The Hydrogen Sonata

Fifteen (S -13)

“This is a closed system, of course,” the blindfolded man said, feeling his way to the seat and then turning it, holding it angled away from the ancient-looking console and screen so that the septame could sit in it. Banstegeyn held the back of the seat but did not sit. The blindfolded man — by his uniform, a captain in the Home Regiment — talked to him as though he could see him. “It is unconnected to any other, and so its contents are unavailable elsewhere. I understand other such hermetic arrangements hold certain records it is as well are not readily accessible; however this one merely catalogues various pieces of equipment which are regarded as being best kept secret from the general mass of people, and indeed even the general mass of armed forces personnel.”

“I see,” said Banstegeyn, studying the captain’s face. The man’s eyes were concealed behind a thick metal strap cushioned with dark foam. According to Marshal Chekwri, who had personally driven him here to this anonymous if well-guarded warehouse on the capital’s outskirts, this was perfectly normal and did not constitute some special arrangement made just for him.

When they’d first arrived and been introduced to the blindfolded captain, the marshal had produced a vicious-looking fighting knife and flicked it fast and straight at the captain’s blindfolded face, eliciting, it seemed at first, not the slightest response. Though then the captain had smiled and said, “Ah, I felt the wind of that; were you really testing me, ma’am?”

Chekwri had just smiled her thin, humourless smile.

She’d stayed in an outer office as Banstegeyn had been led into the barely lit inner office, through a double set of thick doors.

“So,” Banstegeyn said, still not sitting. “Do you know who I am, Captain?”

“No, sir. You must be above a certain rank to be here — exactly which depends on the service and regiment — but I don’t know who you are. Your voice sounds vaguely familiar but I wouldn’t be able to place it.” He smiled, and his head tipped back a little so that now he seemed to be addressing a point somewhere above the other man’s head. “For somebody who spends a large part of his working day as a blind man, I am remarkably bad with voices, sir.” He shrugged. “It is a blessing in some ways.”

“I’m sure.”

“Please, sir; sit.”

“Thank you.” Banstegeyn sat down. The captain went through the controls for the system. They were simple enough.

“Any item below a certain size, such as would fit into this drawer…” the fellow pulled out a very long and heavy-seeming drawer in the console “… will be delivered into it. Larger items will be delivered into the pull-out hopper behind you, sir.” He nodded at a section of the wall where there was a rectangular outline nearly two metres long with a substantial double handle.

“The screen should tell you how long it’ll take to physically retrieve any item, sir, should you find one that meets your requirements, but please do be aware it could take some minutes; up to ten in some instances, and certain items require some assembly and… well, loading, frankly. A little patience may be required, sir, and possibly a little familiarity with whatever item is to be called for. I’ll leave it to your own good judgement and that of the officer who accompanied you here whether any selected item is suitable.” The blindfolded captain sighed regretfully. “I trust you’ve already been so informed, sir, but I’m duty-bound to inform you that any and all responsibility for the use of any items found herein rests entirely with your good self, sir, and once an item leaves these premises it becomes fully your property, to the extent that all record of it even having been stored here will be irrevocably wiped and deleted from the database held herein.”

“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. The 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.

“Please don’t do that,” the drone said, using invisible maniple fields to adjust parts of the diamond-sheet-covered solar panels.

“Why?” Tefwe asked.

“Moisture,” Hassipura said. “And impurities such as salts. Your hands will have added a little of each to the sands.”

“Sorry.” Tefwe squatted and stuck her head down into the shade created by the solar panel, gazing at the pool of sand underneath. Inside its transparent sleeve, the turning screw seemed barely to disturb the surface of the sand, which appeared to flow in to fill even the slightest of hollows. She glanced up to see if the drone was looking, reckoned it couldn’t see, then stuck a finger into the surface of the sand pool and took it smartly out again. The sand closed up round where her finger had been — running in, again, like water — to leave no sign that its surface had been disturbed.

“Will you stop doing that?” the drone said, tiredly.

“Apologies,” Tefwe said. “How does it move so smoothly?”

“The grains are spheres,” the drone said, clicking something back into place on the solar array. “They are polished, individually where necessary. I call the stuff sand because it starts out as ordinary sand and still has the same chemical composition as the raw material, but really the particle size is reduced almost to that of fines, and the polishing process leaves each grain almost perfectly spherical. See.” The drone shifted in the air, humming very faintly.

Tefwe stood and straightened as a bright screen suddenly filled the air in front of her, seeming to dim a significant part of the sky and putting her in shadow. The drone had produced a holo display like a magically produced cabinet hovering in front of the woman. The holo showed two grains, highly magnified. One appeared to be about the size of Tefwe’s head, and was jagged, crystalline, all straight edges, spires and juts; not unlike the rocky outcrop itself. It was rainbowed with diffraction colours. The other was pebble-sized, a glass-like shiny blonde and seemingly a perfect sphere.

“Before and after,” the drone said, shutting the screen off and letting the blast of sunlight fall upon Tefwe again. Her eyes adjusted, putting a black dot over the sun to reduce the glare. The sunlight was so strong her vision would have been affected by light coming in through the surrounds of her eyes, so they would be partially silvering, she suspected. Something similar had happened to areas of her skin, again to cope with the ferocity of the sun’s glare. Grief; I’m going silver. She was, she realised, starting to look like a ship’s avatar.

“You polish them all individually?” she asked.

“I have processes, machinery to do the gross polishing,” the drone told her. “Then they are all inspected individually, by me. Any further polishing that is required I do myself.”

“That seems obsessive.”

“Meticulous care can seem so to those unwilling to recognise it for its true worth.”

“I meant you might simply discard the rejects.”

Hassipura gave the appearance of thinking about this. “That I would find offensive,” it said eventually.

“What a strange machine you are,” Tefwe told it.

“That is why I make my home here in the centre of a city in the midst of my dear fellow drones and so many, many delightfully gregarious humans.”

“Is this really all you do?” she asked, gazing round the network of sand-canals, sandfalls, sand weirs, pools, lakes and whirlpools. She wanted to call the dry, canted bridges aqueducts, but couldn’t. Silicaducts, maybe.

“Yes. Do you find it in some way inadequate?”

“No, it’s beautiful in a way. You really have no water at all?”

“None. Why should I have water? I have no need for it, nor does the sandstream complex. Water makes paste and mud. Water clogs and makes the complex stop working. Here, water is a pollutant.”

“Does it rain often here?”

“Almost never, thankfully.”

“Still, shouldn’t you have some water for guests, for visitors?”

“I try to discourage visitors.”

“What about weary travellers? Or what if some poor devil comes crawling across the sands, croaking for water?”

“Having lost their terminal, so unable to call Hub or anywhere else for help?”

“For the sake of argument.”

“Then I would call Hub or somewhere else for help. Scoaliera, do I take it you’re thirsty?”

“Not really, but I think the aphore is.”

“You should have brought more water.”

“I still have some. I’ll let it drink shortly.”

“You came from Chyan’tya?”

“Yes. Read my terminal for the detail.”

The drone was silent for a moment. “Spat on you did it?” it said. “Can’t have been that thirsty.”

“Patently.”

“I’m going to be visiting various parts of the complex over the next hour or so. Do you have anything to let you float?”

“No.”

“You’d better climb on top of me if we’re still to converse, then. I take it you do still wish to converse. It would be too much to hope that you just happened to be passing by sheer coincidence and are now happy to be on your way.”

“Thank you, I will. And of course I’m here for a purpose.”

“I’d kind of guessed.” The drone made a slow swoop to about mid-thigh level on Tefwe. She climbed aboard, sitting cross-legged on its broad back. It rose into the hot, dry air, heading up about ten metres to a sort of little depot of machinery set on a levelled area where the rock had been melted and allowed to cool. Patches were like glass, reflecting the sharp glare of the sun.

The aphore, nestling in the shade of a house-sized boulder, raised its head when it caught sight of her on the drone. It looked confused. Then it put its head back down to the shadow-dark sand and closed its eyes again. The drone lifted a small tube and appeared to inspect it, turning it this way and that in front of the high-magnification band running along its blunt snout. It replaced it, moved to another rack of what looked like miniaturised mining equipment.

“So, come far?” it asked.

“Far enough.”

“Who sent you?”

“Bunch of ships.”

“Will I have heard of any of them?”

She reeled off the relevant names.

“Is this SC?”

“Not generated. Some EUAs are helping out. Think they’re bored. It’s a bit quiet right now.”

“Ah, Elements Usually Associated,” the drone said, and managed to sound almost wistful. “And is the Smile Tolerantly really involved, actively?”

“No. It’s more… wanted.”

“And what do you want, Tefwe?”

“From you? To know the location of our old chum Ngaroe QiRia.”

“Ah. I suppose I should have guessed. What makes you think I know that?”

“Oh, come on.”

“All right. What makes you think I would tell you?”

“It’s important.”

“Why?”

“Long story. He might remember something that backs up a claim somebody’s made. Claim that might make a big difference to a lot of people.”

“You are going to have to do better than that.”

“How long have we got?”

“All day.”

“Okay.” She told him the background. By the time she was finished the drone had carried her almost to the summit of the outcrop. From here, maybe sixty metres above the surface of the desert and the salt pans, she could see pretty much the whole network of the sandstream complex: all the silicaducts, channels and pools, lakes, pools and weirs and all the raising wheels and screws that lifted the sands from the base of the outcrop. From above, it looked even more like it was all done with flowing, dyed water; foreshortened like this, you couldn’t see the relatively steep slopes required to make the sands move under gravity. The raising wheels turned slowly, scooping sand from one pool to deposit it in a higher one. The wheels in particular, seen en masse, made the whole outcrop look like a giant clock powered by sand and sunlight.

She could see the aphore, still trying to keep in the shade of the rocks far beneath as the sun moved across the sky. The animal was making thin, whinnying noises. Probably thirsty, Tefwe thought.

The high desert was flat and shining, dotted with dark outcrops like jagged islands on that sea of salt, hot sand and dust. The pale writhing column of a dust devil danced in the distance, like a ghostly impersonation of a waterspout. The view of the encircling mountains, all shimmering in the heat, was bleakly impressive. She did feel a little exposed though. The skin on the back of her hands had gone quite silvery-white under the sunlight. The sky above was a hazy shining blue; a cobalt blister like a vast, concentrating lens with her at the focal point. This stark, intense azure was the true colour of the desert, she thought.

Her stomach made a faint, delicate rumbling sound. She wondered when she had last eaten; her body was using the ambient heat to drive many of the processes that usually would have needed the chemical fires produced by food. Her real body, the one still Stored somewhere inside the You Call This Clean?, wouldn’t have been able to do this, any more than it would have silvered up on prolonged exposure to harsh sunlight. Her own skin would have started to tan.

“I remember that Ngaroe had some affinity with the Gzilt,” the drone said, once she’d told it all she knew. “At one time I thought he might have been one of them originally, many bodies ago.”

“Seems he’s still on his first.”

“My, that is a long, long time to be in the one body,” the drone said, sounding genuinely impressed. “I knew he was old, but that old? Really?”

“Apparently.”

“He could still be lying. He used to lie a lot, I recall.”

“He might be lying. But then he might not. Anyway, what do you think? Important enough to let me know where the hell the old fuck is?”

“What would be intended for him?”

“Just going to be asked what he knows. Nothing untoward.”

“What if he is uncooperative?”

“Ha! When was he otherwise?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Then I leave empty-handed. But at least we can say we tried.”

“Nothing further?”

“Nobody’s going to drug him or read his mind or anything. These are perfectly normal Minds involved here, with honour, self-respect and all that usual uptight shit.”

“I will need your word on this.”

“You have it. If he won’t tell me, he won’t tell me. End.”

“My information is five years old.”

“Barely yesterday, by QiRia’s geriatric standards.”

“He told me he was going to… lose, or donate, or abandon, or get rid of something — he used all four terms when we talked — then go to contemplate The Mountains of the Sound, on Cethyd, in the Heluduz system.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Few have.”

“Just… these mountains?”

“He wasn’t sure where exactly he’d be going but there’s an Outworlders’ Quarter, so probably there. Claimed he’d already been for a look and talked to… ah.”

“Deleted at random?”

“Nearly. Still have it. Docent Luzuge. Somebody called Docent Luzuge. If he, she or it is still alive and active, this person would know where to find him.”

Tefwe’s pen terminal picked up the words. It was a lot smarter than the old pen terminals Tefwe had been used to, and the kind of smart that found it relatively easy to hide from the level of investigatory tech the drone had. The terminal had been effectively awake and evaluating everything it had been sensing since shortly before Tefwe and the aphore had arrived at the outcrop. It was getting jostled about in the bottom of a pocket in her thin shirt and so not seeing very much, but it could hear perfectly well. It made a transmission.

A satellite the size of a pebble, held stationary just above the atmosphere directly over where Tefwe was, which had been keeping station directly over her since she’d been Displaced to the surface at Chyan’tya, relayed the transmission to its home ship, the VFP Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process, which, on hearing the relevant words, itself handed the information on to various other craft, including the Contents May Differ and the element of the fast picket fleet known to be nearest to the planet Cethyd, as well as making a general call through the usual network of trusted craft, just in case they knew of a still closer ship that hadn’t been letting everybody else know its position.

“I wonder what he was leaving behind, and why?” Tefwe said.

“I wondered that too. I did ask. He wasn’t forthcoming.”

“Cethyd?” she said.

“Some civ-forsaken ball on the outskirts of nowhere, jealously guarded by well-teched barbarians. Known for The Mountains of the Sound. Aren’t your implants working?”

“I’m leaving them off. Just got my terminal.”

“Which has just been in touch with something overhead.”

“Really? That’s sneaky.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I should have guessed.”

“This isn’t the real you, is it?”

“No; spare body carried by an SC ship, altered to suit.”

“I imagine another you will be popping into existence very shortly, somewhere near The Mountains of the Sound, on Cethyd.”

“I dare say. That is where you think he is?”

“Yes,” the drone said. “I’m too old to play those kinds of games. Your word stands, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Well; good hunting, to your next self. What happens to you — to this you — now?”

“Supposed to head back to the VFP. Naturally it wants to snap me back instantly, now, and be on its way, but I said you’d appreciate me making the effort.”

“Well, I have. But don’t let me detain you.”

“Really?”

“Go immediately if you wish.”

Tefwe thought. She could almost feel the VFP — doubtless listening — willing her to agree. “Later,” she said, and half expected to be snatched away anyway as the ship’s property, or to see a wrathful bolt of fire falling from the heavens to strike her, or at least the nearby desert. “Around sunset, perhaps. First I ought to let the aphore drink, but I’d like to see more of the sandstream. If it’s not too much trouble.”

~Ms Tefwe, sent the ship via some internal piece of augmentation which, obviously, she only thought she’d turned off.

“None at all,” the drone said. “Though, sandstreams, in the plural, you should have said.”

“There’s more than one?”

~Ms Tefwe, the ship sent again.

“Many. Most of the outcrops you can see from here are similarly adapted.” The old drone sounded proud.

“Really! I must see them.”

~Ms Tefwe, the ship sent once more.

“We could visit two or three in the time. Soon I hope to start linking them, underground, and complete a programme of replacing all the external raising screws with internal ones.”

“Not the wheels, though, I hope. I like the wheels.”

~Ms Tefwe; kindly reply.

“Not the wheels. Those I intend to keep.”

“How long will all that take?”

~Ms Tefwe…

“Many decades. Don’t you think you should answer the ship?”

“… Na.”