The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  xLSV You Call This Clean?

  Technically I agree with that. In practice I agree we say and do nothing. The circumstances, due to the timing, are unique. Yes, you should always tell the truth, unless you find yourself in a situation where it would be utter moral folly to do so. At least now we know the truth. The fevered, speculative potential of it has collapsed to something definite, and not so terrible, after all. To tell it would not be the worst thing ever, either. And one should always tell the truth, unless … The point is that we are not automata; we have a choice. I say we exercise it wisely, and stay silent.

  ∞

  xGSV Empiricist

  So, shall we vote? And/or open it up to others so that more may vote?

  ∞

  xUe Mistake Not …

  If I might.

  ∞

  xGSV Empiricist

  Please.

  ∞

  xUe Mistake Not …

  We know how this works. If we do nothing then any disaster that befalls the Gzilt over the next few hours is entirely theirs. If we intervene we become at least complicit. This is a truth that has not been asked for; even the original bearers of it, the Z-R, made it clear they were happy it stay unknown. We know, and what we know is – now that we can be sure of what we know – that it is not our business. Whether the knowing was worth the price we and others have paid is another sort of moral equation, at right-angles to this one. I say we do nothing. Vote if you like.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Anybody wish to wrest from me my claim for precedence in the awkward customer/dissenting adult/outright contrarian stakes? … No? Thought not. Then when I say that I reluctantly agree with what our colleague the Mistake Not … has just said, I think we might consider the matter closed.

  The Caconym, in the shape of its virtual avatoid, returned to the castle-made-of-castles it had modelled within the near-unending recesses of its computational matrices. Its humanoid shape set out from the gatehouse that was made of tens of thousands of already mighty gatehouses, and walked all the way to the high tower which sat like a fat flagpole on top of the great composite tower, many subjective kilometres away into the fractal architecture of the baroque edifice.

  It had waited all this time to hear anything from the mind-state of the Zoologist – anything at all that might have helped it and its colleagues in their attempts to understand the workings of the Sublime – and, despite being tempted to do so many times, it had not come back here to attempt to force the pace or the issue.

  Now that the matter in hand appeared to have been settled – without, it had to be said, any help from the Zoologist – it had something to report, and could release the soul of the other ship from whatever obligation to help that it might have felt under. Not that that appeared to be very much, given the continuing silence. At least the instances of weird, ambiguous intrusions into its substrates, maybe from the Sublimed realm, had tailed off to nothing recently. That was a good sign, perhaps.

  Or perhaps not. It was starting to worry about that.

  It arrived, at last, after a climb of many thousands of steps, at the door to the airy, enclosed lair inhabited by the consciousness of the Sublime-returnee, the abstract of what had once been the Mind of the Zoologist.

  There was no answer when it knocked. The place sounded quiet. It already felt that it knew what it was going to find. The door was locked, but only at a crude physical level, within the sim. Unlocking it was hardly more complicated than the act of turning the handle and pushing the door open.

  The door swung, stuck, had to be pushed.

  The Caconym’s avatoid walked in and looked around.

  The space was, as it had guessed, empty of the Zoologist’s mind-state. It was full of almost everything else, including debris, litter and rubbish of every kind, stained glassware, bulbously gleaming electrical gear, intestinal quantities of tubing, foul smells, loudly protesting, unfed animals, and multitudinous ropes hanging from the ceiling, but of the strange creature with the pale red, mottled skin and the long arms with six fingers, there was no sign.

  After it stopped looking for the avatoid of the Zoologist it started looking for a note. It didn’t find one.

  “You might have said goodbye,” it said, eventually, to the air, in case its departed guest had left some sort of message behind that might be triggered by speech … but its voice just disappeared into the clutter and the dust and the hazy sunlight coming through the tall windows, and brought no response.

  The ship instituted a full search of its computational and storage substrates, just in case, but with no real hope it would find any sign of the Zoologist. Sure enough, there was nothing. Apart from this ersatz, abandoned lab and its own memories of its departed colleague, the Zoologist had left without a trace.

  The Caconym was about to calm the squawking, screeching animals in their cages, but then grew instantly tired of the whole absurd conceit, and with one command abolished the entire castle and everything in and around it, closing down the whole scenario with a single thought.

  Twenty-four

  (S -0)

  In the end he went with everybody else.

  There had been a time there when he thought he must have gone mad, for he had been thinking of staying behind, of not going at all, and perhaps – once it had all taken place – of putting himself into the hands of some authority, to be tried and judged and accept whatever punishment might be decreed for what he had done – for all the things he had done, but especially for this last thing.

  But that had been just a passing fantasy, a mood, something to be indulged. In the end he knew he had to go, and he told himself that not going, and indulging in this masochistic orgy of justice and repentance, would be the truly selfish thing for him to do. Finally, at long last, it was not all about him. He was, he would be, just another humble Enfoldee, taking his place along with everybody else for the step off the cliff that bore you up rather than causing you to fall …

  The Presence that had hung over the parliament building for so long had swelled a little, become a dark sphere. In the last few hours, more and more Presences had appeared, sliding into existence throughout the whole of Gzilt space, wherever there were people: in homes and communes and barracks, in ships and sea ships and aircraft, in squares and piazzas, in public halls, lecture theatres, auditoria and temples, markets and malls, sports venues and transport stations and in all the places where the Stored had recently been resting, before pre-waking.

  The aliens who had come to wish the Gzilt farewell, and those who had come to profit from their going, had, by convention, withdrawn for the moment, leaving those about to depart to themselves.

  Time-to devices and public clocks and displays spread throughout the Gzilt realm ticked down the last few hours and minutes, and people met at pre-arranged places and ate last meals and said last things and, sometimes, told others secrets they’d been keeping. Or decided not to.

  Generally, as people tended to, they got together in groups of family and friends, then joined with other groups to form gatherings of dozens or hundreds and – again, as people usually did, though the exact expression of such emotionality depended both on the physical as well as the psychological make-up of the species concerned – they held hands.

  Many sang.

  Many bands and orchestras played.

  And in the end the time counted down to nothing, and, in the presence of Presences, all you did was say, “I Sublime, I Sublime, I Sublime,” and that was that. Off you went, just folding out of existence as though turning through a crease in the air that nobody had noticed was there before.

  He met up with Marshal Chekwri at the end. She had no more family than he did, and they had come to share much over the last twenty days or so.

  They stood in the gardens of the parliament, under an inappropriately squally sky, with showers, waiting to say the words with a few dozen others. They left it relatively late during the hour that was regarded as the optimum pe
riod, just to make sure that a respectable proportion of the whole Gzilt civilisation was indeed going.

  It was, he reflected numbly, a lot like watching election results coming in. There was a slow start to the Instigation, but the numbers quickly swelled about a quarter of an hour in, according to the news channels still covering events, and by the start of the last third of the hour it was obvious almost everybody was making the transition. The numbers Subliming accelerated again. Those gathered in the garden agreed they could go.

  “Traditionally, people tell each other secrets at this point,” Marshal Chekwri said to him, in a brief moment when the others were all making their goodbyes and choosing where to stand, and with whom. “Mine,” Chekwri said, with a smirk, “is that I failed my officer exam. I cheated. Blackmailed a senior officer to get the pass.” She shrugged. “Never looked back.” She put her head to one side. “You?”

  He stared at her. For an instant he wasn’t sure he knew who he was staring at, or why, or that he knew anybody or anything any more. Eventually he shook his head. “Too many,” he said, almost too quietly to be heard, turning away from her. “Too many.”

  Jevan and Solbli, his secretary and aide-de-camp, were there, and he was astonished when it was Jevan who said he had always loved him, not Solbli, whose secret was that she had no secret.

  He mumbled something, lost for speech for the first time in many decades.

  They chose the end of the just-started minute as the time they would go. They all joined hands and when the time came they all said the words and went, just as a small rain shower began.

  In the end he went with everybody else.

  He was re-made, and yet he had been destroyed. He knew he would have done all he could, in his additional incarnation within the android on Xown, but still – again – it had not been enough. Had he been successful, he might have stayed behind, with something to celebrate and to live up to. Instead, he could only admit defeat. It was some consolation that nothing calamitous happened in the interval between the failed operation inside the Girdlecity, and the Instigation that was the beginning of the Subliming.

  All that mattered now was that the crew of the Uagren had accepted him, and he was part of the ship now.

  No Presence needed to appear; ship AIs were capable of performing their own Enfolding.

  Agansu went with them.

  In the end she didn’t go, not there and then. She knew what this meant.

  “I can’t leave without you!” Warib had wailed from the screen, the sea blue-green behind her, the happy voyagers forming up in their last formations, hugging and crying and choosing who to hold hands with.

  And in the end all she could say was, “Yes, you can, mother,” and kill the connection, knowing that she could, and that she would.

  Twenty-five

  (S +24)

  At sunset above the plains of Kwaalon, on a dark, high terrace balanced on a glittering black swirl of architecture forming a relatively microscopic part of the equatorial Girdlecity of Xown, Vyr Cossont – Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont, as she had once been – sat, performing T. C. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalogue number MW 1211, on one of the few surviving examples of the instrument developed specifically to play the piece, the notoriously difficult, temperamental and tonally challenged Antagonistic Undecagonstring – or elevenstring, as it was commonly known.

  T. C. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, MW 1211, was more usually known as “The Hydrogen Sonata”.

  While she played, and the sun sank beyond the distant, hulking line of the dark, near-totally deserted Girdlecity, a lone Liseiden freighter took off from a part of the great structure just a few kilometres away, close enough for the sound of its relatively crude engines to impinge on Cossont’s consciousness.

  She was able to ignore this potential distraction. She kept on playing.

  Her own flier sat at the far edge of the terrace, twenty metres off, a few lights glowing in the cockpit, where Pyan lay curled asleep, exhausted after an afternoon and early evening spent playing with flocks of birds.

  Eventually, almost an hour after she’d started, Cossont got to the end of the piece, and, as the last notes died away, she set the two bows in their resting places, kicked down the side-rest and, flexing her back carefully, stood up and out of the instrument.

  She opened her mouth wide, rubbed her face with her top set of hands and massaged the small of her back with her lower pair, through the material of a Lords of Excrement jacket. She hooked her slippers off with her toes, then bent and pulled on her boots. She stood looking at the elevenstring for a while, listening to the quiet harmonics that the evening winds made in the external resonating strings.

  She had walked the empty, echoing spaces of the Girdlecity many times over the last few days and evenings, and taken the flier to other places around the planet. You had to fly on manual now; the nav and safety systems were mostly still there, but not to be relied upon.

  She had seen nobody at all within the Girdlecity. She had chanced upon the same abandoned school she had walked past that first evening, when Commissar-Colonel Etalde had appeared to whisk her away. It was twice deserted now, with all the Storage units opened, the people they had held departed. Even the guard arbite she’d accidentally activated had gone; maybe taken by the Liseiden. The winds moaned through the vast spaces of the Girdlecity, playing it like some colossal instrument.

  In the cities and towns and villages scattered across the planet, she had seen a few people, though only ever from a distance; she was forming the impression that the only individuals left were those who’d always fantasised about having the world to themselves one day.

  Most days, though, she saw nobody.

  The closest encounter she’d had with anything large and living had been when she’d surprised a wandering skitterpaw late one evening, in a small windswept city on the Dry Coast bordering the Dust; the animal had gone loping off into the shadows after giving her a good long look, like it had been deciding whether to attack her or not. She had a little ten-millimetre knife missile with her – a gift from the ship, and a device not above reminding her whenever she was about to leave home without it – so it hadn’t been as frightening an experience as it might have been. Still, it had been scary enough, and it was surprising how quickly the wild had started to colonise the deserted structures of civilisation, and how much difference it made, there being – in most places – nobody about rather than almost nobody about.

  The final figures for those making the transition into the Sublime had come in at over ninety-nine point nine per cent, as far as anyone could tell, with little variation between planets and habitats. Xown and Zyse had carried even greater proportions of their populations across into the Enfold. This was, unless you were absolutely determined to regard the whole process as an act of tragic collective insanity, an excellent and satisfying result.

  A slightly stronger gust of wind swirled about the platform and the elevenstring made a new, deep, lowing sound, like it wanted to be released back into the wild now, even though there was nothing biological about its construction and it had been fashioned by a Culture ship, twenty years past and a quarter of the galaxy away.

  She smiled ruefully in the dusk light, then turned her back on the instrument and walked to the flier, leaving the elevenstring standing, slightly lop-sided, where it was, with its protective case arranged, still open, neatly to one side.

  She heaved herself up and into the flier, shooing Pyan out of the way; the creature protested sleepily and didn’t wake up properly, finally wrapping itself limply round her neck and hanging there without even bothering to form a knot. She suspected that if familiars had been prone to snoring, Pyan would have been snoring.

  She sat in the flier for a moment, letting it check its systems. She gazed at the Girdlecity, focusing on where it dipped to meet the horizon. The sun had not long set, and the red-g
old skies were swiftly darkening.

  She had thought of looking for the couple with the child again, the little family she’d met inside the Girdlecity on that first evening. The search and successfully finding them would be sufficient, she’d decided; that would be difficult enough. She wouldn’t want to suggest that she stay with them or any such foolishness.

  In addition, she had an invitation to go with the Mistake Not …, which would be departing before too long, having helped in the general business of keeping the peace amongst the Scavenger civs as they took stuff, dismantled things, occupied places or studied tech to copy. The Culture ship would be heading out on a long voyage to the planet called Cethyd, on the far side of the galaxy, to attempt to contact the original, biological QiRia, to see if he would like his eyes and his memories back, now that all the fuss was over.

  Just getting to him might be interesting, given the bizarre hostility of the locals and not-quite-so-locals, so it promised to be an adventure.

  There was no rush, anyway; though the whole Scavenger thing had quieted down, the Culture ships had stuck around for a bit, and were now awaiting the arrival of the last of the ships that had been involved in their recent discussions over what to do about the Gzilt. She’d got the impression they were all quietly pleased with themselves, also that this get-together was just an excuse for some mutual metaphorical back-slapping and whatever passed amongst Culture Minds for nights of drunken revelry and general carousing, and that they were already turning the whole fractious, murderous escapade into something semi-mythical to take its place in the ongoing history of Terrific Things The Culture And Its Brilliant Ships Had Got Up To Over The Years.

  Though not one called the Caconym, apparently; it had just turned without ceremony and gone back to doing whatever it was it liked doing.

  And not the Empiricist; it had more important things to do else-where. System-class ships always did, apparently.

  Cossont strapped in, closed the canopy, took manual control and lifted the little flier away from the terrace, letting the craft rise and bank and pirouette all at once.