The Algebraist (32 page)

‘Oh, there are bound to be back-ups, and I’m not even sure the old fellow has been finally put to rest.’

‘After two hundred years?’

‘Come now, Fassin, there were matters of probate.’

‘And it’s in the war zone?’

‘Very likely, yes! Isn’t it exciting? I think we ought to go there immediately!’ Y’sul waved all his limbs at once. ‘Let’s form an expedition! We shall go together.’ He looked at Hatherence. ‘You can even bring your little friend.’

- I have been considering whether to attempt to communicate with your Shared Facility, via your satellites or directly, the colonel told him.

- I wouldn’t, Fassin sent. - But if you decide you must, tell me before you try. I want to be well out of the volume.

- You think the same sort of attack directed against us following your ‘ping’ might be directed against us here?

- Probably not here, in a Dweller city. But then, why risk it? We don’t know that whoever’s been shooting at us quite understands what they’d be letting themselves in for, so they might just waste us and have to deal with the consequences later. We won’t be around to jeer.

- We need to find out what is going on, Major Taak, Hatherence informed him.

- I know, and I’m going to send a request for information up to a sat from a remote site as soon as I’ve checked out what’s been going on via the local nets.

The colonel floated over to look at the enormous though ancient and highly directional flat screen which Fassin was using in his attempt to find out what had been happening. They were in Y’sul’s home, a ramshackle wheel-house in a whole vast district of equally shabby-looking wheel-houses hanging on skinny spindles underneath the city’s median level like a frozen image of an entire junkyard’s worth of exploded gearboxes.

Y’sul had escorted them back from his club in a state of some excitement. Then he’d left them alone, taken his servant Sholish and gone off in search of a decent tailor - his usual tailor had most inconveniently taken it into his mind to change trades and become a Dreadnought rating; probably trying to get in on the ground floor of this upcoming war.

- What have you found? the colonel asked, watching the flat screen fill with an image of the Third Fury moon. - Hmm. The moon appears almost undamaged.

- This is an old recording, Fassin explained. - I’m trying to find an updated one.

- Any mention of the hostilities?

- Not very much, Fassin told her, using a manipulator to work the massive, stiff controls of the old screen. - There’s been a mention on a minority radio news service, but that’s it.

- It is regarded as news, though? This is encouraging, I think?

- Well, don’t get too excited, Fassin sent. - We are talking about a station some amateurs run for the few people like themselves who are actually interested in things happening in the rest of the system; maybe a few thousand Dwellers out of a planetary population of five or ten billion.

- The number of Dwellers in Nasqueron is really that uncertain?

- Oh, I’ve seen estimates as low as two billion, as high as two hundred, even three.

- I encountered this degree of uncertainty in my research, Hatherence said as Fassin switched manually between channels, data sets and image-trails. - I recall thinking it must be a mistake. How can one be two base-ten orders of magnitude out? Can’t one just ask the Dwellers? Don’t they know themselves how many they are?

- You can certainly ask, Fassin agreed. He put some humour into his signal. - An old tutor of mine used to say of questions like this that the answers will prove far more illuminating regarding Dweller psychology than they will concerning their actual subject.

- They lie to you or they don’t know themselves?

- That is a good question too.

- They must have an idea, the Colonel protested. - A society has to know how many people it contains, otherwise how would it plan infrastructure and so on?

Fassin felt himself smiling. - That’s how it would work in pretty much any other society, he agreed.

- There are those who would assert that Dwellers are not in fact civilised, the colonel said thoughtfully, - that they could scarcely be said to possess a society in any single planet, and on a galactic scale cannot be said to constitute a civilisation at all. They exist rather in a state of highly developed barbarism.

- I’m familiar with the arguments, Fassin told her.

- Would you agree?

- No. This is a society. We are in a
city.
And even just in the one planet, this is a civilisation. I know the definitions will have changed over the years and you might take a different view from me, but in the history of my planet we’d refer to a civilisation based around a single river system or on a small island.

- I forget how small-scale one has to think when dealing with planets with solid-surface living-environments, the colonel said, apparently without meaning to insult. - But even so, the definition of a civilisation has to move on when one ascends to the galactic stage, and the Dwellers, taken as a whole, might seem deficient.

- I think it comes down to one’s own definition of the terms, Fassin said. - Hold on; this looks promising.

He swung back from a mosaic of sub-screens to a single moving image. Third Fury again, though this time looking hazier, less defined, and shot from some distance away. The shallow domes of the Shared Facility were obvious if not clear, down near one tipped edge of the little moonlet. A flash on the surface away to one side, and a semi-spherical cloud of debris, spreading. A glowing crater left where the flash had come from.

- This looks like yesterday, Hatherence said.

- Does, doesn’t it? Fassin agreed. - Looks like it was taken from high up on Belt A or the south of Zone 2. Just some amateur pointing a camera. Fassin found how to spin the stored recording back and then forward, then discovered how to zoom in. - And that’s us.

They watched a cerise spot appear on a glittering blister near the edge of the Shared Facility, and could just make out the grainily defined debris of the hangar dome blowing outward in front of a sudden haze of quickly dissipating mist. A tiny dark grey dot rose from the shattered dome and crawled away: the drop ship, making its desperate dive for the planet.

Fassin spun the recording forward. The moon’s position altered quickly, flying away across the dark sky as Third Fury continued on its orbit and whoever was recording the images was whirled away in the opposite direction by the twenty-thousand-kilometre-wide jet stream beneath them. - Definitely Band A, Fassin said.

A brilliant white flash washed out the whole screen. It faded, and a crater kilometres across was left. Debris spread everywhere like a flower’s seed-head, just ready to shed, caught in a sudden hurricane. The interior of the crater was white, yellow, orange, red. The debris continued to spread. It looked like most of it would stay in more or less the same orbit as Third Fury itself.

They both watched in silence. The moon had changed shape. It wobbled, seemed to partially collapse in on itself, slowly, plastically resuming a spherical form after losing so much of its earlier mass. Yellow cloud tops came up in a near-flat line to meet it and the small glowing globe spun under the horizon.

Fassin let the recording play out and start to loop. He stopped it. The screen froze on the recording’s first image of Third Fury, almost overhead, just after the first impact.

- That did not look like a survivable event, the colonel sent. Her sent voice sounded quiet.

- I think you’re right.

- I am very sorry. How many people would have been in the Shared Facility base?

- A couple of hundred.

- I saw no sign of your Master Technician’s craft, or of the attacks on us once we quit the drop ship.

Fassin compared the recording’s time code with the gascraft’s own event list. - Those happened after what we saw here, he told the colonel. - Over the horizon from where this recording was taken, anyway.

- So much for back-up or reinforcements. The colonel turned towards him. - We still go on, though, yes?

- Yes.

- So, now what, Fassin Taak?

- We need to talk to some people.

‘So you want to communicate with your own kind?’ Y’sul asked. ‘Via a relay at a remote site,’ Fassin said.

‘Why haven’t you done so already?’

‘I wanted to get your permission.’

‘You don’t need my permission. You just find a remote dish and send away. I suspect any vicarious effect on my kudos level will be too small to measure.’

They were in an antechamber of the city’s Administrator. The antechamber was a sizeable room furnished with wall hangings made from ancient CloudHugger hides, all yellow-red and whorled. A few sported the holes where the creatures had been punctured. One curved section of wall was a giant window, looking out over the vast floating scape of wheels that was Hauskip. Evening was starting to descend and lights were coming on throughout the city. Y’sul floated over to the window and caused it to hinge down by the unsubtle tactic of bumping into it reasonably hard. He then floated out over the impromptu bow of balcony so produced, muttering something about liking the view and maybe moving his own house up here. A breeze blew in, ruffling the old CloudHugger hides as though their long-dead occupants were still somehow fleeing from their hunters.

Colonel Hatherence leaned over towards Fassin. - This kudos thing, then, she sent. - It is
really
how they calculate their worth?

- I’m afraid so.

- So it’s the truth! I thought it was a joke.

- Distinguishing between the two is not a Dweller strong point. Y’sul wandered back, failing to shut the window. His vanes made a quiet burring noise as he roted through the gas towards them.

‘Give me the message,’ he said. ‘I’ll forward it.’

‘Via an out-of-the-way transceiver?’ Fassin asked.

‘Of course!’

"Well, just send to Sept Bantrabal, letting them know I’m all right and asking whether they’re okay at their end. I imagine they already know what happened to the Third Fury moon. You might ask them whether anything has been heard of Master Technician Apsile and the drop ship which escaped the moon’s assault, and what happened to the ships supposed to be protecting Third Fury.’

‘Ahem,’ the colonel said.

They both looked at her. ‘Is this wise?’ she asked.

‘You mean should I pretend to be dead?’ Fassin said.

‘Yes.’

‘That did occur to me. But there are people I’d like to know I’m alive.’ He thought of that glimpse of a flash which might have been something hitting ‘glantine while Third Fury was being bombarded. ‘And I’d like to know my friends and family are all right.’

‘Of course,’ the colonel said. ‘However, I wonder if it might be more sensible for me to communicate with my superiors first. We might ask Dweller Y’sul here to let me use this remote relay. Once a more secure link had been established, perhaps via one of the warships, which I assume are still somewhere around the planet, a message might be sent to your Sept to let them know you are well. None of which need take long.’

While Hatherence had been speaking, Y’sul had floated right up to her, seemingly intent on peering through the front plate of her esuit, which was in fact completely opaque, and indeed armoured. Eventually he was within a centimetre of her, towering above the oerileithe. The colonel did not retreat. One of Y’sul’s rim limbs tapped - more delicately this time - on the colonel’s esuit casing.

‘Would you mind not doing that, sir?’ she said frostily.

‘Why are you still inside that thing, little dweller?’ Y’sul asked.

‘Because I am evolved for higher, colder levels with a different gas-mix and pressure gradient, Dweller Y’sul.’

‘I see.’ Y’sul drew back. ‘And you have a very strange accent and way with grammar. I swear this human speaks better than you do. What were you saying again?’

‘I was asking you kindly to refrain from making physical contact with my esuit.’

‘No, before that.’ .

‘I was suggesting I make contact with my superiors.’

‘Military superiors?’

‘Yes.’

Y’sul turned to Fassin. ‘That sounds more interesting than your plan, Fassin.’

‘Y’sul, two hundred of my people died yesterday. If not more. I’d like--’

‘Yes yes yes, but--’

‘I might have to signal ‘glantine direct, if no satellites are left,’ Hatherence was saying, as a tall door swung up in one wall and a Dweller in ceremonial clothes poked its rim out.

‘I’ll see you now,’ said the City Administrator.

The Administrator’s office was huge, the size of a small stadium. It was ringed with holo-screen carrels. Fassin counted a hundred or so of the study stations, though only a few were occupied by Dwellers, mostly fairly young. There were no windows but the ceiling was diamond leaf, with most of the sections slid round to leave the place open to the rapidly darkening sky. Floatlamps bobbed, casting a soft yellow light over them as they followed the Administrator to her sunken audience area in the centre of the giant room.