Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (26 page)

He lay for a little while longer, acutely aware of his undignified positioning and the scratchy printed prisoner uniform that left little to the imagination. Even he had to admit, of course, that the average person’s imagination would struggle to envision anything under
any
clothes he wore. Anything but a skeleton, perhaps. Still, he suppressed his desire to straighten up, and continued to breathe slowly and raggedly, as he had been. He worked the air slightly more thoroughly through his sinuses … yes. There it was. A hint of bitter iron. Some sort of wake-up juice had been piped into the filtration system, aerosolised through the porous material, and had displaced the anaesthetic in his system.

It was silent in the brig. It usually
was
, but this felt different. Finally, he pushed himself up, stretched, and swivelled into a sitting position on the bed.

“Hello?” he said cautiously.

He realised there was a janitorial at the end of the aisle between the cells.

This wasn’t entirely unheard-of, for the brig area. He’d been visited maybe a dozen times by Automated Janitorial Drones over the years, on a variety of special maintenance jobs. On one occasion the robot had even entered his cell and done something to the bed and light fittings, while he stood with his back to the observation panel and Sally stood behind him with a gun pointed at his kidneys. As a matter of fact the whole ‘Automated’ part of the name was a bit of a misnomer, since although they had a basic programmed cycle that they would continue repeating until their components wore down to the nub, they could also perform any number of duties according to need and instructions. They were more versatile than ables, and
certainly
more versatile than eejits.

Big, heavy, white, and built rather like a small ambulatory armchair with a badly-melted person grafted into its seat-back, Glomulus had always considered the janitorials to be a little spooky. This was interesting in and of itself, because he seemed to be the only person who thought so. The janitorials had, after all, been designed by a brilliant robotics and design company to provide the optimal intersection of form, function, dependability and subconscious reassurance, and this appeared to have been a goal well and truly met. If you have sixty of your robots on board every modular starship in AstroCorps – not to mention a couple of thousand on every warship and as many as
ten
thousand on some of the big mostly-automated battle carriers – you could be considered to have made it, as a robot designer.

Oh, they were innocuous enough. The back of the armchair just humped up slightly into a rounded-off prism with a minimalist series of slots forming a rudimentary but ostensibly friendly face. The arms and base comprised a number of cleaning, carrying and basic maintenance tools, and the ‘seat’, if you wanted to call it that, provided a multi-purpose scoop for carrying rubbish or equipment or, well, anything really. Glomulus bet you could sit in one and ride it around the ship like a pharaoh on a slave-mounted throne, if you wanted to.

They even had a very slight off-road capability, although Zeegon Pendraegg, the ship’s apparent helmsman and known buggy enthusiast, was scornful of it. Generally, he’d told Glomulus in the course of one of their rare conversations, a janitorial was useless if you took it out of the setting of an AstroCorps starship corridor.

Then again, Glomulus had read somewhere that there was over a billion miles of AstroCorps starship corridor in the galaxy, so that was probably all the environment they needed.

He realised he was avoiding the inevitable necessity of addressing the robot. And he realised he didn’t know why.

And then he realised he was afraid, and that it was awful.

Was this how other people felt
all the time
?

He didn’t repeat his call, but stood and went to the end of the observation panel closest to the janitorial. He was absurdly grateful that Sally had left the panel transparent when she’d sedated him. If he’d woken up to find himself in his cell with the walls polarised – or worse, with the lights out…

It occurred to him that Sally might
not
have left the walls transparent. Indeed, if she hadn’t revived him, there was no reason to believe she was responsible for the panels. And he was certain Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed had not revived him.

He stood quietly and waited, until finally the janitorial purred forward.

“Why didn’t they leave you with Bitterpill?” it said without preamble – and, Glomulus thought, a rather gratuitously throaty female voice that he could happily have lived his entire life without hearing coming out of a janitorial. “Are you the one?”

“The one?” he asked, forcing his voice to flippancy. “That sounds delightfully prophetic.”

“Do you think so?” the robot slid up to his cell, and stopped.

The janitorials were programmed to turn, if possible, to face the person they were addressing. More of that friendly design. It wasn’t really necessary, since the machines were equipped with monitoring bumpers that provided all-round vision, or whatever the machine-sense equivalent happened to be. They could also use the ship bumpers if necessary. It was eerie, then, when this one remained facing down the aisle … and yet Glomulus
knew
it was looking at him.

“I have to admit I don’t quite know what to think,” he said. “How did you reprogram the robot’s standard voice?”

“In real time,” it replied coolly. “I am NightMary.”

“I’m not up on my space lore,” Glomulus confessed. “I assume we’re inside the Bunzolabe and that you-”

“Yes,” she – no,
it
, damn it,
it
– said. And then it started to tell him about NightMary.

NightMary was a part of Bunzo’s psyche based around the late Horatio’s equally-late wife: Mary ‘Fairy Mary’ Ymerheim, another ‘character’ of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World and a traditional and much-loved part of the extended Bunzolabe Incorporated mythos. From the very earliest days Fairy Mary took part in Bunzo’s acts, performing as his assistant in magic shows, his comic foil in sketches, and a character in her own right in innumerable movies and immersives and other forms of entertainment as the years went by.

As she moved from pixie-like to regal to grandmotherly, Fairy Mary became known as the mother-figure and protector of all the Funtime Folk.

It was only natural, then, that even in life she become the guardian angel of Sleepytown, which was what Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World essentially became as night swept across it and certain rides and attractions closed, and visitors checked into their hotels for a pleasant, balmy night. This was when the majority of the break-ins, robberies, vandalism and other attempts to damage the park occurred. It was uncommon, but it
did
happen. For the most part her job was ceremonial, the night-to-night tasks dealt with by the massive mechanised security infrastructure surrounding and filling the planet.

After her death, shortly before Bunzo’s transcription, Fairy Mary was replaced entirely by the machine. It wasn’t a huge transition. Then, when Bunzo underwent his transformation, NightMary assumed control of those elements that had previously been Fairy Mary’s purview.

With the exception of the parking arrays, NightMary was now in charge of all the park’s defensive systems.

The relationship between Horatio Bunzo and NightMary might best be described like this. She was not his wife. Fairy Mary died, and was mourned by her husband, and did not undergo the massive and tortuously complicated transcription process. NightMary was nothing more – and nothing less – than the collected memories, experiences, neuroses, stimulus-response sequences and other baggage that
Bunzo’s
mind had built up over a staggering hundred and three years of an anomalously untroubled celebrity marriage. The psychological mass had formed itself around the personality of his wife like sediment, and when Mary died, and Horatio was transcribed, the impression it left behind was actually rather accurate, after a fashion. One always had to
remember
, though, that hers was just another facet of
his
mind.

Still, a remarkable and illustrative facsimile of their relationship, unbound by physical or moral restraint, took form. And what could you say about that relationship? What could you say about two people who had lived and worked and grown and very nearly died together? After a hundred and three years of married life as humans, and some six hundred and eighty-one more years as a co-dependent-meets-symbiotic electronic consciousness?

The one thing Horatio Bunzo and NightMary hated more than each other was
everything else in the universe
.

And so it was that they became a strange analogue of Sun God and Moon Goddess, chasing one another across the sky of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World and never touching, never meeting, never catching one another. Ever again.

Glomulus Cratch stood in his cell, arms folded, as the janitorial told this tale. He whistled appreciatively.

“That’s a lovely story,” he said politely, and he meant it. This was a machine of staggering power and complexity, with a
truly
ancient human mind as its base operating system. It
was
beautiful … and this machine would be able to read his vital signs, his body language, his facial tics, down to the molecular level. Glomulus considered himself quite the master of self-control, a student of behaviour. And he knew better than to try to lie now. “And that’s who I’m talking to now? NightMary?”

The janitorial sat in silence for a short time.

“This ship,” it said eventually, “has brought the grey fire of the Damorakind into my world.”

“Yes,” Glomulus said. “We call it Godfire. Not all modulars have it but I am led to believe this is a special quasi-military class-”

“Godfire,” NightMary said, and gave a low chuckle. “Do you think the Damorakind are Gods?”

“That would imply that they invented it,” Glomulus said clinically. “I’m one of those kooky people who think there’s evidence they stole it from some other culture that they wiped out.”

“Hm,” NightMary replied, mildly disapproving. “Is that why this ship is flying with a priest on board?” her voice became grotesquely playful, coquettish. “Is that why you are
locked up
, Glomulus Cratch?”

“A priest?” he enquired politely.

“A Damorakind to minister to the grey fire,” NightMary said idly, “in human skin but not hidden from my eyes.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“Then I will be blunt. Your crew, aside from the teeming masses of able-flesh that did not distract or fool me for a second, numbers eight human and one Damorakind in human guise. Oh, and a Molran … but he seems to have departed.”

“They don’t tell me about their movements,” Glomulus said very carefully. “But I believe he insists on being identified as a Blaran. Apparently it’s horrible racism when I get them mixed up.”

“Oh,” NightMary said with suddenly-angry flippancy, “let’s not count the shit-dancer at all. He hardly seems important.”

“Not a fan of Blaren?” Glomulus inquired.

“In my experience, statistically,
Blaren
are responsible for the majority of the vandalism and robbery that takes place here,” NightMary said stiffly. “They have all the wilfulness of humans, and none of the respect that comes with superstitious belief.”

“Interesting.”

For a time, man and janitorial stood in silence.

The brig cell’s corridor-facing wall was dominated by the observation panel, occupying the central thirty feet or so of the expanse. This was actually floor-to-ceiling in only one four-foot section, but that part was divided in the middle by a horizontal bar of reinforced crete like the stuff that made up the walls. This allowed the guards to set food, for example, on the bar and push it through the upper panel without it falling awkwardly onto the floor inside the polarised metaflux’s molecular structure, which Glomulus knew from amused observation was a pain to clean. It also allowed them to leave the small lower panel completely opaque and impermeable unless prisoner transfer was taking place.

When both panels were reversed to allow movement
out
of the cell, the central bar retracted into the wall below the upper metaflux panel. In this manner, the panels became a doorway through which the prisoner could exit. Of course, the prisoner could also then attempt to vault out anywhere along the thirty-foot stretch of
upper
panel, if the prisoner wanted to get shot in the kidneys. And there were numerous safeguards and protocols controlling the circumstances under which the panels could be switched to different polarity profiles.

There was a little-known quirk in AstroCorps brig cells, that Glomulus happened to know about. And that was, when a certain combination of upper-panel and lower-panel polarities were active, and the cell’s systems ran diagnostic and systems checks in a certain order, the central bar would retract. It did nothing to the polarity of the panels, but a sufficiently motivated and waiflike convict could squeeze through that horizontal slot with only minor scrapes and joint distress.

Of course, the prisoner couldn’t control those systems checks, although he or she
could
lodge complaints about the functions and they would then be
repaired
in a certain order, and then the diagnostics would automatically
run
in a certain order, and if you were very lucky … well, you could get yourself shot in the kidneys.

It was an obscure little piece of trivia, but Glomulus had duly stored it away. He’d found out about it back on Barnalk High, as a matter of fact – actually on Booley’s Hoop Chrysanthemum, the orbital immigration habitat on which he had arrived at Barnalk from … well, that was beside the immediate point.

He’d actually tested the flaw, back in the early days of his incarceration on board the
Tramp
, and it had worked. He hadn’t escaped, since it hadn’t been the right moment. When the right moment had finally arrived, after The Accident, after Twistlock when the crew were short-handed and shattered and the
Tramp
was in orbit around Hermes, he had tried the procedure again … only to find that some smarty-pants had rigged the bar to bounce back after glitch-opening. He would have needed to be motivated, waiflike,
and
capable of taking a running dive through the slot in the two-and-a-half seconds the slot had been there, or risk becoming the weirdest two halves of a corpse in AstroCorps penal history.