The Hydrogen Sonata

?

xLOU Caconym

oMSV Pressure Drop

The Passing By… would appear to be of the Effectively Useless persuasion. It needs — it has needed throughout — to be much more aggressive in monitoring these “various personalities involved, especially Septame Banstegeyn”; and — indeed — especially Septame Banstegeyn. It should not be lodging polite requests to see these people if-they’d-be-so-kind-when- they’re-able-pretty-fucking-please; it should be spying and eavesdropping on and bugging the fuck out of the fucking lot of them. This is what happens when you let an antiquated academic with a special interest in a civ take on any sort of serious role involving them because it “understands” them. It doesn’t just understand them; it identifies with them, mimics them — it wants to fucking be them. Not good enough.

?

To be fair, this posting did look like a sinecure until all this Z-R shit hit the impellers.

?

These things always do. Perhaps the lesson is that there are no sinecures, just matters of potentially grave consequence we happen to get away with most of the time. Can we ask the Empiricist to lean on the Passing By…? These big System-class fuckers are supposed to cast a long shadow ahead of them, or what use are they?

?

I’ll make the suggestion. Back to the general babble.

?

xGSV Contents May Differ

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

oLSV You Call This Clean?

Well, we must await further developments. Let us hope nothing too momentous occurs in the meantime.

* * *

The first part of the ship dance “The Approaching Eclipsing of One Sun by Another” was performed with due ceremony on the achievement of the Gzilt system outskirts, with the Gzilt home planet of Zyse only hours away. The dance was augmented with the participation of the Culture ship Beats Working. This vessel’s accrued inferred alien cachet value (positive), honorary, had, by general acclaim within the fleet and squadron, now become so great that it might actually be embarrassing for it to be informed of the level to which it had ascended so rapidly.

It was probably and arguably already over the limit that even as august a being as Ossebri 17 Haldesib, holding a position as elevated as Swarmprince and Sub-Swarm Divisional Head and Fleet Officer in Charge, could be properly expected to confer-by-informing. It was decided therefore to allow the Culture ship to continue to accrue inferred alien cachet value (positive), honorary, for the meantime, while still not disturbing the metaphorical airflow-through-the-hive by informing the vessel of this distinction.

Regardless, Gzilt and Zyse now lay ahead, and close.

“Hello again. Sorry for being so… abrupt.”

“That’s all right. I take it we’re still aboard the same Culture ship, the Mistake Not… ”

“Yes, we are.”

“So, what were you looking at that disturbed you so?” the voice from the silver-grey cube asked. “Or are you going to turn me off again?”

“We were looking at what you’d done to yourself.”

“Really? What?… Come on; tell me. The version of me in here and version of me that did whatever I did to myself are less than twenty years apart. When you’ve lived as long as I have, that’s nothing. I won’t have changed much in between. Effectively I’m the same person. Tell me.”

“You’d put your earliest memories into your eyes, then had those removed,” she said. “You went to Ximenyr, in the Girdlecity, to have it done. You had extra ears put where your eyes should have been.”

“…Well, that’s certainly taking my predilection for the audible over the visible to an extreme.” The voice sounded genuinely amused.

“It just seemed… drastic. Shocking,” Cossont said. “It looked like… like self-mutilation.”

“It’s my body to mutilate as I see fit, Cossont. And, from somebody currently possessing four arms, that’s an odd criticism.” Cossont opened her mouth, but then the voice went on. “This wouldn’t have been on a place called Cethyd, would it? In the Mountains of the Sound?”

“Yes.”

“Ha! Makes sense. Heard about that place quarter of a millennium or more ago; been meaning to go ever since. Good for me for taking it seriously enough to dedicate more than the standard proportion of sensory equipment to the task. I admire myself.”

Cossont, lying on her bed with the cube sitting on the pillow next to her, raised her eyebrows at that, but let it pass. “An old friend of yours called Tefwe went there,” she said, “to try and persuade you to talk about what had happened back when the Culture was coming together and the Gzilt nearly joined but didn’t.”

“Huh. So much for swearing old lovers to secrecy and respect for one’s privacy.”

“But what the hell were you thinking? Taking out your own eyes? Leaving them with Ximenyr?”

“Did I? I bet it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, less obvious than leaving the data with all the other informational detritus orbiting Ospin. For example.”

“What were you — what are you trying to hide, though?”

“Who knows? Maybe I’m better without the memories. So: we’re heading for Xown?”

“Yes,” Cossont said quietly to the cube. “We’re going to see Ximenyr, in the Girdlecity, to try and get your eyes, your memories back.”

“Interesting that I didn’t want the memories destroyed, just… parked.”

“Whatever they may be.”

“Whatever they may be… Of course, just because the eyes are there doesn’t mean the memories are too. I could have had those wiped… It’s gone very quiet out there. Hello?”

“That would be a joke too far, Ngaroe.”

“All the same. I wouldn’t put it past me.”

“This. I love this, when you are over me, when I can barely see you or touch you but I know that you are there and just a breath away and I feel each exhaling is like a warm breeze across the land, when I can hear each beat of your heart over mine, when you are close enough that I can feel the heat of you on my skin. Then you are my presence, over and above me, like a promise. I live for these moments. I die at the thought they might stop in the Sublime.”

“You say the sweetest things to me. I wish I could say such things to you, so beautifully.”

“You draw them from me, you are their muse, their true creator; we make them between us. I am a hopeless stumbler and stutterer, always have been, with anybody else. So you must take half the credit. At least.”

“If you say I must, I must, but I feel embarrassed that you say, that you give so much and I can’t give you the same.”

“Words are just one language, Virisse. Just one way of expression. You speak with your eyes, you speak with your sweet tongue and gentle fingers, with your whole body. Like this, and this. What?”