The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  “You are stressed, General,” Agansu said. “I understand. I regret what has happened—” The general started shouting at him as he said this, but he persevered, talking over her. “—and that which shortly must occur. I merely wished to salute your bravery and inform you that while, sadly, no official record of your exemplary behaviour, until this point, at any rate, will be possible, a fellow officer will not forget how well you discharged your duties. I understand how little consolation this might be, but it is all I have to offer.”

  “You self-righteous worm-infested turd,” the general said, nearly spitting; “swallow a gut-full of acid, stick your head up your own rectum and vomit.” She looked away as somebody spoke to her, then back to him. “Oh; slowing the whole station,” she said, sneering. “Going to let us drop into the photosphere and roast to death. Quick splash of plasma or a particle jet too quick a death for us? Where’s your fucking honour now?”

  “Unfortunately we are no longer alone; at least one other vessel of significant capabilities is now present in the system, and to do as you suggest, while of course representing my first choice for the sake of due respect, might attract unwanted attention. Slowing your current location so that it descends into the sun accomplishes the same end while being much less likely to be noticed. I apologise. I suggest that those of your comrades unable to auto-euthenise before conditions become especially uncomfortable accomplish the required deed through the use of side arms. I assume you have those.”

  The general said nothing for a few moments. Behind and around her, her crew seemed to be doing all they could to prevent the old research and monitoring station from falling into the sun, and to send any sort of signal of distress, either directed or broadcast; punching buttons, shouting commands, manipulating holo displays. All, of course, to absolutely no avail, Agansu knew, though he appreciated the merit of always trying to do whatever one could in all circumstances, no matter how inevitable the outcome.

  Then General Reikl said, quite calmly to somebody off-screen, “Cut this in three seconds.”

  She turned back, faced the screen and seemed to sob; a single great heaving motion shook her entire upper body. Agansu was, for an instant, most surprised, then slightly disappointed, and, lastly, oddly touched.

  Then Reikl put her head back a little, jerked it forward again, hard, and spat a surprisingly large amount of spittle, phlegm or a mixture thereof, straight at the camera. The view was obscured for about half a second before the comms link was cut off entirely, from her end.

  Agansu had felt himself start, spasming backwards instinctively into his suit and the unseen surface of the couch beneath as the spittle had hit the camera, even though he was so many tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometres distant, and so utterly, perfectly, contained and protected within so many concentric layers of armour, insulation and material.

  He tried to re-establish contact – he felt he had to – but no reply was forthcoming. He realised he’d have been disappointed if there had been any.

  Beyond that, he was, momentarily, not sure quite how to feel.

  He thought about it, and settled for a hope that he would meet his own end with such blazing contempt and fortitude.

  After that, he thought his way back to the magnified view of the old solar research and monitoring station. It was silhouetted, insect small, against the heaving livid face of the star. He lay in silence and watched over the few minutes it took for the dark speck to fall into the arching trajectories of plasma forming the upper reaches of the inferno.

  Eventually the tiny dot winked out in a brief, microscopically irrelevant extra pulse of flame, quite lost within the encompassing storm of nuclear fires below.

  The colonel closed his eyes in a kind of silent salute to the departed warriors. There would be no Subliming for them now. But then there would be none for him, either. The colonel had volunteered to stay behind after the Subliming, as part of the Gzilt Remnanter. In theory this was because it meant sacrifice and was therefore a noble thing to do. The truth, of which he was suitably ashamed, was that he was terrified of oblivion, and that was what Subliming seemed to him to be. He could not tell anybody this.

  “Somebody was a masochist,” one of the crew remarked, when he rejoined them on the virtual bridge of the Uagren.

  “How so?” Agansu asked.

  “They kept on distress-signalling all the way down,” the comms officer said. “But their vital signs telemetry was still included – probably just forgot to turn it off. Thing is, all the life signs flicked off one by one over less than a minute after they broke contact. All except one. The one that stayed on rode that baby all the way down to the fires, alive.”

  “Showing distress?” Agansu asked.

  “Not especially. Nothing to indicate severe pain. But still.”

  Ten

  (S -18)

  “Mine doesn’t.”

  “Play strange tricks?”

  “Never. I’d feel more normal if it did.”

  “I was kind of only kidding anyway.”

  “I’d guessed.”

  “It is Mr QiRia who plays strange tricks,” said the excessively hairy avatar to Cossont’s right, and chuckled.

  Cossont lay lounging under a taut white, breeze-vibrated awning on the great raft Apranipryla, on the water world called Perytch IV. To her left, on another lounger, was QiRia, the man who claimed to be absurdly old. Splayed on a couch on her other side was the avatar of the Warm, Considering.

  Culture ship avatars were usually human, or at least humanoid, especially when they were mixing mostly with humans, but not that of the ancient Delta-class GCU Warm, Considering; its avatar, Sklom, was in the form of a sylocule, a spikily blue-haired, six-limbed, six-eyed creature with a bulky central body.

  Sklom lifted a murky-looking drink glass with a fat straw in it from a tray, raised its body from the couch a little and appeared to squat over the glass. There was a slurping noise and the level in the glass went down. Cossont had yet to find this less than fascinating. Also, slightly disgusting.

  The Warm, Considering was supposed to be horrendously ancient itself – thousands of years old – though still not, the avatar and ship seemed happy to concede, nearly as venerable as QiRia. The man, however old he really was, seemed to be at least partially under the protection of the antique ship. It took him wherever he might want to go, provided or confirmed covering identities – he’d be besieged by media people or those just fascinated by extreme age, otherwise, he claimed – and, perhaps, she thought, from hints dropped over the last few days, helped maintain whatever aspects of his physiology and memory he could not take care of himself. She supposed if you were going to hide for ten thousand years, inside the Culture or anywhere else, it would help to have a ship on your side.

  “I’d have thought your memory would play more tricks than anybody else’s,” she said to QiRia. This was the fourth day the man had spent out of the water, and the first without wet towels spread over him. “What with you having so much of it. Memory, I mean.”

  The man rubbed his face with both hands. “Well, you’d be wrong,” he told her. “One of the things you have to do if you’re going to live a long time and not go mad is make sure your memories are properly … looked after. Managed.”

  “How do you even fit them in?” Cossont asked. “Are you basic-ally all computer, inside your head?”

  “Not at all,” QiRia said, his expression indicating he found the idea distasteful. “In some ways my brain is as it’s always been, just stabilised. Been like that for millennia. Though it does have a modified neural lace within it. Heavily modified; no comms. What I do have is extra storage. Not processing; storage. The two are sometimes confused.”

  “What,” Cossont asked, “is it remote, or—?”

  “No. It’s in me,” QiRia told her. “Throughout me. Vast amount of storage room in the human body, once you can encode in the appropriate bases and emplace a nano-wire read-out system through the helices. Started with co
nnective tissue, then bones, now even my most vital organs have storage built in. Doesn’t detract from their utility in the least; improves it in some ways, in terms of bone strength and so on. Though I have noticed this body doesn’t float very well.”

  “You are weighed down by your memories, literally!” Sklom said, chortling.

  QiRia looked unimpressed at this as he held up one hand, extended a digit and inspected it. “Well yes. However, it also allows me to have more knowledge in my little finger than some people do in their whole body, literally.”

  “What of your masculine organ of generation?” Sklom asked. The avatar was modelled on a male sylocule. “What is stored there?”

  QiRia frowned and looked away, as though distracted, gauging. “Currently empty.”

  Sklom hooted with laughter. Cossont reflected that males seemed to find the same things funny even across utterly different species.

  “Room for expansion!” Sklom wheezed, though QiRia looked unimpressed at this and shared a rolling-eyes look with Cossont.

  He pinched the top of his nose. “At first, my memories were placed randomly throughout my body, with many copies,” he said. “Now, as the available space has been taken up, there is generally only one copy of each memory, and I have, over the centuries, as part of one of my long-term internal projects, sorted and moved and … re-stored all my memories, so that they reside in what seem to me apposite locations.” He looked at Cossont. “I lied; my genitals contain all my memories of previous sexual encounters. It seemed only appropriate.”

  “Ha!” Sklom said, sounding happy.

  “Like you say,” Cossont agreed. “Appropriate. What’s left in your actual brain?”

  “Recent memories, recently recalled old memories, a highly intricate map of where all my memories are stored throughout my body, and a sort of random, sifted debris of all the thoughts and memories that have ever passed through my head. That I can’t – daren’t – interfere with too much, aside from one or two very specific episodes. To do so further would risk becoming not myself. We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self.”

  “What are the one or two specific episodes—?” Cossont began.

  “None of your business,” QiRia said smoothly.

  Cossont lowered her voice a little. “Has anyone ever broken your heart?” she asked quietly.

  “Phht!” Sklom spluttered.

  “In the sense I’m sure you mean, not for over nine and a half thousand years,” QiRia told her briskly. “Taking another, more pertinent definition, my heart is broken with each new exposure to the idiocies and cruelties of every manner of being that dares to call or think of itself as ‘intelligent’.”

  “In other words,” Sklom chipped in, “about every century, half-century, or so.”

  QiRia glared at the creature, but let the point stand.

  “So,” Cossont said, “sexual memories in your genitals …”

  “Yes,” QiRia said.

  “Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers?”

  QiRia looked at her. “In my head, of course.” He looked away. “There are not so many of those, anyway,” he said, voice a little quieter. “Loving becomes harder, the longer you live, and I have lived a very long time indeed.” He fixed his gaze on her again. “I’m sure it varies across species – some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all – but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the … expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved.” He smiled bleakly at Cossont. “You are young, of course, and so none of this will make any sense whatsoever.” His smile melted away, Cossont thought, like late spring snow over a morning. “I envy you your illusions,” he said, “though I could not wish their return.”

  The long piers and bulbous pontoons of the giant, articulated raft flexed and creaked around them, like a giant arthritic hand laid across the surface of the ocean, forever trying to pat it calm.

  “Ah-ha!” Sklom said. “Here it is!” The avatar jumped off the couch and roll-walked across the raft in a blue blur of limbs as a small shuttle craft appeared in the skies to one side, coming curving in across the restless blue-green waves. It held the elevenstring which the Anything Legal Considered had recently made for Cossont. Having heard that ideally the instrument required four arms and hands to play properly, Sklom wanted a go.

  QiRia sighed. “This is going to sound awful, isn’t it?”

  Cossont nodded. “Yup.”

  She came to, again. There was an instant of sheer panic as she remembered the decompressing blast and the misty explosion of released air that had rolled her and the android out into the vacuum and the iron-cold surface of the planet … then she realised she felt all right, and not in any pain, and that she was warm and even comfortable.

  She opened her eyes, half expecting the roll of an oceanic swell beneath her, and the white sky of a stretched awning above.

  “In a medically enabled shuttle, aboard the Culture ship Mistake Not …,” a person standing next to her announced. Whoever they were, they had skin the colour of brushed bronze. Ship avatar, Cossont found herself thinking. The figure shrugged. “That was me assuming your first question would have been on the lines of, Where am I?” it told her.

  Cossont swallowed, found her throat was a little sore, and just nodded. She managed a low grunt.

  The bald, androgynous avatar had green eyes, an open, honest-looking face and was dressed conventionally enough by Gzilt standards. Cossont turned her head from side to side. She was lying on a partially reclined bed, still dressed in her much-punctured trews and Lords of Excrement jacket. The dead trooper lay, still in his suit but with the helmet-front hinged back, to her left. Inside the helmet, his face didn’t look right. The avatar saw her looking. It reached over to close the face-plate.

  The android Eglyle Parinherm lay, still in his technically incorrect and over-stretched colonel’s jacket, to her right. He seemed no more alive than the dead trooper. Pyan was flapping round the roughly circular space, then came fluttering closer, squeaking something about her being – ah! – alive after all – hurrah!

  At least this time, Cossont started to think, she’d managed to leave behind the … then she noticed that against one bulkhead lay the dark, coffin-like case of the elevenstring.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “Oh, for …” she muttered, then looked at the avatar and did her best to smile.

  “You’re alive! You’re alive!” Pyan yelped excitedly, landing on her chest and jumping around, flapping at Cossont’s face with its corners.

  “Astute as ever,” Cossont said, patting the creature with one set of arms while she looked around and took in more of her surroundings.

  There was a sort of casual understatement common to what you might call official Culture craft when it came to interior design; an artful simplicity concealing gigglingly hi-tech. She’d become familiar with it during her exchange student years. What she could see here appeared to display it, so she was going to accept what she was being told. Though, given the pace and severity of recent events, she wasn’t taking anything for granted. However, even if this wasn’t what it looked like, it was definitely better than being frozen to death in the cramped, upside-down transport, or outside on the bleak hard surface of the Sculpt planet.

  She cleared her throat, continued to pat the over-excited and now purring Pyan, and nodded towards the android, lying still and unbreathing a metre away from her. “Is he – it – dead?” she asked.

  “No,” the avatar said. “However, your android companion does represent military tech, in a situation of some opacity regarding factionality, and in addition seems confused, so I thought it best to keep it temporarily inanimate.”

  Cossont looked at the avatar. “Factionality?”

  “Yes; I’m not currently sure which side it or anybody els
e is on. Or what the sides actually are.” The avatar smiled at her. “You come tagged as reserve Lieutenant Commander Vyr Cossont. Correct?”

  Cossont nodded. “Correct.”

  “I’ve already introduced myself,” Pyan announced, pointing one corner at Cossont’s face, then at the avatar’s. The creature sighed, settling flat onto Cossont’s chest. “We’re old friends.”

  The avatar looked askance at this, but smiled briefly at the familiar. “Pleased to meet you,” the avatar said to Cossont. “And welcome aboard. My name’s Berdle. I’m the avatar of the Mistake Not …”

  “Culture ship?” Cossont asked, just to be sure.

  “Culture ship.” The avatar nodded. “Slightly confused Culture ship at the moment. Wondering why elements of the Gzilt military appear to be attacking each other. Would you have any idea?”

  Cossont had raised her head from the semi-reclined couch. Now she blew out her cheeks and let her head go back again.

  Gratitude at rescue was all very well, but trust, and blabbing, were different. She had no idea how much to reveal, always assuming the ship hadn’t read her mind or something already. Stall, she thought. She said, “Mind if I ask what sort of Culture ship, first?”

  “Erratic,” the avatar said emphatically.

  “Erratic … warship?”

  “Not officially,” Berdle said, looking pained. “But also not without resources in that regard.”

  “You rescued us,” Cossont said. “I’m sorry; I should have said thank you by now. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” The avatar nodded, then glanced at the dead trooper. “I’m afraid rescue came too late for your armoured friend here.”