Even at organic processing speed, Sergio lost track of the time they spent at relative speed. The Po Chane came and went, only Bluothesh himself spending much time chatting with the former human. Sergio knew better than to trust the rapport that developed between people with the sort of relationship dynamic he and Bluothesh had, but he was unable to deny a certain guilty liking for the terrifying spectre.
Aside from Kitander Po Chane, there were a few hundred Fergunak on board the great grey leviathan that was their draft-horse. The Flesh Eater was no longer permitting full-scale water production and extrusion into her superstructure, so the sharks were contained in the great grey, and they weren’t particularly scintillating company – although they did launch the occasional sabotage attempt or other devilry that kept things moderately entertaining. After one such attempt caused an explosion that the Flesh Eater only barely managed to contain within her own internal chambers, she sent in a half-dozen of the Po Chane to either kill or disable the ‘organic components’ of their transportation system, and that was the end of that.
They were flying essentially blind, having forced the Fergunak to lay a course to the coordinates where they’d picked up the Flesh Eater in the first place, but otherwise not having any control over the jump. Furthermore, Sergio was not accustomed to perpetual consciousness without the biological separation of waking and sleeping, intake and digestion and output, heartbeat and respiration. After a while it all became a blur, exacerbated by his occasional dips of indeterminate duration into computer-time.
Finally, though, they approached the coordinates the Flesh Eater had forced the Fergunak to dig out of their navigation history and return to. With mingled relief and apprehension, Sergio almost-felt them flip back over into standard reality.
Immediately, Sergio felt himself pulled into computer-processing time.
“This is not our intended destination,” the Flesh Eater said shrilly.
“Are you sure?” Sergio said lazily, accessing what he could of the great grey leviathan’s navigation logs. His access was cut in moments – indeed, with a sluggish lurch the Flesh Eater once again disgorged her foreign contents and reconfigured to her minimum volume and maximum density and strength – but what he managed to pick up pleased and relieved him beyond measure. “It seems like the intended destination to me.”
“What have you done?”
“Me? Nothing,” Sergio said innocently. “I warned you about the Fergunak, didn’t I? About how they hold grudges? About how they lack a sense of proportionate response?” the Flesh Eater remained silent, although even at these accelerated registers Sergio could feel the hard white substance of her body trembling, tearing under the forces she was attempting futilely to withstand. “I was fairly sure that the Fergies would anticipate your using their relative drive to get back to your point of origin, especially once all the other available superluminal drives in the volume were disabled and there was no more chance of drawing in any new victims. The stellar trawl being burned out and all.”
“You knew–!”
“I hoped,” Sergio admitted. “I didn’t know, not for sure. But it seemed like a fairly elementary first response – if an enemy gets control of your systems and wants to use you to get around, make sure they can’t get where they want to go. It was the only parameter they could really control. Of course they were going to overwrite the bonefields coordinates with some other location. Pretty obvious really, if you have any experience with Fergunak at all.”
“My secondary weapons will kill your friends,” the Flesh Eater said, her voice high and brittle. “When we do not return … or at least keep them stranded in deep space until their dying days.”
“I doubt it,” Sergio said. “If my friends – and the Draka’s Fergunak – did their jobs, your secondary weapons were destroyed a minute or two after we went into soft-space. Chances are, they’ve fixed their relative drives by now and gotten on with their lives.”
“Do you know where they’ve dropped us, Captain Malachi?” the Flesh Eater hissed.
“Again, I don’t know for sure,” Sergio replied, looking out through his chamber-surface at the frozen form of Bluothesh Po Chane where he floated near the entrance to the room Sergio called home. The twisted Blaran appeared to have snagged in mid-fall, either caught off-guard by the ship’s abrupt reconfiguration or by some other interference. It was rare to see the gaunt, pale creatures wrong-footed, and seeing it from computer-time was even more amusing. “I don’t know for sure,” he repeated, “but if my quick and dirty scoop of the gridnet is accurate … we’re quite close to the galactic core, near the so-called Great Ice – the ribbon of comets that form the native habitat of the aki’Drednanth. And – unless I’m wrong – we’ve been dropped inside the last stable orbit of a black hole,” the ship did not respond, again – her whole form, the room in which Kitander Po Chane hung, and the chamber in which the last earthly remains of Sergio Malachi were suspended, was thrumming now, seemingly on the brink of shaking itself to pieces. “I understand the aki’Drednanth call this particular black hole Deadshepherd. I’m not sure why,” he waited again. “I assume, if you had the power to fly us out of this, you already would have,” he went on when the Flesh Eater maintained her trembling silence. “I assume you shed all our excess baggage, including our relative drive, in order to maximise your hull shielding,” he waited. “Out of curiosity,” he said when the ship refused to answer him, “how much longer can you withstand the gravitational forces of a black hole? I mean, I’m impressed, but if you could just hurry up and die already–”
“You have absolutely no conception of what you have done,” the Flesh Eater said, sounding paradoxically calm. “Your very question has no meaning.”
“Well, just for example,” Sergio persisted, “do you have time to explain what you mean by that?” more strange, deep-water vibration was the only response he got to this. “Maybe I should hurry things along,” he said, “go back to organic time and see what Bluothesh has to say about–”
“You fool,” the Flesh Eater hissed. “You’re already operating at organic time.”
Sergio would have blinked if he could. He looked again at the suspended figure of Po Chane in the doorway.
“Oh,” he said.
“We have been here, in relative terms,” the Flesh Eater said, “for over a hundred and fifty billion years.”
“Oh,” Sergio said again. He waited, feeling the thrumming of the vessel around him. “Well, if it’s any consolation,” he heard himself saying, “all my friends are probably dead, right?”
There was another long, trembling silence.
And then the Flesh Eater laughed.
Ghåål’s Ark
I
Gandicon Ghåål was not a widely respected man. He lived on the outskirts of his village, not because he’d been driven there but because the village had formed around a centre that just happened to put him on the outskirts. Except it didn’t just happen to do that. It did that, by the will of the people, because the people just didn’t like him all that much.
And Gandicon didn’t much care. He was elderly – in fact, he was downright antique. He’d hit his Third and Final Prime late, it had come on him almost blissfully slowly, and the post-Prime fade had been merciful in its gentleness, free of the traditionally accompanying collapses and complications. His only real failing, at least before the hallucinations started, was a slight hardness of hearing in comparison to his fellow villagers. And even that, he exaggerated for the dual reasons of not wishing to rub their faces in his culturally unseemly vitality, and the convenience of the fact that anything important enough to be worth listening to would probably be considered worth repeating. By and large, however, he’d remained hale and healthy – a state of affairs that gave every indication, medically, of persisting for the foreseeable future with little or no change.
It wasn’t unheard-of for Molren to live to Gandicon’s age, sometimes longer. Especially a Molran of Gandicon’s caste. But it w
as unusual. He was the oldest Lawkeep in the region of Bonshoo Drop, but that in itself wasn’t a sufficient rarity to make him a celebrated part of the Bonshoo Drop community. It wasn’t even enough to make him vaguely appreciated. It was, in fact, just about enough to make him an annoying piece of ancient local baggage.
And Gandicon Ghåål would probably be the first to admit, with a serene lack of concern that was quite common to those of his demographic, that he only had himself to blame for this prevailing opinion. He didn’t put in a whole lot of effort, and hadn’t for the past five or six hundred years.
Gandicon Ghåål was over five thousand years old.
II
The hallucinations had begun a few days ago, but they’d been subtle at the start. Easily mistaken for natural phenomena, the result of sensory infirmity, even – in a couple of bump-in-the-night cases – pranks performed by local youngsters. It didn’t help that the first ones had taken place while it was dark.
Molren were not naturally suited to living on planets with diurnal cycles. That is to say, they could handle it perfectly well, but that wasn’t the sort of environment they’d evolved in and it would still be a number of very drawn-out lifetimes before any major physiological changes took place – if they ever did. It wasn’t after all, as if they had any sort of evolutionary imperative at this stage in their development. Molren didn’t sleep, living only with slight lulls in their cognitive rhythms and metabolisms to allow their brains to process experiences and their bodies to purge toxins. It didn’t noticeably slow them down. A lulling Molran was still more than a match for any of the native wildlife even when it was wide awake. Ever since they’d arrived, they’d adapted as best they could to the strange new environment – few species adapted like the Molren – but it would be a slow process.
It wasn’t strange when the planet turned its back on the local star and darkness fell across the sky. It was all any of them, even Ghåål, had ever known. But it was still a phenomenon accompanied by a shift in perceptions and environmental effects, and the ever-wakeful Molren often found it disorienting. It would be many more generations before they were truly accustomed to it. The planet’s rotation on its axis and its orbit around its sun didn’t quite conform with the so-called Firstmade calendar that the Molren had followed for the duration of their known history, but it was close enough.
The planet’s rotation on its axis, its orbit around the local star … Gandicon still thought of the astral bodies in these terms, even though he’d been born here. He was only second generation, and that was a rarity. Most of the population curve was strictly spaced out in the third- to fifth-generation demographics.
The Molren endured the night periods, even enjoyed them in their own way. Molren would always adapt, on an intellectual level even if physiological changes were minimal and scarcely necessary. Gandicon quite liked night-time, even though it could be disorienting. The local nocturnal wildlife became active and grew louder, the usual daytime sounds seemed to shift back into a softer rhythm in counterpoint, and even the shapes of things seemed to change as the shadows deepened. The temperature dropped too, and he rather approved of that. It seemed right, as though the planet were opening itself to the freezing cold of space, the illusory warmth of the sun peeling back to show a hint of the true nature of things. The regular sweep of starry blackness across the sky, the view of the cosmic void it offered … you could sit on your porch and stare up into the cold and distant past. Light from fires a million years dead poured down onto the blissfully spinning little world.
But when the darkness came, and the hallucinations rode in on its wings, Gandicon hadn’t recognised them for what they were. Not at first.
He wondered about that, as things unfolded. He cursed it, not that it made much sense to do so. It wasn’t as if a few days more or less would have made any difference to the ultimate outcome, would have changed anything he did or anything that happened as a result. The work of decades, the work of centuries … what was a few revolutions of the globe, in comparison to that? But he couldn’t help but berate himself.
What if he’d been able to figure it out right away? What if he’d started sooner, thought things through more clearly, made an honest-to-goodness plan instead of rambling off on his initial age-bleached instincts? He was still pretty focussed and methodical, for an old fellow, but he readily admitted he wasn’t as sharp as a younger man. What if he hadn’t waved off those first few events as an illusion of the darkness, the action of foraging animals, the high spirits of a pair of local kids?
What if the crystal had been able to communicate with him properly? What if it had found a better mouthpiece for its message?
When the hallucinations finally manifested in broad daylight, removing all doubt, it was a shift of an entire order of magnitude – in complexity, in clarity, in certainty. Gandicon’s mood was propelled from mild concern about his cerebral integrity, straight through the conviction that he was in fact hallucinating, and on to a reasonable certainty that what he was seeing was actually real.
But then, that was what people who hallucinated thought, wasn’t it?
Molren were only prone to sensory-input irregularities under fairly exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, being in excess of fifty centuries of age was one of those. At least in his case, Gandicon became certain what he was seeing was real – but not precisely in a delusional sense. He was convinced, once the visions began manifesting by daylight, that he was indeed seeing them – but that he was the victim of a hoax.
This, too, cost him some precious time, but at least in this case it was only a matter of hours.
The young boy appeared in his house early one afternoon, around the annual orbital tipping-point that meant the weather was going to start growing cold again. The child was smooth-featured and anywhere between ten and forty years old, and not immediately recognisable as a local lad. He was shorter than Gandicon by a head and one pair of shoulders, slightly plump as regular Molren generally were – Lawkeeps tended to be gaunt, and Gandicon’s years had wrung even the small allocation of juice that a Lawkeep was born with out of his system – and clad in a simple blue garment that was somewhere between a smock and a robe.
And it wasn’t just the clothing that was blue – the child’s entire body, from flat-topped head to narrow bare feet, was a softly-glowing blue-purple in varying shades. Even his eyes, twinkling and large in his delicate young face, and the elongated gleaming eye teeth emerging from beneath his upcurved upper lip, were rendered in cool indigo.
“Hello, Gandicon Ghåål,” the boy said in a clear, piping tone that further narrowed down his age. There was only a slight harmonic in his voice, meaning that his windpipes hadn’t fully developed and separated yet. So. No older than fifteen years.
“I’m not sure how you’ve done that, but it’s very good,” Gandicon congratulated the kid, gesturing at the soft glowing getup with a lower hand. He chuckled shortly. “Of course, if it doesn’t wash off, you’re probably going to regret it before long,” he didn’t get up from his chair, where he’d been taking his ease and finishing a small serving of mashed tubers. He’d just been considering a pipe of gdaka to round off the meal. He settled back and put his feet up on the low table nearby. He’d been doing this, it occurred to him, for a couple of thousand years. The sheer number of tables he’d worn his way through, just resting his heels on them gently once or twice a day … it crossed his mind that, if this was an actual genuine hallucination, it might be a result of his brain rebelling against the raving dullness of his existence. He looked around towards the door, which was closed. “How did you get in here anyway?”
“I don’t understand that question,” the boy said. “I am where you are. If you are inside, I suppose I am inside.”
“Huh,” Gandicon said, eyeing the young fellow. It was an interesting approach to a prank, rather more sophisticated than he would have expected … but he would be the first to admit that he had a low opinion of young people and tended to undere
stimate them a lot. And what exactly should a figment say when the hallucinating person asked how it got in? He pondered whether he should get up and poke the lad in the chest with a finger, just to see whether he was solid. He wondered if maybe that would be validating, or enabling, or accepting the vision in some way. Certainly, he thought, it would be playing into the pranksters’ hands.
Before Ghåål could make up his mind, however, the boy went on.
“They are coming, Gandicon. The death of your world approaches on silent wings of black steel.”
Gandicon looked at the boy in frank amusement, then cast a glance around the room as if to share the joke with its hypothetical perpetrators. And in that half-second while his attention was elsewhere, the child vanished into thin air.
“Huh,” Gandicon said again. This, too, was rather more sophisticated and clever than he would have given a fifteen-year-old credit for, but he knew there were ways to synthesise such a disappearing act. It was especially easy in a place like Gandicon’s house, which was bare and minimalist and devoid of security or surveillance measures – by ordinary standards, let alone Lawkeep ones. For all he knew, the youngsters of the local town were taking to the shiny enticements of technology in a way their parents had eschewed, and the entire thing had been a projection of light and sound from beginning to end.
He wasn’t entirely sure why anyone would bother to test such a thing on him. He knew he wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t so demonised that he thought he would be subjected to tricks of such convoluted meanness. On another hand, however, perhaps it was a case of ‘better the cranky old Lawkeep than anyone else’.
Still, he wondered why. What purpose could such an intricate deception serve? Entertainment, certainly – but what manner of entertainment? He’d been a Lawkeep all his life. Over-analysis of motivations came to him as naturally as breathing.
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