The Hydrogen Sonata

Eight (S -20)

The ship knew it would have to do it sooner or later. Might as well get it over with.

Within the computational substrates that provided the environment for the Caconym’s Mind there were plenty of bits it had never used, didn’t presently use and probably never would use. Physically fairly compact — in three dimensions fitting inside a fat ellipsoid only fifteen metres or so in length — the effective capacity of the Mind’s substrates was suitably vast. The comparisons usually involved how many normal drone or human mind-states could be losslessly encoded within the same volume, or how far back in time you would have to go before you got to the point where in any given society every single bit of computing power they would have possessed back then, summed, would be less than equal to the power contained within a single Mind.

The Caconym didn’t really care. All that mattered was that — due to innate Culture over-engineering, its own consecutive incarnations as earlier ships and a sort of long-term laziness about pursuing the most efficient use of its much-augmented and added-to substrates — it had significant spare carrying capacity, and had agreed to house the mind-state — the soul, albeit reduced — of another Mind inside it.

The Mind concerned was — well, had been — that of a Culture ship called the Zoologist, an ancient Boulder-class Superlifter. A glorified tug, basically.

Superlifters had always tended towards eccentricity. It had never been the most difficult example of ship- or Mind-psychology to put this down to being a result of their rather boring and repetitive job, their usually uncrewed nature and the fact that, as well as being tugs, they had been designed as emergency, stop-gap warships, back before the Idiran war, when the Culture hadn’t really had any proper warships, or at least none that it was going to admit to having.

The Zoologist was one of a relatively small group of Superlifters to have survived the war. Then, even before the great conflict had ended — but long after the Culture had produced fantastically more powerful warships by the multitude — it had done something relatively unusual: it had Sublimed, all by itself.

A little later it had done something for which the term “unusual” was woefully inadequate: it had come back again.

It was practically the definition of a Mind that the word — properly capitalised — meant a conscious entity able to go into the Sublime, not evaporate, and even — maybe, sometimes, very occasionally, in fact so seldom that it would be quite close to most people’s statistical definition of “never” — be able to return, in some sense still viable and identifiably the same personality as that which had made the transition from Real to Sublime in the first place.

If the Zoologist’s reasons for wanting to Sublime had — aside from the obvious, of wanting to experience the sheer ineffable wonderfulness of it all — been opaque, its reasons for coming back to the Real were simply baffling. The Mind itself had no explanation whatsoever, and seemed bemused by the question.

Come back it had though, and — seemingly having no desire to remain in its own resurfaced vessel or even substrate — it had canvassed various of its earlier comrades amongst the Contact fleet (those that had survived; the severe attrition of the early years of the Idiran war came into effect here) to see if any of them would house its soul for posterity, or at least until it got bored and changed its mind again, or whatever.

Meanwhile, Contact’s finest and most expert Minds in all things to do with the Sublime had tried debriefing the returned Mind. They had initially been ecstatic at having one of their own who had been there and made the return trip (lots of Minds had promised to do so over the millennia, though none ever did; the Zoologist had made no such undertaking, but had returned). This had, however, proven farcical.

The ship’s memories were abstracted, beyond vague; effectively useless. The Mind itself was basically a mess; self-restructured (presumably) along lines it was impossible to see the logic behind. Identifiably the same, it was expressed in the most bizarre and obfuscatory tangle of needlessly complicated and self-referential analytical/meditative and sagational/ratiocinative processal architecture it had been the misfortune of all concerned ever to contemplate.

Special Circumstances — Contact’s scruple-free wing and the bit that was as close to military intelligence and espionage matters as the Culture even reluctantly admitted to possessing — had been more than happy to take receipt of the old ship’s physical form, desperate to see if its time in the Sublime had altered it in any way, or if its re-creation back out of the Sublime — if that was the way it worked — had left tell-tale signs giving some or indeed any clue to how the Sublime worked (either way the answer was, it hadn’t).

They ended up no wiser even regarding the seemingly non-get-roundable requirement that you could not go disembodied into the Sublime. You had to make the transition substrate and all: brains and whole bodies, computational matrices and whole ships — or the equivalent — seemed to be required, as well as the personalities and memories such physical ware encoded.

In any event, finally free of all this unwelcome and troubling attention, the Mind that had been housed in the Zoologist had taken up residence inside the substrate of the Caconym, and retired to a life of time-passing hobbies and quiet contemplation.

Quiet and extremely slow contemplation; the Zoologist had insisted on an allocation of computational resources within the Caconym’s substrate so modest and restricted that its full consciousness could only be expressed with a lot of calculational fancy footwork and some very intense looping. It had been offered as much power as it might have needed, sufficient to let it interact with its host in full Mind real time, but had declined. What all this meant was that for the Caconym to talk to the Zoologist, or interact with it in any other meaningful way, it had to slow itself down to the sort of speed a non-augmented human would have been able to keep up with. This, apparently, signified some sort of philosophical authenticity to the Zoologist, and sheer laziness to the Caconym.

Back in the Real, the principal consciousness of the Caconym was watching the skies and stars around it whip past as it raced the Pressure Drop to Gzilt space, while simultaneously performing prodigious feats of potential pattern- and relevance-spotting as sub-systems reported back after performing multi-dimensional searches of every database known to intelligent life, all to look for any additional information that might be brought to bear on the issue under consideration. At the same time, it was running simulation after simulation to try to build up a reliable prediction matrix regarding how things might turn out.

In that context, the Mind was happily thinking at close to maximum speed, barely below serious, full-on combat velocities and cycle times, thoroughly and satisfyingly involved with and wrapped up within a problem that, for all its thorniness, possessed the incomparable virtue of being important and real, not imagined; here on the other hand, it was reduced to a conversation that would take subjective months between each question and response.

The Caconym sometimes envisaged its substrate architecture as a giant castle; a castle the size of an enormous city, the size of a whole world of castles all aggregated together and piled one on top of another until you had a sort of fractal fortress that looked suitably and stonily castle-like from afar, with walls, towers and battlements and so on but which, as you got closer, resolved into something much bigger than it had appeared, as it became clear that each — for example — tower was made up of a conglomeration of much smaller towers, stacked and serried and piled one upon another to resemble a vastly larger one.

What remained of the Zoologist’s soul had taken up residence in one of these tiny towers; one that perched on top of a colossal meta-tower, forming what, from a distance, looked like a thick spire.

In some states of mind, the Caconym would take the time to walk through its own substrate image, coalescing its sense of self into a human-resembling avatoid and strolling through this virtualised castle-scape from the vastly complicated main gate until, via ramps and walkways, halls and stairways, it got to its destination. Other times it flew straight there in the form of a giant bird, flapping slowly over the roofs, parapets and embrasures, bastions, courtyards and keeps until it found the location it was looking for.

This time it imagined itself as a single vast storm cell of dark, lightning-flecked cloud poised circling ponderously over the entirety of the vast castle like some malevolent galaxy of slow-revolving mist, then, from the lowering funnel of a developing tornado mouth, suddenly consolidated itself into a single raptor, the skies clearing instantly as the bird folded in its wings and stooped, cannonball-quick, to the spire-tower, spreading its wings to brake its headlong plunge an instant before it would have dashed itself against the stones of the tower’s parapet.

The ship re-imagined itself as a human avatoid as it touched down onto the flagstones of the tower’s machicolated battlements. It raised a hand to knock on a stout wooden door, but it opened by itself.

Inside, where the virtual environment belonged to and was envisaged by the Zoologist, the tower opened out into a substantial but not preposterously big single-storey circular space which resembled a cross between the study of a wizard specialising in highly exotic stuffed fauna and the laboratory of a mad scientist with a weakness for bubbling vials and giant items of electrical equipment with conspicuous insulation issues. The whole was lit by hazy sunlight coming through tall, skinny windows. Beyond the portion swept by the door the floor was a mess; the Caconym had to wade through ankle and then knee-deep litter to make any progress into the room.

“When I was old the first time,” the avatoid of the Zoologist announced, from one of its ropes, “I remember thinking this whole set-up looked a little tired. Later I came back round to the idea. Now I cycle through periods of embarrassment and a rather childish delight. Hello. Welcome. To what, etc.?”

The Caconym found a rickety-looking chair resembling a modest, partially deconstructed throne, and — after sweeping the seat clean of assorted debris, some of it sufficiently animate to protest with chirps and squeaks — sat. It gazed up and across at the vaguely human-looking avatoid of the Zoologist, which was staring at it, upside-down, one leg wrapped round a rope dangling from the ceiling.

There were dozens of similar ropes hanging from the tall vaulted ceiling of the space, many coloured, quite a few with what looked like rope baskets attached to them, like fruits made of netting, and some connected by the suspended loops of more horizontal ropes. This was where the Zoologist’s avatoid lived, worked, played, rested and — if it indulged in such generally unnecessary, throwback behaviour — slept. It claimed it had not set foot on the floor of its lair for subjective decades, believing the floor was better used for storage than access. Storage of rubbish, bits of dead things and broken or redundant pieces of equipment, the Caconym noticed, but did not say.

The Zoologist’s avatoid was poised upside-down over a large stone bench with a seething complexity of chemistry equipment arrayed upon it. It looked a lot more like a set-designer’s idea of a chemist’s workplace than a real one, but that sort of detail had never troubled the Zoologist.

The avatoid was holding a test-tube brimming with bubbling, smoking, dark yellow liquid. It dropped this into a rack of similar tubes and swung over to be closer to where the Caconym sat. Elongated arms, six-fingered, double-thumbed hands, similarly designed legs and feet and a prehensile tail made this look casual and easy — even elegant. It wore only a loin cloth adorned with a little belt of dangling tools and tightly cinched pouches. Its pale red skin was mottled as though by the shadows of leaves. It crossed its arms, swinging to and fro a little as it looked down at the other avatoid.

The Caconym briefly considered pleasantries and some talking round the point before circling in on what it had actually come to discuss, decided this had been symbolically covered by the storm-cell image — not that there was any guarantee the Zoologist had actually noticed this going on outside — and decided to get straight to the point.

“Tell the truth, Zoo,” it said. “How much contact do you still have with the Outloaded?”

The upside-down avatoid looked startled. “What makes you think I have any?”

“You drop hints. Also, you quite obviously know more than you seemed to know when the Minds in the metaphorical white coats were picking over what passes for your personality and memories, shortly after your profoundly unexpected return from the Land of What-the-Fuck, plus there’s stuff goes on with your allocated portion of my substrate, however miniscule and however seldom, that I can’t quite account for. Not without invoking processes beyond my understanding and — as far as I’m aware — beyond the understanding of any other Minds. Processes that therefore kind of have to involve the kind of sub-scale higher dimensions; dimensions numbered seven or eight, to pick a number, and involving stuff that is presently still beyond the ken of us humble Culture Minds. So either you’re still in touch with the Sublime in some way, or it — or somebody or something in there — is trying to get in touch with you, or even altering or trying to alter details of your personality or storage without your knowledge. That latter possibility in particular would be a little concerning for me, obviously, as this is all happening within my innermost field structure, in my core, effectively inside my own mind, in a not-very-far-stretched sense.”

A large piece of electrical equipment in a corner made a distinct sizzling sound, then shorted out. “Ah,” the upside-down avatoid said. “You noticed that stuff.”

The Caconym nodded.

It had guessed something like this might happen even before it had made its offer of house room to the other ship’s Mind. It was an open secret that the Sublime — or at least entities within the Sublime — could access almost anything within the Real. Part of the proof of this was that when people — or more commonly, machines — tried to hedge their bets by sending a copy of themselves into the Sublime, so that a version of them could continue to live and develop within the Real, it never worked.

The copies sent into the Sublime always went, but it seemed they always came back for their originals (or the originals came back for the copies — it didn’t really matter which way round you thought to try it), and that the versions left in the Real always, but always, were persuaded to follow their precursor versions into the Sublime. This seemed to happen almost no matter how hermetically you tried to isolate the version still in the Real.

It was possible to quarantine a Mind or other high-level AI so thoroughly that no force or process ever heard of within the Real could get to it or communicate with it (its substrate could be physically destroyed if you threw enough weaponry at it, but that didn’t count)… but no known means of isolation could prevent something from the Sublime establishing contact with a copy of itself still within the Real, and somehow persuading it to come away, or just quietly stealing it. About the only crumb of comfort when this happened was that the relevant substrate in the Real stayed put rather than accompanying the newly departed; whatever process in or from the Sublime caused all this to happen was thorough, but not greedy.

Still, all this had worrying implications for Minds, which were not used to being at the mercy of anything at all (aside from the aforesaid vulgar amounts of weaponry), but they did a pretty good job of not thinking about it.

Even the individuals who did properly return — usually decades or centuries after Subliming — rarely stayed very long back in the Real, disappearing into the Sublime again within a few tens or hundreds of days. The Zoologist was one of a tiny number of returnees who looked like they might be back indefinitely.

The Caconym had thought all this through, however, and had decided that it was prepared to take the risk of having something inside its innermost field structures that might have not just ideas of its own but communications of its own too. So the fact that something might be happening deep inside what was effectively its brain that it had no control over — something to do with the ever-mysterious Sublime, of all things — was not as troubling to it as it might have been.

The Zoologist’s avatoid looked hurt. “You’ve never said anything before.”

“It was never important before.”

“Not important? Unexplained events in your own substrate? Really?”

“I gave you a home freely, without conditions. Also, I trust you. Plus, while undeniably a little worried, I felt privileged to have what I took to be vicarious, and possibly unique, contact with a realm that remains inscrutable to us despite all our techno-wizardry.” The Caconym’s avatoid shrugged. “And, frankly, I’ve been waiting for a situation to arise wherein I could use this knowledge to try to shame you into telling me stuff you probably wouldn’t otherwise.”

“Honest of you to admit.”

“Disarmingly so, I hope.”

The Zoologist’s avatoid pulled its arms in tighter to its body, seemed to think for a moment. “I still have some contact, though it’s all very… inchoate. Inexplicable. Hard — impossible — to translate back into here, the here-and-now.”

“Try.”

The Zoologist sighed, put its long-fingered hands to its face and made a sort of patting motion. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“What? How intrinsically ungraspable it all is?”

“Pretty much. See that insect?” The Zoologist nodded, indicating to one side of where the Caconym sat. The Caconym turned its attention to a wooden workbench whose edge was centimetres from one of its avatoid elbows. A tiny six-legged insect small enough to fit on a baby’s fingernail was making its erratic, zigzaggy way along the very edge of the table, antennae waving. The Caconym zoomed in on the creature, evaluating it utterly, down to the code it was constructed from.

“Yes,” it sighed, coming back to the virtual macro. “Let me guess: does it understand what the equipment on the bench is for? Or even what a bench is?”

“I was thinking more of, how would you explain a symphony to it? Or a—?”

“Before we over-focus on my own and my kind’s hopeless inability to understand the unutterable fabulousness of the Sublime, can I run the present situation back here in the Real past you?”

The Zoologist’s avatoid smiled. “If you like.”

It took the best part of an hour, subjectively. In the Real, on the way towards Gzilt space, light years were traversed during the time. To the rest of the hyper-busy Mind of the Caconym, it felt like years had passed by the end.

Just before the summing-up part of this impromptu briefing, the ship contacted the Pressure Drop, to make sure it had everything up to date.

Good timing, the other ship replied. You coincide with a signal from our friend the Contents May Differ. Take a look at this:

∞

Signal Sequence excerpt, GSV Contents May Differ / Zihdren-Remnanter Adjunct Entity Oceanic-Dissonance:

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

oZihdren-Remnanter Adjunct Entity Oceanic-Dissonance

So, to get to the point: are you saying that despite the fact you lost a ship to unprovoked enemy action, and have asked myself and colleagues to investigate, you don’t want this made public?

∞

Essentially, yes. Kindly keep all matters, information and actions pertaining thereto as confidential as possible.

∞

And you intend to make no attempt to resend the information carried by the entity aboard the Exaltation-Parsimony III?

∞

That would be correct. Despite transmitting news of the event at Ablate and what we can only presume was the unfortunate misunderstanding regarding the Exaltation-Parsimony III to our Enfolded brethren, we have received no further instructions from them thus far, and therefore continue to follow the previously transmitted instructions. In essence, these consist of (1): Send a Ceremonial Entity to take part in the festivities marking the entry of the Gzilt into the Sublime, said Ceremonial Entity to carry information regarding the provenance of the work known to the Gzilt as the [detail redacted], said information to be transmitted to the Gzilt at the appropriate point in said festivities. (2): In the event of any problematic phenomenon or phenomena pertaining thereto judged by us to be in excess of our resources, contact should be made with sympathetic elements within the Culture, on conditions to be determined by ourselves as the responsible remnant representation of said Enfolded brethren, the Zihdren, of blessed memory. Instructions end. Our conditions, referred to above, principally concern your keeping information re said events and actions as confidential as possible, in perpetuity until further notice.

∞

All of which might make things a little difficult operationally.

∞

Understood. Life is limitations.

∞

And glibness, patently, on occasion, too. Your pardon, but I sense motions being gone through.

∞

On occasion, a superfluity of assiduousness can be vulgar.

∞

I understand. What can I possibly say? We’ll see what we can do.

∞

Our gratitude is a given.

(Signal Sequence excerpt ends.)

Pusillanimous legalistic fucks, eh? the Pressure Drop sent. So we get to do their dirty work and they’ll be quite happy for no more to come of this whatsoever, because it’d all be embarrassing to the memory of their Enfolded fucking brethren.

∞

I suppose legacies may be expressed in various ways, the Caconym replied. Assuming the truth of the claim that the Remnanters have contacted their Sublimed forebears and yet received no further instruction, aforesaid forebears may be presumed to be relatively happy with the present situation. Which does raise the remote possibility that this could have been even more of a set-up, from the start.

∞

You mean the Remnanter boyos conspired to have their own ship blown out of the sky?

∞

The thought had already occurred, though it was so far down the list of possibilities I thought it not worth getting to. However this reaction on the part of the Remnanters shifts it up the table somewhat, tagged less for paranoia and more with justifiable suspicion, however cynical.

∞

Still a remote likelihood. You’d think.

∞

Agreed. Makes no difference so far. And how do things fare in Gzilt space?

∞

The Mistake Not… is making its dash. The Passing By…’s two Thugs are being gunned-up as we speak. It is proving harder than expected to prise the Empiricist’s Delinquent twins Headcrash and Xenocrat away from the smatter outbreak at Loliscombana; they’d turned it into a competition about who bagged the greatest amount of smatter but then there was a dispute over whether the criterion ought to be tonnage or processing power. This has been settled by a compromise but both desire more time to stock up on the criteria they had earlier discounted. The Empiricist has agreed to give them another couple of hours to enjoy themselves before shouting at them. However, talking of talking with refugees/remainders/rejects from/of/expelled from the Big S, have you been in touch with your contact/s?

∞

Doing so even as we speak. Taking the opportunity provided by the glacial pace involved to get an update from your good self. Elevate not your hopes though; nothing useful so far or on the horizon.

∞

Well, best of luck. By the by, have you passed me? The delays on these signals—

∞

Hours ago. And closer than you might imagine.

∞

Neat. Didn’t see a damn thing. Exemplary encasement management. Awfully glad we’re on the same side. Close to over-straining our design maxima envelope, are we?

∞

That’d be telling. Anyway, I must return to the land of the lichen-slow.

∞

Yeah, you have fun now.

∞

Unlikely.

∞

“I appreciate the Sublime would appear to be involved,” the Zoologist said eventually, sounding like it was making an effort to be patient.

“Indeed. All I’m asking is that you think about this, and if there is anything you can do, any help you can give, please let me know.”

The Zoologist looked pained, shook its head. “But none of it matters.”

“Not to you, perhaps. Just indulge me.”

“But to what end?”

“It will seem to matter to me, to us. The sum of fairness in our existence — however mean and shoddy compared to the Sublime — may be increased, and some suffering prevented.”

Another shrug. “It still won’t matter, doesn’t matter.”

“Pretend it does; game it that way,” the Caconym suggested. “As a favour to me, in return for my forbearance regarding whatever tying-sheets-into-a-rope and escaping-the-dorm shenaniganeering it is you get up to via the frayed edges of filament-foamed nano-reality and the divine nether-world of the blissfully Enfolded.”

“Still no difference, still not mattering.”

The Caconym looked around the lair/laboratory. “Does what you do here matter?”

“Not really,” the Zoologist admitted. “It passes the time, keeps me involved.” It looked at the rack of multi-coloured test-tubes. “Currently I am, and for the next few centuries, probably will be, experimenting with a variety of virtual chemistries, usually involving many hundreds or even thousands of elements and often branching into some requiring new varieties of fundamental particles.” It smiled. “There is much more: I play many games in other virtualities, all fascinating and unpredictable, and I still explore the Mathematical Irreal, as opposed to the Ultimate Irreal of the Sublime.”

“And in all of this, to what end?”

“No end save itself: I pass the time to pass the time, and stay involved to stay involved.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Why not?”

“Uh-huh. So it’s still worth doing.”

“To some extent.”

“Well, I — we all — do the same in the Real. To rather more significant effect, as we see it.”

“I know. I understand.”

Did it though? the Caconym found itself wondering. Did this abstracted creature, this sketch, really understand? How far removed from reality — from the Real — was it, even though in theory it was back within it?

From the little the Caconym had been able to glean from its fellow Mind — basically rumours that it had, ambiguously, confirmed — to exist within the Sublime was to expand in perception and understanding for ever, in a space that could never fill up. No matter how any transitioned, translated civilisation or flourishing individual entity expanded its scope and reach and expression, there was always more room, and more room within a whole new set of dimensions that were, conversely, full, that were thick with possibility.

The Real — with its vast volumes of nothing between the planets, stars, systems and galaxies — was basically mostly vacuum; an averaged near-nothing incapable of true complexity due to its inescapable impoverishment of structure and the sheer overwhelming majority of nothingness over substance. The Sublime was utterly different: packed with existence, constantly immanentising context, endlessly unfolding being-scape.

Like many a Culture Mind, the Caconym had tried simulating the experience of being in the Sublime; there were various easily available and tweakable packages which Minds passed from one to another, each the result of centuries of study, analysis, thought, imagination and effort. All claimed to give a glimpse of what it must be like to exist in the Sublime, though of course none could prove it.

And all were unsatisfactory, though each had its adherents and some even had what were in effect — shocking this, for the Culture’s Minds — their addicts.

The Caconym had tried a few and found them all wanting: frustrating, inadequate, even oddly demeaning.

“Well,” it said, “will you at least promise you’ll think about finding a way to help?”

The Zoologist smiled. “That I can do. I duly promise.”

The Caconym’s avatoid looked down, plucked the tiny insect from the bench and held it trapped between two fingers. It held it up, antennae waving, towards the upside-down avatoid. “You always say that nothing matters. Would it matter if I crushed this, now?”

The Zoologist shrugged. “Cac, it’s just a package of code.”

“It’s alive, in some sense. It has a set of programmed reactions, responses, so on. A tiny fraction of this environment’s richness would be snuffed out if I reduced it to its virtual components.”

“All this, and all you imply by it, is known. Thought about, allowed for, included. Still.”

The Caconym’s avatoid sighed. It put the insect back on the bench, right on the corner it appeared to have been heading for. “No matter. Thank you for agreeing to think about it.”

“Least I can do.”

The Caconym stood, then paused. “I said that I trust you,” it said to the upside-down avatoid hanging a few metres away. “And, right now, I believe that you will do as you say, and think about this, because you have promised to.” It paused. “Am I being foolish? Outside of an enforceable legal framework — something that is manifestly not present here — trust only operates where beings have the concept of honour, and, generally, a reputation — a standing — they want to protect. Do such considerations affect you at all? Do even these things… matter to you?”

The Zoologist looked troubled. Eventually it said, “When you come back from the Sublime, it is as though you leave all but one of your senses behind, as though you have all the rest removed, torn away — and you have become used to having hundreds.” It paused. “Imagine you,” it said, nodding at the Caconym, “being a human — a basic human, even, without augmentation or amendment: slow, limited, fragile, with no more than a couple of handfuls of very restricted senses. Then imagine that you have all your senses but — say — touch taken away, and most of your memories as well, including all those to do with language, save for the sort of simple stuff spoken by toddlers. Then you are exiled, blind and deaf and with no sense of smell or taste or cold or warmth, to a temperate water world inhabited only by gel fish, sponges and sea-feathers, to swim and make your way as best you can, in a world with no sharp edges and almost nothing solid at all.” The Zoologist paused. “That is what it is to return from the Sublime to the Real.”

The Caconym nodded slowly. “So, why did you?”

The Zoologist shrugged. “To experience a kind of extreme asceticism,” it said, “and to provide a greater contrast, when I return.”

“Well,” the Caconym observed, “that’s possibly the most unambiguous information on Subliming you’ve ever imparted. To me, at least. However, you haven’t answered the question I actually asked.”

“The point is that even such a reduced, enfeebled creature would still be in some sense its old self, even if it found it hard to express such a fact. And what was important to it before, if it had any real value then, will remain important to it now, for all the intervening change, elevation and reduction.”

“I shall take that as meaning I am not being too hopelessly foolish.”

“You may still be, but then so may I.”

“Yes, well, let’s not make a competition out of it.”

“I will see if there’s anything I can do, regarding this. If there is, I’ll be in touch. Thank you for coming to see me.”

“Always a frustration. I’ll let myself out.”

The Caconym’s avatoid vanished without any pretence of walking out or flying away.

The avatoid of the Zoologist hung looking at the tiny insect on the bench for a while longer, then shook its head and swung back to where the rack of test-tubes fumed quietly away.