The Hydrogen Sonata Read online

  She’d risen, done a little practice – it had been unsatisfactory, thanks to a deep background hum the ship was making which interfered with some of the internal resonating strings – and thought she’d have time to breakfast with the crew and maybe try to get more out of Etalde regarding what was going on, even if it was just gossip, when they’d arrived, and Etalde was there at her cabin door offering to carry the elevenstring to the cruiser’s hangar and the waiting pinnace.

  “No food?” Pyan yelped. She’d just let it fasten itself round her neck. It tended to nibble at whatever Cossont ate and breakfast was its favourite meal.

  Etalde frowned at the creature. “That thing is security-cleared, isn’t it?”

  “Sadly,” Cossont said. “We’re there?” she asked. “Already?” She stared at Etalde’s plump, gleaming face. “Sir?” she added. She hadn’t even had time to be issued with a proper uniform; all she had was her civilian trews and frankly inappropriate jacket. Luckily the avatar, when worn as a cape usually, covered the more garishly offensive parts of the logo.

  “Yes,” the commissar-colonel said. “Ship kind of pushed it. All a bit rushed. You fit to go?”

  “No food?” Pyan said again, plaintively.

  “No food,” she confirmed, turning and letting Etalde pick up the elevenstring’s black case while she grabbed her jacket and folded it inwards.

  “No food,” the familiar said quietly, as though to itself. “Cripes.”

  “This is Marshal Boyuter, Commander in Chief. I’m General Reikl, marshal elect; this is General Gazan’tyo.” The two men and one woman – Reikl, who’d been speaking – smiled at her. She nodded. “Please,” Reikl said. “Sit.”

  The room was small, functional, mostly filled with a square table and four seats. It felt like it was deep within the hurtling asteroid. There was no screen, holo display or obvious processing presence at all.

  Cossont sat. She wore Etalde’s jacket over her shoulders; he’d been left in an antechamber several thick, closed doors back. He had charge of her jacket, the familiar and the elevenstring, all guarded by two troopers in full armour and a pair of combat arbites like frozen explosions of mercury and knife-blades. Cossont’s earbud, receiving and transmitting only on the asteroid’s own channels since she’d come aboard, had shut itself off entirely. She’d been asked to hand it over all the same and so had left that behind too.

  “Are you well, Lieutenant Commander?” Reikl asked her.

  “Thank you, yes, ma’am.”

  “Sorry we couldn’t find you a uniform jacket with the requisite number of arms,” Reikl said, smiling again. “I imagine one is being prepared as we speak.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Cossont sat with her upper hands clasped on the table, the other pair hanging down; it disturbed people less that way, were they of a disturbable nature.

  “Now,” Reikl said. “To business. None of this is being recorded, minuted or monitored elsewhere—”

  “Far as we know,” Marshal Boyuter said, smiling first at her, then Reikl, who nodded impatiently.

  “As far as we know,” she agreed.

  The marshal was thin, grey-looking, his pale face part-covered with a colourful tattoo that looked both fresh and unfinished. Cossont had the feeling she was looking at a life-task, still incomplete. She’d been out of the services for nearly twenty years and even now didn’t feel terribly military, despite being told her commission had been reactivated, but it was still slightly shocking to see somebody so senior exhibiting something so non-regulation as a facial tattoo. Oh well. As people were continually pointing out – strange times.

  The marshal sat relaxed in his seat, almost slumped, playing continually with what looked like some sort of multi-tool and rarely looking directly at her after an initial, staring inspection when she’d first entered the room. He’d frowned at her twin sets of arms. General Gazan’tyo was rotund, ever-smiling and seemed to communicate solely by nods. He had a variety of small time-tos scattered about the chest of his uniform jacket, as though he didn’t entirely trust any of them and was looking for a consensus. If she hadn’t known – well, assumed – better, Cossont might have thought both men were on drugs.

  Reikl was different: thin and bright-eyed, she sat upright and looked sharp, tense, almost predatory. “What you are going to hear has until now been restricted to the three of us in this cabin,” she told Cossont.

  “And whoever it was originally meant for,” the marshal added quietly, staring at the multi-tool. He let it go and it floated into the air a little, making a low whirring noise.

  Reikl looked pained for an instant, then said, “This was information we came by … indirectly.” She glanced at the marshal as though expecting another interruption but he was reaching out to the little multi-tool, clicking it off. It fell into his other hand, poised beneath.

  “There has been a communication from our erstwhile benefactors the Zihdren,” General Reikl said, smiling thinly at Cossont. “It’s in the nature of these pre-Subliming times, apparently, to do this kind of thing: to make one’s peace where there might have been discord, answer puzzling questions and generally settle accounts with those about to make the transition.”

  “Old scores,” the marshal muttered.

  “The communication was due to be delivered immediately before the Instigation. However, it came to light before it was supposed to,” Reikl said.

  “Intercepted!” General Gazan’tyo said suddenly, still smiling his broad smile.

  “Intercepted,” Reikl agreed. “By another regiment, on behalf, we believe, of our political betters.”

  The marshal dropped the multi-tool onto the desk, scooped it up again. Reikl didn’t even glance; she kept Cossont fixed with her gaze. “You’re a musician, Ms Cossont, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, wondering why her rank had been dispensed with.

  “Tell me about your time on …” The general gave a small smile. “You’ll have to forgive me.” She took out a notebook of real paper from a uniform pocket, consulted it. Again, it was very strange to see somebody, especially somebody of such seniority, not having names and other information immediately to hand, transmitted by earbud or implant straight into their head. A notebook! Cossont thought. Could the local processing have broken down so much in the lead-up to Subliming that even the regimental high command refused to rely on it? That seemed absurd. “The Anything Legal Considered, I believe is the name?” Reikl said, leaving the notebook open on the table.

  “Ah, that,” Cossont said. She’d sort of always known there was a chance what happened during her student exchange years would come back and bite her.

  “Yes, that,” the general said. “Everything, please. And not in your own time; we’re in a hurry here.” She didn’t look at either of the males in the room but Cossont got the impression the general would have liked to.

  “I was on an exchange programme, on a Culture ship; a GCU called the Anything Legal Considered—”

  “I have it as an LCU,” the general interrupted.

  “Sorry, yes,” Cossont said, flustered. “It was. Anyway, I was playing the volupt, that is, I’d passed my … Doesn’t matter. Anyway,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I’d talked to the ship about the, another instrument called the eleven … the Antagonistic Undecagonstring, and—”

  “‘Antagonistic’?” Reikl said.

  “Um, just means that applying manual tension to one set of strings applies it to others as well,” Cossont said. “Or decreases it, depending.” Reikl gave a curt nod. Cossont went on: “I told the ship how I planned to try it some day if I could get my hands on a good example, and it looked it up and, ah, well, long story short: it built one for me. Presented it to me as a surprise on my birthday. I started playing it, with the ship’s help; it had made a sort of twin-arm prosthetic which … anyway,” Cossont said, feeling herself shrinking under the general’s gaze, “I became very interested in the instrument, the ship knew this and – this was near t
he end of the exchange; it was a two-year, ah exchange – it asked if I wanted to meet somebody who claimed to have met Vilabier. The Younger; T. C. Vilabier; he composed the piece that … it’s the most famous piece written for the elevenstring. The first … the piece that caused it to be designed and made at all, although there are many oth—”

  “If I can just hurry you along, Lieutenant Commander,” Reikl said. “Who was it you met, and where?”

  “A man called QiRia. That was his real … well, the name he had before he went to this place. It was called Perytch IV, a water world. This man had been swimming, living with the Issialiayans, the inhabitants – something to do with an interest in their, ah, sounds, sonic sense; they’re these huge animals, semi-sentient or proto-sentient or whatever. Rich sonic culture. Anyway, he’d been one of them for, well, decades and he was coming back, going through something called … Processal Reconnecting?”

  The general glanced at her notebook, turned a page, nodded curtly. Cossont felt relief at getting something right.

  “So, the ALC had turned—”

  “The what?” Reikl interrupted, then shook her head quickly. “No; got it. Ship. Carry on.”

  “The ship turned up at Perytch IV, I went down to this giant raft, met with QiRia – he was in human form by now, put back into his old body, though he was still kind of strange and vague a lot of the time. Oh, and there was another ship avatar there, from a Culture ship called the … Warm, Considering. I think. Pretty sure that was it. Felt like it was his … his mentor or protector or something. It seemed to take this claim of his about being incredibly old seriously too. I just thought, well, I just assumed this was all some sort of elaborate joke – Culture ships do this kind of thing … but I met him and we talked; just an hour at first, then more the next day, and the ship seemed happy to stick around and the old guy didn’t seem to want me to go and he was kind of fascinating, so we talked a lot, over several days. He claimed he’d spent … dozens of lifetimes as various other types of creature over the years, and often with some sort of sound or music-based thing going on, and he really did claim that he’d known Vilabier.” Cossont found herself laughing, just once. Reikl didn’t look amused but didn’t tell her to shut up either. “Back when he’d been human the first time, if …”

  “T. C. Vilabier?” Reikl said, glancing at her notes. “The composer who died nine thousand, eight hundred and thirty-four years ago?”

  “Yes!” Cossont said, waving her upper arms briefly. Etalde’s jacket slid off her shoulders; she caught it with her lower arms, replaced it. Marshal Boyuter regarded this action with what looked like consternation. “So I thought he was crazy,” Cossont continued, glancing at the two men but concentrating on Reikl. “At first. By the time I left, five, six days later, I believed him. He didn’t seem bothered either way; maintained that what he was telling me was all true but it didn’t matter if I believed him or not.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Mostly stuff about Vilabier himself. How he’d hated—”

  “What else?” Reikl said. “Aside from Vilabier. What else might he have been doing at that time? Round about then – within a century or so.”

  Cossont pressed her lips together. “Ah,” she said, after a moment. “Well, he did say that he’d been …” She shook her head. “He claimed he’d been involved with the negotiations, the conference that set up the Culture.” She shrugged, shook her head again, as though denying any responsibility for such patent nonsense. “He actually claimed … he’d been on one of the negotiating teams.”

  “Which one?”

  “He never would say. I didn’t believe that bit at all, frankly. I thought he was just playing with me. I could believe the whole thing with Vilabier – there were so many details, so much stuff I’d never heard of that sounded right … and also that turned out to be true, though only after I’d done some really deep research … But he was always much more vague about all the stuff concerning the conference and the negotiations, like he hadn’t bothered to do the research to lie properly. I mean, I checked, obviously; went through all the standard data searches, but there was nobody of that name mentioned and it’s all pretty well documented. I didn’t, you know, press him on it after the first time or two; he’d just bring it up again later, now and again, and tease me for obviously not believing him. Actually I was kind of embarrassed for him. The Vilabier stuff was so convincing but the … you know; being in right at the start of the Culture, when we … well, it was just so … so unbelievable.”

  She suspected she knew how Reikl had got to hear about this. Like most people Cossont kept a journal and in the public part of it – the part that was shared by friends and might in theory be accessed by anybody – she had mentioned meeting somebody who claimed to have known Vilabier. She couldn’t remember if she’d mentioned QiRia by name, but she had mentioned the meeting. It had been a sort of boast, she’d supposed, though, at the same time, when she’d made the entry, she had played the episode down, maybe given the impression there had been only one meeting, not a series over several days. Even as she’d dictated the words she’d treated it all as much more of a joke than it had really felt at the time, as though she had stopped believing in it herself.

  It had felt oddly like betrayal, as though she was letting QiRia down somehow, but – in the context of the sort of thing you bandied around with pals, about family, friends, boys, crushes, drink, drugs, pranks and so on – it had seemed too serious in its raw form, too pretentious. So she’d mentioned him only in passing, as an example of the kind of eccentric/crazy you met sometimes when you travelled, especially if you got to go travelling on a Culture ship (serious kudos there – few people got to do that and she knew most of her friends were jealous she’d been chosen, even if it had just been by lottery).

  Reikl said nothing for a moment. Neither did the marshal or the other general, though that felt less noteworthy. Reikl looked down at her notebook on the table in front of her. “What was his first name?” she asked. She looked at Cossont. “You just called him QiRia; there must have been more, no?”

  “Ngaroe,” Cossont told her. “He was called Ngaroe QiRia. Though he was just re-assuming that name; for the time just before – decades, like I say – he’d been …” Cossont looked up and away, grimacing. Right now she was missing her earbud and access to distant data storage. She spread her arms, nearly dislodging the jacket again. “Isserem?” she offered. “That was his … his aquatic name.”

  Reikl nodded again, lifted a small pointer and made some sort of amendment to her notes. It might have been a tick.

  “Intercepted!” General Gazan’tyo said suddenly, again.

  Marshal Boyuter looked at him, openly sneering.

  Reikl put the notebook back in her pocket. She wore a time-to on her chest; a tiny mechanical-looking thing. She glanced at it, stood, looked at the marshal and then General Gazan’tyo. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me and the Lieutenant Commander?”

  The two men exchanged looks, nodded. The marshal made the little tool thing hover again. He seemed to be humming to himself.

  Reikl nodded to Cossont, who stood and followed her out of the room via the same door she’d entered by, though – once the arm-thick door had rotated back into place – she realised she was looking down a short stretch of gleaming circular-section corridor that hadn’t been there before. Another door was rolling aside at the far end as they walked. It closed behind them as they entered an identical length of corridor; its diameter was at least three metres but there was no distinct floor and the slight curvature under her feet made walking surprisingly awkward. It was like walking down a smooth-bore gun barrel. Cossont guessed that this was a part of the asteroid interior left over from when it had been without its own gravity field.

  When both the doors behind and ahead were closed, General Reikl stopped and turned to Cossont, making her stop too.

  “I apologise for the state of my fellow senior officers,” Reikl told her.
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  “I …” Cossont began, unsure what to say.

  The general looked very earnest. “You seem … quite sober.”

  “Um, thank you, ma’am,” Cossont said, and felt foolish.

  Reikl stared into her eyes for a few moments. “We need to ask you to do something for us, Lieutenant Commander,” she said. “I need to ask you; your regiment. Something that might have a relevance for all the Gzilt.” Reikl took a breath. “You are of course back under military discipline now, though even that might be seen to carry less significance than it ought, these days. But I need to know: are you willing to do what we might ask, what I might ask?” Her gaze flicked from one of Cossont’s eyes to the other, back again.

  “What is it I’m being ask—?”

  “Look for something,” Reikl told her.

  “Look for something?” Cossont frowned. “Ma’am, I wasn’t special forces or anything …” she said. She felt trapped here, with just the two of them in this length of gleaming tube. Reikl was smaller than her, she realised, but seemed to have a compressed power, a sort of density that gave the impression of being overbearing.

  “I know,” Reikl said, waving one hand. “We’re going to give you a combat arbite. Well, technically an android; looks human. For protection.”

  “Protection?” Cossont found herself saying. She was no warrior. She’d been terrible at self-defence and weapon training; she’d stayed on an extra year after her draft period and risen to the dizzy height of Lieutenant Commander on the strength of a sincere interest in military band ceremonial music and an over-enthusiastic Commanding Officer. She hadn’t even been backed-up, had her mind-state read or anything, and that was just the first sign that you were taking the Military Outright seriously as a profession. Now they were talking of teaming her up with some combat arbite, for protection. Protection from whom, from what?

  “Probably unnecessary protection,” the general said dismissively. “But this is of more than passing importance.” She smiled, unconvincingly. “Let me ask you, Ms Cossont: where do you feel your loyalties lie?”