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

Good old Whye. Helping everyone.

“How do you feel about there being a murderer in our midst?” he asked – perhaps an over-blunt question, but certainly a relevant one.

“Uh,” Thorkhild said, “I … I … bad?”

It was pretty clear that Thorkhild was involved
at least
in the hull breach that had stalled them, and for various reasons he was implicated in the rest of the possibly-interconnected morass of death and intrigue as well. The problem with interrogating an eejit, though, was that he could only answer so many questions before getting stressed and confused, and then it was all over. He may never get un-stressed again, and any hint of a recurring cross-examination would result in loss of bladder and bowel control and a lot of bleating and blabbering. So they’d tried
very briefly
to get answers through Sally, then they had handed him over to Janus.

It wasn’t
exactly
like counselling another eejit, he had to admit. Every evaluation was unique, that was one of the first big lessons you learned … but there was more to it than that. This was the first time an aki’Drednanth-enhanced eejit had sat down to an evaluation, with a murder case hanging in the balance. No pressure.

Poor blind Thorkhild still seemed to be having some problems, most likely a combination of whatever the aki’Drednanth pups had done when they’d all-stopped and the tension of being a Person of Interest in a murder investigation. Thorkhild probably didn’t have the capacity to
understand
what a murder investigation was, let alone contemplate murder himself, but he could pick up on the general mood on board. It was part of his most basic configuration. One of the things that set eejits aside from janitorials.

The problem was, the fact that Thorkhild was already pretty messed up made it that much more difficult for
Janus
to talk to him about any of the things they wanted him to talk about. So he settled for banality.

“Well, you know, we’re all worried,” he said, “and we all feel bad. But the Commander and the Chief Tactical Officer assure us there’s no real risk of further attacks, and that certainly seems to be borne out by the evidence we’ve been seeing. I mean, everything suggests this was related to Maladin and Dunnkirk, not any of the rest of us. We’re looking into everything,” he waved a hand. “Even the drawings Dunnkirk left behind, of the forests-”

“He did lots of forest drawings.”

Janus stopped, Fudgely halfway to his mouth, and glanced across the room past Thorkhild’s shoulder. A monitor on the wall of his office was displaying one of the pretty forestscapes Decay had passed on to him. Part of Whye’s attempted profile-building case analysis had involved staring at the pictures for hours on end, and trying to figure out if they meant anything psychological-y. About all he had come up with so far was ‘tree fetish’, and he didn’t actually think that was a thing.

“Yes,” he said. “We found them in his quarters. How did … have you seen them before?”

“I … uh, I don’t know. I think I … I had dreams?”

“That’s right,” Decay had reported the curious remarks Thorkhild had made about his dreams. “You had dreams about Dunnkirk, right? Did you see these pictures in the dream? Or did you see him in the actual forest?”

Thorkhild just looked miserably confused at this, and Janus wondered if he was being insensitive about use of the word ‘seeing’, and whether maybe he should be using some other word instead. “I … uhh, I don’t know.”

“Mm, well never mind, just say whatever’s on your mind,” Janus said vaguely. “Good to get it off your chest. Just blurt it out.”

He continued to murmur reassuringly, listening with only half an ear as he finished his Fudgely bar. Usually when he told an eejit to just blurt out whatever was on his mind, the eejit would mention his itchy bottom or the smell of feet in the eejit crèche or some other irrelevant though mildly-amusing biological fact. It was another interesting way in which the Midwich Eejits differed from normal ones, but still weren’t quite
ables
.

On the tail of that reflection, though, Whye realised something
else
that had been bothering him, and it made him stop listening to Thorkhild altogether. It was something that Glomulus Cratch had said back before Dunnkirk had been killed. Perhaps had even said
while
Dunnkirk was
being
killed.

“Maybe they didn’t want to make a big deal of it in front of Thord,”
the Rip had said, talking about the accidental death of their eejit nurse a few months back,
“since she sort of helped to
make
Bethel. Same with Maladin and Dunnkirk, I suppose. They were invested in the configuration of our Midwich Eejits.”

“…really very confused, headaches, don’t know where I am, can’t see, sometimes think-”

“Thorkhild,” Janus leaned forward, “sorry to interrupt, but … Thord and Maladin and Dunnkirk … did you … do you feel connected to them? Like, did their input when you were configured give you some sort of bond, that you felt more keenly when Dunnkirk was killed?”

Thorkhild looked warily off to Whye’s left. “How could I tell?”

“I need an able to use as a control subject,” Janus murmured to himself, making a slightly fudge-smeared note on his pad. “Find … out … how much … config … remember,” he looked back up at Thorkhild and smiled, then wondered yet again just how reassuring a purely visual facial expression was supposed to be, and almost losing his certainty before reminding himself that a smile could very easily be heard in one’s voice, especially by a blind person with refined aural acuity. “Thorkhild,” he repeated, “sorry. My questions aren’t making any sense. Tell me about the others. Tubby Shaw, before he went into that airlock, and the others who were printed with Dunnkirk and Maladin helping out. How do they feel
ah damn it
yes Commander?”

His pad had chimed softly just as he’d started formulating the right approach, the right set of questions to ask, and he opened the comm with a grimace of apology to Thorkhild followed by a second grimace when he realised neither grimace would, like the smile, be likely to do much good.

“Yeah,” Clue said, “look, this may not be the best time, but we’re finally getting something from the pups. Can we interrupt?”

“Sure, sure,” Janus stammered, “sure, go ahead.”

“No, I mean, we’re outside.”

“Oh.”

Janus hit the control on his desk, and the office door opened. He took a moment to appreciate the Commander’s dedication to their roles. She could have overridden the lock quite easily – but ship’s counsellor, even conducting a rather fruitless interview with an eejit, was deserving of professional courtesy and privacy.

Not only Z-Lin stepped through, but also a determined-looking Sally and an unhappy-looking Waffa. Janus nodded to each in turn, mystified.

“This is … difficult,” Z-Lin said, “and we’re still hammering out the details. Two of the pups seem to be able to operate the transcriber glove in tandem, and they’re giving us mostly-coherent verbal responses,” at this, she looked at Waffa with a mixture of weariness and expectancy.

Waffa didn’t disappoint her. “You mean this gibberish about ‘mother’s rebellion’,” he said, “and ‘returning to return’? And ‘finding lost’?”

“Yes, a lot of it is still hugely lost in translation,” Z-Lin said, “but we’ve got a pretty good idea about their mother and the rebellion she represented. I wouldn’t go treating any of the rest of it as holy backwards-talking prophecy-speak, at least not until we can be sure they’re not just twiddling the wrong sensors inside those gloves.”

“But I assume some of it was clear?” Janus asked.

“Yeah, clear enough,” Sally said, and even she gave Waffa a little commiserating shrug and a pat on the arm. “They said Thorkhild’s the guy.”

Janus stared, first at his three crewmates and then at the eejit sitting in front of his desk. Thorkhild stared too, but that was his default thing that he did with his face – otherwise he didn’t seem to have responded at all to the accusation. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” Whye said, pushing carefully back in his seat. “The aki’Drednanth pups in the oxygen farm have fingered
Thorkhild
,” he dropped to an almost under-the-breath mouthing of the name, and accompanied it with a theatrical point towards his patient, “as Dunnkirk’s killer?”

“Yes,” Sally said, simultaneously with Waffa saying “no.”

“This doesn’t sound like an open and shut case,” Janus remarked.

“It doesn’t
need
to be,” Sally said. “He’s not a crewmember. He’s not human. If there’s any suggestion of involvement, we don’t need a
warrant
.”

“I’m not worried about his
rights
,” Waffa said in exasperation. “I’m worried that if we’re wrong, we will still have the killer on board.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Sally said. “No legal constraints against reopening the case. And of course we’re going to keep on looking for evidence. This isn’t airtight and none of us are suggesting we
mulch
him until we find out more. That really would be pointless.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Waffa said, “but you’re still talking about an arbitrary decision to-”

“Wait, please,” Janus raised a hand. “What did the aki’Drednanth say, exactly?”

“Exactly?” Z-Lin said dryly, and looked down at her organiser. “They said ‘he did it, blind copy-human did it, blind Thorkhild, blind Thorkhild killed Dunnkirk, blind copy-human killed Bonshoon, it was Thorkhild, it was Thorkhild, now stop’.”

“That’s … really incriminating,” Whye admitted. Thorkhild still didn’t seem to be responding at all. He was just sitting, glacially calm, staring unseeingly into the middle distance. Janus roused himself a little. “Although of course, it’s dubious testimony from possibly-confused and very strange aki’Drednanth juveniles who didn’t seem to have witnessed
anything
, right?”

“Right,” Waffa said. “They could be saying it for any number of reasons. They might still not even have pieced together what’s going on, what all the different words
mean
.”

“Thorkhild
did
inject himself into the investigation,” Sally said doubtfully. Janus could sympathise. She
wanted
to believe it. It solved all of their problems, and fed just a little bit into her eejit-paranoia. This was also the reason, as a former cop, that she was
suspicious
of the explanation.

It was also, as far as solutions to murder went, a real tip-of-the-iceberg sort of deal. Look at it for more than a couple of seconds and you realised just how much was left unanswered. Yes, Thorkhild might have gone haywire after being separated from the little crew of renegade psychics who had helped configure him. That was what Janus had been working his way towards, at least in relation to Thorkhild’s response to Dunnkirk’s death and his apparent interest in stopping the ship. Maybe he’d even talked Tubby Shaw into
stopping
the ship for them. Then when he tried to get back in touch with Maladin and Thord out in the emptiness, he’d given himself this brain-spasm instead, right when the pups had started in with their own psychic yammering.

That part hung together.
Sort of
.

And yes, maybe that haywire-going had extended as far as him deciding to sedate Dunnkirk and drain his blood until he died. You could never tell why an eejit did things, although it was vanishingly rare for them to do
anything
this violent. Maybe he had been trying to prep the Bonshoon for insertion in his sleeper pod, and restoration to the Dreamscape? Who knew?

So what did Thord’s litter of weird ancient pups have to say about it all of a sudden? And why did their clumsy ad-libbed testimony end with a devastatingly-suspicious ‘now stop’? Now stop what? Asking so many questions? Boy, maybe these aki’Drednanth didn’t know humans so well after all. No wonder Z-Lin, Sally and Waffa all looked so disgruntled.

“What happens next?” Janus asked.

“Damned if I know,” Clue replied, “but it’s going to have to be my call – if only to stop Waff and Sally from coming to blows.”

“I’m not completely insane,” Waffa protested.

“And the decision’s all yours,” Sally concurred.

“So lovely to have the unwavering support of my senior staff,” Z-Lin muttered.

“Here for you,” Sally replied.

“To the edges of the galaxy and … never mind,” Waffa added.

“My door is always open,” Whye said. “To, you know, all of you.”

They escorted Thorkhild to the brig.

ZEEGON (THEN)

They’d emerged from soft-space and drawn to a halt on the edge of the exclusion zone, close to one of the automated buoy stations Janya had read up about. The buoy measured little over a hundred feet across and barely caught the light from the distant sun in the centre of the Bunzolabe or, for that matter, the
Tramp
’s proximity floodlights. It was just a small, utilitarian grey dome with a chunky set of compensators underneath it. As they approached, Zeegon had mused that it looked like nothing so much as a small stone beetle floating in space.

The wider security system, a flattened bubble made up of some ninety thousand of the mechanised buoys, was ancient and existed for the dual purpose of keeping wandering travellers out of the Bunzolabe, and keeping Bunzo
in
. And it had made absolutely no secret of the fact, as soon as they arrived, that this was what they were dealing with. Horatio Bunzo, electronic
deus ex machina
, most certainly
did
exist. And he was just as powerful and insane as the legends said.

“Of course, in official Fleet and Corps terms, that’s all just hearsay and conjecture,” Bitterpill had said. “Nobody believes it and it can’t go on the official record until eight bureaucrats have filled out the same exact set of forms with the same exact information. And even then, it’ll be contested at the first opportunity and the note will find its way to some classified archive and then the next people to show up here will be as hopeful as you are, bright-eyed and full of ‘rogue mechanicals’ and ‘misunderstandings exaggerated over time’ and ‘the truth must be something rather more prosaic’. Well, I tell you, it’s adorable every time but the truth is
not
prosaic. Not even slightly.”