· All news to me, Fassin. Possibly some small group might have control of such things, though I find that hard to believe, frankly.
· Ah, well, Fassin sent. He was silent for a few moments.
· Yes? Setstyin sent.
· Well, Fassin replied slowly. — I did have an idea.
· An idea? Indeed.
· What if the Transform answer wasn’t a joke?
· Not a joke? But it’s zero. What use is that?
· You see, Fassin sent, and the little gascraft nudged forward a fraction on the dent-seat, closer still to Setstyin, — I had thought, what use would an equation be, after all this time? How could it tell you anything useful? A frequency and a code to be broadcast on it was the only thing that really made sense; then these worm-
holes could be hidden anywhere in the named systems and only activate themselves when needed. So the fact it was an equation at all made it kind of pointless even before it was worked out.
· I’ll take your word for it, Setstyin told the human. — You are rather losing me here, but it all sounds terribly convincing.
· And then there was all that absurd twisting and spiralling when I was aboard the ship heading through the wormhole portals. Being cut off from external senses seemed obvious enough, but why the spiralling?
· Umm, yes, in the ship. I see.
· And just the fact that all of Dweller society does seem like a proper civilisation.
· Now you really are losing me, Fass.
· And you obviously possess technologies that we still haven’t understood.
· Well, we’re like that. Us Dwellers, aren’t we? Oh dear, I think all this is upsetting my balance.
· You see, if the Transform means what it says, what it’s saying is that the adjustment you have to make to each entry on the Dweller List to find out where the wormhole portals are in relation to those original locations named is…
Fassin held the little gascraft’s working arm out, inviting Setstyin to answer.
The Dweller ruffled his sensory mantle, which had gone a slightly odd colour. — I’m sorry, Fassin, I feel positively dizzy.
· Nothing! Fassin sent. — The adjustment is zero.
· Is it? Is it really? I’m sure this is fascinating, really.
— And what was the original List based on, what did it give?
Again, he gave the Dweller a chance to answer, but he didn’t.
— It gave the location of Dweller-inhabited gas-giants! Fassin put a sort of triumphalist joy into the signalled sentence.
— I see. I do feel slightly off, Fass. Do you mind if I… ?
Setstyin rose, wobbling slightly, and roted over to his desk.
He started opening lockers and drawers, then glanced up. “Keep going, keep going,” he said. “I have my medication in here somewhere.”
The Dweller signalled to his servant while he looked through the drawers, keeping his signal pit below the level of the desk, out of sight of the human in his gascraft.
— Was Mr Taak armed in any way?
After a moment: — No, sir. The house checked automatically, naturally. Aside from his manipulative devices, he is unarmed.
— I see. That’s all.
The arrowhead swivelled to keep line-of-sight with the Dweller.
— The List doesn’t need the Transform, Fassin told Setstyin.
— All you need to know is that the planets are the location.
— Really? Indeed. And how can that be?
The little gascraft rose up into the air above the dent-seat.
— Because your wormhole portals are inside your planets,
Setstyin, Fassin sent calmly.
The Dweller froze, then opened one last drawer. “But that’s ridiculous,” he said aloud.
“Right in the centre,” Fassin continued, also speaking out loud now. “Probably of every single gas-giant you guys inhabit. There were only — what? — two million when the List was drawn up, that right? But that was long ago, and it was a historical document even then. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear you’d connected up every last Dweller planet by now.”
“I’m sorry, Fassin,” Setstyin said. “You wouldn’t convince a child with this. Everybody knows you need a flat region of space to make a wormhole portal work.”
“Ah, that’s the beauty of it. The very centre of a planet is flat,” Fassin said. “Right in the very centre of a planet, of any free-floating body — sun, rock, gas-giant, anything — you’re being pulled equally in all directions. It’s just like being in orbit round a world and feeling weightless. The only problem, of course, is keeping a volume of space open in the core of a planet or a sun or whatever in the first place. The pressure is colossal, almost beyond belief, especially in a gas-giant the size of Nasq., but in the end it’s just engineering. Hey, you guys have had ten billion years to get good at that sort of stuff. Anything that isn’t impossible you learned to do easily when the galaxy was a quarter of the age it is now.
“So you don’t need to position portals in space where anybody could see them or use them or attack them, you don’t even need to leave your own planet to access them, you just head for some well-hidden shaft that leads you down to the very centre of the world. Maybe at the poles. That would be an obvious kind of place. And if you’ve got somebody aboard your ship who might be keeping track of where you’re going somehow, you just throw in all these crazy spirals and flash some screenage of space into wherever you’re keeping them, so they never can tell they’ve gone down, not up, and have sunk into the core, not flown out into space.”
“Ah, here we are,” Setstyin said, and pulled out a large handgun. Suddenly perfectly steady, he aimed and fired before the little gascraft could react.
The beams tore the arrowhead apart, slamming through it and sending it whirling back against a stack of library crystals and then somersaulting over and over as Setstyin kept firing the gun, spreading fire and scattering wreckage all over the library floor. Wildly spinning pieces of debris were sent shrapnelling across the glittering stacks, cracking spines and smashing crystal pages to powder. What was left of the little craft crashed into the windows by the balcony, shattering the diamond as though it was sugar glass. Setstyin stopped firing.
Debris pattered down. Smoke drifted, gradually sucked towards the shattered window.
The big Dweller roted carefully over to the broken window, keeping the gun trained on the smoking remains of the little craft as he approached.
“Sir?” his servant called over the house intercom. “Sir, are you all right? I thought I heard—”
“Fine,” Setstyin called, not shifting his attention from the wreckage as he drew closer. “I’m fine. Be some cleaning up to do in due course, but I’m fine. Leave me, now.”
“Sir.”
A warm breeze ruffled his robes as Setstyin floated out of the window and drew up almost on top of the guttering wreck. He prodded the ruined gascraft with the muzzle of the gun. He prised part of the craft’s upper shell away.
He peered inside.
“Fucker!” he screamed, and whirled back into the library, tearing through the gas to the desk. “Desk! SecComms, now!’
Aun Liss watched the man as his little craft, his second skin, was destroyed.
Fassin winced just the once, twitching as though pained.
Aun thought he did not look well. His body was thin inside the borrowed fatigues and he was trembling slightly but continually. His face looked much older than it had, pinched and drawn, eyes sunken and surrounded with darkness. His hair, looking crinkled and thin, had grown a little while he’d been inside the gascraft. His eyes and the edges of his ears and nostrils, plus the corners of his mouth, were red from the effects of coming out of the shock-gel — and having the gillfluid come out of him — after all this time.