The Hydrogen Sonata Read online

  “… get off while—” the general was saying. “Stut it; few seconds’ gap, let the shut—”

  The figure in the chair sat up suddenly, hinging at the waist. It blinked in the light. “Reporting!” it shouted, then seemed to freeze. The commander and his assistants were tapping feverishly at their screens, reaching into the holo displays, fingers dancing, muttering commands. The figure in the chair jerked, spasmed, turned its head quickly from side to side, then said, calmly, “Fleet alarm program identified.” Its voice was almost drowned out by the racket.

  “Then prep a disloc from the fucking hangar!” Reikl was shouting to somebody unseen. “Parametered for a class T shuttle.” She sucked air through her mouth as she listened. “Well get them out and put them in one; we can throw it further.” Another pause. “Just as far as possible!”

  “Commander,” the figure in the chair said suddenly. Cossont looked back to find it/him staring at the head technician. Then he noticed Cossont. “Commissar-colonel,” he said. She was confused for a moment, then realised she was still wearing Etalde’s jacket. The android swung his legs round and appeared to be about to get off the seat. Then he spotted Reikl and said, “General!” He jumped to the floor. “Parinherm, Eglyle, android entity, in simulation, reporting.” He saluted Reikl, who had her back turned and was still shouting to somebody else.

  “The helmet,” the commander said.

  One of the assistants strode up to the android and went to take the helmet off his head. The figure flicked out both hands and caught the assistant’s wrists; the girl yelped. “Hurting!” she shouted as the android quickly transferred both her wrists to the grip of one hand. The tech commander swore and manipulated something above his screen. The android’s arms went slack, releasing the assistant, who glared at the commander but swept the bulky helmet off the android’s head.

  “On our way,” Reikl said. She pushed past the assistant – she was rubbing her wrists – plucked Etalde’s jacket off Cossont and threw it over the android’s naked shoulders. The android pulled it as tight as he could – it was too small – and appeared to be about to say something when Reikl muttered, “Not promotion,” then took the android by one elbow. He seemed to resist.

  Reikl looked at Gaed and said, “Make this move. Now.”

  The same travel capsule flicked them down one level, the doors barely closing before they seemed to bounce open again and Cossont, Reikl, the android and Tech Commander Gaed – muttering to himself, staring at his hand-held, fingers flicking about inside the holo image – were striding quickly into the crowded hangar amongst sleek missile and dronecraft, bulky transports and chunky-looking weapon platforms.

  “Acknowledged,” Reikl said calmly. Then she started running. “Kick to AI!” she yelled. Cossont ran too. At her side, the android loped, barely jogging while Tech Commander Gaed stumbled behind, making an anguished wailing noise. “Immediate!” Reikl shouted.

  “Upper deck, stern hangar, Regimental HQ, Fzan-Juym, Eshri, Izenion,” the android said conversationally, looking about as he loped across the deck. “General Marshal Elect Reikl, commanding, in sim.”

  “Ma’am!” a male voice shouted. Cossont realised she recognised the voice without immediately knowing whose it was, then saw Etalde leaning out from the rear of a tiny four-man shuttle ten metres away. Reikl turned, ran towards it.

  A small squad of troopers and a pair of combat arbites stood at the open rear ramp. Etalde dived back into the tiny craft, threw himself into a seat and held out one hand to Cossont. She could see the elevenstring’s case strapped into the seat beyond him. I cannot get rid of that damn thing, she found herself thinking as she leapt into the craft, almost banging her head.

  “You briefed?” she heard Reikl demanding.

  “No, ma’am,” somebody replied.

  “Look after her,” Reikl said crisply, nodding at Cossont, then next thing she was in the shuttle with them, bent over, in front of Etalde. Reikl glanced at the elevenstring’s case. “What the—?” she said, then shook her head, hit a large button above Etalde’s seat and grabbed the commissar-colonel by his shirt front. “Sorry,” she said and hauled him – unprotesting but open-mouthed – up and out of his seat. She propelled Etalde out of the rear door, jumped out after him and then pushed the commanding trooper and the android inside, a hand on the back of each, sending both stumbling towards the two empty seats.

  “Cossont!” Reikl said, fixing her with her gaze. “Find your friend. Find out if it’s true. Report to me or the next most senior officer in the regiment.” She turned away. “Ready! Go!” she shouted, beginning to run.

  Cossont felt straps start to secure her into the seat. She looked out at Etalde’s pale, crestfallen face as the troopers and combat arbites sprinted past him. He seemed to realise he was holding something in his hand; an object like a thick necklace. There was one round his neck too.

  He threw it in towards her just as the rear door started to rise. She caught the device; an emergency helmet-collar. She clamped it on.

  The last thing Cossont saw of the asteroid’s interior was Reikl, running back, grabbing Etalde by his collar and pulling him away from the shuttle, limbs flailing as he tried to balance, turn and run all at the same time. The shuttle door slammed shut.

  The android sat opposite her in his too-small colonel’s jacket, smiling vaguely. “Class T shuttle, four-berth,” he said, sounding calm. “AI pilot. Unidentified captain trooper commanding. In sim.”

  The clanging thud of the shuttle door’s closing was still reverberating through the craft when there was the briefest of high, piercing whines and then an almighty clap of sound as though an angry god had taken a good run-up and kicked the vessel just as hard as he, she or it could.

  Cossont blacked out.

  On the raft, the mists rose like departing dreams.

  She had never seen skies so big: pile after soft pile of pink and yellow, red and pale blue cloud, towering on into the lost depths of the green, shading-to-violet atmosphere, producing great hazy slanted spans and troughs of shade and enormous shafts of prismed light that lay strewn across this vault, seemingly balanced between the masses of cloud or resting one end on those ponderous, puffed, so slowly changing billows while their bases stood rooted within the utter vastness of the sea, the single great everywhere ocean with its planet-crossing swells, sky-spanning, light-defeating storms and forever restless waves. The ocean could be many colours, but to her – on a world that was all ocean with no beaches at all – it looked the colour of beach-washed jade.

  Birds and airfish, singly and in vast flocks that dimmed the sun, filled the spaces between the ocean and the clouds, lazily trailing one long wing across the brief smooth curvings between the waves before disappearing amongst the long rolling troughs again, or weaving columnar patterns like grey, fractal shadows against the soaring architecture of cloud.

  Higher – glimpsed sometimes between the clouds – the slow dark shapes of storeyblimps and torpedons sailed stately and serene, the storeys drifting with the winds, rising and lowering to find those likely to take them in whatever direction they wanted to go, while the slimmer lengths of the torpedons went tacking across the currents in the air.

  “You’re still young. You suffer from the … sweet delusion that anything … really matters.”

  “Were you this full of stool before you were a fish?”

  Isserem/QiRia laughed. “Probably.” He seemed to think about it. “Definitely.”

  “If nothing matters,” she asked him, “why are you even bothering to talk to me?”

  “Well, quite,” he said, and nodded. He dipped his head beneath the surface of the water in the long tank, then resurfaced, wiping his face. He looked at her, blinking. “How … brave you are,” he told her. “For ever setting up … chances for me to dismiss … you.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I’m enjoying talking to you. Unless I’m tiring you. Wouldn’t want to tire you.”

  He laughed again. “Now you
appeal to … my desire not … to appear frail in front of … a youngster.”

  “Do you ever think you might over-analyse trivial things, like conversations?”

  “All … the time.”

  He was resting in a long shallow tank open to the sea at one end, on a side-raft which was joined to the main structure by an articulated gantry. She lay almost naked on a lounger, a glass of water to hand.

  The main body of the giant raft Apranipryla lay close enough to put them in shadow later; it rose and fell in sections as it rode the permanent oceanic mega-swells and slow-decaying old storm swells, its white shade canopies and billow-roofs like sails, increasing the effect of the winds on its slowly gyring passage across the face of the vast, watery globe.

  “Well,” she said. “He’s remembered. That’s something.”

  “It still does not … really matter.”

  She shook her head. “Better to be remembered for the wrong thing than for nothing at all.”

  “No. As well … not to be remembered at all as … that is the … state that will apply to all of us … in time.”

  She wanted to say, “So what?” But didn’t.

  “You don’t think Vilabier wanted to be remembered?”

  “I don’t think it matters … either … whether … he cared or not, or is remembered … or not.”

  “Mattered to him,” she said. “Probably,” she added, reminding herself that, according to the convention they were observing here, he had actually known the guy and she hadn’t. Not that she really believed him.

  “Tik would have been … appalled to be known for the … Hydrogen Sonata and nothing else,” Isserem/QiRia said, gazing wistfully out to the ocean beyond the foot of the tank. “He hated it.”

  “Hated it?”

  Isserem/QiRia shrugged, rising and falling in the tank.

  “He wrote it as a joke,” he told her, wiping his face again. The old man’s consciousness had only been removed from the leviathid – the giant sea creature he had inhabited – a few days earlier. He had been in there, been that creature, lived as that creature – swimming, mating and fighting with others of its kind – for many decades. He’d circled this vast globe five times, he claimed. He was still getting used to being a bipedal humanoid again, and – for now – found it most comfortable and comforting to lie, floating, in sea water.

  “Initially,” he added, glancing at the girl. “Initially he just … hated it. Later … it became more serious, but it … was always a criticism, a … grim joke … an extended grim joke, but … never a labour of love. More labour of hatred. Contempt … very least.”

  Words were still coming haltingly to him. His mind was struggling to adapt to speaking again after decades of slow singing and the transmission of thoughts and feelings by singular, though complex, sonic images. Every now and again he would throw his head back and open his mouth as far as it would go, as though yawning, silently. This action would continue for a few days, the medics had told him; the deep, primitive levels of his being were distressed at what they were interpreting as a sort of blindness, and were trying to send out a pulse of underwater sound, to illuminate his surroundings.

  The action was, as he’d pointed out, itself an echo.

  “… a reaction shared by … most listeners,” QiRia said. “I was at the first … performance.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Oh dear.”

  Cossont frowned. “I thought the first performance was a triumph.”

  “Audience of … academics,” QiRia said. “And they had each been given … copies of the … score.”

  “The score is beautiful.”

  “No denying. However, I was at the first … public performance.”

  “Oh.”

  “The reaction was … mixed. Some people … hated it … others … really hated it.”

  Cossont smiled indulgently.

  Isserem/QiRia could have been any age, just looking at his skin. It was very smooth but it was still somehow old-looking. His expression was the most unreadable she had ever encountered, though of course they came from different blood-lines; she wouldn’t have expected to be able to read an alien’s expressions, even if they were part of the vast meta-species of humanoid. The genetic inheritance of his body was mammalian; he even had vestigial nipples on his – to her – shallow-seeming chest. They looked like a couple of rather painful insect bites. This was, apparently, the same body he had inhabited before he’d been transferred to the leviathid. It had been Stored on the raft Apranipryla all this time. Now he was back.

  He had spent all his life, he claimed, based (his word) in this single humanoid body, wandering throughout the Culture and beyond, especially in the remnants of the civilisations that had given rise to it – including that of the Gzilt, even though they had never quite got round to joining. He’d watched the Gzilt stagnate while the Culture had changed from a fractious, ramshackle collection of wildly disparate societies – some barely on talking terms – to become at once more purposefully homogeneous and more wildly varied as it slowly schismed, developed, diffused and grew towards the prominence it now possessed.

  Throughout, he had taken what he called occasional holidays in other forms, again both within the Culture and without: he had been birds, fish, animals, machines, aliens of a dozen different types and genders, in some cases for centuries at a time. Always, though, he returned to the same old, ever-renewing humanoid body, his memories refreshed, his palate and appetites rejuvenated. And always wandering, too; never settling down, never returning to wherever he had grown up – wherever that was; he refused to say.

  Then, for the last few decades – pursuing a recently discovered interest in sound above all other senses – he had been a leviathid, here on the water world of Perytch IV, his voice a clamorous, ocean-filling wail; a pulsed, directable blast of underwater sound capable of travelling thousands of kilometres, or pulverising a smaller sea animal to death with the instant crushing pressure of it. Cossont had no idea how any of that must have felt.

  “But the Sonata isn’t just Vilabier’s most famous work,” she said. “It’s his most complex. Especially at the time, in fact for long after his death, most critics thought it his best.”

  “Still, he … hated it,” Isserem/QiRia insisted. “He wrote the … central part to prove how easy it was to write such … mathematical … programish … music, but there was no … love in it. Or melody, of course.”

  “Melody isn’t everything.”

  “No single thing … is. We are not surprised, are we?” He looked at her, wiping his face again. “Then he realised that … even within its own … dictatorial, sequential … logic the piece was incomplete, and was only a … partial criticism of the things he hated, so he decided to … complete it, and did.”

  Isserem/QiRia looked thoughtful, staring up at the patch of sky visible beyond the flapping, snapping canopy above, shielding them from the blast of tropical sun. “That was probably … Tik’s mistake,” he mused quietly. He called Vilabier “Tik”, which was short for T’ikrin, the composer’s first name. Cossont had been shocked the first time he’d done this. Now she found it an affectation. “He appeared to start … taking his joke too seriously.” He looked at her. “I did try to warn him,” he said.

  “You knew him when he was writing it?” she asked, trying to sound neutral; not too sceptical. She sipped from her glass.

  “We met up several times … while he was writing it. I was …” he waved one hand elegantly out of the water, dispensing drips across the sloshing waters “… one of those cultural attaché things … You know.”

  She nodded as though she did.

  “I even helped him.”

  “What?” she spluttered.

  “Oh, not with the music … as such.” The old man smiled. “With the matching … of each note to a high-level … glyph in Marain.”

  Marain was the language – the Culture’s language – they were using, right now. She’d thought it polite to learn it for the exc
hange visit; there were even some words it shared with the Gzilt language, which had made it easier. Recently, after nearly a year speaking it, she had realised that she had started to think in Marain, and also that Gzilt was beginning to seem a little crude and clumsy in comparison. This made her feel oddly disloyal. “Marain was around then?” she asked.

  “Oh, the Culture … had its language before it itself … really existed.”

  “You were matching …”

  “Each note to a multi-dimensional glyph.”

  “In Marain?”

  “The spoken version … and the … three-by-three grid used to form the written … displayed version is just … the base level of a fractal, infinitely … scalable multiple-dimension … descriptor. There are more complex … strata.”

  “What? Beyond the nonary one?”

  He looked pained. “Nonary is … incorrect. Really it’s … binary, arranged in a … three-by-three grid. But yes. Three by four, four by four … three cubed, four cubed … so on. The Minds alone use … understand … the versions in … multiple extra dimensions. They can hold … the whole word those glyphs make in their … minds.” He looked at her. “Ultimately anything … may be so described. The entire universe, down to … every last particle, ray and … event would be compressible into … a single glyph … single … word.”

  “Pretty long word.”

  “Hopelessly so. It would take … a universe’s lifetime to articulate it. But still.”

  “What was the point of that?” she asked. “Matching notes to glyphs?”

  “I have no idea,” the old man said, smiling. “But the point is … the Hydrogen Sonata is … an elaborate, contrived attack on … the sort of composition it … represents. He, Tik … hated clashing, atonal music. He was basically … taking the piss, showing how … easy it was to write … how difficult to … listen to. Now the piece he’s most remembered for.” He shrugged again. “‘Such is fate,’ as they say.” He gazed out to sea for a moment, then added, “One should never mistake pattern … for meaning.”