The Hydrogen Sonata

“Hate the Culture, for what it’s become.”

He looked at her, laughed. “What? Are you completely insane?” He laughed some more, quite loudly. Then he drained his glass, glanced at hers and said, “We need another drink.”

There was not much more after this. They had talked earlier about a midnight swim, but they’d got too drunk. The swell-riding motion of the raft went from being lulling to making her a little nauseous, then, when that passed, back to being lulling again.

She must have fallen asleep because she woke to the sounds of seabirds mewing overhead and the sight of the sun prising open the narrow gap between the horizon and the cloud base. It was cold. There was a blanket over her, but QiRia had gone.

She returned to the ship later that day, still a little the worse for wear, and life went on.

Most of a year later she was leaving to go back to Gzilt and home. Again, she was a little hung-over, after another, more crowded leaving party with some of the other humans on the ship. The elevenstring was a sort of guilty presence haunting her every step, the float-pallet never leaving her side. That was when the golden-skinned avatar of the Anything Legal Considered had handed her the glitteringly grey cube with QiRia’s mind-state embedded in it, then bid her farewell and turned on its heel.

She’d only accessed the soul inside the cube twice in over three years. The first time was on the Gzilt liner heading home, to check that the voice that came out of it was really his — she didn’t activate either the screen or holo function, and there was no built-in visual capacity in the cube at all. He was grumpy, eccentric, opinionated, and knew of everything they’d talked about up to and including their conversation on the raft on that last night, so it probably was him in there, or something like him, at least.

She’d asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn’t see. He’d said that it was like being woken from a deep and satisfying sleep, to be asked questions while you kept your eyes closed. He was quite happy. Sight was over-rated anyway.

It felt creepy, though, talking to him, and the further away in time and space she drew from the hazy heat and long slow swells of Perytch IV, the more her scepticism about QiRia’s claims of extreme longevity — and pretty much everything else — returned.

The grey cube was quite small, and she nearly lost it a couple of times. She was aware that this might really be because secretly she wanted rid of it.

Eventually, after she’d stayed with her mother for a few days one time, left the cube behind, realised, and called Warib just as she was about to throw it out, she’d begun to doubt it would ever be safe with her. Then she’d moved out, relocated to another part of Zyse and really thought she had lost the cube this time, misplaced in the move. It showed up eventually, at the back of a drawer.

She’d activated it one more time after that, then donated/permanently loaned it (whatever) to one of the Secular Collectionary orders in the Ospin system, where most of the old stuff of Gzilt ages past went to be catalogued, stored and cared for… and almost certainly never to be either lost or looked at ever again.

The same fate nearly befell the elevenstring, which she kept maintained and which she played, briefly, about once a year. But that would have felt like just too much rejection; keeping the ridiculous instrument somehow kept her from feeling quite so bad about abandoning QiRia’s soul, even if by now she had convinced herself, again, that he was just an old fraud.

Still, it was only when she was thinking of looking for a life-task to give her something to do while she waited for the Subliming to happen that she thought again of playing the thing.

This was a decision she would later regret, often.

She woke up, wondered where she was. Dim light, and her augmented eyes, showed her a room or cabin she didn’t recognise. It looked very nice though. There was almost complete silence. She was in the spacious shuttle craft of the Culture ship, the Mistake Not… She looked over the side of the billow bed, located in a little alcove off the craft’s main open area. Another alcove, closed off, held the inert body of the android Parinherm. The elevenstring was stashed overhead somewhere in a storage locker.

Pyan lay on the floor, a dark mat. It raised the tip of one corner lazily, sleepily acknowledging her, then went flat again.

She lay thinking about the day just passed. She’d been unconscious at least twice. She’d briefly met or at least seen dozens of people who were now all dead. She’d been rescued once, twice, just escaping death both times. And she’d been told to look for the soul of an old fraud she’d met once, for a few days, nearly twenty years earlier, when — looking back — she’d been little more than a kid. People were dying and ships damaging themselves to get her from place to place, and she wasn’t at all sure she was the right person to do whatever it was they were all expecting her to do.

Soon it wouldn’t matter anyway. She was still going to Sublime, wasn’t she? Everybody else was. She supposed she’d sort of have to go if everybody else did.

Personally, she wasn’t sure it really mattered whether the Book of Truth had been based on a lie; a lot of people had long half assumed that.

How much did it matter to others though? Perhaps a lot — perhaps enough. Would that knowledge — if it was true — stop people Subliming? Maybe it would. So much of the whole process of deciding to make this final civilisational transition had been about mood, relying on an atmosphere that involved a kind of gradually growing, shared, blissful, resignation. A feeling of inevitability had settled over the Gzilt somehow, self-propagating and self- reinforcing, making Subliming look like just the next, natural step.

People had been talking seriously about Subliming for centuries, but it was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likelihood in the popular imagination, beginning at unthinkable, progressing to absurd, then going from possible but unlikely to probable and likely, before eventually arriving — round about the time of her birth — at seemingly inevitable.

And anticipated, and desirable.

Would all that change if it was discovered the Book of Truth had been some sort of alien trick and the hallowed, semi-worshipped Zihdren no better than charlatans?

Some people thought the Gzilt were going rather early, that most species/civs waited a little longer, entered a lengthier period of etiolation before taking the plunge… but then every species was different, and the Gzilt believed themselves especially different, exceptionally different, partly because of the Book and what it had told them. Would its message being brought into doubt kick away the foundations of that self-satisfaction and make people question the wisdom of Subliming at all?

Maybe — just embarrassed, if nothing else — they’d want to escape the shame and uncertainty involved by hurrying into Subliming with even more determination. Maybe only half the Gzilt would go, or just a fraction; enough still to be viable within the Sublime but leaving larger numbers behind, perhaps to make their own decision at some later date. So a schism, beyond healing, in the Sublime, and chaos, perhaps, back in the Real.

Even if the Subliming still took place as planned, in full, would the knowledge of that last-moment counter- revelation about the Book somehow colour the Gzilt experience once they had Enfolded?

If she recalled correctly all the books and articles she’d read and the programmes and discussions she’d seen, it would make little or no difference, but nobody — not even Elder species who’d been studying exactly this kind of stuff for aeons — could be entirely sure, because so little detail ever came back out of the Sublime.

She didn’t know; all she could do was what she’d been asked/ordered.

What she did know was that it really shouldn’t be her responsibility how this panned out. She was just a musician, a civilian in the reserve who’d once, briefly, bumped into an old guy that suddenly everybody wanted to talk to.

She just wasn’t that special. She was no idiot, and she would happily accept that she was a very gifted musician, but it ought not to be falling to her to work out any important part of this society-wide, alien-involving, end-of-days mess.

Maybe she should just leave QiRia in peace. Ask the ship to take her home, or to wherever or whatever had become the new HQ for the regiment, make her report there and then get taken back to Xown, the Girdlecity and her apartment, or just a place — anywhere — where she was less likely to be inside something getting shot at with hi-tech weaponry.

But she’d promised Reikl she would do as she’d been asked/ordered. She had been re-commissioned, too, so even with the Subliming coming up and all the usual rules and disciplines seemingly evaporating around everybody,