Her legs were thick and furry, jointed in the aki’Drednanth manner rather than the Molranoid or humanoid, and terminated in splayed, shaggy-fur-ankled hooves. She was a wood Goddess, fierce and heartbreaking, and Maladin knew he was gazing at her now, but he couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d wanted to.
One of his first questions, on achieving the Dreamscape, had been why, if you can dictate your body’s formation from the moment of fertilisation, do you not shape it to be the same in both worlds? Why keep the bestial aki’Drednanth form?
Thord had laughed. Am I not bestial? She’d asked, spreading her four great arms wide and engulfing him. There is the aki’Drednanth form, and there is the Dreamscape, the Drednanth form, she’d done her best to explain. One ought not resemble the other any more than your brain ought resemble your body.
He also knew that his own form in the Dreamscape was much the same as hers, but it didn’t have the same arresting effect when he caught sight of it, as did the forms of Thord or Dunnkirk.
As if thinking of him summoned him close – and in the Dreamscape this was not such a great leap – Dunnkirk dropped from the overhanging branch of a nearby tree with a laugh. His hooves slammed into the soft earth and kicked divots in the grass as he sat with uncomplicated joy. No damage to this world was permanent, and Dunnkirk delighted in throwing his weight around. Maladin smiled at him affectionately.
“Our friends in the starship are worried,” Thord said, passing by each of them and running loving hands over their heads and backs, before sitting down against a tree trunk equidistant from them both.
“Mm, the Fergunak and their silly games,” Dunnkirk said lazily. His lower hands dug and clenched in the soil on either side of his thick-pelted legs. “Such unhappy, driven creatures.”
“Driven, certainly,” Maladin said. “I don’t know if I’d call them unhappy.”
“I’d unfortunately have to agree with you on that one,” Dunnkirk sighed. “Did those smokeberries really come from Bayn Balro, do you think?”
“There doesn’t seem to be much doubt of that,” Maladin said regretfully. “Unfortunately…”
“Unfortunately, even if we could have picked out their minds and their ripples from the general shout,” Thord finished his thought for him, “they were in soft-space for most of their journey and now they’re in soft-space once more. And one vessel in soft-space might as well be in the subluminal universe for all its ability to contact another vessel in the grey.”
“We’re probably talking about more than one vessel here though, aren’t we?” Dunnkirk surmised.
“It seems likely,” Thord said. “The foreboding among our friends grows more tangible.”
“Still,” Maladin said, “perhaps they are happier worrying about the sharks than about the more serious enemies they might face.”
“Certainly they’re safer from the sharks,” Dunnkirk said stoutly. “With us to protect them.”
Thord looked troubled. “All we can do is wait and see what the next stop brings,” she paused, her eyes flicking a glance across between the two Bonshooni, and she smiled. “Look,” she said, “he’s back.”
Maladin and Dunnkirk turned carefully.
The mind – it wasn’t a full manifestation, let alone a complete Dreamscape form – bobbed and twisted in the air above a nearby stream. It could almost have passed as some product of Thord’s mind, except it had no really clear structure or logic. She would never consciously bring such an odd shape into her world. The mind was like a fat, fleshy worm, writhing and quivering and coiling in the air as though suspended from a branch by spiderwebs. It expanded and contracted in a slow, wet breathing motion. It seemed an unlovely little thing, Maladin thought kindly, until you fully appreciated what it was.
At first, Maladin had wondered if it might be Glomulus Cratch, experimenting in some way in an attempt to enter the Dreamscape premature and uninvited. But Thord had assured them this was not the case.
It was an eejit – specifically, one who’d been nicknamed Thorkhild – one of the twenty who were products of Thord’s, Maladin’s and Dunnkirk’s careful interference with the configuration process. Like the rest of the new eejits, Thorkhild was a much more coherent psychological specimen and quite good at his work. Unfortunately, he was also blind – a problem that seemed to be his only failing, but one they had not been able to fix with transplants, surgery or therapy. He’d learned his way around the consoles and maintenance equipment pretty quickly without the benefit of eyesight, and was still more effective than almost any of the eejits on board. He even gave the ables a run for their money sometimes, especially in the dark.
And he had proved strangely open to the Dreamscape. When he slept, as he was now, his consciousness actually slipped partway into Thord’s domain apparently without meaning to. It was by no means unheard-of, although it was rare in humans and very rare in ables. And it had never been satisfactorily studied, or developed in any way. It was just an aberration, and most of the time the Drednanth delicately eased the mind in question back into its correct place and made sure it could only come back again of its own volition.
This had, contrary to popular belief, happened on several controlled and clandestine occasions with human minds. Humans were capable of walking the Dreamscape, even though it could take decades – ideally a century or more – of acclimatisation and training, or a truly aberrant mental landscape, to make the transition. Or both. They’d been hesitant to expel Thorkhild’s mind because of the hand they’d had in his configuration, and out of concern for the exacerbating effect it might have on his psychology.
Whether it meant Thorkhild might have other perceptive abilities or hidden depths, they had yet to really explore.
As before, Thorkhild squirmed and bounced above the surface of the water for a few seconds, then silently popped like a soap bubble and was gone. Maladin turned back to Thord, and grinned.
“Is he lingering longer?”
“Probably wishful thinking,” Thord said, “but it seemed like he is.”
Maladin sighed in contentment, settled back and looked up through the leaves at the wedges and arcs of deep sky visible above their heads. None of Thord’s little contributions to that vault were currently visible from where he was lying.
“When … ?” he asked.
Thord smiled. That was another thing about the Dreamscape. You never really needed to complete a thought, explain a question, surround an idea with endless words.
“Not long now,” she replied.
It was nine weeks to Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost, and the three spent most of that time happily in the oxygen farm, in the Dreamscape. Occasionally Maladin would go out into the artificial warmth of the ship and chat with the rest of the crew, and occasionally Dunnkirk would. They were interesting people. Good people, Thord insisted.
Once or twice the Bonshooni even test-ran their sleeper pods, making sure the power sources worked and the slow-down systems were smooth and incremental. The wake-up was a bit abrupt, because they either had to set it to wake them at a certain predetermined point or allow Thord to do it manually. Thord was far more capable, as a native, of navigating the flesh world and the Dreamscape simultaneously – Maladin could never have jogged in circles around the ship while immersed in the Dreamscape – so she was the only one who could do it. And as Dunnkirk said, as long as the wake-up worked, it didn’t need to be smooth. Ultimately, they were going to climb into the pods and float into space with Thord and the seed, and they wouldn’t need to wake up again after that.
Maladin also enjoyed reading the public-record report logs that found their way onto the computer’s data network.
- - - Standing Wave to Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost + 2 days shore leave + 9 weeks shipboard + total duration from The Warm 43 weeks shipboard + incident report - - -
- - - Altercation between or involving helmsman HZPJ [Zeegon], 3 eejits [designations omitted], Automated Janitorial Drone 3 and Automated Janitorial Drone 9 + incident he
reinafter designated “Astro Tramp Derby” + misuse of deck space for vehicle testing purposes - - -
- - - Helmsman HZPJ instigated high-level combination function testing of 2 new PIVs [Planetary Insertion Vehicles] + Helmsman HZPJ acted as operator of PIV#219 and eejit [designation omitted] acted as operator of PIV#220 + Automated Janitorial Drone 3 and Automated Janitorial Drone 9 were reprogrammed against regulations to act as “control” vehicles, piloted by eejit [designation omitted] and eejit [designation omitted] respectively + testing took place in the form of an “obstacle course”-style race through uninhabited and non-key areas of the ship, including habitats, secondary oxygen farm, exchange plane, upper officers’ quarters and recreation dome - - -
- - - Result + Commander XOZLC [Z-Lin] declared “Astro Tramp Derby” successfully concluded in perpetuity + Helmsman HZPJ charged with sole responsibility of repairing minimal damage to PIVs, Automated Janitorial Drone 3, Automated Janitorial Drone 9 and ship bulkheads + PIV#219, operated by Helmsman HZPJ, was declared victorious by way of obstacles most effectively overcome & time factor - - -
- - - Report ends - - -
Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost was another space station, without even a scenic gas giant or unusual sun or ancient floating relic to make it more interesting. After joining the crew on the bridge long enough to establish that the big old deep-space factory was still there, still venting its waste particles into the interstellar gulf and still returning the hopeful comms signals of incoming modulars, Maladin returned to the farm and the Dreamscape. Shosha Ranch had not received much word and even fewer visitors in a long time and were simply pleased to get the raw materials the Tramp was delivering. The Molren and humans on board had not heard of any attacks, nor had they seen any Fergunak in recent weeks. But then, Shosha Ranch was relatively primitive and low-population, with only a couple of hundred sentients of either species – the majority of the life-forms aboard were ables, and not only were they useless for anything the Tramp might need, they also didn’t even originate from Shosha Ranch. There was no fabricator on the outpost, no technology of any really advanced kind with the possible exception of the gravity exchanges. The ables were delivered in bulk every twenty-five years or so as the previous batch began to burn through their fourth or fifth set of lungs and organ rejection became too difficult to counteract.
In the meantime, Thord and Dunnkirk were in the Dreamscape dealing with the reconnected and highly-active Drednanth mass consciousness, and Maladin wanted to be in there helping as much as he could.
Of course, Thord and her Dreamscape were in no direct danger. She was travelling far and wide, metaphysically speaking, communing with vast numbers of her kind and gauging the waters as reaction to her deeds spread and developed. But the Drednanth would never be so crude as to undo what she had crafted, nor to try to stop her from following her path to its wilful conclusion. To do so would be tantamount to making war on itself, denying or – worse – destroying a part of its own great mind. An immortal gestalt existence was, by necessity, a peaceful and harmonious one.
That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t also intense – especially for the weak, unaccustomed Bonshooni tourists cowering in Thord’s protective bubble, cringing in the howling winds of thousands upon thousands of millennia of disapproval colder than the void. It was something of a relief when they concluded their business at Shosha Ranch, cruised back out into space, and accelerated back into the seclusion of relative speed.
SALLY
It was a long way from Shosha Ranch to Zhraak Burns, although by no means their longest stint in the grey. The next stretch was going to be twelve weeks, and Sally had a deep, dark sense of foreboding about it. Zeegon was already racing eejits through the corridors on janitorials.
Still, this leg was a solid eight, after an absolutely minimal-duration and entirely dull stopover at Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost. Sally thought that maybe the main source of the crew’s unrest this time, aside from a recurrence and spike in intensity of the aki’Drednanth dreams that were supposed to have long since faded back to normal background levels, was the region into which they were now heading.
The next leg of the flight was a string of settlements the crew had taken to calling ‘the barmy arm’. The galaxy could be sliced in any number of ways, and the way their flight path sliced it this time just happened to take them out through a series of oddball little settlement-worlds that were the interstellar equivalent of the scenic route. Without any of the interstellar equivalent of scenery which, to be fair, they’d all been rather spoiled for on Standing Wave.
What Sally kept coming back to, as the source of recent tensions on board, was simple. It didn’t matter if Zhraak Burns was destroyed when they got there.
Well, okay, it mattered, because the Burnèd were innocent people even if they were also more-than-slightly weird. But if Zhraak Burns was still there, then it was just another backwater of no strategic value to friend or foe, spared by the Cancer-or-whatever because of its low technology profile but no help to them for exactly the same reason. If it was gone, it was gone and their current theories were either useless, or the Cancer had taken out all the high-tech targets while they were in soft-space and had now moved on to everyone else.
And if it was still there, additionally, then it was a Zhraaki enclave anyway. Heck, call it what it was – a cultist commune. Not even Zeegon, a reformed Zhraaki Orthodox, wanted to go there.
The dreams were just an additional stress that nobody needed.
Sally sighed, stepping into her cluttered office and leaning back against the door. She’d just come from a flare-up that she would describe in her security log as “a minor altercation”, but which in her head she was calling “an ugly, murder-hungry son of a whore disguised as a mess hall argument, and not very well-disguised either because it’s getting hungrier.”
She’d learned, as they got to know one another better professionally, that Waffa had an entire second vocabulary for things. A vocabulary that existed almost entirely inside his head, and in the obscure metadata of the Tramp’s log system, for all that she read that stuff as little as humanly possible. So when he said something that was ostensibly quite clinical and detached, he was in fact saying something completely different in his head.
Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed realised that she’d started to do the same.
After leaning against the door for long enough to reassure herself that nobody was coming in – a completely pointless act of defiance, because nobody but Clue and the Captain could enter without Sally’s permission, and if either of them did the door slid open sideways so Sally would fall right on her arse and then murder might really happen – she crossed the cosy-and-claustrophobic-by-design room and grabbed her cup.
It was a good cup, given to her by the Greater Castermaine Police Department when she had ended her assignment with them and returned to the Tramp with the Barnalk High Ripper as combination prisoner-in-transit, trophy and God damn neck-albatross. Come to think of it, he was still all of those things, but – and this was where the universe was really having a laugh – he’d somehow added “Chief Medical Officer (non-Corps)” to the list. She often woke up sweating at night wondering what would happen when Glomulus Cratch decided to exercise his prerogative under AstroCorps regulations, allowing him to overrule the officers’ orders in medical situations. Because he already knew about the prerogative. Nothing was more certain.
That was going to be an interesting time to be alive.
Of course, his convict status and the fact that every other crewmember had the tried-and-tested ability to detonate his shackles and blow off his hands and feet on a whim might just trump the phoney-baloney “doctor’s orders” protocol. Strangely, though, this did nothing to help Sally sleep at night. It just meant that the image engraved on the insides of her eyelids when she woke up was of Glomulus Cratch sitting on the medical bay floor in the lotus position, bloody stumps held out serenely while he relieved people from duty to the sound of the groovy muz
ak of the month that he piped incessantly through the medical bay sound system.
So, her cup. That was basically what she had to show for her time with Greater Castermaine PD, but it was good enough. It was a solid pint, with an additional stimulant capsule dispenser built into the heavy handle. Even stockpiling the way Contro did with his toffees, she’d run out of stim several times, but fortunately she’d been able to stock up again on Standing Wave. The cup was shaped like an old-fashioned quantum concussion shell, and it had a swirled Xidh word etched onto its side. Sally didn’t know the Xidh alphabet well, but she was reliably informed the word was bosskra, which translated crudely as the end of the stick with the shit on. This was based on one of those parallel cultural legacies that Janya found endlessly fascinating, and Sally couldn’t see why the Greater Castermaine PD boys would have bothered to lie to her about what the cup said.
It didn’t matter anyway, because the cup held enough coffee – that was coffee, another thing she periodically had to ensure the ship didn’t run out of for the safety of everyone on board, because fuck zolo – to get her through the average day, with room left over to add enough stim to get her through an abnormal day, and – after a generous slurp – space to add a shot of 001100101 half-malt to get her through the other kinds of days.
Sally poured herself an almost-full cup from the percolator in the corner of her office, added three doses of sugar, then thumbed the handle twice to add stim pellets. She then squeezed the handle steadily to activate the kinetic whisk built into the bottom of the cup, stirring it as she crossed the room. She sat heavily in her deep, comfortable chair and sighed again.
Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 27