Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (19 page)

“Such has been my experience of humans in the more rarefied sciences,” Arbus So concurred. “Even so, a formidable intellectual achievement.”

“Oh, it’s formidable alright,” Z-Lin muttered, and resumed communications. “What happened, Contro?”

“Nothing, nothing! It’s juff that I was looking at the storage freevers while Waffa was tinkering with the conduits, and I found a box of ice cream, or at least I thought it was ice cream, but then it turned out to be rather a lot colder than I had thought it would be! Ha ha ha, anyway I think the bleeding has stopped now! But it fertainly does feel funny! Well not ‘funny’, because if it was funny I would be laughing, but then again I
am
laughing, so that’ff a point!”

“Contro,” Z-Lin said, “did you lick an oxy block?”

“Yeff!”

“Okay,” Zeegon murmured in satisfaction, “
now
we can leave.”

Z-Lin sighed. The helmsman tapped his console, the stars outside blurred, and the grey curtain of Ol’ Drabby fell over the
Tramp
once more.

It was a week to Eshret, the first leg of their mind-numbingly long and tedious journey out to the edge of the galaxy. And that, Z-Lin constantly reminded herself, was if they were lucky. There was almost an infinite list of things worse than a long, boring, uneventful space voyage.

At least this time – and, she once again reminded herself,
so far
– the Captain had not overruled her proposed flight plan and suggested any of his infamous ‘shortcuts’. She wasn’t sure how many more of those the crew would stand for, even with the forty-two AstroCorps-configured ables Clue
technically
now had on her side if it came to outright mutiny. Still, it paid to remember that every journey was composed of many small, hopefully-boring steps. And the first step was Eshret, and the offloading of their Molran passengers.

Z-Lin, to all practical purposes the Captain of
Astro Tramp 400
, was left with the duty of interacting with their passengers. The Molren were a characteristically withdrawn bunch who needed very little in the way of entertainment, conversation or other pandering, which was fine with her. Their single aki’Drednanth passenger, and her two Bonshoon friends, were more interesting than the forty Molran survivalists added together.

Dunnkirk and Maladin
called
themselves ‘brothers’, more often than not, but the truth was that they might have been brothers, or lovers, or friends, or pretty much anything. It was hard to be sure, and really only mattered if you were a human anyway. The term might have been used as an expression of biological fact, or as a legal consideration, or as a relic-phrase of traditional familial unity, or as a pure Bonshoon metaphor for close affection and mutual support. One thing it didn’t pay to do was to impose humanity’s ridiculously prudish sexual worldview on it. The pair were most certainly affectionate with one another.
Very
affectionate. And they were
not
human. Imposing standards and taboos on them would be about as meaningful as imposing a minimum haircut length, or telling them to only use one pair of arms.

The human puritanism about breeding relationships was particularly odd, Z-Lin reflected after a few conversations with the Bonshooni, when one considered the willy-nilly way in which her species actually
bred
. Decay described human relationships as
pure wilful reproductive randomness that you fight and kill and die to defend against anyone who dares suggest any sort of sanity or framework around the relentless whirlwind of copulation
. And this was from a
Blaran
, known rebels against the more rigidly-controlled Molran evolutionary track.

Well, it more or less summed things up as far as Clue was concerned. She was all too aware that she was in a line of work where ‘sleeping with your colleagues’ was a particularly terrible idea, even if she wasn’t a commanding officer. And even if the options
hadn’t
just been pruned down to about six candidates, each more laughable than the last, before finally dipping out of the human species altogether by way of the eejit crèche. That limited recreation to the rather tacky ‘shore leave’ option, and even then she would never have described her experiences as a ‘relentless whirlwind of copulation’, for all that a little whirlwind might have been fun from time to time.

Still, the preoccupation with pigeonholing and judging the relationships of others – even those with whom one did not actually share a
genus
– was one way to pass the time during long flights, particularly flights through soft-space. Z-Lin had a feeling they would all be looking for things to talk about by the time they got to the edge. The ability to disregard humanocentric mores, however, also tended to bring with it a serene acceptance of humanocentric labels. This was fortunate, because without that serenity the Molren, Blaren and Bonshooni would probably have destroyed humanity within a week of meeting them. It was still something to keep in mind, perhaps, even if she herself had no intention of prying – sooner or later boredom would have its way.

Clue was particularly unfond of this facet of command.

Eshret, when they arrived, was more or less as advertised. There was no beacon or anything in orbit except for a little trio of solar-powered navigation satellites, and nothing on the ground talking to them except the steady ping of the research station. Otherwise, and aside from a few sterile bands of rocky mountains, the planet was a sandbox. The only thing that made the desert worth living in rather than the mountains was its utter stability. No tectonic activity, none of the dust storms that usually plagued sandy worlds, and apparently no complex life whatsoever. The microbial biomass was sparse and utterly neutral, the atmosphere was fed by the same tiny organisms breathing and decomposing in the sand, and more advanced orders of animal life seemed never to have evolved there at all.

It was, admittedly, a researcher’s dream. An ultimately uncluttered biosphere, and yet obviously
old
. There was geology, even if it was a bit run-down. The sand had come from somewhere, and there was no real reason
why
the microbes had not gotten their act together over the sun-parched aeons. Yes, there was a distinct dearth of water, which was the basis of the prevailing theory as to why Eshret’s life-forms had reached ‘crusty proto-stromatolite’ and called it a day. Samples drilled out of the crust also suggested a long-bygone period of solar activity that might have nuked the biosphere of Eshret back to square one and left it there, but the sun was stable now, and the world itself was
technically
as fertile-in-potentia as many similar deserts on other worlds.

The Molren under Mortelion Arbus So had a couple of big old settler-grade condensers with them, as well as seed stock. Soon, and strictly in accordance with their low-impact philosophy, they would have their corner of the planet-girdling desert blooming with alien plants. A nice salad, Waffa joked, would be just the thing after a heaping big plate of worms.

There was nothing much else to be said or done. The station was still there, all the machinery in working order and the worms – after a week of worm jokes even Z-Lin was curious enough to want to see for herself – present and accounted for. Whatever had killed The Warm, it either hadn’t come this way or had passed Eshret by due to its insignificance. There was no sign that anyone or anything had come to the planet in years, and the fact that a drift of sand about four feet high had built up on one side of the little cluster of modules spoke louder than any beacon of both solitude and atmospheric stability.

“We will stay here as planned,” Arbus So declared, as her colleagues began ferrying down in the
Tramp
’s landers, “and await word from The Warm. This settlement may need to serve its purpose as an evacuation point, and so we shall begin preparations, but as of your departure we will be denied superluminal communication methods and so shall simply wait.”

This had, of course, been the arrangement. Nobody had been able to guarantee that anyone would come back to The Warm using Eshret as a stopover, and it would be at least three years before the
Tramp
was back in this region. And that was if she even retraced her steps rather than heading elsewhere, which was by no means certain. Without recourse to relative speed, a week’s travel at approximately twelve thousand times the speed of light might as well be the far side of the universe, whether you were flying or simply trying to transmit a message. The survivalists were on their own. Which was basically what made them survivalists.

“Okay,” Z-Lin said, and shook the Molran’s lower right hand. “Any groups we meet, we’ll let them know your situation.”

“Very good, Commander. And…” Arbus So smiled. It still looked rehearsed, although they were slightly more comfortable around one another by now and Arbus So let her elongated eye teeth gleam in the blazing sun. It was hard to imagine a place more different to The Warm, actually. “Thank you for the
eejits
.”

Clue gave a humourless laugh. “No, thank
you
.”

Several of the survivalists had taken a keen interest in the
Tramp
’s broken ables over the past week, although none of them had offered any suggestions about how to fix the actual fabrication plant. They had, on the other hand, been very keen to take a small group of eejits into use on Eshret. Molren were more suited than humanoids to almost all varieties of manual labour, they were not shy in pointing out, but there was a range of tasks to which even the
Tramp
’s most abysmal eejits could be set … and some of the Molren were interested in seeing if they could, through education and examination, help the eejits to overcome their configuration issues. If nothing else, some of the eejits at the bottom of the barrel had flaws that the Molren deemed worthy of additional study, which Decay darkly interpreted as the Molren finding the eejits funny.

Z-Lin didn’t much care. The ‘gift’, as formal Molran-colony-to-AstroCorps request, allowed them to get rid of fifteen of their absolute-lowest-end eejits and perform the same sort of executive print order loophole as they had managed on The Warm, on a slightly smaller scale. More empty slots meant permission – within the bounds of their slowly-recovering but still under-capacity oxygen farm – to print more eejits. It was a convenient, though by no means vital, added safety-buffer to their oxygen consumption. And after dropping off their fifteen most fantastically beshitted pieces of wetware, statistically they were in with a decent shot at printing improvements. These were, after all, eejits that had been unsuitable even for the manual work on The Warm by way of their incompetence, eejits that were only still alive in the first place because their shipboard designations had not placed them in areas commonly associated with lethal accidents.

Arbus So nodded her hairless flat-topped head slightly, her ears flaring wide in the sun as though collecting energy for her. “We will keep you – and Thord – from your important journey no longer. Go with our thanks.”

Most of the crew, Z-Lin was ready to wager, would have happily stayed in the sun for at least a little while before diving back into soft-space. Even Decay would have tolerated it, and Zeegon was clearly itching to tackle the dunes. But there really was
nothing
on Eshret, and they’d just been dismissed about as unequivocally as one could be dismissed. And so they stowed their landers, peeled up out of the planet’s space-time shadow, and flipped back over into relative speed once more.

The next leg, from Eshret to Wynstone’s Attic, was five weeks.

JANYA

It was nice to actually have ables again, although it soon became apparent that for all their affable professionalism and fresh-cadet diligence, the newcomers weren’t really mingling with the larger eejit population. Janya decided, just for something to do on the long flight, to make a semi-detailed academic study of it.

This wasn’t easy, because the ables and the eejits weren’t exactly like animals behaving in a normal manner in their natural environments. The eejits were like damaged toys, their actions – or lack thereof – more or less random and only loosely connected to classic stimulus and response. The ables, in contrast, were closely-attuned to their shipboard tasks, and very sensitive to the approach of someone they considered a superior. This meant they would straighten up, stop what they were doing unless it was some crucial piece of maintenance work, and politely ask how they could be of assistance. And the respond-to-a-superior behavioural model applied to every person on board with the possible exceptions of Maladin and Dunnkirk the Bonshooni – Janya, as Head of Science, most certainly qualified even though she was a civilian, and saying “just carry on with your work and pretend I’m not here” just seemed to make the poor fellows uncomfortable.

It applied to every
person
on board. The eejits were not people any more than the ables were, and so the ables sorted their fellow clones according to a difficult-to-follow internal hierarchy … and, while some of the ables clearly outranked others, one thing seemed abundantly clear – every single eejit was placed somewhere lower still. It wasn’t a matter of snobbery, aloofness or any sort of superiority. They weren’t embarrassed by the badly-configured ones, or outraged at having to share a life-form classification with them. They just seemed to naturally and without malice assume that the eejits were faulty, undependable pieces of equipment rather than actual ables.

And at the same time, Janya noted, it was the
ables
who seemed to suffer from the snubbing. The eejits, for their part, didn’t really notice the treatment. The ables, however, were neither one thing nor the other. They were the same flesh as the eejits, but ultimately disconnected. They were close – in their specific fields – to the humans in intellect, but separated by a philosophical gulf even vaster than the literal one the
Tramp
was traversing. They did their jobs, bustling around importantly in their crisp red uniforms and keeping the ship running smoothly, but Janya thought they seemed lost. They were like ants in a child’s ant farm, doing what they were made to do but disconnected, unaware that the other things inside the farm were also ants, just ants with their antennae broken off. They were lonely, somehow, and unthinkably sad.