The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  The tide has passed. How many days? I don’t know. All I know is that there was a time when I watched the surface get closer, then a time when I stood up and swatted away a murder-louse like an irritating fly, before sliding the nictitating membranes from my eyes. I thought Grable would be gone, as would my lift off-planet. Even so, when the water was round my feet I reached into the remains of my jacket, extracted my palm computer, called up a map to locate the pick-up point and headed that way.

  In the first moments of the tide I had nearly been dislodged from my crevice. Then the surges passed and in the company of murder-lice I swam in the sea, and I breathed. I did not have gills, but somehow my lungs had been altered to extract oxygen from the water. The lice left me alone as they fed on the masses of flotsam caught in the flood. I was almost enjoying myself when the first dark shape blotted out the blue and green light.

  They were a kind of flatfish but the size of great whites, and there was nothing amusing about their sideways-opening jaws and offset eyes. I got into my crevice with all speed as they hit the murder-lice. The water clouded with ichor and legs and pieces of carapace drifted before being snapped up by smaller fish.

  There was little pleasure from then on. Next came the giant rays that ate lice and flatfish alike. There was a particularly unpleasant squid that I only saved myself from by discharging the Tenkian’s cell into it. The rest of the time was a waking nightmare. I wasn’t even safe in my crevice. A hammerwhelk joined me and I ignored it until it attached itself to my leg and drilled a centimetre-diameter hole through my shell. I managed to pull it away and extract its siphon from my leg before it hit any arteries, but the pain was beyond belief, and I didn’t know how to scream. I swore then that Chaplin Grable was going to really pay. I swore that if I got out of this I would use the form I now had before being adapted back to human normal. I was going to eat him feet-first.

  I stand by what remains of the gravcar. It is jammed between two shellfish-crusted slabs of rock where the world-tide left it. My laughter sounds like coughing and the ratcheting of claves. I pulled the hammerwhelks from the metal they had been clinging to when Grable lifted the craft and saw the holes they had made through into the oh so delicate control circuits. Grable’s hand, in his armoured glove, is gripping the control column. I don’t know where the rest of him is. I shall move on now. The Golem Twos are in a nearby crevice. My fortune in the human world is assured. I am heading for one of the sealed bases that were finally established here. It is about five hundred kilometres away and there will be more world-tides to be endured before I reach it. The Tenkian follows, operating on batteries taken from the gravcar. I will survive.

  10

  THE GABBLE

  The shimmer-shield visor was the most advanced Jonas had been able to acquire. It only occasionally caught the light as if to let him know it was still there, it allowed a breath of the native air through to his face as he guided this clunky aerofan over the landscape – the breather unit only adding the extra ten per cent oxygen he required – and he could actually experience the damp mephitic smell of the swampland below. This would be the closest he could get to this world, Masada, without some direct augmentation.

  Jonas looked around. The sky was a light aubergine, the nebula a static explosion across it, fading now with the rise of the sun, ahead of which the gas giant Calypse was in ascent: an opalescent orb of red, gold and green. Below him a flat plain of flute grasses was broken by muddy gullies like a cracked pastry crust over some black pie. From up here the grasses looked little different from tall reeds reaching the end of their season. The reason for their name only became evident when Jonas spotted the monitor transport and brought his aerofan down to land beside it. The grasses tilted away from the blast of the fan, skirling an unearthly chorus. The hollow stems were holed down their length where their side branches had dropped away earlier in the season. Thus each one played its own tune.

  Settling on a rhizome mat, the fan spattered mud all around as it wound down to a stop. Jonas waited for that to finish before opening the safety gate and stepping down. The mat was firm under his feet – this might as well have been solid ground. He looked across. Three individuals stood in a trampled clearing, whilst a third squatted beside something on the ground. Jonas walked over, raising a hand when he recognized Monitor Mary Cole turning to glance towards him. She spoke a few quiet words to her companions, then wandered over.

  ‘Jonas.’ She smiled. He rather liked her smile: there was no pretension in it, no authoritarian air behind it. She was an ECS monitor here to do a job, so she knew the extent and limitations of her power and felt no need to belittle others. ‘This is not what I would call the most auspicious start to your studies here, but I knew you would be interested.’

  ‘What’s this all about, Mary? I just got a message via aug to come and meet you at these coordinates to see something of interest to me.’

  She shrugged as they turned to walk towards the clearing. ‘That was from B’Tana. He likes rubbing people’s noses in the rougher side of our job whenever the opportunity presents.’ She glanced at him. ‘Are you squeamish?’

  ‘I’ve been working for Taxonomy as a field biologist for fifty-three years. What have you got here?’

  ‘A corpse, or rather, some remains.’

  Jonas halted. ‘Should I be here, then?’

  ‘Don’t worry. This is not murder and you won’t be bringing any contamination to a crime scene. We got everything that happened here on sateye shortly after he screamed for help over his aug.’

  Entering the clearing, Jonas glanced around. No doubt about what that red stuff was staining the flattened grasses and spattering nearby upright stalks. Mary held back to talk to one of her companions while he walked forward to stand beside the man working with the remains. There were fragments of bone scattered all about, the shredded rags of an envirosuit, one boot. The skull lay neatly divided in half, stripped clean, sucked dry.

  ‘May I?’ Jonas asked, gesturing to the bone fragments.

  The man looked up from the handheld scanner he was running over the rhizome mat. Beside him rested a tray containing a chrome aug, a wristcom and a QC hand laser – all still bloody.

  ‘Certainly – he’s past caring.’

  Jonas immediately nailed the forensic investigator as a Golem android. That was the way it was sometimes: a disparity between speech, breathing, movement, maybe even a lack of certain pheromones in the air. It never took him long to see through human emulation programs. He turned his attention to the fragments, squatted down and picked one up. It was a piece of thigh bone: as if someone had marked out a small diamond on that bone, drilled closely along the markings with a threemillimetre bit, down to the marrow, then chiselled the piece free.

  ‘Hooder,’ he said.

  ‘Medium-sized,’ the Golem replied.

  Jonas turned to him. ‘Who was this?’ He nodded towards the remains.

  The Golem winced and glanced towards Mary Cole, then said, ‘A xenologist who came here to study mud snakes. We lose between five and ten each year.’

  Jonas called over to Mary, ‘Is this what you would call an educational outing for me?’

  Glancing over she said, ‘Jonas, you would not have been sent here if you needed that.’ She nodded to her companions and they headed back towards the transport, then she came over and gestured at the remains. ‘We get them all the time. They upload skills then come here thinking they’re going to brilliantly solve all the puzzles. You, as you say, have worked for Taxonomy for fifty-three years. The maximum experiential upload is less than a year – enough for a language or some small branch of one of the sciences.’

  Jonas watched the Golem stand, extend the head of his scanner on a telescopic arm, and began to swing like a metal detector.

  ‘I upload,’ he observed.

  ‘Yes, on top of your fifty-three years of experience.’

  ‘Granted,’ he said. ‘So you get a lot like this?’

  ‘Certain
ly – there’s a great deal here to study.’

  Jonas knew that. Prior to twenty years ago this world had been out-Polity and ruled by a vicious theocracy. With the help of undercover ECS agents rebels managed a ballot of the planetary population, the result of which was the Polity subsuming this world. But events had been complicated. During that time some biophysicist had come here in a stolen Polity dreadnought and caused all sorts of mayhem. Jonas did not know the details, all he did know was that it had taken ECS twenty years to clear up the mess, and that some areas of the planet were still under quarantine. Also, at about the same time one of the four spheres of a transgalactic alien bioconstruct called Dragon had arrived, suicided on the planet’s surface, and in the process, out of its mass, created a new race: dracomen. These creatures alone were worthy of centuries of study. They used direct protein replication rather than some form of DNA transcription and could mentally control their body growth and substantially alter their offspring. Their initial shape was based on a human thought-experiment: What might dinosaurs have been like if there had been no extinction and they had followed the evolutionary path of humans? But beside these the planet boasted much weird fauna: the tricones forever churning the soil, a multitude of herbivores, mud snakes, siluroynes, heroynes, hooders and the decidedly strange gabbleducks. And those were only the larger wild creatures.

  ‘Do you know if there are any instructions concerning his remains?’ Jonas asked.

  ‘We will know soon enough,’ said the Golem. He was squatting down now, digging at the ground with a small trowel. After a moment he stood, holding up some item about the size of a little finger.

  ‘Memplant?’ Jonas suggested.

  The Golem nodded.

  Jonas turned back to Mary. ‘I’d like to make some recordings and measurements, and take a few samples. That okay?’

  ‘That’s fine. And if he has no special requirements concerning his physical remains I’ll have Gryge,’ she gestured to the Golem, ‘box them up for you.’

  ‘And a copy of the sateye recording?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Jonas headed back to the aerofan for his holocorder and sampling equipment. He did not suppose he would learn anything new here, or from the recording – it would just be more information to feed Rodol’s appetite. The AI was already digesting everything the locals knew about hooders, plus twenty years of ECS data, but its hunger was never satisfied.

  Shardelle noted that within the last hour another forty-three linguists had come online, but that hour had also seen off sixty-two. Their number, now standing at just over seven hundred thousand, was in steady decline in the network. Comparative analyses with just about every language on record had been made. New languages had been generated for comparison – still no joy. Syntactic programs ranging from the deeply esoteric to the plain silly had been employed, but they had not come close to cracking one word, or a hint of a morpheme, of what was now being called The Gabble.

  What precisely did Yaw-craggle flog nabble goop, mean, or Scrzzz-besumber fleeble? Even the AIs seemed to be failing, and they were making comparative analyses across a huge range of data: an enormous list of environmental parameters including the creature’s location, the ambient temperature, variations in air mix, what the creature was looking at, hearing, smelling or otherwise sensing; the time of the day or night, what objects were in the sky; variations in the speakers themselves including size, sex, number of limbs and what they happened to be doing with them at the time, what had happened to them earlier. Occasionally concurrence did occur. Two gabbleducks had said yabber while peering into the distance and gesturing with one clawed limb. There had been other concurrences too. But utterly bewildering was that statistically, if the five hundred creatures under scrutiny had been generating random noise, there should be more concurrences than this. It was a maddeningly negative result. Shardelle, however, felt this was a negative that must indicate something.

  Shardelle disconnected her aug from the linguistic network and at once her sight and hearing returned. Plumped in a comfortable chair she glanced around inside her ATV, but inevitably her gaze centred on the screen that was presently showing the view from holocam 107. This one was her favourite gabbleduck – the biggest and weirdest of them all. The creature was sitting in a stand of flute grass and in this pose its body was pyramidal. Its three pairs of forelimbs were folded monkishly over the jut of its lower torso, one fore-talon of one huge black claw seemingly beating time to some unheard song. Its domed head was tilted down, its duck bill against its chest. Some of its tiara of emerald eyes were closed. Obviously it was taking time out to digest its latest meal whose bones lay neatly stacked beside it.

  What was known about this creature? Its double-helical Masadan equivalent of DNA was enormously long and contained coding enough for every species on this planet. But the sheer quantity of coding material did not necessarily mean the creature was complex – most of this could be parasitic and junk DNA. The first researchers into human DNA had been surprised to discover that lizards, lungfish and ferns possessed substantially more DNA than themselves, and that they had no more than common grass. What it did mean, however, was that as a species the gabbleducks were very old.

  They were omnivores; often supplementing their diet with flute grass rhizomes, fungi and, oddly, anything shiny they could lay their claws on. They possessed complex voice boxes, and as was already demonstrable, there seemed no reason for this. On the whole they were solitary creatures and spoke only to themselves. When they met it was usually only to mate or fight, or both. There was also no reason for them to carry structures in their skulls capable of handling vastly complex languages. Two thirds of their large convoluted brains they seemed hardly to use at all. In short: they were a puzzle.

  Shardelle stood, walked along the metal floor of the ATV and climbed up into the chainglass bubble of the cockpit. Checking the map screen she noted the transponder positions for the two hooders in the area, then chose a route to take her back to the Tagreb complex that avoided them completely. She had seen what had happened to an ATV and its four occupants when they ignored this simple rule and drove close to one of the creatures for a look, or rather, she had seen the torn and very small fragments that remained of both people and vehicle. Taking up the joystick she drove herself rather than be guided in by Rodol. As an afterthought she mentally sent the detach command to her aug and removed the chrome slug of sophisticated computer hardware from the side of her head. She had some thinking to do and found that easier while driving, bare-brained.

  Taxonomic and genetic research bases, Tagrebs, looked like giant iron tulip flowers when stored in the vast hold of the research vessel Beagle Infinity. Launched, a Tagreb maintained its shape during entry into a planetary atmosphere while its AI came online. The AI then slowed the Tagreb in lower atmosphere with fusion thrusters before finally descending on the chosen location using gravmotors. Upon landing the flower opened, folding four petals down to the ground. From this five plasmel domes inflated – one at the centre and one over each petal. Their internal structures – floors, ceilings, walls and stairs – were inflated at the same time. The AI then took a look around to decide how best to continue.

  Rodol, aware of the problems Masada might present, first injected a thick layer of a resin matrix into the boggy ground below to protect the base from the depredations of tricones – molluscan creatures that given time could grind their way through just about anything – before injecting the same substance into the hollow walls and floors of the structure itself. Next the AI woke its telefactors, which immediately took the requisite materials outside the base to construct an electrified perimeter fence and four gun towers. Unusually, these towers were supplied in this case with proton cannons capable of punching holes through thick armour, for some of the natives were anything but friendly. After three days the base was ready for the next stage. Automated landers descended inside the fence and the telefactors began bringing in supp
lies: food, bedding, nanoscopes, full-immersion VR suites, soaps and gels, nano micro and submacro assembler rigs, an aspidistra in a pot, autodocs, autofactories, holocams, coffee makers … Every item was slotted into its place or plugged in.

  On day five a hooder came to investigate, attacked the fence, then retreated leaving its rear segment behind – incinerated by one of the cannons. On day six Rodol brought the fusion reactor fully online, supplying power to the multitude of sockets throughout the base. Lights embedded in the ceilings were ready to come on. Sanitary facilities were ready to recycle waste. Rodol stabbed filter heads down into the ground to suck up water, which was first cracked for its oxygen to bring the internal atmosphere to requirements, and thereafter pumped into holding tanks. The humans, haimans and Golem arrived shortly afterwards; disembarking from shuttles with massive hover trunks gliding along behind them. Only a few days after was it discovered that the five gravplatforms were not nearly enough for those who wanted to do fieldwork. Grudgingly, Rodol cleared Polity funds to pay the local population for twenty aerofans and five fat-tyred all-terrain vehicles.

  Jonas arrived on foot, having been on the planet for six months getting to know the locals and many of the ECS monitors still assigned here. Six months later he raised in celebration a glass of malt whisky to the scene beyond the panoramic window of his upper-dome apartment and laboratory. It was in a befuddled state that two hours later he received the message through his aug.

  ‘Hi, Jonas,’ said Mary Cole.