Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (6 page)

“Go ahead then,” Z-Lin said. “Let’s see if it’s as stupid as mine.”

“Something out there caught the eejit’s foot as it flew out the airlock,” Janya concluded, “and hurled it back at us.”

“Yep,” Clue sighed. “That was what I got too.”

“There’s one other thing I’m concerned about?”

“More than that?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.”

“Okay,” Janya took a deep breath. “We were at all-stop when the remains left the ship. Assuming a reasonably straight or at least predictably curved trajectory, we can plot roughly where the remains
went
.”

“Right.”

“We then started up again, along our original course. So when the remains were – presumably – caught and fired back at us–”

“Fired or thrown–”

“Fired or thrown, we can plot roughly where the remains would have
caught
us, specifically which quadrant of the ship they would approach.”

“Let me guess, the foot came at us from some bizarro angle.”

“Correct.”

“And not from an angle that would allow us to say ‘right, so it came out with a spin on it and picked up some anomalous but natural acceleration and then caught us in the flank as we flew away’.”

“No,” Janya replied. “It needed not only to be deflected by something with enough force to exceed our acceleration, but also to move
around
us and overtake us at the aforementioned speed. And that would require whatever
deflected
it to…” she gave a little sigh. “This is a very convoluted way of saying that–”

“That something moving very fast caught the foot and threw it unerringly back at us as it swooped by?”

“Something like that. I’m not sure the trajectories and angles match up but I keep telling you I’m not that sort of scientist. For all I know,
we’ve
changed direction.”

“But this thing that sent the foot back to us,” Z-Lin went on, “it might have just flitted on its way, right?”

“Possibly,” Janya allowed. “Of course, we will need to conduct further tests.”

“Yes.”

“Tests of a
medical
nature,” Janya stressed, “and again, not that sort of scientist. I have a vague idea of where to start, but this is organic matter and there’s bound to be something I don’t think of, that will turn out to be important. I’m not going to be able to research this one,” she added, and hoped she hadn’t put too much sarcasm into the word
research
.

Z-Lin, of course, didn’t notice sarcasm any more than a fish notices water. “Right,” she said. “I guess you’d better transfer it back to medical and then head up there yourself,” she paused the barest moment. “Are you okay with that?”

“Of course,” Janya closed her hands, feeling the imaginary firmness of the subdermals under the pads of her fingertips.

People acted as though Janya knew evil. She wasn’t sure if it was just the highly-publicised events she had been involved in – events which the crew of the
Tramp
had been close enough to touch, almost literally – or the rumours that had been multiplying and dividing about her ever since. And not just multiplying and dividing – probably committing other crimes against arithmetic too, if Janya knew rumours. And she did.

Heck, for all she knew it was just her scars, giving people ideas. It didn’t take much to put an idea in someone’s head, as Decay was so fond of pointing out.

Janya did know evil, at least insofar as she knew its big secret. It was a secret as old as time, and hidden from the sentient universe by a sort of unconsciously-agreed blindness about which she seemed to have been one of the few individuals to have missed the memo.

Evil didn’t exist.

If you were to ask your average human, or perhaps even your average Molran, Blaran or Bonshoon, they would probably say that evil was personified in Damorakind. That was a nice, easy, conceptual cop-out. What could be more evil than the Cancer in the Core? Why, its very name was calculated to be synonymous with ravenous death, death that could not be bargained with. The Fergunak were the lapdogs of Damorakind, if a term as inappropriate as ‘lapdogs’ could be applied to a race of fifty-foot-long, cybernetically-enhanced sharks. But that was just it, wasn’t it? If a
Fergunakil
bent the purely metaphorical knee to Damorakind, what could possibly be more evil than that?

Ah, and therein lay the seed of it.
What could be
more
evil
? What could be more evil than a murderer of infants, a violator of children, a puppeteer of the doom of a million innocents?

Patently ridiculous. There were natural forces that did all of these things, in one way or another. Were they evil? Well, granted, some particularly stupid people thought so. But most others seemed to be in agreement on the fact that it was the presence of
conscious will
behind these acts that constituted evil.

So was it the
act
, or the
will
?

And why then was the Cancer named after a mindless, will-less force of biology?

What could be
more
evil? This wasn’t a definition of a
thing
, a quantity one could ever
know
. It was a scale, entirely hypothetical and, case by case, ultimately meaningless. What could be more evil than the Cancer, killing and enslaving and torturing and mutilating anything that was not their own species? Twisting and brutalising even their own – if the stories held even a grain of truth – when they didn’t live up to their mad ideals of Damorakind perfection, in a gross perversion of the natural selection that had given birth to humanity, or the more controversial eugenics practiced by the Molren. What could be worse?

Well, lots of things. Lots of things could be
more
evil. Anyone with a decent imagination and a few hundred thousand generations of survival of the fittest to draw on as a powerhouse could tell you that. But that only made those imaginary things
more
evil. It made them markers on the road, it didn’t make them the road itself.

Evil hadn’t finished. You’d simply run out of headspace.

The way people talked about it, evil was less a conceptual enemy, and more like some sort of
goal
. An end-state that people arbitrarily labelled their enemies as knowingly – consciously, by definition –
striving to reach
. It was the propaganda of the natural world, endemic to every species of sufficient complexity. Once you got smart enough to talk about killing each other for natural resources, smart enough to consider
not
killing, to consider
sharing
instead, the old monster inside you started to get smarter too. And it started to come up with justifications for doing what it always had. And ways of doing it that were
complicated
, proportionate to the species.

Janya had often considered basing her mastercraft on the nonexistence of evil. Certainly, whenever somebody trotted out more pedestrian examples like the paltry deeds of single human murderers, she had to stifle a giggle. Not even up-close-and-personal contact with a killer could shock a true student of history. Although it could leave more literal scars.

Are you okay with that?

How
are
things?

“Of course I’m okay,” she repeated more firmly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Glomulus had actually met an aki’Drednanth once.

Fridge. That had been her human-friendly pseudonym. They all had names like that. Aki’Drednanth had quirky senses of humour.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was thinking about her now. It was a peculiarity of nerves and senses and memory, perhaps. The tight, bordering-on-uncomfortable feeling of the micro-film setting on his hands, the smell of sterility, the quality of the light …

Quite aside from the fact that standing at an examination table, looking down at an article of dead flesh, tended to make him philosophise at the best of times, he supposed he
had
been thinking about minds, and the amazing spectrums in which they could come. Synth, able, eejit, Contro … and yes, all the variety of the Six Species. But there really was no mind like an aki’Drednanth mind, and when it came down to the choices and fates that had brought him here, his musings often took him back to Fridge.

He hadn’t entered the Dreamscape with Fridge – Blaren rarely, and Molren even more rarely, had the mental flexibility and raw
capacity
to interface on that level, and Cratch didn’t know of
any
Bonshoon or human to manage it, not even a human of Contro’s unique character and mentality. Whether Damorakind or Furgunak managed it, he couldn’t say and didn’t much care to speculate. But with only about five hundred aki’Drednanth in the entire extended Molran Fleet population of – what had it been, forty billion, and ten times that in sleepers? – just meeting one was something of an achievement.

Yes, Fridge. Fridge had been an interesting encounter.

Aki’Drednanth were believed to be a type of Ogre, like the ones that were said to have founded Þursheim. Whether or not they were the
same
species was questionable, especially since there was no real material evidence left in Þursheim anymore. They were big, hairy, tusky, they tended to speak in roars …

And they were smelly. Above about minus ten degrees Celsius – and Fridge had been out of her envirosuit for various reasons, and while it had been chilly it had not been
freezing
on the day of their meeting – various parts of the aki’Drednanth anatomy and certainly some of the bits on their skin, under the pelt, began to melt and that stuff was fragrant. An aki’Drednanth would not
melt
if left in a warm environment, that was one of the many myths about the species … but she would most likely die or suffer pulmonary failure or brain damage long before actually turning into a puddle of sludge. Much of their circulatory systems consisted of a series of supercooled fluids in channels of fibrous material with a melting point somewhere below ice, and their brains were like great, intricate snow-sculptures of crystallised ammonia and fatty acids and other more exotic substances. And the aki’Drednanth took brain damage very seriously indeed.

The aki’Drednanth believed, with a reasonable amount of scientific verification, that their consciousness was collective and eternal. The former assertion, given that the aki’Drednanth were perfect telepaths, was pretty solid. The latter, well, that was a bit more difficult to verify, wasn’t it? But the evidence was compelling.

Aki’Drednanth
, literally if not exactly, meant
the living Drednanth
. The
Drednanth
, in turn, was the immortal psychic gestalt the aki’Drednanth considered their true species-self. It was horrifyingly complicated, but the theory could be simplified thusly: aki’Drednanth consciousness was collective, and each huge beast constituted a node, like a processing hub. When an aki’Drednanth died, her consciousness was dispersed among all the others. It simply folded into its own personal Dreamscape and existed as pure thought in an unimaginable, supercooled organic mainframe.

Naturally even the amazing, intricate crystal-quantum computer of an aki’Drednanth brain couldn’t contain the full consciousnesses of more than a
few
individuals, and the Drednanth was by simple arithmetic made up of trillions of former minds. This was where it all got a bit
myth
-y. It was said that the Great Ice, a band of almost-interlinked comets that was the aki’Drednanths’ home and ran like a ribbon through the near-centre of galaxy, contained structures to house the vast majority of the Drednanth ur-mind.

It certainly made a fun explanation for why they were so mercilessly territorial.

It got even more tricky when you took their idea of reincarnation into account. With aki’Drednanth, reincarnation was quite literal. When an aki’Drednanth conceived, the existing ancient minds bucked for position according to unknowable Drednanth rules, and one candidate wove herself into the new aki’Drednanth right from the first cell division. She directed her own growth, building body and brain electromagnetically around her consciousness, until the infant that was born was a new iteration of a being that had last been aki’Drednanth maybe two hundred thousand years ago, and had spent the past two thousand centuries as Drednanth.

You could laugh at an aki’Drednanth and tell her that her beliefs were a load of shooey, of course. An aki’Drednanth would most likely ignore you serenely. They had the pacific nature that Cratch whimsically liked to believe came hand-in-hand with immortality, and while some things
did
goad them to terrible anger, just laughing and calling them insane liars wasn’t one of those things. And a darn good thing too.

Why, you just had to hear their crazy ideas and legends about the origins and history of the universe – legends apparently garnered from the length and breadth of the eternal gestalt existence of the aki’Drednanth – to know that the majority of it was most likely down to interpretation and metaphor. Or, at best, truth viewed from across a vast species gap and through a cultural lens a light year thick. No wonder people called them wacky-wacky-Drednanth.

There were deeper and larger games at play, of course. The selection of which specific Drednanth was to become aki’Drednanth started in the mind-plane and continued in the womb, and then in the ferociously primitive litters aki’Drednanth birthed, of which only one or two in twenty survived to juvenility. Being reborn was just the beginning – if you didn’t have what it took, you’d be dumped unceremoniously back into the Drednanth ocean, and wait another few hundred millennia. There was the myth of assorted Drednanth heroes, giants among giants, leaders and demigods who marched forth from the Dreamscape in the aki’Drednanth hour of need.

There was, of course, the myth of the oona’aki’Drednanth –
the New
. Because all those thousands of billions of Drednanth had to come from somewhere, right? They couldn’t all be recycled, all the time. Occasionally, a true newborn would come, and be added to the stockpile in the mass subconscious.