The Hydrogen Sonata

Three (S -23)

The Mistake Not…, a Culture vessel of indefinite age, hazy provenance and indeterminate class but generally reckoned to be some sort of modestly tooled-up civilian craft rather than a part of the Culture’s allegedly still slowly shrinking military resources, had been detailed to rendezvous with the Liseiden fleet by the clinker sun of Ry. The result of an experiment carried out by the General Systems Vehicle that had constructed it decades earlier, and not even officially classed as an Eccentric, the craft’s real status had always been moot. Regardless, currently it was seconded to the Contact section for the occasion of the Gzilt Subliming. Seemingly eager to make a good impression, the ship made sure to be at the rendezvous point especially early.

It had a few dozen hours to wait; it circled the husk that was the long-dead sun for a while, inspecting the tiny, barely radiating stellar remnant, then darted about the rest of the system in a series of high acceleration/deceleration dashes — just for the fun of it, really — surveying the handful of cold, gas giant planets orbiting the cinder.

Slightly too big to be a true brown dwarf, the sun had never been quite substantial enough to maintain nuclear fusion for any meaningful amount of time, effectively passing straight through the Main Sequence that defined normal stellar evolution as though it was a barrier to be slipped past rather than a path to be travelled along. It had never blazed brightly and after what truncated life it might have had as a true star, had subsequently spent billions of years just radiating away what little internal heat it had ever possessed.

It lay burned out now, as cold as its accompanying planets and darker than the galactic skies around it. The Mistake Not… could see everything around it perfectly well, of course, and in exquisite detail, able to ramp up any remnant radiations from the failed star itself or the background wash of galactic space or illuminate anything it felt the need to inspect using a variety of its own active sensor arrays, and — in case all that standard 3D stuff wasn’t enough — it was capable of deploying the ultimate vantage point of standing outside the skein of real space altogether, looking down on this local patch of the normal universe from either direction of hyperspace… but still it missed the starlight. There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.

This was just… dull.

Especially in 3D. Via hyperspace the ship could see a delightfully attractive supernova filling nearly a thirty-secondth of the sky off to one side, but the wavefront of real light had yet to crawl across the intervening gulf of space to get here and illuminate this fate-forsaken cinder. Dull beyond dull.

And lifeless! The whole system! Even the few Deadly-Slow species — the glacially paced plodders of the galactic community whose constitution and chemistries might have suited the cold and quiet of the local environment — appeared to have given both the star and its planets a miss; no Baskers, no sign of Seedsail or Darclouds or any of the other relevant species that were the cosmic equivalent of sub-silt feeders. A lonely, misfit sun, then; never quite one thing or the other, and remote from its peers.

The Mistake Not… registered a twinge of affinity with the dead star, and investigated that response as well, turning over in its mind the bizarre concept of a conscious entity such as itself feeling some sort of metaphorical connection with something as classically boring, as easily described and as billion-year venerable as a failed sun.

The ship was aware that, however splendid, intellectually refined and marvellous it might be (and it was very much of the opinion that it was all of those things, and more), it would likely still only ever measure its age in thousands of years, and for all the star’s monotonous lifelessness and sterility, it would still be here when it, the ship Mistake Not…, had gone.

Still: life was life, consciousness was consciousness, and mere classical matter, inanimate — no matter how long-lasting — was just ineffably boring and in a sense pointless compared to almost any sort of life, let along something that was fully aware of its own existence, never mind something as gloriously hyper-sentient and thoroughly, vitally connected to the universe as a ship Mind.

And besides, when it had ceased to be as a Culture vessel, the ship was confident that its being would continue to exist in some form, somewhere, either — at the very least — as part of some long-slumbering transcorporated group-mind, or — ultimate of ultimates, as far as was known — within the Sublime.

Which kind of brought it back to where it had come in: here.

The approaching Liseiden fleet manifested as a collection of forty slightly embarrassingly untidy warp-wakes, some distance off.

The Liseiden were fluidics: metre-scale eel-like creatures originally evolved beneath the ice of a wandering extra-stellar planet. They were at the five going-on six stage of development according to the pretty much universally accepted table of Recognised Civilisationary Levels. This meant they were Low Level Involved, and — like many at that level — Strivationist; energetically seeking to better themselves and shift their civilisation further along its own Main Sequence of technological and societal development.

They were a lively, creative and uninhibited species, according to most analyses, and just the tolerable side of the assertive/aggressive line, though not above bending the odd rule or stepping over the occasional decency boundary if they thought they could profit civilisationally. So not, in that regard at least, that different from almost every other Involved species.

They were here, now, to negotiate, trade, acquire or just plain steal whatever they could of whatever assets, plant, kit, tech or general gizmology the Gzilt left behind when they Epiphanised in twenty-three days’ time. And they had form in this regard: they’d done this before with other Subliming species, which meant they went by another name according to most people’s reckoning: Scavengers.

Scavenger species, it was fair to say, were not universally liked or respected by all their galactic cohabitees, and that could lead to trouble, especially within the heightened emotional atmosphere surrounding a Subliming, and all the more so when there were other, competing Scavenger species in the vicinity sharing the same predatory intentions, which, here, there were. The Mistake Not… was part of a distributed meta-fleet of Culture and other craft invited into their until-now jealously guarded space by the Gzilt to help keep matters as friendly and civilised as possible while they got ready to do the Big Disappear.

Normally the martially inclined though generally peaceful Gzilt would have had plenty of their own ships to enforce any degree of compliance they wanted within their own sphere of influence, especially against people toting the sort of bow-and-arrow tech a level five/six civ like the Liseiden could muster, but these were not normal times; the Gzilt had chosen to send many of their best ships into the Sublime first, as though to reconnoitre. It wasn’t unknown for about-to-Sublime species to do this, but it was unusual, possibly a little paranoid, and arguably dangerous, a little like you had already taken your eye off the target…

Happily, according to the galaxy-wide gossip web that passed as an intelligence network between Culture ships, there had lately been local rumours of a last-minute deal between the Gzilt and at least one of the circling Scavenger species — probably the Liseiden — to legitimise and formalise the scavenging process.

The Liseiden were definitely learning. These days they went actively looking for this sort of mutually agreed understanding with species about to Sublime, rather than just piling in like piratical scrappers every time. On this occasion they’d even thought to get representation: they’d hired a people called the Iwenick to be their humanoid face at negotiations with the Gzilt. This was, by general assent, a Smart Move.

So the Liseiden would get the contract, as it were, and be expected to conduct themselves with the decorum befitting their presence anywhere near such a momentous event, as well as behaving with the sort of studied calmness that only came from knowing that what you were engaged in was a dignified and conscientious clearing-up and recycling process, and not some childishly desperate rule-free scramble for whatever loot could be scooped before the adults stepped in to re-impose order.

Sadly, an equally plausible rumour held that — perhaps thanks to the pride of the Gzilt, for too long reluctant even to think of lesser civs pawing over their remains following their departure for better things — this had all been left far too late, and the other Scavenger species, already in place within or around Gzilt space, would refuse to honour any such agreement.

There was, as a result, a distinct chance that things might get interesting.

The ship watched the Liseiden fleet crawl closer.

Much further off than they’d ever have imagined possible, it had already begun to monitor some of their comms traffic.

“…deal with the Culture ship?”

“…well, I—”

“Got a name for this thing yet?”

“…um—”

“The Mistake Not…, apparently.”

“The Mistake Not…?”

“Affirmative.”

“Mistake Not what?”

“That’s all we’ve got, sir.”

“That’s not really good enough, is it?”

“Not really, sir. I—”

“Nyomulde; you’re supposed to be the Culture fan-child of the Fleet; what have you… do you have?”

“Ah, sir. The form, um, the ellipses after the words ‘Mistake Not’ imply there’s more, but it’s redacted; hidden. I’ve had the AI scan the relevant databases and there’s… there is no more. I mean, there is sort of generally understood to be more, but it’s like, ah, it’s not for public… it’s sort of a private joke between the Culture ships, the Minds.”

“A joke?”

“It’s what they’re like, sir.”

“Ridiculous. How’d this bunch of effete spawnsuckers ever get to where they are?”

“Well—”

“Class? How about…? What class is it? What are we dealing with here? Have they deigned to tell us that or is that redacted too?”

“I’ve got it down as a non-defined ‘U’ open brackets ‘e’ close brackets, sir.”

“Keep going, officer.”

“Well, ‘non-defined’ sort of speaks for itself, ‘U’ just means ‘Unit’ and ‘e’… Hmm. I thought that meant Eccentric, to be honest, sir, but some sources hold that it stands for erratic. Strictly speaking the ‘e’ should be upper case if it stands for—”

“Size? What size is it?”

“In the order of a couple of kilometres, though that’s just the outer field envelope.”

“‘In the order of.’”

“Best we’ve got, sir.”

“I see. Do we have any idea what it looks like?”

“Um, not really, sir. No record of its appearance within the field complex boundary. There are various guesses but they’re all very speculative. One or two—”

“Spare me, officer. It’s a Culture ship but we don’t know what sort.”

“In a pebbleshell, yes, sir.”

There was a lot more like this, all in the Liseiden tongue, which was made up of a not inharmonious series of bubbly water-belches. The ship added the name Nyomulde to the Culture’s intelligence archive of known Liseiden officers, immediately transmitting this to a variety of its comrade craft both near and far.

The Liseiden hadn’t been forthcoming regarding the identity of the approaching fleet’s commanding officer, or even which ships would make up the fleet in the first place, but from the largest ship’s warp signature — hideously obvious from light years away — the Mistake Not… had determined hours earlier that it was the Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya, a Collective Purposes Vessel (First Class) and fleet flagship representing the last word in what the Liseiden were capable of building.

Much more satisfyingly, from the tone and word choice of one of the individuals talking — referencing earlier notes compiled by other Culture ships — the Mistake Not… was becoming increasingly certain that one of the voices it was listening to was a senior Liseiden officer called Ny-Xandabo Tyun, a male who held the rank of Salvage and Reprocessing Team Principal. Admiral, in other words.

But what babble! What to-ing and fro-ing over such simple operational matters! A bunch of dim-witted, slow-thinking bios swimming in a tub clouded with their own effluent, trying to work out what was going on around them by staring through portholes probably. It was hard for a ship, a Mind, not to feel at least a degree of contempt.

And they were still talking, out there between the stars, as the little flock of ships scraped slowly, slowly closer. (The fleet was already having to decelerate, the Mistake Not… noted, with some exasperation. This would draw the whole process out even further.) It was only a meet-and-greet anyway; almost as soon as it got here the Liseiden fleet would be breaking up again, most of the ships heading off singly or in small groups to individual places of interest within the Gzilt sphere; only the flagship and a few smaller vessels would remain as any sort of substantive unit.

This was something Admiral Tyun himself didn’t know yet; there were sealed orders in the flagship’s AI detailing all this dispositional stuff which were only to be accessed on the fleet’s arrival at the clinker star but which the Culture already knew about through a piece of deft signal interception by some other ship or ships tens of days earlier.

The Mistake Not… found knowing this — while Admiral Tyun did not — quite agreeable.

It would probably tag along with the flagship and its escorts, plus it had prepared an eel-like avatoid to represent it in person aboard the flagship. From what it had been told, the Liseiden were almost suspiciously keen to welcome this creature aboard.

It listened in to the animal chatter again.

Good grief, they were still discussing its own name!

The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless.

All these people seemed to do was talk!

It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.

Finally one of them said, “Sir, we… may be approaching the sort of distance the Culture ship can start to read our comms.”

“This far out?”

“–encrypted, aren’t… isn’t it?”

“Precautionary principle applies, team. Officer?”

The obvious, inter-ship comms traffic ceased. The Mistake Not… considered dedicating an effector to the lead vessel to monitor it internally, but there was a tiny chance they might spot it doing so — a tiny chance increased by the possibility the fleet carried tech filched on earlier Scavenging sorties — so it didn’t.

Hours of patient waiting later, the Liseiden fleet of large, boxy-looking ships finally dragged itself into the Ry system, hauled up into a rather quaint orbit around the clinker sun with the warp-engine equivalent of loud clanks and clouds of black smoke, and — finally — rendezvoused officially with the Culture ship Mistake Not…

Effusive greetings of great solemnity and seemingly genuine friendliness flowed in both directions.

It was while all this was going on and the avatoid eel was being puttered across to the fleet flagship in an antique shuttle brought along specially for the purpose that one of the Mistake Not…’s multitudinous sub-routines — this one charged with deep analysis of recent HS sensor data by opportunistic triangulation following significant movement within any given real space reference frame — flagged the tiniest of oddities.

It was timed, originally, just over twenty-two hours earlier and it was located some centuries away, about a quarter of the distance round the boundary of the rough sphere of stars and space that held the Gzilt volume of influence. Specifically, it had taken place within the colossal, slow-tumbling clouds and wastes and veils of light marking the Yampt-Sferde supernova: the pretty one it had noticed earlier whose real light had yet to get here. Somewhere inside the vast, escaping fires of the nebula there had been a microscopic flare of radiation displaying an unusual, even anomalous signature spectrum.

Suddenly in proper, no-nonsense combat-grade Mind-thinking time, while the transfer shuttle moved a few nanometres towards its destination, the AI cores on the Liseiden flagship slept deeply between cycles and the Liseiden themselves would have appeared frozen and silent even observing them on a scale of subjective years, the Mistake Not… watched the sub-routine’s resulting attention-cascade briefly suck in and focus other computational assetry on the data, rapidly producing all the available analysis it was presently possible to compile on the subject.

The anomaly — so faint, far away and overwhelmed by the seething turmoil of energies all around it as to be only very ambiguously weapon-blink — looked like it was centred quite precisely on the artificially maintained planetary fragment called Ablate, where the Gzilt had some sort of ceremonial facility.

…Oh-oh, thought the Culture ship.