Iain Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata

~I never did tell you my whole name, did I?

~You did not. Many have remarked that your name would appear to be part of a longer one, and yet, unusually, even uniquely, nobody has heard the whole of it.

~May I tell you it now?

~Please do.

~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath . Cool, eh?

~Such braggadocio. That smacks of smokescreen, not power.

~Take it as you will, chum. But how many Culture ships do you know of that exaggerate their puissance?

~None till now. You may be the first.

~Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. Who do you think has the real martial provenance here? In a fight, you’d have no choice but to try to destroy me immediately. You’d fail. I’d have a choice of just how humiliatingly to cripple you. This is the truth; depend.

~So you say. We might beg—

~Enough. I think I know what happened out at Ablate. I owe you no respect. If you are experiencing a craving to die honourably, feel free to try to stop me when I instigate kick-away, in one millisecond from now. Otherwise, stand aside. Also? I retract my suggestion that you ought to depart. The place down here is a wreck. I’m leaving various drone teams and bits of medical gear behind, but I do intend to leave, and the locals could do with some disaster control. Stepping into that breach would be substantially more constructive than placing yourself across the cannon’s mouth. Your choice. Goodbye, one way or the other.

The Mistake Not… slipped out from under the Real. It left behind a silvery ellipsoid just to the rear of the drained ruin that was the airship Equatorial 353 . The silvery ellipsoid shrank to nothing and winked out over the course of several seconds in a gentle, orderly fashion, producing no more than moderate breezes as the air flowed in to replace the volume of the departed ship.

The ship itself fell beneath the planet, where the world’s gravity distorted the skein of space into a shallow bowl shape.

Then it turned, twisted, aimed and powered away, unmolested.

She felt like shit, and great, and hopeless, and euphoric, all at the same time.

The ship had brought her back to some sort of life.

Normally, that badly injured, that close to death after such major trauma to every single major organ save her brain, she’d have been left in a therapeutic coma for nine or ten days, and even then the change, the difference between her physical state at the beginning and at the end of that time, would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to people of a past age, taking her from good-as-dead to good-as-ever.

Instead, because of the Subliming, she had been repaired bit by bit, detail by detail, almost cell by cell, leaving her body a patchwork of pre-existing normality and dazzlingly fresh new bits, so that she felt jangled, vibrating, bruised beyond belief yet with nothing to show for it, perpetually astounded at being suddenly not dead, not seriously injured to the point of near-death…

She had listened in, from her sickbed in a much smaller but still-well-equipped module, to the debriefing QiRia gave on being reunited with the memories stored in the recovered eyes.

“You are, perhaps, the only Gzilt who will ever hear this,” the avatar told her.

The ship had made a new avatar. It looked and talked like Berdle had, before it/he had changed to look more like a Gzilt male, the first time they had set foot on the Girdlecity together.

“Sure you should be telling me?” she asked, huskily. Even her throat and lower tongue had taken a puncture wound in that last fusillade of fire from the android Agansu.

“I think you earned it,” the ship told her. It had yet to give its new avatar a name. It wouldn’t use “Berdle” again; it was sort of a tradition, it said, that when you lost an avatar you gave the next one a different name.

“Huh,” was all she would say.

Pyan heard the secret about the Book of Truth too — Pyan, now forever wanting to be wrapped, whimpering and cooing annoyingly round her neck, consoling, seemingly genuinely, honestly concerned for her after so nearly losing her — but the ship, at Vyr’s request, made sure that what Pyan heard of this, Pyan forgot again.

She still hadn’t managed to lose the elevenstring, either. As part of her personal effects, the ship had thoughtfully transferred it to the smaller shuttle craft before slinging the larger one, the one she’d been staying in, alongside the Girdlecity, to distract the Churkun .

It was a relief, albeit a guilty one, that there wasn’t room to play it inside the smaller craft.

It still took up an awful lot of space.

xGSV Empiricist

oLOU Caconym

oGSV Contents May Differ

oGCU Displacement Activity

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?

Fellows, colleagues, friends… We have our answer. It is much as we expected, though the import of even the most expected news changes when it becomes definite, and fact. The question is: what do we do? What do we say?

∞

xLOU Caconym

I’d tell them. I’d swamp their airways with it. I’d announce it so it’s the first thing the newly pre-woken hear. But I know we won’t. For what it’s worth, I’m resigned to the decision we’re all about to make, of keeping it quiet.

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

The simulations have been exhaustive but inconclusive; the likelihood is that releasing the information would make little difference, but with the outside possibility that there might be chaos, a partial Subliming with a significant part of the Gzilt populace and AIs changing their minds, further dispute between the Scavengers, and possibly even between the non-Subliming part of the Gzilt and the Scavengers. The chance of things turning ugly is small, but not that small, and the ugly might be very big ugly.

∞

xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

We can’t tell them. Those that would most care already know, or guess. Those that might be most affected are those we have the least right to disturb.

∞

xMSV Pressure Drop

I can’t agree. The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t.

∞

xLSV You Call This Clean?

Technically I agree with that. In practice I agree we say and do nothing. The circumstances, due to the timing, are unique. Yes, you should always tell the truth, unless you find yourself in a situation where it would be utter moral folly to do so. At least now we know the truth. The fevered, speculative potential of it has collapsed to something definite, and not so terrible, after all. To tell it would not be the worst thing ever, either. And one should always tell the truth, unless… The point is that we are not automata; we have a choice. I say we exercise it wisely, and stay silent.

∞

xGSV Empiricist

So, shall we vote? And/or open it up to others so that more may vote?

∞

xUe Mistake Not…

If I might.