Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (18 page)

The events herein can be assumed to have taken place, therefore, between one and seven million years ago. If they took place at all. - - -

“It is an unimaginable length of time. It is the age of species. You think you understand this, intellectually, but you do not. What I can tell you is a memory of a memory, an image, a dream. We do not record perfect data. We remember, but it is unique to our own perceptions, to our minds. You should not consider it a historical account. It was something that happened to me before I was Thord. Before I ran the ranges of Damorakind’s aki’Drednanth parks on the Great Ice, and rode with Ded Moroz, the visitor, out into the galaxy to continue my work with the seed that I had dreamed into its nest on an uncharted comet. Long before our slavery. Before
Damorakind
. But it may be best to think of it simply as a story.”

Well, Janya had to admit it had been quite a story.

- - - Thord spoke of a simple foraging existence on the cometary ribbon-mass of the Great Ice, many thousands of aki’Drednanth generations passed in this fashion with no momentous events or changes to set them aside. When such an event did occur, it would be shared through the Drednanth Dreamscape and at such a separation of time it is easy to see that a blurring would occur. Whether Thord, or Thord’s previous incarnation, hereinafter pre-Thord [more appropriate nomenclature pending], was actually present during the event or whether she remembered it second-hand and her life was uneventful, is largely irrelevant at this disconnect.

The Great Ice is still largely unexplored by Six Species scientists and unexplained by current cosmological theory, since it is deep within Damorakind territory near the Core. It is assumed to be a great series of concentric and interlinked rings and bands of cometary ice surrounding the Core, interspersed with dense star systems and black hole superclusters and other exotic astronomical events. There is compelling evidence to suggest that the bands wander around and through these other systems, and are not only dense enough to maintain a breathable atmosphere in many stretches, but also – due to the background cosmic radiation and extensive stellar presence – a steady temperature considerably higher than the general cosmic background. Extremely inhospitable to humanoid and Molranoid life, but comfortable for aki’Drednanth.

The Great Ice ribbons are also said to exist in such close-packed masses that travel
along
them is possible, although it is not certain if this is literally the case. Whether even a powerfully-muscled aki’Drednanth could simply step or leap from one piece of ice to the next is unknown, and generally not held to be plausible. The standard gravity across the Great Ice is, moreover, thought to be higher than humanoid and Molranoid standard, accounting for exaggerated aki’Drednanth size and musculature.

Whether the aki’Drednanth practice of integrating their own Drednanth consciousness into the physical matrix of the Great Ice, as a form of solid-state memory repository, has any effect on any of the physical properties described above, remains unknown.

Pre-Thord witnessed the arrival of an alien structure in close proximity with the Great Ice. The structure was described as a geodesic lattice of many hundreds of enormous struts, each one a thousand miles long or more, forming an elliptical disc. The structure appeared to be a combination vessel and habitat, slow-moving but designed to house generations of inhabitants. It was massive enough, taken as a whole, to coalesce a thin but breathable atmosphere, and exerted a reasonable facsimile of gravitational pull. In these respects it was much like the Great Ice itself.

The structure was formed from a metallic compound that remained constant at a low temperature that was nevertheless well above that of normal background space. This minimised its visibility profile and simultaneously increased the effectiveness of its coalesced atmosphere. Thord strongly implied that this structure was the original piece of alien mega-architecture from which such relics as The Warm [see note 355], Eternal Prime [see note 415] and Finger of God [see note 415a] originated. Her travels, later in life, with the seed would seem to correspond to some vestigial curiosity about the structure, its history, and its ultimate fate. All difficult to establish at the previously-mentioned disconnect of one-to-seven million years.

The structure had more powerful gravity and a more effective atmosphere than the modern-day relics, due most likely in part to the overall mass of its completed structure as opposed to the single scattered struts. The temperature was considered warm by aki’Drednanth standards, yet comfortable, and the atmosphere proved an effective buffer against cosmic radiation and cold. It included habitations on strut surfaces and under the surface of the structure, as well as within the centre of the geodesic lattice in the form of what I have roughly translated as a multi-type biosphere, possibly for sampling purposes. Any speculation would be massively conjecture-heavy.

The structure passed close by pre-Thord’s region of the Great Ice and five hundred aki’Drednanth boarded. This appears to be a standard sample size of aki’Drednanth individuals when they mingle with other cultures [notwithstanding the Damorakind slave-system; see note 12]. Structure then continued on into Core and back out, very slow trajectory and data about its overall movements even more subject to “aki’Drednanth incarnation drift”.

Inhabitants seemed to be a mixed population comprising a “community” with generic and often contradictory goals of exploration, seclusion, understanding. Their precise physiological and cultural characteristics… - - -

Janya set down the pad with a sigh. And that was just it. That was the point at which the blurry line between fact and daydream finally vanished altogether, and she could no longer be certain which era of history Thord was drawing from – or if she was just drawing straight out of the Dreamscape itself. There was no coherent explanation of the different bygone races that had either built or populated – or
both
– the great alien structure. There was no adjusting for the fanciful merging of sensory experience and opinion, the confused jumble of people and places and words and images. It was like an irretrievably corrupted, albeit beautiful, series of snapshots from an old data block.

Well, that was almost precisely what it
was
.

Thord could not even say with any certainty whether she had been one of the aki’Drednanth to join the strange ancients on their mysterious crawl through the Core. Due to the nature of the Drednanth consciousness, she both
had
been, and
hadn’t
been. The Dreamscape, after all, was reality
from
fantasy, a mental landscape that was functionally inseparable, for an aki’Drednanth, from the flesh. And this cast the entire story, retroactively, into the thoroughly dubious realms of hearsay and myth.

She had known this difficulty would occur, of course – she had read numerous aki’Drednanth ‘oral histories’ in the past. There was still value in hearing a new variant, a new tale from an aki’Drednanth newly returned to the physical world after a million years existing as pure consciousness in a great mysterious mainframe of ice. Every story exchanged with the aki’Drednanth added to the whole. And this specific anecdote, about this specific encounter and this specific vessel, did not seem to be part of the wider canon.

Thord had only been around for thirty-something years, and had not spoken to many people. Perhaps no other aki’Drednanth in the Six Species had shared this experience – or, given that they shared
everything
, perhaps it was more accurate to say that perhaps no other aki’Drednanth in the Six Species had been present in the way pre-Thord may have been, and thus the tale had gone untold.

Or maybe the story had been fuelled entirely by the fact that Janya and Thord had met at The Warm. Maybe there was nothing more to it than that.

Janya sighed again. She’d reciprocated, of course, by telling Thord some of her life story prior to her arrival at Judon Research Outpost. She’d never really shared the information with anybody – not because it was particularly secret or incendiary, but because she didn’t consider it all that interesting or relevant. But perhaps in another million years,
post
-Thord would be sitting in some alien starship or under some strange alien sky, relating Janya’s story to a wide-eyed alien academic – an academic of a species that was right now just learning to walk upright and use simple tools. And the academic would dutifully record the information, all the while shaking its head in despair at the lack of academic veracity in the tale, and its sheer inapplicability to the task of assembling a factual long-term history of the galaxy.

She could only hope there would still
be
academics to listen, and to dismiss.

What were you doing?
she thought.
What was the long game you were playing – with the seed, with these pups? What are these aki’Drednanth that you’ve smuggled aboard our ship?

And did Dunnkirk die because of it?

Janya didn’t believe in intuition. Gut instinct was just a shorthand for a series of stimulus-response experience and prediction models built up over time.

But that felt like the truth to her.

JANUS (NOW)

Janus sat back and peeled a printer-ration Fudgely bar out of its regulation grey paper. They weren’t as tasty as the classic Fudgelies of his youth, but he told himself that this was just the fondness of nostalgia. The truth was, they were all the same arrangements of molecules, and he didn’t remember
how
the originals had tasted different, exactly. In all likelihood, the Fudgely factory on Coriel had just contained a giant printer somewhere in the basement that did nothing but churn out Fudgely bars.

“You know, it’s funny really,” he said, and took a bite from the sticky chocolate bar. “After so many years of the crew making jokes and putting off coming to see me, and some of them even saying they were never
coming
to see me under any circumstances … after all the months of simulations and courses and training, and counselling sessions with eejits who never had any problems I could possibly fix, suddenly I’m responsible not only for counselling the Barnalk High Ripper, but analysing piles and piles of personal information from a murder victim in order to help work up a profile that will help us find the killer.

“The killer who’s, you know, probably still on board.

“Who
has
to be on board, really, since the murder happened while we were in soft-space and we only came out again a couple of days back.

“Unless the emergency all-stop had been the work of our killer, who’s now made his or her getaway. I don’t know if anyone or anything left the ship. Nobody tells me these things. Would Bruce have told us? Maybe not, if it’s all a big conspiracy. Either way, good riddance if the murderer
has
flown the coop, I say. And it’s not like it’s going to make a difference now, since we’re back at relative speed.”

He took another, slightly moodier bite of his chocolate. His patient – or perhaps
subject
was a better term, or even
suspect
– sat with all the expressionless patience one might expect.

They’d finished the emergency repairs and been back in soft-space about two days now, all without much progress on any of the weird events that had occurred lately. Janus understood that they had also discussed taking the opportunity to do a full repair job and restore the dome to normal ship stats, removing the seed airlock … but in the end had decided to leave the renovations as they were. The section of the oxygen farm in which the pups lived still needed to be repurposed for aki’Drednanth use, and who knew when they might need to move something – a great big block of ice, for example – in and out of that area?

Janus suspected that at least
part
of the decision had come from the Commander rather liking the idea of having a couple of big old blast doors readily available between the aki’Drednanth nursery and deep space. It was uncertain whether the pups could work up a mental supernova and kill everyone on board before or in the moments immediately following Clue’s order that those doors be opened – he hadn’t even asked whether any sort of emergency-blast-open protocol had been set in place – but it all came back to that old saying. Sometimes it was better to
have
the means to eject your passengers into space and not need it, than to
need
it and not have it.

He didn’t like to think this, though, because he wasn’t sure if the pups might pick up on it. And they did have enough difficulties with their airlocks as it was, without adding improvised emergency-vent things.

Still, the
necessary
repairs had been made and they’d gotten back underway, all without much resolution to the looming issues at hand. From Dunnkirk’s murder to the alleged sabotage of Maladin’s pod to the
definite
sabotage of the ship that had dropped them back into real space a few days earlier, there seemed to be more questions than answers. Fortunately, at least the aki’Drednanth backlash they’d been worried about in reaction to Dunnkirk being killed didn’t seem to have hit them while they were making repairs. Clue still said they needed to be able to show
some
sort of investigation and due process by the time they actually returned to civilisation and had to account for the dead Bonshoon in their medical bay ward. But in the meantime, their tender squishy brains seemed to be off the hook.

Equally fortunately, it seemed as though his counselling sessions with Glomulus Cratch were over now that they’d served their apparent purpose of giving the Rip an alibi. That was a tad conspiratorial, but that’s what you got when you spent too long looking at murder evidence.