He tried to concentrate, and looked down at the image-leaf again. He’d been given this by Valseir. Was that right? It had been a sort of calling card, a letter of introduction, leading him to… He seemed to feel it had led him to Valseir, but that didn’t make sense.

No, wait: the house in the depths, and the old wandering Dweller. He’d given him the image-leaf. And it had led him, somehow, to Valseir. But there was something else. He’d discovered something else. He’d woken up thinking about this, before the wormhole transition. There was something hidden in the image-leaf. A message, a code.

Fassin looked round the empty platform. There was nobody else here. He let the little gascraft’s image processors drink in the view shown on the image-leaf in as much detail as it could offer. Various routines started running. In a few minutes, his gaze was torn away from the sparse but familiar-looking starscape above. He looked at the results.

There had been something in there.

It looked like alien algebra.

There was about a page and a half of it. It looked like one long equation, or maybe three or four shorter ones.

He felt very excited. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he had an idea that this linked into the Dweller List. The details evaded him, but he knew that he’d been looking for the Transform that was supposed to open up the famous List, and maybe — just possibly — this piece of alien mathematics had something to do with it. Maybe what he had before him here was the Transform, though that was a little difficult to believe.

Fassin tried to figure out what the symbols in front of him might mean, but couldn’t even get started. The gascraft’s comprehensively mucked-around memories might once have contained something which would have sent him in the right direction, but they didn’t any more.

He linked with the city’s data nets, synched with an equatorial university library and looked up a data reservoir specialising in alien mathematics. He chose a couple of symbols at random and pinged them to the database. It answered immediately, with references.

What he was looking at was expressed in Translatory V, a pan-species, universal notation of just under two billion years age, devised by the long-extinct Wopuld from earlier Dweller elements. He downloaded a full translation suite.

He had to stop, and look out over the cloud tops. He was experiencing a strange mix of emotions.

This might be the thing he’d been sent to look for, the very object of his mission. Their mission, rather; he ought not to forget Colonel Hatherence. This could well be what he’d been looking for, all that time. And yet, if the Mercatoria, or at least the Ulubine part of it, had hoped that this would save them, then it hadn’t. He’d got back too late, and the invasion had already happened. It was all over.

And there was so much he seemed to have forgotten! What had the Voehn done to him? Y’sul had been badly injured but apart from the effects of his healing coma he seemed — and professed himself to be — fine, mentally. Quercer Janath didn’t seem to have suffered at all. Maybe that was just luck, or something to do with being a truetwin — he didn’t know.

Still, there was this to be done, this deciphering. It might still lead to something momentous. The invasion might have already happened but the counter-attack was still to take place, and anyway, there was his own take on the rights and wrongs of what was going on. He would still rather the Beyonders had the information, if there was any useful information to be had, in the equation.

Something glinted in space just over the horizon to the west, way out across the cloud tops. A ship, perhaps.

Fassin returned his attention to the equation and the alien translation suite. He applied one to the other. In the virtual space which the gascraft’s crippled biomind projected into his own mind, the image split and a copy of the equation appeared alongside the original. He watched the symbols shuffle and change in the copy, turning into Dweller standard notation. The symbols on both copies of the equation flickered and highlighted, turned different colours and seemed to swell out and then lapse back in again amongst the rest as the equation worked itself out.

It was truly an equation, too. He’d had some vague idea thanks to something that somebody had said that it might be a frequency and signal or something, but it wasn’t that. Or if it was it was very oddly disguised.

The last few terms flicked and flashed on both sides of the split image. The answer appeared right at the end, blinking slowly.

It was a zero.

He stared at it, at them.

A zero in Dweller standard notation was a dot with a short line under it. In Translatory V, it was a diagonal slash.

A dot with a short line under it winked at him from the copy of the equation. A diagonal slash lay at the end of the original, also slowly flashing.

He tried again. Same result.

He rechecked the image, pulled the hidden code out of it again, in case the processor systems had made a mistake the first time.

There had been no mistake. The equation he came up with the second time was the same as the first. He ran that one as well, anyway.

Zero.

Fassin laughed. He could feel himself inside the shock-gel nested within the little arrowhead craft, chest and belly shaking. He had a sudden, vivid image of standing on the rocky shore of a planet, waiting for something. He stopped laughing.

Zero.

So the final answer was nothing. He’d been sent to the far side of the galaxy, had the answer with him all the time anyway, and what it was, was “Fuck all’. But in maths.

He started laughing again.

Ah well.

Another glint, out over the cloud tops again, nearly directly north, and high. A scatter of tiny lights lit up the sky just beneath whatever it was that had just reflected the light. A hint of violet. Then white.

He watched the same region of space for a few moments, looking for more. Whatever it was, it had to be fairly far away. If it was the same thing that had glinted earlier near the horizon then it was something high over the equatorial zone, tens of kilo-klicks out.

Zero. Well, that was illuminating. Fassin wondered if there really was a true answer somewhere, if what he’d found — what Valseir had stumbled onto and then what Fassin had unknowingly brought out with him after his long-ago delve — was part of a whole suite of decoy answers. Was there just this one, or were there more? Was the myth of the Dweller List’s famous Transform footnoted with hundreds of false answers?

Well, if it was, he wasn’t going to go looking for them. He’d done his bit. He’d even, in a sense, accomplished his mission, when he’d thought it was never going to happen. He was too late, and the result was a nonsense, a joke, almost an insult, but — by any given god you cared to name — he’d done it.

He ought to start thinking about how he was going to get off the planet, or at least get the information out there, just for form’s sake. Share the indifferent news.

Another couple of flashes from space, near where the first crop had shone. One tiny blink, one longer flare. A few moments later what looked like a ship’s drive lit up and floated away, gathering speed quickly.

Fassin looked for evidence of any Shared Facility satellites, or indeed any Mercatorial hardware anywhere around Nasqueron. There didn’t seem to be anything. He’d told Aun Liss he’d try to ping a position between two Seer satellites, EQ4 and EQ5, but the satellites weren’t there any more. He wondered if he could work out where they would have been and so where the microsat that he’d suggested the Beyonders position between the two might be. He looked inside the gascraft’s memory, trying to find the sat schedules, dug them out, then fed in the local time and his current location.