The story of the sleepers. The thirty billion. The forty billion, when the Worldship Porticon was completed, and then seventy when Darkmas and Bosskra and Big Shooey joined the growing Fleet, each one built more swiftly than the last, far outstripping the methodical construction of the shipyard’s automated robots.8 By that time, Bason was a quinmillennial herself and she left the Grandix to live in Big Shooey, a wonder of modernity and comfort where the revered ancients were encouraged to spend their final years. If there was rotation of the sleeper stock, any overhaul and replenishment of the pods, nobody discussed it with her. The glossed-over understanding was that technology was continually advancing, and the sleepers were capable of preserving their charges indefinitely. It was said that the Molren inside them were no longer even conscious, and therefore didn’t need the cumbersome implants and processors that would keep their minds occupied. They were cargo, in truth.
And this wasn’t even a lie, not really. Technology did advance, even though the long-buried secret of superluminal travel continued to elude the Fleet. The new Worldships didn’t run wholly on Bharriom cores, but alternative power generation methods were discovered and upgraded all the time. And they’d never really known about the lifespan of a sleeper. Not even Mer had known.
Bason, for her part, didn’t fight the new reality. She went where she was deferentially bid, and if she had an inordinate volume of belongings and mobile laboratories and hulking deep-rooted storage containers, that was her business. Mer helped the bureaucracy and associated questions to go away, and the Damorak – unknown, now, by anyone but Karturi since her elders from the Old Enclave had long since passed – vanished into Big Shooey with her.
And the sleepers slept on.
It was a fact vaguely acknowledged but never really thought about. With each new Worldship came a Fleet-wide overflowing of sleeper pods and more Molren lay down to join their ranks, generation after generation, making room for the waking crew. But it was part of the near-geological-timescale life cycle of the Worldships – never really overseen, never really quantified and inspected. It was one of the greatest underlying principles of the Twin Species, after all. The assumption that the sleeping Molren outnumbered the waking Molren and Blaren. Every Worldship had sleeper-holds with ten times the population of the waking crew. It was a known thing. The idea, the myth of the vast civilian population for whom the Twin Species lived and worked and died, was the noble backbone unifying the Fleet’s very existence. The sleepers’ importance, as a matter of logic, was paramount.
Mer suspected that the Molren who became aware of the situation simply didn’t want to break the hearts of their earnest underlings and admiring progeny, and were opting not to tell them the truth – that the Molren who had gone into storage back on Dema were already irretrievable, would disintegrate into slurry if they were ever awakened – or, at best, would be irrevocably damaged, in body and mind. The Single Sigh, packed in their scores of millions into the Bonshoo as a strange mark of respect for Gandicon Ghåål, were no more. Even the descendants of those who remained awake, and who vastly swelled the numbers of Single Sigh sleepers as the occupation of a Bonshoo pod became a kind of Single Sigh pilgrimage,9 were reduced in time to shapes of meat with mild electric currents.
But there was no need for a conspiracy of silence. The slow march of centuries and the steady, practical civil minds of the Molren did the work, enshrining the past in a vault of eternity and reducing the act of expansion and the crawling progress of the Fleet across the infinite star-spattered darkness into a series of blank rituals, at once momentous and bereft of meaning.
Gandicon Ghåål had once said that stagnation, complacency and insularism were the death of species, and he hadn’t been wrong … but as long as the species that was doing the dying had been dead for a thousand years already, did anyone really care?
Did it matter, if the reverential protection of its mouldering carcass was providing the framework for another species – two species – to live on?
Mer wondered about this, from time to time.
EDITOR’S NOTE
I would up having to finish this anthology rather more quickly than I’d planned, but in a sense it’s good to get it out there. I really wasn’t going to do much more with it.
My original plan, shining and wonderful as it was, had been sixteen short stories in a nice collection, to round out The Final Fall of Man series and tell some of the stories that had been too big for side-notes in the main narrative. Once I’d written Sisterhood and added Black Honey Wings and was halfway through Malachi’s Gambit, I realised that sixteen stories of this length was going to make a book way too big for my publishers to handle, at least in paper form.
And so I decided on four stories in a book, and a probable four-part anthology for the completed sixteen stories.
Special thanks as always go out to my editorial team Janica, Zachary, Kristiina and dreameling; my endlessly amazing cover artist Gabriel; and my e-booking guru Lucas.
Here’s a few additional notes you might find interesting, by way of a DVD extra (only, you know, in a book).
Sisterhood
This short story was extremely challenging to write, and I’m sure it’s going to prove even more challenging to read. One of the things that consistently confused my editorial team during The Final Fall of Man was how, exactly, the Drednanth work. The easy solution, for the wider story that is The Final Fall of Man series, is that it does work, and humans probably shouldn’t worry too much about it.
Well, I still don’t think we’ve answered that question, but this story was an attempt at showing the terrible immortal telepathic yetis in more detail. Way more detail – and from the inside.
As such, I fully understand that there is a lot of complicated stuff in here, above and beyond the already-pretty-damn-complicated stuff that I put in The Final Fall of Man about the Drednanth, the aki’Drednanth, the Dreamscape, the Great Ice, and all the hijinks that ensue when the disembodied mind of a millions-of-years-old creature gets in line for reincarnation. It’s not an easy subject to explain thoroughly. Especially not if you also want to make it into a halfway interesting story.
It crossed my mind that I could focus on the pups, and make the entire story into a Battle Royale-esque (or Hunger Games-esque, for you young whippersnappers out there) description of the fight for supremacy and the opportunity to reach adulthood. But everything that was happening in the other sphere, away from the screaming meat, kept dominating the story.
And that was when I realised that was the whole point of the Drednanth.
We’ve seen newborn young compete for limited resources. It happens all the time in nature. The weak are pushed from the nest, the dead are eaten. Nature is horrifying. What we haven’t seen is what it would look like from the inside, and on the assumption that the struggling pups are in fact completely sentient, and ancient, and possessed of mental environments vaster than any feeble physical backdrop.
The flesh, ultimately, is important to the Drednanth only insofar as they want to experience the world of mortal organisms. Living and dying don’t mean the same thing to them. Their bodies are not their prisons. It turned out to be a far more difficult concept for this mere human to express satisfactorily, and it will probably prove baffling to read. I appreciate the fact that you attempted to do so.
Hell, I felt it was worth it just for the sentence Why have I poured myself into the aki’Drednanth brain-ice of a Drednanth I have never met? It’s a question that, I like to think, will actually make some sort of sense to a reader who has been paying attention, but is otherwise complete gibberish.
And isn’t it what we’re all wondering, when you get right down to it?
Black Honey Wings
The entire Black Honey Wings story was actually posted on my blog, Hatboy’s Hatstand, between May and September of 2015. So it was all there, more or less, in the form you’ll find it in here. So, yes – you could have gotten this story for free, if you’d been reading my b
log. But I felt it needed to be published here.
I made a few minor edits but mostly left the story, the details, and above all the structure untouched. On the blog, I posted the story as a serial daily, and that included the oh-so-confusing overlap of “Meanwhile” and “Meanwhile, Again” with the Roman numerals to keep it a little bit coherent. I hope it’s not too enraging.
In this story, you will notice we have a footnote for the first time. Get used to them, they’re common in a lot of the stories here and very common in a lot of my other writing (which will be coming soon).
Malachi’s Gambit
This story began as a historical footnote about the origins of the ‘Draka scenario’ referenced once or twice in The Final Fall of Man. It’s a situation in which a starship’s Captain is dead and the XO pretends the Captain is still alive in order to relay orders and complete a mission … or else a situation in which a starship’s Captain is alive but otherwise unavailable, and the XO pretends the Captain is dead in order to assume command … it’s a confusing concept that can be applied to a range of different mission eventualities, thanks to its obscure and undocumented origins. Its actual origins, as you see here, were rather stranger than suspected.
It also became, quite by chance, a little back-story on the Blaran Po Chane dynasty, also mentioned only fleetingly in The Final Fall of Man as the hosts of the fateful encounter between the Astro Tramp 400 and the Dark Glory Ascendant. In the 39th Century, the Po Chane rule an odd little mostly-automated waystation on the edge of central colony space. A waystation called the Bluothesh (Linda, Ivan) – amalgamated, no doubt, from the remains of the Linda Gazmouth, the Rotten Ivan, and perhaps ol’ Captain Kittypo’s original corsair ship.
The Bluothesh (Linda, Ivan) name, in turn, came from an even more convoluted joke. Bluothesh, a Xidh word from my long-established lexicon, replaced the word crazy. Thus Bluothesh (Linda, Ivan) is shorthand for Crazy Linda, Crazy Ivan. “Crazy Linda” is a nickname of a friend of mine (no, her real name is not Linda Gazmouth), and I felt she deserved some kind of reference in the series even if it was a tiny and well-hidden one. “Crazy Ivan” is a Cold-War-era term for a submarine manoeuvre, but it was adapted by the science-fiction classic Firefly to refer to a starship spin-trick. It’s in this spirit, obviously, that I took the term (although what a “Rotten Ivan” might be, well, I leave that up to the reader to hypothesise).
And then, again without my knowledge that it was going to happen, the story became part of the Destarion myth as the Flesh Eater revealed her strange origins.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Oh, and just one more thing (as a famed and beloved old television detective was known for saying) …
The Mundus protocol mentioned in this story may or may not be related to the MundCorp name or the Worldship Mundus from which the corporation took its name, not to mention the TransMundus corsairs under Gila Rodel who ultimately inherited the old derelict in Drednanth, the second book of The Final Fall of Man. It is, however, almost certainly related to the Mundus Accords mentioned in passing by The Gaffer in Damorak, the seventh and penultimate book of The Final Fall of Man. One of our heroes, General Moral Decay (Alcohol), points out “[i]t’s a common term. Mund, mundus.”
It’s interesting to note that Jaws, the classic novel by Peter Benchley that inspired an equally classic series of movies, was in turn inspired by the real-world adventures of a shark fisherman by the name of Frank Mundus.
Read into that what you will.
Ghåål’s Ark
Obviously, what you’re seeing in this story is the long-forgotten origin of the Molran Fleet, and its starting point in a galaxy (or indeed universe) far, far away. It’s an important part of the back-story that I’d planned out, but hadn’t really intended to write.
Well, here it is. You’re welcome.
There’s clearly a lot more to tell here, since this was just the first step and a lazy summary of the second. It tells of the very beginning of the Molran exodus and the formation of the Twin Species, but doesn’t go into detail about the massive undertaking that was the boarding of the Worldships, the long flight, and the expansion of the Fleet.
This tale takes place some forty thousand years before the events of The Final Fall of Man. The Fleet’s journey from Dema to the Portal, through the Damorakind / Damorak ruled territory of “hallowed silence” fame, took around fifteen thousand. The long, terrible flight out of the Core, after the Fleet’s violation of the gates of space and their encounters with the Damorakind civilisation on the far side, took another twenty-five thousand. How many Worldships went through the ruined gates, how the Bharriom preserved the Fleet, how many lives were lost in the hopeless battle before the aki’Drednanth saved the forty Worldships of the Fleet that eventually made it to Earth … all of these steps have gone untold, and may remain untold.
This story also introduces a pair of very important families, nay dynasties, into the “FFoMiverse” – the Karturis, obviously, and the Ghååls. The Karturi line continues to Massington Karturi and his son Mos ‘the Artist’ Karturi, who play a very important role in the history of the Six Species and maintain their close ties to the machine mind, later known as the synthetic intelligence. What you may have missed, however, in reading The Final Fall of Man, is that Karturi and Ghåål are reunited on the Grandmother Spider mission. Mos Karturi and Aratrix Ghåål are the two Molren on that mission, along with – among others – the Fergunak group known as the Glorious Flawed and the Blaran master-thief named Grendel’s Grief.
It’s widely understood that Karturi and Ghåål formed a very close bond, despite the riotous arguments they apparently had.
There may be more to tell there. Who knows?
Edpool, somewhere in Finland
2nd March, 2017
The writing will continue until morale improves.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Hindle was born in Perth, Western Australia, and did some stuff there for a while before moving to Sotunki, Finland.
He now lives happily ever after in Sotunki with his wife Janica, his daughters Elsa and Freja, and a growing collection of dead mobile phones, boring anecdotes about his busted car, and books what he wrote all by himself using big-people words.
He has no intention of stopping anytime soon.
OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW HINDLE
Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011
(The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)
THE FINAL FALL OF MAN
Eejit
Drednanth
Bonshoon
Fergunakil
Blaran
Molran
Damorak
Human
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Are You My Corpulent Brood Matriarch?
OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW HINDLE
Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011
(The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)
THE FINAL FALL OF MAN
Eejit
Drednanth
Bonshoon
Fergunakil
Blaran
Molran
Damorak
Human
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Are You My Corpulent Brood Matriarch?
Notes
[←1]
It is interesting to note that in Xidh – the primary language of the Six Species – and a lot of Fleet dialects, the word blaran was synonymous with child or recalcitrant youth. Blonryn, widely agreed to be its ancient source word, literally meant Molran who does not consider itself adult / Molran who does not consider itself Molran. It was hotly debated as to whether some of the original Blaran offshoots from the Molran species were descended from Molran ‘Lost Boys’ who simply refused to acknowledge adulthood.
[←2]
Mini-whorl weaponry, col
loquially known as Godfire, was one of the few technological advances that the Six Species had dared to steal from the Cancer in the Core. This had been achieved some centuries ago, with little success in reverse-engineering or improving the weapon. Admittedly, it didn’t really need improving.
[←3]
Yeka Mogak. Six Species, in the Molran tongue known as Xidh. Literally the count of years since the official drafting and ratification of the Six Species charter that confirmed the Wild Empire of humanity and the bubbling cultural stew-pot of the Five Species – Molran, Blaran, Bonshooni, Fergunak, aki’Drednanth – as a single united entity. Even in the Eighteenth Century YM, this was very much considered a work in progress.
[←4]
Xidh, a more archaic dialect, insane. Literally chaos-touched, chaos-afflicted.
[←5]
Indeed, as the old saying went, even the nothing was dangerous in space.
[←6]
Skirting the edge of permitted Fergunakil weaponry, the enhanced-cadmium component of the warhead reacted with the surface of dynacrete hulls, creating an over-conductive coating that subsequent strikes could take advantage of. Also known as thin-end warheads and etcher weaponry.
[←7]
Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 47