The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  She was standing in the middle of his apartment – to his perception, for the augram was being played directly into his mind.

  ‘Hello, Mary.’ He toasted her with his glass.

  ‘This is not real-time or interactive so don’t bother asking questions. I just want you to know that one of our coastal survey drones picked up precisely what you want, here …’ The location downloaded into his aug. ‘That’s only five hundred and thirty kilometres from you. Have a nice one.’

  As the image blinked out Jonas was already groping for his aldetox. ‘Rodol, I need the field autopsy gear, the big stuff, and I need it now!’ he bellowed.

  ‘What you require is available, but unfortunately the transport situation has not improved. All the gravplatforms are out and aerofans will not suffice,’ the AI replied.

  Jonas gulped water to wash down the pills. He was already starting to feel sober even though the aldetox had yet to take effect. ‘What about the ATVs?’

  ‘There are three here. Two require new drive shafts, which one of the autofactories is currently manufacturing. The other is assigned to Shardelle Garadon. Perhaps you should speak with her.’

  Jonas returned to his chair while the aldetox took effect. Any of the ATVs had room enough to carry all the equipment he would require, initially, then came the problem of bringing specimens back. Perhaps he could get some help there from ECS? Something for a later date, he thought – plenty of work to do before then. After a moment he made a search for Shardelle’s aug address, found it, and tried to make contact. Annoyingly her aug was offline. Instead, he found her apartment address within the Tagreb, stood, and unsteadily headed for the door.

  Fifteen hundred and thirty-two linguists remained: the hardcore. The rest dismissed The Gabble as having less meaning than the sounds lower animals made. At least those sounds had a reason, some logical syntax, some meaning related to alarm, pain, pleasure or the basic ‘I’m over here, let’s fuck’.

  Unfortunately only a third of that hardcore consisted of linguists who Shardelle felt had anything meaningful to contribute. Of those, one Kroval – a haiman based on Earth who in the silicon part of his mind held nearly every known language in existence – had the most to contribute. His analysis fined down to, ‘The phonemes are 80 per cent the anglic of Masada, and their disconnection from coherent meaning seems almost deliberate. I can say with certainty that they are not parroting the language, and perhaps a degree of understandable human paranoia engendered by the unknown, or possibly unknowable, leads me to feel they might be deriding it.’

  The latest offering from a small group of the others, who Shardelle labelled the lunatic fringe, had been, ‘It must be what is not said: meaning can be attributed to the synergetic whole of negatives. We just need to isolate the network of disaffirmative monads in a …’ and so it had continued until the speaker in question seemed in danger of disappearing up his own backside. It was this last that had led Shardelle to disconnect her aug and cast it aside.

  They seemed to be getting nowhere. In fact, over the last six months, more imponderables had entered the equation. On the biological front little more was known than had been obtained by close scanning and sampling, and that had cost them fourteen mobile scanners and seven beetle-sized sampling drones – gabbleducks swatted them like flies and then, if they were shiny, ate them. What Shardelle had been waiting for, like so many others in the Tagreb, was a death. Other researchers had obtained their subjects’ corpses: a siluroyne, a heroyne, loads of mud snakes. But it seemed gabbleducks were in no hurry to die and not one corpse or any remains had been picked up by the vast number of ECS drones constantly scanning the planet. Shardelle wondered about that: why so much scanning activity, why the quarantine areas still, what was it that ECS was keeping quiet? No matter, she had enough puzzles to concern her at present. Perhaps she should slip out one night with a pulse rifle and solve the corpse problem. The Gabble, and its source, frustrated her that much.

  Time to sleep, she decided. Thinking like that was a sure way to get her expelled from the Tagreb and the planet. Nothing gets killed, unless in self-defence, until its sentience level has been properly assessed.

  Just then, as she was about to head for her bed, there came a hammering at her door. Shardelle grimaced and considered ignoring it, but there was urgency in that hammering – maybe the corpse? She opened the door expecting to see one of the others on her team. Who was this?

  He held out a hand. ‘Jonas Clyde … hooders. May I come in?’

  Shardelle stood aside and waved him into her apartment. He looked younger than she had expected, but that meant nothing. His blond hair was cropped and he moved with athletic confidence. His face was tanned and his eyes electric green. His hands looked … capable. He scanned around quickly, his gaze coming to rest on her screen. The big gabbleduck was lolloping through the flute grasses.

  ‘Moves like a grizzly bear,’ he observed.

  She of course recognized his name. Jonas Clyde was something of a legend in Taxonomy and usually studied exactly what he wanted on any new world. It had come as a pleasant surprise to Shardelle, upon hearing he was on this mission, that he had not chosen the gabbleducks.

  ‘Substantially larger, though,’ she said, closing the door.

  He obviously auged through to her screen control for figures appeared along the bottom. ‘Eight tonnes – not something you’d want to be standing in the path of.’ He turned to her. ‘I hear they eat people.’

  ‘Chew, certainly … coffee?’ She walked over to her coffee maker – an antique almost three centuries old – and began making an espresso.

  ‘Yes please – same for me. You say “chew”?’

  ‘Humans obviously disagree with their digestion, but if someone annoys them sufficiently they chew them up and spit out the pieces. But of course, like everything else with them, their behaviour is puzzling. Gabbleducks have pursued human prey across hundreds of kilometres, for no particular reason, and killed them. There was one case of a hunter shooting a clip from an Optek into one creature and it ignoring him completely. A recent one we observed via holocam: a gabbleduck abandoned its territory, crossed five hundred kilometres, and drowned a pond worker in her squirm pond. We don’t know why.’ Bringing two cups of espresso over she nodded to her sofa. He sat down. Placing the cups on the table between she took the armchair opposite. ‘I was surprised you didn’t choose them as your subject for study.’

  He grimaced. ‘They were my initial choice, but I have experience with dangerous fauna so it was suggested, rather strongly, that I choose the hooders. Obviously gabbleducks are dangerous, but not so lethal that it was felt necessary to fit every one with a transponder to know its location.’

  ‘I see,’ Shardelle nodded, sipped her espresso. ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘I want your ATV,’ he replied.

  ‘Nothing if not direct. What for?’

  ‘Hooders are long-lived and practically indestructible.’ He paused. ‘That’s a puzzle too – we were told by the locals that when hooders reach a certain age they break into separate segments and each segment grows into a new hooder. This planet should be overrun with them … perhaps some mechanism based on predator prey ratio … ’ He sat gazing off into space.

  ‘You were saying,’ Shardelle prompted.

  ‘Yes … yes. They are practically indestructible but for one big fault. As you know, the sea tides here are vicious – the moons and Calypse all interact in that respect. Hooders sometimes stray down onto the eastern banks at low tide, get caught there, then washed into deep water and eventually drown. It takes a while, but it’s deep off the banks and hooders are very heavy.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Occasionally a hooder corpse will get dragged up by the bank current and deposited ashore.’

  ‘I see – you have your corpse.’

  ‘And no way of getting a large field autopsy kit to it.’

  Shardelle gazed up at the screen. ‘Where is it?’

&
nbsp; Jonas touched his aug for a moment, frowned, then pointed. ‘Five hundred and thirty kilometres thataway – straight to the coast.’

  Shardelle nodded at the screen. ‘He is about three hundred kilometres in the same direction.’

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘Of course you can use my ATV, but under one condition: I’m coming with you.’ Shardelle knew there was more to her decision than the gabbleduck’s presence on the route. There was the escape from the frustration of her research, which in that moment seemed to have translated into sexual frustration.

  From the chainglass bubble cockpit Jonas glanced into the back of the ATV. Apparently these had been used as troop transports during the rebellion against the theocracy. Now either side of it was stacked from floor to ceiling with aluminium and plasmel boxes, strapped back against the sides, with only a narrow gangway leading back and elbowing right to the side door. It had been necessary for them to remove much of Shardelle’s equipment, including the chair, but she did not seem to mind. He realized she was glad of this excuse for a journey to take her away from the meticulously boring research into gabbleduck biology, and the seemingly endless and fruitless analysis of The Gabble.

  ‘How long will it take us, do you think?’ he asked, now looking ahead. They were leaving the Tagreb enclosure, rolling across an area of trammelled flute grass through which new red-green shoots were spearing.

  ‘How long do you want it to take?’

  ‘Your meaning?’

  ‘Sixty hours if we go non-stop. Rodol can guide the ATV during the night … do you need sleep?’

  ‘No – I’m asomnidapted.’

  ‘Ah, well I’m not.’ She glanced back. ‘I guess I could bed down there overnight.’

  Jonas shook his head. Now they were on their way his urgency to get to the dead hooder had decreased. ‘No, let’s stop during night time. I may not need to sleep, but I don’t want to spend that long just sat here. There’s camping equipment in the back so you can get your head down.’

  Shardelle guided the ATV down one of the many paths crushed through the flute grass and leading away from the Tagreb.

  ‘And what will you do meanwhile?’

  He tapped his aug. ‘Continue my research. Rodol is sequencing the hooder genome and transmitting the results to me. I’m running programs to isolate alleles and specific coding sequences. I intend to built a full virtual model of hooder growth.’

  ‘But first you need to be rid of the parasitic and junk DNA to get to the basic genome.’

  ‘Yeah, obviously – I’ve got programs working on that first.’

  ‘It’ll probably be a massive task. The assumption has always been that hooders are the most ancient creature on the planet’s surface. The gabbleduck is probably younger, and its genome is immense.’

  ‘Yes, quite probably,’ Jonas replied, then after a moment, ‘I don’t really like the term junk DNA.’

  Once, centuries ago, no one had known what all the extra coding was for. Now it was known that it was history: old defensive measures that no longer applied, viruses incorporated into the genome, patches much like additional pieces of computer code to cover weaknesses in a program. Some biologists likened much of it to the scar tissue of a species, but Jonas felt that not entirely true because it could on occasion provide survival strategies. Perhaps a better analogy would be to the scar tissue and consequent experience of an old warrior.

  ‘You have a better one?’ Shardelle asked.

  ‘Reserve, complementary or supplementary.’

  ‘Very good.’

  By midmorning the sun was passing underneath Calypse, throwing the gas giant into silhouette. Jonas spotted the snout spurs of mud snakes cleaving the rhizome layer ahead of them – attracted by the vibrations the vehicle set up – but they disappeared from sight, perhaps recognizing the inedibility of ATV tyres. Checking her map screen Shardelle turned the vehicle away from flattened track and nosed it into flute grasses standing three metres tall. The cockpit skimmed this, its lower half in the grass. A faint hissing sound impinged under the varying hum of the hydrogen motor and hydrostatic gearing. Eventually they broke from the flute grasses and began negotiating a compacted slope where the old grasses had been flattened by the wind. When they reached a low peak a vista opened to one side of them. A fence stretched out of sight in two directions. Over the other side the ground was black, hazed with occasional reddish patches where new grass was sprouting.

  ‘Quarantine area,’ Shardelle observed. ‘You were here for six months before the Tagreb arrived. Do you know what they’re so worried about?’

  ‘No monitor will answer direct questions, but by the methods being employed I’d guess biogenetic weaponry was employed.’ He gestured to the blackened terrain. ‘What you see here is only the flash-over area – the perimeter of a firestorm. I’d guess that the hypocentre was the strike point of an orbital beam weapon. They burnt that inner area right down to the bedrock and now they’re watching to make sure nothing survived.’

  ‘Seems rather excessive.’

  Jonas decided to tell her the whole story, and wondered if she would think the actions ECS had taken here so excessive then. ‘You have to consider: how did one man “steal” a Polity dreadnought? Mary Cole, a monitor I know, let slip that the research vessel Jerusalem was here for a time. You know what that means.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Jain technology?’

  He nodded. ‘A few fragments sit in the Tranquillity Museum on the moon. That part of the museum can be instantly ejected and destroyed by CTD. It seems that fact is the biggest part of the attraction of the exhibit, because what sits there in a chainglass case just looks like a few bits of coral. It’s the potential though: a complexity of dead nanomachinery that still, as far as I know, defies analysis.’

  ‘Someone used active Jain technology?’

  ‘It would seem so. First to steal the dreadnought, then use both dreadnought and technology to hit this place.’

  ‘I’m surprised anyone has been allowed here at all.’

  ‘I’d guess the AI view is that they can’t be overprotective. Three distinct and extinct ancient races have been identified: the Jain, Atheter and Csorians. Remnants of their technologies exist, so it’s no good us burying our heads in the sand in the hope they’ll go away. We have to learn how to deal with them, hopefully before we run head-first into something that might destroy us.’

  ‘And of course there are those that are not extinct, like whatever created Dragon.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  She looked at him, waiting for something more, then prompted: ‘Do you think we’ll ever get the full story of what happened here?’

  ‘The bones will be fleshed out in time. We know the Theocracy was supplying Separatists on Cheyne III and used technology, bought from Dragon, to destroy an Outlink station. The Polity supported the rebellion here which finally overthrew the Theocracy. Dragon changed sides, apparently because it did not like blame being attributed to it for the destruction of the station, and assisted that rebellion before suiciding on the surface. The guy who stole the dreadnought? Some Separatist coming here on the side of the Theocracy. He and his ship were incinerated while pursuing Polity agents to the Elysium smelting facilities.’

  ‘I heard that Agent Ian Cormac was involved,’ said Shardelle.

  Jonas snorted. It amazed him how scientists, whose entire ethos was based on logic and empirical proof, sometimes believed complete rubbish.

  ‘There is no such person,’ he stated, which killed the conversation for some time.

  Shardelle listened to the engine wind down, and to the slow ticking of cooling metal. She had parked the ATV on a hillock that she knew extended in a ring some kilometres in diameter. It was a good place to camp, the ground too dry for mud snakes. She liked the view as well and felt safer being able to see for kilometres in either direction. Rodol was watching by satellite and would warn if anything was getting too close, but this vantage gave them the opportunity
to eyeball any of the natives and decide themselves whether it might be necessary to run. She turned to Jonas.

  His eyes were closed, but obviously, not needing to, he was not sleeping. He was auging – probably deep in some virtuality in which the hooder genome lay across his entire horizon and godlike he peeled away clumps of it for analysis and compiled the resultant data. She studied his profile, the hard intensity of his features, the natural tan that came from spending a lot of time outside. Eventually she unstrapped herself and left him to it, turning on her shimmer-shield visor and snagging up her field tent and related equipment on the way out of the ATV. The landscape was red gilded by the nebula when he joined her an hour later. She was sitting in her camp chair before her tent, her visor flicking off and on as she sipped coffee.

  ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘I tend to get annoyed when anything blurs my focus.’

  ‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘But I’ve been focused on The Gabble for so long I need a break. Incidentally I’ve no belief in mythical superhumans and perfectly understand that they are an AI creation to make us feel better about ourselves.’

  ‘So you don’t see Horace Blegg’s hand in all this?’ he queried, raising an eyebrow.

  She laughed. ‘No … I see here some ECS action which for a while will be considered a net gain for the Polity until the dirt starts to surface.’

  ‘Mmmm … and talking of dirt: Rodol has finished sequencing the hooder genome.’

  ‘Dirt?’

  ‘There is none, or rather, surprisingly little.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Still a lot of analysis to do, but thus far we’ve found nothing that can be identified as parasitic in the genome. There are, however, a vast number of superfluities, accounting for immune-response identifiers.’

  ‘That makes no sense. If it’s old enough to acquire so high a level of immune response, it will have acquired parasitic DNA as well.’

  ‘You’d think.’

  There was something he was not telling her. She let it rest. At present she felt the most relaxed she had been in some time – just thinking about nothing and watching the world. She did not need his frustrations right then.