The Algebraist (25 page)

Fassin looked up at the sleek lines of the gascraft.
How small it looks,
he thought.
Tiny space to spend years in… decades in… even centuries…
They landed. Apsile, more experienced, got his knee-flex just right; Fassin bounced.

The giant esuit had to tilt to clear the carrier ship’s opened hold doors, toppling then coming upright again with a burr of vanes and a whoosh of air. ‘I must say I myself would prefer to enter the atmosphere directly, that is to say, in fact. Indeed, in reality,’ the colonel shouted.

‘Yes,’ Fassin said. ‘I would too, colonel.’

‘Good luck in that!’ the oerileithe boomed.

‘Thank you,’ Fassin said. ‘I suspect good luck will be necessary, if not sufficient.’

A few hours later he had just about enough time to reflect that it was bad luck which produced the opportunity they had both been looking for, before he had to flee for his life.

*

The others persuaded him eventually. Thay, Sonj and Mome were all going. Why not him? Not nervous, surely? Maybe just too lazy?

He wasn’t nervous or - quite - that lazy. He just wanted to stay back at the nest and bland with K, who was coming to the end of a tream, socked into a traumalyser and a linked-up subsal. She floated, lightly tethered, in the gentle stream blowing out of the air chair, slim graceful body semi-foetal, arms waving, her long, end-tied chestnut hair blossoming above her like a cobra hood, wrapping over her head then wafting back again. The NMR net was like a hand with twenty-plus slim silver fingers grasping her head from the back. The subsal’s transparent tube disappeared into a tiny neuro-taplet just behind her left earlobe. K’s eyes moved languidly behind their lids and her face seemed set in a smile.

At this stage, coming out of a long tream, it was as though she had been diving in some abyssal depths and was now swimming slowly back in through a few kilometres of sunlit shallows. You could wade out to meet the person coming in without surrendering yourself to the whole para-lucid chemical-NMR-holo-induced dream state, you could sort of snorkel with them while they still gilled, heading for the beach that was mundane reality.

- Hey, Fass! she’d sent when he first dipped in to join her, slipping on a small NMR collar and becoming part of the slowly evaporating tream. She’d been away for a day and a half; a long one. - You came to meet me? Thanks, part!

- Have fun? he asked.

- More than fun. Guess where I’ve been?
He sent a shrug. - Faintest.

- I did a delve! I treamed a delve like Seers do, into Nasqueron! Well, it wasn’t really Nasq, it was another gas-giant called Furenasyle. That’s where the chip must have been templated. You heard of Furenasyle?

- Yeah, it’s another place they do Dweller Studies. So you treamed you were there? Delving, yeah?

- Surely did. You make it sound so amazing. And, Fass, it was great! Best tream… well, second-best tream I’ve ever had! K sent a kind of complicit, sexy smirk in his direction. He guessed the tream she was referring to. They’d experienced it together. A love-tream, a joint immersion in what they felt for each other. Well, supposedly. Love treams were tacky in some ways - you could still lie about your feelings in them, and if you selected the right template from the traumalyser device and suitable accompanying chemicals from the subsal, you could pretty much guarantee a tream of surpassing, wide-eyed heart-throbbing bliss even between two people who basically hated each other. But it had been good, between the two of them. Good, but not something that he’d wanted to do again. He supposed he was suspicious of the whole Virtual Reality experience, and treaming, especially with a synched-in subsal providing appropriate synthesised chemicals for delivery to the brain, was the most immersive VR you could find. Legally or semi-legally, anyway.

- You should try it! Really! It would be like practice, don’t you think?

- I suppose. If delving is what I’m going to end up doing. I take it you’d recommend it.

- If it’s like that, sure!

Sure was what he was not. He was still young, still undecided. Should he become a Slow Seer, like everybody seemed to expect him to become, even including the people he shared the nest with on Hab 4409 (‘The Happy Hab!’)? Or should he do something else entirely? He still didn’t know. The very fact that everybody thought he would become a Seer eventually, after a few wild years - and these were surely wild years, not something that you ever imagined could go on for ever or even for very long - made him all the more determined not to do what was expected of him… well, maybe ‘determined’ was too strong a word, he admitted. Reluctant. Made him more reluctant. He supposed that was better. Still, he might surprise them all. He might go off and do something entirely, utterly and excitingly different. He just had to experience lots of different things until he found the right thing, was all.

- Listen, I’m probably going with the others to the protest. Well, unless you need me, you know…

- Good for you! I don’t mind. You go. I’d come too, but I need to ramp out of this shallow. That last time I steeped really crawled. Ugh!

- Okay. See you.

- Later, part!
He left the nest.

The nest - a low-gee pod of forty or so mostly small spherical rooms housing a kind of commune of (all human) gappers, nopers, treamers, trustafarians, zealers and zonkers - was in a big bunch of living spaces up near the hab’s long axis, near the (rather arbitrarily termed) ‘west’ end, not far beneath the suntube. The nest allegedly belonged to the mother of one of the trustafarians, though unofficially it was the Immaturian People’s Republic of Whateverness (and had semi-official paperwork and software to prove it, too).

Hab 4409 was one of a few hundred thousand habitats orbiting Sepekte. It was average size, a cylinder of re-formed asteroid material fifty kilometres long and ten across, spinning to create about two-thirds of a gee at its internal diameter surface. It turned in the unending sunlight like a giant garden roller flattening photons. Two twelve-kilometre mirror-lens systems - one at either end - faced Ulubis star like a pair of vast, unbearably thin flowers. Further mirror complexes funnelled the captured sunlight through two windows of diamond sheet into the hab’s long axis, where a final set of mirrors - moving up and down the suntube to create something like the feel of a planetary day - finally directed the light towards the internal surface. Or at least finally directed the light towards the internal surface if there wasn’t something like one of the grape-bunch-like nest complexes in the way (more mirrors).

Many more people lived in the habs than lived on planets in the system and most of the habs were somewhere near Sepekte. Hab 4409 had been a fairly liberal, free-flowing, laissez-faire, who-cares kind of place almost since its inception - as part of a horrendously intricate incumbent species asset-swap write-off dodge - two millennia earlier. Even its ultimate ownership had never fully been settled, and several generations of lawyers had gone to their plush retirements - having followed the saga of Hab 4409’s provenance and title since their days as articled clerks - still lacking a sense of closure re the above.

So the place attracted drifters, artists, misfits, natural exiles, political and other eccentrics and slightly deranged or badly messed-up people of more or less every sort, and always had. Most were from Ulubis but some were more exotic and from further afield, generally trustafarians and-or gappers portaling in from the rest of the Mercatoria, taking time out between education and responsibility to relax a little. The place produced good art, it was an unofficial - but tax-deductible - finishing school for the aforesaid children of the rich (give the darling brats true freedom and let them see how empty it was, was the idea), it was a way station for those heading out to disgrace or back from perdition, and it was a halfway house for those who might or might not ever again contribute anything useful to society but who just might galvanise it fundamentally. (And, if you wanted to be really paranoid about stuff, it was - as far as the authorities were concerned - a relatively easy-to-watch and even easier-to-close-down sump for dangerous ideas: a radical trap.) It was useful, in other words. It fulfilled a purpose, if not several. In a society as large as that which existed around Ulubis, somewhere had to provide that sort of service.

People were people. Some would always be straight, some would always be a bit twisted, but they all had some sort of part to play, and they were all in some sense valuable, were they not?

But now the fucking Mercatoria, the fucking Ascendancy or fucking Omnocracy, or whatever they fucking were, the fucking Hierchon (more likely, one of his new rotational crop of advisers who saw a way to make some money and gain some extra power), or the Peregal below him or Apparitor below
him
or just the Diegesian gimplet who was actually nominally the governor or mayor or whatever he was supposed to fucking be (his post, his presence and his protecting bully boys only here at all thanks to an earlier dispute over who controlled what, resulting in a grubby, century-old compromise), anyway the fucking big boys, the fucking people who owned fucking everything or thought
some
fucker ought to own fucking everything had decided, decreed,
deemed
that proprietorship of the whole fucking place - and that of lots of other similar habs in similar situations of disputed\uncertain\dubious\happily contingent ownership - should pass to what they called a properly accredited and responsible authority. Which basically meant them. Or if not them, their chums. Somebody who took things like ownership and rent-gathering and petty law-enforcement and so on seriously. It was the law-makers, the law-givers, being outlaws, and it would not be allowed to stand, it would not be allowed to pass, it would not go unchallenged, it would not go into the local statutes without a serious fucking challenge. These people, for whatever fuckwit reason, were destroying part of what was good about the habs, about Sepekte-Orbit, about Ulubis system, about the society they were all in the end a part of. Ultimately they were being stupid and self-destructive, and all that was required was that the people who could see all this clearly - because they were right here, at the sharp end, at the cutting edge - pointed this out to them. They were all on the same side in the end, it was just that sometimes the fuckers in authority got too far away from the reality of life as the mass of people lived it, and that was when you had to make a stand, make a point and make yourself heard.

So they went to the protest, down the friction tubes and the bungees and along the tramways to the central plaza and the makings of a great crowd.

‘You just have to think about it,’ Mome said as they walked the last street into the plaza. ‘The Beyonders never attack habs, never attack whole cities, never attack anything big and easy and defenceless. They attack the military and the authorities and big infrastructure stuff. Their attacks, their violence, their military strategy is a discourse amenable to analysis if one is prepared to approach it shorn of propagandistic preconceptions. And the message is clear: their argument, their war is with the Mercatorial system, with the Ascendancy and the Omnocracy and the Administrata and not with the common people, not with us.’

‘Resent being called common!’ Sonj protested. ‘Erring on the side of generosity including you in the category "people", Sonj,’ Mome shot back. Mome was a little guy, pale, intense and always slightly hunched, as though perpetually preparing either to pounce or duck. Sonj was huge; a big bumbling dark brown geezer of changeable moods and intensely curly short red hair who only looked at home or even slightly graceful in low gee.

‘Doesn’t necessarily make them the good guys,’ Fassin insisted.

‘Makes them people open to reason, people capable of indulging in meaningful dialogue,’ Mome said. ‘Not just mad fuckers to be put down like vermin, which is pretty much what we’re told they are.’

‘So what’s stopping them talking to us?’ Fassin asked.

‘Us,’ Mome said. ‘Takes two to talk.’

They all looked at him. Mome was known to talk a lot. Sometimes to audiences who had, basically, long since fallen asleep. He shrugged.

‘My cousin Lain--’ Thay said.

‘Another
one?’ Mome asked, feigning incredulity.

‘Sister of cousin Kel, half-sister of cousin Yayz,’ Thay explained patiently. She was Sonj’s part, also generously made; awkward in low gee but bouncily agile on the hab’s internal surface at two-thirds of a gee. ‘My cousin Lain,’ she continued determinedly, ‘the one in the Navarchy, says that she reckons the reason the Beyonders attack so much at all is because if they don’t the Navarchy and the Summed Fleet goes after them. And we don’t just attack military stuff. She says we hit their habs. Kill millions of them. Lot of offs unhappy with--’

‘Lots of
whats
unhappy with?’ Mome asked.

‘Lots of offs,’ Thay repeated.

‘I got the
word,’
Mome repeated with a sigh, ‘I just didn’t get the
meaning.’
He snapped his fingers. ‘Wait. Short for "officers", right?’

‘Correct.’

‘Brilliant. Carry on.’

‘Lot of offs unhappy with this,’ Thay said again, ‘so the ‘yonds - the Beyonders - just attack us to keep us on the defensive.’ She nodded once. ‘That’s what my cousin Lain says.’