The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  Jonas spotted something revealed where the cowl had lain and walked over. Carrion-eaters were thick on the ground there amid a tangle of bones and tatters of leathery skin. He had wondered why they had been so numerous around the hooder itself, for it seemed unlikely they could feed upon its substance before time and bacteria had softened it sufficiently. The creature had obviously gone to its death still clutching recent prey. He returned, picking up the saw on the way, to Shardelle.

  ‘Drag it over there.’ He pointed to the cliff. ‘We’ll spray with repellant and set up a big frame tent over it.’

  She looked askance at him.

  ‘Please,’ he added.

  The cowl, with two body segments still attached, sledded easily across the sand. Jonas took a tank of the repellant from the ATV, slung it from his shoulder and using a stemmed pressure sprayer, walked around this section of the beast liberally coating it. Carrion-eaters fled in every direction. The tent, which came in a large square package, he sat on the first body segment and activated from a distance. Within seconds the package spidered out long carbon-fibre legs, stabbed them into the ground, then dropped fabric down like a bashful woman quickly lowering her skirts.

  ‘Let’s get the equipment set up,’ Jonas said.

  Later he was delving into the cowl: pulling up jointed limbs that terminated in scythe blades as sharp and tough as chainglass, or in telescopic protuberances that looked like hollow drills; excavating one red eye from the carapace, jumping back when it fluoresced, laughing and returning to work; running an optical probe down into one small mouth to study the wealth of cutting and grinding gear inside.

  ‘You know, the present theory is that the hooder requires all this so it can deal with a kind of grazer living in the mountains. Those creatures feed on poisonous fungi, the toxins from which accumulate in the black fats layered in their bodies. When the hooders capture them under their hoods, they need to slice their way through their prey very meticulously, to eat only what are called the creature’s white fats.’ He glanced at Shardelle, who was watching with fascination.

  ‘They don’t kill their prey,’ she observed.

  ‘Apparently. When the hooder goes after a fungus grazer, the grazer immediately starts breaking down the black fat to provide itself with the energy to flee, and then its blood supply and muscles become toxic too. So any serious damage to either could release poisons into the uncontaminated white fat. The hooder dissects its prey, not even allowing it to bleed. It eventually dies of shock.’

  ‘The same with any prey it catches,’ Shardelle added. ‘Including us.’

  ‘I don’t believe it for a minute,’ said Jonas. ‘The fungus-grazers are only a small part of its diet, and many hooders don’t even range into the mountains.’

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘I just don’t know.’ He lifted out another jointed limb, this one terminating in a set of chisel-faced pincers. ‘All I do know is that when they’ve finished with their victim there’s usually nothing left larger than a coin.’

  He continued working, and did not notice till much later that the tent’s light had come on, and Shardelle had gone. Looking outside he saw that she had set up her own tent, and no light showed inside. He went back to work, only stopping in the morning to get something to eat and plenty to drink, and to then sit meditating for an hour while his asomnidapted body cleared its fatigue poisons. As Calypse gazed down and the rising sun etched fire across the horizon, he experienced a moment of deep calm clarity. He knew now, felt that somewhere, deep inside, he had always known. So much confirmed it. Total confirmation had come from close nanoscopic study of the carapace. The sun had breached the horizon when he returned inside to package his samples. Really he needed no more from this beast now. Others could come here if they wished.

  Shardelle wormed out of her tent, smelling coffee and feeling a deep overpowering need for it. For a moment she could not figure what was different, then she saw it: the frame tent was gone, the hooder’s cowl and two attached segments were in pieces. Jonas was sitting crosslegged on one of the limestone slabs, sipping a self-heating coffee. He gestured to another sealed cup resting nearby. She walked over to him.

  ‘You’ve finished?’ she asked incredulously.

  He grinned. ‘Amazing what you can achieve when you have no need for sleep. I’ve been working for Taxonomy for fifty-three years. In my last eighteen years of being asomnidapted I’ve done more work than in the previous thirty-five.’

  ‘Perhaps I should consider that for myself,’ said Shardelle, pulling the tab on her cup. She preferred the coffee from her machine in the Tagreb, but this convenience here was preferable. While she waited for her drink to heat she observed that he had a piece of carapace resting on a brushed-aluminium box before him.

  ‘Any conclusions?’ she asked, leaning her buttocks against a nearby slab.

  ‘Very definitely.’ He reached inside his coat and removed a small handheld gun. Shardelle recognized it as a quantum cascade, QC, laser.

  ‘I promise not to steal your research,’ she quipped.

  He grimaced. ‘It’s not the stealing I would worry about, but how it may well be hushed up.’ He pointed the laser at the carapace and fired. A wisp of smoke rose, picking out the beam in the air. There was a red glow at the point of contact, but whether from heat or simply reflected light, Shardelle could not tell. But nothing else was happening to the carapace.

  ‘You know, every piece I’ve managed to study has been old and partially broken down by bacteria. These are the freshest remains I’ve ever studied.’ Still he was firing the laser, and still the carapace was unaffected. ‘You see, a piece of old carapace would have started disintegrating by now – that’s because certain nanostructures inside it would have broken down.’ He turned off the laser, then abruptly put his bare hand flat down on the carapace.

  Shardelle leaned forward. ‘An insulator?’

  ‘You’d think.’ He poured coffee on the aluminium box and it immediately sizzled into steam.

  ‘Shit!’ Shardelle squatted down beside the box to peer closely at the carapace. She then looked up at Jonas. ‘Conductive … superconductive?’

  ‘Carbon fullerene nanotubes. When was the last time you saw something like that naturally produced?’

  ‘About never.’

  ‘They’re laced through the carapace material, which bears some resemblance to the shock-resistant composite laminates we use in our spaceships. The interesting part is that the nanotubes link down deep into the hooder’s body. I’ll have to look closely at the scans but my guess is that the more you heat up one of these bastards the faster it moves.’ He picked up the piece of carapace. ‘Of course, though you won’t see stuff like this naturally produced, you can find it elsewhere.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He looked at her directly. ‘Polity battlefield armour.’

  ‘What? … What are you saying?’

  ‘The genome was the first clue: so short, so concise, so exact. What I’m saying is that hooders, though living creatures, are artefacts; biogenetic artefacts.’

  Ahead lay a plain of flattened flute grass, boring and level as it disappeared into misty distance. Shardelle set the ATV on automatic, monitored by Rodol, and decided it was time, as Jonas was now doing, to check into the virtual world. She took her aug from a pocket of her envirosuit and plugged it in the permanent plug behind her ear, closed her eyes and booted up.

  First she checked her messages and was appalled to find over four thousand awaiting her attention. She opened only those from recognized sources. Some of it was personal; from her brother, from two of her three children, one from her third husband, another from her great-grandmother. The first were easy enough to answer with pages from her diary run through a personalizing program. The one from her great-grandmother, who was a xenobiologist of some standing, she took rather more care over. As she laid out the reply, detailing her frustrations and nascent theories, she wondered if Jonas knew her great-grandmother. She
had been in Xeno for seventy years and he in Taxonomy for fifty-three, perhaps they had met at some time? Other messages updated her with news from the Tagreb. A gabbleduck’s bill had been discovered in the mountains. In her absence it had been measured and analysed ad nauseam, but nothing new learnt. Still other messages were debating the merits of this linguistic theory or that one, and it was with a sinking sensation that she opened some of the messages from unrecognized senders to find links to where papers on The Gabble had been published. She turned her attention to the linguistic net.

  The hardcore had now dropped down to below a thousand. It seemed that most of the lunatic fringe had dissipated, hence the appearance of all those papers. Most serious theorists did not publish until they had something worth publishing. That was accepted protocol to prevent too much rubbish clogging up the informational highways. Nothing new on the net. Returning to her messages she deleted every one from unknown sources. Only then did she spot the message from the haiman Kroval on Earth:

  ‘Every bird sings for a reason, similarly do dogs bark. Perhaps the Anglic similarity is misleading and the morphemes longer than we would suppose … maybe the length of a gabbleduck’s life. Perhaps they are all saying the same thing?’

  That made Shardelle pause. She groped for meaning and it seemed to her to be lurking out of reach.

  ‘The meat is forbidden,’ the dracoman child had said.

  Something there … something.

  After time her frustration became too much and she removed her aug. Once again taking up the controls of the ATV, she noticed that Rodol had reset its course, taking the vehicle away from the big gabbleduck. The reason was obvious: a hooder only five kilometres away from it. With a quick glance at Jonas, Shardelle manually overrode that and put them back on course. She was damned if she was going to miss seeing it on the way back to the Tagreb. Jonas had made his big discovery. Maybe she could come out of this with at least something.

  A minute later, Jonas looked at her and said, ‘Rodol just informed me that you are taking us closer to a hooder than might be safe.’

  Shardelle pointed at the map screen.

  He nodded. ‘Just be ready to run. Hooders move damned fast when they want to.’

  Shardelle felt almost angered by his reasonable attitude, and felt too ashamed to analyse too closely the reason for that.

  Afternoon, and they were back into still-standing flute grass. Shardelle spotted the gabbleduck when they were still kilometres away from it. It sat; a pyramid of alien flesh, its green multi-eyed gaze fixed on the horizon, bill swinging gently from side to side.

  ‘How close would be safe?’ Jonas asked when they were only a kilometre away.

  Shardelle looked down at her hand gripping the joystick. Her knuckles were white. ‘I’m going to approach it. I’m going to walk up to it. You can stay in the ATV if you want.’

  Five hundred metres, two hundred metres. Shardelle felt her frustration increase. The gabbleduck had not even turned to look at them. It was as if it could not be bothered to acknowledge their presence. At a hundred metres she just trickled the ATV forward.

  ‘That thing is fucking immense,’ said Jonas. He had abandoned his seat to go into the back of the vehicle. Returned now she saw that he was clutching an ECS pulse-rifle.

  ‘What do you intend to do with that?’

  ‘I’ll just keep watch. If it goes for you I can maybe drive it off, though seeing it now I realize it might just ignore this popgun.’

  Shardelle nodded, and brought the ATV to a halt ten metres away from the monstrous creature. Turning on her shimmer-shield visor she manoeuvred past him and headed for the door. When she finally stepped down onto the rhizome mat and began pushing her way through the flute grasses, she heard The Gabble.

  ‘Umbel shockadisc po frzzzt,’ gabbleduck grumbled to itself.

  A few paces took her out of the standing flute grasses to where the creature sat. She recognized the stack of grazer bones beside it. The gabbleduck had returned to a previous location.

  ‘Pthog,’ the gabbleduck intoned. ‘Erb scugalug.’

  It just made Shardelle angry. She marched forward and round until she was standing directly in front of the creature. It was indeed massive: folds of flesh hanging down from its body and almost concealing its powerful rear limbs. When it moved through the flute grasses its three sets of two forelimbs slotted neatly together to form two composite forelimbs, so it seemed to run on all fours like, as Jonas had observed, a bear. Now those forelimbs were folded on its chest, and sat like this it seemed some immense alien Buddha. Shardelle glared up at it.

  ‘I’ve listened to over a thousand hours of that crap!’ she shouted. ‘What the fuck are you saying?’

  ‘Frogijig unth,’ it observed.

  All so close to meaning, but no meaning there. Returning her attention to its fleshy torso she saw that it had acquired a whole ecology all its own. The gabble-duck was crawling with prawnlike crustaceans. Where these were most numerous was around wet-looking sores, and the occasional lumpish growth leaking milky fluid.

  ‘Shardelle! Shardelle! Get back here quick!’

  Those crustaceans …

  A sudden excitement filled her. They were the very same species they had seen crawling around the dead hooder: carrion-eaters, they never fed on living flesh, but like vultures possessed an instinct for death.

  ‘Shardelle!’

  This gabbleduck was dying! She would have her corpse!

  Then, through her aug: ‘This is Rodol. You must flee your current location at once. A hooder approaches.’

  What?

  Shardelle turned and gazed out across the plain the gabbleduck viewed. A black train was heading towards her, weaving back and forth. The hooder bore some resemblance to a giant millipede with its segments and many paddlelike legs. It also moved with the fast oiled smoothness of that arthropod. Shardelle froze to the spot, not out of fear, but through incredible angry frustration. She could not have this taken away from her, not now. It just was not fair.

  ‘For fuck sake get in here! Maybe it’ll ignore us!’

  The ATV was parked right next to her. She had not heard it arrive.

  ‘Brogon ahul bul zzzk,’ said the gabbleduck.

  She suddenly realized how jealous and stupid she had been, and that both she and Jonas might pay for that. She ran for the door of the ATV and piled inside, hauled herself forward. Jonas was in the driving seat trying to get the thing into reverse. He did not take the power off and with a crunching shudder the vehicle stalled.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

  They both looked through the screen. The hooder was close, its front end rising off the ground like the striking head of a cobra. Inside its cowl was a mass of glittering knifish movement through which two vertical rows of red eyes glared. It was not focused on them. It was focused on the gabbleduck. Surely it would respond to this. Shardelle looked at the exterior intercom Jonas had been calling her through to check it was still on. No need really. She could hear the hard oily clattering of the hooder’s movement.

  ‘Brogon,’ the gabbleduck repeated, waving a black claw in the air.

  The hooder froze. The gabbleduck turned its bill towards the ATV. It blinked some of its emerald eyes, then returned its attention to the hooder. After a moment it reached out with one claw and made an unmistakably dismissive gesture. The hooder sank down, turned in a gleaming arc and sped away.

  ‘How do I get this damned thing started again?’ Jonas asked

  ‘There’s no need. It’s gone.’

  He snorted a harsh laugh. ‘Yeah, right. Well when you’ve quit having your moment of epiphany, perhaps you’d like to take a look at the map screen.’

  Shardelle did so, and for a moment could not make much of the graphics displayed there. They didn’t seem to make much sense.

  ‘About thirty of them,’ said Jonas.

  Then it did make sense. There were thirty hooders scattered all around them. They were moving, but seemed to be hol
ding off for the present.

  ‘You say the bill of a gabbleduck was found in the mountains?’ Jonas asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Jonas turned off the ATV’s engine. Moving the vehicle back into a stand of flute grass had been the best they could do. Hopefully the hooders would attack the gabbleduck and be too sated by that to attack them. There was no way to hide completely. He had studied the hooder sensorium and knew it would pick up body heat even through the skin of the ATV. Leaving the engine running would generate more heat to further attract attention.

  ‘Nothing else?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s damned annoying. There should be more – bones at least.’

  They were having a perfectly sensible conversation, sitting in the ATV, waiting to die. The nearest monitor force had sent a transport, but that would not be here for another hour. The hooders, it now seemed evident, were holding off until the gabbleduck finally expired. That could happen at any moment.

  ‘But the tricones grind away all remains, which was why that bill was found in the mountains.’

  Jonas wondered for just how many millions of years the tricones had been grinding stuff away. He auged through to the Tagreb and directly into the database maintained by those researching the molluscs. It did not take him long to discover that the tricone genome was just as concise and devoid of rubbish as the hooder’s. He connected then to the AI.

  ‘Rodol, are you listening in?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Good.’

  To Shardelle he said, ‘Three ancient races, whose physical technological remains probably would not fill the back of this ATV.’

  She glanced at him, seemed about to say something, then abruptly returned her attention to the gabbleduck. He thought she was swallowing tears.

  ‘Tricones are biogenetic artefacts as well,’ he added.