The Hydrogen Sonata

on trying.

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Have a lie down, as one of one’s humans might say to another.

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Shut up and get back to your work, as they also might say.

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Ha! Good simming. Over and outload!

A ship dance of celebration was required.

The fleet had already split into separate squadrons of eight ships apiece (save for the flagship squadron of twelve ships plus the accompanying Culture craft Beats Working) and these squadrons had flown in different directions towards their appointed places of interest where they might hope to accrue technology which would prove advantageous to the Ronte. Therefore a full fleet dance could not be performed. Instead a coordinated split-fleet dance would be performed, each squadron and ship and crew being made conscious of the movements of all the others so that the distributed dance would be accomplished as a joyous whole, virtually.

Accordingly, the dance “Multiple New Swarmqueens, Brought Together By Advantageous Zephyrs, Display Together In The Light Of The Two Home Suns At Double Zenith” was performed, to glorious effect. At the respectful request of the Culture ship, a place was found for it to become part of the dance as well, a task of honour it executed with diligence, understanding and precision, to the greater glory of the Ronte people, who had, against all expectation, been granted the Preferred status that they had known they deserved but had doubted would be conferred.

The Culture ship Beats Working accordingly accrued additional inferred alien cachet value (positive), honorary, with made-awareness of award status deferred.

The fleet squadrons reconfigured to reflect their new status. All but a few adjusted their courses for more important sources of technology, infrastructure and territory, given that these were likely now to fall to them without dispute. The flagship squadron turned to set a course for Zyse, the Gzilt capital and home system.

“People were targeted, I tell you, Banstegeyn,” Yegres told him as they walked in the grounds of the trime’s villa in the hills overlooking the city. The parliament building shimmered whitely in the distance, blurred with warm air rising, the Presence a dark inverted drip-shape above it, made tiny by the distance.

A pair of light cruisers, their smooth, kilometre-long hulls silvered, hung in the air ten thousand metres above the city. This was supposed to be reassuring for the remaining populace after the shock of the attack on the Regimental HQ of the Fourteenth at Eshri.

“Targeted,” Yegres repeated, glancing at Banstegeyn. The two crunched along a gravel path, followed at a discreet distance by Solbli and Jevan. Banstegeyn’s chief secretary and aide-de-camp were seemingly muttering to themselves, partially sub-vocalising as they communicated elsewhere. He’d given them the job of continuing to try and find a way to nullify the Scavenger vote earlier. There had been over ten millennia of inherently convoluted and frequently murky parliamentary business, all of it faithfully recorded; there had to be a precedent in there somewhere. It would be a start if nothing else.

Yegres was accompanied by a float-tray. It held a glass and decanter; he helped himself. “Frix was offered an introduction to some girl he’d had his eye on — or Quvarond’s wife or something; I don’t know — Yenivle took a case of Kolymkin… something; some priceless vintage.” Yegres frowned. “Wish the bugger had offered me that. So thoughtless.” He shrugged, shook his head. “Not sure what Jurutre was offered, but seemingly something furtive regarding a child. Not filthy, or even illegal, just… sad… Anyway, it was all terribly well organised. Done with military precision.” He barked a laugh. “Better than that, actually; didn’t miss and hit their own people.”

“And you?” Banstegeyn asked. “What did Trime Quvarond offer you?” He found it hard to keep the sneer out of his voice.

“Nothing at all, dear boy,” Yegres said amiably, waving one hand around. “I voted against you because I just don’t like you.”

Banstegeyn was stopped in his tracks. He heard Jevan and Solbli stop at the same time, gravel rasping under their feet. They’d gone silent, poised.

Yegres wandered on, oblivious, for another couple of steps before stopping too. He looked back at Banstegeyn.

“Oh, just kidding you on,” he said, smiling. “The vote was already lost so I joined in to look less… perennially obedient.” He frowned. “But you should realise, Septame; everything is breaking down a little now, including your grip. What worked until now — obligations, understandings, favours owed, the promise of future advancement and the threat of secrets becoming public and so on — they don’t have quite the force they did before.” He shrugged, then smiled broadly. “This is what you wanted, Ban. What you worked for all this time, what you’ve engineered. End of an era. Ha! End of the end of all eras.” He waved both hands this time, spilling a little wine. “School’s breaking up. People are out to play.”

Scoaliera Tefwe, who had been a friend and a lover of Ngaroe QiRia long ago, when he was already a very old man and she had been of conventional middle age — a little under two hundred — woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries.

Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken.

All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening nearby, and inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied.

It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. She opened her eyes.

SIMULATION, said the glowing red letters along the bottom of her field of vision. Ah, she thought, whereupon the word faded away.

So she was still sort of asleep, after all. But her consciousness and sense of embodiment were being woken up.

She was, apparently, already sitting, fully dressed, in a chair facing a table in a large, pleasant-looking room of some antiquity with a view — to one side, through opened floor-length windows — over mountains lined with trees and a lake whose shore was lined with villages. The wakes of a few boats left long white Vs on the wind- ruffled waters.

At the other end of the table from the windows, there was a time display in an ornate wooden case. She looked at the date.

My, that had been a long sleep.

Across the table from her there was a chair. When she looked away from the time display, a figure hazed from nothing through transparency into seeming solidity over the course of a couple of seconds. The small, pale, androgynous figure now sitting opposite her appeared to be the avatar of the LSV You Call This Clean? This was reassuring; she was still where she might have expected to be. The calm conventionality of the whole being-woken process had been a fairly infallible sign that nothing was likely to be too wrong, but this helped confirm it.

On the other hand, she was usually woken lying down, with time to take stock if she wanted, and swing herself off the couch, perhaps take the air and take in the view from the balcony, and only go to sit at the table when she felt she wanted to. Not this time, though; getting the basic minimum here.

“Scoaliera,” the virtual avatar said, smiling.

“YC,” she replied. The You Call This Clean? didn’t name its avatars or avatoids separately; people usually just called them ‘YC’. “Are we both well?”

“We are.”

Always good to know that your Stored self and the ship carrying it/you were judged to be well according to the punctilious standards of a Culture Mind. “So,” she said, “what is it?”

“Hoping you’ll agree to take a trip, fully uploaded-style, then to be downloaded into an avatoid.”

“Where? Why?”

“Not sure where yet; you might be able to help answer that yourself. The why is that we need you to look for Ngaroe QiRia.”