The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  Whether these simulated beings were really really alive, and how justified it was to create entire populations of virtual creatures just for your own convenience under any circumstances, and whether or not – if/once you had done so – you were sort of duty-bound to be honest with your creations at some point and straight out tell them that they weren’t really real, and existed at the whim of another order of beings altogether – one with its metaphorical finger hovering over an Off switch capable of utterly and instantly obliterating their entire universe … well, these were all matters which by general and even relieved consent were best left to philosophers. As was the ever-vexing question, How do we know we’re not in a simulation?

  There were sound, seemingly base-reality metamathematically convincing and inescapable reasons for believing that all concerned in this ongoing debate about simulational ethics were genuinely at the most basic level of reality, the one that definitely wasn’t running as a virtual construct on somebody else’s substrate, but – if these mooted super-beings had been quite extraordinarily clever and devious – such seemingly reliable and reassuring signs might all just be part of the illusion.

  There was also the Argument of Increasing Decency, which basically held that cruelty was linked to stupidity and that the link between intelligence, imagination, empathy and good-behaviour-as-it-was-generally-understood – i.e. not being cruel to others – was as profound as these matters ever got. This strongly implied that beings capable of setting up a virtuality so convincing, so devious, so detailed that it was capable of fooling entities as smart as – say – Culture Minds must be so shatteringly, intoxicatingly clever they pretty much had to be decent, agreeable and highly moral types themselves. (So; much like Culture Minds, then, except more so.)

  But that too might be part of the set-up, and the clear positive correlation between beings of greater intellectual capacity taking over from lesser ones – while still respecting their rights, of course – and the gradual diminution of violence and suffering over civilisationally significant periods of time might also be the result of a trick.

  A bit, after some adjustments for scale, like the trick of seeding another society with the ideas for a holy book that appeared to tell the truth on several levels but which was basically just part of an experiment, the Contents May Differ thought, as it reviewed the results of the latest sim runs.

  The sims it was setting up and letting run were all trying to answer the relatively simple question, How much difference will it make if the Gzilt find out the Book of Truth is a fake?

  And the answer appeared to be: Who the fuck knows?

  Once you started to think that the only way to model a population accurately would be to read the individual mind-states of every single person within the real thing – something even more immoral than it was impractical – it was probably time to try another approach entirely.

  As a good, decent, caring and responsible Culture Mind, the Contents May Differ would never run a sim of the Gzilt people at the individual level to find out anyway, even if it could have, and – apart from anything else – had decided some time ago that even resorting to such desperate measures wouldn’t solve anything in any case. Because there were two Problems: the Simming Problem and the Chaos Problem.

  The Chaos Problem meant that in certain situations you could run as many simulations as you liked, and each would produce a meaningful result, but taken as a whole there would be no discernible pattern to them, and so no lesson to be drawn or obvious course laid out to pursue; it would all depend so exquisitely on exactly how you had chosen to tweak the initial conditions at the start of each run that, taken together, they would add up to nothing more useful than the realisation that This Is A Tricky One.

  The real result, the one that mattered, out there in reality, would almost certainly very closely resemble one of your simulated results, but there would have been no way at any stage of the process to have determined exactly or even approximately which one, and that rendered the whole enterprise almost entirely futile; you ended up having to use other, much less reliable methods to work out what was going to happen.

  These included using one’s own vast intelligence, pooled with the equally vast intelligences of one’s peers, to access the summed total of galactic history and analyse, compare and contrast the current situation relative to similar ones from the past. Given the sort of clear, untrammelled, devastatingly powerful thinking AIs and particularly Minds were capable of, this could be a formidably accurate and – compared to every other method available – relatively reliable strategy. Its official title was Constructive Historical Integrative Analysis.

  In the end, though, there was another name the Minds used, amongst themselves, for this technique, which was Just Guessing.

  * * *

  The mount was called Yoawin. It was old and in no particular hurry, though still strong and tireless. Well, as tireless as Tefwe needed it to be; she got weary and saddle-sore before it started showing signs of complaint.

  Tefwe had chosen an old-fashioned saddle: tall and unwieldy if you were planning on performing any fancy stuff, but comfortable. Comfortable for the aphore as well as her; you always had to think of your mount. They’d had intelligent animals for hire at the stables in Chyan’tya, too; ones you could talk to, both amended bio and what were effectively walking, talking slightly dumb drones made to look biological. She guessed talkative people might hire those. Maybe people who were so talkative they couldn’t persuade other humans to ride with them. But a talking mount had always struck Tefwe as taking things a little too far. Aphores were quite smart enough, and sufficiently companionable to provide a sort of silent friendship.

  They’d arrived in the middle of the night, on this side of the Orbital. She left at first light, riding out through the quiet town. There was some sort of festival happening during the day and some flower garlands, stretched across the street leading out of town towards the hills, had sagged with the dew during the night; she had to lift them out of the way to get underneath. One pale blue flower, loosened, started to fall. She caught it, sniffed it, stuck it in her hair, rode on.

  The town was much as she’d remembered. It sat like a rough brush stroke along one side of the Snake river, cliffed on the shifting sands of tawny and grey-pink that marked the desert edge; a fragrant oasis of bell-blossom and strandle flower, even-cluss and jodenberry, the low, flowing buildings half submerged by their own orchards and groves.

  Across the river, past some stunted, half-hearted dunes and the silted-up entrance to a long-dry oxbow lake, the brush and scrub of the low prairie began. The few scattered bushes looked like an after-thought to the land: quick, light scribbles of brittle-dry vegetation, prone to fires that in the right wind could move so fast you were better turning to face their heat and running straight through, because you’d never outrun them.

  The river was very low; just a trickle at the bottom of the crack-dried muds and in-flowed spills of sand like fanned ramps. High season. The rains would come in a third of a year from now, falling in the Bulkheads, which were so far off that even in the clearest weather you could strain your eyes for ever and you’d never see them, night or day, not this far down in the thick of air.

  A few tens of days later after the rains started falling in the high lands of the Honn-Eynimorm Bulkhead Range, the river would swell, generally pushing a plugged mess of old leaves, scrawny twigs, gnarled branches, stripped tree trunks and the bleached hides and bones of dead animals before it, like a moving barricade of half-forgotten decrepitude and death.

  She rode out across the Pouch, the bay of desert and patchy set-sand that lay between the river and the town on one side and the hills on the other. A pair of raptors wheeled high up, following her for half the morning, then found something else to watch, kilo-metres off anti-spinwards. She lost sight of them in the building heat of the cloudless day.

  Her backside got sore; she glanded numb, rode on.

  At the height of the day, a de
siccant umbrel provided shade for her and the aphore, once she’d chased a snoozing misiprike away. It had been fast asleep; she’d had to clap her hands and holler to get it to wake while she and the suddenly nervy aphore stood, only ten metres away.

  The misiprike had looked up, risen tiredly to its feet and loped off. It stopped once to snarl back at them as though it had only just remembered it was supposed to be a fearsome creature, then padded loose-limbed over the frozen waves of set-sand.

  She fed the aphore, her stomach rumbling, then ate, drank. Even in the shade it was very hot; she and the mount snoozed.

  She’d missed the descent; usually she liked being dropped onto the inside of an Orbital, rather than taking the conventional approach of coming up from underneath. A descent meant you got to see the overview of the place you were coming to; a real view, even if it was through a screen, not a pretend one.

  She’d been born and raised on a planet. This was a rare thing, in the Culture; even rarer than being born on a ship, and that was pretty rare in itself. Things had been like this for millennia. Anyway, she ascribed whatever eccentricities she was prone to displaying to that oddity of birthright. She’d spent more time on Os than anywhere else – spent centuries living on them – but still she couldn’t help but think of planets as normal and Orbitals as somehow aberrant, for all that the artificial worlds far outnumbered the number of naturally inhabitable ones.

  In the end it was kind of unarguable that planets were natural and Orbitals were artificial, though she supposed that, when you thought about it, it was really no more natural to live on the outside of a huge, skein-warping sphere of rock, held to its surface – like the atmosphere – by nothing more than gravity than it was to live on the inside of an O, held there by spin, with the atmosphere held down by the same movement and stopped from spilling off the edges by retainment walls of diamond film and fate knew what exoticism of material and field.

  She drifted in and out of her snooze, and, while still dozily waking up, asked her ancient pen terminal whether anybody had ever built a planet, or discovered a natural Orbital. Yes to the former, though rarely, and not for aeons. A straight no to the latter.

  “There you are,” she told Yoawin as she got her to stand and busied herself re-setting the animal’s bridle. “Planets not guaranteed totally natural after all.”

  The aphore snorted.

  That night, at the start of the hills – maybe a kilometre in and a hundred metres up, by a dry water bowl – Tefwe slept under the stars and the bright, lit band of the Orbital’s far side.

  That was the really unnatural sign of an O, she supposed. You might not notice the inside-out curvature at any time, or come to an access tube that would let you drop the hundred metres or whatever to the world’s space-exposed under-surface, or see the sea or the clouds held ruler-straight against an edge wall, but, come the night, there would be the sure and certain sign that you really were pinned by your rotating frame of reference to the inside of a bracelet ten million klicks across: the far side, shining in its daytime while the side you were on had its back turned to whatever sun the whole O circled.

  Well, unless the clouds on your side of the Orbital were really thick, she supposed, and fell asleep.

  Come the morning they left in the grey pre-dawn, despite Yoawin’s protests. “Don’t you spit at me, you addled stumble-hoof,” Tefwe said, and spat back at it. “There. See how you like it.” She wiped her face while Yoawin shook hers. “There. Now, sorry. Both of us sorry, yes? No more spitting. Here.” She gave it some dried berries.

  A series of tall cliffs kept them mostly in shade until nearly noon, letting them keep going longer. They ate, drank and dozed under an overhang.

  The track just before the pass was very steep; she got off Yoawin and led the animal up the zigzagging path. Dry stones rattled under her boots and the aphore’s hooves. At a corner in the trail near the top, one fall of initially just a dozen or so stones set off a small landslide further down. The fractious, rattling, rumbling sound of it echoed off the cliffs and slopes all around like dry thunder. Tefwe watched the dusty mass descend, to see if it would sweep away any part of the track, but it didn’t, and the tumbling mass of stones and boulders slowed and slumped to a dusty stop on the shallowing slope some way above the valley floor.

  From the pass, the plateau was only fifty metres below her, ringed by sharp peaks and ragged cliffs. Its surface was bright with salt lakes and thin wind-corralled whorls of pale sand. Yoawin panted. Tefwe patted the animal’s snout and looked around as the hot wind swept her hair back from her face. She smiled, and felt the dried skin on her lips protest at the motion.

  A couple of kilometres away, shimmering in the heated air, she could see the rocky outcrop where the drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie would be working on its sandstreams.

  Tefwe reached up to where the flower she’d picked the day before had been, tucked into a coil of her hair, at least until this morning, thinking to leave it here at the pass. But her fingers closed round nothing; it had gone, already fallen.

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  oGCU Beats Working

  You appear to covet the behaviour of our superlifter siblings, and have become a sort of serial tug. Were you getting bored?

  ∞

  A little. I also thought that – given the Ronte had been due to arrive at Zyse in particular significantly after the Enfolding – helping them to get to Zyse swiftly might help preclude the Liseiden, faced with an empty home system devoid of both those it had belonged to and those it had been allocated to, being tempted to ignore the decision in favour of the Ronte by resorting to illegal pillaging. I simply wanted to remove that temptation by making sure the Ronte were in position at the time of the Instigation, thus ensuring a smooth handover.

  ∞

  Thoughtful. However it does rather make it look as though we favour one over the other.

  ∞

  I appreciate that, however all we are doing is favouring the rightful over those who might, wrongly, feel aggrieved and who, were this action not taken, have the means and the opportunity to act upon that feeling, with potentially disastrous results.

  ∞

  Noble motivations, I’m sure. May I ask you to run any ideas for future innovations of a similar nature past the rest of us before carrying them out? Would you do that?

  ∞

  I would.

  Fifteen

  (S -13)

  “This is a closed system, of course,” the blindfolded man said, feeling his way to the seat and then turning it, holding it angled away from the ancient-looking console and screen so that the septame could sit in it. Banstegeyn held the back of the seat but did not sit. The blindfolded man – by his uniform, a captain in the Home Regiment – talked to him as though he could see him. “It is unconnected to any other, and so its contents are unavailable elsewhere. I understand other such hermetic arrangements hold certain records it is as well are not readily accessible; however this one merely catalogues various pieces of equipment which are regarded as being best kept secret from the general mass of people, and indeed even the general mass of armed forces personnel.”

  “I see,” said Banstegeyn, studying the captain’s face. The man’s eyes were concealed behind a thick metal strap cushioned with dark foam. According to Marshal Chekwri, who had personally driven him here to this anonymous if well-guarded warehouse on the capital’s outskirts, this was perfectly normal and did not constitute some special arrangement made just for him.

  When they’d first arrived and been introduced to the blindfolded captain, the marshal had produced a vicious-looking fighting knife and flicked it fast and straight at the captain’s blindfolded face, eliciting, it seemed at first, not the slightest response. Though then the captain had smiled and said, “Ah, I felt the wind of that; were you really testing me, ma’am?”

  Chekwri had just smiled her thin, humourless smile.

  She’d stayed in an outer office as Banstegeyn had been led into
the barely lit inner office, through a double set of thick doors.

  “So,” Banstegeyn said, still not sitting. “Do you know who I am, Captain?”

  “No, sir. You must be above a certain rank to be here – exactly which depends on the service and regiment – but I don’t know who you are. Your voice sounds vaguely familiar but I wouldn’t be able to place it.” He smiled, and his head tipped back a little so that now he seemed to be addressing a point somewhere above the other man’s head. “For somebody who spends a large part of his working day as a blind man, I am remarkably bad with voices, sir.” He shrugged. “It is a blessing in some ways.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Please, sir; sit.”

  “Thank you.” Banstegeyn sat down. The captain went through the controls for the system. They were simple enough.

  “Any item below a certain size, such as would fit into this drawer …” the fellow pulled out a very long and heavy-seeming drawer in the console “… will be delivered into it. Larger items will be delivered into the pull-out hopper behind you, sir.” He nodded at a section of the wall where there was a rectangular outline nearly two metres long with a substantial double handle.

  “The screen should tell you how long it’ll take to physically retrieve any item, sir, should you find one that meets your requirements, but please do be aware it could take some minutes; up to ten in some instances, and certain items require some assembly and … well, loading, frankly. A little patience may be required, sir, and possibly a little familiarity with whatever item is to be called for. I’ll leave it to your own good judgement and that of the officer who accompanied you here whether any selected item is suitable.” The blindfolded captain sighed regretfully. “I trust you’ve already been so informed, sir, but I’m duty-bound to inform you that any and all responsibility for the use of any items found herein rests entirely with your good self, sir, and once an item leaves these premises it becomes fully your property, to the extent that all record of it even having been stored here will be irrevocably wiped and deleted from the database held herein.”