot adventure, even if there was anything to return to, even if the coming war hadn't destroyed or altered everything. And would her Sept want her to marry into a Sept that no longer existed? Where was the good match, the wise marriage there? Would even she want to, and if she still did, would it not be out of duty, out of sympathy, out of the feeling that their contract must still be honoured, no matter what? What a formula for future blame and bitterness that would be.

  It was almost a comfort to realise that Jaal too would prob­ably be lost to him. It was as though he was hanging over some great drop, about to fall, destined to fall, and the greatest pain came from the act of still hanging on, fingers scraping, nails tearing. Let go of this one last thing to cling to, and the fall itself would at least be painless.

  He wasn't going to kill himself. It was grimly good to know he could do it, but he wouldn't. From a purely practical point of view, he was fairly certain that Hatherence had followed him, using her esuit's military capabilities to hide herself from his gascraft's senses. She'd try to stop him. It could get undigni­fied, and she might even succeed. If he really wanted to kill himself, he was sure there were easier ways. Just heading deeper into the war zone and powering hard straight for a Dreadnought should do the job.

  And it would be too easy. It would be selfish. It would be the end to this terrible, gnawing feeling of guilt, a line drawn under that, and he didn't think that he deserved such an easy way out. He felt guilty? So feel guilty. He had meant no harm - quite the opposite - he'd just been wrong. Feeling guilty was stupid. It was understandable, but it was stupid, just beside the point. They were dead and he was alive. His actions might well have led directly to their deaths, but he hadn't killed them.

  What was left? Revenge, maybe. Though who to blame? If it really had been Beyonders, that made his old treachery (or prin­cipled, self-sacrificing stand, depending) look foolish somehow. He still despised the Mercatoria, hated the whole vicious, cretinous, vacuously self-important, sentience-hating system, and he'd never had any illusions about the unalloyed niceness of the Beyonders or any other large group, or thought that a struggle against the Mercatoria would be other than prolonged, painful and bloody. He'd always known that his own end might be painful and long-drawn-out - he would do everything he could to make sure it wasn't, but sometimes there was just nothing you could do. He had also realised that innocents died just as filthily and in equally great numbers in a just war as they did in an unjust one, and had known that war was to be avoided at almost all costs just because it magnified mistakes, exaggerated errors, but still he'd hoped there would somehow be an elegance about his involvement in the struggle against the Mercatoria, a degree of gloriousness, a touch of the heroic.

  Instead: muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death - all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictive-ness, just through the ghastly, banal working-out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.

  Perhaps he had brought it all down upon them. Never mind advising Slovius to get away from the Autumn House: his delve, his famous delve, the action of meeting Valseir and trading infor­mation might have produced all this. It might all be his fault. Taking all he'd been told at face value, it was.

  He tried to laugh, but the gillfluid filling his mouth and throat and lungs wouldn't let him, not properly. 'Oh, come on then,' be tried to say into the gassy skies of Nasqueron (it came out as a hopeless mumble), 'show me it's all a sim, prove the Cessona's right. End run. Game over. Lift me out.'

  Still all just a mumble, a gurgling somewhere down in his throat as he half stood, half lay there in his coffin-shaped alcove in the little hovering gascraft, poised within the gas-giant's atmosphere at a place where a human could expose themselves to the elements and not die too quickly, if they had something to breathe.

  Revenge was a poor way out too, he thought through his tears. It was human nature, it was creat nature, it would be in the nature of almost any being capable of feeling angry and injured, but it was nearly as poor a way out as suicide. Self-serving, self-centred, selfish. Yes, if he was set in front of whoever had ordered the lobbing of a nuke at a house complex full of unarmed, unwarned civilians, he'd be tempted to kill them if he could, but it would not bring the dead back.

  He never would have the opportunity, of course - again, reality scarcely ever worked that neatly - but if, in theory, he was presented with the chance, the fabled they're-tied-to-a-chair-and-you've-got-a-gun scenario, able to hurt or kill whoever had killed most of those he'd loved, he might do it. There was an argument that it would only make him as bad as them, but then he knew that in a way he was already just as bad as them. The only moral reason for doing it would be to rid the world, the galaxy, the universe of one self-evidently bad person. As though there would ever be a shortage, as though that wouldn't just leave the same niche for another.

  And it would be a military machine, a hierarchy involved here, anyway. The responsibility would almost certainly diffuse out from whoever — or whatever group — had drawn up the relevant strategy through to whoever had given some probably vague order down to whoever had drawn up the general and specific targeting criteria, on down to some schmuck grunt or thoughtless technician who'd pressed a button or tapped a screen or thought-clicked an icon floating in a holo tank. And doubt­less that individual would be a product of the usual hammer-subtle military induction and indoctrination process, breaking the individual down and building them back up again into a usefully obedient semi-automatic asset, sentimental towards their closest comrades, loyal only to some cold code. And, oh, how utterly sure you would have to be that they really were responsible in the first place, that you weren't being fooled by whoever had arranged all this tying-to-a-chair stuff and equipped you with a gun in the first place.

  Maybe automatics had slotted in the final target programming. Was he supposed to track down the programmer too and tie him up with whoever had given the attack-authorisation or dreamed up the whole wizzo plan for visiting Ulubis in the first place?

  If it had really been Beyonders, it might have been an AI which was responsible for the deed, for who-knew-what reason. Why, he'd ha
ve to find it, turn the durn thing off. Though wasn't the Mercatoria's murderous attitude to AIs one of the reasons he hated it so much?

  And maybe, of course, it had all been their mistake and his fault. Perhaps they'd thought they were going to hit an empty house and only his idiot advice, his meddling, had filled it with people. How to apportion the blame there?

  His eyes were bad now, like sand had been thrown in them. He couldn't really see anything, the tears were so thick. (He could still see via the collar, which was a strange experience, the tipped, clear view of the arrowhead's senses overlaid on his body's own.) He couldn't kill himself. He had to go on, see what could be done, pay tribute, try to make up, try to leave the place even fractionally better than he'd found it, try to do whatever good he might be capable of.

  He waited for the Truth to kick in, for the sim-run to end, and when it didn't - as he'd known it wouldn't but had almost hoped it would - he felt bitter, resigned and grimly amused all at once.

  He told the little gascraft to tip back and seal him in again. The arrowhead angled backwards, closing the canopy and enveloping him once more, the shock-gel already moving to cushion and cosset him, tendrils of salve within it starting to heal and repair his flesh and soothe his weeping eyes. He thought the machine did it all with something like relief, but knew that was a lie. The relief was his.

  'Ah, opinions differ as opinions should. Always have, do and will. Might we have been bred? Who knows? Maybe we were pets. Perhaps professional prey. Maybe we were ornaments, palace entertainers, whipping beings, galaxy-changing seed-machines gone wrong (these are some of our myths). Maybe our makers disappeared, or we overthrew them (another myth - vainglorious, overly flattering - I distrust it). Maybe these makers were some proto-plasmatics ? This, must be said, a pervasive one, a tenacious trope. Why plasmatics? Why would beings of the flux - stellar or planetary, no matter - wish to make something like us, so long ago? We have no idea. Yet the rumour persists.

  'All we know is that we are here and we have been here for ten billion years or more. We come and we go and we live our lives at different rates, generally slower as we get older, as you good people have seen within these walls, but beyond that, why are we? What are we for? What is our point? We have no idea. You'll forgive me; these questions seem somehow more impor­tant when applied to us, to Dwellers, because we do seem -well, if not designed, certainly, as one might say, prone to persisting, given to hanging about.

  'No disrespect, do understand, but the selfsame questions applied to Quick, to humans or even - like-species apologies begged, dear colonel, accept - to oerileithe, have not the same force because you do not have our track record, our provenance, our sheer cussed, gratuitous, god-denying abidance. Who knows? Maybe one day you will! After all, the universe is still young, for all our shared egocentricity, our handed-down certi­tude of culmination, and perhaps when the Final Chronicles are written by our unknowable ultimate inheritors they will record that the Dwellers lasted a mere dozen billion years or so in the first heady flush of the universe's infancy before they faded away to nothing, while the oerileithe and humans, those bywords for persistence, those doughty elongueurs, those synonyms for civil­isational endurance, lasted two and three hundred billion years respectively, or whatever. Then the same questions might be asked of you: Why? What for? To what end? And - who can say! - perhaps for you, such being the case, there will be an answer. Better yet, one that makes sense.

  'For now, though, we alone are stuck with such awkward challenges. Everybody else seems to come and go, and that appears natural, that is to be expected, that is the given: species appear, develop, blossom, flourish, expand, coast, shrink and fade. Cynics would say: ha! just nature, is all - no credit to claim, no blame to take, but I say huzzah! Good for all for trying, for taking part, for being such sports. But we? Us? No, we're different. We seem cursed, doomed, marked out to outstay our welcome, linger in a niche that could as well fit many - yes, many! - others, making everybody else feel uncomfortable by our just still being here when by rights we should have shuf­fled off with our once-contemporaries long ago. It's an embar­rassment, I don't mind admitting. I'm amongst friends, I can say these things. And anyway, I'm just an old mad Dweller, a tramp, an itinerant, a floatful plodder from place to place, worthy of nothing but contempt and handouts, both if I'm lucky, worse if I'm not. I try your patience. Forgive me. I get to talk to so few apart from the voices I make up.'

  The speaker was an off-sequence Dweller of Cuspian age called Oazil. To be off-sequence was to have declared oneself -or, sometimes, to have been declared by one's peers - uninter­ested in or apart from the usual steady progression of age and seniority that Dweller society assumed its citizens would follow. It was not by itself a state of disgrace - it was often compared to a person becoming a monk or a nun - though if it had been imposed on rather than chosen by a Dweller it was certainly a sign that they might later become an Outcast, and physically ejected from their home planet, a sanction which, given the relaxed attitude Dwellers displayed to both interstellar travel times and spaceship-construction quality control, was effec­tively a sentence of somewhere between several thousand years solitary confinement, and death.

  Oazil was an itinerant, a tramp, a wanderer. He had entirely lost contact with a family he claimed to have anyway forgotten all details of, had no real friends to speak of, belonged to no clubs, sodalities, societies, leagues or groups and had no perma­nent home.

  He lived, he'd told them, in his carapace and his clothes, which were tattered and motley but raggedly impressive, deco­rated with carefully painted panels depicting stars, planets and moons, preserved flowers from dozens of CloudPlant species and the polished carbon bones and gleaming, socketed skulls of various miniature gas-giant fauna. It was a slightly larger-scale and more feral collection of what Dwellers called life charms compared to the sort of stuff Valseir had worn save when there was some sort of formal event to attend.

  When Fassin had first seen the Dweller tramp it had even occurred to him that Oazil was Valseir in disguise, come back in some attempted secrecy to taunt them all, see how they would treat a poor itinerant before revealing himself as the true owner of the house come to reclaim his lost estate. But Valseir and Oazil looked quite different. Oazil was bulkier, his carapace fractionally less symmetrical, his markings less intricate, his voice far deeper and his quota of remaining vanes and limbs quite different too. Most marked of all, Oazil's carapace was much darker than Valseir's. The two were of roughly similar age - Oazil would have been slightly junior to Valseir had he still been on-sequence: a Cuspian-baloan or Cuspian-nompar to Valseir's Cuspian-choal - but he looked much older, darker and more weather-beaten, almost as dark as Jundriance, who was ten times his age but had spent much of his life as a scholar in slow-time, not wandering the atmosphere exposed to the elements.

  Oazil towed behind him a little float-trailer - shaped like a small Dweller and similarly bedecked - in which he carried a few changes of apparel, some sentimentally precious objects and a selection of gifts which he had made, usually carved from OxyTreeCloud roots. He had presented one of these, shaped to resemble the bubble house itself, to Nuern, to pass on to Jundriance when next he left his depths of slow academe.

  Nuern had not looked especially impressed to receive this small token. However, Oazil claimed that Valseir's house had been a stopping-off point for him during his peregrinations for the last, oh, fifty or sixty thousand years or so. And there was anyway, especially away from cities, a tradition of hospitality towards wanderers that it would be profoundly kudos-sacri­ficing to ignore, certainly when there were other guests around to witness the insult.

  'Will you stay long, sir?' Nuern asked.

  'Yes, will you?' asked Livilido.

  'Oh, no, I'll be gone tomorrow,' Oazil told the younger Dweller. 'This is, I'm sure, a fine house still, though of course I am sorry to hear that my old friend is no more. However, I become awkward when I spend too long in one place, and houses,
though not as terrifying to me as cities, provoke in me a kind of restlessness. I cannot wait to be away when I am near a house, no matter how pleasant its aspect or welcoming the hosts.'

  They were outside on one of the many balconies girdling the house living spaces. They had originally convened for a morning meal to welcome Oazil in the net-hung dining space. But the old Dweller had seemed uncomfortable from the start, edgy and a-twitch, and before the first course was over he had asked, embarrassed and plaintive, if he might dine outside, perhaps beyond a window they would open so that they could still converse face to face. He suffered from a kind of claustrophobia brought on by countless millennia spent wandering the vast unceilinged skies, and felt uncomfortable enclosed like this. Nuern and Livilido had swiftly ordered their younger servants to strike table and set the meal up on the nearest balcony.

  They'd all gone outside, and - after voluminous apologies for seeming to force his will upon them - Oazil had settled down, enjoyed his meal, and, subsequent to sampling some aura-grains and timbre-trace from the narcotics in the table's centrepiece -modelled on a globular university city - he had relaxed suffi­ciently to share with them all his thoughts on Dweller origins. It was a favourite after-meal topic with Dwellers, and so one there was effectively nothing original to say concerning, though, to give Oazil some credit, the subject had been his academic speciality before he'd slipped the moorings of scholastic life and set float upon the high skies of wander.