The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  “Will you stop doing that?” the drone said, tiredly.

  “Apologies,” Tefwe said. “How does it move so smoothly?”

  “The grains are spheres,” the drone said, clicking something back into place on the solar array. “They are polished, individually where necessary. I call the stuff sand because it starts out as ordinary sand and still has the same chemical composition as the raw material, but really the particle size is reduced almost to that of fines, and the polishing process leaves each grain almost perfectly spherical. See.” The drone shifted in the air, humming very faintly.

  Tefwe stood and straightened as a bright screen suddenly filled the air in front of her, seeming to dim a significant part of the sky and putting her in shadow. The drone had produced a holo display like a magically produced cabinet hovering in front of the woman. The holo showed two grains, highly magnified. One appeared to be about the size of Tefwe’s head, and was jagged, crystalline, all straight edges, spires and juts; not unlike the rocky outcrop itself. It was rainbowed with diffraction colours. The other was pebble-sized, a glass-like shiny blonde and seemingly a perfect sphere.

  “Before and after,” the drone said, shutting the screen off and letting the blast of sunlight fall upon Tefwe again. Her eyes adjusted, putting a black dot over the sun to reduce the glare. The sunlight was so strong her vision would have been affected by light coming in through the surrounds of her eyes, so they would be partially silvering, she suspected. Something similar had happened to areas of her skin, again to cope with the ferocity of the sun’s glare. Grief; I’m going silver. She was, she realised, starting to look like a ship’s avatar.

  “You polish them all individually?” she asked.

  “I have processes, machinery to do the gross polishing,” the drone told her. “Then they are all inspected individually, by me. Any further polishing that is required I do myself.”

  “That seems obsessive.”

  “Meticulous care can seem so to those unwilling to recognise it for its true worth.”

  “I meant you might simply discard the rejects.”

  Hassipura gave the appearance of thinking about this. “That I would find offensive,” it said eventually.

  “What a strange machine you are,” Tefwe told it.

  “That is why I make my home here in the centre of a city in the midst of my dear fellow drones and so many, many delightfully gregarious humans.”

  “Is this really all you do?” she asked, gazing round the network of sand-canals, sandfalls, sand weirs, pools, lakes and whirlpools. She wanted to call the dry, canted bridges aqueducts, but couldn’t. Silicaducts, maybe.

  “Yes. Do you find it in some way inadequate?”

  “No, it’s beautiful in a way. You really have no water at all?”

  “None. Why should I have water? I have no need for it, nor does the sandstream complex. Water makes paste and mud. Water clogs and makes the complex stop working. Here, water is a pollutant.”

  “Does it rain often here?”

  “Almost never, thankfully.”

  “Still, shouldn’t you have some water for guests, for visitors?”

  “I try to discourage visitors.”

  “What about weary travellers? Or what if some poor devil comes crawling across the sands, croaking for water?”

  “Having lost their terminal, so unable to call Hub or anywhere else for help?”

  “For the sake of argument.”

  “Then I would call Hub or somewhere else for help. Scoaliera, do I take it you’re thirsty?”

  “Not really, but I think the aphore is.”

  “You should have brought more water.”

  “I still have some. I’ll let it drink shortly.”

  “You came from Chyan’tya?”

  “Yes. Read my terminal for the detail.”

  The drone was silent for a moment. “Spat on you did it?” it said. “Can’t have been that thirsty.”

  “Patently.”

  “I’m going to be visiting various parts of the complex over the next hour or so. Do you have anything to let you float?”

  “No.”

  “You’d better climb on top of me if we’re still to converse, then. I take it you do still wish to converse. It would be too much to hope that you just happened to be passing by sheer coincidence and are now happy to be on your way.”

  “Thank you, I will. And of course I’m here for a purpose.”

  “I’d kind of guessed.” The drone made a slow swoop to about mid-thigh level on Tefwe. She climbed aboard, sitting cross-legged on its broad back. It rose into the hot, dry air, heading up about ten metres to a sort of little depot of machinery set on a levelled area where the rock had been melted and allowed to cool. Patches were like glass, reflecting the sharp glare of the sun.

  The aphore, nestling in the shade of a house-sized boulder, raised its head when it caught sight of her on the drone. It looked confused. Then it put its head back down to the shadow-dark sand and closed its eyes again. The drone lifted a small tube and appeared to inspect it, turning it this way and that in front of the high-magnification band running along its blunt snout. It replaced it, moved to another rack of what looked like miniaturised mining equipment.

  “So, come far?” it asked.

  “Far enough.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Bunch of ships.”

  “Will I have heard of any of them?”

  She reeled off the relevant names.

  “Is this SC?”

  “Not generated. Some EUAs are helping out. Think they’re bored. It’s a bit quiet right now.”

  “Ah, Elements Usually Associated,” the drone said, and managed to sound almost wistful. “And is the Smile Tolerantly really involved, actively?”

  “No. It’s more… wanted.”

  “And what do you want, Tefwe?”

  “From you? To know the location of our old chum Ngaroe QiRia.”

  “Ah. I suppose I should have guessed. What makes you think I know that?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “All right. What makes you think I would tell you?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Why?”

  “Long story. He might remember something that backs up a claim somebody’s made. Claim that might make a big difference to a lot of people.”

  “You are going to have to do better than that.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “All day.”

  “Okay.” She told him the background. By the time she was finished the drone had carried her almost to the summit of the outcrop. From here, maybe sixty metres above the surface of the desert and the salt pans, she could see pretty much the whole network of the sandstream complex: all the silicaducts, channels and pools, lakes, pools and weirs and all the raising wheels and screws that lifted the sands from the base of the outcrop. From above, it looked even more like it was all done with flowing, dyed water; foreshortened like this, you couldn’t see the relatively steep slopes required to make the sands move under gravity. The raising wheels turned slowly, scooping sand from one pool to deposit it in a higher one. The wheels in particular, seen en masse, made the whole outcrop look like a giant clock powered by sand and sunlight.

  She could see the aphore, still trying to keep in the shade of the rocks far beneath as the sun moved across the sky. The animal was making thin, whinnying noises. Probably thirsty, Tefwe thought.

  The high desert was flat and shining, dotted with dark outcrops like jagged islands on that sea of salt, hot sand and dust. The pale writhing column of a dust devil danced in the distance, like a ghostly impersonation of a waterspout. The view of the encircling mountains, all shimmering in the heat, was bleakly impressive. She did feel a little exposed though. The skin on the back of her hands had gone quite silvery-white under the sunlight. The sky above was a hazy shining blue; a cobalt blister like a vast, concentrating lens with her at the focal point. This stark, intense azure was the true colour of the de
sert, she thought.

  Her stomach made a faint, delicate rumbling sound. She wondered when she had last eaten; her body was using the ambient heat to drive many of the processes that usually would have needed the chemical fires produced by food. Her real body, the one still Stored somewhere inside the You Call This Clean?, wouldn’t have been able to do this, any more than it would have silvered up on prolonged exposure to harsh sunlight. Her own skin would have started to tan.

  “I remember that Ngaroe had some affinity with the Gzilt,” the drone said, once she’d told it all she knew. “At one time I thought he might have been one of them originally, many bodies ago.”

  “Seems he’s still on his first.”

  “My, that is a long, long time to be in the one body,” the drone said, sounding genuinely impressed. “I knew he was old, but that old? Really?”

  “Apparently.”

  “He could still be lying. He used to lie a lot, I recall.”

  “He might be lying. But then he might not. Anyway, what do you think? Important enough to let me know where the hell the old fuck is?”

  “What would be intended for him?”

  “Just going to be asked what he knows. Nothing untoward.”

  “What if he is uncooperative?”

  “Ha! When was he otherwise?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Then I leave empty-handed. But at least we can say we tried.”

  “Nothing further?”

  “Nobody’s going to drug him or read his mind or anything. These are perfectly normal Minds involved here, with honour, self-respect and all that usual uptight shit.”

  “I will need your word on this.”

  “You have it. If he won’t tell me, he won’t tell me. End.”

  “My information is five years old.”

  “Barely yesterday, by QiRia’s geriatric standards.”

  “He told me he was going to… lose, or donate, or abandon, or get rid of something — he used all four terms when we talked — then go to contemplate The Mountains of the Sound, on Cethyd, in the Heluduz system.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Few have.”

  “Just… these mountains?”

  “He wasn’t sure where exactly he’d be going but there’s an Outworlders’ Quarter, so probably there. Claimed he’d already been for a look and talked to… ah.”

  “Deleted at random?”

  “Nearly. Still have it. Docent Luzuge. Somebody called Docent Luzuge. If he, she or it is still alive and active, this person would know where to find him.”

  Tefwe’s pen terminal picked up the words. It was a lot smarter than the old pen terminals Tefwe had been used to, and the kind of smart that found it relatively easy to hide from the level of investigatory tech the drone had. The terminal had been effectively awake and evaluating everything it had been sensing since shortly before Tefwe and the aphore had arrived at the outcrop. It was getting jostled about in the bottom of a pocket in her thin shirt and so not seeing very much, but it could hear perfectly well. It made a transmission.

  A satellite the size of a pebble, held stationary just above the atmosphere directly over where Tefwe was, which had been keeping station directly over her since she’d been Displaced to the surface at Chyan’tya, relayed the transmission to its home ship, the VFP Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process, which, on hearing the relevant words, itself handed the information on to various other craft, including the Contents May Differ and the element of the fast picket fleet known to be nearest to the planet Cethyd, as well as making a general call through the usual network of trusted craft, just in case they knew of a still closer ship that hadn’t been letting everybody else know its position.

  “I wonder what he was leaving behind, and why?” Tefwe said.

  “I wondered that too. I did ask. He wasn’t forthcoming.”

  “Cethyd?” she said.

  “Some civ-forsaken ball on the outskirts of nowhere, jealously guarded by well-teched barbarians. Known for The Mountains of the Sound. Aren’t your implants working?”

  “I’m leaving them off. Just got my terminal.”

  “Which has just been in touch with something overhead.”

  “Really? That’s sneaky.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “This isn’t the real you, is it?”

  “No; spare body carried by an SC ship, altered to suit.”

  “I imagine another you will be popping into existence very shortly, somewhere near The Mountains of the Sound, on Cethyd.”

  “I dare say. That is where you think he is?”

  “Yes,” the drone said. “I’m too old to play those kinds of games. Your word stands, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well; good hunting, to your next self. What happens to you — to this you — now?”

  “Supposed to head back to the VFP. Naturally it wants to snap me back instantly, now, and be on its way, but I said you’d appreciate me making the effort.”

  “Well, I have. But don’t let me detain you.”

  “Really?”

  “Go immediately if you wish.”

  Tefwe thought. She could almost feel the VFP — doubtless listening — willing her to agree. “Later,” she said, and half expected to be snatched away anyway as the ship’s property, or to see a wrathful bolt of fire falling from the heavens to strike her, or at least the nearby desert. “Around sunset, perhaps. First I ought to let the aphore drink, but I’d like to see more of the sandstream. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  ~Ms Tefwe, sent the ship via some internal piece of augmentation which, obviously, she only thought she’d turned off.

  “None at all,” the drone said. “Though, sandstreams, in the plural, you should have said.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  ~Ms Tefwe, the ship sent again.

  “Many. Most of the outcrops you can see from here are similarly adapted.” The old drone sounded proud.

  “Really! I must see them.”

  ~Ms Tefwe, the ship sent once more.

  “We could visit two or three in the time. Soon I hope to start linking them, underground, and complete a programme of replacing all the external raising screws with internal ones.”

  “Not the wheels, though, I hope. I like the wheels.”

  ~Ms Tefwe; kindly reply.

  “Not the wheels. Those I intend to keep.”

  “How long will all that take?”

  ~Ms Tefwe…

  “Many decades. Don’t you think you should answer the ship?”

  “… Na.”

  Sixteen

  (S -9)

  xLOU Caconym

  oMSV Pressure Drop

  Cethyd? Barely mentioned in my data reservoirs.

  ∞

  Will you down a current all-civs/systems overview? This is becoming ridiculous.

  ∞

  Ignorance can be interesting.

  ∞

  Also fatal. I am not going to copy you the relevant data; get it all yourself. Anyway, Cethyd is a good choice, if he’s trying to escape our attention. Home of the Uwanui, under something called the Oglari Jurisdiction, themselves beholden to the Dolstre, who seem to have decided we’re no friends of theirs. And the Oglari are just able enough and vicariously well up-teched enough to make a friendly visit tricky. Perhaps as well we have the SC fleet and its fellow travellers on-side. Nearest is a brother ship to you, a Troublemaker, de-fanged to VFP. Think it’ll be up to the task?

  ∞

  Indubitably.

  ∞

  It is effectively weapon-free. And it starts as a Limited. No offence.

  ∞

  We are of that generation of “Limited” that classes as nominatively camouflaged. We out-everything earlier GOUs. It’ll handle whatever it finds.

  ∞

  Hmm. Oh-oh, hello; incoming…

  ∞

  xGSV Contents M
ay Differ

  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

  oLSV You Call This Clean?

  Hello all. Developments. Not all encouraging. The good news is that the two Delinquent GOUs Headcrash and the Xenocrat have arrived at Zyse. The neutral/slightly odd news is that the Beats Working has taken it upon itself to ferry the principal squadron of the Ronte fleet to Gzilt ahead of time, and the bad news is that the Smile Tolerantly, once an ancient GCU, is now what might best be described as a Culture-Zihdren-Remnanter hybrid.

  ∞

  xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

  I think I speak for all of us when I say — relative to that last bit there — what?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Well, quite. The Smile Tolerantly has been discovered in the Zihdren home system and now apparently describes itself as a tributary adjunct to the Z-R, with enhanced loyalties and a hybrid OS now including multiple elements congenitally associated with Z-R craft.

  ∞

  xGCU Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

  “Enhanced loyalties”?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  The thinking is this actually means divided loyalties, though when pressed the vessel also expressed a preference for “dual loyalties”.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Is there any hint it has access to the Z rather than just the Z-R?

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  Sadly, none. In fact it specifically ruled that out. It was at pains to stress it was a level down from whatever parts of the Z-R get to pick up the mysterious but majestic crumbs of information and instruction that fall from the celestially elevated high table that is the Enfolded Realm. It would appear to have become devoutly eccentric, if not technically Deranged. It ceased communication with the ship which re-discovered it — its own old home GSV, the Unreliable Witness — after a few short messages, and was willing subsequently to reveal only that their exchange had already run over some (it is believed arbitrarily arrived-at) limit.