Iain Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata

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xGSV Empiricist

Please.

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xUe Mistake Not…

We know how this works. If we do nothing then any disaster that befalls the Gzilt over the next few hours is entirely theirs. If we intervene we become at least complicit. This is a truth that has not been asked for; even the original bearers of it, the Z-R, made it clear they were happy it stay unknown. We know, and what we know is — now that we can be sure of what we know — that it is not our business. Whether the knowing was worth the price we and others have paid is another sort of moral equation, at right-angles to this one. I say we do nothing. Vote if you like.

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xLOU Caconym

Anybody wish to wrest from me my claim for precedence in the awkward customer/dissenting adult/outright contrarian stakes?… No? Thought not. Then when I say that I reluctantly agree with what our colleague the Mistake Not… has just said, I think we might consider the matter closed.

The Caconym , in the shape of its virtual avatoid, returned to the castle-made-of-castles it had modelled within the near-unending recesses of its computational matrices. Its humanoid shape set out from the gatehouse that was made of tens of thousands of already mighty gatehouses, and walked all the way to the high tower which sat like a fat flagpole on top of the great composite tower, many subjective kilometres away into the fractal architecture of the baroque edifice.

It had waited all this time to hear anything from the mind-state of the Zoologist — anything at all that might have helped it and its colleagues in their attempts to understand the workings of the Sublime — and, despite being tempted to do so many times, it had not come back here to attempt to force the pace or the issue.

Now that the matter in hand appeared to have been settled — without, it had to be said, any help from the Zoologist — it had something to report, and could release the soul of the other ship from whatever obligation to help that it might have felt under. Not that that appeared to be very much, given the continuing silence. At least the instances of weird, ambiguous intrusions into its substrates, maybe from the Sublimed realm, had tailed off to nothing recently. That was a good sign, perhaps.

Or perhaps not. It was starting to worry about that.

It arrived, at last, after a climb of many thousands of steps, at the door to the airy, enclosed lair inhabited by the consciousness of the Sublime-returnee, the abstract of what had once been the Mind of the Zoologist .

There was no answer when it knocked. The place sounded quiet. It already felt that it knew what it was going to find. The door was locked, but only at a crude physical level, within the sim. Unlocking it was hardly more complicated than the act of turning the handle and pushing the door open.

The door swung, stuck, had to be pushed.

The Caconym ’s avatoid walked in and looked around.

The space was, as it had guessed, empty of the Zoologist ’s mind-state. It was full of almost everything else, including debris, litter and rubbish of every kind, stained glassware, bulbously gleaming electrical gear, intestinal quantities of tubing, foul smells, loudly protesting, unfed animals, and multitudinous ropes hanging from the ceiling, but of the strange creature with the pale red, mottled skin and the long arms with six fingers, there was no sign.

After it stopped looking for the avatoid of the Zoologist it started looking for a note. It didn’t find one.

“You might have said goodbye,” it said, eventually, to the air, in case its departed guest had left some sort of message behind that might be triggered by speech… but its voice just disappeared into the clutter and the dust and the hazy sunlight coming through the tall windows, and brought no response.

The ship instituted a full search of its computational and storage substrates, just in case, but with no real hope it would find any sign of the Zoologist . Sure enough, there was nothing. Apart from this ersatz, abandoned lab and its own memories of its departed colleague, the Zoologist had left without a trace.

The Caconym was about to calm the squawking, screeching animals in their cages, but then grew instantly tired of the whole absurd conceit, and with one command abolished the entire castle and everything in and around it, closing down the whole scenario with a single thought.

In the end he went with everybody else.

There had been a time there when he thought he must have gone mad, for he had been thinking of staying behind, of not going at all, and perhaps — once it had all taken place — of putting himself into the hands of some authority, to be tried and judged and accept whatever punishment might be decreed for what he had done — for all the things he had done, but especially for this last thing.

But that had been just a passing fantasy, a mood, something to be indulged. In the end he knew he had to go, and he told himself that not going, and indulging in this masochistic orgy of justice and repentance, would be the truly selfish thing for him to do. Finally, at long last, it was not all about him. He was, he would be, just another humble Enfoldee, taking his place along with everybody else for the step off the cliff that bore you up rather than causing you to fall…

The Presence that had hung over the parliament building for so long had swelled a little, become a dark sphere. In the last few hours, more and more Presences had appeared, sliding into existence throughout the whole of Gzilt space, wherever there were people: in homes and communes and barracks, in ships and sea ships and aircraft, in squares and piazzas, in public halls, lecture theatres, auditoria and temples, markets and malls, sports venues and transport stations and in all the places where the Stored had recently been resting, before pre-waking.

The aliens who had come to wish the Gzilt farewell, and those who had come to profit from their going, had, by convention, withdrawn for the moment, leaving those about to depart to themselves.

Time-to devices and public clocks and displays spread throughout the Gzilt realm ticked down the last few hours and minutes, and people met at pre-arranged places and ate last meals and said last things and, sometimes, told others secrets they’d been keeping. Or decided not to.

Generally, as people tended to, they got together in groups of family and friends, then joined with other groups to form gatherings of dozens or hundreds and — again, as people usually did, though the exact expression of such emotionality depended both on the physical as well as the psychological make-up of the species concerned — they held hands.

Many sang.

Many bands and orchestras played.

And in the end the time counted down to nothing, and, in the presence of Presences, all you did was say, “I Sublime, I Sublime, I Sublime,” and that was that. Off you went, just folding out of existence as though turning through a crease in the air that nobody had noticed was there before.

He met up with Marshal Chekwri at the end. She had no more family than he did, and they had come to share much over the last twenty days or so.

They stood in the gardens of the parliament, under an inappropriately squally sky, with showers, waiting to say the words with a few dozen others. They left it relatively late during the hour that was regarded as the optimum period, just to make sure that a respectable proportion of the whole Gzilt civilisation was indeed going.

It was, he reflected numbly, a lot like watching election results coming in. There was a slow start to the Instigation, but the numbers quickly swelled about a quarter of an hour in, according to the news channels still covering events, and by the start of the last third of the hour it was obvious almost everybody was making the transition. The numbers Subliming accelerated again. Those gathered in the garden agreed they could go.