Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (38 page)

“Some stray capsules must have been lying around after the emergency anaesthetising of that Blaran corsair,” he said later, when Z-Lin and Sally and Decay were investigating the incident. “I didn’t see any until today, but … and you know eejits,” he mimed popping something into his mouth. “If it fits past the teeth, down it goes.”

“What are those marks on either side of his neck?” Decay pointed at the dead eejit on the autopsy table.

Sally reached out and placed both hands just above Bethel’s collar, thumbs overlapping strangler-style. “They’re too small to be hand-marks,” she concluded, “and we saw from the footage that he only touched him with his fingertips. No way it could do this sort of damage. Not even Cratch.”

“What, old Skull Crusher McGee here?” Decay asked with exaggerated surprise. “Are we sure about that?”

“If I had to guess,” Glomulus suggested remorsefully, “I’d say they were impact bruises from the capsule opening in his throat,” he wondered if Janya was likely to take part in the investigation at all, and what she would make of the log footage she had most certainly already watched closely. She’d kept quiet so far, for whatever unfathomable reason, so perhaps she would continue. “But a full autopsy will confirm. I assume you’re going to wait until a new nurse has been printed off? I can’t exactly perform the autopsy myself, can I?” he spread his hands. “I was closely involved with the death, and – as Nurse Bethel said himself – I’ve got this record.”

“To be honest,” Sally said, “after listening to the exchange that went on prior to the incident, I’m wondering if this was some sort of meta-flaw. You hear myths about ables inciting rebellion, asking for things they shouldn’t, breaking their configuration parameters.”

“The guys back on Zhraak Burns would call it ‘emergent self-destruction’,” Decay remarked. “They think able fabrication is the wilful creation of an army for the purposes of our own undoing – well,
your
own undoing, I suppose, but since I’m on this ship with you I doubt the army would bother to differentiate.”

It was a fine line, Glomulus reflected, between society-helping morality and progress-hindering superstition. And if you expected any given issue to fall into one of those categories and remain there permanently, regardless of the context, then you were a damn fool. People tended to lump all the Zhraak-worshipping groups together, but the truth was there were Zhraaki castes even more fundamentally peace-and-love than the dippiest Mygonites.
And Mygonites
, he added to himself, eyeing Sally,
at the lunatic end of the Zhraaki spectrum
. Zeegon himself was descended from an Orthodox Zhraaki community,
probably
on Aquilar although he’d never really had much of a conversation with the fellow. Whatever conditions had been involved in the upbringing of their wisecracking helmsman, they were far removed from Zhraaki cults as popular culture understood them.

Misunderstandings everywhere.

When it came to humans – or any sentient species, he had to concede – diversity and individuality were the rule. For all the rituals and tribalism, no two people had the same exact idea about … well,
anything
.

“I’m not sure I’d take it that far,” Z-Lin demurred, as if summing up Glomulus’s thoughts. “There are always myths and rumours and I know you guys enjoy the occasional campfire story, but only the weirdest offshoot-cults anywhere in the Six Species really believe that stuff, and it’s only because they don’t understand fabrication technology.”

“Do
we
?” Sally asked. “I mean, there might be a time and a place for able and eejit emancipation, but is it something we want to worry about on this ship? Our plant has undergone a technical failure that might be unique to this ship – or if not a unique failure, then a unique combination of damage and side-effects.”

“Maybe Thord planted the seed of independence when she and the Bonshooni helped with the configuration,” Decay suggested.

“Or – and I hate to speak ill of the dead – maybe Bethel was just a whinging jerk,” Z-Lin countered. “Look, in the basic AstroCorps sciences they teach us that aki’Drednanth have worked their telepathic mojo on fabrication and configuration machines for
centuries
, in just about every different way our fevered minds could dream up to suggest to them. You think they wouldn’t have tested that? Apparently-consciously-reincarnating telepaths, and mind-building technology? And all they’ve ever been recorded doing is about what Thord and her friends have done here – tweaking the effectiveness of the configuration, improving the quality of the imprint, making a maintenance able who might also be capable of correcting a bit of Xidh grammar. Or in this case, a decent nurse eejit who has a hissy fit about wanting to go climbing. And then eats a God damn pill he finds lying on a table. Not a good survival tactic, for a medical bay worker.”

“I still recommend we put
all
the medical equipment into special lockdown again,” Sally said, frowning at Cratch. “I mean, it didn’t look like he had anything to do with that isolation pod business–”

“I didn’t,” Glomulus protested, truthfully enough. He’d been fast asleep when Chilton – he was reasonably sure that had been his designation – had snuck into the medical bay to hide from the dinosaurs, and ended up dying with a couple of pints of Bonshoon blood curdling in his veins.

“–but then in no time he had that sedative thing weaponised,” Sally went on, “and now apparently some bits and pieces of it –
fatal
bits and pieces, to humanoids – have just been floating around. It’s only a matter of time before he tries something with…”

“With a crewmember who has subdermal activators?” Decay finished for her.

“Please don’t suggest putting implants in all the eejits,” Glomulus said plaintively. “Having them in Contro is nerve-racking enough.”

“Personally I think he should go back into the brig until we need him,” Sally concluded.

There seemed little point in arguing that Bethel had been an eejit, not a person. Legally, you could at worst be fined for destroying one. But then, Doctor Cratch acknowledged that he was not a common citizen with full afforded rights.

“Worth it,” Cratch forced a smile. “I mean, as long as the crew are safe and the eejits aren’t wandering around in here while I’m gone. You’ve seen how they hurt themselves,” he put a downcast expression on his face. “Not that I’m apparently very good at helping them anyway.”

“Just make sure the place is completely clean this time,” Clue sighed in frustration. “I’ll talk to Thord, and see if there’s anything she’d like to say about
any
of this. Keep the body under film until I decide whether it needs an autopsy and who should do it. And if you go
near
the body in the meantime, Doctor Cratch,” she tapped the heels of her hands with her fingertips meaningfully, as if playing a pair of invisible castanets. “You’ll be spending the next couple of months breaking in a new set of extremities.”

To Glomulus’s surprise, however, there was no aki’Drednanth fallout from the death. Either Thord was as convinced as the investigators, or she was as inscrutable and secretive as Janya Adeneo. The days crawled back into weeks – sitting and letting the time slide by was something at which Doctor Cratch had grown quite adept during his impossibly drawn-out stretch in the
Tramp
’s brig – and they skimmed silently through the grey gulf of soft-space towards Greentemple. Z-Lin ordered the body of Nurse Bethel recycled. There were no further emergencies, indeed nothing for Glomulus to do at all except patch up two separate sets of weasel-bites to two different eejits who just couldn’t seem to keep their hands to themselves.

Twelve weeks. Two sit-downs with an antiseptic swab and a packet of bandages. He might as well have
been
in the brig. This was probably why Sally decided not to bother making her recommendation official.

It didn’t matter where Glomulus Cratch sat. He was a prisoner everywhere, and that meant he wasn’t a prisoner
anywhere
.

JANYA

They spent another two days of shore leave on Greentemple. Janya personally wouldn’t have minded staying longer. In fact, for a short time she actually seriously considered disembarking altogether, and maybe not even asking them to swing by on their way back in to pick her up.

Greentemple had a library.

The books were mostly electronic, but the data could be uploaded onto blank electro-vellum volumes specifically designed for the purpose, pages of flimsy bound in convincing facsimiles of wood and leather and showing the uploaded book as if it had been printed there a thousand years ago. There were also genuine volumes, both in flimsy and on other media rarer and more fragile. All but the most ancient of these – which Janya had access to on the weight of her academic ID – were impressively difficult to distinguish from the uploads. Janya spent a solid thirty-two hours of her shore leave doing much what she did during space flight – just doing it a lot more intensively.

The library, simply called Central, was the main repository of knowledge in the mostly-automated capital region of the tiny island city-state of Say Sorry (Claws). There really wasn’t much else there, aside from an expansive gleaming spaceport, a series of R&R options, a mass of warehouses, and conveniences around the island’s shores for the constantly-shifting traffic of the farmers. The city-state itself owed its idiosyncratic name not to the farming communities that surrounded it, but to its Molran founder of the same name some eleven hundred years previously.

The dominant culture on Greentemple was a branch of the modest, practical Molran faith observed in older Fleet Worldships, holding that the vastness of space was a form of exile from which the faithful might one day escape, if they but found the ruined gates. It wasn’t terribly exciting, and like Zhraak Burns some three thousand light years distant, the natives here just got on with the day-to-day job of agriculture.

Greentemple, unlike Zhraak Burns, was populated mostly by Molren and was a dominantly oceanic world with a few tiny islands, of which Say Sorry (Claws) was one.
Like
Zhraak Burns, however, and
unlike
Bayn Balro’s woe-begotten home planet, Greentemple was extremely stable, its thick, heavily-saline ocean more like a globe-spanning half-mile-deep swamp than anything else. The majority of that ocean was given over to the specially-modified algae that made breathing on board a starship possible, and the giant packing barges that passed for farms and crawled slowly through the thick sludge from island to island.

The algae, thanks to its design, was more or less inert and low-yield at the balmy temperatures enjoyed on most of Greentemple. It was only when dropped to forty below zero that the oxygen-producing reactants activated. This was just as well, because if a planet like Greentemple had been sheathed in a hundred and fifty feet of
actual
oxygen farm algae, it would have become uninhabitable to anyone – with the possible exception of the giant ticks like Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space, Janya thought – within six months.

As it was, some of the great farm mats had to be painstakingly migrated from north to south to avoid the worst of the winter weather closer to the poles. A sufficiently cold and cloudless winter night could activate an entire field and make it borderline explosive. It was summer on Say Sorry (Claws), and resultantly fragrant outside. Another reason Janya was happy to stay inside the Central library.

Perhaps the best thing about the vast ocean of Greentemple, however, was that it was too nutrient-clogged and salty for Fergunak to live in. They might as well try to live in cold vegetable soup. None of the information-packaging services could remember seeing a Fergunakil ship in living memory.

Janya was excited about her study of the Tramp’s able and eejit population, which had entered a fascinating new phase with the introduction of the eejits Glomulus referred to as ‘the Midwich Eejits’. They’d begun to form a sort of layered society, a hive of sorts with different classes. The ables, at first so aloof and sad, were interacting and connecting with the twenty new eejits made with the help of Thord and the Bonshooni. Nineteen now, since the death of Nurse Bethel. They had not yet decided on a new batch print-off, and whether or not the aki’Drednanth and her friends would help. They had yet to even decide whether it was a good
idea
for the aki’Drednanth and her friends to help.

The nineteen Midwich Eejits were in turn integrating with the existing eejit population, sort of acting as go-betweens. The ables responded to them more readily, as if they were crewmembers or at least fellow ables. The mass-eejits treated them as more of their own – which, technically, they
were
– and the configuration-reinforced eejits didn’t gather in a clique the way the ables did. They spread out among the eejits according to their functions, and slept in the big spontaneous conglomerations the eejits did, in the wards.

Nevertheless, Janya wanted to know more. She devoured a couple of books on the subject of ables and their history and surrounding ethical debates; able configuration flaws, which was nothing she hadn’t read before in the process of ‘researching’ their broken plant; group able behaviour, which was almost universally dull and the literature as dry as Eshret; and, on Z-Lin’s suggestion, historical aki’Drednanth involvement in able configuration. The results of the latter, she found, had not been much more extreme in ables than it had been for eejits, for all that the new batch on board were relatively high-quality.

And the small population of aki’Drednanth in the Six Species had never really been keen on sitting in fabrication plants. Dreamscape-capable non-aki’Drednanth like Maladin and Dunnkirk had experimented with the work, but without an
aki’Drednanth
to facilitate the communion it seemed the
Drednanth
was unwilling or unable to tend to anything so mundane as able configuration. Not consistently, and never with anything approaching a predictable result. Even the nineteen eejits they’d printed off with Dunnkirk’s supervision had exhibited a huge range of characteristics.