Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (36 page)

“I wish you hadn’t reminded me of that,” Sally said. “I was just deciding to ignore how keen you were on the whole the-Artist-is-a-genius thing back when we were dragged into this. When did you decide the underspace had to be bricked back up and the revolutionary universe-spanning drive forgotten for the good of us all?”

“Bruce lost its mirror,” Janus said quietly.

“I admit,” Bruce agreed, “a lot of it has only recently become apparent to me. Maybe I am finding new thought routines in order to bypass systems damaged either by The Accident or by exposure to the underspace itself. Maybe it’s just the severing of the connection between me and the Artist, allowing me to re-examine my priorities and values. Like Whye says, we’re no longer reinforcing each other. My fundamental desire to protect this crew is no longer at odds with his psychosis,” it paused again. “You saw the manufactory,” it said. “You saw Testing Core 3. You saw that he was developing ways to miniaturise the drive, make it portable, make it
organic
, make the extrusions permanent? Like
actual
gateways. He was working on a way to feed the entire universe into this thing. All the people, at least. What was driving him to do that? Will I be able to stand against it, or will I simply be folded under and allow the darkerness to consume you all?”

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Clue said. “Sally’s right, we don’t have much choice,” she glanced at Sally, Janya, Decay, Whye, and waved directionlessly at the air to indicate Bruce’s presence. “If it decides to take this action, there’s really not much we can do about it. It’s already
on board
the Artist’s scooter. It could just go. It might just go the second the drive gets it into its head to dive again.”

“I still don’t understand why this is better than just whorling the whole thing,” Sally admitted.

“A relative whorl just operates between this universe and its flipside, unreality,” Bruce said. “The matter is
destroyed
, but the laws of physics mean that on some level it still
exists
. That’s probably fine for the stuff you already hit, but if you do the same with all of it…”

“It’ll still leave whatever’s going on in the underspace,” Whye said. “That – those, whatever – will still be trying to get back here.”

“Right,” Bruce said. “The connection, the communion is made, the door is open and the reaction is still ongoing. It’s still intensifying, and soon it probably won’t even need a machine on this side, or indeed anywhere. Scattering this gear, the prime drive and the Artist himself – the prime node of communion – all through unreality and back also seems like a pretty terrible idea, simply because it’s … I don’t know, it’s just like spraying a bacteria-infected corpse across two habitats instead of one. Worst-case scenario, the underspace seeps into
unreality
as well as reality.”

“And what would that do?” Sally asked. “Keeping in mind that we’ve already done it anyway, so if it’s too disastrous we’d probably prefer not to know about it.”

“Danged if I know, actually,” Bruce confessed. “Maybe it won’t do anything – as long as we fix it
now
. But if you destroy the drive, we will have lost our ability to control it
in any way
from this side. We’ll be at the mercy of the darkerness. Whatever that actually entails, which I couldn’t say either. But after seeing what happened to the crew of the
Boonie
, I don’t think it’s good.”

“What
did
happen to them?” Z-Lin inquired.

“I don’t know,” Bruce replied helplessly. “I only
saw
it. And it was through the hub, not any sort of dependable synthetic intelligence sensory apparatus. They – it was like the process the Artist was undergoing, but he knew things they didn’t, his communion was deeper and more pure, he didn’t fight it, he had access to the technology – he’d
invented
the technology – so he was able to hold it off, work with it. Control it, even. I don’t–”

“What
happened
to them?” Sally snapped.

“You saw them,” Bruce said, “those of you who went into the
Boonie
, at least, you saw them. Most of them, anyway – the ones who came back. You saw them in Testing Core 3.”

“That was … that was people?” Z-Lin asked a little sickly.

“Some of it was,” Bruce said. “As far as I know.”

“I thought the crew sabotaged the station and its shuttles and stuff when the darkerness got inside them,” Waffa said when nobody else seemed inclined to speak up, “and they ‘freaked out’. So there wasn’t any way they could actually go anywhere,” he paused. “And I only now realise that’s not what you meant when you said ‘the ones who came back’. They weren’t on shuttles or in escape pods at all, were they?”

“They dived,” Bruce said. “Again – as far as I know.”

“I assumed the Artist just killed them,” Clue added.

“In a way he did,” Bruce admitted, “but in a far worse way, he didn’t.”

“Okay, the communion with the underspace is awful and can contaminate people,” Clue said briskly, “we sort of already suspected this so let’s move on.”

“Yes,” Waffa said, “let’s move on to the part where it doesn’t happen to us because we come up with some brilliant way of stopping it, please.”

“That’s what I was trying to do,” Bruce said, before Janus could do more than open his mouth. Whye subsided. “That was the point of all this,” Bruce went on. “Destroying all the Artist’s machinery and equipment, the drives, even the whole Testing Core 3 and the remains of the
Boonie
’s crew, might
seem
to work. It might even
work
in the short term, but sooner or later this is going to get out of control, if it isn’t already. And then it’s going to continue, and get more severe.”

“So sooner or later, those blobs will come back to the surface,” Whye spoke up. “Diving in the opposite direction. The eejits can see this better than we can, can see that the shadows are just waiting. Sort of lying dormant, ready to become darkerness again.”

“Won’t sending all this stuff into the underspace just help provide the blobs, this underspace-darkerness ‘them’-thing, with a
means
of diving in the opposite direction?” Sally asked.

“That assumes ‘they’ need any sort of drive to do it,” Janus said. “It doesn’t look like ‘they’ do.”

“Why have we started using wacky inverted commas?” Waffa asked.

Ignoring him, Sally threw her hands up. “So doesn’t
that
mean we’re screwed either way?”

“Not if I actually succeed in my mission,” Bruce said ruggedly. “Communion. I’d be there as an ambassador of sorts, closing the door behind me and removing the need for further incursions.”

“At least this way is a
shot
,” Clue said while Sally was still rallying her objections. “It’s a chance to solve the problem. Whorling would just smash the machine. It wouldn’t close whatever connection the Artist has made between here and the underspace. It wouldn’t get rid of whatever it is the eejits are sensing. Zeegon disconnected the drive, and that hasn’t seemed to get rid of whatever they’re seeing,” she glanced at Janus. “Right?”

“Right,” Whye replied. “We didn’t dive, but turning off the machine didn’t seem to do anything to change the conditions.”

“And destroying the machine probably wouldn’t either,” Clue concluded. “It’d break the gate, not close it – like Janus said.”

“There’s also the chance that this will make the whole problem way, way worse,” Sally said. “Without anything left on
this
side, we might stop diving. If something’s coming up from the other side, at least there wouldn’t be a machine on this side for it to connect to.
Or
a machine on that side for it to ride in on.”

“Also true,” Z-Lin admitted. “I don’t think any of us should go around claiming we have a damn clue what’s going on here.”

“Not even me,” Bruce said jovially, “but it seems like the best shot.”

“Assuming, like you said before, that you’re not just saying all this because you want to continue whatever insane thing the Artist was trying to do,” Sally pointed out.

“Yes,” Bruce conceded blandly, “assuming that.”

“If there
is
something on that side coming up, it doesn’t matter if there’s a machine on this side or not, it’ll come up anyway,” Decay said, “at least if what Bruce is saying happens to be true, and what we’ve witnessed with the eejits means what we’re blindly theorising it does. And from what we’ve seen, we – that is, the agencies in this universe who operate the underspace drive machinery – are losing control of the dive function anyway.”

“Just because it
seemed
to activate last time without anyone doing anything,” Janya said, “doesn’t mean the Artist was
keeping
it from happening and his death set the whole thing in motion and we’re losing control more and more. It seems
likely
, but it’s by no means the only possibility. I’m just saying. I tend to agree with the plan as presented, but have to acknowledge that there are other possibilities. For all we know, we dived because Bruce – who is connected to the drive directly via the damn scooter that his hub’s built into –
made
us dive.”

“True,” Bruce remarked.

“Bruce would you shut up?” Clue snapped.

“Sorry.”

“And the only way to stop it is from over there,” Decay went on, ignoring this, “again,
apparently
. And again, with due consideration for the fact that there
is
no literal ‘over there’. And this seems to be the only way to do it. Believe me, I’d feel better if we were sending people we trusted as well, but it’s a one-way trip –
if
all goes according to plan,” he paused. “Which is beyond dubious,” he added, “since I haven’t understood a damn thing about what’s going on since basically the first dive, and we’re now talking about acting on the advice of a synthetic intelligence we’re all pretty sure is insane.”

“If it fails, then we’ve tried and failed,” Clue said firmly. “If we destroy the machinery and
that
fails, we’ve lost our quite-possibly-illusory-anyway options. Simple risk assessment.”

“If we destroy all the equipment and the problem continues, at least if Bruce was still here it might have the knowledge required to design or print off components for a
new
drive,” Janya suggested.

“Oh ho ho, no chance,” Bruce said. “I’m intelligent and have high information retention, but you should see those things. I swear the Artist was feeding his soul into it, and half the schematics were inside his head.”

“We would
definitely
have found them,” Decay remarked.

“Nice,” Bruce congratulated the Blaran dryly.

“So,” Sally said unwillingly, “you go in there. And we wait out here. And hope for the best.”

“Just like always,” Janya said.

“And I have to go deep,” Bruce said. “As deep and as far as I can go, in whatever sense that idea is applicable to the underspace. A shallow dive, a part-immersion, won’t cut it. I’ve got to go all the way in.”

“Into the …
darkestness
?” Whye suggested.

“Ugh, you had to say it,” Sally growled.

The goodbyes between Bruce and the crew of
Astro Tramp 400
were brief and not overly emotional, somewhat tainted by the fact that they all overwhelmingly failed to trust the synthetic intelligence or a single one of its motives or statements, and were all reasonably certain it was leading them into some fate worse than death. About the only person who seemed in any danger of choking up was Waffa.

“We’ll get your mainframe fixed up and then hook you up with a new hub,” he said, sounding for all the world like a mother sending her only child off to Little Astro camp for the first time, “and you’ll be right as rain. This busted hub will be gone and you’ll be back, good as new.”

“Sure I will, mate,” Bruce said, awkwardly reassuring and very plainly embarrassed. “Sure I will.”

They’d moved the whole assemblage out of the passage near the recycling station and back into the docking bay on that level, providing Bruce with a wide clear space under the blister windows to perform its final dive. Glomulus Cratch, with official permission to leave the medical bay and by common agreement from the crew, was standing beside the scooter and replacing the sterile-wrapped pieces of the Artist as best he could into their proper places. Zeegon, just having finished disconnecting the drive, had ceremoniously and mostly-uncomplainingly reconnected it.

“Are you sure you don’t need to be at a safe distance outside the ship or anything?” Sally asked.

“Nah,” Bruce said. “There’s no space or time or anything, remember? Wherever I am while I’m up
here
is irrelevant.”

“Right,” she muttered, “forgot about there not being any space or time or anything.”

“Presumably, though,” Janya said, “you can control the extent of the … what, the bubble that forms around the drive and drops its volume into the underspace. Sorry, I’m still sort of thinking in terms of relative fields.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, “it’s a bit more wacky than that but you’ve got the general gist of it. If all I want to take with me is the scooter, then that’s what goes. It’s taking
more
than about the volume of the
Tramp
with me that was a bit of a challenge. We were working on that.”

They’d decided to keep the Jauren Silvan weasel, which they’d informally named Boonie. It hadn’t seemed to have suffered any adverse or lingering effects from touching the blob of darkerness, any more than the rest of them had from travelling through the underspace itself. It didn’t, according to Bruce, constitute a ‘gate’ and their cringe-inducingly unscientific ‘does this weasel seem spooky to you?’ tests with a couple of the ship’s eejits seemed to bear this out. It would, furthermore, be cruel and unnecessary to leave it behind down there just because Bruce was staying.

As a result, the sample box was rattling and thumping on the floor by Sally’s feet. Janya had tried to pass off the responsibility of fixing up a more appropriate habitat for Boonie and ascertaining how they might best keep it alive – if that was even possible – but so far the only other volunteer was Zeegon and he wanted to drop the weasel into the nearest airlock. If it happened to be a
malfunctioning
airlock, that was messy and sad but ultimately not a matter of concern.