Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (40 page)

“I understand,” Thord assured her. “It might be enjoyable, but I am … I feel I am beyond such things. In a few short months we will be at the edge, and my journey will be over. There is nothing I need to say to Rime that we cannot do through the Dreamscape, while we are in orbit around Burned Heart.”

“And that will only take a few seconds,” Janya said, “from what I’ve read, and heard. That Dreamscape communion takes place on a heavily-condensed speed-of-thought timescale.”

“Yes.”

“So … again, I guess I have to come back to ‘why are you telling me this?’,” Janya said. “Why have you paid me this visit, and why are you telling me about Rime?”

“Because there is a chance that she might wish to visit the ship,” Thord said, the pensive pink glow returning to her light panel. “To see the seed. We enter a critical time now, this is why – it is one of the reasons I have been so insistent that my quarters are not intruded upon. We are a territorial species.”

“We understand this,” Janya said. There had been a number of misunderstandings and minor incidents throughout the course of the trip, but they’d always cleared the air afterwards. “But … okay, wouldn’t Rime also understand that the seed needs to be left alone?”

“Perhaps,” Thord said, then added more certainly, “probably. As I said, it is a chance. A chance only.”

“And why are you bringing this to me?” Janya went on. “If it comes down to one aki’Drednanth wanting to come aboard, and another wanting to refuse her access, that’s a command decision way above my pay grade. Have you talked to Z-Lin?” she hesitated again. “Or the Captain?”

The warm pink bars of light on Thord’s helmet brightened, and the uppermost bar went completely dark for a few seconds while she spoke. “I have not,” she admitted. “But … perhaps you understand, it is not their decision either.”

“I suppose not,” Janya conceded. “It’s the proverbial rock and hard place, for an AstroCorps officer. Both you and Rime would fall under priority zero, and either one of you could scramble the minds of the sentients on board if it came down to either party getting insistent. You or Rime could probably make short work of the three-hundred-odd fabricants on board too, for that matter,” Thord inclined her head again. “Which still doesn’t explain … are you here to ask me for
advice
?” she blinked.

“Yes.”

Janya sighed, and sat for a moment. “You want to keep Rime off the ship, in the unlikely event of her wanting to come aboard,” she said. Thord nodded. “But if she turns up at our docking blister in her own ship – she has one, yes?” Thord nodded again. “If she turns up in orbit and asks to come aboard, there’s nothing any of us can do,” another nod. “And she knows you’re coming?”

“Yes.”

“Then here’s my suggestion,” Janya said briskly. “You, and Maladin and Dunnkirk if you like, get in a lander as soon as we’re about to hit normal space. As soon as we arrive, get into the Dreamscape and tell Rime that you’re on your way down. Zeegon or Decay will fly you down to the pole and you can catch up with Rime. Keep her on the surface. Say whatever you need to say to convince her that she shouldn’t come up here to poke at the seed with a stick,” Thord flickered her lights faintly in amusement. “I can’t advise you on how best to take care of
that
, but in my experience the best way to stop somebody from paying
you
an unwanted visit is to get the visit out of the way first, by dropping in on
them
.”

“A strategy you failed to employ, when I first intruded on you here in your quarters,” Thord noted, this time with more pronounced amusement.

“Well, exactly,” Janya said with a slight lift of her eyebrows. “I know what I’m talking about. Beyond that very simple trick, I really can’t suggest any actions here.”

Thord rose smoothly to her feet with a soft
clunk
of her envirosuit. “I believe this will suffice,” she said. “Your original suggestion, that I take shore leave and pay my fellow aki’Drednanth a face-to-face visit, was a good one.”

“It has the added benefit of being something nobody on board is likely to question,” Janya added, “as long as your more aki’Drednanth-accustomed companions don’t say anything.”

“They will not,” Thord replied, then added in amusement, “humanocentric, yes?”

Janya smiled faintly. “No offence intended to Decay,” she frowned slightly. “How
did
you make it?” she asked. “The seed. I’ve been reading and reading, and there’s only the most sidelong references to the process. Is it secret?”

“No,” Thord said, “it is just … personal, unique to the Drednanth who craft each piece.”

“I assume your use of the term
Drednanth
is intentional.”

“A lot of the work is done from the Dreamscape,” Thord nodded, “before the aki’Drednanth crafter re-enters this sphere. You remember, no doubt, what I told you of my long wait as Drednanth?”

“You passed up opportunities to return to the flesh,” Janya said, “in order to get some sort of preferential placement on the ladder when you returned thirty-something years ago.”

“Essentially. Timing is critical,” Thord lowered herself back onto her haunches. “I could not begin the painstaking work of crafting the seed, if my bid to return to aki’Drednanth was likely to be refused. And so I waited. Once that obstacle at least was reduced as much as practical, I began the work. It is not entirely dissimilar to extending the Drednanth mind in the Great Ice – but it is a very difficult process to put to words, which is why literature on the subject is sparse.”

“That’s one way of saying it,” Janya muttered good-naturedly. “But basically it’s an atomic-level rearrangement of ice crystals into an information-bearing lattice – construction of a giant brain, in grossly basic terms – and it happens in much the same way as Drednanth guide the formation of their aki’Drednanth forms in the womb, yes?” Thord nodded. “Drednanth consciousness infusing the cells on a tiny scale, via some sort of electrochemical reaction.”

“Complex beyond complexity,” Thord said, “but the theory is sound. The mind works her way into the flesh world from the Drednanth to the aki’Drednanth, embodying herself in the aki’Drednanth brain and housing herself in the aki’Drednanth body. And so it is with the seed – only not with a Drednanth mind, so much as a cross-section, a snapshot of the Drednanth
totality
.”

“No wonder it’s a hundred and fifty feet long,” Janya remarked.

“Indeed.”

“So you … you began to grow the seed before you became aki’Drednanth?”

“Yes. In a sense. In purely physical terms, of course, a place was needed to house the ice while it grew.”

“Isaz?”

Thord shook her head. “I travelled much, before coming to Ildarheim. The main bulk of the seed was originally on the surface of a comet. It remained there for the time it took for me to gestate, and to be born, and to survive my infancy.”

Janya nodded. Aki’Drednanth juveniles were, by Six Species standards of child-raising, astonishingly savage. Of their litters, usually only one or two survived the intensive competition for resources. It was a process that had not changed in millions of years – and indeed, why would it? Aki’Drednanth reincarnation tended to negate physiological evolution, even if their minds were advanced beyond human understanding. “Another challenge,” she said, and Thord nodded. “And if you’d failed, your work on the seed would have gone to waste.”

“This was one test I could not weight in my favour by remaining Drednanth for a longer period,” Thord said. “Sooner or later, the aki’Drednanth must be born, and win her way to the life she has claimed. However, if I had perished as a newborn, all would not have been lost.”

“The seed would have stayed on that comet,” Janya marvelled, “and you could have taken another shot at it in however-many-thousand years.”

“Yes.”

“But only you could complete it,” she said, suddenly understanding – and feeling inexcusably thick for not having done so before. “You started it as Drednanth, you had to finish the job as aki’Drednanth. Other aki’Drednanth poke around at it, and you might be right back to square one.”

“Isaz understood this,” Thord said, rising ponderously once more.

“And Rime might not.”

Thord nodded. “And Rime might not.”

A few days after this singularly odd exchange, the
Tramp
arrived in the Burned Heart system. Thord, as per Janya’s instructions, made her way to the landers even as they were decelerating into proximity with the small, desert-dominated planet, and politely declared her intentions of visiting her friend on the surface. As predicted, Z-Lin bent over backwards to provide assistance, and Decay jumped at the chance to pilot the lander to Burned Heart’s tiny polar ice cap. The Blaran barely even waited long enough to report that Burned Heart was alive and well and returning their hails, before trotting off the bridge. By the time Zeegon declared them secured in orbit, the lander was shooting out of the
Tramp
’s docking blister and dropping into the atmosphere.

Maladin and Dunnkirk stayed behind, ostensibly to watch over the seed and – Janya strongly suspected – to prevent the possibility of any of the crew from snooping around in the oxygen farm. She couldn’t have said where this conviction came from, but it was insistent. She tried to tell herself that Thord was simply embarrassed to introduce her Bonshooni friends to Rime, but that somehow didn’t ring true.

Aside from the polar ice caps, and the fact that it was more like a planet-sized baking-hot cattle ranch than a classical sandy desert, Burned Heart was a lot like distant Eshret. It had slightly more in the way of weather, a couple of regions of big geological upheaval, and these in turn fed the moderate climate that enabled the tough, spiky grasses to grow. A couple of decent-sized townships sprawled in the tropics, watered by aqueducts from polar ice processing plants – one of which Rime was apparently occupying, and had been for the past twenty years or so. The people of Burned Heart were very proud of their resident aki’Drednanth, but as far as Janya was aware Z-Lin didn’t even tell them about Thord.

Burned Heart, like Greentemple before it and Zhraak Burns before that, was something of a technology-vacuum backwater with only the most lightweight communications gear and minimal capacity to house landers from orbit. Also like their other recent stops, however, Burned Heart had not received many visitors lately and the township they’d contacted, Gymerville, had plenty of vacancies. Zeegon ferried down a few crewmembers who were interested in getting off the ship, standing under another sun, and enjoying some cuisine the preparation of which may or may not have violated a number of shipboard atmospheric regulation ordinances, but as Janya had predicted they did not stay long. Gymerville had a strict curfew and some extended ritual blessings for any newcomers who wanted to have their feet on the hard-baked ground at sun-down, and this was part of the reason they’d picked the township in the first place – it had been the first decent-sized settlement to be hit by local dawn when they arrived, giving them a solid eight hours of refreshing blazing sunlight and enabling them to depart after dinner with a minimum of ceremonial bullplop.

And this – after conducting their minimal business and confirming that Burned Heart had no more been attacked by hostile aliens than Greentemple had been – was exactly what they did. Thord was right behind them and returned to the ship shortly after local sundown, and trundled back immediately to her quarters in the oxygen farm. Presumably Rime had not required her to take part in any Hearter rituals before leaving, but Thord didn’t say a word about her meeting and Janya suspected she never would.

Rime didn’t follow her, and didn’t contact the
Tramp
, and within an hour and a half of Thord’s return to the ship they were settling back into soft-space.

Z-LIN

Nine weeks out of Burned Heart, two weeks from Declivitorion. They’d been on the metaphorical road from The Warm approximately seventy-five weeks.

There hadn’t been any major crap-ups in the past two months and change. No outbursts of boredom-induced creativity from their technical-minded crewmembers. No mass-pulpings of eejits in any of the
Tramp
’s more meat-grindery articles of vital machinery. It had all been by-the-book, professional, stiflingly dull.

In the past few weeks, as Z-Lin had noted tended to happen after about six weeks in the grey, people had stopped frequenting the parts of the ship that had extensive viewscreens and windows. They walked across rooms and along corridors without raising their eyes. The bridge was still manned, but those on duty were more interested in their consoles and organisers than the view outside.

You couldn’t look into Ol’ Drabby for that long without realising that nothing was looking back into you.

Z-Lin usually ate in the mess with the others, if only to keep herself sane. On this occasion, however, she’d set a table in the officers’ dining room. It was a big, fancy, horribly empty space, and she regretted it almost as soon as she’d finished setting it up, but at least it was formal. And at least its windows could be covered over with artful screens, replacing the ghastly grey view with a sequence of attractive space- and planet-scenes. More than a few of them, she’d noted with amusement, were from the beautiful skies of Standing Wave. It was pleasant, without inducing homesickness.

Her dinner guest, of course, was generally immune to that sort of thing anyway. General Moral Decay (Alcohol) was a known warm and sensitive soul, but tended towards sarcasm in the face of sentiment.

“Very nice,” the Blaran said, eyeing the food appreciatively. His nostril-slits quivered faintly as he breathed in the scents. “I didn’t realise there was any heartsteer left.”

“I saved most of my share,” she said, picking up a knife and beginning to carve away at the thick slab of steak. “Not much of a red-meat eater, myself.”