Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (10 page)

“Bravo,” Janus approved.

“So when
you
ask…”

“When I ask,
screw
social expectations,” Whye said, the crudity flowing smoothly into the statement. The patient smiled. “I’m asking because I want to know how
you’re
doing. Maybe later, if you’re interested, you can ask how I’m doing, but–”

“Why would I do that?” the patient asked, brow furrowing in polite puzzlement. “Isn’t this session sort of meant to be about me?”

“Of course, of course,” Janus hastened. “I was just saying, you know, if,
later on
, you happened to be interested – not that you would be–”

“No no, I’m interested,” the patient stammered. “How are things with you?”

Whye laughed, just a little forcedly, while he considered his options.

Arguably, he thought, it ought to be possible to turn this around into a valuable lesson about the persistent, insidious nature of social convention-or-possibly-expectation. A classic trap, yes? But then, was that any way to establish counsellor-patient trust? By springing a conversation trap on the patient, first session?

On the other hand, he’d started the whole thing about asking him and the patient had engaged with that, arguably in full awareness of the fact that they were disregarding social whatever. So maybe he should reward the attempt to meet him halfway, and simultaneously make a point, by answering frankly and fully. Tell the patient exactly how he felt, every minute of every arbitrarily-designated space-day. Lead by example, teach by doing. And risk turning the entire session dynamic inside-out.

On the
other
hand -

Janus became aware that his strained laugh had gone on a bit too long, and the patient was looking nervous again.
Big backslide
, he berated himself.
Classic rookie mistake
.

“No,” he raised a hand, pushing down his imaginary amusement and shaking his head in imaginary befuddlement. “No, not important. I was just getting caught up in it all. I want to know how things are with
you
.”

“Okay,” the patient, although still puzzled, visibly calmed down.
Whye, you old dog
, Janus congratulated himself,
you’ve done it again
. “Okay, how things are with me. Um, well, I guess I’d say I’m nervous.”

“Nervous,” Janus nodded. “That’s good.”

“It is?” the patient said, alarmed again. “What’s good about it? It’s counter-productive and unprofessional, and none of the other crew–”

Whye held up a hand. He’d been ready for this one, at least. “Believe me,” he said smugly, “we’re all nervous. People just hide it for different reasons, and to different degrees.”

“What? Why? Are you nervous? What are
you
nervous about?”

“I’m not – that’s – the point is, everybody’s nervous about something.”

“They are? All of them?” Janus nodded reassuringly. “What, about
the same thing
?”

“I – you – what?”

“Is it the same thing I’m nervous about? I didn’t think the stuff I worried about – you know, the thing about food printers, I just … it didn’t strike me as something everyone would worry about.”

“No, it’s … it’s not that,” Janus floundered. “It’s other stuff with everyone else–”

“If there’s something everyone but me is nervous about, shouldn’t I at least know what it is?” the patient exclaimed. “Doesn’t it sort of suggest I should be nervous about it too? Now I’m getting nervous about what I’ve missed!”

“Everyone’s nervous about their own different things,” Whye said. “Yours is, uh, the printer thing, like you said. Zeegon might be worried that he can’t actually fly a starsh–” he bit that off and hoped the patient, who he was clearly losing more comprehensively by the second, didn’t notice. “Everybody has something they’re nervous about.”

“Everyone’s nervous?” the patient asked, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“That’s right.”

“Each person about something different?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone.”

“So … it’s normal,” the patient went on. “To be nervous about something.”

“Completely,
perfectly
normal,” Whye said soothingly, and felt confident enough about this recovery that he dared another little chuckle. “If you weren’t nervous about
anything at all
, well,
then
there’d be something wrong with you.”

“So why am I trying to
get over
my anxiety?” the patient demanded. “If it’s the thing that’s stopping there from being something wrong with me, why am I here?”

“Yes, but if it’s hampering your daily–” Janus started, then sighed at the flat-eyed face on the screen. “Yeah, you know what?” he sat back. “You’re cured.”

- - - Simulation failed + patient neurosis enhanced - - -

“Dang,” Whye opened his console and pulled out a bag of choc-bursts. “Almost had it that time.”

“Saliva, you say? Ha ha ha! That’s jolly unhygienic!”

Much as it took a lot to get anyone to admit this, Contro wasn’t
stupid
, as such. Even Contro himself would usually agree that he was a terrible muddlehead a lot of the time. Muddlehead, he thought, was a funny word and so why not admit to being one? It was certainly a point, wasn’t it? And when you got right down to it, the life of a muddlehead was enjoyable and undemanding and, well, was there really any more to it?

In fact, if you believed the files and the case reports and all the other stuff that had been written and said about him during his time on the
Tramp
– and Contro
did
actually absorb most of that on some level, even if he needed ‘General Decay’ to bring it to his attention – he was actually regarded as highly intelligent and extremely empathic.
Excessively
empathic, in fact. But, even more so than Janya, Contro’s intelligence was specialised and his empathy necessitated that his intellect and behaviour followed – could
only
follow – a certain path.

He still couldn’t get his head around why Decay was a General, for example. Oh golly, the conversations they’d had about that! Fun and loud and so much repetition! Repetition of what exactly, Contro was afraid he couldn’t say. But it had probably been important or Decay wouldn’t have said it.

And it was a path completely and utterly unsuited to actually being on board a starship. Let alone being Chief Engineer of said starship. That was just a weird accident as far as Contro was concerned, another example of what a funny old thing life was and something about which he liked to chuckle and philosophise with anyone who would listen, and admittedly that number had dwindled rather sharply since The Accident. He also wasn’t entirely sure whether ‘philosophise’ was the right term, since there was probably some specific academic way you should philosophise and some sort of special education you needed in order to do it, and in general he just wasn’t much good at that sort of thing and so he decided he should probably call it something else, like ‘marvelling’. He marvelled about things. He was a real old-fashioned armchair marveller.

Right now, Contro was out of his element. He was out of his element in main engineering too – in fact he was out of his element in most places in normal space and time – but now, in the medical bay, he was even more out of his element.

The medical bay was almost as bad as Janya Adeneo’s lab. Everything in there was bright and shiny and looked like something he should pick up and play with. Honestly, it seemed unfair and mean of him
not
to play with things that had quite obviously been a lot of trouble and expense to make, and had evidently been made by someone who
really wanted
them to be enjoyed and appreciated. It was like a direct slap in the face to the mysterious long-gone person who had put in all that effort, to leave such tantalisingly hand-grip-imprinted and button-laden gadgets lying on their gleaming shelves. And every time he tried to pick one up and play with it, Janya told him not to touch. Which was funny.

There were lots of toys in the medical bay too, but Glomulus – Waffa called him ‘the Rip’, which was
also
funny – let him muck around with stuff more often. Even after Contro accidentally did the thing with Glomulus’s bracelets four times, he was still nice to him. Contro had deactivated his subdermals, but everyone got upset with him when he’d told them, so he had stopped telling them.

He understood, in theory, why the subdermals were necessary. But it just wouldn’t stay in his head.

“I’ll say it is,” Glomulus agreed with him cheerfully. “Imagine the things you could catch, from a frozen clonefoot.”

“I know! All sorts of things, I bet!” Contro paused. “What sorts of things?”

“I think you can turn into a clone if you lick bits of clones,” Glomulus twinkled.

Contro waved a hand dismissively. “Oh yes, ho ho, you’re having a laugh at me, I get it, very funny Mister Cratch. Can you, though?” he said, suddenly concerned. “I mean, recombinant DNA and dominant traits and all that hoo-hah, it’s at least a possibility, isn’t it?”

“Glomulus, would you leave him alone?” Janya said in a pained voice.

In truth, Contro had landed in the apparently very-important-indeed position of Chief Engineer due to a combination of evening education annexe courses he had pottered around with for fun; a coincidence of thought-patterns that transpersion physicists shared with engineers (and also, incidentally, actors and utter, cold-blooded psychopaths); a knack for talking with people; and outmoded employment demographic laws.

It was weird, but as mindless and infuriating as he was, as
deadly
as he could be in main engineering and neighbouring precincts, everyone seemed to agree that the daffy little becardiganed
bonsh
er was likeable and nice and generally inoffensive. He set them at ease, and everyone liked a Chief Engineer who could set people at ease. Contro had actually read this assessment, word for word, in one or another of the multitude of records and reports that were floating around the ship’s systems. Decay had collected some of the more personal intra-crew reports and statements during one of his odd ‘data-mining’ excursions, and enjoyed sharing them with the relevant crewmembers. The Blaran and the Mygonite shared a bit of an outsider-bond – at least that was what Decay said – and so he felt obliged to let Contro know about these things.

Contro quite liked the phrase ‘daffy little becardiganed
bonsh
er’, so he occasionally used it to describe himself.

He hadn’t read
all
the reports. Frankly he found it hard to believe that anyone
could
. And he
knew
that he was supposed to at least read Waffa’s ones, but it just wasn’t possible to look at so many words and then line them all up and march them through his brain in an orderly fashion and expect them to arrive at some sort of long-term storage area in anything resembling the military formation required to convert them into useful, accessible knowledge. Two thousand words couldn’t possibly travel as light signals to the eyes, through the optic nerves, into the brain, through the cognitive process and into the memory and response areas without losing, say, thirteen or fourteen hundred words along the way. How did
words
become
knowing things
anyway? That was silly. It made him laugh.

And yet, despite all this, Contro set people at ease. Even Waffa, occasionally. He knew this, because Decay had shown him the statements and he was sure Decay wouldn’t make stuff like that up. There was already too much
real
information to wade through, without adding in
not-real
stuff to complicate things.

And that was great. Because setting people at ease was what Controversial-To-The-End
liked
to do.

“We’re still analysing the samples and attempting to work out
exactly
what we’re looking at,” Janya went on, still relentlessly and admirably focussed on the same single thing she had been focussed on for – ooh, it must have been
minutes
now, “but yes – it was most certainly Molran saliva. We’re just not sure
why
.”

“Oh well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out!” Contro said, since it seemed a positive and reassuring platitude was called for. And by golly, he congratulated himself modestly, that had been a good one. Then, as a bonus, he threw in a suggestion. “I know, maybe he was drifting in space and starving, so he tried to eat the foot but then it was nasty so he threw it away!”

Dear God, he was an honest-to-goodness
contributor
to this conversation!

“We’re quite a long way from anywhere, for him to be just drifting in space right near where we happened to have an airlock malfunction,” Janya pointed out. “And if he was drifting out here, and starving, I don’t think he’d throw away an eejit’s foot. Molran and Blaran digestive systems are quite capable of handling human flesh, as Decay never ceases to delight in reminding us simply because it’s creepy information.”

“Aw, but I’m sure Decay wouldn’t eat us!”

“I’m … quite sure of that too,” Janya said after an awkward pause. “What I mean is, we’re not sure what led the saliva to be on the sample, or how the sample found its way back to us.”

“Right, right,” it was all just unbearably exciting and interesting to Contro, even though he knew it would all be in one ear and out the other eventually and that would be annoying for his poor friends.

Contro was
so
empathic and open, so very undemanding, that a conversation that might otherwise feel like it was taking place with a specially-designed piece of dialogue-generating software was actually far more fulfilling than one might expect. It could also be very annoying, when someone who already knew what they were talking about had to get a certain response from him and Contro didn’t know what that response should be, but the annoying instances were thankfully minor. Or so he liked to believe and so the personnel reports Decay shared with him seemed to bear out. He was like an empty cup – in so many more ways than one, ho ho – and even if he didn’t really
understand
what people were pouring into his ears, he responded to it and made people
feel
as though it was important.