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

“I’m really not sure you’re qualified to reassure us, Bruce,” Zeegon said flatly. “Hastily or otherwise.”

“I am somewhat more resistant to the effect than humans or Molranoids,” Bruce said, “owing to the fact that my brain has not evolved over millions of years from a primitive stem that instinctively seeks out patterns and ways to fill vacuums. I am not ruled by the impulse to see the explicable in the inexplicable – I can see something new and be satisfied with the fact of its unprecedented
newness
, until further data comes to light. The idea of the unknown and the unfamiliar is so thoroughly linked with danger and death in your genetics, you are quite capable of refusing to see it if no alternative is readily available.

“But yes, the nature of the place is so very
other
, the emptiness so much more profound than a matter of any mere scarcity of waves and particles, that even I find it difficult to ignore the insistent feeling that there must be
something
out there. Something coming closer. Something working its way into the safe bubble of our universe that we descended in.”

“You can probably put us down for a group therapy session later,” Waffa said to Janus.

“Okay,” Whye said. “I don’t know how that’ll work, but sure,” he paused again, then added, “Okay, it’s going away now. The blob. It sort of just sucked away into the air. I poked the air and nothing happened. I poked the air with a pen,” he added. “Sorry.”

“God damn it, Whye,” Clue muttered, then turned to address the comm system. “You’re talking about this as if you’ve flown this way before,” she said. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Well, I’m a synthetic intelligence,” Bruce reminded her gently. “I don’t need to process experiences through three pounds of bio-paste before talking about them. Fair to say that all this stuff was becoming old news to me almost as soon as it happened. Sorry if that makes me sound like a smartarse.”

“But you knew this was coming,” Z-Lin said.

“And you had a reasonable idea of what to expect,” Sally added. “More than just a matter of you preparing for it. More like you’d already done it.”

“Only because it feels like I have,” Bruce replied. “The synthetic intelligence hub that the Artist brought with him, that brought me off standby and allowed me to observe and plan things unseen and unsuspected, had of course been through the darkerness with the Artist when he came here. The hub was active, online, as part of some trial runs … otherwise he could have simply left it offline until encountering me. This way, the hub was able to gather data, experiences. And what the hub gathered up, all that information became part of me as soon as I connected. As such,
that
element of my consciousness
has
travelled with the underspace drive before. A whole heap of times.”

“And nothing at all went wrong with that,” Z-Lin said.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Bruce sniffed.

“So what is this place?” Clue changed tack. “Jauren Silva, did you say?”

“Why don’t you go down,” Bruce said, “and see?”

“
Buggy time
,” Zeegon jumped to his feet. “I’m driving.”

“You’re going
down there
?” Janya exclaimed.

“Sure,” Zeegon said. “Only thing we can do, right?”

“You just want to drive your latest buggy,” Janya accused.

“Not my
latest
buggy,” Zeegon protested. “It has to be one that’s mission-tested.”

“Even so, is this really the best idea?”

“Now look, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to an excuse to do the job for which I am actually trained and qualified and, indeed, for which AstroCorps employed me in the first place,” Zeegon said reasonably. “Sort of like you might feel if we arrived at a giant library planet and the nerds who lived there sent us a distress signal saying all their books were piled up in a heap and they had no idea what to do next, because their head librarian had died of an allergy medicine overdose or something–”

Janya glared. “That’s–”

“
However
,” Zeegon said placatingly, “in this case we are dealing with a clear and present threat. We’ve been invited – nay,
instructed
– to make planetfall, presumably to meet the Artist on his own terms and on his own turf, and possibly to see his grand scheme. Perhaps to offer praise or insights on his work, or study its potential application in smaller, wheeled vehicles,” he paused, and glanced at Z-Lin. “Am I overselling it?”

“You sort of disappeared behind a red flag when you said ‘nay’,” Clue said, “but I think I know where you’re heading with this.”

“Right,” Zeegon said. “Bruce and the Artist, just on the topic of not letting people leave the ship, have proved willing and able to kill and dismember.”

“I trust you see the logic behind it now,” Bruce said, sounding mollified. “Wouldn’t’ve wanted anyone floating around outside when we entered the underspace.”

“And we appreciate that,” Zeegon said.

“Are you being sarcastic?” Bruce snapped.

“Little bit. No disrespect, but you
did
kill a dude,” Zeegon turned back to Janya. “And that was a rule they didn’t even
tell
us about,” he went on. “What might they do if we decide to ignore an actual
instruction
from them?”

“I assure you, the ban on leaving the ship is now lifted,” Bruce added helpfully.

“They might kill us all,” Zeegon pressed. “Or they might just decide to plop us back into the underspace for a second and bring us back out of it
already on the surface
if it looks like we’re taking too long thinking about it. The fact that this is a
starship
, that it was built in space and is not actually designed for planetary insertion, sort of becomes moot when a
third
little dip in the darkerness will bring us back out into space again. We may be severely damaged by getting force-parked on a planet, though. The
Tramp
wasn’t really made to hold up her own weight.”

“You’ve made your case,” Janya conceded. “Your logic is sound, even though I don’t for a
second
believe you care about any of that.”

“Of course I don’t,” Zeegon said, and pointed towards the door. “I’ll load Methuselah onto the lander.”

After Clue, Zeegon, Decay, Waffa, Sally and three of their higher-shelf eejits had assembled in the lander and she’d seen them off on their way to Jauren Silva, Janya did what she could to further the mission – if you could call it that – from on board.

First she went to Whye’s office, since it was right there on the secondary bridge deck with the lander bay. Janus was at his desk, doodling aimlessly on an organiser pad. She could tell he was doing so, because the pad was still connected to the wall monitor so the picture – it appeared to be some sort of dragon with a top hat on – was clearly visible when she stepped inside. Nevertheless he slapped the pad down and folded his hands in his lap when he heard her polite knock.

Janus Whye was a young man, tall but pot-bellied in a way that would place an extrovert somewhere between ‘jolly’ and ‘party animal’, and to be fair he did under certain circumstances fulfil those prerequisites. Like almost every other crewmember, he had absolutely no business in the position in which he currently found himself. Also like almost every other crewmember, he had lost every person on board with whom he happened to have a single hobby, interest, passion or pastime in common. With the exception of – surprisingly – Contro and a small-scale botanical sideline they were running together, he didn’t have anything much to do with the rest of the crew on a daily basis.

He’d been one of three horticultural mood analysts on board at the time of The Accident. This was admittedly three more horticultural mood analysts than a starship the size and function of the
Tramp
needed, but they had been on a long-haul journey to a new experimental commune-settlement when everything hit the fan. Now there were no specialists or researchers, the designer clippings they’d been transporting had all been destroyed, and Whye was the only member of his team left. His intended transit had been extended, by the Captain’s order, while the
Tramp
flailed from one disaster and diversion to the next. Their ultimate goal was
still
to pass by the colony and drop him off, although when that would happen – and whether he would be any use there whatsoever with no team and no plants to stroke and say damn fool hippie things to – remained to be seen.

To be perfectly honest, Janya had no idea what a horticultural mood analyst was supposed to do anyway, but that had seemed to be the gist of the practice every time Whye had explained it.

“Hey,” he said. “Uh, you need counselling?”

“Not really,” Janya said, feeling – as she always did when she was in Whye’s office – somewhat apologetic about her mental stability. “I just came to see if the blob was still here.”

Whye looked blank, as if maybe there had been several blobs in recent memory, between which he needed to distinguish. “The blob? Oh, the blob,” he pointed to the corner of the room next to the broad window panel. “It was right there,” he said. “Sort of half-inside and half-outside the window. Pretty strange, I thought.”

“Yes…” Janya said. Sure enough, the blob of darkerness had vanished as if it had never been there. Just like on the bridge, and all around the ship, the traces had melted away. Indeed, if Bruce were to be believed about the null properties of the stuff, they really
hadn’t
been there anyway. They’d simply been a sensory placeholder to account for a fundamental absence. “Did you get a good look at it? I mean, without poking it.”

“Pretty good,” Whye said, seeming a little puzzled as to why she’d bother asking him about it. “It was just a blob of weird nothingness. We saw creepier stuff in the bonefields, and on Twistlock.”

Janya grimaced lightly. “Yes,” she said. “Did it move? The blob, I mean.”

“Not while I was looking at it,” Janus said discerningly, “but it
was
sort of different each time I looked. It didn’t really have a shape or an edge or anything though, so it was difficult to say for sure. Didn’t you see it?”

“Only on the bridge,” she said, “and it was outside the ship,” she thought of Zeegon –
it was on
this
side of the screen
– and shook her head. “I didn’t see much.”

After leaving Whye to his doodling, she crossed to main engineering on the same deck. On the way she stopped a pair of eejits and asked them if they had seen anything or experienced any oddness during their dip into the underspace, but quickly realised this was a pointless and doomed endeavour. After four blank stares, two anecdotes about run-of-the-mill shipboard events that the eejits had
considered
odd, and one long rambling counter-question about what had actually happened to them while the Artist’s drive was active, she gave up and headed to main engineering.

“Hello there!” Contro was sitting at a console just outside the reactor core, drinking a cup of tea. “What brings you here? Want a cup?”

Contro grew his own tea, in a double-row of ‘ponics beds. With Whye’s eager assistance, he actually managed to produce quite a passable blend that was infinitely superior to the printed stuff. Their little plantation generated enough tea for each crewmember to have one cup a day, with a healthy surplus for storage. Since only Janya and Contro drank tea regularly, this left them with all the tea they could ever want.

“No thanks. What can you tell me about shooey?”

“Ha ha ha! Nothing! Do you want some of
that
?”

Janya blinked. “What?”

“Well, it’s almost expelling time. I can give you a cup if you like!”

“Um, that shouldn’t be necessary,” she said, wondering as she always did just what was going on in Contro’s head to make him create such strange connections. They
almost
felt logical, as if you could peel away a couple of layers of reality and find that his thought processes actually made sense. “I was just wondering whether there might be some link between the Artist’s underspace drive and the … darkerness … it generates, and the shooey generated by transpersion reactors,” it occurred to her that Contro was looking at her even more blankly than usual. “You do know what’s been happening, right?”

“Nope!”

Janya sighed, and filled in as quickly as she could the sequence of recent events. “It doesn’t so much generate the stuff, as immerse us in it and then allow us to emerge somewhere else,” she concluded, “but it leaves some of the stuff floating around, that then vanishes. Bruce says it has absolutely no real characteristics, which in a way sort of reminded me of shooey.”

“I see!” Contro didn’t seem any more or less amazed by the prospect of a whole new paradigm of interstellar travel than he had by the idea that Janya might want a cup of shooey instead of tea. “Gosh, that’s interesting! And you say we’ve done it now?”

“We came out of the whatever-it-is, the underspace,” Janya said, “and we seemed to be at a planet. Unless Bruce’s fakery is far more thorough than we suspected, we really have travelled a considerable distance without going to relative speed. An impossible distance, probably, even if we
did
go to relative speed.”

“Righto, but you know, the shooey, the reactor, all of this,” Contro waved his teacup affably at the smooth wall of the core, “it’s nothing to do with the relative field, or the way we travel anywhere. The reactor is just what
powers
the drive. They’re closely linked because only nuclear transpersion gives off that amount of energy, but the reactor powers everything on board! If there’s a new stardrive that does things differently, that’s jolly good – maybe it means we’ll be able to stop using the relative drive, eh? That’ll certainly save power! Not to mention space!” he laughed. “We could install a water-skiing ring in one of the toruses, and then you could see how it’s done!”

“That’s … good forward planning,” Janya said, “but for now we’re still very much at the mercy of this Artist fellow who seems to be the only person who knows anything about the drive, how it works, what its effects are, how much power it uses … everything,” she sighed, and shrugged. “It just occurred to me that, since shooey is a transpersion byproduct, or used-up fuel, or whatever, drained of all its basic atomic and electromagnetic qualities, it might bear some resemblance to this substance that seemed to fill the underspace, where no atomic or electromagnetic qualities had been imprinted on anything in the first place. It might give us a place to start.”