The Hydrogen Sonata

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.”