“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?”