The Hydrogen Sonata
Page 35
“It’s complicated because in a sense I’m not really here, Ngaroe,” she told him. “I’m still Stored – technically, basically – on a ship called the You Call This Clean? a long, long way from here. What you see in front of you is a copy; I feel entirely like me inside here, but the truth is I’m embodied inside a ship’s blank-body, appropriately customised.”
“Hmm. So, let me see, I think only Hassipura knew where I’d hidden myself this time. Have you been to see it?”
“Yes. It still builds sandstream complexes on a life-forsaken plain in the middle of nowhere on an O called Dibaldipen; the kind of barren wasteland on an Orbital that designers pretend they meant to happen all the time but which is really the result of over-artistic weather-pattern modelling and which secretly they are thoroughly ashamed of and embarrassed by.” She paused. “Though I was in yet another copied body then, still it feels exactly as though that was me, riding out across the desert to talk to the recalcitrant machine. It, ah, it sends its regards, by the way.” She shrugged. “It was being sincere and un-ironic, as far as I could tell.”
QiRia smiled. “Yes, I visited it there,” he told her. “Honn, Dibaldipen. Dusty … Anyway. What has caused this proliferation of Tefwes, Tefwe?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s a flap going on. They need me to ask you something.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“A fairly standard ship collective handling the latest budding emergency.”
“SC?”
“No. Though some SC-associated ships helped get me to Hassipura and now to you.”
“Should I be worried or flattered?”
“Flattered.”
“Hassipura told you where I was … willingly?”
“Yes.”
“How easy was it to convince it?”
“It took time, but that was mostly just showing it the respect it believes it’s due. That drone demands a certain ceremoniality in such matters.”
QiRia smiled again, nodded. “And you left it well, functioning?”
“Entirely. Anyway, it still has surprisingly many ambitions in regard to its desiccated hobby.”
“So, what is it you want of me?”
“We need you to confirm or deny something. It will take a little while to explain.”
“I have the time. Do you?”
“Of course. It’s about the Gzilt.”
“Ah-ha!”
“They’re about to Sublime.”
“I know. I trust that all goes smoothly.”
“Ah, well,” she said, and told him all she had been told.
He sat forward, listening, nodding now and again.
“So,” Tefwe said, “the Z-R seem to think you might be able to confirm what the message from the Zihdren themselves is claiming: that the Book of Truth is a lie, part of somebody’s experiment in applied practical theology or something. And we – the Culture – have been asked to help the Z-R with this, plus we have a kind of obligation to the Gzilt to do the right thing.”
“But how much difference might it make?” QiRia asked, sounding sad. “Knowing the truth of it, if it is true?”
Tefwe shrugged. “I don’t know, Ngaroe. I’m not sure anybody knows. But we can’t just let it go. I guess the truth always needs to be chased down. I’m helping with the chasing, and you have the answer, or part of it. If you remember. Do you remember?”
He just sat there smiling at her, silent. The Sound, outside, a vast shadowy symphony of meaninglessness, still seemed to fill the small, night-dark cell.
Her throat was a little sore, she realised, from having to keep her voice raised for so long. She cleared it, said, “I remember that you told me you forgot nothing, remembered everything, had it all stored within you, sometimes multiply, in exhaustive, awful, boring, terrible detail. Detail ghastly for its sheer everlasting banality.” She paused to give him time to speak, but still he didn’t. “It would be good to know what you know about all this, Ngaroe. You always seemed to feel something for the Gzilt. It might help them to know whether this is the truth at last, or another lie.” She paused again, but still he kept silent. “Even if we find out something that it might be best for them not to know, at least we’ll know. At least we’ll have the choice.”
“But who would we be to make that choice?”
“Their friends.”
“Really?”
“The Culture has no selfish interests in this, Ngaroe,” she said, trying not to sigh, though doubting that he’d hear her if she did. She could sense that they were already starting to gravitate back to some of the arguments they’d had centuries ago. They had ended inconclusively then – unless you counted mutual annoyance as a conclusion – and she thought it highly unlikely they’d end up any different this time.
He looked unconvinced, eyebrows rising again. “The Culture has an interest in everything it touches,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed that at least.”
“Maybe so, but no selfish interest. We just want to do the right thing by people we’ve historically felt close to.”
“Ah. That old excuse.”
“Will you stop that?” She could feel herself starting to get angry with him again, and that was not going to help. “It’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth.”
“One person’s truth,” he began.
“Oh, fuck,” she said, looking away and crossing her arms. “Here we go …” She looked back when she realised he was laughing. “What?” she demanded.
“I can’t help you, Tefwe,” he told her. He was looking down now.
“What? Why not?”
“I just can’t.” He reached down by the side of the chair, felt for and found the cord there, and started pulling it. She could hear the matting that had rolled down over the cell’s open window earlier as it was pulled back up again. The Sound pulsed back into the room, filling it like an avalanche bursting into a cabin an instant before it was swept away entirely.
“Because,” he said, shouting, “I got rid of those memories some years ago.” He completed hauling the sound-deadening matting back up and sat back again as though exhausted, like somebody long deprived of the sunlight finally being allowed to face directly into its warmth again. He took a deep, satisfied breath and shouted, “So I don’t have them any more. Not here. Not on me, not in me. They’re gone.” Tefwe’s ears had mostly closed up again, assaulted by the noise. She wasn’t sure she could really hear what QiRia was saying any more; it was more that she was lip-reading. There was a fraction more light getting into the cell now, around the still-closed shutters.
“But why?” she shouted.
“Fear, Tefwe,” he said, shrugging. “I was frightened that what I knew would be enough to cause me trouble, given what was going to happen; given the Subliming. So I made sure that the memories became encoded in just one place – two places. Then I saw an old friend who relieved me of them.” He shook his head. “Now I have no idea what I used to know. I’m sorry.”
“So … where are … where were those memories?” she asked, yelling. “Where were they encoded?”
He reached up to his face with one hand, took off the slatted glasses. The heat coming off his skin, differentiated according to the various surfaces on his face, plus the small amount of evening light leaking round the edges of the shutters, meant her eyes could see quite well enough.
In the very first instant, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at, or what was wrong with his face. Then she started to realise. She felt herself frowning and sitting further forward, to see properly and to make sense of what it was she was seeing. Though she thought she knew now, and thought she should, really, have known all along.
At first she thought that where his eyes had been he now had a pair of belly-buttons, but that was just her first, instinctive reaction. Looking closer, thinking it through, she realised that what he actually had in his eye sockets, in place of his eyes – quite neatly integrated, looking for all the world as though they belonged there – was another p
air of ears.
Ngaroe smiled, though it was a thin smile this time; perhaps even a mocking one. The Sound, though baffled by the heavy shutters, seemed to rise suddenly then and shake her to her core, making her synthetic lungs resonate and her carbon bones vibrate and her own augmented eyes quiver and water in their sockets. It all but drowned out his voice.
Through her tears she struggled to lip-read what he said in reply to her question about where the missing memories had been encoded:
“Take a guess, Tefwe.”
Seventeen
(S -8)
xLSV You Call This Clean?
oLOU Caconym
oGCU Displacement Activity
oGSV Empiricist
oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
oUe Mistake Not …
oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
oMSV Pressure Drop
oGSV Contents May Differ
Hello. Bad news. Mr QiRia has been tracked down but would appear no longer to have the information we seek. See attached report.
∞
xGSV Contents May Differ
Ms Tefwe seems to have been unable to take any steps which might have confirmed whether he was telling the truth or not. Are we simply going to take his word for this? I had gathered that the gentleman was/is notoriously unreliable.
∞
xLSV You Call This Clean?
Correct. However, determining whether he was telling the truth or not would have meant kidnapping Mr QiRia. That would have been difficult and wrong. And it is hard to see what his motivation might be in lying about this. He certainly had the ability to compartmentalise his memories in the way described, and his eyes were genuinely missing. As the report’s appendices make clear, Ms Tefwe carried analytical capacity which independently verified both that this was the real person and that his eyes had been surgically excised. Short of removing him entirely from the hearkenry to carry out a full body scan, it is not easy to see what more could be done. I think we have to take this as it appears.
∞
xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
And it appears that the problem recedes over the horizon once again, its solution still out of our reach. Are we really determined to pursue this chimera regardless of cost?
∞
xGSV Contents May Differ
I suspect the consensus remains much as it was. Has anyone changed their opinion since the last vote? … No? All right, then; we are as we were.
∞
xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
Thinking, I hope, of what we do if and when we discover whatever there is to discover. Personally, I would vote for not telling the Gzilt, no matter what we find, and I suspect I am not alone in feeling that way. Which is why I question the point of looking so insistently in the first place. I don’t want to appear presumptuous, but perhaps we might all think a little along these lines?
∞
xLOU Caconym
Gee, thinking ahead. Whom’d a thunk a that?
∞
xGSV Contents May Differ
Mistake Not …, it would appear to be up to you and Lieutenant Commander Cossont.
∞
xUe Mistake Not …
Yup. Little busy.
The elegance of conventional Orbitals lay in the fact that their diameter – they were usually about three to four million kilometres across – meant that the speed you had to rotate them at to produce what would feel like standard gravity to your average Culture person – not to mention a generous statistical spread of non-Culture humanoids and other species – also automatically produced a day/night cycle that was right in the middle of what the Culture regarded as the acceptable spectrum of values.
The artificial, inside-out worlds usually orbited their stars on roughly circular paths, generally following orbits set between those of any planets present, though sometimes taking up the same orbit, socketed into safe, non-collisionary lock-step tracks in and around the planet’s Trojan points. Some Orbitals flew more ellipsoidal paths, swinging further out and closer in to their star, to produce seasons, if desired. Spinning them almost but not quite edge-on to their parent sun prevented the far side from eclipsing whatever part lay in sunlight at the time.
The Culture hadn’t invented Orbitals like this, but it had taken them up with an enthusiasm nobody else had ever displayed, the Minds attracted both by the grandiosity of the concept – this was engineering on an epic scale, and even the skinniest full O had the surface area of twenty or thirty standard one-G planets – and by its sheer chronocyclic, material-frugal elegance; compared to planets, Orbitals represented a very matter-cheap way of providing generous amounts of pleasantly rural and even wild-looking living space, plus you could usually build your Orbitals from exactly the asteroidal debris you’d want to get rid of in a solar system anyway, to stop bits of it flying around and hitting your fancy new worlds.
Microrbitals were, as the name implied, much smaller versions of the same basic idea; they could be any diameter you wanted because the spin speed wasn’t rigidly linked to both the force experienced at their surface and their day/night cycle. You spun a microrbital at the appropriate rate to produce whatever apparent gravity you required, set it circumference-on to the sunlight, then put a suite of angled mirrors at its centre to reflect the light, rotating these independently to give you the desired light/dark periodicity.
The microrbital of Bokri was tiny; barely more than a thousand kilometres across. This was so small that the retaining side walls of sheet diamond which kept the atmosphere in would have met in the middle had the world been filled with a significantly denser atmosphere or spun much slower. As it was, the central mirrors were so close to the top of the walls that they rested on struts running along their inside edges so that the whole assemblage looked like the axle and spokes of a giant wheel.
The world was almost as long down its axis as it was wide and was conventionally arranged – by the relaxed, abundantly provisioned standards of a post-scarcity humanoid civilisation – with parkland, forests, lakes and aesthetically pleasing built-up areas and isolated grand architectural statements spread across its nearly three million square kilometres of interior surface.
The Gzilt had never entirely turned their backs on the ideas of both private ownership and money, though the latter had been demoted to being of mostly ceremonial value and both had been detached from what most people regarded as being the most important measure of a person’s worth; there had been enough of everything to go around everybody in the Gzilt civilisation for many millennia, and while a degree of self-interest and acquisitiveness was taken as being only natural, outright self-obsession and full-on greed were regarded as signs of weakness of character, if not a symptom of actual psychological damage.
The Bokri microrbital was joint-owned by a group of Secular Collectionary orders: institutionalised obsessive, only para-religious organisations, each devoted to one or other aspect of preservation.
One order collected ancient farming implements, another chemical rockets and antique space craft, while another had specialised in household dust; its sheds and warehouses were packed with billions and billions of vials and other containers collected from worlds and habitats throughout the Gzilt realm over thousands of years and filled with nothing more than the sort of stuff that collected in the corners of rooms and cabins and which had been picked, swept, sucked or electro-staticked up by volunteers or enthusiasts to be sent to the Little Siblings of the Detritus, on Bokri.
This had seemed idiotic, even perverse to many people, right from the start, but had turned out to be surprisingly if modestly useful, providing the raw material for many an undergraduate paper on, for example, changing patterns of casual domestic ambient surface debris through the ages.
The Incast were a philosophical order dedicated to storing as much of the disputed, superseded or just plain long-proved-w
rong knowledge that the Gzilt civilisation and species had built up over the millennia, and any artefacts associated therewith. Housed in multiply backed-up and distributed memory storage facilities across Bokri and various other microrbitals throughout the Ospin system and beyond were entire libraries of ancient conspiracy theories, crackpot physics hypotheses, unutterably antique speculations on anatomy, chemistry and astronomy, and – as a sort of sideline – devices holding the mind-states of untold numbers of individuals and group-minds – mostly Gzilt but from other species as well.
Some were static back-ups for the dynamic originals, held and running elsewhere, some were being retained under the instructions of the people whose personalities and memories they held encoded, to be re-energised and their inhabitants woken at some specific date or when something especially noteworthy occurred to the Gzilt – the Subliming naturally representing pretty much the ultimate example of that criterion – and some had effectively been lost or abandoned.
In the Culture, stuff like this would be collected by Minds with an interest in just such societal flotsam and jetsam and stored in the specially adapted bays and hangars of GSVs, or in the subsidiary structures of Orbital Hubs. In the Gzilt, the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin were the place; they acted as the sump, the filtered, partitioned bilges of the civilisation.