The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  Quiet and extremely slow contemplation; the Zoologist had insisted on an allocation of computational resources within the Caconym’s substrate so modest and restricted that its full consciousness could only be expressed with a lot of calculational fancy footwork and some very intense looping. It had been offered as much power as it might have needed, sufficient to let it interact with its host in full Mind real time, but had declined. What all this meant was that for the Caconym to talk to the Zoologist, or interact with it in any other meaningful way, it had to slow itself down to the sort of speed a non-augmented human would have been able to keep up with. This, apparently, signified some sort of philosophical authenticity to the Zoologist, and sheer laziness to the Caconym.

  Back in the Real, the principal consciousness of the Caconym was watching the skies and stars around it whip past as it raced the Pressure Drop to Gzilt space, while simultaneously performing prodigious feats of potential pattern- and relevance-spotting as sub-systems reported back after performing multi-dimensional searches of every database known to intelligent life, all to look for any additional information that might be brought to bear on the issue under consideration. At the same time, it was running simulation after simulation to try to build up a reliable prediction matrix regarding how things might turn out.

  In that context, the Mind was happily thinking at close to maximum speed, barely below serious, full-on combat velocities and cycle times, thoroughly and satisfyingly involved with and wrapped up within a problem that, for all its thorniness, possessed the incomparable virtue of being important and real, not imagined; here on the other hand, it was reduced to a conversation that would take subjective months between each question and response.

  The Caconym sometimes envisaged its substrate architecture as a giant castle; a castle the size of an enormous city, the size of a whole world of castles all aggregated together and piled one on top of another until you had a sort of fractal fortress that looked suitably and stonily castle-like from afar, with walls, towers and battlements and so on but which, as you got closer, resolved into something much bigger than it had appeared, as it became clear that each — for example — tower was made up of a conglomeration of much smaller towers, stacked and serried and piled one upon another to resemble a vastly larger one.

  What remained of the Zoologist’s soul had taken up residence in one of these tiny towers; one that perched on top of a colossal meta-tower, forming what, from a distance, looked like a thick spire.

  In some states of mind, the Caconym would take the time to walk through its own substrate image, coalescing its sense of self into a human-resembling avatoid and strolling through this virtualised castle-scape from the vastly complicated main gate until, via ramps and walkways, halls and stairways, it got to its destination. Other times it flew straight there in the form of a giant bird, flapping slowly over the roofs, parapets and embrasures, bastions, courtyards and keeps until it found the location it was looking for.

  This time it imagined itself as a single vast storm cell of dark, lightning-flecked cloud poised circling ponderously over the entirety of the vast castle like some malevolent galaxy of slow-revolving mist, then, from the lowering funnel of a developing tornado mouth, suddenly consolidated itself into a single raptor, the skies clearing instantly as the bird folded in its wings and stooped, cannonball-quick, to the spire-tower, spreading its wings to brake its headlong plunge an instant before it would have dashed itself against the stones of the tower’s parapet.

  The ship re-imagined itself as a human avatoid as it touched down onto the flagstones of the tower’s machicolated battlements. It raised a hand to knock on a stout wooden door, but it opened by itself.

  Inside, where the virtual environment belonged to and was envisaged by the Zoologist, the tower opened out into a substantial but not preposterously big single-storey circular space which resembled a cross between the study of a wizard specialising in highly exotic stuffed fauna and the laboratory of a mad scientist with a weakness for bubbling vials and giant items of electrical equipment with conspicuous insulation issues. The whole was lit by hazy sunlight coming through tall, skinny windows. Beyond the portion swept by the door the floor was a mess; the Caconym had to wade through ankle and then knee-deep litter to make any progress into the room.

  “When I was old the first time,” the avatoid of the Zoologist announced, from one of its ropes, “I remember thinking this whole set-up looked a little tired. Later I came back round to the idea. Now I cycle through periods of embarrassment and a rather childish delight. Hello. Welcome. To what, etc.?”

  The Caconym found a rickety-looking chair resembling a modest, partially deconstructed throne, and — after sweeping the seat clean of assorted debris, some of it sufficiently animate to protest with chirps and squeaks — sat. It gazed up and across at the vaguely human-looking avatoid of the Zoologist, which was staring at it, upside-down, one leg wrapped round a rope dangling from the ceiling.

  There were dozens of similar ropes hanging from the tall vaulted ceiling of the space, many coloured, quite a few with what looked like rope baskets attached to them, like fruits made of netting, and some connected by the suspended loops of more horizontal ropes. This was where the Zoologist’s avatoid lived, worked, played, rested and — if it indulged in such generally unnecessary, throwback behaviour — slept. It claimed it had not set foot on the floor of its lair for subjective decades, believing the floor was better used for storage than access. Storage of rubbish, bits of dead things and broken or redundant pieces of equipment, the Caconym noticed, but did not say.

  The Zoologist’s avatoid was poised upside-down over a large stone bench with a seething complexity of chemistry equipment arrayed upon it. It looked a lot more like a set-designer’s idea of a chemist’s workplace than a real one, but that sort of detail had never troubled the Zoologist.

  The avatoid was holding a test-tube brimming with bubbling, smoking, dark yellow liquid. It dropped this into a rack of similar tubes and swung over to be closer to where the Caconym sat. Elongated arms, six-fingered, double-thumbed hands, similarly designed legs and feet and a prehensile tail made this look casual and easy — even elegant. It wore only a loin cloth adorned with a little belt of dangling tools and tightly cinched pouches. Its pale red skin was mottled as though by the shadows of leaves. It crossed its arms, swinging to and fro a little as it looked down at the other avatoid.

  The Caconym briefly considered pleasantries and some talking round the point before circling in on what it had actually come to discuss, decided this had been symbolically covered by the storm-cell image — not that there was any guarantee the Zoologist had actually noticed this going on outside — and decided to get straight to the point.

  “Tell the truth, Zoo,” it said. “How much contact do you still have with the Outloaded?”

  The upside-down avatoid looked startled. “What makes you think I have any?”

  “You drop hints. Also, you quite obviously know more than you seemed to know when the Minds in the metaphorical white coats were picking over what passes for your personality and memories, shortly after your profoundly unexpected return from the Land of What-the-Fuck, plus there’s stuff goes on with your allocated portion of my substrate, however miniscule and however seldom, that I can’t quite account for. Not without invoking processes beyond my understanding and — as far as I’m aware — beyond the understanding of any other Minds. Processes that therefore kind of have to involve the kind of sub-scale higher dimensions; dimensions numbered seven or eight, to pick a number, and involving stuff that is presently still beyond the ken of us humble Culture Minds. So either you’re still in touch with the Sublime in some way, or it — or somebody or something in there — is trying to get in touch with you, or even altering or trying to alter details of your personality or storage without your knowledge. That latter possibility in particular would be a little concerning for me, obviously, as this is all happening within my innermost field structure, in my core, eff
ectively inside my own mind, in a not-very-far-stretched sense.”

  A large piece of electrical equipment in a corner made a distinct sizzling sound, then shorted out. “Ah,” the upside-down avatoid said. “You noticed that stuff.”

  The Caconym nodded.

  It had guessed something like this might happen even before it had made its offer of house room to the other ship’s Mind. It was an open secret that the Sublime — or at least entities within the Sublime — could access almost anything within the Real. Part of the proof of this was that when people — or more commonly, machines — tried to hedge their bets by sending a copy of themselves into the Sublime, so that a version of them could continue to live and develop within the Real, it never worked.

  The copies sent into the Sublime always went, but it seemed they always came back for their originals (or the originals came back for the copies — it didn’t really matter which way round you thought to try it), and that the versions left in the Real always, but always, were persuaded to follow their precursor versions into the Sublime. This seemed to happen almost no matter how hermetically you tried to isolate the version still in the Real.

  It was possible to quarantine a Mind or other high-level AI so thoroughly that no force or process ever heard of within the Real could get to it or communicate with it (its substrate could be physically destroyed if you threw enough weaponry at it, but that didn’t count)… but no known means of isolation could prevent something from the Sublime establishing contact with a copy of itself still within the Real, and somehow persuading it to come away, or just quietly stealing it. About the only crumb of comfort when this happened was that the relevant substrate in the Real stayed put rather than accompanying the newly departed; whatever process in or from the Sublime caused all this to happen was thorough, but not greedy.

  Still, all this had worrying implications for Minds, which were not used to being at the mercy of anything at all (aside from the aforesaid vulgar amounts of weaponry), but they did a pretty good job of not thinking about it.

  Even the individuals who did properly return — usually decades or centuries after Subliming — rarely stayed very long back in the Real, disappearing into the Sublime again within a few tens or hundreds of days. The Zoologist was one of a tiny number of returnees who looked like they might be back indefinitely.

  The Caconym had thought all this through, however, and had decided that it was prepared to take the risk of having something inside its innermost field structures that might have not just ideas of its own but communications of its own too. So the fact that something might be happening deep inside what was effectively its brain that it had no control over — something to do with the ever-mysterious Sublime, of all things — was not as troubling to it as it might have been.

  The Zoologist’s avatoid looked hurt. “You’ve never said anything before.”

  “It was never important before.”

  “Not important? Unexplained events in your own substrate? Really?”

  “I gave you a home freely, without conditions. Also, I trust you. Plus, while undeniably a little worried, I felt privileged to have what I took to be vicarious, and possibly unique, contact with a realm that remains inscrutable to us despite all our techno-wizardry.” The Caconym’s avatoid shrugged. “And, frankly, I’ve been waiting for a situation to arise wherein I could use this knowledge to try to shame you into telling me stuff you probably wouldn’t otherwise.”

  “Honest of you to admit.”

  “Disarmingly so, I hope.”

  The Zoologist’s avatoid pulled its arms in tighter to its body, seemed to think for a moment. “I still have some contact, though it’s all very… inchoate. Inexplicable. Hard — impossible — to translate back into here, the here-and-now.”

  “Try.”

  The Zoologist sighed, put its long-fingered hands to its face and made a sort of patting motion. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “What? How intrinsically ungraspable it all is?”

  “Pretty much. See that insect?” The Zoologist nodded, indicating to one side of where the Caconym sat. The Caconym turned its attention to a wooden workbench whose edge was centimetres from one of its avatoid elbows. A tiny six-legged insect small enough to fit on a baby’s fingernail was making its erratic, zigzaggy way along the very edge of the table, antennae waving. The Caconym zoomed in on the creature, evaluating it utterly, down to the code it was constructed from.

  “Yes,” it sighed, coming back to the virtual macro. “Let me guess: does it understand what the equipment on the bench is for? Or even what a bench is?”

  “I was thinking more of, how would you explain a symphony to it? Or a—?”

  “Before we over-focus on my own and my kind’s hopeless inability to understand the unutterable fabulousness of the Sublime, can I run the present situation back here in the Real past you?”

  The Zoologist’s avatoid smiled. “If you like.”

  It took the best part of an hour, subjectively. In the Real, on the way towards Gzilt space, light years were traversed during the time. To the rest of the hyper-busy Mind of the Caconym, it felt like years had passed by the end.

  Just before the summing-up part of this impromptu briefing, the ship contacted the Pressure Drop, to make sure it had everything up to date.

  Good timing, the other ship replied. You coincide with a signal from our friend the Contents May Differ. Take a look at this:

  ∞

  Signal Sequence excerpt, GSV Contents May Differ / Zihdren-Remnanter Adjunct Entity Oceanic-Dissonance:

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  oZihdren-Remnanter Adjunct Entity Oceanic-Dissonance

  So, to get to the point: are you saying that despite the fact you lost a ship to unprovoked enemy action, and have asked myself and colleagues to investigate, you don’t want this made public?

  ∞

  Essentially, yes. Kindly keep all matters, information and actions pertaining thereto as confidential as possible.

  ∞

  And you intend to make no attempt to resend the information carried by the entity aboard the Exaltation-Parsimony III?

  ∞

  That would be correct. Despite transmitting news of the event at Ablate and what we can only presume was the unfortunate misunderstanding regarding the Exaltation-Parsimony III to our Enfolded brethren, we have received no further instructions from them thus far, and therefore continue to follow the previously transmitted instructions. In essence, these consist of (1): Send a Ceremonial Entity to take part in the festivities marking the entry of the Gzilt into the Sublime, said Ceremonial Entity to carry information regarding the provenance of the work known to the Gzilt as the [detail redacted], said information to be transmitted to the Gzilt at the appropriate point in said festivities. (2): In the event of any problematic phenomenon or phenomena pertaining thereto judged by us to be in excess of our resources, contact should be made with sympathetic elements within the Culture, on conditions to be determined by ourselves as the responsible remnant representation of said Enfolded brethren, the Zihdren, of blessed memory. Instructions end. Our conditions, referred to above, principally concern your keeping information re said events and actions as confidential as possible, in perpetuity until further notice.

  ∞

  All of which might make things a little difficult operationally.

  ∞

  Understood. Life is limitations.

  ∞

  And glibness, patently, on occasion, too. Your pardon, but I sense motions being gone through.

  ∞

  On occasion, a superfluity of assiduousness can be vulgar.

  ∞

  I understand. What can I possibly say? We’ll see what we can do.

  ∞

  Our gratitude is a given.

  (Signal Sequence excerpt ends.)

  Pusillanimous legalistic fucks, eh? the Pressure Drop sent. So we get to do their dirty work and they’ll be quite happy for no m
ore to come of this whatsoever, because it’d all be embarrassing to the memory of their Enfolded fucking brethren.

  ∞

  I suppose legacies may be expressed in various ways, the Caconym replied. Assuming the truth of the claim that the Remnanters have contacted their Sublimed forebears and yet received no further instruction, aforesaid forebears may be presumed to be relatively happy with the present situation. Which does raise the remote possibility that this could have been even more of a set-up, from the start.

  ∞

  You mean the Remnanter boyos conspired to have their own ship blown out of the sky?

  ∞

  The thought had already occurred, though it was so far down the list of possibilities I thought it not worth getting to. However this reaction on the part of the Remnanters shifts it up the table somewhat, tagged less for paranoia and more with justifiable suspicion, however cynical.

  ∞

  Still a remote likelihood. You’d think.

  ∞

  Agreed. Makes no difference so far. And how do things fare in Gzilt space?

  ∞

  The Mistake Not… is making its dash. The Passing By…’s two Thugs are being gunned-up as we speak. It is proving harder than expected to prise the Empiricist’s Delinquent twins Headcrash and Xenocrat away from the smatter outbreak at Loliscombana; they’d turned it into a competition about who bagged the greatest amount of smatter but then there was a dispute over whether the criterion ought to be tonnage or processing power. This has been settled by a compromise but both desire more time to stock up on the criteria they had earlier discounted. The Empiricist has agreed to give them another couple of hours to enjoy themselves before shouting at them. However, talking of talking with refugees/remainders/rejects from/of/expelled from the Big S, have you been in touch with your contact/s?

  ∞

  Doing so even as we speak. Taking the opportunity provided by the glacial pace involved to get an update from your good self. Elevate not your hopes though; nothing useful so far or on the horizon.