· So, what do you think, young Taak? Good to be home?
· A fascinating experience, Fassin agreed. — We’re, what? He double checked his internal navigation instrumentation. — Two equatorial sats along and a band up?
· Now, Fass, Paggs began.
· So if I do this — Fassin sent, and lunged his double disc towards Paggs’s. Paggs had guessed what was coming and already started to move away, flinching backwards and up. Fassin’s machine seemed to dart towards the other Seer’s remote craft, then draw back, stopping just short of where Paggs’s machine had been. — You’ve got just enough time to get out of the way, Fassin pointed out reasonably.
· Seer Taak… Braam Ganscerel began.
· Whereas if I did something similar on the far side of the planet, Fassin continued, — at the far end of a whole chain of sats, the best part of a full light second away even without any processing delays, we might both now be listening to our remotes telling us that, at best, I just voided their warranties.
· Fassin, Ganscerel sent with a sigh. — I think we’re all aware of the speed of light and the diameter of the planet. And these remotes are anyway not completely stupid, or unprotected. They have an extremely sophisticated collision-avoidance system built into them. One we had to clear specifically with your friends in the Shrievalty to have built in, it’s so close to… to being clever.
· But if a Dweller points a laser at you for fun, Fassin asked,
— just to see if you’ll flinch, what good is any collision-avoid-ance system to you then?
· Perhaps, Ganscerel suggested mellowly, — one ought not to mix with the kind of Dweller who would be likely to act in such a manner in the first place.
Except they’re the ones that are most likely to share interesting stuff with you, old man, not the desiccated, harmless but clueless pixie-brains you tend to spend your time flattering, Fassin thought. He was fairly certain that it was just a thought. People always worried that in theory in VR you might say something you only meant to think, but he wasn’t so rusty in the techniques of remote delving that he was truly concerned. It might, anyway, even do Braam Ganscerel some good to hear a few politely unspeakable things now and again.
· Perhaps, indeed, Chief Seer, was all he said.
· Hmm. Let’s step out, shall we?
They returned to the reality of a remote-send suite buried deep in the Third Fury Facility, blinking in the light as technicians helped to unclip them from the couches, pushing themselves forward to clear the half-domes of the NMR assemblages, handing back earpieces and simple black velvet blindfolds, flexing and stretching as though they’d been under for a genuinely long delve rather than a mere hour or so at a one-to-one time ratio.
Paggs worked his fingers, undoing the last couple of soft tabs that connected him to the thin pneumo-tubes which had both sensed his movements and would have prevented him from throwing himself right off the couch in the event that he’d performed any especially energetic actions.
Ganscerel lay with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and letting the technicians detach him from the machinery.
Paggs glanced over. “Are we convincing you at all, Fass?”
“You’re convincing me it’s even easier to remote delve these days than it used to be.” Fassin levered himself from the couch with the steady application of force from one small finger and let himself float very gently towards the floor. “I would have taken your word for it.”
“So, you only got one-third of the volumes concerned, young Taak,” Ganscerel said.
Fassin was giving a very private briefing in an engineering store off the secondary ship hangar. Ganscerel had wanted it conducted in his quarters but there wasn’t a way of squeezing the colonel in there. Present were Fassin, Ganscerel, Paggs and Colonel Hatherence. Fassin wanted them each to know as much as he did — or at least as much as he thought they ought to know — about what he had found on his long-ago delve and what they would be looking for on the one they were hoping to begin the following day.
“Yes,” he said. “I traded some high-definition images of Earth Twentieth-Century European Expressionist paintings for -amongst a lot of other stuff — what was catalogued as a tri-trans-lated text of a pre-Third Chaos Lutankleydar epic poem, a private, unpublished work by — or perhaps commissioned by -a Doge of the Enigmatics. It was all double-encrypted and compressed but it was known to be in three volumes. I got three volumes from Valseir, only — as it turned out years later, when it was finally de-mangled by the Jeltick — what I’d been given wasn’t Volumes One, Two and Three. It was Volume One, three times over, in three separate languages. And it wasn’t by an Enigmatic Doge either.
“One of the volumes was in a previously known but untranslatable Penumbral language from the time of the Summation. When the translation was made it acted as a Rosetta; gave the key to a lot of other stuff, and that sidetracked everybody for a while. Then some pin-eyed Jeltick scholar spotted a note at the end, buried in the appendices in a crude but related slang-language, obviously added later, but not much later, that basically said the whole thing had been written during the Long Crossing of the Second Ship, by an Outcast Dweller skilled in the Penumbral language, and that, yes, of course there was a Dweller List, they — the ship, or its crew — had the key to it, and it would be included in Volume Two or Three of this epic poem. It was also, of course, in the ship, and the ship was heading for the Zateki system. That’s why the Jeltick sent an expedition straight there as soon as they had the translation.”
“Why not come here, to Nasqueron, where they might have found the Third Volume?” Paggs asked, smiling.
“Because the Shrievalty hadn’t told them where the data had come from. Whether this was oversight or deliberate we haven’t been told. The Jeltick may have guessed it was from a Dweller Studies centre but they couldn’t be sure whether it was or not and, if so, which one. They probably did start making inquiries, but they didn’t want to alert anybody else to the importance of what they had. Don’t forget, the information had been copied and re-copied — it was lying about in data reservoirs all over the civilised galaxy. Quite possibly people had even already translated and read the main text but just hadn’t got round to the appendices, where the all-important note was. The slightest hint that there was anything of strategic interest in that tranche and everybody else would have dusted it off, read it and — bang — the Jeltick would have lost their edge. So they fuelled and tooled and set sail for Zateki instead.”
“This could all be a hoax, you know,” Ganscerel said, snorting. He adjusted his robes, frowning deeply. “Ido believe I detect the laboured and tortuous signature of Dweller humour here. This could just be a joke at the expense of anyone foolish enough to fall for it.”
“It could indeed, sir,” Fassin agreed. “But we have our orders and we have to make the effort, just in case it is all true.”
“So we are looking for the remaining two volumes of this… what is it called, exactly?” Colonel Hatherence asked.
“Best translation,” Fassin said, “is, The Algebraist. It’s all about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, love, longing, honour, long voyages home… all that stuff.”
“And what is or was this Long Crossing?” Ganscerel asked irascibly. “I haven’t heard of it.”
“The voyage back home from what humans used to call the Triangulum Nebula,” Fassin said, with a small smile.
“Well,” Ganscerel said, frowning once more. “We are not really much further forward, are we? And what, pray, do we call the Triangulum Nebula now, Seer Taak?”
“We call it the Lost Souls II Galaxy, Chief Seer. The crossing was called the Long Crossing because it took thirty million years. The outward journey allegedly took almost no time, because it was conducted through an intergalactic wormhole, the portal location of which is amongst those included in the Dweller List.”