The Hydrogen Sonata

Sixteen (S -9)

xLOU Caconym

oMSV Pressure Drop

Cethyd? Barely mentioned in my data reservoirs.

∞

Will you down a current all-civs/systems overview? This is becoming ridiculous.

∞

Ignorance can be interesting.

∞

Also fatal. I am not going to copy you the relevant data; get it all yourself. Anyway, Cethyd is a good choice, if he’s trying to escape our attention. Home of the Uwanui, under something called the Oglari Jurisdiction, themselves beholden to the Dolstre, who seem to have decided we’re no friends of theirs. And the Oglari are just able enough and vicariously well up-teched enough to make a friendly visit tricky. Perhaps as well we have the SC fleet and its fellow travellers on-side. Nearest is a brother ship to you, a Troublemaker, de-fanged to VFP. Think it’ll be up to the task?

∞

Indubitably.

∞

It is effectively weapon-free. And it starts as a Limited. No offence.

∞

We are of that generation of “Limited” that classes as nominatively camouflaged. We out-everything earlier GOUs. It’ll handle whatever it finds.

∞

Hmm. Oh-oh, hello; incoming…

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

oLOU Caconym

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Empiricist

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?

Hello all. Developments. Not all encouraging. The good news is that the two Delinquent GOUs Headcrash and the Xenocrat have arrived at Zyse. The neutral/slightly odd news is that the Beats Working has taken it upon itself to ferry the principal squadron of the Ronte fleet to Gzilt ahead of time, and the bad news is that the Smile Tolerantly, once an ancient GCU, is now what might best be described as a Culture-Zihdren-Remnanter hybrid.

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

I think I speak for all of us when I say — relative to that last bit there — what?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Well, quite. The Smile Tolerantly has been discovered in the Zihdren home system and now apparently describes itself as a tributary adjunct to the Z-R, with enhanced loyalties and a hybrid OS now including multiple elements congenitally associated with Z-R craft.

∞

xGCU Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

“Enhanced loyalties”?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

The thinking is this actually means divided loyalties, though when pressed the vessel also expressed a preference for “dual loyalties”.

∞

xLOU Caconym

Is there any hint it has access to the Z rather than just the Z-R?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Sadly, none. In fact it specifically ruled that out. It was at pains to stress it was a level down from whatever parts of the Z-R get to pick up the mysterious but majestic crumbs of information and instruction that fall from the celestially elevated high table that is the Enfolded Realm. It would appear to have become devoutly eccentric, if not technically Deranged. It ceased communication with the ship which re-discovered it — its own old home GSV, the Unreliable Witness — after a few short messages, and was willing subsequently to reveal only that their exchange had already run over some (it is believed arbitrarily arrived-at) limit.

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

So do we now need somebody specialised who can talk to it? Or a succession of them, each claiming their ration?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Possibly. This is being looked into.

∞

xMSV Pressure Drop

And, a “hybrid OS”?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Whatever that might be taken to mean. It has hinted that it has incorporated certain processing paradigms and substrate/software architectures from the Z-R into its Mind.

∞

xMSV Pressure Drop

My first — and, thus far, abiding — reaction is, That’s diseased. But perhaps that’s just me?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

No, not just you.

∞

xGCU Displacement Activity

Ditto.

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

Okay. While accepting that that particular nugget of nonsense presents as a one-off random irrelevance, it still seems somehow pointedly symbolic of this whole enterprise turning up grisly unpleasantnesses that it might, in retrospect, have been better to have left stewing under their particular little rocks. Need we go on with this? Can’t we just, for once, let the slumbering ogre be, and step lightly away?

∞

xMSV Pressure Drop

I might see some merit in that.

∞

xLOU Caconym

Well I don’t. It is not seriously being suggested that we back off just because what we seek isn’t falling into our laps, is it? We made an undertaking to help the Z-R. We stick to that.

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

But they don’t seem too concerned about us sticking with it. Why should we?

∞

xLOU Caconym

Because somebody around here has to keep their word and do the right thing.

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Let’s vote on it. We can discuss details later, and/or set up different proposals, but just to clear the air here, the proposal is: we abandon the whole shebang regarding the attack on the Z-R ship and the BoT (and whether it’s actually “T” or not) and go back to what we were each doing before this all blew up. Yes or no?

∞

LOU Caconym No.

GCU Displacement Activity No.

GSV Empiricist Abstain.

GSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry Yes.

Ue Mistake Not… No.

MSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In Yes.

MSV Pressure Drop No.

LSV You Call This Clean? No.

GSV Contents May Differ (Co-ordinator’s abstention, but leaning towards Yes.)

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Clear enough. Does anybody want to resign from the group?… No? Any other comments? No?… Really? All right. As ever; back as and when with whatever exciting new snags start laddering the skein…

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

oGSV Contents May Differ

Worth a try. I appreciate you making the point about leaning towards Yes even though the vote was already lost.

∞

Least I could do. Maybe thoughts will change with subsequent developments and we might vote again.

∞

I shall cling to that filament.

∞

xLOU Caconym

oMSV Pressure Drop

“Pointedly symbolic”! What gibberish. And our group coordinator is “listing”.

∞

That was “leaning”, as well you know.

∞

Still off-kilter.

∞

Perhaps some of our colleagues worry we are starting to indulge in group-think, and to obsess.

∞

We are a group of Minds. Thinking is what we do. And obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.

However, they’re still aboard, even if they might be sitting fretting in the lifeboats. Unlike the completely overboard idiocy of this “Hybrid OS” abomination.

∞

First I’d heard of that. Some sort of weird Z-R mutant Mind. That’s almost baroquely… horrifying. Ghoulish, even. Positively Gothick. What could have possessed it?

∞

To do it? Who knows. But we know what possesses it now. The Zihdren-Remnanter.

∞

If this marks the start of a new, fashionable trend amongst ship Minds, I may Sublime myself shortly.

∞

Still, might yet yield advantage. Never mind the denials. Any sort of more direct link to the Z-R than we’ve been used to until now implies better access to the Z within the Enfold. An opportunity.

∞

Uh-huh. We’ll see. Makes the Beats Working’s oddly enabling behaviour look positively normal, for sure. Giving pickup-backs to the Ronte. I mean, really. Mind you, they were going so slowly. It probably got bored. What do you think?

∞

I think there’s a reason there are so few of the Scree class, despite the fact they’re the smallest, energy-cheapest to build of all the Contact Units. Five humans is just too small a crew; they’re almost guaranteed to go a bit mad. It’s like the opposite of being outnumbered; the more humans you have aboard you, the better their eccentricities average out and you’re left with something easy to model, anticipate and influence. You have safety in their numbers. Five bios and one Mind, in one teeny wee ship? Their basic insanity is going to manifest. And it’s reality-distorting; infectious, practically. Always going to end badly.

∞

Yes, but you can always kick a human crew off at the next GSV if you really don’t get on. Not as bad as becoming a “hybrid”, with alien operating system shit incorporated. That’s just… perverted.

∞

The Culture had a problem with the rump of the Zihdren civilisation that the Zihdren-Remnanters represented. It was the same problem they had with most other light-basking species. The whole comms and data network of such beings was not something truly independent of them as creatures; instead it was effectively an extension of them as a mass of interconnected individuals, and so the Culture, with its self-imposed embargo on reading the minds of other beings, regarded it as immoral to investigate even aspects of the Remnanters’ existence as seemingly impersonal and banal as their data reservoirs without specific permission, something that had, to date at least, rarely been forthcoming.

It meant that the Remnanters were slightly mysterious as far as the Culture was concerned; they were less than perfectly known and understood, they were incompletely assessed, intrinsically beyond certain very useful forms of analysis, proof against being properly simmed and so, in theory, capable of surprising the Culture. This was a devilishly itchy, annoying thing for your average Mind — had there even been such a thing — to have to address.

It was just as well that the Remnanters were little more than a civilisational after-thought, an only-visible-at-high-magnification detail on the vast, ever-changing galactic map, and that — at least for now — there were only a few other similar species making any ripples in the big shared paddling pond of the big G; imagine — so went a popular nightmare scenario for ships of a certain disposition who worried about this sort of stuff — having to cope with the Zihdren themselves when they’d been in their pomp!

On the other hand there were species/civs with no such compunctions who regularly investigated as deeply as possible into the minds of others — especially when they were as weird as the Remnanters — and would cheerfully share the information with anybody who asked.

As long as no favours were promised in return, the Culture would — reluctantly, even a little guiltily — use that kind of information, just to keep from being too embarrassingly ignorant.

Scoaliera Tefwe woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries.

Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken.

All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening, both inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied.

It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. Hmm. That thought itself felt… familiar. She opened her eyes.

She was sort of expecting to see the word SIMULATION, however briefly, but it wasn’t there. She blinked, looked around.

She was floating in some sort of suspensor field, in air, in a human or humanoid body dressed in some clingy but lightly puffed cover-all which left only her feet, hands and head exposed. She was held reclined in the air. It was as though she was sitting in an invisible chair. A boxy ship drone was at eye-level, looking at her. The room around her appeared to be medical unit standard.

“Ms Tefwe?” the drone said.

“Reporting,” she said. She looked at her hand. It looked like her hand, though she knew enough to know that meant almost nothing. “A reverser field, please?”

The drone put a screen in front of her, showing her her own face. She touched the skin on her cheek, pressed her nose one way then the other. Looked like her face.

She remembered talking with the avatoid of the You Call This Clean? in a virtual environment. She remembered waking in reality in the medical facility of the Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process, and she remembered the journey across the desert on the aphore, to go and talk to the old drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie.

She had stayed with it for a couple of days, calling in a supply drop from the Orbital’s Hub to feed and water the animal at the end of that first day.

The VFP had been annoyed at her dallying but had not zapped her back to it without permission. The important part of its mission had already been carried out; it had transmitted the information on QiRia’s location to the other interested ships. It could afford to let her spend a while with the ancient drone and its sandstreams.

Another ship, another VFP, the Rapid Random Response Unit, had been time-closest to Cethyd and had started out for the planet within a second of the information being picked up. It had started readying one of the handful of humanoid simulacra bodies it carried aboard, instructing the creature’s physiological systems to alter the blank-basic body’s appearance so that it would resemble Tefwe. The transfer of Tefwe’s updated mind-state could wait until the last hour or so before deployment, hence the relaxed attitude the Outstanding… was able to take to Tefwe’s delaying tactics.

The Rapid Random Response Unit’s flight time to Cethyd had been two and a half days; a lucky proximity, Tefwe guessed, given that the place was, as Hassipura had suggested, kind of off the beaten track, in a system called Heluduz in one of the faint tendrils of stars that lay on the very outskirts of the galaxy, spun out from the rim like the exhaust from a spent firework.

The place itself was nothing special; just a biggish rocky world with a thick though transparent oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a small majority of land compared to deep ocean.

After her surprisingly extended jaunt to see Hassipura’s sandstreams, Tefwe had ridden off again on the aphore Yoawin. The ship had Displaced both of them as soon as they dropped more than a couple of metres beyond the pass, depositing a very confused aphore straight back into its stables in the livery at Chyan’tya.

Tefwe went back to the ship, where her mind-state was, finally, read and transmitted to the Rapid Random Response Unit half a day before it reached the planet of Cethyd, while it was still checking and re-checking its Displacer components, testing the system with dummy payloads and planning its brake points and loop-return profiles.

Tefwe shook her head. “Is this really necessary?”

“This would represent an absolute minimum,” the boxy ship drone told her.

Tefwe looked down at herself. The ship had insisted she wear what appeared to her like a grossly over-spec’d suit. She looked, she thought, like she’d been dipped in a thick layer of sticky mercury.

The suit was only about five or six millimetres thick and seemed to weigh almost nothing, plus it thinned so much over her hands and especially her fingers that she half expected to see her fingerprints through the silver covering, but it was meant to be terribly effective. Well, once the helmet component had rolled up, it was just a roll round her neck at the moment, like a thick metallic scarf. Obviously the tech had moved on since the last time she’d needed to be protected at anything like this level.

“What exactly is this?”

“That is a full-survival/light-battle suit, two layer.”

“What’s a light battle? Is that a skirmish or something?”

“It will keep you safe and well, even if the Displace is very slightly off, and protect you against unwelcome attentions, should locals take exception to you.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Who knows? Some people are just primitive.”

“This isn’t really about the locals, is it? This is in case the other lot — the Oglari — in case they spot me, or their bosses.” Tefwe had woken with a full briefing effectively downloaded and digested inside her head.

“We are trying to protect you as well as we can, Ms Tefwe,” the ship told her. “Ideally I would put you down in a more aggressively profiled suit and inside a supporting capsule — at least — with a full drone and missile screen, exactly where you need to be; however, our intelligence is that such a force, in such a location, would be very likely both to be sensed on emplacement and to give cause for severe diplomatic unpleasantness if discovered. Hence the suit.”

“Can I put ordinary clothes over it?”

“They’ll burn off if the Displace is even slightly out. The suit is able to mimic the appearance of clothing.”

“I’d prefer ordinary clothes. Can’t I carry them inside the suit or something?”

The drone made a sighing noise.

Eventually she got a kind of backpack that melded itself to the suit, containing some clothes and a few supplies.

“This increases both your mass and bulk,” the ship told her through the drone. “Now I have to re-calibrate and skim even closer to the planet.”

“How close you going?”

“Seventeen-five k.”

“Velocity?”

“Forty per cent Crashed to fifty-seven kilo-lights at closest approach; sub millisecond window.”

Tefwe whistled. “You’re going to scrunch me up into a tiny little ball, aren’t you?”

“If you were properly human, it would break every major bone in your body, and quite a lot of the others. Happily, you’re not. You won’t trauma, will you? I could put you under…”

“Not me. Tough as old space boots. Known for it.”

“Good. The suit will be trying not to use any fields, including AG, so the landing could be a little bumpy.”

“Kinetic.”

“Kinetic?”

“That’s how we used to express it in the old days.”

“Hmm. Kinetic. That too is appropriate.”

The Rapid Random Response Unit performed the start of a crash-stop, then — when it was, for a vanishingly brief moment, within less than a planetary radius of the world — used its heavy-duty Displacer to loose a balled-up Tefwe and a scatter of miniature subsidiary support components towards the planet. Then it continued on its way — slowing, in effect, more slowly — and started a wide turn that would bring it back to the system some hours later for a more stealthy approach to Cethyd.

Tefwe came hurtling out of the sky at a little under the speed of sound. The suit gauged where it was and what was happening to it, saw that it was heading for land with no large body of water available — which was sub-optimal, but never mind — and braked hard by spreading layers of itself like ribboned parachutes, scrubbing off ninety-five per cent of its speed in about half a kilometre of forty-five-degree flight. Tefwe felt herself tumbling, and the deceleration as a tremendous weight — oddly distributed due to the way she was packed, pressed into a contorted, maximally compacted ball that would have killed a basic human. The tumbling decreased. She felt her orientation steady and settle, and then the weight eased too.

She felt the impact as a dull thud on her back and knees, not sore at all, then the suit’s voice said quietly, “Landed.”

Tefwe started to un-ball as the suit unwrapped her, letting her spread herself out to lie looking up at an ochre sky visible between softly swaying stalks of some tall, bronze-coloured grass. She could feel her lungs re-inflating. They’d been collapsed to save volume.

“How we doing?” she asked when she had some breath to spare.

“We are doing well,” the suit said. “No hostile interest detected.”

“That’s nice.” Her conventional pain receptors came back on line, tingling once to confirm, then quieting down.

She sat up, dusted herself down, then, still sitting, unhitched the backpack and put on the clothes she’d had the ship make for her. They were supposed to make her look a bit like a pilgrim. A human pilgrim, specifically, because the locals here weren’t human, though there were used enough to hosting humanoid pilgrims from nearby systems. Then she let the backpack collapse itself and stow into the small of the suit’s back.

Finally, cautiously, she stood up.

Cethyd lay heavy beneath the orange-red sun called Heluduz.

“You used to look at my chest.”

“Because of what was not there. Absence can snag the gaze more effectively than presence.”

“What? Oh, breasts! Mammalian stuff. Of course. I thought you just thought I had a particularly fine and barrel chest.”

“One way of putting it.”

“Did you ever want… did you ever think about us, you know, fucking?”

“Which answer would insult you less: yes or no?”

“Neither. Either. I wouldn’t be insulted.”

“Then the answer would be, not really.”

“Not really? So a bit, then. Ha!”

She was a little drunk. She was still going to leave the silver-grey cube with the Incast order — she was en route to the Ospin system now, in this fine clipper ship — but she’d thought she ought to at least turn the device on, make sure the old guy was in some sense still in there, and maybe ask his forgiveness. Maybe.

Too many cocktails in the bar. Thought she’d been doing extremely well with a handsomely chunky young fellow there — a serving captain in the Eighth — but then the girlfriend he’d neglected to mention had shown up — supposed to be a surprise for him; she’d got on at the last port a couple of hours ago, been waiting impatiently in his cabin since, wondering where he’d got to… Things had started to turn just a little ugly and so she’d made her excuses and left.

She had decided before she’d left home ten days earlier that one thing she definitely wasn’t going to do during the voyage was turn on the device with QiRia’s mind-state inside — she’d been adamant about that. He was an old fraud and even just giving the damn thing to her had probably been some sort of attempt to manipulate her; he was lucky she was paying him the compliment of physically taking the device to Ospin like some sort of warped pilgrimage or homage or something rather than just posting it to the Incast order. She’d brought her volupt with her; she would use the time constructively to practise.

But then, perhaps because of the cocktails, she’d changed her mind.

“The Gzilt never joined in the great genetic mash-up that the rest of the Culture proper thought appropriate to ensure everybody could breed with everybody else,” QiRia’s voice said. (In theory she could have seen him too, had his face look down on her from the cabin’s screen; she hadn’t chosen that option.) “As a result, the genes aren’t in either of us to make us appear attractive to or feel attracted towards the other, beyond a very basic pan-human interest sparked at a distance or when clothes conceal the disappointing truth. Trust me; it is rarely an encouraging sign when the more apparel is removed, the less attractive a prospective sexual partner becomes. I wasn’t keeping a tally, but if you’d been watching carefully I suspect you’d have noticed that I looked — glanced, more likely — at your chest more often when you wore a top than when you were naked from the waist up. The point is rather that we found each other interesting at all, sexual considerations removed. Again, you’ll have to trust me that the difference implicit in a ten-millennia age difference is far more important than a difference in both gender and/or species.”

“So you’ve never had sex with a Gzilt woman?”

“Ah. I didn’t say that.”

“So you have?” Cossont, lying on the bed, plumped up her pillow and made herself comfortable, staring at the screen. Maybe she should have put his face on the screen. Would he be blushing now? Did mind-states inside devices like this blush? Did QiRia blush? Had he? She couldn’t remember.

“Technically, yes,” the voice from the cube said, sounding unconcerned. “It was, again technically, unsatisfactory for both parties. The seemingly superficial physical differences become more… pronounced when one gets down to it, as it were. Sometimes, however, one indulges in that sort of behaviour as a sort of extension of friendship. Not with everyone; not all need such an expression. Most of the people I find interesting, and in that sense attractive, live more in the mind than in the body. Still, some seem to require such… confirmation. My impression has always been that the commitment to the act, its symbolism, is more important than the act itself, which, in its commission — or at least in the reflection upon it — tends to emphasise the differences between those involved rather than their similarities. I have done the same sort of thing with males of my own species type, despite not having sexual feelings specifically for them. Sometimes it feels only polite.”

Cossont lay on her back, looked up at the cabin ceiling, both hands clasped behind her head. “Anybody I’d know?”

“Who? My sexual partners amongst the Gzilt?”

“Yes.”

“No. Nor heard of. And besides, they’re all long dead. As of now, I believe all my ex-lovers, of all species, are dead. One or two might be in Storage.”

“That sounds so sad.”

“Well it isn’t. Feel free to feel sorry for me if you wish, for your own sentimental satisfaction, but not on my account. I have lived ten thousand years; I’m used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying… one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually. Happily one retains the emotions that let one draw delight from life’s enduring basics, like love, friendship, sex, sheer sensory pleasure, discovery, understanding and erudition. Even when one knows that in the end it’s all… contingent.”

“Really thought you were going to say ‘meaningless’, there.”

“No. All things have meaning. Haven’t we already been through this?”

“It’s just that meaning doesn’t mean what we think it means.”

“Even your attempts at triteness cannot entirely hide the grain of truth in that particular assertion. We are all prone, in our ways. My own comforter at the moment, and perhaps for the next few centuries, appears to be homing in on the serenity offered by immersing oneself in an environment of all-pervading sound… for some reason. I really only meant to spend a year or so with the leviathids on Perytch IV, but then felt very… at home in that sonic environment; very content.” The voice from the cube paused. “In the end it palled… but only relatively, and still it left its own… echo. An echo of desire, of need.” Another pause. “I — the real me — may pursue that interest. For a time.”

Cossont was silent for a while.

“You really are old, aren’t you?” she said eventually.

“What makes you think that?”

“A young — younger — guy would have asked whether I ever felt attracted to you.”

“No; a less secure, less self-sufficient, less sure-of-himself person might have.”

She gave it a moment, then said, “So, what do you think?”

“About your feelings for me?”

“Yes.”

“As a person I’m sure you found me profoundly interesting though not actually attractive. As a potential sexual partner, I would prefer to hope the very thought would have been at least slightly unpleasant. Don’t feel you have to confirm or deny any of that. What other questions arising might you have?”

“How have you kept going, all this time?”

“Fortitude.”

“Seriously. If I’m to take you seriously, your claims seriously: how? Wouldn’t you want to kill yourself eventually, at some point, just at some really low point that you’d never have got to if you only lived for a century, like they did in the old days, or a few centuries, or whatever? Wouldn’t that happen?”

“Well, not to me, obviously.”

“But that’s what I’m asking. Why? Why not? How come?”

“I told you before: I take a perverse delight in watching species fuck up.”

“I remember. I’ve thought about that. I don’t believe that can be all there is. There must be something else.”

“Maybe I had something to live for.”

“Okay. But what?”

“Or, maybe I had something to not die for.”

“Hmm. Aren’t they…?”

“They are not quite the same thing. You may have to think about it. Anyway, my precise motivations needn’t concern you. That I am as old as I’ve claimed, that you believe me; that does concern me. Not a great deal, but I would like to think you do believe me.”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,” she confessed. “When I talk to you I do.”

“That will suffice. Anything else I can help you with?”

She smiled, though he couldn’t see. “So, do we get more secure as we get older?”

“Some do. I have. Though I have also detected a sort of long-term tidal action in that and a lot of other emotional states. For real-time centuries I will feel, say, gradually more secure in myself, then for the next few centuries I’ll feel less certain. Or over time I’ll go from thinking I know pretty much everything to realising I know next to nothing, then back again, and so on and so on. Overall, it approximates to a sort of steady state, I suppose, and I am by now quite entirely used to such periodicity and allow for it. Similarly, I seem to oscillate between times of feeling that nothing matters, when I tend to act riskily, foolishly — often on a whim — and intervening periods when I feel that everything matters, and I become cautious, risk-averse, fearful and paranoid. The former attitude believes in a sort of benign fate, thinking I am just somehow destined to live for ever, while the latter believes in statistics, and a cold, uncaring cosmos, and cannot quite believe that I have lived as long as I have while ever thinking that life is just a hoot, and taking risks and behaving rashly is worth it just for the fun of tweaking the nose of the universe. The former state has a sort of cheery contempt for its opposite, while the latter is simply terrified of its obverse. Anyway, my point is: come back in a century or two and I might not seem so sure of myself.”

“In a century — in a few years — I’ll be with everybody else in the Sublime.”

“Best place for all of us. I’d go myself but longevity has become such a habit.”

“You don’t want to be offered the chance to go with us, with the Gzilt?”

“You’d be my second choice, after the Culture itself, but no. Not really my choice to make anyway; my real self will take that decision and I’ll be looked out wherever I am and taken away too, if and when the time comes.”

“They say it’s like the most brilliant lucid dream, for ever.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Do you dream, in there?”

“No. Being switched off is exactly like going to sleep — you’re not really aware of it happening, only of waking up again. But you wake after a dreamless sleep.”

“I’m sleepy now,” Cossont said, yawning involuntarily just at the thought. “I’m going to switch you off. That definitely okay? You sure?”

“Entirely. Sweet dreams, Ms Cossont.”

“Sleep well, Mr QiRia.”

…She woke up. Still aboard the Mistake Not…

They’d be at Ospin in a couple of hours, bouncing into the microrbital belonging to the Incast Secular Collectionary order she’d donated the device to.

She remembered that evening aboard the clipper, umpteen years ago, and remembered a surprising amount of that conversation with QiRia’s stored mind-state. She remembered lying with just two hands clasped behind her neck, travelling with the sensibly sized volupt — as elegant in form as it was in tone — rather than the hulking lump of half-unplayable preposterousness that was the twenty-four-string elevenstring.

She remembered fretting over things like pleasing her mother without giving in to her, and whether she’d find somebody as cute as that serving captain in the cocktail bar — though single.

This time, she was wondering whether a pursuing ship might be just about to blow them out of the skies, or whether some pre-alerted special forces ultra-commandos would be waiting for them at the Bokri microrbital to slice or blast them to pieces. Also, whether she’d live to see the Subliming, and whether she would, in the end, go along with everybody else into it.

Vyr lay in the darkness, top hands clasped behind her neck, lower hands clasped over her belly, thinking that, sometimes, not all change was for the better.

The image — of a tearful woman sitting with her back to a view of clouds and sea — was shown as though on a conventional screen hanging in front of him.

“…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—”

“—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…”

The screen went blank. Colonel Agansu nodded. “I see. And this lady is…?”

“She is Warib Cossont, mother of Vyr Cossont, Reserve Lieutenant Commander in the Fourteenth, the female her mother is referring to,” the intelligence officer of the 7*Uagren said. The IO, the colonel and the ship’s captain were the only presences within the virtual command space.

“This may tie in with the unexpected presence of the 5*Gelish-Oplule at Eshri,” the captain told Agansu. “The ship’s last known location was near Xown, and the last known location of Vyr Cossont was in the Girdlecity of Xown. If the ship made full speed from Xown to Eshri there would have been time for it to deliver Vyr Cossont to the Fourteenth’s HQ anything up to two or three hours before our arrival and the attack.”

“Was Vyr Cossont listed as one of those aboard the Fzan-Juym satellite?” the colonel asked.

“No,” the IO said.

“However, that means nothing,” the captain said. “There was barely time for her to be registered and besides, if she was being summoned for some sort of secret mission she would never have been added to the official complement anyway.”

“Where did this information come from?” Agansu asked.

“The screen clip came medium-ranks secret from Regimental Central Intelligence, flagged low probable relevance,” the IO officer said. “But we then added it to a review of our own multiple-remotes sensor data following the destruction of the HQ, which indicated there’s a fifty per cent chance that one of the larger medium-sized pieces of wreckage was a mostly intact though largely disabled four-berth shuttle. That being the case, there is then a sixty per cent chance that one or more viable biologicals could have been Displaced from the wreck to the Mistake Not…, the Culture ship we’re following.”

“Why was this information not extracted from the data at the time?” Agansu asked.

“The data from remotes,” the captain said, “especially in a combat volume, is received erratically, sporadically and late. Real-time data has to be prioritised, Colonel.”

“I see. This Lieutenant Commander Cossont; I can see no mention of her in any special forces or intelligence lists.”

“We don’t believe she is special forces or on a military intelligence secondment,” the captain said. “We believe her semi-civilian status was not cover, but the truth. Her value to the Fourteenth’s high command may have been opportunistic and sudden; the likelihood is it would only just have come to light before she was summoned.”

“And what might the nature of that value have been?” Agansu asked.

“We don’t know yet,” the IO admitted. “Best guess is possibly related to the Culture individual Ngaroe QiRia, who is mentioned in the message from the Zihdren recovered at Ablate.”

“There is record of an individual or individuals of that name having visited Gzilt several times in the past,” the captain added, “though not for several centuries.”

“And all this tells us what?” Agansu asked.

“Perhaps where Lieutenant Commander Cossont is heading,” the captain said. “Until now the Culture ship has pursued a course which has made its final destination difficult to predict, even at a system level. However, within the last half-day, it has become almost certain that it’s aiming for somewhere within the Ospin system. There is a record of Vyr Cossont travelling to the habitat of Bokri, within the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin.”

“When?” Agansu asked.

“Sixteen years ago, three and a half years after she returned from a student exchange trip within the Culture. Her most likely destination within Bokri, we believe, would have been the Incast order. It is possible she deposited an article of some sort with them, possibly a mind-state; the cargo manifest for the vessel she travelled on is a little ambiguous on the exact nature of whatever she might have left there, though some sort of article classified as a ‘self-powered general storage device, alien, vouched, sophisticated, capacity unknown’ is mentioned as forming part of her luggage on the way there but not on the way back.”

“We’ve started trying to get some answers out of the Incast order on this,” the IO said. “Nothing so far; there are confidentiality issues. Also, they’re just under-staffed.” The image of the intelligence officer looked at the captain and the colonel. “With cooperative assets in place we could just hack them but as we’re on our own with this there won’t be much we can do until we physically get there.”

“This is, anyway, all conjecture,” the colonel pointed out.

“It is,” the captain agreed.

“But it’s the best conjecture we’ve got,” the IO officer said. “Nothing else is flagging connections.”

“The Culture ship is already running us about as fast as we can go, Colonel,” the captain said. “If it starts bouncing around inside the Ospin system there’s every chance it can either lose us, put somebody or something down anywhere it wants to without us being able to spot it happening, or both. I think the concatenation of this Cossont person and the Bokri habitat represents a serious lead and that it’s worth following. I propose we try to follow the ship round Ospin if it does start dodging, but rather than lose it while we try to find out what it’s been doing where, we assume it’s heading for Ospin, and act accordingly.”

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 horizon 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?”

“It’s complicated because in a sense I’m not really here, Ngaroe,” she told him. “I’m still Stored — technically, basically — on a ship called the You Call This Clean? a long, long way from here. What you see in front of you is a copy; I feel entirely like me inside here, but the truth is I’m embodied inside a ship’s blank-body, appropriately customised.”

“Hmm. So, let me see, I think only Hassipura knew where I’d hidden myself this time. Have you been to see it?”

“Yes. It still builds sandstream complexes on a life-forsaken plain in the middle of nowhere on an O called Dibaldipen; the kind of barren wasteland on an Orbital that designers pretend they meant to happen all the time but which is really the result of over-artistic weather-pattern modelling and which secretly they are thoroughly ashamed of and embarrassed by.” She paused. “Though I was in yet another copied body then, still it feels exactly as though that was me, riding out across the desert to talk to the recalcitrant machine. It, ah, it sends its regards, by the way.” She shrugged. “It was being sincere and un-ironic, as far as I could tell.”

QiRia smiled. “Yes, I visited it there,” he told her. “Honn, Dibaldipen. Dusty… Anyway. What has caused this proliferation of Tefwes, Tefwe?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s a flap going on. They need me to ask you something.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“A fairly standard ship collective handling the latest budding emergency.”

“SC?”

“No. Though some SC-associated ships helped get me to Hassipura and now to you.”

“Should I be worried or flattered?”

“Flattered.”

“Hassipura told you where I was… willingly?”

“Yes.”

“How easy was it to convince it?”

“It took time, but that was mostly just showing it the respect it believes it’s due. That drone demands a certain ceremoniality in such matters.”

QiRia smiled again, nodded. “And you left it well, functioning?”

“Entirely. Anyway, it still has surprisingly many ambitions in regard to its desiccated hobby.”

“So, what is it you want of me?”

“We need you to confirm or deny something. It will take a little while to explain.”

“I have the time. Do you?”

“Of course. It’s about the Gzilt.”

“Ah-ha!”

“They’re about to Sublime.”

“I know. I trust that all goes smoothly.”

“Ah, well,” she said, and told him all she had been told.

He sat forward, listening, nodding now and again.

“So,” Tefwe said, “the Z-R seem to think you might be able to confirm what the message from the Zihdren themselves is claiming: that the Book of Truth is a lie, part of somebody’s experiment in applied practical theology or something. And we — the Culture — have been asked to help the Z-R with this, plus we have a kind of obligation to the Gzilt to do the right thing.”

“But how much difference might it make?” QiRia asked, sounding sad. “Knowing the truth of it, if it is true?”

Tefwe shrugged. “I don’t know, Ngaroe. I’m not sure anybody knows. But we can’t just let it go. I guess the truth always needs to be chased down. I’m helping with the chasing, and you have the answer, or part of it. If you remember. Do you remember?”

He just sat there smiling at her, silent. The Sound, outside, a vast shadowy symphony of meaninglessness, still seemed to fill the small, night-dark cell.

Her throat was a little sore, she realised, from having to keep her voice raised for so long. She cleared it, said, “I remember that you told me you forgot nothing, remembered everything, had it all stored within you, sometimes multiply, in exhaustive, awful, boring, terrible detail. Detail ghastly for its sheer everlasting banality.” She paused to give him time to speak, but still he didn’t. “It would be good to know what you know about all this, Ngaroe. You always seemed to feel something for the Gzilt. It might help them to know whether this is the truth at last, or another lie.” She paused again, but still he kept silent. “Even if we find out something that it might be best for them not to know, at least we’ll know. At least we’ll have the choice.”

“But who would we be to make that choice?”

“Their friends.”

“Really?”

“The Culture has no selfish interests in this, Ngaroe,” she said, trying not to sigh, though doubting that he’d hear her if she did. She could sense that they were already starting to gravitate back to some of the arguments they’d had centuries ago. They had ended inconclusively then — unless you counted mutual annoyance as a conclusion — and she thought it highly unlikely they’d end up any different this time.

He looked unconvinced, eyebrows rising again. “The Culture has an interest in everything it touches,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed that at least.”

“Maybe so, but no selfish interest. We just want to do the right thing by people we’ve historically felt close to.”

“Ah. That old excuse.”

“Will you stop that?” She could feel herself starting to get angry with him again, and that was not going to help. “It’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth.”

“One person’s truth,” he began.

“Oh, fuck,” she said, looking away and crossing her arms. “Here we go…” She looked back when she realised he was laughing. “What?” she demanded.

“I can’t help you, Tefwe,” he told her. He was looking down now.

“What? Why not?”

“I just can’t.” He reached down by the side of the chair, felt for and found the cord there, and started pulling it. She could hear the matting that had rolled down over the cell’s open window earlier as it was pulled back up again. The Sound pulsed back into the room, filling it like an avalanche bursting into a cabin an instant before it was swept away entirely.

“Because,” he said, shouting, “I got rid of those memories some years ago.” He completed hauling the sound-deadening matting back up and sat back again as though exhausted, like somebody long deprived of the sunlight finally being allowed to face directly into its warmth again. He took a deep, satisfied breath and shouted, “So I don’t have them any more. Not here. Not on me, not in me. They’re gone.” Tefwe’s ears had mostly closed up again, assaulted by the noise. She wasn’t sure she could really hear what QiRia was saying any more; it was more that she was lip-reading. There was a fraction more light getting into the cell now, around the still-closed shutters.

“But why?” she shouted.

“Fear, Tefwe,” he said, shrugging. “I was frightened that what I knew would be enough to cause me trouble, given what was going to happen; given the Subliming. So I made sure that the memories became encoded in just one place — two places. Then I saw an old friend who relieved me of them.” He shook his head. “Now I have no idea what I used to know. I’m sorry.”

“So… where are… where were those memories?” she asked, yelling. “Where were they encoded?”

He reached up to his face with one hand, took off the slatted glasses. The heat coming off his skin, differentiated according to the various surfaces on his face, plus the small amount of evening light leaking round the edges of the shutters, meant her eyes could see quite well enough.

In the very first instant, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at, or what was wrong with his face. Then she started to realise. She felt herself frowning and sitting further forward, to see properly and to make sense of what it was she was seeing. Though she thought she knew now, and thought she should, really, have known all along.

At first she thought that where his eyes had been he now had a pair of belly-buttons, but that was just her first, instinctive reaction. Looking closer, thinking it through, she realised that what he actually had in his eye sockets, in place of his eyes — quite neatly integrated, looking for all the world as though they belonged there — was another pair of ears.

Ngaroe smiled, though it was a thin smile this time; perhaps even a mocking one. The Sound, though baffled by the heavy shutters, seemed to rise suddenly then and shake her to her core, making her synthetic lungs resonate and her carbon bones vibrate and her own augmented eyes quiver and water in their sockets. It all but drowned out his voice.

Through her tears she struggled to lip-read what he said in reply to her question about where the missing memories had been encoded:

“Take a guess, Tefwe.”