Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (29 page)

Of course, with Bruce in full active synthetic intelligence mode, there was at best a blurry line between it and the autopilot anyway. But it let them land, and sealed and pressurised the bay regardless of their transgressions against the Artist down on Jauren Silva. Sally wondered if it felt almost as responsible for the rain of Godfire as they did. They had, after all, taken over what was to all intents and purposes Bruce’s body using the game changer, and made it fire its guns at the base.

She couldn’t help but wonder why Bruce itself didn’t seem to be harbouring more of a grudge against them for that. Maybe synthetic intelligences felt differently about that kind of enforced human control, as opposed to the terrifying violation a human might justifiably consider it. She also reflected, as the lander locked down and exchange gravity took hold and they all dropped into their seats, that it would probably be a mistake to
assume
the synth felt okay with what they had done to the
Tramp
’s systems. For all they knew, it was as furious as the Artist had been. Especially since it already seemed to have deviated colossally from standard synthetic intelligence stimulus-response territory. There was really no saying
how
Bruce felt, or what it might do to them as a result.

Still, for the time being they were all alive. They sank back into their own natural weights and pressed into their seats with the neat effortlessness of experience, and then rose and clambered back out of the lander once all the indicators showed it was safe. Once again, Sally didn’t do this entirely without qualms, but accepted that there was little they could do if Bruce did turn out to be harbouring vengeful thoughts. She picked up the sample box containing the clattering, chattering Jauren Silvan weasel.

“What are we going to do with this?” she asked.

“Standard procedure would be to scrub the container and send it to the lab for testing, and keep us all inside the bay here under quarantine until we could be sure none of us had brought anything dangerous back from the surface,” Z-Lin glanced back as Foley and Mace came out of the lander with Ricky staggering groggily between them. He seemed to be improving and was at least back on his feet again, so the lander’s emergency medical supplies had evidently done some good even if they had been applied by the other two eejits. “But since all that would happen with feedback from the computer and we can’t really depend on anything the computer tells us … Bruce, you somehow seem to know about Jauren Silva’s flora and fauna,” the Commander raised her voice slightly. “Can you tell us anything about the weasel, or anything else we might have picked up?” she waited. “Bruce?”

“Um.”

The faltering, uncertain utterance from the
Tramp
’s synthetic intelligence was unsettling enough, but then the ship shuddered and Sally realised
why
it had said ‘um’.

“We’re diving again,” Sally breathed, carrying the sample box across the bay to the wide porthole in the side of the docking blister. Sure enough, the vivid grey-green curve of the planet was fading, swimming into sooty darkness.
Darkerness
. They were sinking back into the underspace.

“Did the Artist get up after all?” Z-Lin asked uneasily, as the
Tramp
continued to shake.

“No,” Bruce actually sounded taken aback. “No, this is … this is actually not possible.”

“Wait –
you’re
not doing this?” Zeegon demanded. “And the Artist isn’t doing it either?”

“It’s complicated,” Bruce said, its voice turning tense and harried. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Give us a shot at it,” Waffa suggested. The
Tramp
groaned and Jauren Silva faded completely out of sight.

“The first few dives were normal,” Bruce said, “and remember, like you say, I wasn’t there for them. It’s just hub-memory I’m talking about now.”

“Right,” Z-Lin said impatiently. “Go on, Bruce. Please.”

They stood in the bay, watching through the window as sooty, clinging
something
, a brain’s attempt to fill in a gap, crawled in and took the place of planet, stars, the void itself. Then the placeholder-shadow deepened further into darkerness as both the mind and the universe just stopped trying.

“Anyway, after a while,” Bruce said, “it somehow seemed as if there were …
things
in there. The Artist believed it was simply overcompensation, a mirage of sorts, the mind inventing figments to fill the absence. Unable to comprehend the true extent of the nothingness that the underspace represented, the mind insisted that there had to be some sort of relatable or understandable content, and the senses theoretically played along,” Bruce cleared its make-believe throat. “Theoretically.”

“But the hub was getting them too,” Sally said.

“Exactly. Now the hub is
basically
a synthetic intelligance, albeit a silent and vegetative one, certainly no good for navigation even though it could collect sensory data in various ways. There’s no saying it
can’t
experience the same sensory deprivation response an organic can. Even more so, perhaps, because its senses are so widespread and integrated and varied. But they
do
tend to be less susceptible to illusion. It’s a simple fact of design.”

“So it wasn’t just happening in your heads,” Z-Lin said, “and whatever it is, once we start to get it too, it’s not just going to be in ours.”

“So then the Artist thought it was a reaction,” Bruce went on, “the nothingness in the underspace
curdling
in contact with matter from our universe. Like milk reacting to something acidic.”

“Or a pearl forming around a grain of sand,” Zeegon said.

“Right. Or a lamer and even more worn-out simile,” Bruce agreed, “if one exists.”

“How about you figure out what exactly is going on here, and explain it to us,” Zeegon growled, “instead of cracking wise about my similes?”

“And maybe let us know how deep we’re going?” Z-Lin added, as the darkerness bulged closer and heavier against the outside of the ship.

“And
where
we’re going?” Decay put in, stepping back from the window and fingering his flattened, red-veined ears. “You’re still in charge of navigating through this, aren’t you? That was why the Artist wanted you in the first place.”

“The Artist realised it wasn’t a reaction, so much as a
communion
,” Bruce continued its explanation, ignoring the demands of its crewmates. “Just because physical existence didn’t start in the underspace, just because matter and time didn’t exist, it didn’t logically follow that there was
nothing
. There was only nothing
as we knew it
.

“And as we dove – as the Artist dove, again and again – the darkerness adapted, and found a way to … communicate.”

“Communicate?” Z-Lin and the others backed still further away from the bay window as the great globular shadow pressed in. Humans and Blaran then twitched flock-like to one side as a clot of the stuff extruded into the lander bay right beside them. It vanished again almost immediately, but Sally’s peripheral vision began to swim with the stuff, and from the way her friends were shifting uneasily she guessed she wasn’t the only one. “Okay, how screwed
are
we here?”

“Again, not communication as
we
know it,” Bruce said. “But a means of making contact, and learning.”

“A means that gets inside us, and makes us insane or possibly cataleptic,” Zeegon summarised.

“It’s not
their
fault their means of communing has these effects,” Bruce said snippily.

“No,” Z-Lin replied, “it’s the Artist’s fault for bringing our universes together in the first place.”

Sally put the sample box down with a thump and an indignant shriek from the weasel within. “And now it’s happening on its own.”

“That might be possible, if the Artist is really out of it,” Bruce admitted. “Like I was trying to tell you, at first it was normal. Then it got invasive, intrusive, insistent. The deep darkerness that he went to on the early dives was more potent. But it got better, when we mastered the dive. But then, it started to seem like more darkerness was coming with us from the underspace, inside us, and staying. And
then
, it started to seem like the Artist needed to use the drive to
keep
us from diving, rather than make us dive. To hold us above the surface. The dives get deeper, you see, if you don’t control it carefully. This one…”

Clue glanced at her watch. “It should have ended by now.”

“Yes.”

“So he dived,” Sally said, “he got covered in deep dark shooey, then every time he dived it grabbed him tighter, and then he had to use the drive to keep himself from getting dragged down, and now it’s dragging us all down.”

The ship shuddered, and the oppressive nothingness closed in.

“How deep are we diving?” Zeegon asked nervously. “Do you know that? Do you have any control over it? Or are we just going all the way in?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce said.

“And is it still the drive that is enabling the dives, or are they going to happen on their own and the drive is the only thing keeping us on the surface most of the time?” Sally added.

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you use the drive to surface us?” Z-Lin asked. “Does it have to be the Artist who does it, or can we do it ourselves?”

“I don’t know!” Bruce snapped.

“What happens if we destroy the drive the Artist’s got with him?” Sally demanded. “Either these dives are going to continue with or without the drive, and we’re screwed either way because the underspace is irreversibly merging with our universe, or the drive’s
causing
it, acting as a catalyst of some sort, and destroying it–”

“How about just deactivating it, for a start?” Zeegon suggested. “If we keep destroying stuff, we might end up wrecking something we’re going to need later.”

Before Sally could respond to this – actually, Zeegon was right, and in this case it would probably be a good idea to re-examine all her primary instinctive responses – the
Tramp
gave a final shudder and a sharp lurch that made everyone but Decay stagger sideways. Sally stumbled and kicked the sample box, adding to the momentum of its mild slide and sending it skidding straight into a second blob of darkerness that had materialised near the bay wall.

The darkerness lifted, a bright swell of planet reappeared in the bay window, and they were back in normal space.

The mound of darkerness the sample box had slid into receded, ink-in-water-in-reverse, and the sample box and the patch of deck it was sitting on reappeared. The weasel, that hadn’t stopped chittering and scratching and thumping since Clue had dropped it in there, went right on chittering and scratching and thumping. Z-Lin was fairly sure it had fallen silent for those brief seconds when it was actually
inside
the blob, but they’d all had other things on their minds at that point.

“That’s not Jauren Silva,” she said, stepping gingerly past the box and approaching the window once again. They were further out – as she looked, she saw the lumpy shape of a moon or large asteroid begin to slide past between the
Tramp
and the planet – and the planet itself was much larger. A gas giant, in fact, bloated and red-beige and striated with thousand-mile storm fronts.

“I don’t like this,” Zeegon said. “There’s something not right with that planet. I can feel it in my shoulder-blade.”

Zeegon had a fibre-crete shoulder-blade and often cited it as evidence against the rightness of places and situations. Z-Lin tended to take warning signals from body-parts with a grain of salt, but Zeegon’s assorted implants and replacement pieces actually formed a rather dependable trouble barometer, and Clue often found herself in the position of having to take what she could get in terms of danger signs.

In this case, she noted as she stepped up to the window and continued her examination of the gas giant, the helmsman may have been onto something. There didn’t appear to be anything inherently
wrong
with the planet itself – all the blobs and traces of darkerness seemed to have receded and vanished, so perhaps they hadn’t gone as deep as all that – but they were
close
to it. There appeared to be moons in stable orbits lower than their current position, but the
Tramp
didn’t seem to be orbiting as far as Z-Lin could tell. In fact, they’d been at all-stop and in orbit around a much smaller planet, and whatever heading and momentum they’d carried through the underspace with them probably remained largely unchanged in their new location.

It was entirely possible that they’d fall victim to their new neighbour’s gravity, and be pulled down.

“Have you ever been here before?” Sally asked, looking up in the vague direction of the ship’s comm speakers. “Bruce?”

“I don’t think so,” Bruce replied. “Navigation is still locked out so I can’t say for sure where we are, but I’m fairly sure I’ve never been to this planet before.”

“Bruce,” Clue said carefully, “can you tell us
anything
about what’s happening here?”

When it finally spoke, Bruce still sounded uncharacteristically shaken. “I think it’s defending itself.”

“What?”

“The darkerness. It might not be an
entity
, it might not even exist in any real sense, but when our universe’s matter and time and space mingled with the underspace, it created some sort of amalgamation of the two. It leaks between the membranes, from deep down, bubbling up to the surface and bursting here.”

Z-Lin became aware that the others were staring worriedly at her, nervously at each other, wide-eyed at the window.

“It comes up and it gathers around people,” Bruce went on. “It gathered around the Artist, within him, within me. It … Jauren Silva,
Boonie’s Last Stand
, it was more than just a research and development station, more than just the Artist’s base and the place where he stored his experimental prototypes. It was
active
. It was like a nest. A nursery.