The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  '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.

  When he looked up, the stream was flowing through a large amphitheatre, and a great crowd of people were watching him intently.

  At the transition point of the journey, where the Protreptic stopped accelerating, turned a half-somersault and pointed its engines at its destination to start deceleration, Quercer & Janath spent some time checking that Y'sul was still healing satisfactorily.

  Fassin used the time to explore a little more of the Voehn ship, floating the arrowhead gascraft down the narrow circular access tubes, investigating crew quarters, storerooms and cham­bers. Camera remotes tracked his every move, the thoroughly internally surveillanced ship making it simple for Quercer & Janath to keep whatever fraction of an eye on him they thought appropriate.

  He found what he thought was probably the commander's cabin, a couple of bulkheads behind the command space. It was the most generously proportioned obviously personal space he'd encountered. It looked bare and alien. There was a slightly more comfortable version of one of the multi-spine cradle seats he was used to seeing throughout the ship by now, and some representations of coverings on certain walls, plus what might have been carpet designs on the floor. Only the designs existed, painted on or displayed by some thin-film technology - Fassin couldn't tell. Similarly, there were no ornaments, just holos of ornaments. He'd heard most warships were like this; cutting down on weight and the possibilities of stuff flying about during hard manoeuvring by having the appearance of things rather than their physical presence.

  He floated in front of one carpet design that looked like a piece of text, all small, curled glyphs in a network, but could find no record in the gascraft's memories of such a language. He wondered what it said. He recorded the image. Quercer & Janath would probably wipe it when they went through the portal, but never mind.

  The next time he met up with the ship, on the far side of the river there was a massive dark wall, rising sheer and jet from the waters, its summit crowned with crenellations and gun turrets. Further guns poked out of gun ports distributed in stag­gered lines over the whole top quarter of the huge wall, making it look like the side of some ancient sea-ship, only the biggest and most preposterously long one there had ever been, its vast hull diminishing into the distance. The guns were not static but moved in sequence, in waves of what appeared almost like loco­motion, making the exposed barrels look oddly like ineffectual oars on some colossally mis-designed trireme or an impossible, upended millipede.

  The ginger-haired ape sat nearby as usual. It had a new shield, round and highly polished. It sat looking at it and flicking imag­inary specks from it. Sometimes it held it up to see it sparkle in the light, and sometimes it held it up so that it could look at itself in it.

  'Text?' the elderly man asked. 'On a floor display? No, I'm sorry, I don't have any memory of that, not stored. If the ship still existed, if I still had access . . .' He looked sad. Fassin glanced at the ginger-haired ape, but it looked away and started whistling, or at least trying to.

  'Maybe there's some way I can patch through an image I have,' Fassin said.

  'You have an image? You have been on the ship?' The man looked surprised.

  After some to-ing and fro-ing, Fassin having to jog back up the step and through the doorway back into normal reality to set things up, he was able to display the image he'd taken. The long-limbed ape held up his shield and the image appeared there.

  'Oh, that?' the man said. He stroked his short grey beard. 'That's something the Commander picked up a long time ago, in the days when he had command of a smaller ship. A trans­lation into Ancient Sacred of something which I believe marks the end of an abomination, an AI.'

  'What does it say?' Fassin asked.

  'It says, "I was born in a water moon. Some people, espe­cially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter, 'moon' seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

  '"If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pres­sure, make one's way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon.

  '"Where a strange thing happened.

  "'For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pres­sure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from.

  '"This was, of course,—"

  'At which point it cuts off.'

  Fassin thought. 'Where did it come from?'

  'It was used by one of the anathematics that Commander Inialcah hunted down and killed as a kind of memory-death mantra, to remove any trace of what might have been in its memory. The AI concerned later turned out to have been one of those also seeking the so-called Transform. It was that pursuit which originally gave the commander an interest in the matter. The memory-death mantra he had translated and kept partly as a kind of talisman, though I believe he also always thought there might be some meaning to the specific piece the AI chose to overwrite its memories with which might prove useful if he could ever work it out, because AIs were known, as he said, for being too clever by half, and through their arrogance some­times gave important information away. That was another reason for preserving it and keeping it constantly before him.'

  In his dream, Fassin was standing with Saluus Kehar on a balcony over a volcanic caldera, full of red-hot bubbling lava. 'We're to gas-capable a whole load of stuff for—' Sal was saying, when he paused, cleared his throat and waved one hand. 'Heck,' he continued, turning into a Dweller, but somehow with a human face and without getting any bigger. He floated out over the waves of lava. 'Idiotic things, little Fassin. I took the orig­inal of the beast to a friend and fellow friend in the city of Direaliete. A friend and fellow friend.'

  Fassin gazed at his own hands, to check that he was still himself.

  When he looked up, Saluus had gone and the river he was standing in had temples on both sid
es, up steep flights of steps the height of prison walls.

  'Original of what?' he heard himself ask.

  The far side of the river showed a city from the age of waste, all medium-rise buildings, smoke and electric trains and multi-lane roads full of roaring cars and trucks. They had to raise their voices a little to make themselves heard over the noise. A sweet, oily burning smell wafted over the river towards them.

  The ginger ape picked its gleaming teeth with a giant sword.

  'Another image?' the man said. He looked fit in a lean way and was no longer young. His beard was mostly grey. 'Let me see.'

  Knowing what to do this time, Fassin showed the man the little image-leaf which depicted yellow sky and brown clouds.

  'Obviously the colour's wrong,' he told the man. 'I couldn't help noticing.'

  'Oh, yes, there's an image there. I see it.'

  'I know, but what—?'

  'And some algebra, ciphered into the base code.'

  At that, the ape's long, curved sword came sweeping down and cut the man through, slicing him from neck to hip. The remains gushed down the steps to the river and wriggled away, all silver.

  Fassin looked up at the great ape. 'Hey,' he said, 'it was just a—'

  'Who's clever?' the ape hissed, drawing back the terrible, glit­tering sword.

  Fassin woke up shaking. He was in a coffin - he'd just hit his head on the inside of the lid. He tried to blink and couldn't because something was in his eyes, surrounding them, surrounding every part of him, filling his mouth and nose and anus

  Shock-gel, gillfluid, the gascraft. Fucking calm down, he told himself. How long you been a Seer again?

  The Protreptic, the ex-Voehn craft en route for Nasqueron, Ulubis via the Direaliete system, under the command of the self-confessed twin AI Quercer & Janath, pirates and close-combat Voehn-wasting specialists.

  They were back under moderate deceleration, on their way into the system and the hidden wormhole.

  The details of the dream were starting to slip away from him, fish sine-waving goodbye through the water. And yet he felt he'd understood something. What had it been?