Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“Before that?”

Fassin smiled. “My extended one-to-one with Valseir, the delve which included my sojourn with the Raucous Rascals of Tribe Dimajrian.” He imagined he didn’t need to remind his uncle of too many of the details of that particular excursion. This had been the protracted delve which had made his name as a gifted Seer, the six-year journey — by body-time; it had lasted nearly a century by outside reckoning — that had established his reputation both within Sept Bantrabal and the hierarchy of ’glantine Seers beyond. His exploits, and the value of the stories and histories he had returned with, had been largely responsible for his elevation to the post of Chief Seer-in-waiting in his Sept, and for the offer of marriage to the daughter of the Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon, the most senior of the twelve Septs.

“This takes us back how many years, in real?”

Fassin thought. “About three hundred… Two hundred and eighty-seven, if I recall correctly.”

Slovius nodded. “There was much of that delve released during its course?”

“Almost nothing, sir. The Raucous Rascals insisted. They are one of the more… unameliorated adolescent pods. I was allowed to report that I was alive once per year.”

“The delve before that?”

Fassin sighed and tapped the fingers of one hand on the fused glass at the side of the pool. What on old Earth could this be about? And could Slovius not simply look up the Sept records for such information? There was a big cantilevered arm thing stowed against the wall of the pool chamber with a screenpad on the end. Fassin had seen this device lowered into place in front of Slovius for him to peer at and prod the keys with his finger stumps. It was, patently, not a very rapid or efficient method of interrogating the house library, but it would answer all these questions. Or the old fellow could just ask. There were servants for this sort of thing.

Fassin cleared his throat. “Most of that was taken up with instructing Paggs Yurnvic, of Sept Reheo, on his first delve. We paid court to traav Hambrier, in one-to-one time with the Dwellers to allow for Yurnvic’s inexperience. The delve lasted barely three months, body-time. Textbook introductory, sir.”

“You found no time to pursue any studies of your own?”

“Little, sir.”

“But some, yes?”

“I was able to attend part of a symposium on deep poetics, with the university pod Marcal. To detail the other attendees I would have to inquire within the Sept records, sir.”

“What more? Of the symposium, I mean. Its subject?”

“If I recall, a comparison of Dweller hunting techniques with the actions of Machine War Inquisitories.” Fassin stroked his chin. “The examples were Ulubis-system local, some regarding ’glantine.”

Slovius nodded. He glanced at his nephew. “Do you know what an emissarial projection is, Fassin?”

Fassin looked up at the segment of gas-giant visible through the transparent roof panel. The night terminator was just starting to appear to one side, a line of increasing darkness creeping across the distant cloudscape. He looked back down at Slovius. “I may have heard the term, sir. I would not care to offer a definition.”

“It’s when they send a tuned suite of queries and responses to a physically remote location, by light beam. To play the part of an emissary.”

“ ‘They’, sir?”

“Engineers, the Administrata. Perhaps the Omnocracy.” Fassin sat back. “Indeed?”

“Indeed. If we are to believe what we are told, the object they send is something like a library, transmitted by signal laser. Suitably housed and emplaced within enabled equipment of sufficient capacity and complexity, this… entity, though it is simply a many-branched array of statements, questions and answers, with a set of rules governing the order in which they are expressed, is able to carry out what seems very like an intelligent conversation. It is as close as one is allowed to come to an artificial intelligence, post-War.”

“How singular.”

Slovius wobbled in his pool. “They are assuredly surpassing rare,” he agreed. “One is being sent here.”

Fassin blinked a few times. “Sent here?”

“To Sept Bantrabal. To this house. To us.”

“To us.”

“From the Administrata.”

“The Administrata.” Fassin became aware that he was sounding simple-minded.

“Via the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir .”

“My,” Fassin said. “We are… privileged.”

“Not we, Fassin; you. The projection is being sent to talk to you.”

Fassin smiled weakly. “To me? I see. When will—?”

“It is currently being transmitted. It ought to be ready by late evening. You may wish to clear your schedule for this. Did you have much arranged?”

“Ah… a supper with Jaal. I’m sure—”

“I would make it an early supper, and don’t tarry.”

“Well, yes. Of course,” Fassin said. “Do you have any idea, sir, what I might have done to deserve such an honour?”

Slovius was silent for a moment, then said, “None whatsoever.”

Guime replaced an intercom set on its hook and left his place by the agate wall to kneel and whisper to Slovius, who nodded, then looked at Fassin. “Major-Domo Verpych would like to talk to you, nephew.”

“Verpych?” Fassin said, with a gulp. The household’s major-domo, Sept Bantrabal’s most senior servant, was supposed to rest dormant until the whole sept moved to its winter lodgings, over eighty days from now. It was unheard of for him to be roused out of sequence. “I thought he was asleep!”

“Well, he’s been woken up.”

The ship had been dead for millennia. Nobody seemed to be sure quite how many, though the most plausible estimates put it at about six or seven. It was just one more foundered vessel from one or other of the great fleets which had contended the War of the New Quick (or perhaps the slightly later Machine War, or possibly the subsequent Scatter Wars, or maybe one of the brief, bitter, confused and untidy engagements implicit in the Strew), another forgotten, discarded piece from the great game of galactic power-mongering, civilisational competition, pan-species manoeuvring and general grand-scale meta-politicking.

The hulk had lain undiscovered on the surface of ’glantine for at least a thousand years because although ’glantine was a minor planet by human standards — slightly smaller than Mars — it was by the same measure sparsely populated, with fewer than a billion inhabitants, most of those concentrated in the tropics, and the area where the wreck had fallen — the North Waste Land — was a rarely visited and extensive tract of nothing much. That it had taken a long time for the local surveillance systems to return to anything like the sort of complexity or sophistication they’d exhibited before the commencement of hostilities also helped the ruins avoid detection. Lastly, for all the vessel’s hulking size, some portion of its auto-camouflage systems had survived the craft’s partial destruction, the deaths of all the mortals aboard and its impact on the planet-moon’s surface, and so had kept it disguised for all that time, seemingly just another fold of barren, rocky ejecta from the impact crater left by a smaller but much faster-travelling derelict which had crashed and vaporised in a deep crater ten kilometres away right at the start of the New Quick dispute.

The ship’s ruins had only been discovered because somebody in a flier had crashed, fatally, into one of its great curving ribs (perfectly holo-disguised at the time as sheer and shiningly inviting clear sky). Only then had the wreck been investigated, plundered for what little of its systems still worked (but which were not, under the new regime, proscribed. Which basically did not leave much.) and finally — the lifting of its hull and major substructures being prohibitively expensive to contemplate, its cutting-up and carting away difficult, also not cheap and possibly dangerous, and its complete destruction only possible with the sort of serious gigatonnage weaponry people tended to object strongly to when used in peacetime in the atmospheres of a small planet-moon, even in a wilderness area — it had been cordoned off and a series of airborne loiter-drones posted on indefinite guard above, just in case.