CONTRO
“Saliva, you say? Ha ha ha! That’s jolly unhygienic!”
Much as it took a lot to get anyone to admit this, Contro wasn’t stupid, as such. Even Contro himself would usually agree that he was a terrible muddlehead a lot of the time. Muddlehead, he thought, was a funny word and so why not admit to being one? It was certainly a point, wasn’t it? And when you got right down to it, the life of a muddlehead was enjoyable and undemanding and, well, was there really any more to it?
In fact, if you believed the files and the case reports and all the other stuff that had been written and said about him during his time on the Tramp – and Contro did actually absorb most of that on some level, even if he needed ‘General Decay’ to bring it to his attention – he was actually regarded as highly intelligent and extremely empathic. Excessively empathic, in fact. But, even more so than Janya, Contro’s intelligence was specialised and his empathy necessitated that his intellect and behaviour followed – could only follow – a certain path.
He still couldn’t get his head around why Decay was a General, for example. Oh golly, the conversations they’d had about that! Fun and loud and so much repetition! Repetition of what exactly, Contro was afraid he couldn’t say. But it had probably been important or Decay wouldn’t have said it.
And it was a path completely and utterly unsuited to actually being on board a starship. Let alone being Chief Engineer of said starship. That was just a weird accident as far as Contro was concerned, another example of what a funny old thing life was and something about which he liked to chuckle and philosophise with anyone who would listen, and admittedly that number had dwindled rather sharply since The Accident. He also wasn’t entirely sure whether ‘philosophise’ was the right term, since there was probably some specific academic way you should philosophise and some sort of special education you needed in order to do it, and in general he just wasn’t much good at that sort of thing and so he decided he should probably call it something else, like ‘marvelling’. He marvelled about things. He was a real old-fashioned armchair marveller.
Right now, Contro was out of his element. He was out of his element in main engineering too – in fact he was out of his element in most places in normal space and time – but now, in the medical bay, he was even more out of his element.
The medical bay was almost as bad as Janya Adeneo’s lab. Everything in there was bright and shiny and looked like something he should pick up and play with. Honestly, it seemed unfair and mean of him not to play with things that had quite obviously been a lot of trouble and expense to make, and had evidently been made by someone who really wanted them to be enjoyed and appreciated. It was like a direct slap in the face to the mysterious long-gone person who had put in all that effort, to leave such tantalisingly hand-grip-imprinted and button-laden gadgets lying on their gleaming shelves. And every time he tried to pick one up and play with it, Janya told him not to touch. Which was funny.
There were lots of toys in the medical bay too, but Glomulus – Waffa called him ‘the Rip’, which was also funny – let him muck around with stuff more often. Even after Contro accidentally did the thing with Glomulus’s bracelets four times, he was still nice to him. Contro had deactivated his subdermals, but everyone got upset with him when he’d told them, so he had stopped telling them.
He understood, in theory, why the subdermals were necessary. But it just wouldn’t stay in his head.
“I’ll say it is,” Glomulus agreed with him cheerfully. “Imagine the things you could catch, from a frozen clonefoot.”
“I know! All sorts of things, I bet!” Contro paused. “What sorts of things?”
“I think you can turn into a clone if you lick bits of clones,” Glomulus twinkled.
Contro waved a hand dismissively. “Oh yes, ho ho, you’re having a laugh at me, I get it, very funny Mister Cratch. Can you, though?” he said, suddenly concerned. “I mean, recombinant DNA and dominant traits and all that hoo-hah, it’s at least a possibility, isn’t it?”
“Glomulus, would you leave him alone?” Janya said in a pained voice.
In truth, Contro had landed in the apparently very-important-indeed position of Chief Engineer due to a combination of evening education annexe courses he had pottered around with for fun; a coincidence of thought-patterns that transpersion physicists shared with engineers (and also, incidentally, actors and utter, cold-blooded psychopaths); a knack for talking with people; and outmoded employment demographic laws.
It was weird, but as mindless and infuriating as he was, as deadly as he could be in main engineering and neighbouring precincts, everyone seemed to agree that the daffy little becardiganed bonsher was likeable and nice and generally inoffensive. He set them at ease, and everyone liked a Chief Engineer who could set people at ease. Contro had actually read this assessment, word for word, in one or another of the multitude of records and reports that were floating around the ship’s systems. Decay had collected some of the more personal intra-crew reports and statements during one of his odd ‘data-mining’ excursions, and enjoyed sharing them with the relevant crewmembers. The Blaran and the Mygonite shared a bit of an outsider-bond – at least that was what Decay said – and so he felt obliged to let Contro know about these things.
Contro quite liked the phrase ‘daffy little becardiganed bonsher’, so he occasionally used it to describe himself.
He hadn’t read all the reports. Frankly he found it hard to believe that anyone could. And he knew that he was supposed to at least read Waffa’s ones, but it just wasn’t possible to look at so many words and then line them all up and march them through his brain in an orderly fashion and expect them to arrive at some sort of long-term storage area in anything resembling the military formation required to convert them into useful, accessible knowledge. Two thousand words couldn’t possibly travel as light signals to the eyes, through the optic nerves, into the brain, through the cognitive process and into the memory and response areas without losing, say, thirteen or fourteen hundred words along the way. How did words become knowing things anyway? That was silly. It made him laugh.
And yet, despite all this, Contro set people at ease. Even Waffa, occasionally. He knew this, because Decay had shown him the statements and he was sure Decay wouldn’t make stuff like that up. There was already too much real information to wade through, without adding in not-real stuff to complicate things.
And that was great. Because setting people at ease was what Controversial-To-The-End liked to do.
“We’re still analysing the samples and attempting to work out exactly what we’re looking at,” Janya went on, still relentlessly and admirably focussed on the same single thing she had been focussed on for – ooh, it must have been minutes now, “but yes – it was most certainly Molran saliva. We’re just not sure why.”
“Oh well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out!” Contro said, since it seemed a positive and reassuring platitude was called for. And by golly, he congratulated himself modestly, that had been a good one. Then, as a bonus, he threw in a suggestion. “I know, maybe he was drifting in space and starving, so he tried to eat the foot but then it was nasty so he threw it away!”
Dear God, he was an honest-to-goodness contributor to this conversation!
“We’re quite a long way from anywhere, for him to be just drifting in space right near where we happened to have an airlock malfunction,” Janya pointed out. “And if he was drifting out here, and starving, I don’t think he’d throw away an eejit’s foot. Molran and Blaran digestive systems are quite capable of handling human flesh, as Decay never ceases to delight in reminding us simply because it’s creepy information.”
“Aw, but I’m sure Decay wouldn’t eat us!”
“I’m … quite sure of that too,” Janya said after an awkward pause. “What I mean is, we’re not sure what led the saliva to be on the sample, or how the sample found its way back to us.”
“Right, right,” it was all just unbearably exciting and interest
ing to Contro, even though he knew it would all be in one ear and out the other eventually and that would be annoying for his poor friends.
Contro was so empathic and open, so very undemanding, that a conversation that might otherwise feel like it was taking place with a specially-designed piece of dialogue-generating software was actually far more fulfilling than one might expect. It could also be very annoying, when someone who already knew what they were talking about had to get a certain response from him and Contro didn’t know what that response should be, but the annoying instances were thankfully minor. Or so he liked to believe and so the personnel reports Decay shared with him seemed to bear out. He was like an empty cup – in so many more ways than one, ho ho – and even if he didn’t really understand what people were pouring into his ears, he responded to it and made people feel as though it was important.
And, insofar as it was very, very interesting to him, it was important. He never really felt the urge, as almost every other human in the universe did, to interject with his own anecdotes or opinions or experiences, finding enough joy and excitement in the ones he was hearing. It was an extremely rare characteristic for a human being to have, and if it weren’t coupled with his characteristic inability to grasp and intuit the following stages of conversation, it would have been a massively beneficial psychological force.
Even with his shortcomings, Contro was often asked why Janus Whye was ship’s counsellor instead of him. To which Contro invariably replied, “aww, but Whye is nice too!”
And … well, Contro had worked in the engine room, technically, before now. It wasn’t such a huge leap to station him there again, as far as he was concerned. Yes, it was all a bit different-y, but that was good. And things seemed to be working out. Again, as far as he was concerned. In a way – and although he’d always be too modest to say it this way, Decay had said it for him once or twice – they were fortunate that he had survived The Accident. Certainly Contro was fortunate, ha ha. But without him, the Tramp’s big old transpersion engines would probably have fallen silent long ago and they would most likely never have remained in motion.
So the extension of jurisdictions around each surviving human – and in Decay’s case, Blaran – using their original areas of employment and expertise as epicentres naturally meant that main engineering became Contro’s domain. Even though Z-Lin and Waffa both had more practical expertise and usually had to do any work that wasn’t either directly nuclear-transpersion-related or controlled by the Tramp’s automated systems. Because they had their own jobs to do and everyone had to pull their weight. And that was just fine with Contro, even if it did mean he was sometimes dead weight, metaphorically speaking.
Controversial-To-The-End was named in the tradition of the Mygonite society that had birthed and raised him. The Mygonites were culturally and legally proscribed from performing or receiving psychoanalysis and therapy even if Whye hadn’t already been such an excellent counsellor for the rest of the crew. And although he wasn’t really a practicing Mygonite – or even a particularly observing one – his personality more than made up for the lapses in ritual.
The Mygonites believed in The Good Old Days, and Muddling Through. There was something magically compelling about the idea of Muddling Through, of course, that Contro really felt applied to his daily life. Plus, when anyone asked him about his background and he said he was a Mygonite, it tended to cut out a lot of the difficult questions and Contro was in favour of that.
Now, however, was not a time to dodge the tricky ones.
“Does this mean our culprit licked the foot and then threw it back at us, or did he put the whole thing in his mouth and spit it at us?” he mused aloud, and this idea was so visually entertaining that he had to give another laugh. “Ha ha!”
“I’d like to believe the latter, purely for its comedy value,” Glomulus said, “but as pulpy as the foot was, and as big as a Molran’s mouth is, I just can’t see it in my mind’s eye.”
“I’m not certain why I’m involved here,” Contro admitted.
“We want to try to coax more power out of the core,” Janya said. “For speed or shields or weapons, whatever we might need. We’re not sure. Evasion, perhaps. Protocol sort of says you should be here for this examination and response discussion, but beyond protocol we were hoping you might be able to work something out anyway.”
“I could ask Waffa,” he suggested hesitantly.
Clue, fair-minded to the last, said it was because Contro had somehow managed to fit nuclear transpersion physics into his brain, and it occupied 100% of his psychological capacity.
“Have you seen a transpersion engine?” she’d asked Waffa once, back when he’d still bothered to complain about Contro. “It’s like an ant farm made of glass, a labyrinth of tubes and bubbles and it has a big black spike in the middle and red ones around the edges poking into it and there’s water and ice and there’s no computer, just the man and the maze. If you know how it works, there’s no room in your brain for anything else. There just can’t be.”
Contro thought it was jolly nice of people to make excuses for him, but he knew he could be an awful duffer at times. He knew that his position as Chief Engineer was equal parts accident and charity. He didn’t mind. It was jolly nice of everyone.
And this whole thing with the foot coming out of their airlock and then coming back was, in his opinion, very exciting and amusing. The world outside the labyrinth was bright and primary-coloured and as simple as a stack of blocks, but the way those blocks could be stacked, and the intuitive way everyone else seemed to think the blocks should be stacked, never ceased to surprise him. And they were different every time and people thought that was obvious. Except when they weren’t different, and then people thought it was obvious that they were meant to be the same every time. It was funny and made Contro laugh.
It wasn’t that the world was simple. It was just a completely different kind of puzzle. And Contro couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t quite real. It was a different puzzle. A very funny one, usually. Come on, a frozen foot popsicle that had been licked and then thrown back at them. That was funny.
“We have a visitor out there,” Janya was saying. “Now, remember that thing with the black hole? The cultists? You did something with the engine that made us invisible.”
Contro blinked. “Oh! I did? I say, that was a darn good trick! How did I do that? Did I then go ‘ta-daaa’ and pull us out of a top hat?”
“No,” Janya said. “No you didn’t.”
“That would have been neat,” Glomulus admitted.
“Okay, another question,” Janya went on, sparing Glomulus an unreadable look. At least, unreadable to Contro. “Can we abort the whole cycle-up acceleration thing and return to all-stop, and if so, how quickly? If we wanted to batten down and wait for our friend to contact us–”
“I thought that wasn’t evolutionary–” Cratch fell silent at another glare, this one slightly less taxing to understand.
“Now now,” Contro said jovially, “let’s not start stabbing and popping again.”
“Stabbing and … popping?” Glomulus glanced at Janya, whose face was carefully blank.
“You know, stab-stab, pop-pop,” Contro gave a merry laugh and poked his fingers vaguely. “Didn’t you two have a fight once?”
“That’s … I suppose you could say so,” Glomulus admitted. Janya cleared her throat.
Contro had already moved excitedly on. “Okay,” he said, “I’ve got it. Picture this,” he fanned his fingers into a little tableau-frame. “A Molran, somehow able to survive in space, is following us–”
“Why is he following us?” Glomulus asked, at the same moment Janya asked “how is he surviving in space?”
“I don’t know! Ha ha ha, honestly! But if space whales can, then surely to goodness–”
Janya raised her hand. “Hold on, space whales?”
“Why does nobody believe me about whales?”
“Okay, setting aside the question
of space whales for a moment,” Janya said, “he’s following. How and why?”
“Maybe we’re the only people out here. Maybe it was an accident,” he snapped his fingers and then spread them back into his little hypothetical-scene-border. “Maybe he was on board, and he went off on his own at some point!”
“There wasn’t anything definite about this guy not being a crewmember, right?” Glomulus said, reasonably enough. Janya grimaced and tipped a hand back and forth uncertainly.
“Right,” Contro said. “He could be in an escape pod or something. He might be hanging onto a rope, like he’s water-skiing out there.”
“Water what?” Janya exploded.
“You never water-skied? Honestly, we did it all the time back in Þursheim. Ask Sally about it. I mean, she’s not from there but–”
“Yes yes,” Janya said, “but towing becomes a far larger problem once we hit relative speed. Any sort of tailing motion becomes a challenge, really. As you no doubt know better than any of us.”
“Right, obviously you’d have to match our relative field and merge with it, and hitchhike along when we skip,” Contro agreed. “Very tricky, very tricky indeed.”
“And yet, we have this,” Glomulus pointed at the blob of meat and shredded shoe.
“Maybe we’re ignoring the obvious,” Contro said. He’d read a line like this in a book, and it always lent a delicious sense of logic and rationality to whatever the next sequence of words happened to be. No harm in trying, was his theory.
“Which is … ?”
“Um.”
Glomulus snapped his fingers and jabbed his index fingers at the others. “Molran clinging to the hull, gets Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 sprayed across his faceplate, the foot goes through his faceplate and he ends up wearing it in his mouth.”
“Yeah!” Contro enthused, missing Janya’s eye-roll. “Emergency seals or whatnot would slam down all through the suit, and probably save him. A human might have a hard time of it but a Molran would be okay.”
“Exactly,” Glomulus said, “or maybe a ‘Blaran’,” he exaggerated the finger-quotey-marks-gesture, “since this whole adventure would put a Molran over the Dirty Deeds limit and land him on the Naughty List, wouldn’t it?”
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 8
