The Hydrogen Sonata

back to impersonating a normal-enough-looking pants and jacket combo.

“Oh,” she said, as Berdle lowered the hatch closed with his foot. Her voice sounded just as it had in the tank, which meant slightly odd. The suit’s helmet unit was still covering her face. This doubtless explained why she was being spared any smells she might not have cared for, and why she was still listening to her own voice as relayed through the suit’s earbuds.

Berdle nodded. “There you are; clean,” he said. “Happy now?” Though that was weird too, because his mouth didn’t move as she heard him say this.

“Ecstatic. Thanks.”

“Welcome. Suit-surface nanofields, Vyr,” the avatar said, turning and walking away from her towards a low doorway at the far end of the gantry, where it met a bulkhead. “Zero friction unsticky,” she heard him say. He shook his head. “Really.”

“Yeah,” Cossont said, following him. “Hey, I don’t want to disturb you but you were just starting to sound a bit dismissive there.”

Berdle was bent down, poking seemingly randomly at the area around the mechanical handle on the door, as though expecting to find a finger-sized keyhole. “Sorry.”

She joined him at the door. “Do you think there’s any field or area where I could make you feel small and a bit slow compared to me, Berdle? Ever?”

The avatar kept poking at the door with his finger. “Well, of course not,” he said patiently, his mouth still not moving. “I’m not a person, Vyr; I’m the walking, talking figurehead of a ship.” He squatted, staring at the door. “A Culture ship,” he added, sticking his finger out and poking again. “A Culture ship,” he muttered, “of some intellectual distinction and martial wherewithal… moreover.” His finger seemed to slip into the surface of the door as though it — or his finger — was a hologram.

Berdle withdrew his finger and stood up. Something clicked and the door swung open towards them. “Me first,” he said, conversationally. There was a pause. “Oh,” Berdle said. “They really have changed the place.”

“Well, we’ve changed the place a bit,” Ximenyr said, walking in front of the reporter arbite with its camera eyes. He was granting an exclusive interview, letting just one media representative in initially before the airship was opened up to everybody else. “The last eight days have been very busy with restructuring. Quite radical restructuring, involving pretty much everybody on board, which has been one reason for keeping people away, though mostly it’s just to make it a more exciting reveal.” He smiled at the arbite. Ximenyr was dressed in a plain white shift. Five of his fellow party-goers, similarly clad, accompanied him and the arbite along the dark, broad, gently downward-curving corridor. “Many of us have been doing our own personal restructuring too,” he said. Ximenyr waved one hand. “I had all sorts of weird shit going on with my body, but I’ve brought myself back to something much more standard, much more pure, even.”

“Do you regret your early excesses?” the arbite asked. It was taking instructions from a panel of bio- journalists spread across Xown and beyond. An AI was collating their queries and producing representative questions.

“Oh no,” Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.”

“Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?”

“No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts. And most of them had to remain dry, or produce only, well, sort of sweat-gland quantities of ejaculate. Though it was very nice ejaculate; sort of slightly oily perfume, and not in the least icky. Unless you thought about it, of course.”

“Do you feel you are a more serious artist now?”

“No. I have claimed to be an artist in the past, but really all I’ve ever been is a sort of glorified surgeon. I would like to think I’ve been artistic at times and shown artistic flare and so on, but I think that, especially now that we’re nearly at the end of things, it’s all right to abandon claims and pretensions and just relax a bit. Maybe I’ve inspired artistry and artisticness in others; that’d be a happy assessment.”

“What is the greatest number of people you’ve had sex with at the same time?”

“About forty-four, forty-five, forty-six? It was hard to be sure, in the heat of the moment. We tried to get to the maximum, of fifty-three, obviously, but even in effective zero-G, all oiled up and most people just sticking their hands in from the outside of this heaving mass of bodies, we just couldn’t make it. Too close together. And also, frankly, I think some people got too excited and interested in each other rather than going for this record with me, you know? Still, it was a lot of fun trying. On the other hand, it was an effort, too, you know? So much preparation and set-up and planning and briefing. Sex should be about spontaneous fun, don’t you think? Anyway, here we are.”

Their little party had arrived at the bottom of the gently bowed corridor, where it briefly levelled out and then started to rise again, heading aft. A small crowd of people — mostly dressed in plain white shifts like the one Ximenyr wore, so that they looked vaguely like they belonged to a religious order — were busy gathering up pieces of complicated-looking equipment and wrapping foam and loading everything onto a series of little flat-topped wheeled vehicles; one, fully loaded, was making its own way up the slope beyond, just about to disappear under the curve of ceiling.

Directly above where Ximenyr, his followers and the reporter arbite now stood there was a wide, new-looking circular staircase leading up to a cake-slice-shaped hole in the ceiling, where there was darkness punctured by a few tiny lights.

“Come on up,” Ximenyr said, leading the way. He started ascending the fan of stairway, followed by the arbite and the five people who’d accompanied them.

“Lights, please, and enhance,” Ximenyr said as he walked out into the space above. The reporter arbite arrived, looked up. The space above was a single enormous space which almost filled the remainder of the airship, right to the top. It was mostly dark, but lit by thousands of small lights pointing inwards at a vast, hazy, cylindrical space perhaps five hundred metres long and four hundred metres across. What looked like a small globular galaxy lay directly overhead, shining. The way the light moved within the space overhead suggested that it was full of water, or some sort of transparent liquid.

The space immediately round the stair-head held stacks and racks of lockers and shelves; beyond, shadows hid any walls. For all its obvious extent, the low ceiling, the darkness and the sensation of a great mass hanging immediately above made the place feel oddly oppressive.

Right in front of them there was one of six small, translucent spheres, each about three metres in diameter, all arranged around the very bottom of the vast container above and looking like hopelessly inadequate supports for its bulk. The dark walls around the vast lit space showed no other form of support, just the tiny floodlights.

“Now, we’re playing around with image a bit here,” Ximenyr said, reaching up and patting the surface of one of the small translucent spheres, “because you couldn’t see through that much of even the purest water, but this is a sort-of-true representation of what you’d see if the water wasn’t there.”

“So,” the arbite said, “what is this?”

“This is a giant water pool; you climb up those steps, get naked, stick one of these breathers in your gob…” Ximenyr picked up a stubby tube from one of the nearby shelves and waved it in front of his mouth, “…pass through one of these spheres and then float up to the bright lights up there at the top. That’s the ultimate party area; that’s like heaven, like our own little mini-Subliming. I mean, it’s just the usual stuff up there: comfy furniture, drink, drugs and lots of images and music — and dancing, and fucking, you’d imagine — but all a bit more quiet and contemplative, I guess, and all under this lovely clear dome under the top of the ship, and the whole point is this is the only way to get there, and — once you’re there — there’s no way out… but it doesn’t matter, because then comes the Subliming.” Ximenyr grinned at the arbite’s camera eyes. “This was my plan from the start of the Last Party and my original idea was to spend a year or years sort of milking myself for the fluids to go in here, but that proved impractical. Water it is. Perfumed water.” He winked at the arbite’s eye cameras.

“Fucking typical man,” Cossont muttered. “You know what he’s done in that water, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s art,” Berdle said, looking serious.

He and Cossont were holed up behind some lightweight furniture in a disused storage space one deck below the curving corridor Ximenyr and the reporter arbite had just walked down. They were watching the arbite’s feed