The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

Author:Iain M. Banks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction - Space Opera, Fiction - Science Fiction, Graphic Novels: General, Science Fiction, Comics & Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels, Space Opera, Interplanetary voyages, Fiction, Space warfare, Wormholes (Physics), General, Anthropologists
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2010-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Library Twenty-One (Cincturia \ Clouders \ Miscellania) had a conceit, a Dweller equivalent of a door made from a bookcase. Valseir had shown it to Fassin after the human had stayed with him for an extended period after their first meeting. It led, inward at first, towards the centre of the cluster of library spheres, through a short passage to a gap between two more of the outer spheres, then into the open gas. The joke - a hidden door, a secret passage - was that the various Cincturia were the outsiders of the galactic community, and the particular bookcase hiding the secret passage was categorised ‘Escapees’.

After their meal, Fassin gave the impression of shutting himself away in the library for some late-night shelf-scanning. Instead he screened up the house’s system statements and looked back to just after the time of Valseir’s yachting accident and alleged death. He did something unusual, something barely legal by Mercatorial standards and usually pointless on Nasqueron; he speeded up, letting the gascraft’s legal-max computers and his own subtly altered nervous system rev to their combined data-processing limit. It still took nearly half an hour, but he found what he was looking for: the point, a dozen days after Valseir’s accident, when the house recorded a rerouting of power and ventilation plumbing. Its altimeter had registered a wobble, too - a brief blip upwards, then the start of the long, slow descent that was continuing even now.

Then Fassin had to work out where the CloudTunnel segment might be now. It would be beyond the start of the shear zone, past where the whole atmospheric band moved as a single vast mass, down into the semi-liquid Depths. These moved much more slowly than the gas above, the transition levels great turbidly elastic seas being dragged along as though reluctantly after the jet-stream whirl of atmosphere above.

It was all dead reckoning. By the Dweller way of judging such things, the atmosphere was static and the Depths - not to mention the remainder of Ulubis system, the stars and indeed the rest of the universe - moved. With only notionally fixed reference points, finding anything in the Depths was notoriously difficult. After two hundred years the section of CloudTunnel could be anywhere; it might have sunk beyond feasible reach, been broken up or even drifted to the Zone edge and been pulled into another Belt entirely, either north or south. The only thing working in Fassin’s favour was that the length of tube he was looking for was relatively large. Completely losing something forty-plus metres in diameter and eighty klicks long wasn’t that easy, even in Nasqueron. Still, he was relying on the CloudTunnel retaining the usual profile of buoyancy-decay.

The likely volume - though identified with a worrying degree of fuzziness - was about five thousand kilcks away, though coming closer all the time, having been all the way round the planet many times. In a dozen hours it would be almost right underneath the house again. He calculated.

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