“No, I mean, we’re outside.”
“Oh.”
Janus hit the control on his desk, and the office door opened. He took a moment to appreciate the Commander’s dedication to their roles. She could have overridden the lock quite easily – but ship’s counsellor, even conducting a rather fruitless interview with an eejit, was deserving of professional courtesy and privacy.
Not only Z-Lin stepped through, but also a determined-looking Sally and an unhappy-looking Waffa. Janus nodded to each in turn, mystified.
“This is … difficult,” Z-Lin said, “and we’re still hammering out the details. Two of the pups seem to be able to operate the transcriber glove in tandem, and they’re giving us mostly-coherent verbal responses,” at this, she looked at Waffa with a mixture of weariness and expectancy.
Waffa didn’t disappoint her. “You mean this gibberish about ‘mother’s rebellion’,” he said, “and ‘returning to return’? And ‘finding lost’?”
“Yes, a lot of it is still hugely lost in translation,” Z-Lin said, “but we’ve got a pretty good idea about their mother and the rebellion she represented. I wouldn’t go treating any of the rest of it as holy backwards-talking prophecy-speak, at least not until we can be sure they’re not just twiddling the wrong sensors inside those gloves.”
“But I assume some of it was clear?” Janus asked.
“Yeah, clear enough,” Sally said, and even she gave Waffa a little commiserating shrug and a pat on the arm. “They said Thorkhild’s the guy.”
Janus stared, first at his three crewmates and then at the eejit sitting in front of his desk. Thorkhild stared too, but that was his default thing that he did with his face – otherwise he didn’t seem to have responded at all to the accusation. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” Whye said, pushing carefully back in his seat. “The aki’Drednanth pups in the oxygen farm have fingered Thorkhild,” he dropped to an almost under-the-breath mouthing of the name, and accompanied it with a theatrical point towards his patient, “as Dunnkirk’s killer?”
“Yes,” Sally said, simultaneously with Waffa saying “no.”
“This doesn’t sound like an open and shut case,” Janus remarked.
“It doesn’t need to be,” Sally said. “He’s not a crewmember. He’s not human. If there’s any suggestion of involvement, we don’t need a warrant.”
“I’m not worried about his rights,” Waffa said in exasperation. “I’m worried that if we’re wrong, we will still have the killer on board.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Sally said. “No legal constraints against reopening the case. And of course we’re going to keep on looking for evidence. This isn’t airtight and none of us are suggesting we mulch him until we find out more. That really would be pointless.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Waffa said, “but you’re still talking about an arbitrary decision to-”
“Wait, please,” Janus raised a hand. “What did the aki’Drednanth say, exactly?”
“Exactly?” Z-Lin said dryly, and looked down at her organiser. “They said ‘he did it, blind copy-human did it, blind Thorkhild, blind Thorkhild killed Dunnkirk, blind copy-human killed Bonshoon, it was Thorkhild, it was Thorkhild, now stop’.”
“That’s … really incriminating,” Whye admitted. Thorkhild still didn’t seem to be responding at all. He was just sitting, glacially calm, staring unseeingly into the middle distance. Janus roused himself a little. “Although of course, it’s dubious testimony from possibly-confused and very strange aki’Drednanth juveniles who didn’t seem to have witnessed anything, right?”
“Right,” Waffa said. “They could be saying it for any number of reasons. They might still not even have pieced together what’s going on, what all the different words mean.”
“Thorkhild did inject himself into the investigation,” Sally said doubtfully. Janus could sympathise. She wanted to believe it. It solved all of their problems, and fed just a little bit into her eejit-paranoia. This was also the reason, as a former cop, that she was suspicious of the explanation.
It was also, as far as solutions to murder went, a real tip-of-the-iceberg sort of deal. Look at it for more than a couple of seconds and you realised just how much was left unanswered. Yes, Thorkhild might have gone haywire after being separated from the little crew of renegade psychics who had helped configure him. That was what Janus had been working his way towards, at least in relation to Thorkhild’s response to Dunnkirk’s death and his apparent interest in stopping the ship. Maybe he’d even talked Tubby Shaw into stopping the ship for them. Then when he tried to get back in touch with Maladin and Thord out in the emptiness, he’d given himself this brain-spasm instead, right when the pups had started in with their own psychic yammering.
That part hung together. Sort of.
And yes, maybe that haywire-going had extended as far as him deciding to sedate Dunnkirk and drain his blood until he died. You could never tell why an eejit did things, although it was vanishingly rare for them to do anything this violent. Maybe he had been trying to prep the Bonshoon for insertion in his sleeper pod, and restoration to the Dreamscape? Who knew?
So what did Thord’s litter of weird ancient pups have to say about it all of a sudden? And why did their clumsy ad-libbed testimony end with a devastatingly-suspicious ‘now stop’? Now stop what? Asking so many questions? Boy, maybe these aki’Drednanth didn’t know humans so well after all. No wonder Z-Lin, Sally and Waffa all looked so disgruntled.
“What happens next?” Janus asked.
“Damned if I know,” Clue replied, “but it’s going to have to be my call – if only to stop Waff and Sally from coming to blows.”
“I’m not completely insane,” Waffa protested.
“And the decision’s all yours,” Sally concurred.
“So lovely to have the unwavering support of my senior staff,” Z-Lin muttered.
“Here for you,” Sally replied.
“To the edges of the galaxy and … never mind,” Waffa added.
“My door is always open,” Whye said. “To, you know, all of you.”
They escorted Thorkhild to the brig.
ZEEGON (THEN)
They’d emerged from soft-space and drawn to a halt on the edge of the exclusion zone, close to one of the automated buoy stations Janya had read up about. The buoy measured little over a hundred feet across and barely caught the light from the distant sun in the centre of the Bunzolabe or, for that matter, the Tramp’s proximity floodlights. It was just a small, utilitarian grey dome with a chunky set of compensators underneath it. As they approached, Zeegon had mused that it looked like nothing so much as a small stone beetle floating in space.
The wider security system, a flattened bubble made up of some ninety thousand of the mechanised buoys, was ancient and existed for the dual purpose of keeping wandering travellers out of the Bunzolabe, and keeping Bunzo in. And it had made absolutely no secret of the fact, as soon as they arrived, that this was what they were dealing with. Horatio Bunzo, electronic deus ex machina, most certainly did exist. And he was just as powerful and insane as the legends said.
“Of course, in official Fleet and Corps terms, that’s all just hearsay and conjecture,” Bitterpill had said. “Nobody believes it and it can’t go on the official record until eight bureaucrats have filled out the same exact set of forms with the same exact information. And even then, it’ll be contested at the first opportunity and the note will find its way to some classified archive and then the next people to show up here will be as hopeful as you are, bright-eyed and full of ‘rogue mechanicals’ and ‘misunderstandings exaggerated over time’ and ‘the truth must be something rather more prosaic’. Well, I tell you, it’s adorable every time but the truth is not prosaic. Not even slightly.”
Bitterpill was the name of the guiding intelligence behind the border system. This was a bit odd, considering that it was a widely-dispersed and multiple-mechanised-unit-controlling electronic mind assigned spe
cifically to safeguard against another widely-dispersed and multiple-mechanised-unit-controlling electronic mind. It had also been quite fast to point out that this irony was not lost on it. It had nodded quietly to them from the nearest buoy as soon as they’d dropped out of superluminal speed, and told them they were entering a dangerous spatial volume and should go away.
When they didn’t, it had declared them “damned fools” and told them to dock with the buoy for final data protocols. By the time they did that, the entire sentient crew aside from the Rip had assembled on the bridge.
“Now, considering that you have ignored all my warnings and entreaties,” it added while Decay was negotiating a data upload so antiquated it might as well have been a different language, “if any of you want to stay in the hab while the others go into the Bunzolabe, you’re more than welcome. Consider this an official invitation and final hopeless recommendation.”
“I understand the habitats are not frequently visited,” Z-Lin said.
“We’re between upkeep tours at this point, so you’ll have a wait, I’m not going to lie,” Bitterpill acknowledged, “but the last tour did add a new skullie to the library. I think this one has eating and sex in it. You organisms like that stuff, right?”
Bitterpill wasn’t a synth, by its own admission. Unless it was a severely crippled synth. A synth that actively didn’t update itself, routinely switched itself off and wiped vast tracts of its own mind, and basically kept itself consciously sub-sentient as a defence mechanism against infiltration and corruption. Its conversational response structure was on a par with a high-functioning non-synth computer.
This still left it, after almost six hundred years since its commissioning, capable of impressive feats of cynicism.
“We’re nuts about eating and sex,” Zeegon told it. “Just not entirely sure what a skullie is.”
“Oh, kids these days,” Decay said mildly from the comms console. “My parents had a home cranial interplex when I was a little one. They didn’t let me use it, there was this myth that it softened the oolya bones under the ear … but it’s classic. Old school interactive media.”
“Direct manipulation of the sensory, pleasure and memory centres,” Z-Lin explained, “usually stimulating synaptic pathways to tell stories between one and eight hours in length.”
“My dad told me that back before sleeper pods worked properly, the mind would stay awake,” Decay went on, “and after a few years the sleepers would go weird. So they used skullie tech to keep the brain occupied. Anyway, even skullie scenarios didn’t work long-term, because they only had a limited set of information. So they ended up fixing the pods to lock the brainwaves down completely. And the skullies were kept and adapted as a form of entertainment for the waking world. Which makes them one of the oldest technologies in the Fleet.”
“And you say it has eating and sex?” Zeegon mused.
“You’ll need an adaptor patch installed in the back of your skull,” Clue warned. “Molranoid synaptic jiggering would probably just give you a seizure.”
“But would it – and I feel this is a crucially relevant question – be a seizure that included eating and sex at some stage?” Zeegon insisted.
“You might bite your own tongue and get a spontaneous erection,” Bitterpill offered. “Does that count?”
“I guess I’ll have a think about it after we learn more about Bunzo,” he decided after some additional consideration. “Not sure I want to trust a cranial implant to Wingus and Dingus.”
“Not sure I’d trust Wingus and Dingus to implant the eyes on a snowman,” Waffa added.
“That’s a valid point.”
There was nothing in the general vicinity he had decelerated them into. Just the grey stone bug floating in the emptiness, and the sun a distant gleam slightly brighter than the background stars. Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was well out of sight on the far side of the system. This was an intentional entry gambit on their part, but not one Zeegon could take credit for. It had already been factored into their entry coordinates.
Still, as Bitterpill said, it would be a mistake to imagine Horatio Bunzo wasn’t very close, at every point.
“There’s a pair of long-range hunter-comm satellites about two thousand miles from here,” it told them. “He doesn’t have machinery for every one of the buoys, although I’m sure he could rustle it up if he wanted to. But those sats are capable of sending and receiving data to and from any of the defence-grid buoys within thirty or forty thousand miles of here, and back to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World into the bargain. That requires some piggybacking, of course.”
Bunzo, it seemed, didn’t regularly try to get out. His last protracted effort had been almost eighty years ago, aside from the occasional data bug that he tried sneaking on board the ships he allowed to leave. But those, Bitterpill said, always got purged.
“I haven’t decided yet,” it said, “whether he’s completely missed the point of data infiltration and time-bomb virals because he’s just not capable of understanding what it means to be a computer, or if he’s generations ahead of us all and the stuff we catch is just a brilliant decoy. For all I know, he’s out there already in every computer system in the galaxy.”
“Well, he’s not,” Janus assured the strange old computer.
“Of course, you’d say that,” Bitterpill replied, “wouldn’t you?”
Bitterpill’s non-sentient intellect had been developing, in an emergent sense, from a standard verbal-response model for centuries, but was founded on Fleet standard computing systems of the late 33rd Century. It was lent simple-synapse-level complexity by the big old network of simple but vastly numerous defence computers on the buoys. It also admitted to developing to a certain extent in direct response to the assortment of comm-based exchanges of hostilities it had experienced with the vast entity it was supposed to be containing. That was, after all, one of its primary functions – to develop and learn in order to provide ongoing containment of the brilliant old ghost.
“What have you and Bunzo been talking about?” Janus asked.
“He tells me jokes,” Bitterpill said. “Horrible, horrible jokes, for decades at a time. And occasionally one of them is just a grotesquely descriptive mutilation-fantasy or other perversion, and he seems to be tracking my ability to pick each of these out of the line-up when they come.”
Whye frowned. “That’s all he does?”
“Well, he can multitask,” Bitterpill said. “Every facet of him has facets, every one of them capable of existing more or less independently and autonomously. He’s more like a synth army than a single computer system. And some of his personality aspects are more autonomous and realised than others. Are you a shrink?”
“Ship’s counsellor,” Janus clarified.
“He’ll like you.”
“Oh good.”
“I initiated contact with a dumbler species once,” Bitterpill continued reminiscently, “did you know? System perhaps two or three light-months from here. They started sending out pings, I bounced back the usual be-quiet routine, and sent a whisper out to headquarters. But it was over a year before they came out anyway, and in that time the little dears had sent this beautiful light-riding vessel. Such heroism. They must have known it was a one-way trip, but they had to meet this wonderful voice from the system next door. They were so excited about not being alone in the universe.
“It really was embarrassing to have to tell them what the Bunzolabe was, and why I was here.”
The crew glanced at each other uncomfortably.
“Embarrassing?” Zeegon felt obliged to ask.
“Well, imagine you’re the sole representative of the first alien culture a group of eager young dumblers ever met,” Bitterpill said. “A huge, ancient machine in dispersed orbit around a nearby star system, just gathering space-dust. So exciting! They see some of the buoys on their deep-space telescopes, they recognise them as artificial, they send a hopeful greeting to the mysterious artefact, and it sends
back a deep and thrilling message: be quiet, you’re not alone, there are dangerous things out here that will hear you and hunt you down. Well, they’re not going to leave that alone, but to their credit they do stop shouting. Instead they build this marvellous sailing ship, miles and miles of reflective ultra-light sheeting that will pull their intrepid astronauts away from their sun and fling them across the gulf at almost a quarter the speed of light. They must have been experimenting with the technology already, but finding me made them change their focus and accelerate their timetable.
“And then they finally arrive at the artefact, and what do they find? A security fence around an abandoned amusement park. What’s my great cosmic function? Keep kids from wandering in here to drink beer, mostly. Keep them from getting minced up in the gears of the dodgy old hurble-burble.”
“Anything to say about ‘hurble-burble’, old man?” Zeegon asked Decay quietly.
“Quiet, sonny.”
“The three surviving astronauts – one of them had died in a high-speed debris impact that damaged the vessel – ended up stuck on a buoy not far from here,” Bitterpill concluded. “Their ship was too big and flossy to turn around and it lost all its juice, quite aside from the damage it had already sustained. I kept them alive with the standard habitat fare, since by sheer luck they were roughly compatible. They weren’t well, by the end, but they were alive. The upkeep team finally came and picked them up, finished their rounds and then took them back to their home system and did the full contact and hush-up properly. I haven’t heard from them since. They probably gave up space as a bad idea.”
They stayed with Bitterpill for another night and a day, preparing for their incursion and examining the defence system’s information upload. Such as it was.
“It’s about eight hours from here to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World,” it told them, “which is where his power is focussed … but despite what you’ve heard, it would be a mistake to assume he is unaware of things that happen in the wider reaches of the Bunzolabe.”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 15
