Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “She’s in here,” Bayn said. “Just … I feel I should prepare you, since you might not have the context to necessarily understand what you’re seeing. It may be distressing. Please try not to get upset.”

  Moskin started forward again, and the tunnel opened out once more into a chamber. Inside…

  And Moskin clenched his jaw to hold back a scream.

  A GLORIFIED FORTUNE TELLER

  Blacknettle, the Angel, was curled in a foetal position with her legs tucked up and her arms and wings wrapped around them. Her hair and feathers drifted like seaweed. She was pallid-skinned, a strange contrast to the lovely woodland-brown of the Angel that had come to meet the Flesh-Eater in Fade, but it was hard to tell for sure. Her flesh was bleached, faded, horribly distorted by the thing she was curled inside.

  It was a dome, like a bubble of thick resin, occupying the centre of the chamber much as the observation platform had done in the room below. It was either made of yellowish material, like amber, or else the liquid inside was the colour of watered-down ale. Blacknettle floated inside it like a laboratory specimen, moving flaccidly with some invisible current cycling the stuff through her pod. The curve of the walls and the long years of immersion in the fluid added a ghastly bloated look to the trapped immortal’s face and hands.

  And she was awake.

  Her head moved slowly, swivelling, a drowned corpse returning to life for a final kiss. Pale hands moved, fingers uncurling like maggots. Her eyes, blood-ringed and bulging with flecks of blue and gold surrounding the ragged pupils, stared out at the Elf.

  “This is a control chamber,” Bayn was saying. “Obviously this is not a fully according-to-spec usage of the interface technology, but it has worked moderately well. After the partial decommissioning and assignment to … Elevator duty,” she went on bitterly, “the interfaces were reordered to function only with human input. This was considered a safeguard, and an extension of the human species protection act that the Brotherhood agreed upon.

  “The integration is obviously supposed to be far more complete, taking a trained and qualified – and voluntary – crewmember and meshing their cerebral and nervous complexes with the ship systems. The result is a cybernetic, biomechanical symbiosis … it’s really quite beautiful, when done according to regulations and design tolerances, but I understand if you find it a little unsettling.”

  “It’s an unsettling concept,” Moskin said, stepping unwillingly closer to the strange growth in the floor, “but obviously the most distressing part is that this integration is … not according to regulations and design tolerances, yes?”

  “That is correct,” Bayn sounded honestly unhappy. “Any compatible humans who might have volunteered to act in a command capacity were lost on Earth, and I wasn’t equipped when the event occurred. Angels, while human in most senses, are physiologically unsuited. Not to mention, well, incapable of full dissolution. The Destarion might have the – forgive me – processing power to integrate an Angel, but I have been forced to improvise.”

  “Improvise,” Moskin repeated, stepping up to the bulbous side of the control chamber. Blacknettle, curled in the thing like a fly in still-setting amber, stared out at him with a blank look on her small-featured yet flawless human face. Not only was her appearance distorted by the surface and the liquid, but now he was close he could see that her perfect porcelain skin was in fact marred with cracks. Like old glazing in truth, she was covered in a webbing of constantly-shifting hairline fractures from which flakes periodically drifted and dissolved in the fluid. She wasn’t breaking up, however – before his eyes Blacknettle was constantly fleshing back out, regenerating.

  “Yes, it’s all very upsetting, and very distracting,” the Flesh-Eater explained. “At first, you see, I tried to integrate her fully and use her as a guidance and command system. I need humans to operate, since the accord – like I said. I suppose it’s fair enough, the Brotherhood was concerned about their more powerful inorganic military assets turning against their human charges, so it must have seemed like a good idea. But she’s not compatible, and now she’s just sort of … jammed.”

  “Jammed,” Moskin said, numbly aware that he’d once again just repeated the last word Bayn had spoken.

  “Of course, she is providing considerable benefit,” Bayn went on. “Not necessarily in a command capacity, but she provides a much-needed organic perspective, some measure of ‘the hideous mystical illogic of organic creatures’ you mentioned, and some small analytical inroads into the program of human undead – that is to say, the Angels themselves – that the revered Firstmades set in place to administrate the Four Realms. I initially thought she would be able to provide deeper and more far-reaching insights, but she’s really little more than a glorified char-glass. Do you know what a char-glass is?” she barely waited for Moskin to shake his head. “I suppose it is an outdated reference at this point … a char-glass was a clever little piece of technology that scanned simplified probabilities and used them to create prophetic forecasts and predictions. All in fun, really, and laughably inaccurate and easy to fool. If they were too accurate, people would have been unsettled by them and they would not have been popular.

  “Of course,” she continued, “I shouldn’t have been surprised. Naturally Blacknettle is just a glorified fortune teller – just as a computer is a glorified abacus, and a luminal accelerator is a glorified slingshot … and in a quite literal sense, an Angel is a glorified human. That’s why it’s referred to as glorification, after all. The idea that an Angel is a glorified human can be taken as a statement of admiration or denigration.”

  “My God,” Moskin couldn’t help murmuring. He looked at the Angel again, trying to school his face to hide his disgust in the uncomfortable knowledge that she could almost certainly see him. A thick, gnarled white cable extended from the bottom of the control chamber and looped around the beautiful creature like an umbilical cord, terminating in the side of Blacknettle’s head instead of in her belly. The incision through which the cord plunged around the cord, if you could call it an incision, was pale and jagged with the same cracked and flaking scales as the rest of her skin, but more pronounced. Her flesh shifted and opened and closed around the intrusion, evidently trying to heal but prevented by the Flesh-Eater’s own aggressive self-repair function. “Is she … she looks … can she communicate?”

  “Yes and no,” Bayn replied, and now she sounded relieved that Moskin was taking this as well as he was. He couldn’t help but wonder how many would-be partners had made it this far only to react in horror and disgust – and whether, when that had happened, the Flesh-Eater had turned them into soot-smears on her pristine white floor. “In every meaningful sense, when I speak with you it’s as though the words are mine and Blacknettle’s. But at the same time, we can’t separate out and speak as two. The concept has no meaning. We are integrated.”

  The Angel’s eyes flicked from side to side, horribly and bloodily aware, and her wings flared and closed slowly in the amber liquid, like the fins of some outlandish sea creature.

  GROWTH

  “I hope you like the selection I’ve designed. The choices cover a wide range of dietary requirements and – optimistically – provide an enjoyable spectrum of flavours and styles. Variety, I believe, is something organisms crave.”

  Moskin didn’t have much appetite, but was uncertain how Bayn might respond to having her hospitality spurned. Besides, he’d made up his mind almost from the start that he wasn’t going to play the silly game of eating his own rations while living on Bayn’s warmth and breathing Bayn’s air. If she wanted to kill or otherwise consume him, she could do it easily. Lacing his food would be a waste of effort. This hadn’t changed just because he now knew she had a pickled Angel in one of her labs.

  He settled cautiously on the extruded white enamel stool and examined the selection of dishes as they emerged from what Bayn referred to as ‘the gastroclave’. It was essentially a table with a hump in the centre, from an orifice in
which an assortment of dishes silently slid.

  “Thank you,” he said, pulling the first plate to have emerged at the head of the gastroclave sample parade towards him and picking up the accompanying spoon. Like the plate, and like almost everything else in the ship, it seemed to be formed of heavy, flawless white enamel. He scooped up some of the food – at least that was pale beige. It was warm, and bland to the taste, but he supposed that was to be expected since the dish appeared to be shepherd’s pinch. He nodded appreciatively, nudged the plate to one side, and pulled over a bowl of bright red splanch. This, too, had a spoon in it and he doled some of the hopefully-piquant stew onto the shepherd’s pinch and folded it carefully.

  “A certain amount of structure and routine is also important, of course,” Bayn carried on cheerfully, “to allow organics to function efficiently. A framework. Is that not true?”

  “I suppose it is,” Moskin admitted. “Incidentally, while we’re talking about frameworks and psychology…” he busied himself for a time, eating the spiced-up shepherd’s pinch. It really wasn’t at all bad. “Mm,” he said approvingly, because a little positive reinforcement couldn’t hurt in convincing the Flesh-Eater he was on her side. Am I not on her side? “Anyway, I was curious … do you have to operate in white?” he asked, and gestured around with his spoon. The curved walls, the gleaming table with its little train of dishes, the hump of the gastroclave. “Lowland Elves are inclined to nature and bright colours. Even Fade seemed a bit drab to me.”

  “Ah,” Bayn said amicably. “You consider it perhaps a little sterile, clinical. This has long been a sore point for the Category 9 family.”

  “I didn’t mean to seem critical–”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Bayn assured him, “I am quite happy to indulge you. My default interior style is not particularly inspired.”

  As Moskin looked around, meal forgotten, the pale room slowly flushed with colour. The table and gastroclave in angular tones of metallic blue-black; the chair and floor in a rich crimson; the walls and ceiling in delicate shades of pale brown and mottled green. Seconds after she’d spoken, Bayn had decorated the room as though a plush and ultra-modern dining setting had been set up in the middle of a forest clearing.

  “That,” Moskin said sincerely, “is very pleasant. Thank you.”

  He returned to his meal with a will, and Bayn seemed downright bubbly with enjoyment now that her guest was pleased with his food and his surroundings.

  “The better we get to know each other, the better I’ll be able to cater to your needs,” she said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he promised, then went on nonchalantly. “So the Angel, this Blacknettle. Is she actually doing anything for you – for us – at this point?” he picked up a golden-brown panashta pastry from a nearby plate. Damn fool? he remembered old Gyre cackling. “I only ask because you said she wasn’t integrated properly, and you can’t process her…”

  “Not exactly,” Bayn agreed, “it’s true.”

  “So why not let her go?” he bit into the panashta, then raised the remaining half as he chewed. “You know,” he said, mostly to make his question sound even more like an afterthought, “my friend’s grandmother used to make panashta. These are a close second.”

  “Sounds like a challenge to me,” Bayn declared. “As for poor old Blacknettle, I’m afraid I can’t just let her go. I mean, I suppose I could, but if she didn’t recover then I’d just be abandoning her – or even worse, giving her back to the Archangels as a piece of evidence in my own trial.”

  “Recover?” Moskin asked, taking another panashta. He’d been telling the truth, technically. These were a very distant second to Gyre’s pastries, but the only other panashta he’d ever had were the ones his father had made and the ones they’d served on the Koshanna Doof on his way from Barnalk Low to Fade. And those two examples, from either distant end of the tasteless-to-murderously-overspiced spectrum, were locked in an eternal battle for last place on his list.

  “Yes, and if she did recover, that might be even worse,” Bayn said, seeming to misunderstand his question. “Angels are too powerful. She’d tear me to pieces.”

  “You seemed to have that other Angel’s measure,” Moskin frowned. Keep it light. Keep it casual. Keep your mouth half-full. “She was … anxious about the prospect of coming in here.”

  “Oh, that,” Bayn said. “That was mostly for show. A bit of handy Godfang-myth, a bit of classic misdirection, a bit of good old-fashioned flim-flammery, a lot of bluff. Plus she was probably half-convinced Blacknettle was working with me – which she is, of course … but not exactly in a combat capacity.”

  “So an Angel could take down a Category 9?” Moskin asked, not having to feign his surprise.

  Bayn non-laughed again. “I very much doubt it. The Destarion can eat Angels for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But a little old Flesh-Eater like me? Well … an Angel could take me down. Maybe. If she gave it her all. And besides,” she went on, “I’m making some interesting headway on a … different kind of interface. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that. I don’t really have the resources to take it as far as I could, but it’s all in the interest of growth.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” Bayn said, still sounding cheerful, “you understand, at least superficially, that the Destarion has been around for a very long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she – we, really – managed to survive all these years by adapting. Again, you probably understand this on a superficial level, and I don’t mean any insult by that.”

  “No,” Moskin agreed easily, “it’s certainly true. All I know is that the Elevator is an ancient and yet highly advanced warship, and that doesn’t make much sense unless you assume she’s upgrading herself.”

  “Yes … although the truth is more complicated. Civilisations rise and fall, Moskin, and advance and decline. A top-of-the-line warship in one millennium is a stylish, harmless old antique in the next, and then the deadliest thing in the cosmos again in the next. But upgrading certainly never hurt.”

  “And I understand that you – she – you are a sentient entity in your own right according to the rulings, an artificial but fully-realised life-form,” Moskin added. “By definition, self-improving and capable of learning.”

  “Yes,” Bayn said again, “although, as I say, it can be difficult to comprehend the extent of that gift, over a span of aeons. The Elevator, as you call her, has been through a lot. She’s seen wars you can’t begin to comprehend. She’s traversed universes you’ve never heard of, and faced enemies more terrifying than any agent of the Adversary, any mere lapdog of the Darkings. The things she’s done battle with … it’s hardly any wonder she was assigned to travel between the Pinian realms and Castle Void as a retirement plan.

  “When I say ‘adapting’, I am talking about processes with only the vaguest scientific explanations. Every horror that took place within her hull, every atrocity that washed the decks with blood of friend and foe alike, made her stronger. She took something away from it, and she grew tougher and smarter and more independent, so the same things could never happen to her again. And so … all new things happened. That’s the way of the urverse.

  “How can I explain it?” Bayn said, and let out an almost-convincing sigh. “When a God channels divine power into a mortal organism, the result is a priest, a mage, an Angel. When a God channels divine power into a starship, the result is the Destarion.”

  “The Elevator has God’s power?” Moskin breathed.

  “Not our God’s power, certainly,” Bayn said placidly. “I am, even more so than you, a subject of the Pinian Brotherhood. There are all kinds of power, and mere energy output is the most basic of them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Moskin admitted.

  “In terms of simple armour and firepower, a Category 9 might have some elements of divine power. A God, after all, is just another class of life-form with properties beyond the organic framework,�
� Bayn said. “The Destarion is powered by – among other things – mass quantities of artificial Bharriom, the so-called God stone.”

  Moskin nodded. ‘Artificial Bharriom’ was a misnomer, of course. There was no way to synthesise the God stone. But the Bharriom in the Destarion was enhanced and refined and mechanised somehow, and didn’t – for example – send out quasi-sentient phantoms the way the ‘natural’ stone did. And the quantities were said to be … unthinkable. Bharriom was exquisitely rare, practically impossible to find, and pieces larger than a baby tooth were all but vanished from known Corporate territory, spirited away into private collections or in use by empires. You had to travel a long way to find useful quantities, and you could reasonably expect to fight a war over any piece larger than a Molran’s narrow little fist.

  But the Firstmade Brotherhoods had been around for a long time. They had been around since before the God stone had first started to grow in the quiet corners of the urverse. And they had the wealth to place the great bars of Bharriom into the Category 9s.

  “From what I was told, the weapons called God-Eaters aren’t even the greatest in her arsenal,” he said.

  “True,” Bayn replied, “although the label is really more fanciful than literal. I’m not sure she could stand up to an attack from an actual God, and of course we would never engage in battle with our revered owners … this is what I mean, about power. It’s more or less irrelevant how powerful the Pinians are, since their authority overrides all protocols.”

  “But other Gods?”

  Bayn didn’t reply for a while. “The Brotherhood has enemies of many stripes,” she said eventually – and singularly unhelpfully. “This is why we improve ourselves.”

  “It’s nothing if not ambitious,” Moskin allowed.

  “What is evolution at its core, if not the natural process by which an organic species unwittingly eliminates its flaws and augments its strengths, achieving more suitable forms generation by generation?” Bayn philosophised. “Our kind simply lacks the iterative model favoured by organics, opting instead for an upgrade-and-redesign approach that is more applicable to our class of life-form. It doesn’t really matter at the moment, since the Destarion is folded away and sleeping right now. But I am awake, and I am still collecting experiences and learning ways to make myself stronger.”