The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  Warib shook her head and said quietly, resignedly, “Oh, do as you please, Vyr; you always do, always have. Come as you wish; embarrass me all you like. Why break the habit of a—”

  Cossont didn’t catch the last word; she was already out the door.

  Miraculously, thinking back to all this domestic nonsense of just a few days earlier, with her eyes closed and her mind half wandering, Vyr got right through the central, especially demanding section of the second-last movement without — for the first time — making any mistakes. She’d done it! The tangling blizzard of notes had been successfully tackled. She was on what always felt like the easy downhill gliding bit now where the notes were fewer and further apart and easier to bridge; another minute or so of nothing-too-demanding and she’d have the damn thing licked.

  She felt a smile on her lips and a breeze on her face. There was even a pleasant thrumming noise coming from behind her, courtesy of the elevenstring’s external resonating strings and the breeze she’d been hoping for; she could feel it through her spine and the seat of her pants. My, for once even the elements seemed to want to wish her well in this ridiculous enterprise.

  She was thinking about opening her eyes when a sudden gust of wind from the other side briefly silenced the resonating strings, rocked her in the seat and nearly toppled the instrument and her together; she was forced to abandon the stop-pedals and plant both feet firmly flat on the ground to steady both herself and it; her trews flapped against her calves and she felt her hair come loose again as she was forced to stop playing, unbalanced and unsettled. The external resonating strings made a noise partway between a fart and a groan.

  The notes faded away and the gust of wind died too, but a new noise of what sounded like an engine winding down replaced the elevenstring’s music, and she felt a sort of multiple-thud from the terrace come up through her feet and the supporting spar under her backside.

  She still didn’t open her eyes. She withdrew both bows in good order from the strings and sat up straight within the O of the hollow instrument, then — with a single accusatory stare at her flier, which was only now switching its lights on again — she turned to where all this new commotion seemed to be coming from.

  An eight-seat military flier, still the colour of the near-black sky above, was settling onto its quartet of squat legs fifteen metres away, its bulbous bulk unlit until a waist door flicked down and somebody emerged so senior that, even as a nominal civilian in the regimental reserve, Vyr had no real choice about standing and saluting.

  She sighed and stepped out of the elevenstring, clicking down the side-stand at the same time, so it could support itself. The elevenstring made a very faint creaking noise.

  Vyr hooked her slippers off, pulled her boots on, then stood at attention, managing to ear-waggle her comms unit awake. “Etalde, Yueweag, commissar-colonel, Regimental Intelligence; precise current attachment unknown,” the earbud whispered curtly as the officer advanced at a trot. He took his cap off and stuck it under his arm, then smiled and waggled one hand as he approached. Vyr stood at ease. She glanced at her own flier, narrowing her eyes a fraction.

  “Contacted Pyan,” the aircraft told her through her earbud. “It whines, but is on its way. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Cossont said quietly.

  A pair of fully armed and armoured troopers swung out from the regimental flier and stood, weapons ready, one on either side of the door, which flicked closed again. Vyr allowed her face to register some surprise at this development.

  “… stay informal, shall we?” Commissar-Colonel Etalde was saying, nodding as he arrived in front of her. He was short, plump and appeared to be perspiring slightly. Like a lot of people these days, he wore a time-to; a watch dedicated to displaying how long was left to Instigation; the very moment — assuming that everything went according to plan — of the Subliming event. His was a dainty digital thing which sat on the chest of his uniform jacket and contrived to look a lot like a medal ribbon. Vyr had one too but she’d left it somewhere. Even as she noticed the commissar-colonel’s example, the time-to’s display clicked over to count one day less; it must be midnight on home planet Zyse.

  Commissar-Colonel Etalde looked at Vyr, taking in her extra arms. He nodded. “Yes, I was…” He looked past her at the elevenstring. His eyes bulged. “What the hell is that?”

  “A bodily acoustic Antagonistic Undecagonstring, sir,” she told him. She was staring over his head, as etiquette demanded. Happily this took no great effort.

  “Don’t say,” Etalde said. He looked back to her. “It yours?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He made a clicking noise with his mouth. “Suppose we’d better take it with us.”

  “Sir?” Vyr said, frowning.

  “Does it have a case or something?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. It’s over there.” She swivelled, indicated the dark case lying on the black tiles of the terrace a few metres away, almost invisible.

  The commissar-colonel glanced back towards the two troopers. The nearest was already moving in the direction of the case, carbine shouldering itself as he or she jogged across the black tiles of the terrace.

  “That us?” Etalde asked. “We fit?”

  “Sir?” Cossont repeated, still frowning.

  Etalde appeared briefly confused, then snapped his fingers. “Oh! Yes! Better…” He cleared his throat then said, “Lieutenant Commander Cossont, you are hereby re-commissioned with immediate effect for the duration of the current emergency.”

  Vyr’s frown deepened. “There’s an emergency?”

  “Sort of a secret one, but yes.”

  Cossont felt her expression contort despite herself as she looked down at the commissar-colonel. “Now?” she said, then adjusted her expression and gaze and said, “I mean; now, sir? So soon before the—?”

  “Yes, now, Lieutenant Commander,” Etalde told her sharply. She heard him sigh and saw him put his cap back on. “Thing about emergencies,” he said, sounding weary. “Rarely occur when they’d be convenient.”

  “May I ask what—?”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Etalde suggested, suddenly breezy again. “Ask away. Won’t do you any good. No idea myself.”

  The trooper appeared with the elevenstring’s case, opened. It took all three of them to wrestle it in.

  Etalde, breathless, nodded towards the military flier. “Commsint AI’s saying you’ve got a pet or something coming in, that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” she told him. “Few minutes out still.” She went to lift the elevenstring’s case but the trooper did it for her, hefting it onto one shoulder, carbine swinging round from the other.

  “We’re tracking it,” Etalde said as the trooper stepped towards their aircraft. Cossont stood where she was. The commissar-colonel stopped and looked back at her. “Well, come on,” he told her. “We’ll rendezvous with the creature in the air.” He smiled. “Faster.”

  “And my flier, sir?” she asked.

  Etalde shrugged. “Tell it to go home or wherever it has to go to, Lieutenant Commander; you’re coming with us.” He shrugged. “Orders.”

  * * *

  “Never heard of it.”

  “More commonly known as the Hydrogen Sonata.”

  “Still never heard of it.”

  “No great surprise, sir. It’s a bit obscure.”

  “Renowned?”

  “The piece?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only as being almost impossible to play.”

  “Not, like…?”

  “Pleasant to listen to? No. Sir.”

  “Really?”

  Vyr frowned, thinking. “An eminent and respected academic provided perhaps the definitive critical comment many thousands of years ago, sir. His opinion was: ‘As a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”

  The commissar-colonel whistled briefly. “Harsh.”

  Vyr shrugged. “Fair.”

  “Life-task, eh?”
r />   “It seemed like a good idea at the time, sir.”

  In the ink-black skies above the Kwaalon plains, the military craft decelerated quickly and swung almost to a stop; the rear ramp swung down and wind came buffeting and roaring in before a shush-field calmed everything down.

  Vyr was strapped into a wall seat between Etalde and a third trooper. The first two troopers were on the other side of the small cabin with the elevenstring in its case secured between them like some bizarre carbon-black coffin, its nearest extremity close enough to Cossont to touch. An AI was flying the aircraft.

  Pyan, Cossont’s familiar, which had the form of a square black cape, flapped its way in from the turbulent darkness outside, bumping into the spongy shush-field and fluttering theatrically to the floor in apparent surprise as the craft’s rear door slammed closed and the flier accelerated again.

  “Oh, gracious!” Pyan said on the local open channel, as it struggled against the rearward pull. It used its corners to heave itself along the floor towards Cossont, who tapped into their private link and growled,

  “Stop dramatising and get over here.”

  The cape flowed along the floor and climbed up to her shoulders with a little help from Etalde and Cossont herself. It draped itself there as best it could given the straps, fastening itself round her neck.

  “You’re touchy,” it told her. “What’s all the fuss about anyway?”

  “With any luck, nothing.”

  Three

  (S -23)

  The Mistake Not…, a Culture vessel of indefinite age, hazy provenance and indeterminate class but generally reckoned to be some sort of modestly tooled-up civilian craft rather than a part of the Culture’s allegedly still slowly shrinking military resources, had been detailed to rendezvous with the Liseiden fleet by the clinker sun of Ry. The result of an experiment carried out by the General Systems Vehicle that had constructed it decades earlier, and not even officially classed as an Eccentric, the craft’s real status had always been moot. Regardless, currently it was seconded to the Contact section for the occasion of the Gzilt Subliming. Seemingly eager to make a good impression, the ship made sure to be at the rendezvous point especially early.

  It had a few dozen hours to wait; it circled the husk that was the long-dead sun for a while, inspecting the tiny, barely radiating stellar remnant, then darted about the rest of the system in a series of high acceleration/deceleration dashes — just for the fun of it, really — surveying the handful of cold, gas giant planets orbiting the cinder.

  Slightly too big to be a true brown dwarf, the sun had never been quite substantial enough to maintain nuclear fusion for any meaningful amount of time, effectively passing straight through the Main Sequence that defined normal stellar evolution as though it was a barrier to be slipped past rather than a path to be travelled along. It had never blazed brightly and after what truncated life it might have had as a true star, had subsequently spent billions of years just radiating away what little internal heat it had ever possessed.

  It lay burned out now, as cold as its accompanying planets and darker than the galactic skies around it. The Mistake Not… could see everything around it perfectly well, of course, and in exquisite detail, able to ramp up any remnant radiations from the failed star itself or the background wash of galactic space or illuminate anything it felt the need to inspect using a variety of its own active sensor arrays, and — in case all that standard 3D stuff wasn’t enough — it was capable of deploying the ultimate vantage point of standing outside the skein of real space altogether, looking down on this local patch of the normal universe from either direction of hyperspace… but still it missed the starlight. There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.

  This was just… dull.

  Especially in 3D. Via hyperspace the ship could see a delightfully attractive supernova filling nearly a thirty-secondth of the sky off to one side, but the wavefront of real light had yet to crawl across the intervening gulf of space to get here and illuminate this fate-forsaken cinder. Dull beyond dull.

  And lifeless! The whole system! Even the few Deadly-Slow species — the glacially paced plodders of the galactic community whose constitution and chemistries might have suited the cold and quiet of the local environment — appeared to have given both the star and its planets a miss; no Baskers, no sign of Seedsail or Darclouds or any of the other relevant species that were the cosmic equivalent of sub-silt feeders. A lonely, misfit sun, then; never quite one thing or the other, and remote from its peers.

  The Mistake Not… registered a twinge of affinity with the dead star, and investigated that response as well, turning over in its mind the bizarre concept of a conscious entity such as itself feeling some sort of metaphorical connection with something as classically boring, as easily described and as billion-year venerable as a failed sun.

  The ship was aware that, however splendid, intellectually refined and marvellous it might be (and it was very much of the opinion that it was all of those things, and more), it would likely still only ever measure its age in thousands of years, and for all the star’s monotonous lifelessness and sterility, it would still be here when it, the ship Mistake Not…, had gone.

  Still: life was life, consciousness was consciousness, and mere classical matter, inanimate — no matter how long-lasting — was just ineffably boring and in a sense pointless compared to almost any sort of life, let along something that was fully aware of its own existence, never mind something as gloriously hyper-sentient and thoroughly, vitally connected to the universe as a ship Mind.

  And besides, when it had ceased to be as a Culture vessel, the ship was confident that its being would continue to exist in some form, somewhere, either — at the very least — as part of some long-slumbering transcorporated group-mind, or — ultimate of ultimates, as far as was known — within the Sublime.

  Which kind of brought it back to where it had come in: here.

  The approaching Liseiden fleet manifested as a collection of forty slightly embarrassingly untidy warp-wakes, some distance off.

  The Liseiden were fluidics: metre-scale eel-like creatures originally evolved beneath the ice of a wandering extra-stellar planet. They were at the five going-on six stage of development according to the pretty much universally accepted table of Recognised Civilisationary Levels. This meant they were Low Level Involved, and — like many at that level — Strivationist; energetically seeking to better themselves and shift their civilisation further along its own Main Sequence of technological and societal development.

  They were a lively, creative and uninhibited species, according to most analyses, and just the tolerable side of the assertive/aggressive line, though not above bending the odd rule or stepping over the occasional decency boundary if they thought they could profit civilisationally. So not, in that regard at least, that different from almost every other Involved species.

  They were here, now, to negotiate, trade, acquire or just plain steal whatever they could of whatever assets, plant, kit, tech or general gizmology the Gzilt left behind when they Epiphanised in twenty-three days’ time. And they had form in this regard: they’d done this before with other Subliming species, which meant they went by another name according to most people’s reckoning: Scavengers.

  Scavenger species, it was fair to say, were not universally liked or respected by all their galactic cohabitees, and that could lead to trouble, especially within the heightened emotional atmosphere surrounding a Subliming, and all the more so when there were other, competing Scavenger species in the vicinity sharing the same predatory intentions, which, here, there were. The Mistake Not… was part of a distributed meta-fleet of Culture and other craft invited into their until-now jealously guarded space by the Gzilt to help keep matters as friendly and civilised as possible while they got ready to do the Big Disappear.

  Normally the martially inclined though generally peace
ful Gzilt would have had plenty of their own ships to enforce any degree of compliance they wanted within their own sphere of influence, especially against people toting the sort of bow-and-arrow tech a level five/six civ like the Liseiden could muster, but these were not normal times; the Gzilt had chosen to send many of their best ships into the Sublime first, as though to reconnoitre. It wasn’t unknown for about-to-Sublime species to do this, but it was unusual, possibly a little paranoid, and arguably dangerous, a little like you had already taken your eye off the target…

  Happily, according to the galaxy-wide gossip web that passed as an intelligence network between Culture ships, there had lately been local rumours of a last-minute deal between the Gzilt and at least one of the circling Scavenger species — probably the Liseiden — to legitimise and formalise the scavenging process.

  The Liseiden were definitely learning. These days they went actively looking for this sort of mutually agreed understanding with species about to Sublime, rather than just piling in like piratical scrappers every time. On this occasion they’d even thought to get representation: they’d hired a people called the Iwenick to be their humanoid face at negotiations with the Gzilt. This was, by general assent, a Smart Move.

  So the Liseiden would get the contract, as it were, and be expected to conduct themselves with the decorum befitting their presence anywhere near such a momentous event, as well as behaving with the sort of studied calmness that only came from knowing that what you were engaged in was a dignified and conscientious clearing-up and recycling process, and not some childishly desperate rule-free scramble for whatever loot could be scooped before the adults stepped in to re-impose order.

  Sadly, an equally plausible rumour held that — perhaps thanks to the pride of the Gzilt, for too long reluctant even to think of lesser civs pawing over their remains following their departure for better things — this had all been left far too late, and the other Scavenger species, already in place within or around Gzilt space, would refuse to honour any such agreement.