Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (7 page)

And the evidence for all these preposterous beliefs, the histories and knowledge of the creatures, was almost utterly conclusive. They had the mental landscape to ‘save’ themselves. They
were
telepaths without peer. And in several cases, unusually-frequent reincarnations of wartime or otherwise important aki’Drednanth
had
seemed to live and die and return, apparently knowing exactly what her alleged predecessor had known,
being
the exact aki’Drednanth her alleged predecessor had
been
.

Then there was the fact that, over the past couple of million years, the aki’Drednanth had apparently evolved physically even less than the Molranoids had. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not if you were building your old body from scratch every time, in the womb.

Yes, deeper and larger games. And it was the
least
of which, in Cratch’s opinion, that seemed to get the most muttered, gossiped attention. That was the mystery of how the aki’Drednanth managed to defend their fragile storage supercomputer against the Cancer in the Core that practically coexisted with the Great Ice. Well, that was simple enough – they survived by serving Damorakind, aside from the few hundred aki’Drednanth who stepped out of slavery to join the Molran Fleet, seemingly just out of idle curiosity. They had become the Fourth Species – up until that point, it had only been the three Molranoid species and a whole lot of death and destruction.

That wasn’t, to Cratch’s mind, particularly puzzling
or
particularly upsetting. That was simple survival. Something he’d once hoped to learn from aki’Drednanth like Fridge. Brains were interesting. Minds were incredible. He’d once hoped to be the first human to enter the aki’Drednanth Dreamscape. A mind you could step into, figuratively at least … it was hard to imagine anything better.

Oh yes, he’d dreamed big, back in the day. If you were
going
to dream, indeed, why not make it big? But that had all been a long time ago. Back before Judon Research Outpost.

Back before Barnalk High. Where everything had started to go wrong.

And all of it a series of seemingly random events that had led him here. So, what was the point of it all?

What indeed?

Cratch stood, once again, and looked down at a sodden red thing on an examination table. He reflected on how paradoxical life could be, how astonishingly perverse, while still maintaining the flawless illusion of being a completely random series of events governed, ultimately, by subatomic particles moving around one another. He wondered if there was a human Dreamscape akin to the one in which the Dreadnanth waited their turn to be flesh once again – a psychic afterlife that humans were too reckless and crazy and self-centred to control, and therefore to know about. Maybe there was, and all of the deaths, all of the brutality, all of the humourous autopsies and practical jokes in morgues, were just so much bureaucracy. The pointless cataloguing of decomposing meat that the
owner
of which no longer cared about so why, in the name of all that was holy, did anybody else?

Ah, well.

This time, there was no music on the player. This time, he was most certainly being watched. And not just by the bumpers.

Janya stood in the room between Nurse Wingus and Nurse Dingus. Her own pair of eejits, near-pinnacle specimens who’d actually been given
proper
names – Westchester and Whitehall – stood behind her.

Cratch was, for once, sufficiently discomfited as to cause his cheerfully daffy act to drop back a couple of gears to muted affability. Janya Adeneo had the uncanny ability to do that to him at the best of times, and this was an exceptional circumstance.

He circled the table. About all you could say about this examination sample was that it was smaller than the last one. And had elements of shoe worked into it.

“Not sure what you want me to look for here, Prof,” he confessed.

“I’m not a professor, Glomulus,” Janya said coolly, “I’m just the closest we have. At least until we can get Westchester to stop–”

“WHERE THE HELL AM I AND WHY IS IT SO DARK AND QUIET WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAVY LOADER DID IT SHUT DOWN?”

“–resetting to ‘blind dock worker’ every time his abstract thought levels reach some apparent maximum tolerance level,” she concluded, as Wingus and Dingus stepped in and performed the quick series of simple calming and reacquainting exercises they’d been trained to give Westchester when he had one of these rare but extremely disruptive episodes. He did recover his
personality
quite fast, even if it did mean his train of thought was completely derailed and he had to start almost from scratch with the entire endeavour. “And until we can get Whitehall to stop doing … well,
that thing
,” she added.

Cratch nodded, and looked at Whitehall instinctively. Whitehall looked – as far as even a top-shelf eejit was capable – mildly embarrassed while his brother grumbled and muttered curses in between Wingus and Dingus. Embarrassed but not, it was important to note, as though he was in any danger of doing
that thing
.

Westchester and Whitehall were configured with as close to classic research scientist templates as possible, biochemist and physicist respectively. They were relatively stable and quite handy in certain highly-specialised ways, and even more importantly seemed to complement each other. Between the two of them, they formed a sort of gestalt ‘generic scientist’ of surprisingly high calibre.

And they seemed to calm each other, Whitehall raising Westchester’s reset threshold and Westchester punching Whitehall very hard in the face to render him unconscious at need.

Janya had told everyone she had hopes of using them to
retrocalibrate
other eejits towards greater levels of usefulness, and even attempt to patch up Westchester and Whitehall’s own irregular but catastrophic glitches.

There had been a number of experiments, ranging from hilarious to nightmare-inducing.

“I can’t really deduce anything from the foot,” Doctor Cratch confessed, “I mean, we’d already figured out that it got chopped off by the inner door and smooshed out through the outer one. How it then got turned around and splattered back onto our hull is anyone’s guess,” he raised a braceleted hand as Janya opened her mouth. “I know,” he said, “it was frozen solid so it didn’t
splatter
so much as
tonk
.”

“I wasn’t going to correct that point,” Adeneo said distractedly. “But if there are any traces on the sample – some cells or particles from whatever it either collided with or was caught by … just some sort of
trace
that sets it aside from the larger control sample–”

“You mean the body.”

“Yes,” Janya said, her voice level and unfriendly, although not really any more or less so than usual, “I mean the body.”

“I’m guessing a collision or a slingshot would have allowed us to register whatever it was our adventurous foot here had collided with or slingshotted around,” Cratch mused.

“Indeed,” Whitehall said, while Westchester continued to look thunderously confused and, well, blind, “it seems at a cursory visual examination that there
was
no collision. A sufficiently glancing collision to send the sample back into our path, at sufficient acceleration to intercept us as we in turn accelerated away, and yet for the accelerator to
not
accompany the object – ah, the foot – on the same trajectory … this would require the impactor, the accelerator, to be
extremely
high-impact. The sample would have been shattered, or burned, or otherwise damaged.”

“So what are we looking for here, exactly? Something mechanical or organic that could intercept, catch, fling back … ?”

“We don’t know what we’re looking for,” Janya said. “That is what these tests are intended to establish, in as low-impact a way as possible. There has already been considerable damage from the catchment scoops, since this was assumed to be a rock at first detection.”

“Well, we can’t blame Waffa for that–”

“I wasn’t blaming Waffa,” Janya said. “It’s just going to make the examination more difficult.”

“The examination that will tell us if somebody caught Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s foot and threw it back at us at high speed?” Cratch twinkled. “Are we looking for fingerprints? DNA? Trace elements of lacrosse stick?”

Janya spared Cratch an unamused look. “DNA, certainly,” she said. “Easy enough to look for, and if we find anything but Able Darko’s DNA in there, we’ll know that we’re dealing with…” she paused, actually uncertain.

“An interstellar body-part shortstop?” Doctor Cratch hazarded.

“Yes,” Janya said. “We’ll call it an IBPS in the official report, of course.”

It irritated Cratch that he sometimes couldn’t tell when Janya was being sarcastic, and instead had to just assume that she was because it seemed like the only way to get out of conversations with her in one piece. “Okay,” he said reasonably, “well whatever we’re going to do, we might as well get on with it before we either fly too far away from whatever-it-is, or it comes after us and catches us unawares.”

“Agreed.”

Janya set the scanners in action, and they unwound from the ceiling like metal tentacles. Cratch watched them curl and focus on the slowly-melting mince-and-polymer popsicle in the middle of the workspace. He couldn’t help but think it was a lot of effort and infrastructure for very little purpose.

“So what if we get some DNA reading from some cantankerous intergalactic kraken that we’ve just slapped in the puckered series of orifices and ghastly spines and hooks it has for a face, with about six percent of a snap-frozen eejit?” he asked. “Are we going to turn around and try to talk with it? Or just fly on, perhaps accelerating a little in order to guarantee it doesn’t start throwing anything else in our direction?” he paused. “It’s going to be the former, isn’t it?”

“We are primarily a ship of exploration for the expansion and betterment of the human race,” Janya said firmly.

“We
were
that, once,” Cratch said, “or to be entirely fair,
you
were. Not entirely convinced I qualify for inclusion,” he waited a moment for Adeneo to either agree or disagree with this, but she seemed content to just stand quietly and study the controls as the scanners did their work completely autonomously and in no need of guidance or supervision. “Now, since The Accident? I don’t know what we are, but explorers? Expanders? Betterment of the race? The sensible evolutionary thing for us to do right now would be to find a quiet uninhabited planetoid and hole up and lick our wounds for a while. Every instinct in my body is telling me this is what we should do.”

“I’m perfectly well aware of what the instincts in your body tell you to do,” Janya said.

Cratch opted to ignore that. “When did you last get an external communication?” he asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“When was it? I don’t get anything, of course, but that doesn’t mean much. Have you gotten any messages or hails or distress calls, since the
Dark Glory Ascendant
fiasco?” he paused. “For that matter, any messages or pings from any of their escape pods? They can’t
all
have been sucked into that–”

“There are good reasons you are denied communications access,” Janya said, “and that extends to asking me leading questions and attempting to–”

“To what? Make you think?”

She bristled visibly, but didn’t rise to him. Nor, he noted, did she seem to be making any muscle-tension movements towards her subdermal activators. It was one of the most unsettling things about her, in fact. Aside from the Captain himself, Janya Adeneo was the only person aboard the
Tramp
to never use the implants.

He just didn’t know what to think about that.

“You know as well as I do,” she went on, “if we holed up to lick our wounds, we’d die on that planetoid. It’s the animal instinct, yes, but it’s not in possession of all the facts. It’s not taking into account that we’re in space, that we’re alone, that we have other faculties to fall back on, that we have to keep on flying in the hopes of meeting something that can help us to the next step. In the hopes of getting answers. If we stop swimming, we drown. Parking on a planet would basically mean lying down and dying. This ship is a severely injured animal, yes. But it is a
sentient
animal.”

“Is that what we’re hoping this is?” Doctor Cratch asked, waving at the foot and the hypothetical agency beyond the ship responsible for hurling it after them as they flew on. “Something that can help us to the next step?”

“We’ll never know if we run away to the nearest planetoid and bare our teeth at anything that comes close.”

“Alright,” he said, and the machinery began to spit out readings and analyses and endless streams of symbols. “So what does any of
this
mean?”

Janya turned her attention back to the consoles. “Most of it, I don’t know,” she admitted easily, “this is why Westchester and Whitehall are here.”

Westchester had recovered his equilibrium and was now looking into a spectrometer viewpiece with every sign of professional composure. “Indeed,” he said. Cratch had noticed that
indeed
was one of the words the science eejits used. In particular, Westchester used it as a recovery-word to settle his dominant personality configuration back into place after a docker backflip. Your average dock worker rarely concurred with a hypothesis or opinion by saying
indeed
. “And I believe this may be something you will find interesting, Doctor Cratch.”

“You can call him Glomulus,” Janya said, “he’s not an accredited doctor.”

“Trained but never certified,” Cratch admitted with a little confessional twiddle of his long fingers. “Technically I’m only a field medic but this is what we’ve got. Anyway, you can call me w–”

“
Glomulus
,” Janya interjected firmly, and lowered her voice. “If you tell him to call you what he likes, you might just push him back over the edge,” she said, “or at the very least
towards
it again. We’ve noticed that’s precisely the type of creative-process thinking that contributes to his limitation.”