Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (10 page)

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.

He opened the door and was surprised to find Thorkhild standing there.

Thorkhild was a strange one, one of the nineteen remaining so-called ‘Midwich Eejits’ configured with the bolstering mental efforts of Thord and the Bonshooni. He was recognisable by the fact that in his case, the usual dopey vacuity that was the eejit standing expression was blank in a more profound way – Thorkhild was blind, although beyond the doll-like stare there was no
physical
sign. His eyes were perfectly alright, not milky or in any way damaged. Indeed, they’d been twiddled with, surgically, by the Rip and declared perfectly operational. You could graft one into a person’s injured eye socket and it would work. The blindness, like every eejitism, was related to the
configuration
, not the
printing
.

“Thorkhild,” Decay said, “how can I help you?”

“Uhh,” Thorkhild started. Blindness wasn’t his
only
flaw, although his slight brain-lag was very minor in comparison to other eejits. He swung his face ponderously upwards, adjusting for the direction from which Decay’s voice had come. Until that moment – probably forgetting Decay was a seven-foot-five Blaran, or possibly just not thinking it mattered one way or another – he had been carelessly addressing the Blaran’s chest. “I was looking for whoever’s in charge of the … uh, the murder thing, who’s investigating it, but they’re asleep?”

Decay’s ears dipped briefly. This was quite impressive abstract thought, for an eejit, and
definitely
outside the box. “Do you know something about the murder, Thorkhild?”

“I, uhh, no,” Thorkhild admitted. “Nope.”

“You didn’t witness anything?”

“Nope.”

The blind eejit looked so downcast at these failures, Decay felt moved to ask some follow-up questions. “What’s your function on board, Thorkhild?”

“Assistant maintenance,” he replied promptly, “equipment and console checks.”

“Medical bay?”

Thorkhild looked even more blank than usual for a moment, and actually reached out to touch the frame of Decay’s door. “No…?” he said. “I think, crew quarters one, near blister bay three…?”

“Sorry, I mean, do you work on equipment and console check maintenance for the medical bay?” Decay clarified. “Excellent ship-sense, though,” he complimented the eejit.

“Oh, uh, no, I’m assigned to obs, rec, comms … basically the domes,” Thorkhild said. “Not medical bay,” he paused, then went on just a little defensively, “I’m on down-time right now, going back to the crèche to rest and eat food and also poop,” he hesitated minutely. “To
do
poop, I mean, not eat it.”

“Right, right, it’s fine – I wasn’t worried about you skipping work or eating poop,” Decay hastened. “What I mean is, you weren’t working in the medical bay – you weren’t in the area when the murder took place, you didn’t find anything in the course of your work?” he’d already known there weren’t any other dedicated medical bay eejits, although of course there were throngs of random extras who might have been there for an assortment of backup or cleaning or repair purposes. He didn’t have the
entire
eejit roster memorised.

Thorkhild was shaking his head. “Nope.”

“Okay,” Decay said kindly, “why are you looking for the Chief Tactical Officer, then?”

“I want to help.”

“That’s … good,” Decay said. “I’m sure you can. We’ll think of something. Anything you can offer us, we’ll listen to. I’ll find you after your next shift and we can talk to the Chief Tactical Officer and Chief of Security and Operations, alright?”

“Alright,” Thorkhild paused. “Are we going to stop? The ship?”

Decay blinked. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said, “not until we know more. There’s … it’s complicated. Why do you ask?”

Thorkhild shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Decay watched, nonplussed, as Thorkhild turned and trundled back along the corridor, apparently as confident and surefooted as any sighted crewmember. Something compelled him to call out after the well-built humanoid. “Did you know Dunnkirk?”

Thorkhild stopped, turned back, and looked disconcertingly not-quite-directly-at Decay where he stood in his doorway.

“I had dreams about him,” he said.

Decay went back into his rooms, returned to his scoop, and picked up his glass. He frowned at the artworks on the walls. It was a long time before he finally took another sip of
taktura
.

JANYA (THEN)

Janya Adeneo sat in her quarters among her neat stacks of books, reading an article about the political history of the Total Human Consciousness Transcription Ban on her organiser. She preferred bound hard copy, but she’d read all her books already, and even
re
-read a few of the denser tomes. And besides, she didn’t have this one in print. It was one of the barrel-scrapings from the ship’s database, a huge solid-state repository that had been filtered and compressed and overwritten hundreds of times. It was no great treasury of Six Species knowledge, nothing approaching a totality of data. Its older and more irrelevant content had been dropped and new stuff layered on top with every stopover, every link-up with a synthetic intelligence hub, every fly-past of an entertainment sat.

And then, to top it off, the whole lot had been scrambled by the computer’s systemic meltdown during The Accident. All things considered, she’d been lucky to find anything at all on such an obscure topic.

Janya was not one to hold a grudge. She considered that there was a difference between holding a grudge and just
remembering things
. Janya remembered things. It was when you remembered things
out loud
, at carefully-planned times, when those things had proven harmful to yourself and others, that the line between remembering things and holding a grudge got blurry.

But Janya didn’t do that, although she could. The Accident had surely been the result of a cataclysmic failure somewhere along the line, but there was no point in dwelling on it. And the bonefields? She’d
told
them not to go there, and they’d ignored her. It would be nice if they could remember
that
, and recognise that she wasn’t reminding them of it every ten minutes, instead of remembering that she had been the one with the coordinates.

The
rumoured
coordinates, she corrected herself in mild irritation. She was a researcher, not a cartographer. Not a navigation officer. It had all been research, an exercise in astro-mythology. She’d
still
tried to stop them.

Besides, at least the bonefields were in the past. According to the legends, you could only go there once. And even if that was a load of superstitious nonsense, they presumably had the coordinates on record now so they couldn’t even go there by
accident
. It would also be nice, Janya thought, if the rest of the crew tried remembering
these
facts, instead of irrelevant ones.

Zeegon, now – Zeegon might be a grudge-holder. He remembered, and he took some things personally. Not that Janya could blame him for that. He was helmsman now, so when someone fed him coordinates and he flew the ship to them, he took a share of whatever happened next as befitted being the guy who had dropped them in it. Not fair, obviously, but when it was coupled with the fact that lives had been lost, it was difficult
not
to take it personally.

She didn’t waste time wishing she’d known ahead of time how things were going to happen, since it was pointless to regret the unavoidable and the past. If she
had
known in advance what these jarheads had been intending to do with her research, she would have … well, that was just it.

What
would
she have done? The data had already been stored in her personal files, moderately protected with her personal identification tags and key-terms, and archived according to her unique and extremely convoluted filing system, all of which had been digitally uprooted and dumped into the then-
A-Mod 400
’s personnel database in a single scoop when Janya had come aboard from Judon Research Outpost.

Knowing would have just added frustration to the mix, since there was little more she could have done. If she’d known far enough in advance, she supposed, she could have
not done the research at all
, but where would human civilisation be if people started down that road? No. That way lay madness.

She’d deduced that it must have been done early. Right back at the start, logically, when she was in recovery and her relocation from the Outpost to the modular had essentially been affected while she was unconscious. The data must have been siphoned off somehow during the transfer, since her personal files had not been tampered with
after
that initial move. Well, not
much
, and not that she really had the skill to tell either way. Her research and personal logs weren’t exactly Megadyne-encrypted and they weren’t booby-trapped, but only Decay had actually done any infiltrating as far as she knew. And that had been random snooping, for fun, and he had been up-front about it. Nothing to do with the bonefields.

It hadn’t been Decay. It had been Z-Lin. Of course it had been Z-Lin. That stood to reason, didn’t it? She was
one of them
.

Oh, the Captain and his ‘shortcut’ had ultimately taken the blame for the whole sorry event, but Janya remembered that it had been
her
research that had gotten them there, and she was pretty sure Zeegon remembered too. And Clue, it seemed to Janya, used the Captain and his eccentricities as a convenient smokescreen for innumerable little deviations, breaches of AstroCorps protocol, and outright Six Species charter violations. It was impossible to tell which of these originated with the Captain and which originated with the Commander, of course. Janya would have catalogued each case more thoroughly, but she was reasonably sure the information would find its way back to Clue.

In this case, however, unless the Captain
also
happened to be descended from the same line – vanishingly unlikely – then the driving force behind their reckless plunge into the bonefields had been Z-Lin Clue, and
only
Z-Lin Clue.

Beyond that, it all got a little bit intrigue-y, and Janya tended to retreat into the nearest book in the face of intrigue. That was how almost five years had gone by on board the so-called
Tramp
, and she had no great regrets on that score.

It was all just so random. They must have copied her research, then held onto it for
three years
before finally deciding on this ludicrous ‘shortcut’ plan after their encounter with the
Dark Glory Ascendant
. Why then? Why not immediately? It wasn’t as if they had been waiting until they’d rid themselves of Glomulus Cratch, because they’d calmly gone for years without doing
that
, either. Cratch had been in the brig three years by the time they’d finally decided to use Janya’s information, his return to Aquilar for sentencing held off for a variety of extremely – and increasingly – dubious reasons. Shortcuts had been the least of it. They didn’t get told anything. There were good reasons for that, but it was also annoying.