Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (15 page)

“Okay,” Clue said, looking up from the transcript of Sally’s singularly unilluminating dialogue with the Artist. “Why?” there was a pause and a series of blank looks at this. “Why dismember Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 but then catch his bits?”

“Simple,” Janya replied. “Because of its orders. Whether they came from an external source or from its own subroutines.”

“Nobody leaves,” Waffa said sickly.

“I’m struck by a sudden insatiable desire to talk about the weather,” Cratch remarked into the silence.

Z-Lin pointed at him without looking. “Shut up,” she turned to Sally. “Why the elaborate charade, though?”

“There doesn’t need to be logic behind a synth’s random whims any more than there needs to be logic behind a–” she stopped, and looked at their medic, “–
human
psychopath,” she concluded.

“We were all weirded out but more or less accepting of the possibility that a Molran might catch a flying piece of corpse, bite it and throw it back at us,” Janya commented. “Once the readings said that’s what it was, we didn’t question it.”

“Just in case it
isn’t
just the whimsy of madness,” Sally went on, “maybe somebody should ask Bruce whether there are any
other
rules like the whole nobody-leaves thing, that it might decide to dismember us in the execution of.”

They waited for a moment, just in case Bruce happened to still be patched in despite the game changer. If it was, it opted not to speak up. Not even to huffily defend itself against the unfair accusation of being dismemberment-happy.

“Waffa, it speaks to you,” Z-Lin said. “Let us know if and when you get a response.”

“Look, we can discuss this all night,” Sally said, “the point is, once we accept that the
machine
is compromised, we have to second-guess
everything
we know that came to us through the machine. And that’s not an easy space to get our heads inside, because we
live inside
the machine and we get basically
everything
from it.”

“Still,” Janya muttered, “we should have considered this as soon as Waffa told us about Bruce.”

“No point wailing and gnashing about it,” Clue said. “The good thing about square one is, the only way is forward. Of course, this presupposes we are aware of all the squares and there are no as-yet unsuspected squares somewhere
behind
square one for us to be unexpectedly pushed back onto, my proverbs are crap, alright? Let’s move on.”

“There might still
be
a foot-biting Molran lunatic in a scooter out there with a synthetic intelligence hub in his lap, referring to himself as ‘the Artist’ and calling the shots Bruceside,” Sally said. “Or the whole story might just be a fabrication intended to put us off the trail of whatever Bruce is
actually
doing. Or it might just be making it all up for no reason.”

“Those are some widespread options,” Waffa remarked.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Contro said.

Z-Lin
tsk
ed lightly but patiently. “Is now really the–”

“–he hasn’t been matching our relative field profile and piggybacking along with us. Not in the last couple of dozen times we’ve gone relative.”

“What? How do you know?” Clue demanded.

“Well, it’s obvious, really!” Contro laughed. “It would have left a bubble on the surface of the field, a distortion. Not
literally
, of course, but like a puddle with a brick at the bottom, and a duck swims over the brick and its feet brush over the top and – well, honestly, you know what I mean!”

“We actually don’t,” Waffa pointed out.

Clue frowned. “Are you saying this Artist
didn’t
use the
Tramp
’s computer to merge its field with his and track us through soft-space?”

“Using our computer or just by a lucky guess, either way it would have left a mark,” Contro said positively. “A duckprint on the–”

“Can we leave the duck for just a second?” Z-Lin requested.

“Righto!” Contro said cheerfully. “It’s not a perfect comparison anyway, since a duck floats on the
surface
of a puddle with its feet dangling
down
, and for this to work it really needs to be a
torus
-shaped puddle–”

“Why didn’t you mention that this was impossible back when we were talking about the Artist merging fields?” Cratch interrupted gently.

“Well, I didn’t know there wasn’t a lump until just now!” Contro said. “Honestly, you lot! I had to
think
about it!”

“You’ve been … thinking about it,” Janya said, sounding a little lightheaded. Contro smiled innocently and tapped his temple. “Calculating the relative field profile of the ship and checking it for irregularities.”

“Yep!”

“In your head.”

“Well, I don’t know how to do it on the computer and the computer might be acting all wacky anyway!” Contro exclaimed. “Honestly!”

“Contro’s brain may be the only ship system not infiltrated by Bruce,” Clue said, mentally marking this sentence down on her list of things she never thought she would say in the course of her professional life. It was a long list, but this sentence came in quite close to the top of it.

“Did pigs carry each other around a lot?” Contro asked. “I don’t think
I’ve
ever seen one that did.”

“This does tend to bolster the ‘there is no Artist’ hypothesis,” Janya suggested smoothly. “It’s one of the few pieces of information – and I can’t believe I’m about to say this – that we can actually depend on.”

“It is sort of one of those days,” Z-Lin concurred with a nod.

“If Contro says there’s no sign of a second vessel following us through soft-space, that either means the Artist was floating right here in this area when we dropped out, or came
in
from somewhere else at relative speed and dropped out right here next to us – neither one of these is necessarily
impossible
, but they’re both staggeringly unlikely,” Janya said.

“Or that he never existed in the first place and Bruce is just making him up,” Clue concluded.

“Right,” Janya said, and turned to the smiling Contro. “I never thought I’d say this either, but what about your ‘clinging to the hull’ theory from earlier?” she asked. “Could he do that and ride along with us, and then launch himself out into space when we dropped out?”

“Not without throwing a relative field of his own to surround him, and merging it with ours,” Contro said, “which would leave the ripple, see? The relative field is only a matter of microns around our hull, he couldn’t sit under it. If he’s come with us, he’s been inside the ship the whole time,” the transpersion physicist finished positively, “and Bruce has been hiding him from us. And maybe
then
jumping out into space when we slow down, and pretending he followed us, and Bruce hiding all
that…”

Everyone was staring at the smiling little man in the cardigan.

“Bruce seemed pretty definite about the Artist being
out there
,” Waffa ventured. “It got all poetical on that particular point, actually.”

“Misdirection?” Z-Lin suggested.

“More to the point, is there any way we can tell for sure in either case, without just waiting for more information from some non-Bruce-related source?” Janya asked. “This course-change, for example. It happened before Sally locked navigation. Our acceleration had started before Sally locked the relative drive, too – how long before we hit maximum subluminal and start to burn out the conventional engines?”

“The engines won’t burn out,” Z-Lin said firmly. “But we
will
reach maximum subluminal cruising speed and level off.”

“Are we close enough to any stars or other bodies to make some sort of visual guesses as to our course and heading?” Waffa added.

“Not really,” Z-Lin said, “and even if we had a sextant, none of us know how to use one.”

“If we could see any stars, we could navigate by sextant,” Cratch said cheerfully, “if we had a sextant and knew how to use it and the navigational controls weren’t locked out. My proverbs are no better than yours, Commander.”

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”

“Sorry.”

“So what are the odds of us
actually
having been course-changed,” Janya said, “and crashing into whatever the Artist has us pointed towards because we locked Bruce out of the navigational system?”

“At subluminal?” Sally said, and shook her head. “There’s nothing within fifty thousand years of here.”

“So we have some time,” Clue concluded.

“I guess we really
can
discuss this all night,” Cratch smiled.

There was, of course, only so much circular discussion even the intrepid crew of the
Tramp
could endure, so after a short while they departed for dinner and then to their quarters for an uneasy night-shift of sleep.

Doctor Cratch, naturally enough, was not invited to join the crew for dinner. He was accustomed to eating alone.

“Well, not entirely alone anymore,” he said to the empty medical bay. “Right, Brucey boy?”

There was no answer, and Cratch wondered if this was because Sally’s little synthetic-intelligence-blinding machine was doing its work on the internal communications system, or just because Bruce didn’t want to socialise with him any more than the rest of the crew did.

He wondered if this also meant the observation bumpers were offline.

Not worth it,
he thought.
Not yet
.

Whistling tonelessly to himself, Cratch stored the last remaining piece of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 with the rest of his body, then went to the food printer.

There were two printers in the larger medical bay that served as his house arrest site. The huge fabricator for medical supplies and tools had been irreparably damaged in The Accident that had claimed the lives of Doctor Mays and his entire staff, which Cratch supposed had saved the surviving crew the trouble of finding a way of rendering it harmless for his use. It still took material from the eejit plant and churned out its organs, body-parts and skin on demand, with haphazard and minimal surgical customisation potential, but it could no longer make replacement equipment or spare parts, or synthesise medicines.

Fortunately, with the reduction of the crew to nine humans and one Molran – one
Blaran
– the existing stockpile of medicine and other supplies would be enough to stave off everything but old age. The eejits were, thanks to Able Darko’s wonder-genes, extremely hardy and rarely needed shots or medication. And even if one
did
encounter a problem that required treatment with some of their irreplaceable supplies, it was simply a matter of letting him die and then printing off a new one
without
the problem.

The smaller printer did meals and non-medical items garnered mostly from raw materials in the recycling and ‘ponics centres. Cratch ran off a bowl of bland ribbon pasta – he’d long since learned it was better not to test the device’s capabilities with fancy requests – and carried it across to the set of consoles he had been sitting at for most of the evening.

It was a big improvement on the brig.

“Hello!”

Cratch looked up as Contro came bustling into the room. “Long time no see.”

“Indeed, indeed! Ha ha ha!” Contro rounded the now-clean examination table, wandered apparently-aimlessly along the consoles, and looked under a couple of the seats. He paused periodically to squint and poke at the organiser pad he was carrying in one hand, then went back to peeking and bobbing.

“Looking for something?”

“I left my pad behind somewhere!” Contro chuckled, straightened, and poked at the device in his hand. “Can’t seem to figure out how to find it! Honestly, there should be a ‘where did you last put it?’ program on these things!”

“That’s not it in your hand, then,” Cratch assumed. “The pad. Only, that one you’re playing with looks like the only organiser pad I’ve ever seen you use.”

Contro looked at the pad as if seeing it for the first time. Then he laughed. “Golly, what a duffer! I had it all along and I was using it to try and
find
it! Try explaining
that
to someone, they’d never believe you!”

“Oh, they might,” Doctor Cratch said mildly, and took a mouthful of pasta. “Do you even know how to use one comm device to find another one?”

“Not really!” Contro chuckled again, ruefully. “I was asking Waffa if he’d seen it, and he suggested I use this to search! Said he thought it would show up right under my nose just like that! Ha ha ha, and look! I guess he was right!”

“I suspect he may have been playing a tiny little practical joke on you,” Cratch suggested.

“Maybe he was! What a cheeky chimp! Aw, but good for him,” Contro plonked himself down on a chair further along the row of consoles and monitors from Glomulus, and pushed the organiser pad deep into his cardigan’s waist pocket. “You know, I could have just used my watch anyway, but I never use it!” he flopped his sleeve back, unfastened the gleaming black wristwatch, and gave it a little shake. “Ha ha, I never remember it dangling around on my wrist there anyway!”

“I hear you,” Cratch smiled and gave his own pair of heavy bracelets a shake.

“I suppose you do!” Contro said merrily, and poked at the watch. “Could never get the ruddy thing to work anyway,” he went on. “Waffa has his hooked up to all sorts of things, you know. He doesn’t even need to do his work at a console, it all comes right through the wristwatch. Amazing, don’t you think?”

“It’s a fabulous time to be alive, right enough,” Glomulus said idly. “Can I take a look?” Contro unfastened the watch and slid it across the counter. “Would you like to join me for dinner?” he asked, studying the sleek little device incuriously.

Contro’s face remained smiling and blank. “What, you mean like a date? Aw, I’m very flattered but I think we should just–”

“Not a date,” Cratch said, looking up and doing his best to keep a straight face, “just dinner from the printer, the way mother used to make.”