The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  ∞

  xGCU Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

  “Enhanced loyalties”?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  The thinking is this actually means divided loyalties, though when pressed the vessel also expressed a preference for “dual loyalties”.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Is there any hint it has access to the Z rather than just the Z-R?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Sadly, none. In fact it specifically ruled that out. It was at pains to stress it was a level down from whatever parts of the Z-R get to pick up the mysterious but majestic crumbs of information and instruction that fall from the celestially elevated high table that is the Enfolded Realm. It would appear to have become devoutly eccentric, if not technically Deranged. It ceased communication with the ship which re-discovered it – its own old home GSV, the Unreliable Witness – after a few short messages, and was willing subsequently to reveal only that their exchange had already run over some (it is believed arbitrarily arrived-at) limit.

  ∞

  xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

  So do we now need somebody specialised who can talk to it? Or a succession of them, each claiming their ration?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Possibly. This is being looked into.

  ∞

  xMSV Pressure Drop

  And, a “hybrid OS”?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Whatever that might be taken to mean. It has hinted that it has incorporated certain processing paradigms and substrate/software architectures from the Z-R into its Mind.

  ∞

  xMSV Pressure Drop

  My first – and, thus far, abiding – reaction is, That’s diseased. But perhaps that’s just me?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  No, not just you.

  ∞

  xGCU Displacement Activity

  Ditto.

  ∞

  xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

  Okay. While accepting that that particular nugget of nonsense presents as a one-off random irrelevance, it still seems somehow pointedly symbolic of this whole enterprise turning up grisly unpleasantnesses that it might, in retrospect, have been better to have left stewing under their particular little rocks. Need we go on with this? Can’t we just, for once, let the slumbering ogre be, and step lightly away?

  ∞

  xMSV Pressure Drop

  I might see some merit in that.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Well I don’t. It is not seriously being suggested that we back off just because what we seek isn’t falling into our laps, is it? We made an undertaking to help the Z-R. We stick to that.

  ∞

  xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

  But they don’t seem too concerned about us sticking with it. Why should we?

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Because somebody around here has to keep their word and do the right thing.

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Let’s vote on it. We can discuss details later, and/or set up different proposals, but just to clear the air here, the proposal is: we abandon the whole shebang regarding the attack on the Z-R ship and the BoT (and whether it’s actually “T” or not) and go back to what we were each doing before this all blew up. Yes or no?

  ∞

  LOU Caconym No.

  GCU Displacement Activity No.

  GSV Empiricist Abstain.

  GSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry Yes.

  Ue Mistake Not … No.

  MSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In Yes.

  MSV Pressure Drop No.

  LSV You Call This Clean? No.

  GSV Contents May Differ (Co-ordinator’s abstention, but leaning towards Yes.)

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Clear enough. Does anybody want to resign from the group? … No? Any other comments? No? … Really? All right. As ever; back as and when with whatever exciting new snags start laddering the skein …

  ∞

  xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

  oGSV Contents May Differ

  Worth a try. I appreciate you making the point about leaning towards Yes even though the vote was already lost.

  ∞

  Least I could do. Maybe thoughts will change with subsequent developments and we might vote again.

  ∞

  I shall cling to that filament.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  oMSV Pressure Drop

  “Pointedly symbolic”! What gibberish. And our group coordinator is “listing”.

  ∞

  That was “leaning”, as well you know.

  ∞

  Still off-kilter.

  ∞

  Perhaps some of our colleagues worry we are starting to indulge in group-think, and to obsess.

  ∞

  We are a group of Minds. Thinking is what we do. And obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.

  However, they’re still aboard, even if they might be sitting fretting in the lifeboats. Unlike the completely overboard idiocy of this “Hybrid OS” abomination.

  ∞

  First I’d heard of that. Some sort of weird Z-R mutant Mind. That’s almost baroquely … horrifying. Ghoulish, even. Positively Gothick. What could have possessed it?

  ∞

  To do it? Who knows. But we know what possesses it now. The Zihdren-Remnanter.

  ∞

  If this marks the start of a new, fashionable trend amongst ship Minds, I may Sublime myself shortly.

  ∞

  Still, might yet yield advantage. Never mind the denials. Any sort of more direct link to the Z-R than we’ve been used to until now implies better access to the Z within the Enfold. An opportunity.

  ∞

  Uh-huh. We’ll see. Makes the Beats Working’s oddly enabling behaviour look positively normal, for sure. Giving pickup-backs to the Ronte. I mean, really. Mind you, they were going so slowly. It probably got bored. What do you think?

  ∞

  I think there’s a reason there are so few of the Scree class, despite the fact they’re the smallest, energy-cheapest to build of all the Contact Units. Five humans is just too small a crew; they’re almost guaranteed to go a bit mad. It’s like the opposite of being outnumbered; the more humans you have aboard you, the better their eccentricities average out and you’re left with something easy to model, anticipate and influence. You have safety in their numbers. Five bios and one Mind, in one teeny wee ship? Their basic insanity is going to manifest. And it’s reality-distorting; infectious, practically. Always going to end badly.

  ∞

  Yes, but you can always kick a human crew off at the next GSV if you really don’t get on. Not as bad as becoming a “hybrid”, with alien operating system shit incorporated. That’s just … perverted.

  ∞

  The Culture had a problem with the rump of the Zihdren civilisation that the Zihdren-Remnanters represented. It was the same problem they had with most other light-basking species. The whole comms and data network of such beings was not something truly independent of them as creatures; instead it was effectively an extension of them as a mass of interconnected individuals, and so the Culture, with its self-imposed embargo on reading the minds of other beings, regarded it as immoral to investigate even aspects of the Remnanters’ existence as seemingly impersonal and banal as their data reservoirs without specific permission, something that had, to date at least, rarely been forthcoming.

  It meant that the Remnanters were slightly mysterious as far as the Culture was concerned
; they were less than perfectly known and understood, they were incompletely assessed, intrinsically beyond certain very useful forms of analysis, proof against being properly simmed and so, in theory, capable of surprising the Culture. This was a devilishly itchy, annoying thing for your average Mind – had there even been such a thing – to have to address.

  It was just as well that the Remnanters were little more than a civilisational after-thought, an only-visible-at-high-magnification detail on the vast, ever-changing galactic map, and that – at least for now – there were only a few other similar species making any ripples in the big shared paddling pond of the big G; imagine – so went a popular nightmare scenario for ships of a certain disposition who worried about this sort of stuff – having to cope with the Zihdren themselves when they’d been in their pomp!

  On the other hand there were species/civs with no such compunctions who regularly investigated as deeply as possible into the minds of others – especially when they were as weird as the Remnanters – and would cheerfully share the information with anybody who asked.

  As long as no favours were promised in return, the Culture would – reluctantly, even a little guiltily – use that kind of information, just to keep from being too embarrassingly ignorant.

  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, both 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. Hmm. That thought itself felt … familiar. She opened her eyes.

  She was sort of expecting to see the word SIMULATION, however briefly, but it 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 held reclined in the air. It was as though she was sitting in an invisible chair. A boxy ship drone was at eye-level, looking at her. The room around her appeared to be medical unit standard.

  “Ms Tefwe?” the drone said.

  “Reporting,” she said. She looked at her hand. It looked like her hand, though she knew enough to know that meant almost nothing. “A reverser field, please?”

  The drone put a screen in front of her, showing her her own face. She touched the skin on her cheek, pressed her nose one way then the other. Looked like her face.

  She remembered talking with the avatoid of the You Call This Clean? in a virtual environment. She remembered waking in reality in the medical facility of the Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process, and she remembered the journey across the desert on the aphore, to go and talk to the old drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie.

  She had stayed with it for a couple of days, calling in a supply drop from the Orbital’s Hub to feed and water the animal at the end of that first day.

  The VFP had been annoyed at her dallying but had not zapped her back to it without permission. The important part of its mission had already been carried out; it had transmitted the information on QiRia’s location to the other interested ships. It could afford to let her spend a while with the ancient drone and its sandstreams.

  Another ship, another VFP, the Rapid Random Response Unit, had been time-closest to Cethyd and had started out for the planet within a second of the information being picked up. It had started readying one of the handful of humanoid simulacra bodies it carried aboard, instructing the creature’s physiological systems to alter the blank-basic body’s appearance so that it would resemble Tefwe. The transfer of Tefwe’s updated mind-state could wait until the last hour or so before deployment, hence the relaxed attitude the Outstanding … was able to take to Tefwe’s delaying tactics.

  The Rapid Random Response Unit’s flight time to Cethyd had been two and a half days; a lucky proximity, Tefwe guessed, given that the place was, as Hassipura had suggested, kind of off the beaten track, in a system called Heluduz in one of the faint tendrils of stars that lay on the very outskirts of the galaxy, spun out from the rim like the exhaust from a spent firework.

  The place itself was nothing special; just a biggish rocky world with a thick though transparent oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a small majority of land compared to deep ocean.

  After her surprisingly extended jaunt to see Hassipura’s sandstreams, Tefwe had ridden off again on the aphore Yoawin. The ship had Displaced both of them as soon as they dropped more than a couple of metres beyond the pass, depositing a very confused aphore straight back into its stables in the livery at Chyan’tya.

  Tefwe went back to the ship, where her mind-state was, finally, read and transmitted to the Rapid Random Response Unit half a day before it reached the planet of Cethyd, while it was still checking and re-checking its Displacer components, testing the system with dummy payloads and planning its brake points and loop-return profiles.

  Tefwe shook her head. “Is this really necessary?”

  “This would represent an absolute minimum,” the boxy ship drone told her.

  Tefwe looked down at herself. The ship had insisted she wear what appeared to her like a grossly over-spec’d suit. She looked, she thought, like she’d been dipped in a thick layer of sticky mercury.

  The suit was only about five or six millimetres thick and seemed to weigh almost nothing, plus it thinned so much over her hands and especially her fingers that she half expected to see her fingerprints through the silver covering, but it was meant to be terribly effective. Well, once the helmet component had rolled up, it was just a roll round her neck at the moment, like a thick metallic scarf. Obviously the tech had moved on since the last time she’d needed to be protected at anything like this level.

  “What exactly is this?”

  “That is a full-survival/light-battle suit, two layer.”

  “What’s a light battle? Is that a skirmish or something?”

  “It will keep you safe and well, even if the Displace is very slightly off, and protect you against unwelcome attentions, should locals take exception to you.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Who knows? Some people are just primitive.”

  “This isn’t really about the locals, is it? This is in case the other lot – the Oglari – in case they spot me, or their bosses.” Tefwe had woken with a full briefing effectively downloaded and digested inside her head.

  “We are trying to protect you as well as we can, Ms Tefwe,” the ship told her. “Ideally I would put you down in a more aggressively profiled suit and inside a supporting capsule – at least – with a full drone and missile screen, exactly where you need to be; however, our intelligence is that such a force, in such a location, would be very likely both to be sensed on emplacement and to give cause for severe diplomatic unpleasantness if discovered. Hence the suit.”

  “Can I put ordinary clothes over it?”

  “They’ll burn off if the Displace is even slightly out. The suit is able to mimic the appearance of clothing.”

  “I’d prefer ordinary clothes. Can’t I carry them inside the suit or something?”

  The drone made a sighing noise.

  Eventually she got a kind of backpack that melded itself to the suit, containing some clothes and a few supplies.

  “This increases both your mass and bulk,” the ship told her through the drone. “Now I have to re-calibrate and skim even closer to the planet.”

  “How close you going?”

  “Seventeen-five k.”

  “Velocity?”

  “Forty per cent Crashed to fifty-seven kilo-lights at closest approach; sub millisecond window.”

  Tefwe whistled. “You’re going to scrunch me up into a tiny little ball, aren’t you?”

  “If you were properly human, it would brea
k every major bone in your body, and quite a lot of the others. Happily, you’re not. You won’t trauma, will you? I could put you under …”

  “Not me. Tough as old space boots. Known for it.”

  “Good. The suit will be trying not to use any fields, including AG, so the landing could be a little bumpy.”

  “Kinetic.”

  “Kinetic?”

  “That’s how we used to express it in the old days.”

  “Hmm. Kinetic. That too is appropriate.”

  The Rapid Random Response Unit performed the start of a crash-stop, then – when it was, for a vanishingly brief moment, within less than a planetary radius of the world – used its heavy-duty Displacer to loose a balled-up Tefwe and a scatter of miniature subsidiary support components towards the planet. Then it continued on its way – slowing, in effect, more slowly – and started a wide turn that would bring it back to the system some hours later for a more stealthy approach to Cethyd.

  Tefwe came hurtling out of the sky at a little under the speed of sound. The suit gauged where it was and what was happening to it, saw that it was heading for land with no large body of water available – which was sub-optimal, but never mind – and braked hard by spreading layers of itself like ribboned parachutes, scrubbing off ninety-five per cent of its speed in about half a kilometre of forty-five-degree flight. Tefwe felt herself tumbling, and the deceleration as a tremendous weight – oddly distributed due to the way she was packed, pressed into a contorted, maximally compacted ball that would have killed a basic human. The tumbling decreased. She felt her orientation steady and settle, and then the weight eased too.

  She felt the impact as a dull thud on her back and knees, not sore at all, then the suit’s voice said quietly, “Landed.”

  Tefwe started to un-ball as the suit unwrapped her, letting her spread herself out to lie looking up at an ochre sky visible between softly swaying stalks of some tall, bronze-coloured grass. She could feel her lungs re-inflating. They’d been collapsed to save volume.

  “How we doing?” she asked when she had some breath to spare.

  “We are doing well,” the suit said. “No hostile interest detected.”

  “That’s nice.” Her conventional pain receptors came back on line, tingling once to confirm, then quieting down.

  She sat up, dusted herself down, then, still sitting, unhitched the backpack and put on the clothes she’d had the ship make for her. They were supposed to make her look a bit like a pilgrim. A human pilgrim, specifically, because the locals here weren’t human, though there were used enough to hosting humanoid pilgrims from nearby systems. Then she let the backpack collapse itself and stow into the small of the suit’s back.