The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  “Yes,” the avatar said. “Sadly busy, given the shocking event at Eshri. What ought to be a time of contemplation and quiet preparation becomes a time of mourning, bitterness, and even recrimination. I just wanted to reiterate the Culture’s condolences and to reinforce our offer of help.”

  “Both much appreciated. I hope you will take it as a sign of our confident closeness, not our arrogance, that we had assumed no less.”

  “Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway,” the avatar said, smiling.

  Banstegeyn smiled too, politely, but kept quiet. It was slightly less rude than saying, Well, if that’s all, or glancing at his time-to.

  “You will of course also have our help in the search for the culprits.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Indeed. And we may, shortly, be able to make good on that offer.”

  “Oh? How so?” This, he’d be prepared to admit, had his attention.

  “Luckily, we had a ship in the volume quite shortly after the attack on the HQ of the Fourteenth. It thought it best to leave almost immediately in case, in the ensuing confusion, it was mistaken for a hostile; however, it was able to take certain readings that might help in any investigation into the attack.”

  “Really? And what would those readings indicate?”

  “It is too early to say,” the avatar said apologetically. “Besides, it might be best for us, preferentially, and initially at least, to present the data raw, rather than interpreted, lest we be seen to be trying to influence the investigation.”

  “So, you’re willing to submit this data to the relevant authorities?” Banstegeyn asked.

  “Indeed.”

  “I take it you’re aware that I’ve appointed the First, the Home Regiment, to look into the matter.”

  “Hmm,” the avatar said, with an odd, tight expression on its face. Banstegeyn reckoned he’d learned to read avatar expressions pretty well over the years. If the creature had held up a sign saying “Yeah, are you sure about that?” the signal would hardly have been any clearer. “That is not what one would normally expect, is it?”

  “Normally a Combined Regimental Committee would perform such a task,” Banstegeyn agreed. “However, given the time constraints imposed by the up-coming Instigation, the depletion of the relevant ranks due to Storage and the disarray within so much of the fleet due to the number of ships that have already Sublimed, it was decided that, as the single most cohesive element of the defence forces still functioning, the First ought to shoulder the load.”

  “So that is not just an interim measure?” the avatar asked. “There seemed to be some confusion. I thought you might know better than anybody what was planned.”

  Banstegeyn smiled. “I am a mere septame, not the president or a trime or a general. But to the best of my knowledge First will be allowed to continue to pursue the investigation until a satisfactory conclusion is reached. That would be my suggestion, at least.”

  “I see. I’ll let the relevant ships know. We have yet to decide whether the information we hold would help or hinder the investigation.”

  “That would be your choice.”

  “If I may touch on another matter, I think we were all surprised at the result of the decision regarding the Scavenging situation and would hope that this will not lead to any unpleasantness. We would accordingly like to offer the cooperation of the ships which are accompanying elements of the Liseiden and Ronte fleets. Your fleet people are already aware of their names, locations and so on, but please allow us to work with you to prevent any conflicts of any nature between the parties involved.”

  “That is kind, and thoughtful,” Banstegeyn said. He gave a tight little smile of his own, glanced at the viewing port, towards the planet.

  “Thank you for your time, Septame.”

  “My pleasure. My only regret is that there is so little of it to go around at the moment.”

  The avatar unfolded itself as the door behind it opened. It flowed gracefully through the doorway. Banstegeyn heard it exchange a few words with his AdC and secretary, waiting outside. He turned his attention back to the port and the view of Zyse, listening to Jevan and Solbli enter with a rustling of clothes. He heard the door close. They’d already called with the gist of it: bad news.

  “Nothing at all?” he said, turning back to them. Jevan and Solbli both looked solemn, and tired. Jevan looked as unkempt as he ever did and Solbli very nearly looked her age. He supposed he ought to feel flattered they had spent so much of their own real time searching for a solution, rather than just leaving agents and data-trawls to do all the work for them.

  “Nothing, Septame,” Jevan said with a sigh.

  They did, in the end, care about him, Banstegeyn realised. A lot more than he really cared about them, which was the right way round, and made their devotion all the sweeter in a way.

  “Trime Quvarond was very careful to follow all procedures correctly,” Solbli added.

  The same was true of Orpe. The President’s AdC was here on the orbital base too, for the same regiment-sponsored security conference; there ought to be time for some zero-G sex later. He thought the experience was a little over-rated, personally, though the girl seemed to like it. The real pleasure, he felt, lay more in being able to watch the planet turn beneath you as you fucked. There was something very satisfying about that. He hoped it would still feel as satisfying even though, this time, he would not be looking down on it knowing that one day it would carry his name.

  “We are here because somebody destroyed an entire regimental HQ and fate alone knows what else. We are not far off being at war, arguably. If we were, technically, at war … would that …?”

  Jevan was already shaking his head. “I’m afraid not, Septame.”

  “You might persuade the president not to sign the order,” Solbli suggested, with a thin smile.

  Banstegeyn didn’t even pretend to smile. The president was duty-bound to sign everything put in front of him or her, up to and including an order for his or her own execution, in theory. Not that that principle had been tested for eleven millennia.

  Even then, even at death, a politician could just come back; being backed-up at the start of your term was part of the deal, and if you were killed during your time in office you got re-embodied. Wonderful disincentive for assassination; Banstegeyn had always appreciated it. There was some delay in between – forty days, was it? Or thirty? – to allow time for a clone of the deceased to be grown and implanted with their most recent back-up, and people got shuffled around to take your place in the meantime, but then you just resumed your post … or you could take part in a subsequent election if you’d been in the last year of your term; now he thought about it there was some sort of …

  Then he had to look away from Jevan and Solbli, because he’d just had an idea, and the audacity of it, the sheer dagger-like simplicity and directness of it, had all but taken his breath away.

  He yawned, spreading his arms, giving himself a chance to shiver, to tremble, without it looking suspicious, and said, smiling, “Well, there we are; some you lose.” He looked at his time-to, shrugged. “In fifteen days it won’t matter a damn anyway.”

  Jevan and Solbli looked relieved, and a little surprised.

  The representative of the Culture ship of the Scree class, the Beats Working, was warmly welcomed into the principal shared gallery space of the squadron and fleet flagship Interstitial/Exploratory Vessel Melancholia Enshrines All Triumph by Ossebri 17 Haldesib, Swarmprince and Sub-Swarm Divisional Head. Gifts were exchanged, and, although the Culture representative, one Jonsker Ap-Candrechenat, was unable to ingest a welcoming libation in the fullest sense, it nevertheless absorbed a portion into its chemical analysis unit and graciously accepted the remainder on board itself to be returned to the ship the Beats Working later, where it would be treated with all due respect.

  Great respect had already been shown, it had been decided after consultation with the appropriate experts, expert systems and r
eference library resources aboard the Melancholia Enshrines All Triumph, in the act of sending a mechanical but fully sentient device to represent the Culture ship Beats Working, as the machine was able to exist within the Melancholia Enshrines All Triumph nakedly, without any sort of exo-suit. This would not have been possible had one of the tiny number of humans aboard the Culture vessel been allocated to represent it.

  Drones were known, in theory, to be of at least equal intelligence to Culture humans and were generally adjudged, in practice, to be of somewhat greater intelligence by both Ronte Fleet Intelligence and by most leading academics in respectable universities and other respected institutions of higher learning within the Ronte Trans-Cooperative Domain, using models of intelligence that more fully expressed the true essence of what intelligence actually was, objectively.

  That the drone Jonsker Ap-Candrechenat had been sent to talk with Ossebri 17 Haldesib, was, therefore, no insult and, indeed, to the contrary, was a mark of great respect, conferring as it did a greater implicit closeness to the Culture ship’s mother-queen Mind, which itself represented a tiny but true sliver of the great hive-mind that was the entire Culture.

  The Swarmprince and Sub-Swarm Divisional Head accordingly met the drone personally and had ordered his principal next-three-in-line Officers of Seniority to accompany him in his progress through the ship to the meeting and to be present at the meeting itself, as well as making sure that his Intelligence and Translational Officers and their respective deputies were present and fully briefed, of course, as protocol demanded.

  Initial formalities safely completed, continuing formalities satisfactorily under way (in the shape of correct poses, gestures, scents and manners of speaking), the business of the meeting might be allowed to begin.

  “The ship Beats Working would beg to be permitted to assist the glorious squadron of the Ronte which it is its privilege to escort. To be so empowered would allow the Beats Working to begin to repay and reflect some of the great esteem which it has earned in being permitted to escort the exalted squadron.”

  “This is indeed an honourable conception,” the Swarmprince replied after the briefest of consultations with his servant officers. “What form would this assistance take?” The Swarmprince was known for his almost shocking incisiveness and the brevity of his locution.

  “This assistance would take the form of a series of long-range ship dances, performed serially between the Culture ship Beats Working and each of the squadron ships in turn, involving them together travelling at enhanced rates of velocity in the direction already so wisely chosen by the squadron, namely towards the planet of Zyse in the system of Gzilt. The Culture ship Beats Working would dance, if such a thing might be contemplated and then allowed, with each of the squadron ships in turn, to the outskirts of the system, or to near to that limit, and then return to the remainder of the fleet, to ship-dance with the next ship, and so on, until all twelve vessels have been danced with.”

  There was consultation. “This dance, or series of dances,” the Swarmprince said. “It would honour the Ronte and the Culture equally?”

  “It would.”

  “And be performed for its own sake?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And it might also result in the squadron arriving at the Gzilt system some appreciable amount of time earlier, of course. That has been considered?”

  “That has, though of course this would be of subsidiary importance.”

  “How much earlier might our arrival be? Has this been computed?”

  “It has. The re-formed squadron would arrive at the Gzilt system outskirts in nine days’ time, rather than, at our current rate of progress, nearly twenty.”

  “This would cause our esteemed escort the Culture ship Beats Working no risk of damage?”

  “It would not, Swarmprince. The field structure of the Culture ship Beats Working would be swelled to accommodate each Ronte ship in turn and the resulting squadron-of-two would make its way as an entity to the designated volume on the system approaches.”

  There was consultation. “I must insist,” the Swarmprince said, “that you accept I am most serious and settled in my view that this is a most generous and thoughtful offer, but one that we could not possibly accept, out of our respect for the good Culture ship Beats Working. We could not possibly ask such an onerous and mighty task of it, and, therefore, with all gratitude, we must decline said kind and generous and thoughtful offer.”

  The Culture ship Beats Working had done its homework on the Ronte and their customs and mores, and the results of that study had been presented to the drone Jonsker Ap-Candrechenat, which did not, as a result, just accept this apparently fairly final-sounding No. Instead it kept on arguing, knowing that – for a matter of such importance, involving the prickly issue of Ronte pride – anywhere between four and six cycles of offer, consultation and regretful rejection might have to be endured before the offer was finally accepted.

  The offer was duly accepted on the sixth iteration, counting the initial one.

  Later that day, the Beats Working started ferrying the Ronte squadron one by one to the outskirts of the Gzilt system – quite far out for the first one, the rest gradually closer and closer, so that by the time it had delivered the last one they would all be chugging along under their own power in pretty much their standard formation.

  This was a much less boring task than strolling along at a few per cent of its own highest velocity while the Ronte squadron made full speed – for them – to Gzilt.

  Scoaliera Tefwe woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries.

  Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken.

  All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening nearby, and inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied.

  It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. She opened her eyes.

  The word SIMULATION, which was what she expected to see first, albeit briefly, wasn’t there. She blinked, looked around.

  She was floating in some sort of suspensor field, in air, in a human or humanoid body dressed in some clingy but lightly puffed cover-all which left only her feet, hands and head exposed. She was at forty-five degrees to the floor, looking down. A tiny, sleek ship drone – so tiny and sleek it might have passed for a knife missile – was at eye-level, looking at her. The room around her appeared to be medical unit standard.

  “Ms Tefwe?” the drone said. She was being tipped slowly backwards to an upright position, and lowered towards the deck.

  She cleared her throat. “Reporting,” she said, remembering the earlier simulated conversation with the You Call This Clean? Where she was now would be under the control of either a cooperative Hub Mind or a Special Circumstances ex-Psychopath-class Very Fast Picket. From the look of the drone, she was guessing the latter.

  “Welcome aboard the VFP Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process,” the drone said, confirming her guess just as her feet met the deck. She felt her weight transfer to the soles of her feet, through the gently squashed flesh to her bones, her body. Whatever field had been supporting her ebbed away and she felt planted, properly re-embodied.

  “Reverser field, please,” she said. One sprang up in front of her, between her and the drone. She looked like her old self; precisely so. “Thank you.” The field vanished.

  The little drone said, “We are entering the outskirts of the Angemar’s Prime system, en route for Dibaldipen Orbital. Would you care to specify a particular plate on the Orbital?”

  “Honn plate,” she told it.

  “Honn. Course adjusted. Is there anything else you require?”

  “Breakfast.”

  “Being prepared; your specified waking default.”

  “Thank you. Please call ahead to Xunpum Livery, Chyan’tya, Honn, and reserve a mount. An aphore, for an open-ended,
minimum four-day hire. Assure them I am suitably experienced with such animals but kindly do not reveal my identity.”

  The little drone suddenly developed an aura field, turning a crisp blue-grey. “A mount? An animal?” it said. “Four days? I had rather envisaged Displacing you at sub-millimetre accuracy, precisely where you want to go.”

  Tefwe rose and fell on the balls of her feet, flexed her hands into fists and relaxed again. “I’m sure,” she said. “However the person I’m going to see is something of a stickler in such matters. Certain standards have to be maintained, designated procedures adhered to. I am far from being guaranteed an audience at all; if I don’t turn up looking like I’ve been travelling for a while I am almost certain to be ignored.”

  The little drone was silent for a moment, then said, “Couldn’t you just pretend?”

  “No. And I’ll be honest; could be five days. Maybe more. Four days is just the travelling time.”

  “I was under the impression that the whole point of this exercise was to expedite matters as swiftly as possible.”

  “It is. What would be the journey time from the present location of the Blue-class LSV You Call This Clean? to Dibaldipen Orbital by the fastest Very Fast Picket?”

  “Approximately one hundred and thirty-two days.”

  “Well, there you are then.”

  “But once you’ve seen the person, you could come straight back with the information you require, or simply transmit it to be passed on to any subsequent re-embodiment. In any event, there would be no need to return slowly.”

  “In theory. In practice the person concerned might check up on the manner of my return, become upset and refuse to see me on any subsequent occasion.”

  “Would any subsequent occasion on which you might wish to visit this person plausibly carry the same moral weight or general significance as the present one, in which it has been judged worth effectively putting the entire Fast Picket fleet at your disposal, other commitments allowing?”