The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  The suit – its helmet – had saved him. Then the Uagren had, too: bringing him back on board, placing him in its medical facility, gently peeling away and removing the blackened, bubbled remains of the suit and slicing away the burned, roasted skin and flesh where it was beyond reusing before it had – coaxingly, almost lovingly – started to knit his bones, repair and regrow his torn, battered organs, and nurture where possible and replace where necessary his bruised, assaulted flesh.

  It was a process that was still ongoing. Agansu was many days away from being physically whole again, and would still be largely dependent on the ship when the Subliming happened in three days’ time – assuming, of course, that it was still going to take place on schedule.

  In its own way, though, even knowing that this body’s part in matters was over was itself a kind of comfort. It meant that – having given his all, having been so nearly killed in honourable combat – now he didn’t have to leave the healing comfort of the ship again, and could decide at the time whether to Sublime with the Uagren and its crew, or not. If not, then he would be left by himself in a medically enabled minor craft, to be delivered to whatever might be left of his regiment, or indeed his civilisation, after the Instigation and the great Enfolding.

  But he might go, with everybody, after all. He was thinking of changing his mind, of Subliming despite his earlier decision and still-existing fears. Coming so close to death on Bokri – even while knowing that an earlier, backed-up version of him might be re-wakened somewhere – had been salutary, and had made him think again about his attitude to death, oblivion and the whole issue of Subliming. Also, he had in some way come to feel part of the Uagren, and at one with its crew. He liked the idea of Outloading with these already semi-virtualised people. Assuming, of course, that they felt the same way. He worried that he still seemed like an interloper to them; perhaps even a foreign body, an irritant. He was nervous about broaching the subject.

  In the meantime, there was the issue of having to update the customised bio-plausible android which the ship had left inside the Girdlecity of Xown when it had set off in pursuit of the Culture ship, nearly ten days earlier. The Uagren was on its way back to Xown, but – unable to maintain the kind of speeds it had on that dash, due to engine field degradation – it was doing so at a comfortable cruise rather than a sprint, and would arrive at Xown a full day after the Culture vessel.

  It could still transmit the colonel’s mind-state ahead and have this new, post-Bokri version integrated into the one that had been left behind, but Agansu had to admit he had been resisting the process, using as his excuse the idea that the longer they waited, the longer he would have to think about what had happened within the Incast facility and learn whatever lessons could be learned from the experience, before transmitting.

  The truth was that he was reluctant to hand over to the android left behind on Xown because he was jealous; the android would become the new him, and it – not he – would have the next set of experiences. It would be the one, the version of him that would have the opportunity to engage with the enemy and defeat the Culture ship’s avatar. It did not seem fair; he wanted to be the victor; this version, the original, from-birth Cagad Agansu, colonel of the First, the Home System regiment, and not some quickly customised android formed from a blank the ship had been holding probably since it was first built.

  He knew – of course he did – that the android represented a version of him, that it would think of itself as fully being him, but that was beside the point. The action would all happen away from him, and the person, the entity involved, would not be him; he would be lying here, still being carried towards whatever would happen in the Girdlecity, on Xown. Perhaps the experiences the android had could be re-integrated back into his own memory. That was possible, but it didn’t always work – it seemed to depend on how extreme and traumatic the experiences had been – but even then, he would always know that in a sense it hadn’t really been him there, at the front, at the tip of the spear.

  “Colonel?” the captain said, talking to him across the virtual bridge of the ship, where he sat to one side of the arc of officers arranged around their welter of screens, read-outs and controls.

  “Yes, Captain,” he said. “I think I’m ready. There are no more lessons to be drawn. Please carry out the procedure.”

  The captain nodded to the data/comms officers. “Proceed.”

  Agansu seemed to fade away for a moment, and was briefly aware of not being on any sort of virtual bridge at all, but being a broken body, still under repair, held deep in the bowels of the ship, as it read his mind, sorted and arranged the resulting data and encrypted it for transmission ahead to the android waiting on Xown.

  “Welcome back,” the captain said, smiling, as though, Agansu felt, he was a lone bio who had needed to leave the bridge to obey a call of nature. “And to good news.”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “We have big guns at Xown,” the captain announced. “A capital ship, also reporting to Marshal Chekwri, so on our side no matter how narrowly that’s defined.” The captain smiled thinly. “And it’s already dealing with some of the shit the Culture craft left behind.”

  The suite of materiel and general sensory assetry the Mistake Not … had left behind at Xown mostly reported back to a satellite which stowed to about the size of a human fist. Fully deployed, with finer-than-hair-thin tendrils extending tens of kilometres away from it in its geosynchronous orbit, it watched something big and probably military approaching Xown across the skein of space. It was also aware of every piece of free-floating hardware in the system being pinged with signals asking them to identify themselves. This was a bad sign.

  It reported this to the also approaching but more distant Mistake Not … and was told to shut down to passive-minimum awareness. It did so, but it was still found, jolted with a tiny but abrupt gravity gradient that first illuminated it in passing and swept on, then returned, pulsed, and almost immediately plunged it into its own steep, sharp hole in space-time. Its last act was to destruct as chaotically and messily as possible, depriving any focused analytical equipment of the chance to determine much about it at all.

  On Xown, scattered about the part of Girdlecity where the airship Equatorial 353 was moving slowly towards the place it had set off from five years earlier, dozens of tiny bits and pieces of Culture hardware started dropping out of the sky, falling to the floor or tumbling clicking and clacking through the vast piped spaces of the construction. Some burned, or fused, or just glowed, destructing as best they could. Some just had to accept deactivation and likely capture.

  A very small number, where able, closed down, closed off or better still ejected all their conventionally discoverable hardware processing and shifted down to back-up bio or atomechanical systems. Even those were vulnerable, through basic triangulation on their last recorded position in the network, as recorded by the compromised components unable to wipe their memories in time, and most succumbed; snapped away by disloc, knocked out of the air with close-range effector weapons or frazzled in mid-flight as they tried to escape by pinpoint bursts of plasma fire like miniature daytime fireworks.

  The airship Equatorial 353, home of the Last Party, had built up a following of several hundred people over the last few days as it and Gzilt society in general approached the culmination of their respective journeys; however, only a few people noticed any of this small-scale destructive activity, and even they dismissed it as just more random chaotic irrelevance, symptomatic of these final days.

  One small device, which had looked like a four-winged insect from the start, suddenly realised that it was probably all that remained of the components the ship had left behind. It sat on the snout of the airship, perched clinging to a thin stanchion supporting a long, dangling, trailing banner, and watched through impersonated compound eyes as another component, a thumb-sized scout missile, plummeted from on high, falling minutely past the bulbous nose of the slowly advancing airship, unwinding a twis
ting thread of grey smoke as it fell, unseen by any human eye. It disappeared into the dark depths of the huge open-work tunnel beneath.

  Some seconds later the giant airship bulged its way through the volume of air the little device had fallen through. The artificial insect detected a faint, disappearing trace-scent of the scout missile’s descent.

  The insect considered its instructions in the event of such eventualities, waited for a time, then lifted off, buzzing away on a long falling curve, building in just enough erraticism into its course to look convincing as it headed for the nearest point of entry into the body of the airship.

  “That’s not good,” Berdle said.

  “What’s not good?” Cossont asked.

  “Something big and powerful just rolled up at Xown and started blighting all my gear,” the avatar told her. They were sitting in the shuttle’s compact command space, watching the planet approach as they decelerated from the system edge.

  “What gear?”

  “The bits and pieces I left behind to keep an eye on whatever’s happening there.”

  Cossont frowned at the avatar. “Do you leave stuff behind everywhere you’ve been?”

  “Pretty much.” Berdle looked at her with an expression indistinguishable from genuine incomprehension. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Never mind. This big and powerful something; bigger and more powerful than you?”

  “Definitely bigger.”

  “We still going in?”

  “Even less choice now.”

  “We couldn’t just … call Ximenyr?” Cossont said. “Could we? You know; just say, Hi, we need them eyes you’ve got?”

  Berdle smiled briefly. “I have been trying to contact the gentleman. I asked Mr QiRia’s mind-state if it would cooperate and it said it would, but Ximenyr’s been impossible to contact. A direct appeal to him, from Mr QiRia, ought to be our first course of action when we do gain access to him.”

  “Oh. You might have told me.”

  “I might.” Berdle agreed, looking unconcerned. “I would have, had we been successful.”

  “Huh. Okay. So: this ship the same one as at Bokri?”

  “No,” the avatar said. “Can’t be. Registering all different anyway. Battleship rather than battle-cruiser; I can outrun it, but that’s not much use when we both want to be in the same place at the same time.” Berdle shook his head. “Shit in a slather. Pretty much everything’s gone or going. I’m losing all my senses down there.”

  “Think they’ll be putting their surveillance in, instead?”

  “I suppose. Though, being Gzilt navy rather than special forces or anything, I bet their stuff isn’t as sneaky as my stuff.”

  “What was the last you heard through all this sneaky stuff?”

  “Ximenyr was still there on the airship, getting prepared for the latest bout of ceremonial partying. Apparently; that’s all according to the airship’s own channels. I don’t have direct access to him, and he hasn’t been heard of for at least seven days. I have – had – stuff inside the airship but nothing in the guy’s own quarters after he found that scout missile. Pretty sure he’s still there, but not certain. I’ve found some incidental recording of him still wearing the container round his neck, from the day after we visited him, so – at least initially – we didn’t spook him. Also, the whole layout of the airship’s been changing, since a couple of days after we were here before; they’ve created a big new space inside. And they’ve been bringing in a lot of extra tech, including new field projectors. And water; that thing must weigh a lot more than it used to, but they seem to have balanced it all out with extra AG. None of which would matter if we could see inside it properly, but we can’t. Plus now we’ve got competition, and they know where our attention’s been focused, if they didn’t before. Not to mention,” he said, turning to her, “there’s been a guy, walking or jogging ahead of the airship, since we left.”

  “I thought there were various people doing that?”

  “Oh, it’s collected lots of people keeping pace with it recently, in air-cars, travel-tube carriages, special trains and ground vehicles, plus there are people keeping pace with it on foot for half a day or so at a time, but there was only one guy who just kept it up all the way through. I had an insectile watching him the whole time and he just never stopped; he hardly even varied his pace. All he did was switch what level and which side he was on, and keep level with different parts of the airship, I suppose so he wasn’t too conspicuous. He’s got some sort of camo or adaptive clothing on that changes every day, but that didn’t throw the bug off; it was still the same guy, walking or jogging day and night.”

  “Probably not human then.”

  “Probably not human,” Berdle agreed. “Though of course you never know; there are some very odd humans.” He frowned at the screen and the giant red-brown, green and blue ball of Xown, as though the planet itself had been responsible for this upset. “Trouble is, he’s disappeared now, too.”

  He awoke.

  He was in a military medical facility aboard a regimental fleet ground liaison craft, flying within a subsidiary tunnel space of the Girdlecity of Xown. It was late afternoon on this part of Xown; five minutes off midnight, back on Zyse.

  He was lying on a couch, blinking at the ceiling light panels. He was a customised bio-plausible android, waking after having had the latest version of his guest implanted.

  He was Colonel Agansu, translated and transplanted into this fresh, tireless, highly capable and perfectly unharmed new body.

  It made no difference.

  He knew that he had been worried about having his consciousness duplicated in this way, but he had been a fool to torment himself with such concerns. Of course the original of him, lying being put back together and regrown in the bowels of the Uagren, would always think of itself as the “real” him – he accepted this without emotion – but he knew who he was, within this body, here, now, and that there was work to be done.

  Knowing that there was another iteration of himself elsewhere was mildly comforting, like having another layer of protection wrapped around him, but made little real difference.

  A screen on a flex-arm swung over to inspect him. A woman’s face looked at him from somewhere remote. The doctor’s gaze flicked to one side then the other, doubtless studying read-outs. Then she said, “Well, whoever you are, whatever it is they want you to do, you’re as ready as you’ll ever be to do it. Good luck and good Subliming, brother.”

  Agansu swung out of the couch. The screen seemed to flinch, withdrawing towards the ceiling as he did so.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He felt the aircraft settle on a solid surface; interfaced with the craft’s systems, he knew he would be three hundred and ten metres ahead, two hundred and twenty metres away laterally and zero metres vertically from the nose of the airship when he exited. He checked his camouflage clothing, got it to impersonate something civilian and nondescript.

  He remembered days of jogging and walking, climbing steps and ramps, descending steps and ramps, in filtered daylight and lamplight and ghostly sat-light and no light, the airship filling his view ahead or a presence at his back or a steady shape at one side or the other or above him or through gratings beneath him as he paced. Sometimes fireworks, lasers and holographic images burst from, lanced out, or enveloped/preceded/trailed the airship, especially at night, and sometimes loud music could be heard playing. Floodlights and running lights lit it every night. Sometimes when he ran behind and above it he could smell food and fumes and detect the spoor of bio-drugs.

  He recalled the feeling of being swaddled and protected, within the 7*Uagren, and remembered talking to the avatar of the Culture ship, and thinking that he had the creature and Vyr Cossont where he wanted them, at his mercy … then hurtling broken and screaming down the lift shaft, like a burned insect falling flaming down a tall chimney. He remembered lying broken and burned and taken apart within the ship again, then beginning to be made whole again
, while he contemplated how close to death he had come and how the prospect of oblivion within the Subliming had started to seem less terrifying.

  Two sets of memories had been formed at the same time, but this made no difference either.

  The ground liaison craft carried little weaponry and was only able to equip him with a kin-ex side-arm, but that would not matter for too long. The android body had what was effectively a laser carbine embedded in each forearm, the beams exiting through a skin-disguised muzzle in the heel of each hand.

  He jumped easily, seemingly lightly, from the lowered door of the stealth-black craft, then – as it closed itself, flipped over and powered off down the fifty-metre-diameter tunnel – he turned and jogged down a broad, cross-corridor of soaring lattice girders and overarching pipes that led directly to the giant basket-weave of tunnel where the Equatorial 353 moved. There was an area of open balcony deck ahead. The airship would be just about to pass it by the time he got there.

  The 8*Churkun established contact.

  ~Colonel Agansu.

  ~In translation, yes.

  ~I am captain of the 8*Churkun. The marshal sends regards.

  ~Please thank the marshal.

  ~We have completed the scour of Culture devices from the immediate volume and beyond, though a vessel – I would guess the Culture ship that you encountered at Ospin – is approaching. It was slowing but is now re-accelerating. We are going to attempt to intercept or disrupt any attempt it makes to disloc materiel or personnel into or near the Girdlecity; however, we cannot be certain of success.

  ~It would help to know the intended location of any such attempted disloc, to help confirm the nature of enemy intentions, Agansu sent, approaching the great open balcony that gave out onto the tunnel which held the approaching airship.