The Algebraist

“Doesn’t necessarily make them the good guys,” Fassin insisted.

“Makes them people open to reason, people capable of indulging in meaningful dialogue,” Mome said. “Not just mad fuckers to be put down like vermin, which is pretty much what we’re told they are.”

“So what’s stopping them talking to us?” Fassin asked.

“Us,” Mome said. “Takes two to talk.”

They all looked at him. Mome was known to talk a lot. Sometimes to audiences who had, basically, long since fallen asleep. He shrugged.

“My cousin Lain—” Thay said.

“Another one?” Mome asked, feigning incredulity.

“Sister of cousin Kel, half-sister of cousin Yayz,” Thay explained patiently. She was Sonj’s part, also generously made; awkward in low gee but bouncily agile on the hab’s internal surface at two-thirds of a gee. “My cousin Lain,” she continued determinedly, “the one in the Navarchy, says that she reckons the reason the Beyonders attack so much at all is because if they don’t the Navarchy and the Summed Fleet goes after them. And we don’t just attack military stuff. She says we hit their habs. Kill millions of them. Lot of offs unhappy with—”

“Lots of whats unhappy with?” Mome asked.

“Lots of offs,” Thay repeated.

“I got the word,” Mome repeated with a sigh, “I just didn’t get the meaning.” He snapped his fingers. “Wait. Short for ‘officers’, right?”

“Correct.”

“Brilliant. Carry on.”

“Lot of offs unhappy with this,” Thay said again, “so the “yonds — the Beyonders — just attack us to keep us on the defensive.” She nodded once. “That’s what my cousin Lain says.”

“Ayee! Crazy “yonding talk,” Mome said, putting his hands over his ears. “Get us all arrested.” They laughed.

“At least we have the freedom to say this sort of thing,” Fassin pointed out.

Mome did his special Hollow Laugh.

In the central plaza, Fassin greeted people, drank in the sense of solidarity and slightly edgy fun — lots of inventive costumes, towering floss-sculptures and buzzing balloonderers (trailing slogan ba

The hab was a giant, verdant city rolled up into a spi

Then Fassin heard some sort of shout at one edge of the crowd, nearest the palace of the Diegesian, which was the focus for the protest. He might have smelled something strange, but then that was probably just one of the cruising balloonderers disseminating some drug that Fassin’s immedio-immune system hadn’t recognised. Then he realised maybe it wasn’t, because all the balloonderers dropped suddenly, as one, out of the air. Also, the sun in the suntube went out. Which never happened. He heard lots of odd noises, some of which might have been screaming. It seemed to get cold very quickly. That was odd too. People were hitting him, with their shoulders mostly, as they went ru

His name finally jolted him awake. “Back with us? Good.”

The speaker was a small man in a large chair across a cramped-looking metal desk. The room — or whatever — was too dark to see into, even with IR. The sound of the man’s voice in the space suggested it was not a big space. Fassin was aware that his face and especially his mouth hurt. He tried to wipe his mouth. He looked down. His hands could not move because his forearms were — he tried to think of the right word — shackled? They were shackled to the seat he was sitting in. What the hell was this? He started laughing.

Somebody hit him in his bones. It was like his entire skeleton was a wind chime and his flesh and muscles and organs were somewhere else, only nearby but still co

“What the fuck was zhat?” he asked the little man. His voice sounded comical with some of his teeth knocked out. His tongue probed the gaps. Felt like two out, one loose. He tried to remember how long it took adult teeth to grow back. The little man was quite a jolly-looking soul, with a plump, amused-seeming face and chubby, rosy cheeks. His hair was black, cropped. He wore a uniform of a type that Fassin didn’t recognise. “Are you shucking torturing me?” Fassin asked.

“No,” the little man said in a very reasonable tone of voice. “I’m just doing this to get your attention.” One of his hands moved on the desk’s surface.

Fassin’s bones clattered as though played upon again. His nerves, having experienced this twice now, decided that really this was no joke, and in fact felt extremely sore.

“All right! All right!” he heard himself saying. “Itake the shucking point. Fucking point,” he said, working out how to adapt his pronunciation to his new dental layout.

“Don’t swear,” the little man said, and hurt him again.

“Okay!” he screamed. His head hung. Snot dripped from his nose, saliva and blood from his mouth.

“Please don’t swear,” the little man said. “It indicates an untidy mind.”

“Just tell me what the f — what you want,” Fassin said. Was this real? Had he been in some sort of weird VR dream ever since he’d joined K for the coming-out-of-the-shallows end-of-tream thing earlier? Was this what happened when you got tream templates cheap, or illegally copied or something? Was this real? It felt painful enough to be real. He looked down at his legs and the hems of his shorts, all covered in blood and mucus and snot. He could see individual hairs on his legs, some standing, some plastered to his skin. He could see pores. Didn’t that mean it was real? But of course it didn’t. Treams, simcasts, VR, all depended on the fact that the mind could really only concentrate on one thing at a time. The rest was illusion. Human sight, the most complicated sense the species possessed, had been doing that for millions of years, fooling the mind behind the eyes. You thought you had colour vision, and in some detail, over this wide angle but really you didn’t; accurate colour vision was concentrated within a tiny part of the visual field, with only vague, movement-wary black-and-white awareness extending over the rest.