The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  “Maybe.” Cossont crossed all four of her arms, forming a cage across her chest. “Are you saying he really is the age he says he is?”

  Berdle nodded. “Looks like it.”

  “And you think this is going to be him. Have been him. This Yutten Turse guy?”

  “Ran all this past a few stats packages,” Berdle said, “and, even allowing for appropriate fuzzinesses of intra-species spelling, phonetics and pronunciation, the match chances are better than seventy per cent.” The avatar nodded at a sub-screen set into the haptic band set across the centre of the encompassing main screen. “Got some screen of him.” A holo leapt out, miniaturised. The first item was a still image of a man in late middle age, wearing a big silly grin, a loud shirt and a grass hat.

  “Is that supposed to be him?” Cossont asked. She was still feeling cross.

  Berdle nodded. “That is Mr Yutten Turse, of who-knows-whereville.”

  “Looks nothing like him,” she snorted. Though, zooming in on the face, there might have been something familiar about his eyes.

  “Hmm,” Berdle said, obviously unconcerned. “Still, he was coming here, to the Girdlecity.”

  Cossont snorted again. “You might be surprised how little that narrows things down, spaceship.”

  Berdle smiled but didn’t look at her. “I am aware of the structure’s dimensions.”

  On the sub-screen, some moving footage followed: the man seemed to get slightly lost in the transit lounge, apparently unsure which way to go, until he left, led by a modest amount of luggage on a helpful float-trolley. Maybe he did walk a little like QiRia. Maybe. He disappeared. A still of his face came back, then was replaced by another set of screen images which seemed to show him leaving again, dressed similarly but wearing big dark glasses. If anything, he looked even less sure where he was going on the way back. The images faded away and the sub-screen went dark.

  Ahead, the view was all Girdlecity; even sitting forwards, craning her neck, there was no sign of sky or sea. A few tiny, dim lights were only now starting to prick the obsidian surface of the structure. Berdle must have thought an instruction to the shuttle, because the screen extended smoothly, silently backwards, so that the view now took in directly overhead and a little further back. Looking straight up, she could see the sky again. She nearly said thank you, but didn’t.

  “Hello, that looks familiar,” Pyan said, flapping and hopping through to sit on her lap. “Girdlecity?”

  “Huh,” Cossont said.

  “Oh,” Pyan said. “Hzu coast. That’ll be pretty.”

  How fucking dare QiRia come back to where she lived — not just the civilisation but the system, the planet where she lived — and not look her up? What sort of friend was that?

  “So, do we think he was looking for somebody?” she asked.

  “According to his subsequent movements, happily documented by your fearsomely watchful Aliens Bureau, it seems he was looking for a particular person or for a particular artefact/location,” Berdle said. “Which he seems to have found.”

  “Where in the Girdlecity?” Cossont asked. This wasn’t the bit she knew; this was about a third of the way round the planet from Kwaalon and the great plains.

  “He was going to Launch Falls,” Berdle said.

  “That’s nowhere near here,” she told him.

  “I know. The artefact/location concerned has moved.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. It’s an airship.”

  “One of the internals?”

  “Only one still moving, apparently.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” she told the avatar.

  “Apparently it’s famous,” Berdle confirmed. “Well, notorious.”

  “Hope you’re ready for a party,” she told the avatar, one eyebrow hoisted even though it wasn’t looking at her.

  The avatar’s head tipped briefly. “Ready for anything.”

  Cossont was silent for a moment as the Girdlecity drifted closer and more detail began to show on the dark textures of its surface. “It really didn’t look all that much like him,” she said.

  “What has that got to do with anything?” The avatar glanced at her. “Seventy per cent represents a good chance.”

  Cossont frowned suddenly. “Where did you say he claimed to have come from?”

  “Neressi.”

  “Spell that?” The avatar spelled it for her. “In Marain?” she asked, frown deepening. She listened again, nodded. Ahead, whole constellations of lights were brightening into existence against the surface of the Girdlecity as they continued to draw closer. They were still fifteen or twenty kilometres out. She sighed. “It’s probably better than seventy per cent,” she told the avatar. “When he was on Perytch IV he was… you know… transplanted, had his consciousness transferred into this gigantic sea creature. He took the name… Isseren.”

  Berdle nodded. “Ah-ha,” the avatar said, softly.

  “Oh!” Pyan said, after a moment. “Backwards!”

  “Yes,” Cossont said sourly. “Fucking backwards.”

  Jelwilin Keril, the Iwenick Cultural Mission Director, left the Strategic Outreach Element CH2OH.(CHOH)4.CHO in his private yacht.

  At least he was able to call his yacht something sensible. He’d named it Iberre, in honour of his father-mother. And he was allowed to refer to it as a yacht, not a Space-Capable Inter-Element Transportation Component, or something of similar over-literal awkwardness. He looked back at the Strategic Outreach Element CH2OH.(CHOH)4.CHO. It hung against the star-flecked blackness, a svelte grey flattened ellipsoid.

  Strategic Outreach Element. Everybody else would just call it a ship.

  Still, this was modern-day thinking. “Ship” just sounded a bit crude, apparently — redolent of bulbous wooden things rolling around on the high seas, infested with parasites and stinking with drunken, seasick sailors. Even the Culture’s partiality to the term “unit” — used by the Iwenick until recently in a slightly cringing attempt at flattery — was seen as not fully expressing the powers and capabilities of the vessels it was attached to. Apparently, according to the advisors who made their living thinking about this sort of thing, “unit” was for ever associated with the words “light industrial”.

  He turned back. Never mind. But he knew exactly why he was thinking about names.

  The Liseiden flagship, the Collective Purposes vessel Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya (the name of some ancient Liseiden hero, so acceptable, if unpronounceable) swelled in the screen, a well-lit hangar already open for the yacht. The ship was a jumbled mass of planes and edges, barely even symmetrical from certain angles. It was supposed to appear complicated and impressive but to Jelwilin it just looked like a confused slump of different-sized boxes, like the result of an accident in a warehouse.

  Jelwilin inspected his image in a screen. Full uniform, perfectly groomed, manicured and made-up. He looked great — not that an alien would notice or care. This could all have been done in a few minutes, of course, by him simply holo-ing in to the Liseiden ship’s command deck and talking to them that way, but there were times when a personal appearance — even a personal appearance inside a glorified fish bowl — was the only way to show the desired portion of respect, and the Liseiden were certainly expecting the full serving, to compensate for the wound to their pride and expectations they’d just experienced at the hands of the perfidious Gzilt. Hence the ship rendezvous and the face-to-face.

  Cultural Mission Director Jelwilin patted down his uniform jacket, adjusted a cuff. He felt the need to urinate, but he had already done so before leaving the ship, and knew this was simply the result of nerves.

  “He wants more?” Team Principal Tyun roared. “The son-of-a-runt!”

  Sitting — comfortably enough, but very conscious that he was contained within a perfectly transparent sphere, exposed to inspection from every side — in front of the array of sinuously floating Liseiden, their bodies waving to and fro like fat scarves in a slow-motion breeze, Cultural Mission Direc
tor Jelwilin set his face as well as he could in an expression of understanding and shared pain. The Liseiden might not have any officers capable of interpreting his species’ facial expressions, but they would probably have AIs which could; might as well make the effort. Anyway, it was all integral to the part he was playing here. Method diplomacy.

  “The septame tells us that he is confident that he can overturn the decision,” Jelwilin said calmly. “And Ambassador Mierbeunes is very — and very encouragingly — insistent that the septame will be able to make this happen. Ambassador Mierbeunes is one of our most senior and most experienced diplomats, as well as one of the most successful. I have known him for many years and I don’t think I have ever seen him more confident in the abilities of another person. The thing is that to achieve what he believes he can, Septame Banstegeyn assures us that he needs to take greater risks than those he has taken until now. Accordingly, he asks for a greater reward. And, frankly, Team Principal, what he asks for is something it costs you next to nothing to agree to. And I emphasise ‘agree to’ rather than, say, ‘grant’ or even ‘fully commit to in your soul’.”

  Tyun’s voice seemed to come from somewhere underneath the little stalk-seat Jelwilin was sitting on. It was disconcerting, as was being able to hear the Liseiden’s actual words, booming liquidly — if muffled — against the surface of the transparent sphere, a sort of continuous guttural bubbling that barely preceded the translated version.

  “I’m taking the point that it might seem to cost us next to nothing to agree to renaming a local star,” the Team Principal said, “but what I want to ask is: is that actually relevant? I think we risk being seen to reward failure if we concede this, Cultural Mission Director. We are not here to indulge that sort of shit.”

  “If I might liken this to a military campaign, Team Principal,” Jelwilin said, “what we have suffered here is a reverse, and a battle lost, certainly, but it is not final defeat, and the war remains winnable. Of course I appreciate that one might, in theory, be seen to be rewarding failure, but a side that shoots its generals after every lost battle would quickly run out of good generals as well as bad, or end up with a population of generals who did everything they could to avoid all battles, even the most winnable, just in case.”

  “But that is not the alternative, Jelwilin,” Tyun said. “The alternative is to take a more robust attitude to securing the acquisition of the technology and infrastructure we’ve been seeking and thought we’d been promised. Let me be clear. We have the fire-power to enforce the bargain that was already arrived at. We cannot, and we will not, be seen to be weak in this.”

  Jelwilin looked pained. “Obviously, we all hope that using force of arms would be regarded as very much the last resort. I need hardly tell you, sir, that hostilities are always expensive, of reputation as well as materiel, and it would, I am sure you would agree, be better to settle this without recourse to the uncertainties and chaos of war, particularly given the already engaged interest of another level-eight civ in the shape of the Culture, and especially following the still unexplained attack on the regimental HQ of the Fourteenth on Eshri; things are very delicately poised after that, and even without the involvement of the Culture I need hardly point out that, although much depleted, the Gzilt fleet remains an extremely powerful force. Please, Team Principal, let me report back to Ambassador Mierbeunes that I have your permission to continue to pursue a more peaceful solution.”

  “Yes, well, the Culture appears to have lost interest in us,” Tyun said. “The ship they sent as escort apparently found more pressing matters to attend to.”

  “I understood that a Thug-class Fast Picket was on its way to join you,” Jelwilin said.

  “Hmm. Not if I can help it. We’re going to try throwing them off with some judicious re-dispositioning. A moment,” Tyun said. The transparent sphere surrounding Jelwilin suddenly became opaque, leaving the Cultural Mission Director staring at a fuzzy representation of the Liseiden ship’s command centre. He could make out some deep, distant-sounding bubbling noises that were doubtless the Liseiden discussing the matter amongst themselves.

  “The fire-power to enforce the bargain”, indeed. That was overly aggressive. What were they playing at? Hadn’t the Liseiden simmed this? If there was a proper shooting war between the Liseiden and the Ronte, even the victor would probably come out of it worse off in the long term. Never mind any formal censure from the Galactic Council; high-level players like the Culture would take a dim view of a situation that looked entirely soluble by peaceful means suddenly tipping into the mayhem of a war, no matter how small. Whoever instigated that would find themselves on the wrong end of not just one short leash but several, as a bunch of their betters suddenly decided they ought to keep a closer eye on these semi-barbarians who’d had the temerity to threaten the galactic peace.

  And all for some territory and left-behind tech. Or at least a cut of it, in the Iwenick’s case.

  Jelwilin had always respected those civilisations that left their achievements behind, intact, when they Sublimed, so that the results of their labour and intellects could be put to use by others, but he could appreciate that there were reasons — beyond a childish desire to take your toys with you — for razing your structures, flattening your cities, collapsing your habitats, deleting all the hi-tech-enabling information you possessed and destroying anything else that people might fight over. Well, save for planets, he supposed.

  Some species did it that way, and apparently a proportion always had, ever since Subliming began, so there was no particular disgrace in it. The Gzilt, though, had never been big on razing or burning; certainly not just for the sake of it. They were, and had always been, pragmatic rather than revengeful. Supposedly this was one of the behaviours they’d contributed to the demeanour of the Culture right at the beginning, even though they hadn’t actually joined it.

  The sphere went transparent again. Discussions had obviously been concluded. Jelwilin sat up straight and assumed an expression of cautious optimism.

  “Mission Director,” Tyun said. “We have come to a decision.” The Liseiden sounded curt, severe. Jelwilin felt relief. Tyun would be compensating for a decision to keep talking rather than to get threatening. A conciliatory, regretful or solemn tone would have augured very badly. “You may authorise Ambassador Mierbeunes to continue negotiations and continue our earlier course regarding the septame.”

  Jelwilin bowed. “Thank you, Team Principal.”

  “Furthermore, to reinforce the perception of our commitment to a successful outcome regarding the totality of this matter, we shall re-disposition the main portion of our fleet to Zyse.”

  Jelwilin assumed his pained expression again.

  “Team Principal, if I might make a suggestion—”

  “No, thank you, Mission Director,” the Liseiden said, politely but firmly. “You may not. Kindly don’t make the mistake of imagining you’re entering this discussion anywhere else than following its conclusion. The actions I’ve outlined are settled. They will not be subject to further negotiation. We thank you for your assistance and valued advice.”

  Jelwilin knew when to give way with grace. “I understand, Team Principal,” he said. “I wish us both the best fortune in these endeavours.”

  “Thank you,” Tyun said, his body making slow S shapes in some unseen current. “You may return to your… Element.”

  As far as anybody could tell, the Girdlecity of Xown had been built by the long-Sublimed Werpesh simply because they could. Nearly thirty thousand kilometres long, the structure formed a single vast bracelet round the equator of the world. A-shaped in cross-section, over a hundred kilometres across at the base, dozens at the top and just under two hundred klicks high — so tall that it protruded above almost all the atmosphere, providing Xown with a spaceport sufficiently prodigious to have served a thousand such worlds — the Girdlecity was a single colossal barricade, an everywhere-pierced wall, halving the planet.

  Even building on t
his extraordinary scale, there were touches of elegance to its design; because Xown was a planet with little wobble and the Girdlecity straddled the equator, it effectively sat between the narrow tropic lines, only ever casting a shadow on lower parts of itself, never on the planet’s surface.

  And it could easily have been bigger. As a Non-Gravitationally Constrained Self-Supporting Artefact, or, colloquially, just an NG — which sort of stood for Neutral-Gravity structure — it was formed from a mix of ordinary and exotic materials that meant only a tiny fraction of its mass actually imposed itself as weight upon either its own lower reaches or on the crust of the planet beneath. Had they wanted, the Werpesh could have arranged it so that where the mighty structure’s foundations met Xown’s bedrock, they exerted a gentle upward pull, rather than a modest load. Artefacts constructed using this sort of technology could be extended indefinitely, with no annoying tendency to collapse in on themselves. Most such structures were in space, and some were much bigger.

  The Girdlecity had the additional problem of needing to keep its structural elements tuned for their precise place within the slope of the planet’s gravity well, but this had proved trivial. Even so, while nearly weightless, the artefact still had colossal mass, and its effect on Xown’s total angular momentum had been to slow down the planet’s rotation by nearly a second a year.

  As was the case with each of their impressive if arguably rather pointless Sculpt worlds, the main point of the Girdlecity, as far as its builders had been concerned, appeared to have been the building of it, rather than any subsequent use it might have been put to. The Werpesh — famously secretive and opaquely motivated — had never chosen to elaborate on their reasons for constructing it. Some of them had lived in portions of it and it did function as a kind of grossly over-engineered spaceport, but the main use it might have had — attracting alien tourists — wasn’t one the Werpesh had ever chosen to promote. Most of the time, before the Werpesh finally did the decent thing and Sublimed, the sparsely populated, barely used Girdlecity had just sort of sat there.