Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“Why would anybody target a moonlet like Third Fury?” Paggs asked.

“Indeed,” Ganscerel said, as though he had been just about to ask that very question.

“No good reason,” Fassin said. “But then a lot of places there’s been no good reason to hit have been getting attacked recently.”

“This might well include Nasqueron itself,” Ganscerel pointed out.

“Which can absorb a lot more punishment than Third Fury.”

“You might still be targeted.”

“If I’m in there in a gascraft, even with Colonel Hatherence riding shotgun, I should be effectively untraceable,” Fassin told them.

“Unless,” Paggs said, “she’s supposed to be in constant touch with her superiors.”

“And that might be the real reason we are all expected to stay together on Third Fury, delving remotely,” Ganscerel said, sighing. He looked at Fassin. “Control. Or at least the illusion of it. Our masters are fully aware how important this mission is, even if they think themselves for the moment above explaining its precise nature to all who need to know. They are naturally terrified that if it goes wrong some of the blame will stick to them. Really, it is all up to us: a bunch of academics they’ve never particularly cared about or for, even though -’ Ganscerel looked round the assembled junior Seers “- being a centre of Dweller Studies represents the only thing which makes Ulubis in any way remarkable.” He directed his gaze on Fassin again. “There is very little they can do, therefore they will attend with extreme diligence to what trivial matters they are able to affect. With us all apparently safe on Third Fury protected by a small fleet of warships, they will feel they are doing all they can to assist us. If they let you go down into Nasqueron, and something does go wrong, they will be blamed. In that they are right.”

“It won’t work, Braam.”

“I think we have to try,” the older man said. “Look.” He patted Fassin’s arm. Fassin was dressed in his Shrievalty major’s uniform and feeling awkward amidst fellow Seers. “Have you tried remote delving recently?”

“Not for a long time,” Fassin admitted.

“It’s changed,” Paggs said, nodding. “It’s much more lifelike, if you know what I mean; more convincing.” Paggs smiled. “There have been a lot of improvements over the last couple of centuries. Largely thanks to the Real Delving movement, frankly.”

Oh, Paggs, flattery? Fassin thought.

Ganscerel patted his arm again. “Just try it, will you, Fassin? Will you do that for me?”

Fassin didn’t want to say yes immediately. This is all beside the point, he thought. Even if I didn’t know there was a potential threat to Third Fury, the argument that matters is that the Dwellers we need to talk to just won’t take us seriously if we turn up in remotes. It’s about respect, about us taking risks, sharing their world with them, really being there. But he mustn’t seem intransigent. Keep some arguments back; always have reserves. After a moment he nodded slowly. “Very well. I’ll do that. But only as a trial delve. A day or two. That’ll be enough to feel any difference. Then we have to make a final decision.” Ganscerel smiled. They all did.

They had a very pleasant dinner with the senior officers of the small fleet taking them to Third Fury.

Fassin got Ganscerel alone at one point. “Chief Seer,” he said. “I will do this remote delve, but if I feel it’s not good enough I’m going to have to insist on going direct.” He gave Ganscerel space to say something, but the old man just looked him in the eye, head thrown back. “I do have authority,” Fassin continued. “From the briefing, from Admiral Quile and the Complector Council. I realise it’s been compromised by people in-system coming to their own conclusions about the best way to tackle this problem, but if I think I need to, I’ll go as high and wide as I can to get my way.”

Ganscerel thought for a while, then smiled. “Do you think this delve — or delves, this mission — will be successful?”

“No, Chief Seer.”

“Neither do I. However, we must make the attempt and do all we can to make it successful, even so, and even though failure is probably guaranteed. We must be seen to do what we can, attempt not to offend those above us, and aim to protect the good name and the future prospects of the Slow Seers in general. These things we can definitely do. You agree?”

“So far, yes.”

“If you genuinely believe that you must delve directly, I shall not stand in your way. I shall not back you, either, because to do that in my position would be to tie myself too directly to a course of action I still regard as fundamentally foolhardy. In any other set of circumstances I would simply order you to do as your most senior Chief Seer tells you to do. However, you have been instructed from on high — from extremely on high -Fassin Taak, and that does alter things somewhat. However. Try this remote delve. You might be surprised. Then make your own mind up. I won’t stand in your way. The responsibility will be entirely yours. You have my full support in that.” With a wink, Ganscerel turned away to talk to the heavy cruiser’s captain.

Fassin reflected that being given full support had never felt so much like being hung out to dry.

The Pyralis blazed with its own trailed aurora as it entered the protective magnetombra of Third Fury, a little twenty-kilometre-wide ball of rock and metal orbiting just 120,000 kilometres above Nasqueron’s livid cloud tops. The gas-giant filled the sky, so close that its rotund bulk took on the appearance of a vast wall, its belts and zones of tearing, swirling, ever-eddying clouds looking like colossal contra-rotating, planet-wide streams of madly coloured liquid caught whirling past each other under perfectly transparent ice.

Third Fury had no appreciable atmosphere and only the vaguest suggestion of gravity. The heavy cruiser could almost have docked directly with the Seer base complex on the side of the little moon which always faced Nasqueron. However, a troop landing craft took them from one to the other. The Pyralis lay a few kilometres off, effectively another temporary satellite of the gas-giant. Its escort of two light cruisers and four destroyers took up station a few tens of kilometres further out in a complicated cat’s cradle of nested orbits around the moon, slim slow shadow shapes only glimpsed when they passed in front of the planet’s banded face.

Third Fury had been constructed, or converted, from an already existing moonlet, billions of years earlier, by one of the first species to pay homage at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. Given that Dwellers were the most widespread of the planet-based species of the galaxy, with a presence in almost all gas-giants — themselves the most common type of planets — the fact that out of those ninety million-plus Dweller-inhabited super-globes there were exactly eight with populations willing to play host to those wishing to carry on more than the most fleeting conversation with their inhabitants spoke volumes — indeed, appropriately, libraries — about their almost utter lack of interest in the day-to-day life of the rest of the galactic community.

It was, though, only almost utter; the Dwellers were not perfectly anything, including reclusive. They sought, gathered and stored vast quantities of information, albeit with no discernible logical system involved in the acquisition or the storage, and when quizzed on the matter seemed not only completely unable to present any obvious or even obscure rationale for this effectively mindless accumulation of data, but even genuinely puzzled that the question should be asked at all.

There had also, throughout recorded time — even discounting the notoriously unreliable records kept on such matters by the Dwellers themselves — always been a few of their populations available for discourse and informational trading, though this was invariably only granted on the eccentric and capricious terms of the Dwellers. Since the end of the First Diasporian Age, when the galaxy and the universe were both around two and a half billion years old, there had never been no working centres of Dwellers Studies, but in the following ten and a half billion years there had never been more than ten such centres operating at any one time either.