Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (38 page)

It was, he realised,
exactly
like that.

Existence stretched out into a tunnel, a void elongated into a strand with his eyes at one end and his brain at the other, and all the way along its length the underspace
strummed
the void like a violin string. He didn’t even know what that meant. He focussed, and was absurdly grateful to find that he could still
feel
the sharp little claws of the space weasel, Boonie, digging into his shoulder blade and the crook of his neck, kinks in the infinite strand that perception had become. Boonie’s claws were like little clusters of needles, almost drawing blood, and he brought the dark tunnel of his wits to bear on that and that alone, coiling around on himself and attempting to bunch the strand back into a semblance of a nervous system.

Finally, the ship stilled. It was the drifting stillness of total power loss, only the
apparent
presence of gravity revealing that some sort of life support still functioned. Dead, becalmed, adrift. Except that all of these terms implied
some
sort of setting, something for them to be becalmed
in
. Here, there was nothing. Here, there wasn’t even a
here
. And the fact that they were
there
in it was supremely unnatural.

Zeegon wondered if maybe he and the rest of the crew and the ship herself were trying to evaporate the way the blobs of darkerness had done in
their
universe, after previous dives. He wondered whether those blobs had experienced any emotion, any sensation as they vanished. Had the darkerness returned here when it dissolved, or had it simply ceased to exist, becoming the theoretical-end-state-shooey it logically was in their universe, a shadow without anything to cast it, without light to form it? They were, Zeegon was suddenly sure, about to be unmade in much the same way, returned to the primal nothingness of
this
universe as it attempted – not consciously, but just by whatever passed for action-and-reaction here – to restore its natural balance.

Silence and calm and utter, stifling nothingness fell on the
Tramp
. It tightened around Zeegon, squeezing, entering his mind through each of his senses and pinning his body to the floor using its own confused, terrified nervous system. It pinned him, immobilised him, and began work on reducing him to the nothingness he should be.

And then Contro stood up.

“Hello!”

Zeegon struggled to raise his head, and as eyesight and hearing and basic cause-and-effect sequential logic sidled sheepishly back into the repertoire of his consciousness, he saw the other crewmembers slowly and painfully doing the same. Their eyes were blank, their faces slack as the faces of disengaged eejits, but at least he could
see
them again.

“Um,” he managed to say, and was struck by a sudden jarring realisation that the
last
thing he’d said had been
um
as well, and that had only been about three seconds ago.

“Gosh,” Contro went on enthusiastically, “there are a lot of you, aren’t there?”

Zeegon exchanged a muzzy glance with Decay.

A lot of you?
The Blaran mouthed, although with his up-curved lips and elongated teeth, it was hard to be sure. It
had
to be that, though, because that was exactly what Zeegon had been repeating in
his
head and anyway, seriously, what else was there to mouthe?

“Or just one, yes!” Contro went on, after listening to something apparently only he could hear. “Ha ha ha! Or something else!”

“Contro,” Z-Lin said carefully, pushing herself to all fours and then struggling up onto one knee, “can you
see
them?”

“Well yes, of course!” Contro said, then tilted a hand back and forth dubiously. “Well, you know, honestly, not
see
, so much as … well, obviously, in the sense that a duck can see the underside of a…” he trailed off, listening again. “Do I what … ? Represent … ? Oh no, I don’t suppose I … no, I couldn’t say I speak for
all
of us, I’m an awful duffer you know–”

“Controversial-To-The-End speaks for all of us!” Clue shouted, and then lowered her face gracefully into the palm of her hand. “Oh my God,” she mumbled against her wrist.

Contro went on to have a conversation with whatever the underspace equivalent to a native life-form was, the thing that was working its way into their minds, their bodies, seeping into their atomic structures. It may not have even existed to
converse
with, but Contro conversed with it. Who better, after all? How many fractured and twisted variations of reality did a nuclear transpersion physicist see when he was in the engine? How did that machine fit inside your head, and what else did it leave room for once it was in there?

Zeegon could only hear one side of the exchange, and a lot of
that
he blocked out in sheer horrified embarrassment because it sounded much like the Contro-side of just about every conversation that had ever taken place between Contro and anyone. Or any
thing
. It was like the embarrassment of introducing Contro to a visiting dignitary or alien contact, intensified by whole orders of magnitude due to the fact that this was the possibly-conscious essence of an entire
universe
. And Contro was the only one who could talk to it.

The conversation was laughter-and ‘honestly’-heavy, it rambled off several times into misunderstandings and tangents about tea, children’s toys and space whales, it owed a lot to the Mygonite credo of Muddling Through and The Good Old Days, and it ended with “righto!” And it made Zeegon want to curl up inside his own mouth and chew himself to death rather than admit it was happening.

His brain
, Zeegon thought.
His weird God damn brain
.

“They don’t want our universes to mix either,” Contro reported happily, after some indeterminate and tortuous stretch of time. “They have rules about this sort of thing. Well, not
rules
as such, and not
want
… and not really
they
…”

“We get it, Contro,” Z-Lin said wearily. “I just can’t believe you managed to talk to them,” she raised a hand as Contro opened his mouth. “I know,” she said, “not
talk
as such. Something about a duck.”

“Ha ha ha! Exactly! I think!”

“So what happens now?” Sally asked, rising cautiously to her feet as the darkerness further relaxed its grip on them. She nudged the empty sample box with one foot, glanced across at Zeegon and raised her eyebrows, and the helmsman shrugged sheepishly. Boonie had relaxed its –
his
, Zeegon was pretty sure – grip somewhat, but was still curled tightly against the crook of his neck and was vibrating very lightly. Zeegon looked around at the others. It definitely wasn’t just his imagination: the jumbled tunnel-vision of deepest underspace was letting up considerably, even as he looked. “And am I asking Bruce, or Contro?”

“I
think
,” Bruce said, “the original plan is still viable. My communion with this … level … is still imperfect, although by dint of my makeup and previous exposures I suppose it is better than nothing. And from what I’ve gathered, like Contro says, they – the underspace,
it
– it wants the gate closed as well. If that means the drive stays here and I enter full communion and stay behind too, then that is about as much our-universe matter as they want lying around for interest’s sake. At least we can use the drive to keep it contained, the way the machinery at Testing Core 3 was keeping the darkerness contained there.”

“
In theory
,” Janya said warningly.

“In theory,” Bruce agreed. “For all we know, the whole lot will just dissolve away–”

“I didn’t realise you were wearing makeup!” Contro laughed. “‘By dint of my makeup’, you said! How does that help? Honestly! Aw, but I’m sure you look very nice! Is it on your central processor or have you put fake eyelashes or something on–”

“Contro,” Z-Lin interrupted gently. “You did a great job, but…”

“I know, I know!” Contro said jovially. “‘Shut up’, right you are!”

“Let’s not say ‘shut up’,” Clue said, “so much as ‘not right now’.”

“It’s extraordinary,” Bruce confessed. “It’s obviously related to having a special kind of mental alignment, but there were nuclear transpersion physicists on board the
Boonie’s Last Stand
and none of them … well, they were Molren, so maybe that accounts for it. It seems likely that
it
, the underspace, brought the entire ship down here just because it had sensed Contro on previous dives, and knew he was the best intermediary available. Better even than the eejits, with their apparent ability to sense what was happening.”

“Sorry!” Contro said.

“No, I mean it’s
good
that–”

“So what
happens
?” Sally insisted.

“Well, the very fact that we’re all here means we were right,” Janya said. “The underspace was reaching out and taking things into its own hands, metaphorically speaking, so the only solution
is
to shut it down from this side.”

“And from what I’m seeing, at least after this exchange with Contro,” Bruce said, “closing down the connection appears to be something we’re all in agreement on.”

“Yes,” Contro said with a little laugh, “apparently we’re creepy!”

“
We’re
creepy?” Zeegon blinked.

“Everything’s relative, Zeeg,” Decay pointed out.

“And besides,” Glomulus added cheerfully, “we
are
creepy.”

“It will, however, still mean I need to stay here,” Bruce went on. “So our previous farewells, exchanged back in our own universe predive, can perhaps be taken as read,” the
Tramp
gave a shudder, “as I believe there will be little time for a repeat of the heart-warming and tear-jerking scene now.”

“Do you even know how to use the drive to lock the door behind us?” Janya asked, “or are you just completely making all of this up as you go along?”

“Not all of it,” Bruce protested.

“And of the parts you’re making up, what percentage of it is just a blind assumption that whatever Contro said to the underspace is going to have the desired result?” Janya pressed.

“Look, at some point you’re just going to have to surrender to the unknown,” Bruce said.

“Don’t get fatalistic with me,” Janya growled.

The darkerness around them – and still within them, Zeegon was quite sure – seemed to swirl like smoke. Or at least, again, that was the closest his brain could come to translating the sensation. On his shoulder, Boonie tightened his grip and gave a nervous hiss.

“Just having the drive here in the underspace should take us most of the way to achieving the closure we want,” Bruce said. “The worst of the stuff stays here, completing its breakdown or its transformation, and leaving nothing on your side. No connection, no way back. The rest is simply a matter of … well, it’s difficult to explain without using ducks, apparently, but it
seems
as though we’ve reached an understanding,” it seemed to pause thoughtfully, although that might simply have been an artefact of intensive calculation and data collation. “Certainly there has been some profound shift in the drive’s output and its interaction with its environment since Contro had his little talk.”

“Do you think it might help if we left Contro here to translate for you?” Waffa asked. “For all eternity?”

“Oi!” Contro laughed.

“Just kidding.”

“Look, wait,” Janya said, planting her feet as the floor rumbled underneath them again, “won’t we just end up being a link all over again if we go back? Don’t we all have to stay here now, to keep the gate closed?”

“Oh Hell no,” Zeegon growled.

“We’ve travelled in the underspace,” Janya insisted, “it’s inside us now, just like it was in the crew of
Boonie’s Last Stand
. I can feel it.”

“Me too,” Sally said. Decay and Clue nodded, and one by one the other crewmembers looked around at each other uneasily. “For all we know, we’re already going the same way as them.”

“They apparently went bad because they went deep at the start,” Whye said apprehensively, “and right now we’ve just gone about as deep as it’s possible to go, right?”

“No,” Bruce assured them, then paused again. “Well,
yes
, but–”

“It’ll take me ten minutes to rig the guns to backfire into the core and whorl the whole lot of us,” Sally said. “It’s got to be better than going the way of the
Boonie
’s crew. I didn’t even
see
them but I know that much.”

“
Listen
,” Bruce said in exasperation, “I don’t know how much time we have. Yes, we all came in deep, but that’s part of why this dive was
better
than the first ones. We knew what we were doing more, this time around. Still not
entirely
, but better than – and look, we also had Contro.”

“Yay!” Contro beamed.

“It’s the
drive
that makes the connection,” Bruce went on, talking faster and faster as the shaking continued and the darkerness grew more agitated, “the other infestations you saw were a combination of bad diving and defensive reactions from the underspace itself, and experimental changes wrought by the Artist. And only this specific hub is hooked up to the drive – the discrete machinery is safe. That is, the
Tramp
, and you lot, you’re all going to be fine. All the really contaminated stuff will be on this side, where it doesn’t really count as ‘contaminated’, any more than having atoms in is a contamination in our universe. So the connection will be gone. Especially since the underspace is going to pull back, quit its defensive thing.”

“It is?” Whye asked.

“They said they’d pull back and let the ways close,” Contro said helpfully.

“But the drive has to stay,” Bruce concluded. “And me, or at least this hub, since it’s integrated into the drive. The real me, on board the
Tramp
here, is clean. It’s – I’ve – only dived as many times as you have. And the Artist’s body needs to stay,” it added, “since I guess you could say it’s
becoming
.”