The Great Ice is still largely unexplored by Six Species scientists and unexplained by current cosmological theory, since it is deep within Damorakind territory near the Core. It is assumed to be a great series of concentric and interlinked rings and bands of cometary ice surrounding the Core, interspersed with dense star systems and black hole superclusters and other exotic astronomical events. There is compelling evidence to suggest that the bands wander around and through these other systems, and are not only dense enough to maintain a breathable atmosphere in many stretches, but also – due to the background cosmic radiation and extensive stellar presence – a steady temperature considerably higher than the general cosmic background. Extremely inhospitable to humanoid and Molranoid life, but comfortable for aki’Drednanth.
The Great Ice ribbons are also said to exist in such close-packed masses that travel along them is possible, although it is not certain if this is literally the case. Whether even a powerfully-muscled aki’Drednanth could simply step or leap from one piece of ice to the next is unknown, and generally not held to be plausible. The standard gravity across the Great Ice is, moreover, thought to be higher than humanoid and Molranoid standard, accounting for exaggerated aki’Drednanth size and musculature.
Whether the aki’Drednanth practice of integrating their own Drednanth consciousness into the physical matrix of the Great Ice, as a form of solid-state memory repository, has any effect on any of the physical properties described above, remains unknown.
Pre-Thord witnessed the arrival of an alien structure in close proximity with the Great Ice. The structure was described as a geodesic lattice of many hundreds of enormous struts, each one a thousand miles long or more, forming an elliptical disc. The structure appeared to be a combination vessel and habitat, slow-moving but designed to house generations of inhabitants. It was massive enough, taken as a whole, to coalesce a thin but breathable atmosphere, and exerted a reasonable facsimile of gravitational pull. In these respects it was much like the Great Ice itself.
The structure was formed from a metallic compound that remained constant at a low temperature that was nevertheless well above that of normal background space. This minimised its visibility profile and simultaneously increased the effectiveness of its coalesced atmosphere. Thord strongly implied that this structure was the original piece of alien mega-architecture from which such relics as The Warm [see note 355], Eternal Prime [see note 415] and Finger of God [see note 415a] originated. Her travels, later in life, with the seed would seem to correspond to some vestigial curiosity about the structure, its history, and its ultimate fate. All difficult to establish at the previously-mentioned disconnect of one-to-seven million years.
The structure had more powerful gravity and a more effective atmosphere than the modern-day relics, due most likely in part to the overall mass of its completed structure as opposed to the single scattered struts. The temperature was considered warm by aki’Drednanth standards, yet comfortable, and the atmosphere proved an effective buffer against cosmic radiation and cold. It included habitations on strut surfaces and under the surface of the structure, as well as within the centre of the geodesic lattice in the form of what I have roughly translated as a multi-type biosphere, possibly for sampling purposes. Any speculation would be massively conjecture-heavy.
The structure passed close by pre-Thord’s region of the Great Ice and five hundred aki’Drednanth boarded. This appears to be a standard sample size of aki’Drednanth individuals when they mingle with other cultures [notwithstanding the Damorakind slave-system; see note 12]. Structure then continued on into Core and back out, very slow trajectory and data about its overall movements even more subject to “aki’Drednanth incarnation drift”.
Inhabitants seemed to be a mixed population comprising a “community” with generic and often contradictory goals of exploration, seclusion, understanding. Their precise physiological and cultural characteristics… - - -
Janya set down the pad with a sigh. And that was just it. That was the point at which the blurry line between fact and daydream finally vanished altogether, and she could no longer be certain which era of history Thord was drawing from – or if she was just drawing straight out of the Dreamscape itself. There was no coherent explanation of the different bygone races that had either built or populated – or both – the great alien structure. There was no adjusting for the fanciful merging of sensory experience and opinion, the confused jumble of people and places and words and images. It was like an irretrievably corrupted, albeit beautiful, series of snapshots from an old data block.
Well, that was almost precisely what it was.
Thord could not even say with any certainty whether she had been one of the aki’Drednanth to join the strange ancients on their mysterious crawl through the Core. Due to the nature of the Drednanth consciousness, she both had been, and hadn’t been. The Dreamscape, after all, was reality from fantasy, a mental landscape that was functionally inseparable, for an aki’Drednanth, from the flesh. And this cast the entire story, retroactively, into the thoroughly dubious realms of hearsay and myth.
She had known this difficulty would occur, of course – she had read numerous aki’Drednanth ‘oral histories’ in the past. There was still value in hearing a new variant, a new tale from an aki’Drednanth newly returned to the physical world after a million years existing as pure consciousness in a great mysterious mainframe of ice. Every story exchanged with the aki’Drednanth added to the whole. And this specific anecdote, about this specific encounter and this specific vessel, did not seem to be part of the wider canon.
Thord had only been around for thirty-something years, and had not spoken to many people. Perhaps no other aki’Drednanth in the Six Species had shared this experience – or, given that they shared everything, perhaps it was more accurate to say that perhaps no other aki’Drednanth in the Six Species had been present in the way pre-Thord may have been, and thus the tale had gone untold.
Or maybe the story had been fuelled entirely by the fact that Janya and Thord had met at The Warm. Maybe there was nothing more to it than that.
Janya sighed again. She’d reciprocated, of course, by telling Thord some of her life story prior to her arrival at Judon Research Outpost. She’d never really shared the information with anybody – not because it was particularly secret or incendiary, but because she didn’t consider it all that interesting or relevant. But perhaps in another million years, post-Thord would be sitting in some alien starship or under some strange alien sky, relating Janya’s story to a wide-eyed alien academic – an academic of a species that was right now just learning to walk upright and use simple tools. And the academic would dutifully record the information, all the while shaking its head in despair at the lack of academic veracity in the tale, and its sheer inapplicability to the task of assembling a factual long-term history of the galaxy.
She could only hope there would still be academics to listen, and to dismiss.
What were you doing? she thought. What was the long game you were playing – with the seed, with these pups? What are these aki’Drednanth that you’ve smuggled aboard our ship?
And did Dunnkirk die because of it?
Janya didn’t believe in intuition. Gut instinct was just a shorthand for a series of stimulus-response experience and prediction models built up over time.
But that felt like the truth to her.
JANUS (NOW)
Janus sat back and peeled a printer-ration Fudgely bar out of its regulation grey paper. They weren’t as tasty as the classic Fudgelies of his youth, but he told himself that this was just the fondness of nostalgia. The truth was, they were all the same arrangements of molecules, and he didn’t remember how the originals had tasted different, exactly. In all likelihood, the Fudgely factory on Coriel had just contained a giant printer somewhere in the basement that did nothing but churn out Fudgely bars.
“You know, it’s funny really,” he said, and took a bite from the sticky chocolate bar. “After so many
years of the crew making jokes and putting off coming to see me, and some of them even saying they were never coming to see me under any circumstances … after all the months of simulations and courses and training, and counselling sessions with eejits who never had any problems I could possibly fix, suddenly I’m responsible not only for counselling the Barnalk High Ripper, but analysing piles and piles of personal information from a murder victim in order to help work up a profile that will help us find the killer.
“The killer who’s, you know, probably still on board.
“Who has to be on board, really, since the murder happened while we were in soft-space and we only came out again a couple of days back.
“Unless the emergency all-stop had been the work of our killer, who’s now made his or her getaway. I don’t know if anyone or anything left the ship. Nobody tells me these things. Would Bruce have told us? Maybe not, if it’s all a big conspiracy. Either way, good riddance if the murderer has flown the coop, I say. And it’s not like it’s going to make a difference now, since we’re back at relative speed.”
He took another, slightly moodier bite of his chocolate. His patient – or perhaps subject was a better term, or even suspect – sat with all the expressionless patience one might expect.
They’d finished the emergency repairs and been back in soft-space about two days now, all without much progress on any of the weird events that had occurred lately. Janus understood that they had also discussed taking the opportunity to do a full repair job and restore the dome to normal ship stats, removing the seed airlock … but in the end had decided to leave the renovations as they were. The section of the oxygen farm in which the pups lived still needed to be repurposed for aki’Drednanth use, and who knew when they might need to move something – a great big block of ice, for example – in and out of that area?
Janus suspected that at least part of the decision had come from the Commander rather liking the idea of having a couple of big old blast doors readily available between the aki’Drednanth nursery and deep space. It was uncertain whether the pups could work up a mental supernova and kill everyone on board before or in the moments immediately following Clue’s order that those doors be opened – he hadn’t even asked whether any sort of emergency-blast-open protocol had been set in place – but it all came back to that old saying. Sometimes it was better to have the means to eject your passengers into space and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
He didn’t like to think this, though, because he wasn’t sure if the pups might pick up on it. And they did have enough difficulties with their airlocks as it was, without adding improvised emergency-vent things.
Still, the necessary repairs had been made and they’d gotten back underway, all without much resolution to the looming issues at hand. From Dunnkirk’s murder to the alleged sabotage of Maladin’s pod to the definite sabotage of the ship that had dropped them back into real space a few days earlier, there seemed to be more questions than answers. Fortunately, at least the aki’Drednanth backlash they’d been worried about in reaction to Dunnkirk being killed didn’t seem to have hit them while they were making repairs. Clue still said they needed to be able to show some sort of investigation and due process by the time they actually returned to civilisation and had to account for the dead Bonshoon in their medical bay ward. But in the meantime, their tender squishy brains seemed to be off the hook.
Equally fortunately, it seemed as though his counselling sessions with Glomulus Cratch were over now that they’d served their apparent purpose of giving the Rip an alibi. That was a tad conspiratorial, but that’s what you got when you spent too long looking at murder evidence.
Good old Whye. Helping everyone.
“How do you feel about there being a murderer in our midst?” he asked – perhaps an over-blunt question, but certainly a relevant one.
“Uh,” Thorkhild said, “I … I … bad?”
It was pretty clear that Thorkhild was involved at least in the hull breach that had stalled them, and for various reasons he was implicated in the rest of the possibly-interconnected morass of death and intrigue as well. The problem with interrogating an eejit, though, was that he could only answer so many questions before getting stressed and confused, and then it was all over. He may never get un-stressed again, and any hint of a recurring cross-examination would result in loss of bladder and bowel control and a lot of bleating and blabbering. So they’d tried very briefly to get answers through Sally, then they had handed him over to Janus.
It wasn’t exactly like counselling another eejit, he had to admit. Every evaluation was unique, that was one of the first big lessons you learned … but there was more to it than that. This was the first time an aki’Drednanth-enhanced eejit had sat down to an evaluation, with a murder case hanging in the balance. No pressure.
Poor blind Thorkhild still seemed to be having some problems, most likely a combination of whatever the aki’Drednanth pups had done when they’d all-stopped and the tension of being a Person of Interest in a murder investigation. Thorkhild probably didn’t have the capacity to understand what a murder investigation was, let alone contemplate murder himself, but he could pick up on the general mood on board. It was part of his most basic configuration. One of the things that set eejits aside from janitorials.
The problem was, the fact that Thorkhild was already pretty messed up made it that much more difficult for Janus to talk to him about any of the things they wanted him to talk about. So he settled for banality.
“Well, you know, we’re all worried,” he said, “and we all feel bad. But the Commander and the Chief Tactical Officer assure us there’s no real risk of further attacks, and that certainly seems to be borne out by the evidence we’ve been seeing. I mean, everything suggests this was related to Maladin and Dunnkirk, not any of the rest of us. We’re looking into everything,” he waved a hand. “Even the drawings Dunnkirk left behind, of the forests-”
“He did lots of forest drawings.”
Janus stopped, Fudgely halfway to his mouth, and glanced across the room past Thorkhild’s shoulder. A monitor on the wall of his office was displaying one of the pretty forestscapes Decay had passed on to him. Part of Whye’s attempted profile-building case analysis had involved staring at the pictures for hours on end, and trying to figure out if they meant anything psychological-y. About all he had come up with so far was ‘tree fetish’, and he didn’t actually think that was a thing.
“Yes,” he said. “We found them in his quarters. How did … have you seen them before?”
“I … uh, I don’t know. I think I … I had dreams?”
“That’s right,” Decay had reported the curious remarks Thorkhild had made about his dreams. “You had dreams about Dunnkirk, right? Did you see these pictures in the dream? Or did you see him in the actual forest?”
Thorkhild just looked miserably confused at this, and Janus wondered if he was being insensitive about use of the word ‘seeing’, and whether maybe he should be using some other word instead. “I … uhh, I don’t know.”
“Mm, well never mind, just say whatever’s on your mind,” Janus said vaguely. “Good to get it off your chest. Just blurt it out.”
He continued to murmur reassuringly, listening with only half an ear as he finished his Fudgely bar. Usually when he told an eejit to just blurt out whatever was on his mind, the eejit would mention his itchy bottom or the smell of feet in the eejit crèche or some other irrelevant though mildly-amusing biological fact. It was another interesting way in which the Midwich Eejits differed from normal ones, but still weren’t quite ables.
On the tail of that reflection, though, Whye realised something else that had been bothering him, and it made him stop listening to Thorkhild altogether. It was something that Glomulus Cratch had said back before Dunnkirk had been killed. Perhaps had even said while Dunnkirk was being killed.
“Maybe they didn’t want to make a big deal of it in front of Thord,” the Rip had said, talking about the
accidental death of their eejit nurse a few months back, “since she sort of helped to make Bethel. Same with Maladin and Dunnkirk, I suppose. They were invested in the configuration of our Midwich Eejits.”
“…really very confused, headaches, don’t know where I am, can’t see, sometimes think-”
“Thorkhild,” Janus leaned forward, “sorry to interrupt, but … Thord and Maladin and Dunnkirk … did you … do you feel connected to them? Like, did their input when you were configured give you some sort of bond, that you felt more keenly when Dunnkirk was killed?”
Thorkhild looked warily off to Whye’s left. “How could I tell?”
“I need an able to use as a control subject,” Janus murmured to himself, making a slightly fudge-smeared note on his pad. “Find … out … how much … config … remember,” he looked back up at Thorkhild and smiled, then wondered yet again just how reassuring a purely visual facial expression was supposed to be, and almost losing his certainty before reminding himself that a smile could very easily be heard in one’s voice, especially by a blind person with refined aural acuity. “Thorkhild,” he repeated, “sorry. My questions aren’t making any sense. Tell me about the others. Tubby Shaw, before he went into that airlock, and the others who were printed with Dunnkirk and Maladin helping out. How do they feel ah damn it yes Commander?”
His pad had chimed softly just as he’d started formulating the right approach, the right set of questions to ask, and he opened the comm with a grimace of apology to Thorkhild followed by a second grimace when he realised neither grimace would, like the smile, be likely to do much good.
“Yeah,” Clue said, “look, this may not be the best time, but we’re finally getting something from the pups. Can we interrupt?”
“Sure, sure,” Janus stammered, “sure, go ahead.”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 14