The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  She started to wake up. She felt odd, heavy but not heavy. Her blood roared in her ears. There was something weighing heavily on her shoulders. Nothing felt quite right.

  “What was that?” a familiar voice asked, sounding muffled, barely audible over the roaring in her ears.

  “Additional entity potentially aboard,” another voice – deep, male – announced casually. “Scanning. Identified: artificial construct, personal.”

  “And who is that?” the muffled voice asked.

  Cossont knew it now: Pyan. Though, pursuing this thought, she was still a little hazy on who or what “Pyan” was. Somebody/something close, associated with affection and annoyance. That was as near as she could get for now.

  “Parinherm, Eglyle,” the male voice said. “In sim.”

  It felt like somebody was sitting on her shoulders. Maybe not a full-sized person, but a child at least. Also, that people were pulling on her legs and arms. All … four arms. Was that right? Oh, yes, it was; she had four arms these days, had had for years.

  She opened her eyes. Two images, both of inside somewhere or something. Something quite small, cramped. The images swam together, became one.

  The man sitting opposite turned to look at her. The android. He was an android. Beside him was a person clad all in silver. The android reached up above his head, did something, and fell to the ceiling, twisting as he went, landing on all fours. On the ceiling. Where some other stuff seemed to have come to rest as well.

  Cossont thought about this.

  Then she realised; she was upside-down. The weight on her shoulders was her own weight. Things were starting to come back to her now. Some aches and pains. Feeling a little nauseous; probably a good idea to get the right way up, soon.

  The android was tapping on the side of the armoured helmet the trooper wore. The trooper’s armour had turned mirror, reflecting everything. “Hello?” the android said, tapping again. “Hello? Any form of communication? No?” He tapped once more, then stood back. “You seem dead,” he announced. He sounded puzzled.

  The trooper was hanging oddly, too loose. His carbine, also gleaming, hung around his mirror-armoured face-plate.

  Cossont felt sore all over. She tipped her head as best she could, neck muscles complaining, trying to see the button that would release her straps. She couldn’t twist her head that much; some sort of thick necklace thing was stopping her. She felt for the button, but that hurt too, even though her arms and hands were hanging in that direction anyway.

  Like almost all Gzilt people she had been born with a sophisticated pain-management system genetically grafted on top of the ancient, genuinely stupid-sore raw animal nerve-based sense, and she understood enough about how the whole process worked to know that if you were doing something and it hurt, you should stop doing it. So she stopped.

  “Could you help me?” she asked the android.

  He approached her, crouched. Even upside-down, his body looked too big, bursting out of the colonel’s jacket he wore. It had ripped in places.

  “How may I help you?” he asked.

  “Help me down. Catch me. Please.”

  “Certainly.” He reached under her head, something clicked and she fell a few centimetres before the android’s arms caught her round the waist. He turned her the right way up and positioned her sitting on the floor that had been the ceiling.

  “Thank you,” she told him.

  “My pleasure.” He smiled like a child. “You have four arms,” he observed.

  “Yes, I have,” she agreed, rubbing them gingerly and wincing. She looked at the trooper hanging unmoving above and across from her, seeing her own face distorted in his armour. “Did you say he’s dead?”

  “I think he is,” the android said.

  “But how? He was the only one wearing armour. How—?”

  “I think it was his armoured suit that killed him,” the android said matter-of-factly. “In the same way that the shuttle tried to destroy itself, and us.” He paused, then smiled and said, “In—”

  “If it’s safe,” Pyan’s faint voice said from inside the elevenstring’s case, “could I be let out now, please?”

  The android looked at her. “The artificial construct,” he said. “Is it yours?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Where are we? What happened?” She remembered being on the asteroid moon Fzan-Juym, General Reikl storming about … then nothing. Nothing until she woke up here, in what looked like a very small upside-down military transport.

  “We are somewhere on the surface of the Sculpt planet Eshri, in sim. What happened—”

  “‘In sim’?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the android said brightly. “In sim. This is said to indicate that this is not reality but rather a simulation.” He frowned. “I am admittedly confused by aspects of the currently running simulation and have yet to work out their likely utility, though this puzzle might itself be part of the utility of the sim, for training purposes.”

  She stared at him.

  “Can you hear me out there?” Pyan said; its voice was somewhere between petulant and plaintive.

  “This is not a sim,” Cossont told the android.

  “Mm-hmm,” the android said, nodding.

  She felt her eyes narrow. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I am prepared to believe that you – as presently constituted – believe that this is not a sim.”

  “‘As presently constituted’? What the hell does that mean?”

  “You, as a part of the simulated environment,” the android said cheerily.

  She stared at him. It. “Listen,” she said.

  “I can hear you, you know,” Pyan said testily. “If I can hear you, you can hear me.”

  Cossont turned briefly towards the elevenstring case. “Pyan, shut up.” She looked back to the android. “I am not part of any simulation,” she told it. “I am a flesh and blood human being, and in some pain right now.” She rubbed her aching arms.

  “We were flung around a lot as the craft fell,” the android said.

  “Uh-huh. And so it makes me very nervous that you think this is just a simulation and I’m just a part of it. I need you to treat me as real and human.”

  “I am,” the android said.

  “This matters, understand? There is no second try, no extra life. Not for me, anyway; I’m not backed-up or anything.”

  “Really?” The android looked sceptical.

  “Really,” Cossont told it, firmly. “Even when I was in the military I was never high risk, so I was never backed-up. Maybe you are, or can be, but not me. It’s not a game, not a sim.”

  “I understand and I am treating the situation accordingly,” the android said reassuringly, nodding. “That is why I guided this craft safely to ground after its own AI attempted to destroy it.”

  “What?” Cossont said.

  “What?” Pyan yelped.

  “That is why I guided this craft safely to ground after its own AI attempted to destroy it,” the android repeated.

  “You guided it—?” Cossont said. She looked towards the nose of the craft. “But how—?”

  “Following the aggressive effectorising of both the craft’s AI and the trooper’s suit, an attack which I believe was directed at obvious and conventional military systems and so was not directed at myself, I was able to establish communication with the craft’s back-up control sub-systems and guide it safely to ground. I was able to make use of the debris falling from the remains of the regimental HQ vessel as cover, causing this craft to maintain a similar trajectory to some of the portions of debris as they fell, until the last moment, otherwise we might have been hit again, by kinetic, beam or particle munitions.”

  Cossont closed her eyes, feeling her skin crawl. She shook her head. “The … the regimental HQ vessel … the Fzan-Juym asteroid, the moon; it’s … gone?”

  “Destroyed,” the android confirmed. His eyes went wide and he made a sudden flapping motion with both hands. “A very
extreme simulation scenario!”

  “Destroyed?” Cossont repeated, unable to take this in. “Completely?”

  The android shook his head. “Not completely in the sense of annihilated, as would be the case had it been attacked with a large amount of anti-matter, say, but completely in the sense that it was pierced by one or more energy weapon beams and blown apart into many tens of thousands of significant pieces, the largest perhaps forming up to five or six per cent of the mass of the craft before its destruction, the smallest—”

  The roaring in her ears had come back, drowning out what the android was saying. Cossont remembered Etalde’s face, Reikl’s, the grinning looks on the faces of the line of dancing people she and Reikl had encountered before they took the travel capsule.

  She was suddenly glad she was sitting down. She felt dizzy, disoriented. “Would anyone have survived?” she asked, shaking her head, trying to clear it. This hurt.

  The android looked at her oddly. “Well,” it said slowly, “we survived, patently.”

  “Apart from us.”

  “Hard to say with any certitude,” it told her. “Possibly not. While interfacing with this craft’s sensors I think I saw other small craft attempting to escape but all those I was able to pay any attention to fell victim to secondary and/or subsequent munitions and/or attacks. Also, I think I ought to add that I think I detected other space craft in the vicinity of the planet being attacked as well, so the assault was not purely on Fzan-Juym.”

  “What did all this?” Cossont asked.

  “From the little I could observe, the attack profile would fit that of a single large ship or a small group of sub-capital craft of level seven or eight capability on a semi-rapid closing transit. The weapon signatures would fit those of our own – that is, Gzilt – fleet, though that may represent deceit by those responsible; there is a certain lack of specificity inherent in weapon identifiability at this sort of implied civilisational level. This is known in some circles as the ‘purity’ effect.”

  Cossont stared at the creature.

  “Ahem,” the muffled voice inside the elevenstring case said.

  Cossont felt sore and tired and wanted to sleep some more. She wondered if this was what it was like to be truly old.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  “For us, not very much,” the android said. “This craft cannot move, the doors are inoperative and it may be unwise to send any distress signals. The craft is incapable of transmitting any distress signals in any event as I had to permanently disable its signal processing unit to prevent it broadcasting our status and position immediately after we were first effectorised. It may be best to wait for rescue by friendly forces, though in a wider context our present non-participatory immobility may represent an end-run situation within our part of the simulation at this time and we may well experience seeming oblivion or a possibly abrupt transition to base reality at any moment. I am prepared for either, as you may be too, even without knowing it. On the other hand, we are not in a completely stable or static situation given that we are gradually losing heat to the planet’s surface and the external near-vacuum, and a small amount of this craft’s atmosphere would also appear to be leaking. So in that sense this part of the run is continuing.”

  Cossont stared a little longer at the android. It/he stood suddenly upright and executed a little bow. “By the way, my name is Eglyle Parinherm. Yours?”

  “Vyr Cossont,” she told it. “Lieutenant Commander, reserve, recently re-commissioned.”

  “Delighted, ma’am.” Another small bow. “Though,” the android said, a small frown on his face, “for future reference and any subsequent runs, I’d suggest that a real human being would have wished to swap identities before this point.”

  Cossont felt her mouth open. She was aware that she probably looked like a moron. She shook her head gently.

  “Will somebody,” Pyan’s muted voice said, “tell this fucking lunatic we’re not in a fucking simulation and get me out of here?”

  “Shall I?” Parinherm asked breezily.

  “Please do,” she told him.

  Parinherm opened the elevenstring’s case. Pyan yelped, propelled itself out and flew across to Cossont. It thudded into her chest, wrapped in on itself like a rolled towel; two corners of its fabric extended like clumsy arms to hug her. “This is horrible!” it wailed. “Make it stop!”

  “I could disable the device,” Parinherm told Cossont, nodding at Pyan.

  “Leave me alone!” it yelled.

  “That’s all right,” Cossont told Parinherm. Reluctantly – the thing had never been this clingy before – she cuddled the familiar, patting what passed for its back. She shivered. It was getting cold inside the little craft.

  Parinherm had stuck his head into the elevenstring case. “Here is a garment,” he said, pulling out Cossont’s jacket. He held it up, letting it fall open. “‘The Lords of Excrement’,” he quoted, with seeming approval. He chuckled. “What an unexpectedly random touch.”

  “I’d better have that,” Cossont said, holding one hand out. Parinherm handed it over and she slipped it on. “So we’re losing atmosphere?” she said.

  The android nodded. “Oh, yes. And heat. Assuming the simulation continues, it will be interesting to see whether the last of the available air escapes first, or freezes.”

  “This is horrible,” Pyan said again.

  Cossont kept on patting the creature. “There there,” she said, for want of anything better.

  Eight

  (S -20)

  The ship knew it would have to do it sooner or later. Might as well get it over with.

  Within the computational substrates that provided the environment for the Caconym’s Mind there were plenty of bits it had never used, didn’t presently use and probably never would use. Physically fairly compact – in three dimensions fitting inside a fat ellipsoid only fifteen metres or so in length – the effective capacity of the Mind’s substrates was suitably vast. The comparisons usually involved how many normal drone or human mind-states could be losslessly encoded within the same volume, or how far back in time you would have to go before you got to the point where in any given society every single bit of computing power they would have possessed back then, summed, would be less than equal to the power contained within a single Mind.

  The Caconym didn’t really care. All that mattered was that – due to innate Culture over-engineering, its own consecutive incarnations as earlier ships and a sort of long-term laziness about pursuing the most efficient use of its much-augmented and added-to substrates – it had significant spare carrying capacity, and had agreed to house the mind-state – the soul, albeit reduced – of another Mind inside it.

  The Mind concerned was – well, had been – that of a Culture ship called the Zoologist, an ancient Boulder-class Superlifter. A glorified tug, basically.

  Superlifters had always tended towards eccentricity. It had never been the most difficult example of ship- or Mind-psychology to put this down to being a result of their rather boring and repetitive job, their usually uncrewed nature and the fact that, as well as being tugs, they had been designed as emergency, stop-gap warships, back before the Idiran war, when the Culture hadn’t really had any proper warships, or at least none that it was going to admit to having.

  The Zoologist was one of a relatively small group of Superlifters to have survived the war. Then, even before the great conflict had ended – but long after the Culture had produced fantastically more powerful warships by the multitude – it had done something relatively unusual: it had Sublimed, all by itself.

  A little later it had done something for which the term “unusual” was woefully inadequate: it had come back again.

  It was practically the definition of a Mind that the word – properly capitalised – meant a conscious entity able to go into the Sublime, not evaporate, and even – maybe, sometimes, very occasionally, in fact so seldom that it would be quite close to most people’s statistical
definition of “never” – be able to return, in some sense still viable and identifiably the same personality as that which had made the transition from Real to Sublime in the first place.

  If the Zoologist’s reasons for wanting to Sublime had – aside from the obvious, of wanting to experience the sheer ineffable wonderfulness of it all – been opaque, its reasons for coming back to the Real were simply baffling. The Mind itself had no explanation whatsoever, and seemed bemused by the question.

  Come back it had though, and – seemingly having no desire to remain in its own resurfaced vessel or even substrate – it had canvassed various of its earlier comrades amongst the Contact fleet (those that had survived; the severe attrition of the early years of the Idiran war came into effect here) to see if any of them would house its soul for posterity, or at least until it got bored and changed its mind again, or whatever.

  Meanwhile, Contact’s finest and most expert Minds in all things to do with the Sublime had tried debriefing the returned Mind. They had initially been ecstatic at having one of their own who had been there and made the return trip (lots of Minds had promised to do so over the millennia, though none ever did; the Zoologist had made no such undertaking, but had returned). This had, however, proven farcical.

  The ship’s memories were abstracted, beyond vague; effectively useless. The Mind itself was basically a mess; self-restructured (presumably) along lines it was impossible to see the logic behind. Identifiably the same, it was expressed in the most bizarre and obfuscatory tangle of needlessly complicated and self-referential analytical/meditative and sagational/ratiocinative processal architecture it had been the misfortune of all concerned ever to contemplate.

  Special Circumstances – Contact’s scruple-free wing and the bit that was as close to military intelligence and espionage matters as the Culture even reluctantly admitted to possessing – had been more than happy to take receipt of the old ship’s physical form, desperate to see if its time in the Sublime had altered it in any way, or if its re-creation back out of the Sublime – if that was the way it worked – had left tell-tale signs giving some or indeed any clue to how the Sublime worked (either way the answer was, it hadn’t).