The Hydrogen Sonata

swept up in the current emergency and now, having just heard from her, fears for her well-being and even life.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Vyr shouted. She looked at Berdle. “You did put in the bit about her not telling anybody I’d been in touch?”

“Of course,” Berdle said. He frowned. “I thought I’d been entirely unambiguous. Even forceful.”

Cossont just shook her head, looked back at the screen. There was an abrupt cut to a head-and-shoulders shot of Warib, sitting in her largest white couch with the sea and clouds behind. Small glowing figures in the top right corner of the screen read S -13, reminding any especially absent-minded viewers how many days were left to the Subliming. Warib was dressed in a blouse suit Vyr didn’t recognise. It was a bit frilly and showy. “Madame Cossont,” the voice continued, slightly altered in timbre and ambience now, “you recently heard from your daughter, didn’t you?”

“Or somebody claiming to be her, yes. It’s not like her to be so poor getting back to me, it really isn’t. We’ve always been very close and kept in touch all the time and then she just seemed to disappear from the face of the planet, and apparently her bed hasn’t been even slept in for days — many, I mean several days — and then, of course, she is in the Fourteenth, the regiment the Fourteenth, and she was always very active in the Reserve, very respected, and of course there’s been this terrible, terrible—”

“Madame—” the voice of the unseen interviewer said.

Berdle looked at Vyr; she had one of her upper hands cupped over her nose and eyes, the other three hands all clasped tightly across her chest.

“—terrible explosion on this planet and for all I know — well, I thought, I assumed the worst, naturally, as any mother would. I wondered, ‘Could she have been there, was that where she went? Did she know something?’ as soon as I heard about, about the thing, but then there was nothing, just nothing—”

“Madame Cossont—”

“I’m sorry. I am just rattling on, aren’t I? I do care, I worry so much about her…” She looked away to one side, put her hand to her mouth and balled it there, her lips tightening, her eyes blinking quickly. Her lower lip started to tremble.

“I can’t watch any more of this,” Vyr announced. “Turn it off. Please. What’s the upshot?”

The screen disappeared.

“Oh!” Pyan said. “I was enjoying that!”

“Your mother relates,” Berdle said, “that she received the text message you sent via myself and says she thinks you’re ‘mixed up in something’.”

“Well,” Cossont sighed, “she got that right, if nothing else.”

“She says that she doubts it really was from you and describes you as, I quote: ‘wittering about her hair, when that’s never been something she’s ever even cared about, I mean I’ve done my best, I always have, but anyway, it did strike me as highly suspicious’. End quote.”

Vyr put both upper hands over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. That was supposed to… last time we… she said… oh, never mind.” She took a deep breath, looked up. “Nothing about how my claiming to have met an extremely good-looking and very powerful man was even less likely to be true?”

“I didn’t include that,” Berdle confessed. “You left it to my discretion and I thought it best to leave it out.”

“Probably just as well. She’d have assumed it was code for I’ve been kidnapped.”

Parinherm looked suddenly alert and glanced around quickly. “You haven’t been kidnapped, have you?” he said, and seemed to be tensed to leap up from where he sat.

“Excuse me,” Berdle said, and the android went limp, relaxing as though deflated and settling back into the lounger.

“That is going to get tiresome,” Cossont said, frowning at the unconscious android. “Can’t you just re- program it or something?” she asked Berdle.

“Not so easily,” the avatar said. “It has highly recursive, deeply embedded, multiple-level physical source coding check-sets worked down to the atomechanical level as well as a radically tenacious prescribed assume- simulation default with closely associated deacativatory protocols. It’s a real tangle. Probably meant to be a safety feature.”

“Certainly not a comprehensibility feature.”

Berdle smiled. “I beg your pardon. I mean it’s hard to re-program it without disabling it, potentially.” The avatar shrugged. “There will be a work-around recorded somewhere obscure, probably; I’ll keep looking. Plus I’ll just continue to think about it.”

“What about the ship that’s following us?”

“I don’t see any need to test its top speed by trying to outpace it; better to keep that edge, assuming it exists. I’ve run a lot of sims for a fly-through of the Ospin system and an insertion into various of the dataversities and I’m confident this can be done with minimal chance of the following ship spotting where you’re inserted, unless it’s a particularly remote unit.” Berdle paused. “We can leave this another hour or two, but, given that you have effectively raised the subject, it would be helpful to know which of the dataversities or other objects we might be targeting.”

Cossont nodded. “It’s the Bokri microrbital; the Incast facility.”

“Thank you,” Berdle said, then smiled. “That shouldn’t be a problem. It’s in a relatively densely packed volume of the cloud. Plenty of cover.” It looked at Cossont. “Would anybody — your mother, for example — know that you took the mind-state device to the Incast order on Bokri?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t tell anybody.” She sighed. “I put it in my private journal and General Reikl knew about that, but I suppose that all got destroyed when the Reg HQ was blown up.”

“Probably,” Berdle agreed.

Cossont sighed. “If this all goes horribly wrong, you’ll have to contact my mother to tell her you’ve lost her little girl.”

“If this all goes horribly wrong,” the ship told her, “I too might be lost.”

“Well, you’ve heard what she’s like; death might be preferable.”

“That,” Pyan said primly, “is no way to talk about your mother.”

Cossont looked at Berdle and said reasonably, “That, I think you’ll find, is the only way to talk about my mother.”

“These things accrete.”

“Most things accrete that don’t gradually crumble, rust or evaporate.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest there was any merit in the process.”

“Indeed. Nor in its opposite.”

“I’m glad we have finally found something to agree on.”

“I’m not.”

“I think you make a virtue of contrariness, or think to.”

“You might be dismayed to know just how little what you think matters to me, Scoaliera.”

“I doubt it. My expectations could hardly be lower. Also, I’m encouraged by your relative approachability and good humour on this occasion.”

“I do believe my sarcasm-meter just twitched.”

“A false positive, I fear. I was being entirely sincere.”

“You say? Have I been imagining that I was the very exemplar of hearty, helpful bonhomie on our last meeting?”

“Possibly.”

“Hmm.”

The drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie was the size and shape of a large grey suitcase. A rather battered and dusty large grey suitcase. Its scraped, slightly dented casing glinted in the sunlight where it had been polished by the sand in the wind, or had been scraped against stones. If it was showing an aura field, it was being washed out by the brilliant sunlight. But probably it wasn’t; it never had in the past, not as long as Tefwe had known it.

“Anyway, I am not persuaded that memories do only accrete,” the drone told the woman. “Even without the intrinsic limitations of a conventional biological brain, what one forgets can be as important and as formative as what one remembers.”