The Algebraist (26 page)

‘Ayee! Crazy ‘yonding talk,’ Mome said, putting his hands over his ears. ‘Get us all arrested.’ They laughed.

‘At least we have the freedom to say this sort of thing,’ Fassin pointed out.

Mome did his special Hollow Laugh.

In the central plaza, Fassin greeted people, drank in the sense of solidarity and slightly edgy fun - lots of inventive costumes, towering floss-sculptures and buzzing balloonderers (trailing slogan banners, yelling chants and scattering narconfetti) - but still felt oddly apart from it all. He looked up and around, ignoring for the moment the people - mostly human - and the circle of domed and gleaming buildings.

The hab was a giant, verdant city rolled up into a spinning tube, with small hills and many lakes and criss-cross avenues between low-rise hanging-garden apartments and winding rivers and spindly towers, some arched like bows and reaching all the way up to the suntube, where they curved - or needle-eyed - round to meet towers on the far side. Bunches of nests - surrounded by mirrors, trailed with friction tubes like jungle creepers - clustered near the long axis, and dirigiblisters floated like strange, semi-transparent clouds beneath them.

Then Fassin heard some sort of shout at one edge of the crowd, nearest the palace of the Diegesian, which was the focus for the protest. He might have smelled something strange, but then that was probably just one of the cruising balloonderers disseminating some drug that Fassin’s immedio-immune system hadn’t recognised. Then he realised maybe it wasn’t, because all the balloonderers dropped suddenly, as one, out of the air. Also, the sun in the suntube went out. Which never happened. He heard lots of odd noises, some of which might have been screaming. It seemed to get cold very quickly. That was odd too. People were hitting him, with their shoulders mostly, as they went running past him, then they were falling over him, and he realised he was
Fassin?,
realised he was
Fassin
lying down, then he was
Fassin
getting hit again, but he was
Fassin
trying to get up and stand again, and he was
Fassin,
he was
Fassin,
he was on his knees and he was
Fassin
just about to get up from his knees onto his feet - swaying, feeling very strange, wondering what all the people were doing lying down around him - when -
Fassin
- he was knocked down again. By a man in armour, steel grey, with a big trunchbuster club and no face and a couple of little buzz-drones at each shoulder, spraying gas and making a high, terrible keening noise that he -
Fassin!
- wanted to get away from, but his nose and eyes and everything else stung and hurt and he didn’t know what to do, he was
Fasssin!
just standing there and the guy with the big club thing as long as a spear came up to him and he
Fasssin?
stupidly thought he might ask him what was going on and what was wrong with
Faaassssiiinnn?
wrong when the man swept his club-spear trunchbuster thing round and into his face, knocking some teeth out and sending him spinning to
‘Fassin?’

His name finally jolted him awake. ‘Back with us? Good.’

The speaker was a small man in a large chair across a cramped-looking metal desk. The room - or whatever - was too dark to see into, even with IR. The sound of the man’s voice in the space suggested it was not a big space. Fassin was aware that his face and especially his mouth hurt. He tried to wipe his mouth. He looked down. His hands could not move because his forearms were - he tried to think of the right word - shackled? They were shackled to the seat he was sitting in. What the hell was this? He started laughing.

Somebody hit him in his bones. It was like his entire skeleton was a wind chime and his flesh and muscles and organs were somewhere else, only nearby but still connected somehow and some fucker - actually, some very large group of fuckers - had taken a whole load of hammers and whacked each one of his bones really hard at the same time. The pain went almost as quickly as it arrived, leaving just a weird sort of echo in his nerves.

‘What the fuck was zhat?’ he asked the little man. His voice sounded comical with some of his teeth knocked out. His tongue probed the gaps. Felt like two out, one loose. He tried to remember how long it took adult teeth to grow back. The little man was quite a jolly-looking soul, with a plump, amused-seeming face and chubby, rosy cheeks. His hair was black, cropped. He wore a uniform of a type that Fassin didn’t recognise. ‘Are you shucking
torturing
me?’ Fassin asked.

‘No,’ the little man said in a very reasonable tone of voice. ‘I’m just doing this to get your attention.’ One of his hands moved on the desk’s surface.

Fassin’s bones clattered as though played upon again. His nerves, having experienced this twice now, decided that really this was no joke, and in fact felt extremely sore.

‘All right! All right!’ he heard himself saying. ‘I take the shucking point. Fucking point,’ he said, working out how to adapt his pronunciation to his new dental layout.

‘Don’t swear,’ the little man said, and hurt him again.

‘Okay!’ he screamed. His head hung. Snot dripped from his nose, saliva and blood from his mouth.

‘Please don’t swear,’ the little man said. ‘It indicates an untidy mind.’

‘Just tell me what the f-- what you want,’ Fassin said. Was this real? Had he been in some sort of weird VR dream ever since he’d joined K for the coming-out-of-the-shallows end-of-tream thing earlier? Was this what happened when you got tream templates cheap, or illegally copied or something? Was this real? It felt painful enough to be real. He looked down at his legs and the hems of his shorts, all covered in blood and mucus and snot. He could see individual hairs on his legs, some standing, some plastered to his skin. He could see pores. Didn’t that mean it was real? But of course it didn’t. Treams, simcasts, VR, all depended on the fact that the mind could really only concentrate on one thing at a time. The rest was illusion. Human sight, the most complicated sense the species possessed, had been doing that for millions of years, fooling the mind behind the eyes. You thought you had colour vision, and in some detail, over this wide angle but really you didn’t; accurate colour vision was concentrated within a tiny part of the visual field, with only vague, movement-wary black-and-white awareness extending over the rest.

The brain played tricks on itself to pretend that it saw as well away from the centre of its visual target as it did right at that bull’s-eye. Smart VR used that same deception; zoom in on a detail and it would be created for you in all its pinpoint exactitude, but everything else you weren’t attending to with such concentration could safely be ignored until your attention swung that way, keeping the amount of processing power within acceptable limits.

Fassin dragged his attention away from his blood-spattered leg. ‘Is this real?’ he asked.

The little man sighed. ‘Mr Taak,’ he said, glancing down at a screen, ‘your profile indicates that you are from a respectable family and may one day even become a useful member of society. You shouldn’t be mixing and living with the sort of people you have been mixing and living with. You’ve all been very foolish and people have suffered because of that stupidity. You’ve been living in a kind of dream, really, and that dream is now over. Officially. I think you ought to go back home. Don’t you?’

‘Where are my friends?’

‘Mr Iifilde, Mr Resiptiss, Ms Cargin and Ms Hohuel?’

Fassin just stared at him. Shit, in all the last few months he’d been staying here he’d only known them by their first names. He supposed those were Thay, Sonj and Mome’s last names, but really he’d no idea. And there had been four, hadn’t there? Did that mean they were counting K as well? But she hadn’t been to the protest.

‘They’re being held elsewhere, or they’ve been processed and released, or we’re still looking for them.’ The little man smiled.

Fassin looked down at his arms, held within metal hoops. He tried to move his legs, then leaned over and looked down. His legs were shackled too. Or manacled or whatever. His mouth felt very odd. He ran his tongue round where his teeth had been, checking again. He supposed he’d have to get false ones until the new ones grew back. Or sport a piratical grin. ‘Why am I being treated like this?’ he asked.

The little man looked incredulous. He appeared to be about to hurt Fassin again, then shook his head in exasperation. ‘Because you took part in a violent demonstration against the Diegesian, that’s why!’ he said.

‘But I wasn’t violent,’ Fassin said.

‘You personally may not have been. The demonstration you took part in most certainly was.’

Fassin would have scratched his head. ‘Is that all it takes?’

‘Of course!’

‘Who started the violence?’ he asked.

The little man jerked his arms out to each side. His voice went very high. ‘Does it
matter?’

Fassin had meant which side, but he could tell the little man thought he’d meant which demonstrator. He sighed. ‘Look, I just want to get back to my friends, to my nest. Can I go? I didn’t do anything, I got my teeth knocked out, I can’t tell you anything, or… anything…’ he said. He sighed again.

‘You can go when you sign this.’ The little man swivelled the screen around so Fassin could see. He looked at what he was supposed to sign, and at the fingerprint pad and camera patches on the screen which would record that it had really been him signing (or, more to the point, make a fake document take up a fraction more storage space).

‘I can’t sign this,’ he said. ‘It basically says my friends are all Beyonder agents and deserve death.’

The little man rolled his eyes. ‘Read it
carefully,
will you? It just says you have
suspicions
in that regard. You don’t seriously think
your
word would be enough to convict anybody of anything, do you?’

‘Well then, why get me to--?’

‘We want you to
betray
them!’ the little man shouted, as though it was the most obvious thing ever. ‘We want you to turn your back on them and become a productive member of society. That’s all.’

‘But they’re my friends.’ Fassin coughed, swallowed. ‘Look, could I get a drink of water?’

‘No. You can’t. And they’re not your friends. They’re just people you know. They’re barely acquaintances. You got drunk with them, got stoned with them, talked a bit with them and slept with some of them. You’ll all go your separate ways soon enough anyway and probably never keep in touch. They are not your friends. Accept that.’

Fassin thought better of debating what being a friend meant, in the circumstances. ‘Well, I’m still not betraying them.’

‘They’ve betrayed you!’

The little interrogator swung the screen round, clicked on a few patches and swung it back. Fassin watched Thay, Sonj and Mome - all stuck in seats like the one he was secured in, and Sonj looking pretty beaten-up - say they thought that Fassin held Beyonder sympathies and was a danger to society who needed watching. They each mumbled something to that effect, signed the screen and pressed a thumb against the print patch (Sonj’s left a smear of blood).

The screenage shook him. It had probably been faked, but all the same. He sat back. ‘You faked that,’ he said, unsteadily.

The little man laughed. ‘Are you mad? Why would we bother?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fass admitted. ‘But I know my friends. They wouldn’t--’

The little man sat forward. ‘So just sign this and in the
highly
unlikely event that it ever crops up, just say
yours
has been faked.’

‘So why not fake it anyway?’ Fassin shouted.

‘Because then you won’t have
betrayed
them!’ the little man yelled back. ‘Come on! Sign and you can go. I’ve got better things to do.’

‘But why do any of this?’ Fassin said, wanting to cry. ‘Why make anybody betray anybody?’

The little man looked at him for a moment. ‘Mr Taak,’ he said, sitting back, sounding patient. ‘I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they’re nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they’ll be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause.’

‘But--’

‘Be quiet. The idiotic issue you chose to complain about - ownership of a habitat - really has nothing to do with you. It’s a legal matter, an ownership thing. You weren’t even born here and you wouldn’t have stayed beyond a few more months anyway, admit it. You should have kept out of it. You chose not to, you put yourself in harm’s way and now you’re paying the price. Part of that price is letting us know that you have made an effort to dissociate yourself from the people you were complicit with. Once you do that, you can go. Home, I would suggest. I mean to ‘glantine.’