The Hydrogen Sonata

Seven (S -20)

Fzan-Juym was a sub-summit-orbit satellite of the Sculpt planet Eshri, making it one of a very small sub-category of moons; only its military nature and natural/artificial status — it was, arguably, a ship — stopped it being regarded as a genuine wonder.

The Werpesh, the people who had constructed the Girdlecity on Xown, had turned their attentions to Eshri at about the same time they’d begun building on Xown, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. By then Eshri had been dead for well over a billion years. It was small, dry, frozen and stony, with a thin atmosphere and a solidified core that registered as barely warm; most of the heat from its formation had been convected and then radiated away, and what little radioactivity the core had possessed had since decayed almost to nothing.

Thanks to little tectonic activity of its own but a lot of early asteroid-battering that had produced lava outflows covering large parts of the world, it had been a fairly smooth little globe to start with. The Werpesh had decided to improve — as they saw it — upon this promising start, and used planiforming techniques to turn Eshri into one of their Sculpt worlds; a flat-surfaced planet of polished rock with a network of encircling trenches — steep sided, kilometres deep and tens of kilometres wide — incised into and right around it. From space the planet looked like a colossal ball-bearing etched with ball-races for thousands of smaller spheres.

Scholars of the Werpesh and their works reckoned Eshri was the most extreme of all the Sculpt worlds; on no other had the ground been so thoroughly levelled, the remaining atmosphere so assiduously removed, the canyon-trenches etched so deep or so wide or attained such a bewildering complexity.

Like all the few dozen or so Sculpt worlds, there had been no utility to the project. As far as could be discerned — the Werpesh had been a reticent species, unable or unwilling to explain themselves to the extent that other, more nosy species thought they ought — the Sculpt worlds were basically a series of titanic works of art.

That they also functioned as highly visible expressions of sheer power and a certain willingness to ignore galactic etiquette (most species/civs had long since agreed to leave “wild” worlds like Eshri untouched), well, that was probably just an added bonus. Nevertheless, although the Werpesh had not been a particularly aggressive or expansive people, it would be fair to say that their contemporaries had been less than heartbroken when they’d opted for Subliming and stopped building such impressive vulgarities as the Girdlecity of Xown and the Sculpt planets.

The Gzilt, by luck and the good grace of at least one Elder species in nominal control of the Werpesh legacy, had fallen heir to most of the Sublimed species’ abandoned systems in their immediate vicinity, and had quickly and enthusiastically got on with the business of — for example — colonising and rebuilding on and within Xown’s great Girdlecity. They were less sure what to do with the brace of Sculpt worlds they had inherited; neglected if never quite abandoned, these had by default become no more than occasional if rather one-trick tourist stopover sites.

Then the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14 — which was all and none of the adjectives in its name — had chosen to make Eshri its home. Or at least the home of its home.

Fzan-Juym had been the Regiment’s headquarters for nearly a millennium by then. Roughly spherical and a couple of kilometres in diameter, the satellite had started out life as an asteroid of the Izenion system; just another tumbling rock amongst tens of millions of others. Initially, after being hollowed out to become the regimental HQ, it had been left in a close-to-original orbit within the Izenion system’s inner asteroid belt, theoretically gaining from being just one of a bewildering array of potential targets, should anyone ever be foolish enough to wish it harm. Later, with improvements in weapon and sensor technology, the natural camouflage effect of being part of a mass of other asteroids had been negated. Happily, the likelihood of any realistic threat had receded at the same time, so the placement of the regiment’s HQ became more about statement — prestige, even — than about operational survivability.

So Fzan-Juym had been appropriately refitted, refurbished and improved, towed to Eshri, slung into a low orbit around it and then carefully lowered still further — kilometre by kilometre, metre by metre, eventually millimetre by millimetre, speeding up all the time — until its orbit now lay a kilometre beneath the planet’s surface, darting along one of the widest and deepest canyons of all in a blur of planet-girdling movement, its course held steady by a network of hermetically isolated AIs and multiply redundant thruster systems dedicated to doing nothing else.

Its own engines had done almost all the work at every stage, though various other craft had helped and been there to step in had anything started to go wrong, but a modest degree of seeming helplessness was deemed to be useful in providing a sort of camouflage of its own.

Fzan-Juym, headquarters of the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14, had been in sub-surface equatorial orbit of Eshri ever since, zipping along like a super-fast bullet in a slab-sided groove open to the pitch-black sky, orbiting the planet in less than an hour and covering over two hundred million kilometres every year — nearly half a trillion altogether by now — while never coming closer than fifteen hundred metres to either the flat canyon floor or its sheer, polished sides.

You approached Fzan-Juym carefully, from astern. Approaching it any other way meant its hair-trigger defensive systems would blow you out of the sky. Coming in from astern meant that even if you collided with it, approaching too fast, the extra impetus would, in theory, merely boost its orbit a fraction, sending it higher, away from danger. It also meant that as well as the arrays, batteries and multiple turrets of emission, kinetic and missile weapon system sites pointing at you, you got to contemplate the impressive collection of variegated main drive units and crater-wide thruster nozzles pointing straight at you, each of them guaranteed to be usefully and reliably — and terminally — weapon-like in their effect should they be turned on even for a microsecond while you approached.

The principal hangar entrance lay nestled in the centre of a quartet of main drive units; the transfer pinnace slipped towards it, shadows wheeling about it as it gently outpaced the asteroid, approaching at about humanoid running speed, a little faster than was normally allowed. The little twelve-seat vessel disappeared, pitching nose-down for a moment and trembling as it encountered the asteroid’s own internal gravity field.

The view behind cut off as a field and then a real, physical door blocked the view of the deep, sunlit trench whipping past outside, and lights came on in the hangar as the pinnace settled to the floor. Somewhere, a system would be compensating for the small amount of downward impetus caused by the tiny craft transferring its weight to the hangar deck.

Commissar-Colonel Etalde looked at Vyr Cossont and smiled. “Home at last!” he said, possibly a little too heartily.

Cossont just smiled.

They had crossed the few decades from Xown in the Mureite system to Eshri in Izenion within the 5*Gelish-Oplule, a regimental cruiser about as fast as anything the fleet possessed. Tired, and with nothing seemingly expected of her after they’d transferred to the ship above Xown, she’d slept aboard in a cabin of a size significantly above that her reactivated rank would normally have called for and wondered if she had the bulk of the elevenstring to thank for this; they’d quartered it with her.

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

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

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

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

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

“No food?” Pyan said again, plaintively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, yes, ma’am.”

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

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

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

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

“As far as we know,” she agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Old scores,” the marshal muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Antagonistic’?” Reikl said.

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

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

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

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

“So, the ALC had turned—”

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

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

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

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

“What did he tell you?”

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

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

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

“Which one?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marshal Boyuter looked at him, openly sneering.

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

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

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

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

“I apologise for the state of my fellow senior officers,” Reikl told her.

“I…” Cossont began, unsure what to say.

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

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

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

“What is it I’m being ask—?”

“Look for something,” Reikl told her.

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

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

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

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

Cossont felt disoriented by the sudden change in direction. “Loyalties? Um, well, to the regiment, to Gzilt,” she said. “And, ah, family…”

“And how do you feel about Subliming?” The general glanced at her chest. “I see you have no time-to, though your records say you were issued with one.”

“I just left it behind one day,” Cossont said, hearing her voice falter. She cleared her throat. “I’m ready to Sublime, with everybody else,” she said, drawing herself up a little, as though for inspection. Reikl looked at her, said nothing. “There’s a bit of… I’m a little nervous,” Cossont confessed. “I suppose everybody is, but, well, it’s all documented, it’s all meant to be… better. There; in the Sublime.” She was aware this sounded lame. She shook her head. “And it’s all I’ve ever known, ma’am; just what’s expected. Of course I’m going to go when everybody else does.” Reikl waited. Cossont added, “Because everybody else… does.”

Reikl nodded. “Kind of in the whole culture, whole society, preparing, since before you were born,” she agreed. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to ask you again: are you willing to do what we might ask, what I might ask?”

Cossont looked into the other woman’s eyes for a moment. She thought of all the people you heard about who had resigned commissions, disobeyed orders, committed ludicrous crimes, especially just recently, all because the Subliming was so close and the wheels of justice ground so slow; by the time they might expect to be punished, they’d have gone with everybody else. Every individual got their own chance, apparently, with no way — aside from summary execution — for society to pick and choose who went.

She suspected most people had been tempted to do something crazy in these final days, maybe something they’d always thought about but never dared do, until now. She’d gone for the other option, of just keeping your head down and maybe taking on an absorbing life-task until the big day came. One way of looking at this was that it was less self-obsessed. Another was that it was less daring, a cop-out, almost cowardly.

She could say no, she was aware of that. Reikl she trusted, and had heard good things about, but the uselessness of the other two senior officers had been a shock. She hadn’t realised how mad things had become. They’d all be Sublimed soon anyway — what was the point of taking on some mission that might be even slightly dangerous? It was all very romantic, but she had no illusions regarding her own abilities — she was no spy, no hero, no super-agent.

Still, there was something about the intensity of the other woman’s gaze and the way she carried herself, some expression of the force of her personality — and maybe just some residual need in Cossont to obey somebody so much more senior, inculcated from childhood and throughout her life — that made her want to please Reikl, to do as she said or even demanded. It was also, she admitted to herself, a way of abandoning her idiotic life-task without losing too much self-respect. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do whatever I can, ma’am. But it would help to know—”

“Yes.” Reikl nodded, as though just remembering something. “Yes, well, sorry to make it sound so melodramatic, Lieutenant Commander, but let me get to the point: the Book of Truth is a lie.”

Cossont stared at her.

The Gzilt holy book was something you just grew up with, something you took for granted, and felt proud of. It might, in a sense, have outlived its most useful period, when it had demonstrably been telling the Gzilt people truths — facts — they could never have guessed at the time, but it was still revered. Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usually tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who — it took real blind faith not to accept — had made them up.

But even then, of course, the Book of Truth stood alone, as the one that had made sense throughout.

That the Zihdren had turned out to be not quite so important, and not unique, as the book implied, made little difference. Because another thing that you learned was that everybody had their own point of view; all species and civilisations saw things from their own perspective — and with themselves, generally, naturally, at the centre of things. The Gzilt were in one sense no different, and in another were rather better off, more justified in their self-regard, because they had had less to repudiate, less baggage to renounce; their holy book had little to apologise for.

“A lie?” she heard herself saying.

“Not just a misinterpretation or a good deed or helping hand taken too far: an outright, deliberate lie, coated with a selection of scientific truths to make it easier to swallow, but otherwise fashioned purely to deceive,” Reikl told her.

“By the Zihdren?”

“By the Zihdren,” Reikl confirmed. “In fact, by a tiny faction within the Zihdren: a solitary university faculty, a small renegade research team with a single dissident individual at its head. We are, and always have been since the Book was put together, an experiment, Ms Cossont. The Scribe was just a clever man down on his luck with a gift for speculation, embroidery and marketing. He was selected by the Zihdren — profiled, chosen — and then given the basis of the Book. The rest, of course, he just made up.

“We know all this because there was a Zihdren-Remnanter ship on its way to Zyse and the parliament for the final ceremonies. It was carrying a… an android, some sort of humanoid entity that was to represent the Zihdren at the ceremonies, but it was also supposed to confess all this deception to the political high-ups just before Subliming, so that technically the confession would have been made and the Zihdren’s revelation would have been delivered, but too late — you’d assume, they were assuming — to make any difference, and not for general consumption, of course. The political establishment is more locked into the whole Subliming idea than anybody else; they might be a little shocked, dazed even, to have confirmed what cynics and apostates have been muttering for millennia, but they would never call off the whole Subliming or think to put it to a vote or a plebiscite.”

The general smiled. It was not a convincing expression. “Only, the Zihdren ship never arrived at Zyse. It was intercepted by a Gzilt ship en route, and destroyed on some pretext,” she said. “Just before it was incinerated the Zihdren ship tried to reason with the Gzilt craft by explaining how important its mission was. It released the sealed information it was carrying. Until that point we believe it hadn’t known itself what the message contained. It was destroyed anyway and a component of the Gzilt ship loyal to something beyond the regiment it belonged to ensured the information duly made its way to us.”

Reikl stepped a little closer to Cossont, making Vyr want to step back. She resisted the urge, let the other woman put her face close to hers. “And the thing is,” the general continued, “the message mentioned Ngaroe QiRia by name, as somebody who might help provide proof that this was all true, even if there would have been precious little time to have done the checking required by the time this information was supposed to have been passed on.” Reikl did her faux smile thing again. “So, Ms Vyr Cossont, Lieutenant Commander Cossont, reserve, in her civilian blouse and the Lords of Excrement jacket she’s been trying to hide,” Reikl said, reaching out with both hands and gently patting down Cossont’s shirt collar, “we are looking to you to help us here, because some of us would dearly love to know if all this really is all true, and what further light on matters Mr QiRia — in any of his incarnations — might be able to throw on things. Because we understand — I understand — that the gentleman concerned might exist in more than one form now, is that not right?”

“Ah,” Cossont said, “that.”

“Yes,” Reikl said softly. “That.”

“The mind-state thing.”

“Just as you say; the mind-state thing.”

“It’s not something that I have any more, ma’am,” Cossont confessed.

“I know,” Reikl told her, leaning back a little from her. “You donated it to one of the Centralised Dataversities on the Bokri microrbital, Ospin.”

Cossont nodded. “The Incast facility. They specialise—”

“—specialise in that sort of thing,” Reikl said, nodding. “Yes, I’ve read your journal.”

Cossont frowned. “But that was in the private—”

“Don’t be naive,” Reikl said, shaking her head. “We’re your regiment. The point is, would you be prepared to go there and get it back?”

“To Ospin?”

“We’re practically en route,” the general said, her gaze wandering all over Cossont now, as though inspecting her in some military parade, taking in her overall appearance, her clothes, everything. Cossont felt oddly helpless, transfixed. In a parade the inspecting officer traditionally looked for the slightest thing out of place or badly done; perhaps Reikl was looking for anything on her that had any military merit whatsoever. “It would be very helpful,” Reikl was saying, still inspecting her. “You could even be doing something Gzilt as a whole would be most grateful for. Obviously we all respect life-tasks but this could be rather more important than playing a piece of music all the way through, however difficult it might be. Really, promotion and medals and awards and such nonsenses mean nothing if we’re all about to step into the big bright and shining light, Vyr, but there is just a chance that we’d be doing so under false pretences, and it would be good to know the truth, don’t you think? Just in case we wanted to rethink, and stay in the Real and accomplish more here first, and leave Subliming for another time. That ought to be a choice, don’t you agree?”

“I—”

“Shouldn’t even be too dangerous. And much better than us going piling in. The regiment, I mean, mob-handed, fully tooled. That could be awkward. There might be ructions. In fact, ructions would be pretty much guaranteed, given that Ospin and the Dataversities fall under the protection of the Home Systems Regiment, and it was one of their ships, we think, that wasted the Zihdren vessel. Powf! Like that.” She snapped her fingers gently in front of Cossont’s face. “You, however, have a plausible motive for inspecting something you donated, so we’d like to send you to see if the shade of Mr QiRia will talk to you and shed any light. Do you think you could do that? Would you be prepared? I’m very much hoping it’s not too much to ask. Is it, Vyr? Is it too much to ask?” The general was suddenly quite close to her again.

Cossont shook her head; she felt she’d been half hypnotised. “No, ma’am. I’ll… I’ll go. I’ll… it’ll be my…” Cossont shook her head, cleared her throat, pulled herself upright. “I will do what you ask.”

The general leaned back again, smiled — sincerely, this time, or so it appeared. “Thank you,” she said, with a little side-nod of the head. “Now, let’s find your android bodyguard, shall we?” She turned and walked smartly along the awkwardly curved floor of the corridor; the door ahead rolled open. Cossont followed.

The mind-state thing.

It had been a final present she’d received from the Anything Legal Considered; a copy of QiRia’s soul, basically. The ship hadn’t handed it over to her until the day and the moment she was leaving, a bag in her hand and the elevenstring’s case sitting on a float-pallet slaved to her, hovering obediently at her side like a slightly annoying pet.

She’d been bade farewell by the ship’s golden-skinned avatar and had started to turn — one foot still on the floor of the ship’s hangar, her other foot on the rear ramp of the Gzilt transfer shuttle — when the avatar had said, “Oh, and there’s this,” and, when she’d turned, handed her a little dark-grey, subtly glittering cube which lay heavy in her palm.

“From our old friend on Perytch IV,” the avatar had told her. “That’s him, in there, in a sense. For you alone; to be ignored, consulted, insulted, thrown aside, as you wish, he told me to say.” The creature had held up its gleaming golden hand. “Goodbye.”

Outside the corridor end, in a wider cross-chamber, there was sudden noise and a line of men and women in a mixture of uniform and fancy dress, dancing past, roaring with laughter. Almost all sobered instantly the moment they saw the general, and stood to attention, breathless, grinning. One or two stood at ease, or even hunched over, hands on knees, getting their breath back or still laughing.

“At ease, all of you,” Reikl said, then put some volume and steel into her voice and repeated, “All of you,” to bring the last couple into line. She looked at them as Cossont stood behind her, finding herself the object of some interest. Reikl caught the glances. “Yes,” she said, “somebody in civilian clothes, behaving with rather more decorum than any of you.” She nodded. “However; as you were.” She glanced at Cossont and they set off up the larger corridor.

Behind them, the hilarity quickly resumed.

A travel capsule was waiting, door open for them, a few metres away. The doors closed. Reikl muttered something Cossont didn’t catch — the general might even have been sub-vocalising badly.

The only thing indicating they were moving was a holo display showing the capsule travelling through the asteroid moon from near the centre towards the stern where the hangar complex lay. Cossont watched this with Reikl next to her. The general was gnawing at a finger pad, a brooding look on her face.

They exited into a large room like a cross between a laboratory and a small manufacturing plant, crossing to the only apparent activity, where three people in tech uniforms, one a commander, fussed round a raised seat where a figure reclined, bottom half in standard fatigues, top half naked, the back of his head enclosed by some sort of bulky helmet. A series of giant holo screens, all displaying graphics of colourfully complex incomprehensibility, arced around the group.

The man opened his eyes as they approached, looked about, eyes swivelling, gaze fixing briefly on each of the faces around him. His expression looked uncertain, fearful. Cossont noticed that he was restrained in the semi-reclined seat, held at ankles and wrists, a thin metallic band round his waist.

“So, Gaed,” Reikl said to the tech commander, “is this… are we ready yet?” The man in the seat stared at her as she spoke, as though he’d never heard anybody make such a noise before. He was tall, muscled, with a lean face. If this was the android Reikl had spoken about, Cossont thought, he was quite convincingly human-looking, apart from the rather immature, bewildered expression on his face.

“Another few hours, I think, ma’am,” the tech commander said. He held a small control pad, like his two assistants, both of whom — a young man and a young woman — saluted Reikl, ignored Cossont completely and then, after a nod from the general, got on with what they’d been doing, which was mostly staring at the giant screens, muttering into thin air and to each other, and consulting their control units, manipulating holo displays hovering above the screens like the ghostly projected images of wildly complicated plumbing systems. The man in the chair twitched, looked surprised, most times they did this.

“What’s the delay?” Reikl asked impatiently.

“It’s, ah, software, ma’am,” the tech commander said, glancing at Cossont for the first time. He returned his attention to the general. “Not expecting a re-emplacement, not of something at this level. Taken us a bit by surprise. It’ll all happen, ma’am, depend on it, but…” His voice trailed off as one of his assistants twisted something within the holo display above his hand-held screen, and the man in the chair relaxed suddenly, slumping into what looked like unconsciousness, head lolling to one side, mouth slack. He jerked awake a moment later, stared straight up and in a deep but controlled voice said, “Unit Y988, Parinherm, Eglyle, systems checked, all enabled. Sim status ready, engaged, chron scale subjective one-to-one.”

“Default status assumptions keep kicking in,” the tech commander said with a sigh. “Safety thing.” He looked at Reikl, possibly for support or sympathy.

“Is it ready to roll or not?” she asked.

“Not as he is, ma’am; still thinks he’s in simulation mode.”

“That’s unhelpful, Commander,” Reikl said frostily. “Get it ready. As a matter of extreme urgency.”

“Ma’am,” the commander said.

Reikl turned to Cossont, opened her mouth, then frowned, looked away. She held up one hand, turning to pace off a couple of steps. “How fast?” Cossont heard her say.

“Unit Y988, Parinherm, Eglyle,” the deep male voice said behind Cossont. “Systems checked, all enabled. Sim status ready, engaged, chrawww…” The voice slurred into silence as she watched Reikl stiffen.

“—thing in its way?” the general said, her voice urgent. She spun on one booted heel, her face raised to the light-studded ceiling. She stamped on the floor. Cossont stared. She looked round at the tech commander and his two assistants. They had their heads down, exchanging worried glances.

“No,” Reikl said, facing away from the others but making no attempt to keep her voice down. “No. Don’t. Take too long.” A pause. “Temporary command incapacity.” Another pause. “My fucking authority! Yes. All ships full autonomy; F-Z priority. Up and out, max, immediate. Yes. What? Yes! Full; now.”

A moment later an urgent warbling tone rang throughout the lab space and lights started flashing. The floor trembled beneath Cossont’s feet and a bassy, near sub-sonic rumble seemed to fill the air, her bones and lungs. The general wheeled, stamping back towards them.

“Gaed,” she said to the tech commander, who was looking up at the ceiling. He refocused on Reikl. “We’re heading down a deck,” she told him. She nodded at the figure in the chair, slumped unconscious again. “Bring this thing.” The tech commander opened his mouth to speak. Reikl raised one finger. “Right now. Fast as. Bring it. Work on it as we go. No more; just do,” she said, as the tech commander opened his mouth again. She spun away once more, saying “What?”

“You heard,” the tech commander said to the assistants, raising his voice over the incessant urgent warbling of the alarm. Cossont watched him flick something in the holo display over his hand-held. The restraints fell away from the man in the chair just as he jerked awake again and said, “Unit Y988, Parinherm, Eglyle, systems checked, all enabled. Sim status ready, engaged, chron scale subjective one-to-one.”

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

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

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

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

“The helmet,” the commander said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You briefed?” she heard Reikl demanding.

“No, ma’am,” somebody replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cossont blacked out.

On the raft, the mists rose like departing dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All… the time.”

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

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

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

“It still does not… really matter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hated it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The score is beautiful.”

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

“Oh.”

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

Cossont smiled indulgently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Melody isn’t everything.”

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

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

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

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

She nodded as though she did.

“I even helped him.”

“What?” she spluttered.

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

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

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

“You were matching…”

“Each note to a multi-dimensional glyph.”

“In Marain?”

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

“What? Beyond the nonary one?”

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

“Pretty long word.”

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

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

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

She started to wake up. She felt odd, heavy but not heavy. Her blood roared in her ears. There was something weighing heavily on her shoulders. Nothing felt quite right.

“What was that?” a familiar voice asked, sounding muffled, barely audible over the roaring in her ears.

“Additional entity potentially aboard,” another voice — deep, male — announced casually. “Scanning. Identified: artificial construct, personal.”

“And who is that?” the muffled voice asked.

Cossont knew it now: Pyan. Though, pursuing this thought, she was still a little hazy on who or what “Pyan” was. Somebody/something close, associated with affection and annoyance. That was as near as she could get for now.

“Parinherm, Eglyle,” the male voice said. “In sim.”

It felt like somebody was sitting on her shoulders. Maybe not a full-sized person, but a child at least. Also, that people were pulling on her legs and arms. All… four arms. Was that right? Oh, yes, it was; she had four arms these days, had had for years.

She opened her eyes. Two images, both of inside somewhere or something. Something quite small, cramped. The images swam together, became one.

The man sitting opposite turned to look at her. The android. He was an android. Beside him was a person clad all in silver. The android reached up above his head, did something, and fell to the ceiling, twisting as he went, landing on all fours. On the ceiling. Where some other stuff seemed to have come to rest as well.

Cossont thought about this.

Then she realised; she was upside-down. The weight on her shoulders was her own weight. Things were starting to come back to her now. Some aches and pains. Feeling a little nauseous; probably a good idea to get the right way up, soon.

The android was tapping on the side of the armoured helmet the trooper wore. The trooper’s armour had turned mirror, reflecting everything. “Hello?” the android said, tapping again. “Hello? Any form of communication? No?” He tapped once more, then stood back. “You seem dead,” he announced. He sounded puzzled.

The trooper was hanging oddly, too loose. His carbine, also gleaming, hung around his mirror-armoured face-plate.

Cossont felt sore all over. She tipped her head as best she could, neck muscles complaining, trying to see the button that would release her straps. She couldn’t twist her head that much; some sort of thick necklace thing was stopping her. She felt for the button, but that hurt too, even though her arms and hands were hanging in that direction anyway.

Like almost all Gzilt people she had been born with a sophisticated pain-management system genetically grafted on top of the ancient, genuinely stupid-sore raw animal nerve-based sense, and she understood enough about how the whole process worked to know that if you were doing something and it hurt, you should stop doing it. So she stopped.

“Could you help me?” she asked the android.

He approached her, crouched. Even upside-down, his body looked too big, bursting out of the colonel’s jacket he wore. It had ripped in places.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

“Help me down. Catch me. Please.”

“Certainly.” He reached under her head, something clicked and she fell a few centimetres before the android’s arms caught her round the waist. He turned her the right way up and positioned her sitting on the floor that had been the ceiling.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“My pleasure.” He smiled like a child. “You have four arms,” he observed.

“Yes, I have,” she agreed, rubbing them gingerly and wincing. She looked at the trooper hanging unmoving above and across from her, seeing her own face distorted in his armour. “Did you say he’s dead?”

“I think he is,” the android said.

“But how? He was the only one wearing armour. How—?”

“I think it was his armoured suit that killed him,” the android said matter-of-factly. “In the same way that the shuttle tried to destroy itself, and us.” He paused, then smiled and said, “In—”

“If it’s safe,” Pyan’s faint voice said from inside the elevenstring’s case, “could I be let out now, please?”

The android looked at her. “The artificial construct,” he said. “Is it yours?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Where are we? What happened?” She remembered being on the asteroid moon Fzan-Juym, General Reikl storming about… then nothing. Nothing until she woke up here, in what looked like a very small upside-down military transport.

“We are somewhere on the surface of the Sculpt planet Eshri, in sim. What happened—”

“‘In sim’?” she asked.

“Yes,” the android said brightly. “In sim. This is said to indicate that this is not reality but rather a simulation.” He frowned. “I am admittedly confused by aspects of the currently running simulation and have yet to work out their likely utility, though this puzzle might itself be part of the utility of the sim, for training purposes.”

She stared at him.

“Can you hear me out there?” Pyan said; its voice was somewhere between petulant and plaintive.

“This is not a sim,” Cossont told the android.

“Mm-hmm,” the android said, nodding.

She felt her eyes narrow. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I am prepared to believe that you — as presently constituted — believe that this is not a sim.”

“‘As presently constituted’? What the hell does that mean?”

“You, as a part of the simulated environment,” the android said cheerily.

She stared at him. It. “Listen,” she said.

“I can hear you, you know,” Pyan said testily. “If I can hear you, you can hear me.”

Cossont turned briefly towards the elevenstring case. “Pyan, shut up.” She looked back to the android. “I am not part of any simulation,” she told it. “I am a flesh and blood human being, and in some pain right now.” She rubbed her aching arms.

“We were flung around a lot as the craft fell,” the android said.

“Uh-huh. And so it makes me very nervous that you think this is just a simulation and I’m just a part of it. I need you to treat me as real and human.”

“I am,” the android said.

“This matters, understand? There is no second try, no extra life. Not for me, anyway; I’m not backed-up or anything.”

“Really?” The android looked sceptical.

“Really,” Cossont told it, firmly. “Even when I was in the military I was never high risk, so I was never backed-up. Maybe you are, or can be, but not me. It’s not a game, not a sim.”

“I understand and I am treating the situation accordingly,” the android said reassuringly, nodding. “That is why I guided this craft safely to ground after its own AI attempted to destroy it.”

“What?” Cossont said.

“What?” Pyan yelped.

“That is why I guided this craft safely to ground after its own AI attempted to destroy it,” the android repeated.

“You guided it—?” Cossont said. She looked towards the nose of the craft. “But how—?”

“Following the aggressive effectorising of both the craft’s AI and the trooper’s suit, an attack which I believe was directed at obvious and conventional military systems and so was not directed at myself, I was able to establish communication with the craft’s back-up control sub-systems and guide it safely to ground. I was able to make use of the debris falling from the remains of the regimental HQ vessel as cover, causing this craft to maintain a similar trajectory to some of the portions of debris as they fell, until the last moment, otherwise we might have been hit again, by kinetic, beam or particle munitions.”

Cossont closed her eyes, feeling her skin crawl. She shook her head. “The… the regimental HQ vessel… the Fzan-Juym asteroid, the moon; it’s… gone?”

“Destroyed,” the android confirmed. His eyes went wide and he made a sudden flapping motion with both hands. “A very extreme simulation scenario!”

“Destroyed?” Cossont repeated, unable to take this in. “Completely?”

The android shook his head. “Not completely in the sense of annihilated, as would be the case had it been attacked with a large amount of anti-matter, say, but completely in the sense that it was pierced by one or more energy weapon beams and blown apart into many tens of thousands of significant pieces, the largest perhaps forming up to five or six per cent of the mass of the craft before its destruction, the smallest—”

The roaring in her ears had come back, drowning out what the android was saying. Cossont remembered Etalde’s face, Reikl’s, the grinning looks on the faces of the line of dancing people she and Reikl had encountered before they took the travel capsule.

She was suddenly glad she was sitting down. She felt dizzy, disoriented. “Would anyone have survived?” she asked, shaking her head, trying to clear it. This hurt.

The android looked at her oddly. “Well,” it said slowly, “we survived, patently.”

“Apart from us.”

“Hard to say with any certitude,” it told her. “Possibly not. While interfacing with this craft’s sensors I think I saw other small craft attempting to escape but all those I was able to pay any attention to fell victim to secondary and/or subsequent munitions and/or attacks. Also, I think I ought to add that I think I detected other space craft in the vicinity of the planet being attacked as well, so the assault was not purely on Fzan-Juym.”

“What did all this?” Cossont asked.

“From the little I could observe, the attack profile would fit that of a single large ship or a small group of sub-capital craft of level seven or eight capability on a semi-rapid closing transit. The weapon signatures would fit those of our own — that is, Gzilt — fleet, though that may represent deceit by those responsible; there is a certain lack of specificity inherent in weapon identifiability at this sort of implied civilisational level. This is known in some circles as the ‘purity’ effect.”

Cossont stared at the creature.

“Ahem,” the muffled voice inside the elevenstring case said.

Cossont felt sore and tired and wanted to sleep some more. She wondered if this was what it was like to be truly old.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“For us, not very much,” the android said. “This craft cannot move, the doors are inoperative and it may be unwise to send any distress signals. The craft is incapable of transmitting any distress signals in any event as I had to permanently disable its signal processing unit to prevent it broadcasting our status and position immediately after we were first effectorised. It may be best to wait for rescue by friendly forces, though in a wider context our present non-participatory immobility may represent an end-run situation within our part of the simulation at this time and we may well experience seeming oblivion or a possibly abrupt transition to base reality at any moment. I am prepared for either, as you may be too, even without knowing it. On the other hand, we are not in a completely stable or static situation given that we are gradually losing heat to the planet’s surface and the external near-vacuum, and a small amount of this craft’s atmosphere would also appear to be leaking. So in that sense this part of the run is continuing.”

Cossont stared a little longer at the android. It/he stood suddenly upright and executed a little bow. “By the way, my name is Eglyle Parinherm. Yours?”

“Vyr Cossont,” she told it. “Lieutenant Commander, reserve, recently re-commissioned.”

“Delighted, ma’am.” Another small bow. “Though,” the android said, a small frown on his face, “for future reference and any subsequent runs, I’d suggest that a real human being would have wished to swap identities before this point.”

Cossont felt her mouth open. She was aware that she probably looked like a moron. She shook her head gently.

“Will somebody,” Pyan’s muted voice said, “tell this fucking lunatic we’re not in a fucking simulation and get me out of here?”

“Shall I?” Parinherm asked breezily.

“Please do,” she told him.

Parinherm opened the elevenstring’s case. Pyan yelped, propelled itself out and flew across to Cossont. It thudded into her chest, wrapped in on itself like a rolled towel; two corners of its fabric extended like clumsy arms to hug her. “This is horrible!” it wailed. “Make it stop!”

“I could disable the device,” Parinherm told Cossont, nodding at Pyan.

“Leave me alone!” it yelled.

“That’s all right,” Cossont told Parinherm. Reluctantly — the thing had never been this clingy before — she cuddled the familiar, patting what passed for its back. She shivered. It was getting cold inside the little craft.

Parinherm had stuck his head into the elevenstring case. “Here is a garment,” he said, pulling out Cossont’s jacket. He held it up, letting it fall open. “‘The Lords of Excrement’,” he quoted, with seeming approval. He chuckled. “What an unexpectedly random touch.”

“I’d better have that,” Cossont said, holding one hand out. Parinherm handed it over and she slipped it on. “So we’re losing atmosphere?” she said.

The android nodded. “Oh, yes. And heat. Assuming the simulation continues, it will be interesting to see whether the last of the available air escapes first, or freezes.”

“This is horrible,” Pyan said again.

Cossont kept on patting the creature. “There there,” she said, for want of anything better.