Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (20 page)

It was most noticeable when they slept.

That was, of course, another thing that was difficult to observe, if only because watching ables while they slept felt creepy and borderline-molestation-y. The eejits slept in their ‘storage’ crèches, a huge and overcrowded mess of knocked-through storerooms, able quarters and unused floorspace above the medical bay. Some of them slept in the duty wards adjacent to their work areas. Some of them slept in their work areas. But most of them just sort of flopped in a pile like giant red-jumpsuited hamsters, slept, and then got up and shambled back to whatever they had been doing before their soupy brains switched over to sleepy-time.

The ables slept in regimented bunks, supremely self-contained and clearly designated. They were items recharging in storage sockets until their next use. They’d carved out a space on the upper eejit storage level to do this, meticulously reconstructing fourteen triple-bunk beds for the forty-two of them to sleep on. And they did. And the eejits continued to just slump in drifts around the crisp-sheeted little island of AstroCorps precision that had appeared in their midst.

It was difficult to make a proper study, then, due to the fact that observation by a superior tended to change their behaviour. And it was next to impossible to
talk
to an able about anything so esoteric as his sense of belonging. As for talking to eejits … well, she had
some
success talking with her aides, Whitehall and Westchester. But they had very definite limits of their own, particularly where Westchester and abstract conceptualisation went. It was all fun and games until someone started thinking he was a dock labourer who had just gone blind for some reason. Janus Whye had conducted interviews with eejits, even performed some kind of counselling on them, but without much in the way of academically satisfactory results.

Janya wondered if counselling an eejit was closer to counselling a human, or performing therapy on a plant the way Whye was actually qualified to do.

For a while, then, she had taken to using the surveillance and communications bumpers throughout the ship to watch the ables unawares, but it took a lot of executive permission and messing around to get that sort of access. Or, even worse, she needed to sit in the medical bay and wait for an accident or injury to set the tracking monitors off. And that was a haphazard observational tool at best, it depended on some kind of usually-unpleasant medical emergency taking place, and it required her to put up with Glomulus Cratch’s attempted banter.

Glomulus suggested that there might be ways to get the bumpers to perform surveillance without the emergency system being active, and without executive oversight. Janya told him she would forget she had heard him say so.

It was the beginning of their third week in transit from Eshret to the Wynstone’s Attic colony, when Thord came to Janya’s library.

Janya had only seen the aki’Drednanth a handful of times since they’d set out, on the rare occasions the crew had gathered together in one place. The little scientist disliked the cold, and Thord had not often set foot outside her refrigerated quarters, and so as far as Janya was concerned the two of them had perfectly understood one another.

On this occasion Janya was off-duty, insofar as her ‘working’ shifts actually meant anything anyway. She could go basically anywhere from her labs in the dome, down to the exchange and then back up again as far as the officers’ quarters unchecked, and even the restricted areas were more or less okay as long as she explained herself occasionally. She could do this at any hour of shipboard day or night, as long as it was understood that in scientific emergencies, she be available to perform research.

‘Research’, a concept almost as intentionally ill-defined as ‘scientific emergency’, was not something you could do in a normal duty shift at predictable times. Not on a starship. It was something that had to be done when something happened that the crew
suddenly and urgently
needed to know more about. In this case, there was nothing of the sort going on and so she was sitting in a quiet wing of her modestly-expanded quarters, curled up in a chair with a book.

The door to her main quarters, two cabins over, chimed softly. Since most of her crewmates would announce themselves discreetly on the communicator rather than come knocking, she guessed immediately that it was one of their three passengers.

Or an able
, she reminded herself. It was easy to forget, in their absence, how regularly the big guys had run errands, delivered messages, carried out repair work or checks on various systems. That had been the good old days, of course. After about three absolute disasters, they’d taken the eejits off most of those jobs.

The new guys were back on them again.

When Janya padded through to the door and opened it to find Thord’s suit-clad torso blocking the doorway like a second wall, then, she was mildly surprised but not shocked.

Thord leaned in and filled the upper part of the doorway with the front of her huge shovel-like helmet. “May I come in?” she asked.

Can
you come in?
Janya thought reflexively, and stepped back. “If you can fit through the door,” she said, “please.”

“I can fit,” Thord replied, turning in preparation and allowing Janya to see the flickering lower bar of her light panel at the back of her neck in the process. “It just requires a little…” she drew herself in with a series of gentle hisses and clanks, overlapping some of her envirosuit plates and hiking in a few joints here and there, and was – just barely – able to slide sideways through the door. “Modular starships were designed to cater for the land-bound five of the Six Species,” she said, “and my suit was designed for Six Species and AstroCorps compatibility, but it is … larger than standard. It has some give…” she stretched, seeming to expand again, “…and so it still fits. Modulars in particular spare little space. If the door was any smaller I would need to take the suit off, fold it, drag it through, and then don it again on the far side of the door, but that would be irritating,” she gave another swift flutter of laughter on her light panel. She was
chatty
, Janya reflected as she had on their first encounter, as well as giggly. “Not to mention dangerous, in an evacuation situation.”

“What can I help you with, Thord?” Janya led the immense aki’Drednanth through, with another couple of smooth contractions of her envirosuit, to the library. “I’d offer you something, but I don’t suppose I’m stocking anything here that you can…” she paused, berating herself. “Did you even have any aki’Drednanth food with you when you came aboard?”

Thord moved along the shelves, deceptively light and silent in her armour. Janya couldn’t perceive much difference between her movements now and her easy loping on The Warm, except now she was moving along the floor. “No,” she replied, “but the amino acids and compounds I require are very easy to generate. Maladin has equipment in his luggage that will convert the carbon blocks and the hydrogen-phalanx ampoules you stocked up on. I, like most of my kind, am used to living on artificial rations when we venture out among the stars. The natural sustenance we hunt on the Great Ice, and which flourishes in the Core, it does not travel well,” she glanced at Janya’s shelves. “You have bound paper books.”

“They’re printed on flimsy, most of them,” Janya replied, “but it’s
good
flimsy. A reasonable tactile facsimile to paper. The printer does it quite well. It’s still a space-filler, but…”

“The tactile is the most important,” Thord said, raising a hand and flexing the long, thick, armour-plated fingers. “It is one reason for my dislike of these gauntlets. And flimsy is the best material for books, in my natural environment. Paper, or the
kashta
papyrus of the Molren of old … these things do not last in the cold.”

“I instantly like you more,” Janya said calmly.

“Did you not like me before?”

Janya’s eyebrow twitched. “Did I say that?”

“No, you did not.”

Janya crossed the room and began to brew herself some tea. It was her second for the day, a little in excess of their informal rationing system for the stuff Contro grew in ‘ponics, but they had a steadily-growing surplus so it seemed the right thing to do. “Did you come to check on me in particular?”

“I am visiting each of the crew. That way, the one I truly wish to investigate will remain unaware that she is being singled out.”

Janya paused in the middle of spooning out the tea, and narrowed her eyes at her visitor. Thord was still perusing the bookshelf and had her back turned, but of course aki’Drednanth relied on senses other than sight.

She was almost certain that Thord had said ‘she’ intentionally, and that it was not just because aki’Drednanth used the same pronoun universally for their own kind. They knew the difference between male and female, and how important it was to the other bipedal species even if they themselves found it pointless and in poor taste to bring into the open. Thord
might
be a stranger to the concept of culturally-driven gender distinction, either freshly reborn out of the Drednanth mass-mind or newly-arrived from the Great Ice – as far as Janya was aware, Thord was a relative unknown among the tiny and near-celebrity aki’Drednanth population in the Six Species. So yes, she
might
be using the term accidentally. But it was a slim chance. She’d just referred to Maladin using the masculine pronoun, after all.

Janya noticed these things.

No. It was more likely in this case that Thord was simply using ‘she’ as a handy alternative to ‘one’. It was
equally
likely, however, that she was using it
knowing
that Janya would assume the aki’Drednanth ‘she’ was in play, rendering the pronoun irrelevant in terms of narrowing down
which
crewmember exactly Thord was ‘checking out’.

Assuming she was actually ‘checking out’ anyone at all, and that whole thing was not just a small game on Thord’s part.

“You waited quite a long time before coming to see me,” Janya said instead of voicing any of these suspicions. “You must have investigated all the others already.”

Thord half-turned towards Janya, and the lower bar of her light panel flickered again. She was, Janya reflected again, a rather jolly aki’Drednanth. Janya had met two other aki’Drednanth in the course of her studies, and Boréas and Arendelle had been possessed of dry senses of humour at best. “Most of the others came to visit me in my quarters,” Thord said. “I could not have avoided investigating them if I wished to.”

“I regret you had to make this special house call,” Janya said, and Thord light-laughed again. “I don’t care for the cold if I can possibly avoid it.”

“You came aboard The Warm.”

“I was misled by the name,” she quipped, then shook her head. Aside from the thermals that basically nullified the cold entirely, the crew had inherited a set of
niqi
s from The Warm’s supplies. They’d had more clothes and equipment than personnel, as Lou Bendis himself had pointed out at the time. “The truth is, I do not make a habit of imposing myself on others. Particularly by going to their quarters.”

“An attitude I must applaud,” Thord said with another flash of amusement. “I too prefer solitude, and after the initial flurry of visits and gawking is done with I hope to continue our journey with – I am saying this too bluntly and I apologise – minimal intrusion. The company of Dunnkirk and Maladin is quite enough.”

“I have no problem with that level of bluntness,” Janya assured her. “I imagine a week or two of drop-ins is enough to get to know us, if not get fed to the teeth with us.”

“Not at all,” Thord said, “but this is to be a long flight, yes?”

“Wynstone’s Attic, Gethsemane, Seven Widdershins,” Janya read easily off her organiser, “Prufrock, Þursheim, MundCorp Research Base, Standing Wave, Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost, Zhraak Burns, Greentemple, Burned Heart, Declivitorion, and then the edge is another week from there. A
long
trip, most of it through very small and isolated settlements,”
the final few stops with a distinctly back-woods zealot feel to them
, she thought, with slight unease.

“Yes,” Thord agreed. “I feel we can take things slowly. It is my hope that I will be able to move among you as I am now, in my suit, and reduce the need for you to venture into the farm ring. I know it is a delicate environment that has already suffered damage due to my intrusion and the renovations you performed. And there is my … luggage to consider.”

The seed
, Janya thought with an inner nod. “Is it vulnerable to interference?”

“It is very sturdy,” Thord said, “but designed to drift through space. It can resist small impacts, and microthrusters connected to the pods that will be attached to it will help it to avoid larger bodies as much as possible. But it is the warmth, and the touch of warm-blooded creatures, that could possibly damage its crystals. It is a difficult thing to explain.”

Stay out of my quarters
, Janya translated mildly in her mind,
point taken
. Aki’Drednanth were known to be fiercely territorial in some cases, although that was usually only once you ventured closer to the Great Ice. “Of course.”

“You must forgive me for imposing now,” Thord concluded.

“There is nothing to forgive,” Janya said, “you are quite welcome,” she finished the tea, and carried it across to her chair while it was still steeping. “Was there anything specifically you wanted to talk about?”

Thord shrugged massive shoulders in a very easily-translated gesture. “What do you think about this mission?”

“It’s as good as any we’ve been on since I joined this crew,” Janya said, sitting back with a shrug of her own. “Better than most, because we’ve actually been helping people.”

“You joined the crew from the Judon Research Outpost,” Thord said, “at the same time as Glomulus Cratch and Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed.”

“Sally was already part of the crew,” Janya shook her head. “She’d separated from the ship, come to Judon, and rejoined them when Glomulus and I came aboard. But your timeline is close enough.”