The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  “Citizen,” the arbite said, then must have identified her from some processing she had with her – probably her earbud. “Reserve Lieutenant Commander,” it corrected itself, and saluted.

  “Just taking a stroll, arbite,” she told the machine.

  It remained motionless, seemed to think about this, then without another word folded itself back into its resting sphere-shape with a sort of metallically oiled grace. Compacted, it looked like a piece of sculpture.

  She wandered on, and encountered the family by the side of another great drop, where a broad roadway hung over one of the hundred-metre-wide open-work tunnels that threaded their way through the Girdlecity. The man and the woman were huddled round a little fire, its light reflecting off the wall of diamond-film wall lining the roadway.

  “Good evening,” she said to them, looking quizzically at the fire, which was just a small stack of burning logs. More cut lengths of tree were heaped just beyond where they sat. Both looked up at her, unsmiling. They were dressed for outdoors and looked slightly unkempt. Cossont couldn’t see anything to identify them. Her implants were unable to sense anything electronic on them either, which was most unusual. Their faces were smudged. She wanted to march them both off to the nearest working shower and get them cleaned up.

  “Evening,” the man said, then looked away and poked at the fire with a stick. The woman seemed to be muttering something to herself, talking down into her voluminous hiking jacket. Perhaps she was just on the phone to somebody, Cossont thought, though somehow it didn’t feel like she was, not if her own implants couldn’t find anything to hand-shake with.

  Cossont was about to ask them whether they were wanderers, locals out for a stroll, or what, when a little face peeked out from within the woman’s jacket, stared up wide-eyed at her, and then disappeared again with a rustle of clothing. The woman looked up at Cossont with an expression at once wary and defiant.

  It took Cossont a moment or two to realise.

  She was so used to thinking of herself as part of the Last Generation, the last people to be born before people stopped having babies, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at initially. A toy? had been her first thought.

  “You have a child!” she said, taking a step closer to the woman and going down on her haunches, her face level with the other woman’s, her hand going out towards her, then withdrawing again.

  The woman smiled, seemed to talk into her jacket again. “Chuje,” she said softly, “say hello to the lady.”

  The little face peeked out again. A child; a real child – as far as she could tell – maybe four or five years old. A girl. She looked very serious as she stared at Cossont, who said, “Hello, Chuje.”

  “Allo,” the child said, then bit her lip and hid away again within the folds of the woman’s jacket.

  Cossont stared at the woman. The man was sitting closer now, looking over both of them. “She’s—” Cossont began.

  “Ours,” the woman said. “Three and a half.” Pride, this time, as well as suspicion and defiance. The girl looked out at Cossont again, then, still watching Cossont, cuddled into her mother, and was cuddled back.

  Cossont sat back, her mouth open. She tore her gaze away from the deep, dark eyes of the little girl, looked at both her parents. “So, you’re not …”

  “We’re not going,” the man said.

  Not going. Not Subliming when the time came in twenty-three days from now, when the Stored all over Xown and Zyse and throughout every other planet and moon and habitat and ship of the Gzilt were roused for their pre-waking, and the last few hours before the Subliming itself.

  Cossont knew there were people like these, people determined for whatever reason not to Sublime along with everybody else, and she had even met one or two – though she’d always thought that they would change their minds when the time came – but she had never met anyone who had had a child as well.

  The convention – it was not quite a law, but it was close to one – was that you did not take a child into the Sublime. It had to be a mature, considered, final action for a civilisation and the individuals within it who were ready to go, who had thought about it fully and had decided they were ready to make the transition. The Gzilt considered children to be unable to give their informed consent on something so important, which meant they regarded taking a child with you as something close to abuse.

  So, generally, people had stopped having children. A few, a very few, were born, nevertheless, to parents who still intended to Sublime, but those making that choice, especially with young children, were widely treated as pariahs; most had retreated to communities of the similarly inclined in distant habs.

  Cossont found herself staring at the young couple. They were very young, she thought. Maybe ten years younger than her – they must have been barely more than children themselves when the child had been born. “It’ll be lonely,” she told them.

  “It’s already lonely,” the man said.

  The woman said, “We know,” at the same time.

  “Yes,” Cossont said, feeling foolish. “I suppose you know that.” She smiled apologetically at them.

  “She’s our future,” the man said, nodding down towards the child.

  Cossont nodded, wondering what sort of future it would be. No other species/civ would accept that the few per cent of the Gzilt who remained after the Sublimation would constitute a continuance of that civilisation. All the Gzilt’s deserted living places, from the home planet of Zyse itself to the smallest hab and ship, would be regarded as fair game for takeover, absorption, appropriation. Xown itself, due to the fact it was home to the Girdlecity, was earmarked for pan-cultural monument status under the care of one of the Galactic Council’s Neutral Foundations. Nobody would get expelled or thrown out of any habitat airlocks, but their worlds would fill up, sooner or later, with others; some humanoid, some not, but all aliens, all outsiders.

  You couldn’t even delay very long if you did change your mind and decide to go after everybody else. The rate of subjective/absolute change within the first few hours that people spent inside the Sublime was such that leaving it much more than an hour or so was risky; you’d get there and be isolated, those who had made the transition just hours before – whether they’d been close friends, lovers, family, identical twins, clones, whatever – would already have become so changed, so ascended in complexity, that you would have virtually nothing in common. You’d be on your own, or part of a hopelessly small group, effectively contextless, unanchored to anything greater than yourself, and so likely just to evaporate, dissolving into the generality of the fabric of the Sublime, meaningless.

  It was unknown whether this phenomenon was something intrinsic to the exotic physics and other fundamental natural laws of the Sublime itself, or a rule imposed by those who inhabited the realm and helped enable the transition of people and civilisations. Various civs had conducted research into the subject and confirmed the effect without pinning down the cause. Perhaps a little of each, seemed to be the tentative consensus, which was not entirely helpful.

  “We’re not Resist or anything,” the woman said suddenly. She was staring at the flashes on Cossont’s jacket collar. Resist were the people who were militant Stay-behinders, holding demonstrations, instigating civil disobedience and even now arguing before the Galactic Council that the Sublime was illegal, improperly mandated. A few groups on the fringe of the Resist movement had used violence to try to make their point.

  “Just civilians,” the man said.

  Cossont nodded again. The couple had resigned their ranks, whatever they had been. It happened. It made you poor – it was tantamount to taking a religious vow of poverty – though being poor in a post-scarcity society that only retained money as a sort of ceremonial formality was not so terrible; it took only one person of nominally average means to support any number of those requiring alms. It also tended to make you an object of either grumbling suspicion or grudging admiration, depending.

  The litt
le girl had come further out from her mother’s jacket and was staring at Cossont now, her wide eyes reflecting the flickering orange firelight, her hands playing with a small toy, turning it over and over in her chubby, grubby hands.

  “Can I hold her?” Cossont said suddenly, looking first at the woman, then the man.

  “No,” the man said quickly, as the mother put an arm round the child, as though protecting her from Cossont. “We don’t allow that,” the man continued. “Too many people want to touch her, hold her.” He shrugged. “She stopped liking it.” He glanced around the cavernous space they were in. “Part of the reason we’re out here.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said to Cossont, but kept her arm where it was.

  “Understand,” Cossont said. She smiled as best she could. She looked at all three of them, smiled broadly at the child, then stood slowly. “I have to go,” she said. “Best of luck.”

  “Thank you,” the man said.

  “You going that way?” she asked, pointing the way she had come.

  The man looked wary again, just shrugged.

  “If you are,” she said, “there’s a Store site in an old school; combat arbite guarding it. Shouldn’t cause you any trouble, but … just so you’re not alarmed.” She smiled once more.

  The woman nodded. The child disappeared into the folds of her mother’s jacket again.

  “Nice to meet you,” Cossont said.

  “You too,” the man said. “Goodbye.”

  “Take care,” she told them.

  The woman just nodded.

  Cossont turned and walked away, into the deepening shadows of the vast construction. The pale, meagre light of the fire, enhanced by her augmented eyes, lit the way for a while.

  It might not even be a real child, she told herself. It might be a sophisticated toy, or one of the new artificial children they’d brought out for those who felt the need for a child’s company – little robots, basically. A screen programme she’d watched had shown one you’d have sworn was a real child, but wasn’t. Apparently they even smelled right.

  Maybe such robots didn’t feel right; too heavy or too hard to the touch. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t let her hold it.

  The combat arbite came alive again as she passed by. It stood again but this time kept silent and just saluted.

  Cossont shook her head, flexed her shoulders and back one more time, then rotated the instrument so that it faced across the freshening wind. She took up the two bows and, with a single swift, graceful movement, sat within the instrument again, settling her backside and both feet into place, taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out as she started playing a few practice scales. Almost immediately, a small gust of wind spilled across the terrace and made the external resonating back-strings, stretched down the rear of the instrument, thrum quietly. The sound – not discordant, which with an elevenstring was always a bonus (some would say a surprise) – was muffled and quickly died away again with the departing breeze, but nevertheless drew an “Ah-ha” from her as she flexed her double set of shoulders, adjusted her grip on the two three-sided bows and prepared to play.

  She’d try the second-last section of the Hydrogen Sonata; she had yet to get this right in a single pass. It was a tough part and not what she wanted to do, but she’d never get anywhere if she only did the easy stuff. The second-last section was fast and furious – even angry.

  She’d think of her mother. That might help.

  “I mean, look at you!”

  She looked at herself; first just down, then at her reflection in the black mirror formed by the blanked-out glass wall of the main bedroom unit. She shrugged. This was a particularly graceful movement when you had four arms, she thought. “What?” she asked her mother, frowning.

  Warib just looked at her daughter. Vyr checked her own reflection again. What she could see was a tallish Gzilt girl dressed in neat fatigues; dark grey skin with shoulder-length pale hair above broader than normal – but hardly grotesque – shoulders. Top set of arms a little longer and better defined than the additional set, a healthily substantial chest, a fashionably defined waist and the broad hips of a non-mammalian humanoid. Her legs were a little shorter and her back a little longer than the conventional image of Gzilt perfection, but who cared? Arguably, the four-arm look was all the better for that; it sort of balanced.

  Her mother made an exasperated noise.

  Vyr squinted. Was there some detail she was missing? She was in her mum’s apartment and so in relatively unfamiliar territory, but she knew there would be a proper mirror-reverser unit around somewhere, probably in the blacked-out bedroom unit, where Warib’s latest lover was apparently still asleep.

  Vyr looked at her mother. “What?” she said again, mystified.

  Warib spoke through clenched teeth. “You know perfectly well,” she said.

  Warib was dressed in a long and elegantly gauzy morning gown that looked impractical enough to be genuinely expensive. She was a more willowy version of her daughter with longer and thicker hair; physically she was effectively ageing backwards and would do so until they all Sublimed. Her daughter had already passed the age when people usually started to control their appearance, but only by a few years, and Vyr had anyway decided some time ago that she would just get older naturally for the time that she had left, given that the big kablooey of transcendent smashingness that was the Subliming would be along soon to make this life and everything in it seem irrelevant and feeble and so on and such like.

  She’d been mildly astonished that her mother seemed to take her daughter looking older than she did as some sort of rebuke. It had been the same when she’d become a Lieutenant Commander. She’d thought Warib would be proud of her; instead she was upset that – however technically, and regardless of the fact it didn’t really mean anything – her own daughter now outranked her.

  “Is it the arms?” she said, waving all four. Beyond Warib, the view through the windows of the apartment showed sea sliding slowly past. Her mother lived on a klicks-long superliner endlessly circling the enclosed coast of the Pinicoln Sea, within Land, the single vast continent that made up most of Zyse.

  “Of course it’s the arms!” Warib told her. She grimaced as though she’d just tasted something bitter, and shook her head. “And don’t try to be funny, Vyr, it’s not within your reach.”

  Vyr smiled. “Well, I wasn’t, though that is almost—”

  “You’ve always got to try to be different, haven’t you, Vyr?” her mother said, though it wasn’t really pitched as a question. “‘Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!’” she sang with what was probably meant to be sarcasm, wobbling her head and doing a little dance.

  “Well—”

  “You’ve taken great delight in trying to embarrass me ever since you were little.”

  Vyr frowned. “I’m not sure I ever formulated that as a specific ambi—”

  “You started trying to make my life hell when you were still wetting your pants.”

  “… probably more of a happy acci—”

  “That’s what you used to do, in fact; take your knickers down and pee in front of my guests. How do you think that made me look? At parties. In front of some very important people!”

  “So you’ve said, more than once, but remember I checked the house records and—”

  “Your father and I deleted those, they were so embarrassing.”

  “Hmm. But the amendments files—”

  “How can you disbelieve your own mother?” Warib wailed, putting her elegantly manicured hands up to her glossily perfect face and letting her head drop forward. The tone of voice and gesture were both cues that she would shortly start to screech and sob were the point not conceded.

  “Anyway,” Vyr said patiently. “The point now is—”

  “That how can I invite you to my party when you look like that!” Warib said, flinging one arm out towards her daughter and almost shrieking the last word. “A freak!”

  “The arms?” Vyr sa
id, just to be sure.

  “Of course the fucking arms!” her mother roared.

  Vyr scratched her head. “Well, so, don’t invite me,” she said, trying to sound reasonable.

  Warib took a deep, measured breath. “How,” she said, her voice lowered to the sort of whispered, husky tone that indicated Vyr’s last question had been so idiotic it had scarcely been worth wasting breath on at all, “can I not invite you when you’re my daughter and I’m supposed to be proud of you?” Her voice started to rise again. “What will people think then? What?”

  “So I have four arms,” Vyr said, gesturing with all of them. “People used to have two heads, or look like octolegs or tumblebush, or—”

  “That was in the past!” Warib told her acidly. “Ancient days. No one cares.”

  “I don’t know,” Vyr told her, shaking her head. “I saw a screen thing about that travelling ultimate last party outfit on Xown and there were people there that—”

  “Vyr!” her mother wailed. “Will you listen?”

  “… big airship thing, inside …” Vyr found herself silenced by a flash of her mother’s eyes.

  “Nobody,” Warib told her, “who is anybody does that sort of thing any more!” She drew in a breath and said carefully, “It’s infantile, Vyr. Don’t you pay any attention to—?”

  “Mum, I’m just trying to—”

  “Oh, dear God, don’t call me ‘mum’,” Warib said, eyelids fluttering closed.

  “… say goodbye and see-you-soon to everybody, and play this piece—”

  “Everybody,” her mother shouted at her, “is reverting to classic! Don’t you even know that? Amendments …” Warib hesitated. “Obvious amendments … are out. Nobody’s doing it any more. Everyone’s going for human basic as a mark of respect for all the millions of generations that helped get us to this point.”

  Warib stared at the floor and slapped herself gently on the forehead, a gesture that – as far as Vyr knew – was a genuine innovation within the repertoire and so might actually be unchoreographed, perhaps even spontaneous. This was so surprising Vyr came extremely close to feeling concern.