Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“Tell me what you know,” Fassin suggested. “I’ll fill in what I can.”

“They want lots of warships, Fass.” Sal gave a sad-looking smile. “Lots and lots of warships. We’re to turn out as many as we can for as long as we can, though they want them sooner rather than later, and any advanced projects that might take longer than a year, even existing ones, are being deprioritised. We’re to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for—” Sal paused, cleared his throat and waved one hand. “Hell, idiot stuff; we’re to rough-cut a whole load of civilian conversions: armed merchantmen, one-shot cloud-miners, tooled-up cruise liners and so on. We didn’t even do that in the last Emergency. So whatever it is, it’s serious, it’s presumably what our military friends would call credible, and it’s not very far away. Over to you.”

“Lot I can’t tell you,” Fassin said carefully. “Most of which I guess wouldn’t interest you anyway.” He wondered how much he could say, how much he needed to say. “Supposedly to do with something called the Epiphany-Five Disconnect.”

Sal raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. Bit away. Wonder why they’d bother? Richer pickings inward of where they are.”

“But a significant part of the Summed Fleet is on the way. We’re told.” Fassin grinned.

“Mm-hmm. I see. And what about you?” Sal asked, dipping closer to Fassin, voice dropping. “What’s your part in all this?”

Fassin wondered how much the continual rush of noise produced by the waves below would mask their words, if anybody was listening from far away. Since he’d arrived he’d showered and put on a change of clothes he’d requested from the house — caught without the necessary means of attire due to an extended stay away from home, he’d explained, needlessly. He got the impression the servants were perfectly used to providing clothes of varying sizes and for whatever sex to house guests. Still, even without the proscribed horror of nanotech, it was possible to make bugs very small indeed these days. Had the Shrievalty or the Hierchon’s people put some sort of trace or mike on him? Had Sal? Did Sal put surveillance on his guests as a matter of course? His host was waiting for an answer.

Fassin looked into the drink. A few small bubbles of gas rose to the surface and broke, giving some tiny proportion of the substance of Earth to the atmosphere of a planet twenty thousand light years away. “I just did my job, Sal. Delved, talked, took away what the Dwellers would let me take away. Most of which was not momentous, not important, not going to change anything much at all, not something everybody would want or risk everything for.” He looked Saluus Kehar in the eye. “Just stumbled my way through life, you know? Over whatever turned up. Never knowing what would lead to what.”

“Whoever does?” Sal asked, then nodded. “But I see.”

“Sorry I can’t really tell you too much more.”

Sal smiled and looked out at the slope of artificial surf, the pandemonium of waves beyond and the sheer cliffs further away still, brown-black beneath a hazy azure sky.

“Ah, your minder,” he said. The esuit of Colonel Hatherence of the Shrievalty appeared to one side, low over the foam, floating out over the mad froth of waters like a great fat grey and gold wheel. Whirling vane-sets on either side of her esuit kept the Colonel from sinking into the maelstrom. For all its massive size when you were standing next to it, the esuit looked very small from up here.

“She giving you any problems?”

“No. She’s okay. Doesn’t insist I salute her or call her Ma’am all the time. Happy to keep things informal.” All the same, he was hoping to get the Colonel out of the way somehow, either before or once he got down into Nasqueron.

Fassin watched the Colonel as she picked her way across the scape of waves. “But can you imagine trying to sneak into Boogeytown with that dogging your every move?” he asked. “Even just for one last night?”

Sal snorted. “The dives and the ceilings are too low.”

Fassin laughed. This is like sex, he thought. Well, like the seduction-scenario thing, like the whole stupid mating dance of will-you-won’t-you, do-you-don’t-you rigmarole. Tempting Sal, leading him on…

He wondered if he’d seemed sufficiently mysterious yet hinted at maybe being available. He needed this man.

Dinner with Sal, his wife, their concubines and some business associates, including — amongst the latter — a whule, a jajuejein and a quaup. The talk was of new attacks on distant outposts, martial law, delays in comms, restrictions in travel and who would gain and who would lose from the new Emergency (nobody on any of the couches seemed to anticipate losing more than a few trivial freedoms for a while). Colonel Hatherence sat silent in one corner, needing no external sustenance, thank you, but happy, indeed honoured, to be there while they consumed nourishment, communicated conversationally and intercoursed socially while she continued her studies (much-needed!), screening up on Nasqueron and its famous Dwellers.

Drinks, semi-narcotic foods, drug bowls. A human acrobat troupe entertained them, floodlit beyond the dining room’s balcony.

“No, I’m serious!” Sal shouted at his guests, gesturing at the acrobats, swinging through the air on ropes and trapezes. “If they fall they almost certainly die! So much air in the water you can’t float. Sink right down. Get caught up in the under-turbulence. No, idiot!” Sal told his wife. “Not enough air to breathe!”

Some people left. Drinks later, just the humans. To Sal’s trophy room, corridors and rooms too small, sorry, for Colonel Hatherence (not minding; so to sleeping; good nights!). Sal’s wife, going to bed, and the remaining few. Soon just the two of them, overlooked by the stuffed, lacquered, dry-shrunk or encased heads of beasts from dozens of planets.

“You saw Taince? Just before the portal went?”

“Dinner. Day or two before. Equatower.” Fassin waved in what might have been the general direction of Borquille. You could see the lights of the Equatower from the house, a thin stipple of red climbing into the sky, sometimes perversely clearer above when the lower atmosphere was hazed and the higher beacons shone down at a steeper angle through less air.

“She okay?” Sal asked, then threw his head back and laughed too loudly. “As though it matters. It was two centuries ago. Still”

“Anyway, she was fine.”

“Good.”

They drank their drinks. Cognac. Also from Earth, long, long ago. Far, far away.

Fassin got swim.

“Oh shit,” he said, “I’ve got Swim.”

“Swim?” said Saluus.

“Swim,” Fassin said. “You know; when your head kind of seems to swim because you suddenly think, ‘Hey, I’m a human being but I’m twenty thousand light years from home and we’re all living in the midst of mad-shit aliens and super-weapons and the whole fucking bizarre insane swirl of galactic history and politics!’ That: isn’t it weird ?”

“And that’s what? Swing? Swirl?” Sal said, looking genuinely confused.

“No, Swim!” Fassin shouted, not able to believe that Sal hadn’t heard of this concept. He thought everybody had. Some people — most people, come to think of it, or so he’d been told — never got Swim, but lots did. Not just humans, either. Though Dwellers, mind you, never. Wasn’t even in their vocabulary.

“Never heard of it,” Sal confessed.

“Well, didn’t imagine you might have.”

“Hey, you want to see something?”

“Whatever it is, I cannot fucking wait.”

“Come with me.”

“Last time I heard that—”

“We agreed no more of those.”