Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (22 page)

They’d arrived at what had looked like a spot specially designed for the purpose, even though their lander had been the first to burn its mark on the smooth crete surface. Waffa wondered if it had actually been built by Bruce or the Artist or whatever was running the show here, specifically for the crew of the
Tramp
. But it hadn’t looked
new
. And the few remaining signs of sentient habitation on Jauren Silva – the terraces, and the slapdash fences – had been rough and minimal in comparison.

It was as if some drone had been activated, with an inbuilt idea of what it needed to do to set up a settlement, and had gone about it by the numbers, most likely operating alone and entirely on automatic: landing pad, connecting road, support terraces, security perimeters. But with no concessions to the actual terrain, or even any sign that it was
aware
of the terrain’s characteristics.

This was, Waffa soon realised, exactly what had happened. There was no other real reason for the pad to exist, or to be so far from wherever they were heading. The lander wasn’t very high-impact, its electrochemical burn mostly solar-powered and very tightly contained. They could have landed right in the front yard of the Artist’s secret lair. It wasn’t as if he was hiding its location by preventing them from landing there. If this was what the road Bruce had set them on was, then it was going to lead them straight to it.

It was a colony template, filled out in an extremely haphazard way by unsupervised machines. No wonder it seemed familiar – it was a perfect macrocosm of life on board the
Tramp
.

“Did the Artist make all this?” Clue wondered as they bumped down the dirt path. It seemed as though her train of thought had been following much the same route as Waffa’s own. “Or did he just move into an abandoned station?”

It was difficult to believe Jauren Silva had been settled intentionally, but if it had then it was
easy
to believe the settlement had been abandoned shortly after the dodgy robots had put it all together. One of their three eejits had already fallen into a sinkhole, although they’d managed to save him with only minor scrapes and bruises. Another had gotten his head stuck inside a hollow log, and had been stung by something that Bruce assured them wasn’t deadly to a hominid of Able Darko’s constitution. He was, however, now sweating even more than everyone else and his skin was pallid and greasy, the weird lumpy swelling surrounding the bite looking like a cluster of purple knuckles under his skin.

It had been more tempting to leave that one where he’d trapped himself.

“Does it always rain this much?” Waffa asked when no answer seemed forthcoming to Z-Lin’s question.

“What am I, a bloody weather balloon?” Bruce snapped, then went on in a more moderate tone. “That said, I do have readings here from the past few months, and it seems to have been raining quite solidly. Whether that means it always has…”

“I’m seeing lots of debris and run-off and erosion,” Waffa pointed at the side of the road as they jounced past. One of the drone-built terraces was completely cut away down the middle by a narrow but fierce little waterfall that was dropping away into the moss beside the road, presumably to fall into some subarboreal cavern that was steadily working its way deeper and wider. “Just wondering if your buddy set up shop here at the end of the dry season and now we’re in for six months of storms and your whole setup’s about to be washed away because you didn’t get a chance to study the atmospherics. On account of not being a bloody weather balloon,” he added supportively.

“I’m not sure what I’ve done to cause you all to be so snarky,” Bruce huffed. “I’ve been a perfect crewmember, protecting and serving and getting you all the information you need–”

“Not
quite
all,” Z-Lin corrected.

“…running all your systems when you were undermanned, and keeping things going against some huge obstacles–”

Sally, who had been stretching to fiddle with a set of controls in the roof, looked down with an outraged expression. “You killed a guy with an airlock!” she exclaimed.

“…
while severely damaged
, and on top of it all, we’ve provided you with a new drive system that’s going to allow you to travel anywhere in the universe at will–”

“As long as you like blobs of mobile primordial nothingness that I’m beginning to suspect make you insane,” Zeegon chimed in.

Bruce finally seemed to notice it was being interrupted, and fell sulkily silent for a moment. “There’s no pleasing some people,” it eventually muttered.

Waffa had a sudden, very vivid memory of a crewmember, back before The Accident. Leelee Pons. She’d been in the ops division, although unlike Waffa she had been certified. Their shifts and duties only intersected a couple of times. “
Get off the stage
,” she used to say whenever somebody overreacted. “
Put the understudy back on
.”

He wasn’t sure what had brought the memory on. He hadn’t had a thing for Leelee, or anything like that. He hadn’t memorised their respective rosters so he could look forward to her arrival. Actually, he was fairly sure she’d been involved with Astor Grole down in exchange mechanics, which was great because Grole had also been a nice bloke. But Waffa
had
enjoyed her company. They’d been buddies, he liked to think.

And suddenly – there, on that seething jungle planet, as they bounced down the lumpy drone-built road in Zeegon’s favourite rover towards an uncertain fate – he missed her. Sharply.

It happened sometimes. It all crashed in. Leelee was dead, her body swept into the rec-side relative torus and her atoms scattered across the exchange plane like a layer of oil across the surface of a puddle. They’d cleansed the exchange and the toruses a half-dozen times, and it still felt like you’d taken a grease bath when you crossed the plane in freefall rather than using the elevator.

Leelee was gone. Astor was gone. Son Of Astor, the able who perpetually followed Grole around and helped him with his tasks and helped him pull off those stupid magic tricks he did during break time, he was gone too.

Waffa had sometimes wondered if he should talk to Whye about this. But he’d probably just end up bumming the guy out.

“Did we get any confirmation of
where
this planet is?” he asked, to break the huffy silence left behind by Bruce’s last exclamation, and to distract himself from the dull, bereaved ache that had started in his forehead. “I mean, in relation to our last known coordinates?”

“We couldn’t really tell yet because navigation is locked out,” Clue replied, “but it certainly doesn’t look like the Artist was faking this drive of his. We were – as certain as possible –
definitely
in deep interstellar space, and now we are
definitely
on a planet. That’s
our
senses telling us so, not the computer. So it brought us a considerable distance, successfully.”

“How did Bruce navigate here without navigation?” Zeegon asked the question Waffa was about to. The helmsman spun the wheel and took the rover around a bend in the road ankle-deep in water without decelerating. There was a rattle of gravel and a plume of lukewarm mud, and then they were back on what passed for a straight stretch. “Obviously it doesn’t need navigation to use the underspace drive,” he went on. “So – first – how does
that
work, and – second – what good is it doing us to keep it locked out of navigation?”

“We–” Clue started.

“Hold onto something!”

In adrenaline-induced slow motion, Waffa looked up to see an impossibly vast shape descend out of the rainclouds. It was a tree, or maybe just a branch, probably no more than fifteen feet in diameter and a hundred long, but at the time it looked like a moss-and-vine-wreathed leviathan dropping back to the surface of the ocean after a prodigious leap. It hit the road in front of them and just kept going, smashing through the surface in a spray of chips to reveal that the ‘ground’ was no more than a six-foot crust of rotten wood and creepers over another one of those yawning abysses. Too late to stop, Zeegon hit an old-style button on the custom control panel in front of him while they were still jouncing and slewing from the impact of the deadfall. Methuselah roared, and they hit the new chasm at a slight side-on angle and with the buggy’s blunt nose gently upturned. Still in slow-motion, they sailed across the gap. Waffa looked out through the window with glazed detachment and could still see the enormous log turning and splintering as it tumbled to its new resting place.

It was only after they came bouncing to the road on the far side, teetered on the brink of rolling and then – with a whoop from Zeegon – righting themselves and skidding to a halt, that Waffa realised he’d been looking out of
Sally’s
window. At the same moment, he realised the rover’s roof panel was open and rain, sodden jungle storm-noises, and three mosquitoes each the size of his hand had entered the vehicle.

“Don’t stop here,” Clue snapped, “the whole damn shelf might collapse underneath us.”

“Man overboard,” Zeegon said, jerking his thumb.

Z-Lin spun and glared at the empty seat next to Waffa, then at Waffa himself. “How did that even
happen
?”

“I have no idea!” Waffa babbled. “She was there a second ago!”

“She was standing up and diddling with the roof controls,” Decay said, pointing. “The bounce must have catapulted her straight up and out.”

Zeegon checked his screens and the old-fashioned mirrors he’d installed around the pilot’s bucket-seat. Then he hit the communicator. “Sally?”

“I’m fine,” her voice came back immediately. The rest of the team unclenched
en masse
. “I’m on the other side of that bloody enormous hole that just got carved in the scenery.”

“She came out of the
roof
, and landed on the ground, and she’s okay?” Zeegon said incredulously.

“She’s pretty tough for a human,” Decay remarked.

“Hate to spoil the legend,” Sally said, “but if there hadn’t been a foot of moss over wood-pulp, I would’ve screwed my legs royally. I did actually plan on getting out of the buggy like a normal person.”

“Hold tight,” Z-Lin said, “we’ll circle back.”

“Negative,” Sally replied curtly. “I’ve been looking at those fences as we passed them and I think we’re getting close. If they fit the standard model, then we’re already inside the innermost perimeter. I was going to get out and scout around anyway.”

“You could have picked a better moment,” Clue declared.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly my decision,” Sally shot back, “I was just standing up like a dumbarse when that tree came down. Nice driving, Zeeg,” she added. “Everyone alright on that side?”

“May need a change of pants,” Zeegon replied.

“We’re fine,” Z-Lin amended steadily.

“Looks like more rainwater runoff is pouring away into the gap,” Sally went on. Waffa stood up and looked out of the open roof, and saw Sally’s small, solid shape crouching on the far side of the great sagging gulf in the road. She raised an arm, and he waved back. Sure enough, the maw seemed to be widening as a couple of small waterfalls on either side roared off into the darkness below, eating away the soft mostly-flora-composed topsoil. “I’ll find a way for you to get back across, and keep an ear on you through the comm,” she continued. “Go and see whatever it is Bruce wants to show you.”

“Try not to get caught in a landslide or stuck up a tree,” Z-Lin advised.

“Thank you, Commander,” Sally said calmly. “Try not to get captured by a mad Molran inventor and get tied up and told his entire plan before being slowly and sadistically killed by an insane synth while the inventor blithely leaves the room to carry out his plan, you hear?”

“Well done, Sally,” Clue sighed.

“I can’t catch your transmissions but I
can
hear your actual voices through the mikes,” Bruce said in a hurt tone.

“Sorry Bruce.”

“And I can tell when you’re being insincere,” Bruce added, although now it sounded more amused than upset.

Sure enough, a couple more meandering turns down the road and the jungle opened up around them to reveal the Artist’s Jauren Silva base of operations.

“Well,” Clue said, “I guess that answers the question of whether he built this place himself or inherited it.”

“Looks like neither,” Zeegon agreed.

The structure was a slate-grey mass obscured only partially by creepers and algae, the great slick bulk clearly
hull
rather than
wall
. They slowed as they approached the ancient-looking ruin.

“It’s a manufactory station,” Clue confirmed, “or
most
of one. Those things are completely spacebound, it’s lucky it didn’t collapse entirely.”

“Let’s not be so quick to assume it hasn’t,” Waffa said. “It looks pretty messed up,” the station and its haphazard settlement template made a little more sense now – a space station would have drones of various functions but landscaping and colony-building would not be a hardware or software priority. When the huge satellite had ended up beached here, the drones had probably adapted as best their limited programming would allow.

“They have no manoeuvring capability,” Z-Lin went on, “they’re built on-location and they use tugs for any movement they need to make after that. No star drives, and they certainly can’t
land
. How he got it here without it completely…” she broke off, and shook her head. “I’m still thinking about this in terms of relative-drive physics,” she said quietly. “He didn’t need to fly or land or disassemble this thing at all, in order to steal it and bring it here. Did he?”

“He just needed to drop it into the underspace and plop it back out right here,” Decay agreed. “Although without any way to direct it…”

“Exactly,” Bruce said exultantly. “The Artist commandeered this station and brought it here through the underspace, yes. You might consider it his test leap. Or
leaps
.”

“He hit-and-missed his way around the galaxy until ending up here,” Decay surmised.