Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  It was, admittedly, a researcher’s dream. An ultimately uncluttered biosphere, and yet obviously old. There was geology, even if it was a bit run-down. The sand had come from somewhere, and there was no real reason why the microbes had not gotten their act together over the sun-parched aeons. Yes, there was a distinct dearth of water, which was the basis of the prevailing theory as to why Eshret’s life-forms had reached ‘crusty proto-stromatolite’ and called it a day. Samples drilled out of the crust also suggested a long-bygone period of solar activity that might have nuked the biosphere of Eshret back to square one and left it there, but the sun was stable now, and the world itself was technically as fertile-in-potentia as many similar deserts on other worlds.

  The Molren under Mortelion Arbus So had a couple of big old settler-grade condensers with them, as well as seed stock. Soon, and strictly in accordance with their low-impact philosophy, they would have their corner of the planet-girdling desert blooming with alien plants. A nice salad, Waffa joked, would be just the thing after a heaping big plate of worms.

  There was nothing much else to be said or done. The station was still there, all the machinery in working order and the worms – after a week of worm jokes even Z-Lin was curious enough to want to see for herself – present and accounted for. Whatever had killed The Warm, it either hadn’t come this way or had passed Eshret by due to its insignificance. There was no sign that anyone or anything had come to the planet in years, and the fact that a drift of sand about four feet high had built up on one side of the little cluster of modules spoke louder than any beacon of both solitude and atmospheric stability.

  “We will stay here as planned,” Arbus So declared, as her colleagues began ferrying down in the Tramp’s landers, “and await word from The Warm. This settlement may need to serve its purpose as an evacuation point, and so we shall begin preparations, but as of your departure we will be denied superluminal communication methods and so shall simply wait.”

  This had, of course, been the arrangement. Nobody had been able to guarantee that anyone would come back to The Warm using Eshret as a stopover, and it would be at least three years before the Tramp was back in this region. And that was if she even retraced her steps rather than heading elsewhere, which was by no means certain. Without recourse to relative speed, a week’s travel at approximately twelve thousand times the speed of light might as well be the far side of the universe, whether you were flying or simply trying to transmit a message. The survivalists were on their own. Which was basically what made them survivalists.

  “Okay,” Z-Lin said, and shook the Molran’s lower right hand. “Any groups we meet, we’ll let them know your situation.”

  “Very good, Commander. And…” Arbus So smiled. It still looked rehearsed, although they were slightly more comfortable around one another by now and Arbus So let her elongated eye teeth gleam in the blazing sun. It was hard to imagine a place more different to The Warm, actually. “Thank you for the eejits.”

  Clue gave a humourless laugh. “No, thank you.”

  Several of the survivalists had taken a keen interest in the Tramp’s broken ables over the past week, although none of them had offered any suggestions about how to fix the actual fabrication plant. They had, on the other hand, been very keen to take a small group of eejits into use on Eshret. Molren were more suited than humanoids to almost all varieties of manual labour, they were not shy in pointing out, but there was a range of tasks to which even the Tramp’s most abysmal eejits could be set … and some of the Molren were interested in seeing if they could, through education and examination, help the eejits to overcome their configuration issues. If nothing else, some of the eejits at the bottom of the barrel had flaws that the Molren deemed worthy of additional study, which Decay darkly interpreted as the Molren finding the eejits funny.

  Z-Lin didn’t much care. The ‘gift’, as formal Molran-colony-to-AstroCorps request, allowed them to get rid of fifteen of their absolute-lowest-end eejits and perform the same sort of executive print order loophole as they had managed on The Warm, on a slightly smaller scale. More empty slots meant permission – within the bounds of their slowly-recovering but still under-capacity oxygen farm – to print more eejits. It was a convenient, though by no means vital, added safety-buffer to their oxygen consumption. And after dropping off their fifteen most fantastically beshitted pieces of wetware, statistically they were in with a decent shot at printing improvements. These were, after all, eejits that had been unsuitable even for the manual work on The Warm by way of their incompetence, eejits that were only still alive in the first place because their shipboard designations had not placed them in areas commonly associated with lethal accidents.

  Arbus So nodded her hairless flat-topped head slightly, her ears flaring wide in the sun as though collecting energy for her. “We will keep you – and Thord – from your important journey no longer. Go with our thanks.”

  Most of the crew, Z-Lin was ready to wager, would have happily stayed in the sun for at least a little while before diving back into soft-space. Even Decay would have tolerated it, and Zeegon was clearly itching to tackle the dunes. But there really was nothing on Eshret, and they’d just been dismissed about as unequivocally as one could be dismissed. And so they stowed their landers, peeled up out of the planet’s space-time shadow, and flipped back over into relative speed once more.

  The next leg, from Eshret to Wynstone’s Attic, was five weeks.

  JANYA

  It was nice to actually have ables again, although it soon became apparent that for all their affable professionalism and fresh-cadet diligence, the newcomers weren’t really mingling with the larger eejit population. Janya decided, just for something to do on the long flight, to make a semi-detailed academic study of it.

  This wasn’t easy, because the ables and the eejits weren’t exactly like animals behaving in a normal manner in their natural environments. The eejits were like damaged toys, their actions – or lack thereof – more or less random and only loosely connected to classic stimulus and response. The ables, in contrast, were closely-attuned to their shipboard tasks, and very sensitive to the approach of someone they considered a superior. This meant they would straighten up, stop what they were doing unless it was some crucial piece of maintenance work, and politely ask how they could be of assistance. And the respond-to-a-superior behavioural model applied to every person on board with the possible exceptions of Maladin and Dunnkirk the Bonshooni – Janya, as Head of Science, most certainly qualified even though she was a civilian, and saying “just carry on with your work and pretend I’m not here” just seemed to make the poor fellows uncomfortable.

  It applied to every person on board. The eejits were not people any more than the ables were, and so the ables sorted their fellow clones according to a difficult-to-follow internal hierarchy … and, while some of the ables clearly outranked others, one thing seemed abundantly clear – every single eejit was placed somewhere lower still. It wasn’t a matter of snobbery, aloofness or any sort of superiority. They weren’t embarrassed by the badly-configured ones, or outraged at having to share a life-form classification with them. They just seemed to naturally and without malice assume that the eejits were faulty, undependable pieces of equipment rather than actual ables.

  And at the same time, Janya noted, it was the ables who seemed to suffer from the snubbing. The eejits, for their part, didn’t really notice the treatment. The ables, however, were neither one thing nor the other. They were the same flesh as the eejits, but ultimately disconnected. They were close – in their specific fields – to the humans in intellect, but separated by a philosophical gulf even vaster than the literal one the Tramp was traversing. They did their jobs, bustling around importantly in their crisp red uniforms and keeping the ship running smoothly, but Janya thought they seemed lost. They were like ants in a child’s ant farm, doing what they were made to do but disconnected, unaware that the other things inside the farm were also ants, just ants with their antennae
broken off. They were lonely, somehow, and unthinkably sad.

  It was most noticeable when they slept.

  That was, of course, another thing that was difficult to observe, if only because watching ables while they slept felt creepy and borderline-molestation-y. The eejits slept in their ‘storage’ crèches, a huge and overcrowded mess of knocked-through storerooms, able quarters and unused floorspace above the medical bay. Some of them slept in the duty wards adjacent to their work areas. Some of them slept in their work areas. But most of them just sort of flopped in a pile like giant red-jumpsuited hamsters, slept, and then got up and shambled back to whatever they had been doing before their soupy brains switched over to sleepy-time.

  The ables slept in regimented bunks, supremely self-contained and clearly designated. They were items recharging in storage sockets until their next use. They’d carved out a space on the upper eejit storage level to do this, meticulously reconstructing fourteen triple-bunk beds for the forty-two of them to sleep on. And they did. And the eejits continued to just slump in drifts around the crisp-sheeted little island of AstroCorps precision that had appeared in their midst.

  It was difficult to make a proper study, then, due to the fact that observation by a superior tended to change their behaviour. And it was next to impossible to talk to an able about anything so esoteric as his sense of belonging. As for talking to eejits … well, she had some success talking with her aides, Whitehall and Westchester. But they had very definite limits of their own, particularly where Westchester and abstract conceptualisation went. It was all fun and games until someone started thinking he was a dock labourer who had just gone blind for some reason. Janus Whye had conducted interviews with eejits, even performed some kind of counselling on them, but without much in the way of academically satisfactory results.

  Janya wondered if counselling an eejit was closer to counselling a human, or performing therapy on a plant the way Whye was actually qualified to do.

  For a while, then, she had taken to using the surveillance and communications bumpers throughout the ship to watch the ables unawares, but it took a lot of executive permission and messing around to get that sort of access. Or, even worse, she needed to sit in the medical bay and wait for an accident or injury to set the tracking monitors off. And that was a haphazard observational tool at best, it depended on some kind of usually-unpleasant medical emergency taking place, and it required her to put up with Glomulus Cratch’s attempted banter.

  Glomulus suggested that there might be ways to get the bumpers to perform surveillance without the emergency system being active, and without executive oversight. Janya told him she would forget she had heard him say so.

  It was the beginning of their third week in transit from Eshret to the Wynstone’s Attic colony, when Thord came to Janya’s library.

  Janya had only seen the aki’Drednanth a handful of times since they’d set out, on the rare occasions the crew had gathered together in one place. The little scientist disliked the cold, and Thord had not often set foot outside her refrigerated quarters, and so as far as Janya was concerned the two of them had perfectly understood one another.

  On this occasion Janya was off-duty, insofar as her ‘working’ shifts actually meant anything anyway. She could go basically anywhere from her labs in the dome, down to the exchange and then back up again as far as the officers’ quarters unchecked, and even the restricted areas were more or less okay as long as she explained herself occasionally. She could do this at any hour of shipboard day or night, as long as it was understood that in scientific emergencies, she be available to perform research.

  ‘Research’, a concept almost as intentionally ill-defined as ‘scientific emergency’, was not something you could do in a normal duty shift at predictable times. Not on a starship. It was something that had to be done when something happened that the crew suddenly and urgently needed to know more about. In this case, there was nothing of the sort going on and so she was sitting in a quiet wing of her modestly-expanded quarters, curled up in a chair with a book.

  The door to her main quarters, two cabins over, chimed softly. Since most of her crewmates would announce themselves discreetly on the communicator rather than come knocking, she guessed immediately that it was one of their three passengers.

  Or an able, she reminded herself. It was easy to forget, in their absence, how regularly the big guys had run errands, delivered messages, carried out repair work or checks on various systems. That had been the good old days, of course. After about three absolute disasters, they’d taken the eejits off most of those jobs.

  The new guys were back on them again.

  When Janya padded through to the door and opened it to find Thord’s suit-clad torso blocking the doorway like a second wall, then, she was mildly surprised but not shocked.

  Thord leaned in and filled the upper part of the doorway with the front of her huge shovel-like helmet. “May I come in?” she asked.

  Can you come in? Janya thought reflexively, and stepped back. “If you can fit through the door,” she said, “please.”

  “I can fit,” Thord replied, turning in preparation and allowing Janya to see the flickering lower bar of her light panel at the back of her neck in the process. “It just requires a little…” she drew herself in with a series of gentle hisses and clanks, overlapping some of her envirosuit plates and hiking in a few joints here and there, and was – just barely – able to slide sideways through the door. “Modular starships were designed to cater for the land-bound five of the Six Species,” she said, “and my suit was designed for Six Species and AstroCorps compatibility, but it is … larger than standard. It has some give…” she stretched, seeming to expand again, “…and so it still fits. Modulars in particular spare little space. If the door was any smaller I would need to take the suit off, fold it, drag it through, and then don it again on the far side of the door, but that would be irritating,” she gave another swift flutter of laughter on her light panel. She was chatty, Janya reflected as she had on their first encounter, as well as giggly. “Not to mention dangerous, in an evacuation situation.”

  “What can I help you with, Thord?” Janya led the immense aki’Drednanth through, with another couple of smooth contractions of her envirosuit, to the library. “I’d offer you something, but I don’t suppose I’m stocking anything here that you can…” she paused, berating herself. “Did you even have any aki’Drednanth food with you when you came aboard?”

  Thord moved along the shelves, deceptively light and silent in her armour. Janya couldn’t perceive much difference between her movements now and her easy loping on The Warm, except now she was moving along the floor. “No,” she replied, “but the amino acids and compounds I require are very easy to generate. Maladin has equipment in his luggage that will convert the carbon blocks and the hydrogen-phalanx ampoules you stocked up on. I, like most of my kind, am used to living on artificial rations when we venture out among the stars. The natural sustenance we hunt on the Great Ice, and which flourishes in the Core, it does not travel well,” she glanced at Janya’s shelves. “You have bound paper books.”

  “They’re printed on flimsy, most of them,” Janya replied, “but it’s good flimsy. A reasonable tactile facsimile to paper. The printer does it quite well. It’s still a space-filler, but…”

  “The tactile is the most important,” Thord said, raising a hand and flexing the long, thick, armour-plated fingers. “It is one reason for my dislike of these gauntlets. And flimsy is the best material for books, in my natural environment. Paper, or the kashta papyrus of the Molren of old … these things do not last in the cold.”

  “I instantly like you more,” Janya said calmly.

  “Did you not like me before?”

  Janya’s eyebrow twitched. “Did I say that?”

  “No, you did not.”

  Janya crossed the room and began to brew herself some tea. It was her second for the day, a little in excess of their informal rationing system for t
he stuff Contro grew in ‘ponics, but they had a steadily-growing surplus so it seemed the right thing to do. “Did you come to check on me in particular?”

  “I am visiting each of the crew. That way, the one I truly wish to investigate will remain unaware that she is being singled out.”

  Janya paused in the middle of spooning out the tea, and narrowed her eyes at her visitor. Thord was still perusing the bookshelf and had her back turned, but of course aki’Drednanth relied on senses other than sight.

  She was almost certain that Thord had said ‘she’ intentionally, and that it was not just because aki’Drednanth used the same pronoun universally for their own kind. They knew the difference between male and female, and how important it was to the other bipedal species even if they themselves found it pointless and in poor taste to bring into the open. Thord might be a stranger to the concept of culturally-driven gender distinction, either freshly reborn out of the Drednanth mass-mind or newly-arrived from the Great Ice – as far as Janya was aware, Thord was a relative unknown among the tiny and near-celebrity aki’Drednanth population in the Six Species. So yes, she might be using the term accidentally. But it was a slim chance. She’d just referred to Maladin using the masculine pronoun, after all.

  Janya noticed these things.

  No. It was more likely in this case that Thord was simply using ‘she’ as a handy alternative to ‘one’. It was equally likely, however, that she was using it knowing that Janya would assume the aki’Drednanth ‘she’ was in play, rendering the pronoun irrelevant in terms of narrowing down which crewmember exactly Thord was ‘checking out’.

  Assuming she was actually ‘checking out’ anyone at all, and that whole thing was not just a small game on Thord’s part.