There was another uncomfortable pause, into which Clue’s organiser pad chimed softly. She pulled it out of the pocket of her thermal, and glanced at it.
On Janya’s suggestion, Waffa and Sally and Decay had checked Dunnkirk’s frozen body, cursorily and non-invasively. According to the report she’d just received, the Bonshoon’s teeth were intact. That could just mean that Cratch hadn’t managed to get back to the medical bay and collect his trophy yet, and wasn’t planning on it until after the dust had settled … but it was somewhat indicative. The Barnalk High Ripper, while known for his calculating nature and frightening ability to bide his time, was not exactly restrained when the time for the kill arrived. It seemed unlikely this was any sort of booby-trap or elaborately-planned remote killing. Plus, Cratch could never have suspected he’d be invited to Whye’s office.
Could he?
Aside from the most unsatisfying dismissal of the Rip from their suspect pool, they had also quickly discounted Wingus and Dingus, the enduring fixtures of the medical bay nursing team.
Despite Sally’s gloomy pronouncements about eejit uprisings and emergent behaviour, it didn’t look like any of them had deviated from their absolute configuration baselines sufficiently to do murder. So far, with the investigation underway less than three hours, it seemed like they’d eliminated all but a pair of suspects, each more impossible than the last. Next steps…
Clue realised the aki’Drednanth were gathered calmly around her knees.
They weren’t climbing and crawling and tussling the way they had been in Thord’s presence when Clue had first seen them, back at Declivitorion. Whether that was because they were a little older now, growing and maturing fearsomely fast, or because of Thord’s departure and the shift in their dynamic, or because of the death that had just occurred, Clue had no idea.
Maybe it was simply a reaction to their immersion in soft-space and being separated from the rest of their kind, from the entire Drednanth. Reincarnated ancients or not, this was the first time in this life they had been cut off. For all Z-Lin knew, they’d never been cut off. Had there even been technology capable of shifting aki’Drednanth into layers of space where they lost radio contact, the last time these seven had been drawing breath?
“You girls can go ahead and get back to killing and eating each other again soon, if that’s what you have to do,” Z-Lin said. “In the meantime, I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to find out who did this. We liked Dunnkirk. If you can help us in any way, like you did with the Fergunak – well, not exactly like that, but if you can help in any way, that would be … appreciated. If not … I just wanted to let you know that we’re investigating it. And we’ll have answers for you by the time we get to our next stopover. And you can pass them on to Thord, and Mal, if that’s how you do that sort of thing.”
The aki’Drednanth pup near the suit had extricated her paw from the transcriber glove and was now standing with the others. She blinked her dark eyes slowly, and inclined her fuzzy white head in an absurdly dignified little nod. It could have been an entirely involuntary movement, immature nerves and muscles coping with the young creature’s heavy skull, but it didn’t seem that way.
Ancient, she reminded herself. Unthinkably ancient little uzzy-fuzzy bundles of frosty fluff. Also possibly mind-readers, so enough with the uzzy-fuzzy.
Z-Lin Clue left the farm, stripped off the thermal and headed wearily to Sally’s office. There would be no sleep just yet, she realised, even though they were almost literally in limbo here. There was no rush, their ship was locked down by the laws of physics and unphysics alike, and if anyone was going to destroy evidence it would happen whether she slept or not. But for the moment, exhausted though she was, the investigation took precedent.
She was unable to suppress a feeling of unpleasant foreboding about the weeks to come.
DECAY (NOW)
“Look at these.”
They were in Sally’s office or, more accurately, a side-office because Sally’s own office was a chaotic jumble of old-style books and blocks and files and junk, full beyond redemption and a certain bottomless pit into which the meagre material evidence of the current case would vanish without a trace. Therefore, Waffa had overseen the data coordination and made sure it was always up-to-date on their pads, and they’d gathered the little collection of personal possessions Dunnkirk had left behind in this spare room.
Actually – Decay looked around as he stood up and crossed the room – this room wasn’t a side-anything. It was Drago ‘Brutan’ Barducci’s old office. It was bigger than Sally’s cosy little space, made to seem even bigger now that the eejits and janitorials had put Brutan’s possessions into storage. Sally had moved into the chief’s boots, but not his office. Decay couldn’t say he blamed her.
He took the sheet of flimsy Sally handed up to him from where she was sitting. He judged it was old-fashioned too, in its own way – thick and heavy, like old kashta papyrus. He looked at what Dunnkirk had left on the flimsy, tapping slowly from image to image, and revised his assumption. It was relatively new material, if not exactly cutting-edge technology. But it was expensive art-quality stuff. He glanced at Sally, and felt his ears drop in surprise when she held up the worn wood-and-wisp scriber she’d just pulled from the box.
“He did these with that?” he murmured, and went back to the drawings. Rich green forestscapes, sometimes populated by outlandishly beautiful fawn-form creatures like something out of Twin Species mythology, dominated a collection of heartbreaking beauty. “He was good.”
“He was brilliant,” Sally said, and Decay carefully continued to study the works – no great chore – when he heard the emotion in her voice. It wasn’t something he’d normally be much good at detecting, but he knew Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed. He waited until she cleared her throat and went on grimly, “but just what the Hell do they mean?”
“They’re like woodland deities from old Fleet mythology,” Decay said. “Back when we had forests with dirt under them instead of ‘ponic underlay.”
“Yeah,” Sally said, “we had that sort of thing on Gífrheim too. Probably even older than that, from Earth days. Bit different, of course. Humanoid, but with the same sort of animal legs. Weird how some things are parallel like that,” she sighed. When Sally got philosophical, you knew she was tired. “But why’s he drawn so bloody many of them?” her voice faltered again, then went on angrily when she realised how noticeable her sorrow had become. “Big gob-stonk he was.”
“Do you think-” it’s relevant to the case? he’d been about to ask, but wisely amended to, “-it’d be okay if I copied these across to my personal files? Might throw them up on my walls.”
“Don’t see why not,” Sally said. “I already did. Might be something visible in a blow-up, after all. Or you could just be sitting and vaguing out for a few minutes, and suddenly realise you’re looking at something important. That’s how cases get solved sometimes, you know.”
It usually wasn’t, of course. Even Decay knew that most of the time, cases were solved by the existence of solid and obvious and unrefutable evidence, it happened immediately, or else cases got indefinitely shelved.
“Good idea,” Decay said, and tapped his pad in his lower hands, interfacing with the flimsy. “And four eyes are better than two.”
“Mm,” Sally grunted.
Waffa, wiped out by the work he’d already put in and the added shock of Dunnkirk’s death, had wisely declared that he would be no further good to anyone until he got some sleep, and so had retreated to his quarters for a few hours’ unconsciousness. Decay hadn’t bothered to ask Sally whether she was intending to do the same. He’d seen that same determined expression on her face after the bonefields, and knew there was no arguing with it. To be honest, he was quietly happy to see the look, if ‘happy’ was the right term. It probably wasn’t. But he’d begun to think The Accident had knocked it off her face for good.
He was also more or less resigned to once again being the t
oken monkey-flunky on board, bat-head on the spot when the witchy hour rolled into the wolf hour and everyone else wanted to sleep.
“It seems like strange subject-matter for a Bonshoon whose life had been poured into a friendship like he had with Thord,” he mused. “All that ice and cold. Maybe this was a way of compensating for the environments he missed. Maybe he wasn’t as committed to the aki’Drednanth thing as Maladin was, and that’s why he was left behind. Maybe it’s even got something to do with his death. We know it wasn’t suicide, since those blood sacs got swapped out by somebody and he was paralysed, but…” he pondered the possibility of assisted suicide, before rejecting it. Dunnkirk wouldn’t have turned his back on his friends. He might have found his way to a proper sleeper pod, souped it up and then rejoined them in the Dreamscape if he could, but suicide? And which of them would help him, given that the Rip had been otherwise engaged? “It’s also a bit weird that there aren’t any pictures of Maladin, since they were so close,” he went on. “Or any pictures of Thord, for that matter.”
“Mm.”
“I should forward these to Janus as well,” Decay said, “maybe he can factor them into his psychological assessments.”
“Mm.”
Decay looked across. “Hey monkeybuns, wake up,” he said loudly. Sally jumped, snarled, and flashed him a momentary look of gratitude. The only thing worse than being yelled at or mocked for nodding off, to Sally, would be if he stole out and left her to the sleep she needed. He might as well get a blankie and pull it up over her.
“I’m awake, you flatheaded ghone,” she growled.
Decay grinned. Ghone, a derogatory Xidh slang term meaning clone, was what Blaren called Molren when they were feeling uncomplimentary within the limits of near-polite social interaction. It was significantly more insulting to use against a Blaran.
“I’m going to dig more into that minimalist little personnel and visitor history file that we uploaded from The Warm,” he said, turning for the door, “see if there’s anything more in there about them that might be relevant. And I think I can do it without the accompaniment of your poorly-designed windpipe struggling to respire.”
“You saying I snore?” Sally shot back.
“Not at all, Chief Tactical,” Decay protested. “I understand ladies snore.”
“Right, you bastard,” Sally grumbled, standing up and stretching. “I’m done anyway, this shit’s not getting solved tonight. Ping me in six?”
“You got it.”
Of course, to call The Warm’s personnel file on Maladin and Dunnkirk ‘minimal’ was an understatement. They hadn’t been residents, hadn’t even been long-term visitors, and had been moving under the radar as travelling in the company of an aki’Drednanth tended to enable. And there was nothing in there on Thord. Instead, Decay found himself sitting back in his reading scoop, looking contemplatively at the triptych he’d projected onto his lounge room’s wall panels. Three of Dunnkirk’s forest scenes, blown up to four times their original sizes, the centre one depicting a pair of the strange woodland creatures. He sat, and pondered the farther, deeper points of history.
The Bonshooni, or a quite astonishing number of them, took the belief about the rest of the universe being an illusion painted onto the walls – the Bonshoon veil – even further than one might suspect. A lot of them believed the Six Species were already lodged in the walls. All of them. Or, more specifically perhaps, that the believer was lodged in the walls, while everything else was a veil illusion.
It helped to pretend those of a different school of thought than you were not actually real. Indeed, if any culture other than the Bonshooni had held such a belief, it would be a recipe for easy violence.
It all had its origins in the ancient myths, old tales about the stars being holes in sackcloth, or painted onto the bowl of the sky. The Bonshooni thought they were true, with due consideration to their own technological context. There was no real magic in the Bonshooni philosophy, except insofar as technology so advanced as to appear that way to little life-forms with no possible means of comprehending it. Was there a wall around the galaxy, feeding back false data to anyone inside looking out? What did it matter? You couldn’t fly out there, not dependably, and once you reached the point where you didn’t know whether or not you were being spoon-fed sensory information – whether or not you were trapped like a fly in amber and feeding false telemetry of your own to the people inside looking out … it all became an exercise in hypothetical philosophy. You never really could trust your senses, or your devices. Reality became meaningless, an arbitrary set of conditions that people agreed on, mostly without speaking, everybody just hoping that everybody else was thinking the same thing. So what if the Bonshoon veil lifted? How would you know? What if, in the words of the legendary Gaius Modine, it was veils all the way down?
Yes, it was ludicrously complex, and almost as mad to think of it as technology as it was to think of it as magic, but that was Bonshooni for you. If anything, the eternal and infinite afterlife of the Drednanth was mundane in its scientific plausibility.
Decay smiled sadly, and reached out his lower left hand to lift his cup of taktura. He’d picked up twin bottles at the Zhraak Burns visitor centre, and had made the decision to finish one bottle before reaching Mobi, and to save the second bottle until they got back to Aquilar. Or the nearest intact equivalent, if it came to that. It wasn’t contraband, wasn’t narcotic in any way. The Burnèd, even the relative liberals of the visitor centre, didn’t go in for that sort of thing. The bottles were made in pairs, traditionally, the first bracingly bitter, the second sweet. You were supposed to begin an arduous task with the first, and celebrate its completion with the second.
It was a nice idea.
He sipped, winced not-entirely-unhappily, and set the tumbler back down. He looked at the triptych and thought about the Bonshooni. And fantasy dreamscapes. And weird beliefs. And where poor, smiling, forever-innocent Dunnkirk fitted into it all.
Why did most Bonshooni believe they were trapped behind this veil, this stifling physics-bound universe? Well, the usual reason, really. Punishment for some age-old transgression. Heck, more than a few Molren believed something pretty similar, with their hopeless quest for the ruined gates of space. Whether they believed it literally and scientifically was irrelevant. It was a part of the cultural make-up of the Fleet, and had been since the Molren were a single species.
The Bonshooni had begun their journey to subspecieshood in a long-gone Molran Fleet Worldship named – perhaps predictably enough – Bonshoo. This ship, for various deeply-complicated ghoney damn reasons, was governed by an oddly-liberal bunch who had long since formed a tiny de facto Fleet of their own with one Worldship and her attendant swarm of carriers and enforcers, although they still flew with the rest of the Fleet. They did things a bit differently on Bonshoo. All part of the rich tapestry of diversity and bright-eyed melting-pot whimsy that was the Twin Species – or, as it was starting to call itself after the aki’Drednanth sacrifice and the Fergunak defection of convenience and mild interest, the Four Species.
When the Molren of Bonshoo woke up almost two-thirds of their sleepers at once, seven billion Molren from the last three generations of the homeworld’s dying breaths, some Worldship governments considered it something of a defecation on the tapestry. A lot of the sleepers happened to belong to a movement called the Single Sigh, which was why they had been stored on Bonshoo in the first place. But in the Fleet’s cataclysmic encounters with Damorakind, this had been forgotten. So many records, so much history, so much memory. All devoured. That was why the Molren called them the Cancer in the Core.
It had never been intended that they all be woken up at once. Even taking into account the policies of staged, orchestrated and balanced population replenishment, these Molren were never meant to be woken up en masse. They were one of those cultures that were supposed to be eased back into reality a small community at a time, and assimilated. Normalised. The Single Sigh were the sort
of thing the new Molren of the Fleet – those spacebound generations who had lived and died on the Worldships during the long diaspora – tended to frown on, and want to do something about. Messy, and fractious, and emotional, and passionate. But in the panic and the population plummets, this was one mass-thawing that slipped through the cracks.
The Single Sigh movement – call it what it was, a cult – found fertile ground on Bonshoo, and within ten thousand years the Bonshooni were a bona fide subspecies even more distinct than the Blaren before them. They were defined not only legally and culturally and with deep-written hereditary tags, they were also separated by old-world genome shifts. Their Worldship, a seething overcrowded mass of waking Molranoids far beyond its intended capacity, still managed to limp along with the rest of the Fleet but it was an ever-increasing embarrassment to the sedate and cautious Molren. Not to mention a source of boundless hilarity and social commentary to the Blaren.
The Bonshooni had almost been a subspecies when they went into their pods, and after however many tens of thousands of years of spacebound eugenics the Molren were simply too vanilla for them to interbreed with, even if either species wanted to. Oh, there was still the occasional case of successful crossbreeding – medical science, after all, was capable of far more horrifying acts of ill-advised creation – but of the two branch-offs, the Blaren actually remained more compatible with Molren. And they’d left the club earlier.
Anyway, shortly after that, the Fleet had arrived above Earth.
Decay held up his glass again. Zhraak Burns. Maladin and Dunnkirk had spent a lot of their shore leave time on Zhraak Burns in a little patch of forest in the middle of the visitor centre, he remembered randomly. Had that been on Dunnkirk’s request?
His musing was interrupted by the soft sound of a door chime from the far side of his expanse of linked-together quarters. By the time he climbed to his feet and made his way through the rooms to the relevant entrance, he knew it was an eejit at the door. Only an eejit rang a door chime with such childlike innocence and endless, grinding patience.
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 7
