“I understand,” Banstegeyn said. “Do I have to sign anything, or speak a form of words?”
The captain’s smile was broad, tolerant. “Oh, absolutely not, sir. Officially you aren’t even here.”
“I see. Well, thank you. Sorry to put you to so much trouble.”
“Not at all, sir. There’s been very little demand lately; it’s been terribly slow. Nice to have somebody requiring our services again. I’ll leave you now, sir; press the blue button on the left of the console if you need any help.”
Banstegeyn waited until the heavy doors had fully closed behind the captain before turning back to the screen. He took in a breath to tell it to wake up, then felt foolish. Of course; entirely manual, without the least semblance of voice-recognition, let alone even crude AI. He found the On button, thumbed it.
A simple in-holo screen, with a keyboard, or a stylus and writing tablet, if so desired.
He sighed. This might take some time.
T. C. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, MW 1211 – The Hydrogen Sonata – started with a single sustained note, right at the top of the range of the instrument which had had to be invented to play it properly, the bodily acoustic Antagonistic Undecagonstring for four hands. That single note was then joined by a faint, uncertain chord of slowly shifting harmonics, which was another way of saying that it started to sound out of tune after it got more than one note in. Fans and detractors alike agreed that this was a remarkable achievement, and also that the work as a whole was something of an acquired taste.
The single high note at the start of the work was meant to signify a solitary proton, specifically a hydrogen nucleus, while the following wavering pseudo-chord was supposed to embody the concept of a sole electron’s probability cloud, so that together the first note and the first chord represented the element hydrogen.
Vilabier was thought to have been joking when he had claimed that the work was itself merely the first note in a vast and incrementally more complicated cycle that would grow to encompass the entirety of the periodic table.
Regardless; after this simple beginning the work became furiously complicated and – initially at least, until playing techniques and prosthetic technology had sufficiently improved – almost unplayable. Initially, in this case, meant for several centuries. Many held that whether it was unplayable or not didn’t particularly matter; what did was that it was completely unlistenable.
But that was, arguably, to take a somewhat doctrinaire attitude to what the word “listenable” meant.
“I like it,” the ship said, through Berdle.
“Really?” Cossont said, standing and shaking herself, loosening all the over-tensed muscles that tended to result when one played the elevenstring with any gusto. She’d only tackled the first movement, and then purely because the ship had asked her to, and because she was feeling guilty about not having played the instrument for days. The ship had altered the acoustics of the big central lounge area of the module to make it sound sweeter. They were a day out from their destination, the cloud of Centralised Dataversities and associated other habitats, institutions and auxiliary resources in the Ospin system.
“Yes,” Pyan said, “really?”
Pyan had been perfectly indifferent to the Hydrogen Sonata – as it was to all music – until it had realised that most people hated the piece, when it had decided to join in the chorus of disdain.
“I can see what it’s trying to do, and it has a mathematical elegance to it that I appreciate,” Berdle said. “Also, I’ve invented a form of musical notation that I think enhances its appreciation in the abstract, as a visual and intellectual internalised experience, without one actually having to listen to it.”
Cossont nodded. “I can certainly see the point of that.” She stopped, frowned. “You’ve invented a …?” She shook her head. “No, never mind.”
“I agree with Mr Berdle,” Eglyle Parinherm said. “However, I do detect a degree of discordant tonality.”
The android had been activated hours earlier, waking instantaneously on the bed platform where he’d been stored. He’d stared straight up and, in a deep, controlled voice said, “Unit Y988, Parinherm, Eglyle, systems checked, all enabled. Sim status ready, engaged, chron scale subjective one-to-one.”
“Hmm,” Berdle had said. It had tried turning the android off and on again a few times since, but to no avail.
Cossont flexed her fingers, stowed the instrument’s two bows in its case. “Discordant tonality about covers it,” she said.
“While you were playing,” Berdle said, “I found some screen of your mother.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Shall I …?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
Two days after they’d left the Izenion system, Cossont had suddenly realised she ought to let her mother know she was okay. She’d asked the ship to get a message to Warib telling her that she was alive and well but couldn’t communicate directly.
“But I could arrange a direct communication quite easily,” the ship had told her.
“Could you really?” she’d said, eyes wide. “Anyway, as I was saying: alive and well but not able to communicate directly … um, don’t tell anybody I’ve been in touch, obviously, ah … hope you’re well … should see you before the Instigation.” She’d smiled at the very handsome Gzilt male that the avatar had become. “And tell her I’ve met an extremely good-looking and very powerful man, if you like. That’ll keep her happy.”
“Any customary sign-off?” Berdle had asked.
“Well, hers to me is usually, ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that!’ followed by the screen going blank, and mine is usually, ‘Um, you take care,’ because it sounds, well, caring, without necessitating the use of the word ‘love’.”
“Hmm,” the avatar had said. “Also, it’s a little un-personalised. As it stands, anybody could be sending her this, and she might suspect she is being lied to by a third party.”
Cossont had sighed. “I suppose. Well … tell her Pyan says hi, and … I’m keeping my natural hair colour.”
And now the ship had found some screen of Warib.
“This is from yesterday afternoon, on one of the channels on the cruise sea ship your mother inhabits,” Berdle told her, as a screen appeared in mid-air, level with where Cossont stood. She threw herself down into a chair. The virtual screen dipped, following her. Pyan flapped and flopped over to arrange itself on the lounger next to Cossont. Even Parinherm leaned over to get a better view. Cossont thought of requesting some privacy, then decided she didn’t care.
The screen came to life with a roaming shot of her mother’s apartment on the sea ship and a female voice-over saying, “We spoke to Madame Warib Cossont, of deck twenty-five, who believes her daughter may have been swept up in the current emergency and now, having just heard from her, fears for her well-being and even life.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Vyr shouted. She looked at Berdle. “You did put in the bit about her not telling anybody I’d been in touch?”
“Of course,” Berdle said. He frowned. “I thought I’d been entirely unambiguous. Even forceful.”
Cossont just shook her head, looked back at the screen. There was an abrupt cut to a head-and-shoulders shot of Warib, sitting in her largest white couch with the sea and clouds behind. Small glowing figures in the top right corner of the screen read S -13, reminding any especially absent-minded viewers how many days were left to the Subliming. Warib was dressed in a blouse suit Vyr didn’t recognise. It was a bit frilly and showy. “Madame Cossont,” the voice continued, slightly altered in timbre and ambience now, “you recently heard from your daughter, didn’t you?”
“Or somebody claiming to be her, yes. It’s not like her to be so poor getting back to me, it really isn’t. We’ve always been very close and kept in touch all the time and then she just seemed to disappear from the face of the planet, and apparently her bed hasn’t been even slept in for days –
many, I mean several days – and then, of course, she is in the Fourteenth, the regiment the Fourteenth, and she was always very active in the Reserve, very respected, and of course there’s been this terrible, terrible—”
“Madame—” the voice of the unseen interviewer said.
Berdle looked at Vyr; she had one of her upper hands cupped over her nose and eyes, the other three hands all clasped tightly across her chest.
“—terrible explosion on this planet and for all I know – well, I thought, I assumed the worst, naturally, as any mother would. I wondered, ‘Could she have been there, was that where she went? Did she know something?’ as soon as I heard about, about the thing, but then there was nothing, just nothing—”
“Madame Cossont—”
“I’m sorry. I am just rattling on, aren’t I? I do care, I worry so much about her …” She looked away to one side, put her hand to her mouth and balled it there, her lips tightening, her eyes blinking quickly. Her lower lip started to tremble.
“I can’t watch any more of this,” Vyr announced. “Turn it off. Please. What’s the upshot?”
The screen disappeared.
“Oh!” Pyan said. “I was enjoying that!”
“Your mother relates,” Berdle said, “that she received the text message you sent via myself and says she thinks you’re ‘mixed up in something’.”
“Well,” Cossont sighed, “she got that right, if nothing else.”
“She says that she doubts it really was from you and describes you as, I quote: ‘wittering about her hair, when that’s never been something she’s ever even cared about, I mean I’ve done my best, I always have, but anyway, it did strike me as highly suspicious’. End quote.”
Vyr put both upper hands over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. That was supposed to … last time we … she said … oh, never mind.” She took a deep breath, looked up. “Nothing about how my claiming to have met an extremely good-looking and very powerful man was even less likely to be true?”
“I didn’t include that,” Berdle confessed. “You left it to my discretion and I thought it best to leave it out.”
“Probably just as well. She’d have assumed it was code for I’ve been kidnapped.”
Parinherm looked suddenly alert and glanced around quickly. “You haven’t been kidnapped, have you?” he said, and seemed to be tensed to leap up from where he sat.
“Excuse me,” Berdle said, and the android went limp, relaxing as though deflated and settling back into the lounger.
“That is going to get tiresome,” Cossont said, frowning at the unconscious android. “Can’t you just re-program it or something?” she asked Berdle.
“Not so easily,” the avatar said. “It has highly recursive, deeply embedded, multiple-level physical source coding check-sets worked down to the atomechanical level as well as a radically tenacious prescribed assume-simulation default with closely associated deacativatory protocols. It’s a real tangle. Probably meant to be a safety feature.”
“Certainly not a comprehensibility feature.”
Berdle smiled. “I beg your pardon. I mean it’s hard to re-program it without disabling it, potentially.” The avatar shrugged. “There will be a work-around recorded somewhere obscure, probably; I’ll keep looking. Plus I’ll just continue to think about it.”
“What about the ship that’s following us?”
“I don’t see any need to test its top speed by trying to outpace it; better to keep that edge, assuming it exists. I’ve run a lot of sims for a fly-through of the Ospin system and an insertion into various of the dataversities and I’m confident this can be done with minimal chance of the following ship spotting where you’re inserted, unless it’s a particularly remote unit.” Berdle paused. “We can leave this another hour or two, but, given that you have effectively raised the subject, it would be helpful to know which of the dataversities or other objects we might be targeting.”
Cossont nodded. “It’s the Bokri microrbital; the Incast facility.”
“Thank you,” Berdle said, then smiled. “That shouldn’t be a problem. It’s in a relatively densely packed volume of the cloud. Plenty of cover.” It looked at Cossont. “Would anybody – your mother, for example – know that you took the mind-state device to the Incast order on Bokri?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t tell anybody.” She sighed. “I put it in my private journal and General Reikl knew about that, but I suppose that all got destroyed when the Reg HQ was blown up.”
“Probably,” Berdle agreed.
Cossont sighed. “If this all goes horribly wrong, you’ll have to contact my mother to tell her you’ve lost her little girl.”
“If this all goes horribly wrong,” the ship told her, “I too might be lost.”
“Well, you’ve heard what she’s like; death might be preferable.”
“That,” Pyan said primly, “is no way to talk about your mother.”
Cossont looked at Berdle and said reasonably, “That, I think you’ll find, is the only way to talk about my mother.”
“These things accrete.”
“Most things accrete that don’t gradually crumble, rust or evaporate.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest there was any merit in the process.”
“Indeed. Nor in its opposite.”
“I’m glad we have finally found something to agree on.”
“I’m not.”
“I think you make a virtue of contrariness, or think to.”
“You might be dismayed to know just how little what you think matters to me, Scoaliera.”
“I doubt it. My expectations could hardly be lower. Also, I’m encouraged by your relative approachability and good humour on this occasion.”
“I do believe my sarcasm-meter just twitched.”
“A false positive, I fear. I was being entirely sincere.”
“You say? Have I been imagining that I was the very exemplar of hearty, helpful bonhomie on our last meeting?”
“Possibly.”
“Hmm.”
The drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie was the size and shape of a large grey suitcase. A rather battered and dusty large grey suitcase. Its scraped, slightly dented casing glinted in the sunlight where it had been polished by the sand in the wind, or had been scraped against stones. If it was showing an aura field, it was being washed out by the brilliant sunlight. But probably it wasn’t; it never had in the past, not as long as Tefwe had known it.
“Anyway, I am not persuaded that memories do only accrete,” the drone told the woman. “Even without the intrinsic limitations of a conventional biological brain, what one forgets can be as important and as formative as what one remembers.”
Hassipura had made its home in a tall, jagged outcrop of dark rocks that stuck out above the white waste of the salt desert like a diseased tooth. Through the machine’s efforts over the centuries, the place had become a dry little paradise of directed cause and effect, an oasis of minutely ordered motion and an arid image of a water garden.
“I thought drones, like Minds, remembered everything,” Tefwe said.
“Well, we don’t.” There was a pause before it said, “Well, I don’t.”
Tefwe and the drone were at the foot of the outcrop, just a vertical metre and a few shattered-looking boulders away from the surface of the desert. Tefwe was standing and Hassipura was hovering level with the woman’s head, performing some maintenance on a fragile-looking raising screw. The raising screw was powered by the fierce sunlight falling on a small semi-circular array of solar panels part-encasing its lower quarter.
“I see,” the woman said. “Do you choose what to forget, or do you just let things disappear randomly?”
“Scoaliera,” the drone said, “if I chose what to forget, I would very likely have forgotten all about you.”
The screw, one of a dozen or so at this lowest level of the rocks, was a couple of metres tall, and thin enough for Tefwe’s fingers to have met, had she grasped it one-handed. Th
e foot of the device lay in a pool of sand about a metre across; the slowly rotating screw twisted lazily in the dark-gold grains, raising them inside a transparent collar with a hypnotic steadiness to deposit the lifted material, a minute or so later, into another pool on a higher tier of the outcrop, where a second level of raising screws and sand-wheels like pieces of giant clockwork would transport the material further up, and so on, for level after level and diminishing tier after diminishing tier until a single last raising screw, buried in a tunnel inside the dusty peak of the tor, deposited a small trickle of sand to an overflowing pool at its very summit.
“That is ungallant, and, I suspect, also not true.”
“Let us test that, shall we, should you ever come to visit me again?”
“I don’t believe you delete memories at random.”
“They are chosen at random and buffer-binned; whether they are finally deleted is a matter of choice.”
“Ah. Might have thought so.”
The drone had subtly sculpted the outcrop over the decades and centuries it had lived here, cutting channels, pools, cisterns, tunnels and reservoirs into the rock, building structures that at least resembled aqueducts and creating, had the whole complex been filled with water, what would have been a kind of secret water garden, albeit with rather steeply inclined canals and aqueducts.
But the outcrop held no water at all. Instead it was sand that moved within the tunnels and channels, sand which was lifted within the raising wheels and screws, and sand which fell in little whispering falls and moved liquidly down dry weirs.
“Whatever makes you think I’d wish to visit you again after being so roundly insulted?”
“That fact that I have insulted you just as roundly in the past to so little effect,” the drone said smoothly, “for here you are. Again.”
“You’re right. I ought to come back just to annoy you,” Tefwe said, squatting. She dipped her hand into the shaded pool where the rod of the raising screw slanted into the tawny grains. She let the sand fall back between her fingers; it slipped away almost as quickly as water would have. “It moves very smoothly,” she said, inspecting her hand. A few tiny grains adhered to her skin, all in the lines of her palm.
The Hydrogen Sonata Page 30