“That depends.” Beyond the old Dweller, the GasClipper race continued, well ahead of the labouring Blimper. Screens relaying signals from camera jets showed the action in close-up. The sounds of distant cheers came through the open diamond-pane windows of the private box. “Why did you go into hiding?”
The Dweller switched to signal-whispering. — Because I thought to skim through what I’d traded you for the Expressionist paintings you had brought. I read a certain note at the end of a certain volume. Which reminds me that I must apologise. It was not my intention to seem to fob you off with three different translations of the same volume instead of all three parts of the one work. However, read that note I did, and came to the conclusion that what was being referred to was the sort of information that people die for, and most certainly will kill for. I decided to disappear. I became dead.
“Sorry I doubted you, Valseir,” Fassin said, moving forward and holding out two manipulators towards the old Dweller.
“Suspicious to the last,” sighed Valseir, ignoring the left manipulator and shaking the right with his own extended right hub-arm. “There; how humans greet. Are you satisfied now, Seer Taak?”
Fassin smiled. “Entirely. Good to see you again.”
— You must feel emotional pain, then. I feel sorry for you.
— I am trying not to feel too sorry for myself. Which is helped by getting on with what needs to be done.
Fassin had told Valseir about the attacks on Third Fury and Sept Bantrabal. Valseir had related his life since they had last met, a time dominated by the Dweller List in a way that even Fassin’s hadn’t been until recently. Most of that period he had spent in hiding, after arranging what looked like his own death with the help of Xessife, the Dweller captain whom Fassin had seen briefly earlier. He was an old StormSailor, a Jammerhand and Clipperine with a collection of trophies and medals that outweighed him. Retired now, pursuing a more contemplative course, content to take charge of a Blimper now and again just to stay part of the whole StormSailing scene.
· And what needs to be done, Seer Taak?
· I think we need to find that third volume. Do you still have it?
· I do not. However, it is not the third volume itself that is of consequence in this matter.
· Then what is?
· A note, a brief appendix.
— Do you have that?
— No.
— Do you know where it is?
— No.
· Then we may all, to use a human term, be fucked.
· I do know the direction it went in.
· That could help.
· You agree that it may be that important? That we may all be “fucked’ without it?
· Oh, we may very well all be thoroughly fucked with it, but without it, while people think this thing exists, they will do terrible things to anybody who gets in their way or isn’t being what they regard as a hundred per cent helpful. My minder here, an oerileithe Ocula colonel, tells me there’s a fleet of Mercatoria warships over Nasqueron. The excuse is they’re here to help pick up me and her, but I think they might have another purpose.
· Military intervention?
· The instant they think there might be a firm lead towards the List.
· Well, we must try not to furnish them with one. I must also try not to furnish my fellow Dwellers with an excuse for regarding me as the most terrible traitor for even thinking of passing on anything to do with the thing in question to alien powers, even if my own studies and those of many others indi-cate that the data being sought is hopelessly out of date or a fantasy, or both. However, I do need to tell somebody which direction to point in, or I may have to stay dead for ever.
· Fate seems to dictate that it’s me you tell. Where do I go?
· Ah. Now then. I must explain. When I realised what was being referred to in the note in the first volume, I naturally looked for volume three. Well, at least I did so after spending some days in a state of horror and rage, realising that through no fault of my own — save the usually harmless hobby of biblio-philia — I had potentially unleashed something capable of destroying much, starting with my own quite happy and content life. This episode over, I devoted myself to my search and discovered the volume eventually. I have never had such cause to curse my own lackadaisical approach to cataloguing. The relevant piece was in the form of a separate folder attached within the appendices. I myself took the original of the folder to a friend and fellow collector in the city of Deilte, in the South Polar Region, contained within a safekeep box which I asked him to look after for me, and not to open. In the event of my death, he was to hand the safekeep box on to somebody he in turn would trust not to open the box. A family member or some other trusted person would appear in due course carrying an image-leaf with a particular image in it. The one you now carry. They were to be given the box.
— So would your friend in Deilte have known of your death?
I didn’t.
· Perhaps, perhaps not. He is an antiquarian data-collector like myself, but a recluse. He may have heard through mutual acquaintances.
· Right, Fassin sent. — So I must make for Deilte. What was your friend’s name?
· Chimilinith.
The name was barely out of Valseir’s signal pit when Fassin registered a neutrino burst.
· Any particular part of Deilte? he asked, starting to look round in more detail.
· Chimilinith tended to move his house around. But I imagine the locals will know of him.
· Okay. So, did you take a look at this data? What did it look like?
The diamond-bubble private box was nearly empty: just the two of them, the float-tray and bowl — he’d scanned them automatically when he’d entered and they were just what they appeared to be, no more — and the screens, which also seemed perfectly standard. Who’d be using neutrino comms? From where? Why the sudden burst, just then?
— It looked like algebra.
Fassin scanned Valseir’s simple clothes. No hint of anything high-tech there. The most sophisticated thing in his robes was the weave itself.
— Algebra? he asked.
There was nothing on the inside or the outside surface of the diamond bubble itself. He scanned the access tube. Clear.
— It looked like alien algebra, Valseir told him.
Fassin looked up at the undersurface of the Blimper immediately above, then swept for anything in the clear gas space outside within the same radius. Still nothing. Something further outside, then.
— Alien? he asked, distracted.
There seemed to be nothing nearby. There was the Dzunda, then nothing for a hundred metres or so until the next Blimper, then the other spectator and ancillary craft beyond — with the single accompanying Dreadnought Puisiel a few klicks further up in the atmosphere, easily keeping pace with the spectating fleet — then the GasClippers themselves, currently starting to round the Storm Wall buoy which marked this short race’s first turning point.
· Alien symbology. Though not entirely. I thought I recognised some of the symbols. They looked like a form of Translatory IV, a pan-species type, so-called “universal’ notation dating from perhaps two billion years ago, invented by the Wopuld — long extinct invert spongiforms — though with elements of ancient Dweller icons. I would have made notes, but I thought better of committing any of it to a form I could carry around save what exists — necessarily sketchy — in my own mind. Hence I have not been able to work on it since.
Fassin was taking in what was being said — and recording it on the gascraft’s systems in case he wanted to review it later -but he was still frantically scanning the volume all around them for some form of bug or surveillance device. Another burst of what certainly seemed like neutrino comms registered on the little gascraft’s sensors; a sudden pattern in the general wash of near-massless particle chaos.