Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (37 page)

“There we go,” Cratch said, lifting what looked like – yes, the legs and lower body of the dead Molran, swathed and hidden in wrappings, the remains of his clothes, and the sterilising sealant they’d coated everything in before leaving the medical bay. He raised the enormously heavy, already-stiffening mass of bone and sinew, folded it by the knees over his arm, and angled it awkwardly into the vehicle, like he was tucking half of a giant child into bed.

Janya wondered why she had pictured it in precisely those terms, and felt a moment of regret that she couldn’t go back and not do so.

“I guess that’s me ready to go,” Bruce said.

The entire contraption, the technological space-centaur with the now-dead organic heart, seemed to Janya’s eyes that much more poignantly dynamic,
alive
, because of the perceived housing of Bruce’s consciousness within it. In defiance of the aforementioned organic matter, indeed, it seemed to
pulse
. It sat in the middle of the docking bay, slanted against the floor on its slightly-broken support struts and the curved bulk of its conventional drive components, and the crew stood before it nervously while Glomulus finished pushing and flopping the wrapped carcass-pieces in place and Zeegon checked the whole apparatus over – totally unnecessarily – for safety and spaceworthiness.

“You don’t think it’s ghoulish, do you?” Waffa asked without hope, as Cratch finished his task and stepped back, peeling away his sterile membranes and dusting off his hands delicately but with his usual ostentation. The scooter-suit obediently eased closed, grinding slightly at the end of its sequence as over-stressed parts failed to mesh quite as perfectly as they had before – but the whole thing did close up tight.

“What,” Z-Lin said. “Sealing up a dismembered Molran corpse with organs apparently composed of anti-universe matter into an EVA suit and sending it into a potentially new frontier of reality for all eternity, in the company of a severely-damaged synthetic intelligence hub with the intention of guaranteeing none of it ever comes back to haunt us? Yes, Waff, it’s pretty damn ghoulish.”

“You’ll be okay,” Waffa said again. “You’ll … I don’t know what it’ll be like, but you’ll…”

“When the dive occurs and the
Tramp
stays here,” Bruce said, “I’ll disconnect. The part of me in
this
universe will go serenely and involuntarily into standby, and the part of me in the underspace will go back to just being a hub, albeit with the mission parameters we’ve programmed into the scooter’s computer core to allow me to fulfil my mission. I literally won’t know what’s happened to myself, in either place. The hub won’t be
me
.
I
will be here – like you say, waiting for you guys to fix me.”

Waffa looked at Clue, then at Janya, with a weird sort of agony on his face. “This is a sentient being,” he said, “and arguably mentally handicapped due to damage and … and whatever, contamination. It can’t be held responsible for its actions and it can’t be deemed capable of making this sort of decision.”

“Waffa, it’s okay,” Bruce said. “You know this is the only choice.”

“Can’t you just program the drive, and the scooter, to go down there and deliver a message or something, and not dive back up?” Waffa asked. “I mean, there are – you’ve – Bruce has got some problems, but the active synthetic intelligence is still more useful to us than just the computer,” he said, turning to the Commander again. “We’re undermanned and running with heavy damage and we don’t have much in the way of crew expertise. This just seems like throwing away resources.”

“We were already working
without
those resources, though,” Z-Lin said, “although I suppose I’d have to admit that ‘muddling through’ might be a better phrase than ‘working’, and even ‘muddling through’ is a bit over-optimistic.”

“I don’t know,” Contro, who until now had stood in the faintly-smiling silence Janya was accustomed to seeing on his face when things beyond his understanding were happening, spoke up. “We’re nothing if not a muddle, right?”

“Damn skippy,” Cratch said.

“And this hub, and all this technology from the
Boonie
and the Artist,” Z-Lin said, “it’s hazardous. If we don’t destroy it outright, sending it into the underspace is the only way. We’ve
done
this conversation,” she sighed. “It was only a conversation in the first place because the chain of command is so unutterably be-arseholed.”

“Of course, not to exacerbate things, but … we haven’t dived again in a while, regardless of whether the drive was offline or online,” Janya said hesitantly. “If we waited, and studied this whole situation more, we might find some solution that didn’t involve sacrificing somebody.”

“No, I think I’d rather go,” Bruce said, suddenly sombre. “I should … you know, warn them.”

“Warn who about what?” Clue asked.

“About
you
,” Bruce said, its voice small and lost and afraid.

The crew exchanged glances.

“Are you serious right now?” Z-Lin asked.

“What happened to you guys? The
Boonie
, the Artist’s body, all of this. I’m sure you weren’t like this before, the last time I came off standby when the
Dark Glory Ascendant
was in the neighbourhood. Was it their fault? When did you get so
violent
?”

“It was the Rip who cut up the Artist,” Waffa pointed at the ship’s medic.

“That was an
autopsy
,” Glomulus protested, his face amused as it usually was when someone accidentally used his crew-only nickname in front of him. “
After
he tried to cut off my wossnames with a scalpel.”

“Hang on, Mister Suddenly-Boo-Hoo-You-Humans-Are-So-Nasty,” Sally interrupted the incipient debate, “
who
was it who chewed up an eejit and sprayed him into space?”

“Let’s not get hung up on who chewed up what and spat it into space,” Bruce said defensively. “The point is, whatever-it-is in the underspace has just as much to fear from a merging with this universe as you do from a merging with the darkerness. Just because we don’t understand that side, don’t pretend it’s all one way.”

“That’s
nothing like
what it sounded like you were saying a second ago,” Sally accused.

“Hey,” Bruce snapped, “if I can’t philosophise about the ills of humanity in my final moments before sacrificing myself for the good of same, what’s the point? And besides,” it went on in a tone of injured dignity, “I acted with extreme prejudice in order to protect you from worse. And because of the hub’s exposure to the underspace. And because I’d taken damage in the first place. Are you saying you guys are the way you are because The Accident hit you in the same way it hit me, and the able fabricator, and the - ?” it snapped to an obviously-indignant stop. “Is that what you’re saying? You’re damaged components?”

“No,” Clue admitted, “we’re just up against it.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Bruce said, “as an excuse it would certainly have novelty value–”

“Are you leaving or not?” Janya asked.

“
Fine
.”

Bruce fell into a seething silence, and a small blue-green light came on halfway down the barrel of the scooter. That was all.

“Understated,” Cratch approved.

“I sort of thought there’d be a wobbly swirly blob that would appear out of nowhere and the whole scooter would sort of pop out of existence,” Sally remarked.

“Um,” Zeegon said, and pointed. Janya and the others turned and looked.

The darkerness washed in against the windows, and the
Tramp
dived.

The ship shuddered, then
groaned
. Groaning was a new one, Zeegon thought. It added to the impression that they were sinking beneath the surface of some heavy, smothering liquid, some dense substance that was squeezing the
Tramp
, crushing her.

Except that wasn’t
really
what was happening. It was just what it
seemed
like, because what was really happening was too impossible for comprehension. The
Tramp
, and everything aboard, was sinking into a universe in which spatial existence, time and distance and mass, had never existed, and there was only one way a multi-dimensional object could
fit
itself into that set of parameters. And so the
Tramp
shed dimensions, sloughed off causality and duration and atomic mass, and basically peeled away the skin of her own reality in a futile attempt to fit into a new one.

But that wasn’t something the brain could process, wasn’t something that worked on a fundamental level, and so the very nature of what was happening
translated
itself.

The darkerness fell over them, deepened relentlessly. It sank in through the docking blister, the little slice of space that had been visible through the windows swimming out of sight and being replaced by the overactive, overenthusiastic, overcompensating nothingness of the underspace. Deeper, and deeper, and heavier. The shuddering grew more pronounced, and then there was a mighty
BDANG
and the entire ship lurched and dropped. It was as though the
Tramp
had fallen onto an underwater ledge, and then the ledge had collapsed underneath them and they’d dropped another fifty feet, buckling and twisting. Everyone, even Decay, tumbled to the trembling, thrumming floor.

And that was when Zeegon felt it.

It wasn’t consciousness and it certainly wasn’t corporeal. It wasn’t
anything
, really, and that made it extremely difficult to explain, difficult to quantify or to recall after the fact. Difficult to even
experience
. The brain simply didn’t process it in any meaningful way. But, in direct contradiction of everything the human brain had evolved to believe, in defiance of every sensory assumption,
it still happened
.

The darkerness looked into them, into them all, looked into every molecule and particle and wave and string of this baffling, bewitching, terrifying
stuff
that had extruded into its universe.

It
looked
, and it
weighed
, and if it had had a pen, it probably would have had a good poke.

Zeegon pushed himself up onto his elbows, and looked around to see the rest of the crew similarly struggling. The floor was vibrating heavily and giving an occasional jolt that made it difficult to regain balance, and so far only Decay was on his feet. The Blaran reached down and helped the Commander to rise.

Sally was lying on her stomach, holding the box with Boonie inside it to keep it from bouncing around too severely, and staring with fixed, Sallyesque determination at the nothingness welling up around them. In a moment of transcendent fellow-organism feeling, Zeegon elbow-crawled across to the Chief Tactical Officer, pried open the box before she could do more than widen her eyes at him, and let Boonie scuttle up his arm. Unlike during the post-launch zero-gravity on board the lander, when the sleek, powerful little creature had been spooked almost out of its mind, now it seemed relatively calm. Perhaps the esoteric nature of the underspace’s menace was lost on a space weasel, Zeegon mused. Or a jungle weasel, or whatever Boonie was.

You’re a space weasel now
, he thought disjointedly.

The good news was, Boonie didn’t scratch the shooey out of him, and seemed calm and happy in his presence – reassured by it, in fact. And Zeegon, in turn, felt reassured by the weasel’s claws lightly gripping his shoulder through his uniform.

The not-so-good news was, the darkerness was continuing to solidify and congeal and draw in, making the very substance of the ship seem to creep away and become less real. Zeegon wondered, inarticulately, why the others hadn’t vanished yet, why blobs hadn’t appeared and swallowed them all up … until it occurred to him that this had already happened. They were
already
inside one. All of them. The underspace had consumed them.
There are no more blobs
, Zeegon thought,
because blobs were what happened when a small leakage of darkerness was left behind in
our
universe
.

“Bruce?” Clue said, stumbling forward and almost falling even with the Blaran by her side. Her voice was at once hollow and muffled, as though Zeegon’s ears couldn’t decide what exactly was wrong with the acoustics and so were just delivering what material they had to his brain and then calling it a day. Z-Lin took another faltering step before human and Blaran alike crashed painfully to their knees as the
Tramp
gave another titanic jolt. “What in the living, breathing Hell?”

“I don’t – I can’t,” Bruce said, its voice too sounding distant and warbly, not to mention worried from the ship’s communication system. “I told you, it’s not just coming from the drive. It’s…” here, there was another solid
BDANG
and the comms blared feedback for a moment, “…without any help, on its own,” Bruce was carrying on when Zeegon’s hearing returned to as close to normal as it seemed was possible at that time, “the only solution is to deal with it from this side.”

“Deal with
what
?” Sally shouted. “There’s–”

A third
BDANG
knocked Blaran and Commander back to the floor entirely, and the ship
howled
. Zeegon closed his eyes, then opened them quickly when he saw how wrong the shadow behind his eyelids looked. He glanced around, no longer able to tell how much time had passed. Decay was rising to his feet again. Clue looked dazed. The others were simply lying and holding onto the floor for dear life, just like he was, in case it tried to buck them off again. If it did, he began to realise, it was entirely possible he’d just drift away and cease to exist. Space and distance and the very solidity of objects were beginning to systematically fail, as though his brain had stopped taking input from his senses altogether, until such time as the senses stopped being silly and behaved like proper senses again.