The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  There was, as a result, a distinct chance that things might get interesting.

  The ship watched the Liseiden fleet crawl closer.

  Much further off than they’d ever have imagined possible, it had already begun to monitor some of their comms traffic.

  “…deal with the Culture ship?”

  “…well, I—”

  “Got a name for this thing yet?”

  “…um—”

  “The Mistake Not…, apparently.”

  “The Mistake Not…?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Mistake Not what?”

  “That’s all we’ve got, sir.”

  “That’s not really good enough, is it?”

  “Not really, sir. I—”

  “Nyomulde; you’re supposed to be the Culture fan-child of the Fleet; what have you… do you have?”

  “Ah, sir. The form, um, the ellipses after the words ‘Mistake Not’ imply there’s more, but it’s redacted; hidden. I’ve had the AI scan the relevant databases and there’s… there is no more. I mean, there is sort of generally understood to be more, but it’s like, ah, it’s not for public… it’s sort of a private joke between the Culture ships, the Minds.”

  “A joke?”

  “It’s what they’re like, sir.”

  “Ridiculous. How’d this bunch of effete spawnsuckers ever get to where they are?”

  “Well—”

  “Class? How about…? What class is it? What are we dealing with here? Have they deigned to tell us that or is that redacted too?”

  “I’ve got it down as a non-defined ‘U’ open brackets ‘e’ close brackets, sir.”

  “Keep going, officer.”

  “Well, ‘non-defined’ sort of speaks for itself, ‘U’ just means ‘Unit’ and ‘e’… Hmm. I thought that meant Eccentric, to be honest, sir, but some sources hold that it stands for erratic. Strictly speaking the ‘e’ should be upper case if it stands for—”

  “Size? What size is it?”

  “In the order of a couple of kilometres, though that’s just the outer field envelope.”

  “‘In the order of.’”

  “Best we’ve got, sir.”

  “I see. Do we have any idea what it looks like?”

  “Um, not really, sir. No record of its appearance within the field complex boundary. There are various guesses but they’re all very speculative. One or two—”

  “Spare me, officer. It’s a Culture ship but we don’t know what sort.”

  “In a pebbleshell, yes, sir.”

  There was a lot more like this, all in the Liseiden tongue, which was made up of a not inharmonious series of bubbly water-belches. The ship added the name Nyomulde to the Culture’s intelligence archive of known Liseiden officers, immediately transmitting this to a variety of its comrade craft both near and far.

  The Liseiden hadn’t been forthcoming regarding the identity of the approaching fleet’s commanding officer, or even which ships would make up the fleet in the first place, but from the largest ship’s warp signature — hideously obvious from light years away — the Mistake Not… had determined hours earlier that it was the Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya, a Collective Purposes Vessel (First Class) and fleet flagship representing the last word in what the Liseiden were capable of building.

  Much more satisfyingly, from the tone and word choice of one of the individuals talking — referencing earlier notes compiled by other Culture ships — the Mistake Not… was becoming increasingly certain that one of the voices it was listening to was a senior Liseiden officer called Ny-Xandabo Tyun, a male who held the rank of Salvage and Reprocessing Team Principal. Admiral, in other words.

  But what babble! What to-ing and fro-ing over such simple operational matters! A bunch of dim-witted, slow-thinking bios swimming in a tub clouded with their own effluent, trying to work out what was going on around them by staring through portholes probably. It was hard for a ship, a Mind, not to feel at least a degree of contempt.

  And they were still talking, out there between the stars, as the little flock of ships scraped slowly, slowly closer. (The fleet was already having to decelerate, the Mistake Not… noted, with some exasperation. This would draw the whole process out even further.) It was only a meet-and-greet anyway; almost as soon as it got here the Liseiden fleet would be breaking up again, most of the ships heading off singly or in small groups to individual places of interest within the Gzilt sphere; only the flagship and a few smaller vessels would remain as any sort of substantive unit.

  This was something Admiral Tyun himself didn’t know yet; there were sealed orders in the flagship’s AI detailing all this dispositional stuff which were only to be accessed on the fleet’s arrival at the clinker star but which the Culture already knew about through a piece of deft signal interception by some other ship or ships tens of days earlier.

  The Mistake Not… found knowing this — while Admiral Tyun did not — quite agreeable.

  It would probably tag along with the flagship and its escorts, plus it had prepared an eel-like avatoid to represent it in person aboard the flagship. From what it had been told, the Liseiden were almost suspiciously keen to welcome this creature aboard.

  It listened in to the animal chatter again.

  Good grief, they were still discussing its own name!

  The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless.

  All these people seemed to do was talk!

  It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.

  Finally one of them said, “Sir, we… may be approaching the sort of distance the Culture ship can start to read our comms.”

  “This far out?”

  “–encrypted, aren’t… isn’t it?”

  “Precautionary principle applies, team. Officer?”

  The obvious, inter-ship comms traffic ceased. The Mistake Not… considered dedicating an effector to the lead vessel to monitor it internally, but there was a tiny chance they might spot it doing so — a tiny chance increased by the possibility the fleet carried tech filched on earlier Scavenging sorties — so it didn’t.

  Hours of patient waiting later, the Liseiden fleet of large, boxy-looking ships finally dragged itself into the Ry system, hauled up into a rather quaint orbit around the clinker sun with the warp-engine equivalent of loud clanks and clouds of black smoke, and — finally — rendezvoused officially with the Culture ship Mistake Not…

  Effusive greetings of great solemnity and seemingly genuine friendliness flowed in both directions.

  It was while all this was going on and the avatoid eel was being puttered across to the fleet flagship in an antique shuttle brought along specially for the purpose that one of the Mistake Not…’s multitudinous sub-routines — this one charged with deep analysis of recent HS sensor data by opportunistic triangulation following significant movement within any given real space reference frame — flagged the tiniest of oddities.

  It was timed, originally, just over twenty-two hours earlier and it was located some centuries away, about a quarter of the distance round the boundary of the rough sphere of stars and space that held the Gzilt volume of influence. Specifically, it had taken place within the colossal, slow-tumbling clouds and wastes and veils of light marking the Yampt-Sferde supernova: the pretty one it had noticed earlier whose real light had yet to get here. Somewhere inside the vast, escaping fires of the nebula there had been a microscopic flare of radiation displaying an unusual, even anomalous signature spectrum.

  Suddenly in proper, no-nonsense combat-grade Mind-thinking time, while the transfer shuttle moved a few nanometres towards its destinat
ion, the AI cores on the Liseiden flagship slept deeply between cycles and the Liseiden themselves would have appeared frozen and silent even observing them on a scale of subjective years, the Mistake Not… watched the sub-routine’s resulting attention-cascade briefly suck in and focus other computational assetry on the data, rapidly producing all the available analysis it was presently possible to compile on the subject.

  The anomaly — so faint, far away and overwhelmed by the seething turmoil of energies all around it as to be only very ambiguously weapon-blink — looked like it was centred quite precisely on the artificially maintained planetary fragment called Ablate, where the Gzilt had some sort of ceremonial facility.

  …Oh-oh, thought the Culture ship.

  Four

  (S -22)

  Septame Banstegeyn went from group to group, taking part in multiple hand-shakings, everybody standing side-on and putting a single hand into a big confused but well-meaning tangle in the centre. Sometimes the resulting “shake” was a trembling muddle, sometimes the ball of grasping hands would end up going up and down quite violently, as though they were all making it happen deliberately; everybody always looked slightly surprised when that happened. Doubtless this was an example of or metaphor for something or other.

  Anyway, Banstegeyn didn’t enjoy the process; in fact he hated it. He took particular care, therefore, to look entirely as though nothing he could possibly be doing right now could conceivably give him greater pleasure. He was hearty, amiable, roaring with laughter when he needed to, but he had a continuing need to wash his hand or at least wipe it on his robes, as though to decontaminate it after all this sweaty touching.

  Well, this was just one of the many objectionable things that a man in his position had to do. In the end it was worth it; it would all be worth it.

  “Well, Ban, it’s all yours now!”

  “Folrison,” Banstegeyn said, forcing a smile as the other, junior parliamentarian shook him by the shoulders. Over-familiarly, Banstegeyn thought. Folrison looked drunk, probably was; a lot of them were, though not him — never him. And he didn’t like being called “Ban”, either. “It’s all all of ours now, I think you’ll find,” he told the other man, then gestured modestly at his own chest. “Merely a caretaker.”

  “Na, you finally got your way. You’re in charge.” Folrison smiled. “Of not very much for not very long, but, if it makes you happy…” He looked away as though distracted, seemed to catch somebody else’s gaze. “Excuse me,” he said, and wandered off.

  Banstegeyn smiled at Folrison’s retreating back, in case anybody was looking, though what he was thinking was, Yes, just fuck off.

  “Sir.”

  “Septame.” His chief secretary and aide-de-camp both appeared out of the mêlée.

  “Where were you two when I needed you?” he demanded.

  Jevan, his chief secretary, looked dismayed. “But, sir,” he said, “you said—”

  “Would you like a wipe, Septame?” Solbli said quietly, smiling as she pulled a moist square from her satchel and offering it to him discreetly.

  Banstegeyn nodded, quickly wiped his hands and gave the towel back to Solbli. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Eventually, shaking off the last overly effusive well-wisher from the lower ranks, they were able to make it to the doors leading from the still-crowded main assembly chamber to the Senior Levels and the terrace overlooking the darkened gardens and the near-deserted city.

  Banstegeyn nodded to the parliamentary constable who’d opened the door, then, at the top of the steps leading down to the terrace, while Jevan and Solbli stood respectfully a couple of steps behind, had a brief moment to himself before anybody else rushed up to tell him what a historic day it had been. His earbud, released from the rule-imposed no-personal-comms restriction of the parliament interior, started to wake up, but he clicked it off again; Jevan and Solbli would be catching up and would let him know about anything urgent.

  The gardens — roundels of paving and splashing pools surrounded by maze-like blocks of black hedges within which it had always been easy to find nooks where quiet words might be had — were just starting to look neglected, even under the soft, subdued lights shining from antique lampposts; the city — a quaint jumble of low domes and soaring spires, gently floodlit but looking empty as a stage set — lay quiet and still under a dark, clouded sky.

  So late. The session really had gone on far too long.

  A handful of aircraft drifted above M’yon, lights winking; not long ago there would have been hundreds. Banstegeyn had long thought of the old Ceremonial Capital as an open-air museum, with the parliament its dustiest exhibit. It was just that now it truly looked like it. Anyway, M’yon was not where the real power lay at all — that was in the teeming habs, the great ships, the orbiting manufacturies and the Regimental HQs — but rather where it had to look like it lay.

  On the terrace, the principal knot of people surrounded the president: the usefully useless president, her cohort of effete trimes, a few of his fellow septames and a smattering of junior degans who must have ridden in on somebody more senior’s coat-tails. Secretaries, AdCs, advisors, a few Military Outright bigwigs and a smattering of accredited aliens made up the rest; some of the aliens were humanoid, some disconcertingly not.

  The ambassadorial party from the Ronte — the insectiles who were one of the two Scavenger civs the Gzilt were actually talking to — existed inside heavy-looking exo-suits like tiny, complicated spaceships, all alarmingly sharp joints and angles and the occasional hiss and stink of some escaping gas. Their translators didn’t work as well as they seemed to think and it could be confusing to talk to them. They tended to huddle on the outskirts of gatherings like this, lucky to have a Gzilt military attaché to talk to, and even then only because the unfortunate officer had been ordered to do so. Four of the six suited Ronte were resting on their spindly-looking suit legs; the other two were floating over a pond, humming. Oh, and a few journalists and media people, he noted with some distaste; even the body politic had parasites.

  It was the last day of the Gzilt Parliament. The very last day; it would never meet again. Anything relevant that needed dealing with from now on would be handled by transitional committees or temporary cabinets. The various representatives, having made their final farewells, would shortly be departing. A handful of those local to Zyse itself would head off in fliers, but all the rest would take ship to be with their families and/or loved ones, the great majority of them in conveniently distant systems where, Banstegeyn devoutly hoped, they’d be unable to cause any trouble if any difficult decisions had to be made over the next twenty-odd days.

  Banstegeyn had made sure that he was chair of several of the most important committees, and that his people chaired or controlled almost all the rest; plus it was tacitly accepted that he would be in charge if there was need of an emergency temporary cabinet.

  Which there might be, now, of course. Only a very few people knew this at the moment (very few, but, patently, at least one fucker too many), though it was looking increasingly likely. It gave him stomach contractions just thinking about it; Go! he wanted to scream at all of the other parliamentarians. Hurry up! Just go. Be gone! Leave him and the people he trusted to make the decisions that had to be made.

  It had all got far too close for comfort, time-wise, over the last day or two. The Remnanter ship had appeared earlier than they’d been expecting and then what had happened out at Ablate had already leaked, it seemed. How the fuck had that happened so quickly? If he ever found out who’d been responsible… Bad news upon bad news; things crowding in, happening much faster than he’d anticipated.

  It could all be handled — things could always be handled — but the handling might get rough. Well, that couldn’t be helped. The goal was what it had always been; a successful Sublime, his reputation and place in history assured.

  He turned and looked up at the parliament building, where the Presence hung. He could hardly see it in the darkness.<
br />
  The Presence was dark grey, shaped like some high-altitude balloon before it ascended; a slightly flattened semi-sphere curving down via a long, pendulous, narrowing tail to a point that looked to be aimed straight at the pinnacle of the parliament building’s central cupola. It was about sixty metres across near the top and nearly three hundred metres in height. That spike-like tip hovered silently just a few metres above the cupola’s spire; it looked as though somebody tall, balanced on the very top of the spire, could have reached up and touched it. A few of the parliament’s floodlights reflected dully off the bulbous near-black curve beneath its summit.

  It had appeared twelve years earlier, on the day the parliament had passed the Act that confirmed the results of the Final Subliming Plebiscite, setting in train all the preparations for the event. A manifestation from the Sublimed Realm, a symbol from those who had already gone before. No more than a signpost, really; not animate or intelligent, as far as was known; just a reminder that the decision had been made and the course of the Gzilt was set. It was unmoved and unaffected by wind, rain, whatever, and barely there at all according to the military’s technical people; only just more than a projection. Real but unreal, like a shadow falling from another world.

  They’d been expecting it; the Presence hadn’t come as a surprise — these things always appeared when a people, a civilisation, was preparing for and committed to Subliming — but, somehow, actually seeing it there had still come as a shock.

  Banstegeyn remembered watching the poll figures wobble; parliament, the media and his own people were canvassing the general population all the time back then, and the commitment levels had dipped significantly when the Presence had appeared. He’d worried. This was so much what he wanted, what he believed in and knew was right, what he himself had spent his life working towards and staked his reputation on; this would be his legacy and his name would live for evermore in the Real, no matter what lay ahead in the Sublime. It was utterly the right thing to do; he had known this and still knew this with absolute certainty, and yet still he’d worried. Had he been too bold? Had he tried to make everybody go too soon: a decade early, a generation, even?