The Hydrogen Sonata

the thing is, the Remnanters still wanted the thing kept secret afterwards, even after it had been factored into the negotiations.

“That caused some head-scratching.

“It was an AI that came up with what looked like the best solution, at which, I recall, we were all quite pleasantly surprised at the time. Huh. That was a sign of the future, if ever there was one. Anyway.

“So, the solution was that one volunteer representative — who at the same time would have to be approved by the others in his or her team, so it wasn’t as simple as the first volunteer getting the gig… anyway, one of us from each of the relevant civs — should agree to hear this evidence from the Zihdren-Remnanter, vote on it — with a veto — and then forget what it was we’d been asked to vote on.

“This was all going to be made possible by preparing each of these rep’s brains before they heard the big secret, then — after they had — just, well, wiping that bit of their memories. We were all assured this was all entirely possible, and reliable and not in any way dangerous, and the most we’d forget would be a single day’s worth of memories. So we all agreed.

“And it all happened, and we all heard the big, bad terrible secret, but obviously it wasn’t that big or bad or terrible, because nobody vetoed the Gzilt joining this new cobbled- together civ — we were calling ourselves mongrels even back then, feeling very edgy and radical. And so the Gzilt were cleared to become part of the Culture… even though in the end they didn’t actually take up the offer and go through with it.

“So. All well and good, you might think. That’s what we all thought.

“…Except one member of the negotiating party, a certain Representative Ngaroe QiRia, from the Buhdren Federality — that would be me — later remembered what it was that he’d heard, what he’d been expected to forget, what he thought, like everybody else, he had forgotten.

“Thing is, I’d always been interested in long-term living, even way back then, and particularly in holding on to memories that might otherwise get forgotten, over-written or whatever. So I’d had some experimental cranial, biochemical brain-chemistry-mangling stuff done, not all of it entirely legal or even medically advisable, but most of it didn’t seem to have worked anyway, frankly, so it never really occurred to me it might interfere with this hear- and-forget thing they’d hit us with during the negotiations.

“Turned out I remembered all this stuff I’d been meant to forget due to a fix even I didn’t know I had: something the clinicians had added as some sort of experimental after-thought and then either forgot to tell me about — ha! — or decided it might be better to keep quiet about.

“Anyway, the effects have been ongoing, and have stayed and developed, though they’ve long since been smoothed over and ever-so-carefully incorporated into all the other treatments and amendments and augmentations I’ve had since.

“At first I wouldn’t Sublime or even be Stored or undergo any sort of transitional state because I was afraid this secret would come out, because I don’t think I understood that though it was a… I don’t know; a faith-shaking secret… that’s just in theory. In practice, people don’t believe for good reasons anyway, they just believe and that’s it, like we don’t love for good reasons, we just love because we need to love.

“Later, even knowing this, and knowing that the Gzilt knowing would make little real difference because they would just ignore the knowledge or find another way of not thinking about it, I still just kept on living, not Subliming with any group and not trans-corporating into a group-mind or into a Mind or anything else because it had become a habit, this going on and going on. It had become so much of what made me who I had become, there seemed no point in trying to change it.

“So I became the man who lived for ever, more or less, because I’d once held a secret I didn’t care about any more.

“Well, didn’t care about until I heard about the Gzilt Subliming, and, in time, decided that what I knew about them might be dangerous to me. Living for a long time can make you very cautious, cautious to the point of something close to cowardice, frankly… and so, anyway, I got rid of the information, had it excised and put it away from me, even though I put it somewhere in Gzilt space, somewhere pointed; with the Last Party, and Ximenyr, where it seemed to me it belonged.

“This amused me at the time. It amuses me still.

“I’d asked Ximenyr to look after what I’d left with him, and keep it — keep them — close. I didn’t tell him what they held, or how important that information might be. I didn’t imagine he would wear them, in full view and plain sight. But then, why not?

“That amuses me too.”

Berdle had perished protecting her, attacking the android that had held Colonel Agansu’s personality before it could target Cossont, who had been running along the gantry above. That had let the arbite accompanying Agansu get in a kill-shot on the avatar. The arbite had then been destroyed by the already half-crippled remains of the outer suit they had left behind earlier, operating, as Berdle had said it would, as a drone.

Ximenyr was dead — he’d been in the tank when it was attacked, helping people confused by the watery maze — but he was being brought back from a Stored version made ten days earlier; he’d always been backed- up.

Hundreds had died in the airship and beneath it: drowned, crushed, torn apart.

The ship had killed Agansu itself, using a Displaced sleet of MDAWS nanomissiles, slaved.

~Your forces have been routed, despatched, the Culture ship had sent to the Gzilt ship. ~No need for you to hang about here now. I’ll be going myself, shortly. Probably best you don’t try to stop me.

~I have a regimental marshal talking to me — slowly, of course — on another channel. She wishes me to engage you in combat.

~Yes, but I already have what we came here to look for. Unless you withdraw to the system outskirts and make no sudden moves, I’ll broadcast the results to the whole of Xown, and packet it all up to spread through the whole of Gzilt. Let me go without resistance and there’s still — I’m guessing — a significantly better than even chance that nothing will come of this, and what I now know will remain buried.

~So all this, so much death, has been for nothing?

~Way it works, sometimes. And my conscience is clear; I didn’t start this. In the end, though, we’re at the place at least one of us wanted to get to. End of run.

~Of course, rather than the choice between what you threaten, and our allowing you to escape, we might engage with you on the instant, to prevent you from carrying out either.

~I never did tell you my whole name, did I?

~You did not. Many have remarked that your name would appear to be part of a longer one, and yet, unusually, even uniquely, nobody has heard the whole of it.

~May I tell you it now?

~Please do.

~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?

~Such braggadocio. That smacks of smokescreen, not power.

~Take it as you will, chum. But how many Culture ships do you know of that exaggerate their puissance?

~None till now. You may be the first.

~Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. Who do you think has the real martial provenance here? In a fight, you’d have no choice but to try to destroy me immediately. You’d fail. I’d have a choice of just how humiliatingly to cripple you. This is the truth; depend.

~So you say. We might beg—

~Enough. I think I know what happened out at Ablate. I owe you no respect. If you are experiencing a craving to die honourably, feel free to try to stop me when I instigate kick-away, in one millisecond from now. Otherwise, stand aside. Also? I retract my suggestion that you ought to depart. The place down here is a wreck.