Iain Banks - The Algebraist

It was her time. She knew that.

She’d really thought there would be tears, but they stayed away. How strange not to know oneself, after so long, at such an extremity, and so close to the end.

What else? Well, she’d thought of telling him, of confronting him, of bringing it all back up again, of listening to him rage at or plead with or scream at her. That had been something she’d rehearsed a lot, that had been something she’d thought through time after time after time as she’d played and replayed this scene in her head over the years and decades and centuries, taking both her part and his, trying to imagine what he’d say, how he’d try to explain it, how he’d imply she was mad or mistaken.

Ultimately Taince had just got bored with it. She’d heard it all before. There was nothing more to say.

She was taking a man’s life on circumstantial evidence, on a hunch. She ought to give him the chance to appeal. She ought at least to allow him to know it was about to happen.

But then, why?

The cold sheen of desert and the vast impenetrability of the dark, ruined ship rushed up to meet them.

“Shit, Tain—!”

Sal might have tried to use the eject — it was one system she couldn’t disable from her controls — but then, that was why she’d flown the last bit upside down.

In the end all it took was a single quick flick of the wrists.

The cutter slammed into the side of the ship, just ten metres off the desert floor, at about half the speed of sound.

There is, along the higher latitudes of the Northern Tropical Uplands of the planet-moon ’glantine, in the system of Ulubis, a bird which, thanks to its call, people call a Hey-fella-hey.

The bird is a migrant, a passer; that is, a bird that does not dwell in the given region but only ever passes through. The Hey-fella-hey passes through these latitudes in the early spring, heading north.

It was a cool day, mid-morning. Nasqueron, half full, cast a ruddy-brown light over the soft shadows of the day. Once, one might have seen sky mirrors away to one side or the other, bringing sunlight to us even when Nasqueron filled most of the sky above. However, many of these devices were destroyed in the war, and so our little planet-moon is a literally gloomier place now than it once was, returned, until new mirrors are emplaced, to its primitive state.

I was working in the old formal pasture, wading deep in an exasperation of chuvle weed choking a — by now — almost hidden pond and trying to work out what to do with the weed and the feature (for both are pretty in their own ways) when I heard the distinctive call of said bird. I stopped and listened.

“Hey-fella-hey-fella-hey-fella-hey!” the bird sang. I turned slowly, looking for it in the higher branches of the nearby trees.

While I was looking — I never did locate the bird — I saw a figure walking along the high path towards the stream and the perimeter wall which gives out onto the slope holding — a little further up — the ruins of the old Rehlide temple.

I looked carefully, zooming in and trying to filter out the effects of the intervening bushes and shrubs, because the figure walked very like Seer Taak, who had been a long time gone from us. (“Us”! — always the same, hurtful mistake. There was no “us” any more, just a few sad remnants left behind at a house abandoned.) The figure disappeared behind a clump of thicker shrubbery, though they would reappear shortly if they continued to follow the path.

I thought. In retrospect, perhaps the person walking on the path had been somewhat older than the gentleman I had been pleased to think of as the young master. He was slightly stooped, which Seer Taak never had been, and he was perhaps too thin, plus he walked like somebody who had been injured in some way. So it seemed to me, at any rate. I would not claim to be an expert in such matters. I am but a humble gardener, after all. Well, a head gardener, but all the same. Still humble, I hope.

The figure did indeed reappear, though not exactly where I had been expecting. Whoever it was had taken a side path and was now walking almost straight towards me. They raised a hand. I raised a trowel, waved back. It was Seer Taak! Or — by all reason — it was somebody doing their damnedest to look like a rather more aged version of him.

I clambered out of the pond, shook some chuvle weed from a couple of legs, and lumbered up the path bank to meet him.

“Young master?” I said, dropping trowel, rake and spade and brushing soil and weed-stems from my arms.

The man smiled broadly. “HG, it is you.” He was dressed in long, loose, casual clothes, nothing like those of a Seer.

“It is you, Seer Taak! We thought the worst! Oh! For you at least to be alive!”

I confess I folded, going down on all eights, staring at the gravel of the path, overcome.

He squatted in front of me. “We never see what’s in front of us, do we, HG?”

“Sir?”

“HG, tell me you’re not an AI”

I looked up at him. “Emotion? Was that it? I should have known that would give me away one day.”

He smiled. “Your secret’s safe.”

“Well, perhaps for now.”

“Patience, HG.”

“You imply that things may change? Or that I should just wait for death? We do not die easily. We have not been allowed to.”

He smiled a slow, painful smile. “Change, HG.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yes. All sorts of things are happening.”

“I have heard something. They say there is a wormhole mouth, in Nasqueron?” I looked up at the great planet which seemed to hang over us, its vast circlet rivers of gas — cream and brown, yellow, white, purple and red — forever sliding in contrary directions.

Fassin Taak nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “It turns out we were all connected, all the time.” He picked up a pebble from the path, looked at it. “The Dwellers may even let us use their wormhole network, if we ask them nicely. Sometimes. There is a furious debate going on in Dweller society even as we speak — and probably for some time to come, Dwellers being, well, Dwellers -regarding to what extent the undying admiration of every even vaguely sentient species in the rest of the galaxy and possibly beyond could possibly constitute a general increase in the background kudos level for all Dwellers, and therefore a valid reason for throwing open their galactic transport system to all.”

“That would indeed be a great change.”

“And not one that the Mercatoria would be allowed to control.”

“It would still be the Mercatoria.”

“It can change too. It won’t have any choice. Patience, HG.”

“Well, we shall see, but thank you.”

I looked at him. Fassin Taak did indeed look older. His face was more careworn, the lines around his eyes deeper. “Has all been well here, HG?”

“All is well in the garden. The house… well, that is not my province.”

Now he looked down. “I took a look around,” he said. His voice was quiet. “It was all very quiet. Very strange and quiet with nobody there.”

“I try not to look at it,” I confessed, “except sometimes at dawn and during the very early morning, when it looks much as it always did: bright light upon it but no sign of life. That I can bear.” I saw the image even as I spoke of it. “I am lucky that I have the garden to tend. By looking after it, it looks after me.”

“Yes,” he said. “We all need something to do, don’t we?”

I hesitated. “Still, there is not a day goes by when I do not curse my luck to have been stuck here rather than with them somehow, when the end came. I envy the Head Gardener of the Winter House, where they all died together.” I pulled myself up a fraction. “But enough. And you, sir? What do you do these days?”