Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1)

by Andrew Hindle

  “You’re still building Worldships?” Bason asked.

  “Well, technically,” Mer said. “Beyond the initial programming and setup, I don’t have much connection to the robots. I can repurpose them, of course, quite easily … but yes. The Bonshoo was only completed some three hundred years ago. The fourth ship is likely to be in excess of two thousand more years in construction. The timeline, as I say, only accelerated after I was able to conduct investigations into the Grandis 459’s origins and the region we had arrived through. That was when I found reason to suspect the existence of hostile alien life, and established the possibility of its tracking our superluminal wake, and … well, that was when I rededicated a lot of my processing capacity to contacting the Molren of Dema.”

  “Why didn’t you just send a robot?” Bason asked.

  “Or fly one of the Worldships around into orbit?” Gandicon asked.

  “The Worldships required Bharriom power systems before they could function as intended,” Mer said. “A drawback of the original design. I lack the capacity to improvise – just making contact with your communications systems was a considerable undertaking, and it ended up hinging on your … specialised domestic network.”

  “I’m a tinkerer,” Karturi admitted.

  “Well, the same drawback applied to the robots,” Mer added. “They’re not capable of communication according to your systems, and they’re not capable of atmospheric insertion.”

  “And another ship will be two thousand years in the making?” Gandicon asked.

  “Yes,” Mer said, for once not pretending it didn’t understand. “Which is why I suggest you start out, perhaps take a set of robots and the requisite raw materials along, and complete construction of the fourth ship in transit. You may need it to expand into.”

  “You think?” Bason frowned.

  “After a fashion,” Mer answered, making the young woman squint at the wall suspiciously. “Of course, there are other alternatives to taking the shipyard infrastructure along–”

  “There’s a problem with your fourth Worldship,” Gandicon said.

  “No Bharriom to power her,” Bason nodded.

  “Yes, that is a problem,” Mer agreed, “but there are alternative fuel sources and energy generation possibilities. The Molren of Dema didn’t power their civilisation using the Bharriom crystals they arrived with, after all. If they had, you probably would have had more difficulty bringing the hearts here.”

  “A planet has quite a few available power sources that a vessel in deep space lacks,” Gandicon pointed out.

  “Yes,” Mer conceded. “This is why the Worldships need Bharriom. But there are alternative options out there. Even before we consider the possibility of finding more Bharriom in space, or on other planets.”

  “Is that a strong possibility?” Bason asked.

  “I can’t say at this point,” Mer replied. “I don’t have eyes out there. But the fourth ship isn’t far along. Pack it up and take it along to continue building, or leave it here to burn along with the rest of Dema’i civilisation.”

  “Wow,” Bason said mildly, “that was unexpectedly bleak.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mer didn’t sound particularly sorry, but Gandicon supposed its emotional expression was limited. Maybe. It certainly managed to put some kind of feeling into its statements, even though that feeling could only be artificially constructed, and it was impossible to tell how much of it was Gandicon’s own expectation.

  The whole idea just got more confusing the deeper you delved into it. After all, what was an organic sentient’s emotional response, if not a series of behavioural and expressive cues designed to communicate a chemically-dictated response to environmental conditions?

  “…but it doesn’t matter,” the omnipresent voice was carrying on, seemingly in response to Gandicon’s thought process but actually continuing its conversation with Karturi. “The fourth ship wouldn’t have the power requirements of the others, so she may not have needed a Bharriom heart, at least until … well, certain future contingencies and possible routes, this is perhaps a matter for disclosure once we are closer to the actual evacuation point and have more members of Dema’s leadership on board. Suffice it to say that a Bharriom power source would be advantageous, but…”

  “Why would her power requirements be lower?” Bason asked. Gandicon, who had been about to pursue the question of what exactly was going to happen along their escape route to require full power from the Bharriom hearts – and what exactly Mer knew about it anyway – subsided and let Bason speak. He wasn’t confident about getting a straight answer from the machine mind in any case.

  When Mer spoke it seemed to sound hesitant, but promptly grew in confidence – sounding, if Gandicon hadn’t known better, as though it wanted to get the sentence over with and move briskly on. “Well … well, the pods in the fourth ship wouldn’t be functional, obviously.”

  “What?” Bason asked.

  “‘Obviously’?” Gandicon added.

  For a short time there was no explanation forthcoming, as the coach eased to a halt and the two Molren disembarked. They followed the broad thoroughfare – this section of the Worldship was more like the magdock in Koi-Jack city, evidently designed for large volumes of people – into a gently-sloping passageway easily broad enough to admit a hundred Molren shoulders-to-shoulders.

  “This shipyard, along with me – or some iteration of me – has been running for almost ten thousand years,” Mer spoke up as they ascended. The passageway curved almost imperceptibly as it rose, its outside curve pierced at regular intervals by slightly smaller passageways leading off into the ship. “The Worldships are designed primarily as cargo transport, but there’s also living space to make them work as generation ships. They could house millions of waking Molren – hundreds of millions, if they lived in a regimented and sensible manner within their means. At that point, the sleeper pods would be more a form of long-term backup, raw genetic archiving.”

  “What sort of capacity do they have?” Gandicon asked, looking around at what he could only see as a hideous waste of space and atmosphere in an ostensibly efficient vessel. Perhaps the great curving avenue had some sort of practical purpose, he thought. “We were looking at the Worldships from the outside. They’re – what – a hundred, a hundred and fifty times as long as the Grandix building was tall?”

  “A hundred and seventy-five times as long, to be precise,” Mer said. “Although truly precise measurements of the Grandix building by jurisdictional region and level, against practically non-existent schematics of the Grandis 459–”

  “But they’d hold at least a hundred and seventy-five times the number of pods as the original ship – at a conservative estimate, and not including possible scaling up of support infrastructure?” Gandicon insisted. “So … three hundred and fifty million sleepers, on top of the possibly hundreds of millions of waking Molren you mentioned earlier?”

  “Um,” Mer said, and this time Gandicon was sure it sounded not just hesitant, but downright uncomfortable. Again, it was too conceptually problematic to be anything but a distraction at this point. “Actually,” the voice went on, “the Worldship Bonshoo – the first vessel you activated – can carry almost ten billion, stowed in sleeper pods.”

  “Ten billion!” Gandicon burst, stopping in his tracks in the middle of the broad passageway. “How?”

  “Please specify,” Mer said, but the phrase lacked the fraudulent computing-error tone of its earlier evasions. “The process is complicated, but to explain it to someone without a background in advanced medical practice … each pod can maintain a Molran in metabolic suspension, preserved in a state similar to that of diurnal slumber but with certain distinguishing–”

  “Mer,” Bason said warningly. “The pods. We’re not worried about how they work, we’re worried about how many of them there are. Are you telling us each Worldship carries ten billion of them?”

  “Um,” Mer said again. “Well, yes. The Bonsh
oo … the hearts provide the required power, of course, quite easily – although the pods do have quite a hefty power requirement. And as I said, yes, each Worldship can provide living environment and sustenance – with some raw material infusions and extensive recycling – for up to a billion or so in living, breathing crew. But that will require expansions, allowances … the design takes this growth into account. It will require discipline. I’m describing an end-state population, starting with a smaller base. You can’t just load up a billion people as crew, and ten billion into the pods, and fly off for parts unknown. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “There aren’t ten billion people to load into the pods,” Gandicon exclaimed. He didn’t start along the corridor again yet – to be honest, the moderate exertion of ascending the gently-curved pathway had reawakened twinges of discomfort in his still-healing body. “Weren’t you keeping track of the population of Dema as you designed these things?”

  “No,” Mer said a little impatiently. “I was barely even sentient. I just set the robots to build, and they built. You don’t have ten billion organic units to shift? That’s good news. Less work getting them on board, and plenty of room to expand.”

  “What’s the catch?” Bason asked, eyes narrowed.

  “What’s the catch?” Gandicon repeated numbly, turning to stare at her. “Did you not hear that these ships are running thirty billion unnecessary storage pods? There’s only three billion people on the planet.”

  “Almost five, actually,” Bason said in a low voice.

  “Okay, I’m out of touch,” Gandicon said impatiently. “That’s still only a sixth of the capacity of these three ships.”

  “That’s still not really a catch,” Bason said. “That’s a benefit. I want to know about the but. We could almost bring the entire population on board these three ships as waking crew, if what Mer says is–”

  “That actually brings us to the but,” Mer said.

  “Go on,” Bason invited. They started along the corridor again, slowly.

  “Actually, there’s only one ship’s-worth of functional pods. All three ships have some, since I’ve redistributed them to a small degree to balance the power requirements, but it’s still … the Bonshoo has seven billion operational pods, this ship – the Enna Midzis – has two billion, and the Grandix has little over a billion. The rest of the pods making up the thirty billion total that Gandicon mentions … well, they’re not functional. Obviously.”

  “‘Obviously’?” Gandicon repeated dryly.

  “There weren’t the raw materials available to make the required exotic-compound components,” Mer said. “Not locally – not inside this system. They were all expended on the first ten billion. Essentially, there were enough raw materials to make one fully-loaded and full-capacity ship, but when that was done, the system was able to continue building and why not, because there were three power sources available. And after that, it was just another step … so, um.”

  “‘Um’?” Bason said, echoing Gandicon’s tone.

  “They’re replicas,” Mer said. “The pods. Most of them. Partially functional, but … like I said, the functional pods can be shared out more evenly to balance the power needs, but it doesn’t make much difference. The Bonshoo will run just as effectively as the Grandix, for our purposes. And like you said, you only need five billion active pods anyway – at the absolute maximum.”

  “That’s still a lot of replicas,” Bason said.

  “A lot of raw materials and construction effort,” Gandicon agreed. “And why? Why not just redirect those resources to making a fleet of evacuation craft, or the fourth Worldship, or … anything? Even if you didn’t have the most recent information and your sentience was dormant, you couldn’t have thought there were thirty billion Molren over there.”

  “I didn’t think anything,” Mer said a little snippily, “but it still doesn’t really matter. There are still ten billion pods, aren’t there, and five billion people to put in them. So. The main challenge is getting them here.”

  “That is the main challenge,” Gandicon allowed. “Which is why it might have been nice to have some sort of infrastructure for it–”

  “Alright, let’s not be too critical,” Bason said. “We weren’t expecting to find anything like the Worldships up here, let alone the capacity to save every Molran on Dema. One problem at a time.”

  “Yes,” Mer said, and Gandicon definitely wasn’t imagining the injured dignity in the voice now. “And besides, there are practical reasons for having even twice the number of pods required – and potentially you could have far more. The compounds required to upgrade the replicas to full working models aren’t as rare as Bharriom crystals. You could feasibly find more in interstellar space. You could increase your pod complement–”

  “A Worldship capable of sustaining a billion Molren, as well as preserving ten times that many in storage and running an assortment of other systems, isn’t that different to a small mobile planetary ecosystem,” Gandicon said. “I’m not an expert by any means but it seems fairly realistic to assume we can live on these ships as cleanly as we have lived on Dema. The planet’s not a terrible mess.”

  “What’s your point?” Bason asked.

  “I just wonder, what practical reason would we have for wanting two or three sleeper pods for each evacuee?” Gandicon tried to keep his voice polite. “That level of population expansion seems reckless, unless it occurred over the course of hundreds of millennia – in which case I would have to wonder how long this evacuation was intended to last.”

  “I agree,” Mer said a little too quickly and readily, “you might want to avoid expanding that much. But the pods would allow you to build up a solid population base, and an accessible pool of low-tech genetic diversity, like I said. This is basic stuff, for a generation ship. Build up the population, then consider rotating them through the pods. Ten percent per ship, waking. Maximum. Ninety percent per ship, sleeping.”

  “Sleeping in shifts?” Bason said, frowning.

  “It might be best,” Mer said. “I for one have no raw data on the effects of long-term storage on a conscious entity. The settlers seemed to get through the outward journey okay, but…”

  They reached the end of the long curved thoroughfare, and stepped out onto the central control deck.

  XXV

  The deck was an immense semicircle with windows, or screens, running floor to ceiling all the way around the curve. The view wasn’t particularly interesting, predominantly black void with a scatter of almost-invisible planet-fragments reflecting the sunlight, and the slender thread of the access rail stretching from the main shipyard spar somewhere in the darkness. The chamber itself was echoingly empty with more of that paradoxical just-constructed and long-abandoned dustiness. Consoles and control stations were arranged around the semicircle, and the straight ‘rear’ wall was split by a corner-to-corner gallery that seemed to open off into another chamber behind. Gandicon and Bason wandered into the vaulted space, looking around in awestruck silence.

  They were spared the necessity of breaking the hushed moment, or of regathering their thoughts and continuing their discussion with Mer, by the abrupt reappearance of the Heart in a happy puff of soft blue light that spread across the antiseptic space like Dema’i moonlight.

  “Hello,” the smiling child said.

  “Balls and eyes,” Bason hissed, “I thought you weren’t going to appear like that anymore,” the Heart looked so downcast at this that she immediately amended, “I’m glad you did, though. You just surprised me.”

  “Did something disconnect you from the power system and return you to your crystal … manifesting … form?” Gandicon asked. He, too, had been surprised by the appearance of the Bharriom phantom – although it was probably more accurate to say that he’d been startled almost to the point of shouting. His chest ached in a long, queasy column right down the centre of his torso, and his lower hands began to tremble slightly. He slipped them into his pockets to conceal the
reaction.

  “The power relays are still initialising,” Mer said while the Heart looked politely baffled. “There will be some fluctuations while – what are you looking at?”

  “Wait – you can’t see him?” Bason asked sharply, pointing at the glowing boy. “Or hear him?”

  “I see and hear that you’re seeing and hearing something,” Mer replied.

  “That’s interesting,” Bason mused, then noticed Gandicon’s nonplussed expression. “It means that what we’re seeing isn’t actually a physical alteration of light hitting our eyes and entering our brains,” she explained, “and what we’re hearing isn’t modulated air vibrations passing through our ears and entering our brains. It may in fact be happening entirely in our brains, and just manifesting to our senses–”

  “Does this matter?” Gandicon asked. “I mean, not to be brusque, but–”

  “It just doesn’t make sense that physical-environment elements like the speeding capsule-launcher would make him disappear from our sight, if he was in our heads all along,” Bason said, then laughed shortly. “Not a single one of the different entities on board this ship have any way of answering this, have they?” she said wryly.

  “If it’s an expression of the Bharriom consciousness through the filtration system of your brains,” Mer said, “obviously it makes sense that I don’t see it – and it also makes a certain amount of sense that it obeys a specialised subset of the rules of physics as normalised by your senses and subconscious expectations. Like standing on the floor, speaking your language, getting left behind by sudden unexpected acceleration…” it paused. “Tell it I say hello?”

  “Hello, Mer,” the Heart smiled. There was an uncomfortable pause.