Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (33 page)

“Fridge told me about you,” she said without further preamble.

“Really? When? Oh,” he wiggled his fingers. “Some earlier time when we were at subluminal, using your wacky-wacky powers, right?”

“Yes.”

“Of course. I’m surprised you’ve come to me while we’re at relative speed, though,” he went on. “Not that I’m any threat to you, but … aren’t you all alone right now?”

“Not entirely,” Thord said, with a soft fade-in, fade-out of the lowermost bar of her eye-panels that demonstrated muted amusement.

“Ah, right. You have Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” Glomulus noted.

“Yes.”

“So what did Fridge say about me?”

“Many things. It is not important. She said that you were a deep thinker, and a great friend to the aki’Drednanth. A scholar of sorts.”

“An enthusiastic amateur – don’t let Janya Adeneo hear you call me a scholar,” Glomulus smiled and sat down at a console, gesturing the great suited figure to enter further. “I have some
gazz thrash
in the sample freezer,” he said, and was rewarded with Thord’s entire interface panel brightening to yellow. “A lot of the ingredients are synthesised, but it’s been crystallising now for … ooh, eight months or so, so they might have lost their vat-taste. I started micro-brewing them after we set out from The Warm.”

“Impressive.”

“I’m no more a chemist than I am a scholar,” he said modestly, “but … well, did Fridge happen to mention my
gazz thrash
?”

“She did not.”

“Like her mother used to make, that’s what she said. Got icicles in her eyes, she told me. You can go ahead and get confirmation on that next time we stop.”

“You are a droll fellow,” Thord said, but the warm yellow glow of delight had lingered gratifyingly. “I will be pleased to try your home-brewed
gazz thrash
.”

Humming happily, Doctor Cratch trotted over to the freezers and rummaged in them for a while, eventually emerging with a large sample canister usually given over to liquid nitrogen storage. And, to be fair, nitrogen
was
one of the lesser ingredients in a good
gazz thrash
, if only as a catalysing agent that mostly boiled away during the formation of the crystallised slush. It gave a delicate aftertaste, or so Glomulus had been told. Presumably an aftertaste of delicious nitrogen.

“Straight from the bottle?” he asked, raising the steam-cascading canister in his heavy-duty sample tongs.

“Thank you,” Thord settled on her haunches, reached out and took the canister. It looked like a small can of soda in her gauntleted hand. She opened it deftly, tilted her head a little and let the helmet fold open and retract around her massive shoulders. Glomulus sat, enjoying his first in-person look at the great, shaggy, frost-steaming head, the enormous curved tusks, the jutting lower jaw and tiny, gleaming, ice-crystal-beautiful eyes. She opened her mouth wide and angled her head down – he caught a glimpse of a wide, pointed, zebra-striped tongue – and poured the boiling slush generously down her throat.

The stripes, he thought to himself as she
scrunch
ed the
gazz thrash
back and forth in her giant maw discerningly for a few seconds, were the aki’Drednanth equivalent of tattoos, and made in much the same basic way as human tattoos. As far as he knew only warriors had them – warriors of a particularly rebellious and anti-establishment nature. Glomulus knew Thord was only an innocent thirty-something … and yet, if you followed aki’Drednanth beliefs, she was in fact a far older soul. One who had not drawn breath in a thousand millennia.

“It is very good,” she concluded, putting the lid carefully back onto the canister and letting her helmet fold shut once more with a hiss of atmosphere. “No vat taste … but I am desensitised to artificial food. Anything that has been made with some time and care tastes good.”

“You’re bold, drinking something I’ve made.”

“Yes, you have a reputation on board,” Thord said, settling more comfortably. “I think if you poisoned me, it would be very difficult to blame somebody else.”

“That’s true,” Cratch admitted. “And they’d be liable to permit me to defend myself from outside the ship.”

“With no hands or feet,” Thord added, “I am told.”

“Exactly. Not to mention a little brain-damage-induced catatonia as a special parting gift from you.”

“I think from what Fridge told me,” Thord said, “I would be able to reward you with a more thoughtful gift. It is the work of moments, with a certain mind, to awaken the subconscious cortex and plunge the thoughts into a permanent nightmare state.”

“It sounds like a perfectly diabolical punishment,” Glomulus said. “Although I might have trouble telling the difference.”

“Yes,” Thord opened the canister and her helmet again, and took another liberal mouthful of the frigid slush. She closed her helmet, put the canister down, and continued. “You have taken a dark and difficult path.”

“All paths are dark and difficult,” Glomulus said, “for the first few people to go down them. I like to think I’m laying cobblestones and putting up lamps and signposts along the way.”

“Colourful and philosophical,” Thord remarked.

“Thank you?”

“Do you believe this about your path?” she went on.

“Does colourful philosophy need to be believed?” he asked back. “In fact, does
anything
need to be believed, in order to affect reality?”

Thord sat for some time, presumably watching him closely or possibly mind-scanning him with her spooky frontal lobes. Or, maybe, having a quick snooze in her suit. Doctor Cratch had to admit that he would feel tempted to snooze if he had a suit like that. It would have to be
warmed
, however, not cooled.

“You want to enter the Dreamscape,” she said, picking up the canister. She had time to open canister and helmet, and empty the last of the
gazz thrash
into her mouth while Glomulus was sitting in mute surprise. She resealed her helmet and negligently tossed him the container. It was still near-burning cold even though it had been sitting in the open for a time, and he was caught by surprise. He fumbled and juggled the heavy tube, swearing involuntarily like an idiot. “This was something you were going to do with Fridge,” she said, when he finally managed to swing and set the canister down on the console next to him. “Something perhaps you were going to try.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Do you need to believe it,” Thord asked, “in order to affect reality?” she rose ponderously to her feet. “Thank you for the
gazz thash
.”

“Another ten months, maybe a year before we reach the edge,” Glomulus said. “I should be able to brew you a second batch.”

“Make more,” she said. “If you have difficulty filling the requisition for ingredients, I will place the order personally.”

“That’ll make it easier,” Glomulus admitted. “Although I think they might draw the line at you and me doing any wacky-wacky mind-melding. Some realities are more difficult to affect than others.”

Thord paused near the doorway, and turned slightly to show her amusement in another muted flicker of light. “There is a long path ahead of us all, Glomulus Cratch,” she said. “Soon we may be glad to have a layer of cobbles, a lighter of lamps, a maker of signposts,” she hitched in her envirosuit and eased sideways through the door as soundlessly as she had entered. “And a brewer of good
gazz thrash
,” she added, as she started down the corridor.

“Like mother used to make,” Glomulus called after her. “It’s funny, because aki’Drednanth … mothers … never mind then.”

He was busying himself with the next distillation and crystallisation – as promised, the requisition of certain ostensibly controlled substances was vastly easier with Thord’s quiet seal of approval – a few days later when they dropped back into the universe near Standing Wave.

ZEEGON

Standing Wave was a little astronomical oddity in an otherwise uneventful and inhospitable system. The moon, for reasons of density, momentum and composition, orbited the gas giant of Devil-May-Care at a rate somewhat slower than the rest of the surging ring system that immediately surrounded her. She
did
orbit – the name of the moon was a minor bit of poetic licence – but it was slow enough that the smaller bodies and dust particles of Devil-May-Care’s rings swept around her and sleeted through her anomalously thick, sturdy atmosphere.

She was cold – for thirteen months of her twenty-month year she was hidden behind Devil-May-Care and from the sun – but she was liveable. And yes, her orbit was sluggish and she was still slowing down. Why, in another twenty or thirty million years, she’d slow down enough for her orbit to finally decay and send her back into the boiling pink-brown clouds of Devil-May-Care. In the meantime, she was home to almost twenty million humans, five million Blaren and three million Bonshooni. A token scattering of Molren and Fergunak – the latter restricted to a great series of interlinked tanks, aquariums and canals rather uncreatively known as Seaworld – made up the rest of the modest population.

Tourist season was the seven months of decidedly iffy sunlight that Standing Wave got each year.

It was
not
tourist season now.

Zeegon settled back on the cosy, intimate little couch and enjoyed the feeling of being inebriated – not hammered, just quietly buzzed – for the first time since Prufrock. He also enjoyed the feeling, thus far an entirely platonic and audio-visual experience but with the promise of later conversion to a more immersive 3-D format, of being with a female who was neither Z-Lin, Sally, Janya, probably-Thord nor a four-hundred pound Bonshoon refugee.

“Fill you up, flyboy?”

“Please,” he said, raising his empty glass, “and if you can never utter a phrase that hideously clichéd again, that would be
awesome
.”

His drinking buddy – somehow the two of them had been whittled down from the six
Tramp
sters who’d started out on the Wavefront R&R strip together and the small crowd of hospitable people eager to help them drink and eat and be merry – chuckled endearingly. “Oh come on. It’s not like I’ve ever met an actual AstroCorps helmsman before. If I don’t get to trot out the corny crap now, I’ll be left with a lifetime of regret.”

All the moonlets and meteors large enough to be a threat to Standing Wave had been sifted out of her orbital path and dashed on her surface long before settlers showed up, and now the rest sort of just washed through the uppermost reaches of her atmosphere in a harmless but breathtaking way.

For the past eight hundred years or so, the inhabitants of Standing Wave had been continuing to clear the moon’s path through the rings by collecting a lot of the more valuable rocks and trace elements as they swept around them, but there was always more. The resulting view was, of course, absolutely stunning no matter whereabouts on the moon you happened to be standing.

“I keep telling you, I’m not AstroCorps,” he said, wobbling his glass at just the wrong moment and getting a splash of something unnecessarily sticky over his wrist for his trouble. “Not Academy-tip-top-officially. Just helmsman, non-Corps.”

“Those fish-eyed
stonk
ers from the Fleet aren’t AstroCorps either,” his friend said, “but they’re not down here drinking with the monkeys, are they?”

“That doesn’t even – what was that even meant to
mean
?”

“I don’t know, it sounded all defiant and loyal and romantic in my head.”

Romantic is promising
, Zeegon thought fuzzily.
Heck, I’d even be prepared to believe
loyal
and romantic, on a strictly ad hoc basis
.

Standing Wave was currently accompanied in orbit by
Bloji
and
Dark Brutan
, a pair of Fleet Worldships each about half the diameter of the little moon. Zeegon wasn’t actually sure if they were Fleet or Separatist, like the ones they’d just missed at Seven Widdershins. Whichever they were, they were cruising along above Devil-May-Care’s ring-plane, not really visible in the perpetual darkness of Standing Wave’s pseudowinter.

Occasionally one of the deep-space leviathans would encounter a meteor or piece of debris outside Devil-May-Care’s orbital plane, and blast it out of the way with a silent flare like heat lightning. Then, if you were fortunate – or
un
fortunate – enough to be standing out in the cold and looking up at just the right moment, you would be treated to the eerie sight of Devil-May-Care’s looming bole being lit up by the blast, and the silhouettes of
Bloji
and
Dark Brutan
in the foreground through the incandescent ever-shifting curtain of Standing Wave’s sky.

Thord, Maladin, Dunkirk and the Rip had, naturally, stayed aboard the
Tramp
. Clue and Decay had gone off on some sort of official meetings-and-talks junket, leaving the rest of them to rest and recuperate in their own ways. Heck, for all Zeegon knew or cared, the Captain had gone to hobnob with the Molren too. That’d be a first.

Zeegon wasn’t terribly interested in what Decay and the officers were up to, though. And he wasn’t interested in the Worldships although the locals of the Wavefront seemed to want to talk about little else.

“Why would you want to drink with Molren anyway?” he asked. “Take a gallon of hooch to get one tipsy.”

His friend laughed, and they clinked glasses.

They’d met – ooh, must have been two hours ago now – and Zeegon had been quick and up-front in asking her for confirmation that she was not a professional. This wasn’t his first shore leave, after all.

I’m not a prostitute, if that’s what you mean
, she’d responded,
but I am extremely professional, and don’t kid yourself. Almost everyone on the Wavefront is in hospitality, and you’re a starship pilot. Any action you get tonight is either going to be purchased, meaningless, with an idiot, or all three of the above
.