The Hydrogen Sonata

by Iain M. Banks

  “Anomalous pres—” the suit began.

  Then two things happened.

  She was struck – kicked, it felt like – in the back, very hard, though somehow she and the suit managed to stay standing. At the same time something burst brightly, pink and white, off the drawer-front immediately before her, about level with the middle of her chest.

  She was still thinking about turning round, wondering what had happened, when she realised that whatever light had burst against the drawer-front must have come straight through her to get there.

  Smoke drifted up from the exit wound in her chest. She could smell roasted meat over the cold, sharp sensation of the oxygen.

  “—ence detect …” the suit said, as more, individually slightly lighter kicks struck her all over her back and rear. This time she was thrown against the drawers of the chest, and the whole thing nearly tipped over. Then it bounced off the bulkhead behind and she was thrown back again, turning woozily round as she did so – the little trails of smoke made pretty spirals in the relatively still air – before she started to slide downwards. The ruined, ragged back of the suit went stuttering down the set of drawer handles, jolting her as she slumped to the deck.

  A one-armed figure was standing in the doorway looking at her, just lowering his one good arm.

  “Ship … re … establish – blish – lish – ish – shh …” the suit whispered to her, and sighed to quietness. The faint draft of oxygen at her nostrils faded.

  Then the one-armed figure in the doorway lit up brilliantly all down one side, from foot to scalp, and was thrown bodily, hard against the door jamb, pieces flying off it as it rebounded, lit up from the other side now, disintegrating.

  What was left, reduced to something like a too-thin, charred, one-armed skeleton, fell forwards, hitting the deck at about the same time as she did.

  Twenty-three

  (S -0)

  Something.

  Somebody talking to her.

  Asking questions. A question:

  Did she want to keep both sets of arms?

  Of course she wanted to keep both sets of arms. What sort of idiotic, dumb-ass—

  … back to sleep …

  This would all be hurried, extemporised, done much more quickly than the normal guidelines advised, to keep to the schedule.

  She didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t even know where she was, in this darkness. Once or twice she woke up – in this darkness – and wondered who she was.

  But each time she remembered.

  “… it was all a sociological experiment by the Zihdren. A rogue Philosophariat – the Philosophariat Apposital … I think that was their name – they, it – it was all down to one individual in the end – planted everything in the Book of Truth according to some obscure Metalogical hypothesis, to settle an argument between two groups of scholars with opposing theories. Briper Drodj, the Scribe, elab-orated on the basics as everybody pretty much knew, but the essence was always what the Zihdren had put there. Of course this whole approach was later discredited and the Philosophariat Apposital was ‘Dissolved with Moderate Disgrace’ not long after, and this particular experiment – like many similar others – was quietly forgotten. The Zihdren Sublimed a couple of centuries later, decades before the Gzilt even reached space.

  “All this became known to a very few people way back at the start of the process which brought the Culture into existence. Happened following contact by Zihdren-Remnanter. They were, I suppose – so they claimed – conscience-stricken. Well, conscience-charged might be a better way of putting it. The Zihdren had felt bad taking this grubby little secret into the Enfolding so they thought they could have the best of both worlds by Subliming without mentioning it but leaving it to their Remnanters to spill the broth at a later date.

  “There had been rumours about all this before, of course, but no one who counted in Gzilt society, or not enough of them, had ever really thought it mattered all that much until then, when the whole join-this-new-grouping-or-not thing was in the air. And, by the by, it wasn’t even definitely going to be called the Culture at this point; did you know that? A lot of people wanted that we should all call ourselves the Aliens, I remember, but … anyway, the vote went to ‘Culture’. Though, frankly, I didn’t vote for it. Or Aliens, I might add; I abstained.

  “Anyway, we knew – the negotiating teams knew – that there was something the Remnanters had inherited – some dark secret or something – that might have a bearing one way or the other on the whole joining issue, for the Gzilt. Maybe even – the rumours were crazy, some of them – for the others too, as in a veto against the Gzilt joining being used, perhaps, by one or more of the other parties. Which was sort of ticklish enough, but, the thing is, the Remnanters still wanted the thing kept secret afterwards, even after it had been factored into the negotiations.

  “That caused some head-scratching.

  “It was an AI that came up with what looked like the best solution, at which, I recall, we were all quite pleasantly surprised at the time. Huh. That was a sign of the future, if ever there was one. Anyway.

  “So, the solution was that one volunteer representative – who at the same time would have to be approved by the others in his or her team, so it wasn’t as simple as the first volunteer getting the gig … anyway, one of us from each of the relevant civs – should agree to hear this evidence from the Zihdren-Remnanter, vote on it – with a veto – and then forget what it was we’d been asked to vote on.

  “This was all going to be made possible by preparing each of these rep’s brains before they heard the big secret, then – after they had – just, well, wiping that bit of their memories. We were all assured this was all entirely possible, and reliable and not in any way dangerous, and the most we’d forget would be a single day’s worth of memories. So we all agreed.

  “And it all happened, and we all heard the big, bad terrible secret, but obviously it wasn’t that big or bad or terrible, because nobody vetoed the Gzilt joining this new cobbled-together civ – we were calling ourselves mongrels even back then, feeling very edgy and radical. And so the Gzilt were cleared to become part of the Culture … even though in the end they didn’t actually take up the offer and go through with it.

  “So. All well and good, you might think. That’s what we all thought.

  “… Except one member of the negotiating party, a certain Representative Ngaroe QiRia, from the Buhdren Federality – that would be me – later remembered what it was that he’d heard, what he’d been expected to forget, what he thought, like everybody else, he had forgotten.

  “Thing is, I’d always been interested in long-term living, even way back then, and particularly in holding on to memories that might otherwise get forgotten, over-written or whatever. So I’d had some experimental cranial, biochemical brain-chemistry-mangling stuff done, not all of it entirely legal or even medically advisable, but most of it didn’t seem to have worked anyway, frankly, so it never really occurred to me it might interfere with this hear-and-forget thing they’d hit us with during the negotiations.

  “Turned out I remembered all this stuff I’d been meant to forget due to a fix even I didn’t know I had: something the clinicians had added as some sort of experimental after-thought and then either forgot to tell me about – ha! – or decided it might be better to keep quiet about.

  “Anyway, the effects have been ongoing, and have stayed and developed, though they’ve long since been smoothed over and ever-so-carefully incorporated into all the other treatments and amendments and augmentations I’ve had since.

  “At first I wouldn’t Sublime or even be Stored or undergo any sort of transitional state because I was afraid this secret would come out, because I don’t think I understood that though it was a … I don’t know; a faith-shaking secret … that’s just in theory. In practice, people don’t believe for good reasons anyway, they just believe and that’s it, like we don’t love for good reasons, we just love because we need to love.

>   “Later, even knowing this, and knowing that the Gzilt knowing would make little real difference because they would just ignore the knowledge or find another way of not thinking about it, I still just kept on living, not Subliming with any group and not trans-corporating into a group-mind or into a Mind or anything else because it had become a habit, this going on and going on. It had become so much of what made me who I had become, there seemed no point in trying to change it.

  “So I became the man who lived for ever, more or less, because I’d once held a secret I didn’t care about any more.

  “Well, didn’t care about until I heard about the Gzilt Subliming, and, in time, decided that what I knew about them might be dangerous to me. Living for a long time can make you very cautious, cautious to the point of something close to cowardice, frankly … and so, anyway, I got rid of the information, had it excised and put it away from me, even though I put it somewhere in Gzilt space, somewhere pointed; with the Last Party, and Ximenyr, where it seemed to me it belonged.

  “This amused me at the time. It amuses me still.

  “I’d asked Ximenyr to look after what I’d left with him, and keep it – keep them – close. I didn’t tell him what they held, or how important that information might be. I didn’t imagine he would wear them, in full view and plain sight. But then, why not?

  “That amuses me too.”

  Berdle had perished protecting her, attacking the android that had held Colonel Agansu’s personality before it could target Cossont, who had been running along the gantry above. That had let the arbite accompanying Agansu get in a kill-shot on the avatar. The arbite had then been destroyed by the already half-crippled remains of the outer suit they had left behind earlier, operating, as Berdle had said it would, as a drone.

  Ximenyr was dead – he’d been in the tank when it was attacked, helping people confused by the watery maze – but he was being brought back from a Stored version made ten days earlier; he’d always been backed-up.

  Hundreds had died in the airship and beneath it: drowned, crushed, torn apart.

  The ship had killed Agansu itself, using a Displaced sleet of MDAWS nanomissiles, slaved.

  ~Your forces have been routed, despatched, the Culture ship had sent to the Gzilt ship. ~No need for you to hang about here now. I’ll be going myself, shortly. Probably best you don’t try to stop me.

  ~I have a regimental marshal talking to me – slowly, of course – on another channel. She wishes me to engage you in combat.

  ~Yes, but I already have what we came here to look for. Unless you withdraw to the system outskirts and make no sudden moves, I’ll broadcast the results to the whole of Xown, and packet it all up to spread through the whole of Gzilt. Let me go without resistance and there’s still – I’m guessing – a significantly better than even chance that nothing will come of this, and what I now know will remain buried.

  ~So all this, so much death, has been for nothing?

  ~Way it works, sometimes. And my conscience is clear; I didn’t start this. In the end, though, we’re at the place at least one of us wanted to get to. End of run.

  ~Of course, rather than the choice between what you threaten, and our allowing you to escape, we might engage with you on the instant, to prevent you from carrying out either.

  ~I never did tell you my whole name, did I?

  ~You did not. Many have remarked that your name would appear to be part of a longer one, and yet, unusually, even uniquely, nobody has heard the whole of it.

  ~May I tell you it now?

  ~Please do.

  ~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?

  ~Such braggadocio. That smacks of smokescreen, not power.

  ~Take it as you will, chum. But how many Culture ships do you know of that exaggerate their puissance?

  ~None till now. You may be the first.

  ~Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. Who do you think has the real martial provenance here? In a fight, you’d have no choice but to try to destroy me immediately. You’d fail. I’d have a choice of just how humiliatingly to cripple you. This is the truth; depend.

  ~So you say. We might beg—

  ~Enough. I think I know what happened out at Ablate. I owe you no respect. If you are experiencing a craving to die honourably, feel free to try to stop me when I instigate kick-away, in one millisecond from now. Otherwise, stand aside. Also? I retract my suggestion that you ought to depart. The place down here is a wreck. I’m leaving various drone teams and bits of medical gear behind, but I do intend to leave, and the locals could do with some disaster control. Stepping into that breach would be substantially more constructive than placing yourself across the cannon’s mouth. Your choice. Goodbye, one way or the other.

  The Mistake Not … slipped out from under the Real. It left behind a silvery ellipsoid just to the rear of the drained ruin that was the airship Equatorial 353. The silvery ellipsoid shrank to nothing and winked out over the course of several seconds in a gentle, orderly fashion, producing no more than moderate breezes as the air flowed in to replace the volume of the departed ship.

  The ship itself fell beneath the planet, where the world’s gravity distorted the skein of space into a shallow bowl shape.

  Then it turned, twisted, aimed and powered away, unmolested.

  She felt like shit, and great, and hopeless, and euphoric, all at the same time.

  The ship had brought her back to some sort of life.

  Normally, that badly injured, that close to death after such major trauma to every single major organ save her brain, she’d have been left in a therapeutic coma for nine or ten days, and even then the change, the difference between her physical state at the beginning and at the end of that time, would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to people of a past age, taking her from good-as-dead to good-as-ever.

  Instead, because of the Subliming, she had been repaired bit by bit, detail by detail, almost cell by cell, leaving her body a patchwork of pre-existing normality and dazzlingly fresh new bits, so that she felt jangled, vibrating, bruised beyond belief yet with nothing to show for it, perpetually astounded at being suddenly not dead, not seriously injured to the point of near-death …

  She had listened in, from her sickbed in a much smaller but still-well-equipped module, to the debriefing QiRia gave on being reunited with the memories stored in the recovered eyes.

  “You are, perhaps, the only Gzilt who will ever hear this,” the avatar told her.

  The ship had made a new avatar. It looked and talked like Berdle had, before it/he had changed to look more like a Gzilt male, the first time they had set foot on the Girdlecity together.

  “Sure you should be telling me?” she asked, huskily. Even her throat and lower tongue had taken a puncture wound in that last fusillade of fire from the android Agansu.

  “I think you earned it,” the ship told her. It had yet to give its new avatar a name. It wouldn’t use “Berdle” again; it was sort of a tradition, it said, that when you lost an avatar you gave the next one a different name.

  “Huh,” was all she would say.

  Pyan heard the secret about the Book of Truth too – Pyan, now forever wanting to be wrapped, whimpering and cooing annoyingly round her neck, consoling, seemingly genuinely, honestly concerned for her after so nearly losing her – but the ship, at Vyr’s request, made sure that what Pyan heard of this, Pyan forgot again.

  She still hadn’t managed to lose the elevenstring, either. As part of her personal effects, the ship had thoughtfully transferred it to the smaller shuttle craft before slinging the larger one, the one she’d been staying in, alongside the Girdlecity, to distract th
e Churkun.

  It was a relief, albeit a guilty one, that there wasn’t room to play it inside the smaller craft.

  It still took up an awful lot of space.

  xGSV Empiricist

  oLOU Caconym

  oGSV Contents May Differ

  oGCU Displacement Activity

  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?

  Fellows, colleagues, friends … We have our answer. It is much as we expected, though the import of even the most expected news changes when it becomes definite, and fact. The question is: what do we do? What do we say?

  ∞

  xLOU Caconym

  I’d tell them. I’d swamp their airways with it. I’d announce it so it’s the first thing the newly pre-woken hear. But I know we won’t. For what it’s worth, I’m resigned to the decision we’re all about to make, of keeping it quiet.

  ∞

  xGSV Contents May Differ

  The simulations have been exhaustive but inconclusive; the likelihood is that releasing the information would make little difference, but with the outside possibility that there might be chaos, a partial Subliming with a significant part of the Gzilt populace and AIs changing their minds, further dispute between the Scavengers, and possibly even between the non-Subliming part of the Gzilt and the Scavengers. The chance of things turning ugly is small, but not that small, and the ugly might be very big ugly.

  ∞

  xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

  We can’t tell them. Those that would most care already know, or guess. Those that might be most affected are those we have the least right to disturb.

  ∞

  xMSV Pressure Drop

  I can’t agree. The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t.

  ∞