Banks,Iain M - The Algebraist

IAIN M. BANKS

THE ALGEBRAIST

ISBN: 1-84149-229-9

Version 1.0

Prologue

One: The Autumn House

Two: Destructive Recall

Three: Nowhere Left to Fall

Four: Events During Wartime

Five: Conditions of Passage

Six: The Last TransformEpilogue

PROLOGUE

Ihave a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings

and endings are contin-gent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any storyreally begin? There

is always context, always an encompassinglygreater epic, always something before the described

events, unlesswe are to start every story with, 'BANG!Expand! Sssss . . .',then itemise the whole

subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question.

Similarly,no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things . . .

Nevertheless, I have a story to tell you. My own direct partin it was vanishingly small and I have

not thought even to intro-duce myself with anything as presumptuous as a proper name.Nevertheless, I

was there, at the very beginning of one of thosebeginnings.

From the air, I am told, the Autumn House looks like a giantgrey and pink snowflake lying

half-embedded within thesefolded green slopes. It lies on the long, shallow escarpmentwhich forms the

southern limit of the Northern TropicalUplands. On the northern side of the house are spread thevarious

formal and rustic gardens which it is both my duty andmy pleasure to tend. A little further up the

escarpment rest theextensive ruins of a fallen temple, believed to have been aconstruction of a species

called the Rehlide. (6ar., either severelyabated or extinct, depending on which authority one choosesto

give credence to. In any event, long gone from these parts.) The temple's great white columns once

towered a hundred metres or so into our thin airs but now lie sprawled upon andinterred within the

ground, vast straked and fluted tubes of solid stone half buried in the peaty soils of the unimproved

landaround us. The furthest-fallen ends of the columns - which musthave toppled slowly but most

impressively in our half-standard gravity - punched great long crater-like ditches out of the

earth,creating long double embankments with bulbously roundedtips. Over the many millennia since their

sudden creation thesetall ramparts have been slowly worn down both by erosion andour world's many

small ground-quakes so that the earth hasslumped back to refill the wide ditches where the column

endslie, until all that is visible is a succession of gentle waves in the land's surface, like a series of small,

splayed valleys from whoseupper limits the unburied lengths of the columns appear like the pale

exposed bones of this little planet-moon.

Where one column fell and rolled across a shallow river valley,it formed a sort of angled cylindrical

dam, over which the waterspills, is caught and channelled by one of the metres-deepgrooves

embellishing the column's length, and then flows downto what remains of the column's ornately carved

capital and aseries of small, graceful waterfalls which end in a deep pool justbeyond the tall, dense

hedges which mark the highest limit ofour gardens. From here the stream is guided and controlled,some

of its waters proceeding to a deep cistern which providesthe headwaters for our gravity fountains down

near the housewhile the rest make up the brook which by turns tumbles,rushes, swings and meanders

down to the ornamental lakes and partial moat surrounding the house itself.

I was standing waist-deep in the gurgling waters of a steeplypitched part of the brook, three limbs

braced against the current,surrounded by dripping exer-rhododendron branches and coilsof weed,

trimming and dead-heading a particularly recalcitrantconfusion of moil-bush around a frankly rather

threadbareraised lawn of scalpygrass (basically a noble but failed experi-ment, attempting to persuade

this notoriously clumpy varietyto...ah: my enthusiasms may be getting the better of me, andI digress -

never mind about the scalpygrass) when the youngmaster - returning, whistling, hands clasped behind

his back, from his morning constitutional round the higher rockeries -stopped on the gravel path above

me and smiled down. I lookedround and up, still clipping away, and nodded with as muchformality as

my somewhat awkward stance would allow.

Sunlight poured from the purple sky visible between the curveof eastward horizon (hills, haze) and

the enormous overhangingbulk of the gas-giant planet Nasqueron filling the majority ofthe sky (motley

with all the colours of the spectrum belowbright yellow, multitudinously spotted, ubiquitously zoned

andbelted with wild liquidic squiggles). A synchronous mirroralmost directly above us scribed a single

sharp line of yellow- white across the largest of Nasqueron's storm-spots, whichmoved ponderously

across the sky like an orange-brown bruise the size of a thousand moons.

'Good morning, Head Gardener.'

'Good morning, Seer Taak.'

'And how are our gardens?'

'Generally healthy, I would say. In good shape for spring.' Icould have gone on to provide much

more detail, naturally, butwaited to discover whether Seer Taak was merely indulging inphatic

discourse. He nodded at the water rushing and breakingaround my lower limbs.

'You all right in there, HG? Looks a bit fierce.'

'I am well braced and anchored, thank you, Seer Taak.' I hesi-tated (and during the pause could

hear someone small and light running up the stone steps towards the gravel path a little furtherdown the

garden), then, when Seer Taak still smiled encourag-ingly down at me, I added, 'The flow is high

because the lower pumps are on, recirculating the waters to enable us to scour oneof the lakes free of

floating weeds.' (The small personapproaching reached the path's loose surface twenty metresaway and

kept running, scattering gravel.)

'I see. Didn't think it had rained that much recently.' Henodded. 'Well, keep up the good work,

HG,' he said, and turned to go, then saw whoever was running towards him. I suspectedfrom the

rhythm of her running steps that it was the girl Zab.Zab is still at the age where she runs from place to

place as amatter of course unless directed not to by an adult. However,I believed that I detected a

more than casual urgency in her gait.

Seer Taak smiled and frowned at the girl at the same time asshe came skidding to a stop on the

gravel in front of him, puttingone hand flat to the chest of her yellow dungarees and bending over for a

couple of deep, exaggerated breaths - long pink curls swirling and dancing round her face - before

taking one even deeper breath and standing up straight to say,

'Uncle Fassin! Grandpa Slovius says you're out in a commun-icardo again and if I see you I've to tell

you you've to comeand see him right now immediately!'

'Does he now?' Seer Taak said, laughing. He bent and pickedthe girl up by her armpits, holding her

face level with his, herlittle pink boots hanging level with the waist of his britches.

'Yes, he does,' she told him, and sniffed. She looked downand saw me. 'Oh! Hello, HG.'

'Good morning, Zab.'

'Well,' said Seer Taak, hoisting the child further up andturning and lowering her so that she sat on

his shoulders, 'we'dbetter go and see what the old man wants, hadn't we?' He starteddown the path

towards the house. 'You okay up there?'

She put her hands over his forehead and said, 'Yup.'

'Well, this time, mind out for branches.'

'Youmind out for branches!' Zab said, rubbing her knucklesthrough Seer Taak's brown curls. She

twisted round and wavedback at me. 'Bye, HG!'

'Goodbye,' I called as they went towards the steps.

'No,you mind out for branches, young lady.'

'No,you mind out for branches!'

'No,you mind out for branches.'

'No,you mind out for branches . . .'

ONE

THE AUTUMN HOUSE

It had thought it would be safe out here, just one more ambi-ently black speck deep-chilled in the

vast veil of icy debriswrapping the outer reaches of the system like a frozen, tenuousshroud of tissue.

But it had been wrong and it was not safe.

It lay, slow-tumbling, and watched helplessly as the probing beams flickered across the pitted,

barren motes far away, andknew its fate was settled. The interrogating tendrils of coher-ence were

almost too quick to sense, too seemingly tentative toregister, barely touching, scarcely illuminating, but

they did theirjob by finding nothing where there was nothing to find. Justcarbon, trace, and ice-water

hard as iron: ancient, dead, and -left undisturbed - no threat to anyone.

The lasers flicked off, and each time it felt hope rise, findingitself thinking, despite all rationality, that

its pursuers wouldgive up, admit defeat, just go away and leave it be, to orbit there for ever. Or perhaps

it would kick away into a lonely eternityof less than light-slow exile, or drift into a closedown sleep, or

...Or it might, it supposed - and this was what they feared,of course, this was why they hunted - plot

and plan and gatherand make and quicken and build and multiply and muster and - attack! . . . Claiming

the vengeance that was so surely its,exacting the price its enemies all deserved to pay - by any algebra

of justice under any sun you cared to name - for their intoler-ance, their savagery, their generacide.

Then the needle rays reappeared, fitfully irradiating the soot-ice-clinker of another set of

barnacle-black detritus, a littlefurther away, or a little closer, but always with a rapid, metic-ulous order

to them, a militaristic precision and a plodding,bureaucratic systematicism.

From the earlier light trails, there were at least three ships.How many did they have? How many

might they devote tothe search? It didn't really matter. They might take a moment, a month or a

millennium to find their quarry, but they obvi-ously knew where to look and they would not stop until

theyhad either found what they were looking for or satisfied them-selves that there was nothing there.

That it was so obviously in harm's way, and that its hidingplace, however enormous, was almost the

first place they had chosen to search, filled it with terror, not just because it did notwant to die, or be

picked apart as they had been known to pick its kind apart before killing their victims utterly, but

because ifit was not safe in this place where it had assumed it would be,then, given that so many of its

kind had made the same assump- tion, none of them would be safe either.

Dear Reason, maybe none of us are safe anywhere.

All its studies, all its thoughts, all the great things that might have been, all the fruits of change from

the one great revelationit might have had, and now would never know the truth of,would never be able

to tell. All, all for nothing now. It couldchoose to go with some elegance, or not, but it could not

choosenot to go.

No un-choosing death.

The needle rays from the needle ships flicked on\flicked off away across the frozen distances, and

finally it could see thepattern in them, discerning one ship's comb of scintillationsfrom the others and so

picking out the shape of the search grids,allowing it to watch, helpless, as the slow spread of that

mortalinquiry crept slowly, slowly closer.

*

The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the StarvelingCult of Leseum9 IV and effective

ruler of one hundred andseventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numeroussignificant

artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive

HighAdmiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet

(Det.) and who had once beenTriumvirate Rotational human\non-human Representative for Cluster

Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, inthe days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the

last, fadingrumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago causedthe head of his

once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay

to along-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside downfrom the ceiling of his hugely

impressive study in the outer wallof Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and FarabyBay

towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so thatthe Archimandrite could, when the mood

took him, which wasfairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punchball.

Luseferous had long, sheen-black straight hair and a natur-ally pale complexion which had been

skilfully augmented tomake his skin nearly pure white. His eyes were artificially large,but just close

enough to congenitally possible for people to beunsure whether they had been augmented or not. The

whitesbeyond the black irises were a deep, livid red, and every one ofhis teeth had been carefully

replaced with a pure, clear diamond,giving his mouth an appearance which varied from

bizarre,mediaeval toothlessness to startling, glistening brilliance,entirely depending on angle and light.

In a street performer or an actor, such physiological depar-tures might have been amusing, even a

little desperate-looking;in somebody wielding the kind of power which Luseferouspossessed, they could

be genuinely disturbing, even terrifying.The same half-tasteless, half-horrifying effect might be claimedfor

his name, which was not the one he had been born with.Luseferous was a chosen name, selected for its

phonetic prox-imity to that of some long-scorned Earth deity which mosthumans - well, most rHumans,

at least - would vaguely haveheard of in their history studies while probably not beingentirely able to

place when they had heard the word.

Again thanks to genetic manipulation, the Archimandrite wasnow and had been for some long time

a tall, well-built manwith considerable upper-body strength, and when he punchedin anger - and he

rarely punched in any other state - it was toconsiderable effect. The rebel leader whose head now

hungupside down from Luseferous's ceiling had caused the Archimandrite enormous military and

political difficultiesbefore being defeated, difficulties which had sometimes verged on being humiliations,

and Luseferous still felt deep, deepresentment towards the traitor, resentment which easily and reli-ably

turned itself to anger when he looked upon the man's face,no matter how battered, bruised and bloody

it might be (thehead's augmented healing functions were quick, but not instan-taneous), and so the

Archimandrite probably still whacked andsmashed away at Stinausin's head with as much enthusiasm

now as he had when he'd first had him hung there, years earlier.

Stinausin, who had barely endured a month of such treat-ment before going completely mad, and

whose mouth had beensewn up to stop him spitting at the Archimandrite, could noteven kill himself;

sensors, tubes, micropumps and biocircuitry prevented such an easy way out. Even without such

extraneouslimitations he could not have shouted abuse at Luseferous or attempted to swallow his tongue

because that organ had beentorn out when his head had been removed.

Though by now quite perfectly insane, sometimes, after anespecially intense training session with

the Archimandrite, whenthe blood trickled down from the one-time rebel chief's split lips, re-broken

nose and puffed-up eyes and ears, Stinausinwould cry. This Luseferous found particularly gratifying,

andsometimes he would stand, breathing hard and wiping himselfdown with a towel while he watched

the tears dilute the blooddripping from the inverted, disembodied head, to land in a broad ceramic

shower tray set into the floor.

Of late, though, the Archimandrite had had a new playmate to amuse himself with, and he would

occasionally visit thechamber some levels below his study where the nameless would-be assassin whose

own teeth were slowly killing him was held.

The assassin, a big, powerful-looking, leoninely human male, had been sent without weapons save

for his specially sharpened teeth, with which, it had obviously been hoped by whoever hadsent him, he

could bite out the Archimandrite's throat. This he had attempted to do, a half-year earlier at a

ceremonial dinnerheld here in the clifftop palace in honour of the System President(a strictly honorary

post Luseferous always made sure was filledby somebody of advanced age and retreating faculties).

Thewould-be assassin had only failed to accomplish this task thanksto the Archimandrite's

near-paranoid forethought and intense-and largely secret - personal security.

The failed assassin had been both routinely, if savagely, torturedand then very carefully questioned under the

influences of entiresuites of drugs and electro-biological agents, but had givennothing useful away.

Patently he had been equally carefully wipedof any knowledge that might incriminate whoever had sent

him, by interrogational technicians at least as capable as those whomthe Archimandrite commanded. His

controllers had not evenbothered to implant false memories incriminating anybody closeto the Court and

the Archimandrite, as was common in suchcases.

Luseferous, who was that most deplorable of beings, apsychopathic sadist with a fertile

imagination, had decreed thatthe final punishment of the assassin should be that his own teeth-the

weapons he had been sent with, after all - should bring about his death. Accordingly, his four canine

teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would growwithout ceasing, and

reinserted. These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw,

punc-- turing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorselessgrowth. The lower set curved up

and over his head and, after

a few months' worth of extension, came to touch his scalp nearthe top of his head, while the upper set

grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck, taking about the same time tomeet the skin near

the base of his throat.

Genetically altered not to stop growing even when theyencountered such resistance, both sets of

teeth then started toenter the assassin's body, one pair slowly forcing themselvesthrough the bony plates

of the man's skull, the other set enteringrather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck.

Thetusks digging into the assassin's neck caused great pain but werenot immediately life-threatening; left

to themselves they wouldreappear from the rear of his neck in due course. The fangsburrowing through

his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonisingly, kill him, perhaps in

aslittle as another month or so.

The unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to doanything to prevent this because he was

pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber with bands andshackles of thick stainless

iron, his nutrition and bodily func-tions catered for by various tubes and implants. His mouth hadalso

been sewn up, like that of Stinausin. For the first few monthsof his captivity the assassin's eyes had

followed Luseferous around the chamber with a fierce, accusatory look that the Archimandrite

eventually grew to find annoying, and so he'dhad the man's eyes stitched shut too.

The fellow's ears and mind still worked, however -Luseferous had been assured - and sometimes it

amused himto come down and see for himself the progress that the teethwere making into the creature's

body. On such occasions, havingwhat one might term a captive - yet necessarily discreet - audi-ence, he

sometimes liked to talk to the failed assassin.

'Good day,' Luseferous said pleasantly as the lift doorrumbled shut behind him. The chamber deep

below the studywas what the Archimandrite thought of as his den. Here, aswell as the nameless

assassin, he kept assorted souvenirs of oldcampaigns, booty from his many victories, items of high

artlooted from a dozen different stellar systems, a collection ofweapons both ceremonial and

high-power, various caged ortanked creatures, and the mounted, profoundly dead heads ofall those

major enemies and adversaries whose end had not beenso complete as to reduce their mortal remains

to radiation, dust, slime or unidentifiable strips of flesh and shards of bone (or the alien equivalents

thereof).

Luseferous crossed to a deep, dry tank part-set into the floor and looked in at the Recondite

Splicer lying coiled and still on its floor. He slipped a thick elbow glove onto his arm, reachedinto a

large pot standing on the broad, waist-high parapet ofthe tank and dropped a handful of fat black

trunk-leeches intothe tank.

'And how are you? Are you keeping well? Hmm?' he asked.

An observer would have been unsure whether theArchimandrite was talking to the human male

pinned to thewall, the Recondite Splicer - now no longer still, but raising itsblind, glistening brown head,

sniffing the air while its long, segmented body twitched with anticipation - or indeed the trunk-leeches,

thudding one by one onto the mossy floor of thetank and immediately flexing their way with a sort of

sine-wavemotion across the surface towards the nearest corner, as far away

from the Recondite Splicer as it was possible to get. The brownmass of the Splicer began to shuffle

massively towards themand they started trying to climb the sheer glass sides of the tank,climbing over

each other and slipping back down as soon as they tried to haul themselves up.

Luseferous peeled the elbow glove off and looked round the vaulted, subtly lit space. The chamber

was a comfortable, quiet sort of place set well within the cliff, with no windows or lightshafts, and he felt

safe and relaxed here. He looked over at thelong, tawny shape that was the suspended body of the

assassinand said, 'Nowhere's quite as nice as home, eh, is it?' The Archimandrite even smiled, though

there was nobody to smileat.

There was a rasping noise and a heavy thump from insidethe tank, followed by some almost

inaudibly high keeningsounds. Luseferous turned to watch the Recondite Splicer tearthe giant leeches

apart and eat them, violently shaking its great patchily brown head and tossing some bits of slimy black

fleshall the way out of the tank. Once it had thrown a still-aliveleech up and out of the tank and nearly

hit the Archimandrite with it; Luseferous had chased the injured leech round thechamber with a

shear-sword, cleaving deep slivers out of the dark red granite floor as he hacked and sliced at the

creature.

When the show in the tank was over, the Archimandrite turnedback to the assassin. He put the

elbow glove back on, picked another trunk-leech from the pot and strolled over to the manattached to

the wall. 'Do you remember home, sir assassin?' heasked as he approached. 'Is there any memory of it

in your headat all, hmm? Home, mother, friends?' He stopped in front ofthe man. 'Any of that stuff at

all?' He waved the leech's moist, seeking snout in front of the assassin's face as he spoke. Theysensed

each other, the cold, writhing creature in the Archiman-drite's hand stretching out to try to fasten itself to

the man's face, the man sucking breath through his nostrils and turning his headas far as it would go,

seeming to try and shrink back into the wall behind (this would not be the first time the assassin had

been introduced to a trunk-leech). The tusks digging into hischest prevented him from moving his head

very far.

Luseferous followed the movements of the man's head with the leech, keeping it in front of his

lightly furred, leonine face,letting him smell the straining, quivering mass.

'Or did they rip out all those memories when they cleaned you, before they sent you to try to kill

me? Huh? Are they all gone? Eh?' He let the very tip of the trunk-leech's mouth partsjust touch the

fellow's nose, causing the failed assassin to winceand jerk and make a small, terrified whimpering noise.

'What, eh? Do you remember home, eh, sport? A pleasant place to be,a place you felt safe and secure

and with people you trusted,and who maybe even loved you? What do you say? Eh? Eh? Come on.'

The man tried to turn his head still further, straining the puckered skin around the puncture points on his

chest, oneof which started to bleed. The giant leech trembled inLuseferous's hand, stretching its

mucus-tipped mouth parts stillfurther as it tried to find purchase on the human male's flesh.Then, before

the leech could properly attach itself to the fellow,the Archimandrite pulled it back and let it hang from

his half-outstretched arm, where it swung and twisted muscularly with what felt for all the world like

genuine frustration.

'This is my home, sir assassin,' Luseferous told the man. 'Thisis my place, my refuge, this, which

you . . . invaded, despoiled,dishonoured with your . . . your plot. Your attempt.' His voicequaked as he

said, 'I invited you into my house, invited you to my table as...as hosts have guests for ten thousand

human years and you...all you wanted to do was hurt me, kill me.Here, in my home, where I should

feel safer than anywhere.'The Archimandrite shook his head in sorrow at such ingrati- tude. The failed

assassin had nothing but a dirty rag to coverhis nakedness. Luseferous pulled it away and the fellow

flinched again. Luseferous stared. "They did make a bit of a mess of you,didn't they?' He watched the

failed assassin's thighs quiver andtwitch. He let the loincloth fall to the ground; a servant would replace it

tomorrow.

‘I like my home,' he told the fellow quietly. 'I do, really.Everything I've had to do I've done just to

make things safer,to make home safer, to make everybody safer.' He waved the trunk-leech towards

what was left of the man's genitalia, butthe leech seemed listless and the man already exhausted. Even

the Archimandrite felt like some of the fun had gone out of thesituation. He turned smartly and strode to

the pot on the broadrail over the tank, dumping the leech inside and peeling thethick elbow glove off.

'And now I have to leave home, mister assassin,' Luseferoussaid, and sighed. He gazed down at

the long coiled shape of theonce-again-still Recondite Splicer. It had changed colour from brown to

yellow-green now, adopting the colours of the mossesit lay upon. All that was left of the trunk-leeches

were somedark spots and smears on the walls, and a faint, tangy smell theArchimandrite had come to

recognise as that of yet anotherspecies's blood. He turned back to look at the assassin. 'Yes, Ihave to

go away, and for a very long time, and it would seemI have no choice.' He started to walk slowly

towards the man.'Because you can't delegate everything, because ultimately, espe-cially when it comes

to the most important things, you can'treally trust anybody else. Because sometimes, especially

whenyou're going far away and communications take so long, there'sno substitute for being there. What

do you think of that? Eh?There's a fine thing. Don't you think? Me working all theseyears to make this

place safe and now I have to leave it, still trying to make it even safer, even more powerful, even

better.'He stepped up to the man again, tapping one of the curved fangs boring through the fellow's

skull. 'And all because of peoplelike you, who hate me, who won't listen, who won't do asthey're told,

who don't know what's good for them.' He gripped the fang and pulled hard at it. The man mewed

down his nosewith pain.

'Well, not really,' Luseferous said, shrugging, letting go. 'It'sdebatable whether this will really make

us safer or not. I'mgoing to this ... this Ulubis ... system or whatever it is becausethere might be

something valuable there, because my advisers advise so and my intelligence people have intelligence to

this effect. Of course nobody's certain, nobody ever is. But they doseem uncommonly excited about

this.' The Archimandritesighed again, more deeply. 'And impressionable old me, I'm going to do as they

suggest. Do you think I'm doing the right thing?' He paused, as though expecting an answer. 'Do you?

Imean, I realise you might not be entirely honest with me if youdid have an opinion, but, all the same . . .

No? You sure?' Hetraced the line of a scar along the side of the man's abdomen,wondering idly if it was

one of those that his own inquisitorshad inflicted. Looked a bit crude and deep to be their work.The

failed assassin was breathing quickly and shallowly butgiving no sign that he was even listening. Behind

his sealedmouth, his jaws seemed to be working.

‘You see, for once I'm not absolutely sure myself, and I coulduse some advice. Might not make us

all safer at all, what we're planning to do. But it has to be done. The way some things justhave to. Eh?'

He slapped the man's face, not hard. The manflinched all the same. 'Don't worry, though. You can

come too.Big invasion fleet. Plenty of room.' He looked around thechamber. 'Anyway, I feel you spend

too much time stuck inhere; you could do with getting out more.' The ArchimandriteLuseferous smiled,

though still there was nobody to smile at. 'After all this trouble I'd hate to miss watching you die. Yes,

you come with me, why don't you? To Ulubis, to Nasqueron.'

'Eh? Oh, yes.' Uncle Slovius raised a flipper-like hand andwaved it vaguely. 'Please do.'

'Thank you.'

Fassin Taak hitched up his walking britches, gathered in hiswide shirt sleeves and folded himself

decorously into a sittingposition at the side of the large circular pool of gently steamingand luminously

blue liquid that his uncle floated within. UncleSlovius had some years ago assumed the shape of a

walrus. A beige-pink, relatively slim walrus, with tusks barely longer thanthe middle finger of a man's

hand, but a walrus nevertheless.The hands Uncle Slovius had once possessed were no more -they were

flippers now, on the end of two thin, rather odd andineffectual-looking arms. His fingers were little more

than stubs;a scalloped pattern fringing the ends of his flippers. He openedhis mouth to speak, but then

one of the household servants, ablack-uniformed human male, approached him, kneeling at theside of

the pool to whisper something into his ear. The servantheld his long pigtail out of the water with one

many-ringedhand. The dark clothes, long hair and rings all indicated that he was one of the most senior

functionaries. Fassin felt he oughtto know his name, but couldn't think of it immediately.

He looked round the room. The chamber of ProvisionalForgetting was one of the rarely used parts

of the house, only called into action - if you could call it that - on such occasions, when a senior family

member was approaching their end. The pool took up most of the floor space of a large roughly hemi-

spherical room whose walls were translucently thin agate inlaidwith veins of time-dulled silver. This

dome formed part of onebubble-wing of the family's Autumn House, situated on the continent Twelve

on the rocky planet-moon 'glantine, whichorbited the gaudy, swirlingly clouded mass of the gas-giant

Nasqueron like a pepper grain around a football. A tiny portion of the massive planet's surface was

visible through the trans-parent centre section of the dome's roof, directly above Fassinand his uncle.

The part of Nasqueron that Fassin could see was presently indaylight, displaying a chaotic

cloudscape coloured crimson,orange and rust-brown, the summed shades producing a deep redlight

which fell through the violet skies of 'glantine's thinlybreathable atmosphere and the dome's glazed

summit and helpedilluminate the chamber and the pool below, where the black-cladservant was

supporting Uncle Slovius while he supped on abeaker of what might have been either refreshment or

medi-cine. Some dribbles of the clear liquid escaped Uncle Slovius'smouth, trickling down his grizzled

chin to the folds of his neckand dripping into the blue pool, where tall waves slopped toand fro in the

half-standard gravity. Uncle Slovius made quietgrunting noises, his eyes closed.

Fassin looked away. Another servant approached him,offering a tray of drinks and sweetmeats,

but he smiled andraised one hand in a gesture of rejection and the servant bowedand retreated. Fassin

fixed his gaze politely on the dome's roofand the view of the gas-giant, while watching from the cornerof

his eye as the servant attending his uncle dabbed at the old man's lips with a neatly folded cloth.

Magisterial, oblivious, moving almost imperceptibly with akind of tumultuous serenity, Nasqueron

turned above them likesome vast glowing coal hanging in the sky.

The gas-giant was the largest planet in the Ulubis system,which lay within a remote strand of

Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs on the galactic outskirts, fifty-fivethousand years

from the galaxy's nominal centre and about asremote as it was possible to get while still being part of the

greatlens.

There were, especially in the current post-War age, differentlevels of remoteness, and Ulubis

system qualified as back-of-beyond in all of them. Being on the outermost reaches of thegalaxy - and

hanging well underneath the galactic plane, wherethe last vestiges of stars and gas gave way to the

emptinessbeyond - did not necessarily mean that a place was inaccessible,providing it was close to an

arteria portal.

Arteria - wormholes - and the portals which were their exitsand entrances meant everything in the

galactic community; theyrepresented the difference between having to crawl everywhere at less than the

speed of light and making almost instantaneoustransitions from one stellar system to another. The effect

theyhad on a system's importance, economy and even morale was similarly dramatic and rapid. Without

one, it was as though youwere still stuck in one small village, one dull and muddy valley,and might be

there all your life. Once a wormhole portal wasemplaced, it was as though you suddenly became part of

a vastand glittering city, full of energy, life and promise.

The only way to get an arteria portal from one place toanother was to put it in a spaceship and

physically take it, slowerthan light, from one place to another, leaving the other end -usually - anchored

where you'd started out. Which meant thatif your wormhole was destroyed - and they could be

destroyed,in theory at any point along their length, in practice only attheir ends, at their portals - then

you were instantly all the way back to square one, stuck in your isolated little village onceagain.

Ulubis system had first been connected to the rest of thegalaxy over three billion years earlier,

during what was thenknown as the New Age. It had been a relatively young, not-long-formed system at

the time, just a few billion years old, butwas already multiply life-supporting. Its arteria connection

hadformed part of the Second Complex, the galactic community's second serious attempt at an

integrated network of wormholes.It had lost that connection in the billion-year turmoil of theLong

Collapse, the War of Squalls, the Scatter Anarchy and theInformorta breakdown, then - along with

most of the rest ofthe civilised galaxy - slumbered as if comatose under the weightof the Second, or

Major, Chaos, a time when only its Dweller population on Nasqueron had survived. The Dwellers,

beingnumbered amongst the species meta-type known as the Slow,worked to a different timescale, and

thought nothing of taking a few hundred thousand years to get from point A to point B;a billion years of

Banks, Iain M - The Algebraist

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