Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (35 page)

Obscurely captured by
something
in Contro’s relentless cascade of words, Janus had found himself reactivating muscles and sitting up in spite of himself.

“…can’t close it from
this
side anyway, or open it – so just as well the gates
were
destroyed if you ask me, ha ha, otherwise there’d be no point in even looking for them, not that they exist anyway but aw, don’t you think it would be sad if all those Molren were looking for all that time, for no reason? Space probably doesn’t have a hole in it, though, because space sort of already
is
a hole, if you think about it that way. So maybe it’s a metaphor! But that would be frightfully unsatisfying too, don’t you think? You know, one of those ‘it turns out that the secret was inside all of us’ sort of deals! Apparently Mygon the Last will be waiting out there, wouldn’t
that
be a thing? I imagine he’d be all ‘who broke my jolly gates, who’s going to pay for this then?’ Ha ha ha!”

Hang on
, Janus had thought, with sudden clarity. Why
are they willing to talk about the underspace now? And why with Contro, and not with me? I’m ship’s counsellor
.

He’d watched them, watched them listening to Contro, watched Contro talking at them, watched them talking back at him.

Broken machine
, he’d thought, looking at the eejits. He’d looked at Contro.
Warped hub
.

Whoa
.

And, as often seemed to happen when he stopped thinking about one thing and focussed on another, Whye had understood something that had been eluding him about the way they had dived, this last time. It had come to him suddenly, and with the indefinable symmetry of correctness. The eejits were receptive, open and vulnerable to the underspace in the same way they were open and vulnerable to ouroboros conversation tar-pits with the
Tramp
’s Chief Engineer. They didn’t have the
filters
to escape either phenomenon. What this meant, Whye wasn’t actually sure. Not yet. Not even the Artist had had any experience with eejits, which meant that he hadn’t been on the forefront of underspace / eejit interface research. Janus Whye was.

The underspace drive
was
operating on its own. This much seemed clear. It was operating on its own, and it was
active
– ready to dive – in a sort of standing wave, according to principles they would probably never understand. It had barely been under the Artist’s command in the first place, and even that minimal control had been slipping as the Artist’s mind had drifted farther and farther from the metaphorical shore. But the Artist’s darkerness-riddled body had acted as a sort of doorstop, holding things in place for a time. When he’d died, whatever had been holding the drive’s standing wave in check had been released and they’d been pulled through, then pushed back out, in a sort of vacuum-momentum tide thing.

He wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to say something as unscientific as ‘a sort of vacuum-momentum tide thing’ in Janya’s presence. But again, it
felt
right. And the eejits … well, they were proof.

Somehow.

Damn it
, he’d thought. And it was gone again. But it had been enough. He was almost certain it had been enough.

Whye’s hand had moved despite his steely resolve to remain passive and immobile.

“Hi, guys?” he’d said into his communicator. “I, uh, I’m here with Contro in the, in the engine room I guess…”

Sally, Decay, Janya and Z-Lin stood in main engineering and listened in surprise as the usually quiet and self-effacing Janus Whye explained his grand unifying underspace-Artist-eejit theory in what was, for him, extreme agitation. Waffa and Zeegon had grudgingly agreed to take Contro and a small group of Contro-distracting eejits on their clean-up round, preserving the buddy system Clue still considered necessary.

“…and then he sort of went off on this, I don’t know, this jag about the gates of space and how Molren – some of them – have this belief that they can get
out
of the universe,” the counsellor explained.

“And from
this
, you made a deductive leap about what we need to do about the underspace drive?” Sally asked.

“Right. Sort of. So,” Janus said, “let’s say it’s a gate, right? The Artist made this device that opened a gateway, that you could fly a spaceship or a scooter or two-thirds of a synth hub manufactory and a couple of hundred hapless sons of bitches into – right? Fly in, then fly out anywhere. And in between, you’re somewhere else.”

“I’m sure the Artist would quibble,” Z-Lin said, “but since he’s not here, and unless Bruce wants to weigh in…” they waited, but Bruce seemed to have vagued out again for the time being, so she continued. “Sure. Gate. Probably an oversimplification, but yeah.”

“Oh,
definitely
an oversimplification,” Whye agreed, “I mean, just consider it an, I don’t know, a metaphor. But it’s the underspace part that’s important. The gate, the drive, opens into a place where there’s no time, no space, no matter, no
nothing
, right? It opens into nothing. It send
us
into nothing. That’s why you can travel anywhere, because distance and time mean nothing. Enter the underspace wherever, exit wherever. There’s no actual
gate
, not a literal hole from one place to another. Because the place it ‘leads’ to isn’t a
place
, in any meaning of the sense we understand ‘place’ to mean. So. The gate’s where the drive is. Maybe wherever the drive’s
been
. Maybe a whole bunch of other places, as those blobs start to spread and hang around. Whatever. Not important right now.

“He opened it, and the first time in he went
deep
, probably by accident, and now he just seems to come and go, willy-nilly, going through the gate, if you can call it that.”

“Okay,” Clue said.

“The underspace is nowhere,” Decay added, “so you can enter and leave it basically everywhere. That seemed to be the gist of what Bruce and the Artist were saying.”

“Okay, so – gate that isn’t a gate,” Sally summarised. “Sorry Janus, I’m not being flippant on purpose – but what’s that tell us?”

“And what does it have to do with the eejits?” Clue appended.

“Oh, nothing really,” Janus said, then went on when several crewmembers slumped in frustration, “I mean,
something
, for sure, but unless we learn a whole lot more about it, and study it and stuff, we’re never going to
find out
. And I’d really suggest we
not
study it any more than we have to. The eejits just struck me because they’ve got this sensitivity to it, there’s like a resonance. The nothingness – or whateveriness – of the underspace, it seems to strike a chord with the eejits. It’s like … the damage that was done to the fabrication plant during The Accident, the damage that was done to the whole ship, and to the computer, resonated somehow with the underspace, or the drive or whatever. And the hub, the whole Bruce-thing, when that went through the underspace and maybe got corrupted, and then synchronised up with our computer to bring it to full active synthetic intelligence levels…”

“So The Accident may not have caused damage to the ship, so much as made
compatibility changes
to it,” Decay said harshly, “making it work better with the Artist and Bruce. Which might have been the Artist’s plan all along.”

“Or might just be a complete coincidence,” Janya said. “Go on, Janus.”

“Like I say, it just sort of came to me when I heard Contro talking,” Whye said, watching the Blaran nervously. Sally wondered if Decay’s veins were about to start bioluminescing again, but he seemed to be largely back to his usual calm self. “You know,” Whye went on, “about the Molran myth of the gates of space, and how they were destroyed … destroyed,
but could still be used to get out of
.”

“I think I see where he’s going with this,” Janya said. “If we destroy the last drive, the way we destroyed the manufactory on Jauren Silva, it might well
break
the underspace entrance, but not necessarily
close
it.”

“So there’s still a hole back there at Jauren Silva?” Sally said. “What are we supposed to do about that?”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Janus said. “Because of the completely alien nature of the underspace.”

“There isn’t a ‘hole’ anywhere,” Janya put in.

“Or there’s a ‘hole’ everywhere,” Decay added.

“Wow,” Sally put a hand to her head.

“Right,” Whye agreed. “It’s about as good if we blow them up, or switch them off and dismantle them, or just put them in storage and never use them. Those are important considerations in
this
universe, where actions and reactions
mean
anything. Actually, destroying them seems like the best course, because that prevents anyone else from even
accidentally
using them again from this side.”

Finally, something I understand
. “Right then,” Sally clapped her hands together, then paused as an unpleasant thought occurred to her. “You said it was about as good either way,” she said, “as far as people using the underspace from
this side
goes. That means you think it’s things using the gate from the
other
side – from the darkerness – that we need to worry about,” she paused again. “Or not
things
,” she corrected herself, “but whatever the underspace version of
things
is.”

“Right,” Whye said. “We can blow up or close the ‘gates’, or the technology that allows us to
access
the ‘gates’, as much as we like from here, but … well, okay, first of all we’ll never know if the Artist had other experimental outposts or prototypes or backups lying around.”

“Like that whatever-it-maybe-was in the scooter’s compartment,” Janya muttered. “There probably
aren’t
any more, but we can’t know. Bruce might be able to help us…”

There was another extended pause.

“Hmmm?” Bruce said. “Sorry. Thinking.”

“Not important right now,” Janus said again, “that whole tangent was just to outline how pointless it is to mess with the ‘gate’ from this side. We can’t close it. We can only break it, leave it open, and maybe send ourselves diving over and over, the way we probably did when the Artist died,” he paused and pondered this. “Add inverted commas and / or quotey-marks to taste,” he added.

“It needs to be closed over there,” Clue said.

“Exactly. Because there
is
no
here
, really,” Whye said. “There’s no
there
either, not as such … but at least over there it might have something to seal. Or at least something – or the underspace equivalent of something – to correspond to us destroying the drives over here. It doesn’t necessarily
only
need to be done over there, but it needs to be done over there
too
.”

“Okay,” Sally squared her shoulders. “So I need to get in that scooter, fly it out of range of the
Tramp
, activate the last remaining drive, dive into the underspace, and stay there and close the circuit somehow,” she said.

Whye blinked. “Well, let’s not go nuts,” he said. “First of all, in theory nobody actually needs to go down with the ship. We could just send it down with remote instructions or something. But second, and most relevant, speaking of remote instructions – none of us know how to use the drive anyway. Would any of us know how to even make it dive somewhere, let alone dive and never come back up,
let alone
dive and then deactivate the whole underspace connection from inside the darkerness, if that’s even possible?”

“I can only think of one of us who might know,” Janya said.

“Bruce,” Decay nodded.

“Huh?” Bruce said distractedly, after another pause. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“What are you
thinking
about?” Sally demanded.

“I was just thinking,” Bruce said, “that I need to take the last underspace drive–”

“–And go into the darkerness with it and stay down there and use it to seal the breach from the far side,” Decay said with a certain amount of satisfaction. “We know, we were just talking about it too.”

“Son of a bitch,” Bruce muttered. “It was
so
my idea.”

“Now we’re even for ‘darkerness’,” Decay smirked.

“Anyway, my reasoning was that we – I – have to dive,” Bruce said. “Destroying the equipment would just cut the connection temporarily, and leave a hole – a metaphorical live wire lying severed on the floor.”

“We’re good for metaphors, I think,” Sally remarked.

“I need to take the last of the underspace stuff in, and stay there,” Bruce said. “The body, the drive, all of it. Including my hub. The nature of the darkerspace growths inside the matter of this universe is more than just creepy. I don’t even
know
what it means, except that we have to stop it. You haven’t been down there enough times, and not deep enough, to really feel that communion, that sense of
adjustments
being made to enable a full incursion, a full melding. I have, and I know it needs to be reversed, stopped in its tracks, prevented from ever happening again.”

“I suspect our eejits might be feeling that already,” Janya suggested.

“I accept that we don’t have much choice here,” Sally said, “but are we supposed to just send you off into the underspace, with all this gear and a Molran body that already seems to be half-converted into darkerness, and hope for the best? How will we ever know you’ve achieved your mission, instead of just festering out there and completing whatever process the Artist was starting? For all we know, you and the Artist could come back later, after merging with the underspace entirely and coming back to life as some sort of God-awful hybrid.”

“This is true,” Bruce said. “You actually don’t even know whether I’m still secretly on the Artist’s side, a believer in his grand plan, a
part
of it, and still carrying it out in his absence. His
apparent
absence,” it added significantly, after a theatrical pause.