Iain Banks: The Algebraist

I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with, “BANG! Expand! Sssss…’, then itemise the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things…

Nevertheless, I have a story to tell you. My own direct part in it was vanishingly small and I have not thought even to introduce myself with anything as presumptuous as a proper name. Nevertheless, I was there, at the very beginning of one of those beginnings.

From the air, I am told, the Autumn House looks like a giant grey and pink snowflake lying half-embedded within these folded green slopes. It lies on the long, shallow escarpment which forms the southern limit of the Northern Tropical Uplands. On the northern side of the house are spread the various formal and rustic gardens which it is both my duty and my pleasure to tend. A little further up the escarpment rest the extensive ruins of a fallen temple, believed to have been a construction of a species called the Rehlide. (6ar., either severely abated or extinct, depending on which authority one chooses to give credence to. In any event, long gone from these parts.) The temple’s great white columns once towered a hundred metres or so into our thin airs but now lie sprawled upon and interred within the ground, vast straked and fluted tubes of solid stone half buried in the peaty soils of the unimproved land around us. The furthest-fallen ends of the columns — which must have toppled slowly but most impressively in our half-standard gravity — punched great long crater-like ditches out of the earth, creating long double embankments with bulbously rounded tips. Over the many millennia since their sudden creation these tall ramparts have been slowly worn down both by erosion and our world’s many small ground-quakes so that the earth has slumped back to refill the wide ditches where the column ends lie, until all that is visible is a succession of gentle waves in the land’s surface, like a series of small, splayed valleys from whose upper limits the unburied lengths of the columns appear like the pale exposed bones of this little planet-moon.

Where one column fell and rolled across a shallow river valley, it formed a sort of angled cylindrical dam, over which the water spills, is caught and channelled by one of the metres-deep grooves embellishing the column’s length, and then flows down to what remains of the column’s ornately carved capital and a series of small, graceful waterfalls which end in a deep pool just beyond the tall, dense hedges which mark the highest limit of our gardens. From here the stream is guided and controlled, some of its waters proceeding to a deep cistern which provides the headwaters for our gravity fountains down near the house while the rest make up the brook which by turns tumbles, rushes, swings and meanders down to the ornamental lakes and partial moat surrounding the house itself.

I was standing waist-deep in the gurgling waters of a steeply pitched part of the brook, three limbs braced against the current, surrounded by dripping exer-rhododendron branches and coils of weed, trimming and dead-heading a particularly recalcitrant confusion of moil-bush around a frankly rather threadbare raised lawn of scalpygrass (basically a noble but failed experiment, attempting to persuade this notoriously clumpy variety to… ah: my enthusiasms may be getting the better of me, and I digress — never mind about the scalpygrass) when the young master — returning, whistling, hands clasped behind his back, from his morning constitutional round the higher rockeries stopped on the gravel path above me and smiled down. I looked round and up, still clipping away, and nodded with as much formality as my somewhat awkward stance would allow.

Sunlight poured from the purple sky visible between the curve of eastward horizon (hills, haze) and the enormous overhanging bulk of the gas-giant planet Nasqueron filling the majority of the sky (motley with all the colours of the spectrum below bright yellow, multitudinously spotted, ubiquitously zoned and belted with wild liquidic squiggles). A synchronous mirror almost directly above us scribed a single sharp line of yellow-white across the largest of Nasqueron’s storm-spots, which moved ponderously across the sky like an orange-brown bruise the size of a thousand moons.

“Good morning, Head Gardener.”

“Good morning, Seer Taak.”

“And how are our gardens?”

“Generally healthy, I would say. In good shape for spring.” I could have gone on to provide much more detail, naturally, but waited to discover whether Seer Taak was merely indulging in phatic discourse. He nodded at the water rushing and breaking around my lower limbs.

“You all right in there, HG? Looks a bit fierce.”

“I am well braced and anchored, thank you, Seer Taak.” I hesitated (and during the pause could hear someone small and light running up the stone steps towards the gravel path a little further down the garden), then, when Seer Taak still smiled encouragingly down at me, I added, “The flow is high because the lower pumps are on, recirculating the waters to enable us to scour one of the lakes free of floating weeds.” (The small person approaching reached the path’s loose surface twenty metres away and kept running, scattering gravel.)

“I see. Didn’t think it had rained that much recently.” He nodded. “Well, keep up the good work, HG,” he said, and turned to go, then saw whoever was running towards him. I suspected from the rhythm of her running steps that it was the girl Zab. Zab is still at the age where she runs from place to place as a matter of course unless directed not to by an adult. However, I believed that I detected a more than casual urgency in her gait.

Seer Taak smiled and frowned at the girl at the same time as she came skidding to a stop on the gravel in front of him, putting one hand flat to the chest of her yellow dungarees and bending over for a couple of deep, exaggerated breaths — long pink curls swirling and dancing round her face — before taking one even deeper breath and standing up straight to say,

“Uncle Fassin! Grandpa Slovius says you’re out in a communicardo again and if I see you I’ve to tell you you’ve to come and see him right now immediately!”

“Does he now?” Seer Taak said, laughing. He bent and picked the girl up by her armpits, holding her face level with his, her little pink boots hanging level with the waist of his britches.

“Yes, he does,” she told him, and sniffed. She looked down and saw me. “Oh! Hello, HG.”

“Good morning, Zab.”

“Well,” said Seer Taak, hoisting the child further up and turning and lowering her so that she sat on his shoulders, “we’d better go and see what the old man wants, hadn’t we?” He started down the path towards the house. “You okay up there?”

She put her hands over his forehead and said, “Yup.”

“Well, this time, mind out for branches.”

“ You mind out for branches!” Zab said, rubbing her knuckles through Seer Taak’s brown curls. She twisted round and waved back at me. “Bye, HG!”

“Goodbye,” I called as they went towards the steps.

“No, you mind out for branches, young lady.”

“No, you mind out for branches!”

“No, you mind out for branches.”