“Initially,” he added, glancing at the girl. “Initially he just… hated it. Later… it became more serious, but it… was always a criticism, a… grim joke… an extended grim joke, but… never a labour of love. More labour of hatred. Contempt… very least.”
Words were still coming haltingly to him. His mind was struggling to adapt to speaking again after decades of slow singing and the transmission of thoughts and feelings by singular, though complex, sonic images. Every now and again he would throw his head back and open his mouth as far as it would go, as though yawning, silently. This action would continue for a few days, the medics had told him; the deep, primitive levels of his being were distressed at what they were interpreting as a sort of blindness, and were trying to send out a pulse of underwater sound, to illuminate his surroundings.
The action was, as he’d pointed out, itself an echo.
“…a reaction shared by… most listeners,” QiRia said. “I was at the first… performance.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Oh dear.”
Cossont frowned. “I thought the first performance was a triumph.”
“Audience of… academics,” QiRia said. “And they had each been given… copies of the… score.”
“The score is beautiful.”
“No denying. However, I was at the first… public performance.”
“Oh.”
“The reaction was… mixed. Some people… hated it… others… really hated it.”
Cossont smiled indulgently.
Isserem/QiRia could have been any age, just looking at his skin. It was very smooth but it was still somehow old-looking. His expression was the most unreadable she had ever encountered, though of course they came from different blood-lines; she wouldn’t have expected to be able to read an alien’s expressions, even if they were part of the vast meta-species of humanoid. The genetic inheritance of his body was mammalian; he even had vestigial nipples on his — to her — shallow-seeming chest. They looked like a couple of rather painful insect bites. This was, apparently, the same body he had inhabited before he’d been transferred to the leviathid. It had been Stored on the raft Apranipryla all this time. Now he was back.
He had spent all his life, he claimed, based (his word) in this single humanoid body, wandering throughout the Culture and beyond, especially in the remnants of the civilisations that had given rise to it — including that of the Gzilt, even though they had never quite got round to joining. He’d watched the Gzilt stagnate while the Culture had changed from a fractious, ramshackle collection of wildly disparate societies — some barely on talking terms — to become at once more purposefully homogeneous and more wildly varied as it slowly schismed, developed, diffused and grew towards the prominence it now possessed.
Throughout, he had taken what he called occasional holidays in other forms, again both within the Culture and without: he had been birds, fish, animals, machines, aliens of a dozen different types and genders, in some cases for centuries at a time. Always, though, he returned to the same old, ever-renewing humanoid body, his memories refreshed, his palate and appetites rejuvenated. And always wandering, too; never settling down, never returning to wherever he had grown up — wherever that was; he refused to say.
Then, for the last few decades — pursuing a recently discovered interest in sound above all other senses — he had been a leviathid, here on the water world of Perytch IV, his voice a clamorous, ocean-filling wail; a pulsed, directable blast of underwater sound capable of travelling thousands of kilometres, or pulverising a smaller sea animal to death with the instant crushing pressure of it. Cossont had no idea how any of that must have felt.
“But the Sonata isn’t just Vilabier’s most famous work,” she said. “It’s his most complex. Especially at the time, in fact for long after his death, most critics thought it his best.”
“Still, he… hated it,” Isserem/QiRia insisted. “He wrote the… central part to prove how easy it was to write such… mathematical… programish… music, but there was no… love in it. Or melody, of course.”
“Melody isn’t everything.”
“No single thing… is. We are not surprised, are we?” He looked at her, wiping his face again. “Then he realised that… even within its own… dictatorial, sequential… logic the piece was incomplete, and was only a… partial criticism of the things he hated, so he decided to… complete it, and did.”
Isserem/QiRia looked thoughtful, staring up at the patch of sky visible beyond the flapping, snapping canopy above, shielding them from the blast of tropical sun. “That was probably… Tik’s mistake,” he mused quietly. He called Vilabier “Tik”, which was short for T’ikrin, the composer’s first name. Cossont had been shocked the first time he’d done this. Now she found it an affectation. “He appeared to start… taking his joke too seriously.” He looked at her. “I did try to warn him,” he said.
“You knew him when he was writing it?” she asked, trying to sound neutral; not too sceptical. She sipped from her glass.
“We met up several times… while he was writing it. I was…” he waved one hand elegantly out of the water, dispensing drips across the sloshing waters “… one of those cultural attaché things… You know.”
She nodded as though she did.
“I even helped him.”
“What?” she spluttered.
“Oh, not with the music… as such.” The old man smiled. “With the matching… of each note to a high-level… glyph in Marain.”
Marain was the language — the Culture’s language — they were using, right now. She’d thought it polite to learn it for the exchange visit; there were even some words it shared with the Gzilt language, which had made it easier. Recently, after nearly a year speaking it, she had realised that she had started to think in Marain, and also that Gzilt was beginning to seem a little crude and clumsy in comparison. This made her feel oddly disloyal. “Marain was around then?” she asked.
“Oh, the Culture… had its language before it itself… really existed.”
“You were matching…”
“Each note to a multi-dimensional glyph.”
“In Marain?”
“The spoken version… and the… three-by-three grid used to form the written… displayed version is just… the base level of a fractal, infinitely… scalable multiple-dimension… descriptor. There are more complex… strata.”
“What? Beyond the nonary one?”
He looked pained. “Nonary is… incorrect. Really it’s… binary, arranged in a… three-by-three grid. But yes. Three by four, four by four… three cubed, four cubed… so on. The Minds alone use… understand… the versions in… multiple extra dimensions. They can hold… the whole word those glyphs make in their… minds.” He looked at her. “Ultimately anything… may be so described. The entire universe, down to… every last particle, ray and… event would be compressible into… a single glyph… single… word.”
“Pretty long word.”
“Hopelessly so. It would take… a universe’s lifetime to articulate it. But still.”
“What was the point of that?” she asked. “Matching notes to glyphs?”
“I have no idea,” the old man said, smiling. “But the point is… the Hydrogen Sonata is… an elaborate, contrived attack on… the sort of composition it… represents. He, Tik… hated clashing, atonal music. He was basically… taking the piss, showing how… easy it was to write… how difficult to… listen to. Now the piece he’s most remembered for.” He shrugged again. “‘Such is fate,’ as they say.” He gazed out to sea for a moment, then added, “One should never mistake pattern… for meaning.”