Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (2 page)

“The Commander, for some reason, after all this time,
suggested
that I provide you with treatment,” he said smoothly, and congratulated himself for the unflappably professional segue even if the term ‘segue’ might not have been an appropriate one to use for a transition from nothing to babbling, “or some sort of preliminary sessions. You’re my first official patient,” he gestured to the desk where his pad lay, tantalisingly out of reach, with the blank file open and ready. Then he cursed to himself at the missed opportunity to roll himself back closer to comms and pad alike. “Congratulations.”

“Why, thank you,” the Rip said with a little bow of his head. “Talk about right in at the deep end though, eh?” he waved a hand at the desk as well. “You have a file on me already?” he asked politely.

“I have a file on each crewmember,” Janus said modestly, “but they’re all basically empty until I can add findings of my own, and that sort of has to wait for me to actually start counselling programs with each of the guys. I do also have some notes from Doctor Muldoon, part of the whole official emergency patient transfer thing, but I’m keeping them in separate folders. I don’t want to, you know, contaminate my own findings.”

“Good thinking,” Glomulus approved. “You can pick it up, you know. The pad. If you want. It’s just that … no offence, but I know what it looks like when your hands are searching for something to keep them busy.”

“Well, right,” Janus said with a nervous cough.

He remembered the last time he’d set off Cratch’s incendiary charges, in a moment of confusion and panic. It had been two years ago, give or take a month. Just after they’d torn out of the Wormwood system, the system of the fallen star, way up at the far end of the barmy arm they had just traversed a second time, in fact. Uncertain whether the black hole cultists would see through their hasty and untried attempt to cloak the ship, whether they would give chase, or even whether any of the weirdos had actually managed to sneak aboard.

Maybe Cratch had been about to take advantage of the confusion, and maybe he hadn’t. It was getting more and more difficult for Janus to envision what Glomulus might have tried to do anyway. What was his end-game? Murder everyone on the ship and assume command? After he’d put all of them back together again, at one time or another and to varying degrees, in the medical bay? Even after all that, he was just going to kill them? Fly the ship under eejit control to some predetermined location and resume his deep and super-creepy life’s work, whatever that happened to be? Or just get off the ship and vanish into the crowds on some handy inhabited planet? What?

Well, Waffa had been quite certain Janus had saved his life even if it meant all their minor injuries and chemical-induced illness had to be dealt with by the eejits at the time. And even Glomulus had later magnanimously agreed that he probably
had
been up to no good.
“Skulduggery runs right through me,”
Janus remembered him saying.
“Especially my skull, I suppose…”

Janus coughed again. “Right,” he repeated, “well, that was – you know, no hard feelings, yeah?”

“Perish the thought.”

Whye pushed his chair back to the desk and picked up the pad with some relief. “How many psychiatrists and psychologists have tried to treat you?” he wasn’t actually sure what the difference
was
between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. All he knew was that he was neither.

“Ooh, lots,” Glomulus said, spreading his hands. “Big famous swingers from Dome Med, all the way down to … well, you, I guess I have to say. Don’t take that the wrong way, though. You are the latest in a long and venerable line,” the Rip thrust out his narrow chest theatrically. “I am the subject of papers. I fill data cubes. Archdeacon Ptala Sim wrote his excommunication thesis on me. And in more recent years, the
Tramp
’s own Doctor Mays and old Feathers Muldoon had their turns, from the physical medical sciences and the behavioural sciences viewpoints respectively. You mentioned that you had Ellisandre’s notes.”

“Yes,” Janus said, aware that this was like no counselling session he had ever simulated. “Yes, I do. They’re not very good, though. I mean, well, Doctor – Feathers and I … differed on many key points of psychoanalysis.”

“You thought it had a place in ‘ponic horticulture, and she thought you were a flake,” Cratch smiled. “Sorry. Decay’s little package broadcasts of certain select parts of the personnel reports
did
eventually filter down to me, through my nurses.”

Janus waved it off. “I read Muldoon’s file on me,” he said.

“It couldn’t be worse than mine,” the Rip said reassuringly.

“No,” Whye agreed.
Evil. Evil. Evil incarnate. Do not attempt rehabilitation. Do not engage or connect. Return to Core from whence it came
. Feathers Muldoon had really started to lose it towards the end, and her final few reports on Glomulus Cratch before The Accident had been little more than weird, superstitious ranting. The term ‘whence’ hadn’t been the worst of it. He reminded himself that Ellisandre Muldoon had been a hundred and seventy-seven years old at her death, and winding down towards retirement or incurable dementia or both. “No, it couldn’t,” he leaned back from his desk again. “But like I say, I don’t agree with the methods and conclusions drawn by Feathers. We’re here to chat, and form our own counsellor-patient relationship. Lucky number thirty-seven, right?”

“So you
knew
how many headshrinkers tried to get in here,” Glomulus said jovially, tapping the pale blonde hair at his temple with a long finger.

“Of course,” Janus replied. “Never said I didn’t,” Cratch gave a brief and entirely spontaneous-sounding laugh of delight and approval. “I’m pretty sure that’s only the official count on the AstroCorps medical logs, though,” he went on. “Only you would know the real number.”

“Indeed,” Glomulus said in a gloating tone, “and none of them ever learned the truth about me.”

“The truth?”

Cratch looked surprised. “The truth. It’s really very simple, the answer to why I did the things I did, why I ended up on Barnalk High, all of it. They just never put it together.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Janus said. “That’s why we’re here, after all. I mean, I’m not going to kid myself that I can treat you in any way, but if we can develop some sort of a-”

“I was raised in a hive-town called Slemm,” Glomulus said, “which was essentially a single giant communal brothel for xenophile extremists. My mother would perform sexual acts on Molranoids for the entertainment of others, and when I was deemed old enough I, too, was forced to participate in the performances. It instilled me with a deep and instinctive loathing of the three species, and my childhood there also forever marked me in the greater Molran socio-cultural categorisation scheme. It put black marks next to my identity, assumptions about my character and qualifications. Really very similar to the way Molren label Blaren for the purposes of distinguishing them as an essentially criminal subclass, you see, except more informal. It still cast a pall over my medical studies, limited my options and my support, closed doors to me throughout AstroCorps and across the Six Species. I wandered, an unlicensed and often outright rogue surgeon for hire, until I washed up on Barnalk High. It was there, in the city of Maiaya on the Silver Coast, that I encountered cell-members of the shadow organisation responsible for the founding and continued running of Slemm’s flesh-pits, and the slave-trade and mental conditioning of humans that led my mother to be a prisoner there. Through careful infiltration and submission to further degrading treatment, I learned more about the group and the different interests each cell represented. Naturally, it is difficult – impossible, even – to be sure how much of this was real and how much a product of my abuse-fuelled psychosis, but the deeper I dug the more I became aware that the cells infiltrated every aspect of Six Species culture where human and Molran ostensibly cooperated. And in every case, the driving agenda was one of subjugation, domestication,
alteration
– the transformation of the human species into a semi-sentient-at-best form of livestock. Even the fabrication of ables, so publicly frowned-upon and tut-tutted about by official Molran Fleet bodies, was a technology sponsored and developed by these anti-human cells.

“Well, the rest you know. The head of the snake had to be removed, both the Molranoid masters and their vile human collaborators, and a message sent to the other cells in accordance with the ritual signs and symbols of the organisation’s philosophy. A series of murders, surgically precise – and indeed, who better than a skilled physician with a knowledge of Molranoid anatomy ingrained by a lifetime of medical training and unthinkable physical violation? There’s only one problem, of course.”

“That entire horrible story was just something you made up on the spot,” Janus said, “to mess with my head and poke fun at my attempts to psychoanalyse you?”

Glomulus smiled, and gave him a double-point of approval. “Damn skippy,” he grew momentarily serious. “Sorry.”

“No biggie,” Janus looked down at his still-blank pad. “
Is
there a hive-town called Slemm?”

“Actually, there is,” Glomulus replied with a chuckle. “It’s on Hermes. It’s not a brothel,” he winked solemnly and tapped the side of his nose with a long, slender finger. “At least,
they say
it’s not.”

“Right.”

“You know, of course, that this whole counselling session is just a little bit of devilry dreamed up by Z-Lin and Sally,” Glomulus went on. “I can only assume it’s intended as some sort of payback over the unpleasant incident with Nurse Bethel.”

“You mean when he died?” Janus said. “But that was … it was an accident, right? Sally said it looked like he ate a Molran trank. Plus, it was, like … what, Zhraak Burns? Six months ago? Why haven’t they sent you here before now, if that was their plan?”

“Maybe they didn’t want to make a big deal of it in front of Thord,” Glomulus said, “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. But since Dunnkirk is staying with us now, maybe they decided to just go ahead with my treatment. See what happens next,” the doctor shrugged. “And besides,” he continued ruefully, “even if Sally really believes it was an accident – and I don’t think she does – it
was
my fault. I was negligent. I left dangerous materials lying around in my medical bay, with an eejit on staff who I
knew
tended to swallow things on tactile contact.”

“Hey, look, we’ve all had guilt-inducing accidents with the eejits,” Janus said. “Remember Jocko, Sticky, Bumfluff? Operation Payback? We don’t feel guilty about it for long. Not
really
guilty. I mean, we
can’t
. The main source of guilt is the unconscious association between, say, getting an eejit killed through some negligence or encouragement or inaction, and getting a mentally sub-standard
human
killed by the same method. We feel responsible because
he
doesn’t know better but
we
should, and for some reason it’s different to us being responsible for a recycling unit going haywire and digesting a janitorial, or an oxy block thawing into sludge, because eejits look so much like humans and that’s what we’re hard-wired to respond to.”

“Except you know perfectly well that my profile would suggest I am immune to such anthropomorphic empathy,” Cratch remarked.

“Yes,” Whye admitted uncomfortably, “but you were talking about Z-Lin’s and Sally’s reasons for blaming you for the incident, and you mentioned that you were technically responsible.”

“Fair enough.”

“They’re defective biological components,” Janus concluded firmly.

“Z-Lin and Sally?”

“
The eejits
,” Whye sighed, “that’s how we have to think of them. You want to know what
I
think?”

“Desperately.”

“I think, if murdering an eejit from time to time was enough to keep the homicidal psychotic impulses of our chief medic at bay – no offence, but I’m talking about you-”

“I was on the verge of piecing that together.”

“-I think it would be an easy prescription for the Commander to sign off on.
Objectively
, it should be – and Z-Lin’s usually pretty objective. It’d be an easier substance to fabricate than some of the more complex psych meds, none of which worked on you even
before
we lost most of our fine printing capacity. Eejits come out of the plant, not a medical printer. They’re easy. And if you killed one every couple of months, we’d be able to print more and keep on improving our stock by letting you pick off the weaklings in the herd. The
eejit
herd,” he specified quickly. “You see what I’m saying? Self-regulated eejit accidents at no risk to the ship. Therapeutic murder of able stock. You know what the only problem is?”

Glomulus looked fascinated, although Janus reminded himself that the doctor was a consummate impersonator of human emotion. “It doesn’t work.”

“Exactly,” Whye said, leaning forward again, animatedly. “There have actually been studies on it. Like … weaning murderers away from killing, using surrogates and replacement acts. They don’t go for it. They can tell it’s not real, same as any animatronic or simulated violence. It doesn’t have the emotional value, for whatever definition of ‘emotion’ you want to use. True pathological issues can be treated, maybe even cured, but they can’t be fooled into thinking they’re being indulged,” he paused. “Why does Sally think Bethel wasn’t an accident?”

“Oh,” Cratch spread his hands, “I take very good care of all my equipment, and am far too careful to leave things lying around. And even if
I
was a slob, Sally and Z-Lin are far too careful to leave Molran anaesthetic or any other dangerous medical equipment lying around anywhere near me. They check every inch of the medical bay every time anything happens there and every time anything or anyone new shows up, because they know I’m a relentless collector and squirreller,” he smiled. “Sally can’t believe I would miss something like that, so if it was there, lying around for Bethel to pop in his mouth, it had to have been on purpose. It’s a reasonable suspicion. I just don’t know why
therapy
was what they decided on doing about it. I just keep coming back to the fact that it’s this or the brig, and the crew sort of needs me slightly more at-large than the brig.”