The Hydrogen Sonata

immediately, but there are no grounds. This was most cunningly, cunningly done, believe me. No grounds at all. So, we must fall back for now, regroup. But this is not the end. We will prevail here, dear Mierbeunes, and sense will be seen. But you must understand that I must risk more, to accomplish this, and so I need you to ask one more thing of our friends, when the time comes.”

“Sir!” the ambassador said, almost despairing, “how can I possibly—?”

“Please, please listen, Mierbeunes. My hope, my desire, always — and let us not call it a price, because it is more, far more noble than that — but my desire has always been to have this world, the world of my birth, my cradle, my home, named after one of its most loving and honoured sons.”

“Sir, I—”

“No, please, please do listen. Let me say just this. Let me say just four words. Will you listen, please, dear Mierbeunes? Four words; just four words.”

Mierbeunes sighed heavily, nodded.

Banstegeyn moved still closer, whispering into the ambassador’s ear. “Mierbeunes’ World. Banstegeyn’s Star.”

She should have known. So should QiRia.

Sklom, the sylocule-resembling avatar of the Warm, Considering, played the bodily acoustic Antagonistic Undecagonstring superbly, as though born to it.

The ship had programmed its avatar to do so. It had reviewed all the literature, looked up the specs, watched and analysed every available screen and sound-only recording and then simmed the resulting models exhaustively until the virtual version of the blue-furred avatar could exactly reproduce the performances of all the great virtuosi of the past. The essence of all that had then been downloaded into the avatar.

Sklom sat naturally inside the enormous instrument as though it had been designed around him, grasped both bows as if they’d been made to measure, produced recently grown padded finger substitutes from his paws and extended beautiful music from the very first touch of bow on string.

Cossont listened with an expression of growing horror on her face, even as she found herself close to weeping at the beauty of the music — one of those pieces she knew she knew but could not quite recall the name of out of her own head.

“It’s a bit… rich,” QiRia said, glancing at her.

“What?” she asked.

“The tone,” QiRia said. “Overly full.”

“You think?”

“Air pressure. We’re too low down here.”

“It’s a water world,” she said, not looking at the man as the six-limbed creature inhabiting the elevenstring swayed, limbs sawing, creating beauty. “There’s no dry high.”

“They’re supposed to sound better the higher you go, in the atmosphere of your average oxygen/inert rocky world.” QiRia shrugged. “Up to a point.”

“I don’t know,” Cossont said. “There was at least one music critic who said the elevenstring might keep on sounding better the higher up it was played, and it might sound best of all played above the atmosphere altogether, where you couldn’t hear it at all.”

Still watching Sklom play — perfectly, brilliantly, heartbreakingly — Cossont heard QiRia chuckle.

She had always been bad at losing things. Or very good, if you looked at it a different way. According to her mother it was practically a talent. Cossont had lost count of the number of people who’d suggested that — or at least wondered if — the reason she’d taken up the elevenstring (rather than say, the finger flute) was that the instrument would be so hard to leave behind somewhere.

She duly lost the desire to play the elevenstring; misplaced it for about fifteen years following that performance by the carelessly perfect cobbled-together artificial version of an absurd-looking alien. What was the point of taking the time learning to play anything as well as you could, when a machine could use something it would think of as little better than its hand puppet to play so achingly, immaculately, ravishingly well, exactly as though it was the creature that had spent a lifetime studying, understanding and empathising with the instrument and all that it signified and meant?

“That’s how ships settle scores, lass,” QiRia told her when she opened her heart to him during a last, drunken night spent on Perytch IV, on the great raft Apranipryla.

They sat on deck, sun-awnings rolled back above, just the two of them, neither avatar present. She watched the stars where they showed between the dark, unseen masses of the silently towering cloud masses. He sat with his eyes closed, listening to the slow wind and the slower waves and feeling the gentle lift and fall of the great raft. Even past midnight, the air remained warm and sticky.

“What?” she sniffed, wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

“The Warm, Considering probably felt insulted that the Anything Legal Considered brought you here.”

“Really? But…”

“The Warm, Considering likes to think it is very protective of me.” QiRia drank from his glass. “It is very protective of me. But certain sorts of protection, even care, can shade into a sort of desire for ownership. Certainly into a feeling that what is being protected is an earned exclusivity of access for the protector, not the privacy of the protected.” He looked across at her. His eyes were the colour of the sea, she remembered. Dark now. “Do you understand?”

“I suppose. But I thought they were friends. The two ships.”

“Well, they share an interest in me, perhaps, but whether they are friends… Even if they are, they might still… manoeuvre round each other. Wrestlers, body-fighters, looking for advantage, even if they would never press home fully. And old ships can be quite… quirky, shall we say.” He sighed. “I have outlived one ship who was my protector, back at the start, bade farewell to another who’d had enough of me — can’t say I blame it — and now perhaps the Warm, Considering feels vulnerable. So it strikes out at any perceived threat. It may imagine the Anything Legal Considered wants to replace it.”

“But it’s unfair. On me, I mean. What did I do?”

“Be nosy. Be a fleetingly alive day-fly child showing an interest seen as being undeserved, insufficiently respectful. And the Anything Legal Considered might be seen as presumptuous, making you the elevenstring. That was taken as the attack, even if it was meant innocently; Sklom playing so well, making you look inferior, squashing any interest you might have had in ever wanting to master the instrument… that was the counter-attack.”

Cossont took a deep swallow of her drink. She coughed, then sniffed again. “Yeah, but I bet the ALC isn’t as upset as I am.”

“Well, that is very… ship, too,” QiRia said. “They are as gods of old were merely imagined to be; we are mud in their hands, flies to be toyed with. Etc., blah.” He waved one hand, looked over at her. “They are rarely malicious, never vicious; not to us. Mainly this is because we are so far beneath them it would be demeaning to get that worked up about us and our feelings, but the thing is,” he said, drinking again, “the thing is, they are vastly powerful artefacts, with senses and abilities and strengths that we only fool ourselves we know about or understand, and the subtlest, most infinitesimal of their machinations can bruise us, crush us utterly, if it catches us wrong.” He gave a small laugh that was really just an exhaled breath. “I’ve watched them become so, over the millennia. The Minds took over long ago. The Culture stopped being a human civilisation almost as soon as it was formed; it’s been basically about the Minds for almost all that time.”

“Is that why you’ve stayed alive all this time? Is this your revenge?” She had meant to challenge him properly on the whole alive-for-ever claim, tonight especially, but had decided that it no longer mattered; she’d keep going along with his claim. If it was true, well good for him. If it was just a yarn, well, that was pretty impressive too. She didn’t care.

He didn’t answer for a while. She thought for a moment he might have fallen asleep, like old people did sometimes. She found this funny, nearly laughed. “No,” he said, sounding thoughtful. “No, I have a reason, but… it’s not that.”

“So, do you hate it,” she asked, keeping her voice low, “for that?”

He looked mystified. “Hate what?”