The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  Finally, cautiously, she stood up.

  Cethyd lay heavy beneath the orange-red sun called Heluduz.

  “You used to look at my chest.”

  “Because of what was not there. Absence can snag the gaze more effectively than presence.”

  “What? Oh, breasts! Mammalian stuff. Of course. I thought you just thought I had a particularly fine and barrel chest.”

  “One way of putting it.”

  “Did you ever want … did you ever think about us, you know, fucking?”

  “Which answer would insult you less: yes or no?”

  “Neither. Either. I wouldn’t be insulted.”

  “Then the answer would be, not really.”

  “Not really? So a bit, then. Ha!”

  She was a little drunk. She was still going to leave the silver-grey cube with the Incast order – she was en route to the Ospin system now, in this fine clipper ship – but she’d thought she ought to at least turn the device on, make sure the old guy was in some sense still in there, and maybe ask his forgiveness. Maybe.

  Too many cocktails in the bar. Thought she’d been doing extremely well with a handsomely chunky young fellow there – a serving captain in the Eighth – but then the girlfriend he’d neglected to mention had shown up – supposed to be a surprise for him; she’d got on at the last port a couple of hours ago, been waiting impatiently in his cabin since, wondering where he’d got to … Things had started to turn just a little ugly and so she’d made her excuses and left.

  She had decided before she’d left home ten days earlier that one thing she definitely wasn’t going to do during the voyage was turn on the device with QiRia’s mind-state inside – she’d been adamant about that. He was an old fraud and even just giving the damn thing to her had probably been some sort of attempt to manipulate her; he was lucky she was paying him the compliment of physically taking the device to Ospin like some sort of warped pilgrimage or homage or something rather than just posting it to the Incast order. She’d brought her volupt with her; she would use the time constructively to practise.

  But then, perhaps because of the cocktails, she’d changed her mind.

  “The Gzilt never joined in the great genetic mash-up that the rest of the Culture proper thought appropriate to ensure everybody could breed with everybody else,” QiRia’s voice said. (In theory she could have seen him too, had his face look down on her from the cabin’s screen; she hadn’t chosen that option.) “As a result, the genes aren’t in either of us to make us appear attractive to or feel attracted towards the other, beyond a very basic pan-human interest sparked at a distance or when clothes conceal the disappointing truth. Trust me; it is rarely an encouraging sign when the more apparel is removed, the less attractive a prospective sexual partner becomes. I wasn’t keeping a tally, but if you’d been watching carefully I suspect you’d have noticed that I looked – glanced, more likely – at your chest more often when you wore a top than when you were naked from the waist up. The point is rather that we found each other interesting at all, sexual considerations removed. Again, you’ll have to trust me that the difference implicit in a ten-millennia age difference is far more important than a difference in both gender and/or species.”

  “So you’ve never had sex with a Gzilt woman?”

  “Ah. I didn’t say that.”

  “So you have?” Cossont, lying on the bed, plumped up her pillow and made herself comfortable, staring at the screen. Maybe she should have put his face on the screen. Would he be blushing now? Did mind-states inside devices like this blush? Did QiRia blush? Had he? She couldn’t remember.

  “Technically, yes,” the voice from the cube said, sounding unconcerned. “It was, again technically, unsatisfactory for both parties. The seemingly superficial physical differences become more … pronounced when one gets down to it, as it were. Sometimes, however, one indulges in that sort of behaviour as a sort of extension of friendship. Not with everyone; not all need such an expression. Most of the people I find interesting, and in that sense attractive, live more in the mind than in the body. Still, some seem to require such … confirmation. My impression has always been that the commitment to the act, its symbolism, is more important than the act itself, which, in its commission – or at least in the reflection upon it – tends to emphasise the differences between those involved rather than their similarities. I have done the same sort of thing with males of my own species type, despite not having sexual feelings specifically for them. Sometimes it feels only polite.”

  Cossont lay on her back, looked up at the cabin ceiling, both hands clasped behind her head. “Anybody I’d know?”

  “Who? My sexual partners amongst the Gzilt?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Nor heard of. And besides, they’re all long dead. As of now, I believe all my ex-lovers, of all species, are dead. One or two might be in Storage.”

  “That sounds so sad.”

  “Well it isn’t. Feel free to feel sorry for me if you wish, for your own sentimental satisfaction, but not on my account. I have lived ten thousand years; I’m used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying … one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually. Happily one retains the emotions that let one draw delight from life’s enduring basics, like love, friendship, sex, sheer sensory pleasure, discovery, understanding and erudition. Even when one knows that in the end it’s all … contingent.”

  “Really thought you were going to say ‘meaningless’, there.”

  “No. All things have meaning. Haven’t we already been through this?”

  “It’s just that meaning doesn’t mean what we think it means.”

  “Even your attempts at triteness cannot entirely hide the grain of truth in that particular assertion. We are all prone, in our ways. My own comforter at the moment, and perhaps for the next few centuries, appears to be homing in on the serenity offered by immersing oneself in an environment of all-pervading sound … for some reason. I really only meant to spend a year or so with the leviathids on Perytch IV, but then felt very … at home in that sonic environment; very content.” The voice from the cube paused. “In the end it palled … but only relatively, and still it left its own … echo. An echo of desire, of need.” Another pause. “I – the real me – may pursue that interest. For a time.”

  Cossont was silent for a while.

  “You really are old, aren’t you?” she said eventually.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “A young – younger – guy would have asked whether I ever felt attracted to you.”

  “No; a less secure, less self-sufficient, less sure-of-himself person might have.”

  She gave it a moment, then said, “So, what do you think?”

  “About your feelings for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a person I’m sure you found me profoundly interesting though not actually attractive. As a potential sexual partner, I would prefer to hope the very thought would have been at least slightly unpleasant. Don’t feel you have to confirm or deny any of that. What other questions arising might you have?”

  “How have you kept going, all this time?”

  “Fortitude.”

  “Seriously. If I’m to take you seriously, your claims seriously: how? Wouldn’t you want to kill yourself eventually, at some point, just at some really low point that you’d never have got to if you only lived for a century, like they did in the old days, or a few centuries, or whatever? Wouldn’t that happen?”

  “Well, not to me, obviously.”

  “But that’s what I’m asking. Why? Why not? How come?”

  “I told you before: I take a perverse delight in watching species fuck up.”

  “I remember. I’ve thought about that. I don’t believe that can be all there is. There must be something else.”

  “Maybe I had something to live for.”

  “Okay. But what?”

  “Or, maybe I had something to not die for.”

 
; “Hmm. Aren’t they …?”

  “They are not quite the same thing. You may have to think about it. Anyway, my precise motivations needn’t concern you. That I am as old as I’ve claimed, that you believe me; that does concern me. Not a great deal, but I would like to think you do believe me.”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,” she confessed. “When I talk to you I do.”

  “That will suffice. Anything else I can help you with?”

  She smiled, though he couldn’t see. “So, do we get more secure as we get older?”

  “Some do. I have. Though I have also detected a sort of long-term tidal action in that and a lot of other emotional states. For real-time centuries I will feel, say, gradually more secure in myself, then for the next few centuries I’ll feel less certain. Or over time I’ll go from thinking I know pretty much everything to realising I know next to nothing, then back again, and so on and so on. Overall, it approximates to a sort of steady state, I suppose, and I am by now quite entirely used to such periodicity and allow for it. Similarly, I seem to oscillate between times of feeling that nothing matters, when I tend to act riskily, foolishly – often on a whim – and intervening periods when I feel that everything matters, and I become cautious, risk-averse, fearful and paranoid. The former attitude believes in a sort of benign fate, thinking I am just somehow destined to live for ever, while the latter believes in statistics, and a cold, uncaring cosmos, and cannot quite believe that I have lived as long as I have while ever thinking that life is just a hoot, and taking risks and behaving rashly is worth it just for the fun of tweaking the nose of the universe. The former state has a sort of cheery contempt for its opposite, while the latter is simply terrified of its obverse. Anyway, my point is: come back in a century or two and I might not seem so sure of myself.”

  “In a century – in a few years – I’ll be with everybody else in the Sublime.”

  “Best place for all of us. I’d go myself but longevity has become such a habit.”

  “You don’t want to be offered the chance to go with us, with the Gzilt?”

  “You’d be my second choice, after the Culture itself, but no. Not really my choice to make anyway; my real self will take that decision and I’ll be looked out wherever I am and taken away too, if and when the time comes.”

  “They say it’s like the most brilliant lucid dream, for ever.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Do you dream, in there?”

  “No. Being switched off is exactly like going to sleep – you’re not really aware of it happening, only of waking up again. But you wake after a dreamless sleep.”

  “I’m sleepy now,” Cossont said, yawning involuntarily just at the thought. “I’m going to switch you off. That definitely okay? You sure?”

  “Entirely. Sweet dreams, Ms Cossont.”

  “Sleep well, Mr QiRia.”

  … She woke up. Still aboard the Mistake Not …

  They’d be at Ospin in a couple of hours, bouncing into the microrbital belonging to the Incast Secular Collectionary order she’d donated the device to.

  She remembered that evening aboard the clipper, umpteen years ago, and remembered a surprising amount of that conversation with QiRia’s stored mind-state. She remembered lying with just two hands clasped behind her neck, travelling with the sensibly sized volupt – as elegant in form as it was in tone – rather than the hulking lump of half-unplayable preposterousness that was the twenty-four-string elevenstring.

  She remembered fretting over things like pleasing her mother without giving in to her, and whether she’d find somebody as cute as that serving captain in the cocktail bar – though single.

  This time, she was wondering whether a pursuing ship might be just about to blow them out of the skies, or whether some pre-alerted special forces ultra-commandos would be waiting for them at the Bokri microrbital to slice or blast them to pieces. Also, whether she’d live to see the Subliming, and whether she would, in the end, go along with everybody else into it.

  Vyr lay in the darkness, top hands clasped behind her neck, lower hands clasped over her belly, thinking that, sometimes, not all change was for the better.

  The image – of a tearful woman sitting with her back to a view of clouds and sea – was shown as though on a conventional screen hanging in front of him.

  “… and then she just seemed to disappear, from the face of the planet, and apparently her bed hasn’t been even slept in for days – many, I mean several days – and then, of course, she is in the Fourteenth, the regiment the Fourteenth, and she was always very active in the Reserve, very respected, and of course there’s been this terrible, terrible—”

  “Madame—”

  “—terrible explosion on this planet and for all I know – well, I thought, I assumed the worst, naturally, as any mother would. I wondered, ‘Could she have been there, was that where she went? Did she know something?’ as soon as I heard about, about the thing, but then there was nothing …”

  The screen went blank. Colonel Agansu nodded. “I see. And this lady is …?”

  “She is Warib Cossont, mother of Vyr Cossont, Reserve Lieutenant Commander in the Fourteenth, the female her mother is referring to,” the intelligence officer of the 7*Uagren said. The IO, the colonel and the ship’s captain were the only presences within the virtual command space.

  “This may tie in with the unexpected presence of the 5*Gelish-Oplule at Eshri,” the captain told Agansu. “The ship’s last known location was near Xown, and the last known location of Vyr Cossont was in the Girdlecity of Xown. If the ship made full speed from Xown to Eshri there would have been time for it to deliver Vyr Cossont to the Fourteenth’s HQ anything up to two or three hours before our arrival and the attack.”

  “Was Vyr Cossont listed as one of those aboard the Fzan-Juym satellite?” the colonel asked.

  “No,” the IO said.

  “However, that means nothing,” the captain said. “There was barely time for her to be registered and besides, if she was being summoned for some sort of secret mission she would never have been added to the official complement anyway.”

  “Where did this information come from?” Agansu asked.

  “The screen clip came medium-ranks secret from Regimental Central Intelligence, flagged low probable relevance,” the IO officer said. “But we then added it to a review of our own multiple-remotes sensor data following the destruction of the HQ, which indicated there’s a fifty per cent chance that one of the larger medium-sized pieces of wreckage was a mostly intact though largely disabled four-berth shuttle. That being the case, there is then a sixty per cent chance that one or more viable biologicals could have been Displaced from the wreck to the Mistake Not …, the Culture ship we’re following.”

  “Why was this information not extracted from the data at the time?” Agansu asked.

  “The data from remotes,” the captain said, “especially in a combat volume, is received erratically, sporadically and late. Real-time data has to be prioritised, Colonel.”

  “I see. This Lieutenant Commander Cossont; I can see no mention of her in any special forces or intelligence lists.”

  “We don’t believe she is special forces or on a military intelligence secondment,” the captain said. “We believe her semi-civilian status was not cover, but the truth. Her value to the Fourteenth’s high command may have been opportunistic and sudden; the likelihood is it would only just have come to light before she was summoned.”

  “And what might the nature of that value have been?” Agansu asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” the IO admitted. “Best guess is possibly related to the Culture individual Ngaroe QiRia, who is mentioned in the message from the Zihdren recovered at Ablate.”

  “There is record of an individual or individuals of that name having visited Gzilt several times in the past,” the captain added, “though not for several centuries.”

  “And all this tells us what?” Agansu asked.

  �
�Perhaps where Lieutenant Commander Cossont is heading,” the captain said. “Until now the Culture ship has pursued a course which has made its final destination difficult to predict, even at a system level. However, within the last half-day, it has become almost certain that it’s aiming for somewhere within the Ospin system. There is a record of Vyr Cossont travelling to the habitat of Bokri, within the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin.”

  “When?” Agansu asked.

  “Sixteen years ago, three and a half years after she returned from a student exchange trip within the Culture. Her most likely destination within Bokri, we believe, would have been the Incast order. It is possible she deposited an article of some sort with them, possibly a mind-state; the cargo manifest for the vessel she travelled on is a little ambiguous on the exact nature of whatever she might have left there, though some sort of article classified as a ‘self-powered general storage device, alien, vouched, sophisticated, capacity unknown’ is mentioned as forming part of her luggage on the way there but not on the way back.”

  “We’ve started trying to get some answers out of the Incast order on this,” the IO said. “Nothing so far; there are confidentiality issues. Also, they’re just under-staffed.” The image of the intelligence officer looked at the captain and the colonel. “With cooperative assets in place we could just hack them but as we’re on our own with this there won’t be much we can do until we physically get there.”

  “This is, anyway, all conjecture,” the colonel pointed out.

  “It is,” the captain agreed.

  “But it’s the best conjecture we’ve got,” the IO officer said. “Nothing else is flagging connections.”

  “The Culture ship is already running us about as fast as we can go, Colonel,” the captain said. “If it starts bouncing around inside the Ospin system there’s every chance it can either lose us, put somebody or something down anywhere it wants to without us being able to spot it happening, or both. I think the concatenation of this Cossont person and the Bokri habitat represents a serious lead and that it’s worth following. I propose we try to follow the ship round Ospin if it does start dodging, but rather than lose it while we try to find out what it’s been doing where, we assume it’s heading for Ospin, and act accordingly.”