The Hydrogen Sonata

help. “It’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth.”

“One person’s truth,” he began.

“Oh, fuck,” she said, looking away and crossing her arms. “Here we go…” She looked back when she realised he was laughing. “What?” she demanded.

“I can’t help you, Tefwe,” he told her. He was looking down now.

“What? Why not?”

“I just can’t.” He reached down by the side of the chair, felt for and found the cord there, and started pulling it. She could hear the matting that had rolled down over the cell’s open window earlier as it was pulled back up again. The Sound pulsed back into the room, filling it like an avalanche bursting into a cabin an instant before it was swept away entirely.

“Because,” he said, shouting, “I got rid of those memories some years ago.” He completed hauling the sound-deadening matting back up and sat back again as though exhausted, like somebody long deprived of the sunlight finally being allowed to face directly into its warmth again. He took a deep, satisfied breath and shouted, “So I don’t have them any more. Not here. Not on me, not in me. They’re gone.” Tefwe’s ears had mostly closed up again, assaulted by the noise. She wasn’t sure she could really hear what QiRia was saying any more; it was more that she was lip-reading. There was a fraction more light getting into the cell now, around the still-closed shutters.

“But why?” she shouted.

“Fear, Tefwe,” he said, shrugging. “I was frightened that what I knew would be enough to cause me trouble, given what was going to happen; given the Subliming. So I made sure that the memories became encoded in just one place — two places. Then I saw an old friend who relieved me of them.” He shook his head. “Now I have no idea what I used to know. I’m sorry.”

“So… where are… where were those memories?” she asked, yelling. “Where were they encoded?”

He reached up to his face with one hand, took off the slatted glasses. The heat coming off his skin, differentiated according to the various surfaces on his face, plus the small amount of evening light leaking round the edges of the shutters, meant her eyes could see quite well enough.

In the very first instant, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at, or what was wrong with his face. Then she started to realise. She felt herself frowning and sitting further forward, to see properly and to make sense of what it was she was seeing. Though she thought she knew now, and thought she should, really, have known all along.

At first she thought that where his eyes had been he now had a pair of belly-buttons, but that was just her first, instinctive reaction. Looking closer, thinking it through, she realised that what he actually had in his eye sockets, in place of his eyes — quite neatly integrated, looking for all the world as though they belonged there — was another pair of ears.

Ngaroe smiled, though it was a thin smile this time; perhaps even a mocking one. The Sound, though baffled by the heavy shutters, seemed to rise suddenly then and shake her to her core, making her synthetic lungs resonate and her carbon bones vibrate and her own augmented eyes quiver and water in their sockets. It all but drowned out his voice.

Through her tears she struggled to lip-read what he said in reply to her question about where the missing memories had been encoded:

“Take a guess, Tefwe.”

Seventeen (S -8)

xLSV You Call This Clean?

oLOU Caconym

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Empiricist

oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

oUe Mistake Not…

oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

oMSV Pressure Drop

oGSV Contents May Differ

Hello. Bad news. Mr QiRia has been tracked down but would appear no longer to have the information we seek. See attached report.

?

xGSV Contents May Differ

Ms Tefwe seems to have been unable to take any steps which might have confirmed whether he was telling the truth or not. Are we simply going to take his word for this? I had gathered that the gentleman was/is notoriously unreliable.

?

xLSV You Call This Clean?

Correct. However, determining whether he was telling the truth or not would have meant kidnapping Mr QiRia. That would have been difficult and wrong. And it is hard to see what his motivation might be in lying about this. He certainly had the ability to compartmentalise his memories in the way described, and his eyes were genuinely missing. As the report’s appendices make clear, Ms Tefwe carried analytical capacity which independently verified both that this was the real person and that his eyes had been surgically excised. Short of removing him entirely from the hearkenry to carry out a full body scan, it is not easy to see what more could be done. I think we have to take this as it appears.

?

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

And it appears that the problem recedes over the horizon once again, its solution still out of our reach. Are we really determined to pursue this chimera regardless of cost?

?

xGSV Contents May Differ

I suspect the consensus remains much as it was. Has anyone changed their opinion since the last vote?… No? All right, then; we are as we were.

?

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

Thinking, I hope, of what we do if and when we discover whatever there is to discover. Personally, I would vote for not telling the Gzilt, no matter what we find, and I suspect I am not alone in feeling that way. Which is why I question the point of looking so insistently in the first place. I don’t want to appear presumptuous, but perhaps we might all think a little along these lines?

?

xLOU Caconym

Gee, thinking ahead. Whom’d a thunk a that?

?

xGSV Contents May Differ

Mistake Not…, it would appear to be up to you and Lieutenant Commander Cossont.

?

xUe Mistake Not…

Yup. Little busy.

The elegance of conventional Orbitals lay in the fact that their diameter — they were usually about three to