The Hydrogen Sonata

“They kept on distress-signalling all the way down,” the comms officer said. “But their vital signs telemetry was still included — probably just forgot to turn it off. Thing is, all the life signs flicked off one by one over less than a minute after they broke contact. All except one. The one that stayed on rode that baby all the way down to the fires, alive.”

“Showing distress?” Agansu asked.

“Not especially. Nothing to indicate severe pain. But still.”

Ten (S -18)

“Mine doesn’t.”

“Play strange tricks?”

“Never. I’d feel more normal if it did.”

“I was kind of only kidding anyway.”

“I’d guessed.”

“It is Mr QiRia who plays strange tricks,” said the excessively hairy avatar to Cossont’s right, and chuckled.

Cossont lay lounging under a taut white, breeze-vibrated awning on the great raft Apranipryla, on the water world called Perytch IV. To her left, on another lounger, was QiRia, the man who claimed to be absurdly old. Splayed on a couch on her other side was the avatar of the Warm, Considering.

Culture ship avatars were usually human, or at least humanoid, especially when they were mixing mostly with humans, but not that of the ancient Delta-class GCU Warm, Considering; its avatar, Sklom, was in the form of a sylocule, a spikily blue-haired, six-limbed, six-eyed creature with a bulky central body.

Sklom lifted a murky-looking drink glass with a fat straw in it from a tray, raised its body from the couch a little and appeared to squat over the glass. There was a slurping noise and the level in the glass went down. Cossont had yet to find this less than fascinating. Also, slightly disgusting.

The Warm, Considering was supposed to be horrendously ancient itself — thousands of years old — though still not, the avatar and ship seemed happy to concede, nearly as venerable as QiRia. The man, however old he really was, seemed to be at least partially under the protection of the antique ship. It took him wherever he might want to go, provided or confirmed covering identities — he’d be besieged by media people or those just fascinated by extreme age, otherwise, he claimed — and, perhaps, she thought, from hints dropped over the last few days, helped maintain whatever aspects of his physiology and memory he could not take care of himself. She supposed if you were going to hide for ten thousand years, inside the Culture or anywhere else, it would help to have a ship on your side.

“I’d have thought your memory would play more tricks than anybody else’s,” she said to QiRia. This was the fourth day the man had spent out of the water, and the first without wet towels spread over him. “What with you having so much of it. Memory, I mean.”

The man rubbed his face with both hands. “Well, you’d be wrong,” he told her. “One of the things you have to do if you’re going to live a long time and not go mad is make sure your memories are properly… looked after. Managed.”

“How do you even fit them in?” Cossont asked. “Are you basic-ally all computer, inside your head?”

“Not at all,” QiRia said, his expression indicating he found the idea distasteful. “In some ways my brain is as it’s always been, just stabilised. Been like that for millennia. Though it does have a modified neural lace within it. Heavily modified; no comms. What I do have is extra storage. Not processing; storage. The two are sometimes confused.”

“What,” Cossont asked, “is it remote, or—?”

“No. It’s in me,” QiRia told her. “Throughout me. Vast amount of storage room in the human body, once you can encode in the appropriate bases and emplace a nano-wire read-out system through the helices. Started with connective tissue, then bones, now even my most vital organs have storage built in. Doesn’t detract from their utility in the least; improves it in some ways, in terms of bone strength and so on. Though I have noticed this body doesn’t float very well.”

“You are weighed down by your memories, literally!” Sklom said, chortling.

QiRia looked unimpressed at this as he held up one hand, extended a digit and inspected it. “Well yes. However, it also allows me to have more knowledge in my little finger than some people do in their whole body, literally.”

“What of your masculine organ of generation?” Sklom asked. The avatar was modelled on a male sylocule. “What is stored there?”

QiRia frowned and looked away, as though distracted, gauging. “Currently empty.”

Sklom hooted with laughter. Cossont reflected that males seemed to find the same things funny even across utterly different species.

“Room for expansion!” Sklom wheezed, though QiRia looked unimpressed at this and shared a rolling-eyes look with Cossont.

He pinched the top of his nose. “At first, my memories were placed randomly throughout my body, with many copies,” he said. “Now, as the available space has been taken up, there is generally only one copy of each memory, and I have, over the centuries, as part of one of my long-term internal projects, sorted and moved and… re-stored all my memories, so that they reside in what seem to me apposite locations.” He looked at Cossont. “I lied; my genitals contain all my memories of previous sexual encounters. It seemed only appropriate.”

“Ha!” Sklom said, sounding happy.

“Like you say,” Cossont agreed. “Appropriate. What’s left in your actual brain?”

“Recent memories, recently recalled old memories, a highly intricate map of where all my memories are stored throughout my body, and a sort of random, sifted debris of all the thoughts and memories that have ever passed through my head. That I can’t — daren’t — interfere with too much, aside from one or two very specific episodes. To do so further would risk becoming not myself. We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self.”

“What are the one or two specific episodes—?” Cossont began.

“None of your business,” QiRia said smoothly.

Cossont lowered her voice a little. “Has anyone ever broken your heart?” she asked quietly.

“Phht!” Sklom spluttered.

“In the sense I’m sure you mean, not for over nine and a half thousand years,” QiRia told her briskly. “Taking another, more pertinent definition, my heart is broken with each new exposure to the idiocies and cruelties of every manner of being that dares to call or think of itself as ‘intelligent’.”

“In other words,” Sklom chipped in, “about every century, half-century, or so.”

QiRia glared at the creature, but let the point stand.

“So,” Cossont said, “sexual memories in your genitals…”

“Yes,” QiRia said.

“Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers?”

QiRia looked at her. “In my head, of course.” He looked away. “There are not so many of those, anyway,” he said, voice a little quieter. “Loving becomes harder, the longer you live, and I have lived a very long time indeed.” He fixed his gaze on her again. “I’m sure it varies across species — some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all — but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the… expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved.” He smiled bleakly at Cossont. “You are young, of course, and so none of this will make any sense whatsoever.” His smile melted away, Cossont thought, like late spring snow over a morning. “I envy you your illusions,” he said, “though I could not wish their return.”

The long piers and bulbous pontoons of the giant, articulated raft flexed and creaked around them, like a