The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  Colonel Agansu thought about this. As ever, he was painfully aware that, even speeded up to the max, he was thinking so terribly slowly compared to the captain, the intelligence officer and the rest of the 7*Uagren’s virtual crew. He was also aware that he would probably have to leave the easeful security of the ship, this vast, potent swaddling all around him, and become a walking-around figure once more; a soldier again. A soldier in a battle-worthy combat suit, so still encased in layers of power and protection, but still, just a soldier, toting a gun, even if the combat arbite was at his side to back him up. In a way the prospect filled him with longing, just at the thought of fulfilling his duty, but in a way it filled him with a dread he could never admit to anyone.

  Eventually he said, “Very well. I agree, Captain. Please commit to that. Let Marshal Chekwri know about Lieutenant Commander Cossont—”

  “We’ve already copied to her,” the captain said.

  “Good,” Agansu said. “I think it obvious that all possible avenues of research and confirmation related to this should be pursued urgently, including somebody trusted, if available, interviewing Madame Warib Cossont.”

  The thing looked like a very delicate, golden version of a lace condom; a jewellised version of something from ancient history made pointless by its openness.

  Orpe stared at it lying there in its luxuriously cushioned case, nestled amongst lip-like folds of purple-stained gold-cloth like something illicit; half obscene, half sumptuously beautiful. She held her hands up near her face, away from the opened case, as though nervous, even as her mouth opened and her large eyes drank in the look of it.

  “Oh, I don’t … It looks so … I’m not sure …”

  “Let’s just try it, shall we?”

  “What does it … do? What is it for?”

  “I wear something similar; very similar. They both sink very slightly into our flesh, half a hair’s breadth. And only we know that they are there. When we make love, when we couple, and they touch, they add to the pleasure. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Can they … are they, might they cause … harm?”

  “No no no. They are for pleasure, purely. They are better than surgically sterile, and have no effect except when paired with their twin, the other half of their matched pair, when they create a more intense ecstasy.” Banstegeyn smiled, ran his fingers down amongst some of the ringlets in her hair, touched her cheek. “There are many similar paths to the same effect, my love, just through drugs, implants, augmentations … but the beauty of these is that they are made for each other, and have no other effect, even if,” he smiled regretfully, “one has other lovers. They can’t be felt, they can barely be seen, even if you look for them, and everything else that would ever normally happen, there, can still happen – people have happily given birth, even, though I understand that is not advised – yet the wearer knows they are there, and the wearer of the other half knows that it’s there. It is about … commitment, you might say, and I would say a kind of tying, a bonding, between us.”

  She looked at him shyly. They were alone in the dark cabin of a quietly purring skiff on a perfumed lake in a private pleasure garden on the outskirts of M’yon, at a party being thrown by a family long grown rich on government contracts. They had both worn masks and plain cloaks, like everybody else at the party. “And is there one for you, then?” she asked.

  He smiled, opened the case further, revealing another level, where a slightly slimmer version of the piece lay, also glittering like a narrow pocket of lace made of liquid gold salted with tiny jewels. “There!” he said, as he smiled and she smiled. “One each.”

  She touched the one that was his, stroking it with one finger. “They are not … permanent, are they? They can be taken … out, off …?”

  “Yes. Most easily, by touching the cloth of the case to any part of them. You may keep the case. I’ll wear mine for ever, I swear.”

  She made a delicate, laugh-like noise through her nose. “How do we … put them …?” she asked.

  He laughed, almost silently. “How do you think. Shall I put mine on, first? Perhaps you might like to do that?”

  “Mmm, perhaps,” she said, smiling, lifting the male piece of the two from its ruched nest. It hung from her fingers, golden in the subdued light, perfectly draped. “How … limp it is,” she said, and pressed herself against him, beginning to undo his clothes. “That will not do, now, will it?”

  “Not at all,” he agreed, and lay back, exhaling, allowingly.

  The tramway led tilted into the sky for a long, long time.

  She’d been put down as close to her destination as the ship had dared, but it had still meant a hike through thick fields of chin-tall bronze-coloured grass to a dusty dirt road and then a longer tramp to a deserted tram stop in the middle of the plain.

  From the platform, while she waited, she looked in the direction of the mountains, but they were too far away. A smudge of orange-white, high in the sky to the east, might have been clouds above the mountains, but the range itself was submerged in the atmospheric haze.

  She was on her way to Ahen’tayawa, a hearkenry on the slopes of Mount Jamanathrus in the Querechui range, Cethyd.

  Another traveller came along the road from the opposite direction in a ramshackle three-wheeled vehicle that bounced over the tracks in a cloud of dust. The single passenger got out, lifted a bag, then the contraption drove itself away again, heading back the way it had come. The traveller stopped suddenly on seeing Tefwe, then bow-nodded, chose a sitting area of the platform at the other end from where Tefwe stood, and folded itself compactly into a resting configuration, the rhombus of its patterned head-part lowered over the complex of creased planes it used as upper limbs.

  The Uwanui were mattiform. Most people, most of the time, would have called them folds, though this term could be insulting, depending on the language the term was expressed in and the species it was being used to describe; they looked like tall, dark, angular, multiply poled tents, complexly folded. Their rhomboid head-parts, patterned with eye bands and ear spots, cut by a slit that was their mouth, looked like oddly tilted flags above the tents of their bodies. Origami creatures; beings of the crease.

  The tram arrived, rattling. It was three carriages long with an open upper deck perched above the middle carriage. She and the dark fold got on.

  The tram was mostly empty. It climbed steadily up a slope of tilted plain, stopping to pick up or drop off a few travellers. Those that saw Tefwe all stopped and stared at her for a few moments, then ignored her. Nobody chose to sit close to her.

  The sound built very slowly; it would have been hard to know when it first started to become distinct from the noises of the rattling, swaying tram and the wind moving over the surrounding fields of tall, bronze-coloured grasses and occasional thick-trunked coppery trees. She became aware of the sound when she realised that she’d been assuming for a while that somebody was humming monotonously just behind her, only there was nobody there.

  “Is that … the sound?” she sub-vocalised to the suit.

  “Yes.”

  The tram clattered to a stop at another station, and now she could hear the sound properly, distinctly; it was a low booming collection of tones like very distant and continuous thunder, all the individual claps rolled together and coming and going on the wind.

  She got up out of the uncomfortably tilted seat and went to the front of the tram’s middle carriage, heading upstairs to get a better view. There were more of the locals here; they parted as though to let her through to the front, but she bowed, gestured, hung back. She could see well enough.

  The mountains rose out of the hazy plain ahead like a dark storm of rock, the higher massifs draped with cloud, the highest peaks capped in orange-white ice and snow.

  The sound swelled and fell away with a sort of tantalising grace, its strength implicitly influenced not just by the light breezes circling round the tram but by mightier winds blowing tens of kilometres away towards the far h
orizon and kilometres further into the sky. The sound, she thought, was like something you might have heard from an enormous choir of basses singing a slow, sonorous hymn in a language you would never understand.

  The tram station in the foothills possessed a sort of modest, ordered busyness to it, full of the dark folds moving about it with their odd, side-to-side, flip-flopping walk. The station connected with a whole fan of cogged funicular lines, winding up into the mountains like something being unravelled. The sound here was a little louder, still coming and going on the wind.

  The line she took rose curving away along the side of one mountain, traversed a tall viaduct to the flank of another, went squeaking and squealing through a long tunnel, then ended up at another small station where three cable-car lines terminated. A signpost told her which to take. The sound was a little louder, here; loud enough so that sometimes on the swirling winds you thought you heard a single note or collection of notes and then heard the same again, echoed from some distant cliff.

  The funicular car had had less room than the tram, and the cable-car gondola had even less room than that; the locals almost had to touch her. Part of her briefing download had been a rough understanding of their language. Mostly, amongst themselves, they expressed surprise that she didn’t seem to smell.

  The cable car rose over a dark valley of shales and scree, then over a tilted plain of tumbled rocks interspersed with low, scrubby bushes. Finally the gondola parked in a bare, echoing shed, and disgorged. They were high now, and it was cold. The sound was very loud, and rich; she felt she was starting to feel it in her lungs.

  She hung back to let everybody else go ahead of her, then tramped up a well-worn path through a field of higher-than-head-high boulders, all smooth and round. Stepping stones took her across an icy patch of marsh to a sort of absurdly steep stairway built into a twenty-metre cliff of naked rock. It was so steep it was nearly a ladder. She used the ropes on either side and climbed, following a lumbering local with a giant woven basket on its back; it heaved itself up, corner feet fitting into the creased steps, its elongated prehensile side-corners curling round the thick ropes like hands. It achieved the cliff crest with obvious effort, hauling itself over a low wall.

  Tefwe followed, clambering further up and then over into the wave-wash of vast, bone-battering sound. She felt her ears closing up, reducing the immediate impact of the colossal noise, but she could still feel it through her head, through her teeth.

  She stood in the side-on evening light, looking slightly downhill to the hearkenry.

  The Ahen’tayawa hearkenry on the slopes of Mount Jamanathrus was a collection of modest, low buildings scattered across the stony ground to the rear of the open-fronted cells that formed a long curve facing the mountain itself, which rose – steep, sheet-smooth – from the high plain ahead, its summit obscured by broad rivers of orange-white cloud.

  The sky-filling, soul-battering, ear-splitting sound came from the Timbrelith Caverns: tens of thousands of enormous tunnels bored into and through the tops and flanks of this part of the Querechui Mountains millennia ago by long-departed aliens many centuries before the Uwanui had colonised this part of their world. As was so often the case with enigmatic alien artefacts, the general assumption was that the work must constitute Art.

  The Sound was the result of Cethyd’s prevailing Belt Winds coming thundering through and across those colossal pipes, creating a noise like an orchestra of hundreds of gigantic organs all playing a changing selection of most of their available notes at the same time, with all their stops pulled out. It varied according to the strength and direction of the various winds, how the gusts curled and twisted around the peaks, and whether the local jet-stream was scouring across the peaks of the mountains as well; when that happened – fortunately only every few years – the Sound could reach pitches and strengths that could deafen people kilometres away and bring down buildings in the surrounding hearkenries.

  Ahead of Tefwe, the lumbering local with the basket made its slow, painful-looking way down to the only two-storey building, at the centre of the complex. It disappeared under an archway. She followed it. Two folds stood in the centre of the archway, blocking her way and that of the local with the heavy woven basket. One wall of the archway was grubby white, smudged everywhere with grey. The basket-carrier was just finishing writing WATER, GRAINS on the wall, using a thick stub of charcoal. The two folds stepped aside, let it pass, then stood where they had before, blocking the way.

  Tefwe bowed, then picked up the lump of charcoal. It was almost too big to hold one-handed.

  She took a breath – the thin air she breathed vibrated with the Sound, like something made liquid by it – and wrote, in the local language, GREETINGS. MAY I SEE DOCENT LUZUGE?

  One of the folds nodded, turned and walked away. The other stood in the centre of the archway, impassive, as still as though it had been carved from rock.

  Tefwe got to stand there listening to the Sound, wondering if it was magnified in some way by the archway. She thought she could feel it echoing through her feet and legs, thrumming up through her like a never-ending earthquake.

  Eventually two folds appeared; one was smaller and paler than the other, which she guessed was the guard that had gone to fetch this one, who confirmed its identity by taking the charcoal gently from her hand and writing, I AM LUZUGE.

  It handed her back the charcoal. She wrote afresh; GREETINGS. MY NAME IS TEFWE. MAY I SEE NGAROE QIRIA?

  Luzuge motioned one of the other folds to come forward and look at the names she had written, then indicated that it should go. It did, and she was left looking at the two folds, Luzuge and one of the guards, both of whom rested in front of her in their stood-sitting/parked configuration until the first one came back. It touched Luzuge hand-part to hand-part with a sort of rippling motion, then Luzuge nodded to it and it went to the wall. It rubbed out her original greeting and request to see the docent and wrote, FOLLOW.

  She followed it along a dark, cold, gradually curving corridor at the back of the cells. Almost at the end of the corridor, the fold opened a heavy wooden door and gestured her to enter.

  She was in an open cell with a perfect view of Mount Jamanathrus. In front of her was a low wall, about knee-height on her. The cell was bare apart from a small wooden set of drawers in one corner and a crude wooden seat in the middle, on which a man in dark robes sat. The cell was shaped so as to maximise the Sound, the rear wall bowed and the corners only really there at ground level; above the floor, the walls curved in to meet each other, forming arches that met in a sort of shallow dome above.

  The man in the dark robes half turned both body and head towards her. He looked like QiRia, though he appeared smaller, reduced; like something boiled down to its essence. His skin, visible on his face and hands and feet, had gone a dark red-brown, again like something undergoing a reduction in the bottom of a pan. He wore what looked like dark glasses. They had no glass or anything else transparent in them that she could detect; instead they were slatted, like half-open blinds. Tefwe wasn’t sure how to greet him so was leaving the choice to him; he had never been very forthcoming physically, even as a lover. If he approached her they might hug, but it was not something she expected.

  She saw his mouth move but she could hear nothing over the vast, enveloping Sound. It filled the cell like a god bellowing in her ear.

  She shook her head, though he wasn’t really looking at her. He reached to one side, picked up a cord lying on the floor and pulled it. The cell started to go dark as some sort of covering began rolling down over the single open window. The noise reduced a little. Then he got up and went to the side of the window, swinging in a heavy, wooden, two-part shutter. Tefwe did the same at the other side. The cell was almost completely dark now; her eyes were working mostly on infra-red. The Sound was reduced less than the light. It was still there, especially the deepest, most resonant and longest notes, but when QiRia put a thick wooden bolt across between the two shutters to secure
them, she heard the clunk it made. It was, she realised, the first thing she’d heard that wasn’t the Sound in quite a long time. Her ears relaxed a little.

  QiRia had sat down in his crude-looking seat again. She sat by the low wall in front of him, under the shutters. At first she thought he wasn’t going to look at her, seemingly gazing over her head as though still staring out towards the mountain, then he lowered his head.

  “So, Tefwe,” he began, speaking Marain, his voice little more than a croak. He coughed, cleared his throat, started again, voice louder and assured. “So, Tefwe, let me guess. You just happened to be in the neighbourhood.”

  “Hello, Ngaroe. It’s good to see you again. How are you?”

  “I’m well.” He smiled. It was hard for her to read his expression behind the slatted glasses, but she reckoned it was a genuine smile. “You?”

  “Also well, though it’s complicated.” She looked around the bare little cell. “What is it that you do here, Ngaroe?”

  His eyebrows went up a little at this. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked mildly. “I listen.”

  “You listen?”

  “Yes. That’s … that’s all I do. I sit here and … well,” he said, smiling – this was, Tefwe was already thinking, the most smiley and un-prickly she could remember seeing the man – “calling it ‘listening’ doesn’t really do it justice. I sit here and … absorb the Sound. It becomes part of me, I become part of it. It is … magisterial, bliss-making, overwhelming. I am … transported by it, Tefwe. Here, the locals treat it as a religious experience. I don’t, of course, but I’d still claim it is as important to me as it is to them. As … profound.” He gave a small laugh. “You’re lucky, you know. It comes and goes. Right now I am like a sleeper near the shallowest part of a sleep-cycle, so I can come out of the trance of listening and talk to you. I … I almost welcome the break. A week from now, though, and I’d refuse even to talk to anybody, no matter who they might be, how far they’d come or how urgently they needed to see me, and in two weeks I would be so far under I’d be incapable even of acknowledging the presence of one of the helpers come to tell me I had a visitor. That’s when they have to feed me water with a sponge and try to get me to swallow crumbs of cake.” He smiled his beatific smile again. “But you said that ‘it’ – that is, how you are – was complicated. In what way?”