The Hydrogen Sonata

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.