Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (16 page)

“Golly, you must have had an odd mum!”

“You have no idea,” Cratch grinned. “No, I was just thinking food and, you know, a bit of company. A chat,”
I imagine
, he thought but didn’t add,
the others were almost as eager to ditch you as they were to ditch me
.

“I ate hours ago,” Contro demurred.

Glomulus cleared his throat. Talking with Contro was actually not very challenging once you had the knack of it. Working with eejits helped too, but if this evening’s discussions had established anything, it was that it would be a mistake to assume Contro was anything like an eejit, between the ears. “So, yes,” he said, “that would have been lunch. Aren’t you hungry again?”

“I am, actually!” Contro laughed, and actually slapped his thigh. “I guess that’s why you’re the doc!”

“I’m a marvel alright,” Cratch smiled and waved a hand. “Besides, you know, I think the Commander and Sally would have a few choice things to say about you and me dating.”

“Oh! Are you dating
both
of them? Ha ha ha, you sly dog!”

“
No
,” Cratch spluttered, very nearly losing his cool at the very idea, then brought himself back under control. “No. Just … you know, the security issue,” he tapped his ankle bands together under the console. “No fraternising with the prisoner.”

“Oh! Righto! Aw, but I’m sure you’ll find the right person for you one day!”

“Or
construct
one for myself,” Cratch added, casting a meaningful glance at the big printer squatting in the far corner in front of the little cave where he’d set up his sleeping area. “Moo ha ha ha, they called me mad, the storm is at its peak, and so on,” he put in for emphasis.

Contro looked innocently troubled.
A child,
Cratch thought,
listening to a sarcastic adult answer a question using words he doesn’t understand
.

“What storm?” he asked with a baffled smile. “We’re in space!”

“Just a joke,” Cratch explained. “You know, the old ‘mad scientist makes ideal companion for himself out of assorted body parts’.”

“By gum, can you
do
that?”

“Only if I want my ideal companion to look like Able Darko,” Cratch said lightly, and wiggled the fingers of one hand while he swirled pasta onto his fork with the other. The watch, forgotten by Contro, had dropped deftly into Glomulus’s breast pocket. “And possibly have my hands and feet, I suppose.”

“They’re very nice hands!”

“Well if you think so,” Cratch murmured, “you’d be the first.”

Contro chortled at this, oblivious. “Aw, well – why don’t you have dinner with the eejits?”

“Wingus and Dingus?” Glomulus waved his fork. “They wandered off to the common room. I think they–” he was interrupted by a soft chime over the medical bay intercom.

“What was that?” Contro asked. “Was it Bruce, do you think?”

“If I had to guess,” Cratch replied, “I’d say we’ve hit maximum subluminal cruising speed.”

“Oh! So, now what?”

“Well – again, if I had to guess,” Glomulus said, “we cruise along blindly and wait for the next development,” he grinned around another mouthful of tasteless pasta. “It’s what Sally calls a reactive game, where the opponent is making all the moves and all we can do is respond to each one as he makes them.”

“Doesn’t sound like something Sally would like to play!” Contro noted – surprisingly perceptive, in Doctor Cratch’s opinion.

“No,” Glomulus agreed. “It’s one of her least favourite things in the whole universe. That’s why she pulled out the game changer.”

“Aha!”

“Better to throw a punch and see what happens than to sit and hope your opponent doesn’t need punching, in Sally’s opinion,” Cratch nodded. “But sadly, now it means we’re back to waiting for the Artist to make his next move. Or for Bruce to. Or whichever you like,” he twirled up another forkful. “In theory, the reactive game allows you to save up moves while your opponent uses all of his,” he went on. “But there are problems with that approach.”

“Oh?”

“It depends on the game. If there’s only a fixed number of rounds before the endgame, then you can lose while you’re waiting to make moves of your own. Or you can find yourself with a wealth of possible moves, only to find your opponent has already placed himself in a position of insurmountable superiority so your moves are worthless.”

“What sort of game is this, then?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Doctor Cratch smiled and scooped up the last of his dinner. “We won’t know until somebody wins.”

Contro, looking thoughtful, was just opening his mouth to say something else when the floor shuddered. There was another low chime, a second sustained shudder, and then an alarm began to blare stridently from the loudspeakers.

“What’s all this?” Contro shouted over the din.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” Cratch said, standing and dropping the fork and bowl unhurriedly into the recycling chute, “it’s the Artist’s next move.”

Decay was alone on the bridge when they began their descent. Blaren didn’t sleep.

Your average Blaran stood between seven feet five inches and seven feet seven inches in height. That’s not to say there weren’t seven-foot-two and seven-foot-ten Blaren, but they were rare and extremely distinctive, usually accompanied by other variations. An
average
, for Blaren, was far more specific than it was for humans. Decay, at seven-foot-five, was right on the cusp of ‘short for a Blaran’, but managed to be merely on ‘the short side of average’.

Like all the Molranoids, Blaren had broad, flat-topped skulls and naturally up-curved mouths that made it look to humans like they were smiling all the time. A pair of elongated incisors in their upper jaws made this ‘smile’ far less reassuring, but this was only vestigial primate instinct on humanity’s part. A Blaran was, after all, approximately one hundred percent less ancestrally terrifying than an aki’Drednanth, let alone a Fergunakil. Blaran ears were intricate and mobile and highly sensitive, webbed extensions on either side of the head like the wings of a small pink bat. Blaren were bipedal but had four arms, which was what accounted for most of the height difference between Molranoid and humanoid.

And no, they didn’t sleep. They did, however, get bored, and so Decay was playing a game of
Metak
with the computer. Or, if the events of the past day and a half – from which he had been almost entirely excluded – were to be believed, with the
Tramp
’s prodigal synth, which had gone insane and joined forces with bla bla bla, the humans had done a lot of earnest, purposeful, adorable babbling and Decay couldn’t possibly have given less of a fuck even if modern physicists had discovered a way of splitting the fundamental subatomic fuck-particle.

If there was something out there, Sally would shoot it in the face and that would be the end of it. It hadn’t made the computer any less fiendishly clever on the
Metak
board.

Decay had long since stopped using the full translation of his Blaran name – General Moral Decay (Alcohol) – because people got confused and kept asking him if he was actually a General and why, since General outranked Captain, he was just a non-Corps comms officer instead of running the ship.

Admittedly, it was
mainly
Contro who still had trouble with this concept, but Zeegon and Waffa occasionally jumped on the bandwagon for what they injudiciously referred to as ‘a joke’. It was mildly irritating at worst, but his main concern was what might happen if the misunderstanding perpetuated itself into the miniature mass psyche they had on board the
Tramp
at this time.

One day, the Captain and Z-Lin might run into trouble, and Decay wanted absolutely nothing on the record – official or otherwise – that might place him in charge. Not even of seven humans and a crèche of eejits drifting aimlessly through space. There were few things that horrified him more than the looming spectre of captaincy. It was bad enough to imagine the final nine humans creeping off into old age and dropping dead over the course of the next century or two, leaving Decay – little over two hundred and fifty years old himself at this moment – with approximately four-and-a-half thousand years to enjoy deep space in the company of an army of mentally handicapped human clones.

Long before that happened, he’d sworn to himself, he would either get the crew of the
Tramp
to disembark on some AstroCorps-settled world and decommission the ship … or climb into one of the three remaining escape pods and fire himself into the nearest sun. Now that Steña was gone, there was nothing much to prevent him.

When the ship began to shake and the general alarm started ringing, Decay actually thought it might be a ploy on Bruce’s part to distract him from the confrontation sequence he was running on one of the ship’s most active pieces.

“Nice,” he said appreciatively.

Then he looked up, and saw the surface of the universe close over their heads.

There was no other way to describe it. It was like going under water, except there was no water – just the darkness of space, growing steadily more washed-out … and steadily
darker
. It was as if even the void, with its complete absence of light, was somehow illuminated and now they were sinking, swimming away from that illumination and into a cold gulf that Decay had never suspected of existing. A gulf that had no
right
to exist.

Eyes on the screen, he reached out his lower left hand and tapped the communicator.

“Zeeg,” he said, “if you’re not already hauling arse down to the bridge, you might want to consider starting.”

Decay had long since diagnosed humanity with a hysterically funny, often-horrifying mental illness on a species-scale. Blaren, Molren and Bonshooni subscribed to this general idea as a matter of course – humans were wild, primitive, colourful and endlessly creative, in positive as well as terrifyingly negative and destructive ways – but General Moral Decay (Alcohol) had given it a name. And, being a Blaran, he liked to talk about it to anyone who would listen. This did not currently leave him with a large number of subscribers.

He called it
cerebral dysphasic credulosis
. It was a disease every human suffered from, and there were no exceptions. It had been thoroughly bred into the human genome by thousands of millennia of communication being the prime survival and prosperity factor in their evolution. Ever since the first protohuman had learned how to let another protohuman know where clean water and predator-proof trees were, they had been utterly dependent on the disease, and it had shaped every aspect of their development.

A human, in short, would believe anything it was told, if it was told often enough. This worked verbally, but was particularly powerful in writing. If a human read something, and even more potently if it was encouraged to
write
something, a sufficient number of times, the words simultaneously lost all meaning and imprinted themselves on the human brain as part of the human’s reality script. It was a disease that gave them prodigiously efficient learning curves, cramming aeons of knowledge into life-spans barely beyond a Molran’s first puberty and into psyches almost devoid of instinct or any genetic memory unrelated to falling over when they went to sleep.

It had also given them a multitude of awesomely selfish, arrogant, bigoted and hateful organised religions – not, Decay had long since noted, by the nature of the beliefs themselves, which were fine and lovely, but by books being written and re-written by human agencies according to their own agendas, utterly bastardising the pure faiths. And the humans, under the spell of this crippling legacy brain-damage,
believed the last thing they’d read about it all
, no matter how utterly insane it was.

This wasn’t a problem with the religious texts themselves. Indeed, if humans actually
read
those, their illness would probably lead them safely to enlightenment. But tragically, they didn’t. Decay had yet, for example, to meet a single Mygonite who had read the Book of Mygon, which preached that any violence visited upon another would be inevitably turned back on the wielder. By contrast, Zeegon Pendraegg was, from what Decay had gathered, a reformed Orthodox Zhraaki of some stripe or other, and if he had read the Pinian Gospels According to Zhraak, he would most likely have been a bigger raving psychotic than the Rip. But instead, he’d read a liberal series of interpretations at best. This was by no means a
bad
thing, because it meant he was a truly decent human being – but it proved Decay’s point. Humans believed anything they read, or
had read to them
, and it wasn’t the pure tenets of faith they bothered to read, so much as reams and reams of hideous bile-dripping misquotations and war-justifying spinjobs. And that was the irretrievable
bonsh
they imprinted on, like baby
ata
-birds.

Oh, but the human reality script was powerful stuff. The human reality script said that humanity would escape the ruins of Earth, build starships and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Molran Fleet, becoming lucky number six in the Six Species. The human reality script said that they would survive the Cancer, thumb their squashy beaky little noses at the vast and unfeeling cosmos, and settle world after poor, unsuspecting world.
And that’s exactly what had happened
. Because when a script like that dovetailed with a primate as aggressive and brilliant as the human being, a sane universe just lay down and kept quiet until the dust settled.

There was no cure for
cerebral dysphasia credulosis
. Selective breeding would have eradicated it within five generations, but humans didn’t roll that way. The only treatment was to turn it into something beneficial. To give humans something good to write, and to read, and to mindlessly, robotically believe.

To that end, each year when he celebrated the sort-of-heartbreaking human tradition of the birthday, Decay asked a favour of any friend or crewmember who asked him what he wanted. For a month, he asked them, and for longer if they felt they could, the gift-giver was to wake up each morning and write
I will not be a dick to other sentient beings
ten times on an organiser pad.