The Hydrogen Sonata

“Wait, wait, wait,” QiRia’s voice said. Cossont fell silent. “How far back? Are you asking me to remember things from—”

“The time of the conference that set up the Culture, sir,” Berdle said.

“Ah,” QiRia’s voice said. “That far back. Can’t help you.”

“What?” Cossont said. She and the avatar exchanged looks.

“I said,” the voice from the cube told them, slowly, “that I cannot help you. My memories only go back to… about seventy years standard after that time. The memories in here begin at midnight on the 44th of Pereid, 8023, Koweyn calendar. Before that, I’ve nothing.”

“Seriously?” Cossont said. She could hear her own voice start to rise in tone and volume. “You’re missing—?”

“Must ask you to check, sir,” Berdle said, in a pained voice.

“Check for yourself. You’re a ship; you’ll have the ability. I’m giving you permission. I’m not a biological, not in here, so take a look for yourself. Scan all the data in this cube. Go on; feel free.”

“You’re sure?” the avatar said. He looked at Cossont, who found it was her turn to shrug.

“Yes!” QiRia’s voice said sharply.

Berdle sighed. He smiled at Cossont. “This might take a moment,” the avatar told her.

She sat back slumped in the seat, rubbed her face with two of her hands. She sighed heavily. “Take all the —”

“Ah,” Berdle said, sounding resigned. He looked at Cossont. “I’m afraid it’s just as Mr QiRia’s mind-state has claimed.”

“Told you,” the voice from the cube said.

“The memories aren’t there?” Cossont felt suddenly tired, full of aches, and depressed.

“I’m afraid not,” Berdle told her. “And even the memories of the times when Mr QiRia thought back to those times, before the source memories were edited out, have been expunged, too.” Berdle looked at the cube. “That’s quite a thorough job, Mr QiRia.”

“Sounds like it,” the voice agreed.

Berdle smiled faintly, shook his head as he said, “Would you have any idea why you—?”

“No. None at all. Guess I must have thought I had something to hide. If so, glad I’ve done a good job of it, or made sure somebody else did.”

Cossont was sitting, looking deflated, eyes closed, shaking her head gently. “They can’t just have gone,” she said, as though to herself. “They can’t just have gone.” She looked at Berdle. “What now? Can we look for… the real QiRia, for the old guy himself? He might… he should still know.” She shook her head again. “Shouldn’t he?”

“We’ve already tried that,” the avatar told her. “They found him, but he’d had the memories encoded site- specific in his body, and then had those sites removed.”

“What?” Cossont said, frowning.

“Mr QiRia looks like this, now,” Berdle said, and a screen appeared in mid-air, of a man in a dark room, wearing a pair of dark, slatted glasses. “The person who tracked him down,” Berdle said; “their suit took this.” The screen image moved and the man took off the glasses, revealing that it was QiRia, but also that where his eyes should have been, there were the inner parts of ears.

The clip looped and the screen split to show different versions of the same sequence, in infra-red, slow motion, with the eye sockets zoomed in on, and combinations thereof.

Cossont just stared.

“How gross!” Pyan said.

“What are you looking at?” QiRia’s voice asked.

Cossont reached out and turned the cube off, then slumped back in her seat, eyes closed again. She had a feeling she might be about to cry.

“Do you remember this?” Berdle said softly, and when Cossont opened her eyes again the screen was showing a view that looked familiar, though at first she couldn’t quite place it. It was of a man looking slightly lost in what might have been a transit lounge. Then he left, following a modest amount of luggage on a float- trolley.

Of course: QiRia, arriving on Xown, five years ago. Then a similar set of images which seemed to show him in the same place, dressed similarly but wearing big dark glasses. If anything, he looked even less sure about where he was going this time. The images faded away and the screen went dark.

“And this?” The screen shone out again to show Ximenyr, the man with the many penises on the airship Equatorial 353, in the Girdlecity. It was almost exactly the view she recalled having at the time, though then the view flicked round and showed Cossont’s own face, before flicking back to the man in the bed again. So this had been Berdle’s point of view. This was the sight through his eyes, recorded.

“Mr Berdle, Ms Cossont,” Ximenyr said in his deep, thick voice. “Pleased to meet you.” He opened his mouth and a long tongue snaked out and delicately licked at first one eyebrow then the other, shaping them both neatly into place. The tongue disappeared again. He opened his eyes wide; he had bright, pale blue irises. His eyeballs went back into their sockets, the blue irises disappearing. They were replaced from below by dark red irises which rolled into place and steadied. “Excuse me,” he said. “These pupils work better in daylight.” He smiled widely, showing very white teeth.

Cossont was nodding now. “Mr Ximenyr, the body-amendment specialist,” she said.

This would be why QiRia had looked like he had, the second time in the transit lounge; wearing big dark glasses, seemingly — perversely — less sure of his surroundings than before: he’d been blind.

The screen view now was doing something she hadn’t done at the time, zooming in to a close-up of Ximenyr’s face; the teeth and the eyes at first, then down, to the necklace of trinkets adorning his neck.

The view came to rest and freeze on the tiny — at the time deactivated — scout missile that the ship had sent into the man’s bed-chamber. It was resting on Ximenyr’s chest between what looked like an android’s thumb and a thick crystal cylinder, striped with encrusted jewels.

The frozen image jerked to one side, zoomed in further on the cylinder, showing a hazy view of what looked like semi-transparent crystal with what might have been a pair of berries inside. They were pale green, and looked like they were floating in some sort of off-white surround.

“What colour were Mr QiRia’s eyes?” Berdle asked.

Cossont still had to think, just to be sure. Then she remembered. “When he was there, they were the colour of the ocean on Perytch IV,” she said. “The ocean could be lots of colours,” she told the avatar, “but mostly, in daylight, it was the colour of beach jade. Pale green.” She nodded at the extreme close-up of the jewel-encrusted cylinder with its imperfectly transparent little windows and the two soft-looking things inside that might have been berries. “That colour.”

Eighteen (S -7)

She should never have trusted herself. She ought to have known what she was like. Well, she did know what she was like, but she should have paid more attention or taken the issue more seriously or something.

Scoaliera Tefwe, still within the virtual environment of a substrate housed within the LSV You Call This Clean?, looked at the two holo images of herself facing her and scowled. “So. Neither of you?”

“Certainly not me.”

“Certainly not me.”

They didn’t say it at quite the same time, but then the ships they were housed within were at quite different distances.

The original Scoaliera Tefwe, who thought of herself as the real one — but then, both the others would as well — sighed in exasperation and flicked the images off.

“Huh,” she said.