Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (17 page)

“They’re not,” Janya said softly.

“Right,” Z-Lin said again, pulling the door closed and moving past Janya. She approached the closest aki’Drednanth, who shied back briefly and then stumped forward on paws and knuckles, and craned up to nudge with growing familiarity at Clue’s thigh. “A year old, and they’re not fighting at all. Not even looking like they’re fighting. I know we only just met them a week or so ago, but it’s pretty obvious that they haven’t been fighting this whole time Thord’s been hiding them in here.”

“Far from it,” Janya said, “from what I have seen, these seven are actually cooperating and working together.”

“Mm,” Z-Lin grunted. “And this after Thord was so adamant about the natural order.”

Janya had been thinking about that, ever since Declivitorion. She hadn’t quite dared to bring it up during her conversations with Thord. It had occurred to her that it might be a matter of shame or disgrace among aki’Drednanth. Who knew? “Perhaps she was protesting over-much?”

“Yea, bloody verily,” Z-Lin agreed moodily. “Anyway, I exceeded my authority a little bit where aki’Drednanth are concerned. There was a sort of an allotment of food, I don’t know what kind of system Thord and the others were using, but I just gave them all of it. And we’re working on getting the printers ready to keep up a steady supply. I mean, the point is, we – I gave them a good generous helping of food so there was no reason for them to fight over it. I know there are
meant
to be forms to observe here, but we really are off the map on this one. There
are
no AstroCorps guidelines for raising a litter of baby aki’Drednanth.”

“Do the regulations have anything to say at all?” Janya asked curiously. “Is there anything about aki’Drednanth pups?”

“Nothing much,” Z-Lin said, walking across to the hulking form of Thord’s discarded envirosuit. “They’re so private about everything, and the Molren are so damned reverent, just about all that made it into the AstroCorps regs was this priority zero general order, which basically boils down to
every aki’Drednanth in the galaxy outranks every AstroCorps officer ever, and when they say ‘cow’, you don’t say a thing because you’ve already got a mouthful of grass
. Starting from their insistence that none of them even have a meaningful gender designation, and their adoption of the female pronoun … it all makes the issue of maternity practices a bit problematic. The general conclusion is that aki’Drednanth just
happen
, and nobody should question anything the aki’Drednanth say on the matter, and if the aki’Drednanth don’t say anything, well, nobody should question that either.”

“I understand that most of the time, an aki’Drednanth finds her way to some handy secluded polar region on a planet to give birth,” Janya said, “or does it on board her own ship. Since Thord didn’t have a ship…”

“Exactly,” Z-Lin hefted the frost-rimed arm of the suit, barely managing to lift it to waist-height before dropping it with a grunt. It sank back to the ice with a hiss of compensators. “Aki’Drednanth breeding is secretive and strictly controlled. They come out of the Dreamscape in batches, after passing who-knows how many job interviews out there, and the whole point is that none of it happens spontaneously. The gestation is another interview, infancy is an interview, it’s all designed to test the Drednanth’s worthiness to become aki’Drednanth and take part in the world again. And then here comes Thord, making her crazy ice-seed, hitchhiking her way around the backwaters of Six Species space with a pair of wacky Bonshooni, getting herself knocked up and then
spacing
herself, leaving the bizarrely non-murderous pups in our air supply ring. Safe to say there’s no regs.”

“So you gave them enough food to ensure they wouldn’t need to fight over it,” Janya summarised, looking around. Most of the pups had returned to rooting around through the crushed ice on the floor, or tumbling and yowling together in clearly non-lethal sport.

“I still wasn’t expecting them to share it out and each quietly just chow down on their own serving,” Clue said, “which is what they
seem
to be doing.”

“On the contrary – if these were normal aki’Drednanth,” Janya said, “or at least if these were normal circumstances, I am quite sure they would still fight over
ample
food in much the same way they’d fight over too little. So you’d be off the hook. The strongest would simply bolt down the excess, or hoard it somewhere and fight off the others. One of the benefits of living in below-freezing temperatures, you can be pretty greedy with food you’re not planning on eating, and it will still be good in a few months.”

“That’s what I figured,” Z-Lin nodded. “If they were going to kill each other, they would have. And they’re
not
. Thord and Maladin and Dunnkirk didn’t say anything about them being unusual, but we should have seen that they were already way too old for there still to be seven of them. I know we’ve been a bit distracted, but…”

“I only started reading up on them after Declivitorion,” Janya said, “and to be honest, it never really occurred to me that they would start competing so early, and that these ones were already so old. There was so much else on our minds, like you say … I suppose if I thought about it at all, it was when Thord talked about the way aki’Drednanth traditionally did these things. I suppose I naturally assumed that maybe the litter had been bigger at the start, and some had
already
died. I just didn’t ask her about it.”

“Because for humans it would be insensitive to ask about dead offspring.”

“Yes.”

Z-Lin sighed, and looked around again. “So, they’re cooperating. But that’s not all. I also get the feeling that these girls have all seen not just
Molranoids
before, but
humans
. It might just be their shared memory and knowledge, damned if I know how
that
works anyway, but from what little I know of aki’Drednanth there’s usually
some
sort of adjustment to their new reincarnation.”

“Yes,” Janya agreed, “they refer to it as ‘the waking’. No matter how much of the flesh world they have seen while existing as consciousness in the Dreamscape, it’s a shock to find out it is all real. There are a few scientific journals on the subject, limited by the fact that the aki’Drednanth don’t talk much about it and the Molren are hugely protective – reverent, like you say. The shared experience translating itself into a flesh memory – downloading into the brain matter, essentially, during gestation and development – causes a shift in how the knowledge is processed, and it takes a while for the new aki’Drednanth to learn her responses. Seeing a Blaran or a human through the eyes of a few hundred different aki’Drednanth is one thing, and then seeing one through the lenses and rods and cones of your own new eyes and then translating it into an image in your new brain and then reconciling it with the memories you’ve collected through the collective … well, it all gets very intricate,” she spread her hands, and another of the seven pups stole towards her and nudged her heavy lower jaw between them. “I can only imagine that takes some adjustment.”

“I suppose,” Z-Lin said grudgingly.

“Thord had been Drednanth a long time,” Janya went on, “and she said it took her a long time to awaken. And it didn’t take much to disrupt her again – remember the dreams?” Z-Lin shuddered, and nodded. “There’s no one cause, and the pups are causing their share of mental earthquakes as well, but…”

“But there’s just something about them that…” Z-Lin shook her head. “They seem like they’ve been around before. It’s hard to tell, because how would we be able to tell a normal aki’Drednanth pup from one who’s settling in faster than normal? But it’s like they’re just picking up where they left off, a couple of hundred years ago at the outside. I can’t say where the idea’s coming from, but it’s an insistent one.”

“If they’ve all been aki’Drednanth pretty recently, it means they’ve jumped the queue,” Janya said solemnly. “Put that together with them sharing their food and not fighting to the death – that is a
definite
and
demonstrable
anomaly – and you’ve got some sort of major aki’Drednanth breach of tradition going on,” she looked down at the pup squatting by her feet. “If not an outright reincarnation-scam.”

“I had no idea aki’Drednanth could even screw with that system,” Clue said. “And if they can, why they don’t do it all the time and ruin the whole thing for everyone.”

“Probably why they don’t do it very often,” Janya suggested. “This may even be the first time – if this is what we’re seeing.”

“Okay, so still, forget all that – say they’ve sidestepped the killing-each-other step. Good for them. That still leaves them at about a year old now, as we know, so they
should
be about ready for this graduation to juvenile. Which means they should be figuring out how to use the transcriber and communicate. So far, all I’ve seen is random twiddling. And now they seem to have lost interest in it altogether,” she picked up the floppy blue-netting transcriber glove, and put her own hand inside it. It was far too big for her – her entire hand could almost have fitted inside the netting for one of the great thick fingers – but she managed to curl it and squeeze.

“Gug-guh-guh-guh-guh yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh aah-ahh,” Thord’s suit said eerily.

“Sorry,” Clue muttered. “My point is, they should be able to talk to us, shouldn’t they? Especially if these are recently-aki’Drednanth scammers, and have used this sort of equipment before,” she glared at the pups. “You heard me.”

“They might be getting closer all the time,” Janya suggested, “without even practicing. They might be settling in and adjusting and processing, internally,” she pointed at the glove as it dangled over Z-Lin’s wrist. “It might just be a simple matter of the devices still being too big for their hands.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Unless there’s something inherent in the act of killing each other that helps aki’Drednanth to learn how to communicate linguistically,” Janya added.

“And you’re not ruling that out?” Clue asked. Janya spread her hands again. Z-Lin shook her head and dropped the glove back beside the envirosuit’s enormous boot. “Sometimes I wish I was Commander of a
normal
ship full of
normal
people. This is just another reason we’re off the map,” she went on when Janya didn’t respond to this, “incidentally. If Thord was acting as a … a … shit, some sort of
underground railroad
for smuggling Drednanth back into the flesh world, it’s so far above our pay-grade it makes the murder of a civilian passenger under aki’Drednanth protection look like a second-level cargo violation.”

“I think, as Head of Science,” Janya said dryly, “the best advice I can offer is that we observe and assist wherever necessary, and treat these pups as seven fully-adult aki’Drednanth passengers under the priority zero guidelines. When they finally do give us guidance and instructions, we follow them to the best of our ability. If we get to a suitable planet or settlement
before
they initiate lucid contact with us, we’ll hand them over to the first aki’Drednanth we meet,” she noted that several of the pups looked up at her when she said this. They
definitely
understood. “Unless of course they make it clear that they don’t want us to,” she added with just a hint of sharpness, “or that they will destroy our brains if we try. In which case I am pleased to say the buck stops with the officers on board.”

“Right,” the Commander muttered, “thanks.”

Perturbed, and seeing that the pups were unlikely to tell them anything for the immediate future, Janya returned to her quarters.

They could have gone to more effort to start up a dialogue between the pups, and Thord, and possibly Maladin too, but Janya suspected it was futile. The pups, certainly, were capable of understanding human speech. Z-Lin had that much right. Whether that meant they would act as messenger relays … well, like Waffa had said, the aki’Drednanth tended to be against that sort of thing. Maladin probably wouldn’t really be able to do anything about the problem, even if they
did
manage to communicate it to him. If he was even alive
now
. The pod would open when its regulator malfunctioned, whether he was awake or asleep. He may not even be able to wake himself up. The Bonshooni hadn’t been terribly clear on what exactly was going to happen at the end of their journey, or even
what
the end of their journey would be.

And besides, for all they knew, this was all just a misunderstanding and the pod was fine. Maladin was safely sitting out there on Thord’s porch of eternity as her body and his sleeper pod rode the seed out into intergalactic space.

Janya sat back in her armchair in her little library annexe, and took out her notes. For a while she neither wrote nor read, though, she just sat and thought. About Thord, and those final few days after Declivitorion, before they arrived at the edge.

“Tell me your story,” Janya said, curling her legs up underneath her and raising the teacup to her lips. “The last time you were aki’Drednanth. The first time. Whatever you like.”

“If you tell me yours,” Thord replied. “When you joined this crew. Where you were before that. Whatever you like.”

“Very well,” Janya said. “But you first.”

She pulled up the file she’d opened that very evening. Before Thord had told her she could make notes, she’d already started. That was just the way Janya Adeneo was.

- - - The aki’Drednanth I talked to, Thord, had been aki’Drednanth an unspecified number of times, each time some hundreds of millennia after the last.

The particular incarnation to a flesh-and-blood aki’Drednanth body she recounted to me may have been her previous one, or the one before that. Thord was unable to confirm, due to the nature of extended Drednanth memory. She claimed not to have been aki’Drednanth in over a million years before her current incarnation, a longer-than-usual period as Drednanth for various reasons. Thord was oona’aki’Drednanth, newborn, approximately seven million years ago by her account.