Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (32 page)

“I’m not a haruspex,” Glomulus remarked. “If you want meaning, I’m afraid I’ll have to send you to a specialist.”

“But how do we figure out what’s going to happen next and how we can take control of it?” Sally said, and actually raised her clenched fists to waist-level and gave them a frustrated shake. “I don’t want to go back to reacting.”

“You’ve been pretty active so far,” Clue said mildly, then raised her own hands to placate the Chief Tactical Officer, “and believe me when I say I think that’s been the best course. There’s no telling what the Artist might have done if we hadn’t taken some of the cards out of his hands,” Waffa, still staring fixedly at the blood-soaked pieces of the Artist as though trying to pick out the signifiers of Third Prime, expelled a high, involuntarily explosive giggle. Clue grimaced. “Okay, massive understatement aside, you’ve seen us right this far, Sally,” she glanced at Glomulus. “You too, Cratch,” she added grudgingly.

“I have an idea,” Zeegon said, giving the group a nervous little wave.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Um, well basically the first part revolves around us finding out whether Bruce is actually capable of realising the Artist’s dead,” the helmsman said, “and then finding out how it feels about that.”

“Uh, okay,” Clue said uneasily. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. In fact, now that you mention it, it should have been pretty obvious already and I’m not sure why it thought he was just lying down … but okay. Bruce?”

“Hmm?” the voice from the comm system sounded distracted.

“Uh, are you alright?” Clue asked. There was a taut, worried silence in the medical bay. Glomulus reflected that if the synthetic intelligence came completely unhinged, it could do almost anything – including, but not limited to, flying them directly into the centre of the gas giant from which they were trying to break orbit.

“Yeah,” Bruce replied, “I think so. Just … trying to deal with these damaged relays and disconnects in my … yeah, long story short, I’m okay,” when it continued, it sounded just a little bit stern. “I
did
hear you suggesting we might dive and surface on top of a star, though,” it said. “As if I would let
that
happen.”

“Alright,” Janya said sharply, “then what if the next dive drops us into the Core? There can’t be many higher concentrations of life than that.”

“The Artist would never allow it,” Bruce said, its voice serenely self-assured. “He went looking for the Fleet, this much you know. He has
control
, even without me, at least to some extent. And he created partitions and overrides, to prevent himself from surfacing near Damorakind conglomerations. He’s not
insane
.”

“Um…” Zeegon said carefully.

“So speaking of damaged relays and disconnects and long stories, I’m just going to say it,” Sally stepped in, “you know the Artist is
dead
, right? Only you seem to have been ignoring it or unaware of it or something, despite having heard
other
parts of the same conversation.”

“Dead?”

“Pretty dead.”

“When?”

“Well, he’s dead
now
, if that’s what you mean,” Sally replied with aplomb. “If you want an
exact
time of death…”

“How did it happen?”

“It seems to have been self-inflicted,” Sally replied, making steady eye-contact with Glomulus. “He was apparently looking for some way to deal with the side-effects of exposure to the underspace, and he’s just … dismembered himself.”

“Dismembered
himself
?” Bruce said, surprise making it sound a little more in-the-room.

“Well, we helped, in an autopsy capacity after he was already dead,” Sally admitted. “But it does look like this darkerness stuff is extremely harmful to organisms. Possibly to synthetic intelligences too, and maybe just harmful to
everything
. We’re still not sure,” she hesitated. “We’re sorry about the Artist.”

“Don’t worry,” Bruce said, brightening up alarmingly. “Just consider it the next step in his transformation. You were but witnesses.”

“Uh, okey dokey,” Clue said, and turned to Zeegon. “Good enough?” Zeegon, pale-faced and wide-eyed, gave an uncertain nod. “What else did you have?”

“The second part of my plan,” Zeegon said, slowly recovering his confidence, “involves us dumping the Artist, and all his machinery, and Bruce’s hub if it’ll let us, and that sample case with the weasel in it, into that gas giant out there and then flying away as fast as the natural laws of
this
universe will let us,” he skimmed his flattened hand horizontally through the air in a gliding motion for illustration and emphasis. “And if you want justification for dumping everything and running away, besides the awful shadow organs that were dripping out of that corpse right there and that thing Bruce just said about transformations, I would point out that
something
, not the Artist and not Bruce and certainly not any of us, brought us to this gas giant and there’s no way
I
can see to be certain that whatever it was
didn’t
in fact just want us to take exactly this action. Maybe as part of the
transformation
process we’re meant to be witnessing, I don’t know. Time to stop witnessing, and just leave.”

“Uh, right,” Clue said.

“I also freely admit that my reasons for wanting to flush the weasel specifically are a little more personal than professional,” Zeegon concluded, “but I still feel able to justify that decision by saying that it went inside a blob of darkerness while none of us have done so, so it’s theoretically more likely to have been infected or begun transforming than we are and plus, it’s unlikely to survive away from its home planet that we’re highly unlikely to return to, and it’s only a God damn weasel,” he folded his hands. “I rest my case and respectfully submit this to you, Commander, as ‘Plan A’.”

“For what it’s worth, I
like
Plan A,” Sally said immediately, “although I’d amend it to include a few hearty blasts from Pater and Fuck-ton just like we did on Jauren Silva.”

“I love this amendment,” Zeegon said, pointing at Sally, “for its thoroughness as well as its pleasing sense of going full circle and providing narrative closure.”

“Alright, we’re all very funny,” Clue said. “Zeegon, wrangle some janitorials and go gather up the bodies. Waffa, you go with him. From now on, buddy system all ‘round. And on that topic, someone go and make sure Contro and Whye are together, and have a few of the more stable eejits to keep them from doing anything stupid. And when we have time, I’m going to want to hear more about this magical ability the eejits have to sense the underspace, that they’ve apparently gained at the expense of their ability to put on their pants the right way around.”

Janya, Sally and Z-Lin stood in the corridor by the main docking access to the recycling station level, and looked at the apparatus the Artist had apparently been using as combined vehicle and residence for the past who-knew how long. The crewmembers who had been on the surface of Jauren Silva were now wearing discreet little pads over their ears that would protect them from further damage, give them time to heal, and help transmit sound vibrations more directly and harmlessly through the skull rather than the still-delicate eardrums.

Zeegon was also with them for the time being, ostensibly because he was overseeing the Automated Janitorial Drones as they cleaned up the three eejit corpses on this level, but actually because nothing could have dissuaded him from checking out the adapted scooter the Artist and Bruce had stolen from him.

“Not a bad job,” he conceded.

The scooter and suit were amalgamated into a strange sort of EVA pod, with a faceplate and articulated arms the only thing giving away the life-form within. If it was sealed and locked up, it would have resembled a Molran leaning racily astride a triple-barrelled rocket, his legs melded into the rocket’s body. If you could imagine a centaur of ancient myth – and Janya could – then the Artist’s vessel was
somewhat
like one of them. Just with a small spacecraft instead of a horse bit, and a bulky metal-and-crete Molran instead of a human bit.

She had to agree with Zeegon. The life support, miniaturised power source and combined subluminal and relative drives – that would have been limited, she supposed, in speed and distance, but it was hardly necessary since the vessel had an underspace drive anyway – occupied one barrel of the craft, while the synthetic intelligence hub clearly occupied a second. The third, then, was most likely the underspace drive itself. She hadn’t seen the machinery down on Jauren Silva, so couldn’t be certain. All in all, it was a lovely assemblage, completing and polishing the elegant work Zeegon had already begun.

Indeed, speaking of mythology, Janya had seen pictures of a kind of synthetic intelligence soldier class in one of her books. Char-bots, they’d been called. Sleeker than this apparatus, and without a biological component, but otherwise the look was quite similar.

All gone now.

Speaking of ‘all gone’, the suit was gaping and empty, clearly flung open and left where it was by an enraged Artist while boarding. Janya could smell a familiar musty, inoffensive scent wafting from the padded, readout-lined innards – the smell of an unwashed Molran too long in an enclosed space. She remembered the smell, even milder, lingering pleasantly in the office of Professor Xaban back in her early university days, before she’d embarked upon the next leg of her educational journey. That gentle bouquet was the Molran equivalent of powerfully antisocial, reeking body odour, but to a human nose – and indeed, to a Molran nose – it was practically nonexistent. Molranoids were designed better than that.

Funny, though, how smells could command memory.

Of course, if Glomulus was right – and she saw no reason why he wouldn’t be – the Artist had been far older than ‘the old Xabba’, who had barely seen the tail-end of his Second Prime when he’d attended her graduation.

“So,” Clue said to the helmsman. “There it is, now you’ve seen it,” she jerked her head curtly. “Bodies, if you please.”

“Alright,” Zeegon grumbled. “Just … don’t do anything to it without consulting me. There are design principles and–”

“Of course,” Clue said. “You’ll be in charge of that too. Gadgets and vehicles. Your thing.”

“Right.”

The machine didn’t seem to be in any danger of spontaneously diving them all into the underspace at that moment, but Janya conceded that – short of Janus having some sort of breakthrough with the eejits and using them as some sort of early-detection system – there was no way for them to really know this for sure. It may not even have been this drive that had sent them into the underspace last time. In fact, Janya thought, if Bruce’s rambling was anything to go by, it was possible that the drive was
keeping
them from diving repeatedly, and deeper. Although she was having a hard time figuring out how that worked. Either it enabled the dive, or it prevented the dive, surely? Or was it like some sort of overload spill, where the machine
contained
the underspace-drive energy it used to dive, and they only dived when either the drive activated, or the containment failed?

The whole thing was thoroughly confusing. But it did seem like a severe stretching of coincidence to suggest that they’d just
happened
to dive when Cratch had smashed open the Artist’s head. So what had done that? What had the
Artist
been doing, to give himself all those darkerness tumours and apparent control over underspace dives?

Sally interrupted Janya’s admittedly pointless musings. “What’s this?” the Chief Tactical Officer was leaning in and poking at an open panel extending along the side of one of the barrels. There was a sizeable cylindrical alcove behind it, empty.

“Looks like it might have fallen open when he came out of the suit – or even in the landing,” Clue suggested, pointing at the scratches along the floor and the dents in the scooter. “He came in pretty hard.”

“Maybe that was where he was planning on installing the molecular bonding stimulator,” Janya suggested, gingerly touching a similar panel above the open one. “Look, this is Bruce’s hub, and here’s life support. Whatever the stimulator was going to do, this would be a good place to hook it up to everything,” she
tsk
ed lightly. “Although I don’t know why he’d bother, if he was trading up to take the whole
Tramp
.”

“That might be just a case of him covering his options,” Sally said. “And in any event, if that’s where the hub is, he might as
well
install a fix here rather than bother moving the hub from a handy mobile location like this one. I’m more puzzled by the fact that he came in here basically foaming with rage, howling over the communicator about feeding us all to the darkerness, and immediately went on a killing spree. Does that really mesh with deciding he needed a molecular bonding stimulator, and carefully preparing this space for it before going back to the raving and slaughtering?” she waved a hand. “Or, for that matter, this idea that the eejits are somehow tuned in to all this and might be of use to him?”

“All true,” Janya conceded. “So maybe it did just fall open with the rest of the suit.”

“On the other hand, he
did
seem to direct his killing spree in the direction of the medical bay, where he immediately started looking for gonazine and a molecular bonding stimulator,” Clue pointed out, and shook her head. “Trying to make sense from a dead insane person’s abandoned spacecraft,” she muttered, massaging lightly at her med-padded ear. “Sally’s right, any of these actions could have been made utterly without meaning or purpose, because he was insane. Or all of them,” she paused, but there didn’t seem to be an outburst forthcoming from Bruce this time. “I think the best idea will be to scan the scooter and this panel and niche, and run a check to see whether maybe he had a fallback weapon, a bomb or a backup underspace drive or
something
in there, that he’s stashed somewhere along the way in case something happened – you know, allowing him to achieve his mission even if he happened to get killed,” she paused again. “whatever his mission actually was.”