The Algebraist

The Ythyn were a Scavenger species with a speciality: they collected the dead. They did nothing with them, just stored them sorted roughly by category, type and size, and they usually only collected those bodies — and sometimes the ships and other devices they arrived on — that nobody else wanted. But it was still an irredeemably macabre habit and as a result they shared a generic nickname with other death-obsessed species, having become known as Morbs.

Fassin and Y’sul were welcomed in the cavernous, gently lit entrance hall by a Ythyn officer, a great dark avian three metres tall in a glistening, near-transparent slick-suit over skin like dark blue parchment. Tightly bound double wings, which fully stretched would have spread a dozen metres, indicated the Ythyn was a junior. It stood on an uneven tripod of legs: one thick limb to the rear, two thi

· You are welcome, the Ythyn officer told them in a flat, unaccented signal, prefixed only by formal signifiers for sadness and reverence. — You are Mr Taak and you are Mr Y’sul, yes?

· Yes, Fassin sent.

· I am Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian. I am happy and honoured to be known as “Ninth’ or just “Duty’. Tell me, have either of you two gentlemen made any arrangements for the treatment or disposal of your bodies, after death?

* * *

The Ythyn had been collecting the dead for a billion years, the result of a kind of gruesome techno-curse visited upon them by a species they had fought against and been utterly defeated by. They had lost their small empire, lost their few planets, lost their major habitats and most of their ships and they had even lost themselves, coerced into a programme of genetic amendment that turned them from intellectually rounded beings into creatures utterly obsessed with death.

The cruelty and cleverness of their vanquishers had lain in identifying and choosing a latent weakness congenital to the Ythyn. They had always been a little overly fascinated with mortality compared with the norm of vaguely similar species, but not to the stage of serious abnormality and certainly not to the point that it in any way defined them. And if they had been so grotesquely psychologically disfigured in the process of making them so excessively morbid that they ceased to be iden-tifiably themselves there would have been no artistry, no fitness in their punishment. Instead, by this subtle but significant tweaking of their own bodies’ instruction set, they became what they might have become anyway had some bizarre shiftings in their environment and circumstances so decreed. Those who had not taken their own lives and refused to submit to the inheritable amendment were killed or hunted down and forced to undergo the treatment anyway, though most of those so treated killed themselves as well.

The survivors became wanderers, one of the dozens of planet-evolved species denied or — in a few cases — eschewing any sort of home world. They built massive cold, dark ships and accrued enormous libraries and data reservoirs filled with the subject of death. They haunted the sites of great battles, terrible massacres and awful disasters. Over time, they began to gather the unclaimed dead from such sites, storing them more or less as they found them in their great airless ships, each carrying a cargo of collected death, plodding from one end of the galaxy to the other or gradually spiralling around it. Too big for wormhole travel, loath even to approach too close to a star, the Sepulcraft depended on smaller ships to harvest the dead. Even these rarely used wormholes these days. The Propylaea, which had charge of all the Mercatoria’s portals, was not a charity, and demanded money for passage. The Ythyn had little to offer in payment.

They collected ships from those bringing the dead — or themselves, to die — but those were usually hulks, wrecks or near the end of their useful working lives and anyway regarded by the Ythyn as sacred, amongst the dead themselves. There were occasional donations and bequests from many different societies but they were few and far between. When they could afford to, and there were bodies to be got from the far end of a wormhole, an Ythyn ship would spend the little collateral it had accumulated and send a needle craft to make the collection. But usually they just physically followed the galaxy’s generally sporadic instances of mass death.

That they had long since dutifully gathered up the remaining bodies of the now-extinct species which had inflicted their punishment upon them and could therefore relatively easily and without resistance have re-amended themselves back to their original selves, but had chosen not to, was either their most poignant tragedy of all, or a recognition that they had found a place within the galactic scheme of things that suited them better than might any other.

— We are on our way to the Chistimonouth system, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian told the Dweller and the human as they made their way along a vast curved corridor deep within the giant ship. The tall birdlike being used one of its two thin forelegs to manipulate the controls of a small cagelike car that carried them in perfect silence along a monorail set in the centre of the wide tu

— How will they be unburied? Y’sul asked. — Do they float? Won’t they all have sunk into their own depths? Into water or mud or dissolved rock or something?

The corridors were lined with the dead: stapled, pi

· Those happily buried will be left where they lie, underground, Duty told them. — Some remains are expected in structures, even after all this time. The reports we have had from scouter species indicate that there may be many unclaimed cadavers still in space, at Lagrange points.

· What if they’re all gone? Y’sul asked. — What if somebody’s beaten you to it and… eaten them or recycled them or something?

· Then we will make our way to the next location where we may honour the dead, the dark bird told them, imperturbable.

· Come to think of it, Y’sul said brightly, — there might be a few bods to pick up in a place called Ulubis fairly soon.

Fassin looked at the Dweller but he wasn’t paying any attention.

· Ulubis, Duty said. — I have not heard of this place. Is it a planet?