The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  “But it would have to have a sample of… of the…”

  “It would need a sample, or rather the results of a sample, of Sefoy’s genetic material. But you could get that almost anywhere, Septame: from a glass, from one of the president’s hairs, from any article of her clothing; you could get that from just having shaken her hand or having brushed her cheek with your own.”

  “Everyone she’s ever met throughout her life would be a first-order suspect,” Chekwri told Banstegeyn crisply. She turned to Locuil. “I assume you’re already cooperating with the cops?”

  Locuil nodded. “Second call her security people made.”

  “Truth is, though,” Chekwri said, “this looks like one of ours.”

  “You mean the device that was used?” Banstegeyn said.

  Chekwri nodded. “We had stuff like this. Once, long ago.” She flexed her eyebrows. “Back in what you might call the interesting old days. It was all supposed to have been got rid of, but… maybe some of it wasn’t. Maybe somebody kept some of it somewhere. Or kept the knowledge and the means to make it.”

  Banstegeyn looked steadily into Chekwri’s eyes as she said this, and the marshal returned his gaze just as levelly.

  “Or somebody invented a brand new one,” Locuil said. “The fact remains the president is dead. Not to mention her AdC. Not to mention in… delicate circumstances. But what really matters is, the president is dead. What’s to be done about it?”

  “The protocols are clear,” Banstegeyn said. He was aware that he looked dreadful; tired, unkempt. That was good. His voice was hollow, flat. He was keeping it that way. “The longest-serving trime becomes acting president, the longest serving-septame becomes an acting trime—”

  “Prophet’s spit,” Chekwri said, almost spluttering. “Int’yom as president, even for six days?” She shook her head.

  “Yes,” Banstegeyn said, as though not noticing. “And so on down the levels, while a clone of Sefoy Geljemyn is grown, and elections for a new president are set in train.”

  “That might look a little pointless with the Subliming so close,” Chekwri said.

  “A vote of the whole parliament would be required to alter the protocols,” Banstegeyn said dully, letting the tiredness into his voice. “Eighty per cent approval required for any changes. We’d struggle even to form a quorum with the people we could call back from out-system in time.” He shook his head, wiped his eyes. “I think we have to stick to the rules, act as though there will be an election within forty days, even though there won’t be one.”

  “Or in case there is,” Locuil said. The septame and the marshal both looked at him. He shrugged. “In case this whole situation — the attack on the Fourteenth, the president being assassinated — leads enough people to want to postpone the Subliming.” The other two people in the room continued to stare at him. “Well, it’s plausible,” he said.

  “That would be a catastrophe,” Banstegeyn said.

  “Would it?” Locuil looked unsure. “Just a postponement. Not a cancellation.”

  “The septame is concerned that one might turn into the other,” Chekwri said.

  “Everything has been put in place, everything planned, everything set up and aimed, focused on the one single day of Instigation,” Banstegeyn said. “We can’t go back.” He shook his head. “We go or we don’t, but a… a postponement? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you’re going to have a lot people wondering who did these things,” the physician general said. “The attack on Eshri, the president’s assassination. These are big loose ends. People will feel… I don’t know; dissatisfied, heading off into the Sublime not knowing who had it in for us.” He looked from Banstegeyn to Chekwri. “Don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps Subliming will look like a blessed relief from such worries,” the septame suggested. Neither the marshal nor the physician general looked like they were buying this.

  “Well,” Locuil said, rolling up his screen and putting it back into his jacket pocket, “the first leak was over an hour ago. The news channels are spasming, or frothing, or whatever it is they do. I have a press conference to attend.” He stood. “Septame? I’m assuming you’ll want to be there too.”

  Banstegeyn nodded. “Of course, Locuil. Can you give us five minutes? There are developments regarding Eshri and our Scavenger friends that the marshal and I have to discuss. Briefly, though; literally five minutes.” The septame glanced at his time-to. “Any longer and feel free to knock on the door. Do you mind?”

  “Yes, all right. Five minutes, Banstegeyn,” the physician general said, frowning. He left the room; a babble of noise from the various staff members in the ante-room swelled, then subsided.

  The septame looked at the marshal for a few moments. She gazed back, then slowly raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Septame, were you expecting me to say something just there?”

  Banstegeyn smiled thinly. “No. Good. Right.” He clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. “The physician general is right, though.”

  “I should hope so, on medical matters at least.”

  “Come on, Chekwri; you know what I mean. On people needing answers. We need to give them answers.”

  “Do we? What answers?”

  “What happened at Eshri, what has just happened here. He’s right; people — some people, at least — won’t want to go, won’t want to Sublime with all this going on, unsolved.”

  “So we give them a solution?”

  “We do.” He nodded his head to one side.

  They walked across the study, to the short corridor that led to the bathroom and a small private sitting room. Banstegeyn closed the door behind them, shutting them in the two-metre-long corridor, lit by a single light.

  “It’s very simple,” Banstegeyn said. “The Ronte are our fall guys.”

  Chekwri looked sceptical. “For the prez, too?”

  “We say she had found out how they had been threatening us; that Eshri was their first shot, an example of how they would deal with us if we didn’t let them have their way. Geljemyn was about to remove preferred Scavenger status from them by presidential decree, so they killed her. We tell them to get out of our space, sling as many as we can find of them here into prison or just ship them out too, and all our problems are solved.”

  The marshal looked distinctly unconvinced. “They’re still a little… underdeveloped for convincing bad guys, Septame. In terms of ships they’re barely out of rockets and you think you’re going to convince people they could do this sort of stuff to us? That’s almost as bad as not knowing at all. At least so long as we’re in the dark we can pretend it’s somebody bigger and badder than us. This… just suggests we’re weak.”

  “Blame it on all the ships that have already Sublimed, and hint that the Ronte must have had some higher-tech help.”

  “Like the Culture?” The marshal’s expression was something close to contempt.

  “They have helped the Ronte, haven’t they?”

  “They’ve given a handful or two of their ships a tiny boost. One ship and an act of charity. Patronising, almost. Hardly a mutual aid pact.”

  “So, no, we don’t try to implicate them. Certainly not directly. Just hint. People will come to their own conclusions. That’s all we need. And besides, the Ronte and the Liseiden have backers, mentors; them, perhaps. They might be blamed. You can do this, can’t you?”

  “Of course I can do it, Septame.” Chekwri smiled. “I have a whole regimental intelligence service that’s developed a fine line in rumour-mongering and story-placing over the last few years, and the ear of every media player you’ve courted so assiduously over the decades; they will ask the questions we’ve suggested, they will listen, and they will repeat what we tell them. The issue is whether people believe it. I might even have to seem to oppose you, a little, by speaking up for the fleets — given that I am in charge of the Combined Regimental Fleet Command, after all. They’ll expect me to support them, and I’ll have to.”


  “Do whatever it takes,” he told her.

  “Depend upon it, Septame.” The marshal looked at Banstegeyn’s time-to, turning her head over to one side to read the upside-down figures and hands on the piece of jewellery adorning his chest. “Our five minutes are almost up,” she observed. “Excuse me.” She turned, took a step.

  “I did what had to be done,” he said. “You believe that, don’t you?”

  He hadn’t really meant to say this. Not to her, not to anybody. He was surprising himself here. That wasn’t good.

  Chekwri turned, looked at him.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe, Septame,” she told him coolly. “All that matters is what you tell me to do.”

  He shook his head, gave a half-laugh. “Do you lose any sleep at all over any of this, Chekwri?”

  The marshal raised her eyebrows. “I sleep like the drugged, every night, Septame. I’m just a humble military officer obeying orders. Nobody’s ordered me to worry. Or to lose sleep.”

  A bitterness seemed to fill his mouth. “It had to be done,” he told her.

  “Of course, Septame.” Chekwri shrugged. “I never liked her anyway. Pleasant enough, but… too weak for the position she held. Too… accommodating.” Her eyebrows flexed again. “Still, eh? She died in the arms of somebody who really loved her. They both did. That’s something. In the circumstances, it’s almost kind.” She nodded to one side. “I think I can hear the physician general knocking. We’d best go.”

  “There was one more thing, Septame,” Locuil said, as they sat in the back of the aircraft hopping them from the diplomatic quarter to the parliament for the press conference. Chekwri had taken her own flier back to the Home System regimental ground HQ.

  “What?” Banstegeyn asked.

  “Excuse me,” the physician general said, and reached forward to click a switch. The night-dark privacy screen rose silently between them and their respective senior staff members, sitting across from them.

  Locuil leaned over, and, very quietly, into Banstegeyn’s ear, as the flier levelled out, said, “Ms Orpe was pregnant.”

  “What?” Banstegeyn said.

  “Only by about forty days; it would not have shown even at the time of the Subliming.”

  “Are you—?”

  “Entirely sure. No question of doubt.”

  “But… Would she have…? She must have known…”

  “She certainly would have known. And she was no primitivist in her elective physiology. She had all the standard medically advised augmentations and amendments. The pregnancy must have been deliberate, Septame. It must have been willed.”

  Banstegeyn stared forward at the dark material covering the privacy panel, then looked away, to the side, out of the dull outward-mirrored windows of the aircraft. He watched the city sliding past. They crossed the river. The lowest tier of the parliament gardens rose walled above the troubled surface of the waves. The first few buildings and pavilions would appear in a moment. What had she been thinking of? What did she think she’d been doing? Had she gone completely mad?

  “Why would she—?” he said, then — suddenly realising — stared at the physician general. “Has it — the embryo — has it… do you know who…?” He was babbling. This was not him. He pulled himself together. “Has it been… analysed?”

  “The products of conception have been removed,” Locuil said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “Privately, as it were. So that these do not presently form part of the judicial or evidential material held by the security forces. And they have not been analysed. Of course, they would need to be, for the identity of the—”

  “It might be best if it was… that is, if it… it might be for the best for all concerned if it was… if all that disappeared.”

  The physician general sat back, nodded. “I’ll see what I can do, Septame.”

  He thumbed the privacy screen down again.

  Banstegeyn felt his stomach lurch. The aircraft began its steep descent.

  xGSV Contents May 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?

  The avatar of the Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In reports that the president of Gzilt, Sefoy Geljemyn, is dead and may have been assassinated.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Just looking at the feeds and the official in-system signal streams available, it looks pretty damn certain she was assassinated. One might have expected that our colleague the Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In would know and be able to confirm this by its own direct channels, rather than still be speculating like some out-of-the-loop news concern consisting of a couple of dodgy float-cams and a single reporter hopping round their apartment trying to get their pants on and brush their teeth at the same time, while staring goggle-eyed at the breaking news screens of the big boys.

  ∞

  xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

  In a matter of such consequence, I thought it best to take a cautious approach and wait until the exact nature of the president’s death had been officially announced by the rightful authorities. The Caconym is welcome to take over my role here, if and when it ever arrives in Gzilt. That will, as I understand it, be some considerable time after the Subliming has taken place, though, doubtless, regardless of how that goes, the Caconym will take the opportunity to lecture any Gzilt remaining behind on how they got their whole Subliming strategy wrong anyway.

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  I’m sure this comes as a shock to all of us and we are bound to react to the news in different ways, including blaming ourselves; however, once that is out of the way — and the sooner the better, I’d suggest — the question is going to remain: what can we do now?

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Might I suggest the Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In takes a rather more robust and less respectful attitude to the Gzilt establishment? Treating the Gzilt as slightly eccentric but much-loved relations, worthy of being indulged as we might indulge other elements of ourselves, might be all very well when they are behaving as we might behave; however, when they start wasting Z-R ships, major command and control elements of their own military and their head of state, such indulgence starts to look, at best, like blindness born of self-deception.

  ∞

  xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

  I can assure the Caconym and the others of the group that in a situation of such import, with the Subliming so close and yet so threatened, and a degree of panic and chaos seeming to infect even the highest echelons of Gzilt society, the last thing I shall be doing is indulging in any “blindness” or “self-deception”. I have already begun a more rigorous and assertive overview of the situation by various different methods and strategies. However, I might remind those who seek to tell me how to perform my task here that in a set of circumstances of such delicacy and sensitivity, being discovered to be behaving in what might be taken by our hosts as an aggressive or even threatening manner might only inflame matters further and make any contribution we may wish and be able to make to the solution of the problem itself problematic. This is not some bunch of lo-techs still struggling with the concept of four-dimensionality; this is an equiv-tech civilisation as old and as capable — point-by-point, if not in overall puissance — as our own and entirely able to prevent, discover and/or deal with the vast majority of any surveillance measures — for example — I might be able to emplace. It is also far from impossible that Gzilt is effectively under attack from outside and needs and expects our support, not our intrusive suspicions.

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  Had the Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In been taking a more intrusive a
nd suspicious approach from the start — bugging/hacking/whatevering the relevant players — we would almost certainly know by now whether they are under attack from outside or not. And I bet, by the way, that they’re not.

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  I’m sure all these points are well made. Perhaps we ought to wait and see what the response of the Gzilt hierarchy itself is to the president’s death before we decide what might be done next.

  “Our Intelligence agencies have further, ah, determined, that these same people, the Ronte, have been directly responsible or, through their agents and abettors, been indirectly though culpably responsible for both the attack on the, ah, headquarters of the Fourteenth regiment, on the Fzan-Juym moon of Eshri, Izenion. Izenion system. And the tragic, despicable murder, assassination… of President Geljemyn. Also, for attacks on two fleet warships, one at Eshri and another at the planet of Ablation. Excuse me. Ablate. The planet of Ablate, too, was attacked. And so, accordingly, we are resolved to resist the arrival of the Ronte fleet with all force and demand their surrender. Surrender of their agents and representatives, here. Here on, ah, Zyse and elsewhere. Our security forces are already, this day, carrying out the, ah… such, ah, actions. Being carried, ah… out. Thank you.”

  The new president and extremely old politician — Trime Int’yom, until a small ceremony in the president’s office a few minutes ago — fell silent. He looked uncertain; a small, old man with nervous eyes and skin that had had to repair itself under the light of too many different suns. The first questions were being shouted out by the media people. Acting President Int’yom asked for the first one to be repeated, then held up one hand as he consulted with his staff, four of whom were standing behind him on the podium and looking just as nervy.

  “Dear Scribe’s piss,” Trime Yegres sighed, turning to Banstegeyn with his hand partially covering his mouth. “Gets the Ablate thing wrong twice and then barely remembers the name of the planet he’s fucking standing on. Worthy successor, eh?”