Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“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 sides, 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?

Confusing.

Something about Saluus, and had Hatherence been in there too? Sal’s house, only it had been a volcano, then the virtual environment where he met the ship, and it had looked at -

In the shock-gel, pickled in it, surrounded by it, Fassin felt his eyes go wide and his skin prickle and crawl. His heart spasmed, thudding erratically in his chest.

He could do it himself. He could wait until they got back, back to Nasq. and Ulubis, and take it to somebody — if he found Valseir he could just ask him, though he didn’t think he’d be able to find Valseir — but that wasn’t good enough. He had to know.

He’d committed the image-leaf to the gascraft’s memory. Lying there in the shock-gel, inside the little arrowhead, he called the photograph up and saw it floating before him. The picture of blue sky and white clouds looked odd to him, half-alien and wrong, and yet half-familiar at the same time, invoking a feeling of something between nostalgia and homesickness.

He blew the image up to the point where it became a blocky abstract of colour. He scanned the whole image for smaller images, found nothing, then started running various routines that the gascraft’s biomind held for finding patterns in random data. Had he recorded the image in fine enough detail to find anything hidden in it? Would the hidden data, if it was there, be findable without some other code?

He wished he could access the original, stowed in a tiny locker on the outside of the gascraft, but he couldn’t, not while he was pinned under this sort of force. Anyway, it might look suspicious to Quercer Janath if he started peering too intently at the image-leaf. Because that was where the answer might lie, where it might — just, perhaps, maybe — have been lying all the time.

“…I took the original of the folder to a friend and fellow collector in Deilte, a city in the south polar region, within a safekeep box…’ That, or something very like it, was what Valseir had said.